Darkest England (16 page)

This discovery took place rather unexpectedly. I had begun to hope that by allowing the children of the village to gain invaluable ‘hands-on' experience of my unspoiled innocence I might have relaxed my passage into English life.

Indeed, it seemed to have done so, for no sooner had I returned from the school when Peter the Birdman and Julia invited me to an ancient ceremony on a nearby estate. They told me that from time to time all the villagers dressed in clothes which once marked their station in life, as peasants, or honest yeomen, archers, beaters, ploughmen, and then, said Peter, they made a pilgrimage to what they called the ‘Big House', a great mansion, some miles away, where
dwelt, they said, a magnificent Lord. And there these peasants and yeomen and matrons re-enacted an age-old ceremony for the benefit of foreign visitors who paid handsomely for the privilege of accompanying the Lord of the Big House upon an ancient English hunt; they chased birds and shot them out of the sky, and killed foxes and even deer, and by this traditional blood-letting they felt themselves to be, once again, part of a chosen race whose feet did, in ancient times, walk upon England's mountains green.

Even Peter the Birdman took part in the ceremony, explaining that although he was implacably opposed to the taking of aviary life, the ancient customs of the countryside deserved support, and he worked, not with guns, but with a bag, collecting game knocked out of the sky.

It seemed a wonderful idea, the villagers dressed up, pretending to be peasants, and the Lord of Goodlove Castle dressed up, pretending to be a nobleman.

And I was invited to join the festivities.

To my disappointment, Beth and her father were vehemently opposed to the idea. The Lord of Goodlove Castle, they muttered, might not quite see things my way; and if I ventured on to his estate, I might never leave it again.

I saw how fearful of this Lord the Farebrother family was when the monthly ritual of the collection of rent came round, and Miss Desdemona, cousin of the Lord of Goodlove Castle, would appear, carrying an old shopping bag and talking cheerfully of the garden and the weather and a host of unrelated subjects until at some precise, but undefined moment, a handful of notes were pushed into the shopping bag, apparently unnoticed by Miss Desdemona and unmissed by the Farebrother family, for neither party to the transaction said a word.

Miss Desdemona then moved to Peter the Birdman's cottage and called on him to come out. Peter pretended deafness. His domestic aviary swirled against the panes and pecked and chirruped as if to say that there was nobody home, but we all knew Peter was kneeling on the floor behind the curtain, unable to pay his rent because he had spent it all on his feathered allies.

In my country, this refusal would have led to police vans and prison. But Miss Desdemona, after waiting for a response, eventually moved on to Julia's cottage and no one said a word. For that was not the English way. Peters behaviour had been noted, and would not be forgotten. One night the Lord of Goodlove Castle, who owned all our houses, and much of the village, it seemed, and most of the land between Little and Much Musing, would come to call and demand his fee. I had the sense that although they resented the far-reaching powers of the mysterious noble, they somehow felt him to be part of the very fabric of life, with his festivals and his name and his Big House and his nocturnal raids, and they were all connected, or beholden, or related to the invisible aristocrat. Even Julia, unwillingly slipping her envelope into Miss Desdemona's shopping bag, complaining bitterly about the number of birds in Peter's cottage for which ‘he did not pay a penny', or the presence in the house of the defrocked Bishop of a little person from the colonies who was undoubtedly some sort of live-in servant, while she rattled around like a lost marble in a cold house she could not afford to heat, with a lawn the person from the colonies would not bestir himself to mow, paying rent to a rich man who gave not a thought to decent and proper conduct, but instead spent it all on a harem of floozies, yet she asked Miss Desdemona to convey her best wishes to her cousin – though how a
man of his standing could carry on like some oriental despot she, for one, could not imagine.

To which Miss Desdemona and the Farebrothers and Peter the Birdman, crouched behind his curtains, and I listened and said nothing. For this was the English way; a little tirade was allowed, and even encouraged, but it did not change anything and everyone knew the score. Hate the Lord though they might, even in protest they all still deferred in one way or another to his invisible power. Not, I think because they liked him, or believed in him – but because without him to love or hate, who else was there?

