The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  ‘Good morning, Father Cripps.’

  He hadn’t recognised the voice and was startled by the sudden interruption. He looked in the direction of its speaker and after a pause replied, ‘Good morning’, then turned back to his preparations for leaving. But the voice persisted;

  ‘Forgive me, let me introduce myself. My name is Brettell, Noel Brettell.’

  He sensed a hand rising to greet him, and then Thomas’s was at his own, lifting it to meet Noel Brettell’s. An awkward pause, which he filled with nothing but his silence in return. Brettell squeezed his hand, calluses on his palm, working hands, a firm grip, then let go.

  ‘I’m the teacher at Wreningham school.’

  He didn’t know what to say. He looked into the mist that was his vision and then addressed the form he saw there, ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. I am glad the school is still doing well.’

  As if sensing that the conversation would not continue much further, the young man came straight to his point. ‘I’ve read some of your poetry, Father, and I admire it. To tell the truth I was very impressed. I write a little myself, although I can’t pretend to be as accomplished as you.’

  Brettell was aware he sounded sycophantic, and from what he knew of Father Cripps, this wouldn’t go down well. Praise was only more likely to send him back into the bush even faster than usual. He was nervous, but continued, speaking into Arthur’s silence and his still face, which looked back at him with unfocused eyes and an expression that conveyed both inquiry and a gentle alarm.

  ‘I was wondering if you might let me discuss poetry with you next time we are both in town. Maybe I could read to you. I have quite a good collection.’

  He stopped, then added, ‘I know your eyes are not so good as they used to be.’

  Arthur waited to see if this Brettell had anything more to say, but the only sounds to reach him were those of the town waking. He was thrown. These days he spoke to few of the Europeans, and then it was only with people he had known for most of his life. He had given up meeting new people, thinking he had met everyone he wanted to meet and had lost too many of them to want to build new friendships. As a consequence he was aware he had become awkward and irritable in the presence of strangers, that he had lost any ability he once had for small talk or for the speech of new acquaintances. His first reaction was to refuse the young man, to not disturb his way of things, but this was checked by a genuine sense of gratitude, as if this man’s words had punctured a tiny hole somewhere in his chest, through which a pressure had been allowed to ease. Eventually he answered.

  ‘Yes, I would like that. But not here, come to my place. Next Thursday.’ And then he added, in an awkward attempt at hospitality, dredging the formality from some distant memory, ‘I shall give you some tea.’

  Noel watched the old missionary leave town, walking the dust track back to Maronda Mashanu, his tall frame, even with the arc of age in his back, stepping out beside the slight figure of Thomas. In one hand he held an African walking stick, ornately carved, and in the other the shoulder of his young helper who also carried his old leather satchel, spilling over with books and letters. Together they shuffled their way out of town, walking the unforgiving twelve-mile road that wound its way back to their peculiar church in the veld.

  ♦

  The following Thursday Noel borrowed a bicycle from a farmer and cycled down the winding track from the school at Wreningham, past the two huge gum trees that stood on the hill and down through the dropping lilac of the jacaranda trees towards Maronda Mashanu. Coming over the lip of the final dip before the clearing where the mission stood, he saw Arthur waiting for him. He was sitting outside his rondavel, beside his beloved, oddly deformed church, its five thatched, high-domed roofs looking like huge termite mounds growing from the granite of the misshapen walls. He was sitting alone, staring straight ahead, though it was hard to tell if his eyes were open or not, as he wore a pair of oversized round medical sunglasses. Beside him a table had been fashioned from some wooden planks and upturned oil drums. As he got closer he saw it was laid. With tea, biscuits and peanut-butter sandwiches. Along with the goat-cropped grass surrounding the church resembling a lawn the whole scene gave, for a moment, the impression of a proper tea party. And Noel could indeed have thought himself transported back to England, having tea with this eccentric priest, were it not for the eagles circling above the church and the screams of the baboons swinging in the branches at the edge of the clearing.

  ♦

  That day Noel had read Keats to him. And he would again today. Not that he needed the poetry read for him to remember it. He knew it off by heart. Keats, with his sensorium tuned to vibrancy. How could he ever forget those lines? No, he didn’t need it read to him, but it was not just for his reading that he still asked Noel to come to him every Thursday. And not just for his voice. He valued Noel for his mind too, for the contact it gave him with an intellect that was of the same making as his. An English education, a love of literature, and a life in Africa. A mind requires contact with another, he reasoned, if it is to have confidence in its own existence.

  There was also the secondary physical experience Noel’s visits gave him: an appreciation of the veld by proxy. He liked to think of him cycling or riding over to his rondavel, down the narrow dusty paths, of the wind he would fed, at his back or at his side, cutting one cheek cold while the other heated in the sun. Of what he saw as he rode: the long horizon, the burnt colours of the trees, the granite rocks topped with orange lichen, sculpted and shaped by millennia of wind and rain. It was what he had not seen for himself for years, and what he mourned in the quiet hours of dusk and dawn. His lost landscape, just the other side of the thin wall he lay against and yet further from him than any distance on earth, being as it was, two blind eyes away.

