Darkest England (20 page)

Strange are the meetings that evoke memories of one's native land! And make a terrible joy. The steel mesh, the gun and the burly driver, far from depressing me, gave me a surge of happy recognition. How many times had I not made a similar journey? Trussed hand and foot, on the floor of a police van? Homesickness of a kind replaced my fear and, finding my voice, I bade my kidnapper a loud Good Day!

Swearing a mighty oath to the founder of his religion, he brought the van to a skidding halt. Hurrying from his seat, he threw open the rear doors of my prison, and stared at me in astonished delight.

A huge man, dressed in oily hunter's uniform,
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all rough green, from boots to hat. Much of his head seemed made of hair, out of which his face peered like a rabbit caught in a thorn-bush; a great brassy thatch, like the upside-down-tree
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which wears its roots on its head; below his jaw, it trailed like the branches of the willow which stoops to wash its face in a waterhole.

Indeed, this paragon was bedecked, as Kaggen is my witness, with as much hair below his head as above, it hung in a curtain from his chin, so dense small fowl might happily have nested there. Here then was a warrior as bold in his plumage and his pride as in the bloodcurdling ferocity of his manners. He spoke as if raised up on some lofty pedestal, from which eminence he was accustomed to addressing not only the hard of hearing, but also the weak of eye, for he spoke boomingly, moving his lips around his words very slowly, followed by a belligerent gleam of the eyes, as if his words were wasted on his audience far below. His teeth flashed gold. He was, I swear, as fine an English buck as ever I saw. Even if I was obliged to observe this choice specimen from an enforced recumbancy upon the cold steel floor of his vehicle.

Let me say, too, that I managed, discomfited though I was, to solve several small mysteries about the natives. Firstly, it is claimed that it is only the English abroad who are fat. Everyone will be familiar with the old maxim – if you would war with the English do it after dinner. For as the !Kung rightly observed, they eat not to live but to sleep. They are observably amongst the most adipose of the pale strangers who invaded our land. However it was long believed by our sages that in their own country they were bred for running and hunting, as are proper people everywhere. I can confirm that this is not the case. They tend to the rotund, even in their natural habitat. My captor was shaped rather like the blood pudding we make of the giraffe's second stomach; much liquid inside a thin skin. His girth was as round as the moon's, as full as the flooded waterhole's, as prodigious as that of the hippopotamus. We may infer that this innate tendency to spread, corporeally as well as territorially, is no less pronounced At Home, than
Abroad. And that, in their order of values, weight is a component of status.

Then, his colour. I stress that only his uniform or cloak, vest and boots, were green. We were familiar from childhood with tales that there lived in England troops of green men, hairy and wild, half-gods, half-apes, who fed on honied liquor in forests of oak and alder, and worked magic or murder, as primal whim moved them. It seems to me entirely probable that our misinformation about such verdant manikins, gnomes, wodwos or forest sprites, is based on tales related by travellers after encountering individuals such as the prodigy who shot and imprisoned me. I can well understand that myth may be the only refuge of a shocked sensibility, for truly one imagines, on first meeting certain varieties of native, that one had discovered some new and alarming species, only distantly related – if at all – to civilized beings.

Watching this enormous distended barrel examining me, I was suddenly made aware of the reason way this island race is fond of referring to their land as ‘the old country'. The island is full of old people! My hunter was no exception. At an age when most men are beside the campfire or have long since departed to the land of locusts beyond the Orange River, elderly souls continue to pretend that they are as flush full of youth as young lions: cheer themselves for avoiding at home the corruption, venality and debauchery rife in less fortunate lands across the water; declare they will fight like tigers if Johnny Foreigner dare show his face, and do almost anything to maintain the illusion of youth and strength. And having seen the fate meted out to the old of the tribe I think we can understand why this should be so.

These fruitful reflections were interrupted by my captor, rifle in hand, looming above me like an overfull raincloud
and addressing me as if I were an entire tribe, not a trussed and helpless prisoner on the floor of his van. He demanded my name and, when I answered, his delight increased all the more. With trembling finger he lifted my upper lip and studied my teeth, as we do with a donkey to determine its age; prodded my tongue, as if scarcely believing that I had the power of speech; and fell to examining my bow, quiver and arrows. Fortunately, he did not think to look inside my hat.

