Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

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The 1904 New Year games had been organised by Charlie Anderson, a local farmer known more commonly in the area as ‘Champagne Charlie’, a moniker he’d earned as a miner in Kimberley ten years before. For a few days back then Charlie had been the embodiment of the dream that kept so many young men travelling south, and which kept them there, year on year, in the face of endless disappointment. Because Charlie had struck diamonds, and not just a couple of stones, but a rich seam, packed as tightly in his claim as bees in a hive. Rather than mine them himself he’d sold his rights to the Company and earned his nickname the same night he signed his deal. Taking his cash to the Belgrave, Kimberley’s finest hotel, he’d treated as many men as he could fit in the bar and the billiards room to free drinks. Then he bought out the hotel’s stock of champagne and booked himself into its most expensive suite, where he filled the bath to the brim with the drink, emptying the bottles, frothing and spluttering, two at a time into the white enamel tub. In the bar below the corks sounded from above like gunfire for half an hour and with each pop the men cheered, drunk not just on Charlie’s generosity but also on the idea of his success, which in a way was theirs too, keeping at bay as it did their own doubts and fears, even if just for one night.

Charlie shared his champagne bath with a couple of whores from the brothel across the road who waited until he had passed out before robbing him blind. They left town that night, leaving Charlie still in the bath, a smouldering cigar perched on his lower lip, wagging in time to his snores.

The owner of the Belgrave found Charlie the next morning standing naked in the back yard behind the kitchen blowing apart the chef’s chickens with a Rigby shotgun. Two dogs crouched and whined in the corner, the terrified hens flapped and squawked about the dusty patch of ground, and Charlie stood in the middle of it all, a belt of cartridges across his shoulder and his feet caked in a dough of earth and champagne. Downy white feathers were stuck all over his body, as if he had been caught in an innocent pillow fight and not with a smoking rifle in his hands.

That morning marked the end of Charlie’s brief celebration and the start of a slide that took him gradually further and further north up the railway and eventually into Southern Rhodesia. Enkeldoorn was where he came to rest, blown in like so many others on the winds of their past lives. He bought a couple of hundred acres of land and a small herd of cattle, mostly jumped from native villages, and resigned himself to the life of a small-time farmer. But he never regretted that night and he still dreamt of it often. The proud moment of a man who had lived. The taste of women and champagne, flesh and drink, the stars of Africa through an open window and the thrill of success. He wouldn’t change it now even if he could. That feeling of optimism, of possibility, had been too sweet to ever regret. At least he had felt it once, that what’s he told himself, and it was this thought that kept him going, through the monotonous days of farming, drinking and remembering.

Today was a different kind of day, though. Today he was in charge, and the games were his to organise. Overseen by Charlie a team of native boys had cleared an area the size of four football pitches out of the bush grass that grew around the town. It was marked out at its four corners by a couple of opposing thorn trees and a couple of stakes, driven into the ground. A boundary of stones had been laid to further mark out his new territory. Along the town side two large canvas tents had been erected, for food, lime juice and ginger beer. Cullen wanted to keep this a dry games this year, and he’d made that clear to Charlie. One whole half of the square was roped off for the horse races and the longer running races, while the shorter sprints would take place right in front of the tents, where everyone could get a good view. Some Scotch carts had been brought in for people to stand and sit on, but many of the ladies had brought their own folding camp chairs, and some families had even brought their wicker veranda furniture.

Charlie looked around him from where he stood beside the food tent. It was filling up, a good crowd. Most of the townspeople were here. The doctor and his family, Pastor Liebenberg, Vie from the hotel, the Nashes and the Tullys, Majumder who owned the biggest supply shop in Enkeldoorn, and the usual crowd of British administrators, Company men, Dutch farmers and a few Portuguese traders. There was even a reporter from The Nugget down from Salisbury. A scattering of natives sat on the slope on the other side of the games field, drinking kaffir beer from clay pots. Charlie eyed them suspiciously. He made no secret of disliking the natives, especially this kind, who hung around the town in their ragged uniform of cast-off European clothes. He’d drafted in a couple of native policemen to keep an eye on them, but he’d be watching them himself too.

He checked his watch: ten o’clock, time for the games to begin. Picking up a milk churn resting against the tent he strode out into the centre of the field, carrying it in his arms like a groom taking his bride on to the dance floor. He placed the churn on the ground, and sliding a hammer from his trouser pocket began beating its sides with a rhythmical swing of his arm. The hollow clangs resounded across the cleared ground like the peals of a church bell colling the people to service, and it was with satisfaction that Charlie watched the entrance of the drinks tent switch from dark to pale as the crowd there turned to face him.

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From the shade of the drinks tent Cullen Gouldsbury watched Arthur enter the first race of the day, the hundred-yard sprint. The games had started with some fun sports for the children — sack racing, an obstacle course and a mini gymkhana — but this was the first adult race. The priest had taken off his jacket and Cullen watched him walk out towards the starting line (a thin pouring of flour between two cricket stumps) with the other shirt-sleeved men. The entrants made a good cross-section of the settler types he had worked with over the last three years: stocky, tanned farmers in riding breeches, a Portuguese trader, a couple of store keepers and some administration officials. There were no Africans, although Cullen noticed that Arthur, like a few of the others, had chosen to run ‘native style’, taking off his boots and socks.

The police chief, McGregor, took the role of official starter. He was a barrel-chested man with the air of a sergeant major and an impressive moustache that obscured much of his mouth beneath his white Wolseley helmet. His call of ‘Marks!’ reached Cullen and the crowd around the drinks tent and the chattering hushed as he raised his arm and they waited for the report of his pistol. The men crouched into their starting positions. Cullen could make out a thin cloud of flies hanging above them, like starlings come to roost. The silence seemed on the point of breaking when McGregor eventually fired, the crack of his pistol resounding across the flat earth and a puff of white smoke emerging at the tip of his raised arm.

The noise of the pistol startles Arthur, and it is only when the other men around him surge forward that he starts running, pumping his arms in an effort to drag his weight up to sprinting speed. But it’s a bad start, and already the Portuguese trader on his left is ahead of him, and one of the farmers, Jones, is hard up on his right. All around him there is the sound of breath and the flapping of flannel trousers and loose shirts. The ground is rougher than he thought and as he lands again and again on the stones and pebbles he realises it was a mistake to have gone without his boots. He can see the thin tape of the finishing line now, but the trader is well ahead, as is another man on the far right, although he seems to have lost the farmer. He is still sprinting hard when the trader breasts the tape ahead of him, his arms high, its ribbon giving about his chest then escaping the grip of its holders to curl about him in a brief, fluttering victor’s embrace. It is already falling to the ground and coiling into the dust when Arthur crosses it, a disappointing fourth.