Darkest England (27 page)

With these thoughts humming in my mind, I arrived in Little Musing.

Chapter Ten

Not since old Adam Blitzerlik, who did a bit of gardening for the Mayor of Puffadder, was found astride the Lady Mayor, wearing only her husband's golden chain of office, have I witnessed such an explosion.

I walked up the path and knocked at the door of Edward Farebrother's cottage.

Julia was leaning over the fence. Well, well, she said, the prodigal returns.

Peter the Birdman, out in his garden, said nothing but pretended to be watching a sparrowhawk killing a fat racing pigeon.

The wingless wonder, the failed flier, my old friend and mentor Edward Farebrother opened the door and stared at me the way a man does at the snake he finds in his shoe; his face blushed like the flame tree, then, seeing his neighbours watching, he pulled me sharply inside the house and slammed the door.

And why, David Mungo Booi – he demanded – are you here?

I had arrived prepared to overlook the behaviour of a man who had sold his friend, traded his daughter and broken his word to his Sovereign to placate his tribal taboos. I returned a truthful answer to his question – Goodlove Castle had very nearly claimed my life. I had escaped only by the grace of Kaggen.

That is when he exploded. Pointing a shaking finger at my heart, the former holy aviator declared in ringing tones that I summed up in my hateful little person all that was wrong with the Third World. He had managed, with enormous difficulty, to place me in the house of an aristocrat to teach and tame and fashion me in the ways of the upper classes; knock off a few of my edges; give me a taste for horseflesh, a whiff of shot and shell; a sense of the sacred ceremony of the tea-towel; of roast beef, of common sense; of the knowledge that things will be all right on the day, and we'll muddle through; and of what was, and was not, on; of true-blue Anglo-Saxon love of the loam, the cow and the copse; of that ancient attachment to English acres; English ale; English attitudes which so distinguish the landed gentry of England from those pale shadows across the Channel, the effete, landless, loveless Eurotocracy of other, less fortunate, lands.

And how had I repaid him? I had gone over the wall like an absconding schoolboy.

No wonder that people like me could not feed or clothe ourselves. Give us entry into one of the great houses of England, and we went AWOL. Give us a finger and we took an arm and a leg. Give us millions and we frittered them away. Give us asylum and we began seducing their women; give us a brighter tomorrow and we elected a darker yesterday; give us dams and we bought guns; give us the honey of Northern ingenuity, the cream of Western
intelligence, and we preferred dumb insolence and disease; give us clean water and we kept coal in it; give us condoms and we wore them on our heads, lightbulbs and we used them as penile ornaments, tractors and we lost them, trade credits and we spent them, nuns and we raped them, tanks and we used them to invade our neighbours; give us grain, millions of land-mines, electoral observers, bags of compassion, aid agencies, relief agencies, humanitarian agencies, fighter bombers, field ambulances, dollars, Mercedes Benz, international mediators, marines, and we chewed them up and spat them out and things were soon a lot worse than they had been before we started. Look at Rwanda … Somalia … Angola … Liberia …

And here I was again. Asking for more. Well, he had news for me. Not now. Not ever again. He had treated me as a lost son, trained me, groomed me for better things. And how had I responded? By suborning his daughter, leading her in lascivious dances, preceded by omelettes and lechery in his own back garden. These were his thanks for plucking me from the fists of the authorities as they were about to return me to that distant, god-forsaken, murderous, uncouth, fly-ridden, disease-struck neck of the woods I called home.

He left me then, returning moments later with my brown suitcase and threw it down, without care, on the floor, and it broke open, spilling its precious contents, and I scrabbled to collect my bow of
gharree
wood, my arrows, the ceremonial digging sticks and fire sticks and necklaces of ostrich-eggshell and, most important, the fine copper bangles. The small leather bag, given to me by my cousins the !Kung from the Kalahari, split open. I gazed on the fabled star-stones that Europeans are said to love more than life or love, and which I had quite forgotten. Very
indifferent pebbles, much like gravel you see scattering across the road when the farmer races down the dusty roads in his quick white truck.

Then a silence descended. Where was I proposing to go? the former Bishop suddenly inquired. Not merely had his tone changed but his voice was close to my ear, and I was startled to discover he was down on his knees beside me, searching the darkest corners where the stones had rolled.

To London, I replied. And the Palace.

How could I manage in the capital without help? Surely I needed help?

By those who do not know them, they are said to be a passive, stolid people. Do not believe it. Within the space of moments, for reasons unclear, the once-winged priest had moved from outraged denunciation of my person and all its works into a mood of almost wheedling kindness. Truly they are a mercurial, volcanic, turbulent tribe!

I had learnt a good deal about survival during my time as a guest at Goodlove Castle, I answered.

And did I propose, then, to visit the Queen in all my tribal finery?

My heart pained me so that I could manage no reply. But silently nodded my head. Once upon a time, I dreamed of a far more magnificent progress to the Palace, borne aloft, in the traditional manner of the great explorers, in a sedan chair, carried on the shoulders of four white bearers; as the expedition progressed towards the Palace of the Great She-Elephant, I would recline in the yellow shade, behind my heavy satin curtains, reading some appropriate text from my portable library:
Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile
, by Bruce, or Henry Moreton Stanley's unique primer,
In Darkest Africa
. Bringing up the rear would struggle my
porters, toting their bales crammed with every conceivable necessity: quinine, tea, coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, canned vegetables, dried meat, fruit, bottled water, and champagne, in which to toast the health of the Monarch.

Alas, now this was not to be. My small funds had dwindled to nothing. So, yes, I would present myself at the Palace in the clothes I stood up in.

