by Adam Thorpe
I am in reasonable health – which means excellent, here.
With all my love,
Charlotte
SS Grace, somewhere up the creek, April 24th, 1921
Dear Edward and Joy,
Where to begin? Well, at the beginning. Every day in Africa starts at the beginning. I mean, right at the beginning. It is like whoever-it-was rolling that stone uphill, only to see it rolling down again, for ever and ever.
Our crates are ‘steeved’ beneath a cargo of Bibles, and four new recruits joined us on our journey – along with the Reverend Tarbuck and pretty young Grace (she kept telling me how pretty I am, but she is eight years younger and in full bloom). On land, the four new recruits buzzed about Grace like bees around nectar. On water, they have no choice, since the boat is, if you remember, a thin rectangle 70 ft by 10 ft. She finds this attention charming, while I find it tiresome – that is, none of them is yet buzzing about me, and I feel married and old. Their conversation, however, is frightfully chapel, so maybe I should be grateful.
You will be interested in our living arrangements for these seven days on the water (for which I am dressed fashionably in the season’s nautical neckline, I might add). Two cabins, the bigger fore cabin (the men) bearing trunks and cases on its tin roof, the little aft cabin (the women) rattling a collection of thin poles for tents. An awning spreads the length of the boat, with the funnel poking up in the middle, and the pilot house perched high at the back. A flag droops at the prow, behind which is set a table and five canvas chairs. This is where the bees buzz. Three chairs in the stern. This is where the older members drone – and (right now) cough in the smoke.
The Africans in the Mission lined the shore and waved. Tarbuck’s white deputies waved, less boisterously. We waved back from the rail. The steamer ‘throttled up’ and I felt instantly nauseous. The river became less like a lake, and more like a tunnel, and lost its sea-borne swell. In fact, it became like a tunnel without my noticing. Then it opened up again, and I felt happier. Then it closed, behind and before and all but overhead. Edward: you must come to Africa. It would cure you of your trees obsession. One can have too much of anything – even God’s own vegetation. The tropical forest has the same yearning as the mangrove – to carpet the water. However, the forest has a hem which stops at a precise line about two feet above the brown surface, in case it wets its skirts. It looks as if someone has taken a ruler and scissors to it. It means that there is no proper edge, only the blackest of shadows. I asked James why this was. He said it is the flood-line: the lowest boughs indicate the upper limit of the river’s rise in the wet season. So there.
Because of this hem, and the wraiths of mist that hang in the trees like fairies’ washing, the forest is not of this earth. It floats in the air, like a wall hung from the sky. The sky is very low, of course, and utterly grey. Once or twice, for many hours, we have seen nothing either side but vague phantoms. Then we chug along, very slowly. Horrible. The forest is altogether decadent, much too lush. It drips with heat and moisture and perpetual fertility. Into this fearful domain we deliver these pimpled, pale young men from places like Barnsley and Birmingham, one by one. They stand on a primitive jetty with a green canvas valise, a hurricane lamp, and a waterproof case full of Bibles, and wave merrily from a group of perplexed-looking natives. Then a shaggy bend hides them. There is one left: a cricketer! He has a complete cricketing set, anyway; he hopes to win the pagan tribe over with that infernal game. I have no doubt that he will be successful, out here. The men’s cabin is now less like the Bakerloo Line in the rush hour, James says.
Animal life: the chief fear is the hippopotamus, which I had thought utterly harmless. They have canoes for breakfast, it seems, and mission steamers for lunch. Or rather, they might capsize us for the benefit of their friends, the crocodiles. Many a hippo turns into a sandbank, many a croc turns into a log. Also vice-versa, unfortunately. The three black crew (they sleep where they can) are granted pot-shots at the crocs with a rifle that James claims was last active at Waterloo. I can’t blame them for trying: people have been snatched by these reptiles all along the river – especially children. In the day the forest is quiet. As soon as night begins to fall, it is worse than Gala Night at the Lyceum. But its inhabitants, animal and human, are very shy. Yelps and screeches are its speciality. The goblins talk to each other in whistles – particularly when I am just nodding off in the stifling darkness of my cell, Grace breathing gently opposite. I hope God is Baptist, I think, for all His cruelty.
