by Jacob Ross
When he came upon remote hamlets and villages, children would sometimes chase him, throw stones, call names and scamper, as if he’d bother to chase and beat the little rascals.
When he entered smoky taverns, their earthen floors congealed with mud, sawdust and ash, the room stopped mid-sentence. He bowed low and said Good Evening, smiling broadly to disarm himself.
He ordered a tankard of porter, found a stool and waited for the locals to approach, which they always did, with the caution of bear tamers.
He had long ago learnt that he could be whomsoever he wanted in strange lands.
They gathered around and he regaled them with tall tales: how he’d made a fortune smuggling whale sperm oil into Lisbon but lost it playing Chinese Checkers in San Francisco. How he’d fought for Sitting Bull against General Custer at Little Big Horn or narrowly avoided being decapitated by head hunters in Papua New Guinea. Sometimes he was the deposed King of Tonga, other times a great African chief. He had seen a public beheading of a pirate in Shanghai. Afterwards the executioner swung his victim’s pony-tailed head around like a ball on a chain while the crowd rushed forwards to dip their hands in the blood leaking from the headless torso. He had witnessed a stampede of sabre-brandishing Ottomans in the town of Chania on Crete during one of their Christian uprisings.
His audience, many of whom had never ventured more than ten miles, north, west, south or east, found their world made larger, and for that they were grateful. He was rewarded with drinks paid for and a roof to sleep under for the night.
*
For three days it had been raining and he had been crossing the wide, empty countryside he now knew they called the moors without passing a single settlement or stream. His boots squelched as he walked because he had sunk knee-deep into a marsh. Eventually he came upon an orchard and farmstead just as the skies were clearing. Girls wearing wide-brimmed hats and dirty white smocks were collecting apples in baskets. Boys wearing cloth caps and knickerbockers were running around waving rattles to scare off the birds. A cry went up. A dog came barking towards him. A man appeared, a Mr Renfrey Kelynack, he quickly learned, who was surprised but not alarmed. As a young man he had been sent to work with his uncle as a hammer-man in an iron foundry in the town of Deptford in Kent. He had known men who looked like this one.
By evening Lawani was seated in a thatched longhouse so old it was sinking at one end.
Mrs Kelynack had washed his boots and stuffed them with oats to dry out. She looked young enough to be her whiskery husband’s daughter.
A long oak table with grooves. Flagstone floor with a layer of grit brought in from outside. Lime-washed walls perspiring with condensation. Heavy iron pans hanging from metal hooks. The granite hearth was the stove.
Mr Kelynack said prayers and Lawani dropped his head out of politeness.
Potato and rabbit stew, barley bread, baked figgy plum pudding on a pewter platter sprinkled with white sugar. All washed down with ginger beer. No ship’s weevils. No mould. No grey rubbery mash to digest or disgusting watery gruel. It was the finest meal he had ever eaten but when he thanked the cook her eyes slid away from his.
The children sat there mesmerised and barely spoke. The youngest, Tamsin, sat at his side and began crawling her fingers slowly towards him like a spider. He pretended not to notice. Emboldened, she stroked his hand.
Stop it, Tamsin, said her father.
Mr Kelynack told his guest that his farm was called Bos Eldon and when his father and older brothers died one harsh winter, he had been urged to come home from London.
The farm consisted of Little Lower, Middle Lower and Great Lower Fields. They kept sheep, grew corn, barley and red wheat. A tin seam in the valley was useless, its yield negligible, unlike the mines further north that were big business in these parts. See here, an acre can produce six Cornish bushels of wheat in a good year, that being equivalent to three English bushels. Red wheat weighs more than white so it makes sense to grow that. Oxen are cheaper than mules, which is why I plough with one. Mr Kelynack inhaled on his pipe when he spoke and wheezed like rusty bellows when he did not.
I could do with some help here.
His guest nodded.
And where in the Americas are you from?
His guest laughed. I come from a village called Lagos.
I see, and where is that?
Yorubaland.
Where be Yoboyobolanda? Tamsin piped up. Can we go there?
