Travels with Myself and Another (15 page)

“Missy Wilhelmina?”

“You know, the Queen.”

“Right, I’ll tell her the next time I see her. Come on, I want to get out quick.”

Now a river launch passed us, bearing a load of camera-strung waving Americans, the men in those shirts printed with tropical flowers, the ladies in hair-nets and plastic curlers against the destructive damp. I cannot remember who they were or how they got there. Can they have been a holiday group from the bauxite managerial set? We caught up with them at a large opening in the jungle where a jetty led to a primitive board bungalow. A white couple lived here, a middle-aged paunchy hairy American and a young girl. The man was fulsome about the joys of living in sin far from the idiocy of the modern world. The girl, a forerunner by decades of her present hippy sisters, seemed like someone who is whistling in the dark. A few blacks appeared and stamped around in a shambling dance. The tourists were noisily excited, clicking their cameras at the noble savages.

I thought both tourists and white couple loony. By that process which has to do with not seeing the mote in one’s own eye, I failed to consider that tourists and white couple might think me and my tree trunk gang too loony to believe.

Again we camped, again at sunset I retired to my tent, unable to read, finding the ground hard and the night extremely long. Mr Slicker kept assuring me we were near the Christian cross marked on the map; he might as well have assured me we were near Paris France.

The third day we reached another river village, everybody well greased and smelling to high heaven of that fashionable rancid coconut butter. I made Chinese politenesses with the aged Chief until I heard piercing screams, a body in torment. I demanded to know what was happening and got flat silence from all the residents and from Mr Slicker. The screams were a woman’s; I rushed around the village and located the sounds coming from a closed thatched hut. Get her out, I began to scream too, what are you doing, do something! Stop torturing her, I shouted, what is this, help her! Issuing orders in a fury: someone had to stop the screams.

The black folk had drawn back from me and wore expressions of frozen anger. Mr Slicker, gauging the situation whatever it was, seized my arm and pulled me away, protesting. He hustled me into the hollow tree trunk and our crew paddled smartly off at full speed, to a badly aimed hail of stones from the village younger element. I couldn’t prise a sensible explanation of these goings-on from Mr Slicker. Either he didn’t know or wouldn’t tell but I had interfered in bush business and Mr Slicker was thankful we got out undamaged.

In all the intervening years I have had no reason to report that episode to anyone. This summer, since I was delving in my memory, I told it to a friend while we sat on her terrace in Switzerland, drinking wine and watching the beautiful sunset view down the cleft of green hills to the Rhone valley and across to the jagged snow mountains beyond. I was admiring the view, which is one I love with fervour, and talked absent-mindedly, saying, “I never understood what the uproar was about.”

“Perhaps she was having a baby,” said my friend.

It had not occurred to me and of course was the answer. Of course. They would shut a woman off alone in a hut and let her scream it out by herself, the coconut butter savages, and as it had to be an ancient rite, their custom for childbirth from time immemorial, they would be frightened as well as insulted by my interference. I saw that Mr Slicker had done me a real service; I could imagine a well-aimed stoning if he hadn’t been so fast on his feet.

Perhaps later that childbirth day, or the following day, we came on a lumber camp. Three sweating amiable white men directed a black labour force in felling trees: rare wood, I suppose, as this small operation couldn’t be worthwhile for wood pulp or average building material. I was pleased to hear I hadn’t lost my voice if nothing more. Mr Slicker was as useless as Mr Ma for information and lacked Mr Ma’s charm. We travelled in silence. The lumbermen must have explained about their trees but information is something I constantly seek and forget first. A black child ran up a four-storey tree trunk, outdoing any monkey and scaring me badly; I thought he was showing off and would fall to his death, I provoked loud hilarity in my fellow whites, not due to witty remarks but due to being there, with my ridiculous expedition.

By the fifth or sixth day I was ready to leave exploring to explorers whom I now revered for their endurance but felt must be a special brand of insane.

I couldn’t tell where we were, maybe we had passed the burial cross, maybe it lay weeks ahead. Failure of an enterprise: itching from insect bites, cramped in pup tent and tree trunk, dirty, thirsting for cold water, sick of everyone’s smell including my own, sunk in the true horror journey boredom. We turned around. I was looking forward to the flesh pots of civilization in Paramaribo.

