Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  That you mean nothing serious, or strange, Beth advised.

  Or sudden, her father added.

  In a word, nothing that was not ‘nice’, Beth explained. The importance of being nice was something about which I had lots to learn.

  I made slow but steady progress with my lessons. I learnt not to be frank without apologizing and never to ask directly for what I wanted, but to get others to provide it, without asking. I still had trouble being nice. I saw how Beth suffered. Here, said I, was an opportunity for being nice.

  It was clear to me that although Beth was the beloved daughter of the house, she endured the hours with a kind of ungainly simplicity of which her body spoke more eloquently than her lips. She was housekeeper, hunter-gatherer, gardener, laundress, companion and cook to an increasingly frail old man who, yes, called her his dearly beloved daughter, but behaved towards her as if she were his servant.

  For that matter, he called me his dearest son. But treated me as if I were his prize possession. Appreciated, yes; but imprisoned.

  But I did not say so, for that would not have been nice.

  Beth’s magnificent equilibrium, the swing of her great posterior jutting out a foot or more, at right angles to the back of her spine, two pumpkins on springs, twin udders of elastic delight, I soon came to realize, far from being a source of pride to her, was something so shaming to the poor woman that she seldom ventured out of the house lest the villagers smile and point and mock.

  She went out only in the very early morning, or in the evening when few were about, or darkness hid the magnificent mounds from the neighbours’ eyes.

  In my country every man from Eros to Mouton Fountain would have left donkeys and wives and firesides to stand cheering as she sailed by, but in her own land she hid from the eyes of men. Strange.

  She saw the admiration in my eyes. My almost uncontrollable urge to cheer when she went bobbing by. Each step, as her heel struck the earth, sent a shiver dancing, as wind does on water, across the fleshy plateau of her majestic buttocks. So broad, that lovely shelf, you could have balanced a cooking pot on it. And so I told her how beautiful she was.

  To which she answered that I was very kind.

  Not kind, I corrected her false impression; positively wild with admiration. She had the most naturally perfect body I had ever seen in a woman.

  Too late. I saw from her face that I had made the mistake of being frank when I thought I was being nice. And I began to realize that speaking English is no great advantage when one has to communicate with the English. In fact, the belief that we share a common language often only serves to worsen understanding.

  So I told her instead that she looked very nice.

  She replied that I was also ‘very nice’. Meaning, I think, to compliment me.

  But looking into her troubled, dark-brown eyes, I knew she had not believed a word I said. She called me ‘Boy’, assuming this to be my name, taking it from the promise to seek nothing but asylum which her father and I had signed shortly after I had been dropped on my head during the horrifying attempt to expel me from the kingdom. How long ago it all seemed!

  Boy David, said Beth to me, if ever you are to meet Her Majesty, you must learn to bow – without scraping. And bowing lessons ensued, with Beth sitting in for the Sovereign. I would arrive at the Palace, carrying my suitcase, remove my hat with a flourish, advance into the Presence and bow easily from the waist, being sure to keep my nose in ‘line’ with Beth’s knee, as she sat regally upon a greenupholstered chair – and tapped my chin with a plastic ruler whenever she felt it dipped below the crucial level where bowing became scraping.

  It was while we were playing happily at bowing and not scraping that our neighbour, Julia, arrived to say that old Jed who lived at the bottom of Duck Lane had not appeared for some days. Next, Peter the Birdman arrived and said that if old Jed at the bottom of Duck Lane had not been seen for days, that was no bad thing and he for one would not weep. Old Jed was a hunter and hater of birds, shot them, ate them and kept them in cages.

  Julia now suggested that a useful task for their little yellow friend would be to get him to climb inside the cottage and discover why old Jed had not shown his sharp red nose out of doors these past five days. Being a wiry and lithe sort of chap, she felt sure I could be inserted through some large crack in the roof or lowered down the chimney.

  Peter proclaimed that he stood ready to rescue any robin, hawk, sparrow or starling that might seize its chance of freedom when Jed’s house of horror, as he dubbed it, would be opened to the wholesome light of day.