We stop at dusk, when the mosquitoes come out and we retreat to the main cabin. We can’t retreat there during the day since the rattling funnel makes it uninhabitable (I type or sew or read or doze under the awning). We hardly ever go ashore – there are no clearings, and few settlements. We sit in the cabin around a small table, on which stands a hurricane lamp. The Reverend is surprisingly keen on cards, and there is a small warped backgammon set. The river belches through the window, and its last meal was of something putrefying. Mingled with the sweat from our bodies (it runs down and tickles my ribs), these evenings are rendered scarcely endurable, to put it politely. Herbert Standing – the cricket man – disapproves of card games; he spends each evening oiling his bats in the darkest corner of the cabin. The sickly linseed smell overwhelms everything else after an hour, and will stay with me for life. He is sure his bats are beginning to bend. They think they are bananas, I say. (Bananas here are quite delicious, and the mango is Eden’s own fruit.) He is inscribing each one with his name, using one of my needles heated to redness in the lamp. Herbert E. Standing. He is too tall for this vessel, and has almost knocked himself out twice. I, not Grace, rubbed camomile lotion on to the bump.
The next day: Well, it might as well not be. It might be tomorrow, for all we know. The forest wall is broken by creeks: their vista is further gloom. James thinks the scene is romantic. I feel as if I am trapped between two stage canvases on rollers, for ever returning to the same point. If I close my eyes, sitting here at the table in the prow, the same moss-hung tangle fills my head. When I open them again, five minutes or half an hour later, it is still there – the same drapes, the same branches and leaves, the same moss. I am sure the vessel has stopped, its chuggy rumble just this second started up again. The water barely laps at the mangrove roots as we pass; it seems too viscous to carry a wash. We create a foam, or a froth, like dirty suds. It curls and bubbles yellowly and sinks behind us. I have a horror of picturing the submerged part of the hull creeping along above the putrid bed – so I immediately picture it! The intense stench makes me [wish?] to expectorate – it cannot be healthy. I feel as if I am perpetually slipping in a stagnant bog; I’m sure the stench must be increased by our disturbance of this prehistoric calm.
James relishes it all, even while he loses at cards against the Reverend. He says I will adapt, like the chameleons in Victoria on the chess set, to this most demanding of places. Personally, I never saw a single chameleon grow chequered.
The next day again: I now have a terror of not knowing what day it is. There is nothing to tell you. If one lost track, one would lose it for ever. I now understand Robinson Crusoe’s notches.
We are nearly at Ikasa, however. I am learning to discriminate, as I learned to discriminate between patients’ similar conditions. I’m talking of my surroundings. There are creatures flitting about, if one looks long enough. I’m not sure what type, but they are more than leaves stirring, or shadows. Herbert Standing thinks of the wall as a face, full of thought and expression. The trick is to keep staring until one’s eyes adapt. Scientifically, one’s eyes do adapt enormously, as we know when we take our candles to bed from a gas-lit room.
Gaslight! Electrical light! What dreams they already seem!
I am training myself under young Mr Standing’s tutelage (he went to drawing school, until he saw the light). The trees are of many different types and even colours. One is crimson, but I didn’t notice it until he showed me. The hanging vegetation, th
e loops of creepers, are like Raphael’s drapery, apparently. The chaotic and suffocating tangle is beginning to look contented, at ease with itself, even merry (once or twice, when a bird breaks from it, or a huge trumpet-shaped flower shows). I am seeing the clues.
Standing and even James agree that the mosquitoes are appalling. I wear my veil and gloves if I venture out in the cooler air of late dusk. It has rained on and off, but not heavily: the air is already quite soaked enough, it cannot be sponging up more. The books I have brought for the cabin evenings have curled and grown mould, or ripple like the page I’m typing upon. (I wonder if it will unripple by the time it reaches you?) Spots of slime have appeared on my clothes. I spend much of the evening cleaning these off with pure alcohol, as Standing cleans his bats and bails, and Grace takes notes from her Bible, and the other two play cards.
The last day: We were becalmed by something hitting the engine, but it is now repaired. Herbert Standing has been delivered to his Raphael drapery, his intelligent face. He said, for some reason, as he took my hand to say farewell, that he would never forget what I was. What was I? I have no idea. Anyway, there he stood, with his misted spectacles, droopy collar, and sweat-clamped shirt, making love to me in the most endearing manner. Tarbuck grinned away behind his beard, the black crew secured the gangplank, and James was somehow already on shore, taking this brief opportunity to ‘make contact’ with his Responsibilities – these being a dozen bush-dwellers with not a stitch between them, looking cautious. I cannot blame them. They gave us a basket of yams, and I thought them (the natives) quite beautiful, in their diminutive way. They were not strictly Pygmies, though. I am disappointed.
