Darkest England (11 page)

Their land is a world made of grass, monotonous, broken by trees or small woods with bulges here and there that pass for hills and a few mountains. I estimated that one cannot run in any direction for more than an hour without coming across a batch of little huts that seem to burrow into the cracks and creases of the green, grassy skin like fleas in an old springbuck pelt. The natives, on this island, are less occupants than infestations. It is clear that they breed like rock-rabbits, and have done so since the beginning of time. If you were to slice through the centre of a tall standing ant-heap in the Karoo and examine the writhing life inside, you might have some idea of their clustering, scurrying, teeming millions. So it is in England. There is hardly a place on the island they have not colonized, and what they call ‘remote places' are to us as crowded as a termites' nest. Yet if, as some say, they are a violent, brutal race, how is it that they appear, despite these pressures of overcrowding, still to manage at least the semblance of civility? It is surely because they are at heart an amazingly tolerant people that they do not sting and poison each other like snakes in a sack.

As the former flying Bishop drove me through the scurf
of houses with which they like to adorn the edges of their cities, I noticed many small factories given over to the manufacture of false teeth. This intrigued me. Among the wanderers of the Karoo, when our teeth are gone and we are no longer strong enough to lift stones to shore up a fence against the jackal, or too rheumy-eyed to hold the shearing scissors, we are sometimes set to soften leather, sitting for hours gently gumming the springbuck hides until they take on a suppleness as elastic as the tongue of the rock leguaan. Thinking of the well-chewed, supple leather seats of his motorcar, I inquired of Mr Farebrother if they practised something similar.

He was perplexed by my question. Their teeth were no better or worse than those of other people.

Even as he spoke these words he opened his mouth and showed a line of pitted, ungainly dentures.

My saviour had never been beyond the European mainland and so could be said to have travelled scarcely at all. Or he would have known that the English are recognized everywhere by the challenges to their dentures. In many parts of Africa – where they are remembered at all – it is for red necks or black teeth. Which of these attributes sticks in the mind depends entirely upon whether the people in question saw them retreating (red necks) or advancing (black teeth).

The weakness of their dental equipment possibly explains why they have such difficulty in pronouncing even rudimentary sounds. Edward Farebrother was quite incapable of saying even the simple word ‘!Kung'. And between the clicks produced by tongue against the palate and the simple sound made from the side of the cheek, the sort boys use to encourage cows into the kraal, he heard no difference!

When I demonstrated that there could be sixty or seventy of these musical tongue-in-cheek tales to tell,
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he turned the blushing pink of the desert aloe. Try as he might, he could not produce one of them. I suspected (though I did not say so to this kindly man) the reason hinged upon defective teeth. I also believe that somewhere in their heart of hearts they are ashamed of their disability and constantly hide it. Later I was to observe that the higher a native stands on the social scale in England, the less he moves his lips when he speaks, preferring a kind of clipped enunciation much prized by them as a sign that the speaker is from elevated circles. In part this is done to disguise the limits of his vocal range. It also has important and no less fascinating social consequences based on the following paradox: the less he moves his lips, the worse his teeth are likely to be. But the worse his teeth, the greater will be the social esteem in which he is held.

Here we approach the primitive origins of the famous ‘stiff upper lip'. This may even be a form of penile substitution. Perhaps their peculiarly repressive sexual culture allows stiffening of the lip, where it frowns upon tumescence in other procreative organs? However, the dental basis of the social cachet must never be forgotten. For what is this phenomenon but a national defence, sanctioned by time and custom, against the derision that ensues when lips slacken and the weakness of their dental equipment is revealed to a scornful world?

Watching the grey-green watery fields, set about with ailing elm trees struck down by the Dutch, slip by my window, I was struck by the splendour and the savagery of
these people. Their bravery and their kindness cannot disguise an air of melancholy. It is born of the knowledge that, although still without equal, they were once even more splendid. Surely they are less a people than a perfume? They rise to the nostrils in an aroma composed of a hundred subtle scents and sweetness, bound together (and this is what makes them so singularly interesting) with the acrid taste of anger, the sombre tincture of failure, the flat brown odour of blood. The English are like the tsama melons. They grow best when the earth is driest. They cannot be eaten for their flesh, being altogether too bitter. But their pips are palatable, if well pounded in a mortar, mixed with giraffe fat and toasted over a fire.

