The White Father

by Julian Mitchell

  The White Father

  JULIAN MITCHELL

  To

  RONALD BRYDEN

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Copyright

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  After my first two books, which earned me practically nothing, I left Hutchinson and moved to the more generous Constable, where my brother had gone to work. I had given up on my thesis by now, and was trying to make a living as a freelance writer, which meant, basically, reviewing novels, first for the Spectator, then the Sunday Times, where I shared these duties with the writer Olivia Manning. I even lived for a time in the basement of her house in St John’s Wood. As the autumn went on, the number of books to review became overwhelming. Still in my twenties, with three novels behind me, I felt it was time to escape from this oppressive life and follow the example of so many other English writers and go abroad. Why I chose Morocco I no longer remember. I wasn’t exactly a scholar in French, but I could speak the language a little, and I daresay I imagined it would be pleasantly warm and exotic. I had already decided that my next novel was to be set partly in Africa, which Morocco was, just.

  So off I set, and after a week or two I found myself in El Jadida, known by the Portuguese as Mazagan, a small town on the Atlantic coast, with a splendid fort and a cistern where Orson Wells had shot a lot of his film of Othello, and virtually no tourists now it was late autumn. There had been a small Jewish community there, but they had mostly gone to Israel after Morocco became independent, though one or two businessmen had stayed on. I rented a room from one of these, a Mr Bensimon, opened my portable typewriter and started writing.

  The new book was to be a State of the Nation novel, about the end of Empire, contrasting the last generation of men who’d served it, and the new one which was just breaking out from the long dullness of the post-war years, but didn’t really know where it was going. Because I knew Brian Urquhart, who worked for the UN, and who had nearly been murdered in Katanga, I thought I saw how his generation of committed and often selfless people were adapting the traditional sense of service to new ends. I was also a keen follower of the new music of the Beatles, the Stones and the Kinks, which was changing attitudes among the young. And there had been a moment in the summer when it looked as though the government, under pressure from the Suez Group of the Conservative party, was not going to support the UN over Katanga. Alfreda Urquhart and others decided to organise a letter to The Times from a number of distinguished people to protest against this. I had been a sort of dogsbody, collecting and delivering signatures and sitting in on meetings. I found it very exciting to be part of political action – however small – for the first time. I met MPs and journalists and many well-known people, who if not actually important, thought they were.

  I used my experience of this in the novel, and though I don’t believe that a novelist has to know everything about the subject he is writing about – that’s for journalists (fat chance) – I think the parts of The White Father which are based on personal knowledge are not only the best, but some of the best fiction I had written to that point. But there was a great deal that wasn’t based on personal or any other kind of knowledge, and though I was writing in what was physically Africa, the situation in the colony I invented, the politics, and the primitive tribe, had nothing to do with Morocco, or, alas, anywhere else. I cringe now at what seems like a terribly patronising attitude toward my District Officer, to say nothing of those in his care; and at the fact that I had no idea whatever of what a real District Officer did. I didn’t even know as much about music as the book pretends, and the whole strand about the megalomaniac emperor of the pop world is too satirical to be very funny. The tone of the book is often right; but the detail is inauthentic.

  I was often lonely in El Jadida, where I was regarded with some suspicion by the local caid, though there was a very friendly British schoolmaster and his family who made me welcome. I wrote away all day, eating at cheap restaurants and drinking the vin gris, and in quite a short time I had written a first draft and felt I was ready to go exploring. But if my book was inauthentic, so was the Moroccan weather. That winter was the coldest in Europe and North Africa for many years. In London it produced the last of the famous killer fogs, and in Sussex the Wild Brooks froze so hard you could skate for miles. In Morocco it just rained; and rained. You were safe from the rain in the covered souks of Marrakech, but in Essaouira I had terrible chest pains and thought I was dying of pleurisy. A kindly Spanish doctor at the hospital, eager for European company, kept me chatting for an hour, while tubercular patients hammered for attention. ‘I can cure them’, he said with a shrug, ‘but as soon as they’re cured, they go back to their villages, where the bacteria live in the walls of their houses, and in six months they’re back here again.’ He was more encouraging about my own lungs; a spell of desert air would soon set them right. So, passing the ruins of Agadir, recently earthquaked (you could buy flour in the souks in bags marked ‘a free gift from the people of the United States’), I journeyed south to Goulimime, where the Blue People lived. They were splendid looking, and even quite blue from the dye of their clothes, but I got there on the wrong day for the famous camel market and there wasn’t much else to entertain me, so I then set off for Ouarzazate, which was in the Sahara, almost, and sounded very romantic and good for my chest, In order to reach it, I had to cross the river Draa, where there was a long queue of trucks and buses waiting for the rain-swollen river to subside. How long will it be, I asked. Four or five days, they said. Discouraged, I went back to Marrakech, intending to try to go to Fez and Meknes, but they too were unreachable because of floods, at which point I gave up on Morocco. The doctor was right about my lungs, which were working fine again, but when I went to stay with a friend in Versailles on my way home I made the mistake of trying to walk in the park. It looked beautiful under the snow, but it was so piercingly cold I had to turn back after twenty minutes. Graham Greene and Lawrence Durrell never seemed to have had my bad luck. I went back to London and found somewhere to live. My wanderjahre were over.

