There were two rival stories of how his madness started. One was romantic, an unhappy love-affair. The other was probably the true one, that his brain gave way from overwork for a medical degree. Once an inhabitant of Campden spoke in his hearing of an operation; Charlie Sykes, beating his chest, described the operation in detail. That was how he would speak, gruffly and disconsolately, beating his chest. He had a grudge against God. ‘There He is,’ he said to me, ‘up there, We think a lot about Him, but He doesn’t think about us. He thinks about Himself. But we’ll be up there one day and we won’t let Him stay.’
He had an extraordinary vitality. There was a time when five men could not hold him, and once when two policemen tried to arrest him at Evesham for begging, he flung them both over a hedge. He walked several times a week into Evesham; it was eight miles each way by road, but he didn’t go by road. He knew every gap in every hedge for miles around, and once two men camping in a field above Broadway woke up to see his face in the tent-opening. ‘Naughty,’ he said and disappeared.
He had banked several hundred pounds which he never touched. The only work he ever did, after his reason went, was cattle-droving. He begged, if that word can be applied to his friendly demands, ‘Now, what about potatoes? Or a cabbage? Well then, turnips? What have you done with all that dough you had yesterday?’ I never saw him in a shop, but on Friday mornings he toured the dustbins in the long High Street, turning over their contents in a critical unembarrassed way like a lady handling silk remnants on a bargain counter.
His cottage in Broad Campden had two rooms with one broken chair and a pile of straw in the corner and sixteen pairs of old shoes. He stopped a sweep in the village once and asked him to clean his chimney, repeating the one word, ‘Shilling – shilling.’ The sweep began to clean, but he couldn’t finish, in the airless room and the appalling stench. But the stench didn’t keep out the cold of a hard winter, and when a policeman broke in because no smoke had been seen from the chimney, he found Mr Charles Seitz frozen to death on his straw in the upper room. They didn’t care to undress him; he was so verminous that the fleas jumped on them from his wrists; they put round his shoulders the web with which coffins are lowered into the grave, and dragged him head first down the stairs. Then they crammed him quickly into his coffin, rags and all, and nailed him down. It was terrible weather for grave-diggers, the ground hard enough for an electric drill six inches down.
Major Grant said with relish that the shabbiest adventure he had ever had was in a flat off the Strand with two bawds. They wouldn’t give him change for his note or give him his note back; it was only a question of ten shillings, but he suddenly grew tired of being cheated; he had made a bargain and he’d stick to it. He sat on the bed and wouldn’t leave the flat; they threatened him and badgered him, but he wouldn’t move; through a crack in the blind he could see the flame and flicker of the Strand reflected in the windows of a winehouse. They gave in and he went home.
Buckland digging in the garden turned up a she-mandrake. He said that it was good for cows and pigs to keep them in condition; he put some snails on one side to take home for his supper. Buckland was a didicoi, which was the name they gave in Gloucestershire to gipsies. He had run away from home when he was a boy and walked for two days without food; then he stole a loaf from a baker’s van and ate it behind a hedge. The next day he got a job at a dairy farm. The farmer asked him whether he could milk a cow; he said yes, and the other men milked his cow for him, until he’d learnt to do it for himself, and the farmer never knew.
On either side of the Ridge Way the fields were being harrowed, the horses disappeared over the swell of the down, the men singing in the pale autumn sunlight. Once when one of them came parallel with the other, he called out: ‘Old Molly George has a night out tonight.’ A flock of crows was picking at the turf beside the White Horse. A man was ploughing in a cup of land so far below that he was the size of a grain of oats; the brown-turned earth grew in size, the olive-coloured unturned earth diminished until there was only a thin lozenge in the middle of the field. The crows were flat below, wheeling in mid-air at the height of a cathedral spire. The man sang as he ploughed, his voice as loud as a gramophone in the next room, but I could only catch one word – ‘angels’. When the lozenge disappeared, I could see him lead his horse to the hedge and a thin fume of smoke came up but dispersed long before it reached me. He was burning weeds.
