Darkest England (10 page)

He had gone into bat for the little fellow. He had gone aloft for his fellow clergy. He had preached to them, reminding them that they were not leaving the Church, the Church was leaving them. They were the roast beef of Old England.

For bearing witness in this fashion he had been stripped of his flying licence, shot down in flames, struck off the roll, exiled to the remote provinces, a tiny hamlet among the Black Mountains, known as Little Musing. And there he lived with his daughter Beth, his wife having died a few years before, spared, poor soul, the pain of seeing him blown out of the sky.

As I understood his explanation, this is the way of their
religion. They profess their faith openly, love their fellows freely, and obey the laws of their faith voluntarily. But those who fail to do so are dealt with.

First, he had been grounded. That is to say, he had been forbidden to fly between those distressed clergy who feared the arrival of female healers and whose testicles were now in imminent danger of dissolving and their brains of boiling like sheep's fat on a fire.

Then he had been defrocked. That is to say, he had been ordered to desist from going about in the distinctive dress of their holy men and barred from using his little church. And this for announcing his discovery that God was redundant.

As an atheist, I said, the removal of his frock must have come as a relief. The flying Bishop (grounded) threw me a perplexed glance. I had failed to grasp the complexity of their customs. He was
not
an atheist. True, he had ceased to believe in some God ‘out there', some old man with a white beard who punished or pampered his errant children with brimstone or gifts. Instead, he now believed in the God within. He had rejected that dread phantom which so terrified deluded souls from one end of the earth to the other; chaps who worshipped cows – all well and good, of course – or fellows with a thing about the moon, or naked fakirs who adored little yellow idols on the road to Mandalay – nothing against them, if that's what they want. But he had given it up. And in return found a deity more modest, more in keeping with the pragmatic spirit of his people. Somebody who was – Heaven be praised – more like them.

And nothing, declared the good ex-Bishop, his sharp, dark hair springing dangerously about his head, could keep a good man down. He had a vocation to fly. I had the
impression that he patrolled the heavens, from where he would descend, at regular intervals, among neglected, endangered souls.

Casting a fond glance at me, he said he had not seen anyone who more closely fitted the bill in a long time, as he watched me being carried, trussed like a turkey, to the waiting aircraft. He had been on my case for weeks. In this very vehicle he had followed the Royal Transport. When the Consolers produced the restraints and bundled me up the steps of the aircraft, he was not far behind. When the little chaps go down, promised Edward Farebrother, this bishop gets airborne! If I could have seen the look of horror on my face as I was bound and gagged; if I could have glimpsed the mute, beseeching glance I gave as I was lifted up the aircraft steps; if I could have heard the sound of skull on steel when the bastards dropped me on my head!

I now began to realize this was to be my destiny in England: to be little seen but much watched. I had been observed by a variety of individuals, beginning with my attendant, Mr Geoff, in the Palace of Detention, and extending to others more malign who chose to regard me, not for what I was, a traveller in an antique land, but as some creature from another world, a distant member of some semi-human species, where I was regarded as part of that species at all.

For the earthbound prelate, I was a living relic, a fugitive, a curiosity, an acquisition, an apprentice. More than all these, I was a ‘little fellow' and the Right Reverend Mr Farebrother had devoted his life to the care and upliftment of the ‘little fellow'. As he told me often. And, as I was to discover, this love of ‘little fellows' had roots deep in his personal life.

He had watched, with mounting anger, as one by one
all my companions – Bengali and Pathan and Istrian – who had arrived in England with me, and joined me in the special transport on that high and hopeful day when we were conveyed together from this very aerodrome to the Royal Guest-house, were summarily expelled from the kingdom. He had pleaded and argued with the powers that be to allow these exiles sanctuary in England. Without success. But when it was my turn to take the transport, he had been ready. He had made a special case for me. Though he had been unable to help the other little fellows', they were not quite as little. And they were at least ‘part of the world'. Their expulsion from the kingdom, while unjust, was not especially cruel and depraved, since they came from real countries; they were mature adults, literate and modern. They were not woolly little aboriginals, last of a dying breed, mere children adrift in a world of uncaring adults, living relics from the Stone Age, last in the line of hunter-gatherers, rare as the Great Pandas of China. Rarer even than the gorillas of Rwanda. And for whom expulsion from England spelt extinction!

