Journey Without Maps

THE CARGO SHIP

The cargo ship lay right outside the Mersey in the Irish Sea; a cold January wind blew across the tender; people sat crammed together below deck saying goodbye, bored, embarrassed and bonhomous, like parents at a railway station the first day of term, while England slipped away from the porthole, a stone stage, a tarred side, a slap of grey water against the glass.

Madeira

MY cousin and I had five fellow-passengers in the cargo ship: two shipping agents, a traveller for an engineering firm, a doctor on his way to the Coast with anti-yellow-fever serum, and a woman joining her husband at Bathurst. All except the woman and the traveller knew the Coast; they knew the same people; they had a common technique of living enforced by common conditions. The daily dose of quinine, mosquito netting over all the portholes: diese to them were as natural as the table-cloth at meals.

It is a condition favourable to the growth of legend. Legend belongs naturally to primitive communities where minds are so little differentiated, by work or play or education, that a story can move quickly from brain to brain uncriticized. But sometimes these conditions arise artificially. A common danger, purpose or way of life can very nearly destroy differences of intellect and class; then you get the angels of Mons and the miracles at a shrine.

“Yeslittle’ they were saying in the smoking-room, “you won’t find a tougher man than Captain W.” They all knew of him because they all belonged to the Coast: the captain, the doctor, the shipper.

“If he ran into a broken bottle,” the doctor said, “his face wouldn’t look any different.”

“He’d take a tug round the world as soon as look at you.”

“He doesn’t insure his cargo. He bears the risk himself. That’s why his freight-rates are so cheap.”

“Will people take the risk?”

“His word’s as good as an insurance company’s.”

“But when he loses a cargo?”

“He hasn’t lost one yet.”

In the wireless room on a Saturday night the young agent waited hour after hour for the League results. He and the wireless officer shared an esoteric gossip of the sea : how this or that man had quarrelled with the Old Man and joined another line. The bulbs flickered overhead; tubes hummed in the little cabin with its rows of discs and bulbs, as mechanised as was the engine-room below, a great black polished cliff” pipes tied up at the joints in blue, yellow or scarlet bags like hot-water bottles, a solitary negro with a polishing rag in all the glittering desert of brass and iron.

Coming in from the bulbs and gossip and the dusk I overheard the Captain talking to the doctor in the smoking-room. “Four hundred and sixteen people at Dakar,” he was saying. The subject came up again at breakfast: plague at Dakar, yellow fever at Bathurst, outbreaks hushed up on the French coast, never reported on the Liberian: one was seldom allowed to escape the subject of fever. One could begin a conversation with religion, politics, books; it always ended with malaria, plague, yellow fever. As long as one was at sea it was a joke, like somebody else’s vicious wife; when one was on land it was like a grim story intended to make the flesh creep, but one became conscious then of people who wouldn’t play, who preferred something comforting.

Something like A Village in a Valley by Mr. Beverley Nichols, which was in the small library. One reads strange books in a ship, books one would never dream of reading at home: like Lady Eleanor Smith’s Tzigane, and the novels of Warwick Deeping and W. B. Maxwell : a lot of books, written without truth, without compulsion, one dull word following another, books to read while you wait for the bus, while you strap-hang, in between the Boss’s dictations, while you eat your A. B. C. lunch; a whole industry founded on a want of leisure and a want of happiness.

At Madeira it was raining. The touts were out at ten in the morning in the shabby notorious town. One drank sweet wine at the Golden Gates, and the rain dripped off the curious phallic hats hanging outside the shops. The touts wore straw hats with Cambridge ribbons; they kept at one’s elbow all the way round Funchal; they weren’t a bit discouraged because it was raining, because it was only just after breakfast. “Luxe,” they kept on saying, and “Sex” and something about dancing girls. Their industry, like Mr. Beverley Nichols’s, was founded on a want of leisure and a want of happiness. Quick, quick, you are only on shore for half an hour, you are only vigorous for a few more years, have another girl before it’s too late, you aren’t happy with the one you’ve got, try another. The women sold violets and lilies and roses in the rain, the phallic hats dripped, the touts couldn’t understand that one didn’t want a girl just after breakfast on a wet day. There were other ways of filling up time, one could drink sweet wine at the Golden Gates, one could go back on board and read Lady Eleanor Smith or Mr. Beverley Nichols.

A young German artist and his wife came on board at Funchal as deck passengers and were given the little hospital to sleep in. He was a thick spotty man in a velvet jacket; he had known D. H. Lawrence at Taos and Mabel Dodge Luhan. It hadn’t made any difference, he wasn’t going to write a book about it. In the little hospital he put out his canvases, crude realistic landscapes and die baked faces of Mexican Indians; it grew dark; and everyone drank bad Madeira out of the bottle and he talked about Art and Sport and the Body Beautiful, and his wife, small and curved and lovely and complaisant, was quiet and seasick. He believed in Hitler and Nationalism and swimming and love, he liked the pictures of Orpen and De Laszlo, but Munke’s pictures left him dissatisfied. They left out the Soul, he said, they were materialist; not that he disbelieved in the Body, the Body Beautiful and in physical Love. He agreed to come to Africa too, and illustrate this book; an artist was at home anywhere-but after dinner he changed his mind; and his sweet complaisant nubile

wife said, Yes, she wouldn’t mind coming to Africa, and after dinner she changed her mind too. He was a bad artist, but he wasn’t a bogus one. He lived on almost nothing; he believed in himself and in his hazy Teutonic ideas; and there was a sensual beauty in their relationship. The two lived in a kind of continuous intimacy, she had no ideas but his, no vitality but his; he supplied all the life for both of them and she supplied a warm friendly sensual death; they shared the universe between them All the time, in the cabin, at dinner, at a cafι table, they gave the impression of having only just risen from bed.

By dinner-time everyone was drunk on bad Madeira and the pink gin they called Coasters. The shipping agent sang The Old Homeland and The Floral Dance and little shot an Arrow into the Air and the fat traveller called Younger said, “Pass me some more eau de cow,” spilling his coffee. The aliens went to their cabin, picking their way across the lower deck and up the iron stairs into the stern; she was seasick, but it only made her quieter; it didn’t alter her beautiful sensuous receptivity. The agent sang The Old Homeland again-“Far across the sea, I wonder will they pray for me”-and everyone felt English and exiled and wistful, everyone except Younger, who climbed carefully up the stairs, clinging to the banister: “Fm going home by rail.” He was more English than any of them; the north country was in his heart; he was firmly local and unsentimental and bawdy and honest. He drank because he needed a holiday, because he had heavy work before him on the Coast, because he loved his wife and had desperate anxieties. He had more cause to drink than anyone. The boom years were in his heavy flesh and his three chins; one couldn’t at first sight tell how the depression lay like lead in his stomach. If one were to paint his portrait in the old style of tiny landscapes and Tuscan towns, one would have given him as background an abandoned blast furnace or the girders of a great bridge left a perch for birds.

