The Dust Diaries (8 page)

And this is where I first saw you, in my father’s study on the cover of a book I took down off the shelf that late summer’s afternoon. It was jammed between a collection of yellow and yellowing
National Geographies
and an old Penguin Classic. The title on the spine had been faded to ghost-writing by years of low evening suns through the facing window, so I pulled it out to take a closer look, turning it over in my hand. And there you were, in a sepia photograph washed orange, standing outside a thatched hut, your battered hat in your hand, your tall body sloping to the left as you posed awkwardly for the camera, and your broken boots gaping at your feet like two panting puppy dogs. You’re wearing a dog collar, bright in the sun like a hoop of hot steel about your neck. Your face is handsome, a strong face, but somehow mistrusting of the camera, which your eyes look past, way past, out of the photograph altogether.

I open it and smell the musty, damp smell of old books. The smell I think of as that of the sixties, associating it as I do with my parents’ ageing student books. It is these that occupy many of the shelves in this room, a mix of classic literature and sociology, their jackets faded like the spine of the book I am holding. Both sets of books are often faithfully inscribed on the title page, sometimes with love notes written beneath: on a paperback of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
June 1964. To mydarling Eryl. Yours always, David
. Yours always. Love between the covers. I flip this book open, but there is no written inscription inside. Just a gold address sticker, with the name and address of my great aunt on it. Elizabeth Roberts. My grandmother’s sister, and, I realise standing there, your niece.

I close the book again and take another look at you. You do not look like an ancestor of mine. You are tall for one thing, and I am not. You look English. I am Welsh. At least, I look Welsh, and feel Welsh. And then there is that dog collar. Where do I stand in relation to that? I have often intellectualised God out of existence. I have claimed, in arguments, that man has outgrown the need to rest his troubles on the shoulders of a deity. I have spoken against organised religion. I have written academic essays about the inbuilt ideological obsolescence of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, how the very system of belief the poet tries to explain deconstructs itself in exposition. I am secular and of my time. I am twenty-two years old. I know nothing and I am confused about my intentions in the world. Only the night before I stood in the top field and looked out over the hedge at the sunset cloaking the hills red and considered a letter on my desk from the army: an invitation from the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters to visit their barracks.

The title of the book is written above your head:
God’s Irregular: Arthur Shearly Cripps, A Rhodesian Epic
. Then below, beneath your feet, the name of the author, Douglas V. Steere. Steere. This, then, is the man who had written about you: the man who first organised your life, made chapters out of it, gave it headings. Who made you history. And over the next few days it is Steere who introduces us, who is our go-between as I read about your life in his words.

When I finish the book I know about you. I know the shape of your life, I know the facts. Your birthday, your deathday. I know you were one of the young men at Oxford who listened to Bishop Gore as he outlined the blueprint of a new kind of faith, a socially responsible Christianity. How his ideas lit you and how you became his word made flesh, campaigning against employers who paid their workers sub-union wages, against sweated conditions in industries employing female labour. I know the day you left England and the promise you made to your mother to return. I know you were in the Great War at Lake Victoria, that you took on the colonial administration over land reform. I know the day they took out your eye and when you wrote what to whom.

Already I am making connections. You wrote and I write. You were a runner, not just a competitive one, but an instinctive one. You ran for the running, for the essence and escape of it. I think I know how that feels. I have always run too: through the lanes, up the hills of the Black Mountains. For the primitive feel of its simple exhaustion.

But there are pieces missing. Triggers and gaps in the story, and you are strangely absent. This is you the history, not you the man, and for some reason I am left wanting more. Steere has done his job though, he has brought us together. His prose is dry and functional, but without it I would not have pursued you down the years; I would not have tried to get under your skin. I would never have met Leonard, Jeremy, Betty Finn, Ray Brown, Canon Holderness. I would not have camped in the Red Cave. I would not have danced on your grave last night. And, of course, there would have been no you and me. There would just have been you. Then me. Two people separated by a hundred years of forgotten memories, by a hundred years of dust, settling between us with every year past, covering your tracks and obscuring mine.

Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

Arthur has been running across the veld for over four hours. His feet are bleeding in his boots and his lungs feel the colour of the ground beneath him: red, coarse a nd grained. Drained of fluid, they hang within his ribs like drying tobacco leaves, rubbing against the bone. With each breath a loose covering of dust seems to rise in him, silting in his throat and burning in his chest. He finished the last steel-tasting drops of water from his billy-can ten miles ago. His mouth is parched and his tongue sticks to the skin behind his teeth. He can feel his lips drying out, cracking like waking pupae. His breath clicks in his windpipe.

The veld at his feet is as dry as him, deprived of water these last few months when it should have been raining. And not just any rain, but the downpours of the wet season, so powerful they felt solid: curtains of rain drawn across the end of each day. Italic rain. But no such rain has come, so he runs across hard and broken ground, dotted with scrubland bushes, their leafless twigs branching from the ground like burnt-out capillaries. The shattered shells of damba fruit scatter the path, the debris of hungry baboons. The hills are grey and purple in the distance.

He had left Enkeldoorn that afternoon following the service in the Dutch Reformed Church, giving himself at least five hours to run the thirty-seven miles to Umvuma before darkness. The congregation was small but familiar, the usual gathering of administration men and farmers’ families. Wide-necked, sun-tanned men dwarfing their smaller wives, each wearing a frilling of young children.

Slipping away into the corrugated iron vestry he had packed his cassock and the dark botdes of medicine into a brown leather satchel before removing the stiff clerical collar, unclipping it at the back of his neck and folding it into a side pocket, so he could breathe. These were his rituals of preparation before a long run. Walking outside, he filled his dented steel billy-can from a standpipe by the supplies shop, listening to the deep gurgle rising in pitch as the valve strained to pull the water up through the layers of rock and dry earth. Then he bent to tighten the laces of his boots, and noticed tht split between the upper and the sole had widened again. Standing up again, his thighs aching from another long trek a few days earlier, he secured his satchel across his chest, pulling it tight to reduce the rubbing that he knew would eventually leave him with a raw shoulder strap of red skin.

These preparations were important to him, and for more than just their practical reasons. They helped him to focus, to take a mental deep breath, like a diver filling his lungs before he tips off the cliff into the sea. In this way he would expel the thoughts that had occupied him for the last few hours—the stolen candlesticks from the church, the late mail from England, the worries and agitations of the farmers—and fill his mind instead with the space it required for the long run over the dustland of the veld. Or was it an emptying of the mind? To inhabit instead that place of no thought needed for the wide horizons that are never reached, for the distance between him and his endpoint and for the simple hugeness of the brooding sky above him. He needed this space, this mental clear sky so he could enter the landscape as part of it, and not as an irritation panting over its dry surface. It was only as a part of it that he could face such long runs at the speed he did.

It was growing dark. Not getting dark, but growing, the dark expanding, filling out, a living, corporal darkness. Veld darkness. The clouds that had been burning on their undersides were now bruising into night, and the evening light of long shadows had fallen through to grey. The sky was deepening, disclosing its first stars, and a cool evening breeze was discovering itself in the thick air.

He was worried he would be too late. Three children had already died in the village, and several others had been struck down by the fever when he was there a couple of days ago. It was then that he had promised to return with medicine, European medicine. He knew this would be unpopular with the local
n’anga
, but the people of the village were willing to accept his help, they had seen the children waste away and die, and each feared for their own family. But now it was a race against the darkness. Soon it would be no use carrying on, he would get lost, and would have to camp out for the night. But worrying wouldn’t help. Thoughts of where he was going would only hinder him. ‘Travel with nowhere to go’ is what a Shona elder had told him last year, and it was good advice. Travel for the movement only, not the conclusion, that way you will be part of your journey, and not a victim of it.

So he concentrated instead on the minutiae of his sensations: on the wind that cooled the triangle of skin exposed beneath his neck by his open shirt, on the rhythm of his legs, on the tight beads of sweat that formed and evaporated on his forehead, leaving their residue of salt. He watched the orange and gold shimmer of the trees, their water-starved leaves flicking in this new wind, and he drew deeply on the lightness of his skin, which felt transparent, stretched to opaqueness by his fatigue. Listening to his blood tapping at his temple, he felt alive, painfully so, on the edge of existence. And above that there was the sound of his own breath, ticking in his throat in time with his steps. His metronome, keeping him in time with the sound of the veld, enormous, unapproachable, all around him; full with its own music of the ground shifting with unseen life, waiting for the rains. Full with its own song, a song he was still learning to follow, adjusting, fitting his life to the country. Slowly, he felt he was succeeding, absorbing the country and absorbing into it. On some of the shorter treks he had even gone barefoot when the heat made his boots unbearable. He had once arrived in Enkeldoorn like this, barefooted, skin caked in a fine covering of dust through which his sweat traced veins of dampness. A visiting dignitary had been there, a Bishop from England, and there had been words.

