London at last!
Penetrates the Mother of All Parliaments; sees a Minister destroyed; hears Mr Conbrio put a question; lavishes hospitality on Her Majesty’s Ministers with unexpected results
Not since old Adam Blitzerlik, who did a bit of gardening for the Mayor of Puffadder, was found astride the Lady Mayor, wearing only her husband’s golden chain of office, have I witnessed such an explosion.
I walked up the path and knocked at the door of Edward Farebrother’s cottage.
Julia was leaning over the fence. Well, well, she said, the prodigal returns.
Peter the Birdman, out in his garden, said nothing but pretended to be watching a sparrowhawk killing a fat racing pigeon.
The wingless wonder, the failed flier, my old friend and mentor Edward Farebrother opened the door and stared at me the way a man does at the snake he finds in his shoe; his face blushed like the flame tree, then, seeing his neighbours watching, he pulled me sharply inside the house and slammed the door.
And why, David Mungo Booi – he demanded – are you here?
I had arrived prepared to overlook the behaviour of a man who had sold his friend, traded his daughter and broken his word to his Sovereign to placate his tribal taboos. I returned a truthful answer to his question – Goodlove Castle had very nearly claimed my life. I had escaped only by the grace of Kaggen.
That is when he exploded. Pointing a shaking finger at my heart, the former holy aviator declared in ringing tones that I summed up in my hateful little person all that was wrong with the Third World. He had managed, with enormous difficulty, to place me in the house of an aristocrat to teach and tame and fashion me in the ways of the upper classes; knock off a few of my edges; give me a taste for horseflesh, a whiff of shot and shell; a sense of the sacred ceremony of the tea-towel; of roast beef, of common sense; of the knowledge that things will be all right on the day, and we’ll muddle through; and of what was, and was not, on; of true-blue Anglo-Saxon love of the loam, the cow and the copse; of that ancient attachment to English acres; English ale; English attitudes which so distinguish the landed gentry of England from those pale shadows across the Channel, the effete, landless, loveless Eurotocracy of other, less fortunate, lands.
And how had I repaid him? I had gone over the wall like an absconding schoolboy.
No wonder that people like me could not feed or clothe ourselves. Give us entry into one of the great houses of England, and we went AWOL. Give us a finger and we took an arm and a leg. Give us millions and we frittered them away. Give us asylum and we began seducing their women; give us a brighter tomorrow and we elected a darker yesterday; give us dams and we bought guns; give us the honey of Northern ingenuity, the cream of Western intelligence, and we preferred dumb insolence and disease; give us clean water and we kept coal in it; give us condoms and we wore them on our heads, lightbulbs and we used them as penile ornaments, tractors and we lost them, trade credits and we spent them, nuns and we raped them, tanks and we used them to invade our neighbours; give us grain, millions of land-mines, electoral observers, bags of compassion, aid agencies, relief agencies, humanitarian agencies, fighter bombers, field ambulances, dollars, Mercedes Benz, international mediators, marines, and we chewed them up and spat them out and things were soon a lot worse than they had been before we started. Look at Rwanda … Somalia … Angola … Liberia …
And here I was again. Asking for more. Well, he had news for me. Not now. Not ever again. He had treated me as a lost son, trained me, groomed me for better things. And how had I responded? By suborning his daughter, leading her in lascivious dances, preceded by omelettes and lechery in his own back garden. These were his thanks for plucking me from the fists of the authorities as they were about to return me to that distant, god-forsaken, murderous, uncouth, fly-ridden, disease-struck neck of the woods I called home.
He left me then, returning moments later with my brown suitcase and threw it down, without care, on the floor, and it broke open, spilling its precious contents, and I scrabbled to collect my bow of gharree wood, my arrows, the ceremonial digging sticks and fire sticks and necklaces of ostrich-eggshell and, most important, the fine copper bangles. The small leather bag, given to me by my cousins the !Kung from the Kalahari, split open. I gazed on the fabled star-stones that Europeans are said to love more than life or love, and which I had quite forgotten. Very indifferent pebbles, much like gravel you see scattering across the road when the farmer races down the dusty roads in his quick white truck.
Then a silence descended. Where was I proposing to go? the former Bishop suddenly inquired. Not merely had his tone changed but his voice was close to my ear, and I was startled to discover he was down on his knees beside me, searching the darkest corners where the stones had rolled.
To London, I replied. And the Palace.
How could I manage in the capital without help? Surely I needed help?
By those who do not know them, they are said to be a passive, stolid people. Do not believe it. Within the space of moments, for reasons unclear, the once-winged priest had moved from outraged denunciation of my person and all its works into a mood of almost wheedling kindness. Truly they are a mercurial, volcanic, turbulent tribe!
I had learnt a good deal about survival during my time as a guest at Goodlove Castle, I answered.
And did I propose, then, to visit the Queen in all my tribal finery?
My heart pained me so that I could manage no reply. But silently nodded my head. Once upon a time, I dreamed of a far more magnificent progress to the Palace, borne aloft, in the traditional manner of the great explorers, in a sedan chair, carried on the shoulders of four white bearers; as the expedition progressed towards the Palace of the Great She-Elephant, I would recline in the yellow shade, behind my heavy satin curtains, reading some appropriate text from my portable library: Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, by Bruce, or Henry Moreton Stanley’s unique primer, In Darkest Africa. Bringing up the rear would struggle my porters, toting their bales crammed with every conceivable necessity: quinine, tea, coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, canned vegetables, dried meat, fruit, bottled water, and champagne, in which to toast the health of the Monarch.
Alas, now this was not to be. My small funds had dwindled to nothing. So, yes, I would present myself at the Palace in the clothes I stood up in.
And when I had achieved my goal and presented my credentials to Her Majesty, what would I do then?
What I had always intended – I would return home.
Would I give him a categorical assurance?
Before I could reply, the room erupted for a second time.
Beth, who must have crept upon us silently, and heard most of our conversation, burst upon us and flung her arms around my neck. Her lustrous behind, seen from my vantage point, my nose buried in her neck as she hugged me, showed like two great boulders, smoothed by a mighty river into perfect melons, and carried together by that same torrent to repose side by side like identical twins.