Even when drunk, even when bawdy, he had an admirable sanity. “Eighteen months on the Coast. Tell me, doctor, what do people do about it?”

“Insoluble,” the doctor said.

“But what they do about it?”

“Even the Governor has asked me that. There’s no answer.”

He was the last to go to bed, he would reel for ten minutes up and down the corridor, there was something common and royal about him which called for devotion, nothing he did could offend. “Kipper,” he would shout outside the Captain’s door, “Kipper,” and obediently the Captain would emerge. He had the way of Faktaff with a woman, an absurd innocence that was quite content with a slap and a tickle. “You saucy little sausage,” and even the young shy inhibited married woman who had never left Liverpool, who wouldn’t drink and wouldn’t smoke and wouldn’t look at the moon, slapped him back. There was a ballad quality about Ms bawdry-His words had the merit of children’s art; they were vivid, unselfconscious, uncorrupted.

Ballyhoo

The cinema in Tenerife was showing a film which had been adapted from one of my own novels. It had been an instructive and rather painful experience to see it shown. The direction was incompetent, the photography undistinguished, the story sentimental. If there was any truth in the original it had been carefully altered, if anything was left unchanged it was because it was untrue. By what was unchanged I could judge and condemn my own novel : I could see clearly what was cheap and banal enough to fit the cheap banal film.

There remained a connection between it and me. One had never taken the book seriously; it had been written hurriedly because of the desperate need one had for the moneylittle But even into a book of that kind had gone a certain amount of experience, nine months of one’s life, it was tied up in the mind with a particular countryside, particular anxieties; one couldn’t disconnect oneself entirely, and it was curious, rather pleasing, to find it there in the hot bright flowery town. There are places where one is ready to welcome any kind of acquaintance with memories in common; he may be cheap but he knew Annette; he may be dishonest but he once lodged with George; even if the acquaintance is very dim indeed and takes a lot of recognising.

Two Youthful Hearts in the Grip of Intrigue, Fleeing from Life. Cheated? Crashing Across Europe. Wheels of Fate.

Never before had I seen American ballyhoo at work on something I intimately knew. It was magnificent in its disregard of the article for which it had paid.

Its psychological insight was either cynically wrong or devastatingly right.

The real Orient Express runs across Europe from Belgium to Constantinople. Therefore, you will go wrong if you interpret the word ‘Orient’ to indicate something of a Chinese or Japanese nature. There is enough material of other kinds to arrange a lively colourful ballyhoo, as you will see as soon as you turn to the exploitation pages in this press book.

Date Tie-Up. In the exhibitors5 set of stills available at the exchange are three stills which show Norman Foster explaining the sex life of a date to Heather Angel, passing dates to Heather Angel and Heather Angel buying dates from the car window. The dialogue is quite enlightening on the date subject at one point in the picture. Every city has high-class food shops which feature fancy packages of dates. Tie-in with one of these for window displays, and for a lobby display, using adequate copy and the three stills.

Another angle would be to have a demonstration of date products, the many uses of dates, etc. This would be quite possible in the much larger cities. And in cases where working with large concerns, patrons may be permitted to taste samples. These tie-ups must be worked out locally despite the fact that we are contacting importers of important brands.

Don’t under-estimate the value of a real smart window fixed up with date products, baskets of delicious fruits and dates, and the three stills shown here with adequate copy for your picture. “Buy a package of delicious dates, and take The Orient Express’ for Constantinople, a most thrilling and satisfying evening’s entertainment, at the Rialto Theatre.”

Do you Know That : Heather Angel’s pet kitten Penang had to have its claws clipped because it insisted on sharpening them on the legs of expensive tables;

That the pet economy of Heather Angel is buying washable gloves and laundering them herself; That Una O’Connor permits only a very few of her intimate friends to call her Tiny? That blast of ballyhoo had not sold the film; to my relief, because by contract my name had to appear on every poster, it had kept to the smaller shabbier cinemas, until now it was washed up in Tenerife, in a shaded side street behind an old carved door like a monastery’s. This was what made it an agreeable acquaintance; it hadn’t the shamelessness of success; it might be vulgar, but it wasn’t successfully vulgar. There was something quite un-Hollywood in its failure.

The Canaries were halfway to Africa; the Fox film and the pale cactus spears stuck in the hillside, a Victorian Gothic hotel smothered in bougainvillaea, parrots and a monkey on a string, innumerable themes were stated like the false starts and indecisions of a lifetime : the Chinese job from which one had resigned, the appointment in Bangkok never taken up, the newspaper in Nottingham. I can remember now only the gaudy poster, the taste of the sweet yellow wine, fiat roofs and flowers and an arbour full of empty bottles, and in the small dark cathedral a Christmas crib (casdes and little villages and women with baskets of carrots, a donkey and a motor-car and a comic man in a top-hat, little caves where hermits or gipsies sat asleep on moss-covered rocks, a man on an old-fashioned bicycle, and somewhere right up in a corner, dwarfed by the world, the flesh -those bright spring carrots, the devil-the man in a top-hat, sat the Mother of God with an old-young child, wrinkled and careworn and cross-eyed, and Herod leant over a wall with his crown tilted).

Las Palmas

Of Las Palmas I can remember little more : a man selling women’s pyjamas from a rowing boat after midnight, the women in the ‘33’ with black theatrical eyes and heavy figures. It was half-past one in the morning before we got ashore and found a taxi. Nobody could speak a word of anything but Spanish; the drink was bad and dear, but Younger didn’t mind. His inevitable expression, “You saucy little sausagelittle’ could be heard through all the rooms, his progress was one long slap and tickle and free drink. The manager followed him round with bills he wouldn’t pay and Phil brought up the rear, the young shipping agent who was afraid there would be trouble, who had the unrequited devotion of a page in an Elizabethan play. Every now and again to keep the manager quiet Phil paid a bill and the manager tore it up and dropped it on the floor and wrote another. Then Younger stole the woman belonging to a man with a guitar and the man kissed him and had a drink; the manager wrote a bill, and Phil plucked at Younger’s sleeve and said, “Go steady, old man. Go steady.” A madman came up and threatened Younger, but Younger didn’t understand, didn’t care anyway, didn’t even hear perhaps. He sat on a chair playing pat-paw with his stout black bitch; sometimes he made a pass at her mouth, but she avoided that, nudging with her elbow, pushing forward her empty glass while the manager wrote out another bill. Then it began all over again, the refusal to pay, the arguments, Phil’s “Go steady, old man, go steady,” another drink all round, pat-paw, “You saucy little sausage,” another bill. On the way to the waterside he passed out altogether, had to be carried, fourteen stone of him, into the rowing boat in the dark, dragged up the rocking companion, “undressed and put to bed. But no one grudged it him, he could do these things, next day he was as well as ever, bathed in a costume which wouldn’t meet across him, called “Kipper, Kipper” in the passage, was drunk by lunch-time, explained it was his last drink before the Coast : he was going to work now. No one believed him, but we were wrong.

