EARLY DAYS

Memories. Why do we remember what we do remember? Memories  are scenes we can easily recall, as opposed to the countless events we have witnessed and whose traces are most likely still locked away somewhere in the deepest recesses of the brain. Are the experiences that we can most readily bring up to the surface necessarily the most important? Perhaps not, and certainly we now know (because of psycho-analysis) that many particularly painful experiences are forcibly repressed, though not completely eliminated. Nonetheless, it is perverse to believe that what we cannot easily access is more significant than what we can, and anyway what is important to the child may seem of little interest to the adult, and vice-versa.         ……………………………………………………………….

My very first memory is of being on a ship passing through the Suez Canal. I must have been three, or at most four, at the time. I can see the colours of the dawn and they are not pink and orange but shades of sandy-yellow and brown. I am fascinated by how slowly the immense ship ¹ is moving ― if not quite at a snail’s pace, then certainly that of a tortoise. The ‘banks’ are right there at eye-level; for I am looking through a port-hole of the cabin while my mother is still asleep.
Then the veranda of a small one storey ‘house’, hardly more than a shack; the rickety veranda is cool, deliciously cool, because of the dense overhanging trees. I am cycling up and down on a red tricycle while my mother is having a Swahili lesson. The teacher is a dignified elderly African dressed in a cast-off dark European suit complete with a hat and an umbrella, or at any rate a cane. My mother, a pretty and well-dressed young white woman, is making heavy weather of her Swahili lesson, and I shout out the answers to many of the questions as I tricycle to and fro. I am not sure what the local word for ‘Madame’ was, but apparently the teacher, when reporting on progress to my father, said something like “Memsahib not too good, little boy very good.”

Then, the same veranda but on a very different occasion. I am being held down while an African on his knees is digging out with a wooden spatula horrible things called ‘jiggers’ which get in under your toenails. Presumably, this was a very painful procedure but I don’t remember screaming, only the extreme care of the African. I notice with surprise how much paler the skin of the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet is.

This is Africa, the planet of insects. At night we often heard hyenas howling in the darkness and coming quite close to the Mission settlement, but one gets used to this and no one seems to have actually been molested by one, or by any other wild animal. Insects, however, you cannot avoid. My mother wears thigh-length leather boots in the evenings and we all sleep under mosquito nets, take Palidrome pills at every meal but still usually end up getting malaria anyway. Insects are everywhere, some wonderfully beautiful like the moths that beat against the (probably plastic) window panes and smaller ones that circle endlessly around the kerosene lamps until they drop with exhaustion. Millipedes and centipedes crawl all over the floor, but ants are the worst: every table and chair has bowls of water around the legs and ants still manage to get onto the table and into the sugar and bread.

        Third memory. An irate peasant woman with a coloured kerchief is haranguing my mother because the Mission donkey has got into her vegetable plot². My Swahili isn’t up to this and she probably doesn’t speak it anyway;  my father is away, or at school teaching, thus mutual incomprehension. I watch apprehensively held tight in my mother’s arms. Eventually the local chief arrives to try and smooth things over, maybe compensation is paid.

¹ The ship was The Franconia, a troop-ship taking African soldiers back to their native lands after the end of WWII, and which also had a few civilian passengers including my mother and myself going out to join my father who was already in Kenya on a Methodist Mission station. 
² Agriculture was at the time, and still is in some parts of Africa, entirely carried out by women.

BODMIN and GRAN TABB

During the ages of three and eleven, I spent almost all my life in Africa, first in Kenya and then in Bathurst, Gambia. But interspersed in all this were furloughs when my parents came back for a few months leave which they spent in Cornwall, their county of origin.  I had been born in a ramshackle house in Bodmin (17 Lower Bore Street) still occupied by my grandmother, and  though I don’t remember that event (my birth), the most important and often most traumatic event in anyone’s life, I do have vivid memories of the house spread over many years and reaching well into adolescence.
        Bodmin was for me basically a one-house and one-person town, the person being my grandmother Ethel Tabb. At the time scarcely anyone had television and people like the Prime Minister and the Queen were just voices on the radio that might, or might not, actually exist for all one knew. In the closely knit provincial world of Bodmin, local people became huge figures, their idiosyncrasies multiplied a thousandfold, and my grandmother was certainly one of the more prominent inhabitants.
        But first, the house. It was straight out of Dickens. It had two floors, a large granite step leading onto the main street and was lit by candles or by two mantle gas lamps with ornate prettily painted glass reflectors, one on the mantelpiece above the coal fire downstairs and the other in the larger upstairs bedroom. There was no running water or inside toilet. The backdoor gave onto a crudely cobbled yard with a standpipe providing water for four families. In front of the tap was a long, bare table in dark wood with a china bowl and there Mr. Parr, the next-door neighbour, would shave himself every morning in cold water using a cut-throat razor. Ethel, as I called her, was forever complaining about him monopolising the yard with a table “big enough to seat a family of ten”. Mr. Parr, a moustached, illiterate, gaunt, impressive looking man had been decorated in WWI and, whenever there was an occasion, proudly displayed his medals. His wife was frail and more educated ― as was usually the case with working-class families ― even a little ladylike. They had a small organ and the local minister of the Ealom Brethren, to which they belonged, sometimes came to play a few hymn tunes that you could hear through the wall. I don’t think they ever had any other visitors.

