Darkest England (6 page)

I saw his point. How very different the history of our people would have been if we had done the same. Once we hunted and roamed through all Bushmanland where the rains loved the earth and game crowded the veld. Then the visitors came, black and Boer and English; and where we had hunted the springbuck, now they hunted us. After the Boers came the Red Frocks of the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair – many of whom went by the names of Tom, Dick and Harry – and they hunted the springbuck and the Boer. And us. But today the Bushmen, like the running game, have dwindled to little bits of nothing. If only we had behaved as wisely as they had done!

Now Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty and I were requested to show him our passports. My egg-shaped companion began again to weep. To calm the poor man, I told the guardian we had come in peace. He welcomed this. He seemed to mean it, for no sooner had he glanced at our papers than he ceremonially delivered us into the hands of an official welcoming party who wore distinctive black caps, shaped like elands' udders, which meant, said my first Englishman, that they were officers of the Crown dedicated to keeping the Queen's Peace. My heart leaped. We had come in peace and we were received in peace. What better evidence could there be that our arrival had been foreseen by Her Majesty? This happy thought was further confirmed
when my first Englishman told us that we were to be lodged in special accommodation pending Her Majesty's Pleasure.

Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty did not grasp the good news. Was his mind too limited by the barbarism of his upbringing? Or, perhaps, he was so badly frightened by the sight of the welcoming party in their fine nippled hats that he failed entirely to understand the honour we were being paid. All I can say is that his hair stood up on his head like the bottle-brush flower. He flung himself on the ground and began kicking and screaming. It was then that our welcoming party were forced to take measures to protect the poor deluded soul from injuring himself, and to prevent him from lashing out at other applicants in the queue behind him, some of whom were visibly distressed by his childlike tantrum, and began wailing themselves, giving out sobs and groans until all that great receiving shed was awash and the air filled with lamentations.

The soothing of Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty by the peace-keepers was swift and gentle. A leather belt snapped fast around the waist, a pair of steel bracelets about his wrists. Blind to the fact that they intended him nothing but kindness, he cried on the great Queen to save him, not realizing that her agents were already endeavouring to do so. This further distressed those who heard it, and so the welcoming committee had no choice but to close his mouth by giving him, to chew upon, a leather pad about the size and colour of a mare's tongue and, mercifully, his cries subsided. And, in this pacified condition, we were chauffeured in a large van to the place of Her Majesty's Pleasure.

We were, in the courtesy vehicle taking us to our Royal Guest-house, twelve in all: apart from us there were a family of five Bengalis, two elderly Pathans, three young women from Istria who had fled the tribal wars in that country.
Their good fortune at our right royal welcome cannot have dawned on them, poor souls, for their faces were as white as the petals of the Chinkernichee, and their teeth chattered loudly. My friend, his head bandaged where he had dashed it into the wall at the aerodrome, was weeping again, the tears coursing down his eggy face. Luckily he could not be heard, or my companions in the van might have been even more greatly disturbed.

The generous arrangements for our comfort at Her Majesty's Apartments showed everywhere. Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty and I were placed in a room together, and our hosts removed his restraining belts with great good humour, intimating with many a wink and a nod that they intended him no harm. A wonderful portrait of Her Majesty graced the wall of our room, and it was most humbling to know that she watched over us and would no doubt summon us to her Palace when she felt so disposed. I was given, for my own use, a table and a chair which, I was astonished to learn, would be left in my room overnight, even though they must have feared I might have yielded to habit and chopped up my furniture to make a cooking fire.

Thrice daily we were escorted to a room where we were handed a steel tray, scooped like a tortoise shell into a series of craters, and into these metal depressions were deposited a most alarming selection of materials which our hosts regarded as very desirable.

But when I looked down at my tray what I saw was a mound of wet, grey leaves, beside a pool of semi-stiffened porridge, below a hill of dry leather. Food, said my guardians, you lucky people! And I learnt that the leaves were greens and the porridge whipped potato, and the hill of dry leather had once been part of a pig.