He had the stamina of a bull; he could stop drinking when he chose. The islands were past, next port of call was on the Coast, he had work to do. Nobody knew how far afield his work was taking him and of its importance; he was fat and boisterous, one couldn’t tell from his manner the anxiety of his journey. He was taking a big risk; he had to get orders; and yellow fever was not going to stop him. There was an epidemic at one of the points on his route; he didn’t know of it when he came on board; everyone laughed at him about the fever, and one could tell that he was a little scared; but one could tell too that it was not going to make any difference. He was like an old fighter who is forced back into the ring because he needs the purse; he may be out of condition, may be afraid of getting hurt, but he cannot afford to lose, even if the effort kills him. Younger talked about his wife; he had never before been to a place where he couldn’t ring her up at nine o’clock of an evening; he’d always done it when he was in Brussels, in Berlin, in Warsaw.

Graveyard

The day after Las Palmas, passengers in West Coast boats wake to a completely new air. It lasts for a day and a day only. My sheets were damp with a kind of dew; there was a warm wet wind and a haze over the sea. The air smelt as salt and fishy as the air on Brighton front. The sodden damp to a traveller back from the Coast with malarial infection in his blood is said to be very dangerous, and among sailors this part of the Atlantic is known as the Elder Dempster Graveyard. But the tradition is older than the Line. Burton wrote of it in his Anatomy: “Such a complaint I read of those islands of Cape Verde, fourteen degrees from the Equator, they do male audire; one calls them the unhealthiest clime of the world, for fluxes, fevers, frenzies, calentures, which commonly seize on seafaring men that touch at them, and all by reason of a hot distemperature of the air. The hardiest men are offended with the heat, and stiffest clowns cannot resist it.”

It made Younger think of yellow fever at Kano. In the smoking-room that night, the first night of his new sobriety, he said that he thought death was a great adventure. But life, Phil said, was a great adventure too. Science was making great strides these days; you never knew; though of course Wells and Jules Verne had foreseen it all; what wonderful prophets they were. He said, “I thought Hannen Swaffer was a prophet too once, but he let me down.”

“Isn’t Hannen Swaffer a woman?” Younger said.

“No, he’s a man.”

“Are you sure?” Younger said. But Phil was sure. He’d seen him. He had even spoken to him one night when he came up to address their literary club. It was a change from bridge, that club; they got really famous writers to talk to them. Chesterton had been and Cecil Roberts. Then he went out to look at the moon, leaning over the side, waiting in vain for my cousin or the other woman on board to join him. If one did, he put his arm round her and talked about Wallasey or his wife or League results. He was only formally romantic; he had a great respect for women. He was really far more at home with Younger, looked after Younger when he was drunk, protected him, undressed him if necessary; when Younger became sober he was rather lost, looked at the moon more often, padding round the deck earnestly romantic, irritable because no one would play at tropic nights with him, disappearing at last into the little wireless room to talk about football to ‘Sparks’. One night his vitality which had no outlet overcame him and he began to throw glasses overboard.

Dakar

It must have been two days later that I woke to the grating of iron against stone, and there was the Coast. The word was already over-familiar. People said, “Eldridge. Of course, he’s an old Coaster,” and Eldridge, the middle-aged shipping agent, at the beginning of every meal would say, “Chop, as we call it on the Coast,” or handing a plate of onions, “Violets, we say on the Coast.” One’s pink gin was called a Coaster. There was no other Coast but the West Coast and this was it.

On the quay the Senegalese strolled up and down, long white and blue robes sweeping up the dust blown from the ridge of monkey-nuts twenty-five feet high. The men walked hand-in-hand, laughing sleepily together under the blinding vertical glare. Sometimes they put their arms round each other’s necks; they seemed to like to touch each other, as if it made them feel good to know the other man was there. It wasn’t love; it didn’t mean anything we could understand. Two of them went about all day without loosing hold; they were there when the boat slid in beside the monkey-nuts; they were there in the evening when the loading was finished and the labourers washed their hands and faces in the hot water flowing from the ship’s side; they hadn’t done a stroke of work themselves, only walked up and down touching hands and laughing at their own jokes; but it wasn’t love; it wasn’t anything we could understand. They gave to the blinding day, to the first sight of Africa, a sense of warm and sleepy beauty, of enjoyment divorced from activity and the weariness of willine.

Lΰ, tout n’est qu’ordre et beautι, Luxe, calme et voluptι.

One found it hard to believe at Dakar that Baudelaire had never been to Africa, that the nearest he had come to it was the body of Jeanne Duval, the mulatto ‘tart’ from Le Thιβtre du Pantheon, for Dakar was the Baudelaire of L’Invitation au Voyage, when it was not the Renι Clair of Le Million.

It was Renι Clair in its happy lyrical absurdity; the two stately Mohammedans asleep on the gravel path in the public gardens beside a black iron kettle; the tiny Syrian children going to school in white topees; the men’s sewing parties on the pavements; the old pock-marked driver who stopped his horses and disappeared into the bushes to tell his beads; the men laden with sacks moving rhythmically up and down a ladder of sacks, building higher the monkey-nut hill, like the tin toy figures sold in Holborn at Christmas-time; in the lovely features of the women in the market, young and old, lovely less from sexual attractiveness than from a sharp differentiated pictorial quality. In the restaurant, a little drunk on iced Sauterne, one didn’t trouble about the Dakar one had heard about, the Dakar of endemic plague and an unwieldy bureaucracy, the most unhealthy town on the Coast. Mr. Gorer in his Africa Dances tells how in Dakar the young Negroes simply die, not of tuberculosis, plague, yellow fever, but apparently of inanition, of hopelessness. He stayed too long, I suppose, and saw too much; that sudden sense of happiness which came to one in Dakar doesn’t last, which came to one in Le Million, a happiness that tingles behind the eyes, beautiful and insecure, a wish fulfilment.

Do not expect again a phoenix hour, The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining, Sudden the rain of gold and heart’s first ease… .

Undoubtedly the other Dakar (the Dakar of the four hundred and sixteen dead, of the despair and injustice) was there, but something else was momentarily shining through, something which was always stubbornly existing. So in an early Renι Clair film one could believe that this was the life one was born to live, breaking through life as one had been made to live it, breaking through anxiety and irritation and financial depression and a lust which had gone on too long, these voices in the air, this chase of a lottery ticket among the flying opera-hats, this tuneful miniature love behind cardboard scenery nothing was really serious, nothing lasted, you didn’t have to think about tomorrow’s food or tomorrow’s girl; you stuck up your leg in derision sewing pants on the pavement, you fell asleep among the flowers with your black kettle, you touched hands and felt good and didn’t care a damn.

