City of Spades

‘It’s all yours, Pew, from now,’ he said, adding softly, ‘thank God,’ and waving round the office a mildly revolted hand.

‘Yes, but what do I
do
with it all, dear boy?’ I asked him. ‘Why am I here?’

‘Ah, as to that …’ He heaved an indifferent sigh. ‘You’ll have to find out for yourself as you go along.’

He picked up his furled umbrella, but I clung to him just a bit longer.

‘Couldn’t you explain, please, my duties to me in more detail? After all, I’m new, I’m taking over from you, and I’d be very glad to know exactly
what
…’

Trim, chill, compact, he eyed me with aloof imperial calm. Clearly he was of the stuff of which proconsuls can even now be made.

‘Oh, very well,’ he said, grounding his umbrella. ‘Not,
I’m afraid, that anything I can tell you is likely to be of the slightest use …’

I thanked him and we sat. His eye a bored inquisitor’s, he said: You know, at any rate, what you’re
supposed
to be?’

Simply, I answered: ‘I am the newly appointed Assistant Welfare Officer of the Colonial Department.’

He closed his eyes. ‘I don’t know – forgive me – how you got the job. But may I enquire if you know anything about our colonial peoples?’

‘I once spent a most agreeable holiday in Malta …’

‘Quite so. A heroic spot. But I mean Negroes. Do you happen to know anything about them?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing whatever?’

‘No.’

He emitted a thin smile. ‘In that case, may I say I think you’re going to have quite a lot of fun?’

‘I sincerely hope so … I have certain vague impressions about Negroes, of course. I rather admire their sleek, loose-limbed appearance …’

‘Yes, yes. So very engaging.’

‘And their elegant, flamboyant style of dress is not without its charm …’

‘Ah, that far, personally, I cannot follow you.’

‘On the other hand, for their dismal spirituals and their idiotic calypso, I have the most marked distaste.’

‘I’m with you there, Pew, I’m glad to say. The European passion for these sad and silly songs has always baffled me. Though their jazz, in so far as it is theirs, is perhaps another matter.’

He had risen once again. I saw he had made up his mind I was beyond hope.

‘And what do I do with our coloured cousins?’ I asked him, rising too.

‘Yours is a wide assignment, limitless almost as the sea. You must be their unpaid lawyer, estate agent, wet-nurse and, in a word, their bloody guardian angel.’

The note of disdain, even though coming from a professional civil servant to an amateur, had become increasingly displeasing to me. I said with dignity: ‘Nothing, I suppose, could be more delightful and meritorious.’

He had now closed his eyes; and stood, at the door, a Whitehall Machiavelli.

‘Some might say,’ he told me softly, ‘that your duty is to help them to corrupt our country.’

Up went my brows.

‘So some might say … their irruption among us has not been an unmixed blessing. Thousands, you see, have come here in the last few years from Africa and the Caribbean, and given us what we never had before – a colour problem.’

His eyes opened slowly in a slit. ‘Could it not be,’ I said, ‘that we have given them just that in their own countries?’

‘My dear Pew! Could it be that I positively find myself in the presence of a
liberal
?’

‘My dear boy, of course you do! What else can one comfortably be in these monolithic days?’

He smiled with every tooth.

‘A liberal, Pew, in relation to the colour question, is a person who feels an irresponsible sympathy for what he
calls oppressed peoples on whom, along with the staunchest Tory, he’s quite willing to go on being a parasite.’

Though I sensed it was a phrase he’d used before, I bowed my bleeding head.

‘I own,’ I told him mildly, ‘that I
am
one of those futile, persistent, middle-class Englishmen whom it takes a whole empire, albeit a declining one, to sustain … Remove the imperial shreds, and I’d be destitute as a coolie, I confess …’

This pleased him. ‘To use the vulgar phrase,’ he said, ‘you must learn to know which side your bread is buttered on.’

But this excursion from the concrete into the abstract seemed to me unhelpful in so far as learning my new job was concerned. I made my last desperate appeal. ‘You haven’t told me, though …’

‘Please study your dossiers Pew: the instructions are pasted inside each of their covers. Look:

And so on and so forth, dear man. And may I advise you’ (he looked at his watch) ‘to hurry up and read them? Because your clients will be turning up for interviews within the hour. Meanwhile I shall say goodbye to you and wish you the good fortune that I fear you’ll so much need.’

‘Might I enquire,’ I said, reluctant even now to see him go, ‘to what fresh colonial pastures you yourself are now proceeding?’

A look of mild triumph overspread his face.

‘Before the month is out,’ he answered, ‘I shall be at my new post in one of our Protectorates within the Union of South Africa.’

‘South Africa? Good heavens! Won’t you find, as a British colonial official, that the atmosphere there’s just a little difficult?’

In statesmanlike tones he answered: ‘South Africa, Pew, is a country much maligned. Perhaps they have found a logical solution for race relations there. That is the conclusion to which I’ve rather reluctantly come. Because if my year in the Department has taught me anything, it’s that the Negro’s still, deep down inside, a savage. Not his fault, no doubt, but just his nature.’ (He stood there erect, eyes imperiously agleam.) ‘Remember that, Pew, at your Welfare Officer’s desk. Under his gaberdine suit and his mission-school veneer, there still lurk the impulses of the primitive man.’

He waved – as if an assegai – his umbrella, I waved more wanly, and lo! he was gone out of my life for ever.

