Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  The young man, smiling, recognized me immediately as a member of a receiving nation, and asked in the most interested fashion about my people. He was sure that most of us were dead, dying or scattered to the winds. Had we not thought of resisting our enemies?

  We had fought those who invaded our country, I assured him, but arrows were little use against rifles.

  Exactly, came the answer; heavy machine-guns would have been a better idea. Surely life was hard in our desert places without modern weapons?

  Today, I said, it was not weapons we wanted, but water.

  First-class, said he. Had we considered building a dam?

  I replied that we would do well enough with new windmills to pump underground water.

  I barely saw his hands move. Faster than anything I had ever seen since a striking cobra. A blur of motion and he had slipped a wad of bank notes beneath my bedclothes.

  Then, very calmly, as if nothing had happened, he produced a piece of paper on which appeared these pictures: a bomb, a tank and a battleship. And, in a very winning and modest way, he asked for my help. Would I look at the paper and indicate my feelings by ticking the appropriate symbol? A bomb meant ‘mildly grateful’, a tank ‘very grateful’ and a battleship ‘grateful beyond words’.

  I replied, truly, that I felt no gratitude whatever.

  Not even one little bomb’s worth, he demanded. For all that money?

  What money? I asked.

  How quickly his madness flared. Suddenly he was shy and diffident and modest no longer. He began to rave, calling me a fraud, a yellow swindler; and I believe he might have injured me had men in white coats not burst into the room, gagged him, replaced the blindfold and dragged him away. The swiftness of his hand was not lost on seasoned observers, however, and they took the bank notes too.

  The Head of Care entered now and pronounced herself very pleased. The young man would expect to be back at his desk soon. I had helped a patient with very serious problems of illusory linkage, and she would like to help me too.

  Tell me what you want, dear Booi, urged the woman in white, and I will take care of it.

  There was only one thing I wanted, but I feared it was not in her gift: my freedom.

  The Head of Care laughed her generous laugh, saying how little I understood of their ways. If she could release a man who could not tell the difference between gratitude and battleships, who thought that people should pay for free dams with jet fighters, then she was not going to baulk at a little fellow who imagined he had an audience with the Queen, now was she? And so, she promised, I would be free by the end of the day.

  Her answer astounded me. Out of England, I cried, there is always something new!

  She agreed. No more the barbaric custom of locking up the mentally ill. Discharge them as soon as possible, that was their way. Send them back into the community. Kinder, really. And more economical.

  Delighted as I was at my own good luck, I was also confused. Did this not mean that there were many lunatics roaming the streets of England? What did other people think of this?

  Again there came her tolerant laugh. No problem at all. So easily did her patients slip back into the community that it was soon impossible to tell them apart.

  The way they release lunatics into the community is really rather touching, both in its informality and brevity and in the mutual relief felt by both sides. It is difficult to decide whose pleasure is the greater: the departing patients’ or that of those who wave goodbye.

  Patients being discharged are given a bottle of pills and a train ticket to the city of their choice. I had asked to go to that place, where, my heart told me, my long adventure was soon to be concluded.

  Inmates about to ‘graduate’ from a Place of Safety undergo a simple, dignified, private ceremony designed to attract as little attention as possible. The Head of Care addresses graduates, urging them, as they go back into the world, not to let the side down.

  And to remember the sensitivities of those amongst whom they were being released.

  At this point, several graduates, overcome with joy at the prospect of release, fell on the warders with wild embraces. I thought this might lead to the suspension of the ceremony, but they were discharged as soon as they had been subdued and their pills wrestled from them; the Head of Care explained that these graduates were taking unsuitable medications. They may take ours, or theirs, but never both. Never mix your medications, Mr Booi – it becomes a horrifying cocktail of unhappiness.

  It also led to a regrettable slander. After a spate of stabbings, assaults and even murders in the receiving communities, it had been put about by ignorant or malicious observers that the culprits must be crazy – when, in truth, they had simply forgotten to take their pills or mixed their medications.