One soon enough discovered, of course, that this impression was not the Coast The hawks flapping heavily over Bathurst, a long low backcloth of houses and trees along a sandy beach; a swarm of figures in the native quarter like flies on a piece of meat; the not being allowed to land because of yellow fever; the sense of isolation that the woman had as she went off to join her husband in the quarantined town; this was more really the Coast-the seedy Pole in a singlet and a pair of dirty white trousers who came on board at Konakry, couldn’t speak any English or French and wanted to learn the name of the suits in Bridge. The Captain took his gun and shot a hawk which sat in the rigging, the gulls scattered, twisting in the glittering air, and the dusty body plunged through them on to the deck, like a reminder of darkness.

The Shape of Africa

A reminder of darkness: the girl in the Queen’s Bar. I met her weeping across Leicester Square when the leaves had dropped and made the pavements slippery; she went into the vestibule of the Empire Cinema and verged violently away again (that wouldn’t do), settled at last on a high chair in the Queen’s Bar, made up her face, had a gin and tonic; I hadn’t the nerve to say anything and find out the details. Besides, it’s always happening all the time everywhere. You don’t weep unless you’ve been happy first; tears always mean something enviable.

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 tie 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 Tempelhof 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 Luft Hansa 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 faces of the Ugly-Wuglies in The Enchanted Castle (” littleWalk on your toes, dearlittle 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 realised 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 un” conscious mind is often sentimental; I have written ‘a shape’, and the shape, of course, is roughly that of the human heart.

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 coastlittle’

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 civilisation 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 fox what they wanted, they sourly prevaricated. “From what I garnered here and therelittle’ 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 is 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 white 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 nth 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. L Shorunkeh-Sawyerr, who subsequently gave her away.

She wore a frock of white lace lined with white satin, and of fall 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 Molakι 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, F.G.C.O., 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, M.A., J.P., 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 : Worm-wood, 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 Woman’s Temptation, Married for her Beauty, Beyond Pardon.”

The contributions of Dorothy Violetta Mallatson to the local daily Press vividly summarise 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 colonisation. 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 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.

Cornel 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 Ion? leave every eighteen months, gave garden parties, were supposed to be there for the good of the ruled. It was diese 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 Anglophile, 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 recognise 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 cafιs and the neat tarts of Dakar are the Frenchmen’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 for respectability and a sense of fairness withering in the heat

No Screws Unturned

When I came on shore I was met by an elderly Kru carrying an umbrella. He said reproachfully, I’ve been waiting for some hours.” He held a cable in his hand from London; it asked him to get in touch with Greene, who was leaving for the Republic. “My name,” the Kru said, “is Mr. D.’\ He knew the Republic well, he could be of use.

An even more august authority was giving me unwanted help. Before I left the boat I had been handed a letter from His Majesty’s Chargι d’Affaires in Monrovia, the capital of the Republic, saying that he had announced my visit to the Secretary of the Interior, and the Secretary had informed all the District Commissioners in the Western Province. “Any courtesies shown these persons by the Commissioners and Chiefs with whom they contact will be very highly appreciated, and it is incumbent that you leave no screws unturned to make their trip a pleasant one.” The phrase about the screws had a slightly sinister ring, but this fairylike activity had been no part of my plan. If there was anything to hide in die Republic I wanted to surprise it. Luckily the Secretary of the Interior had suggested a route for me to follow, and it would be quite easy for me to avoid it, to avoid indeed the Western Province, after a few days, altogether.

It would have been easier if I had been able to obtain maps. But the Republic is almost entirely covered by forest, and has never been properly mapped, mapped that is to say even to the rough extent of the French colonies which lie on two sides of it. I could find only two large-scale maps for sale. One, issued by the British General Staff, quite openly confesses ignorance; there is a large white space covering the greater part of the Republic, with a few dotted lines indicating the conjectured course of rivers (incorrectly, I usually found) and a fringe of names along the boundary. These names have been curiously chosen : most of them are quite unknown to anyone in the Republic; they must have belonged to obscure villages now abandoned. The other map is issued by the United States War Department. There is a dashing quality about it; it shows a vigorous imagination. Where the English map is content to leave a blank space, the American in large letters fills it with the word ‘Cannibals’. It has no use for dotted lines and confessions of ignorance; it is so inaccurate that it would be useless, perhaps even dangerous, to follow it, though there is something Elizabethan in its imagination. ‘Dense Forest’; ‘Cannibals’; rivers which don’t exist, at any rate anywhere near where they are put; one expects to find Eldorado, two-headed men and fabulous beasts represented in little pictures in the Gola Forest

But this was where Mr. D., the elderly Kruman, could help; he knew the Republic.

Mr. D, lived in Krutown. Krutown is one of the few parts of Freetown with any beauty; the Krus, the great sailors of the coast, whose boast it is that they have never been slaves and have never dealt in slaves, have escaped Anglicanisation. The native huts still stand among the palm trees on the way to Lumley Beach, the women sitting outside with their long hanging breasts uncovered. Mr. D.’s house was in the only Europeanised street. A bare wooden stair led into a room with wooden walls on which were hung a few religious pictures in Oxford frames. There were four rickety chairs and an occasional table with a potted plant on it. Crudely painted Mothers of God bore the agony of seven swords with indifference, Christ just above his head exposed a heart the colour of raw liver. Insects hopped about on the wooden floor and Mr. D. gently instructed me how to reach the frontier. A Iittle way over the border there was an American mission, the Order of the Holy Cross at Bolahun; it would be as well to stay there a few days and try to get carriers to go through with me to Monrovia. He examined the route suggested by the Secretary of the Interior; that had got to be avoided as far as possible; though I should have to follow it to Zigita. On the blank spaces of the English map, Mr. D. made his pencilled suggestions; he couldn’t be really sure to a matter of ten miles where to put the places he mentioned; the English map confused him with its inaccuracies. At last he gave it up altogether, and I simply wrote the names down in my notebook, spelling them as best I might: Mosambolahun, Gondolahun, Jenne, Lombola, Gbey-anlahun, Goryendi, Bellivela, Banya. But it is unnecessary to give them all here, for as it turned out I did not follow this route at all, didn’t even aim at Monrovia, which had been my object when I sailed. Circumstances in a country where the only way to travel is to know the next town or village ahead and repeat it as you go, like the Syrian woman in Little Arthur’s History who said “Gilbert, London” across England, were to alter my plans again and again until my small book was filled with lists of probably mispelt names in smudged pencil of places I never succeeded in finding. Examining it now I discover this cryptic entry : “Steamer calling C. Palmas and Sinoe. Keep S. dark. Get off at S. Take the beach to Setta Kru, Nana Kru. At N.K., Dr. V., Am. missionary. To Wesserpor or Dio. Tell people to take me to Nimley. On to New Sasstown and C.P.”

This is the record of another plan which came to nothing through lack of money and exhaustion. I had brought with me from England a letter of introduction to Paramount Chief Nimley of the Sasstown Tribe of Krus, the leader of the rebellion on the coast in 193a, It was in the fight against Nimley that the Frontier Force under the command of Colonel Elwood Davis, the President’s special agent, a North American black, had, according to the British Consul’s report, killed women and children, destroyed villages, tortured prisoners. Peace had been patched up but not with Nimley, who with the remains of his tribe was hidden in the bush vainly hoping for white intervention. No white man, Mr. D. said, would be allowed to travel to the Kru coast, but it would be possible by booking a passage on a coasting steamer from Monrovia to Cape Palmas to change one’s mind on board and land unexpectedly at Sinoe. From Sinoe one would travel along the beach to Nana Kru, and from there it would be necessary to get guides who knew the way to Nimley’s hiding-place.

