by M G Vassanji
A few days after my last meeting with Rita in the coffee shop, I finally went to the Anglican church office to collect the box Gregory had left me. On my way I stopped briefly and somewhat guiltily at the grave I had not seen for over ten years. The site was well tended, like the others there, and that morning cut flowers had been placed upon it. The headstone looked more modest than I remembered, the engraving upon it quite bleakly to the point: “Richard Gregory, 1908-1972.” Inside the office I identified myself to the young priest (his predecessor, Mr. Anscombe, whom I had known, had passed away, I was told), who took me to a storeroom. Without too much effort, and to my great relief, we managed to find my cardboard box against the far wall, somewhat misshapen but otherwise intact, at the bottom of a pile of similar boxes. It was marked “To Mr. Pius Fernandes (to be picked up),” and had been secured carefully with sisal twine. I couldn’t help thinking, with gratitude, that old Mr. Anscombe, who had first brought me the news that Gregory had left me the box, had shown remarkable prescience in believing that I would come for it one day.
As I had already guessed long before, most of the contents of the box were textbooks and binders filled with notes for courses. But there were other things, more personal, which in an instant drew me away from Shakespeare and Dickens. There was a thick bundle of staff photographs, from Boyschool — looking through them in sequence one had the eerie sense of the school staff ageing. In his early photographs, Gregory had not been as unkempt and overweight as he was in later years, though he had always been stocky. My own youth in some of them came as a rude shock. There were three issues of the Manchester Guardian, for which Gregory wrote a column called “Bwana Notes.” Three hardback exercise books contained drafts of poems and, I believe, an abandoned novel. There were newspaper cuttings of reviews of two of his books. And, finally, there were bundles of letters, ordered roughly by chronology, and secured with twine. The four letters that I had written to him from London were among these, as were dozens from his students at Boyschool. Then, among letters from numerous people I didn’t know, I found a number from Alfred and Anne Corbin, confirming my growing belief that the three had known each other in Uganda. Not an earth-shaking discovery at this stage, but a relief; a small victory; a gift, if you will, from Richard Gregory. There were just three letters from Alfred Corbin, all written within a few weeks of each other in 1935, and eighteen from Anne, written at various periods between 1937 and 1972.
I have been deeply touched by this bequest, which I had spurned once and forgotten for so long. The box contains, as I had thought, the debris of a life; but this debris is also a wealth. I don’t know what I will make of all this — perhaps there is another project here for a retired schoolteacher. Perhaps I will be able to answer for Gregory his own question, more generously than he himself was able.
25
Gregory had been such a fixture at Boyschool, such a part of the local life and lore, that it always came as something of a surprise to be reminded that he had been elsewhere in Africa. He would admit to it — he’d been in Uganda before Dar — but he made it obvious he had no intention of dwelling on the subject; it was none of your business.
It had been a short stay, 1933-34, and, I always assumed, not a very happy one. It was not hard to imagine a younger, more brash Gregory, a poet straight from London, offending the small local community of officials and being left without friends. The Corbins, however, and especially Anne, took a liking to him.
Entebbe
15/3/35
Dear Richard,
You should by now have settled in your new position in Dar. I trust the town and its inhabitants are more to your liking. Excerpts of your essay have circulated in the upper echelons (among “the gods”) and H. E. himself asked me if you were indeed a socialist s—–. What I said of you does not bear retelling, but you have been redeemed if only as a somewhat eccentric literary type with connections to the London papers.
I am afraid that Commissioner Barnes came to you before I could quite write to you myself. I met him here last month at the Police Conference, at which he brought out a fountain pen which I found rather disturbingly familiar-looking. It was a Waterman with a very distinct design, and I told Barnes — who caught me staring at it — that it reminded me very much of one I had lost years before. It could still be yours, for all I know, was his response. He said the police clerk in Dar had bought it from an Indian called Pipa a few years ago and presented it to him. I told him that a young man called Pipa had run a shop in the town of Kikono where I had been ADC at the start of the War, and that I had lost my diary with the pen. This set the commissioner’s police brain ticking. Well, the long and short if it all is that he has set his mind upon raiding the Indian’s store. Such raids, for stolen property, are quite common, and I myself have been party to a few in Moshi and Dar. I told Barnes that in the — extremely unlikely — event of his finding my diary, he was to place it in your hands immediately …
Anne remembers you fondly. The Ladies’ Reading Group has folded, much to her annoyance, and regrouped as the Child Welfare Clinic. Washing and weighing native babies is not quite in her line of interest and she looks forward to the Little Theatre’s production of Shaw’s Pygmalion. The garden thrives.
Yours truly,
Alfred
Entebbe
17/4/35
Dear Richard,
I am sorry about the fiasco. I had no idea the police would take you along on the raid, and I apologize, again, for involving you in this silly affair. You are probably right that the fire was no accident. Your conjecture that Pipa is just the kind of shopkeeper who would hoard a diary is somewhat disturbing. I had hoped that it was dead and buried. The idea of it lying hidden in an Indian duka is revolting.
