The most hopeful prospect seemed to be an energetic little man with a face tanned darker than an Indian’s by the equatorial sun who was loading crates which evidently contained parts of a motor boat to be reassembled on arrival. Some of the crates were marked in French as well as English, which indicated that the lorry must be bound for the Belgian side of the lakes. I asked the contractor if there was any chance of a job and told him some story which I have forgotten – in Africa all stories are possible – and that I had spent every cent I had to reach Nairobi from Mozambique.
‘I speak French,’ I added hopefully.
‘And Swahili?’
To show that I was fluent I answered him in the language.
‘You don’t look as if you drank,’ he said, half to himself.
‘I have found better ways to waste money when I had some.’
‘You’ll have some if you can start this afternoon.’
Why do I record in detail this meeting with a stranger, having nothing in common with him but a taste for Africa? Because he set me on the way to peace. The mutations of a life do not necessarily spring from close associations but sometimes from a talk or a companionship which only lasts a matter of minutes. So it was here.
Why this record at all if it comes to that, considering Bill Smith is a non-person, an outlaw who renounced any steady stream of life as soon as it no longer contained love? Because I find myself unwilling to join those millions of other Bill Smiths who, as the Ecclesiast writes, are perished as though they had never been born. Then for whom do I write when I am the last of my line without sons or even an identity? For myself, I suppose. Here in the peace of the convent among these women who happily fulfil themselves in their duty to God and the neighbour, I spend the evenings re-living the action of the past – not wholly in repentance but, as it were, licking the blood from my whiskers with pride in the success of stalk and kill which relieves me of weighing right against wrong. I am content to be. I love, therefore I am. She had loved, therefore in some form she is.
My employer was an excellent mechanic and must have been a good picker of men, for his two Kikuyu boys, cook and driver’s mate, were cheerful and intelligent. His navigation and choice of camp sites were poor, for this was the longest journey he had ever undertaken. With relief he soon handed over that side of the business to me. With whom and where, he asked, had I so much experience. Long ago, I replied, with a certain Raymond Ingelram of whom he had vaguely heard. He was disappointed because I would not shoot, but otherwise inclined to slap me on the back for every comfort of the wilds that I knew how to provide.
After delivery of our boat to a ferry company starting up on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, we made ready for the return to Nairobi. He was astonished when I insisted, in spite of his promises of prosperity for both of us, in staying where I was. I had to. The ship would have long since reported the disappearance of Ingelram from Mombasa and the Nairobi authorities, with so many old acquaintances to bear witness, could have no doubt of the real identity of Bill Smith. So my employer paid me off most generously and I settled down in Albertville for a few days until a Belgian mining engineer, attracted by the praises of my employer and the ferry company, appealed to me to take charge of his small safari.
He had no luck. As we were travelling up the Ruzizi River, I went down with a tropical fever which must have been rather more virulent than malaria against which I was pretty thoroughly salted. If he, not I, had been ill, I could have nursed him well enough to give him a fair chance, but he was inexperienced, in a hurry and afraid of fevers in general. So he deposited me in the nearest village, leaving one of his boys to serve me, under the supervision of the local witch doctor, who knew more of fevers than most consultants, but disliked the fuss and bother and questions that would result from the death of a white man. He put me in a hammock and two runners dropped the shivering bundle, like an unwanted baby, upon the steps of the nunnery thirty miles away, where it seemed to me in my fever dreams that white seagulls in a cloud were swooping over me.
They turned out to be the white robes of a heroic little group of Belgian nuns who combined a hutted hospital with farming of fruit, herbs and vegetables and a small herd of fly-proof cows – perhaps to remind them of the long-lost meadows of their home – where the grasslands began to merge into the forest. They soon had a Bill Smith in working order and then asked him where he wanted to go. I answered that I wanted to stay with them and serve them, requiring only my food and an outlying, watertight hut of my own. There were many tasks that a man could undertake for them more easily. The headman was a pious fool, always in and out of the little chapel and paying more attention to the candles than to the garden or the cows.
The mother superior asked me to swear that I was not a fugitive from justice. Leaving out the Gestapo, who had no interest in justice, and the brigadier, a limited man who could not do justice without papers, I could honestly swear that I was a fugitive from no one but myself.
‘But why?’
‘Because my love was killed.’ I could not bring myself to tell her how, or of my vengeance.
‘Yet you are so full of love to us and to the animals. Cannot you love God too?’
‘I do. At dawn with birds and at evening with the beasts.’
She did not understand and was sad.
It is true that in the evening I join in the thanks offered up by the cries of the beasts around me. They have accepted me as of the same substance as these angels whom they do not fear. But there is one I wish had more fear. Killing is too easy for her. I have tried a dozen tricks to frighten her away, but she is impertinent like all cats. She knows me too well and I could swear she is jealous of the nuns. She has the white robes fluttering for the safety of the house, but with me in the last of the light she will exchange a quick, green glance as if there was some secret understanding between us.
