The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  He shakes his head, smiling again, ‘It was the strangest thing really. She was a nurse in London and she shared a flat with my brother’s daughter, Grizelda Holderness. So they were living in London, and she read, I think the life of Bishop Paget, which has a number of quotations from me, especially about Arthur Shearly Cripps. So she said to Grizelda, ‘Who’s this Richard Holderness, because I want to get in touch.’ Anyway, she came to stay with us at Bonda, and when we were all there she told us the most startling, strange story. She said, ‘You know I am Arthur Shearly Cripps’ granddaughter?’ And I said, ‘But he never married,’ and then she said, ‘But no, that’s the story.’

  ’

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  DECEMBER 1900

  Icklesham, Sussex, England

  The piano stands in the middle of the hall where the delivery men left it, each of its four carved feet set on thick swabs of cloth, raising it off the floor’s scarred flagstones. Ada sits in a chair opposite, her apron untied, a dishcloth and a letter in her lap, looking at it, trying to stop a sob that is gathering like a cloud in her chest from rising into her throat and her eyes.

  The letter came with the piano, folded in an envelope slid into the back of the polished lid over the keyboard. It is from Arthur. It is short and to the point, written in his sloping handwriting, dark across the page. It says he is leaving England. That he is going to Africa. A place called Mashonaland in Southern Rhodesia. It says that the piano is a present. Something to remember him by. It says now she will always be able to sing and play. It says he loves her and he loves Theresa, but it is best for all of them if he leaves. And as always, on another sheet, there is a poem.

  Ada reads the letter again. So that is why he came last week. Out of the blue, the first time she’d seen him for over four years. He’d said he was visiting Reverend Churton and wanted to call on them while he was here. He’d said he was sorry he hadn’t warned her he was coming, but he was worried that she would say he could not come. He did not say he had come to say goodbye. He did not say he had come to see his daughter for the first and maybe the last time. He had said nothing about this. Until now. Ada looks up from the letter to the piano again. The front door is still partly open and a slab of winter light falls across it, catching the carvings on its legs and its lid. A dark wooden upright, carved all over with leaves as if it were overrun with dark ivy. Delicate and ornate, it looks out of place in the bare hall. From another world, its clawed feet fantastical above the stone floor.

  Ada stands and goes to it. She lifts the lid of the keyboard. Still holding the letter and the cloth in her other hand, she presses her finger against the middle C. The action of the hammer is smooth and effortless, releasing a single note through the body of the piano into the still air of the hall.

  As it fades she hears the kitchen door open behind her. She turns and sees Theresa standing there, looking at her. Then she looks at the piano. She walks towards Ada, frowning at the instrument.

  ‘What’s that?’ she says, pointing at its carved legs.

  ‘It’s a piano, sweetheart.’

  ‘Is it yours, mama?’

  Ada sits back on her chair and draws Theresa to her, stroking the hair from her face. ‘No, love. It’s ours.’

  ♦

  Ada knew she was pregnant long before she began to show. It was the summer of 1896. A hot summer full with scents and tastes which became more vivid to her overnight. Some just stronger, others repulsive. The honeysuckle in the lane, the turned hay, the pig food, the fermenting hops. The smells she had grown up with all her life, startling and pungent in a way they had never been before. And tastes too. She remembers crushing a raspberry against her tongue and its sweetness seeming almost unbearable in her mouth. As if she were feeling for two. And when she didn’t bleed for the second following month, she knew her instincts were right. She was carrying Arthur’s baby, and it was already alive in her, feeding her sensations as she was feeding its growth.

  When she was sure, she told Arthur. He held her and reassured her, told her everything would be all right. He loved her and he wanted her to be his wife. But then they had to tell her father. And Arthur’s brother. She had been so unprepared, she sees that now. She had not expected her world to be taken out of her hands like that. As if her life were not hers after all; as if any sense of it being so had been nothing more than an illusion. She remembers feeling like one of her father’s prize sows, an item of stock to be traded on, passed into another farmer’s hands. She had always hoped one day her father would give her away, but never like that.

