Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  But the strength of the attraction was there, and it can be explained, I believe, by very compelling characteristics we held in common: in a world where others found us odd, we saw that we were beautiful; and in a world dominated by height, two smaller persons found each other truly towering.

  As it happened, a decision was not required in the matter because, one evening, before Beth arrived with my meal, a crowd of angry villagers assembled outside the church and called on me to come outside so that they could kill me. Among the voices I recognized those of my neighbours Julia and Peter the Birdman. She declared that I had turned the church of Little Musing into a coven of witches and urged the community to burn the place down; and Peter asked me to allow any birds which might be roosting in the church to escape before it was burnt.

  I was just thinking that this was not the warming process that good Farebrother had in mind when that gentleman arrived to announce that the most horrible things were being said about me in the village.

  Had I not, asked the good Farebrother, his porcupine hair flying into accusing points over his broad white forehead, allowed several children at the school to run their hands over my person?

  I had done so – at his urging, I reminded him, as part of the warming process.

  Well, it seemed that the warming process had taken something of a knock. He was sorry to tell me that one of those same children, a little boy, scarcely three years of age, had been discovered, broken and bloody, beside the rusting railway track, his body covered by a heap of stones.

  I was horrified.

  Since I had recently exposed myself to the same children, dressed in little more than the barest essentials, many in the village had drawn most unfortunate conclusions. They had decided I was the killer.

  Decided, I said, seemed an odd word for such an irrational decision, leading, from what I could hear, to horrible bloodlust.

  Moral perturbation was the phrase he preferred. He was quite sure that when I understood the agonizing moral dilemma of many of the men now baying for my blood, I would feel considerable sympathy. However, such was the mood of the crowd that he could not be sure that time allowed for a proper airing of the subject. He intended to slip away and try to head off the furious villagers. Beth would soon arrive in her motorcar and would smuggle me to safety. In the interim, on no account was I to leave the church. Being the House of God, it was a sanctuary the villagers would not dare invade.

  Remembering how little faith they retain for Church or God, I thought this a somewhat optimistic summation of affairs, but the good ex-Bishop insisted, before he fled into the night, that although faith might have died, tradition taught that you did not – if at all possible – disembowel people in church, and tradition would keep the lynch party out long enough for me to escape. With that he squared his shoulders and went out to face the mob.

  Now Beth arrived, terrified by the crowd – who had warned that unless she gave me up, she risked joining me in the fiery pyre when they set the church alight – but vowing to save me. She too had a plan, based on longstanding tradition. These were my instructions: I was to pay close attention, or my life was forfeit.

  She had parked her car outside the vestry door, and if we needed to make a run for it, I would find the boot unlocked and the area enclosed by a steel mesh, forming a cage. On her command, I was to enter this cage, lie down on the floor and pant heavily; she would attach a collar and lead to my neck and then drive the car through the mob. It might also help if I whimpered loudly. I might be mistaken for a family pet. This would have a calming effect on our pursuers, she prayed, and win the time to accelerate through the mob to safety.

  I protested again that the men of Little Musing were greatly mistaken. I had not harmed the child. It seemed unjust.

  Beth gave a strange smile. It was not justice that was at stake, but another tradition. The men of Little Musing might have blamed me for the crime – but in truth they suspected themselves. Assaults on children were so woven into the history, the very fabric, of English life. The more painful implications of the custom were eased by putting it about that (a) other natives were worse, or (b) those responsible were quite unrelated to ourselves.

  By dwelling constantly on this imaginary predator, they have made him into a continual presence; he lurks in the hedgerows, he haunts the back streets. They have many names for him; sometimes he is ‘the man in the van’, or ‘the horrible uncle’, or ‘the bad neighbour’ or ‘the man on the moor’. Frightening images from their pantheon of horrid spirits. He is as fearsome to them as the rain monsters are to us, or the giant snakes which lure women to their death in the bottoms of deep wells, or the vicious baboons who will leap on a virgin the moment her back is turned. The difference, I suppose, is that there is some scientific basis for our horrors, while their demons are little more than extensions of their own guilt.

  I began to perceive how unhappy these poor wretches must have been as we sprinted for the car. But, running for my life, I could not give them the sympathy deserved. Beth flung open the boot, snapped on the dog collar, and I lay on the floor of the cage. She whispered that it might be useful if I could bring up the short hair on the back of my neck.

  Catching sight of us, the mob began screaming. Lying on the floor of Beth’s car, I prepared to be lynched. But nothing happened – except that the screaming turned into singing and cheering. Raising my head cautiously, I saw that they had seized hold of the good Farebrother, and lifted him on to their shoulders, and were carrying him to and fro; some had fallen to their knees and seemed to give thanks.

  The ex-Bishop now encouraged us to rejoice. The crisis was passed. The child battered to death and buried beside the railway line had not been, after all, the victim of the usual predator. It seemed that he had been done to death by two of his older classmates, boys themselves barely eight years old. I could see for myself the joyful relief on the faces of every man in the village, who now felt very ashamed indeed of their threats towards me, and wished to make amends by whatever means possible, and he could say that the warming process was back on track.

