Darkest England (26 page)

I wanted to interrupt and say that, frankly speaking, this might apply to their poisons, but ours were antidoteless, until I remembered those long-ago lessons Beth had given me in how to be nice, and said nothing.

And I remembered enough to know that the Head of Care was being nice to me, and I should be very much on my guard. As I had learnt from the Farebrother family, the impulse to do good is, among the English, a very dangerous inclination. Once set upon the path, they are merciless. There is nothing more fatal, except the need to be kind.

Consequently, I feared the worst when the Head of Care told me, kindly, that she hoped I would not object to being used as a form of therapy.

I replied that, since I was bound hand and foot, objecting would not help me.

She thanked me for my understanding, and they wheeled into my room a young man, blindfolded, in a wheelchair.

The Head of Care reached down her strong arms; her biceps rose full and white like the rills of fat on a
kudu
's kidney, and she took hold of the blindfolded man on his stool and turned him, east and south and west and north, to reassure herself that he was sightless in all directions.

This young man had been a very brilliant government servant until mental illness struck him. Even now he must always be blindfolded, or he saw things.

I asked what he saw.

Her answer surprised me. Links! He saw links. A sad
story. He had once had a fine job – he had been in charge of all the donations, grants-in-aid, the country made to foreign, less-developed, poorer peoples in distant lands. Such gifts were handed over freely. Nothing whatever was expected in return. Unfortunately, sophisticated charity was not easy for developing peoples to understand. The generosity of the donation was polluted by the very thing it was meant to alleviate – the backwardness of the recipient nation. People felt obliged to feel grateful; worse still, they showed it!

Very well. Account needed to be taken of this uncalled-for gratitude: it should be monitored. Accordingly, a civil servant had been appointed to take charge of Foreign Gratitude. He begun hallucinating soon after he took up his post. He conjured up a clear link between, say, the donation of a dam and the grateful purchase of a battleship. Worse followed. Soon he was convinced he could correlate the degree of gratitude felt, using a special scale. After this his condition deteriorated so sharply that he actually began rewarding recipient nations able to display most gratitude. Soon he was seeing connections all over the place, and he had been admitted to this place of safety, where he was kept in the dark and blindfolded whenever taken into the light.

I was puzzled, facing the man blindfolded in the wheelchair. Surely, all he had done was to face facts? Gifts brought tangible expressions of gratitude. Generosity was rewarded. Would it have been better to lie, either to himself or to his country, by denying the existence of a link between donations, grants-in-aid, no-string gifts and a thankful recipient?

The Head of Care laid her strong hands on my shoulders. Sadly, I was not one of them. Or I would have known that failure to tell the whole truth is not the same
thing as lying. Oh, dear, certainly not. Truth was, in fact, a precious commodity – and should be used sparingly. To be economical with the truth was the public servant's duty: how else was the public to be protected? Or foreign friends dealt with whose standards of probity fell far short of one's own?

One glance had told her I was the ideal medicine in this unfortunate case. Aversion therapy, that's what I was. I was a member of the receiving peoples. I was foreign, simple and pitiably poor. The treatment she proposed would consist of convincing the deluded official that there were no links between gifts freely given and gratitude expressed. Thereby restoring not only his sanity, but the reputation of Her Majesty's Ministers, who were, alas, no longer seen in some quarters as the most honest, upright and uncorrupted in all the world.

The treatment required privacy. The Man in Charge of Gratitude would perform only if he believed he was dealing frankly and in the strictest confidence. I was please to remember that the important thing was to destroy, in his mind, any notion of a link. Then, without further ado, she removed the young man's blindfold, slipped from the room and left us alone.

The young man, smiling, recognized me immediately as a member of a receiving nation, and asked in the most interested fashion about my people. He was sure that most of us were dead, dying or scattered to the winds. Had we not thought of resisting our enemies?

We had fought those who invaded our country, I assured him, but arrows were little use against rifles.

