by Robin Duval
Again: no problem with the passport. He passed through the metal detector and received the usual intimate pat-down, without incident. But when he arrived at the far end of the luggage conveyor belt to retrieve his hold-all, an official was already standing over it.
‘Would you care to open this, sir?’ he said.
Bryn tried to look bemused.
‘Is there a difficulty?’
‘You’ve got something in there, sir, that’s setting off the machine. I need you to take the contents out and put them here on this table.’
Bryn was on auto-pilot. He removed the Harrods carrier from the hold-all and stood it upright in front of him; and started building a neat pile alongside it of shirts, underwear and pyjamas.
‘That’ll do, sir,’ said the official. ‘But you can’t take those bananas through. Or the doughnuts. No food.’
‘Drink?’
The official was inspecting the contents of the carrier bag. He looked up condescendingly and shook his head.
‘You know you could have sent this through in your checked baggage? What a pity you didn’t do so, sir.’
And he lifted it up, carrier bag and all, with no apparent effort, and placed it in the confiscation basket at his feet.
Bryn was paralysed. He watched as the man returned to the table and ran his hands over and through Bryn’s most private possessions before reinserting the whole pile, more or less, back into the hold-all. Except for the bananas, the doughnuts and the Harrods carrier bag.
And that was it.
He picked up the hold-all and walked away into the departure lounge with a wild, heady euphoria. Relief that his task, however fruitless in the end, was at last concluded. His flight had been called, so he shifted the bag over his shoulder and marched directly to the departure gate to join the embarkation queue.
The final walk to the aeroplane took passengers down a short corridor and past a row of tables where sealed and wrapped dutyfree purchases were set out for the claimants to retrieve. A few random travellers were being asked – one last time – to show their passports and tickets. Bryn had already walked through when a man in a business suit, who’d been standing apart from the proceedings, stepped forward and put out a restraining hand.
‘Would you wait a moment, sir,’ he said.
Bryn handed him his papers and the man gave them a cursory glance and nodded. A second, uniformed, official produced an old orange vinyl Harrods carrier bag from the back of a row of purchases and planted it carefully in Bryn’s hands. The heavy box-shaped object inside had been wrapped in plastic and sealed, and had a duty-free sticker attached.
‘Move along, please sir,’ said the first, deftly dropping Bryn’s passport and boarding card into the top of the carrier.
At Heathrow, he passed unchallenged through the Nothing to Declare channel. When he emerged into the narrowing final corridor, two familiar figures were standing waiting in the middle of the lane. Marcus did not look at him. His gaze was fixed on the bag weighing down Bryn’s left hand. As he reached him, he lifted it tenderly from his grasp.
‘So we meet again, professor,’ he said, in a tremulous whisper. ‘Well done indeed.’
‘It’s heavy,’ Bryn warned.
‘Ah yes,’ he murmured contentedly. ‘Why don’t we step aside and have a coffee?’
Agnete led them to a table in a coffee shop nearby.
While she was buying their cappuccinos, Marcus made some small talk about mutual friends and barely remembered aunts. But his mind was on other things. From time to time he glanced down at the bag between his feet; his fingers never left its handles. It must all at last have got too much for him because, as soon as Agnete and the coffee returned, he hauled the bag onto his knees under the sheltering edge of the table, dived into it with both hands and energetically began to strip off the wrapping inside.
‘Keep talking,’ he said quietly.
Agnete asked if Bryn’s coffee was satisfactory. He replied that it was not so good as the last time, and she laughed. Marcus tore away until the box of Canadian Club appeared. He ran a penknife along its edge and, very delicately, slid the top aside.
He went white. Bryn had never seen a man so shocked. His own first reaction was to assume some terrible accident with the isotope and he jumped to his feet and started to back away. Marcus flung the carrier bag on the table in front of them and forced both sides of it down, fiercely, with the open palms of his hands. A bottle of Canadian Club whiskey lay serenely within its wooden coffin: seventy centilitres of Ten Year Old Reserve, just as the label had promised.
