Myles Away From Dublin (7 page)

I hope I offend nobody when I reveal that I have been amused by the imperial adventure of the Irish Army into the Congo, though I admit that the newspapers have overplayed the episode so much that it is beginning to be boring. There have been hundreds of pictures of ferociously-accoutred soldiers kissing goodbye to the wife and babes, reminiscent of Tommy Atkins leaving for the 1914 war. When the 32nd battalion paraded in O’Connell Street, Dublin, tens of thousands lined the route on each side, reminding me of nothing less than the funeral of Michael Collins, though this illusion was a bit spoilt by the pipe band, which also departed for the Congo.

The odd thing is that those green troops, probably not one of whom has ever known combat, have no clear idea of what problem they are expected to solve; neither have their relatives and, for that matter, neither have I. The general notion is that Belgium has relinquished her dominion, cleared out and left the Africans to fend for themselves. As I write, they have not cleared out; thousands of Belgian soldiers are still there, armed to the teeth. Nervous whites in the area have fled to Brazzaville, which is the capital of French Equatorial Africa. Are the French to remain in Africa? Are the UN forces going to impose order on the warring African groups and will the Belgian forces shoot at UN soldiers? Let us agree that the situation is complicated and leave it at that.

The Congo is not a country nor a continent but the second mightiest river on the earth. The Amazon is
given first place but this may not be justified. The Congo has a length of over 3,000 miles and far exceeds in majesty the other two mighty African rivers, the Zambesi and the Nile, but Africa is a mass of great rivers, hundreds of which are tributaries of the Congo. Those who take pride in the Shannon as a considerable waterway might note that in parts the Congo is eight miles wide and has many islands. One island is 50 miles long and five miles at its widest part.

The mouth of the Congo was discovered by a Portuguese in 1482 and he erected a pillar there to denote Portuguese dominion, but in the succeeding three centuries scarcely anything was done by way of further exploration or inquiry. In 1816 the British sent a mission under Capt. Tuckey, RN, who found the river and pushed some distance up but some African sickness struck the ship. Tuckey and 16 of his men died and the expedition had to go home.

The Congo basin or drainage area is estimated to be 1,425,000 square miles in area and its possibilities were perceived following Livingstone’s discoveries by a man of unique imperial ambitions, King Leopold II of Belgium. His intrusions in Africa began in 1878 and that, so to speak, is where we came in.

Dr David Livingstone was a truly incredible person whose feats of travel, endurance and recorded
exploration
appear to be far outside the capacity of any one man. He was a person of iron constitution and of simple and kindly mind. He was daunted by nothing.

He was born in Lanarkshire in 1813 of poor parents and entered a cotton mill at the age of ten but persisted in a plan of self-education, got eventually to Glasgow and then London where he took a medical degree. His sole ambition was to spread the Gospel in heathen lands and in 1838 he joined the London Missionary Society; he was
sent to Africa and went to Bechuanaland where another missionary had set up a station 20 years before. From this centre he started explorations for the seat of another and chose a place 200 miles away, where he built a shack. Here he was attacked by a lion and had his left arm badly injured and so it was to remain for the rest of his life. Here, in a savage land where the natives had never seen a white face and where wild beasts roamed, he sent for his wife.

After two years’ missionary work here, he moved with some companions on considerable journeys, his idea being to do pioneering work for missionaries who would follow, recording likely places for new stations and keeping journals which were to be the first real
geographic
and hydrographic deposit knowledge of Africa. One journey on which he followed the Zambesi to its mouth took two and a half years and enabled the filling in of large tracts of Africa which on the map up till then had been a blank. In 1856 he returned to England very emaciated after his first African stint of 16 years.