How could I even contemplate exchanging the safety of their garden for the horrors of home? Beth cried. I must promise to do whatever possible to stay with them for ever.
It is a happy people who live under a delusion, quite impervious to reason. They, who by any measure may be said to lead lives of poverty, sadness, fear and restriction on an overcrowded island, sometimes never seeing the sun from one week to the next, at the mercy of increasingly savage young who would tear their parents limb from limb for a sixpence, and frequently do so, marooned at the mercy of clever and more powerful neighbours, enduring in the twilight of their past glories and fearful of the future, still contrived somehow to believe themselves the happiest people on earth and their system the best that the sons of man ever invented!
Beth was scarcely recognizable; what a dismal descent from the proud, upstanding, free-swinging beauty of the Eland Dance to this wan, tousled-haired person, breasts strangled, haunches swathed in some crumpled, hairy skirt reaching all the way down to her feet which, saddest of all, protruded to show she was again wearing her father’s old shoes.
As I examined his daughter, the flighty holy man examined my star-stones, giving little cries as he did so, ‘Well, I never,’ and ‘If I’m not very much mistaken,’ and other signifiers of happy astonishment, and I began to realize that the !Kung had been wise to include these fripperies among my baggage. The ex-Bishop’s manner had altered utterly, from stone to water. He ran through his fingers the white gravel as if it were food, honey or tobacco, or something almost as valuable.
If I was ever to attain my ambition, warned the ex-Bishop, I would not do so by sticking out like a sore thumb.
Boy David, quoth he, when stalking your quarry, is it not essential to blend into the background? And the best disguise when hunting the lion is his mane, worn as a cloak. And the ostrich is beguiled when the hunter carries, above his head, a beak on a stick, and ties a circle of feathers to his rump, so the ostrich thinks it spies a brother, plodding, sedately over the veld towards him. Like calls to like.
A becreeping cap, said I.
Precisely, returned Heaven’s fallen sky-soarer. If you are to succeed on your final safari, you must so blend, as you pass through England, that your own mother would take you for a native. If you succeed in your safari, and no one, believe me, hopes more heartily than I that you should do so, then you will return from whence you came. I shall see to it that you are fitted out in the best damn becreeping cap money can buy. Can you think of a better plan?
I saw the flaw immediately. I had no money.
He ran the star-stones through the funnel of one hand into the palm of the other and reassured me that with these charms, money would flow like water.
Let me put on my good grey suit, which he had kept very safely for me during my time away; I might carry my tribal dress and my gifts in my suitcase. Now, if I would excuse him, he too would go and slip into something more appropriate to the trek that lay ahead.
We were going somewhere – together?
He seemed astonished by my question; How else would we travel? He would never abandon me, now that my goal was so close. Soon – very, very soon – I would be setting sail for home, my task accomplished, my journey done. To which he could only say, God speed!
Beside the grocer and the little butcher in the dying village of Little Musing stands the old stationmaster’s house. Given over now to the doctor who calls twice a week to serve the dwindling needs of an ageing population. There is always a crowd outside the doctor’s surgery; people who are not ill anxious for a word with those who are. A communal occasion to talk happily about illness, past and present and to come. The English have, I think a lovers’ quarrel with disaster.
When I arrived at the station, suitcase in hand, Farebrother was pacing the platform, dressed in a voluminous frock the shade of pinky purple you see in the Babbian flower (which baboons love for its nutty corns). This lurid costume was, apparently, the uniform of a practising prelate in the Church of England. He had not worn it since his official grounding by the authorities.
I could not help wondering why he dressed so vividly for what I had understood was a secret mission.
That was the point, came his reply. By wearing such regalia he appeared to be what he was not – a full bishop; and since bishops were seen as odd, but essentially harmless, his cloth would enable him to move about London almost unnoticed. Custom would ensure that we were admitted to all the best places, but no one would pay him the least attention. This was his own becreeping cap.
We rumbled away from Little Musing on the rusting rails bound for London, watched by curious cows which now and then fell down and died. Their cattle, which they prize hugely, suffer from a falling sickness, the cause of which is unknown, but which they attribute to the evil machinations, or even spells, or poisons, of forces ‘across the water’.
Strange how the mention of trains evokes a spasm of pain. The mere sound makes them flinch. In their tongue, not for nothing do the two words rhyme with each other: ‘train’ and ‘pain’. They repeat these rhymes to themselves in a kind of furious despair.
Why should this be? In response, Edward Farebrother related one of their oldest tribal myths. They were the inventors and originators of the railways. As they gave so much else to the world. Their genius provided tribes less fortunate than themselves with gifts which no other nation could match. The steam engine belonged to them as surely as the spinning jenny and the football, sweet achievements of the tribe. But then, like sleepy travellers, overburdened with genius, they put down some of their baggage along the way, and never found it again. Like so much else, it was stolen by jealous competitors, copied and travestied, passed off as their own by mixed assemblies across the water, the racial ruction,1 whose trains were bigger, faster, better, and about which they boasted continually, forgetting his too modest people to whom they owed their success.
Was that fair? he implored.
I told him of the honey-finder. This tiny bird spends his life watching for the secret places where the bees, those yellow people with noisy noses, make and hide their honey. Flying to the hunter, the bird points the way to the golden treasure. The hunter will hammer pegs into the cliff face, climb to the hive, and smoke out the yellow people and scoop handfuls of the sweet gold water into his mouth. But he will never forget to thank the honey-finder with a good piece of the honeycomb. It looked to me as if his people had acted as honey-finders to the tribes across the water. Then, instead of gratitude, the barbarians took the English honey-finder and broke his wing.
I had understood, cried my friend, and his tears ran under his white plastic collar. And not one wing only, but both! For not only had they stolen – now they repaid kindness with a vengeance.
