Darkest England (14 page)

Many were the questions to be answered. Would there always be an England? Did the Lord Mayors of all great English cities keep talking cats? Had Jerusalem been built in England's green and pleasant land, as legend insisted? At what precisely did the English aim their arrows of desire?
Were there corners of foreign fields that were for ever England?

Beth explained that the terms under which I had been released into her father's care forbade me to seek any of the aforementioned. For the record, I was not permitted to seek employment either. The only thing I was permitted to seek was asylum.

And, seeing the disappointment in my face, they offered the following items of encouragement:

To which I replied, in the words their ancestors, facing similar difficulties, had used to rally their courage: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Speaking slowly, smiling to show my good intentions, I explained that, far from seeking employment, I intended to offer employment to others. I would need helpers and guides. I appealed to their own tradition of exploration. Did the brave adventurers, pressing deep into Africa, refuse to give employment to native porters and bearers? Did they ask first if the authorities found it acceptable? Imagine if they had stopped to ask permission! Or spent their time seeking asylum when they could have been seeking cities of gold. And ivory. And slaves. They would never have named a mountain, forded a river, shot a rapid, or left their names at some magnificent river falls. Or succeeded in bringing the light of civilization to great stretches of the continent. Very well, then – to retreat from my plan would be to shame the memory of those heroes whose books I had devoured as a child in the library of the good Boer
Smith: Stanley, Livingstone, Kingsley, Burton, Speke and Park.

They shook their heads and foresaw many difficulties; fatal obstacles as well as grave repercussions, lurking dangers, tears before bedtime. They warmed to their task of cataloguing impending disasters, and I began to see that, far from saddening or even worrying them, such muscular gloom is practised much as we practise the preparation of favourite poisons. They are, in fact, never happier than when sharing such black prophecies with each other.

After this little orgy of foreboding, the good Farebrother told me, frankly speaking, that a miracle had saved me and he had a duty to see that I jolly well stayed saved.

Beth, more gently, pointed out that if ever I mounted my expedition to London, I would need special training. To experiment first with the native villagers of Little Musing would be advisable. They were a slow and tolerant lot. Better to begin gently before facing the merciless citizens of the metropolis.

Together they reached this consensus: on balance, taking all things into consideration, erring on the side of caution, I was better off where I was. Better to do nothing. To go nowhere. To wait and see until the time was ripe to make a move.

Now, having spoken from their hearts, they looked happy and relieved. We all knew where we were, said Beth. We had cleared the air, said her father. And they felt sure, said both father and daughter, that we would be very happy together.

This movement between lack of expectation on the one hand and, on the other, the assertion that the little they have is better than the best anywhere else is something so natural, so calming, that it induces in them a state of
tranquillity other natives derive from chewing narcotics – or smoking
dagga
,
¹
as our people do. The difference being that when we take the weed, it is with the intention of inducing dreams, joy and dancing; but they drug themselves with dreams of glory that lead but to a kind of mutinous indolence, and a rancorous domesticity, and to a fatal immobility.

I tried to set their minds at rest. I had powerful protection against any who might wish me harm. From my bag I took a tin of strong medicine, a cunning potion of jackals kidneys mixed with ashes. I had as well a mixture of dried gecko
²
and kidney fat. Making a cut in the wrist and rubbing in this medicine, one has protection against a variety of enemies, including snakes.

They waved aside my remedies, locked them in a cupboard and kept the key, saying they would be perfectly safe, and they suggested that the primitive potions from Bushmanland were of no use in the jungles of modern England. For there, said Mr Farebrother, an individual is judged not by what he does for himself, but by what others can be persuaded to do for him. Many people were instinctively well disposed to rank and wealth. Unfortunately, I possessed neither. Thus we were left with the alternative of making people wish to help me because they felt I was ‘one of them'. Given my appearance, this was difficult, but not impossible. I had only to assume the demeanour of a real Englishman and people would soon forget how very odd I looked and take me for one of them.

I should learn, for a start, to be less headstrong. He noticed my unfortunate habit of blurting out what I felt.
Nothing was more sure to make ordinary people feel very, very uneasy. Also, I must get out of the way of asking directly for things. Preface all such requests, Boy David, with an apologetic disclaimer, the good man suggested. Something like ‘By the way …' or, better still, ‘Would you very much mind if…?' And never, ever speak
frankly
without saying first, slowly, so there should be no mistaking your intention, ‘Frankly speaking…', for this will reassure your listener that you are not making some emotional commitment to honesty or brevity but simply using a conversational convention.

That you mean nothing serious, or strange, Beth advised.

Or sudden, her father added.

In a word, nothing that was not ‘nice', Beth explained. The importance of being nice was something about which I had lots to learn.

I made slow but steady progress with my lessons. I learnt not to be frank without apologizing and never to ask directly for what I wanted, but to get others to provide it, without asking. I still had trouble being nice. I saw how Beth suffered. Here, said I, was an opportunity for being nice.

It was clear to me that although Beth was the beloved daughter of the house, she endured the hours with a kind of ungainly simplicity of which her body spoke more eloquently than her lips. She was housekeeper, hunter-gatherer, gardener, laundress, companion and cook to an increasingly frail old man who, yes, called her his dearly beloved daughter, but behaved towards her as if she were his servant.

For that matter, he called me his dearest son. But treated
me as if I were his prize possession. Appreciated, yes; but imprisoned.

But I did not say so, for that would not have been nice.

Beth's magnificent equilibrium, the swing of her great posterior jutting out a foot or more, at right angles to the back of her spine, two pumpkins on springs, twin udders of elastic delight, I soon came to realize, far from being a source of pride to her, was something so shaming to the poor woman that she seldom ventured out of the house lest the villagers smile and point and mock.