I had to admit, I said, I found it hard to recognize myself in this portrait.

The Right Reverend Mr Farebrother replied that that was all the more reason why he had recognized me on my behalf.

The question I now asked myself was: had I been the victim of a conspiracy? Or had I unwittingly added to my own misfortune by missing some crucial cultural signal which should have alerted me to the fact that those responsible for taking me to the Palace intended to do something very different? Just as the foolish hare, hiding in its burrow, seeks to escape the long steel hook of the hunter by digging ever more deeply into the earth, thus ensuring that its
capture becomes inevitable, had I trusted too much to their celebrated love of fair play? And, when confronted by the sharp truth, fought against it until skewered on its hook?
¹

The suspicion that the natives were not all of equal honesty began to take hold of me and spread through my yet disbelieving consciousness, like one of our own poisons making its slow but irresistible journey through every level of the body, until it settles in the seat of life and love, the heart itself, only to kill the creature to whom it brings this knowledge.

I began to suspect that there existed cunning lesser breeds, without the law, who would not hesitate to wreck my mission. I felt a stabbing sorrow for Her Majesty. Among her flunkeys there were those willing to thwart their Sovereign's wishes.

In answer to his question, I assured Mr Farebrother that I would alert the Monarch as soon as we met. And I planned an early meeting.

Alas, sighed my saviour, that would not be possible. Any movement, other than that envisaged in our agreement, was not permitted. I would be staying with him for the foreseeable future.

I remembered no agreement.

I had signed it, came the reply.

I had signed nothing, I cried.

If I could not recall doing so, said the priest, that was probably because I had been asleep at the time, on the floor of the plane, on which I had hit my head a fair crack when
my captors dropped me. He had been obliged to improvise, by placing a pen in my hand and helping me to sign my name.

But how had he known my name?

Transportation papers and legal dockets gave me the name of ‘Boy David'. He had assumed that this was a corruption of my true San name, probably because those who had first detained me in the remand centre could not pronounce it. At any rate, signing my name had not been a problem. It was a fair guess that I could neither read nor write. He had therefore made my mark: not some Eurocentric, mark mind you, but one from my own tongue one which would make me feel at home – the sign! – which he understood resembled the sound of whiplash.

Thus: ≠.

I did not bother to correct his pronunciation. I am sorry to record that I grew rather frosty at this juncture. No piece of paper was needed to save me, I declared. I possessed the most important guarantee of all – and here I retrieved from its sacred quiver my Paper Promise from the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair. What was more, he was wrong to think of me as a mere visitor. Unlike the other guests awaiting Her Majesty's Pleasure, I was not an exile but an emissary. The official representative of the Society for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of England. I was grateful for his intervention. Though I had felt sure that, in another minute. Her Majesty's representatives would have rushed to my aid. Yes, I would stay with him, as he had so kindly intimated – but only briefly, using the time to recruit guides and porters for my expedition to London, where I would remind the Sovereign of her solemn vow. And, clearing my throat, I began reading from the Great Promise.

He begged me to stop. It would do no good.

Rather dismayed, I now took from my brown suitcase samples of my special gifts; I showed him the three choice poisons and the ceremonial digging sticks included for the Great She-Elephant.

He waved them away with the weary gesture of a sick man scaring flies. I was not free. Certainly not. He had won me a temporary reprieve while my case for asylum was considered. But I should not place too much store by my good fortune. He patted my head and again called me his poor deluded son.

