Darkest England Read online

  DARKEST ENGLAND

  Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944. He is the author of nine novels and one collection of short stories, including Kruger’s Alp, which won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, Serenity House, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize, and My Mother’s Lovers, published by Atlantic Books in 2006 to great acclaim. He is also a poet and playwright and author of the celebrated memoir White Boy Running.

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HOPE

  FICTION

  My Mother’s Lovers

  A Separate Development

  Kruger’s Alp

  The Hottentot Room

  My Chocolate Redeemer

  Serenity House

  Me, the Moon and Elvis Presley

  Heaven Forbid

  SHORTER FICTION

  Black Swan

  Learning to Fly

  The Love Songs of Nathan J. Swirsky

  The Garden of Bad Dreams

  POETRY

  Cape Drives

  In the Country of the Black Pig

  English Men

  FOR CHILDREN

  The King, the Cat and the Fiddle (with Yehudi Menuhin)

  The Dragon Wore Pink

  NON-FICTION

  White Boy Running

  Moscow! Moscow!

  Signs of the Heart

  Brother Under the Skin

  First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

  This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  Copyright © Christopher Hope 1996

  The moral right of Christopher Hope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 84887 165 6

  eISBN 978 1 78239 734 2

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  For Ingrid

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Postscript

  Khoisan click sounds

  Acknowledgements

  In seeking to understand better the traditions and culture of the Khoisan people, so insistently recalled in the notebooks of David Mungo Booi, I learnt a great deal from Alan Barnard’s elegant study: Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa, Cambridge 1992.

  I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce Alan Barnard’s explanation of the five basic click sounds found in Khoisan languages (see page 282).

  An account of my discovery of the English notebooks of David Mungo Booi first appeared in the Daily Telegraph in October 1994.

  The fragment of verse on page 166, translated from the original /Xam by Stephen Watson, is reproduced with the permission of the author.

  Remember,

  we are dealing with barbarians …

  Tacitus (writing about the first Britons)

  Foreword

  I found them camped for the night somewhere between the little towns of Lutherburg and Zwingli. Pieces of corrugated iron propped against their cart made a night shelter. A couple of donkeys gnawed at the scrubby plants on the roadside verge. The wine was going around the fire in a silvery plastic sack, shaped rather like a hot-water bottle with a teat; five litres of rough white, known as a ‘five-man-can’, an udder of intoxication. Theirs was a solitary light on the dusty road that arrows between somewhere and nowhere in the immense darkness of the desert.

  Although it was only about seven in the evening, the temperature was already below freezing, and falling swiftly. Even in autumn, on the high plains of the Great Karoo, nights can kill. The moon had barely risen and the stars were yet to show their blazing fury. The Southern Cross hung in the sky with a heavy, established look; important but a little silly, like a Boer among his minions.

  The nomads of the Karoo, in the far Northern Cape, do not drink to forget. In order to forget you must have something to remember. They drink to dream. So when the father of the family, Old Adam Blitzerlik, tossed something in a dangerous arc through the flames I knew as it landed beside me, with the smell of scorched string, that he was at the cross-over point where one dream ends and another waits to begin.

  I had received their message on election day, over at the Hunter’s Arms in Lutherburg. The hotel was unusually packed. Trouble was expected, shoot-outs, sabotage. A dozen cops, drawn from distant stations, crowded the dining-room in hourly relays and munched through huge T-bone steaks before buckling on their weapons and setting off to guard the polling booths, and to patrol the town for bombs.

  The hotel bar was thick with election officials, foreign monitors and United Nations observers, in the persons of Jean-Paul from Geneva and Matthias from Vienna. They put on their baseball caps when we got news of gunplay among the white extremists boycotting the election. When we had bomb threats they pulled on their loose blue waistcoats and walked up and down in front of the hotel: showing the flag.

  Clara, the owner of the Hunter’s Arms, was proud of the UN presence. ‘Those guys phone Geneva,’ she said. ‘I feel I’m back in the world.’

  To celebrate she went out and bought a pair of blue bell-bottomed trousers, a gold blouse and a hairpiece that she wore on top of her thinning blonde curls in a towering beehive. She put in a formal request to Jean-Paul and Matthias to declare the Hunter’s Arms a UN safe haven. The UN promised to consider its position.

  The message that the Blitzerliks wanted to see me came to Clara in the way of messages in those parts. Someone turned up in the backyard of the Hunter’s Arms, stared at the sky, offered the usual compliments regarding her health, expressed the hope that hunting would be good in the springbuck season, and then abruptly told her that the travelling family had something ‘to give the Englishman’.

  Clara rolled her eyes and laughed in her wild barking way when she relayed the message. The Blitzerlik family had so few possessions that everything they owned was strapped to the back of their cart, pulled by two emaciated donkeys. A tin kettle, a black three-legged pot and a ‘roaster’, an iron grill for cooking over the fire. The Blitzerliks were not in the giving business, said Clara. They were the sorts of people you gave things to. And when you did, they boozed it away. She had watched the nomads straggling into town to vote for the first time in their lives and it made her heart bleed: ‘What must they think? For crying in a bucket!’

