But that was during the day; when it was dark, sitting in the engineer’s bare bungalow and drinking warm beer, I wasn’t so sure about the place. The man looked sixty; one had to explain somehow the fifteen years of white hair and lines he hadn’t really lived. He said again how happy he was; he hadn’t been able to settle in England, his wife was nervy, she had never been out with him, West Africa wouldn’t suit her, she was afraid of moths, and as he spoke, the moths flocked in through the paneless windows to shrivel against the hurricane lamp, the cockchafers and the beetles detonated against the walls and ceiling and fell on our hair. He didn’t mind insects himself, he said, leaping from his chair, hitting at the moths with his hand, squashing the beetles underfoot. (He couldn’t keep still for a moment.) The only thing he feared, he said, was elephants. He had been watching a shoot once beside his motor-cycle when an elephant charged him; it was a hundred yards away and he couldn’t start his cycle. When it was ten yards away he got his cycle started, and after a quarter of a mile at twenty miles an hour he looked back and saw that the elephant hadn’t lost a yard. He got up from his chair again and made for a beetle, but it was too quick for him, driving up against the ceiling. He said he wasn’t lonely, he didn’t know what nerves were – bringing his hand against the wall – he always believed in having one hobby; the last tour it had been the wireless, another tour butterflies, this tour it was his car.
‘Those things are so noisy,’ he complained. ‘They keep one awake at night.’
‘Surely it’s only the light that brings them in,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I always leave a light burning at night,’ and his eyes followed the beetles up and down the bare room. Somebody was playing something; the sound came all the way from the village: a kind of harp playing without melody, an endless repetition of notes.
He said, ‘I’m sorry you are off tomorrow.’ He said it so often that one couldn’t doubt him, even though in the next breath he would explain that he wasn’t lonely, that he liked the life.
I had sent off a messenger that morning with a letter to the Father Superior at the mission at Bolahun. The act of sending a letter by messenger a day’s journey ahead into another country was pleasantly medieval. One paid the messenger nothing when he left; he met one somewhere on the road on his return journey, the road a foot-wide path through thick forest, crossed and recrossed by other paths. But the messengers never went astray; they were as reliable as the English Post Office. Once, when the message was urgent, I sent a man by night, giving him a fill of paraffin for his lamp, and with a dagger hanging over his shoulder he ran out into the dark bush, the letter stuck in a cleft stick.
It was January the twenty-sixth when we left for the Republic (snow in London, yellow fever in Freetown, mist over the burnt grasses at Kailahun). There was a road for another fifteen miles towards the border; I had ordered two lorries to call for myself and the German, who had brought carriers with him from the Republic, at seven o’clock. It was a twenty-mile march from the end of the road to the mission on the other side of the frontier and I was anxious to be there before dark. Nor had I any idea how long we might be held up at the Customs. Only one lorry turned up and it was an hour and a quarter late. The German doubted whether my cousin and I would reach Bolahun before night, for we had only one hammock and his aristocratic mind recoiled from the idea of walking with the men, from the stumbling and scrambling in the dust, and the tiredness. He himself had a chair slung on poles so that he could sit upright above the carriers. But I had to think of money; one couldn’t have less than six carriers for a four-man hammock and by walking from Biedu I was saving seven and sixpence. We packed ourselves on the one small lorry; three whites, three boys, eleven carriers, and thirty loads, and drove unsteadily down the rough road through the thin morning mist. Great flattened thimbles of perpendicular rock rose above the dripping palms; we drove between.
I was vexed by the delay at Kailahun. I had not yet got accustomed to the idea that time, as a measured and recorded period, had been left behind on the coast. In the interior there was no such thing as time; the best watches couldn’t stand the climate. Sooner or later they stopped. My own watch and my cousin’s were the first to go, and afterwards, one by one, I used up the six cheap watches I had brought with me for ‘dashes’ from Marks and Spencer’s. Only one reached the coast and it had long ceased to record the ‘real’ time; when it got dark I simply put the hands at six-thirty. If I wanted to get up earlier in the morning I put the hands on. Perhaps this was what Stanley had in mind when he heard Big Ben strike as he lay dying and exclaimed at the strangeness, ‘So that is Time!’
