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.
WESTERN LIBERIA
The Forest Edge
It was midday. We followed the Customs man into a thatched shelter, sat on high uncomfortable drawing-room chairs and smoked: the little yellow man sat opposite us in a hammock and smoked too, swinging back and forth. I smiled at him and he smiled back; they were surface smiles; there was no friendliness anywhere. The man was thinking how much he could exact, I with how little loss I could escape. A woman brought in a child to see the white people and it screamed and screamed uncontrollably. The men of the Frontier Force lounged and spat in the vertical sunrays, and one could almost see the brown earth cracking. I began a second cigarette.
Then Laminah burst in, a small detonating bomb of fury in the stillness, the doing nothing. He was like a Pekinese who has been insulted by an Alsatian. Somebody had told him he must pay duty on his white barber’s jacket which had a rubber lining. The Customs officer surrendered the point with courtesy, but it seemed to be the signal for the fun to start. I produced my invoices, the German opened a small suitcase and paid half a crown; the officer was in a hurry to get on to bigger game, and the Germanlittle passed out of the frontier station bobbing above #e heads of his carriers. The officer settled to the invoices and the soldiers spat and grinned and passed remarks and I wiped off the sweat.
“This will take all day,” the Customs man said. “Everything here except the tin of Epsom salts, the quinine and the iodine has got to pay duty.” He explained that he would let me go through to Bolahun if I left a deposit; any change would be sent after me; he calculated that four pounds ten would be sufficient guarantee. I extracted a bag of sixpenny-bits from the moneybox without disclosing the automatic. But it wasn’t quite the end. I had to pay two cents each for the eight forms on which my dutiable goods were to be set down in detail. I had to pay for two Revenue stamps, and I had to sign my name at the bottom of the eight blank sheets saying that the items listed above were correct. I was completely in their power; they could fill up anything they liked on the forms. The alternative was to stay where I was for the night and have all my bags and bales opened. As it was I didn’t escape so easily. The next day he sent a soldier over to Bolahun demanding another six pounds ten, and when the soldier went back empty-handed, he came himself, borne in a hammock the long rough path from Foya with four carriers and a couple of soldiers, a dirty white topee on his head and a ragged cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He swaggered across the verandah, a little sour, mean, avaricious figure, grinning and friendly and furious and determined. He got his money, drank two glasses of whisky, smoked two cigarettes; there was nothing one could do about it; it was impossible to bribe an official who probably took a lion’s “share anyway of what he exacted.
I enjoyed the first day’s trek into the Republic because everything was new : the sense of racing the dark, even the taste of warm boiled water, the smell of the carriers; it wasn’t an unpleasant smell, sweet or sour; it was bitter, and reminded me of a breakfast food I had as a child after pleurisy, something vigorous and body-building which I disliked. This bitter taint was mixed with the rich plummy smell of the kola nuts the carriers picked from the ground and chewed, with an occasional flower scent one couldn’t trace in the thick untidy greenery. All the smells were drawn out, as the heat increased, like vapour from moist ground. The carriers walked naked except for loin-cloths, the sweat leaving marks like snails on their black polished skins. They didn’t look strong, they hadn’t the ugly muscular development of a boxer; their legs were as thin as a woman’s, but they ended in typical carrier’s feet, flat like enormous empty gloves, spreading on the earth pancake-wise as if die weights they carried had pressed them out in a peine forte et dure. Even their arms were childishly thin, and when they raised the fifty-pound cases a few inches to ease their skulls, the muscles hardly swelled, were no thicker than whipcord.
We were on the edge of the immense forest which covers the Republic to within a few miles of the coast; we climbed steeply from the frontier post at Foya and from the first village we came to we could see the bush below the huts, falling away, a ragged cascade, towards the sea, lifting and falling and swelling into green plains; hundreds of miles of them, the palms sticking out above the rest like the fartteite of chimney sweeps. The huts here, and in Bande territory, were circular with a pointed thatched roof overhanging the parti-coloured mud walls, whitewashed halfway up. There was one door and sometimes a window; in the middle of the floor were the ashes of a fire which would be lit again at sunset from a communal ember and fill the single room with smoke; the fumes kept out mosquitoes, kept out, to some extent, the fleas and bugs and cockroaches, but not the rats. They were all much alike, these villages, built on a hilltop on several levels like medieval towns; the path one had followed through the bush would drop steeply to a stream where the villagers came to wash their clothes and bathe, then rise abruptly up a wide beaten track out of the shade to a silhouette of pointed huts against the midday glare. The ground in the villages was scarred by the dry beds of streams. In the centre was the palaver-house and at the limit of the village the blacksmith’s forge, both open huts without walls.