And also his beak! the good priest continued. And spat in his eyes for good measure. That would be closer to the scale of the ingratitude with which foreign savages had repaid his people. The mutilation of a nation of honey-finders, the persecution of gentle, useful, enchanted creatures … And when I understood more of their history, I would comprehend that through the ages England’s kindness had been her downfall.
The journey took us much of the day, as English trains are as sensitive as the people who make them. Leaves on the track are enough to bring the system to a lengthy halt.
From time to time broadcast announcements informed passengers, with an enviable frankness, and with frequent expressions of regret, that the train was delayed due to unnamed events over which the authorities had no control; and they were thanked time and again for their patience.
That the passengers did not believe a word of these announcements was perfectly clear. They barely listened to them, preferring to grumble gently amongst themselves. Yet the worse things got, the more cheerful they became. They even took a certain rough pride in these tests of endurance.
I was amazed by the civil way in which the travellers tolerated these delays.
Edward Farebrother was puzzled. Surely, when setting out on a journey we left the arrival time to chance and the gods?
Certainly not, I replied. When setting out on a march of several days between waterholes, a journey that took a band of fifteen people across mountains and deserts, the travellers would know, to within an exact position of the sun, when they would expect to arrive.
Well, said he, in his country individual freedoms far outweighed group expectations. And the most cherished of freedoms was the right to set one’s own pace. And if this resulted in lateness, loss or failure, why, these setbacks were likewise cherished. Even celebrated with a fierce triumph. Thus failure, amongst them, was relished for its individual bouquet, like a fine wine. It was part of their genius that everyone was permitted to fail at his or her own pace. Of their continental neighbours, Germany had paid dearly for too great an insistence on order. And Italy had suffered terribly for making the trains run on time. It was different, thank God, in England. Perhaps when my people had reached a greater stage of technical advancement we would begin to appreciate that hard-and-fast demands were luxuries we could no longer afford.
It was an awesome journey, that expedition into the heart of London. As you travel you might be like the even tinier creatures who live on a water-spider, floating haphazardly down a stream. You feel you are in the world as it was in its primeval beginnings. Every so often we would stop at stations and a group of young warriors, male and female, would board in a kind of explosion, a whirl of white limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling.
I was delighted to have a chance to note the peculiar characteristics of the natives as we rolled slowly southward. The females are notable for the small development of the mammary organs. Few have small waists. Both sexes pierce their ears. Some of the young warriors cut their hair, as do those of the peace tribe, so that it commands their heads like an axe-blade, which they colour with a variety of strong hues. Often they employ scarification, and amongst the most popular of the clan-marks is a stippled line along the temporal lobes from the external edges of the eyebrows to the middle of the cheeks or the lower jaws.
With each stop, a fresh invasion. The chants went up anew, and I felt as if prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? Their cries were incomprehensible. My friend interpreted for me, saying that some commented on the failures of the French, or the deformities of foreigners generally.
I should not be in the least bit afeared, as this was a perfectly normal practice – bands of sport lovers travelling abroad to support their country.
Love of country among these young men was unashamed, as they repeatedly chanted the beloved name of their sceptred isle, which they pronounced with a curious double beat, accentuating both syllables, ENG-LAND! ENG-LAND! Many carried flags. Not only was the proud standard waved at every opportunity, but many of them had made clothes of the national emblem and wore it as a shirt, or as a scarf or even as trousers. Some flew the flag on the tips of their stout black boots, or had tattooed tiny flaglets on each knuckle. One fine young buck, clearly a super-patriot, had emblazoned the beloved red, white and blue on his shaven skull, and the precious emblem flew wonderfully against the granite gleam of bone. Another had taken matters a step further and, perhaps because he was a great singer, he bellowed out ‘God Save the Queen’ in a rough baritone, showing, as he did so, that each of his teeth had been stained red, white and blue. This display of what we might call dental patriotism impressed me deeply.
None the less, I had to confide in my mentor that the sight left me secretly appalled, as a sane man would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in the madhouse.
On catching sight of me, they became very excited. Some leaped from their seats, lifting their arms and scratching in their armpits as if troubled by furious itching; some threw monkey nuts in an artillery barrage of shells, ending with a large banana which struck me on the forehead to the accompaniment of loud cheers. They howled, they leapt and spun and made horrid faces. Ugly? Yes, it was ugly enough, but I felt in me a faint response to the terrible frankness of that noise. It was something that we, so far from the night of the First Ages, find so hard to comprehend, that someone from another part of the world should be traditionally saluted with fruit and nuts.
Good Farebrother, seeing my perplexity, assured me that it was all quite normal, really, a regular occurrence, I should not mistake ceremonial displays of aggression for anything more than healthy high spirits. It was not a war they were preparing for, but a sporting ritual. Certainly I need have no fear for myself, since bloodshed was something they generally preferred to pursue abroad, and, wishing to reassure me of this, he now waved and smiled at the young people.
Perhaps this was not helpful, for the crowd began to take a closer interest in my episcopal companion. One young brave, his hair closely shaved, who had until then been preoccupied with the task of carving his name, DARREN, into the seats with a sharpened screwdriver, now tapped the ex-Bishop on the chest and, indicating his lovely purple frock, demanded to know if he were the Pope. The question accompanied by a large wink at his mates, indicating, I felt sure, that here was a sign of that fabled English humour.
The good Farebrother responded equally gaily with a gentle smile that he was Not Guilty! That, to the contrary, he was Church of England, Eng-Land!, giving to the name of his country just the same double emphasis as the young warriors had done, showing that he was emphatically of their kind.
Unfortunately, the joke did not now, as I had expected, lead to general laughter and good humour all round. Not at all. Hearing the word ‘Pope’, the others began chorusing their desire to perform sexual intercourse with the Pope, whom I took to be some person who inspired deep physical desire in Englishmen. That the young fellows were aroused seemed clear. Calling repeatedly for carnal relations with this Pope person, they grunted, whistled, stamped their feet and brandished their colours; I saw flags in the air, flags in their hair, flags on their fingers and flags on their toes. In this way they arrived at such a state of sexual excitation that some began tearing up the seats and throwing them across the carriage; others began pelting us with coins, and all the time they gave out this curious greeting or salute, perhaps an unconscious expression of their physical erections; that is to say, they lifted stiff arms before their chests and pointed their fingers into the air, as if to suggest the direction from which they expected this longed-for Pope to appear.
