Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

My Dear William,

My left eye, afflicted with ulcerated cornea was removed in Salisbury hospital March 27th. It may heal soon (D. V.). Please let Edith and Violet know.

My love for you always,

A.S. Cripps

There is another a couple of months later:

May 5th, 1940

…My eye socket’s mudes may yield to exercise, so I hope, in the course of the next three months or so — with a view to my replacing a shade with a less conspicuous (and fairly cheap) glass eye (D. V.). But apparently they are by no means up to it — do you (as being surely something of a specialist on eye afflictions through your work on the Kent County Council) know of any particularly hopeful help to weakened eye-muscles, apart from the exercise of shutting and opening one’s eyelids?

And then, in a letter to your niece, my great aunt Elizabeth, dated 9 October 1951, your handwriting is gone altogether, replaced by another, confident and youthful. They are still your words, your voice, but speaking in another’s hand. Scanning to the bottom of the last page I find yours again, in a wisp of ink, awkwardly pulled and dragged across the paper to form a rough A. S. C . It could be the first efforts of a child, or not even writing at all, just the chance falling of a pen over the page. After this signature there is a postscript, again in the stronger hand:

P.S.: I would like you please to pray for your uncle Rev. A.S. Cripps, for he is getting deaf and when reading to him I have to shout for the same word for many times. My best wishes to you!

Yours in the Blessed Lord — L. M. Mamvura

The surname strikes a chord in my memory. Mamvura: this is the name of the man who became your secretary for the last twenty years of your life. A schoolteacher who rode across the veld on his bike to read and write your letters for you. Leonard Mamvura. I try to estimate how old he would be now — seventy? eighty? I wonder if he is still alive. For some reason the idea of a living connection with you is not one that has crossed my mind before, perhaps because you have always been history to me, an element of the past holding no purchase in the present beyond words on a page.

I try to read the letters you wrote after this date, but it becomes impossible. Either Leonard was not always on hand, or your stubborn nature defeated your own eloquence as you tried to write without the aid of sight. The old papers, thin as skin are covered in ink, but no words make it through. There is just chaos on the page, a desperate tangled clue of half-formed characters. But you do continue to write, fifty or more letters. I don’t know if you ever sent them, but you never stopped the writing, as if even when you could not be understood, you still had something to say.

I reach for another box, an earlier one, and in this action I pass my hand back over a decade to where you are readable again. Here, there is the surprise of encountering events of history, suddenly intruding into your intimate correspondence. This to your brother on 15 June 1940:

I heard yesterday that Paris had fallen. I am indeed thankful that the sacred and beautiful treasures of mankind may have been left in peace. That noble Venus (in the Louvre is she not?) may outlive our crazy times now — all being well. Last night I was reading at Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’, and seeming to learn something of the perspective of Religion and Art, of Time and Eternity –

‘All breathing human passion for above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,

a burning forehead and a parched tongue’

That Venus surely may preach on now the abiding

Truth and Beauty for many a long year to come,

‘When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all

ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

I kept the 71 stAnniversary of my birth this week. My love for you all always!!!

Yours ever Arthur S. Cripps

Most of the letters, though, are about your daily life, the pattern of weekly and annual events that informed your days and years in Africa.

There were some rather enjoyable new year Sports and Horse races on Saturday. I made no show or rather a very bad show in the 100 yards (I tried running bare foot like one or two of the others as I had no proper shoes), and wasted ray entrance money…Gouldsbury, my R.C. friend in the native commissioner’s office at the Range, won the high jump…

I take your letters back to the front desk and carry two more boxes to my table. The windows of the library are bruising into evening and I can see the street lights outside have come on, illuminating the leaves of the trees that hang above them. Opening the first of the boxes I find a large brown envelope which I tilt onto the table, emptying its contents onto the dark wood. A cascade of photographs falls out, a scattered pile of white-bordered rectangular images, curling at the corners. Moments of your life in no particular order. I feel a sense of relief at seeing these photographs spread before me; somehow it is in these images that I am convinced you will come even nearer to me. The camera never lies, apparently, and I have come to this library with a faith in its impartial eye. But the photos I find are awkwardly abstract, their stillness robbing them of life, the arbitrary moment existing in its own space only, with no before or after offered. The photograph on the cover of Steere’s book, however, is the only one I have ever seen of you, so it is still a surprise to suddenly have so much of you in one go: years and decades passing through my fingers as I sift through the pile.

In themselves they are ordinary photographs, sometimes badly framed or focused, of people standing and sitting, but their age, and their connection to you, makes each one a fascination. The faces of the people are modern, no different to those around me in the library. Yet I know the distance between them and me, of time and ideas. In the early ones the eyes that look back at the camera have no knowledge of modern warfare; the trenches of the Somme and the camps of Auschwitz have not happened for them, the atom has not been split. Inside their heads they inhabit a different world of ideas to the one I know, and that innocence is in itself beguiling.

I find one of you at Oxford, a posed studio shot taken by Hills & Saunders, your eyes impassive, looking out of the frame. You wear a high wing-collar shirt and cravat with a dark waistcoat. You look healthy, young, with full lips and neatly parted dark hair. I trace the resemblance of family members in your features: my cousin Andrew, my younger brother, and even me. The photograph next to this is also of you, but it is sixty years later and you are a different man. It is printed in a pamphlet-sized parish magazine, The Link , dated September 1952. You are sitting on an old trunk in front of two thatched rondav-els, their mud and daga walls painted with patterns. Again you are looking out of frame, but this time in profile, and from behind a pair of dark round sunglasses. You wear an old panama perched on the back of your head, an oversized light jacket, books bulging from its pockets, and battered shoes. One hand holds the side of the trunk you sit on, the other a clay pipe, your elbow resting on your thin crossed legs. Your face is sunken, the cheeks indented, as if sucked in by a vacuum inside you, and your mouth is down-turned. I do not think you know a photograph is being taken. The caption beneath it reads simply, Arthur Shearly Cripps — Poet . I place the two photos next to each other, and again I feel uneasy. There is something voyeuristic in my ability to have the boy and the old man in front of me, a lifespan laid out on the table, the beginning and end of an untold story which has, over those sixty years, written itself on your face and your body. I put them down and pick up another studio portrait, taken in 1912 and given to the Schultz family, in which you are dressed in your safari solar hat, safari jacket and white dog collar. You look straight into the camera, your chin locked at a defiant angle and your eyes burning into its lens. I look back at them, and they seem to be accusing me, challenging me. Asking me what I am doing there in your life so long after you died.