Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

He had read about Africa: in Olive Schreiner’s book, in Living-stone’s diaries, and even in the novels of Rider Haggard, and he had looked at her on maps. Frequently on the voyage down he had unfolded his Philips’ Authentic Imperial Map of Southern and Northern Rhodesia with British East Africa and studied the names he found there, strange on his ear. Bulawayo, Matobo, Lomagundi . The rivers of Bubye, Nyadazidza and Buma . And then the more familiar names of the settlements and townships: Daisy field,Hartley and the impressively large and bold Salisbury . But still, as he realised now, he knew nothing of Africa. For him then, a thirty-one-year-old Anglican missionary standing on the shores of Beira, it was a vast country which he had filled in his absence from it with ideas and expectations. A physical landscape on which he hoped to practise the ideals that Bishop Gore had inspired him with in Oxford. The African native had no preconceptions of Christianity, no awareness of its history of divisions and institutions. He would be approaching them as untainted individuals. He wanted to immerse his religion, his beliefs and his life in the soil of the country. To discover its rhythms and tides and to fit them to his understanding of the gospel. Above all though, he wanted to prove himself worthy. He remembers some lines from a poem he wrote around that time, ‘The Death of St Francis’:

I seemed in one great stab of eager pain

To feel his heart beating within my heart…

It seemed he lent his Sacred Heart to me:

One moment did I know his wish, his work,

As if mine own they were, and knew with them

The worm-like weakness of my wasted life,

My service worthless to win back his world…

I knew in blissful anguish what it means

To be a part of Christ, and feel as mine

The dark distress of my brother limbs,

To feel it bodily and simply true,

To feel as mine the starving of his poor…

‘ To feel as mine the starving of his poor… ’ That is what he had wanted as he waited for the train to take him into Rhodesia. To feel. To feel God, not on the tables of the English rich, but in the hunger of the starving poor, who, being close to the earth, were already so much closer to Him.

♦

Is that how he felt, or how he thinks he felt? It is hard to tell now, fifty years later, how much of his life he really remembers and how much he has recast in memory. Even that train journey, his first voyage into Africa, into her heart, comes to him down the years as a montage of images, reflections, snatches of conversation. He and the Bishop had sat alone in the carriage, he is sure of that. Near the front of the train, so he felt every jolt and kinetic tug of its halting movement. There never seemed to be any reason for the stopping and starting. Other than the heat, which he does remember, and which maybe affected the train as it would a human or an animal: slowing it down, getting under its skin. The heat. He remembers he found it hard to think under its flat, oppressive pressure. A clear sky and a white sun shining at them through the window, burning on the right side of his face.

The country had passed them erratically. He remembers squinting out at it, through the glare, watching it pass, sometimes at a crawl, then shooting off behind them in a sudden burst of energy like a badly scrolled roll of film. Then it would slow to a crawl again, and then stop altogether, paused in the frame of the window. He thought it was a harsh land, he remembers that. Malarial lowlands, then stony veld covered in tall blond grass and low bushes. The odd swampy area above which huge clouds of flies hovered and twitched. He remembers watching those clouds and thinking of Keats’ gnats, bourne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies . But there had been beauty too, and all the more beautiful to his unaccustomed eye. Shoals of gazelles and impalas, shying away from the train, bounding over the long grass, performing sudden voltes. Or an eagle, ci rcling a solitary tour of the sky. Or the hills, purple in the distance.

The unadulterated country made him aware of the mechanisation of the train, the clumsy weight of its engineering and metal. He remembers one image clearly. Looking back as it took a long bend in its stride, seeing the other carriages curving away behind them, the sun flashing on and off in their windows. He had thought, as he looked at the train sweeping through the veld, of Bishop Knight Bruce who had trekked this way just a few years earlier. It had taken him and his three English nurses three months to reach Umtali then. Bishop Gaul and he would do the same journey in a day. Bishop Knight Bruce had fallen ill as soon as he arrived, as if it had been the journey that was his mission, not the destination. He was shipped home to England where he died not long after his arrival, blackwater fever spreading like a stain of ink through his kidneys. He was forty-four years old.

♦

What else did he remember? Talking with the Bishop, asking him where were the native settlements. And the Bishop telling him they had been cleared to make way for the railway. What else had the Bishop said that day? Words of advice, opinions. He had talked a lot, but he could only remember two moments now. In the first the Bishop is looking out at the passing veld, and he keeps looking out as he speaks.

‘You ask a native where they live,’ he says, ‘and they won’t say Southern Rhodesia. Doesn’t mean a thing to them.’ Then he’d stopped, rubbed his nose and said in a quieter voice, ‘Mind you they haven’t heard of Africa either.’

In the second he is more animated. He’s talking about the mission work he can expect.

‘You’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. It’s education most of them want, give them that and they’ll be happy. They can be pretty unforgiving Christians though, some of them. If the white God doesn’t bring the rains, the crops or the children they want, they’ll soon abandon him for their own again. They’re practical like that.’

He’d paused, cleared his throat, then carried on.

‘Anyway, it’s not them you should worry about, so much as the Europeans. They’re the ones whose souls need saving.’ He’d leant forward, looked him in the eye. ‘They can be a pretty rough lot. Think you can manage?’

♦

He can’t remember what he’d said in reply, just the sensations he’d felt, then, fifty years ago. The hardness of the bench he sat on. The train stopping, jerking him forward, juddering then going still. Looking out of the window as its engine thrummed through the carriage. The sun burning in the sky and the tall blond grass, stretching away over the veld, unmoving in the windless air.

♦

But he doesn’t want to remember anymore. And he doesn’t want to listen to his breath, weak and dry in his throat. So he thinks of Noel Brettell instead, the young teacher who will visit him today. Because there is, after all, something else that he knows, another foothold for his mind. That it is Thursday. The names of the days may not have much sense out where he is in the middle of the rural lands, especially to a blind man, but he needs to know them. He needs to know it is Thursday: the day Noel will visit him, bringing with him his books and his clear voice, that still bears the accent of a Black Country childhood. It’s an interesting lilt, and one he enjoys listening to. It was not often he had listened to poetry and heard the word ‘bronze’ rhyme with ‘sons’. Today Noel would read Keats and Tennyson. Last week it was Eliot, whose writing he’d found intriguing. The Waste Land, Four Quartets and others. To hear poems he had not heard before, even if Noel told him they had actually been written thirty years earlier, fascinated him.