Chapter Five

Lessons in Little Musing; the charms of Beth and the miracle in the church; learns something of their custom of abusing their young, and how this has strengthened their democracy

Gratitude speckled by suspicion; mystery dotted by disbelief; temptation sharpened by nostalgia; these emotions struck me successively in showers, like stinging arrows, after I took up residence in the village of Little Musing.

Edward Farebrother’s welcome alarmed me. It was so firm, so lengthy, so decided. He may have hung up his flying gloves, yes, but he flew freelance now. Third World cases were of very special concern to him. The rich North was building a living bridge between the developed world and the impoverished South. I was his very own aid programme. But between ourselves, given the extreme sensitivity of people to sexual harassment – and especially with the fears of disease coming out of Africa – it would be advisable to keep myself tucked away.

I could not respond with the gratitude politeness demanded, for I sensed that, far from wishing me well on my way, my friends foresaw a lengthy visit; and I dimly perceived that my saviour, in rescuing me from those about to expel me, only achieved this act of redemption by agreeing to become my keeper.

I suspected that my captivity was important to him, for it mirrored his own – and that relieved him. He warned constantly that should I venture out alone, or set off unguided, or, worse, if I ‘ran off’, I must surely come to a terrible end: ‘Chop, bloody chop!’ were the words he used to warn me against straying amongst the natives.

If anything, Beth’s welcome alarmed me even more. She insisted on accompanying me wherever I went; a burly, watchful woman in her fathers shoes. Yet her shapeless clothes could not disguise the naturally lovely lines of her astonishing body. She told me that a little corner of Africa had come to an English village and she had always loved Africa.

Beth said I would be happy if I settled with them. Which I took to mean that she would be happy if I settled with them. She explained that I was classified as a seeker by the authorities.

I seized joyfully on this. Yes, a seeker! What could be a better description? I was on a voyage of discovery. I was prepared for danger. My people who had sent me on my travels were very curious about the island of which they knew little beyond legends and myths. Its culture, dietary habits, and history were the source of so many childish stories. Therefore I had been given the responsibility of preparing a true and accurate portrait of this near-mythical island race.

Many were the questions to be answered. Would there always be an England? Did the Lord Mayors of all great English cities keep talking cats? Had Jerusalem been built in England’s green and pleasant land, as legend insisted? At what precisely did the English aim their arrows of desire? Were there corners of foreign fields that were for ever England?

Beth explained that the terms under which I had been released into her father’s care forbade me to seek any of the aforementioned. For the record, I was not permitted to seek employment either. The only thing I was permitted to seek was asylum.

And, seeing the disappointment in my face, they offered the following items of encouragement:

(1)	Rome was not built in a day.
(2)	More haste, less speed.
(3)	Patience is a virtue.

To which I replied, in the words their ancestors, facing similar difficulties, had used to rally their courage: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Speaking slowly, smiling to show my good intentions, I explained that, far from seeking employment, I intended to offer employment to others. I would need helpers and guides. I appealed to their own tradition of exploration. Did the brave adventurers, pressing deep into Africa, refuse to give employment to native porters and bearers? Did they ask first if the authorities found it acceptable? Imagine if they had stopped to ask permission! Or spent their time seeking asylum when they could have been seeking cities of gold. And ivory. And slaves. They would never have named a mountain, forded a river, shot a rapid, or left their names at some magnificent river falls. Or succeeded in bringing the light of civilization to great stretches of the continent. Very well, then – to retreat from my plan would be to shame the memory of those heroes whose books I had devoured as a child in the library of the good Boer Smith: Stanley, Livingstone, Kingsley, Burton, Speke and Park.

They shook their heads and foresaw many difficulties; fatal obstacles as well as grave repercussions, lurking dangers, tears before bedtime. They warmed to their task of cataloguing impending disasters, and I began to see that, far from saddening or even worrying them, such muscular gloom is practised much as we practise the preparation of favourite poisons. They are, in fact, never happier than when sharing such black prophecies with each other.

After this little orgy of foreboding, the good Farebrother told me, frankly speaking, that a miracle had saved me and he had a duty to see that I jolly well stayed saved.

Beth, more gently, pointed out that if ever I mounted my expedition to London, I would need special training. To experiment first with the native villagers of Little Musing would be advisable. They were a slow and tolerant lot. Better to begin gently before facing the merciless citizens of the metropolis.

Together they reached this consensus: on balance, taking all things into consideration, erring on the side of caution, I was better off where I was. Better to do nothing. To go nowhere. To wait and see until the time was ripe to make a move.

Now, having spoken from their hearts, they looked happy and relieved. We all knew where we were, said Beth. We had cleared the air, said her father. And they felt sure, said both father and daughter, that we would be very happy together.

This movement between lack of expectation on the one hand and, on the other, the assertion that the little they have is better than the best anywhere else is something so natural, so calming, that it induces in them a state of tranquillity other natives derive from chewing narcotics – or smoking dagga,1 as our people do. The difference being that when we take the weed, it is with the intention of inducing dreams, joy and dancing; but they drug themselves with dreams of glory that lead but to a kind of mutinous indolence, and a rancorous domesticity, and to a fatal immobility.

I tried to set their minds at rest. I had powerful protection against any who might wish me harm. From my bag I took a tin of strong medicine, a cunning potion of jackals kidneys mixed with ashes. I had as well a mixture of dried gecko2 and kidney fat. Making a cut in the wrist and rubbing in this medicine, one has protection against a variety of enemies, including snakes.