The diary, a gift from my mother, contains entries I began upon departure for East Africa, and is a record mostly of my first posting as ADC in the town of Kikono next to the German border. I met the shopkeeper Pipa in the most odious circumstances there, engaged in a scuffle with two askaris and my cook, who had objected to his transferring a large quantity of German mail into our postal system. He had come from nearby Moshi to take part in a local festival. Later he married a local Shamsi girl who was in my employ at the time. I gave the couple permission to stay in my district when the War broke out, and later Military Intelligence found use for the man’s connections in German East. Soon afterwards when the Germans occupied Taveta on the border, I evacuated my station upon instructions from my DC and proceeded to Voi. It was in Voi that I first missed my diary, and I recalled writing in it in Kikono immediately before meeting a delegation of the town’s elders. I had placed the diary and pen on a chair before going out to the meeting. I have given up hope of ever getting it back.
Anne sends her kindest. Your suggestion of using a native girl in the role of Eliza Doolittle raised some laughs. The police captain’s wife can do the Cockney accent quite well.
As ever,
Alfred
Entebbe
3/5/35
Dear Richard,
The woman you met in the shop was Pipa’s second wife. The first wife, as I think I wrote earlier, was a most striking-looking woman called Mariamu. She was also in the most pathetic of circumstances you can imagine, suffering ill treatment at the hands of her family, and in particular her stepfather. Before she entered my employ I rescued her from a ghastly exorcism rite.
After my departure from the town, Mariamu met a tragic fate — she was brutally murdered. I conducted a brief investigation into the affair after the War, when I was DC in Moshi, but came up with nothing conclusive. What I found appalling was the lack of interest shown by the family in pursuing the matter further — the crime was not reported to military or civilian authority. All this is ancient history now.
We are preparing for home leave, after which I take up my new posting, whatever the gods ordain. Rumour has it that this time it may not be in East Africa.
Anne sends her warmest.
Your
s truly,
Alfred
How remarkably close Corbin came to his lost diary — first as DC in Dar, when on any day he himself could have walked into Pipa Store but, purely by chance, didn’t; and twelve years after he left Dar, when Commissioner Barnes’s policemen raided the store and were outwitted, leaving behind them a fire for which Pipa was able to win damages. I can only smile at the thought of Gregory in the store, among the spice crates and gunnies, following behind the inspector in charge, sniffing around, observing much but picking up nothing to dirty his hands. Did he feel like a dupe, then — or did he enjoy the experience? I remember him at the funeral of Pipa’s young son Amin; he could have let out that he knew something of the boy’s father, but he didn’t. He did mouth the Kalima with the others, to send off the coffin, and wrote an emotional poem about the wastefulness of a child’s death.
In his letters to Gregory, Corbin shows the reserve we have come to expect of him; yet I wonder if behind the neutral language in a letter, almost exclusively about Mariamu, he hides any feeling for her. About the loss of the diary he appears almost indifferent; that he felt more strongly about it, at least later in his life, we learn from two of the many letters Anne Corbin wrote to Gregory.
Anne Corbin’s letters to Gregory are more spirited, and suggest a relationship of friendly intimacy that is somewhat reserved in the early years, becoming more open, admiring, and dependent towards the end. It was a relationship, one must conclude, whose nature is open to speculation by those interested in the intimate life of the poet.
October 23, 1946
Government House
Entebbe, Uganda
Dearest Richard —
How absolutely thrilling to meet again! Unfortunately our stay in Dar was brief — and sudden. Both factors beyond our control, I assure you. But to see you again!
Thank you so much for coming, as I assume it was for our sake — and yet I do recall that you rather enjoy such occasions once in a while, don’t you, if only to needle the officials and their wives. What did you say to the two junior memsahibs that scandalized them so? Freddie came to your rescue, saying something about the temperament of the artist — but, may I say this, Richard, you were watched like an explosive device on the move with its fuse burning ever shorter!
It was nice to see you again and in your element. You seem happy in Dar, one day you must tell me about it. Please do write.
It is so strange returning to Uganda. There is a feeling of dêjà vu at seeing it all again, yet everything is decidedly different. Rumour has it soon it will be packing-up time for the Empire, which is why we are here. Freddie still has the trust of the old chiefs, who may be needed when the time comes. After that it’s retirement for us in good old England, though I wonder how we’ll adapt to the little island after a lifetime of exile in the tropics.
Freddie loves being back in E.A. He became quite nostalgic in Dar and asked for a tour of the Indian and African districts. I think he was looking for the store where his pen turned up. He must have found the store, but I didn’t ask him about it. He still has the pen — it has a special value for him.
Thank you again for the book. I am enthralled.
But now I must rush — the Girl Guides are expecting their badges and we mustn’t keep them waiting.
Love,
Anne
April 6, 1965
Sevenseas Manor
Burntoak
Surrey
Dearest Richard —
The seasons are still difficult to adjust to but spring is always welcome. The daffodils are out, masses of them, and other bulbs — hyacinths and anemones. It only remains for the sun to come out to brighten the colours. Life is calm here, and not bustling and constraining like the Service. But Sevenseas is not exactly Government House, nor the residence of the British Representative on some lovely tropical beach.