It is far, far away.
He did not want to speak of the place of his birth. As a boy at sea, it was too painful to remember his home and the father he had lost.
Instead, he described the Victoria Falls in Matabeleland. How it dropped over three hundred feet into the great Zambezi River so that when he peered over the edge he saw only hissing froth that nonetheless left him drenched.
The local people call the Falls Mosi-oa-tunya: Smoke that Thunders.
Mossy tinna, Tamsin repeated.
He told them about the sadhus, holy men of India – their hair and faces white with chalk. How some of them walked for so many years with an arm raised in the air that it eventually shrivelled and hung limp. How some of them lay on a bed of nails.
S’dangris, Tamsin said.
It is indeed.
Her hand was a little ball in his so long he ceased to notice it. When he finally opened his palm to release her she jumped onto his lap and squeezed her arms around his neck, almost choking him. Everyone laughed. He carefully unclasped her limbs with fingers that individually were almost as big. She looked up at him and he took in her broad forehead, freckles, stubby nose, hair tangled as a bird’s nest. He put a hand on her shoulder but felt awkward. He had never held a child before. She smelt so different, fresh; this was a child’s smell. She was so tiny, so light, so warm in his lap that he realised in that moment, that if anyone had dared hurt her he would have laid him out flat and stamped on his skull until he heard it crack.
Later, when he was scrubbing himself down by the well with a bucket of water, and the children were in bed and Mr Kelynack had taken the dog off to rally the sheep, he glanced up to see Mrs Kelynack had come around the side of the house.
She was devouring him.
When he hid his shame, she did not look away.
He slept in the eaves, on a boarded platform above the larder, and was, thankfully, untroubled.
He liked his host. Mr Kelynack was a kind man.
Before dawn, Lawani was crossing Middle Lower Field, his staff pounding the ground. Three days later he had climbed to the brow of a hill and saw a strange squatter encampment below. Calwatha Mine. Chimneys blackened the sky, there was a steam-driven pump, shaft openings, pulleys, awnings, giant wheels, timber scaffolding, shuttle tracks, mountains of sludge, granite slopes and a patchwork of cabins and long huts.
The manager, a Mr Yelland, looked grateful to see him enter the camp looking for work. His men had been migrating in droves to the silver mines of Mexico and the copper mines of Tasmania. He told Lawani he’d been a supervisor at a diamond mine in Kimberly in the Cape Colony until his wife insisted they raise their children in God’s Own Country, not some hellhole a million miles from civilisation.
You’ll start at seven and finish at seven with half an hour for lunch, Monday to Saturday. Payday is Friday. You can park yourself in the dorm for now. No point shilly-shallying, we’ll get you down below tomorrow.
A jacket, a bowler hat with a clay candle holder attached, a pot of resin to harden the hat, candles, a pick, shovel, wedges, hammers – all signed for and to be deducted. These people made sure a man spent his wages before he’d even earned it.
Lawani explored the mine; after so long in the wilderness, its clangs and clunks, grinds and growls jolted his senses. He was shocked to come across women, bal maidens, buttoned up with thick skirts and white hats with long side flaps. As spallers, they were crushing rocks of tin ore with sledgehammers on the mine’s dressing floors. Look at them – strong women who wouldn’t
be afraid of him. He was right. As he edged closer, they sized him up. Some were too old to bear children, others were too brazen, except for one of the younger ones, who refused to look up even when he stared so hard she must have felt it.
He pretended to leave and then quickly spun round to catch her – flushed, curious, excited.
The next morning, he descended five hundred fathoms down a shaft in a cage. Deep inside the earth the tunnels were propped up by forests of sliced tree trunks. It was torrid, wet, suffocating. What was he doing here? Had he lost his mind? He would soon move on.
At twenty-six, Tommy Penhaligon had already spent thirteen years underground. He showed Lawani how to chip away at rock while high up a ladder that itself was perched on a thin ledge. It’s one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, Tommy warned. Yeh, really dangerous. If you slip you’ll be done for, Larry.