They waved aside my remedies, locked them in a cupboard and kept the key, saying they would be perfectly safe, and they suggested that the primitive potions from Bushmanland were of no use in the jungles of modern England. For there, said Mr Farebrother, an individual is judged not by what he does for himself, but by what others can be persuaded to do for him. Many people were instinctively well disposed to rank and wealth. Unfortunately, I possessed neither. Thus we were left with the alternative of making people wish to help me because they felt I was ‘one of them’. Given my appearance, this was difficult, but not impossible. I had only to assume the demeanour of a real Englishman and people would soon forget how very odd I looked and take me for one of them.

I should learn, for a start, to be less headstrong. He noticed my unfortunate habit of blurting out what I felt. Nothing was more sure to make ordinary people feel very, very uneasy. Also, I must get out of the way of asking directly for things. Preface all such requests, Boy David, with an apologetic disclaimer, the good man suggested. Something like ‘By the way …’ or, better still, ‘Would you very much mind if…?’ And never, ever speak frankly without saying first, slowly, so there should be no mistaking your intention, ‘Frankly speaking…’, for this will reassure your listener that you are not making some emotional commitment to honesty or brevity but simply using a conversational convention.

That you mean nothing serious, or strange, Beth advised.

Or sudden, her father added.

In a word, nothing that was not ‘nice’, Beth explained. The importance of being nice was something about which I had lots to learn.

I made slow but steady progress with my lessons. I learnt not to be frank without apologizing and never to ask directly for what I wanted, but to get others to provide it, without asking. I still had trouble being nice. I saw how Beth suffered. Here, said I, was an opportunity for being nice.

It was clear to me that although Beth was the beloved daughter of the house, she endured the hours with a kind of ungainly simplicity of which her body spoke more eloquently than her lips. She was housekeeper, hunter-gatherer, gardener, laundress, companion and cook to an increasingly frail old man who, yes, called her his dearly beloved daughter, but behaved towards her as if she were his servant.

For that matter, he called me his dearest son. But treated me as if I were his prize possession. Appreciated, yes; but imprisoned.

But I did not say so, for that would not have been nice.

Beth’s magnificent equilibrium, the swing of her great posterior jutting out a foot or more, at right angles to the back of her spine, two pumpkins on springs, twin udders of elastic delight, I soon came to realize, far from being a source of pride to her, was something so shaming to the poor woman that she seldom ventured out of the house lest the villagers smile and point and mock.

She went out only in the very early morning, or in the evening when few were about, or darkness hid the magnificent mounds from the neighbours’ eyes.

In my country every man from Eros to Mouton Fountain would have left donkeys and wives and firesides to stand cheering as she sailed by, but in her own land she hid from the eyes of men. Strange.

She saw the admiration in my eyes. My almost uncontrollable urge to cheer when she went bobbing by. Each step, as her heel struck the earth, sent a shiver dancing, as wind does on water, across the fleshy plateau of her majestic buttocks. So broad, that lovely shelf, you could have balanced a cooking pot on it. And so I told her how beautiful she was.

To which she answered that I was very kind.

Not kind, I corrected her false impression; positively wild with admiration. She had the most naturally perfect body I had ever seen in a woman.

Too late. I saw from her face that I had made the mistake of being frank when I thought I was being nice. And I began to realize that speaking English is no great advantage when one has to communicate with the English. In fact, the belief that we share a common language often only serves to worsen understanding.

So I told her instead that she looked very nice.

She replied that I was also ‘very nice’. Meaning, I think, to compliment me.

But looking into her troubled, dark-brown eyes, I knew she had not believed a word I said. She called me ‘Boy’, assuming this to be my name, taking it from the promise to seek nothing but asylum which her father and I had signed shortly after I had been dropped on my head during the horrifying attempt to expel me from the kingdom. How long ago it all seemed!

Boy David, said Beth to me, if ever you are to meet Her Majesty, you must learn to bow – without scraping. And bowing lessons ensued, with Beth sitting in for the Sovereign. I would arrive at the Palace, carrying my suitcase, remove my hat with a flourish, advance into the Presence and bow easily from the waist, being sure to keep my nose in ‘line’ with Beth’s knee, as she sat regally upon a greenupholstered chair – and tapped my chin with a plastic ruler whenever she felt it dipped below the crucial level where bowing became scraping.

It was while we were playing happily at bowing and not scraping that our neighbour, Julia, arrived to say that old Jed who lived at the bottom of Duck Lane had not appeared for some days. Next, Peter the Birdman arrived and said that if old Jed at the bottom of Duck Lane had not been seen for days, that was no bad thing and he for one would not weep. Old Jed was a hunter and hater of birds, shot them, ate them and kept them in cages.

Julia now suggested that a useful task for their little yellow friend would be to get him to climb inside the cottage and discover why old Jed had not shown his sharp red nose out of doors these past five days. Being a wiry and lithe sort of chap, she felt sure I could be inserted through some large crack in the roof or lowered down the chimney.

Peter proclaimed that he stood ready to rescue any robin, hawk, sparrow or starling that might seize its chance of freedom when Jed’s house of horror, as he dubbed it, would be opened to the wholesome light of day.

And he ran to his house and shut it tightly so as to join us on our expedition to Duck Lane, and I saw the sparrows, doves and starlings dashing themselves helplessly against the windows and thought how strange it must seem to these creatures of the air to find themselves living in an English cottage – almost as strange as I found it myself.

Down the muddy length of Duck Lane we traipsed, a pathway not, as I had thought, remote and lonely, but packed with houses from which villagers emerged, drawn by promises Julia made to all and sundry that they would soon see the little yellow chap earning his keep.