  And Arthur. Where was he then to tell her everything would be all right? He had always seemed so worldly compared to the other men in Icklesham. Educated, assured. But in the face of her raging father…that had been a terrible thing to see. She had witnessed her father’s anger before—when some chore was left undone, when he thought he’d been swindled at market. But never like this. An anger so complete that at first he was silent. Arthur and her standing before him, and him saying nothing. Just the throbbing vein at his temple and her mother going to stand behind him, placing her hand on his shoulder. Then his shrug when she did, flinching her hand away with a jerk of his arm as if the touch of any woman would have scalded him then.

  And then his anger found its voice. Ada had collapsed and cried to see him so: his face, filled with blood, the skin tight across his jaw and phlegm spitting from his mouth as he threw Arthur out of the house. And the words he said. She had never heard her father talk like that before. And to hear him she couldn’t help but think that he was right and that she, his daughter was the worst sinner on this earth. ‘You’ve brought shame on us, you hear me Ada Sargent, shame!’

  ‘Think you can have your way with us, do you? Well, damn you, Mr Cripps!’ And Arthur, with his learning and his poetry and his university, Arthur the man whom she loved, became a boy before her father’s rage. Age slipped off him like water and when she last saw his face, through the closing door, over her father’s shoulder, it was the face of a young man who was lost in a world he had thought he knew so well.

  She never saw him again until that day last week. He wrote, but soon her father found the letters and forbade them in the house. And then it was all so quick. His brother William came. One night, a week after that day of rage and tears. She didn’t see him, just heard the low bass of two men’s voices in the parlour below her bedroom. She couldn’t make out their talk, but she recognised their tone. She had heard it a hundred times before. At the market, in the village shop. They were bargaining.

  And then her father made up his mind.

  ‘Tom Neeves,’ he told her, ‘is a good man. He’s always liked you, you know that. His farm yields well, and as I say, he’s a good man. So, there it is Ada. You’ll marry Tom Neeves and I won’t hear a word said against it.’

  Her mother said it was chopping the onions that made her eyes so red, but Ada knew that wasn’t true.

  And it was so quick. All her life before then seemed as leisure, and now it was running downhill. Reverend Churton announced the marriage banns. At the same service he told the congregation that Father Cripps, now he was ordained, had left Icklesham to take up a Trinity living at Ford End, Essex. He married her and Tom a month after that service. She was beginning to show and although folk would recognise the baby was early, her father reckoned he’d rather they thought Tom Neeves had been too eager than his daughter had birthed a bastard child.

  So no one knew that Theresa was not Tom’s child. Except, of course, for Tom himself. He alone had that knowledge and the knowing of it rubbed sore at him like a stone in a shoe. Soon, too soon after Theresa was born, he made sure Ada was carrying his own baby. But Theresa was there now. A reminder to him every day of Ada’s romance with Arthur. ‘His flesh and blood in my house,’ he would say when they’d argued. Then, turning to the child herself, he’d bend down low and face her, though still speaking to Ada, saying in a low voice through a tight mouth, ‘Not one of us, t
his one.’

  And Arthur made it worse for her. He sent letters with money and books. He was trying to help, but if there was one thing sure to fire Tom up, it was finding a letter from Arthur with those notes neatly folded inside the envelope.

  And now he had sent this. Ada looks over the carved piano again. What will Tom say about this? She knows he will not let her keep it, not if he knows it is from Arthur. And now Arthur has gone. Sailed to Africa. For a moment when she had seen him standing there last week, nervous, tall, his blue eyes unsure, his hat in his hand, she had thought he had come to take her back. But he had not. He had come to say goodbye, she sees that now. But at least he had seen Theresa, and, from where she stood half-hidden behind her mother’s skirt, Theresa had seen him. This strange man who spoke so softly to her mother and who looked down at her long and hard, like he was seeing right through her.