Nothing had prepared me for the sullen solitude of that sodden landscape in spring. Nor for the sense of regret, the air of defeat, that was everywhere apparent. It was as if some dragon had clawed her way across the country, blasting with her fiery breath all she found upstanding, leaving behind smoking sad ruins, where workers stood idle on street corners and waited for tomorrow.

I saw deserted factories and broken chimneys, I saw mills – not dark or satanic, as I had been promised, but eerily silent. What a miracle of determination it must have taken to decline from the greatest producer of riches and armies and ships and medals and feathered hats and explorers and horses and guns and tobacco into a bare shelf in an empty warehouse, where others deposited their goods. Once the kingdom had been a noisy engine, a god of power. Quick and wild as Kaggen, the mantis. Terrible as the god Khwai-hem, the All-Devourer. A furious demon with steel teeth and smoke curling out of its ears. Now it has been swept bare.

You know how it is in the veld when the children play?
They take stones and build cities in the dust: huts and storehouses and forts and churches. Suddenly the children are called home at the end of the day, and they forget their magic circle, their enormous city, and it lies there in the last light of the setting sun. The stones wonder what has happened to them. They wait for the children to come back. And they never realize, poor stones, that they are huts and storehouses and forts and churches no longer.

We began passing through fields of squalid dwellings, tall brick huts, joined as closely as the cells of the honeycomb, though nothing like as sweet. Here was one of his desolate places, ex-Bishop Farebrother (grounded) explained. Here we would pause briefly to give his flock of the ‘little fellows' hope and comfort. I might leave the vehicle and accompany him, but I did so at my own risk. If the inhabitants got wind of me, they might stampede. They could be unpredictable. I would be reasonably safe if I followed certain precautionary rules.

If pursued, on no account was I to run. I would be taken for one of the detested visitors who descended on these reserves and frightened the inhabitants, a rent collector, journalist, doctor or midwife, individuals no longer welcome in this wilderness, since the estate dwellers believed they harried and extorted and enslaved the tribe.

If attacked, I should freeze. The authorities were forever donating toys and novelties to these people in the hope of diverting and calming their hearts: clowns, magicians, books and films and primitive curiosities from foreign places. If touched, I should stand very still and pretend to be a donation. The attention span of these creatures was very brief. If I did not move, they would lose interest after a few minutes and return to their browsing among the television channels.

So great was the distress and helplessness of these discarded people that they saw any stranger as a threat, assuming him to be at worst French, at best a native of the mainland bent on looting and destruction and the theft of their livelihoods. That they felt this painful, even though they no longer had livelihoods to lose, showed the depth of their dispossession. Worst of all, they might take me for an alien. Such fear and loathing does the alien bestir in the native mind that these people, who in their own way, he assured me, were perfectly normal, really, kind to animals and capable of great generosity, would think nothing of turning on me and tearing me limb from limb. It was nothing personal, I should understand. These same people would be appalled to feel that I should think any less of them if it happened. But he could never forgive himself.

With that we left the vehicle and moved cautiously on to the reservation.

At first sight, the locals looked surprisingly normal; what struck me forcibly was that many were nursing mothers, their young clasped to their breasts, some accompanied by toddlers. The young gamboled and frolicked, as the young of all species will do, in innocent, vivid play. We were well downwind of them. They showed no sign of catching our scent but went about their business, which, so far as I could see, consisted of lounging on street corners, or leaning over fences and calling to each other with raucous little cries, or hurrying into their shelters where the television flickered like a hearth fire.

Of men I saw not a single one. I assumed they would be out hunting, or looking for work in the nearest town, or sitting at a campfire somewhere, telling stories of better days, when they were the finest warriors in all the world, which quaked at their approach.

