Darkest England (18 page)

Such was the transformation in Beth – from a swathed female in her father's shoes to this shining creature, living in a blue tent pitched near the box hedge in an English country garden. But there was something else. In place of the shy, tortured woman who never showed herself except when she was sure no one could see her, there arose a gleaming beauty, listening raptly to the stories I told her of my people, and showing her breasts to the world in the way God intended. In short, it could be said that Beth possessed something I had not seen in her before: she was happy.

Others were not. Young males in the village alehouse, the Brass Monkey, grew increasingly noisy as tales of Beth's new life spread. Night after night I heard the bang of the drums, as young bloods swayed and swooned and stamped to a beat so primal, so savage, we may trace its origins to the beginning of the world – and the publican, fearing some form of raid or attack, sent a runner to the Bishop's house, warning him that the natives were growing restless and begging him to keep his daughter out of the garden. But she would have none of it. She was free at last, she told her father.

Beth was eager to experience all the customs of real life as it was lived by the Red People – all, that is, but one: she preferred food from the refrigerator to anything I caught for her.

I sympathized. After all, their diet is not one we would find very agreeable. And they have irrational distastes. Although, like us, they prefer meat above anything else. Yet they turn up their noses at caterpillars. The English caterpillar,
I can confirm, lightly fried, is the equal of anything I have tasted in Africa. Strange to tell, they know nothing of the delicacy of iguana meat and do not even cook and eat the small lizards to be found on the island. Honey, they take as we do, though they seldom eat it directly from the comb. And they will pass it amongst themselves in a way which our people would perhaps find promiscuous. They make no beer from honey, though legend has it that their forefathers once made a liquor based on honey, as we do. If so, they have lost the art.

The news that Boy David was ‘living rough', as they put it, and foraging for grubs, roots and tubers, became the talk of the village. Guess what Dave's having for dinner, I heard them calling. Come, quick! And in no time at all a gaping audience crowded the garden.

I enjoyed their dismay; I confess it. When a swarm of flying ants passed through the garden I caught several handfuls of these succulent little titbits and fed on them before an astonished crowd of children, farmers and old women, some of whom were audibly upset at the sight.

When word spread that the Bushman was eating termites, so many villagers crowded into the garden the Bishop made them enter in relays. The children were particularly entranced, pretending to gag into the bushes and shouting encouragement. To them, it was a kind of repulsive magic. I felt quite ashamed of myself afterwards. Your average native is a credulous soul; he
wishes
to believe. For him it is Bushman magic. And although there is good sport in this, I cannot believe it anything but cruel to play upon their childlike natures.

To begin with it was a game, pure and simple, as well as a relief, this brief return to the diet of my country. But I was not expecting anyone else to enter the spirit of my
game. What, then, was I to make of the ostrich egg that mysteriously appeared outside my shelter one day, donated by some nocturnal visitor who knew something of hunting, for he left no spoor on the wet grass of dawn, having dragged a broom over his tracks to erase them?

I looked at that huge, pearly shell, so like the moon. So perfect it could only come from the gods, who, in their goodness, pity the people of the world who must go on two legs. So they made another two-legged person. The ostrich. Who else runs so fast? Who else roars so loudly that even the hunting lion stops to listen? Who kicks the sniffing hyena in the head? Who is the fiercest defender of its baby against everything from snakes to elephants? Who first learnt about fire and would have kept the secret to himself, hidden in his warm armpit, had the scheming god Heisib not known how the ostrich loves to dance? They danced together, Heisib and the ostrich, and the clever god waited until the ostrich's head began spinning from the dance and his arms lifted to the sky and then, from deep in his armpit, Heisib plucked the ostrich gold, the fire that warms the Men of Men.