  ♦

  The latch on the back door clicks. The door opens and slams shut. Ada hears Tom stamping the dirt from his boots in the porch. She looks into the kitchen, his lunch half-done on the table. Standing, she puts the palm of her hand against Theresa’s back.

  ‘You go and play now dear,’ she says. ‘Your father’s home, he’ll be wanting his lunch.’

  She opens the door to the parlour and Theresa goes through. Ada pushes it to and knots her apron. She slips Arthur’s letter into the pocket of her skirt and stands in the hall against the piano, the light from the open door falling across her shoulder, waiting.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  1 AUGUST 1952

  Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

  Noel Brettell lets the bike free-wheel down the slope towards the wooden bridge over the stream, feeling the rough surface of the road shake and jolt in his legs and his arms. It is after midday. The sun is high, and as he rattles over the planks of the bridge a pair of black-collared barbets strike up a duet from the branches of a jacaranda tree overhanging the bank. On the other side he begins to pedal up the slope. At the top of the hill he disturbs a yellow-billed kite pulling on the carcass of a rodent at the side of the road. The bird hops and flaps away as he passes. Looking back over his shoulder he watches it strut back to the carrion, its bright beak dipped with red.

  He is cycling out to see Baba Cripps again, the cloth bag slung across his back heavy with books of poetry. Heavy with the words of poets which he is bringing out here, into the bushveld, to read for the blind old priest. How long has he been doing this, every Thursday afternoon, cycling out to read for Cripps? Six, maybe seven years? He remembers that first visit well. Arriving at the clearing, the old man waiting for him beside his pole and dagga rondaval, his spread of peanut-butter sandwiches on the makeshift table. And then, when he was seated beside him, the strange welcoming ceremony performed by children from the missionary’s ‘dame school’. A long file of them, all heights, all ages, parading before him under the eye of their African school mistress. Shuffling, clapping, twisting, knees bent, arms akimbo, repeating a shrill chant, over and over.

  ‘What are they saying?’ he had asked, leaning in close to the priest’s ear.

  ‘They are saying,’ Cripps had replied, a faint smile on his lips, ‘we are glad you have come to be a friend to our father.’

  Noel remembered turning back to the crocodile line of children and looking at them again, their earnest faces, their singing mouths. An idiot boy was weaving in and out of them, performing his own dance, eyes aslant, his face throwing grimaces, his bare limbs grey with dust. And then he had looked back at Cripps, watching them, or rather not watching them with his blind eyes, tapping his carved walking stick against the ground in time to their chant. He had reminded him of a chief he’d once seen, watching a parade of his warriors, or of a grandfather listening to the songs of his grandchildren.

  ♦

  Back then, all those years ago, Noel offered to read for the old priest out of sympathy for the isolation of his blindness and his peculiar form of self-exile. And that was still partly true. Cripps’ life had become increasingly eremitic: he was retreating into the bush like an old lion or an ancient elephant, rooting himself in its silence and its wilderness. But over the years of Thursday afternoons Noel had carried on with the readings, not just out of sympathy, but also because of his interest in Cripps as a poet. He became fascinated by his primitive writer’s eye, isolated as it was from the modern world of cars, cold storage and literary coteries. He knew Cripps’ poetry had suffered as a consequence of this isolation: unexposed to the onward movement of form and language, he had remained committed to the outworn style he had grown up with. A diction suffocated under anachronistic mannerisms, learning his craft as he had between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Georgians. And yet, when he wanted to, Cripps could capture Africa. His use of the Anglo-Saxon term ‘wold’ to describe the gaunt lines of stony hills he trekked across was as strangely apposite as it was archaic. And when he let his anger subside from a poem, when he looked with his eye that had lived under the African sun for so long, then he made moments of bush life live:

  So, when the sun is almost down,

  Bright in the slanting light we come,

  Bearing our rustling grass-sheaves high

  Against the splendour of the sky,

  To thatch for Christ a home –

  It was no surprise to Noel that on that first visit Cripps had wanted to hear the poets he knew in his youth. Tennyson, Murray, Vaughan. He remembered reading Vaughan, his voice loud in the quiet glow of a bushveld evening: ‘I saw eternity the other night—’

  When he finished the poem Cripps was silent, looking away towards the Manesi hills. When he did speak, he didn’t turn to Noel, but just carried on staring towards the horizon through his one blind and one failing eye. ‘Thank you,’ he’d said quietly. ‘I never thought I should hear that again.’