  Around the campfire I found Old Adam Blitzerlik, no more than thirty, too young to warrant his venerable title; his wife, Mina, looked about fifteen, and she fed the fire with handfuls of wiry ashbush. Ma and Pa Blitzerlik, Adam’s pare
nts, drew heavily on their pipes, their tiny, wrinkled, walnut faces wrapped in heavy woollen scarves. Old Adam rolled a cigarette from a scrap of newspaper and struck a match to the bitter, black tobacco. The winebag went around again, accompanied by a single cup. Each measure judged precisely. Half a cup, left to right around the circle, taken at a gulp, and passed on. Stringing a necklace of cheap dreams.

  Now Grandfather Blitzerlik invited me to examine the gift. And Mina fed the fire with candlebush, which made it flare as brightly as if she had doused it with paraffin. I saw the parcel was wrapped in thick brown paper, tied with coarse string, which showed what at first I thought was sealing wax on the knots. Butcher’s paper, I realized later. The sealing wax was, in fact, dried blood. The parcel was ripped in places where Old Adam had helped himself to cigarette paper. Through the holes I glimpsed the red-and-black bindings of two notebooks. Cheap and serviceable notebooks you will find at any stationer’s.

  Grandfather Blitzerlik, after shaking his pipe to clear the stem and spitting into the fire, began to speak in his melodious Afrikaans. I was from England, and so I would understand his story. It did not strike him as odd that he was speaking Afrikaans to an Englishman. The English were magical beings, capable of anything. Long ago had they not come to the Karoo, at the behest of their Queen, the ‘Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair’? And had not her soldiers, in their red dresses, ‘kicked the Boer to Kingdom Come?’ Such was the power of the Empire.

  Well, then, some years ago a white farmer had found a child in the scorched ruins of a camp. A common enough accident; a family had slept too close to their fire one cold night, and only the little boy survived. Poor thing! The farmer, an Englishman from the Zwingli district, had taken the boy home and raised him to read and write and speak English, the only person within a hundred miles to possess such talents. His name was Booi – David Booi.

  It happened, a few years later, that the travelling people of the Karoo fell on hard times. There were beatings, several murders, hunger and hardship; everyone was suffering badly – ‘crying’ – at the hands of the farmers. So they had come up with a plan. Money had been collected among sheep-shearers and jackal-hunters and fence-builders. It had been decided to send David Booi to England, to ask the Queen to send the soldiers in red dresses back again to kick the Boer to Kingdom Come! Was it not a very good plan?

  A good plan, I said. But what had become of their messenger?

  Opinions differed. Old Adam declared firmly that the English Queen had liked David Booi so much, she had begged him to stay in England. No, his father piped up, she had given him a thousand sheep and he lived like a lord. Wrong, said Mina, he was dead. He had perished at the hands of savages, somewhere on his travels; everyone in the Karoo knew it.

  About one thing they had no doubt; the notebooks in the ragged parcel had belonged to this man Booi. And this was known because of the manner in which they had been acquired. Grandfather Blitzerlik had been waiting in the queue at the Scorpion Point Post Office when he had been presented with the notebooks by a white woman.

  Wearing a blue hat, Mina added.

  And the books were in a brown suitcase, said old Adam – long disposed of. Being far too good for books.

  A very beautiful woman, Grandfather Blitzerlik dreamily repeated. She had asked if he remembered David Mungo Booi, and when he told her that everyone remembered David, she gave him the books and vanished. And here the old man turned, as he must have done when the mysterious donor walked out of the post office. He made a curious curving, or scooping, motion with his hand, carving an arc in the firelight, as if in his mind’s eye he watched her leave once again: the white woman in the blue hat.

  It did not matter what had happened to David Mungo Booi; the old grandmother spoke for the first time. For people said now that his mission had not been necessary. But I was an Englishman. Perhaps I had not heard of the voting? Well, a new world had begun, and the wandering people did not need the help of the old Queen of the Red Frocks – now they were going to kick the Boer to Kingdom Come themselves.

  Best of all, added Mina, in the new world everyone would be given houses, and in the houses there would be free telephones. No more would the travelling people, the People of the Ashbush, the Trek Folk of the Karoo, suffer at the hands of the Boer. The red dresses of the English soldiers were needed no longer. From now on the wandering beggars would be kings of the Karoo. Therefore it had been decided that I should take possession of the notebooks that Booi had written on his journey through England. I would be returning to that country, would I not? Should I meet him, I could restore the notebooks to him. Or to the Queen, if I preferred.

  I said I did not understand about the free phones.

  Old Adam gave me a pitying look. He pointed to the stars, blazing beaches of light now, in the black oceans above our heads. People would talk to each other, without wires, through the help of the stars. And there were more stars in the Karoo than anywhere in the world. He hoped the star phones reached England soon.

