The aeroplane rocked over Hanover, the last of the storm scattering behind it, dipped suddenly down five hundred feet towards the small air station, and soared again eastwards. Behind the plane the sun set along the clouds; we were above the sunset; looking back it lay below, long pale ridges of stained clouds. The air was grey above the lakes; they were sunk in the ground, like pieces of lead; the lights of villages in between. It was quite dark long before Berlin, and the city came to meet the plane through the darkness as a gorse fire does, links of flame through the heavy green night. A sky-sign was the size of a postage stamp; one could see the whole plan of the city, like a lit map in the Underground when you press a button to find the route. The great rectangle of the Tempel-hof was marked in scarlet and yellow lights; the plane swerved away over the breadth of Berlin, turned back and down; the lights in the cabin went out and one could see the headlamps sweeping the asphalt drive, the sparks streaming out behind the grey Lufthansa wing, as the wheels touched and rebounded and took the ground and held. That was happiness, the quick impression; but on the ground, among the swastikas, one saw pain at every yard.
Arrived about nine o’clock at the Gare St Lazare, Easter, 1924, went to an hotel, then on to the Casino to see Mistinguette, the thin insured distinguished legs, the sharp ‘catchy’ features like the paper face of an Ugly-Wugly in The Enchanted Castle (‘ “Walk on your toes, dear,” the bonneted Ugly-Wugly whispered to the one with the wreath; and even at that thrilling crisis Gerald wondered how she could, since the toes of one foot were but the end of a golf club and of the other the end of a hockey stick’). The next night the Communists met in the slums at the end of a cul-de-sac. They kept on reading out telegrams from the platform and everyone sang the Internationale; then they’d speak a little and then another telegram arrived. They were poor and pinched and noisy; one wondered why it was that they had so much good news coming to them which didn’t make any difference at all. All the good news and the singing were at the end of an alley in a wide cold hall; they couldn’t get out; in the little square the soldiers stood in tin helmets beside their stacked rifles. That night from the window of an hotel I saw a man and woman copulating; they stood against each other under a street lamp, like two people who are supporting and comforting each other in the pain of some sickness. The next day I read in the paper how the Reds had tried to get out, but the soldiers had stopped them; a few people were hurt, a few went to prison.
The first thing I can remember at all was a dead dog at the bottom of my pram; it had been run over at a country crossroads, where later I saw a Jack-in-the-Green, and the nurse put it at the bottom of the pram and pushed me home. There was no emotion attached to the sight. It was just a fact. At that period of life one has an admirable objectivity. Another fact was the man who rushed out of a cottage near the canal bridge and into the next house; he had a knife in his hand; people ran after him shouting; he wanted to kill himself.
Like a revelation, when I was fourteen, I realized the pleasure of cruelty; I wasn’t interested any longer in walks on commons, in playing cricket on the beach. There was a girl lodging close by I wanted to do things to; I loitered outside the door hoping to see her. I didn’t do anything about it, I wasn’t old enough, but I was happy; I could think about pain as something desirable and not as something dreaded. It was as if I had discovered that the way to enjoy life was to appreciate pain.
I watched from the other end of the bar; she wept and didn’t care a damn; she embarrassed everybody; they cleared a space as if a fight was on and she sat there drinking gin and tonic and crying with empty chairs on either side; the barman kept on serving drinks at the other end. I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know. The unconscious mind is often sentimental; I have written ‘a shape’, and the shape, of course, is roughly that of the human heart.
Chapter 3
THE HOME FROM HOME
Freetown
FREETOWN, the capital of Sierra Leone, at first was just an impression of heat and damp; the mist streamed along the lower streets and lay over the roofs like smoke. Nature, conventionally grand, rising in tree-covered hills above the sea and the town, a dull uninteresting green, was powerless to carry off the shabby town. One could see the Anglican cathedral, laterite bricks and tin with a square tower, a Norman church built in the nineteenth century, sticking up out of the early morning fog. There was no doubt at all that one was back in home waters. Among the swarm of Kru boats round the ship the Princess Marina with its freshly painted name was prominent. ‘Princess Marina,’ the half-naked owner kept on calling. ‘Sweetest boat on the Coast’.