  I cannot stress too strongly, Mr Booi – the Head of Care smiled, as she unlocked the doors to freedom – that there are no discernible differences between people like you and the community about to receive you.

  Then, as she handed me my bottle of pills, she added: no discernible mental differences, at any rate.

  Without more ado, she pushed me gently into the street and locked the door behind me. I was accompanied to the station by a large man in a white coat. He explained that as I was both a graduate and a foreigner, I warranted the special escort due to the doubly disadvantaged. His orders were to ensure that nothing stopped me from leaving their care. I thought such attention very kind. My escort insisted on waiting until the train was slipping from the station before handing me my tickets, running alongside the train and bellowing a last reminder: I was to take my pills – unless, of course, I was already taking my pills; in which case, I was not to take my pills.

  Anyone wishing to study the English might do worse than to spend time in an asylum; I had learned useful lessons about the psychological contours, colours and phantoms of their mental landscapes. I saw, for example, that I had misread their capacity to help a stranger travelling in their country, even when they wished to do so. I had failed to recognize how little they know about their own culture or geography. The average native is probably more confused about his country than the most ignorant traveller, since the traveller, by his very ignorance, is free of the lamentable superstitions, fed by fear, that afflict these people and blind them even to their own virtues. Certain taboos and phobias are so deeply ingrained that to expect them to think coherently, or to behave usefully, is to lay an impossible burden on what is after all a very little country, more badly traumatized by loss of empire and loss of earnings than they are willing, or even able, to admit. How would they have characterized the intentions of an alien San ambassador who proposed to trek boldly where no San had gone before, through bewildering, dangerous terrain about which they themselves knew little, to call on a Monarch about whom they knew even less? As arrogance, foolhardiness or madness? Probably as all three.

  One might say that they regarded my mission as bound to fail, not because of any particular animosity towards me (above a generalized distaste for foreigners and travellers and distance) but because the configuration of their brains makes them prone to despair. Their instinctive belief that nothing can be done shades so closely into the belief that nothing should be done that one cannot drive even a porcupine quill between the two.

  What they prefer is to take any sharp weapon that comes to hand and repeatedly, and obsessively, to stab to death their best beliefs, to assassinate their virtues, to puncture their own confidence and self-esteem, and to bleed to death their most cherished institutions. This has led some to contend they positively enjoy failure. This is a mistaken view. There are signs that they may enjoy succeeding as much as we do. What they fear, however, is forward movement, whether of peoples, of ideas, of time; in short, what they fear is the future. And themselves.

  The explorer is wise not to be deceived by this constant, pitiless self-denigration; the unwary visitor sees them wolfing down their favourite dish, which they call ‘humble pie’, and mistakes their
dinner of despair for the true state of affairs. Rather, as the unwary traveller in the veld sometimes cannot spy the difference between the mottled sun-splashed rocks and the monstrous puff-adder, until he steps clumsily and the common rock rises up with horrible fangs, so they may rejoice in their belief that they are a pretty ordinary nation, but they reserve their ancient right to kill foreigners for saying so. And when they bemoan their decline, it is always from their own standards that they decline, and these are set higher than any others on earth.

  I had chosen as my destination the only place in England I might call home and in a spirit of compassion for the ex-Bishop who had so nearly lured me to destruction in the jaws of Lord Goodlove’s hounds. He would be eaten up with anxiety, I felt sure. The fallen Bishop had been my guardian in England. He had given his word to the Sovereign that he would not let me out of his sight. And he had not kept his word. He would, no doubt, bitterly regret his weakness; but now that I knew a little of their ways, I saw that he had been maddened by the fear of sexuality that lies at the very essence of their being, for I had learnt that the English believe love to be dominated by one factor above all – battery. Of the female partner among those who marry, or of themselves among males who do not, and of children by almost everybody.

