Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

So, when the sun is almost down,

Bright in the slanting light we come,

Bearing our rustling grass-sheaves high

Against the splendour of the sky,

To thatch for Christ a home –

It was no surprise to Noel that on that first visit Cripps had wanted to hear the poets he knew in his youth. Tennyson, Murray, Vaughan. He remembered reading Vaughan, his voice loud in the quiet glow of a bushveld evening: ‘I saw eternity the other night—’

When he finished the poem Cripps was silent, looking away towards the Manesi hills. When he did speak, he didn’t turn to Noel, but just carried on staring towards the horizon through his one blind and one failing eye. ‘Thank you,’ he’d said quietly. ‘I never thought I should hear that again.’

On that first visit Cripps had decided what to read, but now he largely left the choice to Noel (although today he had sent a note written in Leonard’s handwriting with the faint scrawl of his own signature at the bottom: ‘Please bring your Keats and your Tennyson. A.S. C.’). Noel enjoyed the freedom of his choice. He enjoyed bringing newer poets out into the bush and testing them against its grand indifference and Cripps’ timeless ear. Edward Thomas had worn well, Eliot intrigued him, but Auden had not survived the austere nature of that sequestered place. He could tell Cripps was not impressed, and he had to agree. He liked Auden, reading him in his chair in his house, but here it was not the same, the verse skidding off the backdrop of Maronda Mashanu like a chisel off a granite boulder.

It was as a poet that Noel knew Cripps and as a poet he approached him. He had managed over the years to evade the other areas of his life, his religious and social ideas which had so alienated him from much of the local white population. Most of the English farmers of Charter District regarded him with exasperation and contempt and the Afrikaners were equally thrown by his work, loathing any ‘kaffir’ who had dealings with him. Even so, Noel had met some who were willing to admit a grudging respect for his way of life. ‘He’s a bloody fool of a rooinek predikant,’ one Afrikaan farmer had said to him, ‘but, man, he’s a real Christian. I’ve seen him walking along the Umvuma road carrying a black baby on his back. Any white man who can do that, man, he must be like Jesus Christ.’

For himself, Noel had recently been reconsidering many of Cripps’ opinions that had once seemed so extreme. In the light of the past few years they had gained something of a prophetic quality, and the thought had crossed his mind that perhaps the old man had been right all along. That it was not he who was the extremist, but they, the rest of the whites, who had been complacent and indolent in their attitudes. He was, however, still unsure about some of Cripps’ more stringent tendencies. He had recently heard that Cripps refused government agricultural experts onto his farms, and that he had even been imposing fines for ‘immoral behaviour’ on the Africans living there. He also knew that Cripps held an unenthusiastic view towards the Africans’ desire for education. He provided for it, but he was sure the old man would rather they left such Western ideas alone.

When Noel visited on a Thursday afternoon, though, they did not speak of such matters. They did not even enter into serious literary discussion. Cripps was content to smoke his pipe and listen, and Noel in turn, was happy to sit in that clearing, the strange crumbling African church at his back, and read aloud from the poets of the past and the present.

♦

Coming to the bottom of another slope in the road, Noel slows his bike and dismounts by the trunk of a marula tree that marks the mouth of the narrow foot track into Maronda Mashanu. He pushes his bike along the track in front of him, through the mopane and the acacia, the fever tree and the rain tree, its branches dripping with water from the froghopper nymphs, over the river and up through the low thorn bushes and out into the clearing. To his left the old VD clinic that Cripps built and administered to is disintegrating into rubble. Further up, nearer the church, two young children play around a smoking fire at the centre of some huts. An old man sits beside them on a stone, bent over and intent on his basket-weaving. And there, nearer the church again, sitting outside his rondavel, is Cripps, waiting.

Noel lays down his bike on the grass and reaches around into his bag to pull out his camera. Cripps has not heard him. He walks quietly and softly towards him. He is already quite close when Fortune emerges from behind the church, carrying a tray of sandwiches. When she sees him he puts his finger to his lips, and she understands, beaming a big smile at the joke and waving her hand down at him in one playful swipe.

Cripps is sitting on an old wooden box, wearing a threadbare pale jacket and a battered panama, his long legs crossed and his elbow on his knee, smoking his pipe. His pockets are full with notepaper, books, a handkerchief. A clean white dog collar hangs loose from his neck, where once, Noel supposes, it was held firm by the fuller flesh of his youth. He is almost completely still. Noel cannot see his eyes, which are obscured behind a pair of large round medical sunglasses with thick, dark lenses. Perched there on his stool, his features sharp with age, he makes Noel think of a hawk, motionless above its prey: an old, frail hawk, who is still hunting, though he can no longer see or hear.

Noel bends to one knee and takes the camera out of the case. All these years and he has no photo of Cripps. For some reason the old man didn’t like cameras any more. He brings the camera to his eye and frames him there. Although the smell of the pipe is strong, he can smell Cripps himself under its odour. The smell of illness, of death. Old skin, tired breath.

He presses the release button and takes the photograph, then waits, expecting Cripps to turn on hearing the click of the shutter. But he doesn’t move. He heard nothing, and Noel knows that today will be a loud day. Today he will have to declaim the poetry as if on a stage if the old man is to hear the words at all.

♦

‘I said I have brought the Tennyson and the Keats, Father, as you asked!’

Noel leans over from his chair and speaks loudly into the old man’s ear, a half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich in his hand.

Arthur nods. ‘Ah, yes, thank you, Mr Brettell, that’s very kind of you, I’m glad Thomas got the note to you.’

Noel picks the two books out of his bag. They are from the same series, faded leather and peeling gold leaf on the edges of the pages. ‘What would you like me to read for you? I mean, which poems?’ he asks.

A cowbell is hesitant in the distance, and somewhere, not too far away, someone is plucking the metallic harpings of a marimba. Arthur looks down for a moment, or at least moves his head in the manner of a man looking down, the darkness swilling in his eyes.

‘I would like to hear ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.’ He speaks quietly, not like a deaf man. Quietly and deliberately.

Noel smiles to himself. ‘Yes, Father, but which one? They both wrote poems with that title.’

And now it is Arthur’s turn to smile. He turns to face Noel. ‘I know. I should like to hear both of them please, both poems.’

Noel takes up the Keats and thumbs through it, looking for ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, but Arthur has not finished, and he stops turning the pages as the old man continues speaking.

‘I knew them both by heart once. Especially Keats’. I thought on it a good deal and even thought, once, that it might come true for me. But that was not to be. So I have tried to live by Tennyson’s version instead. I think his, at least, has come true, in some way.’

It was the most the priest had ever offered of himself, but Noel didn’t think he was inviting comment or conversation. He felt he was only addressing him as a bystander, that he had really been speaking to himself.