For a short time I believed this meal also contained something even less to my taste, since our people place great store by donkeys and our guardians kept encouraging us not to look a gift horse in the mouth. But I was relieved to learn that this was one of their proverbs and not an allusion to an equestrian element in our diet.

I found, however, that I could not eat this food, free as it was. My eggy friend did no better, saying he preferred death by starvation to being sent back home. I sympathized, but I had no intention of starving to death on the verge of a royal summons.

Luckily, I discovered, on our daily walks around the private walled courtyard of Her Majesty's Lodgings, a garden well stocked with tubers and even a useful supply of ants' eggs, the English variety being a little saltier than our beloved Bushman's rice but tolerable if eaten fresh.

Our attendants were amazed but tolerant. If guests of Her Majesty preferred to dine off ants, or starve themselves to death, then that was their privilege. This I took to be a ‘fine instance' of their forbearance, their desire to live and let live.

I was also given a small, free-standing lavatory. Our host was proud of his accommodation and fittings. Was there ever such a place, where I came from, where everyone was given his own WC and an endless supply of paper? I had to agree. If similar accommodation were offered in the Karoo, every police station between Zwingli and Pumpkinville, from Eros to Jackal's Dance, would be crammed with Ashbush People fighting to get in. Then, too, in our country, the supply of running water is so jealously guarded that our people are lucky if the farmer offers a waterpipe once in twenty miles. In England you may flush the toilet as many times as you wish. I imagined it had something to do with the rain, which, we are reliably informed, ‘raineth
every day'. They study the weather even more carefully than we do. It holds a sacred significance for them. If the rain fell for more than a week, our attendants declared a flood, and feared for their huts. If no rain fell for a fortnight, they declared a drought, and stopped washing themselves.

Our attendants, or hosts, as I learnt to address them, were ever attentive, and very concerned for our well-being. Twice daily, their chief, Mr Geoff, or ‘Minehost' as he liked us to call him, encouraged us to walk in the walled gardens of the Royal Guest-house, though he protested cheerfully that taking meals from his garden presented problems. Ants were all very well. But he begged me to stop eating his daffodils.

My oval friend refused to join us on these pleasant walks. Turned his face to the wall, saying that exercise was not useful to a condemned man, and turned his back on the generous face of the Monarch. This invitation, said he, was simply a means of ensuring that when the time came to expel him from England, he would be fit enough to walk to the aircraft. He rained down protests on Queen and Country. He had come to England believing that a man persecuted in his own country might fine protection in the land of the free. What a delusion!

I must say I was shocked by his cynicism, and his lack of faith.

Minehost contented himself with the gentle observation that Mr Humpty was not ‘playing the game'. He had eyes of the faded blue of the peacock flower; his hair was honey gold; and he wore a black peaked cap, his badge of office as a servant of the Crown. Mr Humpty's failure to ‘play the game' was a source of sadness. It was not merely impolite, it was not sporting, he remarked, as he locked us safely away at night.

Mr Geoff was aided by a number of sub-hosts, all of whom wore the same black cap of Royal Office and carried at their waists a silver bush of keys, for it was a house rule that doors were always to be locked behind us – so great was their devotion to our privacy – and windows were to be bolted at all times, where they were not already barred. I remonstrated with my eggy friend, pointing to the locks and bars. Could anyone be better protected, I demanded?

Mr Geoff was great good fun and a natural mimic. Within hours of our arrival he was imitating each guest who had travelled in the special transport from the aerodrome. He was, by turns, Bengali, Pathan, Sanjaki and Istrian, using as props a headscarf, a limp, a tear and a faithful though unintelligible parody of each guest's language – or, as he called it, ‘mumbo-jumbo'. (They are convinced that most foreigners speak this tongue as naturally as they speak English.)

Clearly, they have as much difficulty speaking foreign languages as they do with foreigners who speak English. But where another tribe might have shown embarrassment or vexation at this disability, not being able even to pronounce our names, the English, an inventive race, simply gave us new ones: ‘Sooties', ‘Spear-Carriers', ‘Parkies'
¹
and other nicknames too numerous to recall, for they vied with each other to invent new and better ones every day.