  Julian Mitchell

  1

  HUGH SHRIEVE made the gesture of assent, passed his right hand twice across his face to indicate pleasure, and sat down.

  At once the tense black faces of the Ngulu chiefs relaxed into gap-toothed grins, and they began to imitate his gestures in a pantomime of pleasure. They crowed like cocks and embraced each other. They jumped up and down with their feet together, they laughed, they literally held their sides.

  Shrieve tried to smile. His gravity, he knew, was part of their pleasure. Sometimes he wondered whether it wasn’t the most important thing he contributed to their festivals, for the permission he had just formally granted had never been in doubt and the minor limitations he had imposed on the hunting trip would, he was resigned to it, be charmingly ignored. Yet they always did ask his permission, as though they needed assurance that what they proposed to do had the approval of a higher power, visible only in the short white man who sat before them now with his gaunt face and a solemn set to his mouth as though he was gripping the back of his bottom lip between his front teeth.

  He rose, quelling the crowing and jumping. He had very blue eyes which stared intensely at people, discomfiting them. But it was all right now, because the eyes were moving from face to face and he was wishing success and the blessings of the gods on the hunting. Bowed heads acknowledged his wishes.
Then he allowed himself a smile before walking between the chiefs towards the rough village street, at the end of which stood his neat white bungalow. For a moment the chiefs watched him, then, with as much dignity as their excitement could contain, dispersed.

  As he walked over the hard baked ruts of the street Shrieve could hear the news spreading excitedly behind him. It was inexplicable, really, the way they pretended twice a year that he might refuse permission for the hunting trips which preceded the spring and autumn festivals, and expressed relief and joy at what was to anyone but themselves entirely predictable. Perhaps, he liked to console himself, they did understand in some mysterious way that he genuinely protected them, that his constant concern for the future they resolutely refused to contemplate was, literally, vital to their survival. But it was doubtful. It was more likely that they simply didn’t remember from one festival to the next what his attitude was likely to be. And therefore his formality was all the more necessary.

  The Nguluan inability to imagine any period of time beyond the next sunrise or sunset was almost ostentatious. The chiefs became heavily glum when asked to discuss a plan which took them even as far as the end of the week: anything beyond that reduced them to total dismay. Their eyes would become very round, their mouths shaped themselves for silent whistles of alarm, their eyebrows (plucked thin in fearful homage to the bushy-browed god Khamva) rose and fell. Shutting his eyes in order not to see, which would make him feel hopeless, Shrieve knew at such times that their hands would be swinging sadly back and forth across their genitals, palms out, in a gesture which meant, roughly: An irresistible force has met an immovable object, Man is but a puppet of the gods, and Things will get far, far worse before they get any better at all. In dark moods, Shrieve would interpret the gesture as, more simply, We do not listen to what we do not wish to hear.

  The Ngulu could be extremely irritating. They didn’t seem to have any general quotidian attitude to life, no mean between joy and sorrow. Everything was made simple, smiles or tears, and Shrieve’s efforts to get them to understand anything at all complicated never succeeded. Today, for instance, he should have insisted more strongly that they hunted only as far as the great curve in the river some forty miles upstream to the coast where their territory ended. But it would have done no good: for them permission to hunt was enough and they took it to mean they could hunt wherever they liked. If he had suggested they wait a few days, they would have nodded eagerly and started tomorrow anyway. If he ever made it clear to them, as was sometimes necessary, that he intended to stick by a disagreeable decision, they would turn huge melancholy eyes on him and begin to moan deep in their throats. If he refused to be moved, they would weep dramatically and rub their heads in the dirt. Such occasions were, he had to admit, rare enough to be noteworthy—indeed, he had reason to believe they were recounted to terrified children. If there were times when he felt that the Ngulu, far from being a backward and almost stone-age race which needed protection, were in fact a highly intelligent tribe, full of cunning and perfectly capable of surviving by themselves the attempted depredations of their neighbours, white or black, such times were few. For the most part he accepted them as they were, and the more they crossed him, the more he loved them.

  Shrieve was a short man, though among the Ngulu he appeared of average height, and his skin had the leathery look of those who have spent years in the sun. He had, since his schooldays, had insoluble trouble with his hair, which was fair and rather skimpy but had the maddening habit of sticking up spikily round his crown. He was self-conscious about his appearance, and this made his small mannerisms more noticeable. Among the Ngulu neither appearance nor mannerisms bothered him, but with his compatriots he felt ill at ease, the hesitations of his delivery became pronounced and he found himself twisting his fingers nervously like a schoolboy. People, he noticed, didn’t at all like the way he looked at them, and in his efforts not to stare he would switch his eyes frantically from person to person in a room. He had lived in Africa since just after the end of the war, and he now had few ties with people in England—his father, a widowed aunt, a few friends with whom he exchanged occasional letters. He didn’t enjoy his leaves at home, feeling that his inadequacies were obvious, and for some years he had not left the colony. England was a country he admired with all his heart: he had a devoted respect for its institutions and a passion for its hills and moors and rivers. He was proud to serve it, he would have been happy doing nothing else, he was sure. But to be in the country itself, to talk with those who gave him orders, who sent him out of give what England had to give, this troubled and embarrassed him. It was, he once tried to explain to his superior in the colonial administration, a hot fat man called Robbins who objected to his refusal to go home for his leave, rather like loving one’s mother too much: it was better to stay away than stand about in shamefaced, shuffling adoration. Robbins had looked critically at Shrieve’s glass (they had been in the bar of the Tennis Club in the capital) and changed the subject. Shrieve, aware of his look, had felt humiliated. He was really only happy, he felt, alone and doing something worthwhile, his pleasurable duty.