She went out only in the very early morning, or in the evening when few were about, or darkness hid the magnificent mounds from the neighbours' eyes.

In my country every man from Eros to Mouton Fountain would have left donkeys and wives and firesides to stand cheering as she sailed by, but in her own land she hid from the eyes of men. Strange.

She saw the admiration in my eyes. My almost uncontrollable urge to cheer when she went bobbing by. Each step, as her heel struck the earth, sent a shiver dancing, as wind does on water, across the fleshy plateau of her majestic buttocks. So broad, that lovely shelf, you could have balanced a cooking pot on it. And so I told her how beautiful she was.

To which she answered that I was very kind.

Not kind, I corrected her false impression; positively wild with admiration. She had the most naturally perfect body I had ever seen in a woman.

Too late. I saw from her face that I had made the mistake of being frank when I thought I was being nice. And I began to realize that speaking English is no great advantage when one has to communicate with the English. In fact, the belief that we share a common language often only serves to worsen understanding.

So I told her instead that she looked very nice.

She replied that I was also ‘very nice'. Meaning, I think, to compliment me.

But looking into her troubled, dark-brown eyes, I knew she had not believed a word I said. She called me ‘Boy', assuming this to be my name, taking it from the promise to seek nothing but asylum which her father and I had signed shortly after I had been dropped on my head during the horrifying attempt to expel me from the kingdom. How long ago it all seemed!

Boy David, said Beth to me, if ever you are to meet Her Majesty, you must learn to bow – without scraping. And bowing lessons ensued, with Beth sitting in for the Sovereign. I would arrive at the Palace, carrying my suitcase, remove my hat with a flourish, advance into the Presence and bow easily from the waist, being sure to keep my nose in ‘line' with Beth's knee, as she sat regally upon a greenupholstered chair – and tapped my chin with a plastic ruler whenever she felt it dipped below the crucial level where bowing became scraping.

It was while we were playing happily at bowing and not scraping that our neighbour, Julia, arrived to say that old Jed who lived at the bottom of Duck Lane had not appeared for some days. Next, Peter the Birdman arrived and said that if old Jed at the bottom of Duck Lane had not been seen for days, that was no bad thing and he for one would not weep. Old Jed was a hunter and hater of birds, shot them, ate them and kept them in cages.

Julia now suggested that a useful task for their little yellow friend would be to get him to climb inside the cottage and discover why old Jed had not shown his sharp red nose out of doors these past five days. Being a wiry and lithe sort of chap, she felt sure I could be inserted through some large crack in the roof or lowered down the chimney.

Peter proclaimed that he stood ready to rescue any robin, hawk, sparrow or starling that might seize its chance of freedom when Jed's house of horror, as he dubbed it, would be opened to the wholesome light of day.

And he ran to his house and shut it tightly so as to join us on our expedition to Duck Lane, and I saw the sparrows, doves and starlings dashing themselves helplessly against the windows and thought how strange it must seem to these creatures of the air to find themselves living in an English cottage – almost as strange as I found it myself.

Down the muddy length of Duck Lane we traipsed, a pathway not, as I had thought, remote and lonely, but packed with houses from which villagers emerged, drawn by promises Julia made to all and sundry that they would soon see the little yellow chap earning his keep.

After knocking at the door several times and receiving no answer, after trying the door and finding it locked, after walking about the little house and shaking the windows in their frames and finding them barred, Mr Farebrother pointed to the crumbling section on the roof where the tiles had slipped and which might be widened enough to allow entry.

To shouted directions from Peter to go gently so as not to scare the birds, I crept through the aperture and was soon inside the house. I found it to be dark and malodorous. The curtains were drawn against the light. I entered a small, airless room heavy with dust and neglect. I knew the scent well enough. Had I not picked it up a thousand times in the veld, where the lion has killed? Where the jackal-hunter had left his traps cunningly buried in the sand beneath a sheet of newspaper? Where the vultures gather?

When I climbed back through the hole in the roof I was met by a barrage of excited demands for information. What had I found inside old Jed's house?

Simply old Jed, I replied, stretched on the carpet, staring
at the ceiling with a gentle, quizzical look on his face, as if considering how very surprising it was to die, as one had lived, alone and unconsulted.

To my astonishment, considerable relief greeted my news. That was all right then. Not as bad as they had thought. Old Jed had had a good innings.

I knew, of course, that an Englishman's home was his castle, but was it also his grave? To die alone, among neighbours – was that not strange? I asked my saviour.

A very Afrocentric line of reasoning, came the reply. Old Jed's neighbours would not interfere with a person's right to privacy while alive and so were hardly likely to intervene in death. A few weeks of silence did not necessarily mean a fatality. How was one to know that one's neighbour was dead? And not simply living quietly? If people were forever calling on friends and neighbours, on the off-chance that one of them may have passed away, well, this would be seen as an outrageous invasion of privacy which no decent person would tolerate. And he had no doubt that Old Jed would have felt exactly the same.

Even as I stood on the roof, above old dead Jed, several locals came by and chaffed the grounded Bishop for this manner of forced entry, pretending to admire his talent for burglary, saying they had never expected it in a former man of the cloth. With many a wink and a nod they asked if they could hire the clever little monkey, as they had a bit of fetching and carrying he might usefully do for them.

Which showed, my wingless friend assured me, that they understood me to be not a bad little chap after all, and, amongst them, that was high praise indeed.

I was pleased. But I suspected that however the locals understood me, I was still some way from understanding them.

*

My lessons in learning to be more like them took another step forward when the terrestrial Bishop suggested that I find some method of integrating myself among the villagers. If they saw I had something to offer, the people of Little Musing would soon take me to their hearts.