Exactly, came the answer; heavy machine-guns would have been a better idea. Surely life was hard in our desert places without modern weapons?

Today, I said, it was not weapons we wanted, but water.

First-class, said he. Had we considered building a dam?

I replied that we would do well enough with new windmills to pump underground water.

I barely saw his hands move. Faster than anything I had ever seen since a striking cobra. A blur of motion and he had slipped a wad of bank notes beneath my bedclothes.

Then, very calmly, as if nothing had happened, he produced a piece of paper on which appeared these pictures: a bomb, a tank and a battleship. And, in a very winning and modest way, he asked for my help. Would I look at the paper and indicate my feelings by ticking the appropriate symbol? A bomb meant ‘mildly grateful', a tank ‘very grateful' and a battleship ‘grateful beyond words'.

I replied, truly, that I felt no gratitude whatever.

Not even one little bomb's worth, he demanded. For all that money?

What money? I asked.

How quickly his madness flared. Suddenly he was shy and diffident and modest no longer. He began to rave, calling me a fraud, a yellow swindler; and I believe he might have injured me had men in white coats not burst into the room, gagged him, replaced the blindfold and dragged him away. The swiftness of his hand was not lost on seasoned observers, however, and they took the bank notes too.

The Head of Care entered now and pronounced herself very pleased. The young man would expect to be back at his desk soon. I had helped a patient with very serious problems of illusory linkage, and she would like to help me too.

Tell me what you want, dear Booi, urged the woman in white, and I will take care of it.

There was only one thing I wanted, but I feared it was not in her gift: my freedom.

The Head of Care laughed her generous laugh, saying how little I understood of their ways. If she could release a man who could not tell the difference between gratitude and battleships, who thought that people should pay for free dams with jet fighters, then she was not going to baulk at a little fellow who imagined he had an audience with the Queen, now was she? And so, she promised, I would be free by the end of the day.

Her answer astounded me. Out of England, I cried, there is always something new!

She agreed. No more the barbaric custom of locking up the mentally ill. Discharge them as soon as possible, that was their way. Send them back into the community. Kinder, really. And more economical.

Delighted as I was at my own good luck, I was also confused. Did this not mean that there were many lunatics roaming the streets of England? What did other people think of this?

Again there came her tolerant laugh. No problem at all. So easily did her patients slip back into the community that it was soon impossible to tell them apart.

The way they release lunatics into the community is really rather touching, both in its informality and brevity and in the mutual relief felt by both sides. It is difficult to decide whose pleasure is the greater: the departing patients' or that of those who wave goodbye.

Patients being discharged are given a bottle of pills and a train ticket to the city of their choice. I had asked to go to that place, where, my heart told me, my long adventure was soon to be concluded.

Inmates about to ‘graduate' from a Place of Safety undergo a simple, dignified, private ceremony designed to attract as little attention as possible. The Head of Care addresses graduates, urging them, as they go back into the world, not to let the side down.

And to remember the sensitivities of those amongst whom they were being released.

At this point, several graduates, overcome with joy at the prospect of release, fell on the warders with wild embraces. I thought this might lead to the suspension of the ceremony, but they were discharged as soon as they had been subdued and their pills wrestled from them; the Head of Care explained that these graduates were taking unsuitable medications. They may take ours, or theirs, but never both. Never mix your medications, Mr Booi – it becomes a horrifying cocktail of unhappiness.

It also led to a regrettable slander. After a spate of stabbings, assaults and even murders in the receiving communities, it had been put about by ignorant or malicious observers that the culprits must be crazy – when, in truth, they had simply forgotten to take their pills or mixed their medications.

I cannot stress too strongly, Mr Booi – the Head of Care smiled, as she unlocked the doors to freedom – that there are no discernible differences between people like you and the community about to receive you.

Then, as she handed me my bottle of pills, she added: no discernible mental differences, at any rate.