It was winter now, snow in London, the fierce noon sun on the clearing, yellow fever in Freetown, behind on the way to the Coast the mist was rising from the forest, drifting slowly upwards, like the smoke of burning weeds below the Ridge Way. We turned away from Major Grant and Miss Kilvane, from the peace under the down and the flat off the Strand, from the holy and the depraved individualists to the old, the unfamiliar, the communal life beyond the clearing.
*Six years later when the fortune of war brought me back to Freetown, I met Laminah and asked after Amedoo. He broke into peals of laughter, ‘Old cook,’ he said, ‘he all right, but Amedoo he under ground.’ (1946)
PART TWO
Chapter 1
WESTERN LIBERIA
The Forest Edge
IT was midday. We followed the Customs man into a thatched shelter, sat on high uncomfortable drawing-room chairs and smoked: the little yellow man sat opposite us in a hammock and smoked too, swinging back and forth. I smiled at him and he smiled back; they were surface smiles; there was no friendliness anywhere. The man was thinking how much he could exact. I with how little loss I could escape. A woman brought in a child to see the white people and it screamed and screamed uncontrollably. The men of the Frontier Force lounged and spat in the vertical sunrays, and one could almost see the brown earth cracking. I began a second cigarette.
Then Laminah burst in, a small detonating bomb of fury in the stillness, the doing nothing. He was like a Pekinese who has been insulted by an Alsatian. Somebody had told him he must pay duty on his white barber’s jacket which had a rubber lining. The Customs officer surrendered the point with courtesy, but it seemed to be the signal for the fun to start. I produced my invoices, the German opened a small suitcase and paid half a crown; the officer was in a hurry to get on to bigger game, and the German passed out of the frontier station bobbing above the heads of his carriers. The officer settled to work on the invoices and the soldiers spat and grinned and passed remarks and I wiped off the sweat.
‘This will take all day,’ the Customs man said. ‘Everything here except the tin of Epsom salts, the quinine and the iodine has got to pay duty.’ He explained that he would let me go through to Bolahun if I left a deposit; any change would be sent after me; he calculated that four pounds ten would be sufficient guarantee. I extracted a bag of sixpenny-bits from the money-box without disclosing the automatic. But it wasn’t quite the end. I had to pay two cents each for the eight forms on which my dutiable goods were to be set down in detail. I had to pay for two Revenue stamps, and I had to sign my name at the bottom of the eight blank sheets saying that the items listed above were correct. I was completely in their power; they could fill up anything they liked on the forms. The alternative was to stay where I was for the night and have all my bags and bales opened.
As it was I didn’t escape so easily. The next day he sent a soldier over to Bolahun demanding another six pounds ten, and when the soldier went back empty-handed, he came himself, borne in a hammock on the long rough path from Foya with four carriers and a couple of soldiers, a dirty white topee on his head and a ragged cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He swaggered across the verandah, a little sour, mean, avaricious figure, grinning and friendly and furious and determined. He got his money, drank two glasses of whisky, smoked two cigarettes; there was nothing one could do about it; it was impossible to bribe an official who probably took a lion’s share anyway of what he exacted.
I enjoyed the first day’s trek into the Republic because everything was new: the sense of racing the dark, even the taste of warm boiled water, the s
mell of the carriers; it wasn’t an unpleasant smell, sweet or sour; it was bitter, and reminded me of a breakfast food I had as a child after pleurisy, something vigorous and body-building which I disliked. This bitter taint was mixed with the rich plummy smell of the kola nuts the carriers picked from the ground and chewed, with an occasional flower scent one couldn’t trace in the thick untidy greenery. All the smells were drawn out, as the heat increased, like vapour from moist ground. The carriers walked naked except for loin-cloths, the sweat leaving marks like snails on their black polished skins. They didn’t look strong, they hadn’t the ugly muscular development of a boxer; their legs were as thin as a woman’s, but they ended in typical carrier’s feet, flat like enormous empty gloves, spreading on the earth pancake-wise as if the weights they carried had pressed them out in a peine forte et dure. Even their arms were childishly thin, and when they raised the fifty-pound cases a few inches to ease their skulls, the muscles hardly swelled, were no thicker than whipcord.
