Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

‘Cripps,’ he said. ‘Father Cripps.’

‘Yes, that’s it. Cripps, of course.’ He offered his hand again. His face was that of a man who had been larger and fuller than he was now. Thinned by heat or illness, the skin hung from his cheekbones and shook around his jowls and his throat when he spoke. ‘Pruen, S. Tris-tam Pruen, MD. Zanzibar , ’ he added helpfully. And then Arthur remembered. It was hard to forget an introduction like that. His visit to Frank in Zanzibar. The Cathedral built over the slave cells. The Princess’s palace, the open balcony, the warm night beyond the candle’s burn. The Governor’s love story about Salome and her German. It all felt such a long time ago. And Pruen, sitting at the end of the table offering his African advice. He still had his book somewhere. In his trunk in his rondavel in Mashonaland probably. That too, he thought, felt far away now.

‘Yes, sorry,’ Arthur said, taking Pruen’s offered hand. ‘I should have remembered.’

‘Nonsense, of course you shouldn’t. Must have been over fifteen years ago, and a lot’s happened since then.’ Pruen cast a glance around the spread military camps, the steamers sitting grey and bleak on the lake, a vivid red and orange sunset firing up the sky behind them. ‘But you’re still with us nevertheless, eh, Father?’

‘Sorry?’

‘In Africa. When we met all that time ago you were starting a two-year tour as I remember.’ He smiled again, but this time with pride. ‘Still got my memory you see. Can’t afford to lose that in my game.’

Arthur nodded, not entirely sure what game that was. ‘Yes, yes, still here. Somehow that lure of a country parsonage never developed for me.’ His attempt at a joke fell weakly on his own ears. ‘And two years, well, it didn’t seem enough time to, I mean, well, even get started on the work I wanted to do.’

‘Still in Southern Rhodesia, though?’ Pruen asked, hooking his thumbs into the straps of his Sam Browne.

‘Yes, Mashonaland, near Enkeldoorn’

‘Oh, I know the land around there.’ Pruen looked off up the little hill by the lake and narrowed his eyes, engaging his memory again. Looking back at Arthur with another proud smile, he said, ‘Wrening-ham is the mission station there, am I right?’

‘Yes, you are.’ Arthur laughed. ‘But I’m not there actually, not any more anyway. I have my own mission farm now, near Wreningham.’

‘Have you now?’ Pruen asked, like a father showing admiration for some feat performed by his son. ‘Well done, well done.’

Out of the corner of his eye Arthur became aware of another figure approaching them from the direction of the khaki tents of the Fusiliers’ camp. Pruen sensed the figure too and turned to see who was joining them. The man was approaching with a quick, confident stride that belied the age written across his face. He was taller than Pruen, but shared the characteristic bearing of a body that had once been heavier, the same loose skin about his neck and chin. He also, like Pruen, wore the uniform of a Fusiliers officer, but had adapted it to the style of a bush ranger, his sleeves rolled to above the elbow and a beaten soft leather hat instead of the regulation solar helmet. The hat’s wide brim was pinned up on one side like a hunter’s, beneath which a pair of bushy white eyebrows and a white goatee sat in shocking contrast to the tanned skin of his face. As he got closer Arthur noticed that whatever emaciation had thinned his face and waist had somehow left his arms and chest intact. They were solid and broad, like those of a labouring man.

Pruen greeted the new arrival with the eagerness of a dog meeting his master. ‘Ah! Lieutenant Selous! Come here, come here, I want you to meet an old friend of mine.’

Arthur couldn’t help smiling at the sudden promotion in intimacy despite the fifteen years since their last meeting.

‘Lieutenant Frederick Selous,’ he continued, gesturing on either side to the two of them. ‘The Reverend Father Cripps. Father Cripps, Lieutenant Selous — although I suspect the lieutenant needs no introduction?’

Pruen raised the inflexion at the end of the sentence, turning it into a question. And he was right. The Lieutenant did not need any introduction, Arthur had indeed heard of Selous before. It was almost impossible to live in Charter country and not hear of him. His name was something of a legend in Southern Rhodesia. Second only to that of Rhodes himself, his was the most often mentioned in settler circles when the nostalgic fires of frontier memories were being stoked. For the last fifty years he had been the country’s foremost big-game hunter and naturalist, famously guiding President Roosevelt on his African safari. He had a reputation as a prolific writer, was a gifted musician and at the age of sixty-four was already a veteran of the Matabele wars of the 18905. Arthur had, however, first paid attention to his name not because of his talent for action, but rather his fierce opposition to it. He remembered reading some letters Selous had written to the Salisbury Herald objecting to the Boer campaign and the treatment of Boer prisoners and their families. The letters made a deep impression on Arthur at the time. He had once overheard a friend of Selous’ describe the hunter as ‘a moral antiseptic in a country where men are not saints’. It was a welcome surprise to find the same man standing before him now.

The dull clatter of the loading process continued on the lake shore behind them and the flies kept up a dog-fighting buzz around their heads as the two men shook hands.

‘Yes, your name goes before you, Lieutenant,’ Arthur said. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.’

‘And if you’re the Cripps I think you are, then it’s an even greater pleasure to meet you. I’ve read your work — I admire it. Bay Tree Country especially.’

Pruen looked on, beaming, like a chemist who had elicited a satisfying reaction from the introduction of two unknown substances.

‘And I’d like to talk further,’ Selous continued, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve come to break up your reunion.’ He turned to Pruen. ‘The men are almost ready, Pruen. Driscoll’s getting jumpy. We should have them fall in.’

A seriousness fell like a veil across Pruen’s face and Arthur suddenly thought how old he looked. How old ihey both looked. Too old. Too full of examined life to go and risk it all before the German guns. In Flanders they were sacrificing boys. Here, it was grandfathers.

Selous turned back to Arthur. ‘Will you be blessing us on our way, Father? ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and all that?’

‘Well, yes, I will, but it needn’t end there. I’m coming along as well.’

‘You’re coming with us? To Bukoba?’

‘Yes.’

The two older men raised their eyebrows in unison. Selous nodded slowly and looked at Arthur from under the brim of his hat. ‘Are you now? Well, there’s a thing. A parson coming along for the ride. Good for you, Father, good for you.’

‘Good for you, Baba, good for you.’

Fortune’s voice reaches him as if down a long corridor filled with cotton wool. Faint, blurred at the edges. Then he feels the cup again, its tin lip at his own, the taste of the wild apple juice spilling over them, running down his chin.

The war. That had not been an easy decision for him to make, philosophically or practically, and he remembers now how the question of what he should do wore away at him, night after night, when the mud walls of this rondavel were still barely dry. At first, like his friends and his family who wrote to him from England, he’d thought the war would be a military, not a civilian conflict. A breast-beating of the countries’ professional armies. But like most of Europe they’d underestimated the strength of its magnetism after so many years of peace. They had not foreseen the efficacy of modern warfare — but then how could they have? Kitchener and his finger, part accusatory, part elective; the million-man army drawn from sons, brothers and fathers. Mons, Ypres, the fingers of the war stretching as far as their homes, the tight black print of the casualty lists, the soft drop of the telegram, the silence in bedrooms in a million houses.