  Beth wept, the Bishop grinned, the men of Little Musing cheered.

  And I? I asked, in my innocence, whether there was anything to be done about the murder of children by children.

  They considered the question and replied that, on the whole, they thought not.

  Try as they might to limit injuries and murders of children by adults, and vice versa, the custom is too widespread, the need too deep, the island too crowded, for there to be anything between the swaggering, proliferating young and the anxious, older generation than a struggle to the death.

  But principles of fairness demanded that everyone got a fair crack of the whip. So it was that, increasingly, children were beginning to act in a very similar way towards their parents, and to abuse adults. Especially the old and the ill, who were attacked at every opportunity. And children were giving every sign of being better at injuring the elderly than their parents had been at harming them. This must be considered an advance of sorts.

  Now it seemed that a third front was being opened up, and children, finding the older generation a less interesting target, were attacking each other. Painful as this sometimes might be, it showed that democratic principles were still very much at work in England. For however frightening the experience of near-lynching might have proved to me, the ex-Bishop hoped very devoutly that I had learned something from it.

  I was happy to set his mind at rest. Certainly I had done so. In my few months in England I had learned two essential lessons of survival: when faced by a murderous mob in a suburb of bastards, pretend to be a donation; when faced by villagers baying for blood, there is no more soothing behaviour than to pretend to be a household pet.

  1

  Marijuana.

  2

  Lizard.

  3

  This bears a surprisingly close resemblance to Livingstone’s account of reactions to his appearance in a remote African villag
e, given in his Expedition to the Zambesi (1865).

  4

  This story of the hare and the moon is common to many of the San people, but it is amongst the /Xam of the Cape that we find it used most forcefully to explain how death came into the world.

  Chapter Six

  Beth goes native; dances with elands and the tale of an omelette; learns the difference between adultery and incompatability; Beth vanishes, and Booi runs into a horse of a different colour

  For reasons not clear to me at that time, Beth began accompanying me into the garden of an evening.

  My decision to sleep outdoors came about for the following reasons. After my near-fatal encounter with the villagers of Little Musing, when they suspected me of some devilish part in the tragedy of the child stoned to death, I took the view that there was safety out of doors, and informed the Farebrothers that henceforth I would be camping in the garden.

  If caution dictated this decision, nostalgia also played its part. I found I simply could not sleep in the great bed assigned me, warm as blood, soft as kapok1 and as deep as death. I tried to honour their hospitality but, as I had found in the Royal Guest-house where I had awaited Her Majesty’s Pleasure, their beds are not sleeping places but warm lakes, into which they dive at night and float, but in which I felt myself drowning.

  Months folded together like feathers in an ostrich’s tail – impossible to tell one from the other. And my unhappiness and impatience grew even greater.

  Many nights I lay in the bed, broad as several donkey’s carts, in the soft English darkness, so exotic, so foreign, and I smelt again the hot brown perfume of rain as it splits the baking desert dust; I heard the rustling music of the busy dung beetle, putting his shoulder to the wheel of his pungent cargo and rolling it roundly home. I would feel in my heart the approach of the springbuck in the hunting season, with little lady steps, perfect on its tiny toes, closer and closer, until it was within bowshot, and its heart began beating in my chest.

  And I could not bear it. I told my friends, the grounded Bishop and his dark-haired, delectable daughter, that I would sleep no longer under their roof. I begged them to understand my feelings. I would hang my grey suit in their cupboard; my boots would sit in their keeping; they would safeguard my cardboard suitcase full of treasures until such time as I set off for London. I would take my loin flap, my bow and arrow, my good broad hat and pitch camp in the garden, under the apple tree. A couple of strips of corrugated iron would do very well, a hollow for my hips scooped from the soft earth, a nightly fire over which I would cook whatever I caught in the fields.

  The Bishop tried to dissuade me, but I told him, speaking very frankly, that it did not much soothe me to be told that the men of Little Musing were now quite over their anger at the death of the child; that none were readier than the people of those parts to forgive and forget; that they were not the sort of folk who bore grudges; and that the warming process was now back on track. I preferred to fix the sun above my head by day and the sky on my back by night and to study the lives of these Remote-area Dwellers from a secure distance.

  I had still that nagging, unprovable, yet irresistible feeling that I was being secretly watched; if this were indeed so, I wished to face my observer on the terrain of my choosing, and not walled up in the breathless confines of an English cottage.

  The effects of this move outdoors were twofold, and surprising. First, Beth, announcing that she too was giving up the indoor life, pitched a small blue tent at the other end of the garden and began to mimic my life, right down to her clothing, which now consisted of a small skirt, sandals and the deliberate removal of everything else, so that her very good breasts, formerly so strangled, now showed clearly by day and by night, to the astonishment of the neighbours and passing natives. Beth announced that she was adopting the dress of the Red People and asked if there was some special ornament or substance she might add to the very fine figure she already presented. I said that, truly, I could think of nothing – except perhaps a layer of sheep’s fat, for this, traditionally, contributed lustre to the women of the Red People. Being in good sheep country, this was easily arranged.

