by Adam Thorpe
In the evenings, all the men wore different coloured cummerbunds and laughed loudly above the piano and the noisy glasses. My mother would appear for a bit, but mostly I’d play chess with Lucy. She wanted to get to Bathurst because she liked the deep blue cummerbunds best. I liked the red ones from Sierra Leone. The only men to come on at Bathurst, however, stayed in Second and Third Class, where we didn’t really go. One of them would walk up and down the deck muttering to himself, with a completely yellow face and bald head and stubble. He said rude words, according to Lucy. She called him Dracula, but his teeth didn’t stick out. Later, she told me he had died suddenly in the night. He was an up-country trader. Maybe he’s infected all of us, she said, and we’ll become a ghost ship.
Sometimes I forgot the black smoke behind us was ours, and thought it was lifting out of the water to chase us and suffocate us. It gave me a cough. Lucy said I wouldn’t like London. When I asked why, she said that it was full of ‘pea-soupers’. This made me worried, because typhoid made you have a pea-soup stool, according to my mother. If someone staggered in from the forest with a pea-soup stool, she would order me and all the servants to keep inside. If the person died and no one came, the body would be wrapped in a sheet and buried very carefully.
The humid air had been left behind. Now I might float up like a bubble, if I wasn’t careful. I couldn’t sleep. I went to my cabin window and looked out into a soft breeze. A darker line must be the Tropic of Cancer, I thought. Or maybe the coast of Senegal, because Senegal came after the Gambia. The sea was like the night river with all the far forest swept away like a big lump of moss. The moon settled on the sea in pieces that were pressed into spoons and then sank, while directly below me the phosphorescence sped off and sped off and made me so giddy it was like going to sleep.
Although it was mostly calm, my mother kept being sick in her cabin and Lucy kept sitting in corners with wet cheeks.
‘Leave me alone,’ they’d both say.
England was cold, like the flat-iron when Augustina wasn’t using it. It was as smoky as Africa, but the smoke had a sour taste. Liverpool was associated in my mind with the word ‘liverish’, one of my mother’s words. So the sight of the port made me feel a bit ill. (The same thing happened when I’d look at the drawings I had done or the books I had read just before my malaria attack, ages before.)
There was more of a swell, as we approached, than at any other time in the whole voyage, and my mother was sick. She was a very bad sailor and kept saying she wanted to die. Lucy had been ill, but with a fever. She emerged looking bone-white, as if her face had been rubbed with kaolin, and stood beside me at the rail, with a purple shawl around her shoulders. She was smiling, lifting her face up to the sunlight. There were big boats and smacks and cranes and a glistening, slippery-looking wall that seemed to slide forward and hit the sea in plumes of spray. It was sunny in bits, and when the sun went in so did all the colours: even the sea was just grey. Its shallow and dirty dullness wallowed and slopped about the breakwater. Each of the concrete blocks tumbled down on it bore a curved iron handle, like the handle on a suitcase. There were bottles on the waves, and rusty tins, and scraps of paper imitating the seagulls that were seated amongst them. I wondered if the water here was English, and whether, if you took some away in a little bottle and poured it into the ocean off Africa, it would dissolve like quinine or float about for ever and ever like a tinned gooseberry.
‘Ah, dear dear England,’ said Lucy. ‘Pro patria mori.’
The ship hooted but it sounded jollier now. There were tiny people on the long wharf, all white. Some of them were waving as they grew. None of them had pith helmets or Bombay bowlers; many of the men wore the funny type of hat I had seen in pictures, with no brim except for a bit in front. Others wore what I knew was called a ‘trilby’, from my Child’s Illustrated Dictionary, though I had never seen one before. There were no parasols and nobody dressed in cream flannels or skirts. Most of them had covered their bodies in long, dark coats, so it was hard to see. I had my thick coat on, but I was used to it. I’d worn it for the last three days, coming out on deck. It no longer hurt my neck or weighed down my shoulders.
