Darkest England (33 page)

Such objects were all tremendously interesting, of course, but those who had forced on her representatives tomb and temple, and seen them crated home to England, had not thought about costs. Now, had they? Frankly, if she saw another shrunken head, she'd scream. And who was expected to pay for it? In reply she tapped the Royal Breast with her wand of feathers.

Her collection of flora and fauna, arrows and earrings, from distant, darker parts of the globe were the envy of the civilized world, but the wretched things were frightfully delicate, and (between herself, myself and the gatepost) not always very well put together. They travelled so badly. Then the mist and the damp ravaged them, and they fell apart as soon as one looked at them.

Since – blessedly, then – I had not added to her Royal Collections, what had I brought her?

Opening my quiver, I took from it the Paper Promise of the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair, and read it aloud:

Her Majesty listened intently, nodding her head from time to time when she recognized a phrase. At the end she said, yes, that was Great-Great-Granny's Promise. Make no mistake.

My heart was glad to hear it. Dropping to one knee, I beseeched her to make good her great ancestor's promise to her well-beloved San people. For indeed we had been molested. We had been scattered. My people were crying. They cried to the Great She-Elephant for help. Either to ride to their rescue or to let them come to her, where they might crouch like ants beneath her generous ears, guarded by her tusks. And let her stamp to death our enemies beneath her great feet.

She gave a wan smile. The Old She-Elephant was no longer what she had been. She took her tusks out at night; her great ears were torn; and she stood on her feet, all day long, and they were in no condition to stamp anyone to death. More was the pity!

As for the Promises passed out by the Queen Empress,
well, she would like to show me something. With that she rose to her feet and crossed to a cupboard, opened it and there spilled on to the carpet roll after roll of parchment bound in ribbon, emblazoned with great red wax seals. All of them, every last one, cried Her Majesty, another promise to another far-flung people. Picking up one at random, she settled a pair of glasses on her nose and read aloud:

What could one expect, after one's relatives had dished out Paper Promises all over the world, as if there were no tomorrow? Well, today
was
tomorrow. And the sooner far-flung nations in the back of beyond recognized it, the better. Some recipients of dear Great-Great-Grandmama's Promises often made very unreasonable demands. One of her ancestors had dispatched a sea captain to discover these very supplicants, and they had repaid the Royal Kindness by killing and eating the Royal Ambassador. If they were not eating visitors, then they were eating each other. And now they were calling on her to spill blood!

Children! For all their war paint and the funny faces they pulled. When they did not get their own way, they were quite impossible! A great fuss followed by a sad case of the sulks; and then they thought nothing of lifting grass skirts and presenting their naked BTMs to all and sundry. On her last royal visit, posteriors had dominated every walk-about. It did not strengthen a relationship if you began by eating the Queen's representative and ended by mooning at her when she took the trouble to visit you.

And, anyway, the shedding of blood was no longer in
her gift. Normally one would have sent soldiers to do that. But now English custom demanded that the shedding of blood, wherever possible, should be left to others.

She was terribly sorry to hear that all was not well between the Red People and the Bores – particularly since they had seemed to be patching things up. But sending troops was just not on. Peace talks would be the most sensible thing. Perhaps one of her officials might act as intermediary and coax us to the peace table?

I said I was sorry, but that was not possible. Did the wild hare converse with the iron hook that rips out its throat?

The Monarch considered this and then munificently suggested that Her Government send a plane to drop food parcels on our remote villages and hamlets. She understood that this was increasingly the popular way of lending assistance in foreign conflicts in which one had no desire to become involved.

Alas, said I, my people did not live in villages; we moved continually in search of chance employment as fence-menders, hunters, tinkers, sheep-shearers, trappers.

Her Majesty now began to show small signs of vexation. If people could not be relied on to remain in one place but went walkabout at the drop of a hat, then they should not be surprised if the major powers did not shower food parcels on them. Aircraft cost the earth. Her own Royal Flight was seldom in the skies these days. Did I know that even her Royal Yacht was to be taken away? An elderly craft which rolled badly in heavy swells but had given sterling service as well as providing less fortunate people in far-flung places with a glimpse of luxury they might otherwise never have seen. If those who planned this destruction could have seen the pleasure on the faces of simple people, as we steamed
into some foreign port, they would think twice about scuttling our yacht.

But then her own people, she feared, had a positive genius for wrecking the very things they did best. Under pressure from impudent upstarts from distant lands, her deluded subjects were turning their backs on the sacred trinity that had made England great: Queen, Church, Currency.

Had I seen the paying guests traipsing through her Palace? Did I imagine she liked strangers in her home? And the mess they left behind?

But we ask you, Mr Booi, she said, gazing at me over her spectacles, what option does one have? How else are we to earn funds for our horribly depleted Treasury? We sweep and scrub and clear up after the visitors. Who else is going to do it for us?

Now she offered a gracious apology for mistaking me for a tax inspector. They had made her life a misery, sneaking in and totting up her riches and demanding she cough up, as they put it, her share of taxes. What riches? Had I any idea how much she spent repairing gutted Palaces, plus the hideous costs of maintaining her children, plus free housing for dozens of staff who had ideas not just above their stations but above hers as well? Had I any idea what a decent page cost? Or a brace of heralds? How hard she had tried to cut back on staff? Yet even now people complained and carped. The lowliest page threatened to go to the tax people. The very soldiers in their sentry boxes demanded that she pay their fox-hunting fees – it drove her into a slough of despond, a
vita horribilis
!

