Collected Essays (47 page)

That, I think, is why one feels at home in London – or in Liverpool or Bristol, or any of the bombed cities – because life there is what it ought to be. If a cracked cup is put in boiling water it breaks, and an old dog-toothed civilization is breaking now. The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?’), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm. We are not quite happy when we take a few days off. There is something just a little unsavoury about a safe area – as if a corpse were to keep alive in some of its members, the fingers fumbling or the tongue seeking to taste. So we go hurrying back to our shelter, to the nightly uneasiness and then the ‘All Clear’ sounding happily like New Year’s bells and the first dawn look at the world to see what has gone: green glass strewn on the pavement (all broken glass seems green) and sometimes flames like a sticky coloured plate from the
Boy’s Own Paper
lapping at the early sky. As for the victims, if they have suffered pain it will be nearly over by this time. Life has become just and poetic, and if we believe this is the right end to the muddled thought, the sentimentality and selfishness of generations, we can also believe that justice doesn’t end there. The innocent will be given their peace, and the unhappy will know more happiness than they have ever dreamt about, and poor muddled people will be given an answer they have to accept. We needn’t feel pity for any of the innocent, and as for the guilty we know in our hearts that they will live just as long as we do and no longer.

1940

PART IV

Personal Postscript

THE SOUPSWEET LAND

A
GHOST
– a
revenant
– does not expect to be recognized when he returns to the scenes of his past; if he communicates to you a sense of fear, perhaps it is really his own fear, not yours. Places have so changed since he was alive that he has to find his way through a jungle of new houses and altered rooms (concrete and steel can proliferate like vegetation). Because
he
hasn’t changed, because his memories are unaltered, the
revenant
believes that he is invisible. Coming back to Freetown and Sierra Leone last Christmas, I thought I belonged to a bizarre past which no one else shared. It was a shock to be addressed by my first name on my first night, to feel a hand squeeze my arm and a voice say, ‘Scobie, eh, who’s Scobie?’ and ‘Pujehun, don’t you remember we met in Pujehun? I was in PWD. Let’s have a drink at the City.’

I came to Sierra Leone to work more than a quarter of a century ago, landing in Freetown from a slow convoy four weeks out of Liverpool. I felt a strong sense of unreality: how had this happened? A kitchen orchestra of forks and frying-pans played me off the Elder Dempster cargo ship into a motor launch where my temporary host, the Secretary of Agriculture, awaited me, expecting something less flippant. The red Anglican cathedral looked down on my landing as it had done in 1935 when I first visited Freetown. Nothing in the exhausted shabby enchanted town of bougainvillaea and balconies, tin roofs and funeral parlours, had changed, but I never imagined on my first visit that one day I would arrive like this to work, to be one of those tired men drinking pink gin at the City bar as the sun set on the laterite.

The sense of unreality great stronger every hour. A passage by air had been arranged to Lagos where I was to work for three months before returning, and I thought it best to warn my host that he would be seeing me again. ‘What exactly are you going to do here?’ he asked, and I was studiously vague, for no one had yet told me what my ‘cover’ in this far from James Bond world was to be. I knew my number, and that was all (it was not 007). I was glad when a major with a large moustache looked in, with an air of stern premeditation, for drinks, and the subject could be changed. ‘Come for a walk?’ he suddenly asked. It seemed an odd thing to do at that hour of the day, but I agreed. We set out down the road in the haze of the harmattan.

‘Find it hot, I suppose?’ he said. ‘Yes.’

‘Humidity is 95 per cent.’

‘Really?’

He swerved sideways into a garden. ‘This house is empty,’ he said. ‘Fellow’s gone on leave.’ I followed him obediently. He sat down on a large rock and said, ‘Got a message for you.’ I sat gingerly down beside him, remembering the childhood warning that sitting on a stone in the heat gives you piles.

‘Signal came in last Friday. You’re an inspector of the DOT. Got it?’

‘What’s DOT?’

‘Department of Overseas Trade,’ he said sharply. Ignorance in this new intelligence world was like incompetence.