It seems there is a custom among their holy men of referring to all and sundry in familial terms: father, son, sister, mother – kinship terms often used by them in a very casual fashion. Yet I soon realized that they have a very vague idea of the patterns of kinship. Perhaps they understood something of them once, but the memory has faded like the duiker's urine in the desert. For instance, they know nothing of joking partners, as we do. Their system appears functional to the point of awkwardness: all foreigners are regarded as avoidance partners; all related natives are held to be joking partners, or kith and kin. Or, as they say, in their economical way, the world is divided into ‘Them' and ‘Us'. This is, in our terms, a crude distinction, but it seems they know no other.

Such gifts were worthless, came the implacable reply, either to buy my way among the tribes, or to sweeten the Royal Heart. And the only piece of paper worth a damn was the one to which we had signed my name and given my agreement.

But to what, I wondered with growing unease, had I agreed?

His answer astonished me. It seemed that I had sworn that were I to be sent back to my beloved Karoo, I would almost certainly be murdered by white farmers. As so many
of my kind had been in the past. The thought of this crime now moved the grounded ex-Bishop so greatly he was obliged to stop the car and weep by the roadside for some minutes. If he could save
one
innocent wretch from massacre by white farmers, he would not have lived in vain.

I appreciated his concern. But, for the sake of accuracy, he should know it was as likely I would be murdered by black as by white farmers. Things were changing in the Karoo. In the past it had been customary to kill only members of other groups, but, under the new dispensation, people were free to kill members of their own group.

These were, agreed Edward Farebrother, undoubtedly small, significant advances in my country. But we should not give way to facile optimism. Certainly there were straws in the wind. But we should be careful not to run before we could walk. Or there would be tears before bedtime. Only that very morning news had reached him that gunmen had burst into a church service and sprayed worshippers with bullets. Feelings of horror, outrage, pain and grief overwhelmed him. For the first time in many years, since his faith in God had become as faint as the stars in the dawn sky, he had cried to the heavens to punish men so evil they would murder black people at prayer.

Later that day he had learnt that the dead were not black, after all, but white. More unexpected still: their killers were black.

For some hours, cried the good ex-Bishop, his joy blazed like a comet. Things truly were changing in my country. It seemed as if God (even if he did not truly exist), for so long deaf to his entreaties, had regained his hearing. Only his stiff knees, unaccustomed as he was to sustained prayer, together with unseasonably sharp weather, had prevented the grounded cleric from running into the streets to proclaim a miracle!

But a dozen dead whites did not mean the tide was on the turn. As the proverb said: ‘One swallow does not make a summer.'

It would be foolhardy to risk my life in my own country when England offered me safe, civilized asylum. That was what we must fight for: the right to remain. Though he had saved me from deportation, my stay of execution was temporary. We must now convince the authorities that my application was genuine. And that was why we had given a sworn testimony that my life was forfeit should I be returned to my country.

In order to win my release into his safe-keeping, he had made further declarations: he promised to provide lodgings, to stand good for food and clothes and medicines while my application was being considered, to hold in a safe place my air ticket and my passport. He swore that, if injured, or ill, I would be treated at his expense. And should I outstay my welcome by a single day, he would hand me over to the authorities for immediate expulsion.

As to my dreams of calling on the Monarch, well, we must proceed cautiously. My mission had his full support. But it was a tough assignment. If I wished to approach the Palace, there were ways of doing so. When conditions were ripe. In the fullness of time. In the meantime, he advised me to listen and learn. To wait and see. To pause and reflect. To look and learn.

And so I did as he bade, sure that in the former flying Bishop I had found a friend. I told him I was prepared to wait. A hunter who finds the waterhole dry must be able to wait. Patience is the mother of rain.

*

In the next weeks, I discovered that to live in England requires a kind of resolution that people from older, freer cultures know little about. It is as if a man had to spend his life buried up to his neck in an ant-heap. The sky is lowered like a roof, grey and grooved, until it slopes across the top of your head in exactly the same way as do our strips of corrugated iron, which we lean against the side of the donkey cart at night, and then crawl into the crowded dark. But, fortunately, being accustomed to nothing better, they have adapted to conditions which would destroy people accustomed to freedom, light and air.