Darkest England (5 page)

I remember nothing of my journey except that I was provided with several plates of food, stored in a kind of plastic case, together with a collection of useful plastic tools, which I stowed beneath my seat. Thus it was that I arrived in London, England, in the gloomy hours of the early morning, consulting the label on the sleeve of my new grey suit, carrying my fine new suitcase and shivering a little, for this was springtime.

Chapter Two

The aerodrome of the English is very big: at least twice the size of the landing field outside Lutherburg. It will seem that I say the twisted thing when I write that not since the last hunting season, when farmers from across the Cape descended on the Karoo for the annual springbuck hunt, landing like flocks of Egyptian geese on the gravel strip beside the Lutherburg municipal shooting range, have I seen so many aircraft.

Most amazingly, our craft did not make low passes over the field, as is the custom, but descended directly. This puzzled me until I reached the following conclusion. The machine need not first dive on the field, as is usual in my country, since there are no donkeys, grazing on the landing strip, that must be sent running before the plane can land.

During our descent I noticed what I took to be groups of pebbles scattered across the green landscape. Lying directly beneath the aircraft's path, they looked from the air for all the world like the sun-split rocks that crowd the
slopes of the low hills in the Karoo. As we dropped lower I saw that they were, in fact, thousands upon thousands of human dwellings, glued closer to each other than the cells of the honeybee. Why should people live directly beneath such roaring engines? In a moment the answer came to me. The English probably reserved their best grazing land for animals. The proof was there to be seen below me. They preferred to let their own people endure the howling, noxious tumult of the great planes rather than inflict such suffering on pets or livestock.

Was there ever such a people! As the machine swam ever closer to the ground, I told myself that David Mungo Booi would rather be an Englishman's dog than a Boer's best friend!

Thick was the sky with other craft as a pepper tree is with sparrows; they fluttered to earth like feathers. Stepping from the door of the aeroplane, we were guided along a tunnel into a shed as big, at least, as the town hall in Compromise. Inside the shed were a number of holding pens where travellers waited, much as flocks must wait before shearing. Unsure which group to join, I hesitated until a man, waving his arms like a small windmill, in the manner that shepherds command vagrant sheep, directed me into the longest line.

And in the way that beasts are guided by the farmer towards the dipping trough, so the lines were kept moving forward, scrutinized by shepherding officials who prowled the ranks, sniffing and snapping at the loiterers and maintaining strict order. It was a long time before the object of our longer line came into view:
more
officials, at tables tall as pulpits, sat in judgement on each visitor.

We, patient supplicants of the longer line, were mostly
Children of the Sun, citizens of the Old World, dusky and dun or honeyed by our father in heaven. Whereas visitors from the New World, those lands where the sun barely showed his face, were directed into the shorter line. I realized these people were related by blood and tribe to the indigenous population and, as such, expected and received special treatment, as kinship demands. I found nothing surprising in this arrangement, since this has long been a custom in my land, where the Boer rulers long ago decreed that their families should receive the best game, land and milk. Such an unexpectedly familiar sight made me ache a little for my motherland.

As happens at hunting parties and shooting parties, one finds unlikely friends. I made the acquaintance of someone quite overcome with excitement. He was a little round man, just ahead of me in the line and shaped very much like an egg, who wept silently but copiously, his tears splashing on to the floor in such a profusion that those coming after us in the line frequently slipped in the spreading pools until at last one of the herders approached him and directed him to ‘put a sock in it'. This was how I learnt his name; for the herder addressed him as ‘Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty'.

As we drew nearer to the place of scrutiny, Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty began shaking, and his tears increased. Seated at a high table, rather as a cashier in the Jackal's Dance General Dealer is enthroned upon a tall stool, the guardian of the island was studying each applicant with terrible gravity, picking through his papers in the way a baboon will groom the fur of a mate, catching a tick here and a nit there. And holding it to the light before swallowing it.

Our herder now shook his head and said if Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty did not put a sock in it, he would have
to leave the line. My companion, looking for all the world like a well-dressed ostrich egg, or a fat locust on legs, took our keeper at his word, for he immediately sat on the floor and removed one of his socks, poor affairs, holed and threadbare, and pushed it into his mouth. Then he removed the other and, with it, he began mopping up his tears.

The herder or shepherd or guardian who had occasioned this behaviour shook his head once again, and expelled the wind from his mouth in much the same sound as you will hear when the belly of the
kudu
is pierced with a hunting knife. Then he returned to his ceaseless patrolling of the line, muttering and mouthing to himself and giving every sign of his continuing displeasure. (Wind, I was to discover, is an obsession among these people. Its retention and explusion, through one or more orifices, is raised amongst the English to an art. And not only in their personal, private inspirations but, as I was to learn, also in their politics the movement of air is most important, especially in the winds of change that blow about their island kingdom and which chill and discomfit them, for they believe winds from elsewhere, the wider world, the Countries of the East, of the Sun, and of the European mainland, signify the end of all that is great. Thus do the English place enormous importance on flatulence – hot air, as they call it – used as a private recreation but also as a method of political analysis for diagnosing what is wrong with themselves.)