I was fascinated. Why, I asked my friend, were these people so filled with desire for the Pope? Did they love him?
On the contrary, came the astonishing reply. They hated him.
Then why did they wish to lie with him?
I had misunderstood the subtleties of the language, said the Bishop, rising from his seat as the missiles rained down on us, and urging me towards the door. The good old Anglo-Saxon expression used did, indeed, refer to coitus, but it was also synonymous with the desire to destroy.
Alas, we were forced to abandon this fascinating etymological discussion, for several coins had struck the Bishop about the head and he was bleeding into his white collar. Seizing my hand, he pulled me into the safety of the corridor, and we beat a retreat to the far end of the train, and locked ourselves in a lavatory.
It was later – oh, so much later – that I remembered, too late, my suitcase and its gifts for the Sovereign. I comforted myself a little with the hope that they might at least be bestowed, by these seeming admirers, on His Majesty the Pope.
And very much later, when I told the good Bishop of my loss, he consoled me by saying that the star-stones at least were safe in his keeping.
We spent the rest of the journey to the capital in the lavatory. I did my best to staunch his bleeding, while he told me how very shocked he had been by such behaviour on what he called his home turf. Sad was a word he used. As well as setback. And scandal. It was also really most unusual. Normally these young people reserved that sort of behaviour for trips abroad.
But they had seemed to be enjoying themselves, I suggested.
This saddened him further. I must be careful not to give way to unwarranted cynicism. We had been exposed to the hooligan element, a tiny hard core of thugs, who were not representative of the great mass of ordinary, decent sports lovers. These sorts of people not only brought the national pastime into disrepute but dragged the country down to a level one was more accustomed to expecting from less civilized people. Still, we must look on the bright side. I had been taught several useful lessons about the patriotism of the young. Having seen what fate awaited the Pope, I could imagine the treatment I would receive if these young patriots took against me. My training in Little Musing had given me the outlines of the camouflage needed if ever I was to travel safely in England. Now the time had come to put a London gloss on the good work.
London looked to me stiffly joined at hip and breastbone, one dwelling to another, a city set hard from end to end. The Queen, explained my guide and mentor, lived at the centre, and from her great Palace (or Royal Kraal, as he believed I would call it) the capital spread in concentric rings, rather as if one had dropped a stone into a waterhole and the ripples had set solid like concrete.
Our first stop was at a tailor shop. Not, you understand a man bent over an old Singer sewing-machine, like Mr Goolam over at Compromise, but someone who advertised in his window that he provided clothes to Her Majesty, by Royal Appointment. I began to glimpse just how cunning was to be the bait mixed by my frockless friend. The tailor ran around me, laying hands on my person, much like the children of Little Musing had done, exclaiming happily on my miniature but lovely measurements, saying that sir had a most original pelvic formation. In my natural state, I probably ran around in a penis sheath? A very short sheath. But we couldn’t have sir walking down Oxford Street in a penis sheath, now, could we?
When Bishop Farebrother whispered that I was on my way to see the Queen, he declared he had known it the moment he set eyes on me, saying to himself that here was a wealthy foreigner with a love of Higher Things. Only such individuals still possessed the style, the fortune, the breeding to appreciate classic English tailoring. In fact, without clients like sir, he would most likely have to close his business; and he had little doubt that Her Majesty felt the same way.
They removed my MAN ABOUT TOWN suit and my rubber boots. I was decked out in my hunting outfit, a heavy woollen suit, dark blue with thin little stripes. The jacket had a long, ungainly vent which, they explained, was to allow the buttocks free play, as the better class of male is often prominent there; a white shirt as crisp as a Karoo daisy with a collar stiff as a dominee’s choker and a tie pink as morning. For my feet soft, brown suede shoes, rather ungainly, flowing like cowpats. They wanted me to give up my big brown hat and adopt one shaped like a piss-pot, which, Mr Farebrother explained, though rarely worn any longer, was affected by aliens trying to ape the locals and so marked me out as an aspirant of real status. But I would not part with my hat, repository of my notebooks, protector of my modesty. And in the end Bishop and tailor agreed to let me keep it, saying it was a permissible foreign eccentricity in what was otherwise a near-perfect ensemble.
Only a last item had to be added, said Edward Farebrother, and that we could collect at our next lesson.
To begin with I found it difficult to work inside my disguise; the becreeping cloak was heavy, smothering and ugly. Especially difficult to manoeuvre in were the broad, flat, shapeless shoes, and I fell over my own feet, but this they said was a good sign. Tailor and cleric added that foreigners frequently found it difficult to adapt to English costume. When faced by discomfort, in myself and others, I should at all times simply barge ahead. If opposed, it helped to raise one’s voice, most especially if asked a question one had not understood. If in doubt, one disagreed. Or disapproved. I confessed to feeling rather ridiculous in the cumbersome outfit, but this too they said was perfectly natural in the early stages of transition. Even indigenous folk took time to get over the feeling. Were people to laugh at me, I should ignore it, for they were the sort who did not know any better. By heeding these simple guidelines I would so closely resemble a native of some importance that it would be impossible to distinguish me from the genuine article.
When my costume was complete, the good Bishop declared he had made me the best damn disguise in the world, an English becreeping cap, by George!
Now the final item would be added, said the flightless Bishop, nodding his big head up and down so that his nose sawed the air like a weaver-bird’s sharp beak; an irresistible titbit to bait our trap.
He took me in my fine new outfit to another part of the city, a noble place thronged with men dressed in just the heavy, creased costume I was wearing, and I blended into the large, pink, important, noisy herd so well, these individuals went about their business of barging ahead and raising their voices and did not even lift their heads and sniff the air when I appeared downwind of them, so I knew that my disguise was working well.
