First published by Verso 2014
© Bart Moore-Gilbert 2014
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-268-5
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-269-2 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-646-1 (UK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore-Gilbert, B. J., 1952–
The setting sun : a memoir of empire and family secrets / Bart Moore-Gilbert.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78168-268-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-78168-269-2 (ebook)
1. Police misconduct – India – Satara (District) – History – 20th century. 2. Police – India – Satara (District) – History – 20th century. 3. Terrorism – India – Satara (District) – History – 20th century. 4. India – History – Autonomy and independence movements. 5. India – History – British occupation, 1765–1947. 6. Moore-Gilbert, B. J., 1952 – Travel – India. I. Title.
HV8249.S37M66 2014
954.03’59092 – dc23
[B]
2013037732
v3.1
This book is for you, Madeleine. It’s no substitute for your grandfather, but it will help you to know him better.
‘We have to create our lives, create memory.’
Doris Lessing, Under My Skin
‘So while, when I travel, I can move only according to what I find, I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out to incident.’
V.S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Map
Prologue
1. The Father I Did Not Know
2. Picking Up the Trail
3. Memory and Doubt
4. Glimpses of Bill
5. My Father’s Friend?
6. Bill or ‘Bill’
7. The Pendulum Shifts
8. The Ghosts of Satara
9. Against the Tide
10. A History Play
11. Terrorism, Old and New
12. Respect Between Enemies
13. Like Father, Like Son
14. An Act of Restitution
15. Two Farewells
Acknowledgements
Writing this book, I’ve accrued debts to many people. First I would like to thank everyone I met in India who facilitated my journey and the researches on which it is based. Several are mentioned in the text, one or two with their names changed – at their request. Without their friendship and help, there would be no narrative.
In the UK and elsewhere, many family members and friends helped by reading drafts and making comments, by providing information and photographs, or otherwise facilitating the progress of the text from uncertain beginnings. These include: Anthony and Pat Bicknell; Janice Biskin-Stanton; Bernadette Buckley; Patrick Gilbert-Hopkins; Keith Goldsmith; Anna Hartnell; Manali Jagtap-Nyheim (who provided invaluable help with translations from Mahratti); Ames and Lindsay Moore-Gilbert; Blake Morrison; Susheila Nasta (who published one extract from an earlier draft in Wasafiri); and Sanjay Seth (who published another in Postcolonial Studies).
My most important debts are to Francis Spufford, who provided huge support throughout and brilliant editorial interventions in early drafts. His sure feel for what was really at stake in the text and gimlet eye for what was redundant played a huge part in its final shape. And Leo Hollis at Verso responded with wonderful enthusiasm from the moment he received the unsolicited script.
Prologue
‘Get up, Nigger, quick,’ Wilson’s whisper rasps, ‘don’t wake the others.’
The boy stirs reluctantly, flinching at the icy draught from the window above his bed. Next to him, he can just make out the beached bulk of Greenwell, the largest pupil in his year, snoring softly.
‘The Colonel wants to see you.’
The boy’s instantly alert. Wilson, the head prefect, who sleeps on the floor below with the senior boys, has never acknowledged his existence before. His housemaster? Why? He jerks back the blankets and reaches for the dressing gown on his chair. It feels like the middle of the night.
‘In his study.’
The boy’s too intimidated to ask questions. His mind churns over recent misdemeanors. No, he’s already been called to account for those. Perhaps another prefect overheard him tonight, telling his tale, long after lights out. They often take turns. The boy’s generally reluctant to participate, even though he loves stories and there’s no set formula to follow. It can be made-up, a summary of a film, anecdotes about their fathers’ work, or a commentary on a recent sporting event. He can’t rehearse the plots of television programmes because his family has never owned one. They’ve only had electricity since he was eight. He loves football, but hasn’t been here long enough to have mastered recent developments in the league. Hearing about Herbert Chapman, or Highbury’s record crowd, things his father has passed on from when he lived in England before the war, interests no one.
So when his turn comes, the boy usually talks of Africa, because that’s what he knows. Often he speaks about the minder he’s had since the age of four. Kimwaga can uncap a fizzing bottle of Pepsi with his back teeth, feather the boy’s arrows and locate wild hives by following the honeybird, which he answers with a special whistle. It’s Kimwaga who gave him the elephant-hair bangle to keep him safe in England and which the boy never removes, even in the shower. Some of his schoolmates insisted it was plastic, until one day he put a match to one of the ebony-coloured filaments and the stink convinced them.
As the boy talks, he can almost smell the woodsmoke on Kimwaga’s warm black skin, see the dark eyes glinting above knobbly cheekbones, trace the crisped hair so different from his own. It’s his favourite way of insulating himself against this freezing country where there’s been no sun to speak of for half a year, where the birds all seem to be grey, brown or black and where he’s had to learn endless rules, most of which make no sense.
Generally his classmates listen politely; but what he speaks of is so alien – rescuing stricken hens from safari ants, greasing tranquillised hippos to stop their hides cracking when the pools dry up, having his Wellingtons scoffed by a hyena. Sometimes, sensing their resistance, he tones it down to make it more like what they know, to make himself more acceptable. Tonight two of them had talked about their pets’ mishaps. So he decided to tell of how one of the boxers got into a fight with a leopard.