But on the lorry from Kailahun I still believed that I could plan my journey by time-table. I thought that we were going to Monrovia, the capital, straight from Bolahun and that we would be there within a fortnight; I would not have admitted the possibility that in four weeks we should be in a place I had never heard of, in the middle of the Republic, watching an old skinny woman who had made lightning in her village carry water back on her head to her fellow-prisoners in the horrible little gaol at Tapee-Ta.
For one thing I hadn’t the money for so extended a journey. I had cashed the last of my credit at Freetown and carried with me about twenty-five pounds in shillings, sixpences and threepenny-bits. In a steel money-box with a padlock it made about half a man’s load. It was no good taking anything but silver into the Republic, and I was to find curious objections here and there to the silver money I had brought. One tribe wouldn’t look at money with Queen Victoria’s head on it; the news of her death had penetrated to the most unlikely places, to places where I and my cousin were the first white people to be seen in living memory, and the value of the coins, they believed, had died with her. When we approached the coast, among the Bassa tribe, we found that nobody would accept the ordinary English silver stamped with a crown or acorns; they would only take the British West African coinage stamped with a palm tree. But this trouble was for the future; I was concerned only at the moment with time, with the need to get to Bolahun before dark. It was an unpractised traveller’s anxiety; it led to unnecessary strain and my carriers’ mistrust. Later I got used to not caring a damn, just to walking and staying put when I had walked far enough, at some village of which I didn’t know the name, to letting myself drift with Africa.
To the Frontier
At Biedu the chief was waiting in the village with the carriers and an interpreter. I knocked the price down from one and sixpence a man to one and threepence, conscious of the faint cynical amusement of the German, who never paid more than sixpence. The loads were spread out down the centre of the village and for the first time I could see the full extent of the luggage we had brought with us: the six boxes of food, the two beds and chairs and mosquito-nets, three suitcases, a tent we were never to use, two boxes of miscellaneous things, a bath, a bundle of blankets, a folding table, a money-box, a hammock; I couldn’t help being a little shamed by my servants, who each brought with them a small flat suitcase.
Later I tried to calculate how lightly a man could travel with safety for any length of time in the West African bush. I had spent more than fifty pounds on equipment and my invoices read like the list of goods supplied to an Everest expedition, but I do not think I could have cut down the loads by more than four with safety, for in West Africa there are strict limits to the lightness of travel, as the story of Dr D, a German botanist, suggests.
A week after I crossed the frontier Dr D died at Ganta in the Central Province, a town which I reached on February the fourteenth. His pathetic and dignified death, which was obviously deliberate, brought the world of Hitler, of Dachau and the concentration camps and Nazi self-righteousness even into this corner of Africa. Dr D had had forty years’ experience of West Africa. Before the war he was German Consul in Monrovia and an agent for the Woermann Line, but he was already known at Hamburg University as a botanist. After the war he was the first German to reopen business in the Republic, but he failed, h
e left debts behind him, and the new Hitler’s Germany to which he returned was not sympathetic to failure. He was seventy years old and a ruined man, and after forty years on the Coast he cannot have been at home among the swastika banners of Berlin, the Sunday processions with drums and bugles and bayonets under the Brandenburg Gate, the demonstrations at Tempelhof. He was interested in tropical flowers, he wasn’t interested in who fired the Reichstag. Harvard University gave him a little money to return to the Republic and make a collection of botanical specimens in the interior. He found Hitler’s Germany well established in Monrovia; the two enthusiastic Nazis there disapproved of Dr D. Hearing a rumour that he would be staying at the German Legation, they called on the Consul-General to protest, so that in those last days he was forced to find hospitality at an English store. There is no evidence of Dr D’s intention, but it seems obvious that he had no wish to return to Europe and that he preferred to die in Africa. It is the only satisfactory explanation of his recklessness. For he went up from Monrovia through Bassa country to Sanoquelleh, ten days’ trek, without a hammock, without provisions, without even a bed or a mosquito-net; he can hardly have travelled lighter when his body was brought down from Ganta for burial in the Lutheran Mission at Mühlenberg. He slept on native beds, ate the native food, and died of dysentery.
