Darkest England (7 page)

Through the bars of my window I noted the paltriness of stars in England. They are still in the skies, I know, but the natives no longer look up. They have made the lights of their cities so bright, the stars fade. They do not worship them. Or steer by them. So advanced are they that they live lives unconnected with the universe. They have only to switch on their street lamps and the million eyes of God go blind.

Arriving with our evening meal, Minehost was considerably surprised to find me on the floor. What on earth was I doing? he demanded. What was the reason I lay on the floor, beneath a blanket, backing my rear end into the radiator?

I explained to him the importance of goats. I described the great feast that takes place at the end of the shearing. When the goats are led into a circle, and their throats are slit. How the blood is carefully collected in plastic bowls,
unless people are too drunk to hold the things steady, which, I am sorry to say, is often the case. Then the headless carcasses must be skinned, while the children often, in their innocent way, take the goats' heads with their gentle, cooling eyes and place them on sticks and stand them to watch over the preparations. The children will fight for the bladders and take them and blow them into footballs and play for hours while the meat cooks. And the women sit and gossip and smoke. The men send off for a five-man-can of white wine from the nearest bottle store, and when the feast is ready, they drink until the sun goes down and the million eyes of God shine in the skies.

Minehost begged me to stop.

My description of this blood-stained country sport, played by filthy urchins before a dinner of goat's meat, distressed him. Even more, that the bladders were used in this way repulsed my second Englishman. In hushed tones that spoke feelingly for the butchered goats far away in the Karoo, he explained that what might have been just a ‘game' to my kind was something so sacred it united England from one end of the island to the other.

Did he not eat meat? I asked.

He bridled. They were the greatest nation of beef-eaters in the world! Had I not heard of the roast beef of Old England? It developed their brains. The present state of the nation's intelligence testified to the superiority of their beef. If ever I was told that English beef caused brains to soften and fail, I should reject it utterly. Lies spread by foreigners across the water jealous of bigger, beef-bred English brains.

I had to tell him at this point that the brain is not the seat of intelligence. It simply gives you a headache. It is the intelligent life of the heart that teaches us to know good from evil.

Such beliefs might be fine in distant places where they kicked around goats' bladders, replied Mr Geoff. But if I went through England talking of the life of the heart, I would not get very far. He begged me to say no more of goat feasts. He deplored what we did to these animals. It was as bad as the cruelty of the French towards veal calves, or the Spanish to donkeys. It was one thing, Mr Booi, said Minehost, to enjoy a good bit of meat and quite another to approve of killing. If such things were necessary, then so be it. But they should be done under adequate supervision, quickly, painlessly and preferably silently. Above all, one preferred not to be told about it.

I realized then that in England entire generations had never seen a freshly slaughtered animal. Never set eyes on the great wash of its blood which sprays like a crimson sea, or seen the steaming offal lifted from the slit the knife makes in its belly. In this way they have arrived at such a pitch of delicacy that we can only wonder at.

Imagine, then, my feelings when I awoke in the morning to see upon the wall a shadow of something swinging, very like the great pendulum of the clock in the Dutch Reformed church at Abraham's Grave. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dawn light, I saw that Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty had hanged himself from the top bunk by his belt, and swung to and fro beneath the very eyes of the Queen of England.

I grieved for the deluded man. Yet, if I am honest, I felt a touch of anger. Just as when I am hunting in the veld and the game flies before me, that instead of waiting to take in the neck or flank the little poisoned arrow that will soothe it to death, the foolish buck runs madly into the
road and is killed by a passing farmer in his truck. What waste. What foolishness!

I looked up at my departed friend, his trouser legs tied to his ankles, his sock protruding from his mouth, in what looked like the cheeky gesture our children make with their tongues when the Boer sails past in his insolence. Slowly swinging in the white light of dawn. And I felt sad for my own people. The Children of the Sun who flocked to England in the hope of better things. Was this how we responded to native hospitality? To the tolerance of our hosts? Following the kindly eyes of the Monarch, which seemed to watch very closely the swinging figure of Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty, I felt that something in her look seemed to say: ‘What, have you left so suddenly, poor fellow? If only you had waited!' Truly, I had to agree. If this was the way we behaved when accommodated at Her Majesty's Pleasure, one had to ask whether we deserved the privilege.

Chapter Three

I knew my hosts were most distressed by Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty's sudden departure, for they never mentioned it again, except to ask me not to allude to it before the other guests, as some were simple souls, very easily led. And one would not like to encourage similar behaviour, now, would one? Respecting this request was rather difficult, since my fellow guests, when they met me walking in the garden, would contrive to find ways of referring to my friend's disappearance, and when I replied, as I had been urged, that he had returned unexpectedly to Bongo-Bongo-Land, I am afraid they expressed their scepticism very crudely, by a variety of devices, such as raising their eyes to Heaven or drawing their fingers across their throats. When our hosts, who accompanied us up the garden paths, forbade further questions, the other guests took childish revenge by conferring on innocent flowers in the garden new and terrible aliases, calling the scarlet rose climbing the high walls ‘prisoner's blood', or asking our attendants whether the creamy
clematis was cultivated for wreaths to adorn our unmarked graves.

I brooded often on my late friends tragic end. How unfortunate an impression he had made. Yet I missed him. Although my attendants were never far away, I lacked company. Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty came, like me, from a short people. Now I found myself alone in a world where meals were too large, beds too wide, chairs too high and men too tall. When Minehost inquired kindly into the state of affairs among the starving whom he took to be very many ‘down my way', it was never clear whether he was referring to my country or my height, as if the air ten inches below his nose held worlds he would never visit, though from time to time he caught glimpses of them from on high.

