The Dust Diaries (9 page)

Arthur watched them in silence, from a distance. They tolerated his eyes as they tolerated his presence. It was these traditional beliefs that wouldn’t be submerged beneath Christian ritual, and again he didn’t mind. Some of these ceremonies had already taken on a significance for himself, and if anythmg he felt they made him and his God a more acceptable intrusion. Part of the landscape. A new chapter in the myth of the country.

When the cup had been passed around full circle, and all the men had dowsed their limbs in beer, Arthur turned and began to walk back towards the village, its rondavels clustered together beneath the granite-strewn kopje. He walked to the one where he had stayed the night, a kitchen hut, its uneven shelves moulded from the wall and polished to a black that managed to gleam in the darkness. Here he put on his cassock and fastened the stiff dog collar about his neck before picking up his Shona prayer book, kneeling onto the hard floor and preparing himself for his own rituals for burying the dead.

He gave the service and last rites in Shona. He wasn’t yet fluent in the language but had learnt enough to perform his duties, memorising the necessary passages. The language fitted him well, he enjoyed the sensation of its vowels and sounds on his tongue. The alien intonation gave the words
A
music he had never found before, freeing them from immediate meaning, lending a rhythm and a metre he had failed to achieve with the broken syllables of English. As he spoke the sun rose behind the grey clouds, and the heat grew, expanded around them, closing them in a humid grip. The boy, who could have been any age between fifteen and twenty-five, the fever having drained him of his true appearance, had been lain out with care, his thin arms folded across his chest, and his body wrapped in pieces of white cloth. His skin had been oiled with groundnut oil, his hair washed with wild apple juice and his eyes cleaned. His mother stood beside the body, quiet and unmoving, her grief wrung from her throughout the night, leaving her hollow with mourning.

Arthur listened to the sound of his own voice shrink into the veld air and watched the shifting bare feet of the little crowd around the grave. When he finished he stood back to let the body be lifted into the newly dug hole, where the boy’s ritual friend, the
sahwira
, was waiting to receive it. But then he saw something was missing. The blanket. The blanket beneath the deceased’s head. There wasn’t one. Dropping his prayer book, he slipped his cassock over his head and began folding it into a neat bundle. As the heavy cloth slipped off him he felt a welcome rush of cool air against his skin, an escape of trapped heat. Kneeling to the ground, he placed the improvised blanket under the boy’s head, gently lifting him with his hand around the base of his skull, then lowering him again onto the white cloth. His head felt fragile, hollow, the bone beneath the skin as thin as a bird’s egg. The people remained quiet, and the boy’s mother looked straight ahead, out towards the mountains in the east. How many children had she lost in this way? How many more would she lose? No one could tell her, least of all him. He felt useless. He stood again and stepped back from the body. The men closed in and lowered it into the grave. Arthur looked at the mother. She was still, her face set, one tear that had outgrown the lip of her eyelid settling on her cheek instead.

The sky listened again, and as the
sahwira
arranged a few paltry belongings around the body—a cup, a catapult and a carved wooden necklace—and the boy’s father and cousins scattered the first handfuls of soil into the grave, the rain began once more. Large drops, that hit the ground heavily, leaving wet dents in the earth and turning the red dust dark. Arthur watched as the men began to shovel the earth back over the body, the loose soil filling in the shape of the boy: the crease between his upper arm and his torso, the shallow basket of his crossed arms, the spaces between his toes, the sunken sockets of his eyes. Soon there was no boy, just a pregnant swelling of disturbed soil, and eventually Arthur turned away, finding it hard to breathe under the restriction of his collar. As he walked back towards the rondavels and smoking fires of the village the last spadefuls of earth padded into the grave behind him, following him like footsteps.

Rhodes House Library, Oxford, England

I have come looking for you again. This time in the underground stacks of the Bodleian Library where I am hoping to find a seam of your life, a trace of you, running like an ore through the layers of books, documents, journals and letters buried beneath the streets of Oxford.