  And he ran to his house and shut it tightly so as to join us on our expedition to Duck Lane, and I saw the sparrows, doves and starlings dashing themselves helplessly against the windows and thought how strange it must seem to these creatures of the air to find themselves living in an English cottage – almost as strange as I found it myself.

  Down the muddy length of Duck Lane we traipsed, a pathway not, as I had thought, remote and lonely, but packed with houses from which villagers emerged, drawn by promises Julia made to all and sundry that they would soon see the little yellow chap earning his keep.

  After knocking at the door several times and receiving no answer, after trying the door and finding it locked, after walking about the little house and shaking the windows in their frames and finding them barred, Mr Farebrother pointed to the crumbling section on the roof where the tiles had slipped and which might be widened enough to allow entry.

  To shouted directions from Peter to go gently so as not to scare the birds, I crept through the aperture and was soon inside the house. I found it to be dark and malodorous. The curtains were drawn against the light. I entered a small, airless room heavy with dust and neglect. I knew the scent well enough. Had I not picked it up a thousand times in the veld, where the lion has killed? Where the jackal-hunter had left his traps cunningly buried in the sand beneath a sheet of newspaper? Where the vultures gather?

  When I climbed back through the hole in the roof I was met by a barrage of excited demands for information. What had I found inside old Jed’s house?

  Simply old Jed, I replied, stretched on the carpet, staring at the ceiling with a gentle, quizzical look on his face, as if considering how very surprising it was to die, as one had lived, alone and unconsulted.

  To my astonishment, considerable relief greeted my news. That was all right then. Not as bad as they had thought. Old Jed had had a good innings.

  I knew, of course, that an Englishman’s home was his castle, but was it also his grave? To die alone, among neighbours – was that not strange? I asked my saviour.

  A very Afrocentric line of reasoning, came the reply. Old Jed’s neighbours would not interfere with a person’s right to privacy while alive and so were hardly likely to intervene in death. A few weeks of silence did not necessarily mean a fatality. How was one to know that one’s neighbour was dead? And not simply living quietly? If people were forever calling on friends and neighbours, on the off-chance that one of them may have passed away, well, this would be seen as an outrageous invasion of privacy which no decent person would tolerate. And he had no doubt that Old Jed would have felt exactly the same.

  Even as I stood on the roof, above old dead Jed, several locals came by and chaffed the grounded Bishop for this manner of forced entry, pretending to admire his talent for burglary, saying they had never expected it in a former man of the cloth. With many a wink and a nod they asked if they could hire the clever little monkey, as they had a bit of fetching and carrying he might usefully do for them.

  Which showed, my wingless friend assured me, that they understood me to be not a bad little chap after all, and, amongst them, that was high praise indeed.

  I was pleased. But I suspected that however the locals understood me, I was still some way from understanding them.

  *

  My lessons in learning to be more like them took another step forward when the terrestrial Bishop suggested that I find some metho
d of integrating myself among the villagers. If they saw I had something to offer, the people of Little Musing would soon take me to their hearts.

  Then there began an animated discussion between father and daughter as to what, if anything, I had to offer. After a good deal of discussion, during which all my suggestions – a love of England, a personal promise from a member of the Royal Family, and so on, were gently rejected – the Farebrothers concluded that my most useful attribute was my natural unspoiled innocence.

  Might he know something of our marriage customs? the good Bishop inquired.

  I replied that amongst our people marriage preceded the begetting of children and that children, when they came, were few and much loved.

  Beth thought this very moving. I had seen for myself the difference in their culture, where the opposite prevailed – where young males believed that the insemination of as many women as early as possible to be among the chief rites of manhood. They then declined all further responsibility, and decamped to some other place, there to continue the tradition, often with violence. Her father and I had been lucky to escape alive from Green Meadow. From what she told me, the fact that our pursuers had been children had made them more and not less dangerous. For these tiny people, guns were fun, killing was a sport, and dying something unimaginable. Children, in some cities, now carried guns as a matter of course, and fought to the death for cash and drugs, to which even eight- and nine-years-olds were addicted.