After knocking at the door several times and receiving no answer, after trying the door and finding it locked, after walking about the little house and shaking the windows in their frames and finding them barred, Mr Farebrother pointed to the crumbling section on the roof where the tiles had slipped and which might be widened enough to allow entry.

To shouted directions from Peter to go gently so as not to scare the birds, I crept through the aperture and was soon inside the house. I found it to be dark and malodorous. The curtains were drawn against the light. I entered a small, airless room heavy with dust and neglect. I knew the scent well enough. Had I not picked it up a thousand times in the veld, where the lion has killed? Where the jackal-hunter had left his traps cunningly buried in the sand beneath a sheet of newspaper? Where the vultures gather?

When I climbed back through the hole in the roof I was met by a barrage of excited demands for information. What had I found inside old Jed’s house?

Simply old Jed, I replied, stretched on the carpet, staring at the ceiling with a gentle, quizzical look on his face, as if considering how very surprising it was to die, as one had lived, alone and unconsulted.

To my astonishment, considerable relief greeted my news. That was all right then. Not as bad as they had thought. Old Jed had had a good innings.

I knew, of course, that an Englishman’s home was his castle, but was it also his grave? To die alone, among neighbours – was that not strange? I asked my saviour.

A very Afrocentric line of reasoning, came the reply. Old Jed’s neighbours would not interfere with a person’s right to privacy while alive and so were hardly likely to intervene in death. A few weeks of silence did not necessarily mean a fatality. How was one to know that one’s neighbour was dead? And not simply living quietly? If people were forever calling on friends and neighbours, on the off-chance that one of them may have passed away, well, this would be seen as an outrageous invasion of privacy which no decent person would tolerate. And he had no doubt that Old Jed would have felt exactly the same.

Even as I stood on the roof, above old dead Jed, several locals came by and chaffed the grounded Bishop for this manner of forced entry, pretending to admire his talent for burglary, saying they had never expected it in a former man of the cloth. With many a wink and a nod they asked if they could hire the clever little monkey, as they had a bit of fetching and carrying he might usefully do for them.

Which showed, my wingless friend assured me, that they understood me to be not a bad little chap after all, and, amongst them, that was high praise indeed.

I was pleased. But I suspected that however the locals understood me, I was still some way from understanding them.

*

My lessons in learning to be more like them took another step forward when the terrestrial Bishop suggested that I find some method of integrating myself among the villagers. If they saw I had something to offer, the people of Little Musing would soon take me to their hearts.

Then there began an animated discussion between father and daughter as to what, if anything, I had to offer. After a good deal of discussion, during which all my suggestions – a love of England, a personal promise from a member of the Royal Family, and so on, were gently rejected – the Farebrothers concluded that my most useful attribute was my natural unspoiled innocence.

Might he know something of our marriage customs? the good Bishop inquired.

I replied that amongst our people marriage preceded the begetting of children and that children, when they came, were few and much loved.

Beth thought this very moving. I had seen for myself the difference in their culture, where the opposite prevailed – where young males believed that the insemination of as many women as early as possible to be among the chief rites of manhood. They then declined all further responsibility, and decamped to some other place, there to continue the tradition, often with violence. Her father and I had been lucky to escape alive from Green Meadow. From what she told me, the fact that our pursuers had been children had made them more and not less dangerous. For these tiny people, guns were fun, killing was a sport, and dying something unimaginable. Children, in some cities, now carried guns as a matter of course, and fought to the death for cash and drugs, to which even eight- and nine-years-olds were addicted.

Perhaps my disapproval showed on my face because she asked, rather tartly, whether murder was not a popular pastime in Africa? Especially in my own country?

I agreed that it was. And my people knew it. We suffered at the hands of the visitors, hunting us, hating us worse than the lynx and the lion and the jackal. Cleansing the land of the Red People and shovelling them into unmarked mass graves where sometimes a shin bone or a skull will fight its way to the surface, to be found by some little Boer child who will play football with the skulls of the First People, whose hearts and homes once reached across the endless flat grass of Bushmanland. And where, today, only ghosts sing in the high places; their hair is to be glimpsed in the rain clouds, their tears fall in the rain. My ancestors can be faintly seen when you look into the faces of the wandering Ashbush People; then their ghostly faces peer out at you – much as the traveller, passing through a dying village, sees the thin faces of starving children staring from the doorways of darkened huts.

But, in England, I cried, it was surely quite different. The Queen loved her people. Her servants, the soldiers and the police, were on the side of the people. Yet from what I had seen, the average citizen was in danger of being killed by armed children.

That was the very reason why it would be very wonderful if the children of Little Musing could be brought face to face with unspoiled innocence, said Mr Farebrother. Something might rub off.

Heart to heart with a survivor of an earlier age, said Beth. Boy David from the Karoo, and the only Bushman in England. Face to face with a genuine hunter-gatherer in the late twentieth century. What a privilege it would be to meet me!

It would give the little children ‘hands-on’ experience, said the ex-Bishop. I might make a difference.

I might also be killed, I pointed out.

They nodded. But after talking about it they felt, very strongly, this was a risk worth taking. Among the adult male population such education was almost certainly too late. The ancient love of freedom was partly to blame. Freeborn Englishmen could not be forced to behave peacefully. Violence could not be confronted without creating more destruction. Containment was the only option among violent young males.

But with children, perhaps it was not too late. If there was any way I might help, then I would deserve the gratitude of generations to come.