We arrived before the most magnificent edifice, with marble columns and a steeple and statues of pensive goddesses, which I knew must be a church or temple. I saw a change in my once-airborne friend’s demeanour which seemed to confirm that here was a place, holy and enchanted.
Remember, Boy David, advised the frockless holy man, that there is a distinction between religion and faith. Religion is the province of the Church of England, but the guardian of faith is the Bank of England. Faith is the shared belief, deep in the soul of the nation, that our currency is sacred, remains, in a word – and what better word could there be for it? – STERLING! Never to be sold short, off or out. Never to be polluted by mongrel admixtures, or supplanted by foreign impostors, or shunted aside by Euro-surrogates, or ambushed and buggered, absolutely buggered, by those who do not share our faith. Who believe money is merely a common-or-garden coinage, a means of whorishly easy exchange between foreigners, instead of the life and soul of a people!
And with a promise that he would show me what real money was, he took from his pocket my little leather bag of star-stones. When I asked what he was doing with it, he replied that he was working a miracle. He vanished into the temple, to emerge some moments later carrying a fat leather satchel bulging with money, and not just any old money, but, as he proudly showed me, English money, coin of the realm, said he, though all were bank notes, each painted with a picture of the Sovereign, and very welcoming she looked, a strangely confiding look in the Royal Eye, as if she said to me: David Mungo Booi, at last! I cannot wait to make your acquaintance.
I was so glad and humble and moved all at once to see that there was something of my world that England wanted more than life itself, even if it was these little pebbles that lie in the desert.
I realized that my patron had entered not some temple, to effect this miracle with my star-stones, but a bank.
When I confessed my mistake he said, very kindly, that it was typical of foreigners, really, to get these things wrong. I would not get far in England if I could not tell the difference between a church and a bank. Banks were in the main devoted to upholding morality; that was why the fall of a bank, which happened rarely, thank God, was an occasion for national mourning. Churches, on the other hand, closed every day. But then they were mostly given to raising money and worrying about affairs financial. The better sort of English bank hardly ever mentioned money, while the Church of England talked of hardly anything else.
Field-craft lessons followed. These consisted of learning how to disgorge cash effortlessly from the leather satchel without ever COUNTING IT, MENTIONING IT and, above all, MISSING IT!
He taught me, also, a set of phrases which he recommended I make my own: Being abroad makes me ill; Oh, really?; It’s just a German racket; No, no, no, no! It’s just not on; and Personally, I blame the French. By varying these phrases, he assured me, and becoming expert in the decorum of the satchel, I would soon blend naturally into the background and pass easily amongst all classes of English society.
When my teacher was satisfied that I looked the part, he took me to their ruling council of elders, or chiefs, who assemble in their Great Place beside the river.
Let us test-fly your becreeping cap – cried the ex-Bishop – in the Palace of Westminster, before we send you to the Palace itself. And he assured me that nowhere in the country was there greater experience of chicanery and deception. If I fooled these connoisseurs of camouflage, I would fool everyone.
Their national assembly is, I suppose, a cross between a church and a railway station, demonstrating how, in their culture, the sacred and the pragmatic are intermingled.
We were met by a Member who, my friend whispered to me, had the ear of Her Majesty’s Government, being himself one of her Loyal Ministers. A smooth, affable, beardless, balding fellow with eyes in which, from their gleam, it always seemed midnight by moonlight, and the dark-brown laugh of the foraging hyena.
His name, said my guide, was Mr Conbrio. And he was widely admired for his knowledge of essential parliamentary procedures. A Member of the highest integrity. If my case interested him, he might be prepared to put a question on my behalf.
Oh, really? I replied, in the manner I had been taught. Well, the question I wished to put was the following: did the Monarch not have a duty to honour the undertakings given by her predecessors to the San people of the Cape of Good Hope, and would she admit David Mungo Booi, their accredited representative, in special audience to discuss the matter?
Addressing me as ‘squire’, a tribute, I assumed, to my disguise, Mr Conbrio explained that before he could even consider putting a question on my behalf, time-honoured procedural customs in the Mother of All Parliaments must be observed. Certain formalities, if I took his drift…?
I did not take his drift. Which formalities did he mean?
Mr Farebrother came to my aid, throwing a meaningful glance at my leather satchel. With studied nonchalance, grateful for my coaching, I handed him several large bank notes amounting to one thousand pounds, casually expressing the hope that this took care of the formalities.
Leaping backwards, as if he had been presented with a cup of scorpion poison, Mr Conbrio’s handsome face turned that ruddy ochre in which our artists once used to portray a kudu speared to death. In icy tones he announced that such behaviour was just not on. It might be all very well in shoddy little assemblies in far-away lands where bribes and dash and kickbacks and pork-fat, as he believed such things were called, greased the wheels of corrupt governments. But we were present in the Mother of All Parliaments and he would do nothing to sully the fairest, finest, freest democracy in the world. He had no doubt I had meant well. But to take this gift from me? Never! It might look to the cynic, or the foreigner, as if Her Majesty’s Ministers could be bought. He would sooner die!
But there was no question, the ex-Bishop interposed silkily, of anything so gross, so offensive. All we requested was the benefit of his advice. Did he know someone who might help us?
That was a very different matter, Mr Conbrio replied. By a stroke of good luck, he was himself a professional consultant specializing in Royal Connections: Marques, Charters, By Appointments, Honours, Yachts, Palaces and Equestrian Events.
More than a stroke of luck, Farebrother assured him in the same manoeuvre by which a trapdoor spider generously extrudes the gossamer noose with which he plans to throttle his prey. It was a prayer answered! As a professional consultant, then – what advice would he give us?
As a professional consultant, Mr Conbrio smiled modesdy, he was obliged by the rules of his professional association – Select Lobbyists, Experts And Zealous Enablers plc – to levy a charge before parting with advice.
From a professional consultant, said Farebrother, he would expect nothing less. And with a movement so mercurial I never saw anything so neatly done (except perhaps the even greater speed with which the notes disappeared into Mr Conbrio’s pocket), he slipped him his fee.
