I was looking out of the window of the day nursery when the aeroplane fell. I could see it crash out of sight on to the playing fields at the top of the hill. The airman had dived, playing the fool before his younger brother and the other boys, tie had mis-calculated the height and struck the ground and was dead before he reached hospital. His small brother never looked, never waited to hear if he were alive, but walked steadily away down the hill to the school and shut himself tearlessly in a lavatory. Someone went and found him there, there were no locks on any lavatory doors, nowhere where you could be alone.
Major Grant said, “And in a cupboard they keep birches.”
The lorries drove up and down the day of the General Strike loaded with armed men. The cafι had been turned into a dressing station and a squad of Garde Mobile moved down the wide boulevard that runs from Combat to Menilmontant searching everyone on the pavement for arms. The whole of Paris was packed with troops; every corner, every high building sheltered a troop, they clustered along the walls in their blue steel helmets like wood-lice. The road of the Revolution from Vincennes to the Place de la Concorde was lined with guns and cavalry. No breaking out here, no return to something earlier, something communal, something primitive.
More police were coming up to get their pickings beneath the wall. Vande and Amah were being persuaded towards the wooden station. I thought of Vande in the dark urging the carriers over the long gaping swaying bridge at Duogobmai; I remembered they had never had the goat to guard them from the elephants. It wouldn’t have been any use now. We were all of us back in the hands of adolescence, and I thought rebelliously : I am glad, for here is iced beer and a wireless set which will pick up the Empire programme from Daventry, and after all it is-home, in the sense that we have been taught to know home, where we will soon forget the finer taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have built.
POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA
A Boatload of Politicians
MY host woke me early to say that if I cared to catch it a Liberian motor-launch was leaving that morning for Monrovia. If I missed it, I might have to wait a week for a Dutch cargo-boat, but he advised me all the same to stay.
The boat was making its maiden voyage down the coast from Cape Palmas to Monrovia. It cannot have been more than thirty feet long, not that I was able to pace it when we scrambled on board from the surf boat, for it was packed-packed with black politicians. There were a hundred and fifty of them on board, and if the owner of the boat had not been with us we should not have been allowed to embark. They shouted that there was no room, that we should sink the boat, they implored the captain not to let us on board, they were scared, for most of them had never been at sea before and the previous evening they had run on a rock and narrowly escaped off Sinoe. The launch tilted with their fear, first one way, then the other. But the owner got us on board, he even found us enough room to set up chairs and sit down, though we couldn’t, once settled there, stir a foot.
The launch, the owner told me, had been bought second-hand for £18 and repaired for £25. It hadn’t even got marine engines. He had installed two second-hand automobile engines, a Dodge and a Studebaker, and except for the rock off Sinoe, it had done well. We slid farther away from the yellow sandy strip of Africa, from the fringe of dark green forest behind the tin shacks of Grand Bassa. The captain, a great fat Kru man in a wide-brimmed hat and a singlet, stood in a little glass shelter and shouted orders down a telephone to the engine-room just beneath his feet, the sun came blindingly up over the thin Japanese cotton awning, a black Methodist minister went to sleep on my shoulder, and the politicians temporarily ceased arguing about the election and began to argue with the captain.
“Say, captain,” they protested in their formless nasal American negro voices, “you don’t wanta use both engines yet. You gotta put out farther before you use both engines,” and the captain argued with them and presently gave way. He couldn’t issue any order without setting the passengers arguing with him.
It was sixty miles to Monrovia and the launch took seven and a half hours, lurching with incredible slowness across the flat scorching African sea with the rocking motion of the hundred and fifty politicians. It was an Opposition boat and the presence of a white man on board seemed to the politicians to have deep significance. Before we reached Monrovia every delegate was convinced that England was behind them. There was to be a Convention in Monrovia of the Unit True Whig Party to elect a Presidential Candidate to oppose President Barclay and the True Whig Party. AU is fair during a Liberian election and the Government agent at Cape Palmas had tried to arrest the owner of the boat and hold it up till the Convention was over. Some of the delegates were supporters of a Mr. Cooper, some of ex-President King, so though they all belonged to the same party, they had plenty to argue about, and the arguments got fiercer after midday, after the tin basins of cassava roots had been handed round (for meals were included in the tariff) and the bottles of cane juice. The cane juice in the midday heat worked quickly; almost immediately half the hundred and fifty politicians were roaring drunk. They couldn’t do anything about it, because if they moved more than a foot the boat heeled over, and once there was a panic on board at a loud crash which reminded them of the rock they had hit the night before. Some tried to stand up and others shouted to them to be still as the boat heeled towards the glassy sea and the captain was heard shouting that he would put any man who moved in irons. I couldn’t move because the Methodist minister was asleep on my shoulder, and the panic soon subsided. We hadn’t hit a rock, somebody had passed out under the cane juice and his head had hit the deck.
The owner of the boat said to me, “These men : they are quiet and gentle now, but you wait till they get ashore. They are thirsting for blood. They would rather kill Barclay than see him elected.”
An old man without any teeth suddenly said, “Do you know in Monrovia they have a map of the whole of Liberia? I am going to go and see it. It is in the possession of a family called Anderson. They have had it for years. Everyone who goes to Monrovia goes to see the map. Sinoe is marked on it, and Grand Bassa and Cape Palmas.” Then a lot of people tried to trap me into saying whether I was financing Mr. Cooper or Mr. King. I might have made history that day, for I am sure if I had said I was financing Mr. Cooper, no one would have voted for Mr. King. And all the while behind the frieze of black heads, five hundred yards away, the yellow African beach slid unchangingly by without a sign of human occupation. Somebody was fishing from the end of the boat and with tiresome regularity catching a large fish. It might have been the same fish, just as it might have been the same patch of sand, but every time the captain left the wheel, trod over the sprawl of limbs into the bow and presently announced in a loud commanding voice, as if he were ordering somebody to be clamped into irons, “A fish!” and entered the fact in a log-book. There would be a momentary break in the babble until a voice began again, “Mishter Cooper ish ish a young man.” “Ex-Presh-Prθs-Presh, Mishter King has exshper, experish …”
The Nonconformist minister hadn’t drunk anything. He woke up suddenly and without removing his head from my shoulder said, “We shall never go straight in Liberia until we let God into our conventions. We must let God choose.”
I said, “I agree, of course, but how will you know which candidate God wants to choose?”
He said, “God made pencils, but man made india-rubber.”