Then the fever hit me. I thought it was malaria but malaria, though a shocker, is not even close to what the Saramcoca produced. My bones felt broken, I whimpered with pain when I moved and finally I couldn’t. I was carried ashore to sleep, and could only crawl, whimpering, beside the tent, modest to my last breath about the inevitable calls of nature. Mr Slicker shook me, shouting “Moddom! Moddom!” like a butler announcing that the house is on fire. “Wake up Moddom! You are talking and crying!”

“What?” The man was crazy; I had been asleep.

“Drink some tea, Moddom, it helps the pains. I told you these mosquitoes are badder.”

“What?” I couldn’t raise myself to drink. Mr Slicker had to handle me like a hospital nurse. He had taken off his black glasses to reveal orange-red eyes, like the yolks of Chinese thousand-year eggs. His breath was bad too. He was in a great turmoil, perhaps fearing I would die, a weak white woman, and leave him to explain matters to the authorities in Paramaribo. I wished he would stop breathing on me and go away.

I was unjust to Mr Slicker. It wasn’t his fault that I decided to explore the Saramcoca. He did his job well and got more than he bargained for. The knitting-needle boys made a sort of stretcher from vines. Mr Slicker got me aboard and kept the canoe paddling like a boat race from dawn without stops until dusk. The return trip is dim, it can’t have lasted more than two or three days. Mr Slicker delivered me to the hotel where I crept up the stairs to my room on all fours, unseen, and lay there, not thinking to ask Gertie for a doctor. I am not sure about this: was I too sick to think straight or too ashamed to admit where and how I got so sick. Later, my own doctor diagnosed this dread disease as dengue, commonly and well named break-bone fever. It is supposed to recur but never did.

The fever dropped by itself in a few days. I told Gertie face-saving (my face) lies: I had an allergy which often caused these bouts of fever, I didn’t want to see any of Our Boys, as I couldn’t bear the sorrow and awkwardness of farewells. Though the fever was gone or at least diminished, acute pain in all joints remained: I told Gertie that I would disappear quietly on the next plane north.

“Did you have a nice time with your friends?” Gertie asked.

“Lovely.” Mr Slicker, the blacks et al. Even reaching for a cigarette hurt so much I wanted to cry. On the final day in Paramaribo, trying to lift myself from a chair by my arms because my legs wouldn’t do the job, I slipped and fell on my wrist, fracturing it. It was only a sharper pain in the other diverse pains. I sent for adhesive tape, strapped the wrist and shuffled to the plane, a wreck of an unsuccessful explorer.

The plane was deliciously cold and as we flew unpressurized high in the sky, by miracle or by chilling, my bones became normal though the wrist ached worse. When I returned to my happy home, everyone gave me a nice welcome-back kiss and asked why I was wearing that grubby adhesive tape, but they were too busy to listen to travellers’ tales.

Money, not war, destroyed the old life of the islands. War only fed in the first big dose of money. I am thankful that I knew the sleepy lovely little islands all through the Caribbean before the dollars poured over them. At first the wintering wealthy arrived, then the reduced-rate summer tourists. Now they’re coining money everywhere the year round. It’s a success story; it’s Progress.

The last time I saw that beautiful cove on Virgin Gorda it was full of suntanned bodies and ringed by boats, from swan yachts to rubber Zodiacs, and there were bottles and plastic debris on the seabed and picnic litter on the sand for the rich are as disgusting as the poor in their carelessness of the natural world. The Social Inn on Tortola is incredible prehistory where now you book months ahead to reserve rooms in ten hotels, or buy a luxury condominium residence; the
Pilot
is unthinkable in the two stylish marinas. St Martin, which I loved first and most, is a thriving blighted area. A great runway on the Dutch side receives jets. Phillipsburg and Marigot are boom towns. Handsome houses of foreigners dot the hills. There are grand hotels and crummy motels, casinos and boutiques, supermarkets and launderettes, snack bars and robber restaurants, throngs of visitors and plentiful muck on the beaches. And the island, once a green bouquet of trees, looks bald. Progress uses space and is more valuable than trees.

It is ridiculous to repine for a past simplicity and quiet and loveliness when I can live where I choose while the islanders are anchored where they are, and probably mad about Progress. Seeing them, I don’t believe that they profit from its advertised benefits. They used to be short of cash but never hungry, never crowded, or hurried. They worked when they had to and not a minute more. Free of nuisance government, they lived in a close community, as content as mortals can possibly be. If they wanted adventure or consumer goods, they went off as sailors or emigrated for dollars but all of them returned to visit or drowse through old age, and knew they could return to what they had left: home didn’t change, home was safe. Now they work for the foreigners on their islands and though they have more money than ever before they feel poor by contrast and they are no longer the sure, idle, chatty, easy people I remember. In another ten years they may be as bitter as the blacks in Harlem.