I watched as all the village, decked out in the costumes of yesteryear, climbed aboard the transport provided by the Lord of the Castle, an old wagon, pulled by a tractor, and set off for the festivities. I felt they resented my refusal to accompany them, but the Farebrothers were adamant.

So concerned did they become at the threat represented by the Lord that they began casting about for some hiding place where I might be concealed until the Lord of Goodlove Castle had forgotten all about me. The church was just the place, they decided.

I offered the opinion that the Lord of Goodlove Castle, knowing I had been living with the former Bishop, would surely guess where I had been hidden.

On the contrary, the Bishop informed me – the last place anyone thought of visiting was a church.

After dark, the Bishop took me to my place of safety. The church was stoutly barred and carried a great padlock. Local people were in the habit of carrying away anything they could lay their hands on, from the lead on the roof down to the pews and flagstones. It was a rural custom.

Custom or not, I could not help wondering whether he regretted the loss of all his sacred furniture.

He confessed that when he still believed, it had saddened him. But it was a phenomenon which happened all over the world, did it not? Even in my country?

I was pleased to be able to tell him that nothing of the sort occurred amongst my people. We built no churches. Our healers and medicine people wore no distinguishing insignia, and owned no fixed property. They were there to help us at the dance time of the eland bull. Or when a woman first bleeds. To talk and to sing of Kaggen, the praying mantis. To pray to !Khwa, the rain god, and to protect us from Khwai-hem, the All-Devourer.

Ex-Bishop Farebrother said it was quite plain to him that nothing was stolen from my people only because they had nothing left to steal. He would give anything to be in my position. And he hoped I realized how well off I was.

He pushed open the door and we entered the holy gloom which they favour in their churches. When my eyes grew accustomed to the semi-darkness, I saw that the floor of the church was made of the lids of the tombs of scores of bishops. The walls were lined with the coats of arms of brave knights, and with the regimental flags of the local soldiery. Relics of famous victories in foreign parts. I could not help reflecting on their extraordinary sensitivity. Not for them the great brassy trumpeting monuments of other tribes, nor the noisy marching displays of triumph. That would not be their way. Rather, they preferred to incorporate their relics into their sacred places, to lay their battle standards in the lap of their Creator. To recognize that, without the help of their God, they could never have conquered three-quarters of the globe and ruled an empire that stretched from sunrise to sunset.

Each evening the good grounded Bishop paid a visit to
me. We talked of my gods and of his, and of how he had come to be excluded from his Church.

Their religion, as he explained it to me, seems rather crude, though it has some saving aspects. They know nothing, for instance, of the power of the moon as regards hunting or rain-making; nor of the songs of the stars or the dangers of the sun. There is some slight indication that they retain rudimentary memories of true religion because they sometimes refer to the beliefs of their ancestors who paid due respect to our mother, the moon.

Mr Farebrother knew nothing at all of how man came to die. How the hare found his mother lying still in the veld, so still he felt she must be dead. He prayed to the moon to wake her, but the moon said that his mother was not dead but only asleep. However, the hare being foolish, the hare being little-brained, the hare being of the family of man that goes on two legs, he would not listen, would not hear, would not believe the moon and cried and cried for his dead mother, until the moon grew pale and angry and, reaching down to earth with long arms, slapped the hare hard across the mouth, as a mother will do a foolish child. The hare's lip was split, and the hare's mother continued in her sleep, now truly a sleep of death. Oh, if only the hare had believed the moon that his mother truly lived; then the hare, like the moon, would have lived for ever, and all the human family.
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My flightless friend told me that, to them, the moon was just a piece of earth that had split away long ago and now floated in the heavens, cold and dead. He stared at
me, open-mouthed, when I told him of Kaggen, who made the moon, the celestial joker, the nimble god, who shifts his shape in the blink of an eye, from cobra to jackal. Mr Farebrother had never seen a praying mantis and shook his head wonderingly as I described the divine jester, who appears to man in devout repose with huge eyes and tiny hands clasped in prayer. He listened in silence when I related how, one day, the mantis was attacked by meercats, so sharp of tooth and claw, and how, in his haste to escape, he pierced the bladder of an eland bull and flooded the earth with inky darkness, and so escaped. But since a dark world is no good for hunting, clever Kaggen made light by throwing his shoe into the night sky, where it hangs shining to this day, helping the hunter on his way.