The good Farebrother begged me not to write off all children merely because some wayward infants had tried to kill me. He appreciated my point, but I must not give up hope. After all, much of the misunderstanding between peoples arises when one nation makes unshakeable judgements about another. Sees it as less than human. Surely – the good man demanded – being human means we all make mistakes?

And indeed I had to agree. For I recalled how, in the old days, we had laughed at his people, the Sea-Bushmen, when they first dragged themselves ashore in our country. So pale, so blind, so soon pink in the sun, so incapable in the wild, so lost in the dark, so reliant on their guns, as needy as is the donkey in the Karoo bushes. So linguistically limited they could not get their tongues around a word, not even the name of our land, calling it Carrow and Camdeboo and other nonsenses. They looked at us and declared we must be gypsies from Egypt. Or the link by which animals were joined to the upper orders. Thus their sojourn in Africa influenced their religion and led to the belief that there were three orders of creatures: the animals, the others and the English.

We felt pity for these wretches who could not tell the difference between the spoor of a kudu and an eland; between the Men of Men and the Red People.

Oh, yes, how we laughed at this pallid infestation! Clumsy visitors who seemed no more noxious than flying ants, no more alarming than the white ants’ eggs which they saw us eat by the fistful, and called ‘Bushman rice’. Oh, yes, how we darkened with shame at their shameful incompetence.

But how wrong we were! For they proved to be more toxic than the greatest of our poisons, which kill surely, but singly. As it happened, these apparently weak, defective, cowardly, diseased creatures were to become a pink plague, a most deadly and obliterating invasion; wherever the pale Sea-Bushmen so much as appeared, we died.

Yet in the beginning, when they first fell on our land, they were received everywhere with great kindness; both by our cousins, the Men of Men, the Korana, the Strand-loopers, and by the Red People. We permitted them to buy a good ox and a fat sheep for one iron hoop apiece. In exchange for the brass cut from their ships’ kettles, we gave many dozens of sheep and cattle. In truth, we had very little interest in their trinkets but took them out of politeness, not wishing to offend these pale Sea-Bushmen who evidently attached great importance to scrap metal.

Next they came with copper bangles. These pleased us for a time. When we tired of those, they brought glass beads, knives, mirrors, iron and copper wire, in exchange for which we gave cattle, sheep, ostrich eggs and honey.

When we tired of those, they came with bullets.

As the flying Bishop had rightly said: we all make mistakes. My people had taken the visitors to Bushmanland to be our friends. And they had proved lethal. Well, then, perhaps I was just as wrong about the little murderers of Green Meadow estate. And though I did not much care about the gratitude of generations to come, I was prepared to do anything that might win me wider acceptance among the natives. I agreed to visit the village school.

The children asked that I wear my traditional clothes. I was happy to oblige, dressing in a small leather apron that protected my qhwai-xkhwe from the world, took up my bow, a quiver of arrows and a drinking gourd made from an ostrich shell, and set off for the school.

From the Bishop’s house to the little school beside the railway station was scarcely two minutes’ walk; in that time most of the villagers were in their gardens, or leaning from their windows to see us pass.

There must be something in our appearance frightfully repulsive to the unsophisticated natives, for the infants took off like hares when they saw us, screaming for their mothers. Alarmed by the child’s wild outcries, the mother rushes out of her hut, but darts back at the first sight of the apparition, crying to the good Bishop that he ought to be ashamed to bring such a thing to the village. Dogs turn tail, and vanish. And hens, abandoning their chicks, fly screaming to the tops of houses. And mothers, holding naughty children away from them, say: ‘Be good or I shall call the Bushman to bite you.’3

None, of this, said my episcopal companion, was to be taken seriously but should be seen as rough, rustic, ready wit, and showed that the villagers had begun to warm to me.

I said I thought they were casting slurs upon my person. I heard, most distinctly, someone ask whether the little bloke didn’t catch cold, walking about in leather underpants.

Mr Farebrother corrected me these were not slurs, but real concerns, cloaked in broad good humour, and all part of the warming process.

In the schoolroom I was stood upon a chair and the children were invited to touch me as part of the warming process. It took a while before they conquered their fear of the strange and the wild, and many questions had to be answered by their teacher – a young woman pierced in ear and nostril with a splendid array of steel clips, not unlike the sort of thing the first English had bartered with us, for use as fish-hooks, when they washed up in Bushmanland. Ritual scarification appears to be a cultural phenomenon among the island youth.

Would I bite? Was my skin so wrinkled because I was very old? These were just some of the questions asked by the children who crowded around my chair.

Their teacher explained that I was a rare survivor of an ancient people who had been hunted and hounded by the colonialists and imperialists of the Western World. It was a miracle I had survived, and she, personally, wished to make a sincere apology to me and my people for the crimes committed against us by her ancestors.

I replied that, speaking very frankly, I welcomed her apology and would have passed it on to my people had they still existed; but I had no doubt that poor shadows of their ancestors though they were, the sponsors of my expedition to England would accept it gladly.

Whereupon she declared that I was really very nice – and I began to feel I had done a good thing in coming to the school.

Mr Farebrother now invited the children to get some ‘hands-on’ experience, and, after a little shuffling and giggling, curiosity got the better of them and they crowded around my chair, stroking my face, digging me in the ribs, and trying to lift my breech cloth so as to expose my lower regions. Soon, indeed, they were so enjoying themselves that several times they very nearly knocked over my chair – though I have no doubt this was quite accidental – and had to be ordered back by their teacher, and forbidden to lay more than one hand on me at a time. And to stop pinching. And poking. And peeping beneath my skirt. But the pandemonium continued until Edward Farebrother and the teacher were forced to call a halt, lift me off the chair and place me on top of the stationery cupboard for my own safety.