Yesterday she jumped the enclosure and killed a cow. That cannot be permitted. Also I am a little afraid for the white robes; the margin between lack of respect and attack is so small. She has to die, my lioness of the twilight. I have forbidden myself to shoot, but there is still another way and in the Sudan I dared it successfully, hurled to the ground under my shield unhurt. One must provoke the direct charge, and I am not sure that charge she will. Another absolute essential is a strong shield of hippopotamus hide and a broad spear of steel forged by a skilled blacksmith. The headman has both in his hut, emblems of the past manhood of his tribe though he himself can’t even handle a pitchfork properly. I must inspect them closely and see if they are up to the job. And then, my dear, the rest is up to you. If you will not charge, it cannot be done. If you will and I can hold the spear steady as you leap, the pain will be no more than that of the bullet.
Epilogue
When I was last in Kenya to stay with my brother, Sir Leander Harding, he told me that police headquarters had recently submitted to him most unexpected news of my old friend Raymond Ingelram.
I had learned after the war that, in the spring of 1942, Raymond had appealed to our embassy in Stockholm to get in touch with me, but Whitehall had replied to the inquiry that I was on service abroad and address unknown – the sad result of too much official secrecy and application to the wrong department. Since then there had been only silence.
Apparently, while being shipped home as a probable enemy agent by Secret Intelligence Middle East, Raymond had gone ashore at Mombasa and eluded a police search by plunging straight into the interior under the name of Bill Smith and settling down as handyman with a conventicle of Belgian nuns. When the Belgians withdrew from the Congo and the usual undiscriminating massacres began, the nuns were evacuated to Kenya with their insignificant possessions. Among them was a locked metal box which they had carefully preserved in the hope that it could be conveyed to some friend or relative of their dear Bill Smith. This they left in the charge of the chief of police. When still unclaimed after many ye
ars, it was opened and found to contain a pile of loose pages which revealed Smith’s identity.
To his story I can only add that when the bodies were discovered the spear was through the heart of the lioness and her teeth had closed on his head. Though the nuns put it more delicately, the two were entwined like a pair of lovers. His arms were round her and one of the hind legs was thrown over his. I make no comment. Did he in the moment of death dream that he embraced his love? Or did he approach some transcendental reality when he wrote ‘she had loved, therefore she is’?
Afterword
A Household Name
There was a time when Geoffrey Household really was a household name, or at least in households where good thriller writing was appreciated and other names such as John Buchan, Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming were bandied about.
I first came across the name on the cover of a paperback edition of A Rough Shoot, a thriller written before I was born but now appearing in orange Penguin livery (rather than the traditional green indicating crime and mystery) with a stylish modern art graphic cover by Charles Raymond. It must have been that cover which attracted me – I was 12 and spending all my pocket money on thrillers – because I knew nothing of the film of the book (made in 1953 starring Joel McCrea and Herbert Lom with a script written by Eric Ambler) and had never heard of the author.
After reading this short, sharp tale set mostly in darkest Dorset and populated by English country gentlemen carrying shotguns (as well as the odd foreign agent), I was, however, determined to find out more about this author which meant, in those pre-Google days, a trip to the local library. There, every reference I found pointed me firmly to an even older thriller; something called Rogue Male, which although first published in 1939 was not difficult to come by as it had remained in print more or less ever since – until recently the only Household title to do so, sadly.
With Rogue Male I was hooked, not only by the story but also by the story of the book’s publication, which was almost as sensational.
Initially published in three instalments in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Rogue Male tells of an assassination attempt, scandalously in peacetime, on a European dictator – clearly Adolf Hitler, though he is never named – by an aristocratic English gentleman and big game hunter. When published in book form in the UK, publication date just happened to be September 1st 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland and Rogue Male was instantly on the way to becoming a classic and was quickly filmed by Fritz Lang in Hollywood under the title Man Hunt.
If Rogue Male, thanks to its subject matter and immaculate timing, is the book which made Geoffrey’s name household, it did not profit the author in the short term for he had already been recruited by British Intelligence for special services overseas. He was not to return to England, and fiction writing, for six years. In his 1958 autobiography Against The Wind, Household tells the story in characteristic disarming fashion of how he received on 20th August 1939 a telegram from the War Office requesting him to report within 24 hours: ‘The urgency surprised and flattered me. No one had ever demanded me within twenty-four hours; next week was always enough.’
The reason Geoffrey Household, by then a 38-year-old Territorial Army reservist, should be so in demand by a War Office still technically at peace was due to his rather unconventional life up to then and it was that life experience which was to shape and permeate his fiction.
After reading English Literature at Oxford, but graduating with no plans and no ambition, he drifted into a position as a trainee banker with the Franco-British Ottoman Bank in Bucharest, Romania – a job he accepted ‘with joy and excitement, knowing nothing more of banks than that they were institutions upon which one drew a cheque hoping that it would be paid.’