  And he had taken me for one of them. How bitterly the former flying Bishop must have regretted his behaviour. Despite Lord of Goodlove’s alarming tale of a father trading his daughter as one might a sack of tobacco. I felt sure that his joy at seeing me would overcome any lingering animus. In his simple mind, my instruction of his daughter in the ways of the Red People had come to seem threatening. I blamed myself for failing to pay enough regard to the primitive terrors of the native mind.

  With these thoughts humming in my mind, I arrived in Little Musing.

  1

  A Victorian ethnologist’s term for people of the San and Khoe-Khoe groupings.

  Chapter Ten

  London at last!

  Penetrates the Mother of All Parliaments; sees a Minister destroyed; hears Mr Conbrio put a question; lavishes hospitality on Her Majesty’s Ministers with unexpected results

  Not since old Adam Blitzerlik, who did a bit of gardening for the Mayor of Puffadder, was found astride the Lady Mayor, wearing only her husband’s golden chain of office, have I witnessed such an explosion.

  I walked up the path and knocked at the door of Edward Farebrother’s cottage.

  Julia was leaning over the fence. Well, well, she said, the prodigal returns.

  Peter the Birdman, out in his garden, said nothing but pretended to be watching a sparrowhawk killing a fat racing pigeon.

  The wingless wonder, the failed flier, my old friend and mentor Edward Farebrother opened the door and stared at me the way a man does at the snake he finds in his shoe; his face blushed like the flame tree, then, seeing his neighbours watching, he pulled me sharply inside the house and slammed the door.

  And why, David Mungo Booi – he demanded – are you here?

  I had arrived prepared to overlook the behaviour of a man who had sold his friend, traded his daughter and broken his word to his Sovereign to placate his tribal taboos. I returned a truthful answer to his question – Goodlove Castle had very nearly claimed my life. I had escaped only by the grace of Kaggen.

  That is when he exploded. Pointing a shaking finger at my heart, the former holy aviator declared in ringing tones that I summed up in my hateful little person all that was wrong with the Third World. He had managed, with enormous difficulty, to place me in the house of an aristocrat to teach and tame and fashion me in the ways of the upper classes; knock off a few of my edges; give me a taste for horseflesh, a whiff of shot and shell; a sense of the sacred ceremony of the tea-towel; of roast beef, of common sense; of the knowledge that things will be all right on the day, and we’ll muddle through; and of what was, and was not, on; of true-blue Anglo-Saxon love of the loam, the cow and the copse; of that ancient attachment to English acres; English ale; English attitudes which so distinguish the landed gentry of England from those pale shadows across the Channel, the effete, landless, loveless Eurotocracy of other, less fortunate, lands.

  And how had I repaid him? I had gone over the wall like an absconding schoolboy.

  No wonder that people like me could not feed or clothe ourselves. Give us entry into one of the great houses of England, and we went AWOL. Give us a finger and we took an arm and a leg. Give us millions and we frittered them away. Give us asylum and we began seducing their women; give us a brighter tomorrow and we elected a darker yesterday; give us dams and we bought guns; give us the honey of Northern ingenuity, the cream of Western intelligence, and we preferred dumb insolence and disease; give us clean water and we kept coal in it; give us condoms and we wore them on our heads, lightbulbs and we used them as penile ornaments, tractors and we lost them, trade credits and we spent them, nuns and we raped them, tanks and we used them to invade our neighbours; give us grain, millions of land-mines, electoral observers, bags of compassion, aid agencies, relief agencies, humanitarian agencies, fighter bombers, field ambulances, dollars, Mercedes Benz, international mediators, marines, and we chewed them up and spat them out and things were soon a lot worse than they had been before we started. Look at Rwanda … Somalia … Angola … Liberia …

  And here I was again. Asking for more. Well, he had news for me. Not now. Not ever again. He had treated me as a lost son, trained me, groomed me for better things. And how had I responded? By suborning his daughter, leading her in lascivious dances, preceded by omelettes and lechery in his own back garden. These were his thanks for plucking me from the fists of the authorities as they were about to return me to that distant, god-forsaken, murderous, uncouth, fly-ridden, disease-struck neck of the woods I called home.