Now, standing on the chair I had so recently vacated, Mr Farebrother appealed to the children. There I was, a poor little fellow, without clothes, or money, or a home. My mummy and daddy were dead. But wicked men wished to send me back to where I had come from. All those who believed Boy David should stay in England where he would be safe, please put up their hands, he cried.

Like a field of prickly pears, little hands stabbed the air.

And would those who wanted the wicked men to leave David alone, please put up their hands?

Such was the determination of the class that this should be so that some children now raised both hands. And several shouted that the wicked men should be killed!

And then my guide and mentor took me home, rejoicing in the success of the warming process. His people, the good man explained, were slow to anger. But, once aroused, they were lions in the fight against cruelty and oppression. He talked of the battle for Dicky the Donkey; of the war for Tiny Alma and of the many ordinary people who devoted their free time to saving calves, cruelly torn from their mothers, imprisoned in tiny wooden boxes in which they could not see, or turn, and sent to Europe, where they were eaten by Belgians who had disgusting tastes in meat; he himself had been several times to France, where he had stood between horses destined for the abattoir and angry Frenchmen addicted to horseflesh. By taking me to their hearts, the children of Little Musing had shown that English compassion for the underdog, or bitch, was alive and healthy in the rising generation, and he, for one, gave a cheer.

It was my custom to walk around the village each day, learning, as best I could, the ways of the Remote-area Dwellers of Little Musing, and considering whether this was a tolerable place in which to settle a colony of our people. Though I seldom saw a human face, I knew that behind the lace curtains in the little dwellings observers kept track of my every step.

They dwell in far-away times; much of their lives could be said to be lived in a damp dreamtime, and if you watch their faces closely, you will see them sometimes fix into that rapt introspection, like man at stool, straining for something to which they feel they remain attached, even as it is passing from them.

They dwell, too, in overcrowded conditions, at almost a thousand to the square mile. Perhaps this proximity to each other explains the extreme discomfort they feel at bodily functions and the exposure of the body, often resulting in a kind of cramped comedy which they use to disguise their embarrassment. Bodies and their functions are a source of public mirth and private horror among them. Individuals need to preserve private space; but they know they have to coexist. Yet any further forced intimacy would drive them mad. So the native genius had come up with a way of making the intense dislike they feel for one another almost bearable – coolness, diffidence, tolerance. Toleration is really just the acceptable face of hatred.

Nothing sustains the English in their present sad and shrunken circumstances (rather worse than those of many of the races who were once their servants) than the knowledge that once upon a time they lived better than anyone on earth. It is a distant race memory which many natives of the island retain, and it is a consolation, of almost religious importance.

Their religion, as I was to discover, is not a question of churches. The closest they come to a feeling of transcendence, and a sense of the sacred, is when they turn to the past. Their faith is a form of ancestor-worship. And the only spiritual experience which binds all orders of society – in fear, awe and loathing – is the blood-sacrifice.

This discovery took place rather unexpectedly. I had begun to hope that by allowing the children of the village to gain invaluable ‘hands-on’ experience of my unspoiled innocence I might have relaxed my passage into English life.

Indeed, it seemed to have done so, for no sooner had I returned from the school when Peter the Birdman and Julia invited me to an ancient ceremony on a nearby estate. They told me that from time to time all the villagers dressed in clothes which once marked their station in life, as peasants, or honest yeomen, archers, beaters, ploughmen, and then, said Peter, they made a pilgrimage to what they called the ‘Big House’, a great mansion, some miles away, where dwelt, they said, a magnificent Lord. And there these peasants and yeomen and matrons re-enacted an age-old ceremony for the benefit of foreign visitors who paid handsomely for the privilege of accompanying the Lord of the Big House upon an ancient English hunt; they chased birds and shot them out of the sky, and killed foxes and even deer, and by this traditional blood-letting they felt themselves to be, once again, part of a chosen race whose feet did, in ancient times, walk upon England’s mountains green.

Even Peter the Birdman took part in the ceremony, explaining that although he was implacably opposed to the taking of aviary life, the ancient customs of the countryside deserved support, and he worked, not with guns, but with a bag, collecting game knocked out of the sky.

It seemed a wonderful idea, the villagers dressed up, pretending to be peasants, and the Lord of Goodlove Castle dressed up, pretending to be a nobleman.

And I was invited to join the festivities.

To my disappointment, Beth and her father were vehemently opposed to the idea. The Lord of Goodlove Castle, they muttered, might not quite see things my way; and if I ventured on to his estate, I might never leave it again.

I saw how fearful of this Lord the Farebrother family was when the monthly ritual of the collection of rent came round, and Miss Desdemona, cousin of the Lord of Goodlove Castle, would appear, carrying an old shopping bag and talking cheerfully of the garden and the weather and a host of unrelated subjects until at some precise, but undefined moment, a handful of notes were pushed into the shopping bag, apparently unnoticed by Miss Desdemona and unmissed by the Farebrother family, for neither party to the transaction said a word.

Miss Desdemona then moved to Peter the Birdman’s cottage and called on him to come out. Peter pretended deafness. His domestic aviary swirled against the panes and pecked and chirruped as if to say that there was nobody home, but we all knew Peter was kneeling on the floor behind the curtain, unable to pay his rent because he had spent it all on his feathered allies.

