Darkest England (15 page)

Then there began an animated discussion between father and daughter as to what, if anything, I had to offer. After a good deal of discussion, during which all my suggestions – a love of England, a personal promise from a member of the Royal Family, and so on, were gently rejected – the Farebrothers concluded that my most useful attribute was my natural unspoiled innocence.

Might he know something of our marriage customs? the good Bishop inquired.

I replied that amongst our people marriage preceded the begetting of children and that children, when they came, were few and much loved.

Beth thought this very moving. I had seen for myself the difference in their culture, where the opposite prevailed – where young males believed that the insemination of as many women as early as possible to be among the chief rites of manhood. They then declined all further responsibility, and decamped to some other place, there to continue the tradition, often with violence. Her father and I had been lucky to escape alive from Green Meadow. From what she told me, the fact that our pursuers had been children had made them more and not less dangerous. For these tiny people, guns were fun, killing was a sport, and dying something unimaginable. Children, in some cities, now carried guns as a matter of course, and fought to the death for cash and drugs, to which even eight- and nine-years-olds were addicted.

Perhaps my disapproval showed on my face because she
asked, rather tartly, whether murder was not a popular pastime in Africa? Especially in my own country?

I agreed that it was. And my people knew it. We suffered at the hands of the visitors, hunting us, hating us worse than the lynx and the lion and the jackal. Cleansing the land of the Red People and shovelling them into unmarked mass graves where sometimes a shin bone or a skull will fight its way to the surface, to be found by some little Boer child who will play football with the skulls of the First People, whose hearts and homes once reached across the endless flat grass of Bushmanland. And where, today, only ghosts sing in the high places; their hair is to be glimpsed in the rain clouds, their tears fall in the rain. My ancestors can be faintly seen when you look into the faces of the wandering Ashbush People; then their ghostly faces peer out at you – much as the traveller, passing through a dying village, sees the thin faces of starving children staring from the doorways of darkened huts.

But, in England, I cried, it was surely quite different. The Queen loved
her
people. Her servants, the soldiers and the police, were on the side of the people. Yet from what I had seen, the average citizen was in danger of being killed by armed children.

That was the very reason why it would be very wonderful if the children of Little Musing could be brought face to face with unspoiled innocence, said Mr Farebrother. Something might rub off.

Heart to heart with a survivor of an earlier age, said Beth. Boy David from the Karoo, and the only Bushman in England. Face to face with a genuine hunter-gatherer in the late twentieth century. What a privilege it would be to meet me!

It would give the little children ‘hands-on' experience, said the ex-Bishop. I might make a difference.

I might also be killed, I pointed out.

They nodded. But after talking about it they felt, very strongly, this was a risk worth taking. Among the adult male population such education was almost certainly too late. The ancient love of freedom was partly to blame. Freeborn Englishmen could not be forced to behave peacefully. Violence could not be confronted without creating more destruction. Containment was the only option among violent young males.

But with children, perhaps it was not too late. If there was any way I might help, then I would deserve the gratitude of generations to come.

The good Farebrother begged me not to write off all children merely because some wayward infants had tried to kill me. He appreciated my point, but I must not give up hope. After all, much of the misunderstanding between peoples arises when one nation makes unshakeable judgements about another. Sees it as less than human. Surely – the good man demanded – being human means we all make mistakes?

And indeed I had to agree. For I recalled how, in the old days, we had laughed at his people, the Sea-Bushmen, when they first dragged themselves ashore in our country. So pale, so blind, so soon pink in the sun, so incapable in the wild, so lost in the dark, so reliant on their guns, as needy as is the donkey in the Karoo bushes. So linguistically limited they could not get their tongues around a word, not even the name of our land, calling it Carrow and Camdeboo and other nonsenses. They looked at us and declared we must be gypsies from Egypt. Or the link by which animals were joined to the upper orders. Thus their sojourn in Africa influenced their religion and led to the belief that there were three orders of creatures: the animals, the others and the English.