  Perhaps my disapproval showed on my face because she asked, rather tartly, whether murder was not a popular pastime in Africa? Especially in my own country?

  I agreed that it was. And my people knew it. We suffered at the hands of the visitors, hunting us, hating us worse than the lynx and the lion and the jackal. Cleansing the land of the Red People and shovelling them into unmarked mass graves where sometimes a shin bone or a skull will fight its way to the surface, to be found by some little Boer child who will play football with the skulls of the First People, whose hearts and homes once reached across the endless flat grass of Bushmanland. And where, today, only ghosts sing in the high places; their hair is to be glimpsed in the rain clouds, their tears fall in the rain. My ancestors can be faintly seen when you look into the faces of the wandering Ashbush People; then their ghostly faces peer out at you – much as the traveller, passing through a dying village, sees the thin faces of starving children staring from the doorways of darkened huts.

  But, in England, I cried, it was surely quite different. The Queen loved her people. Her servants, the soldiers and the police, were on the side of the people. Yet from what I had seen, the average citizen was in danger of being killed by armed children.

  That was the very reason why it would be very wonderful if the children of Little Musing could be brought face to face with unspoiled innocence, said Mr Farebrother. Something might rub off.

  Heart to heart with a survivor of an earlier age, said Beth. Boy David from the Karoo, and the only Bushman in England. Face to face with a genuine hunter-gatherer in the late twentieth century. What a privilege it would be to meet me!

  It would give the little children ‘hands-on’ experience, said the ex-Bishop. I might make a difference.

  I might also be killed, I pointed out.

  They nodded. But after talking about it they felt, very strongly, this was a risk worth taking. Among the adult male population such education was almost certainly too late. The ancient love of freedom was partly to blame. Freeborn Englishmen could not be forced to behave peacefully. Violence could not be confronted without creating more destruction. Containment was the only option among violent young males.

  But with children, perhaps it was not too late. If there was any way I might help, then I would deserve the gratitude of generations to come.

  The good Farebrother begged me not to write off all children merely because some wayward infants had tried to kill me. He appreciated my point, but I must not give up hope. After all, much of the misunderstanding between peoples arises when one nation makes unshakeable judgements about another. Sees it as less than human. Surely – the good man demanded – being human means we all make mistakes?

  And indeed I had to agree. For I recalled how, in the old days, we had laughed at his people, the Sea-Bushmen, when they first dragged themselves ashore in our country. So pale, so blind, so soon pink in the sun, so incapable in the wild, so lost in the dark, so reliant on their guns, as needy as is the donkey in the Karoo bushes. So linguistically limited they could not get their tongues around a word, not even the name of our land, calling it Carrow and Camdeboo and other nonsenses. They looked at us and declared we must be gypsies from Egypt. Or the link by which animals were joined to the upper orders. Thus their sojourn in Africa influenced their religion and led to the belief that there were three orders of creatures: the animals, the others and the English.

  We felt pity for these wretches who could not tell the difference between the spoor of a kudu and an eland; between the Men of Men and the Red People.

  Oh, yes, how we laughed at this pallid infestation! Clumsy visitors who seemed no more noxious than flying ants, no more alarming than the white ants’ eggs which they saw us eat by the fistful, and called ‘Bushman rice’. Oh, yes, how we darkened with shame at their shameful incompetence.

  But how wrong we were! For they proved to be more toxic than the greatest of our poisons, which kill surely, but singly. As it happened, these apparently weak, defective, cowardly, diseased creatures were to become a pink plague, a most deadly and obliterating invasion; wherever the pale Sea-Bushmen so much as appeared, we died.