In my country, this refusal would have led to police vans and prison. But Miss Desdemona, after waiting for a response, eventually moved on to Julia’s cottage and no one said a word. For that was not the English way. Peters behaviour had been noted, and would not be forgotten. One night the Lord of Goodlove Castle, who owned all our houses, and much of the village, it seemed, and most of the land between Little and Much Musing, would come to call and demand his fee. I had the sense that although they resented the far-reaching powers of the mysterious noble, they somehow felt him to be part of the very fabric of life, with his festivals and his name and his Big House and his nocturnal raids, and they were all connected, or beholden, or related to the invisible aristocrat. Even Julia, unwillingly slipping her envelope into Miss Desdemona’s shopping bag, complaining bitterly about the number of birds in Peter’s cottage for which ‘he did not pay a penny’, or the presence in the house of the defrocked Bishop of a little person from the colonies who was undoubtedly some sort of live-in servant, while she rattled around like a lost marble in a cold house she could not afford to heat, with a lawn the person from the colonies would not bestir himself to mow, paying rent to a rich man who gave not a thought to decent and proper conduct, but instead spent it all on a harem of floozies, yet she asked Miss Desdemona to convey her best wishes to her cousin – though how a man of his standing could carry on like some oriental despot she, for one, could not imagine.

To which Miss Desdemona and the Farebrothers and Peter the Birdman, crouched behind his curtains, and I listened and said nothing. For this was the English way; a little tirade was allowed, and even encouraged, but it did not change anything and everyone knew the score. Hate the Lord though they might, even in protest they all still deferred in one way or another to his invisible power. Not, I think because they liked him, or believed in him – but because without him to love or hate, who else was there?

I watched as all the village, decked out in the costumes of yesteryear, climbed aboard the transport provided by the Lord of the Castle, an old wagon, pulled by a tractor, and set off for the festivities. I felt they resented my refusal to accompany them, but the Farebrothers were adamant.

So concerned did they become at the threat represented by the Lord that they began casting about for some hiding place where I might be concealed until the Lord of Goodlove Castle had forgotten all about me. The church was just the place, they decided.

I offered the opinion that the Lord of Goodlove Castle, knowing I had been living with the former Bishop, would surely guess where I had been hidden.

On the contrary, the Bishop informed me – the last place anyone thought of visiting was a church.

After dark, the Bishop took me to my place of safety. The church was stoutly barred and carried a great padlock. Local people were in the habit of carrying away anything they could lay their hands on, from the lead on the roof down to the pews and flagstones. It was a rural custom.

Custom or not, I could not help wondering whether he regretted the loss of all his sacred furniture.

He confessed that when he still believed, it had saddened him. But it was a phenomenon which happened all over the world, did it not? Even in my country?

I was pleased to be able to tell him that nothing of the sort occurred amongst my people. We built no churches. Our healers and medicine people wore no distinguishing insignia, and owned no fixed property. They were there to help us at the dance time of the eland bull. Or when a woman first bleeds. To talk and to sing of Kaggen, the praying mantis. To pray to !Khwa, the rain god, and to protect us from Khwai-hem, the All-Devourer.

Ex-Bishop Farebrother said it was quite plain to him that nothing was stolen from my people only because they had nothing left to steal. He would give anything to be in my position. And he hoped I realized how well off I was.

He pushed open the door and we entered the holy gloom which they favour in their churches. When my eyes grew accustomed to the semi-darkness, I saw that the floor of the church was made of the lids of the tombs of scores of bishops. The walls were lined with the coats of arms of brave knights, and with the regimental flags of the local soldiery. Relics of famous victories in foreign parts. I could not help reflecting on their extraordinary sensitivity. Not for them the great brassy trumpeting monuments of other tribes, nor the noisy marching displays of triumph. That would not be their way. Rather, they preferred to incorporate their relics into their sacred places, to lay their battle standards in the lap of their Creator. To recognize that, without the help of their God, they could never have conquered three-quarters of the globe and ruled an empire that stretched from sunrise to sunset.

Each evening the good grounded Bishop paid a visit to me. We talked of my gods and of his, and of how he had come to be excluded from his Church.

Their religion, as he explained it to me, seems rather crude, though it has some saving aspects. They know nothing, for instance, of the power of the moon as regards hunting or rain-making; nor of the songs of the stars or the dangers of the sun. There is some slight indication that they retain rudimentary memories of true religion because they sometimes refer to the beliefs of their ancestors who paid due respect to our mother, the moon.

Mr Farebrother knew nothing at all of how man came to die. How the hare found his mother lying still in the veld, so still he felt she must be dead. He prayed to the moon to wake her, but the moon said that his mother was not dead but only asleep. However, the hare being foolish, the hare being little-brained, the hare being of the family of man that goes on two legs, he would not listen, would not hear, would not believe the moon and cried and cried for his dead mother, until the moon grew pale and angry and, reaching down to earth with long arms, slapped the hare hard across the mouth, as a mother will do a foolish child. The hare’s lip was split, and the hare’s mother continued in her sleep, now truly a sleep of death. Oh, if only the hare had believed the moon that his mother truly lived; then the hare, like the moon, would have lived for ever, and all the human family.4

My flightless friend told me that, to them, the moon was just a piece of earth that had split away long ago and now floated in the heavens, cold and dead. He stared at me, open-mouthed, when I told him of Kaggen, who made the moon, the celestial joker, the nimble god, who shifts his shape in the blink of an eye, from cobra to jackal. Mr Farebrother had never seen a praying mantis and shook his head wonderingly as I described the divine jester, who appears to man in devout repose with huge eyes and tiny hands clasped in prayer. He listened in silence when I related how, one day, the mantis was attacked by meercats, so sharp of tooth and claw, and how, in his haste to escape, he pierced the bladder of an eland bull and flooded the earth with inky darkness, and so escaped. But since a dark world is no good for hunting, clever Kaggen made light by throwing his shoe into the night sky, where it hangs shining to this day, helping the hunter on his way.

