Darkest England (25 page)

His response was to brake sharply, bringing his splendid vehicle to a rude halt. Then, leaping from the driver's seat, he stood before me, his clenched fist waving in front of my nose like a jackal's tail. I thought he was going to attack me, but it seemed he wished again to make a speech. He spoke wonderfully of something called the New Freedom. Our people would live in free houses. Our children would go to free schools. Water should be free. And electricity. Quite,
quite
free! There would be telephones in each house, and we would call each other over long distances, quite free of charge. He, Hendrik Mamalodi Kosi, promised this. Would I call him a liar?

I thanked him. Far from calling him a liar, I felt that, as a man who made promises, he would appreciate that I had given my word to my sponsors. And I intended to continue my journey until I reached my destination and fulfilled my promise.

He raised his fist, now, very slowly, and unclenched from that bony club a stabbing finger. It pointed to the road. And then he delivered an ultimatum in a loud voice: I was to leave his vehicle immediately. Clearly my long exposure to the English had sent me mad. If I wished to remain in this benighted land, then all he could say was that I deserved whatever I had coming to me. Little as he liked the Boers, he was obliged to admit that he understood now why they called the San people wild, treacherous vagrants who could not be taught or tamed, a pest, a vermin, a disgrace to human kind.

Following the direction of that stabbing finger, I clambered down the steps of his marvellous caravan: on the roadside, I watched as he furiously reversed in a violent screaming of tyres, over which I just made out his last malediction, flung at me as he raced away. You might take the Bushman out of the bush, yelled my erstwhile rescuer, but you could not take the bush out of the Bushman!

Not for the first time, I found myself on the road. But I had an idea I should not have to walk for long. The convoy of antique gasping vehicles we had so abruptly abandoned could not have gone very far.

So it proved. Within an hour I came across the old wrecks huddled like a flock of storm-drenched sheep in a muddy cornfield.

The travellers reminded me in many ways of ourselves.
They called themselves the tribe of peace: I met Nobby and Nosh and Stoney, as well as Sue, Emma and Miranda, who was in an advanced state of pregnancy; and, darting around them like locusts, muddy, tousled children who stared at me frankly and unabashedly, with a kind of limpid curiosity, as if they had never in their lives seen anything like me. I had noted this before – it is the custom to stare with an intensity which is uncomfortable, but which in them is unstudied and completely natural.

Nobby, their leader, was gorgeously colourful. His hair had been shaved severely along the sides of his head into a great wedge, rubbed with grease until it stiffened and it stood up from his skull like an axe-blade. Moreover, this hatchet of hair had been dyed the colour of a locust's wing in the sunset, gold, violet and blue. His thin face, like a long lantern, showed a form of scarification common among the peace tribe, who like to mutilate their nostrils and ears by piercing them with rings, pins, old nails or any metal scrap they find. Their appearance can seem rather frightening when you are first exposed to it, yet I found these people to be the gentlest of souls; hardly ever raising a fist in anger, or a finger for themselves, they look as brazen as butcher-birds – but they are really as gentle as doves.

With
one
exception: they were sworn enemies of Lord Goodlove and all those who hunted the fox. To disrupt this barbarous custom wherever they found it, and to curb the slaughter of innocent animals, was the religion of the tribe.

I admired, as well, the ingenuity with which they gave their flimsy shelters the appearance of substance.

If their household furniture was rather vague, its end use was perfectly clear. Doormats of straw, curtains of string, boxwood cupboards, ingenious extending beds, tin-can chimneys, enamel-basin baths, paraffin lamps, and even real
pictures on make-believe walls. A spurious, yet somehow steadfast, domesticity was achieved. The cumulative effect of which was to construct from the flimsiest pieces of scrap a home as well founded as a castle. A castle built of dragonfly's wings, quick to fold away.