He parted on very good terms with the Missionary Society, for he had now decided that his first duty was to do something about the appalling Arab slave-trading activities he had seen. He took office as Her Majesty’s honorary consul in Africa and led an expedition to the Zambesi on HMS
Pearl
, and was joined by his wife and lady missionaries. The geographical fruits of the
expedition
were enormous, for the intrepid Livingstone penetrated to regions never before seen by a white man. A third expedition, begun in 1865, began with a formidable outfit of sepoys, men, boys, camels, buffaloes, mules and donkeys but the indomitable doctor’s urge to keep going forward meant that this retinue had soon dwindled to four boys. He lost his milch goats and his medical chest was stolen so that when fever struck, he
was helpless. But he still kept going, staggering or being carried, and at one point received help from Gordon Bennett of the
New
York
Herald
through H. M. Stanley.

On May 1, 1873, his boys found ‘the great master’ kneeling at his bed, dead. He was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.

A theme that continues to excite me (and incite me) is the hostility, in certain parts of the world, to coloured people. That phrase ‘coloured people’ does not make sense apart from denoting that the people are of skin not white. What is the virtue of being white, aside from the well-known judgement that accidents of climate have made for white dominance, and that an ascendancy in technological matters makes it easy for the white man to be boss of the black man?

Would the black man, if populationally ascendent, take steps to make white citizens outcasts? Personally, I don’t think so. White people have too many skills to make that sort of segregation possible in a mixed modern community, and those skills seem to be matters, not of personal attainment, but of traditional achievement through trial and error. I have never heard of a negro designing or making a workable motor car but this is not to say that he is incapable of the feat; I feel it means that his interests are elsewhere. Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible. Yet it wasn’t.

Intrinsically there is nothing wrong with a pair of shoes, properly cared for. They distinguish the gentleman or at least the person who wants to be listed in that class. They carry, however, no guarantees at all. All
accomplished
crooks are well-dressed and there is a certain risk in being impeccable.

Some people, usually of literary leanings, prefer dirty shoes and suits, unspeakable shirts, and hats that
intrude into the area of legend. Perhaps I am wrong but I doubt whether a portrait or paragraph of praise ever appeared in
Vogue
about the late James Joyce. (Now that I think of it, that magazine has never praised myself, perhaps a more serious offence against justice.) This bad temper on my part was induced by a piece which appeared recently in a Dublin paper, sent to it from London. Read it yourself:

I hope you do not think it funny. For my own part I feel that it is deeply scandalous; it is also incorrect, tendentious and liable to inflame the passions of people who like to look well in the street or those who just have to. Nobody is going to hand £1,000 to a shabby tramp. Yet who are those people who in London, accoutred with bowler hat and umbrella, dare leave their houses or hotels wearing clean shirts but filthy foot-wear? I think that is a fair question. If they are married men, it seems that their wives refuse to undertake an elementary household chore. If they are visitors in some hotel, it suggests that they have been too lazy or drunk to put their shoes outside the bedroom door on the preceding evening. Any way you look at it, they seem to be thoroughly worthless people.

Cleaning and polishing a pair of male shoes is perhaps the simplest job man can undertake, yet he won’t do it, though he thinks nothing at all about unscrewing eight plugs from his car, cleaning them and adjusting the points. He is quite unconcerned about his own spawgs,
though they are far more visible and conspicuous than plugs under a bonnet.

I remember the day – it was surely 25 years ago – when about a dozen boot-blacks pursued their trade in College Green in Dublin and under the portico of the Bank of Ireland facing College Street. I was too young and too poor at the time to give them my custom and in any case I think I wore slippers just then. But I could not help noticing them and their uniformly villainous appearance. Men of that type, I concluded, could not possibly be engaged in cleaning other people’s shoes. Clearly they were spies – German, British, Irish; some looked bad enough to be serving all those three world powers simultaneously. According to the cutting I have quoted, they have moved to Leicester Square, London, and are now spying for the Russians.

Versatility has always been an Irish virtue.

Let me admit in conclusion that on this whole subject I may be deeply prejudiced. You see, I wear brown shoes and have, in practice, no use at all for
boot-blacks
. In any case, Sarah cleans my shoes every night. Sarah is my landlady. She knows her duties.

I was standing in the shadow of a great cathedral wall in the days of my youth in company with another cub reporter. Why were we called cubs? My dictionary, in its very rare attempts at cracking jokes, follows up the word CUB with this, in brackets: ‘(Etymology
unknown
)’.