Grace is ill in her cabin, but has only a mild fever.
I will give this to someone in Ikasa, to post in Victoria. There must be someone about to go back there, though we haven’t passed anything but a few dug-outs.
With all my love and affection,
Charlotte
P.S. I am well. James has a headache from not wearing his hat for two minutes when the cloud broke yesterday.
Bamakum, May 3rd, 1921
Dearest Edward and Joy,
Your January letter has only just arrived, half-obliterated by damp. Remember to use indelible ink. Better, chip it out on stone: one page was holed by ants, or maybe rats. But I have the gist of your news. I am glad the snowdrops were on time, and the frosts not too hard. Does England really exist? It is like a penny picture, all in black and white, seen through a pall of tobacco smoke.
The smoke in Africa is spicy. Ikasa was spread beneath it, merely a larger sprawl of huts with a dishevelled trading station. This was constructed from iron girders, crate-boards and palm leaves – ‘optimistically’, as James put it – with shelves holding a variety of tinned foods and grubby bottles. It was just like Hobbs’s Stores during the war, only this one gave credit. A pair of florid rogues smoked and grumbled inside it, the worse for the rum. Hargreaves, the current DO, had abused them for running out of whisky two months before. They had seen ‘not a bloody blink of him’ since, despite the row of Claymore tucked at their feet. ‘He’s gone savage, I reckon,’ said the balder one, and his colleague spat out his quid in agreement.
James and Tarbuck reckon they are here for gold or diamonds: the impenetrable range rolling for hundreds of miles to our north is said to be a plunderer’s paradise, openly seamed with both. Tarbuck added that they were doomed to disappointment. I have a horror of our territory becoming overrun by such gold-rush rascals, but the Reverend reassured me that the legends were as hoary as those of the local monster. (Anyway, were they not so, Cap’n Flint himself couldn’t map a hill of doubloons out of that tangle.)
The chief is a heavily scarified, pleasant man of about thirty, and was quite drunk when we met him. (Power and alcohol, like poverty and alcohol, seem to go together, do they not?) We spent the evening in the sober simplicity of his clay-walled compound. The sixteen palace wives danced in a shuffling circle to the pounding of huge drums, and a goat’s throat was ritually slit. ‘It used to be a human throat,’ Tarbuck murmured to me. Should I believe him? We drank palm wine out of gourds. Wine is the wrong word: phenol is better. Whatever, I was instantly woozy. A male dancer came on and made movements that would have shocked Paris. The Reverend is a keen recorder of traditional customs, and looked on benignly or chatted with Chief Ibofo. He has a handsome face topped off by a broad plume of feathers bigger than the Governor’s. James was in a creased white dress coat and ‘evening’ flannels, and mostly listened. He was marble next to the Chiefs ebony, both equally noble-looking in the firelight. James has ‘bags of ideas’ but insists on the ‘indirect’ approach (in the manner approved), so he hardly opened his mouth. Neither did I.
We stayed in a Public Works Department rest-house, first-class. That is, four concrete walls under a tin roof, netting instead of glass in the one tiny window, and a warped door. No furniture (it was all eaten by termites). Our camp beds were fetched off the boat. Mine yielded a slim orange snake which, on being battered to death by James, turned out to be a quite harmless type.
Ants. Have I mentioned ants? They come in all colours and sizes, and there are too many of them. I no longer see the little red ones. ‘They even eat through our tins,’ moaned the stubbled rogues. ‘But it is you who eat through your bottles,’ I replied.
The next morning, we chugged a further two hours up-river and passed a delightful, clean-looking village with conical roofs. Children waved and shouted. One knows a village is coming by a smell of smoke and (thinking of my sanny days) sharper whiffs of ‘natural secretions’. It is not unlike some of Ulverton’s back lanes – pissiferous, I think you call them, Edward. Tarbuck pointed at a gleam of water ahead, all the more brilliant for the dark, narrow reach it lay beyond. ‘That’s the bay,’ he called. James rustled a map, and said that the station should be on its northern flank. I assume his heart quickened as much as mine, at this point, even though I did not know where the north was, and was too shy to ask. I would look where James looked. We settled in the prow, craning our heads forward. It made no difference to the steady screws of SS Grace. (Her namesake, by the way, was by my side, quite recovered.)