And evidently not what Marcus had expected.
He abandoned all discretion. He tossed the wrapping and the Harrods bag on the floor and tipped the bottle out on its side. A lead weight had been strapped to the base with duct tape. Through the clear glass could be seen, not liquid at all, but a quantity of light brown sand. He ripped out the cork and upended the contents on the table. A piece of paper, held in a tight roll by a rubber band, floated out on a tide of silica and fell to the floor.
Agnete leaned over, picked it up and opened it. She giggled and passed it to Marcus. The complexion of his face as he read it darkened from ashen towards deep crimson.
‘Fuck,’ he said, and threw the paper at Bryn.
It had a simple, if dyslexic, message:
Hapy drinkin, sukker
‘Wilson?’ queried Agnete.
She did not appear to be taking the reverse too seriously.
Marcus rose to his feet and brushed the sand off his trousers.
‘Fuck,’ he said again.
And: ‘Sorry, Bryn.’
And with that he marched off; followed after a few seconds by his companion. As she turned into the main concourse, she looked back at Bryn, and blew him a kiss.
He retrieved the discarded bag, did his best to tidy away Marcus’s mess, stuffed as much as he could into a waste bin, apologised to the waitress, and set off for the Piccadilly Line for West London and a good night’s sleep.
The English and America
The Origins of Our Species
Brynmor Williams PhD
PREFACE
I am writing this in West London. Unlike, say, urban California – from which I have recently returned – this is a placid part of the world. It has a low crime rate. There is an extremely modest risk of earthquakes. Few beggars sleep on the pavements or squad cars lurk by street corners. Extreme wealth and hapless poverty co-exist far less frequently. There is a strong sense of community, underpinned by networks of schools, clubs, societies, groups, parties, centres, educational classes, religions – and public houses. This is Brentford, Hounslow and Ealing: the aptly named ‘dormitory’ suburbs of the metropolis.
It may be difficult therefore to accept that civilisation, even here, is the product of violence. Like the bones of our ancestors, death and destruction are never more than a few layers away. Nations in general are not created by the people who were here first, but by those who forced their way in later. By the invaders, the ‘pioneers’ and the settlers. In this monograph I shall be addressing a theme which I hope may have as much relevance to the present-day English as to America.
Let us begin by rolling back the centuries to a time when the ‘New World’ – that is to say, its accessible eastern territories – was mainly forest and the first natives met by the incomers were those living in communities on the sea edge. The history of what happened next remains sketchy, though we know it to have been brutal.
We know that, as their ambitions became greater, the settlers began to move inland. They split up into groups large enough to protect themselves: ten well-armed men seems to have been the norm. A few of them were able to travel on horseback. They carried a range of weaponry of which the commonest was a small cutlass with a single edge, a heavy blunt back and a sharp stabbing point – an effective defence if local inhabitants were to come unexpectedly from the dense forest.
They moved in scattered bands united by their own
separate pledges of loyalty, but these people had a common purpose: to claim the best land for their own. They showed little mercy. In the words of a popular historian of this period: ‘[their] methods of settlement, though extremely practical, and perhaps not wholly at variance with the methods of later colonists, were not distinguished by much regard for the conquered.’ 1
But whatever criticisms we might have from a modern perspective, we cannot doubt the pioneers’ courage. They had committed everything. They had come huge distances from the countries of their birth to the east, and sea travel – all travel – in those days was protracted and hazardous. The further inland they progressed, the more hostile the terrain became. Literally the fittest survived.
Of course the incomers were better equipped for conflict than the locals and more ruthless and determined. This was their last and best chance of making a successful life for themselves. They were better organised and knew what they had to do. The native inhabitants, by contrast, were mostly ignorant of the impending danger and fatally unprepared.
