Darkest England (29 page)

When my costume was complete, the good Bishop declared he had made me the best damn disguise in the world, an English becreeping cap, by George!

Now the final item would be added, said the flightless Bishop, nodding his big head up and down so that his nose sawed the air like a weaver-bird's sharp beak; an irresistible titbit to bait our trap.

He took me in my fine new outfit to another part of the city, a noble place thronged with men dressed in just the heavy, creased costume I was wearing, and I blended into the large, pink, important, noisy herd so well, these individuals went about their business of barging ahead and raising their voices and did not even lift their heads and sniff the air when I appeared downwind of them, so I knew that my disguise was working well.

We arrived before the most magnificent edifice, with marble columns and a steeple and statues of pensive goddesses, which I knew must be a church or temple. I saw a change in my once-airborne friend's demeanour which seemed to confirm that here was a place, holy and enchanted.

Remember, Boy David, advised the frockless holy man, that there is a distinction between religion and faith. Religion is the province of the Church of England, but the guardian of faith is the Bank of England. Faith is the shared belief, deep in the soul of the nation, that our currency is sacred, remains, in a word – and what better word could there be for it? –
STERLING
! Never to be sold short, off
or out. Never to be polluted by mongrel admixtures, or supplanted by foreign impostors, or shunted aside by Euro-surrogates, or ambushed and buggered, absolutely buggered, by those who do not share our faith. Who believe money is merely a common-or-garden coinage, a means of whorishly easy exchange between foreigners, instead of the life and soul of a people!

And with a promise that he would show me what real money was, he took from his pocket my little leather bag of star-stones. When I asked what he was doing with it, he replied that he was working a miracle. He vanished into the temple, to emerge some moments later carrying a fat leather satchel bulging with money, and not just any old money, but, as he proudly showed me, English money, coin of the realm, said he, though all were bank notes, each painted with a picture of the Sovereign, and very welcoming she looked, a strangely confiding look in the Royal Eye, as if she said to me: David Mungo Booi, at last! I cannot wait to make your acquaintance.

I was so glad and humble and moved all at once to see that there was something of my world that England wanted more than life itself, even if it was these little pebbles that lie in the desert.

I realized that my patron had entered not some temple, to effect this miracle with my star-stones, but a bank.

When I confessed my mistake he said, very kindly, that it was typical of foreigners, really, to get these things wrong. I would not get far in England if I could not tell the difference between a church and a bank. Banks were in the main devoted to upholding morality; that was why the fall of a bank, which happened rarely, thank God, was an occasion for national mourning. Churches, on the other hand, closed every day. But then they were mostly given
to raising money and worrying about affairs financial. The better sort of English bank hardly ever mentioned money, while the Church of England talked of hardly anything else.

Field-craft lessons followed. These consisted of learning how to disgorge cash effortlessly from the leather satchel without ever
COUNTING IT
,
MENTIONING IT
and, above all,
MISSING IT
!

He taught me, also, a set of phrases which he recommended I make my own:
Being abroad makes me ill; Oh, really?; It's just a German racket; No, no, no, no! It's just not on;
and
Personally, I blame the French
. By varying these phrases, he assured me, and becoming expert in the decorum of the satchel, I would soon blend naturally into the background and pass easily amongst all classes of English society.

When my teacher was satisfied that I looked the part, he took me to their ruling council of elders, or chiefs, who assemble in their Great Place beside the river.

Let us test-fly your becreeping cap – cried the ex-Bishop – in the Palace of Westminster, before we send you to the Palace itself. And he assured me that nowhere in the country was there greater experience of chicanery and deception. If I fooled these connoisseurs of camouflage, I would fool everyone.

Their national assembly is, I suppose, a cross between a church and a railway station, demonstrating how, in their culture, the sacred and the pragmatic are intermingled.

We were met by a Member who, my friend whispered to me, had the ear of Her Majesty's Government, being himself one of her Loyal Ministers. A smooth, affable, beardless, balding fellow with eyes in which, from their
gleam, it always seemed midnight by moonlight, and the dark-brown laugh of the foraging hyena.