Bicycles and cars went up and down behind the people, or even between them, and there were flat trolleys scurrying about, and horses and carts, and a donkey with blinkers. Even the stevedores weren’t black. It was as if someone had peeled off their skin under their singlets and caps and beards. Only the dirt and grease made black streaks on their glistening muscles. I saw this as they grew almost to human size. They must be very cold, I thought.
Now even my mother had joined everyone else on the deck, her hand cold in mine. She had on the same sort of hat as the women down there, curving down so you couldn’t see her eyes from the side, even looking up at her as I was. It had a little red flower in its band. Some of us were waving, and there were whistles and rattle-noises from the people on the wharf, but generally everyone was silent on the ship, as we slid to our berth. Big blue-and-white letters passed us in reverse order, painted directly on to the wall: Elder Dempster Lines Berth 2. The wall plunged down to a hiss of dirty foam like the suds after Baluti had done the laundry, and there were mad gulls daring the gap between metal and stone.
I could see houses now, beyond the huge sheds and cranes of the dock. They were low and all the same, one after the other moving up the hill and facing others also the same – and more even beyond them, still the same, more of the same than I’d ever seen in my life, all smoking. Their roofs were neither thatched nor of corrugated iron – though there was a lot of corrugated iron on the dock’s sheds, as at Victoria, and around a big square of rubble. The houses that were all the same were not white or cream but very dark and dirty looking, and crept up the hill as if they felt shy. There were big chimneys dotted about, smoking blackly, and strange buildings stuck on to them that looked as if they had fallen sideways like a set of dominoes, with hundreds of windows set in their high walls. These buildings had letters painted on the roofs, or on their tall chimneys. They must be factories, I thought, for I had seen a picture of a factory in Father’s Complete Encylopaedia. They were far bigger than I had expected.
I found I was gripping my mother’s hand. I was searching for forest, but saw only fields and some small, puffy trees. I was also searching for big white cars and narrow laughing ladies with furry collars or nothing on at all, splashing in a pool. I’d seen these in my mother’s copies of Vogue, which arrived now and again in the dug-out, along with bales of The Times. But the pool, liverish though the water was here, was nowhere to be seen.
A vehicle I recognised as an omnibus with Dewar’s on its side passed between two buildings, followed by another with Saxa Salt, which was our salt. This excited me: both because I knew the name so well and the fact that it appeared on something I had always dreamed of riding on. The big chains on the ship rattled and men shouted and there was a knock under our feet.
‘We’re here,’ said my mother. ‘This is England, Hugh darling.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ said Lucy. ‘Absolutely top-hole ching bong spiffing.’
She often said things I couldn’t understand, when she spoke at all. She looked bigger in her cape and shawl. Perhaps she’d grown in three weeks. I wanted to say something, but nothing would come. It was only then that I started to feel really homesick. It started in my stomach, and climbed eagerly into my head. It was a sort of panic, but beaten out on a very low drum and hummed slowly. There were pictures in my head – turned from everything I had known and loved – but continually breaking, like the beads of a kaleidoscope. The only one that stayed fixed was the last view of our coast beyond the fluttering strip of white that was all we could see of the breakers, the sky loaded with long dark clouds like logs.
The sharp smell of my father’s spine-pad hanging off the back of his chair rose for a moment over the fishy stink of the docks and the boat’s huge funnel. Then it disappeared, like a vapour. My mother was always complaining
about the air in Africa, saying it was ‘tainted’ or ‘putrid’ – she particularly disliked the smell that came off moist skin and from grown-ups’ armpits, describing it as full of ‘foul matter’. I quite liked it, but never said so. Now I missed it badly, as I missed the smells of vegetation and cooking and rotten wood.
Tears were dripping off my chin, but I made no sound.
‘Isn’t it exciting, darling?’ shouted my mother.
Lucy nodded, but her cheeks were wet again. That made me feel better.