  He left me then, returning moments later with my brown suitcase and threw it down, without care, on the floor, and it broke open, spilling its precious contents, and I scrabbled to collect my bow of gharree wood, my arrows, the ceremonial digging sticks and fire sticks and necklaces of ostrich-eggshell and, most important, the fine copper bangles. The small leather bag, given to me by my cousins the !Kung from the Kalahari, split open. I gazed on the fabled star-stones that Europeans are said to love more than life or love, and which I had quite forgotten. Very indifferent pebbles, much like gravel you see scattering across the road when the farmer races down the dusty roads in his quick white truck.

  Then a silence descended. Where was I proposing to go? the former Bishop suddenly inquired. Not merely had his tone changed but his voice was close to my ear, and I was startled to discover he was down on his knees beside me, searching the darkest corners where the stones had rolled.

  To London, I replied. And the Palace.

  How could I manage in the capital without help? Surely I needed help?

  By those who do not know them, they are said to be a passive, stolid people. Do not believe it. Within the space of moments, for reasons unclear, the once-winged priest had moved from outraged denunciation of my person and all its works into a mood of almost wheedling kindness. Truly they are a mercurial, volcanic, turbulent tribe!

  I had learnt a good deal about survival during my time as a guest at Goodlove Castle, I answered.

  And did I propose, then, to visit the Queen in all my tribal finery?

  My heart pained me so that I could manage no reply. But silently nodded my head. Once upon a time, I dreamed of a far more magnificent progress to the Palace, borne aloft, in the traditional manner of the great explorers, in a sedan chair, carried on the shoulders of four white bearers; as the expedition progressed towards the Palace of the Great She-Elephant, I would recline in the yellow shade, behind my heavy satin curtains, reading some appropriate text from my portable library: Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, by Bruce, or Henry Moreton Stanley’s unique primer, In Darkest Africa. Bringing up the rear would struggle my porters, toting their bales crammed with every conceivable necessity: quinine, tea, coffee, sugar,
salt, pepper, canned vegetables, dried meat, fruit, bottled water, and champagne, in which to toast the health of the Monarch.

  Alas, now this was not to be. My small funds had dwindled to nothing. So, yes, I would present myself at the Palace in the clothes I stood up in.

  And when I had achieved my goal and presented my credentials to Her Majesty, what would I do then?

  What I had always intended – I would return home.

  Would I give him a categorical assurance?

  Before I could reply, the room erupted for a second time.

  Beth, who must have crept upon us silently, and heard most of our conversation, burst upon us and flung her arms around my neck. Her lustrous behind, seen from my vantage point, my nose buried in her neck as she hugged me, showed like two great boulders, smoothed by a mighty river into perfect melons, and carried together by that same torrent to repose side by side like identical twins.

  How could I even contemplate exchanging the safety of their garden for the horrors of home? Beth cried. I must promise to do whatever possible to stay with them for ever.

  It is a happy people who live under a delusion, quite impervious to reason. They, who by any measure may be said to lead lives of poverty, sadness, fear and restriction on an overcrowded island, sometimes never seeing the sun from one week to the next, at the mercy of increasingly savage young who would tear their parents limb from limb for a sixpence, and frequently do so, marooned at the mercy of clever and more powerful neighbours, enduring in the twilight of their past glories and fearful of the future, still contrived somehow to believe themselves the happiest people on earth and their system the best that the sons of man ever invented!

  Beth was scarcely recognizable; what a dismal descent from the proud, upstanding, free-swinging beauty of the Eland Dance to this wan, tousled-haired person, breasts strangled, haunches swathed in some crumpled, hairy skirt reaching all the way down to her feet which, saddest of all, protruded to show she was again wearing her father’s old shoes.