  Yet in the beginning, when they first fell on our land, they were received everywhere with great kindness; both by our cousins, the Men of Men, the Korana, the Strand-loopers, and by the Red People. We permitted them to buy a good ox and a fat sheep for one iron hoop apiece. In exchange for the brass cut from their ships’ kettles, we gave many dozens of sheep and cattle. In truth, we had very little interest in their trinkets but took them out of politeness, not wishing to offend these pale Sea-Bushmen who evidently attached great importance to scrap metal.

  Next they came with copper bangles. These pleased us for a time. When we tired of those, they brought glass beads, knives, mirrors, iron and copper wire, in exchange for which we gave cattle, sheep, ostrich eggs and honey.

  When we tired of those, they came with bullets.

  As the flying Bishop had rightly said: we all make mistakes. My people had taken the visitors to Bushmanland to be our friends. And they had proved lethal. Well, then, perhaps I was just as wrong about the little murderers of Green Meadow estate. And though I did not much care about the gratitude of generations to come, I was prepared to do anything that might win me wider acceptance among the natives. I agreed to visit the village school.

  The children asked that I wear my traditional clothes. I was happy to oblige, dressing in a small leather apron that protected my qhwai-xkhwe from the world, took up my bow, a quiver of arrows and a drinking gourd made from an ostrich shell, and set off for the school.

  From the Bishop’s house to the little school beside the railway station was scarcely two minutes’ walk; in that time most of the villagers were in their gardens, or leaning from their windows to see us pass.

  There must be something in our appearance frightfully repulsive to the unsophisticated natives, for the infants took off like hares when they saw us, screaming for their mothers. Alarmed by the child’s wild outcries, the mother rushes out of her hut, but darts back at the first sight of the apparition, crying to the good Bishop that he ought to be ashamed to bring such a thing to the village. Dogs turn tail, and vanish. And hens, abandoning their chicks, fly screaming to the tops of houses. And mothers, holding naughty children away from them, say: ‘Be good or I shall call the Bushman to bite you.’3

  None, of this, said my episcopal companion, was to be taken seriously but should be seen as rough, rustic, ready wit, and showed that the villagers had begun to warm to
me.

  I said I thought they were casting slurs upon my person. I heard, most distinctly, someone ask whether the little bloke didn’t catch cold, walking about in leather underpants.

  Mr Farebrother corrected me these were not slurs, but real concerns, cloaked in broad good humour, and all part of the warming process.

  In the schoolroom I was stood upon a chair and the children were invited to touch me as part of the warming process. It took a while before they conquered their fear of the strange and the wild, and many questions had to be answered by their teacher – a young woman pierced in ear and nostril with a splendid array of steel clips, not unlike the sort of thing the first English had bartered with us, for use as fish-hooks, when they washed up in Bushmanland. Ritual scarification appears to be a cultural phenomenon among the island youth.

  Would I bite? Was my skin so wrinkled because I was very old? These were just some of the questions asked by the children who crowded around my chair.

  Their teacher explained that I was a rare survivor of an ancient people who had been hunted and hounded by the colonialists and imperialists of the Western World. It was a miracle I had survived, and she, personally, wished to make a sincere apology to me and my people for the crimes committed against us by her ancestors.

  I replied that, speaking very frankly, I welcomed her apology and would have passed it on to my people had they still existed; but I had no doubt that poor shadows of their ancestors though they were, the sponsors of my expedition to England would accept it gladly.

  Whereupon she declared that I was really very nice – and I began to feel I had done a good thing in coming to the school.

  Mr Farebrother now invited the children to get some ‘hands-on’ experience, and, after a little shuffling and giggling, curiosity got the better of them and they crowded around my chair, stroking my face, digging me in the ribs, and trying to lift my breech cloth so as to expose my lower regions. Soon, indeed, they were so enjoying themselves that several times they very nearly knocked over my chair – though I have no doubt this was quite accidental – and had to be ordered back by their teacher, and forbidden to lay more than one hand on me at a time. And to stop pinching. And poking. And peeping beneath my skirt. But the pandemonium continued until Edward Farebrother and the teacher were forced to call a halt, lift me off the chair and place me on top of the stationery cupboard for my own safety.