Lunchtime they stopped for crowsts, which was dinner and dessert in one: pies stuffed with meat, turnip, potato and onion on one side; jam on the other. He was instructed to hold the pie by the crust or else get tin poisoning from his hands and then to safely discard it down the shaft for the rats.
After work, Lawani joined Tommy and the other men in the winks, the drinking hole next to the mine, where they all got plastered on porter and ribbed him.
If it weren’t for those teeth of yours you’d be invisible in the dark, Larry. Down the hatch in one. Huzzah!
The men quickly slurred their speech and stumbled about. Lawani did not. This was his new self. After twenty years at sea he’d witnessed how drink was the seaman’s prolonged suicide. With fresh water in short supply, he and his fellow seafarers got drunk on Sudden Death and Knock-me-Down, liquor that turned the mildest of men into monsters when the fermented stew rose to the surface in a bile of bloated emotion. Nine months earlier he himself had stabbed a man in Mogadishu. For what? For tripping over his stool.
As the men got rowdier, he looked around and saw her enter, the bal maiden, with the other young women, the unmarried ones, the available ones, he was told. Her hair was thickly curled and piled up, her scrubbed-clean face was peachy, her pale eyes mocking with good humour when he sidled up to her.
We was just saying, you’re as black as night alright, Sambo.
You can call me Lawani… or Larry or… Mr… Bartlett. And you?
Miss Morwenna Warmington to those who’s asking, and mine’s a tankard of porter.
Every evening he escorted her to the cob cottage where she boarded in the village. She brought out a new lightness in him. For the first time in his adult life he felt playful.
Miss Warmington, allow me to accompany you home.
It seems you’ve already made up my mind.
Miss Warmington, allow me to carry your basket.
I can manage full well on my own, thank you.
Miss Warmington, your eyes are like glittering stars.
No, Mr Bartlett, my eyes are like dung and dust and dirt and full of weariness.
She stopped outside the front door to the lodgings she shared with the other girls. He lingered.
Go now, take my lantern for the long walk back across the fields. Give it me on the morrow.
I bid you goodnight, Miss Warmington.
I bid you too goodnight, Mr Bartlett.
Sundays he courted her around the village green. She said she didn’t care what anyone said or thought. He was different to all the other men around, which is what she wanted. Her mother had died after breathing in the soot of the calciner for twelve years. Her father copped it from bronchitis after twenty-three years down the pit, and not a day too soon, she said, and then mumbled, I was his daughter, not his wife.
Her three younger brothers had escaped the pits and gone to sea.
Every Sunday Lawani accompanied her to Zion, the Methodist chapel in the village.
Later, out on the moors, he lay her down upon his brown blanket. She took his weight. She was as comfy and fleshy as he had dreamed. He could not believe his luck. Nor could she. After the life she’d had, she deserved a man so special.
Am I your first, he asked. Yes, she replied, turning away and studying the sky.
Afterwards, they were happiest lying in each others’ silence.
As a spaller, Morwenna stood outside in all weathers on the cobbled dressing floor of the mine and smashed a three pound sledgehammer onto the great rocks of tin ore that were brought up from underground. Every time she raised her weary arms and brought the hammer down on rock, she imagined it was the head of her father. His brains were the wet, reddish waste that made the dressing floor so slippery and dangerous.
Lawani promised her a better life, away from this dump. Perhaps London. Let’s see.
That spring they celebrated becoming man and wife with a mug of porter and a turnip pie. Lawani decided to build a temporary home on the moors, near enough to the mine but far enough away to be undisturbed. He’d had enough of overpriced lodgings crowded with fellow miners and their families all sleeping together in a poorly-ventilated, disease-breeding room. It was no better than below decks and he was already coughing up the dust of the mines.
He needed air. He was beginning to miss the sea.
Our very own makeshift castle on the moors, he told her, built out of stone.
She rolled her eyes. You’re mad you are.
He slapped her cheek.
Well, it’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.
He slapped her again, harder.
She refused to cry.
I am your husband.
She handed over her wages every Friday.