We may imagine such a group, travelling one day along the valley of a small river, led – let us say – by a tall yellow-haired man in his early forties who is shouting to keep up the spirits of his companions. It is summer, because in those days that was the season for long journeys. The river is shallow and sluggish but treacherously prone to fill up in heavy weather and inundate the land surrounding it. They need, nevertheless, to keep it close by because it provides their only reliable reference point within the anonymous canopy of the forest. There are bears still, and wolves; and also deer that they can kill for food.
After weeks of travel, with little sign of any indigenous communities, they cross at a natural ford and emerge into open meadows and are surprised at what now presents itself to them. Fields cultivated for crops beside the river. A cluster of simple dwellings. Honey bees in wickerwork hives. A hunting dog sprawled in the sunshine and a child approaching, naked except for the woollen breeches drawn tightly around his ankles. It has been described as a vision of paradise.
But for these people, the new arrivals, it is what they have come to destroy. Farming and the cultivation of land – the historic enemy of mobility and enterprise and the reason why history has always favoured rootless invaders.
Perhaps, if the natives are lucky, the arrivals will merely subdue them, kill their leaders, and force the rest to labour as slaves in – what for centuries had been – their own fields. And there will, at least in the earliest days, be a degree of inter-racial mingling. Not to put too fine a point on it, invaders tend to be short of women.
But history is always written by the conquerors. Traces of the previous inhabitants, even their language, will be progressively erased. A place will be given a new name, for example to celebrate a prominent pioneer. In this particular case, it will commemorate the loud blonde man who has led them to these meadows.
That is why this site – the site that now most interests us – became known first as Gylla-inghas. It has been suggested 2 that Gylla in the language of the blonde man’s people meant ‘the shouter’; inghas meant ‘his followers’. The name metamorphosed and shortened through the centuries until it became Eal – ing, a suburb of West London. Similarly, other conquered locations such as Reading, Woking, Barking, Worthing and Epping still reflect the names of those Saxon leaders whose followers subdued or killed the existing native tribes and settled there themselves.
A reader may possibly have assumed my narrative to have had some other location in mind. If so, I make no apology. This could have been a story about America, or of many other countries. It is nevertheless about the ancestors of those Pilgrim Fathers who, a thousand years after Gylla, set out once more to seek a better life – making a similar journey across water and land to create what, in both cases, was to become the New England.
The standard carried by the Pilgrim Fathers was the Cross of St George. Gylla’s was the White Horse. He and his fellow invaders raised it on the hillsides overlooking their newly subdued territories. One such eminence overlooks Ealing to this day and on modern maps is called Horsenden Hill: the Hill of the Saxon Horse. The sluggish little River Brent still meanders through the parks and golf courses below, and in the heaviest weather wells up and inundates them. The great primeval forest disappeared long ago. The rich farmland, however, survived well into the nineteenth century, when it was buried progressively beneath rank upon rank of peaceful suburban housing.
1 C E Vulliamy p225
2 Neaves p61 ff
Standing in the middle of the road
is very dangerous; you get knocked
down by the traffic from both sides.
Margaret Thatcher
Chapter 16
It was good to be back.
The semi-detached he and Marion once shared in Ealing had long since been sold, but old friend Dieter quickly stepped into the breach. In his insistent way, he loaned Bryn his own nearby home while for a few weeks he spent filial time with his ageing parents in Baden-Württemberg. It was a kind gesture, and an unusually touching one. Meticulously clean and tidy, the house was exactly as it had been when Dieter’s much-loved partner had died the previous year – exquisitely furnished and lit, not a pot plant or a cushion or a photograph out of place. A challenge to any guest.
The sense of relief, however, soon began to fade. At first Bryn put it down to too many memories of life hereabouts with Marion; or even to the strain of keeping up with Dieter’s (and Graeme’s) impossible standards. But something felt wrong. He wondered if the American experience had left him in delayed shock, or rendered him slightly paranoid.