  When I got back to the Hunter’s Arms, Clara took one look at my parcel and begged me to leave it outside in the backyard until the ‘ceremony’ was over. The ballot boxes were about to be locked away for the night. I stood the parcel on the kitchen step and she advised gloves before I opened it.

  I told her about the phones. ‘For crying in a bucket!’ Clara said. ‘Don’t they know that Lutherburg is on a party line – one line between thirty farms?’

  Her beehive had listed to the left, a little like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. ‘Who will they call on these star phones?’ she demanded. ‘Each other?’

  We all went into the bar. Although the UN had declined to declare the Hunter’s Arms a safe haven, after negotiation it had been decided that while the ballot boxes were being transferred to a place of safety, Jean-Paul would assume a prominent position in the window wearing his cap and his blue waistcoat. Any mad right-wing farmer who thought of shooting up the place would know that the UN had taken the hotel under its auspices.

  The ceremony began. Election monitors, members of peace committees and various foreign observers assembled in the street. What Clara called ‘our official UN party’ gathered in the bar and watched through the windows, as the officials began transferring the ballot boxes into wheelbarrows, to be transported to the post office, where they were to be solemnly locked up overnight before being taken the next morning under guard to the counting station. When it was discovered that the official sealing-wax had vanished, Clara saved the day by giving the observers – who had begun blaming each other – a bottle of her nail varnish. The ballot boxes were sealed with bright-orange paint called Namaqualand Blush, and the procession of barrows rolled rustily down the street, and everyone clapped. Clara said it made her proud to be South African.

  When I returned to the hotel, I found a policeman, with an enormous belly held in check by his gunbelt, on guard outside the kitchen door. He demanded to know if I had left an unattended parcel on the hotel premises. Notebooks, I said. There was blood on the paper, he retorted. I was very lucky it had not been destroyed in a controlled explosion. I would have to wait now – for morning. My parcel had been locked away.

  There was enough starlight for me to peer through the barred windows of the post office. The ballot boxes were lined up like soldiers. Beside them, a sort of lesser relation – but sealed in blood, not nail varnish – was the parcel. Waiting for morning.

  In the notebooks of David Mungo Booi, long passages in English frequently gave way to the vivid, earthy Afrikaans of the Karoo nomads, or ‘Ashbush People’, who travel on their donkey carts from farm to farm looking for work. In moments of excitement, Booi sometimes forgets himself and lapses into his mother tongue. He is unusual among the travelling people of the Karoo in speaking any English at all. There seems little doubt that he is largely self-taught and picked up the language in the library of the farmer who adopted him. The circumstances in which this man, ‘the Boer Smith’, as Booi calls him, found a
n orphaned child among the ashes of the fire that claimed the lives of his parents and the other members of his family are poignantly recalled.

  It is from Smith that the young Booi’s earliest ideas of England derive. It is always and only of ‘England’ that he writes. As if he is quite unaware of Scotland or Wales or Ireland. He never speaks of Britain. Of course, this sort of selective focus on England, to the exclusion of other parts of the United Kingdom, is not unknown, even in Britain today, and may reflect a similar prejudice on Smith’s part. However, more likely still, is the possibility that although the old farmer was known to the local Afrikaner families as ‘our Englishman’, he had himself never in fact set foot in Britain. If his father or even his grandfather had come originally from Britain, this would have been enough for the locals to regard him as irredeemably ‘English’.

  Booi’s first names are revealing. By calling him ‘David Mungo’ I suspect Smith was combining the names of two of his heroes: David Livingstone and Mungo Park – the great explorers of the Dark Continent. By this evocative and effective device he dignified the little orphan boy he found among the ashes of the burnt-out camp.

  As to Booi’s true ethnic provenance, it is unlikely that we will ever know for sure. Certainly, he considers himself to be a descendant of the Bushmen or San hunter-gatherers. He talks lovingly of the ‘Red People’; those truly indigenous South Africans – the Cape Bushmen. His references to particular religious practices suggest an affinity with the /Xam people who once inhabited the area around what is today Lutherburg and Zwingli. But the /Xam are extinct now. For Booi, however, they linger on in the Trek People to whom he belongs and in whose faces and restless spirits, he maintains, one can detect glimpses of his vanished ancestors. There are times, indeed, when he seems to argue that they never died out at all.

  For a clue to the origins of Booi’s prose style, and his subsequent career, we must imagine the sorts of book which the boy might have found in the library of the Englishman, Smith. Mostly, these would have been accounts of travels in Africa, for works by Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley, among others, are frequently referred to in the journals, and Booi draws heavily on the experiences of the great explorers when planning his own expedition. That he had read Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Stanley’s In Darkest Africa as well as the journals of his namesake, Mungo Park, and even Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is plain. He was not only familiar with these explorers, but he felt that he was following, quite literally, in their footsteps, with the same mixture of courage, faith and at times – it must be said – crusading ignorance.