We felt pity for these wretches who could not tell the difference between the spoor of a
kudu
and an eland; between the Men of Men and the Red People.

Oh, yes, how we laughed at this pallid infestation! Clumsy visitors who seemed no more noxious than flying ants, no more alarming than the white ants' eggs which they saw us eat by the fistful, and called ‘Bushman rice'. Oh, yes, how we darkened with shame at their shameful incompetence.

But how wrong we were! For they proved to be more toxic than the greatest of our poisons, which kill surely, but singly. As it happened, these apparently weak, defective, cowardly, diseased creatures were to become a pink plague, a most deadly and obliterating invasion; wherever the pale Sea-Bushmen so much as appeared, we died.

Yet in the beginning, when they first fell on our land, they were received everywhere with great kindness; both by our cousins, the Men of Men, the Korana, the Strand-loopers, and by the Red People. We permitted them to buy a good ox and a fat sheep for one iron hoop apiece. In exchange for the brass cut from their ships' kettles, we gave many dozens of sheep and cattle. In truth, we had very little interest in their trinkets but took them out of politeness, not wishing to offend these pale Sea-Bushmen who evidently attached great importance to scrap metal.

Next they came with copper bangles. These pleased us for a time. When we tired of those, they brought glass beads, knives, mirrors, iron and copper wire, in exchange for which we gave cattle, sheep, ostrich eggs and honey.

When we tired of those, they came with bullets.

As the flying Bishop had rightly said: we all make mistakes. My people had taken the visitors to Bushmanland
to be our friends. And they had proved lethal. Well, then, perhaps I was just as wrong about the little murderers of Green Meadow estate. And though I did not much care about the gratitude of generations to come, I was prepared to do anything that might win me wider acceptance among the natives. I agreed to visit the village school.

The children asked that I wear my traditional clothes. I was happy to oblige, dressing in a small leather apron that protected my
qhwai-xkhwe
from the world, took up my bow, a quiver of arrows and a drinking gourd made from an ostrich shell, and set off for the school.

From the Bishop's house to the little school beside the railway station was scarcely two minutes' walk; in that time most of the villagers were in their gardens, or leaning from their windows to see us pass.

There must be something in our appearance frightfully repulsive to the unsophisticated natives, for the infants took off like hares when they saw us, screaming for their mothers. Alarmed by the child's wild outcries, the mother rushes out of her hut, but darts back at the first sight of the apparition, crying to the good Bishop that he ought to be ashamed to bring such a thing to the village. Dogs turn tail, and vanish. And hens, abandoning their chicks, fly screaming to the tops of houses. And mothers, holding naughty children away from them, say: ‘Be good or I shall call the Bushman to bite you.'
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None, of this, said my episcopal companion, was to be taken seriously but should be seen as rough, rustic, ready wit, and showed that the villagers had begun to warm to me.

I said I thought they were casting slurs upon my person. I heard, most distinctly, someone ask whether the little bloke didn't catch cold, walking about in leather underpants.

Mr Farebrother corrected me these were not slurs, but real concerns, cloaked in broad good humour, and all part of the warming process.

In the schoolroom I was stood upon a chair and the children were invited to touch me as part of the warming process. It took a while before they conquered their fear of the strange and the wild, and many questions had to be answered by their teacher – a young woman pierced in ear and nostril with a splendid array of steel clips, not unlike the sort of thing the first English had bartered with us, for use as fish-hooks, when they washed up in Bushmanland. Ritual scarification appears to be a cultural phenomenon among the island youth.

Would I bite? Was my skin so wrinkled because I was very old? These were just some of the questions asked by the children who crowded around my chair.

Their teacher explained that I was a rare survivor of an ancient people who had been hunted and hounded by the colonialists and imperialists of the Western World. It was a miracle I had survived, and she, personally, wished to make a sincere apology to me and my people for the crimes committed against us by her ancestors.