  He climbed the steps up to the veranda of his bungalow and called “Amy!” After a moment she put her head enquiringly round the door of the living-room.

  Amy was not Shrieve’s wife, yet she was considerably more than his mistress. She was a Ngulu widow of thirty-five or so—the Ngulu were very imprecise about ages after puberty, which officially took place twelve springs after birth, and there were some pretty rough guesses even up to that. She had become first his servant, then his companion in bed, and then the object of his love and the mother of his son. The baby, now nearly two years old, burbled only in Ngulu so far. He had a half-sister and a half-brother, Amy’s children by her first husband. Shrieve was not sure quite how the whole business had happened, but he was glad it had, even if that sort of thing didn’t go down too well in the capital. He had sometimes wondered whether he shouldn’t go through some form of marriage with her, but the Ngulu didn’t go in for official marriages and none seemed necessary. The custom was to set up house with someone, usually after an exchange of gifts between families, sometimes with, sometimes without the consent of the parties—like many Nguluan customs, it all depended on the moods of the people involved. But once you were married, you were married: no divorce was permitted and monogamy was strictly enforced. So Shrieve and Amy were undoubtedly, in the eyes of the Ngulu, man and wife. There was no objection whatever to him as a husband on the ground of his colour. Indeed, the Ngulu had expressed concern, on his arrival, at his lack of a wife, and were pleased when Amy moved in, not only for Shrieve’s sake, but also because it relieved the tribe from the burden of supporting a widow and her children.

  She was small, like all the Ngulu, very black and fat. Fatness was a sign of prosperity, and she worried if her simple skirt needed tightening, which it rarely did. No Ngulu of either sex ever wore anything above the waist, and it was with difficulty, and only after showing her photographs of the Queen, whom Amy regarded with great awe, that Shrieve persuaded her into a loose blouse when white visitors came. Her name was not really Amy but Myamya—the abbreviation was Shrieve’s. They spoke to each other only in Ngulu, though Amy had picked up a few words of English: she was liable, when visitors came, to address them as “My dear”, and to say “I love you” when they left. There were those who considered that Shrieve had gone completely native.

  He kissed her, patted her rump, indicating that he found her both attractive and good, then asked for tea, something it had taken him a long time to teach her how to make. She told him the postman had come, and he followed her into the house to see what there was in the mail, meanwhile happily admiring her breasts, large and generously nippled, as they bounced before her and into the kitchen. Breasts were not considered objects of sexual attraction among the Ngulu, but Shrieve in this remained true to European taste.

  He sorted among the official letters for anything out of the rou
tine. He had to report monthly on births, deaths, sickness (human and animal) and other matters of interest to the administration. In addition there was a letter each week from Robbins, usually brief, answering any enquiries Shrieve might have made. He himself always sent an equally brief note reporting anything out of the ordinary, though there was never much to say. From time to time there was a suspicion that the northern part of the Ngulu territory, which the tribe rarely visited, was being crossed by poachers on their way to the vast game reserves which bordered it, but that was all. No one, fortunately for Shrieve, ever troubled to accuse the Ngulu of poaching, for they were notoriously vegetarian except at their two festivals (after which they were often ill) when they ate a sacrificial bull and hunted antelope for a few days, considering two mediocre beasts, clearly slowed down by age and sickness, an excellent bag. There were, however, serious matters now under discussion in the colony, and Shrieve read Robbins’s letter anxiously to see if there were any developments. But Robbins had said nothing, simply scribbled “Up to our eye-teeth here, hope all goes well with you” on an official piece of paper.

  Shrieve sighed and put the letter down. For over eighty years the Ngulu had thriven under a generally benevolent British protection. They were much loved by anthropologists for their questionable artlessness and simplicity of life, and much loathed by their enemy, the Luagabu, who felt, probably rightly, that they could have wiped out the Ngulu years ago, had it not been for the ridiculously sentimental attitude of the British towards what were, quite obviously, a bunch of half-naked savages, much given to cattle-thieving. The Luagabu, by no means so primitive as their neighbours, held very strong views on the ownership of cattle, and could not consider properly human a tribe which used cows solely for the rearing of calves for sacrifice to a terrible heathen idol whose name, so wicked was it, could not pass an enormous wooden-plated Luagabuan lip. Besides, he might hear and be angry.