Darkest England (23 page)

Beatrice asked the purpose of this penile fenestration. Jade intimated that she would welcome the application of some similar procedure to the Lord of the Castle. And Tracy just stared.

Among certain Red People, it was the custom, I told my fascinated listeners, removing the quill and replacing it behind my ear, when a boy came of age, to have the spike inserted and to wear it whenever the member was not in use. The porcupine quill was the sharpest dart known in nature and a gift of the daughter-in-law of our god Kaggen, the praying mantis. She was given these admirable darts to protect herself against the hunger of her father Kwhai-hem, for, without this essential armour, the All-Devourer would have gobbled her whole. The test of pain was a measure of the endurance of the hunter; I was sure her people had some similar custom.

Beatrice corrected me. Pain was used less as a test of endurance, and more as an aid to sexual stimulation. Many males were incapable of arousal except by inflicting pain on women. I might have noticed that in their culture, bound into the notion of romance and marriage, was the expectation of assault.

Remembering, with a pang, my first exposure to Beth Farebrother, I said I had noticed it rather early on.

Tracy said that among some classes of indigenous male, inflicting pain on women took the form of beatings, strangulation or even murder. Or variations on these themes. And it was seen as quite natural. Often it was the only way of achieving enjoyment. On the other hand, more expensively educated males preferred to inflict pain on themselves.

Among such males, said Jade, you often found that the preferred practice was to do without women at all. Either by confining relationships to members of your own sex, a custom widely encouraged in the best schools, with the male taking over the woman's role.

Or, as an alternative, Beatrice continued, by taking over the woman's role oneself. This was generally done by stripping naked and donning one or other intimate item of female underwear, tying a rope around one's throat, then, after covering the head with a plastic bag and attaching the rope or ligature to some handy household fixture, such as the curtain rail or the banisters, leaping into space. This method of arousal sometimes achieved the degree of lift which my
qhwai-xkhwe
maintained so effortlessly.

But sure, I objected, this risked strangulation?

That was just the point, replied Beatrice. A miscalculation could be fatal. The risk attracted many ambitious men, or ‘high flyers', as they were called, for obvious reasons. Those who failed perished. But those who succeeded in these solitary practices often went on to make considerable names for themselves in politics. It was a code of conduct: better-bred men did not strangle their wives, they preferred to strangle themselves.

I said I understood the code of conduct, but since death was the result in either case, I could not see the distinction.

Perhaps not, said Victoria, but that was because I was not English.

But now Beatrice announced that it was time for their experiment. The hypothesis advanced by the Science Group was as follows: if my
qhwai-xkhwe
was employed for a number of times successively, it was bound to slacken. This theory had been vigorously debated. Now the time had come to put the theory to the test.

Before the experiment began there took place what I suppose I must describe as their equivalent of the gift-giving ceremony. However, it was not as with us, where the lover will present his desired one with the gift of a tortoiseshell, or a springbuck skin, or shoot little love arrows in her direction. No, they presented me with a little rubber hood, or balloon, smaller than, but shaped rather like, the bladders of goats that our children use for footballs.

When locals were about to copulate they rarely observed these formalities. Tracy explained.

But as I was from Africa, said Victoria, certain precautions needed to be taken. Terrible afflictions had spread from my country and laid low many of their people who had no resistance to the plagues.

This is something which must weigh heavily on our hearts. How many European nations have been decimated by our diseases? Without any resistance, these simple souls perished like flying ants. Was it not from the Countries of the Sun that the Black Death had come? And venereal disease? Now another disease struck them down. For which we must again accept responsibility.

So I wore my little hood with gratitude. It was a shade of fiery red, giving the lie to those who claim that these people have no great liking for bright colour. It was Tracy, so good with her hands, who fitted the device, slipping it
over my
qhwai-xkhwe
with the practised ease of the true scientist. And I could not help thinking, when I looked, that I rivalled in hue the tubular flower of the flame-lily.

Each wifeling in turn now removed her clothing and the experiment began in earnest. I had just time to notice an interesting physiological difference between their women and ours. They have no natural apron of skin, covering the tunnel of children,
¹
the entrance to which is more hirsute than we are accustomed to.