Now, I should have asked myself: who would give me such a present? And where in England ostriches lived and laid? And what my visitor's motives might have been. I should have heeded good Farebrother's warning, when I called him to see my prize, and he urged me to return to my bed indoors; it might be safer. He had done what he could to protect me from the less agreeable aspects of English life, but – and he jerked his dark, sharp locks at the world beyond his garden – it was a jungle out there, and while most people I met were basically decent, kindly folk who were beginning to warm to me, he wouldn't fancy my chances if I ran into a horse of a different colour.

But I did not ask. Or reflect. I simply rejoiced. It does not do to question a gift fallen from Heaven. And to waste food is to make hunger your brother. And so, beneath the curious eyes of the neighbours, I prepared a meal.

First, I drilled a hole in the roof of the egg, using the sharpened point of a rose-stem. Next, I scooped in the rather damp earth a hollow, and in the hollow I built a fire of small twigs. Lifting the egg, I carefully poured the belly of it into the sandy hollow where my fire had folded itself into a bed of tasty ash and soon the wonderful aroma that the ostrich omelette alone possesses began floating in the air, sufficiently strongly for even their weak, untutored nostrils to take hold of the fruit of it. Lest there be any misunderstanding of the delight to come, I engaged in a little dumbshow, rubbing my belly and smacking my lips.

I drew from my ashy oven a few minutes later a soft and steaming marvel, a fleshy loaf baked to perfection, salted with a little ash, and offered it to the watchers. But they grimaced and gagged. I heard it said that my omelette was poison; and some covered the eyes of their children when I ate a little to show how good it was.

I offered a slice to Edward Farebrother, but he frowned and declined. Only Beth was prepared to try my fine omelette. That was a grave mistake. Ever afterwards this dinner of innocent golden meat was seen by her father as some horrid magical spell that had changed his daughter from a decent woman of ordinary tastes and sensible disposition into a freak.

Between Beth and her father relations began to sour. She taught me this charm or spell which I was to say out loud in order to ward off the hostility of the villagers: you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.

I said it out loud, but it failed to convince.

Beth now rounded on our noisy audience, extending the debate beyond the egg in question by declaring that she would also be breaking the mould, new ground, and, for the record, she would be breaking with tradition.

To which our audience replied in a great chorus: Oh, no you won't!

And Beth responded: Oh, yes I will!

I did not know it, but I was witnessing the primal ritual warfare in which the English traditionally engage before any transformation may begin.

It is not, as I was to learn, a question of whether anything actually changes. In fact, it hardly ever does. What is important is the noise raised for and against the idea of action.

Beth's transformation began innocently.

She would visit my campfire, sit beside me and listen to tales of Kaggen the mantis and of how he, turning his eyes, big as saucers, on the sky, created the moon who is our father and also our mother.

How could this be? my student demanded. Father and mother in one? Unless the moon were also our God and so contained female and male in one person.

They have literal minds and become confused very easily when expected to think on several planes. Explanations must at all times be gentle, clear, yet firm, and present often difficult facts in an elementary, or what they call a ‘sensible', fashion. This can be taxing and often frustrating, but I can assure anyone who should follow me to these shores that your average native, with careful and patient direction, can be coaxed towards enlightenment, always provided that swift progress is not expected.

By my fireside, of an evening, I would explain, as simply as I knew how, the very complex belief of the Red People that the moon was not our God but that by the moon's light people could observe the work of God in a world which would otherwise be too dark to discern His high and holy ways. Our father the moon and our mother the sun. The lights of the great sky, lay together each night and gave birth the next day to a new sun and moon.

Who gave birth? she demanded.

I replied, the moon, and she was instantly cast down because that did not sound very sensible to her, as I had said the moon was our father.

You cannot give to people who have lacked essential religion for centuries the elements of the true faith in a few encounters beside a campfire. In my estimation, the reintroduction of these people to the essentials of true polytheism is possible. It can be done. But it will take many years. Missionaries. Dedication. In that English country garden, I preferred to concentrate on my own expedition, which showed alarming signs of having become bogged down.