Introducing himself as Goodlove, Lord of all I surveyed, he declared he would have been happy to shake my paw, had said paw been available. But perhaps I might like to confirm that I was, in fact, by golly, a true specimen of the San people? One of the far-flung, far-gone, decimated bands of foragers who inhabited the hot, dry wastes of Southern Africa?

I replied that I preferred plainer speech. The term ‘San' meant no more than a rogue and vagabond. I was a Bushman.

And from which bushy region, precisely, did I hail?

To such a strange question, I gave the obvious answer: from Home.
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Out of the hairy hole of his mouth a laugh clapped like happy thunder. From henceforth, he vowed, my home would be in Goodlove Castle.

When Farebrother had announced that he had acquired a genuine Bushman, he'd laughed. To be frank, he'd yelled his head off. Farebrother might be a living bridge, a descending angel amongst the dregs and the destitute and all that. But blind. A busted flush – not so? A floored flier; the sort of bloke who could not recognize a real San hunter-gatherer if one bit him in the backside. He might be sound in the God department, but in the matter of the Life of the True Pulse, the holy originals of existence, he was a joke. So how could one be sure of my authenticity?

At last I began to understand. A test had been devised?

A most efficient test, confirmed the bearded one. Only a genuine specimen of the San people would have cooked that ostrich egg as I had done. By their omelettes ye shall know them, my captor intoned. My cooking skills had given me plain away. After that it was only a matter of acquisition. He had offered Farebrother large rewards, but the batty old apostle had turned them down. So he had watched and waited.

I remembered the hidden watcher observing my movements. The eyes in the darkness. And now here he was. A wild and booming man who shot passers-by and locked them in the back of his police van.

Farebrother, said the hairy gunman, had rejected all offers. He had gone bloody religious on him. Insisting that he had promised his Bushman a visit to the Queen, and it was vital that we all dealt in a fair manner with the developing world, and other stomach-churning sermons.

He had very nearly despaired of laying hands on me, said my kidnapper, when, Lord be praised! Farebrother changed his tune. Claimed that his daughter Beth was planning to run off with his San lodger. And while he was determined to keep faith with the developing world,
he was not having his daughter wed a Bushman from the Karoo who fancied his chances of marrying into a passport and living the life of Riley off the back of the family fortunes. And so on. All of which ex-Bishop Bonkers had sworn was about to happen ever since his daughter had stripped off and begun running around his garden in a mini-skirt, flaunting her not inconsiderable posterior at the moon.

It was then, said my captor, that he presented himself as the answer to a Bishop's prayer. Did I savvy?

Certainly, I had begun, as he put it, to savvy. Beth had been traded for me?

Exactly.

I had been lured into a trap.

Got it in one.

And where was Beth now?

Back home, he very devoutly hoped and prayed. In the bosom of the busted Bish. Fair exchange no robbery. And not a moment too soon. Appalling woman.

And all this – he waved a hand towards the horizon – was mine. His estate was at my disposal. To hunter-gather in to my heart's content.

I was about to reject his dubious offer when I seemed, once more, to lose consciousness. For a moment I felt as one does in the Trance Dance, when the spirits of the animals, who were once people, rise up and dance in your heart. For I beheld an unbelievable sight, yellow-and-black, lovely, long necks arching up as if they would bite their way through the grey clouds, so low over their graceful heads, a wondrous, impossible sight – a family of giraffe at play in the muddy green field of the Lord.

Now it was my turn to laugh in astonished joy.

And, propping me up in a corner from where I could
see better the marvels of his castle, my hairy captor leapt back into the driver's seat and we continued on our way.

We had barely set off when our vehicle was again halted, this time by a herd of elephant crossing the road. Next, as naturally as if they were galloping across the hot sand of the Karoo (rather muddy, it must be admitted, but undoubtedly the genuine bird), came a procession of ostriches, with their slow, tall step and exasperated look, turning their heads from side to side as if they had lost something of great importance.