And when I had achieved my goal and presented my credentials to Her Majesty, what would I do then?

What I had always intended – I would return home.

Would I give him a categorical assurance?

Before I could reply, the room erupted for a second time.

Beth, who must have crept upon us silently, and heard most of our conversation, burst upon us and flung her arms around my neck. Her lustrous behind, seen from my vantage point, my nose buried in her neck as she hugged me, showed like two great boulders, smoothed by a mighty river into perfect melons, and carried together by that same torrent to repose side by side like identical twins.

How could I even contemplate exchanging the safety of their garden for the horrors of home? Beth cried. I must promise to do whatever possible to stay with them for ever.

It is a happy people who live under a delusion, quite impervious to reason. They, who by any measure may be said to lead lives of poverty, sadness, fear and restriction on an overcrowded island, sometimes never seeing the sun from one week to the next, at the mercy of increasingly savage young who would tear their parents limb from limb for a sixpence, and frequently do so, marooned at the mercy of clever and more powerful neighbours, enduring in the twilight of their past glories and fearful of the future, still contrived somehow to believe themselves the happiest
people on earth and their system the best that the sons of man ever invented!

Beth was scarcely recognizable; what a dismal descent from the proud, upstanding, free-swinging beauty of the Eland Dance to this wan, tousled-haired person, breasts strangled, haunches swathed in some crumpled, hairy skirt reaching all the way down to her feet which, saddest of all, protruded to show she was again wearing her father's old shoes.

As I examined his daughter, the flighty holy man examined my star-stones, giving little cries as he did so, ‘Well, I never,' and ‘If I'm not very much mistaken,' and other signifiers of happy astonishment, and I began to realize that the !Kung had been wise to include these fripperies among my baggage. The ex-Bishop's manner had altered utterly, from stone to water. He ran through his fingers the white gravel as if it were food, honey or tobacco, or something almost as valuable.

If I was ever to attain my ambition, warned the ex-Bishop, I would not do so by sticking out like a sore thumb.

Boy David, quoth he, when stalking your quarry, is it not essential to blend into the background? And the best disguise when hunting the lion is his mane, worn as a cloak. And the ostrich is beguiled when the hunter carries, above his head, a beak on a stick, and ties a circle of feathers to his rump, so the ostrich thinks it spies a brother, plodding, sedately over the veld towards him. Like calls to like.

A becreeping cap, said I.

Precisely, returned Heaven's fallen sky-soarer. If you are to succeed on your final safari, you must so blend, as you pass through England, that your own mother would take you for a native. If you succeed in your safari, and no one, believe me, hopes more heartily than I that you should do
so, then you will return from whence you came. I shall see to it that you are fitted out in the best damn becreeping cap money can buy. Can you think of a better plan?

I saw the flaw immediately. I had no money.

He ran the star-stones through the funnel of one hand into the palm of the other and reassured me that with these charms, money would flow like water.

Let me put on my good grey suit, which he had kept very safely for me during my time away; I might carry my tribal dress and my gifts in my suitcase. Now, if I would excuse him, he too would go and slip into something more appropriate to the trek that lay ahead.

We were going somewhere – together?

He seemed astonished by my question; How else would we travel? He would never abandon me, now that my goal was so close. Soon – very,
very
soon – I would be setting sail for home, my task accomplished, my journey done. To which he could only say, God speed!

Beside the grocer and the little butcher in the dying village of Little Musing stands the old stationmaster's house. Given over now to the doctor who calls twice a week to serve the dwindling needs of an ageing population. There is always a crowd outside the doctor's surgery; people who are not ill anxious for a word with those who are. A communal occasion to talk happily about illness, past and present and to come. The English have, I think a lovers' quarrel with disaster.

When I arrived at the station, suitcase in hand, Farebrother was pacing the platform, dressed in a voluminous frock the shade of pinky purple you see in the Babbian flower (which baboons love for its nutty corns). This lurid costume
was, apparently, the uniform of a practising prelate in the Church of England. He had not worn it since his official grounding by the authorities.

I could not help wondering why he dressed so vividly for what I had understood was a secret mission.

That was the point, came his reply. By wearing such regalia he appeared to be what he was not – a full bishop; and since bishops were seen as odd, but essentially harmless, his cloth would enable him to move about London almost unnoticed. Custom would ensure that we were admitted to all the best places, but no one would pay him the least attention. This was his own becreeping cap.

We rumbled away from Little Musing on the rusting rails bound for London, watched by curious cows which now and then fell down and died. Their cattle, which they prize hugely, suffer from a falling sickness, the cause of which is unknown, but which they attribute to the evil machinations, or even spells, or poisons, of forces ‘across the water'.

Strange how the mention of trains evokes a spasm of pain. The mere sound makes them flinch. In their tongue, not for nothing do the two words rhyme with each other: ‘train' and ‘pain'. They repeat these rhymes to themselves in a kind of furious despair.

Why should this be? In response, Edward Farebrother related one of their oldest tribal myths. They were the inventors and originators of the railways. As they gave so much else to the world. Their genius provided tribes less fortunate than themselves with gifts which no other nation could match. The steam engine belonged to them as surely as the spinning jenny and the football, sweet achievements of the tribe. But then, like sleepy travellers, overburdened with genius, they put down some of their baggage along the way, and never found it again. Like so much else, it was
stolen by jealous competitors, copied and travestied, passed off as their own by mixed assemblies across the water, the racial ruction,
¹
whose trains were bigger, faster, better, and about which they boasted continually, forgetting his too modest people to whom they owed their success.