  ♦

  The scratching at the hut wall has stopped, and there is no other sound to replace it other than the ongoing trill of the cicadas. The veld was waking, but the people of Maronda Mashona were not. The woman with the water must have been on her own, a lone early riser. Maybe the sun wasn’t even up, in which case it would be a long time until Noel arrived. He sh ifted himself on the straw mattress that made his bed, sensing sleep ebbing back to him and his mind beginning to loosen as it did so, like a boat slow-slipping from its mooring. He felt uncomfortable with this free-wandering of his mind. He was a man who had always valued control, both physical and mental, but his body had disobeyed him for quite some time now. Hurting. He had come to terms with this, but his mind, however, he would not let slip from under his restraint so easily. That at least was his wish. In reality he was helpless, as he lay there, feeling his head lighten, his linear thought waver, and the dreams and memories gather at the edges of his sleep.

  A fleeting idea brought him some relief. If he was dying, then maybe this is how the soul prepares, emptying itself of memories so it can leave the body how it entered it—unburdened. But there were some memories he did not want to return to. He had kept himself at a distance from them for over twenty years now, and that is how he wanted it to stay. He refused to even think of them as memories anymore. They were just thoughts, thoughts from another life, a life before this, before him as he is now, lying here, sick and old. Thoughts and memories, the difference was important. Memory was a place revisited. And he could not re-visit. He had held on to those memories for long enough, until he could no longer endure the pull of them. The unbearable sadness of them, opening like a universe in his ribs.

  So, just thoughts then, and old ones too, worn out with examination long ago. Thoughts that had happened, and had gone. Not just been but gone. He could not return there again.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  SUNDAY, 30 JULY 2000

  Harare, Zimbabwe

  Last night I danced on your grave. There must have been more than two hundred of us crammed into the ruins of your church: old men and women, children, mothers with babies swaddled on their backs, young men in Nike and Puma tracksuits, young
women wearing coloured headscarves. And all of us dancing…

  ♦

  But this isn’t where we begin. This is the end of our story, and I should begin at the beginning. Before all this, when I didn’t know you at all. Before I had ever set foot in Zimbabwe. Three years ago. That is when we begin. The summer of 1997. The end of a hot day, when I entered my father’s study, the whisky-and-water light of an evening sun burning up the room, lighting up the bookshelves along the back wall and playing over a scattering of photographs propped there. The photographs are of my family in the past, together and apart. We look out from them, our future selves just beneath the skin, waiting to happen; the scars, the growing, the gaining and losing.

  There is one of my mother as a young woman when she met my father. In monochrome, she smiles out of the shot, looking like a young Liz Taylor, dark hair, white dress, Welsh eyes. My father’s head is in her lap, held in the bottom left corner of the frame. He is looking up at her as she looks away. He looks young and completely happy.

  I am escaping inside from the day outside and from the same family as in these photographs. We are all home, back in the old Welsh longhouse that has been home to me for as long as I can remember. Even when we didn’t live here it was home. We are all together, my parents, my grandparents, my two brothers and myself. We have been eating outside, and now the plates and leftovers litter the plastic table with the sun-shade at its centre, the odd bluebottle dog-fighting over them while my family rest back into the long light of the evening. Except for me. I have come inside to release the pressure of other people for a while. And, of course, to come and find you.

  Your name was mentioned that afternoon, just in passing, by my grandmother. We were talking about writing, and about poetry in particular. She said that her uncle Arthur had written poetry, her uncle Arthur the missionary to Africa. I had never heard of you before and I asked who you were. My father said he had a book about you somewhere. That someone had written a book about you. And then the conversation turned, passed on, and you weren’t mentioned again. The swallows cut between the telephone wires above us, the horses flicked their tails in time to the touch of flies on their flanks, and somewhere in the distance a tractor turned waves of cut hay in a field. But already I was interested in you. A missionary in Africa. A poet. And a relation, tenuous, the shared blood thinned by marriage and time, but still a relation. It was enough to ignite an interest, and enough to send me inside the cool of our thick-walled longhouse to look for you, leaving my immediate relations outside in the sun while I looked for a distant one inside instead.

  And this is where I first saw you, in my father’s study on the cover of a book I took down off the shelf that late summer’s afternoon. It was jammed between a collection of yellow and yellowing National Geographies and an old Penguin Classic. The title on the spine had been faded to ghost-writing by years of low evening suns through the facing window, so I pulled it out to take a closer look, turning it over in my hand. And there you were, in a sepia photograph washed orange, standing outside a thatched hut, your battered hat in your hand, your tall body sloping to the left as you posed awkwardly for the camera, and your broken boots gaping at your feet like two panting puppy dogs. You’re wearing a dog collar, bright in the sun like a hoop of hot steel about your neck. Your face is handsome, a strong face, but somehow mistrusting of the camera, which your eyes look past, way past, out of the photograph altogether.