For a nominal sum he was allowed to build their temporary home near the remains of a granite pit. On three sides was woodland that would protect it from wind. A river ran nearby. He lugged stones from the pit and slotted them into each other. It took weeks before the construction was solid and not prone to collapse. Peat filled in the gaps. Coal sacks were further insulation. For flooring, he laid planks of wood. The finished hut was large enough to sleep two people and high enough for smoke to circulate.
They had a straw mattress on a wooden pallet, a large tin chest containing provisions such as bowls, beakers, pans, billycan, rags, blankets and a bar of Pears Translucent Soap, the one luxury Morwenna asked for and got. For fuel they dug up peat in summer and stacked it like stones to dry out for the coming winter.
In the desert kingdoms they use camel dung, he said.
What’s a camel, my lovely?
In summer they stripped off their garments and washed in the river. He lathered her with her precious, expensive soap. He unclipped her thick hair so that it fell in an abundance of twirling curls to her waist. She wrapped her legs around him and leaned back in the water so that her hair spread out like the fronds of water plants. Her breasts were wet, shiny mounds. He plunged and plunged until he softened.
When she grew round, he was convinced it was a boy.
Finally, he was going to be more than himself.
She began to weep in the mornings and he didn’t understand why she was so unhappy with him. She said she wasn’t. He said she was. Women are strange creatures. Why be so sad when you should be overjoyed? I’m not sad, she cried.
As her stomach grew, so did his dreams. New wife, first child, new life, new beginnings, new country. As soon as my son is old enough, I will take you both back to Yorubaland. I am ready.
Where is it, she asked. Why did they have to go somewhere so far away? You promised London. Everyone’s heard of London.
Then she held her tongue.
Mr Yelland allowed her to do lighter duties at the mine for less pay, sweeping up the waste, a job usually reserved for old women and children.
After twelve hours in the dungeon of the worm-infested earth, he enjoyed the walk home with Morwenna through the spongy tussocks of rushes. When the wind blew he imagined he was sailing between continents.
As autumn arrived the moor became soaked in a grey mist and the tors looked like ancient burial mounds. Earl
y morning, the ground was covered with dew. As winter arrived the tall grasses blanched, dehydrated and died. When mist thickened into fog he imagined he could see the long-necked prehistoric creatures in the Natural History Museum in London, just like the ones he’d seen in photographs in the Gazette. Or he imagined mountainous blocks of ice against the chilly blue sky. He had once worked a whaler called the Svend under Captain Johannsen. The Arctic tundra – a bleakness greater than his own.
He wanted to tell Morwenna all of this.
He awoke early and sat outside wrapped in a blanket to drink tea in the chilly air.
As she grew larger, their walk to the mine slowed down; he helped her along. She was finding it difficult and had to rest often. If she didn’t work until the baby dropped, she’d have no jobs to return to. She complained and wanted to move nearer town. She wanted to live in a proper house even if it was crowded and stank. She wanted to be warm at night. She wanted to be away from the wind that howled outside their hut.
That day they arrived at work and she headed, as usual, for the dressing floor while Lawani went down the shaft with Tommy to the spot they’d left the day before.
They stood on the narrow ledge as the tunnel echoed with the sound of a hundred men and boys banging chisels into rock. Lawani always heard it as a kind of drumming. It made him homesick for a place he could barely remember. Sweat poured down him. He dreamt of roaming the open oceans. How free he had been, changing ships at whim, seeing so much of a world most people cannot even begin to imagine. He thought of the son who would soon be born.
He would name him in honour of his father: Babatunde – Father Returns.
The next morning Morwenna gave birth prematurely in a hut at the mine. It was the shock, they said. Along with everyone else, she had been up all night. The women delivered her a son but Morwenna did not name him until three months after his birth. In hope. In desperation. In disbelief.
At the time of Frank’s birth, his father was trapped five hundred fathoms under the ground. Lawani was not dead at this point. At first the men and boys charged around the tunnel hoping to find a way out. But they were sealed in. They extinguished their lamps to preserve breath until, in the blackness, one by one they slumped.