Tunney had disappeared one afternoon, and came hobbling back at dusk from the direction of the nearby hill, gabled with great bald rocks and thicketed with thorn and cactus. Much of his right shoulder was missing, skin, muscle and sinew ripped away. The shiny grey cartilage and glistening bone beneath had made the boy want to vomit. It looked like one of the cheaper cuts hung outside the butcher’s stall in the village in central Tanganyika where they live. Tunney’s joint, too, was already attracting the fat green flies that buzzed round the wedges of crimson flesh hanging from hooks above the counter or settling on the plates of marbled brains along it. The dog’s blood smelled like warm brass. At first the boy’s father frowned, his brow knitting in the expression which withers the boy when it’s tur
ned on him.
‘He’ll be alright,’ he suddenly smiled, pinching his son’s cheek. ‘Don’t cry, now. It won’t help. Go and get some water.’
When the boy returned at a run, bowl slopping, his father was fiddling in the green canvas medicine bag. As the dog lapped and lapped, he took out a squat steel hypodermic, attached the long needle and punched it into a phial. Clamping the boxer’s back legs between his thighs, his father squirted some liquid from the needle, before stabbing it briskly into the dog’s haunch. Then, refilling from a different phial, he repeated the process. Both times Tunney yelped, but didn’t struggle. His long tongue drooped, showing damp squiggles of gold and black fur wedged round his canines. While his father was gently cleaning the wound, the boy held Tunney’s chest in his hands, willing the panting slower. When the dog at last flopped down on one side, the boy began to pick grey ticks from between his pet’s toes, rolling them like blobs of plasticine under the sole of his takkie and setting them aside to burn later.
His father’s face was close to him. By this time of day the shadow deepened round the chin, as if the thick dark growth on his head, convict-short at the sides and lightly Brylcreemed on top, needed to find somewhere else to emerge.
‘At least it’s not a snake. It’s that damned chui. Look at the claw-marks down his back.’
For several nights, since they’d first heard the leopard’s growling cough from the hill, Tunney and Dempsey had been shut indoors. Leopards like dogs almost as much as goats. His father put an arm round the boy’s shoulder.
‘He’ll be fine. I promise.’
The boy sighed with relief, laying Tunney on a blanket on the floor of the veranda. He couldn’t go through the grief of losing another dog. His father must know; he is Bwana Nyama, the game ranger. And he never breaks promises.
‘I’ve given him something to sleep. Come on, get your bat. We can keep an eye on him while we work on your sweep.’
That story had been the boy’s contribution to the evening’s dormitory entertainment. He’d realised it didn’t have a plot like the stories they read in English. There’d been the usual silence when he finished. Eventually a voice piped up from the far end of the dormitory.
‘Boxers are brave,’ Jones conceded, ‘but a bit ugly, don’t you think?’
The boy had bitten his lip, aggrieved.
He tries to borrow Tunney’s courage now as he follows Wilson down the flights of wooden stairs. In slippers they can be deadly; but that’s not why the boy takes his time. The Colonel usually dispenses justice straight after prep. The boy racks his brain again. He’s learned there’s nothing worse than being unprepared. Even if he’s done nothing wrong, his lower lip has a tendency to wobble betrayingly when he’s caught off guard. Surely no one’s sneaked about the fight in the shoe-room? Fighting’s a beating offence, but the prefects almost always turn a blind eye. In any case, he didn’t have a choice, once Congleton challenged him. The boy had shaken his pudding-bowl fringe as if to confirm that he was indeed the blondest boy in the school, after Congleton called him Nigger. There are no niggers in Tanganyika, he’d insisted after further provocation, only Africans. In any case, if he’s a nigger, the Africans certainly can’t be. Congleton reddened, before smirking triumphantly and demanding satisfaction for being cheeked.
At the brown drape dividing off the housemaster’s quarters from the stairs, Wilson pauses.
‘Go on. He’s expecting you.’ Then the prefect does something extraordinary, intimate. He squeezes the boy’s bicep. ‘I’ll be waiting here.’
Thoroughly perplexed, the boy pulls the curtain back and knocks timidly. There are sounds of movement, as if people are taking up position.
‘Come.’ The Colonel’s usual bark is somewhat muted.
The room’s overheated by the log fire snapping in the grate. A crumpet-fork lies on the mantelpiece beside a gilded clock, which confirms that the boy’s only been asleep an hour or so. He glances fearfully at the bag of golf clubs in one corner, amongst which the housemaster keeps his canes. Has he never pulled one out by mistake on the golf course? The Colonel’s in his usual uniform, navy blazer with silver buttons, grey trousers, narrow-striped tie. To the boy’s increasing confusion, the housemaster’s wife is also there, flopped in a maroon leather armchair with cushions as saggy as her upper arms. Her orange dress jars with the green lampshades. She must have been pretty once; now her blonde hair has rusted and her eyes are puffy. It’s an article of faith among the boys that she’s mad, though one of the gardeners says the problem is drink. The most important thing in her life is Oswald, a liver-and-white Blenheim. It’s the only dog the boy has ever disliked. It shepherds the junior boys on their pre-breakfast run around the walled gardens to the prefabricated refectory. The threat of Oswald prompts all but the sleepiest to maintain at least a trot. He’s been known to grab slowcoaches with his front paws, bouncing behind on his hind legs, like a hairy shrimp, groin pumping furiously against an unwary calf.