Better still was to come. For there, grazing quietly upon a grassy incline – oh, the skip of my heart, the dance of my hooves, the swing of my dewlap – I spied a family of eland, children of Heaven, sisters of God, adorable people with their broad shoulders, fine horns, and meat for a month. No wonder I had heard the roar of the hunting lion before the dark descended: in this place was food for all! Here was Africa – in England!

More and more, they came – our people! My heart sang as there floated past, most graceful of all, a herd of flying springbuck. And I felt again, as always when hunting, the dark stripe that divides its pretty face, running, as if it were my own, from my eyes to my mouth. The buck's hair was red, which is its winter colour, the reason being to warm their blood. In our land it grows white again in spring when the sun returns. But these wore their red coats still. I felt sorry for these little persons, since all their lives in England must have seemed one long winter.

Next a flock of blue cranes, most beautiful of birds, who wear their disguises so well that you can no longer see – unless you know the truth – that once long ago they were girls, in the Early Time when animals were still people; yet the truth is there to be spied in their long thin necks,
delicate voices, the modest trailing of their blue-grey tail feathers along the ground, like women sweeping the earth. Elder sisters of the god Kaggen, protector of children, friends of frogs.

A miracle! That great-walled, black-gated park teemed with our relatives from Africa. Perhaps the grass was too green, the sky too low, the rain too frequent and the mud too plentiful; but, even so, here were baboons who like to imitate men, and then attack them for laughing at their crooked tails or their straight foreheads. Hyena, which we do not eat. And hartebeest, the heart of which pregnant women may not eat. Hartebeest which is the prey, some say, that the moon hunts and from whose hide makes a new cloak for himself; but each morning the moon's troublesome wife plucks and fidgets with the new coat, fraying it down to nothing in no time at all – so the moon must be out again each night hunting a new cloak.

The Lord of Goodlove Castle declared himself delighted by my delight. He clapped me on my shoulder, saying he welcomed me as one conservationist to another. He had dedicated his energies and his fortune to preserving, within the safe enclosure of Goodlove Castle, all creatures who lived the life of the True Pulse. He collected not only endangered specimens from Africa, he had also been instrumental – in his own small way – in rescuing many indigenous forms of island life as well.

Not animals alone, but where there rarity warranted it he conserved human specimens also. He drove me now to the brow of a small hill from where we looked down upon a village – a poor place, stone huts, blackened by smoke, occupied by shuffling figures wearing orange helmets over curiously begrimed, sooty faces.

He had built for these remnants an original village, the
sort of habitat only they lived in, and therein he gave sanctuary to a community who were once to be found – if I could believe it! – in vigorous breeding colonies throughout England. Fearsome warriors. Capable, in their prime, of bringing the kingdom to a standstill, but now, alas, almost extinct. They had once lived in happy warrens, delving deep underground like moles to extract a treasure no one today wanted any longer. Very sad. These men had been a terrifically successful example of adaptation to harsh habitats. But their holes had been closed by an uncaring generation, their skills despised. And with the destruction of their environment, this fine example of English wild life – the miners – had dwindled until they existed only in isolated pockets. Why, cried the Lord, there were today English children who had never seen a miner in his natural habitat! Hence his decision to set up this protected haven in the grounds of Goodlove Castle.

I was moved by his passion. I was reminded, by these remaining miners, very much of our white rhino, the slaughter of which people felt able to oppose only after the bulk of the tribe had been destroyed. And there was the black-maned lion of the Karoo, extinct for want of wisdom.

Exactly! the Lord agreed. And the thing was to get in first, before it was too late. Many other groups were threatened too. They would go the same way as the quagga, the dodo and the miner if we were not bloody careful.

He was very concerned, for example, at the poor survival rates of the traditional English clergyman. He planned an ecclesiastical reserve where these gentle, inoffensive creatures might safely graze, in all their vivid plumage, free from harassment. Numbers had shrunk so drastically, they were as endangered as the red squirrel or the Iberian wolf or the black-maned lion of the Karoo. He had found it
impossible, thus far, to locate suitable breeding pairs. But he would scour the kingdom, for English life would be immeasurably impoverished without the local vicar – a horrible thought: as bad as England without muffins or the monarchy!