They took me to the fire where they cooked their daily gruel, a stew of lentils and beans they call ‘hippy slop'. They used meat – but rarely, finding it very expensive. They preferred to buy their meat at the local shops instead of hunting or taking rabbits or squirrel by snare or trap. I was surprised to learn that these were plentiful enough in the nearby fields. Yet they did not teach their young to hunt. Even bagging birds was forbidden. Nosh pointed out that their disapproval of hunting made poaching quite impossible.

Nobby, his gold earrings flashing in the sun, explained that working for money was also against their religious belief, right?

Right, said Nosh.

But how did they manage to feed themselves? I asked.

No sweat, said Nobby. They went to a special office and were given money for being without work. Or for being with children. Or if they were ill. But they were also given money if they were well.

It seemed to me a far more enlightened idea than our pensions, which are paid only to the old who have worked a lifetime. In England they pay pensions to those still young enough to enjoy them.

Now the pregnant woman, Miranda, whom I saw was similarly stabbed about the nose and ears with the tribal motif which favoured nails and fish-hooks, stepped forward and declared that it had been decided that I should share her caravan during my stay.

All their lives they had struggled towards a natural life,
one combining the visions of the Aboriginals of Australia, the austerity of the Eskimo, the nobility of the Sioux, the songs of the whales, and the healing magic of the Cape Bushmen. And now, right here in their midst, with his cute slanty eyes and his lovely wrinkles and his orangey skin and his adorable rump and his heaps of healing magic, was their very
own
hunter-gatherer, from whom she and Nobby, and the whole tribe, would learn so much. She was at that very moment so overcome with gratitude that she simply had to go and spike a joint in the bender under the trees and listen to the stars singing. Because stars
did
sing if you had Bushman ears, didn't they? And she could feel her Bushman ears growing with every passing minute spent in my company.

And Nobby said, yeah, he thought he'd head up a little Horse, maybe, and pick a little guitar, and if I felt like having a little bit of Horse or Sue, to feel free, because he would be pretty honoured and so, he was sure, would she. Or him, for that matter. No problem. Under a bender, there was no gender.

A lesser-known hazard of travelling among the English is their impulsive desire to fornicate with strangers. It is sometimes difficult to decline without giving offence. But San people are advised to travel with their members well covered at all times.

Fortunately, I was not obliged to refuse. Our delightful conversation was abruptly ended when a young man with two chicken bones threaded through his nose and a face painted in dark-red and white and blue (which, incidentally, are the sacred colours of the rain eland), who had been posted as a guard, came running into the centre of the camp crying in a very agitated way that there were, as he put it, pigs on site!

Imagine my surprise when I saw, cutting a swathe
through a field of corn, not a herd of pigs, but a police car. I watched, amazed, to see the campers fling themselves into its path, climb on its roof and bang on its bonnet.

The police retreated and took up a position on the edge of the cornfield.

Addressing us through a loud-hailer the officers announced they had reason to believe that the tribe was giving shelter to a bogus refugee or asylum-seeker, who planned to enter the Queen's Palace; this man was Boskoid
¹
in appearance, below average height, semi-naked and in possession of a dangerous weapon, namely, a quiverful of poison arrows. Anyone fitting that description should come forward so that he could be eliminated from their inquiries.

It was Nobby who put into words the very thought passing through my mind. How had the police found me among the peace tribe? The answer came in Nobby's words – for ever afterward to ring in my ear:

Mr Kosi – he squealed!

Clearly, since parting company from me, my countryman had not been idle.

I had no wish to bring the force of the law down on the heads of my friends. I proposed giving myself up. But the tribe would not hear of it. I was
their
Bushman! Miranda declared. And if the pigs wanted me, they would have to come and get me.

Once again the convoy of police vehicles advanced towards us.

I watched as the youth so artfully threaded with bones ran forward, rolling a tree trunk into the path of the lead vehicle; and then, leaping on the trunk, he began beating
his chest with his fists in the way that the baboons do when threatened by leopards. The women of the camp banged saucepans together, and the children, in what was evidently a rehearsed manoeuvre, relieved themselves on the wheels of the police vehicle.