I knew I had seen a display of skill which must have taken many decades to perfect. It was not something that came easily or naturally. And, as the ex-Bishop had demonstrated, it was certainly not something that came cheap.
After brief reflection, Mr Conbrio parted with this advice: the best way to advancing my cause would be to table a question in the House. By a stroke of luck he had intended to put just such a question that very day, and I was very welcome to watch from the Visitors’ Gallery the majestic proceedings of the Mother of All Parliaments. I might perhaps learn something to pass on to my people. Who could say?
I answered sincerely that I thought I had already done so.
They have two political parties: the first of these is the Party of the House, which divides into different sides or teams, each identified by a colour, much as young herd-boys, when they hunt doves, identify their loyalty with a red hibiscus behind the ear or a daub of blue chalk on the forehead.
The leader of each team is called something simple, such as ‘John’,2 to remind Members that though the game requires opposing policies, these are as interchangeable as the leaders.
Opposing teams face each other across a fighting floor, seated in green leather benches which rise in ascending tiers towards the roof. The air is criss-crossed with a fine tracery of spittle as arguments are sent this way and that in a form of ceremonial warfare in which a few may emerge rather damp, but no one is seriously hurt. The further back Members sit, the higher their position on the tiers and benches, the louder they shout, and the greater their moral standing. This they call ‘claiming the high ground’. To ask which team is ‘right’, the Right Reverend Mr Farebrother explained, was to miss the point. The object was to score points by holding your opponent up to derision. Members often said the first thing that came into their heads. Tore into each other tooth and nail.
But surely, I observed, this must lead to terrible clashes among their supporters in the country?
It might have done, my guide explained, if the noise from the Chamber reached the outside world. But it seldom did so, and people were able to get on with their lives. It was a magnificent achievement, was it not, to conduct fearless public debates on the great issues of the day while ensuring that the private lives of citizens were barely affected? He felt sure I had seen nothing like it.
Well, now, things grew a little clearer. And I had seen something very like it. I had watched opposing troops of baboons on the hillsides, under a huge, indifferent African sky, mocking, gesticulating, howling at each other, while each troop attempted to gain the higher ground, from where warriors rained down missiles on their enemy or presented their colours, by directing their brightly hued posteriors at the other side. These debates achieved a subtle and satisfying result. The sky remained utterly unaffected by the activities of the apes. Yet all sides of a question were aired without fear or favour; and at the end of the day nothing whatever had changed.
If the opposing teams of the Party of the House were really on the same side, where then, I wondered, was the true opposition?
He pointed to a small group of individuals who sat in a special gallery well above the reach of the brawling teams below. These were the members of the Party of the Press, which never missed a chance to question, to harry, to attack and, where necessary, to destroy Members of Parliament who fell below the high standards laid down by the owners of the public prints, often retiring individuals, usually invisible, yet the true guarantors of English democracy.
The Party of the House may propose, explained my episcopal guide and mentor, but it is often the Party of the Press that disposes. The Party of the House must, from time to time, however briefly, pay attention to its electors. The Party of the Press is answerable to no one, except its owners.
And with that we took our place in the Visitors’ Gallery, and he urged me to watch and learn and to carry myself always as an important visiting native with Anglophile impulses; in short, to remember that I was almost English. We were in luck. That very day we were to see a Minister being destroyed.
The Minister whom it was my privilege to see being destroyed that day was a sad, rather portly, nervous man, habitually looking over his shoulder with the jerky, panic-stricken movements of a rabbit transfixed before the flaring hood and glittering eye of the golden Cape cobra; he bore the portfolio of Minister for National Contentment.
Now I saw unfolding below me, in all its splendour, that flower of their democracy, the parliamentary debate. Mr Farebrother advised me to watch particularly how the loyalties of Members of the House Party were stirred to heroic defence when one of their colleagues was set upon by the Press.
The charge against the Minister was complicated. From what I gathered, the Press reported that he had been seen, disguised in a woolly muffler, bobble-cap and boots, emblazoned with his country’s colours, entering the house of a young woman. The Party of the Press believed a Minister charged with the contentment of the nation should not be playing away or indulging the national game, in particular, shooting and scoring. There was jocund debate as to whether there had been much dribbling. This drew laughter, even from the Minister himself, and one realized how civilized are these debates, despite their apparent bloodiness.
Then the Minister rose to defend himself. He had indeed visited the young woman – and he deplored the salacious reports which emphasized the gender of the therapist involved – to obtain a professional massage of the feet, attending particularly to the toes, which were especially sensitive. He strongly refuted suggestions that anything improper had occurred. A Minister charged with National Contentment had a duty to safeguard his own well-being. A happy Minister had happy feet. And a foot was only as happy as its toes. As to the wearing of the national colours, he had been planning a trip abroad immediately after his massage. Whenever setting out for foreign parts he always donned muffler and cap, a traditional costume of the Englishman when crossing the water, and he wore his colours with pride. He wished to assure the House that he loved his country so much he felt ill whenever he travelled abroad, and wearing the colours improved his health – and his happiness.
This struck a chord with the House and he was loudly cheered on all sides, and I was interested to note that the press joined in the acclamation, showing, yet again, how these people will sink their differences when the national interest is at stake.
But then, as Bishop Farebrother made plain, in Parliament one’s enemies are seldom found amongst the opposition. I was baffled by this comment, when, to my great surprise, there now rose a Member to the rear of the Minister who asked an apparently innocent question: he wished to know where the Minister’s duty lay. Whether or not the Minister had been playing away was a matter of conjecture; however everyone seemed agreed on the fact that wherever the Minister might, or might not, have scored (laughter), it looked very much like an own goal (cheers). And if the Minister had the interests of the nation truly at heart, he would not have ventured so far offside (cries of Shame!). Was it not the duty of the House to show him the red card and to say to him that the only honourable thing to do was to leave the field?
Of the ruthless effect of this attack there was no doubt. A dagger to the heart. The victim turned at bay, but I think we all felt the wound was fatal. His colleagues scented blood and knew that one of the big cats of the political jungle was badly mauled and bled mightily.