  How very beautiful she looked, by moonlight and by sunlight, with her skirt swinging across her thighs and tracing the flowing, swinging outlines of that prodigiously lovely posterior; her upper body was now a column of light, richly gleaming and delicious with the faintly greasy, meaty flavour of newly shorn wool.

  There really has been nothing like it since the wall paintings of our ancestors, where sturdy figures straining nose and knee cap, showing exquisite posteriors, race after fleeing gazelles, and loose their arrows like bees.

  Such was the transformation in Beth – from a swathed female in her father’s shoes to this shining creature, living in a blue tent pitched near the box hedge in an English country garden. But there was something else. In place of the shy, tortured woman who never showed herself except when she was sure no one could see her, there arose a gleaming beauty, listening raptly to the stories I told her of my people, and showing her breasts to the world in the way God intended. In short, it could be said that Beth possessed something I had not seen in her before: she was happy.

  Others were not. Young males in the village alehouse, the Brass Monkey, grew increasingly noisy as tales of Beth’s new life spread. Night after night I heard the bang of the drums, as young bloods swayed and swooned and stamped to a beat so primal, so savage, we may trace its origins to the beginning of the world – and the publican, fearing some form of raid or attack, sent a runner to the Bishop’s house, warning him that the natives were growing restless and begging him to keep his daughter out of the garden. But she would have none of it. She was free at last, she told her father.

  Beth was eager to experience all the customs of real life as it was lived by the Red People – all, that is, but one: she preferred food from the refrigerator to anything I caught for her.

  I sympathized. After all, their diet is not one we would find very agreeable. And they have irrational distastes. Although, like us, they prefer meat above anything else. Yet they turn up their noses at caterpillars. The English caterpillar, I can confirm, lightly fried, is the equal of anything I have tasted in Africa. Strange to tell, they know nothing of the delicacy of iguana meat and do not even cook and eat the small lizards to be found on the island. Honey, they take as we do, though they seldom eat it directly from the comb. And they will pass it amongst themselves in a way which our people would perhaps find promiscuous. They make no beer from honey, though legend has it that their forefathers once made a liquor based on honey, as we do. If so, they have lost the art.

  The news that Boy David was ‘living rough’, as they put it, and foraging for grubs, roots and tubers, became the talk of the village. Guess what Dave’s having for dinner, I heard them calling. Come, quick! And in no time at all a gaping audience crowded the garden.

  I enjoyed their dismay; I confess it. When a swarm of flying ants passed through the garden I caught several handfuls of these succulent little titbits and fed on them before an astonished crowd of children, farmers and old women, some of whom were audibly upset at the sight.

  When word spread that the Bushman was eating termites, so many villagers crowded into the garden the Bishop made them enter in relays. The children were particularly entranced, pretending to gag into the bushes and shouting encouragement. To them, it was a kind of repulsive magic. I felt quite ashamed of myself afterwards. Your average native is a credulous soul; he wishes to believe. For him it is Bushman magic. And although there is good sport in this, I cannot believe it anything but cruel to play upon their childlike natures.

  To begin with it was a game, pure and simple, as well as a relief, this brief return to the diet of my country. But I was not expecting anyone else to enter the spirit of my game. What, then, was I to make of the ostrich egg that mysteriously appeared outside my shelter one day, donated by some nocturnal visitor who knew something of hunting, for he left no spoor o
n the wet grass of dawn, having dragged a broom over his tracks to erase them?

  I looked at that huge, pearly shell, so like the moon. So perfect it could only come from the gods, who, in their goodness, pity the people of the world who must go on two legs. So they made another two-legged person. The ostrich. Who else runs so fast? Who else roars so loudly that even the hunting lion stops to listen? Who kicks the sniffing hyena in the head? Who is the fiercest defender of its baby against everything from snakes to elephants? Who first learnt about fire and would have kept the secret to himself, hidden in his warm armpit, had the scheming god Heisib not known how the ostrich loves to dance? They danced together, Heisib and the ostrich, and the clever god waited until the ostrich’s head began spinning from the dance and his arms lifted to the sky and then, from deep in his armpit, Heisib plucked the ostrich gold, the fire that warms the Men of Men.

  Now, I should have asked myself: who would give me such a present? And where in England ostriches lived and laid? And what my visitor’s motives might have been. I should have heeded good Farebrother’s warning, when I called him to see my prize, and he urged me to return to my bed indoors; it might be safer. He had done what he could to protect me from the less agreeable aspects of English life, but – and he jerked his dark, sharp locks at the world beyond his garden – it was a jungle out there, and while most people I met were basically decent, kindly folk who were beginning to warm to me, he wouldn’t fancy my chances if I ran into a horse of a different colour.