Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  Our attendants, or hosts, as I learnt to address them, were ever attentive, and very concerned for our well-being. Twice daily, their chief, Mr Geoff, or ‘Minehost’ as he liked us to call him, encouraged us to walk in the walled gardens of the Royal Guest-house, though he protested cheerfully that taking meals from his garden presented problems. Ants were all very well. But he begged me to stop eating his daffodils.

  My oval friend refused to join us on these pleasant walks. Turned his face to the wall, saying that exercise was not useful to a condemned man, and turned his back on the generous face of the Monarch. This invitation, said he, was simply a means of ensuring that when the time came to expel him from England, he would be fit enough to walk to the aircraft. He rained down protests on Queen and Country. He had come to England believing that a man persecuted in his own country might fine protection in the land of the free. What a delusion!

  I must say I was shocked by his cynicism, and his lack of faith.

  Minehost contented himself with the gentle observation that Mr Humpty was not ‘playing the game’. He had eyes of the faded blue of the peacock flower; his hair was honey gold; and he wore a black peaked cap, his badge of office as a servant of the Crown. Mr Humpty’s failure to ‘play the game’ was a source of sadness. It was not merely impolite, it was not sporting, he remarked, as he locked us safely away at night.

  Mr Geoff was aided by a number of sub-hosts, all of whom wore the same black cap of Royal Office and carried at their waists a silver bush of keys, for it was a house rule that doors were always to be locked behind us – so great was their devotion to our privacy – and windows were to be bolted at all times, where they were not already barred. I remonstrated with my eggy friend, pointing to the locks and bars. Could anyone be better protected, I demanded?

  Mr Geoff was great good fun and a natural mimic. Within hours of our arrival he was imitating each guest who had travelled in the special transport from the aerodrome. He was, by turns, Bengali, Pathan, Sanjaki and Istrian, using as props a headscarf, a limp, a tear and a faithful though unintelligible parody of each guest’s language – or, as he called it, ‘mumbo-jumbo’. (They are convinced that most foreigners speak this tongue as naturally as they speak English.)

  Clearly, they have as much difficulty speaking foreign languages as they do with foreigners who speak English. But where another tribe might have shown embarrassment or vexation at this disability, not being able even to pronounce our names, the English, an inventive race, simply gave us new ones: ‘Sooties’, ‘Spear-Carriers’, ‘Parkies’1 and other nicknames too numerous to recall, for they vied with each other to invent new and better ones every day.

  I knew from the history lessons of my master, the Boer Smith, that the English sense of humour exceeds those of all other nations; that they enjoyed nothing better than laughing at themselves. However, as with many of these legends, the truth is more complicated. In my experience they laugh at themselves all the harder when they pretend to be other people.

  I would say that, when analysing the nature of the humour displayed by my keeper in the Royal House, it was by the degree to which strangers can be shown to be unlike them that the native wit of the English is manifested. Our distinguishing marks – the way we walked, for instance, or our shapes and colours, our costumes, our accents and, in my case, my naturally curled hair – had them absolutely hooting; my buttocks, being pronounced, were a source of such hilarity that at times they could barely speak and had to content themselves, between guffaws, with curving movements of the hands to indicate my slight steatopygia.

  They fix instantly on some detail, so small, perhaps, no one else would notice it, but which confirms the comic distance between themselves and all others. Much as a group of children will seize with delight on some physical defect in one of their chums, a cleft palate, a stammer, a missing limb, a shrivelled arm, and, stuttering or limping, began mimicking beautifully the odd or clumsy defect, so the natives dote on differences. Nothing sets them laughing more quickly, except perhaps a robust appreciation of the bodily functions: to which they allude often but never mention directly, considering directness in these matters close to vulgarity, a trait I was to observe often, and which has led some critics to contend that they are very great hypocrites. It is not hypocrisy at all – but a special kind of delicacy.

  Try as I might, I could not hope to match their natural sense of humour, yet politeness required that I should at least make the attempt, and so I took to laughing at their pink faces, so comical beneath their black caps – so like monkeys playing at men – and alluding to their very powerful body odour, for, besides their interest in rain, which I have mentioned, their interest in water for washing is theoretical. When I told Minehost that we seldom bathed, he was impressed. But when I told him that the common method of washing among Karoo travellers was to strip naked and wash at a stand tap, using sand to scour the body, which has been treated with a good layer of sheep’s fat, he was appalled. Why should we go to all that trouble? he demanded. To which I replied, in true English fashion, so as to smell a little sweeter than you, Minehost – whose dung signature, a mixture of cheese and ashes, would scare a kudu at fifty paces. But his brow clouded and he was not amused. The English do indeed like laughing at themselves, but only because they hate others doing so.

  In my commodious quarters I was also given a bed, entirely to myself, with two blankets of the finest grey wool. But years on the solid earth gives a man a taste for a plainer couch. I pulled the mattress off the bunk and leaned it against the steel edge of the bed and crept by night into this shelter. Just as we lean our strips of corrugated iron against the wheel of the donkey cart when we outspan by the roadside for the night, and pack the gaps with the rough ashbush to keep out the bitter wind.