Alone, I picked up the dossiers, crossed out his name, and wrote in its place my own: Montgomery Pew. Then, like a lion (or monkey, possibly?) new to its cage, I walked round my unsumptuous office examining the numerous framed photographs of
worthy
Africans and West Indians, staring out at me with enigmatic faces, whose white grins belied, it seemed to me, the inner silences of the dark pools of their eyes.

My first action on reaching the English capital was to perform what I’ve always promised my sister Peach I would. Namely, leaving my luggages at the Government hostel, to go straight out by taxi (oh, so slow, compared with our sleek Lagos limousines!) to the famous central Piccadilly Tube station where I took a one-stop ticket, went down on the escalator, and then
ran up the same steps in the wrong direction
. It was quite easy to reach the top, and our elder brother Christmas was wrong to warn it would be impossible to me. Naturally, the ticket official had his word to say, but I explained it was my promise to my brother Christmas and my sister Peach ever since in our childhood, and he yielded up.

‘You boys are all the same,’ he said.

‘What does that mean, mister?’

‘Mad as March hares, if you ask me.’

He looked so sad when he said it, that how could I take offence? ‘Maybe you right,’ I told him. ‘We like living out our lives.’

‘And we like peace and quiet. Run along, son,’ this official told me.

Not a bad man really, I suppose, so after a smile at him I climbed up towards the free outer air. For I had this morning to keep my appointment at the Colonial Department Welfare Office to hear what plans have been arranged there for the pursuit of my further studies.

In the Circus overhead I looked round more closely at my new city. And I must say at first it was a bad disappointment: so small, poky, dirty, not magnificent! Red buses, like shown to us on the cinema, certainly, and greater scurrying of the population than at home. But people with glum clothes and shut-in faces. Of course, I have not seen yet the Parliament Houses, or many historic palaces, or where Dad lived in Maida Vale when he was here thirty years ago before he met our mum …

And that also is to be one of my first occupations: to visit this house of his to see if I can recover any news of his former landlady – if dead, or alive, or in what other circumstances. Because my dad, at the party on the night I sailed right out of Lagos, he took me on one side and said, ‘Macdonald,’ (he never calls me John or Johnny – always Macdonald) ‘Macdonald, you’re a man now. You’re eighteen.’

‘Yes, Dad …’ I said, wondering what.

‘You’re a man enough to share a man’s secret with your father?’

‘If you want to share one with me, Dad.’

‘Well, listen, son. You know I went to England as a boy, just like you’re doing …’

‘Yes, Dad, of course I do …’

‘And I had a young landlady there who was very kind and good to me, unusually so for white ladies in those days. So I’d like you to go and get news of her for me if you ever can, because we’ve never corresponded all these many years.’

‘I’ll get it for you, Dad, of course.’

Then my Dad lowered his voice and both his eyes.

‘But your mother, Macdonald. I don’t very much want your mother to know. It was a long while ago that I met this lady out in Maida Vale.’

Here Dad gave me an equal look like he’d never given me in his life before.

‘I respect your mother, you understand me, son,’ he said.

‘I know you do, Dad, and so do Christmas and Peach and me.’

‘We all love her, and for that I’d like you to send me the news not here but to my office in a way that she won’t know or be disturbed by.’

‘I understand, Dad,’ I told him. ‘I shall be most discreet in my letters about anything I may hear of your past in England when a very young man.’

‘Then let’s have a drink on that, Macdonald, son,’ he said.

So we drank whisky to my year of studying here in England.

‘And mind you work hard,’ Dad told me. ‘We’ve found two hundred pounds to send you there, and when you return we want you to be thoroughly an expert in meteorology.’

‘I will be it, Dad,’ I promised.

‘Of course, I know you’ll drink, have fun with girls, and gamble, like I did myself … But mind you don’t do these enjoyments too excessively.’

‘No, Dad, no.’

‘If your money all gets spent, we can’t send out any more for you. You’d have to find your own way home by working on a ship.’

‘I’ll be reasonable, Dad. I’m not a child. You trust me.’

And afterwards, it was Peach clustering over me with too much kisses and foolish demands for gowns and hats and underclothes from London, to impress her chorus of surrounding giggling girls. I told her all these things were to be bought much cheaper there in Lagos.

And to my brother Christmas, I said, ‘Oh, Christmas, why don’t you come with me too? I admire your ambition, but surely to see the world and study before fixing your nose to the Lands Office grindstone would be more to your pleasure and advantage?’

‘I want to get married quickly, Johnny, as you know,’ my serious elder brother said. ‘For that I must save, not spend.’

‘Well, each man to his own idea of himself,’ I told him.

And my mother! Would you believe it, she’d guessed
that some secret talk had passed between Dad and me that evening? In her eyes I could see it, but she said nothing special to me except to fondle me like a child in front of all the guests, though not shedding any tears.

And when they all accompanied us to the waterfront, dancing, singing and beating drums, suddenly, as the ship came into view, she stopped and seized me and lifted me up, though quite a grown man now, and carried me as far as the gangway of the boat upon her shoulders.

‘Write to me, Johnny,’ she said. ‘Good news or bad, keep writing.’

Then was more farewell drinking and dancing on the ship until, when visitors had to leave, I saw that my mum had taken away my jacket (though leaving its valuable contents behind with me, of course). And she stood hugging it to her body on the quay as that big boat pulled out into the Gulf of Guinea sea.