His name, said my guide, was Mr Conbrio. And he was widely admired for his knowledge of essential parliamentary procedures. A Member of the highest integrity. If my case interested him, he might be prepared to put a question on my behalf.

Oh, really? I replied, in the manner I had been taught. Well, the question I wished to put was the following: did the Monarch not have a duty to honour the undertakings given by her predecessors to the San people of the Cape of Good Hope, and would she admit David Mungo Booi, their accredited representative, in special audience to discuss the matter?

Addressing me as ‘squire', a tribute, I assumed, to my disguise, Mr Conbrio explained that before he could even consider putting a question on my behalf, time-honoured procedural customs in the Mother of All Parliaments must be observed. Certain formalities, if I took his drift…?

I did not take his drift. Which formalities did he mean?

Mr Farebrother came to my aid, throwing a meaningful glance at my leather satchel. With studied nonchalance, grateful for my coaching, I handed him several large bank notes amounting to one thousand pounds, casually expressing the hope that this took care of the formalities.

Leaping backwards, as if he had been presented with a cup of scorpion poison, Mr Conbrio's handsome face turned that ruddy ochre in which our artists once used to portray a
kudu
speared to death. In icy tones he announced that such behaviour was just not on. It might be all very well in shoddy little assemblies in far-away lands where bribes and dash and kickbacks and pork-fat, as he believed such things were called, greased the wheels of corrupt
governments. But we were present in the Mother of All Parliaments and he would do nothing to sully the fairest, finest, freest democracy in the world. He had no doubt I had meant well. But to take this gift from me? Never! It might look to the cynic, or the foreigner, as if Her Majesty's Ministers could be bought. He would sooner die!

But there was no question, the ex-Bishop interposed silkily, of anything so gross, so offensive. All we requested was the benefit of his advice. Did he know someone who might help us?

That was a very different matter, Mr Conbrio replied. By a stroke of good luck, he was himself a professional consultant specializing in Royal Connections: Marques, Charters, By Appointments, Honours, Yachts, Palaces and Equestrian Events.

More than a stroke of luck, Farebrother assured him in the same manoeuvre by which a trapdoor spider generously extrudes the gossamer noose with which he plans to throttle his prey. It was a prayer answered! As a professional consultant, then – what advice would he give us?

As a professional consultant, Mr Conbrio smiled modesdy, he was obliged by the rules of his professional association – Select Lobbyists, Experts And Zealous Enablers plc – to levy a charge before parting with advice.

From a professional consultant, said Farebrother, he would expect nothing less. And with a movement so mercurial I never saw anything so neatly done (except perhaps the even greater speed with which the notes disappeared into Mr Conbrio's pocket), he slipped him his fee.

I knew I had seen a display of skill which must have taken many decades to perfect. It was not something that came easily or naturally. And, as the ex-Bishop had demonstrated, it was certainly not something that came cheap.

After brief reflection, Mr Conbrio parted with this
advice: the best way to advancing my cause would be to table a question in the House. By a stroke of luck he had intended to put just such a question that very day, and I was very welcome to watch from the Visitors' Gallery the majestic proceedings of the Mother of All Parliaments. I might perhaps learn something to pass on to my people. Who could say?

I answered sincerely that I thought I had already done so.

They have two political parties: the first of these is the Party of the House, which divides into different sides or teams, each identified by a colour, much as young herd-boys, when they hunt doves, identify their loyalty with a red hibiscus behind the ear or a daub of blue chalk on the forehead.

The leader of each team is called something simple, such as ‘John',
²
to remind Members that though the game requires opposing policies, these are as interchangeable as the leaders.

