Gerald Durrell - Fillets of Plaice

“Gerry,” she squeaked, “isn’t this exciting?”

“Well, it may be for you,” I said, “but it’s a pain in the neck as far as poor Martin is concerned.”

“But the D.C!” she said again. “It might mean a promotion for Martin and it might even mean one for Alec.”

“If it’s organised properly,” I said. “The reason we’re having this council of war is to make sure that nothing goes wrong because, as you know, Martin is accident prone...”

Martin, thinking that I was going to tell her the hideous story of the D.C. and the latrine, made one of his windmill gestures to stop me and immediately knocked his glass of beer onto the floor.

“Sorry, sah,” said Amos. The Cameroonians had an endearing habit of saying “Sorry, sah” whenever arty accident befell you, as though it was their own fault. If, for example, you were following a line of carriers in the forest and you tripped over a root and grazed your knee, you would hear “Sorry, sah,” “Sorry, sah,” Sorry, sah,” “Sorry sah,” echoing back along the whole line of carriers.

“You see what I mean?” I said to Mary as Amos cleaned up the mess and brought Martin a fresh glass of beer.

“Yes, I do see,” she said.

“Well, we won’t discuss it now,” I said. “We’ll wait till the others arrive.”

So we drank our beer thoughtfully and listened to the hippos gurgling and roaring and snorting in the river some three hundred feet below us.

Presently McGrade arrived. He was a very impressive Irishman of enormous dimensions with almost pillar-box-red hair and vivid blue eyes, and he had one of those lovely Irish accents that are as soft as cream being poured out of a jug. He slumped his massive form onto a chair, seized Martin’s glass of beer, drank deeply from it and said, “So you’re being visited by royalty, then?”

“The nearest approach to it,” said Martin, “and kindly give me back my beer. I’m in urgent need of it.”

“Is he coming by road?” enquired McGrade anxiously.

“I think so,” said Martin, “Why?”

“Well, I wouldn’t give that old bridge very much longer,” said McGrade. “I think if he came across that we might well have to bury him here.”

The bridge he was referring to was an iron suspension bridge that spanned the river at one point and had been built in the 1900s. I had crossed it many times myself and knew that it was highly unsafe but it was my one means of getting into the forest so I always used to get my carriers to go across one at a time. As a matter of fact, McGrade’s prediction about the bridge was perfectly correct because not many months later a whole load of tribesmen came down from the mountain regions carrying sacks of rice on their heads and all crossed the bridge simultaneously, whereupon it collapsed and they crashed a hundred feet or so into the gorge below. But Africans, by and large, are rather like Greeks. They take these unusual incidents in their stride and so not one of the Africans was hurt, and the thing that annoyed them most was that they lost their rice.

“But he can’t come across the bridge, can he?” said Martin, anxiously looking round at our faces, “Not unless he’s coming with carriers.”

McGrade leaned forward and patted Martin solemnly on the head. “I was only joking,” he said. “All the roads and bridges that he will have to cross to get here are in perfect condition. When you want a job well done you get an Irishman.”

“Now,” I said, “we’ve got a Catholic in our midst as well as a Pious and a Jesus.”

“You,” said McGrade, smiling at me affectionately and rumpling his mop of crimson hair, “are just a bloody heathen animal collector.”

“And you,” I said, “spend more time in the bloody confessional than mending the atrocious roads and bridges that we have got round here.”

At that moment Robin Girton arrived. He was a small, dark man with a hawk-like nose, large brown eyes that always had a dreamy expression in them and gave you the impression that he wasn’t really with you. But he was, in fact, like all the United Africa Company people I had come across, exceedingly astute. He never spoke unless it was absolutely necessary and generally sat there looking as though he was in a trance. Then, suddenly, in a soft voice that had a faint tinge of North Country in it, he would come out with a remark that was so pertinent and intelligent that it summed up so succinctly what everybody else had been arguing about for an hour and a half.

He arranged himself elegantly in a chair, accepted a glass of beer and then glanced round at our faces.

“Isn’t it exciting?” said Mary with great enthusiasm.

Robin sipped his beer and nodded his head gravely.

“I gather,” he said, “that we have been summoned here to do Martin’s work for him as usual.”

“Now, hold on,” said Mary indignantly.

“If you’ve come here in that sort of a mood, I’d rather you left,” said Martin.

“We’ll leave when your beer runs out,” said McGrade.

“What do you mean,” said Martin, “doing my work for me?”

“Well,” said Robin, “I do far more good for the community by selling them baked beans and yard upon yard of Manchester manufactured cloth carefully embossed with aeroplanes than you do running around hanging them right, left and centre for murdering their grandmothers who probably deserved to die in the first place.”

“I haven’t hanged a single person since I’ve been here,” said Martin.

“I’m surprised to learn it,” said Robin. “You administer the place so badly that I would have thought there’d be a hanging every week.”

To hear them you would think that they loathed each other but in actual fact they were the closest of friends. In such a tight little European community you had to learn to live with those people of your own colour and build up a rapport with them. This was not a colour bar. It was simply that at that time the numerous highly intelligent Africans who visited or lived in Mamfe would not have wished to mix with the white community because they would have felt, with their extraordinary sensitivity, that there would be embarrassment on both sides.

I felt it was high time to call the meeting to order so, seizing a beer bottle, I banged it on the table. A chorus of “Yes, sah,” “Coming, sah” came from the kitchen.

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve done since I arrived,” said Robin.

Pious appeared carrying a tray of liquid sustenance and when all our glasses had been replenished I said, “I now call this meeting to order.”

“Dear me,” said Robin mildly, “how dictatorial.”

“The point is,” I said, “that although we all know. Martin is a splendid sort of chap in his way, he is an extremely bad D.O. and, even worse, has no social graces whatsoever.”

“I say,” said Martin plaintively.

“I think that’s a very fair assessment,” said Robin.

“I think you’re being very cruel to Martin,” said Mary. “I think he’s a very good D.O.”

“Anyway,” I said hastily, “we won’t go into that. The reason for this council of war is so that while Martin is making sure that his district is in order we can take over the entertainment side of the thing so that there’s no hitch and the whole thing runs smoothly. Now, I have inspected the house and I’ve got Pious in control of Martin’s staff for a start.”

“There are times,” said McGrade, “when you have strange flourishes of genius which I can only attribute to the tiny drop of Irish blood you’ve got in your veins. I’ve long envied you that steward.”

“Well, envy away,” I said, “you’re not pinching him from me. He’s too valuable. It now comes to a question of food. And this is where I thought that Mary could help.”