We worked up the tight channel of the reach. A half-mile of deep-looking water, with large muscles, like our African pilot’s arm. Then into the broader, calmer waters. In this natural amphitheatre of primordial forest, both James and I missed the stage. Our sense of scale had been worn down, perhaps, and we were looking for something larger. The boat started to turn towards the far bank, and we saw our new home simultaneously. I’m afraid I clapped my hand over my mouth, or I would have shrieked. I had a hand spare for James to squeeze, which he did. Tarbuck, who had never steamed beyond Ikasa, hummed a madrigal. He is very fond of madrigals, and hums them when he is excited, or miserable. I think he was excited.
After that, I was quite calm. The boat moved frightfully slowly over the waters of the bay, made slower no doubt by my impatience. Let me try to set down my impressions while they are still reasonably fresh, and not [rest of sentence made illegible by a mould stain]. At any rate, I will try to describe as Mrs Kingsley does.
The water between us and the station was as still as a mirror, only shot across with blinding patches of reflected sky. The dark streaks faithfully reflected our home. The bright patches shifted at the slight gust blowing down the creek, and made the bank difficult to discern: I had the impression that the five or six squat little buildings I could see would at any moment float out towards us. The main house seemed right on the water, which was rather alarming (an optical effect only).
The trees behind were extraordinarily tall, with very slender trunks of a creamy bark. Their high foliage looked quite ready to pounce on the buildings, and I could not see for the life of me how these latter all fitted in to such a narrow space. There were two dead trees in the front, bone-white to the topmost branch, as if the merest touch of the river had [killed them?]. They were so perfectly reflected that it loo
ked as if each had grown a single thin root to the very deeps. I felt, in other words, that the station was squeezed between hostile water and malevolent forest, and felt momentarily terrified at the thought of setting my foot, let alone living, in such a place. It seemed almost insulting that such a thin scrap of civilisation had been handed to my husband, like gristle to a dog.
In the next minute – and not just because I saw, as we approached, that there was a decent space between the buildings and the trees, colonised with a large hut and some fencing, as well as a high bank at the water’s edge, with steps and a jetty – I felt an extraordinary contentment.
What a wondrous place, I thought, to live with the man you love!
What a gift we have been given, this union with nature at its most innocent, this happy loneliness far from the teeming masses, with nothing but good to perform!
Edward – I reckoned myself the luckiest woman in the world!
That emotion stayed with me a full two minutes (which is rather long for Africa). Until, I suppose, I saw Mr Hargreaves.
‘There’s Bamakum,’ said Tarbuck. ‘Home sweet home. And there, from the look of it, is Hargreaves. Quite brilliant in his day, it must be said.’
I couldn’t see Hargreaves anywhere, but my sight was a little blurred from sweat. The air was very heavy – leaden, I think novelists call it – and through this leaden air came a strange wail. The crew had described to me a monster who lives in the forest: Mary Kingsley actually saw it, said Tarbuck. It has long hair, bloodshot eyes, is extremely smelly, and sits in trees. Its legs dangle down and its feet – whatever the height of the branch it is perched on – always just touch the ground. If you walk into these legs you are no better off than a fly in a spider’s web. It wails, but faintly. I held on to James, I’m afraid.
There was a little white post on the jetty, with some sort of cap. This turned out to be a man, wailing. No, not wailing: singing. Light operetta, it sounded like. The man’s face was shielded by a large straw hat, but as we drew closer I saw that his hands were moving. Sharp claps came over the water, but none of us commented. This is rather fun, I thought. Churning the shallows on its lee side, the vessel released a particularly thick stench, as if suffering from severe dyspepsia. We breathed through our mouths. The whole of equatorial Africa is ill ventilated and full of tainted matter: it would cause Miss Jenkins, our ward sister at the sanny, nightmares. She was never happy unless a fresh gale was blowing through, and was very keen on the Hinckes-Bird plan, which meant closing the lower sash on a thick board. These boards would always fall on my toe. For some reason, this is what I thought of when I saw what I saw, and I burst into laughter. The District Officer of the Bamakum region, and many regions adjoining (almost the size of Wales, when totted up), was dressed in a khaki cotton shirt, a lightweight dress coat, a pair of tropical puttees and creamy canvas shoes – but between his puttees and the shirt’s hem lay a large area of pink thigh. He had omitted his breeches.