The gulls screeched above us, eager to offer me a lift home on their huge wings, mile after mile after hundredth mile. There were no canoes about the ship, to throw pennies to and watch the hands in them flower or the glistening backs curve into the water and come up as grinning heads. There was only the dull, dirty water, full of bottles and paper and tins. This is where the Normans preyed on the English race. This is where the person who made my father anxious and sometimes angry lived. This is where Mr Shakespeare and Mr Tennyson and Mr Kipling and Mr Henty and Mr Haggard were Bound in Cloth and had All Rights Reserved. This is where Blind Pew tapped and the Black Spot was caught and Long John Silver swung his crutch. This is where all our tins, newspapers and bottles came from, to be used up by us and buried in the pit behind the cemetery or handed out to the villagers that visited.
‘This is where, Hugh, you’re going to live,’ my mother was saying, her arm around me. ‘An English boy in England, with an English family and English friends.’
The fat man with the black umbrella, standing next to Lucy, turned and smiled. I noticed that for the first time on the three-week voyage he had changed his panama for a little straw bowler and was clothed in blue-and-white stripes, as if it was not cold.
‘Jolly good show,’ he cried, ‘and here’s to the old country.’
He drew out from his blazer pocket a small gun and pointed it into the air, then shouted, ‘God Save the King!’ It was one of those wooden guns with an iron pin and trigger that you could buy in Victoria, dating from the German days, or even before. I was never quite sure whether they were real or not, whether the natives had ever used them against the Maxim machine-guns. He pulled the trigger. The gun made a dull clack. You could only just hear it above the bustle of the ship’s berthing. He laughed again, wheezily, and my mother joined in. She seemed to be awfully relieved about something.
We took a train to London. England, I noticed, was full of what Lucy called ‘fag-ends’. Every time I looked at my shoes there was a fag-end next to them: on the cobbles, on the slabs, on the metal grilles, on the carpet of the carriage. Father had said that I must kiss the earth when I arrived, like William the Conqueror. But William the Conqueror was a Norman, and there was no earth to kiss.
Lucy’s face was still drawn and pale, but smiling. The steam in the railway station reminded me a little of the mists off the river and in the forest. I closed my eyes against the hisses and whistles, and it helped. When I stumbled and had to open them again, the sun was pouring through the station’s glass roof and our shadows rippled on the fog.
I almost wetted my pants as the train jolted into life; this was the only thing I had really looked forward to, but it wasn’t at all like the little plantation train the Germans had built before the war, with its open carriages. This journey was made in a room my mother described as ‘close’. She opened the window and I thought the smoke would pour in but it didn’t. I had to go to the lavatory but couldn’t do anything when I saw the ground rushing past through the hole. The lavatory had the worst stink I had ever known.
Next to my mother again, I pressed my forehead to the window. The other people were reading, or dozing. The land rushed past nearby but went slower further out, as if it wasn’t very interested. There was not very much forest and the trees were in puffs of very pale green. They looked as if they might be easily torn, like my mother’s best silk stockings. There were trees that were all white. ‘Is that snow?’ I cried, very excited. Lucy laughed and said it was blossom. She looked around at the other people as if she was shy, suddenly. They all looked at me for a moment and then went back to reading. There were more of those shy-looking houses climbing in chains up and down hills, then approaching us so close we went through their back gardens and nearly ripped their washing off the lines.
I wanted to please my mother so I fixed a grin on my face and kept it there for the whole journey. Poles whipped past and Lucy tried to count them. There were cows and sheep in the fields, and horses and men and machines, but each thing was taken away before you got used to it. I kept my hands under my thighs so long that my skin bore the imprint of the woven seat cover, and I wondered whether it would ever go. A big car at a level crossing had a man in it who waved just too late to wave back, but I waved at some boys on a bridge who didn’t. The air in the carriage was worse than on the smoky deck of the boat, but its sourness made me think of the SS Grace passing my home.
My mother looked at me and I tried to be full of grace.
When we arrived in London the hard ground seemed to edge away each time I set my foot down. Dust filled the air, sourer than the harmattan. The sun’s beams shafted into it, making a kind of yellow mist through which everyone hurried incredibly fast. My mother and I were too slow: even Lucy was slower than anyone else, getting knocked and scowling at people. We had very little luggage: the rest was being sent on to Uncle Edward’s. I imagined Uncle Edward as peeping out from behind a great hill of crates and trunks and hatboxes.