We were on the edge of the immense forest which covers the Republic to within a few miles of the coast; we climbed steeply from the frontier post at Foya and from the first village we came to we could see the bush below the huts, falling away, a ragged cascade, towards the sea, lifting and falling and swelling into green plains; hundreds of miles of them, tall palms sticking out above the rest like the brushes of chimney sweeps. The huts here, and in all the Bande territory, were circular with a pointed thatched roof overhanging the parti-coloured mud walls, whitewashed halfway up. There was one door and sometimes a window; in the middle of the floor were the ashes of a fire which would be lit again at sunset from a communal ember and fill the single room with smoke; the fumes kept out mosquitoes, kept out, to some extent, the fleas and bugs and cockroaches, but not the rats. They were all much alike, these villages, built on a hill-top on several levels like medieval towns; the path one had followed through the bush would drop steeply to a stream where the villagers came to wash their clothes and bathe, then rise abruptly up a wide beaten track out of the shade to a silhouette of pointed huts against the midday glare. The ground in the villages was scarred by the dry beds of streams. In the centre was the palaver-house and at the limit of the village the blacksmith’s forge, both open huts without walls.
But though nearly all the villages at which I stayed had these common properties – a hill, a stream, palaver-house and forge, the burning ember carried round at dark, the cows and goats standing between the huts, the little grove of banana-trees like clusters of tall green feathers gathering dust – not one was quite the same. However tired I became of the seven-hour trek through the untidy and unbeautiful forest, I never wearied of the villages in which I spent the night: the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits – love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice-birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature. Love, it has been said, was invented in Europe by the troubadours, but it existed here without the trappings of civilization. They were tender towards their children (I seldom heard a crying child, unless at the sight of a white face, and never saw one beaten), they were tender towards each other in a gentle muffled way; they didn’t scream or ‘rag’, they never revealed the rasped nerves of the European poor in shrill speech or sudden blows. One was aware the whole time of a standard of courtesy to which it was one’s responsibility to conform.
And these were the people one had been told by the twisters, the commercial agents, on the Coast that one couldn’t trust. ‘A black will always do you down.’ It was no good protesting later that one had not come across a single example of dishonesty from the boys, from the carriers, from the natives in the interior: only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one would not have found, or at least dared to assume was there, in Europe. It astonished me that I was able to travel through an unpoliced country with twenty-five men who knew that my money-box contained what to them was a fortune in silver. We were not in British or French territory now: it wouldn’t have mattered to the black Government on the Coast if we had disappeared and they could have done little about it anyway. We couldn’t even count as armed; the automatic was hidden in the money-box, never loaded, never seen; it would have been easy when we were crossing one of the fibre bridges to stage an accident; it would have been easy, less drastically, simply to mislay the money-box or to lose us in the bush.
But ‘Poor fool,’ one could tell the Coast whites were thinking, ‘he just didn’t know how he was being done.’ But I wasn’t ‘done’; there wasn’t an instance of even the most petty theft, though in every village the natives swarmed into the hut where all day my things were lying about, soap (to them very precious), razor, brushes. ‘You can have a boy for ten years,’ they’d say, ‘and he’ll do you at the end of it,’ and laying down their empty glasses they’d go out into the glaring street and down to the store to see whom they could ‘do’ in the proper understood commercial way that morning. ‘No affection,’ they’d say, ‘after fifteen years. Not a scrap of real affection,’ expecting always to get from these people more than what they had paid for. They had paid for service and they expected love thrown in.