Tin roofs and peeling posters and broken windows in the public library and wooden stores, Freetown had a Bret Harte air without the excitement, the saloons, the revolver shots or the horses. There was only one horse in the whole city, and it was pointed out to me by the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, a thin piebald beast pulled down the main street like a mule. There had been other horses from time to time, but they had all died. Where there wasn’t a tin shed there were huge hoardings covered with last year’s Poppy Day posters (the date was January the fifteenth). On the roofs the vultures sat nuzzling under their wings with horrible tiny undeveloped heads; they squatted in the gardens like turkeys; I could count seven out of my bedroom window. When they moved from one perch to another they gave no sensation of anything so aerial as flight; they seemed to hop across the street, borne up just high enough by the flap-flap of their dusty wings.
This was an English capital city; England had planted this town, the tin shacks and the Remembrance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and electric fans and perfect service. Every call one paid on a white man cost ten shillings in taxi fares, for the railway to Hill Station no longer ran. They had planted their seedy civilization and then escaped from it as far as they could. Everything ugly in Freetown was European: the stores, the churches, the Government offices, the two hotels; if there was anything beautiful in the place it was native: the little stalls of the fruit-sellers which went up after dark at the street corners, lit by candles; the native women rolling home magnificently from church on a Sunday morning, the cheap European cottons, the deep coral or green flounces, the wide straw hats, dignified by the native bearing, the lovely roll of the thighs, the swing of the great shoulders. They were dressed for a garden party and they carried off cheap bright grandeur in the small back-yards among the vultures as nature couldn’t carry off Freetown.
The men were less assured; they had been educated to understand how they had been swindled, how they had been given the worst of two worlds, and they had enough power to express themselves in a soured officious way; they had died, in so far as they had once been men, inside their European clothes. They didn’t complain, they hinted; they didn’t fight for what they wanted, they sourly prevaricated. ‘From what I garnered here and there,’ suggested the Creole gossip-writer in the Sierra Leone Daily Mail, ‘it is not the intention of the Governor and his wife to make Governor’s Lodge, Hill Station, the official residence of the representative of His Majesty the King; those who maintain the view that the environments at Hill Station may influence them to the prejudice of the interest of the people are quite mistaken. In fact, it is considered improbable to entertain such an opinion, and I believe His Excellency will burst into peals of laughter if he were to hear such a thing. I leave it at that.’
That was the nearest they could get to a Petition of Right. They wore uniforms, occupied official positions, went, to parties at Government House, had the vote, but they knew all the time they were funny (oh, those peals of laughter!), funny to the heartless prefect eye of the white man. If they had been slaves they would have had more dignity; there is no shame in being ruled by a stranger, but these men had been given their tin shacks, their cathedral, their votes and city councils, their shadow of self-government; they were expected to play the part like wh
ite men and the more they copied white men, the more funny it was to the prefects. They were withered by laughter; the more desperately they tried to regain their dignity the funnier they became.
FASHIONABLE WEDDING AT ST GEORGE’S CATHEDRAL
St George’s Cathedral was the scene of the first fashionable wedding to take place there this year, on Wednesday, the 11th instant.
The contracting parties were Miss Agatha Fidelia Araromi Shorunkeh-Sawyerr, fourth daughter of the late Mr J. C. Shorunkeh-Sawyerr, Barrister-at-law, and Mrs Frances M. Shorunkeh-Sawyerr of ‘Bells Ebuts’, King Tom’s Peninsula, and Mr John Buxton Ogunyorbu Logan of the Survey Dept, son of Mr S. D. Logan, Retired Civil Service Officer.
The bride entered the church at 1.15 p.m. leaning on the arm of her only brother, Mr J. C. I. Shorunkeh-Sawyerr, who subsequently gave her away.
She wore a frock of white lace lined with white satin, and of full length. Its full court train was of white lace lined with rose-pink satin and it fell from the shoulders. She had on a short veil held in place on her head by a coronet of orange blossoms. She carried a bouquet of natural flowers.