  On that first visit Cripps had decided what to read, but now he largely left the choice to Noel (although today he had sent a note written in Leonard’s handwriting with the faint scrawl of his own signature at the bottom: ‘Please bring your Keats and your Tennyson. A.S. C.’). Noel enjoyed the freedom of his choice. He enjoyed bringing newer poets out into the bush and testing them against its grand indifference and Cripps’ timeless ear. Edward Thomas had worn well, Eliot intrigued him, but Auden had not survived the austere nature of that sequestered place. He could tell Cripps was not impressed, and he had to agree. He liked Auden, reading him in his chair in his house, but here it was not the same, the verse skidding off the backdrop of Maronda Mashanu like a chisel off a granite boulder.

  It was as a poet that Noel knew Cripps and as a poet he approached him. He had managed over the years to evade the other areas of his life, his religious and social ideas which had so alienated him from much of the local white population. Most of the English farmers of Charter District regarded him with exasperation and contempt and the Afrikaners were equally thrown by his work, loathing any ‘kaffir’ who had dealings with him. Even so, Noel had met some who were willing to admit a grudging respect for his way of life. ‘He’s a bloody fool of a rooinek predikant,’ one Afrikaan farmer had said to him, ‘but, man, he’s a real Christian. I’ve seen him walking along the Umvuma road carrying a black baby on his back. Any white man who can do that, man, he must be like Jesus Christ.’

  For himself, Noel had recently been reconsidering many of Cripps’ opinions that had once seemed so extreme. In the light of the past few years they had gained something of a prophetic quality, and the thought had crossed his mind that perhaps the old man had been right all along. That it was not he who was the extremist, but they, the rest of the whites, who had been complacent and indolent in their attitudes. He was, however, still unsure about some of Cripps’ more stringent tendencies. He had recently heard that Cripps refused government agricultural experts onto his farms, and that he had even been imposing fines for ‘immoral behaviour’ on the Africans living there. He also knew that Cripps held an unenthusiastic view towards the Af
ricans’ desire for education. He provided for it, but he was sure the old man would rather they left such Western ideas alone.

  When Noel visited on a Thursday afternoon, though, they did not speak of such matters. They did not even enter into serious literary discussion. Cripps was content to smoke his pipe and listen, and Noel in turn, was happy to sit in that clearing, the strange crumbling African church at his back, and read aloud from the poets of the past and the present.

  ♦

  Coming to the bottom of another slope in the road, Noel slows his bike and dismounts by the trunk of a marula tree that marks the mouth of the narrow foot track into Maronda Mashanu. He pushes his bike along the track in front of him, through the mopane and the acacia, the fever tree and the rain tree, its branches dripping with water from the froghopper nymphs, over the river and up through the low thorn bushes and out into the clearing. To his left the old VD clinic that Cripps built and administered to is disintegrating into rubble. Further up, nearer the church, two young children play around a smoking fire at the centre of some huts. An old man sits beside them on a stone, bent over and intent on his basket-weaving. And there, nearer the church again, sitting outside his rondavel, is Cripps, waiting.

  Noel lays down his bike on the grass and reaches around into his bag to pull out his camera. Cripps has not heard him. He walks quietly and softly towards him. He is already quite close when Fortune emerges from behind the church, carrying a tray of sandwiches. When she sees him he puts his finger to his lips, and she understands, beaming a big smile at the joke and waving her hand down at him in one playful swipe.