I only mention these plans which came to nothing, these routes which were not followed, because they may give some idea of the vagueness of my ideas when I landed at Freetown. I had never been out of Europe before; I was a complete amateur at travel in Africa. I intended to walk across the Republic, but I had no idea of what route to follow or the conditions we would meet. Looking at the unreliable map I had thought vaguely that we would go up to the Sierra Leone railway terminus at Pendembu, then go across the frontier the nearest way and strike diagonally down to the capital. There seemed to be a lot of rivers to cross, but I supposed there would be bridges of some kind; there was the forest, of course, but that was everywhere. One apparently reliable book I had read on Sierra Leone mentioned a number of prospectors who had crossed the border into what was supposed to be an uninhabited part of the forest looking for gold and had never returned; but that was a little lower down (the Republic was on the bulge of Africa’s coast-line, and I could never properly remember the points of the compass).

Mr. D. discouraged me. It wasn’t possible, he said, that way. It was evident that he was particularly anxious for me to travel down by Bellivela. Bellivela was the headquarters of the Frontier Force and was being used as a concentration camp for political prisoners, those who had given evidence before the League of Nations Commission of Inquiry into slavery in the Republic. “They’ll have to invite you inside the camp for the night,” Mr. D. said, “and then you can poke around and see things.”

That night I dreamed of Mr. D. and the Customs at the border, a muddled irritating dream. I was always forgetting something; I had arrived at the Customs with all my bags and boxes and Mr. D. tied up in a bale, but I’d forgotten to get any carriers and I had no boys. I was afraid all the time that the Customs inspector would discover Mr. D., that I would be fined for smuggling, and have to pay a heavy duty.

The Three Companions

I arrived in Freetown on a Saturday and the train for Pendembu left on the following Wednesday; I had hoped to find servants engaged for me when I arrived, but Jimmie Daker, to whom I had an introduction, who had promised months before to do his best, had forgotten all about it. He was vague, charming, lost, and a little drunk. He sat in the Grand bar drinking whisky and bitters and talking about the Nazis and the war; he began as a pacifist but after his third drink he was ready to serve again at any moment; his face was scarred from the last war. He hadn’t any idea of how to get boys for the journey, though he agreed that it wouldn’t be wise to take any of those who stood all day at the entrance to the hotel offering their services. He didn’t know anybody who knew anything at all about the Republic. No one in Sierra Leone had ever crossed the border.

“Oh, Jimmielittle’ they all said in Freetown, “poor dear Jimmie,” when I said that Jimmie was finding me boys. “Jimmie doesn’t know a thing.”

In the end I got the best boys in Freetown. My head boy, Amedoo, was famous all the way up the line, and Amedoo chose the second boy, Laminah, and the old Mohammedan cook, Souri. And Jimmie Daker was, in a way, responsible. If I had not been to Jimmie’s for a sundowner, I wouldn’t have met Baddy, who had been twenty-five years in Freetown and knew every native in the place. He was quite drunk. He drove rapidly up and down the hills choosing the worst roads, he nearly got arrested for taking off a black policeman’s hat, the atmosphere was rather like Boat Race night in Piccadilly. “Everyone knows Daddy,” he said, trying to drive into Government House at two in the morning (but the gates were closed), reversing rapidly to the edge of a ditch, plunging uphill again while the sentries stood at attention and watched the car disappear with impassive faces, roaring past the barracks (the guardroom emptied at sight of a car on to the grass and everyone stood to attention in the green under-water light), up a muddy track off the road, coming to a halt against a bank, “You poor innocents,” he said. “We were stranded like criminals in a small lit cage above Freetown. “Have you ever been in Africa before? Have you ever been on trek? What on earth made you choose to go There?” Therelittle it appeared, was quite unspeakable, though, of course, he knew it only from hearsay; he would never dream… . Had we any idea of what we were up against? Had we any reliable maps? No, I said. There weren’t any to be got. Had we any boys? No. Had we let the D.Cs up the line know of our coming and engaged rest-houses? No, I hadn’t known it was necessary. When we crossed the border, how were we going to sleep? In native huts.

“You poor innocents,” he said. He nearly wept over the wheel. Had we ever considered what a native hut meant? The rats, the lice, the bugs. What would happen if we got malaria, dysentery? “Something’s got to be done,” he said, reversing, driving rapidly backwards downhill. His mind switched over to the alternate theme : “Everyone here knows Daddy.” He stopped the car in Krutown beside a policeman and thrust his head out of the window. “Who am I?” The policeman approached nervously and shook his head. “No. Come here. Come close. Tell me; who am I?” The policeman shook his head and tried to smile; he was scared; he supposed it was a game, but he didn’t know how to play. “Who am I, you black varmint?” A young girl tried to slip through tie zone of headlight back into the dark: she had no business out at that hour; but Daddy saw her. “Hi,” he said, sticking his head out from the other side of the car, “come here.” She came up to the car; she was far too pretty to be scared; her bare breasts were small and firm and pointed; she had the neat rounded thighs of a cat. “Tell himlittle’ Daddy said, “who am I?” She grinned at him. She wasn’t scared by any game a man could play. “You know who I am?” Daddy said. She leant right into the car and grinned and nodded. “Daddy,” she said. He slapped her face in a friendly way and drove off. He seemed to think he’d proved something. “Have you thought of the leeches?” he said. “They’ll drop on you from the trees.” We stopped outside our hotel; the wooden floors, the stairs, were alive with ants. Daddy said, “I’ve got to do something for you, I can’t just let you go like this,” drooping over the wheel with sleep.

At dawn a madman began to go groaning down the street; I had heard him at intervals all day; I slipped out from under my mosquito net to watch him trail his rags through the grey early morning; he moved his head from side to side, groaning inhumanly like a man without a tongue. There were no vultures to be seen so early, the tin roofs were bare; do vultures nest? and the bats had gone, the fruit bats which streamed out across the town at seven o’clock.

Strange to say, Daddy remembered next morning that he had promised something. He turned up early at the hotel and said he had the boys outside waiting. I didn’t know what to say to them; they stared back at me from the bottom of the hotel steps waiting for orders; Amedoo, grey-faced and expressionless, holding his fez to his chest, a man of about thirty-five; Souri, the cook, a very old toothless man, in a long white robe; Laminah, the second boy, very young, in shorts and a little white jacket like those barbers wear, with a knitted woollen cap on his head crowned by a scarlet bobble. It was several days before I learnt their names, and I could never fully understand what they said to me. I told them to come back next day, but they haunted the hotel from that moment, the two older men appearing suddenly in the passage, standing silently in front of me with lowered head and fez pressed to the chests. I never knew what they wanted; they always waited for me to speak. It was only later that I realised Amedoo was as shy as myself. I couldn’t have imagined then the affection I would come to feel for them.

