Gerald Durrell - Fillets of Plaice

It was ten o’clock in the morning and already the heat was so intense that I had to keep wiping my hands on a towel so that I did not drench the baby squirrels with my sweat and thus give them a chill. I was not in the best of tempers but while I was trying to get some sustenance into my protégés (who were not collaborating), my steward, Pious, suddenly materialised at my side in the silent, unnerving way that Africans have.

“Please, sah,” he said.

“Yes, whatee?” I inquired irritably, trying to push some milk-drenched cotton wool into a squirrel’s mouth.

“D.O. come, sah,” he said.

“The District Officer?” I asked in astonishment. “What the hell does he want?”

“No say, sah,” said Pious impassively. “I go open beer?”

“Well, I suppose you’d better,” I said, and as Martin Bugler, the District Officer, arrived at the crest of the hill I pushed the squirrels back into their nestbox full of dried banana leaves and went out of the marquee to greet him.

Martin was a tall, gangling young man with round, almost-black eyes and floppy black hair, a snub nose and a wide and very ingratiating grin. owing to the length of his arms and legs and his habit of making wild gestures to illustrate when he talked, he was accident prone. But he was, however, a remarkably good D.O. for he loved his job intensely and, what is even more important, he loved the Africans equally intensely and they responded to this.

Now it has become fashionable to run down colonialism, District Officers and their assistants are made out to be monsters of iniquity. Of course there were bad ones but the majority of them were a wonderful set of men who did an exceedingly difficult job under the most trying conditions. Imagine, at the age of twenty-eight being put in charge of an area, say, the size of Wales, populated by an enormous number of Africans and with one assistant to help you. You had to look after their every need, you had to be mother and father to them, and you had to dispense the law. And in many cases the law, being English law, was of such complexity that it defeated even the devious brain of the indigenous population.

On many occasions, on my forays into the forest, I had passed the big mud-brick courtroom with its tin roof and seen Martin — the sweat pouring down him in torrents — trying some case or other, the whole thing being made even more complicated by the fact that villages, sometimes separated only by a few miles, spoke different dialects. Therefore, should there be dissension between two villages, it meant that you had to have two interpreters from the two villages and an interpreter who knew both dialects who could then interpret Martin. As in courts of law anywhere in the world, you knew perfectly well that everybody was lying the hind leg off a donkey, I had the greatest admiration for Martin’s patience and solemnity on these occasions. The cases could range from suspected cannibalism, via wife stealing, to simple things like whose cocoa-yam patch was invading whose, inch by subtle inch.

On the many occasions that I had visited West Africa, I had only met one D.O. who was unpleasant.

I was very surprised at Martin’s appearance because, at that time in the morning, he should have been up to his eyes in office work. He came down the hillside almost at a run, gesticulating like a windmill and shouting things at me that I could not hear. I waited patiently until he reached the shade of the marquee.

“So you see,” he said, throwing out his arms in a gesture of despair, “I need help.”

I pushed a camp chair forward and pressed him gently into it.

“Now stop carrying on like a mentally defective praying mantis,” I said. “Just shut up for a minute and relax.”

He sat there mopping his brow with a sodden handkerchief.

“Pious!” I shouted.

“Sah,” replied Pious from the kitchen.

“Pass beer for me and the D.O. please.”

“Yes, sah.”

The beer was of a nauseating brand and not really cold because in our rather primitive base camp our only method of refrigeration was to keep the beer in buckets of water which was itself lukewarm. However, in climates like that where you perspire constantly — even when sitting immobile — you need a large liquid intake and for the daytime beer was the best.

Pious gravely poured the beer out into the glasses and Martin picked his up with a shaking hand and took a couple of frenzied gulps.

“Now,” I said, putting on my best soothing-psychiatrist voice, “do you mind repeating, slowly and clearly, what you were shouting as you came down the hill? And, by the way, you shouldn’t run about like that at this hour of the day, ‘A’ it’s bad for your health and ‘B’ it doesn’t do your public image any good. I thought you’d had a terrible uprising in Mamfe and that you were being pursued by vast quantities of Africans with spears and muzzle-loaders.”

Martin mopped his face and took another gulp of beer.

“It’s worse than that,” he said, “ much, much worse. ”

“Well,” I said, “softly and calmly tell me what’s the matter.”

“It’s the District Commissioner,” he said.

“Well, what s the matter with him?” I inquired, “Has he sacked you?”

“That’s the point,” said Martin, “he well might. That’s why I want help.”

“I don’t see how I can help,” I said, “I don’t know the District Commissioner or, as far as I am aware, any of his relatives, so I can’t put in a good word for you. Why, what heinous crime have you committed?”

“I suppose I had better begin at the beginning,” said Martin.

“It’s always a good place to start,” I said.

He mopped his face again, took another sustaining gulp of beer and glanced round furtively to make sure that we weren’t overheard.

“Well,” he said, “you probably haven’t noticed; I’m quite good at my job, but unfortunately when it comes to entertaining and things like that I always seem to manage to do the wrong things. When I had just been promoted to D.O. — that was in Umfala — the first thing that happened was that the bloody D.C. came through on a tour of inspection. Well, everything went splendidly. I had my district in apple-pie order and it seemed as though the D.C. was rather pleased with me. He was only staying one night and by evening I really thought that the whole thing had been a success. But it was very unfortunate that the lavatory in my house had ceased to function and I couldn’t get it fixed in time so I had had a very comfortable grass shack built well away from the veranda, behind the hibiscus hedge. You know, a hole in the ground and a cross-pole on which you sit. Well, I explained this to the D.C. and it seemed that he quite understood. What I hadn’t realised was that my entire African staff were under the impression that I had built it for them and had been using it for several days before the D.C.’s arrival. Just before dinner the D.C. wandered out to the latrine and, apart from the contents which rather put him off, since he was under the impression that it had been done specially for him, he then sat on the cross-pole, which broke.”

It was my turn now to become slightly alarmed.

“God in heaven,” I said, startled, “didn’t you check the cross-pole?”

“That’s the point,” said Martin. “I’m so bad at that sort of thing.”

“But you might have killed him or, worse still, drowned him,” I said. “I know what our latrine’s like here and I certainly wouldn’t like to fall into it.”

“I can assure you he didn’t enjoy the experience either,” said Martin dismally. “He shouted for help of course and we got him out, but he looked like a sort of er... a sort of er... sort of walking dung heap. It took us hours to wash him down and get his clothes cleaned and pressed in time for his departure the following morning, and I can assure you, my dear boy, we sat down to a very late dinner and he ate very little and the conversation was frigid to an almost polar degree.”