“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.