Alan Moore - Jerusalem

That isn’t Bernard Daniels’s view, from his perspective of Fourah Bay College in the middle of the twentieth century. Bernard hails from a Krio family comparatively well-off after years of service to the Macauley and Babington trade company, and he imagines Europe generally — and England in particular — to be the fountainhead of all civilisation. This belief is prevalent amongst the Krio, mostly the descendants of absconded U.S. slaves, who through unswerving loyalty to their British bosses are Sierra Leone’s dominant and most prosperous ethnic group, with native tribes such as the Sherbro, Temne, Limba, Tyra, Kissi, and more latterly the Mende people drawn increasingly together in a shared resentment. Bernard is brought up in the belief that the indigenous tribesmen who live in the Protectorate are savages; embraces gold-rimmed spectacles and stately waistcoats, throws himself with greater diligence into his studies in an effort to more deeply underscore the critical dividing line. He looks at the society around him, at the outbursts of unrest and tribal riots that have continued intermittently since the great Hut Tax war of 1898 when British troops are sent in to suppress the Temne uprising, and Bernard sees the writing on the wall. It’s 1951, November, and Sir Milton Margai, born a Krio but raised as an ethnic Mende, is attending to the draft of a new constitution which will set the stage for decolonisation. Bernard has identified with the oppressor. He has taken on the master race’s fears and snobberies and doesn’t want to still be living in the Lion Mountains’ shadow when the animals control the zoo. Having acquired his law degree, he swiftly and efficiently begins to plan for his departure. Bernard marries his devoted young fiancée Joyce, as keen to make the move as he is, and arranges both their travel and some suitable accommodation once they get to London. Within only a few dizzying weeks his misplaced vision of the mother country has been butted squarely in the face by 1950s winter Brixton with its lights and catcalls, tilted trilbies, unfamiliar tumults. Wheezing innuendo in the barbers’ shops.

His scrawny legs still rolling from the ocean, Henry stumbles down the gangplank into nineteenth century Tiger Bay and, lacking Bernard’s expectations, finds it’s not too bad and in no way is it a shock to him, all the black faces, all the funny sing-song accents. The most startling thing to Henry’s mind is Wales itself, in that he’s never in his life imagined anywhere so wet and old and wild. It’s only when he meets Selina and they marry and nobody says a thing about it that he starts to truly understand he’s somewhere different now, and among different people. From Abergavenny they hike up to join the drovers in Builth Wells and are alone a night or two, camped out there in the million-year-old dark between giant hills, nothing like Kansas. Come the morning and the pair of them are naked as the day they’re born and holding hands as they pick their way slow and careful down the steep bank to a shallow stream what they can wash in. It’s real cold but his Selina is a plump young girl of twenty-two and they’ve got some hot blood between them. Pretty soon they’re having married congress standing up in foam and flow with the clear water churning all around their shins, out in the pinkness of the early daylight with nobody anywhere around except for all the birds that are at that time waking up and trying out their voices. Him and his new wife are kicking up a noise as well and Henry feels as if he’s in an Eden where nobody fell, with little diamonds splashing up and beaded on Selina’s pretty rump. He feels escaped, and can’t remember any moment in his previous life filled up with so much perfect joy. Then, after, when they’re lying on the bank to dry and catch their breath, Selina traces with her fingertip the fading violet lines on his damp arm, the ribbon that might be a road, the shape above it that might be a balance, and she doesn’t say a thing.

For Joyce and Bernard, twentieth century London is a different story. There’s a temperature inversion trapping car exhaust and factory smoke beneath low cloud, people are dying in their hundreds and the government are issuing the populace with useless paper masks in an attempt to look as if they’re doing something. Everybody’s coughing, spitting black muck onto overcast lanes with the Durex brand-name swimming forward out of backstreet fog in sticking-plaster cream and lipstick neon. Bernard realises belatedly that England too is a land of distinct and separate uncouth tribes — cosh-boys and market traders, socialists and spivs, white savages — united only by their grievance and an envy of their betters. Worse, nobody here seems able to appreciate the yawning gulf in status that exists between the black men of Sierra Leone’s Colony and those of its Protectorate, perceiving any coloured person as a coon regardless of their elocution or their bearing, irrespective of their spectacles and waistcoats. Joyce produces their first child, a boy named David, and is pregnant with their second while her husband finds that jobs for which he’s qualified, where his employers also have no qualms about his being African, are few and far between. It seems to Bernard that outside the capital there may be law firms who are not so used to the easy availability of quality employees as their London counterparts and who thus might be more impressed with his impeccable qualifications. He decides to cast his line further afield and at last gets a bite from a company of solicitors in somewhere called Northampton just as Joyce presents him with a second son, whom he proposes they name Andrew. Looking for accommodation in the new town, Bernard is confronted by a policy equating him with both dogs and the Irish while expressing a refusal to rent property to all three of these categories. His infuriating sense of being snubbed is only muddied by his sympathy for the position of the bigot landlords. If Bernard himself had space to let he knows he wouldn’t lease it to Dickensian criminals with vicious hounds, to drunken Irish labourers or to the great majority of his own workshy countrymen. When he gets news of rooms available not far from the town’s centre on a busy thoroughfare seemingly known as Sheep Street, Bernard’s celebratory mood endures until the final paragraph of the acceptance letter, where it states that this agreement is made on the understanding that just Mr. Daniels and his wife will be residing at the flat, and that there won’t be any pets or, most especially, children living there.

Meanwhile, in 1896, Henry and his young wife get carried to their new home on a vast and foaming tide of mutton. From what Henry understands, the landscape-bleaching herds are driven out from Builth and then persuaded to head east through Worcestershire and Warwickshire until they wash like bleating surf against Northampton. It’s a track been there a thousand years or more, and Henry hears how in the old days, century or so before, the drovers learn to stay away from inns where horses are tied up outside that look to be in too good a condition. This is on account of how these well-fed horses more than likely turn out to belong to highwaymen, who have a habit back then of befriending drovers who are headed east, inviting them to call in for a drink on their way back when they’ll have traded all their sheep for money. Naturally, this means that on the return journey they’ll be more convenient to rob and get left with their throats cut in some Stratford ditch. Because of this, most of the herdsmen carry on out of Northampton with their sheep and take them down to London, so they can head back to Wales through Bristol and down that way, missing out the Worcester taverns where the highwaymen are waiting. It occurs to Henry that this Wales — Northampton — London route marks out another triangle much like the one connecting England with America and Africa, and in both cases it’s a kind of cattle being moved. And then of course you’ve got another similarity in that some of the animals that Henry is in charge of — although not that many of them, now he comes to think about it — have been branded. The main difference is the colour of the goods. Henry considers how the movement of his family over generations has been down these well-worn paths of trade, whether that trade be sheep or people, U.S. steel or Buffalo Bill chapbooks, and supposes that these lines of least resistance, which first get carved out by enterprise, end up as destinies. It’s down these money-trails that, say, your great-great-grandpa’s fondness for a drink or else your grandma’s big green eyes go wandering, around the world and through the ages. Henry and Selina don’t have much of what you’d call a plan behind their journey, figuring they’ll maybe carry on to London with the drovers and if they don’t like it there, why, then they’ll head on back to Wales. This is before they reach Northampton and get funnelled in through its north gate in a great swathe of white, where there’s that circle-church that’s older than the hills, there’s that almighty tree been scarred in all the wars, and Henry and his wife Selina, with her mile-long tick-infested bridal train trotting behind her on the cobbles, first set eyes on Sheep Street.