But I had no further time for reflection. The experiment was in full swing, with each scientist attempting to assess whether, when exposed to regular and rhythmic stress, my
qhwai-xkhwe
might eventually flag and fall, and, finding to their mounting excitement that what went up did not always come down, they recorded their discoveries in cries of joy.

As for myself, the passive partner in these experiments, I did the only thing possible. I lay back and thought of Bushmanland.

As I lay resting the following morning, after a long night of concentrated experiment, I was surprised by a visit from the Lord. His upper lip looked somewhat stiffer than usual. Staring down at me as I lay in my ship of a bed, he expressed the hope that I had not been too bored in his absence.

I replied that his womenfolk had been kind enough to include me in discussions of a scientific nature.

He seemed pleased. His wifelings had been chosen for their inquiring minds. Not the sort of women who lay
back and left it all to the chaps. Not at all. The sorts of people who rolled up their sleeves and got down to it. By George, yes.

He seemed very friendly. And of my close scientific cooperation with the Scientific Group he appeared happily ignorant. Far from exhibiting any animus towards me, on the contrary, the Lord of Goodlove announced that he proposed to honour me by giving me a privileged position for the great hunt which was to take place on Fox Wednesday.

But, remembering my pain the last time I had witnessed this particular event, I begged to be excused.

The Lord was eloquent in his plea that I take part. Surely I would not disappoint him? My hunting brother? From me he had learnt the hunting rites of the San, killed his first giraffe and supped on its brain. Now he was offering to repay my kindness by introducing me, at first hand, to one of the most ancient of English ceremonies.

He urged me to think of those who suffer among my people – of the /Xam people of the Cape, gobbled down like ant larvae, by the invaders black and white. Vanished they are from the land to which they belonged, he reminded me, fled like water in a thirsty time!

How could I refuse? Put like that. For, after all, if we do not support their traditions, will we not have only ourselves to blame if one day such specimens of traditional English rites vanish as surely as the hunters of Bushmanland? Where today are our medicine ceremonies of childhood? Who beats the drum when a girl has her first issue of blood? Where is the solemn naming of the fountain by the father in the presence of the son to whom it is being given? Who can remember the respect-names of the animals? Who knows the secrets of rain-making? Where is the Trance
Dance? Who observes our food taboos – that woman will eat no part of the red cat, that children must not taste the tip of the springbucks tail? That no one shall taste the jackal in case they become cowardly like him? Or the baboon because he is too much like us?

Very well – I told him – I would attend, but I would not hunt. I would watch, but I would not kill. This he agreed to very happily.

He stood me in a fine position just over the brow of a little hill, where I could not see the Castle any longer but where, he assured me, the quarry must pass, when he had been flushed into the open. I would see him run before my very nose.

We were brother hunters, the Lord proclaimed. I had helped him to bag his first giraffe. He would repay me now with my first fox's brush!

But what would I do with the tail, I wondered, in that green field, on that glorious morning? Hunters, when they are true, need their quarry more than it needs them. They love what they kill. But these people hunted what they hated, much as they did in love and marriage.

I mused on these things in the early morning light, waiting to see the black helmets and pink coats come over the hill, looking for all the world like the red tubular tips of the aloes that stride like men across the Karoo. I heard the distant baying of hounds and the far-off cracked notes of the hunting horn. The call of the hounds grew louder, and I saw the pack begin to climb the long, green slope where we had killed our first giraffe. Behind them came the huntsmen. The sun shone on the little bugle that Lord Goodlove raised to his lips. What I could not see was the fox, and I shaded my eyes for a better glimpse of the wretched quarry.

The horses' hooves drummed on the wet turf. English soil is soft and sounds well across a considerable distance. By laying an ear to it, you can read the state of the hunt while it is still afar off. The dogs were now in clear view, the pack almost hysterical. They had the scent, were heading in my direction – their jaws wide. The hunt was on to something.

Still no sign of the fox. I reminded myself that Lord Goodlove was not keen-eyed. Many was the time on our hunting expeditions when he had mistaken a hartebeest for a springbuck. But he never minded, saying it didn't matter a damn, so long as he made a kill.