In the holding pens both lines, long and short, moved at their own pace towards the guardian at the high table. Looking at this fresh-faced judge I recalled that when I was a child and the Englishman rescued me from the fire and taught me to read, he showed me pictures of an angel carrying a fiery lance, sent to guard the gates of Eden after our first parents had been expelled from God's garden of
happy delights. That angelic sentry did not seem anything like as fearsome as the guardian of the gates to our English Eden, seated at his high table, wearing a sports coat of grey wool, the colour of ostrich bile, and a tie as pink as a duiker's tongue.

Beside me, my round friend wept and mopped. Hoping to comfort him, I offered him a little refreshment from my small store of provisions in the plastic case I had been given on the aircraft. We shared an apple, Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty and I, though I had difficulty in persuading him to take the sock out of his mouth.

How pleased he was to eat, having been sick with fear since leaving his homeland, which lay beyond the edge of the ocean. He came from a people, he assured me (though I had to struggle to contain my disbelief that such oddity should exist in the world), who ate no meat and whose gods exceeded the stars in the sky. His face, though as richly coloured as mine, showed none of the lines of wisdom found among our people. He looked altogether like some tall infant. I felt him to be a simple soul, lost in the world, and gave thanks in my heart that he had landed in the land of the free, which welcomes to her bosom the lost and confused and protects them like a mother lion does her whelps.

All through our meal my companion wept. But if our herders noticed his continuing distress, they chose not to remark on it. As I was to come to realize, this was one of the most cunning hunting patterns among natives of Albion; when faced with some present or future event they find unpalatable, they lift their noses to give the most marvellous simulation of ignorance. So convincing is this feigned ignorance that it is scarcely to be distinguished from the real thing. I have noticed something similar in the behaviour of
black bush pigs when faced by the ravening hyena. The pig affects ignorance even while it is being devoured. Thus it maintains its sense of superiority during its destruction. The hyena may murder the pig, but the victim never condescends to notice.

At last, my lunar friend and I stood before the high table of the recording angel. Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty, forgetting himself to be in a land where none of this was necessary, and probably imagining himself to be in his home country, faced by an official who had in his hands the power of life and death, flung himself on his knees and began kissing the guardian's hand. The young man blushed very red at this; the strolling herders in the holding pens smiled to see this expression of devotion, and called cheerily, asking if perhaps my poor moon friend had mistaken the guardian of England for the King of Bongo-Bongo-Land? (As I was to discover, they were fascinated by this distant country, to which they frequently referred in tones of astonishment and awe. I am of the opinion that since David Livingstone's travels through Bonga's country, west of the Zambesi, Bonga's name seemed to have stuck in English folk memory in its simplified or corrupted form of ‘Bongo-Bongo'.)

We stood patiently before the official. Here was my first Englishman and I was determined to study him carefully. A young specimen, his skin was of the faintest pink, such as you may see in the last of the sun as it sets over the Snow Mountains. The surface of his face was pitted and somewhat pustular. Later I was to discover that his complexion is something that many of them strive to achieve from babyhood, often devoting themselves to a special diet of fat, sugar and fried potatoes, which, though we might find it nauseating, is highly popular. Clearly he must have shown
great promise in the schools to have been put in this position of authority so young. One had only to see how expertly he extracted his hands from the desperate lips of my terrified companion. It was evidently a custom among them that those employed by the Crown should wield considerable power with very little or, better still, no experience whatsoever. This undoubtedly instils modesty and reminds them of their debt to their Sovereign. His face was soft and long, and much of it appeared to have slipped beneath his chin, where, you might say, it waited on developments. He wore, through his left nostril, three small gold rings, which I took to be a sign of his Royal Service.

When I showed him my Paper Promise with the great Royal Seal, and read sections of it to him, his eyes grew large, and an expression of tender pain crossed his face. He sctratched his hair in the way a child will do when it searches for lice. And when he spoke, his voice was high and trembling, like the cry of the
kiewiet
.

He agreed that my promise had indeed been signed by the Queen Empress and sent to her beloved San of the Karoo. The old She-Elephant had made many such promises. That was a Royal Tradition. And her children, kings and queens in their turn, had given similar promises to many people in colonies, dominions and protectorates on which the sun did not set. But that had been in distant lands in olden times. For, like a true mother of mountains, the Queen Empress had gathered half the world at her feet and looked out over oceans. But she had never intended that her distant children would all come to visit her one day. In ancient English Royal Tradition, one might visit others, but others did not visit one.

But if people who did not know the rules suddenly turned up on one's doorstep, claiming kinship, then it
became necessary to distinguish between sheep and goats, truth-tellers and liars, friends and frauds. Did I take his point? If one allowed into the country every Tom, Dick and Harry one could shake a stick at, then the indigenous natives, upon whom people of my sort relied for help, would feel themselves swamped. Even extinguished. And, instead of welcoming us, would hate us and reject us and injure us. And we did not want that, now did we?