Opposing teams face each other across a fighting floor, seated in green leather benches which rise in ascending tiers towards the roof. The air is criss-crossed with a fine tracery of spittle as arguments are sent this way and that in a form of ceremonial warfare in which a few may emerge rather damp, but no one is seriously hurt. The further back Members sit, the higher their position on the tiers and benches, the louder they shout, and the greater their moral standing. This they call ‘claiming the high ground'. To ask which team is ‘right', the Right Reverend Mr Farebrother explained, was to miss the point. The object was to score points by holding your opponent up to derision. Members
often said the first thing that came into their heads. Tore into each other tooth and nail.

But surely, I observed, this must lead to terrible clashes among their supporters in the country?

It might have done, my guide explained, if the noise from the Chamber reached the outside world. But it seldom did so, and people were able to get on with their lives. It was a magnificent achievement, was it not, to conduct fearless public debates on the great issues of the day while ensuring that the private lives of citizens were barely affected? He felt sure I had seen nothing like it.

Well, now, things grew a little clearer. And I had seen something very like it. I had watched opposing troops of baboons on the hillsides, under a huge, indifferent African sky, mocking, gesticulating, howling at each other, while each troop attempted to gain the higher ground, from where warriors rained down missiles on their enemy or presented their colours, by directing their brightly hued posteriors at the other side. These debates achieved a subtle and satisfying result. The sky remained utterly unaffected by the activities of the apes. Yet all sides of a question were aired without fear or favour; and at the end of the day nothing whatever had changed.

If the opposing teams of the Party of the House were really on the same side, where then, I wondered, was the true opposition?

He pointed to a small group of individuals who sat in a special gallery well above the reach of the brawling teams below. These were the members of the Party of the Press, which never missed a chance to question, to harry, to attack and, where necessary, to destroy Members of Parliament who fell below the high standards laid down by the owners of the public prints, often retiring
individuals, usually invisible, yet the true guarantors of English democracy.

The Party of the House may propose, explained my episcopal guide and mentor, but it is often the Party of the Press that disposes. The Party of the House must, from time to time, however briefly, pay attention to its electors. The Party of the Press is answerable to no one, except its owners.

And with that we took our place in the Visitors' Gallery, and he urged me to watch and learn and to carry myself always as an important visiting native with Anglophile impulses; in short, to remember that I was almost English. We were in luck. That very day we were to see a Minister being destroyed.

The Minister whom it was my privilege to see being destroyed that day was a sad, rather portly, nervous man, habitually looking over his shoulder with the jerky, panic-stricken movements of a rabbit transfixed before the flaring hood and glittering eye of the golden Cape cobra; he bore the portfolio of Minister for National Contentment.

Now I saw unfolding below me, in all its splendour, that flower of their democracy, the parliamentary debate. Mr Farebrother advised me to watch particularly how the loyalties of Members of the House Party were stirred to heroic defence when one of their colleagues was set upon by the Press.

The charge against the Minister was complicated. From what I gathered, the Press reported that he had been seen, disguised in a woolly muffler, bobble-cap and boots, emblazoned with his country's colours, entering the house of a young woman. The Party of the Press believed a Minister charged with the contentment of the nation should not be playing away or indulging the national game, in particular, shooting and scoring. There was jocund debate as to
whether there had been much dribbling. This drew laughter, even from the Minister himself, and one realized how civilized are these debates, despite their apparent bloodiness.

Then the Minister rose to defend himself. He had indeed visited the young woman – and he deplored the salacious reports which emphasized the gender of the therapist involved – to obtain a professional massage of the feet, attending particularly to the toes, which were especially sensitive. He strongly refuted suggestions that anything improper had occurred. A Minister charged with National Contentment had a duty to safeguard his own well-being. A happy Minister had happy feet. And a foot was only as happy as its toes. As to the wearing of the national colours, he had been planning a trip abroad immediately after his massage. Whenever setting out for foreign parts he always donned muffler and cap, a traditional costume of the Englishman when crossing the water, and he wore his colours with pride. He wished to assure the House that he loved his country so much he felt ill whenever he travelled abroad, and wearing the colours improved his health – and his happiness.