Now the Minister looked to me much as a sheep does that has been set on by hyenas. One catches his victim by the throat; several more take deadly hold of legs and tail. And it becomes a race to see whether those with their teeth deep in its flesh will gnaw their way through to the heart before their comrades, at the other end, tear the wretched victim limb from limb.
In the early days of my expedition, I might have baulked at such apparent barbarity, such cynical cruelty, but I was, increasingly, an old English hand, and had learnt that you do not judge these people by mores and conventions suitable to the Bushman traditions of amity and solidarity. Rather, one saw things from an English perspective, which, if carefully examined, revealed a form of fellow-feeling, in Members on both sides of the House, who, rather than allow a colleague to be slaughtered by the Party of the Press, preferred to destroy him themselves.
It was with great emotion that we watched as the former Minister stumbled blindly from his seat and vanished into the outer darkness. A moment charged with emotions; several Members unashamedly blew their noses and stiffened their upper lips. I imagined that now they would offer up some short form of thanks for the divine grace which safeguarded the Chamber, or observe a minute’s silence.
But, as so often, I was proved wrong. For there, on his feet, was none other than young Mr Conbrio, our professional consultant, and he put the following question to the Prime Minister.
Is the Prime Minister aware that, in some of our cities, the numbers of indigenous inhabitants have dwindled to a minority? And that every day, by devious routes, illegal immigrants are being smuggled into the country in numbers no civilized people will tolerate? Will he comment on information passed to me by reliable sources indicating a fresh invasion by so-called Bushmen or San nomads from Southern Africa? The same vagabonds who had sorely troubled Her Majesty’s forces during their late occupation of the Cape of Good Hope? When they were described as a pernicious and vexatious vermin. And that were these nomads to settle in England, they will send stock-theft figures soaring, as well as being a drain on vital resources? Will he not agree that the time has come to say no to illegal immigration, no to the slackening of border controls; no to creeping metrification that threatens to replace the imperial measurements of free men with the thumb-in-the-scale mumbo-jumbo of a discredited Bonapartism. No to those who urge that after centuries sharing the homes of others, on islands, peninsulas and archipelagos around the globe, sharing with them our virtues of loyalty, honesty and common sense, we should now share with them our island home. Enough is enough. Will he assure the House, better still will he tell the country, that the time has come to put a wall of English oak between ourselves and bogus asylum-seekers, and assorted aliens of every stripe – from Bushmanland to Bongo-Bongo-Land.
Such was the excitement aroused by this question that pandemonium reigned in the Chamber; Members jumped to their feet and waved pieces of paper in the air and cried out, ‘Knock ’em for six!’; some cried, ‘Shame!’ though that looked the least of their feelings; and they broke into that curious chant I had heard among the sports lovers on the train to London, that double-beat of the war cry ‘Eng-land! Eng-land!’ accompanied by the steady stamping of the right foot. And I realized that the Members on the green benches were but the parliamentary faces of the gangs on the train. Several were staring hard at the gallery where we sat, and I murmured to my mentor that I thought Mr Conbrio’s question showed a lesser understanding of parliamentary process than I had hoped.
The ex-Bishop, rising quickly to his feet, indicating that it might be polite to withdraw from the gallery at this juncture, muttered that, far from misunderstanding our needs, Mr Conbrio had showed a knowledge of parliamentary process, and a feeling for what the House wanted to hear, which would take him a very long way.
Getting out of the gallery was not easy. Several members of the public took hold of the Bishop, showing no respect for his cloth; others tried to grab me, though Heaven’s ex-aviator thrust me behind his skirts.
It was then that my field training came into its own. Turning to the menacing crowd, I announced in pleasant tones that, personally, I blamed the French. Whereupon those who had tried to stop us leaving fell into such a prolonged state of nodding approval that we were able to slip safely away.
Once outside, I was astonished to see, hobnobbing with members of the Party of the Press, who had so recently contributed to his downfall, the very ex-Minister who had slunk from the Chamber crushed and defeated. Yet he exhibited a gaiety which seemed extraordinary.
How was it that he had recovered his spirits so quickly? Minutes before he had been ruined. Yet now he was shaking hands with the very people who had destroyed him with a series of accusations, merciless and unprincipled, unleashed with the sole aim of driving an effective Minister from office. How could he extend the hand of friendship to such individuals?
What I was seeing, Mr Farebrother explained, was not the hand of friendship; it was the handshake of the newly employed journalist on a good contract. For such was the strength of English democracy that a politician destroyed by the press on Monday would very often be asked to write for them on Friday.
But what would happen, I demanded, if this individual then accused his accusers?
My guide replied that I still had some way to go before I really got the hang of things. If the ex-Minister attacked the press in the press, why, that was his democratic right. More likely, he would defend in print the right of any newspaper to destroy him. That was why no other country could hold a candle to the freedom of the English press – if I did not mind him saying so.
I did not mind him saying so. After what I had witnessed, I would have said so myself.
I had seen that a man is not cast aside when he falls from grace, but is taken up by his enemies, who bind his wounds and set him on his feet. How very different from our poor country, where a man broken on the wheel will be thrown to the butcher-birds or made a supper for jackals.
My reception in the Mother of All Parliaments had not been all we might have hoped for, declared the wingless holy one, but we were not cast down. Not a bit of it. A spot of local difficulty, certainly. But once more into the breach… My camouflage was sound, my demeanour acceptable, my phrasing spot-on, my leather satchel stuffed – all vital attributes marking out the man who was going places. What we needed now was a fast track to the top, and he knew just the one for me.
Oh, really? I replied.
While commending my mastery of the language, he deplored the scepticism he detected in my voice. Small men with facial failings, or language difficulties almost as bad as mine, culturally deprived, financially challenged, from preposterous countries with unpronounceable names, had found England the land of opportunity. Some had begun in the Old Country in a modest way, selling raincoats; others rubber goods, or batches of cheap newspapers which they had parlayed into a press empire, and pension funds so magnificent people could not see where they began or ended. A sheaf of aliens had risen to become peers of the realm in two shakes of a duck’s tail. In our case, time was so tight the proverbial duck would be allowed no more than a single shake. And he said this with that curious glance I had earlier noted and had not much liked.