I replied that, speaking very frankly, I welcomed her apology and would have passed it on to my people had they still existed; but I had no doubt that poor shadows of their ancestors though they were, the sponsors of my expedition to England would accept it gladly.

Whereupon she declared that I was really very nice – and I began to feel I had done a good thing in coming to the school.

Mr Farebrother now invited the children to get some ‘hands-on' experience, and, after a little shuffling and giggling, curiosity got the better of them and they crowded around my chair, stroking my face, digging me in the ribs, and trying to lift my breech cloth so as to expose my lower regions. Soon, indeed, they were so enjoying themselves that several times they very nearly knocked over my chair – though I have no doubt this was quite accidental – and had to be ordered back by their teacher, and forbidden to lay more than one hand on me at a time. And to stop pinching. And poking. And peeping beneath my skirt. But the pandemonium continued until Edward Farebrother and the teacher were forced to call a halt, lift me off the chair and place me on top of the stationery cupboard for my own safety.

Now, standing on the chair I had so recently vacated, Mr Farebrother appealed to the children. There I was, a poor little fellow, without clothes, or money, or a home. My mummy and daddy were dead. But wicked men wished to send me back to where I had come from. All those who believed Boy David should stay in England where he would be safe, please put up their hands, he cried.

Like a field of prickly pears, little hands stabbed the air.

And would those who wanted the wicked men to leave David alone, please put up their hands?

Such was the determination of the class that this should be so that some children now raised both hands. And several shouted that the wicked men should be killed!

And then my guide and mentor took me home, rejoicing in the success of the warming process. His people, the
good man explained, were slow to anger. But, once aroused, they were lions in the fight against cruelty and oppression. He talked of the battle for Dicky the Donkey; of the war for Tiny Alma and of the many ordinary people who devoted their free time to saving calves, cruelly torn from their mothers, imprisoned in tiny wooden boxes in which they could not see, or turn, and sent to Europe, where they were eaten by Belgians who had disgusting tastes in meat; he himself had been several times to France, where he had stood between horses destined for the abattoir and angry Frenchmen addicted to horseflesh. By taking me to their hearts, the children of Little Musing had shown that English compassion for the underdog, or bitch, was alive and healthy in the rising generation, and he, for one, gave a cheer.

It was my custom to walk around the village each day, learning, as best I could, the ways of the Remote-area Dwellers of Little Musing, and considering whether this was a tolerable place in which to settle a colony of our people. Though I seldom saw a human face, I knew that behind the lace curtains in the little dwellings observers kept track of my every step.

They dwell in far-away times; much of their lives could be said to be lived in a damp dreamtime, and if you watch their faces closely, you will see them sometimes fix into that rapt introspection, like man at stool, straining for something to which they feel they remain attached, even as it is passing from them.

They dwell, too, in overcrowded conditions, at almost a thousand to the square mile. Perhaps this proximity to each other explains the extreme discomfort they feel at bodily functions and the exposure of the body, often resulting in a kind of cramped comedy which they use to disguise
their embarrassment. Bodies and their functions are a source of public mirth and private horror among them. Individuals need to preserve private space; but they know they have to coexist. Yet any further forced intimacy would drive them mad. So the native genius had come up with a way of making the intense dislike they feel for one another almost bearable – coolness, diffidence, tolerance. Toleration is really just the acceptable face of hatred.

Nothing sustains the English in their present sad and shrunken circumstances (rather worse than those of many of the races who were once their servants) than the knowledge that once upon a time they lived better than anyone on earth. It is a distant race memory which many natives of the island retain, and it is a consolation, of almost religious importance.

Their religion, as I was to discover, is not a question of churches. The closest they come to a feeling of transcendence, and a sense of the sacred, is when they turn to the past. Their faith is a form of ancestor-worship. And the only spiritual experience which binds all orders of society – in fear, awe and loathing – is the blood-sacrifice.