Between planes, this winter, I hired a glittering Mercedes taxi at Phillipsburg airport because the owner-driver had grey hair and would have known St Martin before it turned into a gold mine. He had driven visitors from the North so long that he sounded American. “Well, Madam, everybody’s got good work and lotsa money, see all these new little houses the people built for themselves? Got everything they want inside, fine things. Got money in the bank. Everybody’s doing very well on St Martin. But the old harmony is gone, it’s gone for good.”

The Caribbean has become a resort and is a world lost. This cuts me deeply in my feelings, as Mr Ma would say, because I loved that world, its looks, its climate, its aimless harmless life, and it was the best anywhere for a solitary swimmer. I don’t like resorts and I can’t afford them.

Grumetti Serengeti Tanzania, early 1970s

Four

INTO AFRICA

Three thousand unexpected dollars fell into my lap from the sale of a short story to television. Slowly it dawned on me that I could blow this money, I could pay my own way to Africa. No editors would send me in spite of repeated suggestions for riveting articles; I was not an old Africa hand. You must be an expert first though how do you become an expert if you can’t get there. I have read haphazardly about darkest Africa all my life but cannot remember what I read or how I made such a simple picture of that central slice of the continent. It was a vast lion-coloured plain, ringed by blue mountains. Beautiful wild animals roamed across the land and the sky went up forever. There were no people in this picture, no Africans or anyone else. I craved to see the country and the animals and now with this money I could do it. Travel for pleasure, the most daring idea yet.

A nice young woman, a travel agent, came for a drink. We got out the Encyclopedia Atlas and looked at the map. I thought it might be a good idea to cross Africa from West to East along the Equator. Douala in Cameroun was the nearest place I could see to the Equator line on the west coast; neither of us had ever heard of it but she promised to make inquiries and arrange a ticket. That took care of travel plans.

She called up shortly to say that I needed yellow fever and smallpox vaccinations according to Air France who flew the route from Paris. My GP had been stationed in Nigeria with the RAF during the war; his feeling about Africa amounted to morbid disturbance of the brain. The whole place was beyond words hideous and to go there of one’s own free will was certifiable. The diseases were revolting and inescapable. If I insisted on this mad venture, he would shoot me full of every known antitoxin for everything he could think of.

His war career just about did me in. On top of smallpox and yellow fever, I got shots against typhoid, plague, cholera, polio and tetanus; pills for dysentery, diarrhoea and malaria; unguents and powders to heal sores and skin infections. He implored me never under any circumstances to drink anything except bottled water and better check where it came from too; and be sure to use disinfectant in washing water. The bugs in water were worse than those in food. Every insect was poisonous and there was no end to their number and variety. He advised me to buy a snake-bite kit but I refused, saying I would die of fear anyway if a snake sank its fangs in me and besides didn’t he expect me to be dead of disease without help from snakes. I felt very ill due to all this preventive medicine and unable to concentrate on the journey.

With only a week left, I had an attack of nerves; I really must collect some useful information. This led me to telephone two friends who had been in Africa. One told me to buy khaki trousers and shirts and comfortable boots in London, to stock up most heavily for the dysentery branch of sickness, to call on the R. and W. King Company Traders when I got to Cameroun, they’d look after me, the insects were indeed a trial but as I liked heat I would have a wonderful time. The other friend said not to bother buying anything here, I could get what I needed in Africa, and it was cold at night, she had found that a hot water bottle came in handy and take at least one heavy sweater and when I got to Nairobi call on Ker and Downey Ltd, they’d look after me, and wouldn’t I be a bit lonely, Africa was so big, but I was bound to have a marvellous trip.

They were talking of two Africas, West and East, and assumed that everyone knew the difference. Africa was Africa to me, about as clever as thinking New York and California would be the same. Always glad to postpone shopping, I compromised by buying a hot water bottle. And set off to cross the continent with a brand new Boots’ hot water bottle, wool trousers and heavy sweater, three cotton dresses, two pairs of city shoes, and a large Spanish fisherman’s straw hat. Since I knew nobody anywhere and expected to be gone nearly three months, I was more interested in amusements.