And now there was talk of evicting her from her home and sending her to live in a ghastly modern barn, resembling, no doubt, some hideous municipal public outhouse known as a People's Palace.

As springs bubble up out of sandy riverbeds where a moment before there has been no sign of water, two majestic globules rose somewhere in the deep wells of the Royal Eyes and ran down the proud cheeks in two straight lines, passing on either side of her thin nose and rather pinched lips. What discipline they showed! As if they knew – those regal tears – that they were coursing down the face of the Queen of England, two soldiers on parade, determined to put their best feet forward.

And then, with an offer which melted my heart, she dried her tears with the quiet observation that she would do her duty, however sharp the serpent's tooth of ingratitude. She insisted I join her in a cup of tea. She slipped off into the silent, darkened palace, apologizing for the gloom, but electricity was simply too expensive; I heard her fumbling down shadowy corridors, stumbling every so often as she collided with an escritoire, a commode or some other item of priceless furniture.

She was back, a few minutes later, carrying two steaming mugs of tea. All her fine china had been sold off, along with the royal silver. Even this line of royal merchandise, destined for the gift shop, where paying visitors snapped up souvenirs of their visit, had proved quite useless. The royal offspring, she explained, were given to separating or remarrying so unexpectedly that nuptial mugs were no sooner painted than they were out of date. The royal cellars were crammed with discontinued marital lines she could not sell for love or money.

Did the Red People, she wondered, also have large families?

Only when food supplies permitted, I explained. We had children in order to provide hunters as well as for the love and comfort they gave, especially when we grew old.
But when food was scarce and a baby was born, the mother might disappear into the bush with her new-born infant and return alone. Everyone understood what had happened; the child had been, as we said, ‘thrown down'.

She allowed that this seemed to her a jolly sensible arrangement, and sighed so that I thought her heart must break.

Now it was that !Kwha opened my eyes. When we hunt the eland, its trail grows weary after a few days, and we know then the poison had begun its deadly work; the blood shows thicker on the grass and soon we come across the beast, lying on its side, its great dewlap quivering, trembling and sweating in the throes of death as the poison works its way from its hooves to its brain, and the power goes out from the creature, and we say that his
N!ow
is deserting him. That power which is found in the giraffe and the gemsbok, in the
kudu
, in the wildebeest and hartebeest, and all the creatures. They give up their
N!ow
and it goes to Heaven, to the gods who send the rain. So the power of this once great Queen was assuredly going back to whatever gods, in their now long-forgotten past, had once smiled on this disconsolate race.

I saw before me an elderly lady in a headscarf, peering uncertainly at the world through a pair of thick spectacles, sipping a mug of cooling tea in a dark room. And I spoke in my heart this question: should the destruction of a Queen be any less tragic than the dying of the eland?

For what was Her Majesty but a member of a rare species? Whose natural habitat was being destroyed. Who faced prodigious odds in her struggle to preserve her ancient rites and customs. Royal numbers dwindled year by year, the few survivors of her line were harried from pillar to post. Her family band – attacked on all sides – faced a fate
as cruel as anything we knew in the Karoo. After all, we had our donkeys at least. We had our zincs with which to build our overnight shelters. We had the sharp wind to lash us onward and a road that ran right into the horizon, along which we moved as we chose, when our blood was up and it was time to trek, asking nothing of anyone. Shearing done, fence poles sunk, goats slaughtered for a meal, and the five-man-can of sweet white wine, attended by its single cup, moving round the circle, pulling on black tobacco, we would dance until the white light came, and the dust itself sprang to its feet and danced beside us.

What had this poor woman to compare with that?

An idea took hold of me in the way the flames take hold of the candlebush on an inky night and it burns brighter than the evening star. For it took one to know one. But if our situation was bad, hers was infinitely worse.

I put down my mug; I doffed my hat, and, sinking now to both knees, I address her thus.

Having seen how she and her family band had been molested and scattered, I could not but ask: if this was the way people of England treated their Queen, did they deserve her? Therefore I, David Mungo Booi, appointed representative of the Red People, formally offered her safe refuge and asylum in our lands.

We would build for her a Royal Hut on the banks of the Riet River, where all the maps and all the missionaries agreed there has been since the beginning the place called Bushmanland. From the First Times, when the animals were still people, ages before the coming of the visitors who stole our land.

Installed in her great place, with her firesticks she would kindle the first fire outside the hut and it would burn in the hearts of her Red People. And then all the travelling
bands, now so long dispersed into the hot country and the high country and the far places, would come to take embers from the royal fire with which to kindle their own. All the Red People: the wanderers of the Karoo, the people of the Kalahari, Caprivi, Okavango and Angola; the People of the Soft Sand, the People who follow the Eland; the People from the East; the River Bushmen; the Basarwa and the Remote-area Dwellers of the deserts of Botswana. Not forgetting the ≠ Haba; the G//ana; the !Kung; the G/wi; the !Xo. And she would be our headwoman.

We would sit by her fire.

We would listen to her stories late into the night.

We would play the foot bow and the mouth bow, the thumb piano and the one-string Bushman fiddle.

We would fight to ensure she did not go the way of the quagga, the black-maned lion and the wild horse.

And at her royal camp, near the place called Canarvon, named for one who had been her relation, and not far from Calvinia, named for one who had been close to God, there would be singing and dancing until the dust danced with us and the world would know that, for the first time, the Bushmen had a Queen. And we would revere her until the end of time, even as her own people did not.