It did not look like a shoe, the Bishop objected.

I explained that the shoe carried with it, into the sky, a cloud of dust from Bushmanland; the dust prevents us from seeing the moon for the true shoe it is.

He appeared unpersuaded. They have great difficulty understanding such profound truths.

We talked about God.

Their God is bound up with notions not of the good, as it is for most other people, but of the useful. Particularly with those things their genius has created: the steam engine, the railway, the spinning jenny, the football match, achievements with which they consider they have enriched the life of man.

Thus it is that one can say that they worship what is gone. Their God lies somewhere behind them, where he inhabits an ideal paradise, small, green and clean. Their God has absented himself. If you wanted a sign that the English were innately religious, said the former flying Bishop, you would tell it from the fact that they were for ever looking over their shoulders asking where he was, why he had gone missing. Would he turn up one day? Again? And come in glory? Was he simply late – like the trains?

But that seemed to me a very pallid god, a polite fiction, a deification of their own nostalgia. I hoped we might discuss it.

Now, they have a great horror of abstract thought. They will do almost anything to avoid it. They hate, above all, what they call ‘speculation’, that is to say, the effort of thinking hard about ideas. When they do this, it is a very comical sight. Their eyes turn inwards. They scratch their heads. They exhibit all the delightful but helpless perplexity you will find among the baboons, those people who sit on their heels when confronted by our fierce euphorbias in the Karoo, which, pointing their poisonous spines at the sky, stop those poor, thirsty baboons from eating their milky flesh.

Each night I was locked in religiously by Beth, who made sure I had enough to eat and drink, often bringing me delicacies she knew I would like, especially the larvae of ants, being entranced when I told her how we prized this ‘Bushman rice’. More and more she asked me about the life and ways of the Red People. Increasingly, she stayed with me after I had eaten, and settled me for the night beneath an old tartan blanket, which she pulled over the stretcher set up for me before the altar, and I noticed the shine to her eye which she had first shown me when I took that bath in her presence on the night I arrived in Little Musing and she had hidden her blushes in the steam and I had hidden my modesty under my hat. Beth now demanded constant stories and instruction in the ways of the Red People, going so far as to say that if her father objected, she would run off to join a Bushman band in the far Kalahari; for she wished to climb out of her skin and enter that of another, where she would be free and alive and far from home.

I suspect my mistake began there. For it seemed to me, in feeding her hunger for tales of the old times, of the mantis and the moon, of hunting customs and the dances of my people, I was pleasing this sad woman who never ventured out of her house and whose duties towards her father were harsh as any servants. Besides, I hoped that in pleasing her I was repaying her father who had saved me. I meant well, but I did badly.

Her absence from home was noted, and her father began arriving unannounced, demanding she return immediately and cook his supper, or sweep the house, or iron his shirts, saying that I was quite capable of bedding myself down for the night and that too much comfort was likely to spoil me. And what good, then, my unspoiled innocence? But Beth tossed her head and looked determined, and I began to wonder what she was determined on. Furious with her father, she told me she would happily stay right through the night, if I liked. Or, if I preferred, she would help me to leave Little Musing and travel with me through the length and breadth of the kingdom, safeguarding me, as the lioness does her whelps. I thanked her for her offer. It showed that the warmth which her father had hoped would be established between the English and myself was now evident indeed, though perhaps not in the way he had intended.

I made no secret of my admiration for Beth: that magnificent plateau, that great fleshy magnificence of her posterior, that spongiform delight, those two fat heifers harnessed to a lovely plough. What man in his right mind would not feast on such charms? And Beth for her part, instead of hiding this miracle, as she usually did among her own people, positively showed it off, allowed the solid, rubbery bounce of each hemisphere to find its own independent rhythm and harmony, walking away from me with a sly backward glance, knowing I was bewitched by that divine fundament. I understood her essential loneliness and I was not, as I have made clear, immune to her charms. However, philosophical questions arose. Could one, for instance, enter into an intimate relation with a local person and not acquire, or have ‘rub off on one’, as the English say, some of their less admirable qualities? Then, too, there was the responsibility to my people. What would it profit their cause were I to go native?

But the strength of the attraction was there, and it can be explained, I believe, by very compelling characteristics we held in common: in a world where others found us odd, we saw that we were beautiful; and in a world dominated by height, two smaller persons found each other truly towering.

As it happened, a decision was not required in the matter because, one evening, before Beth arrived with my meal, a crowd of angry villagers assembled outside the church and called on me to come outside so that they could kill me. Among the voices I recognized those of my neighbours Julia and Peter the Birdman. She declared that I had turned the church of Little Musing into a coven of witches and urged the community to burn the place down; and Peter asked me to allow any birds which might be roosting in the church to escape before it was burnt.

I was just thinking that this was not the warming process that good Farebrother had in mind when that gentleman arrived to announce that the most horrible things were being said about me in the village.

Had I not, asked the good Farebrother, his porcupine hair flying into accusing points over his broad white forehead, allowed several children at the school to run their hands over my person?

I had done so – at his urging, I reminded him, as part of the warming process.

Well, it seemed that the warming process had taken something of a knock. He was sorry to tell me that one of those same children, a little boy, scarcely three years of age, had been discovered, broken and bloody, beside the rusting railway track, his body covered by a heap of stones.