These were tubes of acrylic paint, as I was in an ardent phase of Sunday painting, tiny cards for solitaire, the only card game I know, fine binoculars to gaze upon elephants and giraffes, my particular passion, a rotten little portable typewriter for writing short stories in my ample leisure time and books, ranging from
War and Peace,
for nourishing length, and Jane Austen and Shirer on the Third Reich to paperback thrillers. Luggage being a proven misery, I took only one suitcase and a cosmetics case for medicines but I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without.

On 23 January 1962, I left London, both arms throbbing hotly, switched planes in Paris and spent the next thirteen hours overnight, jammed in the increasingly squalid tourist section of the plane together with a bunch of young European mothers and their small children and babies, all heading for the Congo where a war was going on. That took the edge off any sense of risk at charging into Africa.

In the early morning, coming down to land at Douala, Africa presented itself as grey-green jungle swamp. Muddy snaking rivers and mosquito lakes broke up the jungle. Uninhabited and uninhabitable, except no doubt for reptiles. The rivers washed out into the Atlantic making a wide band, it looked miles wide, of dirty brown water against the blue. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Where were the golden plains and the mountains? Sick from medical care, sick from sleepless exhaustion, I tottered off the plane into a kind of raging heat such as I had felt only in Rangoon before the rains. All I could think of was my hot water bottle which caused me to laugh loudly while the few other arriving passengers stared and drew away.

I can report in detail on part of that long African journey because I found a complete diary, Douala to Khartoum, which I do not remember writing. What I do remember is the summer months, after this trip, in a Pension on the Adriatic outside Trieste, writing copiously about East Africa, with notes to shore up my memory. I was searching for that manuscript of which no scrap remains when instead I came across this West African true life story. It’s just as well; I remember West Africa the way one remembers pain, as an incident but never the precise sensations.

January 24:
First act on African soil: the eager native porter dropped my heavy cosmetics case on the foot of the Air France stewardess. She hopped about saying
“Crétin!”
Porter grinned and shrugged. Health inspector, studying my vaccination documents upside down, had diagonal tribal scars on his cheeks and a nose like a gorilla; unsmiling. Taxi boys crowded, jostled, screamed, grabbed luggage. Price dropped from 300 to 100 francs, but at the hotel the driver simply kept 300 francs and sped away. The hotel belongs to Air France and is the best in Cameroun, though there is hardly any competition. These international cement packing cases for people fall apart fast; it’s a consolation. My room has walls lined with dark wood which has not been dusted or polished for far too long; whole place is just not clean, wearing out. But the air conditioning is at deep freeze pitch and the bathroom works.

Outside the window is a garden, gravelled paths, lawn, flowers, trees, and a swimming pool. The sky is grey-white, very low; a small wind moves the trees. The sun is like a fried egg, Israeli fried egg to be exact, with that specially pale yolk. Beyond the swimming pool the jungle begins again and is cut by a wide, slow, brown river. The garden looks as if everything was struggling to grow in the wrong climate; an incongruous European oasis on the matted west coast of Africa.

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of the air traveller.

The local French are having an aperitif or cocktail party on the roof terrace. Perhaps thirty men in business suits and four dressy wives, who end up sitting together, alone at a table. It looks deadly. The common folk must use the bar this evening; it has air conditioning, a wall tank of goldfish, all the modern conveniences. The clientele is petit bourgeois white, in shirt sleeves, except for one African guest, very fat, wearing an Italian silk suit, whom I heard called effusively, by his countrymen at the airport,
“Monsieur le Ministre.”

Dining-room on roof; also European copy, with exposed goodies, from smoked salmon to pastries; head-waiter, waiters, the works. Young French wives wear highest possible beehive hair-dos and shortest possible skirts, all learned from Paris magazines and quite well done.

Dreamed in the night that Peter Sellers was my doctor, tenderly examining my arms, sore from shots. I was half pleased and half aware of being mocked, when an alarming noise broke in. It sounded as if a phonograph needle was stuck on a record, saying in a loud ugly voice, “Dig
me,
Dig
me.
” Still part asleep I wondered what on earth the neighbours were up to. Instead it was tree frogs, in the encircling jungle.

January 25:
White skin is horrid. Along the edge of the pool lie the fish-belly bodies, the ladies in the least of bikinis, the gentlemen in their “slips.” Does this fried-egg sun not darken the skin? Only one who looks nice is a lean, light brown Camerounian.