Time passed, and my name changed. For my attendants found Booi too difficult for their tongues, too round and rude, and so, much as the farmers do in my part of the world, they gave me a new name, and I became, amid much chaffing, the Boy David.

Mr Geoff, he of the honeyed hair, the bush of keys and the distinctive dung signature, a mingling of cheese, ashes and whisky, watched me fondly, and promised a Royal Summons ‘at any moment'. Its timing depended on a decision ‘on my case'. When I replied that this sounded horribly legal – at home we were always awaiting decisions on our cases by the police into whose hands we had been abandoned – Mr Geoff reminded me that this was England, and Palace procedures proceeded at their own pace, and he could guarantee that some day soon I was in for a Right Royal Surprise, believe you me.

And I did believe him. Because he gave many signs of his regal connections, telling me that the paperwork for my transport was ‘in train', and that punctuality was the
politeness of kings and uneasy lay the head that wore the crown and many other moving testimonies of his closeness to the Royal Household.

Besides, I realized, if Her Majesty had not intended to receive me, she would hardly have gone to the trouble of detaining me at her Pleasure.

Perhaps my friend's disappearance would have caused less suspicion among other guests awaiting Her Majesty's Pleasure had our hosts not continued to insist that he had been called away to live in that mythical land, somewhere at the world's edge, where dwell all Children of the Sun.

Among the English, I discovered to my surprise, there is an almost complete ignorance of the fact that they dwelt for many lifetimes in such places. Minehost denied all knowledge of this. He knew nothing of Africa. I must be mistaken. He knew nothing of the great explorers, nothing of Livingstone. And when I told him that his people had been in Africa, in large numbers, for many years, that they had fought and died and dug for gold and diamonds, shot lions and ruled over the tribes, from the Cape to Cairo, he looked at me as a child does at a storyteller, or as if I had drawn for him in the air a land as fabulous as Monomatapa, peopled by giants. All this might have occurred, long ago and far away, he conceded, but that had nothing to do with him.

I was tempted to ask whether this ignorance was not related to their excessively shrunken world view. Their notions of the world have contracted like a leather cloak left out in the rain. And rain is, perhaps, the key. During my stay in the Royal Guest-house it rained almost every day. And this excessive moisture, damp or liquidity has probably affected their sense of distance, shrinking the world to the size of a miniature toy no bigger than the wooden tortoise a boy carves and keeps in his pocket.

Yet, paradoxically, what is closest to them they consider very large indeed. Although the island, by our standards, is pitfully small, they talk about it as if it were twice the size of Africa. They can imagine nothing beyond it. Yet if you probe patiently, you will discover faint racial memories of the role they once played in the world, ‘long ago and far away', sometimes stirring in their hearts.

If they have forgotten past dreams of glory, except when racked by spasms of involuntary race memory, they have managed to increase their emotional purchase on three things: animals, gardens and the starving. Mr Geoff was always asking after the starving, of whom he had seen many pictures. He appointed me official spokesman. Were there many starving where I came from? Would they always be starving? And if they would be starving always, what possible good was there in feeding them?

Questions flowed from this amiable man. He was, he said, ever interested in the other man's point of view. But, personally, he preferred plants. Gardens were his true love. Had it not been his duty to wrestle daily with ungrateful Children of the Sun, he would happily have cultivated his garden. A lovesome thing, God wot!

As we walked around the garden on our evening promenade, amid foxgloves and columbines, he spoke of his yearning for a time he believed to have been golden, when Englishmen lived better, sweeter, rural lives. Before their trees died, when they inhabited a land unenclosed by hedges, when their noble forebears ran with the rabbit, and talked to the robin, and wandered on a carpet of greensward thick with elms and thronged with hosts of golden daffodils.

I could grieve with him for this vanished time, since it recalled our own – which had lasted longer, and ended
more recently, with the arrival of the white visitors and the Queen's soldiers.

In Bushmanland it had been the farmers who had destroyed our game. In England who had destroyed their trees? I asked.

Enemies from the Netherlands, or Low Countries, had unleashed a plague, came the bitter reply. A doubled-edged destruction. Trees which survived the plague were destroyed in a great wind conjured up by evil forces, somewhere ‘over there', which had cracked its cheeks and huffed and puffed until all the rest fell down.

Knowing how tenderly he felt towards the slaughtered goats of my childhood, I was very surprised, as I walked alone one evening in the peace of this garden, to hear the long, keening sob of what I took to be a lynx trapped in the hunter's wire snare. His cry echoes across the rocky desert, interrupted only for brief moments when, demented by pain, he pauses to try and chew through his own leg …

Although I heard these cries of pain most distinctly, I saw no sign of the victim. But for me the scent became overpowering. I knew its ingredients: fear, helplessness and the hot breath of death.

No wonder then that I stepped carefully around the columbines. For the fiercest thing in the world is a heavy steel trap. It takes the leg and holds it until the hunter returns, be that a day or a week.

I begged Minehost to allow me to end the suffering of the lynx who cried in the night.

He said, wonderingly, that he knew nothing of the lynx.

If not the lynx, it must be several jackals, I said, though
I had not known that this animal was found on the island, a clever, sly, greedy person, who runs as if he has burnt his feet in the campfire, and takes new-born lambs and pregnant ewes and sends the farmers crazy. Then we must send for John Jacobs, the jackal-hunter, who comes with his windhounds, Napoleon and Caesar, and sets his traps for the jackal; a little jackal piss makes his potion, skullbone of rock-rabbit and a perfumed leaf, scattered on the layer of earth that hides the newspaper under which waits the steel trap. Surely nothing so cruel lay buried in this peaceful garden?