Making my way up Parks Road from the confusion of undergraduates and tourists on Broad Street, I pass the tall blue iron gates of Trinity College. I stop and look through their bars at the pristine lawns, symmetrical and level as the baize of a snooker table. An Asian couple are sitting on a bench at the edge of one of them. They have asked a passer-by, another tourist, to take their photograph. He sizes them up in the viewfmder, brings the camera down from his face, takes a step back, and tries again. The boy has his arm around the girl and both of them are wrapped in scarves. They smile, stiffen and wait for the click that will tell them this is caught forever, the moment confirmed. The passer-by hands the camera back and the couple thank him, then move on, cradling the camera and the frame of film inside it which holds the image in grains of silver, in fragile negative, that will, in years to come, be today: their memories of this town, of each other and maybe even of the passer-by who captured it for them. I stay at the gates for a while, feeling their cold iron against my cheek, looking at the implacable passivity of the college buildings, stately at the end of the lawns. Trinity was your college and I suppose these are the buildings that you must have walked through when you were a student here: writing, boxing, rowing, acting, playing out the gentleman’s life and preparing for a career in the law like your father and your brother before you. A half-blue, a runner, a member of OUDS, a poet who published his first pamphlet at the age of fifteen and then another here with Laurence Binyon. These are just some of the facts that I know about you, part of the scaffolding of names and dates that supports my idea of your life. But at the moment that is all I have, facts and the opinions of a few historians and theologians. But I want more than this, I want more than facts. I want to know you, who you were, and that is why I am here.

Turning away from the iron gates, I walk on up the street towards the library, the leaves of the trees turning above me, a few of them falling to the pavement, a slow burnt rain. The gothic Pitt Rivers Museum rises to my right, collections of skelet ons and other treasures housed within its patterned Victorian walls, turn into South Parks Road and walk up to the green brass dome that sits above the entrance to Rhodes House Library. Pushing the heavy door open, I walk in, my shoes squeaking on the polished white and black marble flooring. Busts of thinkers and academics look back at me from the far wall and the whole place bears a weight of study about it. A weight of history and lives kept.

Walking into the atrium I feel a thrill of anticipation at the thought of being so near you, of meeting you outside the pages of Steere’s biography, one to one. This sensation though, is also the excitement of investigation. Because I have not just been drawn here by the desire for more than facts. I have been sent here too, by a couple of lines in Steere’s book about your decision to leave for Africa that caught my eye and snagged on my mind:

There is an undocumented but persistent rumour of a love affair with a girl which might have changed Cripps’ earlier drawing towards the celibate life. This was apparently terminated by the decision to leave for Africa.

The statement is so cursory, so fleeting, that I can’t help but think it hides an undisclosed weight, like the tip of an iceberg that gives no sign of the bulk it carries beneath the water’s surface. This may of course be an illusion, a self-inflicted intuition, because in a way this is what I have been looking for. Evidence of your life beyond your actions, something that will give me a handle on the man behind the history. These lines seem to offer a chink of light onto such a man, suggesting as they do, a capacity for individual and romantic as well as philanthropic or Platonic love. But they cast a shadow as well as light. At times your life has seemed almost penitential in nature, as if governed by a duty of atonement, and I can’t help thinking that these two possibilities, an aborted love affair and the philosophy of your living, may be related in some way. That you had reasons to leave England as well as to go to Africa.

I walk up the dark wooden staircase to the right of the entrance hall and into a long narrow reading room, the walls floor-to-ceiling with books. Coats and bags hang in the corner to my left and there is a quiet hum of work. Down-turned heads, the click of fingers on a keyboard, the odd dry cough.

I type your name into the library’s computer system and it turns out you are not so hard to find. The words conjure up a list of your publications: poetry collections, novels, political tracts. But these aren’t what I’m looking for. What I want comes later: ‘X106: Correspondence, manuscripts, misc. photographs. 7 boxes.’ I fill out the reader’s request form, and hand it in to the librarian at the front desk. She tells me I’ll have to wait for a couple of hours; apparently you don’t come so easy after all.