But that doesn’t matter. More wide-awake than myself, the other cub nudged me and said: ‘Better dowse that cigarette. Here’s the bishop.’

We were covering a Confirmation ceremony and there is not much to write about concerning that, for the Church is immutable and is ignored by the
Daily
Express.

The bishop completely ignored both of us.

‘How well,’ I said savagely, ‘that thing at my feet looks. It’s not a butt but half a cigarette. For all the attention His Lordship paid, we might as well have been smoking cigars. Or long hookah pipes.’

‘Aw shut up. Smoking is very bad for you, anyway.’

Yet out of an ill thing good comes. That phrase ‘Dowse that cigarette’ stayed in my mind. I thought the verb was incorrectly used and consulted my books of reference, my main idea being, I think, to tell off this unmannerly companion. But I forgot that little grudge when a new world opened before my eyes. True dowsing is nearly supernatural. If you dowse you are beside the gates of heaven, and the word has nothing to do with cigarettes or the equally poisonous activity of working for newspapers.

Dowse is a word I have overlooked, perhaps because
it has an enormous number of local slang equivalents. If one used some of them in mixed company, one might be accused of using bad language and told to leave. If only for that reason, I will forbear giving here a list of the equivalent words. But in usage the word dowse is largely misunderstood, or at least adequately
ununderstood
. Those who know the word think it is the cunning art of discovering water under the ground by some system of intuition that borders on witchcraft (for which gift decent women used to be roasted alive). My own dictionary, an expensive but notoriously infirm
compilation,
tells me that a ‘dowsing rod’ is ‘a name for the divining rod’ but is starkly silent as to what dowsing is or, indeed, divining. I suppose that so long as there are people in the world, they will publish dictionaries defining what is unknown in terms of something equally unknown. I am personally convinced that Einstein’s sums were wrong and that his atom bomb is a myth. Who will blast me out of my complacency? The British needed 100,000 tons of German bombs to blast them out of theirs.

But let us get back to this strange word dowse.

Dowsing takes its place with soothsaying, curing sick cows by looking at them, and putting a curse on a fellow man. The persons who do that sort of thing – and they are mercifully scarce in towns and cities – do not know where power comes from, why they are thus endowed, but they do know that what they say, be it good or ill, will happen.

Dowsing has that quality. I once spent a term in the Department of Local Government, inhabited at the time mostly by the sons of peasants. The local authority would write asking for permission to pay a gammy, bent, old man to find water. But they were down-faced by what we call (for want of a better word) Education.
‘You ought to be aware,’ they were sternly told, ‘that the modern method of finding is by a geological survey.’ A Consulting Engineer had to be got, given twenty-five guineas plus travelling expenses, and his carefully-typed report explained that there was absolutely no water in the county. The local engineer would splutter: ‘That dirty tramp up the road in a condemned cottage would find enough water in ten minutes to flood Lough Erin and they wouldn’t let me hire him. I’m afraid there is no future for the hazel twig in the Customs House!’

One fallacy about dowsing is that the twig or bough must be of hazel. Provided the article is small and flexible, any tree will serve. The important part of it is the man holding it, and about him I can give no description or explanation. The man with this gift of divination is usually very ignorant, occasionally illiterate. Normally he is ignorant of the nature of his trust, and regards it as a bit of a laugh. The ancient Irish attributed great wisdom and insights to the seventh son of a seventh son. Your water-diviner does not bother about genealogy. ‘You want to find water?’ he says bluntly. ‘OK. Give me a few quid and I’ll find it within 50 yards of your house.’ The terrifying thing is that he does just that.

But my own interest in this theme is broader. The miracle Irishman is narrow-minded and thinks of nothing but water. In fact oil, gold and dead bodies can be discerned.

The word ‘dowse’ is of Cornish origin, and therefore Celtic. It may seem silly to picture Sherlock Holmes going out for a walk carrying a strange walking stick but if he did so he might solve his mysteries quicker.