All the same I felt relieved to know and at lunch gently led the conversation back to my future in Freetown. ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said to my host, ‘I can tell
you
, though it’s not been officially announced yet, that I am to be an Inspector of the DOT.’

‘DOT?’

‘Department of Overseas Trade.’

He looked a little sceptical. He had every right to be, for by the time I returned I had become something quite different. The DOT, I learnt too late in Lagos, had refused to give cover to a phoney inspector, and an equally unsuccessful attempt had been made on the virginity of the British Council. After that I was threatened in turn with a naval rank and an air force rank, until it was found that unless I was given the rank of commander or group-captain I could not have a private office and a safe for my code-books. When I flew up to Freetown again it was with a vague attachment to the police force which was a little difficult to explain to those who awaited an inspector of Overseas Trade.

The whole of my life in Freetown had the same unreality; for the secretariat I did not exist, for I was not on the Colonial Office list where everyone’s salary and position were set down, and for the Sierra Leonians I was another unapproachable Government servant. I lived alone in a small house on the edge of what in the rains became a marsh, with a Nigerian transport camp opposite me which helped to collect the vultures and behind the scrub which collected flies, for it was used as a public lavatory. Over this I had one successful brush with the administration. When I wrote to the Colonial Secretary demanding a lavatory for the Africans he replied that my request should go through the proper channels by way of the Commissioner of Police; I quoted in reply what Churchill had said of ‘proper channels’ in wartime, and the shed was built. I wrote back that in the annals of Freetown my name like Keats’s would be writ in water. My isolation for a while was increased when I quarrelled with my boss 1,200 miles away in Lagos and he ceased to send me any money to live on (or to pay my almost non-existent agents.)

During that long silence I had plenty of time to wonder again why I was here. Our lives are formed in the years of childhood, and when a while ago I began writing an account of my first twenty-five years, I was curious to discover any hints of what had led a middle-aged man to sit there in a humid solitude, far from his family and his friends and his real profession. Out of my experience was to come my first popular success
The Heart of the Matter
, but I did not begin to write that book for another four years, after the absurdities had already faded from my mind. I had been instructed not to keep a diary for security reasons, just as I was taught the use of secret inks that I never employed and of bird-droppings if these were exhausted. (Vultures were the most common bird – there were usually three or four on my tin roof – but I doubt whether their droppings had been contemplated.)

The start of my life as 59200 was not propitious. I announced my safe arrival by means of a book code (I had chosen a novel of T. F. Powys from which I could detach sufficiently lubricious phrases for my own amusement), and a large safe came in the next convoy with a leaflet of instructions and my codes. The code-books were a constant source of interest, for the most unexpected words occurred in their necessarily limited vocabulary. I wondered how often use had been made of the symbol for ‘eunuch’, and I was not content until I had found an opportunity to use it myself in a message to my colleague in Gambia: ‘As the chief eunuch said I cannot repeat cannot come.’ (Strange the amusements one finds in solitude. I can remember standing for half an hour on the staircase to my bedroom watching two flies make love.)

The safe was another matter. I am utterly incapable of reading instructions of a technical nature. I chose my combination and set it as I believed correctly, put away my newly acquired code-books, shut the safe and tried in vain to reopen it. Very soon I realized the fault I had made: my eye had passed over one line in the instructions and the combination was set now to some completely unknown figure. Telegrams were waiting to be decoded and telegrams to be sent. Laboriously with the help of T. F. Powys I lied to London that the safe had been damaged in transit; they must send another by the next convoy. The code-books were rescued with a blow flame and lodged temporarily in Government House.

I used to look forward to the evenings when I would take a walk along the abandoned railway track on the slopes below Hill Station, returning at sunset to get my bath before the rats came in (at night they would swing on my bedroom curtains). Then – free from telegrams – I would sit down to write
The Ministry of Fear.
Whisky, gin and beer were severely rationed, but some friendly naval officers supplied me with demi-Johns of wine which had come from Portuguese Guinea without passing the customs. On nights of full moon the starving pi-dogs kept me awake with their howling, and I would rise, pull boots over my pyjamas, and get rid of my rage by cursing and throwing stones in the lane behind my house where the very poor lived. My boy told me I was known there as ‘the bad man’, so before I went away from Freetown as I believed for ever, I sent some bottles of wine to a wedding in one of the hovels, hoping to leave a better memory behind.