He was too late. He knew this before he even reached Umvuma, when he was still picking his way down the slope of the kopje before the village. Although it was nearly dark, the old light of the sun just a sliver of grey across the back of the land, he could still make out a cluster of bodies around one of the rondavels, shuffling and moving like an ungainly animal, unsteady on its feet. As he got nearer, he heard the wailing of the women. Long cries of grief from inside the thatched hut, three or four voices in a harmony of distress, weaving a song for the dead. The men remained outside, stern and serious. One of them leant on what looked like a hunting spear, the others held farming tools. They were waiting for the women to cry their grief dry, to empty their wells of sadness, so they could get on with the business of starting over again.

Arthur approached the rondavel, his skin cooling, the cotton of his shirt sticking to his flesh. His breath was coming back under control, drawing back into him, but his heart kept up its wild beating, banging out its pulse within his ribs which felt fragile against its rhythm. The group outside parted in silence to let him through. There was no greeting. Nothing needed to be said. He felt sick with fatigue and thirst, and there was an irritation of doubt working at his mind. Should he have abandoned the service, left earlier? Had he arrived sooner might he have been able to help this boy lying on the floor of the hut, his cheeks hollow with the thumbprint of fever? No, he didn’t think so. A few hours would have been of little consequence, the fever had too strong a hold already. There were others that would be helped. Not that this mattered to the boy’s mother, who knelt over him now, holding his head in her hands, her fingernails digging into the skin of his skull as she rocked back and forth, her eyes screwed shut but with tears still finding their way through as she cried out, ‘
Tovigwa naniko? Tovigwa naniko?
’ Arthur went no nearer the boy, staying where he was, unwilling to break her flow of grief. So he stood there, stooped in the doorway of the rondavel, light-headed with exhaustion, his skin prickling in his sweat-drenched clothes, listening to the mother’s repeated question. ‘
Tovigwa naniko?
’ she asked the night. ‘Who will bury us?’

That night the sky listened, and the rains came, so in the morning they were able to bury the boy in newly wet earth, with the scent of new rain and honeysuckle in the air. Both of these smells reminded Arthur vividly of England, and particularly his boyhood in Kent, when the smell of rain on the dry, hot gravel of the driveway would entice him outside to play. These sudden memories of England were still frequent, ambushing him with no warning, arriving in an instant of recognition before falling through with a pang of homesickness in his chest. They disturbed him, these sudden memories. He had left England. There was nothing there for him anymore.

Despite the night’s rain the men of the village still had to start early to dig the grave. The ground under the wet layer of topsoil was hard and stubborn, and did not give easily to their tools. They worked in pairs, outside the periphery of the village, cutting, digging and sweating, the growing heat like a slow-pressing palm on their backs. Arthur watched them work. The boy’s father was a Christian, and had asked him to perform the burial service, and he had agreed, although he knew that others in the village would want to fulfil the traditional Shona customs of the dead as well. From his experience this was only to be expected, and he didn’t mind. He watched the men finish digging the grave then gather together at its side. A woman came out from the village, naked but for a skin about her waist and a delicate black tattoo across her stomach. She carried a clay pot and a longhandled cup, which she handed to the man who had started the grave now gaping from the red earth before them. The man, who was young, not much older than the boy who had died, took the swollen-bellied cup by its long handle and dipped it into the pot, which was filled with beer, brewed from
rapoko
. He lifted the cup and began pouring the dark, pungent liquid over his legs and arms. The others waited patiently. The beer would protect him from the misfortunes he might suffer from burying the boy, from the scent of the grave. The scent of death. It ran over his body sluggishly, drawing itself out in long trails which snaked down his legs, over the bulge of his calf and down to the ground where it was absorbed by the soil. When he had finished he handed the cup to the next man who did the same.