He took me then to a grand hotel, a palace in itself, situated beside a park they call Green, guarded by a jolly fellow dressed in crimson coat and tall chimney-pot hat who greeted each guest at the door, swearing what an honour it was to have me staying with them once again, as if I had been doing this all my life. He showed me to a room as large, I swear, as the old synagogue in Calvinia, and a bed as big as a potato field. Any misgivings about my friend’s curious haste to leave me at such short notice were swept away when I saw that this very establishment, at its southern extreme, provided a wonderful view of Buckingham Palace. He seemed to have thought of everything. My fears were stilled, my resolve steeled, my ears ready to hear his plan. Which was as follows.
I must be marketable, said the failed aviator. I must appeal widely. So he would announce me to the great and the good as an Egyptian gypsy. A millionaire from the slums of some dusty desert place. And now dreaming of settling in England. Yes. For, once upon a time, I had been plucked from my hovel by an elderly maiden Englishwoman who had taught me the language and the National Anthem. Ever since, I had harboured feelings of affection for the Old Country. My huge fortune, acquired selling English tea and roast beef – in a word, groceries, so dear to the English heart – was a burden to me. Now this grateful Egyptian gypsy wished to repay his dear dead benefactress, and the greatest country on earth, by making a series of donations to important national institutions.
From that point on, it would be plain sailing, the ex-Bishop promised. And he would quietly bow out. He had absolutely no doubt that I would receive the rewards of generosity. In fact, he would not be surprised if – very soon – I found myself kneeling before the throne, while Her Majesty enjoined me to Arise, Sir David! Even as likely, he continued, warming to his theme, was my elevation to the nobility. If you looked at the numbers of those business people ennobled for giving generously to certain funds, you saw that such wise donors were destined for greatness far more often than any other branch of society.
I was caught up in his enthusiasm now and begged him to stay at least until the call came from the Palace, but he lifted a lofty hand and reminded me that he had erred in making me follow his timetable. He now held to his resolution to encourage Third World persons to run their own lives. He was providing aid without strings. Did I fish? No? Well, if I had done so, I would have known that when you give a man a salmon you feed him for a day, but give him a fishing rod and you feed him for life.
Then he fell on my neck, begging me to remember him to Her Majesty if ever I found myself kneeling before her or, more likely still, when I donned ermine and took my seat as Baron Booi of the Karoo or wherever it was I came from … Running his hands through his dark, sharp tufts of hair, which reminded me again of the spikes of the aloe, and turning his anxious eyes full on me for one last time, he bade me goodbye, for ever. And he set off to spread my name amongst the greatest in the land: a grateful grocer come to town with a well-stuffed wallet, eager to express his appreciation to Queen and Country.
I am ashamed to confess I barely missed him because within hours I was besieged by visitors, party chairmen, fund-raisers and political leaders of every complexion, who took me to their bosoms; all of whom, after brief opening compliments about Egypt, its pyramids, its warmth, its culture, followed by succinct expressions of admiration about Romany life, its mobility, its caravans, its lively dances and so on, went on to say how very touched they were to meet a foreigner so wedded to England and English institutions: cricket and clergy and monarchy and groceries and so on. How very much they hoped I would make my home amongst them. How very grateful they would be for any donation I made to party funds. If I took their drift?
I took their drift. I had met Mr Conbrio, had I not?
Yet I was still foreign enough to be amazed at the extraordinary adroitness of these political chieftains and their wonderfully understated acceptance of my donations, very often non-vocal; the wink, the barely perceptible nod of acknowledgement, the ghost of a smile or twitch of the nose. And, before you could blink, my leather satchel was suddenly lighter. Some of my visitors so enjoyed meeting me that they spent the night in the hotel, accommodation which I was careful to pay for, and I drew from the chieftains much praise for my legendary gypsy hospitality. So many foreign benefactors confined their offers of free hospitality to important persons in hotels abroad: it took rare insight to offer free hotel rooms to important persons where they needed them most. At home, in England!
I was delighted with the speed at which my pouch emptied. What had seemed so plentiful vanished like snowflakes that fall in the desert. And once all my money had gone, my visitors stopped arriving to enjoy my hospitality. It was, I supposed, testimony to their calibre. Again that delicate understanding of the English gentleman showed itself. One simply did not barge in on a fellow who has given his all and is awaiting the call.
But someone did barge in. A very vulgar fellow, the guardian of the hotel, who without even doffing his hat, demanded money, saying that I had settled for the rooms of my friends, but I had paid nothing on my own account. And he was not having Egyptian gypsies running up huge bills in his hotel.
With quiet dignity, I informed him I would not be a gypsy for much longer.
Once a gypsy, always a gypsy, the hateful fellow replied.
Maintaining my dignity, I said that my application for citizenship was receiving sympathetic consideration.
He grew even angrier and regarded me the way policemen do in the Karoo when they spy our donkey carts traversing a farmers fence. Such a glance is usually the prelude to searching our bags for stolen meat or firewood.
But I had no bags, except the leather satchel, and that was empty.
Determined to put him in his place, I said that I expected to be made a knight shortly. If not a baron. I was awaiting the call.
The wretch returned that had he known I was connected to nobility when I checked into his hotel, he would have demanded his money in advance. And, without more ado, he ejected me into the street.
The allusion is to Kipling: I have drunk with mixed assemblies, seen the racial ruction rise, And the men of half Creation damning half Creation’s eyes I have watched them in their tantrums, all that pentecostal crew, French, Italian, Arab, Spaniard, Dutch and Greek and Russ and Jew, Celt and Savage, buff and ochre, cream and yellow, mauve and white, But it never really mattered till the English grew polite; (‘Et Dona Ferentes’, 1896) |
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Booi’s visit to the House of Commons must have taken place before the death of the Labour leader, John Smith, in July 1994. |