She was followed by five bridesmaids, the Misses Molaké Shorunkeh-Sawyerr (bride’s sister) and Annie Macaulay, being the chief. They wore salmon-pink lace frocks with georgette coatees of the same colour with white straw hats with pink bands. The others were the Misses Fitzjohn, Olivette Stuart, and Eileen Williams. These wore pink georgette frocks and pink hats. The hymn Gracious Spirit, Holy Ghost, was sung as the bridal procession moved slowly up the nave. The full choir of the cathedral, of which the bridegroom’s father is the Dux, was present, and Mr A. H. Stuart, FGCO, the organist, presided at his organ.
Immediately after the ceremony, the guests repaired to the Crown Bottling Restaurant for Cake and Wine. This function was presided over by Mr A. E. Tuboku-Metzger, MA, JP, an old friend of the bride’s late father.
Here six toasts were proposed and responded to. After this the company broke up, some going to the bridegroom’s parents in Waterloo Street, and others to the bride’s at King Tom’s for more solid refreshments.
About 6 p.m. Mr and Mrs John B. Logan left for their honeymoon somewhere on the Wilkinson Road.
Before leaving them there, we wish them connubial bliss, and the best of luck.
Sometimes it was almost Firbank, it recalled the Mouth family forcing their way into the highest social circles of the city of Cuna-Cuna, but alas! the smell of the fish laid fourteen deep in the roadway, the flowers withered and everlasting in the small public gardens, the low-church hymns did not belong to Cuna – ‘Cuna, full of charming roses, full of violet shadows, full of music, full of love, Cuna . . . !’ Wilkinson and Waterloo streets and the Crown Bottling Restaurant were a poor exchange for Carmen Street, the Avenue Messalina, the Grand Savannah Hotel.
Freetown’s excitements are very English, as Dakar’s are very French; the Governor-General’s garden party, where white and black, keeping sedulously apart on either side the beds, inspected the vegetables to the sound of a military band: ‘Look, he’s really managed to grow tomatoes. Darling, let’s go and see the cabbages. Are those really lettuces?’; the Methodist Synod: ‘Notices of motions fall thick and fast. We pass over some questions in the agenda meanwhile. We sit intently waiting to hear the Missionary Committee’s letter, everyone is attentive, we listen, the air is still, we can hear the dropping of a pin’; literature from the Freetown Ededroko Store which advertised, “Novels, Works of Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, R. L. Stevenson, Bertha Clay, etc., e.g., by Corelli: Wormwood, Sorrows of Satan, Barabbas, Vendetta, Thelma, Innocent’, by Caine, The Deemster, A Son of Hagar, The Woman Thou Gavest Me; by Stevenson: Treasure Island, The Black Arrow; by Clay: A Womans Temptation, Married for her Beauty, Beyond Pardon.’
The contributions of Dorothy Violetta Mallatson to the local daily Press vividly summarize the evangelical fun of Freetown: ‘Looking behind us, Christmas is just round the corner and out of sight. Outspreading away into the distance there is sunshine, sports, and all the outdoor joys we love so well. For the school girl or boy there are school sports to take away the dullness and flatness of the schoolroom life. Then there is the Prize Distribution and Thanksgiving Service. For older people there is the All-Comers Tennis Competition and there is coming up shortly many dances and concerts. For instance, there is the Danvers Dance on the 8th of February, and the Play and Dance of the Ladies of the National Congress of British West Africa which comes on the 15th proximo.’
It would be so much more amusing if it was all untrue, a fictitious skit on English methods of colonization. But one cannot continue long to find the Creole’s painful attempt at playing the white man funny; it is rather like the chimpanzee’s tea-party, the joke is all on one side. Sometimes, of course, the buffoonery is conscious, and then the degradation is more complete. A few Creoles make money out of their prefects, by deliberately playing the inferior, the lower boy: R. Lumpkin alias Bungie is the most famous example. He has become a character. Tourists are taken to see his shop. You are advised by every white man you meet, in the long bar at the Grand, in the small bar at the City, on board ship: ‘You must go to Bungie’s.’ He is the proprietor of the British-African Workmen Store and he styles himself ‘Builder for the Dead, Repairer for the Living’. This is one of his advertisements:
Fear God Honour Your King, be just to mankind – Says Bungie.
*
Easy System
British-African Workmen Store undertake to supply Coffin with Hearse, Men, Grave, etc., by special arrangements for easy payment by instalment.
*
Contracts taken up for Carpentry, Masonry, Painting, etc., at moderate charges.