Without more ado, she pushed me gently into the street and locked the door behind me. I was accompanied to the station by a large man in a white coat. He explained that as I was both a graduate and a foreigner, I warranted the special escort due to the doubly disadvantaged. His orders were to ensure that nothing stopped me from leaving their
care. I thought such attention very kind. My escort insisted on waiting until the train was slipping from the station before handing me my tickets, running alongside the train and bellowing a last reminder: I was to take my pills – unless, of course, I was already taking my pills; in which case, I was not to take my pills.

Anyone wishing to study the English might do worse than to spend time in an asylum; I had learned useful lessons about the psychological contours, colours and phantoms of their mental landscapes. I saw, for example, that I had misread their capacity to help a stranger travelling in their country, even when they wished to do so. I had failed to recognize how little they know about their own culture or geography. The average native is probably more confused about his country than the most ignorant traveller, since the traveller, by his very ignorance, is free of the lamentable superstitions, fed by fear, that afflict these people and blind them even to their own virtues. Certain taboos and phobias are so deeply ingrained that to expect them to think coherently, or to behave usefully, is to lay an impossible burden on what is after all a very little country, more badly traumatized by loss of empire and loss of earnings than they are willing, or even able, to admit. How would they have characterized the intentions of an alien San ambassador who proposed to trek boldly where no San had gone before, through bewildering, dangerous terrain about which they themselves knew little, to call on a Monarch about whom they knew even less? As arrogance, foolhardiness or madness? Probably as all three.

One might say that they regarded my mission as bound to fail, not because of any particular animosity towards me
(above a generalized distaste for foreigners and travellers and distance) but because the configuration of their brains makes them prone to despair. Their instinctive belief that nothing
can
be done shades so closely into the belief that nothing
should
be done that one cannot drive even a porcupine quill between the two.

What they prefer is to take any sharp weapon that comes to hand and repeatedly, and obsessively, to stab to death their best beliefs, to assassinate their virtues, to puncture their own confidence and self-esteem, and to bleed to death their most cherished institutions. This has led some to contend they positively enjoy failure. This is a mistaken view. There are signs that they may enjoy succeeding as much as we do. What they fear, however, is forward movement, whether of peoples, of ideas, of time; in short, what they fear is the future. And themselves.

The explorer is wise not to be deceived by this constant, pitiless self-denigration; the unwary visitor sees them wolfing down their favourite dish, which they call ‘humble pie', and mistakes their dinner of despair for the true state of affairs. Rather, as the unwary traveller in the veld sometimes cannot spy the difference between the mottled sun-splashed rocks and the monstrous puff-adder, until he steps clumsily and the common rock rises up with horrible fangs, so they may rejoice in their belief that they are a pretty ordinary nation, but they reserve their ancient right to kill foreigners for saying so. And when they bemoan their decline, it is always from their own standards that they decline, and these are set higher than any others on earth.

I had chosen as my destination the only place in England I might call home and in a spirit of compassion for the ex-Bishop
who had so nearly lured me to destruction in the jaws of Lord Goodlove's hounds. He would be eaten up with anxiety, I felt sure. The fallen Bishop had been my guardian in England. He had given his word to the Sovereign that he would not let me out of his sight. And he had not kept his word. He would, no doubt, bitterly regret his weakness; but now that I knew a little of their ways, I saw that he had been maddened by the fear of sexuality that lies at the very essence of their being, for I had learnt that the English believe love to be dominated by one factor above all – battery. Of the female partner among those who marry, or of themselves among males who do not, and of children by almost everybody.

And he had taken me for one of them. How bitterly the former flying Bishop must have regretted his behaviour. Despite Lord of Goodlove's alarming tale of a father trading his daughter as one might a sack of tobacco. I felt sure that his joy at seeing me would overcome any lingering animus. In his simple mind, my instruction of his daughter in the ways of the Red People had come to seem threatening. I blamed myself for failing to pay enough regard to the primitive terrors of the native mind.