I asked the name of the place and he told me it was called Green Meadow. Nothing could be less green or further from any notion of a meadow. But muttering spells and incantations over the place, said the wingless cleric, made the horror of it, for the most part, endurable. People sprinkled charmed names over their despair: Beechwood Gardens, Pleasantlands, Happy Fields, Golden Grove, Oakcroft: names that looked over their shoulders to happier times when God was in his Heaven and all was well with the world.

Motioning me to remain where I was, ex-Bishop Farebrother walked cautiously towards a group of young women, calling in a low voice such pleasantries as he thought would soothe and reassure them. We do much the same when stalking birds like the bustard, which are very susceptible to the sounds of their own voices. The quarry seemed surprisingly tame, and their young, batches of filthy six-, seven- and eight-year olds, were obviously very easy in his presence; even the little ones in their prams, or clutching their mothers' skirts, screamed happily as their older siblings tried to attract the Bishop's attention, sometimes punching each other in the face, slashing at friends with pieces of glass, or throwing stones through nearby windows, all in a very natural, high-spirited way.

Encouraged by this show of friendliness and high spirits, I forgot his words of warning and I stepped forward to meet them.

With the shrill clarion call to arms you will hear when the she-elephant sees a hunter approaching her child, the females began trumpeting the alarm. Wheeling and pointing and gibbering, like a troop of baboons sensing the arrival of the ravening leopard. The young took this as an inducement to attack and came at me like hyenas. The
ex-Bishop, keeping just in front of the pack, ran towards me, shouting to me to enter the vehicle or perish!

He ran well for a man more used to flying, and we reached the safety of our vehicle ahead of the mob, though their howls were so loud and so near they quite drowned the sound of the engine as the ex-Bishop raced the motorcar away.

We were almost clear of our pursuers when a rock flung by one of the most determined of them shattered our windscreen, and shards of milky glass rained on the two of us. Although somewhat cut about the face and bleeding from the eyebrows, Mr Farebrother clung to the wheel for dear life and, with a burst of speed of the sort you will see when the locust bounds over the head of the pursuing meerkat, we suddenly found ourselves among safer, quieter streets.

My hat protected me when our windscreen shattered. Mr Farebrother was not so lucky. My friend and protector drove gamely on, wiping blood from his face and expressing his deep sympathy with his little flock. I was further amazed when he suddenly pulled over to the side of the road, parked the car in what he called a ‘lay-by', saying that this was a very old English custom and I could not really be said to have visited his country if I had never had tea in a lay-by. Whereupon he set up a table and chairs, cleverly assembled from the boot, covered with a fine red-and-white cloth, all the while apologizing for neglecting his hospitality towards me, blaming for his negligence his concern for his poor little flock, which made him forget how strange all this must seem to me.

He produced a flask of tea, and when I suggested we should rather treat his wounds, he said perhaps later, but first a cup of tea would do him the world of good. And so
there we sat in our lay-by while enormous lorries raged by like charging rhinos.

I should understand, said my friend, that he would do all in his power to ensure that I achieved my ambition of seeing the Queen. If I were to achieve my goal, then I must first learn something of the temper of the people. When in Rome, one did as the Romans did. I would need to learn survival skills. Street-craft. Combat preparedness. Although, to the trained eye, England might seem peaceful by comparison with the hell I had escaped in my own land, where assassination and racial hatred and wild animals and poverty threatened little fellows such as myself, he would be less than candid if he did not admit that England too, had problems, as I might have noticed. Oh, yes, indeed. He apologized for the reception I had received. It was the children – and they could be deadly.

I begged him to say no more. Had I not been given the most vivid introduction to local conditions? How many foreigners had experienced the sight of native young roaming their natural habitat? It was a kind of bushwalking. How else did one encounter local fauna? I reminded him that I was, after all, a child of the veld, the son of hunters, and I was well aware that on a safari of this sort a traveller must expect a little discomfort.