*
Ready-made Plain and Polished Coffin supplied with Hearse and Uniformed men at any moment. Corpse washed and dressed.
*
Come! I’ll bury the dead by easy system only be true to your sympathetic friend.
That’s Bungie.
*
Do not live like a fool and die like a big fool. Eat and drink good stuff, save small, be praying for a happy death, then a decent funeral. Bungie will do the rest.
*
I’ll bury the Dead.
(Book of Tobias)
I’ll bury the dead and feed the living.
THAT’S BUNGIE ALL OVER.
The City Bar
I wanted to do a pub crawl. But one can’t crawl very far in Freetown. All one can do is to have a drink at the Grand and then go and have a drink at the City. The City is usually more crowded and noisy because there’s a billiard table; people are rather more dashing, get a little drunk and tell indecent stories; but not if there’s a woman present. I had never found myself in a place which was more protective to women; it might have been inhabited by rowing Blues with Buchman consciences and secret troubles. Everyone either had a wife at Hill Station and drank a bit and bought chocolates at the weekend and showed photographs of their children at home:
(‘I’m afraid I don’t care much for children.’
‘O, you’d like mine.’)
or else they had wives in England, had only two drinks, because they’d promised their wives to be temperate, and played Kuhn-Kan for very small stakes. They played golf and bathed at Lumley Beach. There wasn’t a cinema that a white man could go to, and books of course rotted in the damp or developed worms. You developed worms too yourself, after you’d been out a little time; it was inevitable; nobody seemed to mind. Freetown, they told you, was the healthiest place on the Coast. The day I left a young man in the educational department died of yellow fever.
Worms and malaria, even without yellow fever, are enough to cloud life in ‘the healthiest place along the Coast’. These men in the City bar, prospectors, shipping agents, merchants, engineers, had to reproduce English conditions if they were to be happy at all. They weren’t the real rulers; they were simply out to make money; and there was no hypocrisy in their attitude towards ‘the bloody blacks’. The real
rulers came out for a few years, had a long leave every eighteen months, gave garden parties, were supposed to be there for the good of the ruled. It was these men who had so much to answer for: the wages, for example, of the platelayers on the little narrow-gauge line which runs up to Pendembu near the French and Liberian borders. These men were paid sixpence a day and had to buy their own food, and yet in the days of the depression they were docked one day’s pay a month. This was perhaps the meanest economy among the many mean economies which assisted Sierra Leone through the depression, a depression caused by the fall in price of palm oil and palm kernels, the preference Levers at that time were showing for whale oil. The economies were nearly all at the expense of the coloured man; government staffs were reduced by a clerk here and a messenger there. Until the visit of Lord Plymouth, the Under-Secretary of State, who arrived in Freetown on the day that I did, there had been only one sanitary inspector for the whole colony and protectorate. Badgered by the central authority, constantly moved from a district which he was attempting to clean up, he would apply in vain for assistants. Forced labour is illegal in a British Colony, but the sanitary inspector without a staff had to choose between breaking the law or leaving villages as dirty as he found them.
One could exonerate the men in the bar; they were not guilty of these meannesses; they were only guilty of the shabbiness of Freetown, the tin roofs and the Poppy Day posters. Santayana, with the romanticism of a foreign Anglophil, has written that ‘what governs the Englishman is his inner atmosphere, the weather in his soul’. The inner atmosphere, he explains, ‘when compelled to condense into words may precipitate some curt maxim or over-simple theory as a sort of war-cry; but its puerile language does it injustice, because it broods at a much deeper level than language or even thought. It is a mass of dumb instincts and allegiances, the love of a certain quality of life,’ and in a finely chosen if romantic metaphor, he describes how ‘it fights under its trivial fluttering opinions, like a smoking battleship under its flags and signals’. So to be fair to these men one must recognize a certain fidelity, a kind of patriotism in the dust and anglicanism and the closing hours; this is their ‘corner of a foreign field’, just as much as the flowers and cafés and the neat tarts of Dakar are the Frenchman’s corner. If you are English, they would argue, you will feel at home here: if you don’t like it you are not English. If one must condemn, one should condemn not the outposts but the headquarters of Empire, the country which has given them only this: a feeling of respectability and a sense of fairness withering in the heat’.