There are limits, then, to travelling light. A District Commissioner in Sierra Leone seldom travels with less than twenty-five carriers for himself alone, and for much shorter treks than ours proved to be, while at one time, after we had lost two men from sickness, we were travelling with twenty-three. At Biedu, with a four-man hammock for my cousin, I had to take twenty-five carriers. A journey of about twenty miles therefore cost a little more than thirty shillings. Travel in Africa, if carriers have to be hired by the day, is expensive. This was the experience in the Republic of Sir Alfred Sharpe, whose route I followed at the start. He was forced to take carriers from village to village, sometimes paying two sets of carriers in twenty-four hours at the fixed rate of a shilling a day. At most villages there would be delay in finding new carriers; all the men might be working on the farms; and often it was impossible to travel more than eight miles in a day. I learned from his experience and waited at Bolahun a week until I had engaged carriers willing to come with us all the way, and apart from the saving in wages I was able to average more than twelve miles a day over a period of four weeks.
The chief at Biedu gave me a chicken, I gave the chief a shilling. Souri, the cook, tied the chicken’s legs together, Amedoo went down the line of loads testing the weights, the German sat down on his hammock chair, and ‘Off!’ I said. I felt like a subaltern facing my platoon for the first time. I couldn’t really believe that when I said ‘Off!’ the twenty-five carriers would be set in motion. I stood back and watched them with an odd feeling of pleasure, an absurd sense of pride, when like a long mechanical toy they were set in motion and wavered and straightened and strode out through the village on to a wide track which narrowed soon into a path through the elephant grass, into a tree-trunk over a stream, which wound into woods and clearings and woods again, and at last after two hours broadened out into a wide plateau which was the frontier; three or four huts, a few riflemen in scarlet fezes with a gold device, the Liberian flag (a star and stripes), and a little man with a black moustache and a yellow skin and a worn topee who came out into the clearing and greeted me with a shifty nervous jubilant air as much as to say: we’ve got you here, ‘leave no screws unturned’, plenty of tin for yours truly. He said, oh yes, he was expecting me; he had been warned.
One couldn’t help having, however unjustifiably, a sense of the dramatic; the way forward through the clearing was as broad as the primrose way, as open as a trap; the way back was narrow, hidden, difficult, to the English scene.
The Way Back
Rather more than two thousand miles away Major Grant was probably buttonholing another friend. ‘It’s just how you look at it,’ he would say; ‘the fellows are always bragging about Paris, but I say England’s good enough for me.’ He used to visit a brothel in Savile Row; there were scenes of luxurious abandonment in close proximity to the select tailors. He would ring up on the phone and make an appointment, ‘Three this afternoon,’ then explain rather guardedly what he wanted, guardedly because you never knew when the police might listen in and to procure a woman was a criminal offence. ‘Young,’ he would say, ‘mind it’s young’; ‘Fair or dark?’ the maid would say at the other end and sometimes Major Grant replied ‘fair’ and sometimes ‘dark’, according as his passion urged him at the moment towards his fair or dark angel. Then it was as well to add a few details, ‘Something rather lean,’ and in another mood, ‘Curved but not too curved.’ He didn’t, he told me, find the place very satisfactory; shop-girls and nursery-maids adding a little to their wages on the slant were pitiably lacking in finesse. I think it was the theatre rather than the play which exercised its fascination over Major Grant; he liked the idea of ordering a woman, as one might order a joint of meat, according to size and cut and price. There was a wealth of dissatisfaction in his indulgence; he knew the world, and all the time he took his revenge for the poor opinion he had of it. Presently he shifted his custom to an address in Hanover Street, and faded out of my knowledge, though occasionally the old voice came to me insinuatingly across the Corner House tables. ‘Like a pig in a poke. That’s what I enjoy. Never know what you are going to get.’ ‘And if they were not quite up to mark?’ ‘I take what comes,’ the voice would say, ‘I always accept ’em.’