Peerages were handed out to some former governors, though we were passed over. It came as a bitter blow, though he did not say much but sent a letter congratulating Sir Edward of Tanganyika. This was just the jolt he needed to get back to his memoirs and he is working hard at them. There are many photos and scrapbooks to sift through, some of them still in crates. They brought back a lot of memories. He missed that lost diary again. I wish I had it, he said, looking up sadly from the piles of snapshots and papers.
Fate works in mysterious ways, and the strangest coincidence happened to us recently. At a colonial “do” in London, a charming couple from Tanganyika was introduced to us. When Freddie mentioned that he had served in Moshi in 1920, the man said, why, he had lived in Moshi as a child at the same time. His name is Ali Akber Ali and he is rather pompous in a stiff sort of way. Freddie took to him. Where were you born? he asked, and Mr. Akber Ali said, “In a place that’s not on any map. I wonder if it existed at all.” Queer, wouldn’t you say? Try me, said Freddie in that way he has, and guess what our Indian replied: “Kikono!” Freddie met Mr. Akber Ali one or two times in the City after that, for old times’ sake, but I declined to go.
Do write, dear Richard, and write often. Poems and published books are welcome as always, but to this pedestrian soul a simple letter brings more joy.
With kindest thoughts and the warmest wishes from
Yours,
Anne
And so, Ali met privately with Alfred Corbin and did not tell Rita about it. Did Corbin tell Anne what they talked about? I see two men at a table in a spare yet exclusive club that would have befitted a former governor in the colonies, a knighted public servant. As he looked at the elderly Englishman, the mzungu, Ali must have thought: In the colonies he was king of kings, here simply a respected member of the establishment. Ali would remember him dimly from his childhood memories of Moshi; Pipa had told him much more about Corbin. Ali also remembered his wife, having helped her in her garden as a boy; she had not come, perhaps had not remembered him. But Sir Alfred had, and had suggested this meeting. What did he see in the younger man before him? — shades of Mariamu? And the urbanity, the polish, the acquired Englishness of the Indian — how much did they mock him, the real Englishman, bring to the fore the events of fifty years ago? When he had told the girl, Wherever you are, if you need me, don’t hesitate to call upon me.… It would be easy to find him, a colonial officer, in any part of the world. Now, in London, her son sipping an expensive wine, discussing the Labour government and its prospects, the Common Market, the Commonwealth.… With questions on the mind of one, answers on the other’s. What more was said; how many more times did they meet? Was the relationship between the two, whatever its precise nature, acknowledged …
Miscellany (v)
Appendices
(1) “Many are the conditions of life we met that would sound unbelievable today, many customs we saw that have disappeared from the face of the earth. Today the word Empire is taboo and colonialism is discredited. We do not have subject races but underdeveloped nations. A chapter of world history has therewith been closed. We went with the best of intentions, to give of our best …”
From the conclusion of Heart and Soul (1966)
the memoirs of Sir Alfred Corbin, KCMG, OBE.
Correspondence
Cambridge, Mass
May 2, 1988
Mr. Fernandes:
… Sir Alfred Corbin died in his home in Surrey in July 1971. He was at that time consulting with the BBC on a drama titled “The Barons of Uasin Gishu,” based on the lives of the white aristocratic settlers of Kenya. It appeared much later here on public television in 1982, on a show called “Sunday Night Theatre,” which every week brings (somewhat wistfully) Old England and the Empire to the American republic. Anne Corbin died in 1980. There are two sons and a daughter.
Good luck with your reconstruction — can I call it that? — I still have to see it — will I see it? I myself have come from a major battle regarding authenticity and authorship, at a conference in Toronto, where the big question was: Have our texts come to us interpolated by succeeding genera
tions — a question of reconstruction of another sort, but with certain similarities to your efforts, don’t you think? Guess which side I was on.… An inconclusive battle, with much at stake. Watch out for future developments …
Regards,
Sona
Epilogue
Three months have passed since I last saw Rita, almost three months since I handed over to her Alfred Corbin’s diary as I had more or less promised. It was a brief meeting, at the airport lounge, prior to her departure. She took the diary gratefully from me, then pointedly asked, “And everything else?” “I will not disclose,” I said. And so we parted; she to return to London.
What I can never disclose, give to the world, is mine only in trust. The constant reminding presence of a world which I created, a history without the relief of an outlet, can only serve to oppress. And so I have decided to relinquish it. Only then can I begin to look towards the rest of my life and do the best with the new opportunity that has come my way.
In a short while, a man will call to pick up this package of material — notes and scribblings and research I have put together for Rita. It is, as she put it, “everything else,” everything I have written and compiled in relation to the diary — what I have come to think of as a new book of secrets. A book as incomplete as the old one was, incomplete as any book must be. A book of half lives, partial truths, conjecture, interpretation, and perhaps even some mistakes. What better homage to the past than to acknowledge it thus, rescue it and recreate it, without presumption of judgement, and as honestly, though perhaps as incompletely as we know ourselves, as part of the life of which we all are a part? For Rita, then, all this. To do with as she will, to bury it if she must (and if it will allow her).