During four years of youthful, carefree, hedonism, Household never once visited the oil fields of Romania or even learned more Romanian ‘than was necessary to call a cab’ and in 1926 relocated to Spain to try a fresh career as an importer of bananas. He then moved to the United States ‘just in time for the Depression’ and subsequently became a traveller in printer’s inks in South America. During his wanderings he tried his hand at writing children’s stories, finding some success in the U.S. and published his first novel in 1937 as he finally returned to live in England.
When, in that summer of 1939, the War Office summoned him for ‘special duties’ in MI(R) [Military Intelligence (Research), later to become part of the famous Special Operations Executive] it was, to his utter surprise, because of his experiences of Romania, fifteen years before, now that the Ploesti oilfields were clearly going to be of immense strategic value to an aggressive Nazi Germany.
It was probably a slightly bemused Captain Household who found himself shipped to Egypt, still in peacetime, to begin a clandestine life in the Balkans. As a fluent Spanish-speaker by now, he had half-expected that his ‘special duties’ would have consisted, romantically, of organising Basque or Catalan guerrillas to rise up against General Franco’s Fascists. Instead, he found himself posing as an Insurance Agent and travelling via Palestine, the Lebanon and Turkey, to (neutral) Romania where his orders were to plan the destruction of the oilfields in the event of a German invasion – just as his novel Rogue Male was receiving great critical acclaim and success back home.
However, the plans of Household’s amateur, but very willing, group of saboteurs were compromised in July 1940 when a French agent who was aware of them was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris. And as the Germans, Hungarians and Russians began to carve up Romania, Household and his Polish driver made a final defiant journey into occupied Transylvania in a British Legation car proudly flying the Union Jack.
Ordered back to Cairo in September 1940, Household volunteered for a posting in Field Security with the British army in Greece on the grounds that: ‘I knew my way around Athens, could read a menu in Greek and choose from it intelligently.’
It is doubtful if he had much time to visit the restaurants of Athens, as the Germans invaded in April 1941 and Captain Household joined the British retreat and evacuation from Greece, hotly pursued by Nazi dive-bombers across terrain which would, forty years later, feature in Rogue Justice.
From that point, Household insisted he was a ‘non-combatant’ for the rest of the war, remaining in army Field Security and serving in Jerusalem and Beirut (whilst the film Man Hunt was playing in cinemas back in England) and Baghdad in Iraq, returning to Europe in 1945 for one final, traumatic posting to North Germany where he saw the liberation of Sandbostel concentration camp.
Demobbed from the army in July 1945, Household found himself having to more or less start again as a writer after six years abroad, or as he put it, back at the bottom of the snakes-and-ladders publishing game. From then, right up to his death in 1988, he produced thirty books – thrillers, picaresque novels, children’s stories, science fiction and collections of short stories – all in a distinctive style which brought comparisons from the critics with the writing of Fielding, Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Yet it is for Rogue Male which he remains most famous and though publishers pressed him for a sequel for decades, it was not until, at the age of 80, that he began writing Rogue Justice. And just as the book, as well as being a cracking thriller of chase, flight and revenge, is a summation of the life and motivation of the once-anonymous Rogue Male – whom we now know to be Raymond Ingelram – it is also a summary of Household’s personal beliefs forged by his cosmopolitan existence in the 1920s and 30s and his time as a soldier.
In Rogue Justice we learn that Ingelram is ‘an agreeable dinner guest (with) no political opinions whatsoever’ and that he is a man with no use for democracy, but who detests dictatorships. Both descriptions, I suspect, could easily have been applied to Household himself who often referred to himself as a ‘romantic anarchist’. Certainly he had a loathing of state control on individual liberties, which he saw as inseparable from socialism, and admitted that ‘In argument w
ith politicians I am always beaten. I cannot express what I believe, whereas they express what they cannot possibly believe.’ But his real hatred was reserved for Hitler and the Nazis and for what they had done to ‘our once sweet Europe’ and it is this passionate hatred which he gives his doomed hero Ingelram, with the added fuel of a very personal loss.
Even before the declaration of war in 1939, Geoffrey Household declared that ‘My feeling for Nazi Germany had the savagery of a personal vendetta’. His autobiography records how he had ‘watched the gropings of my Europe back towards the lights which had gone out in 1914’. Despite the economic depression, the lights of his Europe had flickered into life, only to be extinguished by aggressive Nazism.
Household’s passionate ‘Europeanism’ is a constant theme in all his writing and the romantic nostalgia he felt for the old, noble, Europe of two empires (Hapsburg and Ottoman) is an integral theme of Rogue Justice and crucial to the psychology of his hero Raymond Ingelram, whose mother we learn was Austrian, ‘descended from the kings of Bohemia’ with estates in Slovakia, The partisans Ingelram encounters on his bloody quest for justice represent ‘the provinces of the vanished empire’ and, when fighting alongside Poles, Czechs, Romanians and Austrians, he notes that ‘we remained Europeans and men of honour. For me as for my ancestors, frontiers are only a nuisance.’
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