Our relationship was to be almost as intimate as a love-affair; they were to suffer from the same worn nerves; to be irritated by the same delays; but our life together, because it had been more perfectly rounded, seemed afterwards less real. For there is so much left over after a love-affair; letters and mutual friends, a cigarette case, a piece of jewellery, a few gramophone records, all the usual places one has seen each other in. But I had nothing left but a few photographs to show that I had ever known these three men; I would never again see the towns we had passed through together and never run into them in familiar places.little

little 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 cooklittle’ he said, “he all right, tut Amedoo he under ground.” (1946).

Up to Railhead

Everything was strange from the moment we pressed our way into Water Street Station through the crowd which always watched the twice-weekly train depart, and waved goodbye to Younger, beyond the black barrier of faces. I felt more at one then with the Kuhn-Kan players; I could appreciate the need in a strange place of some point of support, of one or two things scattered round which are familiar and understandable even if they are only Sydney Horler’s novels, a gin and tonic. For even the railway journey was strange. It is a small-gauge line, and the train noses its way up-country with incredible slowness (it took two days to go two hundred and fifty miles). There are three first-class compartments. The experienced traveller (there was one on the train) engages the middle compartment, which is quite empty, and puts up his own deck-chair; in the other two compartments the company provides wicker armchairs.

One was ‘off, and one was horribly afraid of doing the wrong thing; the etiquette of travel in wild places is as exacting as the etiquette of a new club. Nobody in England had warned me of the centre compartment, although I now understood that as a white man I should have made some effort to engage it. I began to fear, too, my first meeting with a chief; I had been told that I would be ‘dashed’, probably a chicken or some eggs or rice, and I would have to ‘dashlittle back money in return; I must shake hands and be friendly but aloof (it was a relief to enter the Republic and no longer feel that I was a member of the ruling race).

This question of dashes was a complicated one; in the course of the journey we found ourselves dashed not merely the usual chicken (value 6d. or gd. according to quality; return dash, which should always slightly exceed the true value, is. or is. 3d.), eggs (return dash id. each), oranges and bananas (value about forty for 3d.; return dash 6d), but a goat, a dancing monkey, a bundle of knives, a leather pouch, and innumerable gourds of palm wine. It was not always easy to calculate the value, and it was a long time before I overcame my reluctance to press a shilling into a chiefs hand.

I had been told by Mr. D. that I might meet three chiefs before we left Sierra Leone, Chief Coomba and Chief Fomba at Pendembu, the end of the line, and Chief Momno Kpanyan at Kailahun, our last stopping place before the frontier. Chief Momno Kpanyan was a very rich man, and the thought of having to dash him a few shillings clouded the whole of the journey.

I had never been so hot and so damp; if we pulled down the blinds in the small dusty compartment we shut out all the air; if we raised them, the sun scorched the wicker, the wooden floor, drenched hands and knees in sweat. Outside, the dusty Sierra Leone countryside unrolled, like a piece of drab cloth along a draper’s counter, grey and dull-green and burnt up by the dry season which was now approaching its end. The train rattled and reeled forward at fifteen miles an hour, burrowing intimately through the native villages almost within hand’s reach of the huts, the babies rolling in the dust, the men lounging in torn hammocks hung under the thatch. The bush was as ragged and uninteresting as a back garden which has been allowed to run wild and in which the aspidistras from the parlour have seeded and flourished among the brown-scorched grasses and the tall wrinkled greenery.

All the way along the line the price of oranges went down, from six a penny at Freetown to fifteen a penny the other side of Bo. The train stopped at every station, and the women pressed up along the line, their great black nipples like the centre point of a target. I was not yet tired of the sight of naked bodies (later I began to feel as if I had lived for years with nothing but cows), or else these women were prettier and more finely-built than most of those I saw in the Republic. It was curious how quickly one abandoned the white standard. These long breasts falling in flat bronze folds soon seemed more beautiful than the small rounded immature European breasts. The children took their milk standing; they ran to the breast in pairs like lambs, pulling at the teats. But though the region of modesty had shrunk, it was still there. The train crossed the Mano river; far down below the bridge, a hundred yards away, natives were bathing; they covered their private parts with their hands as the train went by.

The railway journey began before eight and finished some time after five; the first stage of the journey ended at Bo; here the train and passengers stayed the night. At some point during the day one had emerged from the Colony into the Protectorate. The change was more than a matter of geography or administration, it was a change of manner. The Englishmen here didn’t talk about the bloody blacks’ nor did they patronise or laugh at them; they had to deal with the real native and not the Creole, and the real native was someone to love and admire. One didn’t have to condescend; one knew more about some things, but they knew more about others. And on the whole the things they knew were more important. One couldn’t make lightning like they could, one’s gun was only an improvement on their poisoned spear, and unless one was a doctor one had less chance of curing a snake-bite than they. The Englishmen here were of a finer, subtler type than on the Coast; they were patriots in the sense that they cared for something in their country other than its externals; they couldn’t build their English corner with a few tin roofs and peeling posters and drinks at the bar.

It might be thought that these men were more fortunate, that their ‘corner’, just because it was less material, demanded less effort to construct. But one cannot carry a country’s art in one’s head, and in the climate of West Africa books rot, pianos go out of tune, and even a gramophone record buckles.

Beside the line Sergeant Penny Carlyle, D.C.’s messenger, swagger-stick under arm, waited for us. Bare-legged and barefooted, with a cap like a Victorian messenger boy’s perched on one side, a row of medals on his tunic, he had the smartness and efficiency of an N.C.O. in the Guards. He marshalled his carriers, led the way to the rest-house, squashed a beetle under his toes, clicked his bare heels and dismissed. There were egrets everywhere, like thin snow-white ducks with yellow beaks. They provided, in their slender Oriental beauty, the final contrast to Freetown; there wasn’t a vulture to be seen, and suddenly, inexplicably, I felt happy in the rest-house, the square squat bungalow built on cement piles to keep out the white ants,, as the hurricane lamps were lit and the remains of the tough, dry, tasteless coast chicken were laid out There was a cockroach larger ‘. than a black-beetle in the bathroom, there were no mosquito rods with the camp beds, my medical outfit, which had cost me four pounds ten at Burroughs Wellcome, had been left behind, a native stood outside the rest-house all the evening complaining of something with folded hands; but I was happy; it was as if I had left something I distrusted behind.