A tiny white boy is being looked after by a black manservant, who moves as if his joints were rubber, without noise or effort, always near the child but not insistently. The French mother calls the child; at once there are nerves and fuss; the child now falls and hurts itself, howls. Within minutes the baby is returned to the black man and all is peace and happiness again.

An elderly Frenchman, who seems to be the hotel manager, spoke to me. No, you cannot drive between here and Yaoundé, or from here to the ex-British Cameroun, unless you go in two cars and well armed. That way, you will have no trouble with bandits. They attack cars, one never knows when, it is like roulette; burn the cars, steal—weapons preferred—and murder the whites. Then they eat those organs which give strength, such as brain, heart, and liver. I see at once that I am going to have hell’s own time knowing what to believe in Africa; though I had heard in London that this area, inland from the coast, was unsafe, there being no government control over it.

Cannot buy any khaki clothes or shoes; now limping around with blister on my heel. If I could go barefoot and wear a
pagne—
a long length of brilliant, often beautifully printed cotton material, wrapped around from breast to ankles and passing over the head like a veil—I would be handsomely dressed.

Douala is shabby, sprawling, and hideous. There is a huge cement church, little rows of shops, empty spaces, more shops. Worse, this is not strange and exciting; I’ve seen it all before, only much more attractive, in the Caribbean. The natives look like Caribbean blacks and are dressed in the odd scraps which are apparently the lot of poor black people who live anywhere near whites. But the scrappily dressed blacks have an agreeable air of going nowhere in particular at their own time and enjoying it; they seem eccentric and free. They are also very pleasant, unlike African Americans who have plenty of reason to be surly and usually are. These Africans are after all at home, and bosses in their own house, and though it looks a very cheesy house to me, hereabouts, still no one with a white skin can push them around just because of having a white skin.

Poor countries can be as expensive as rich ones. $4 for a wretched lunch. $10 for hotel room (same for instance as the splendid Edwardian luxury and super bathroom at the Bellevue in Berne).

January 26:
In the kindergarten across the road the children scream and shout steadily, not just at recess, like a babies’ riot. The town is full of schools. The French teach people to speak their language, which they rightly regard as a boon. One can get on very well with French, though the blacks talk pidgin among themselves. This is a heavenly tongue, a most comic version of English. Thus, when wishing to say that a woman is pregnant, one says: he gottum bell. All animals are beef. Dangerous animals would be: dat beef too bad. I wish I could speak it.

Rereading Isak Dinesen’s
Out of Africa.
It bears no relation to this part of the continent. This is obviously
Heart of Darkness
country. The power of
Out of Africa
is her self-possession. The charm of the writing is an archaic and quaint elegance—the idiom not quite right. But she worries me on God; as if she knew that He and she were both well born.

The taxis drift around with a chum or two chums in the front seat beside the driver. This afternoon, passing the cement church, the chum said, “The biggest sinners and worst men everywhere are Catholics.” He is a Catholic.

I am getting out of here tomorrow, flying in the early morning to the capital, Yaoundé. Africa is there, somewhere; I only have to find it.

January 27:
On the plane sat next to a gum-chewing American youth, of the utmost physical and mental pallor, who was the U.S. courier. He came from Frankfurt, or somewhere in Germany, carrying a thin canvas bag of diplomatic correspondence for the U.S. Embassy in Yaoundé. This made me think hard about the posters in English wartime railway stations: a stern face, an accusing pointed finger, and the query, “Is your journey really necessary?” What can they have here as top secrets? Perhaps hot news on the organ-eating Communists in the bush between Douala and Yaoundé.

Yaoundé looked more hopeful from the air, pimple hills, a town straggling and nestling, red dirt roads. But the same low milky sky, and the muffled scalding sun. The locals are awfully pleased about being grown-ups on their own, and crazed with pleasure over their bureaucracy. You have to fill out a landing card, name, age, occupation, motive of trip etc. etc., which is such a bore and waste of good trees, at every stop here, not just when crossing frontiers. All formalities, health, customs, are again repeated.

The taxi ran all right for a bit, since we were coasting downhill; after that I could have passed it at a walk. My blessed friend, who told me to take my troubles to the R. and W. King Co, Traders, will receive her crown in heaven. My luggage was deposited in front of the R. and W. King godown, in a dusty compound of warehouses and a one-storey office building, and I asked for the manager.