It was not very often I went to the City Hotel, where
The Heart of the Matter
began. There one escaped the protocol-conscious members of the secretariat. It was a home from home for men who had not encountered success at any turn of the long road and who no longer expected it. They were not beachcombers, for they had jobs, but their jobs had no prestige value. They were failures, but they knew more of Africa than the successes who were waiting to get transferred to a smarter colony and were careful to take no risks with their personal file. In the City bar were the men who had stayed put into the beginnings of old age, and yet they were immeasurably younger than the new assistant secretaries. The dream which had brought them to Africa was still alive: it didn’t depend on carefully mounting the ladder of a career. I suppose I felt at home at the City because, after six months or more, I was beginning to feel a failure too.

All my brighter schemes had been firmly turned down: the rescue by bogus Communist agents of a left-wing agitator who was under house-arrest (I intended to have him planted in Vichy-held Conakry believing himself to be an informant for Russia): a brothel to be opened in Bissau for visitors from Senegal. The Portuguese liners came in and out carrying their smuggled industrial diamonds, and not one search – from the rice in the holds to the cosmetics in the cabins – had ever turned up a single stone. In the City bar I could occasionally forget the insistent question what am I doing here? because the answer was probably much the same as my companions might have given: an escape from school? a recurring dream of adolescence? a book read in childhood?

The City Hotel I found on my return last Christmas had not altered at all. A white man looked down from the balcony where my character Wilson sat watching Scobie pass in the street below, and he waved to me as if it was but yesterday that I looked in last for a coaster. Only the turbaned Sikh was absent who used to tell fortunes – in the communal douche for the sake of privacy. A Sierra Leonian played sad Christmas calypsos in a corner of the balcony and a tart in a scarlet dress danced to attract attention (tarts were not allowed inside). Even the kindly sad Swiss landlord was still the same; he hadn’t left Freetown in more than thirty years. He had survived, and to that extent he was successful, but perhaps it was the very meagreness of the success which made his shabby bar the ‘home from home’.

Next day I went to look for my old house. A quarter of a century ago it had been condemned by the health authorities, so it might well have disappeared, and I thought at first it had. A brand-new Italian garage stood on the site of the Nigerian transport camp, the bush where the lavatory had been built had disappeared under a housing-estate, and there were very superior houses now in the lane where the pi-dogs had howled (one was occupied by the Secretary General of the National Reform Council which at that moment was governing Sierra Leone). It took me quite a while to recognize my old home, brightly painted with a garden where the mud had been. The little office had become a kitchen, the sitting-room which had been bleak with PWD furniture was gay with the abstract paintings of a Sierra Leone young woman. I went upstairs and looked into the bedroom where the rats had swung – there were still rats, the owner said – and I stopped on the stairs where I had watched for so long a fly’s copulation. The image brought back the boredom of my adolescence, a youth playing at Russian roulette . . . perhaps that had been a stage towards this barren hermitage on the Brookfield flats.

The Brookfield church was unchanged, where my friend Father Mackie used to preach in Creole: the same bad statue of St Anthony over the altar, the same Virgin in the butterfly blue robe. At Midnight Mass I could have believed myself back in 1942 if in that year I had not missed the Mass. A fellow Catholic, the representative of the rival secret service, SOE, had come to dine with me tête-à-tête and we were soon too drunk on Portuguese wine to stagger to the church. Now the girl in front of me wore one of the surrealist Manchester cotton dresses which are rarely seen since Japanese trade moved in. The word ‘soupsweet’ was printed over her shoulder, but I had to wait until she stood up before I could confirm another phrase: ‘Fenella lak’ good poke.’ Father Mackie would have been amused, I thought, and what better description could there be of this poor lazy lovely coloured country than ‘soupsweet’?