  Fixed to one wall of my apartment was a wonderful engine, all curling pipes about the thickness of a man’s wrist, painted white and very lovely. Around and around an ingenious thicket of metal branches hot water travelled. The heat was about the same as you would feel if you were to warm your hands over the intestines of a freshly killed goat, of which, in their tangled beauty, these water pipes were a distant reminder. By night they would rumble; the belly music of the goat.

  This engine made me long for home. It was very quiet in my room. My friend on his bed said nothing, though he wept from time to time. I was happy enough as I awaited Her Majesty’s pleasure, but I could not see the stars. So I crept out of my shelter and lay close to the water heater by the wall, and felt its belly music carrying me back to my childhood on the road, when after the day’s shearing, on the farm of Jan De Waal out near Compromise, we were given two goats. My father would tether them beside our shelter overnight and when the fire burnt low, and the frost formed like a thick white rind on our blankets, our hair and the donkeys’ ears, in that intense cold that comes just before the dawn, I would slip quietly from under the blanket, where my mother and father and sisters and brothers lay sleeping, and go and lie with the goats, pressed close to their bellies, which were silky and warm and rumbled through the night beneath the great fields of stars, the million eyes of God.

  Through the bars of my window I noted the paltriness of stars in England. They are still in the skies, I know, but the natives no longer look up. They have made the lights of their cities so bright, the stars fade. They do not worship them. Or steer by them. So advanced are they that they live lives unconnected with the universe. They have only to switch on their street lamps and the million eyes of God go blind.

  Arriving with our evening meal, Minehost was considerably surprised to find me on the floor. What on earth was I doing? he demanded. What was the reason I lay on the floor, beneath a blanket, backing my rear end into the radiator?

  I explained to him the importance of goats. I described the great feast that takes place at the end of the shearing. When the goats are led into a circle, and their throats are slit. How the blood is carefully collected in plastic bowls, unless people are too drunk to
hold the things steady, which, I am sorry to say, is often the case. Then the headless carcasses must be skinned, while the children often, in their innocent way, take the goats’ heads with their gentle, cooling eyes and place them on sticks and stand them to watch over the preparations. The children will fight for the bladders and take them and blow them into footballs and play for hours while the meat cooks. And the women sit and gossip and smoke. The men send off for a five-man-can of white wine from the nearest bottle store, and when the feast is ready, they drink until the sun goes down and the million eyes of God shine in the skies.

  Minehost begged me to stop.

  My description of this blood-stained country sport, played by filthy urchins before a dinner of goat’s meat, distressed him. Even more, that the bladders were used in this way repulsed my second Englishman. In hushed tones that spoke feelingly for the butchered goats far away in the Karoo, he explained that what might have been just a ‘game’ to my kind was something so sacred it united England from one end of the island to the other.

  Did he not eat meat? I asked.

  He bridled. They were the greatest nation of beef-eaters in the world! Had I not heard of the roast beef of Old England? It developed their brains. The present state of the nation’s intelligence testified to the superiority of their beef. If ever I was told that English beef caused brains to soften and fail, I should reject it utterly. Lies spread by foreigners across the water jealous of bigger, beef-bred English brains.

  I had to tell him at this point that the brain is not the seat of intelligence. It simply gives you a headache. It is the intelligent life of the heart that teaches us to know good from evil.

  Such beliefs might be fine in distant places where they kicked around goats’ bladders, replied Mr Geoff. But if I went through England talking of the life of the heart, I would not get very far. He begged me to say no more of goat feasts. He deplored what we did to these animals. It was as bad as the cruelty of the French towards veal calves, or the Spanish to donkeys. It was one thing, Mr Booi, said Minehost, to enjoy a good bit of meat and quite another to approve of killing. If such things were necessary, then so be it. But they should be done under adequate supervision, quickly, painlessly and preferably silently. Above all, one preferred not to be told about it.

  I realized then that in England entire generations had never seen a freshly slaughtered animal. Never set eyes on the great wash of its blood which sprays like a crimson sea, or seen the steaming offal lifted from the slit the knife makes in its belly. In this way they have arrived at such a pitch of delicacy that we can only wonder at.

  Imagine, then, my feelings when I awoke in the morning to see upon the wall a shadow of something swinging, very like the great pendulum of the clock in the Dutch Reformed church at Abraham’s Grave. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dawn light, I saw that Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty had hanged himself from the top bunk by his belt, and swung to and fro beneath the very eyes of the Queen of England.

  I grieved for the deluded man. Yet, if I am honest, I felt a touch of anger. Just as when I am hunting in the veld and the game flies before me, that instead of waiting to take in the neck or flank the little poisoned arrow that will soothe it to death, the foolish buck runs madly into the road and is killed by a passing farmer in his truck. What waste. What foolishness!