In a few minutes the cornfield was a battleground. Even the children joined in, biting the officers wherever possible. And the women poured jugs of urine over their heads, pushing a number of them into the noisome latrines of which the nomads were so proud.

Wielding long truncheons, masked and armoured police joined battle with the peace tribe, whose weapons were loaded chamber-pots and whose troops were squads of children. I was reflecting on the interesting principle of their warfare, in which unarmed police and unarmed citizens beat each other severely but seldom fatally, when I was approached by a police officer who asked me to accompany him to the station. I agreed to do so, whereupon – as if to seal the contract – he struck me on the head with his truncheon and, despite some small protection afforded by my hat, not for the first time, night fell suddenly.

I opened my eyes in a room which, for one joyful moment, made me think, in its comfort and security arrangements – bars on window, steel door – that I was back once more in the Royal Guest-house where I had been accommodated – oh, so long ago! – at Her Majesty's Pleasure. My great hat, together with my bow and arrows, had been placed neatly at the foot of my bed, in which, for reasons not clear to me, I seemed to have difficulty moving.

There entered a woman, dressed in white, who called me ‘dear Booi' and urged me to lie back, relax and make
myself at home. She introduced herself as Head of Care and hoped I would be very happy in my new home.

‘Home', I fell to reflecting, is a terrible word in the mouths of others and worst of all in the mouths of the English, who are the only people in the world whose very country is called Home and for whom the homeliness of other peoples' homes is hatefully foreign where it is not absolutely incomprehensible.

Was this place to which I had been brought a Palace of Detention? I asked. Where one awaited Her Majesty's Pleasure?

The Head of Care looked horrified. I was not in jail. It was not the English way to imprison people in need of special help. She consulted her notes. The police had brought me in while I was unconscious. Could I confirm that I was one David Mungo Booi, a bogus asylum-seeker suffering from the delusion that I would be received by the Queen?

I tried to raise myself, only to find my body strapped to the mattress with the same dexterity as a hunter will bind the legs of the baby giraffe before butchering it on the spot. I asked for my precious hat and it was brought to me, rather battered, I fear, as a result of the blows from the police truncheon, and from its cranial hook I retrieved the Paper Promise from the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair and read it aloud, taking comfort from the majestic rhythm of the phrases, and the certainty of English honour.

And tell me, dear, urged the Head of Care, when I finished reading, what were we planning to ask Her Majesty?

Her look should have alerted me. I had seen something like it in the eyes of many a farmer when I had asked for
an advance on my shearing money, or the loan of a suit of clothes, or the gift of a sheep for a fence-mender who had broken his fingers and could no longer work. A mixture of astonishment and disbelief, tinged with anger. But I was sleepy or blind or stupid, and I answered that I planned to ask Her Majesty to send troops to my country to kick the arses of the Boer to Kingdom Come, in accordance with her promise.

She seemed satisfied. Addressing me by the pet-name ‘Sonny Jim', she said, that anyone who believed that would believe anything. She was satisfied that, for my own protection, I had been delivered to a place of safety. In my new home I would find patients with similar delusions had been brought together and were encouraged to share them. Obsessive behaviour could be moderated by exposure to opposing aberrations. While I was prone to royalist fantasies, many of her patients suffered from something very different – a disease of logic.

In less advanced countries people were driven mad by unhappiness, or drugs, or cruelty; in England it was excessive common sense that unhinged them. This made mental illness as difficult to detect as it was to treat. There were more of the reasonably insane in England than anywhere else on earth. Sorting out the demented from the sane required great skill; to all but the specialist's eye, they seemed so very alike.

Her method was to bring certain patients face to face with me. The shock might be salutary. I seemed to have no trace of sense whatever. I was insanely romantic and pathologically credulous. I suffered from a view of England which no one else in the world, least of all the English, believed in. I yearned, I aspired. I dreamed of Royal Receptions, of
justice
and red-coated soldiers. Doubtless I also
believed in decency, honour and cricket. I was absolutely barking, but who cared? Brought face to face with the patients under her care, something of my madness might rub off, in the way that the best antidote to a poison is a little of the same.