I had hoped to reach the mission at five o’clock; but five o’clock brought us only to another hill, another group of huts and stones, and the forest thick below. The balls of cotton were laid outside the huts to dry and a small tree ruffled a pale pink blossom against the sky. Somebody pointed out the mission, a white building which the low sun picked out of the forest. It was at least two hours away, and the journey became more than ever a race against the dark, which the dark nearly won. It came down on us just as we left the forest and wound through the banana plantation at the foot of Mosambolahun, and it was quite dark and cold as we passed between the huts, the old cook flitting ahead in his long white Mohammedan robe, carrying a trussed chicken. All the fires had been lit in the huts and the smoke blew across the narrow paths stinging the eye; but the little flames were like home; they were the African equivalent of the lights behind red blinds in English villages. There must have been nearly two hundred huts on Mosambolahun, packed together on a thimble of rock, and it stood apart in its remote pagan dirt from the neat Christianized garden village of Bolahun in the cleared plain below. A wide flattened path ran down across the plain to Bolahun and a swaying hammock came up it and a little noisy group of men. The hammock stopped at my side and an old, old man in a robe of native cloth with a long white beard put out a hand. It was the chief of Mosambolahun; ninety years old, he quivered and shook and smiled while his people chattered round him. He couldn’t speak any English, but a boy with a gun whom I found at my side told me that, the chief was on his way home from Tailahun, where a brother chief had died. He was swept away again by his impatient hammock-bearers, waving his dried old hand, smiling gently, curiously, quizzically. He was the explanation, I later learnt, of Mosambolahun’s dirt; he was a puppet of the younger men, without authority. He had about two hundred wives, but they would sell him the same wife over and over again; he was too old to keep count. He knew that he was too old, he wanted to retire for a younger man, but it didn’t suit his lawless village to lose their puppet. When he became importunate they told him they had made him a bishop, and that pleased and quieted him.
It was a two-mile walk up to the mission through the village of Bolahun, through the deep barking of the frogs. The mission belonged to the Order of the Holy Cross, a monastic order of the American Episcopal Church. I dumped my loads outside the long bungalow and waited for the priests to come
out from Benediction. I could hear the low murmur of Latin inside; in the darkness only the white eyeballs of my carriers were visible, where they squatted silent on the verandah; everyone was too tired to talk. But the sound of the Latin represented a better civilization than the tin shacks of the English port, better than anything I had seen in Sierra Leone; and when the priests came out and one led the way to the rest-house, his white robe stirring in the cold hill wind, I was for the first time unashamed by the comparison between white and black. There was something in this corner of a republic said to be a byword for corruption and slavery that at least wasn’t commercial. One couldn’t put it higher than this: that the little group of priests and nuns had a standard of gentleness and honesty equal to the native standard. Whether what they brought with them in the shape of a crucified God was superior to the local fetish worship had to be the subject of future speculation.
That night, as the filter dripped and dripped in the bare rest-house living-room, after the carriers had been paid off and the case of whisky opened, I went outside to find the sick C’s partner, Van Gogh. For the prospector’s tent was just outside and a hurricane lamp was burning. ‘Van Gogh,’ the priest had said, ‘you’ll like Van Gogh,’ and seeing a syphon standing on the boxes by the tent, I thought that I would invite him to bring his soda over for a drink. I raised the flap and there Van Gogh was, lying wrapped in blankets on his camp-bed; I thought he was asleep, but when he turned his head I saw that he was sweating; the pale golden stubble of his chin was drenched in sweat. Five hours before he had gone down with fever, and all that night the German doctor attached to the mission sat up with him. He was bad, very bad; he had spent a lifetime in the tropics, but nine months in the Republic had got him down. Next day they took him to the little mission hospital in our hammock; the boys from his gold-camp in the Gola forest came and packed up his tent and goods and carried him down, sick and swaying under the blazing sun.