The housemaster and his wife are flushed and breathing heavily. Once the boy came into his parents’ bedroom and found them like that. The boy dismisses the thought instantaneously. Everyone knows that this couple doesn’t have sex. Otherwise they’d have children themselves, wouldn’t they, instead of looking after other people’s? Still, the Colonel seems strangely embarrassed, his wary left eye more narrowed than usual, as though training his other one on a particularly elusive target.
‘Come and sit down.’
The Colonel motions him to an upright chair, before pulling up another for himself. The boy is agonisingly aware that their knees are almost touching. He sits rigidly, afraid to breathe in case they do. The Colonel glances at his wife, perhaps hoping she’ll speak first; but she continues to study the engraving on Oswald’s collar, as if she’s seeing it for the first time. The dog makes to jump down to welcome the visitor, but she restrains him and he begins to whine. With a sigh of frustration, the Colonel turns back to the boy.
‘The thing is …’ he ventures. He scowls again at Oswald’s protesting yap.
His wife blushes and places one beringed hand over the dog’s mouth.
‘The thing is … thing is …’
The boy stares. His housemaster is supposed to have been among the first English contingents ashore on D-Day; but now his hands are trembling. Purpling, the Colonel squints beseechingly, before cocking himself like a gun.
‘I’m very sorry to have to tell you your father’s been killed in a plane crash.’
For a moment the boy’s simply nonplussed. Why’s the Colonel saying this? He knows his father is a brilliant pilot. He’s flown innumerable anti-poaching missions. Then there’s a blood-chilling wail. At first he thinks it’s the Colonel, but his housemaster is gazing at him, aghast, lips pursed again. Oswald buries his nose in his mistress’s lap, ears flopping over his eyes. It’s as if the boy is shaking to bits. Fluid leaks everywhere, tears and snot and saliva, from his eyes, his nose, his mouth. It goes on so long that he starts to feel like he’s drowning. His chest is red-hot, his throat raw. As the tears boil in his eyes, the housemaster’s wife changes shape, bulging and shrinking, like in a crazy fairground mirror, until she eventually pushes Oswald off her lap and waddles forward, tugging a hanky from her pocket. When the boy doesn’t take it, she dabs clumsily at his face, holding herself apart as though fearful she’ll be splashed. The Colonel, too, is on his feet now, performing an agonised minuet.
‘We’re so very sorry.’
A look passes between the housemaster and his wife, who retreats through the door leading to their private rooms. Courage recovered, Oswald jumps playfully at the visitor.
‘Where’s my mum?’ the boy stammers, feebly fending the dog off. He’s used a word which is banned among his schoolmates and some reflex makes him wonder if it’s been noticed. His housemaster looks down unhappily.
‘Apparently there’s no telephone at the chalet. We’re trying to contact her through an old boy who lives in Lausanne.’<
br />
He can’t take it in. As the sobs break out again, the Colonel’s wife returns, bearing a caramel éclair on a white plate. Condensation sweats on the icing. She presents it to the boy formally, as if he’s won a prize. Oswald leaps prodigiously. She just manages to whisk the éclair out of reach, catching the icing clumsily under her thumb.
‘You bad thing, it’s not for you,’ she admonishes indulgently.
The visitor gazes dumbly at the plate in his lap, cold through his pyjama bottoms. The glazing has buckled and cream oozes out. The dog is frenzied with disappointment.
‘Your aunt phoned the headmaster from Nairobi,’ his housemaster announces. ‘She thought it best you were told straight away. We don’t know how long it’ll take to get through to your mother.’
‘And Ames?’
His older brother is in one of the senior houses, a mile away.
‘You can see him in the morning. I’ve spoken with Mr Tring. We think it’s too late now.’
The boy feels helpless. He knows that if it isn’t a lie, it’s an absurd mistake. But he doesn’t know how to challenge these adults. He just wants to get away. He’s thankful when the Colonel eventually bends stiffly, palms on knees, like an umpire with a tricky adjudication to make.
‘Do you think you’d better go back to bed?’
He in turn seems grateful when the boy nods. His wife coughs asthmatically. She looks like she wants to hug him but doesn’t know how. The boy is strangely relieved.
‘Are you sure you don’t want the éclair?’ she pleads. ‘It’s from Amps.’
The boy’s spent many a breaktime gazing covetously at the pastries in the grocer’s in the village square, wondering whether it’s worth the risk of expulsion to steal one. He shakes his head.
‘I’ll just pop it back in the fridge, then,’ his hostess responds, taking the plate.
‘I’ll fetch Wilson,’ the Colonel says nervously.
The boy gets up slowly and follows. His head is spinning, so that only when his housemaster calls from the passage does he register that Oswald’s pinioned his leg. Before he can react, the dog has ejaculated.
The Setting Sun Page 1