‘Having to construct something upon which to rejoice.’
Miss Kilvane lived in the Cotswolds in a strange high house like a Noah’s ark with a monkey-puzzle tree and a step-ladder of terraces. The rooms were all tiny and of the same shape, like the rows of rooms in an advertising exhibition or in the brothel quarter of an eastern city. The rooms were packed with china ornaments, like Staffordshire and Woolworth pieces and Goss presents from Bournemouth. She was a follower of the Regency prophetess, Joanna Southcott, had a manuscript collection of her prophecies, two counterpanes the prophetess had made, seals and locks of hair and a Communion glass engraved with little ludicrous symbolical figures. She was old and innocent and terribly sure of herself; she took down Joanna’s life from the ghost’s lips. At tea a mouse ran backwards and forwards in a cupboard behind Miss Kilvane’s back; I could see it moving through a crack, between the tins of rather dry biscuits. The old lady, with clear pale-blue eyes, wore an old-fashioned dress of faded mauve and horn-rimmed glasses; in the drawing-room there was a portrait of Joanna, china ornaments, antimacassars on horsehair chairs, a wireless set and a Radio Times. She spoke with complete confidence of the millennium which would come in the next fifty years; she described it in mundane detail. ‘I have always wanted to see Jerusalem.’ She showed me her volumes of manuscript, prophecies taken down by Joanna’s servant, sometimes in doggerel verse. ‘Impostors can copy the prose,’ she said, ‘but not the poetry. People go away and think they can write like that too. Gentlemen send me the strangest sensual verses.’ She spent a long time looking for someone to publish her life of Joanna. She made her way down Paternoster Row and saw a publisher’s office called Sion House; it really looked, she said, as if inspiration had brought her to the right place. She told a man behind a counter that she had brought the manuscript of Joanna’s life and he went away and never came back. ‘It’s the worst snub I’ve ever received,’ she said, but nothing could deter her. She was so innocent and in a way she was so worldly; she printed the life at her own expense; she founded a press to do it. Maori followers of Joanna sent her a motor-car, but she couldn’t learn to drive it; it lay in a garage in the village. A pity; it would have been useful, for since the Lindbergh Baby Case (she kept her old clear horn-rimmed eyes sharply on the world) she had made the discovery that even babies could be sealed’ for Joanna. Her companion was in the north at the time sealing babies. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she said, turning over the Radio
Times. Before I left she sold me a pound of tea ‘from my plantations’; she meant she had some shares in the company; she thought I would like it; the blend was very soothing. It was hot in the small shut rooms and the mice were restless. I climbed down the terraces to the road, past the monkey-puzzle tree, and she watched me go, perched up beside the Noah’s ark with the lonely convictions she shared with the Maoris. She had been made to pay two hundred pounds for her relics; the printing press had passed out of her hands; but she had an immense conviction of success. ‘They tell me the movement is making great progress in the Oxford colleges.’
Mr Charles Seitz was the son of a doctor. He was born in Bombay two years before the Mutiny and he died in 1933 frozen to death in a cottage on a bed of straw. He was the kind of figure that attracts legends. Even his real name was lost in common speech, so that he was known among the Campden villagers as Charlie Sykes, as he padded down the High Street bent double under a weight of incredible rags, clutching a tall stick, his bearded Apostle face bent to the pavement, his eyes flickering sideways, aware of everyone who passed. He was suspiciously like a stage madman; he played up to strangers, bellowing and shaking his stick, so that they edged away, a little daunted. Sometimes in summer he went berserk in the market-place, shouting and shaking all alone in a desert of indifference; no one took him seriously, least of all himself. He earned money from Americans with Kodaks, snapped picturesquely in front of the ancient butter market.