  I looked up at my departed friend, his trouser legs tied to his ankles, his sock protruding from his mouth, in what looked like the cheeky gesture our children make with their tongues when the Boer sails past in his insolence. Slowly swinging in the white light of dawn. And I felt sad for my own people. The Children of the Sun who flocked to England in the hope of better things. Was this how we responded to native hospitality? To the tolerance of our hosts? Following the kindly eyes of the Monarch, which seemed to watch very closely the swinging figure of Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty, I felt that something in her look seemed to say: ‘What, have you left so suddenly, poor fellow? If only you had waited!’ Truly, I had to agree. If this was the way we behaved when accommodated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, one had to ask whether we deserved the privilege.

  1

  Pakkies(?)

  Chapter Three

  He learns something of modern military strategy; the stirring history of Dicky the Donkey and the war for Tiny Alma; the creatures who cried in the night; a Royal Summons that goes sadly wrong

  I knew my hosts were most distressed by Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty’s sudden departure, for they never mentioned it again, except to ask me not to allude to it before the other guests, as some were simple souls, very easily led. And one would not like to encourage similar behaviour, now, would one? Respecting this request was rather difficult, since my fellow guests, when they met me walking in the garden, would contrive to find ways of referring to my friend’s disappearance, and when I replied, as I had been urged, that he had returned unexpectedly to Bongo-Bongo-Land, I am afraid they expressed their scepticism very crudely, by a variety of devices, such as raising their eyes to Heaven or drawing their fingers across their throats. When our hosts, who accompanied us up the garden paths, forbade further questions, the other guests took childish revenge by conferring on innocent flowers in the garden new and terrible aliases, calling the scarlet rose climbing the high walls ‘prisoner’s blood’, or asking our attendants whether the creamy clematis was cultivated for wreaths to adorn our unmarked graves.

  I brooded often on my late friends tragic end. How unfortunate an impression he had made. Yet I missed him. Although my attendants were never far away, I lacked company. Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty came, like me, from a short people. Now I found myself alone in a world where meals were too large, beds too wide, chairs too high and men too tall. When Minehost inquired kindly into the state of affairs among the starving whom he took to be very many ‘down my way’, it was never clear whether he was referring to my country or my height, as if the air ten inches below his nose held worlds he would never visit, though from time to time he caught glimpses of them from on high.

  Time passed, and my name changed. For my attendants found Booi too difficult for their tongues, too round and rude, and so, much as the farmers do in my part of the world, they gave me a new name, and I became, amid much chaffing, the Boy David.

  Mr Geoff, he of the honeyed hair, the bush of keys and the distinctive dung signature, a mingling of cheese, ashes and whisky, watched me fondly, and promised a Royal Summons ‘at any moment’. Its timing depended on a decision ‘on my case’. When I replied that this sounded horribly legal – at home we were always awaiting decisions on our cases by the police into whose hands we had been abandoned – Mr Geoff reminded me that this was England, and Palace procedures proceeded at their own pace, and he could guarantee that some day soon I was in for a Right Royal Surprise, believe you me.

  And I did believe him. Because he gave many signs of his regal connections, telling me that the paperwork for my transport was ‘in train’, and that punctuality was the politeness of kings and uneasy lay the head that wore the crown and many other moving testimonies of his closeness to the Royal Household.

  Besides, I realized, if Her Majesty had not intended to receive me, she would hardly have gone to the trouble of detaining me at her Pleasure.

  Perhaps my friend’s disappearance would have caused less suspicion among other guests awaiting Her Majesty’s Pleasure had our hosts not continued to insist that he had been called away to live in that mythical land, somewhere at the world’s edge, where dwell all Children of the Sun.

  Among the English, I discovered to my surprise, there is an almost complete ignorance of the fact that they dwelt for many lifetimes in such places. Minehost denied all knowledge of this. He knew nothing of Africa. I must be mistaken. He knew nothing of the great explorers, nothing of Livingstone. And when I told him that his people had been in Africa, in large numbers, for many years, that they had fought and died and dug for gold and diamonds, shot lions and ruled over the tribes, from the Cape to Cairo, he looked at me as a child does at a story
teller, or as if I had drawn for him in the air a land as fabulous as Monomatapa, peopled by giants. All this might have occurred, long ago and far away, he conceded, but that had nothing to do with him.

  I was tempted to ask whether this ignorance was not related to their excessively shrunken world view. Their notions of the world have contracted like a leather cloak left out in the rain. And rain is, perhaps, the key. During my stay in the Royal Guest-house it rained almost every day. And this excessive moisture, damp or liquidity has probably affected their sense of distance, shrinking the world to the size of a miniature toy no bigger than the wooden tortoise a boy carves and keeps in his pocket.

  Yet, paradoxically, what is closest to them they consider very large indeed. Although the island, by our standards, is pitfully small, they talk about it as if it were twice the size of Africa. They can imagine nothing beyond it. Yet if you probe patiently, you will discover faint racial memories of the role they once played in the world, ‘long ago and far away’, sometimes stirring in their hearts.