Still the hounds came on. I now thought it wise to put some distance between myself and the hunt. My pace, I am pleased to say, was as good as ever. As a young man I could run down a springbuck. I am no longer fleet, but I am still fast enough to outstrip the hounds they like to use, given some small advantage. I increased my pace as I moved past the giraffes' enclosure and at the same time shifted my direction, aiming for the small wood. As I did so I felt the pack behind me change direction too. I heard the cracked bugle sound again. There was no doubt in my mind now. The dogs, the horses, the hunters, these things were aimed at me. Some mistake had been made. After all, the English redcoats in our land had been fooled by the appearance of the red-tipped aloes striding across the land and mistaken them for black warriors. My skin prickled the way it does when the sharp-toothed, red hair-clipper spider feasts on a man's curls when he lies asleep at night. If the English had mistaken aloes for Xhosas, I told myself, why shouldn't this hunting party now mistake a Bushman for a fox?

The foremost dogs were closer now. The little dark wood still sat way up the incline, and I was conscious that
I was slowing. The dogs were faster than I on the hill. And I knew my little lead was vanishing. I remembered the fever of the dogs when at last they close on their quarry. I remembered the cries of the Red Man as he was torn to pieces by the intoxicated hounds. I thought how sad it would be if I should perish this way, on green, foreign soil, without ever having delivered my message to their Queen, my notes gone, my travels among the English buried with me, my very memory lost in the darkness of this island.

I reached the safety of the little wood ahead of the field. Here, perhaps, was some chance to go to ground. Many a time have I tunnelled into the ant-bear's hole. The badger's lair would be no different. Of course, the creature itself might object, but what with the clamour of the hounds above ground, he might not care to ask too closely why another should want to share his home.

Alas, for the luck of the Bushman! The badger sets I found without trouble. But the entrances were firmly barred against me. Too late I recalled that this was the custom of the Master of the Goodlove Hunt: to block the entrances before the sport began. Another ancient hunters' tradition.

This, then, was a place of death. The badgers sealed in their sets would die slowly. The fox, denied refuge, would go more quickly. I turned at bay and I took from my quiver an arrow. They were too many, I knew that. They had always been too many. But some, at least, would die with me.

It was then that the wood erupted into a screaming, exploding, whistling, jeering, ratcheting, hooting, firecracker world. The hounds yelped and snarled and turned tail. The horses, coming up fast behind, shied and several threw their riders. I saw Lord Goodlove fall slowly, as if he was used to this, and his cracked little bugle described an
arc of the sort you still see when the Evening Star fades from the sky at the first light and falls into the veld, ready to be born again the next night.

The huntsmen were being attacked by an army who came out of the trees and blew whistles and banged drums and rolled beneath the horses' feet the sort of marbles that children play with. I felt myself seized by the hair and passed from hand to hand, from man to man, above the heads of the warriors, down the line, until I was deposited safely in the rear. Who my rescuers were I had no idea, except to know that they had saved me from the jaws of the hounds.

As I was carried off by the raiding party, I heard someone say in tones perfectly throbbing with satisfaction that the hunters of Goodlove Castle would rue this day for a long time; that the Lord himself would be as sick as a parrot; that there was after all, perhaps, goodness and justice and peace in the world; that the Goodlove hunt was spitting blood and a damn good thing too because the travellers of Happy Common had just stolen their fox.

They took me to their camp. A long line of ancient vehicles in a muddy field. There I was directed to one I took to be their king or chief or clan captain, for he lived in a vehicle much grander than all the others. The sort of magnificent conveyance usually seen only among the very rich Karoo farmers when they set off for their holidays on the Cape coast. It had a water tank on the roof, a bed, a stove, a chair; it was an entire house on wheels. I knew as soon as I set eyes on the visitor that here was a luxurious traveller, a rich explorer, and not one at his wits' end like me. I was suddenly very conscious of my poor appearance. Living, as I had done for weeks now, in the green veld of Goodlove Castle among the giraffe and the lion and the
tiger, I was acutely aware of how I must look to this handsome stranger, in my short skin skirt, my cloak and my spear.