I knew from the history lessons of my master, the Boer Smith, that the English sense of humour exceeds those of all other nations; that they enjoyed nothing better than laughing at themselves. However, as with many of these legends, the truth is more complicated. In my experience
they laugh at themselves all the harder when they pretend to be other people.

I would say that, when analysing the nature of the humour displayed by my keeper in the Royal House, it was by the degree to which strangers can be shown to be unlike them that the native wit of the English is manifested. Our distinguishing marks – the way we walked, for instance, or our shapes and colours, our costumes, our accents and, in my case, my naturally curled hair – had them absolutely hooting; my buttocks, being pronounced, were a source of such hilarity that at times they could barely speak and had to content themselves, between guffaws, with curving movements of the hands to indicate my slight steatopygia.

They fix instantly on some detail, so small, perhaps, no one else would notice it, but which confirms the comic distance between themselves and all others. Much as a group of children will seize with delight on some physical defect in one of their chums, a cleft palate, a stammer, a missing limb, a shrivelled arm, and, stuttering or limping, began mimicking beautifully the odd or clumsy defect, so the natives dote on differences. Nothing sets them laughing more quickly, except perhaps a robust appreciation of the bodily functions: to which they allude often but never mention directly, considering directness in these matters close to vulgarity, a trait I was to observe often, and which has led some critics to contend that they are very great hypocrites. It is not hypocrisy at all – but a special kind of delicacy.

Try as I might, I could not hope to match their natural sense of humour, yet politeness required that I should at least make the attempt, and so I took to laughing at their pink faces, so comical beneath their black caps – so like monkeys playing at men – and alluding to their very powerful body odour, for, besides their interest in rain, which
I have mentioned, their interest in water for washing is theoretical. When I told Minehost that we seldom bathed, he was impressed. But when I told him that the common method of washing among Karoo travellers was to strip naked and wash at a stand tap, using sand to scour the body, which has been treated with a good layer of sheep's fat, he was appalled. Why should we go to all that trouble? he demanded. To which I replied, in true English fashion, so as to smell a little sweeter than you, Minehost – whose dung signature, a mixture of cheese and ashes, would scare a
kudu
at fifty paces. But his brow clouded and he was not amused. The English do indeed like laughing at themselves, but only because they hate others doing so.

In my commodious quarters I was also given a bed, entirely to myself, with two blankets of the finest grey wool. But years on the solid earth gives a man a taste for a plainer couch. I pulled the mattress off the bunk and leaned it against the steel edge of the bed and crept by night into this shelter. Just as we lean our strips of corrugated iron against the wheel of the donkey cart when we outspan by the roadside for the night, and pack the gaps with the rough ashbush to keep out the bitter wind.

Fixed to one wall of my apartment was a wonderful engine, all curling pipes about the thickness of a man's wrist, painted white and very lovely. Around and around an ingenious thicket of metal branches hot water travelled. The heat was about the same as you would feel if you were to warm your hands over the intestines of a freshly killed goat, of which, in their tangled beauty, these water pipes were a distant reminder. By night they would rumble; the belly music of the goat.

This engine made me long for home. It was very quiet in my room. My friend on his bed said nothing, though
he wept from time to time. I was happy enough as I awaited Her Majesty's pleasure, but I could not see the stars. So I crept out of my shelter and lay close to the water heater by the wall, and felt its belly music carrying me back to my childhood on the road, when after the day's shearing, on the farm of Jan De Waal out near Compromise, we were given two goats. My father would tether them beside our shelter overnight and when the fire burnt low, and the frost formed like a thick white rind on our blankets, our hair and the donkeys' ears, in that intense cold that comes just before the dawn, I would slip quietly from under the blanket, where my mother and father and sisters and brothers lay sleeping, and go and lie with the goats, pressed close to their bellies, which were silky and warm and rumbled through the night beneath the great fields of stars, the million eyes of God.