On the lawn outside the headmaster’s house, beside a tree covered with wax blossoms like magnolia, we sat and drank gin and lime-juice; it was warm and quiet; they talked of the Republic. I carried an introduction to C, a young Dutchman who was said to be somewhere in the Republic looking for diamonds. The traffic superintendent had heard of him; C. had slipped over the frontier somewhere near Pendembu and rumours had come back that he had found the stones. He was alone, working for some small Dutch company outside the great Trust. But the Trust, so the story went, had been frightened by the rumours; if diamonds were mined on a large scale in the Republic, the Trust could no longer control the price. They had sent spies over to trace C, slipped them across from Sierra Leone, from French Guinea and from the Ivory Coast; they had to discover the truth; the price of diamonds and their own existence depended on it. It was a good story to hear there in the darklittlenear the borders of a country of which no one in Sierra Leone had been able to tell me anything. It was a good story because it didn’t go too far and tell too much, because it had not merely a plot but a subject; it cast a light in so many directions, the satiric, the social, the psychological; one only had to wait for one’s own experience to add colour and facts, though I was almost afraid to find C, lest the vivid outline should be marred by detail.

It was useless in Sierra Leone to ask for information about the Republic. No one had been across; any traffic there was came from the other side. President Kling, who had been forced to resign soon afterwards by the disclosures of the League of Nations Commission of Inquiry, had visited Sierra Leone a few years back. He was received with royal honours; there were banquets and receptions, guns were fired the royal number of rounds. What the President never knew was that he had been used as a dummy for the Prince of Wales, who visited the colony soon afterwards; the salutes had been rehearsed, the committees had tried out their arrangements on him. Later he came up to Bo on his way home. He had planned to go back by land from the boundary, escorted by his troops; it wasn’t safe for a President to make his way through the tribes he ruled without two hundred soldiers to guard him. There was a dinner in his honour; it went well to the end; there were the usual toasts; but when the President rose there was an interruption. The Colonel Commandant of the Republic’s Frontier Force was having a good time. “Sit down, Mr. President,” he said- “I want some more brandies and sodas.”

A few days later his host got tired of the President and had him escorted with proper ceremony to the border, but at the wrong place. The Frontier Force had marched to meet him at Foya and here he was at Kabawana. The Presidential party sat on the ground and waited and hoped; they were very frightened; the British platoon marched off and left them there.

Border Town

As it turned out I had no cause to fear a meeting with the diamond prospector. The story was left vague, unverified, suggestive. Six months in the Republic had been too much for Clittles health; he had gone home. This I learnt the next afternoon at Pendembu, at the small German store where I had been told to inquire for him. The train left Bo soon after nine and arrived in the late afternoon. AU my food was still in bond, but I bought tinned food at the P.Z. store in Bo. One could buy everything there, drinks and tinned foods and clothes and ironware and cures for gonorrhoea (P.Z. have branches all down the coast, even in the Republic; they are a Manchester firm, a kind of West African Selfridge, and in towns where there is no accommodation for white men, the P.Z. store can always be depended on for hospitality.)

At Pendembu another Court Messenger was waiting for ns, and a lorry to take us to Kailahun, to the Government Rest-house, but I called first at the Deutsche Kamerun Gesellschaft to inquire for C. “You’ll find his partner, Mr. Van Gogh,” the German manager said, “somewhere near Bolahun.” P Gogh was looking for gold as well as for diamonds He had been out there for nine months. He’ll be at Bolahun or somewhere in the forest. They couldn’t say more. The Paramount Chief was waiting by the lorry; he was a small man in a robe of native cloth with a cocky little woollen cap; we had nothing to say to each other, we shook hands and smiled, and then the lorry drove away.

The old engine boiled, and the metal of the footboard burnt through my shoes; the driver was barefooted. We drove wildly up-and downhill for an hour on a road like a farm track, but the impression of reckless speed was deceptive, formed by the bumps, the reeling landscape, the smell of petrol and die heat; the lorry couldn’t have gone more than twenty miles an hour. Cars are still rare in that corner of Sierra Leone, men scrambled up the banks, women fled into the bush or crouched against the bank with their faces hidden, as civilisation went terrifyingly by them in a fume of evil smoke.

In Kailahun at the time when we arrived there were only two white men, the District Commissioner and a Scottish engineer who was building a bridge, but a third man, a stranger, drifted in during the evening in a singlet and dirty ducks, with a little black beard and shaven monkish head. The Commissioner had arrived by the same train; he had been down the line to Segbwana to investigate a Gorilla Society murder. A child had been carried off and killed, and a woman had sworn she had seen the gorilla and that he wore trousers. A man confessed, but none of the Commissioners believed that he was the real murderer. He had in his possession a gorilla knife with curved prongs to make the rough clawing wounds, and possession of the knife was alone sufficient to earn him fourteen years’ imprisonment The Commissioner was small, dark, lively, subtle and sensitive; he was new to the place; something had happened to three of his predecessors. There had been a boundary dispute in the district for years between two chiefs, a suspicion of ‘medicine’ in the food, and in a month’s time he would be alone again (the engineer gone). Books came out to him from the Times Book Club, he read them and then they rotted on the shelves.

The engineer sat and smoked in silence. He didn’t read books; he had no conversation; he was white-haired, rocky, slow; he might have been sixty and it was a shock to hear that he was in his early forties. He didn’t mind the loneliness, he said, he was happier here than in England, it suited him. But he had more nerves than he cared to admit.

‘There’s a Liberian messenger waiting here for you,” the D.C. said. It was what I had feared, that the authorities would send a guide to keep us to the route they had suggested. The D.C. sent a man into the village to find him, and soon afterwards the stranger turned up in his dirty trousers and singlet. Everyone took him to be the Liberian messenger, nobody got up or offered him a drink; he was the Enemy with his shaven head and his curious black tuft of beard. He had nothing to say for himself, standing there patiently while he was told what he had to do. “You are going to show this gentleman the way to Bolahun. He will start the day after tomorrow. You know the way to the Holy Cross Mission?”

Yes, he said, he had come from there.

It was a long while before anyone thought of asking whether he was the Liberian messenger. He wasn’t, the messenger had disappeared from Kailahun, the stranger was a German. He wanted a bed; he had dropped in to Kailahun as casually as if it were a German village where he would be sure to find an inn. He had a bland secretive innocence; he had come from the Republic and he was going back to the Republic; he gave no indication of why he had come or why he was going or what he was doing in Africa at all.