Beth asked about dancing, and I explained to her the beauties of the Eland Dance, which she immediately proposed that I should teach her. Now, this presented certain practical difficulties, since the dance in question is usually held at the hut of a girls maternal grandmother, at the moment when she is ready to be initiated into the customs of the band.

To the resourceful Beth the missing grandmother would be no problem. She cheerily assured me that she knew just the person to stand in for her.

He came. He sat in Beth's blue pup tent, and he agreed to wear a shawl over his shoulders to signify his age and sex, but he refused point-blank to smoke a pipeful of strong,
black tobacco, even though I pointed out that, in real life, Beth's grandmother would have been doing so, as she awaited the arrival of the eland bull. At this eminently sensible encouragement, I am afraid that Mr Farebrother quite broke down.

A plaintive litany of woe issued from beneath the shawl. Little Musing was scandalized by Beth's behaviour. If the villagers were upset, the neighbours were livid. Peter the Birdman was frightfully concerned about his crows, which roosted in ever smaller numbers in the episcopal elms. The crows had declined since Peter waged a one-man war in their defence against the gamekeepers who killed goshawks. Gamekeepers did so because goshawks attacked their pheasants. Now, thanks to Peter's war against gamekeepers, goshawks multiplied. Unfortunately, goshawks had been attacking his crows. His crows had been attacking the nests of game birds. Mayhem was everywhere and matters were not helped by two semi-naked people running around the garden feasting on insects. If human beings belonged to a higher order of life than birds – Peter the Birdman protested – then it was their duty to set an example.

And Julia had complained to Miss Desdemona, our rent collector, that the former Bishop appeared to be carrying out some form of agricultural activity in his garden and she felt sure this must be against the terms of his lease and would be prohibited under local bye-laws; what was more, the smoke from my fire got in her washing; and when she had rented a house from the Lord of Goodlove Castle, she hardly expected to find herself living beside a gypsy encampent.

I see, looking back, that I paid too little attention to the emotions aroused by my removal to the garden.

I was happy, however, to have such an adept pupil. And Beth was too obsessed with learning the steps for the Eland Dance, which required her to move in a figure-of-eight formation, circling the fire and her hut, where her beshawled father sat morosely on the ground, asking plaintively if it was all over yet.

Now I entered the dance, as the eland bull himself, lifting my forefingers above each temple, pawing the ground and panting in pursuit of my lovely, fat eland, while she ran before me, lifting her skirt from time to time to expose her magnificent buttocks. Have you ever seen two fat rain clouds, bursting with the liquid of life, bowling along the horizon, pushed by a stiff breeze which palpitates and juggles and kneads these precious containers so that they seem to throb and quiver with the lovely weight they contain? Well, that is the sight I saw before me as Beth, lifting her skirt as if she had been doing this all her life, disappeared around the back of the blue pup tent with the eland bull in pawing, bellowing, stabbing pursuit.

All was happiness – until the good ex-Bishop, suddenly jumping up and ripping off his shawl as we were passing his hut for the seventh time, demanded that I follow him into the house for he wished to have a word with me, in the strictest confidence. Leaving the lovely eland dismayed in the garden, I adjusted my loin-cloth and followed him into his study, where he sat behind his desk, though he left me standing while asking me what my intentions were concerning his daughter.

I did not understand his question and told him so.

Very well, he replied in a grating voice, he would spell it out for me. I was chasing his daughter around the garden clad only in a leather loin-cloth; she wore a skirt not much larger; and, to boot, my
qhwai-xkhwe
was in a
state which left him in little doubt as to my physical ambitions.

I had to fight to control my face. How very instructive it is to see that they assume, always, that their worst characteristics are present in others. Because women in England were terrified of rape, murder, various cruelties at the hands of their menfolk, the ex-Bishop was certain that I felt for his daughter a form of hatred which, from what I understood him to imply, far from making me detest her, was, in English terms, a prelude to love and therefore could, and would, be followed by some liaison. As if this was how they conducted their love affairs – cruelty, assault and abuse being both the forerunners of, and accompaniment to, the married state.