Owen Sheers: The Dust Diaries

On hearing this Mr Beardsley, who had arrived only a few weeks before, began to ask Pruen for his advice on various matters concerning adjustment to tropical life. Which did he consider the best cash crops to grow on the mainland of British East Africa? What was the most effective method of sisal production? How to prevent white ants getting in his food cupboard? The best way to approach a native village? Arthur watched him as he stabbed at a forkful of crabmeat while asking ‘And what about the rats, eh? Bloody things, oh, sorry fathers, yes, the things keep getting at my meat wherever I seem to hang it. Size of dogs they are!’

‘Yes, that took me a while to work out myself,’ Mr Pruen replied, ‘and in the end it was my cook who solved the problem. We simply hung the meat in the centre of the pantry from a rope with a knot in it, and a square sheet of tin skewered through resting on this knot. The rat will climb down the rope as far as this tin, but then find its desires frustrated, slipping off the sheet clear of the meat.’

‘Damned clever, very clever, sir. Why didn’t we think of that, eh, Charlotte?’ Mr Beardsley turned to the girl at his side who forced out a weak smile. Arthur thought she was going to cry. The Governor, recognising that Mr Beardsley was in danger of monopolising the conversation, interjected before he could ask another question.

‘I understand you’re quite a hunter too, Mr Pruen, is that right?’

Mr Pruen looked up at the Governor over his food, smiled, and sat back, placing his cutlery on his plate.

‘Well,’ he started with a heavy sigh, ‘during my time in equatorial East Africa I have come to know the ways of the bush, and so yes, I have had my fair number of run-ins and tangles with the wildlife which lives there. I do therefore also have some knowledge on how best to bag them. Or escape them, depending on the appropriate action at the time,’ he added with a snort.

The writer continued, his gift for verbosity leading him into a series of anecdotes about his African hunting experience. Arthur noticed how these stories all followed a similar pattern. Mr Pruen would amaze the table with the plumage of the sun-birds or plantain-eaters or the peculiar habits of the gazelle, leopard or crocodile, speaking with the authority (and, Arthur admitted, often the love) of the naturalist. Then he would explain in exacting detail the best method to capture, shoot, trap or skin the creature in question. It was a surprisingly candid display, he thought, of man’s ability to worship and destroy. To love and to kill.

He looked around the table. Mr Beardsley was enraptured by the hunting stories, while the Governor nodded politely, obviously having heard such facts and myths before. His wife, in contrast, a stout woman in her forties, ate throughout Mr Pruen’s speeches, silent as she had been the whole evening, her eyes downcast at her plate, while the young Charlotte looked straight ahead of her into the garden, where the midges hovered around the candle flames and the fireflies ignited themselves in sh ort bursts of electric green. Frank, meanwhile, sat quiet and small at his side, the way he used to sit at college when in the presence of authority, real or imagined, as if he could by will alone remain unnoticed. It was getting late, but the heat had still not drained from the day, and as he drifted towards his own thoughts against the distant stream of Pruen’s stories Arthur felt a long tear of sweat gather behind his knee and run the length of his calf into the heel of his boot.

‘But I mustn’t talk about this kind of thing all night. Not when we have new blood at the table…How about you, Father Cripps? I’d be interested to hear what brought you to Africa.’

Arthur was only aware he had been addressed when the faces of the others at the table followed Pruen’s gaze. He felt himself redden at being caught out not listening, but the Governor, who was experienced in this kind of social situation, stepped in to help.

‘Yes, Father, I’d be interested to hear what brought you here as well, if you don’t mind. From what Father Weston has told me you had quite a literary career in the offing back home, and a Trinity living too, I believe?’

Arthur turned to the Governor, at once grateful for his help, but also reluctant to be drawn on his motivations for missionary work, especially in the company of people he had only just met.

‘Well, there were many reasons really,’ he replied, ‘and actually Frank was one of them. I mean, Father Weston and I are old college friends, and he used to write to me about what he was up to here…’ He talked on, sketching out his education under Bishop Gore at Oxford, how he had met James Adderley, a travelling preacher he’d accompanied on treks through the Essex countryside, how he hoped, in coming to Africa, to lessen the blow of two cultures meeting. He said nothing, though, about why he had chosen Southern Rhodesia. Nothing about the book he had read a couple of years before, sitting in his armchair under a veil of light from his standard lamp, the winds of an Essex night beating in waves at his window. The book was Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland , written by Olive Schreiner in a white heat of anger after the ‘96 Mashona uprising. It told the story of trooper Peter Halket, who is ordered to shoot an African prisoner, but who helps the prisoner escape instead, and so is executed himself. But he said nothing about this book or how its story lit his imagination. And he said nothing about the book’s frontispiece either, a photograph that had burnt its image onto his mind. A tree, a mimosa tree as he would come to learn, around which a group of white Rhodesian pioneers rested, all men, lying on the grass propped up on their elbows, leaning on their long rifles, smiling into the camera. And hanging from the tree three more men, all black. Three Africans on long ropes, naked, slow-turning, hanging from the branches of that mimosa tree, their heads dropped, chins to their chests, the bad fruit of a day’s work. He said nothing about any of this; somehow he knew it would not have been welcome information at the table. And he said nothing about Ada either.

♦

He stopped talking. A change had come over the company when he said ‘Christianity’, the word travelling down the table like a cold wind. He smiled briefly at the Governor, then looked down at the scratched and dented surface of the table. Clearing his throat in preparation, it was Pruen who first spoke again.

‘Yes, well, at least Mohammedanism will not be a stumbling block for you, Father,’ he said. ‘Not that I consider it to be a really serious one anywhere on mainland Africa. Apart from here and maybe in Dar I’ve never seen a native perform any Mohammedanistic religious duty beyond turning a sheep or a goat towards Mecca before cutting its throat.’

He laughed, and Beardsley and the Governor joined him. Arthur thought of the elegant minarets and the women in purdah.

Pruen carried on. ‘And I know what you mean about the meeting of two cultures. I’ve spent much of my own time in Africa trying to right the wrongs of such a meeting. Just last month I was at a freed slave station, arranging apprenticeships for the boys there. But you’ll not have that problem in Rhodesia either; the natives there have, I understand, managed to escape the plague of slavery.’

Arthur looked up at him. ‘I was thinking more of the meeting between our own society and the African,’ he said, ‘rather than the Arab and the African.’

‘Oh, come now, Father, I think you have nothing to worry about on that count,’ Pruen said, looking a little surprised. ‘The natives of Mashonaland have not suffered from their meeting with the white man, I assure you. No, your concerns in a place like that should not be with worries of native suffering, but with the natural obstacles you will come across in bringing the gospel to the heathen. Indifference, slow minds and witchcraft, that’s what you should prepare yourself for, Father. But the Mashona are a humble people too, full of humility, and once converted can be quite perfect Christians, I believe. Good material to work with, I’d have thought.’