It did not look like a shoe, the Bishop objected.

I explained that the shoe carried with it, into the sky, a cloud of dust from Bushmanland; the dust prevents us from seeing the moon for the true shoe it is.

He appeared unpersuaded. They have great difficulty understanding such profound truths.

We talked about God.

Their God is bound up with notions not of the good, as it is for most other people, but of the useful. Particularly with those things their genius has created: the steam engine, the railway, the spinning jenny, the football match, achievements with which they consider they have enriched the life of man.

Thus it is that one can say that they worship what is gone. Their God lies somewhere behind them, where he inhabits an ideal paradise, small, green and clean. Their God has absented himself. If you wanted a sign that the English were innately religious, said the former flying Bishop, you would tell it from the fact that they were for
ever looking over their shoulders asking where he was, why he had gone missing. Would he turn up one day? Again? And come in glory? Was he simply late – like the trains?

But that seemed to me a very pallid god, a polite fiction, a deification of their own nostalgia. I hoped we might discuss it.

Now, they have a great horror of abstract thought. They will do almost anything to avoid it. They hate, above all, what they call ‘speculation', that is to say, the effort of thinking hard about ideas. When they do this, it is a very comical sight. Their eyes turn inwards. They scratch their heads. They exhibit all the delightful but helpless perplexity you will find among the baboons, those people who sit on their heels when confronted by our fierce euphorbias in the Karoo, which, pointing their poisonous spines at the sky, stop those poor, thirsty baboons from eating their milky flesh.

Each night I was locked in religiously by Beth, who made sure I had enough to eat and drink, often bringing me delicacies she knew I would like, especially the larvae of ants, being entranced when I told her how we prized this ‘Bushman rice'. More and more she asked me about the life and ways of the Red People. Increasingly, she stayed with me after I had eaten, and settled me for the night beneath an old tartan blanket, which she pulled over the stretcher set up for me before the altar, and I noticed the shine to her eye which she had first shown me when I took that bath in her presence on the night I arrived in Little Musing and she had hidden her blushes in the steam and I had hidden my modesty under my hat. Beth now demanded constant stories and instruction in the ways of the Red People, going so far as to say that if her father objected, she would run off to join a Bushman band in the far Kalahari; for she wished to climb out of her skin and
enter that of another, where she would be free and alive and far from home.

I suspect my mistake began there. For it seemed to me, in feeding her hunger for tales of the old times, of the mantis and the moon, of hunting customs and the dances of my people, I was pleasing this sad woman who never ventured out of her house and whose duties towards her father were harsh as any servants. Besides, I hoped that in pleasing her I was repaying her father who had saved me. I meant well, but I did badly.

Her absence from home was noted, and her father began arriving unannounced, demanding she return immediately and cook his supper, or sweep the house, or iron his shirts, saying that I was quite capable of bedding myself down for the night and that too much comfort was likely to spoil me. And what good, then, my unspoiled innocence? But Beth tossed her head and looked determined, and I began to wonder what she was determined on. Furious with her father, she told me she would happily stay right through the night, if I liked. Or, if I preferred, she would help me to leave Little Musing and travel with me through the length and breadth of the kingdom, safeguarding me, as the lioness does her whelps. I thanked her for her offer. It showed that the warmth which her father had hoped would be established between the English and myself was now evident indeed, though perhaps not in the way he had intended.

I made no secret of my admiration for Beth: that magnificent plateau, that great fleshy magnificence of her posterior, that spongiform delight, those two fat heifers harnessed to a lovely plough. What man in his right mind would not feast on such charms? And Beth for her part, instead of hiding this miracle, as she usually did among her
own people, positively showed it off, allowed the solid, rubbery bounce of each hemisphere to find its own independent rhythm and harmony, walking away from me with a sly backward glance, knowing I was bewitched by that divine fundament. I understood her essential loneliness and I was not, as I have made clear, immune to her charms. However, philosophical questions arose. Could one, for instance, enter into an intimate relation with a local person and not acquire, or have ‘rub off on one', as the English say, some of their less admirable qualities? Then, too, there was the responsibility to my people. What would it profit their cause were I to go native?