I pass the time outside, walking through the buildings of the University that draw the eye upwards, as they were built to do, their yellow Cotswold stone contrasting against the bright blue of a clear autumn sky. Carved grotesques crouch and leer from under the modern guttering alongside yawning gargoyles, their mouths full with dripping lead pipes. It is lunchtime and the pubs are packed close with students after lectures and tutors in armchairs, shielding themselves against the day behind their papers. I think about joining them, going in for a drink in the smoke and the talk, but I keep on walking instead, the city flowing around me, restless with thinking about what those boxes will reveal of you.

When I return the library’s warmth is welcome after the cold of the day outside, an embrace of books and heating. I find a table alone, then go up to the desk and request your boxes. The librarian asks me which ones I want. She won’t let me have you all in one piece, I can only have you two at a time. So I take the first two. Begin at the beginning.

Taking the split cardboard lid off the first box, I find a large brown envelope, stuffed full with your letters. They are bound with a thin cord, and when I lift them out and pull on the knot to untie them, they give a little and expand, as if breathing out the air you breathed over them a hundred years ago. I turn over the first sheet and there is your handwriting. Seeing it there, in front of me, I suddenly feel as though I am trespassing, invasive, as if the sheaves of paper I am touching are not your letters, but your lungs. I have read about you, talked about you, but this is my first physical contact with you, tracing the looping, slanting ink that ran back through the pen to your hand.

I begin to read, but it is not always easy. You often ignore the rules of writing: writing down, then across the same page, sometimes overlapping paragraphs and adding your own marginalia as you go, as if no piece of paper could ever be large enough to give you room for what you had to say.

As I work through your years in that library, you get even harder to read. The paper becomes cheaper, and sometimes it isn’t paper at all, but the back of a school exercise book, a scrap of newspaper, a rough piece of packing material. Letter by letter, box by box, I span the fifty years of your life in Africa, tracing it in your handwriting; large and open when you are optimistic, smaller and constrained when you are angry or concerned. Year by year, letter by letter, I also watch the writing disintegrate, the strong line waver, the touch on the paper weaken, until, by the 1940
s
and 50
s
it is a child’s hand, unsure and unsteady. A letter to your brother William dated 29 March 1940 tells me why:

My Dear William,

My left eye, afflicted with ulcerated cornea was removed in Salisbury hospital March 27
th
. It may heal soon (D. V.). Please let Edith and Violet know.

My love for you always,

A.S. Cripps

There is another a couple of months later:

May 5
th
, 1940

…My eye socket’s mudes may yield to exercise, so I hope, in the course of the next three months or so—with a view to my replacing a shade with a less conspicuous (and fairly cheap) glass eye (D. V.). But apparently they are by no means up to it—do you (as being surely something of a specialist on eye afflictions through your work on the Kent County Council) know of any particularly hopeful help to weakened eye-muscles, apart from the exercise of shutting and opening one’s eyelids?

And then, in a letter to your niece, my great aunt Elizabeth, dated 9 October 1951, your handwriting is gone altogether, replaced by another, confident and youthful. They are still your words, your voice, but speaking in another’s hand. Scanning to the bottom of the last page I find yours again, in a wisp of ink, awkwardly pulled and dragged across the paper to form a rough
A. S. C
. It could be the first efforts of a child, or not even writing at all, just the chance falling of a pen over the page. After this signature there is a postscript, again in the stronger hand:

P.S.: I would like you please to pray for your uncle Rev. A.S. Cripps, for he is getting deaf and when reading to him I have to shout for the same word for many times. My best wishes to you!

Yours in the Blessed Lord—L. M. Mamvura

The surname strikes a chord in my memory. Mamvura: this is the name of the man who became your secretary for the last twenty years of your life. A schoolteacher who rode across the veld on his bike to read and write your letters for you. Leonard Mamvura. I try to estimate how old he would be now—seventy? eighty? I wonder if he is still alive. For some reason the idea of a living connection with you is not one that has crossed my mind before, perhaps because you have always been history to me, an element of the past holding no purchase in the present beyond words on a page.