I took him for a prospector, but it turned out later that he was concerned with nothing so material as gold or diamonds. He was just learning. He sat back in his chair, seeming to pay no attention to anyone; when he was asked a question, he gave a tiny laugh (you thought: I have asked something very foolish, very superficial), and gave no answer until later, when you had forgotten the question. He was young in spite of his beard; he had an aristocratic air in spite of his beachcomber’s dress, and he was wiser than any of us. He was the only one who knew exactly what it was he wished to learn, who knew the exact extent of his ignorance. He could speak Mende; he was picking up Buzie; and he had a few words of Pelli: it took time. He had only been two years in West Africa,

I discovered this very gradually; it took longer than the breakfast to which he came next day, more aristocratic than ever in a clean shirt and a pair of fawn trousers, with an ivory-headed stick, a round white topee, a long cigarette-holder in the corner of his mouth. It was a formal courtesy, but he wasn’t interested in anyone; he was only interested in learning what he wanted to know, and he could tell at once that from us he could learn nothing at all. We asked him questions and he retired more than ever into his reserve of secrecy. Had he ever been to Africa before he came out to the Republic two years ago? No, never. Hadn’t he found things difficult? No, he said with a tiny smile, it had all been very simple. Would one have trouble with the Customs at the frontier? Well, of course, it was possible; he himself had no trouble, but they knew him. Should one bribe them? That was one of the questions he didn’t answer, putting it aside, smiling gently, tipping the ash off his cigarette on to the beaten earth of the floor. The cockchafers buzzed in and out and he sat with lowered head, smoking. No, he wouldn’t have another biscuit. Only after a time he exerted himself to give one piece of information; teaching tired him as much as learning invigorated him. It would be as well, he said, while we were at the Holy Cross to visit the Liberian Commissioner at Kolahun. The Commissioner was a scoundrel; he could make things very unpleasant; besides, it was necessary to take out a permit of residence before one had been in the Republic a week. Then he walked briskly away, twirling his ivory-headed stick, his topee sloped at a smart angle, looking around, learning things. One day (it took a week to discover so much) he was going to write a thesis for Berlin University (he came from Hamburg, but Dr. Westermann was at Berlin and he hoped to win the approval of that great African scholar). The thesis was an end, but the collection of material for the thesis had no end. The thesis was as evasive as the Castle in Kafka’s religious parable.

‘ We met him again in the long flat village. The chief’s new house stood up above the huts, an absurd concrete skyscraper with row on row of stained-glass windows not made to open; in one corner, tucked away, an unpainted door and a flight of splintery steps. This was the house of Momno Kpanyan, one of the richest chiefs in the Protectorate. In the market we got small change; the penny was too large a sum for marketing, and the currency most in use was irons. Their price varied; one could speculate in irons: the rate that day was twenty for fourpence, They were flat strips of iron about fourteen inches long, like blunt arrows; the points must be undamaged and the tails unchipped (this was as good a way as a milled edge to ensure that the currency was not debased); men were coming in to the market with bundles of several hundred irons on their heads.

Kailahun, in memory, has become a clean village, one of the cleanest we stayed in, but what impressed me at the time was the dirt and disease, the children with protuberant navels relieving themselves in the dust among the goats and chickens, the pock-marked women smeared about the face and legs and breasts with some white ointment they squeezed from a plant in the bush and used for beauty and for medicine. They used it for smallpox, for fever, for toothache, for indigestion; for every ailment under their bleak sun; when they were young it soothed their headaches; when they were older they smeared it on their big bellies to bring them ease in their confinement; when they were dying it lay like a sediment of salt on their dried-up breasts and in their pitted thighs. Here you could measure what civilisation was worth; looking back later to Kailahun from the villages of the Republic, where civilisation stopped within fifty miles of the coast, I could see no great difference.

‘Workers of the World Unite”; I thought of the wide shallow slogans of political parties, as the thin bodies, every rib showing, with dangling swollen elbows or pock-marked skin, went by me to the market; why should we pretend to talk in terms of the world when we mean only Europe or the white races? Neither IJL.P. nor Communist Party urges a strike in England because the platelayers in Sierra Leone are paid sixpence a day without their food. Civilisation here remained exploitation; we had hardly, it seemed to me, improved the natives’ lot at all, they were as worn out with fever as before the white man came, we had introduced new diseases and weakened their resistance to the old, they still drank from polluted water and suffered from the same worms, they were still at the mercy of their chiefs, for what could a District Commissioner really know, shifted from district to district, picking up only a few words of the language, dependent on an interpreter? Civilisation so far as Sierra Leone was concerned was the railway to Pendembu, the increased export of palm-nuts; civilisation too,was Lever Brothers and the price they controlled; civilisation was the long bar in the Grand, the sixpenny wages.

It was not civilisation as we think of it, a civilisation of Suffolk churches and Cotswold manors, of Crome and Vaughan. The District Commissioner’s work was to a great extent the protection of the native from the civilisation he represented. The ‘noble savage’ no longer exists; perhaps he never existed, though in the very young (among the few who are not disfigured by navel hernia) you seem to see behind the present to something lovely, happy and unenslaved, something like the girl who came up the hill that morning, a piece of bright cloth twisted above her hips, the sunlight falling between the palms on her dark hanging breasts, her great silver anklets, the yellow pot she carried on her head.

Freedom to Travel

Kailahun is on the border of French Guinea; that presumably is why the District Commissioner’s office was transferred there from Pendembu at the railhead. At Kailahun there is no railway and no telegraph: to communicate with Freetown the Commissioner must send a messenger the eighteen miles to Pendembu. It is difficult to understand what control he has over the border; natives pass freely to and fro; indeed with a little care it would be possible to travel all down West Africa without showing papers from the moment of landing. There is something very attractive in this great patch of ‘freedom to travel’; absconding financiers might do worse than take to the African bush. They could be buried there for a lifetime, and they could carry all the money they needed with them in a country where oranges are fifteen a penny, chickens sixpence each, and wages, if you go deep enough, three shillings a week; where you can feed thirty men, as I found, on thirty shillings a week.

That afternoon we went for a walk into French Guinea with the engineer. The border is the Moa River, about twice the width of the Thames at Westminster. We crossed in a dug-out canoe, standing and balancing with the roll. It was quite easy, only a little frightening because there were alligators in the Moa, The curious thing about these boundaries, a line of river in a waste of bush, no passports, no Customs, no barriers to wandering tribesmen, is that they are as distinct as a European boundary; stepping out of the canoe one was in a different country. Even nature had changed; instead of forest and a rough winding road down which a car could, with some difficulty, go, a narrow path ran straight forward for mile after mile through tall treeless elephant grass. Along the hot wrinkled surface lay the skins of snakes. Natives came stooping up the path, bowed tinder green hammocks of palm nuts; they looked like grasshoppers in a Silly Symphony. We walked for an hour and a half without coming to a village and at last turned back to Sierra Leone. The engineer said the path went straight down to the coast by Konakry, and again one felt the happy sense of being free; one had only to follow a path far enough and one could cross a continent. Sweating in the hot dry day and growing cool again, one found it hard to believe that this part of Africa should have so unhealthy a reputation; one forgot C.’s sickness and the diseased villagers. I had not so much as heard a mosquito and the daily five grains of quinine seemed a waste of medicine.

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, Tm sorry you are off tomorrow.” He said it so often that one couldn’t doubt him, even little 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 mediaeval. 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 £01 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 Freelittle town, 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 moneybox 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 moneybox, 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 yearslittle 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, he 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 the 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. Dlittles 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 Mόhlenburg. 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 fezzes 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 afternoonlittle’ then explain rather guardedly what he wanted, guardedly because you never knew when the police might listenin 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 comeslittle’ 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 Kodak’s, snapped picturesquely in front of the ancient butter market.

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-shillinglittle’ 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 him 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 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 sim 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.