  I open it and smell the musty, damp smell of old books. The smell I think of as that of the sixties, associating it as I do with my parents’ ageing student books. It is these that occupy many of the shelves in this room, a mix of classic literature and sociology, their jackets faded like the spine of the book I am holding. Both sets of books are often faithfully inscribed on the title page, sometimes with love notes written beneath: on a paperback of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, June 1964. To mydarling Eryl. Yours always, David. Yours always. Love between the covers. I flip this book open, but there is no written inscription inside. Just a gold address sticker, with the name and address of my great aunt on it. Elizabeth Roberts. My grandmother’s sister, and, I realise standing there, your niece.

  I close the book again and take another look at you. You do not look like an ancestor of mine. You are tall for one thing, and I am not. You look English. I am Welsh. At least, I look Welsh, and feel Welsh. And then there is that dog collar. Where do I stand in relation to that? I have often intellectualised God out of existence. I have claimed, in arguments, that man has outgrown the need to rest his troubles on the shoulders of a deity. I have spoken against organised religion. I have written academic essays about the inbuilt ideological obsolescence of Milton’s Paradise Lost, how the very system of belief the poet tries to explain deconstructs itself in exposition. I am secular and of my time. I am twenty-two years old. I know nothing and I am confused about my intentions in the world. Only the night before I stood in the top field and looked out over the hedge at the sunset cloaking the hills red and considered a letter on my desk from the army: an invitation from the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters to visit their barracks.

  ♦

  The title of the book is written above your head: God’s Irregular: Arthur Shearly Cripps, A Rhodesian Epic. Then below, beneath your feet, the name of the author, Douglas V. Steere. Steere. This, then, is the man who had written about you: the man who first organised your life, made chapters out of it, gave it headings. Who made you history. And over the next few days it is Steere who introduces us, who is our go-between as I read about your life in his words.

  When I finish the book I know about you. I know the shape of your life, I know the facts. Your birthday, your deathday. I know you were one of the young men at Oxford who listened to Bishop Gore as he outlined the blueprint of a new kind of faith, a socially responsible Christianity. How his ideas lit you and how you became his word made flesh, campaigning against employers who paid their workers sub-union wages, against sweated conditions in industries employing female labour. I know the day you left England and the promise you made to your mother to return. I know you were in the Great War at Lake Victoria, that you took on the colonial administration over land reform. I know the day they took out your eye and when you wrote what to whom.

  Already I am making connections. You wrote and I write. You were a runner, not just a competitive one, but an instinctive one. You ran for the running, for the essence and escape of it. I think I know how that feels. I have always run too: through the lanes, up the hills of the Black Mountains. For the primitive feel of its simple exhaustion.

  But there are pieces missing. Triggers and gaps in the story, and you are strangely absent. This is you the history, not you the man, and for some reason I am left wanting more. Steere has done his job though, he has brought us together. His prose is dry and functional, but without it I would not have pursued you down the years; I would not have tried to get under your skin. I would never have met Leonard, Jeremy, Betty Finn, Ray Brown, Canon Holderness. I would not have camped in the Red Cave. I would not have danced on your grave last night. And, of course, there would have been no you and me. There would just have been you. Then me. Two people separated by a hundred years of forgotten memories, by a hundred years of dust, settling between us with every year past, covering your tracks and obscuring mine.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  1 JANUARY 1904

  Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

  Arthur has been running across the veld for over four hours. His feet are bleeding in his boots and his lungs feel the colour of the ground beneath him: red, coarse a nd grained. Drained of fluid, they hang within his ribs like drying tobacco leaves, rubbing against the bone. With each breath a loose covering of dust seems to rise in him, silting in his throat and burning in his chest. He finished the last steel-tasting drops of water from his billy-can ten miles ago. His mouth is parched and his tongue sticks to the skin behind his teeth. He can feel his lips drying out, cracking like waking pupae. His breath
clicks in his windpipe.

  The veld at his feet is as dry as him, deprived of water these last few months when it should have been raining. And not just any rain, but the downpours of the wet season, so powerful they felt solid: curtains of rain drawn across the end of each day. Italic rain. But no such rain has come, so he runs across hard and broken ground, dotted with scrubland bushes, their leafless twigs branching from the ground like burnt-out capillaries. The shattered shells of damba fruit scatter the path, the debris of hungry baboons. The hills are grey and purple in the distance.

  ♦

  He had left Enkeldoorn that afternoon following the service in the Dutch Reformed Church, giving himself at least five hours to run the thirty-seven miles to Umvuma before darkness. The congregation was small but familiar, the usual gathering of administration men and farmers’ families. Wide-necked, sun-tanned men dwarfing their smaller wives, each wearing a frilling of young children.

  Slipping away into the corrugated iron vestry he had packed his cassock and the dark botdes of medicine into a brown leather satchel before removing the stiff clerical collar, unclipping it at the back of his neck and folding it into a side pocket, so he could breathe. These were his rituals of preparation before a long run. Walking outside, he filled his dented steel billy-can from a standpipe by the supplies shop, listening to the deep gurgle rising in pitch as the valve strained to pull the water up through the layers of rock and dry earth. Then he bent to tighten the laces of his boots, and noticed tht split between the upper and the sole had widened again. Standing up again, his thighs aching from another long trek a few days earlier, he secured his satchel across his chest, pulling it tight to reduce the rubbing that he knew would eventually leave him with a raw shoulder strap of red skin.