He was half-convinced that the house was being watched, or that his calls on Dieter’s artistically antique – and crackly – telephone were being intercepted. He was unnerved to discover that both Dieter’s bedside clocks were eight hours slow, as if they had been set to Pacific Standard Time – a mirror image of his experience in Yosemite. There would be a perfectly innocent explanation of course; if he could think of it.
He badly needed to get out.
He made himself busy with practical issues, the kind that allowed him to hop on buses and lose himself in crowds; and he was the better for it. He set about getting a replacement passport in his real name.
He had not thought this through. First there was an issue of how he had managed to return through Heathrow – which he finessed by claiming he had lost the passport subsequently, while rescuing a dog from the River Brent. That ushered in a fresh complication, because the London office could find no record of the document’s most recent use. It occurred to him, a little late in the day, that it was only a matter of time before they caught up with the news from San Francisco: the SFPD might even report possession of an undrowned document. When – fortuitously – it turned out the passport was due to expire in a few months anyway, he conceded that he could, after all, wait till then.
He was beginning to feel trapped. It worried him also that there was no news from Marcus, or from Agnete. He could see no way of resolving the complications, or staving off the inevitable follow-up enquiries, without some help from them.
There was no reply on Marcus’s work number. An attempt to reach him through the switchboard was also fruitless. Bryn could remember, more or less, where his cousin lived – or used to live. So he took the Underground to Belsize Park Station on the Northern Line, and walked up the hill towards Hampstead Heath until he found the familiar leafy cul-de-sac with a tall, detached Victorian house at the end of it.
For a long time there was no response. He backed away for a better view of any signs of life within. A check-shirted man passed by on the other side of the road and lingered briefly: a neighbour, perhaps, wondering what his business was.
Marcus’s wife opened the front door.
Fiona and Bryn had never had a comfortable relationship. At the root of it, he’d always suspected, was the absence of children. For Fiona, who came from ‘county stock’, breeding was a social necessit
y. She and Marcus had undertaken all the usual tests but no explanation had ever been forthcoming. Maybe they were incompatible. Or had left it too late – Marcus’s ambitions (and Fiona’s for him) had postponed the business of building a family until well into their thirties. Meantime, Fiona had watched as Bryn and Marion’s offspring, the product of student indiscretion and no forward planning at all, noisily grew into adolescence. If she had found all this unbearable, she never said so.
There was also the disastrous event that took place when Fiona had just turned forty. They were celebrating with some friends in this same Hampstead house and had all got drunk, none more than Fiona. At some point late in the evening, she had intercepted Bryn on the stairs and insisted he accompany her to the third floor (‘I need to show you something’). In a spare bedroom intended, as he knew full well, for the children they had never had, she pressed him against the wall and embraced him and, as he responded, slipped a hand down the front of his trousers. Bryn had reacted as if bitten by a wild animal. He jumped back; her face flushed crimson; and in the timehonoured phrase, he made his excuses and left. Scuttled away down the stairs. The whole incident concluded in a matter of seconds.
He doubted if she had ever forgiven him.
‘Good morning, Bryn.’
‘Hi, Fiona. Good to see you.’
‘This is a surprise. I don’t suppose you’re here to visit me.’
‘Well. I thought it might be nice.’
‘Bullshit, Bryn.’
‘Aaah. Fiona. How long is it since we last talked?’
‘I don’t know, Bryn. You tell me.’
She stepped aside and waved him towards the sitting room. It was Surrey translated to north London. Heavy chintz-covered settees and armchairs, framed paintings of country scenes, an alabaster mantelpiece with photographs of Fiona and Marcus in the company of the great and the good. And on a side table, two pictures. Marcus receiving an honour from the Queen. And Marcus and Fiona in white tie and ball dress at some grand embassy reception, standing beside a tall man wearing a white and silver star on his left breast and a slim, blonde woman in a stunning, figure-hugging gown.