The man helping us with our suitcases was black. I wanted to ask him to stay with us, but he was shouted at by someone else and hurried off. Omnibuses were everywhere, now: they rumbled and growled outside the station, each window framing a face like a photograph. I was surprised to see that most of them had roofs on the upper deck. We took a chugging taxi to the hotel, to my disappointment. It was as though the sea’s waves had turned into bonnets and hoods and hubcaps and all those in peril were swimming for their lives between them. There were only about three horses, which surprised me: in the photograph of Piccadilly in my bedroom at home, there were lots. I kept swallowing but the taste stayed in my mouth. My throat was dry. It was only when we were in the hotel lobby that I realised Lucy had gone. I told my mother.
‘But Lucy got out at Chelsea. She said goodbye to you. Don’t you remember? You are a funny boy!’
Now I remembered, but not very well. I saw her melting into thin air like those vampires did in Dracula’s castle. Melting into the endless streets and faces and shouts and rumblings. I suddenly missed her. She had been a bit of Africa, a bit of Victoria. She probably still had black sand in her pockets, like me.
Our room had a tiny iron veranda that looked down on a straight reach of street that never stopped flowing past. When we went down into it, I noticed certain differences. Shoes clicked here. Pidgin never came out of people’s mouths. There were so many words properly printed on walls and doors and cars and buses that I couldn’t read more than a bit of each one, but some of them stayed for ever: New ‘Yard’ Sensation, Permanent Wave 25/- Full Shingled Head, Old English Maple Furniture FURNITURE, and lots of high Toilets with the i missing on their signs. There were even men carrying words on them, in front and behind, and a lot of the words were very loud. The dust and grit and dryness had given me a kind of asthma by the third day, yet it had drizzled without stopping on the second. The real houses went up and up and were as grey and black as rocks, but at least they stayed still; the vehicles were also like houses but they moved. I struggled to move without losing my mother’s hand but it was hard. When we had to cross the road she chose a spot and said, ‘Here we go, hold tight.’ But she held me so tight that I dreaded crossing the road because it hurt my hand so much.
Perhaps only one thing swept away my fear long enough for me to be excited by it. We’d shopped and ‘popped in’ to friends and relations, we’d eaten in something very new called a ‘snack bar’, we’d wandered between waxworks with glass eyes like the eyes of our leopard
-skin rug or the masks in the villages, we’d seen a film on a screen ten times bigger than Mr Tall’s white sheet in Buea, and we were about to go to the zoo. Then the weather turned suddenly colder, and people scurried about in their long funnels of coats, feet and head protruding at each end, looking bad-tempered and even whiter. My mother said we’d have to spend the afternoon in a theatre instead of going to the zoo, because I had a throat and it was spitting.
The theatre was called the Gaiety. It was like the cinema, its seats covered in something strangely agreeable to rub, called red plush. The long red curtains opened and real people with huge feathers on their heads started to sing and jig about in front of a town with lots of pillars. Then the colours changed and the floor underneath them started to turn and the town turned into a desert with palm trees and camels and a far-off pyramid.
‘This is Ancient Egypt,’ my mother whispered. ‘There’s the Pharaoh.’
Now we were in a golden room. Golden masks bumped about around a gold throne. I closed my eyes and opened them again. It was very like a dream but it wasn’t. It hadn’t cost us very much because it was the afternoon and called a matinée, which means ‘morning’ in French. I presumed that while all this was happening in front of my eyes the rest of London had stopped still, but I heard a faint grumble all around which I thought might be traffic, and a tinny bell passing very quickly, which I reckoned might be a fire engine. It was like when you dream, I thought: your dreams go on without the rest of it. Long curving horns blared and the golden room started to fall down. It turned into a big tent where soldiers were shouting and then into a courtyard where a real fountain dribbled. A woman was crying and then a man came in and she was happy and they sang a song, and then lots of people came on and sang, raising their arms at us and waving like on the jetties and wharves. I thought of my father and the servants and wondered what they were doing right at this moment. The theatre wasn’t very full, but the laughter was quite loud and the clapping even louder.