I was horrified.

Since I had recently exposed myself to the same children, dressed in little more than the barest essentials, many in the village had drawn most unfortunate conclusions. They had decided I was the killer.

Decided, I said, seemed an odd word for such an irrational decision, leading, from what I could hear, to horrible bloodlust.

Moral perturbation was the phrase he preferred. He was quite sure that when I understood the agonizing moral dilemma of many of the men now baying for my blood, I would feel considerable sympathy. However, such was the mood of the crowd that he could not be sure that time allowed for a proper airing of the subject. He intended to slip away and try to head off the furious villagers. Beth would soon arrive in her motorcar and would smuggle me to safety. In the interim, on no account was I to leave the church. Being the House of God, it was a sanctuary the villagers would not dare invade.

Remembering how little faith they retain for Church or God, I thought this a somewhat optimistic summation of affairs, but the good ex-Bishop insisted, before he fled into the night, that although faith might have died, tradition taught that you did not – if at all possible – disembowel people in church, and tradition would keep the lynch party out long enough for me to escape. With that he squared his shoulders and went out to face the mob.

Now Beth arrived, terrified by the crowd – who had warned that unless she gave me up, she risked joining me in the fiery pyre when they set the church alight – but vowing to save me. She too had a plan, based on longstanding tradition. These were my instructions: I was to pay close attention, or my life was forfeit.

She had parked her car outside the vestry door, and if we needed to make a run for it, I would find the boot unlocked and the area enclosed by a steel mesh, forming a cage. On her command, I was to enter this cage, lie down on the floor and pant heavily; she would attach a collar and lead to my neck and then drive the car through the mob. It might also help if I whimpered loudly. I might be mistaken for a family pet. This would have a calming effect on our pursuers, she prayed, and win the time to accelerate through the mob to safety.

I protested again that the men of Little Musing were greatly mistaken. I had not harmed the child. It seemed unjust.

Beth gave a strange smile. It was not justice that was at stake, but another tradition. The men of Little Musing might have blamed me for the crime – but in truth they suspected themselves. Assaults on children were so woven into the history, the very fabric, of English life. The more painful implications of the custom were eased by putting it about that (a) other natives were worse, or (b) those responsible were quite unrelated to ourselves.

By dwelling constantly on this imaginary predator, they have made him into a continual presence; he lurks in the hedgerows, he haunts the back streets. They have many names for him; sometimes he is ‘the man in the van’, or ‘the horrible uncle’, or ‘the bad neighbour’ or ‘the man on the moor’. Frightening images from their pantheon of horrid spirits. He is as fearsome to them as the rain monsters are to us, or the giant snakes which lure women to their death in the bottoms of deep wells, or the vicious baboons who will leap on a virgin the moment her back is turned. The difference, I suppose, is that there is some scientific basis for our horrors, while their demons are little more than extensions of their own guilt.

I began to perceive how unhappy these poor wretches must have been as we sprinted for the car. But, running for my life, I could not give them the sympathy deserved. Beth flung open the boot, snapped on the dog collar, and I lay on the floor of the cage. She whispered that it might be useful if I could bring up the short hair on the back of my neck.

Catching sight of us, the mob began screaming. Lying on the floor of Beth’s car, I prepared to be lynched. But nothing happened – except that the screaming turned into singing and cheering. Raising my head cautiously, I saw that they had seized hold of the good Farebrother, and lifted him on to their shoulders, and were carrying him to and fro; some had fallen to their knees and seemed to give thanks.

The ex-Bishop now encouraged us to rejoice. The crisis was passed. The child battered to death and buried beside the railway line had not been, after all, the victim of the usual predator. It seemed that he had been done to death by two of his older classmates, boys themselves barely eight years old. I could see for myself the joyful relief on the faces of every man in the village, who now felt very ashamed indeed of their threats towards me, and wished to make amends by whatever means possible, and he could say that the warming process was back on track.

Beth wept, the Bishop grinned, the men of Little Musing cheered.

And I? I asked, in my innocence, whether there was anything to be done about the murder of children by children.

They considered the question and replied that, on the whole, they thought not.

Try as they might to limit injuries and murders of children by adults, and vice versa, the custom is too widespread, the need too deep, the island too crowded, for there to be anything between the swaggering, proliferating young and the anxious, older generation than a struggle to the death.

But principles of fairness demanded that everyone got a fair crack of the whip. So it was that, increasingly, children were beginning to act in a very similar way towards their parents, and to abuse adults. Especially the old and the ill, who were attacked at every opportunity. And children were giving every sign of being better at injuring the elderly than their parents had been at harming them. This must be considered an advance of sorts.

Now it seemed that a third front was being opened up, and children, finding the older generation a less interesting target, were attacking each other. Painful as this sometimes might be, it showed that democratic principles were still very much at work in England. For however frightening the experience of near-lynching might have proved to me, the ex-Bishop hoped very devoutly that I had learned something from it.

I was happy to set his mind at rest. Certainly I had done so. In my few months in England I had learned two essential lessons of survival: when faced by a murderous mob in a suburb of bastards, pretend to be a donation; when faced by villagers baying for blood, there is no more soothing behaviour than to pretend to be a household pet.

1	Marijuana.
2	Lizard.
3	This bears a surprisingly close resemblance to Livingstone’s account of reactions to his appearance in a remote African village, given in his Expedition to the Zambesi (1865).
4	This story of the hare and the moon is common to many of the San people, but it is amongst the /Xam of the Cape that we find it used most forcefully to explain how death came into the world.