Next to the Parrs was Emma, a middle-aged woman who supported herself by making scones and pasties selling them directly on the street from a sort of hatch. Then there was another family, maybe two. At the other end of the yard was a dark alley leading to a bucket toilet where squares of newspaper stuck onto a rusty nail served for toilet paper.
The kitchen of Gran Tabb’s house was a step down from the living room and had a large butcher’s hook hanging from the middle of the ceiling which somewhat frightened me, though nothing was ever suspended from it as far as I can remember. There was a small gas stove for cooking, sole concession to modernity, and we must not forget the tabby-cat fed from leftovers of the main meal (no one bought catfood then).
The front, or living, room was rather different, a treasure trove of strange and wonderful objects, in a way weirder than anything I’d seen in Africa. There was an enormous turtle on the wall brought back from South America ― Gran’s husband had been in the Navy ― and, I think, maybe one or two other such stuffed mementoes, even at one time an alligator though I can’t remember that. Near the fireplace a policeman’s truncheon was dangling in evidence, Gran Tabb’s idea being that a potential burglar would imagine it was a policeman’s house. This room had one of those large ingle-nook windows in which you could sit, spending half the day watching the people go by through the net curtains. There were a few cars but not many; in my mother’s era it would have been horses and carts.
This main room was dominated by a large, heavy mahogany table with pull-out leaves covered with a thick colourful velvet (or mock velvet) drape with various scenes embroidered on it. This table was, or had been, the centre of Gran Tabb’s life, at once an eating place, play place (for tin soldiers and the like)  and, most important of all, a workspace. Left a widow with three children to bring up at the age of thirty, Gran Tabb ran a small dressmaking business in true ‘cottage industry’ style, rising at four in the morning to work at dresses before getting the breakfast for the children. Customers came to the house so it was at once shop, workshop, living space and, in my grandfather’s time, hospital as well.
I say ‘cottage industry’ but one thing Gran Tabb’s 18^th or early 19^th century forerunners did not have was a Singer Sewing Machine. With its foot-worked treadle, its elaborate transfer decoration, its dead weight and gleaming machinery, it looked to me like a fantastic grown-up toy stranger than anything out of the Arabian Nights. Apart from the mining areas of St. Austell and the extreme south, Cornwall had been little affected by the industrial revolution. But the mighty Singer Sewing Machine had penetrated to the most isolated hamlets and was, even more than the railway, the most potent symbol of advanced civilization not only in England but all over the world ― I was amazed to read the other day that Lenin’s parents in far away Russia had one. My grandfather on my father’s side actually worked as  a travelling rep for Singer, delivering machines (bought on hire purchase terms) around the countryside with a horse and cart.

Gran Tabb’s own father had run a horse and carriage business in Penzance, his customers being mainly local gentry out for a ride and Gran Tabb herself, after finishing an apprenticeship as a dressmaker, had entered  service as a lady’s maid to, amongst other worthies, the wife of the Rear Admiral Sir James Sturgeon Jackson in Plymouth. This sort of thing was, at the time, not unlike students going abroad for a year or two on some volunteer scheme: it meant young country people could travel and have a larger choice of possible husbands ― this was how Gran Tabb met her own husband. In Bodmin, many of Gran’s customers left her offcuts from expensive cloths that she could use for dresses for her two girls, my mother and Auntie Phyllis. This added a dash of luxury and elegance to the somewhat grim situation in which the three children found themselves after their father died in his early thirties. The great events of the year were the Conservative and Liberal Party balls at the Town Hall, and the two Tabb girls were certainly well decked out for that.

Gran Tabb was a person of the spoken rather than the written word ― I say this without any derogatory sense intended. She read while quietly mouthing the words under her breath as apparently most people did until the end of the 18^th century. Her choice of reading did not, I think, extend much beyond Women’s Weekly though she knew off by heart an amusing Victorian poem called “Tea in the Arbour” which was trotted out regularly at family gatherings. But her conversation was loaded with vivid proverbial sayings and hilarious anecdotes. Speaking of someone who walked very slowly, she would, for example, say “He’s like a crab going to gaol”. No one spoke actual Cornish any more at the time, but Gran’s conversation included a fair number of strange words and expressions; we always said we ought to make recordings of her talking but, alas, never got round to it.
Forthright and often caustic though basically good-hearted,  she was someone you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of. She didn’t much care for her sister-in-law, Aunt Dora, because of her social pretensions ― she had once been a governess to the local gentry. Gran Tabb always referred to her as ‘Old Dummond’ and would go around deliberately opening windows to make a draught when Aunt Dora visited as she did virtually every day. I have to admit reluctantly that Gran Tabb was somewhat erratic, not to say flagrantly unjust, in her estimations of people, also that her practical jokes were sometimes taken a shade too far. There was a somewhat retarded young boy in the neighbourhood whom Gran Tabb allegedly once sent to the butcher’s to buy a pound of elbow grease and to the haberdashery to buy a reel of all-coloured black threads. An old man bent double with arthritis was referred to locally as ‘Capital K’, though not to his face.

Though the County Town at the time (today it is Truro) Bodmin wasn’t even on the main Great Western Railway and didn’t seem to have any factories and hardly any offices, though there was an enormous masonry yard at the bottom of the next street scattering dust everywhere and mainly devoted to producing tombstones. Bodmin was my grandfather’s territory, not Gran’s, and arriving at Bodmin from relatively fashionable Penzance, she had apparently summed it up as, “Funny sort of place, nothing here but a barracks, Assizes and a prison”. However, it was the right size for a town (my estimation) since you could easily walk across it from end to end in an afternoon and there were plenty of beautiful walks all around it ― no suburbs to speak of. It was large enough for there to be people passing you didn’t know, but small enough for everyone to know the people that mattered. Also, for some reason the main street was extremely wide at our end, almost like that of a modern American town, though there was hardly any traffic.

Apart from the introduction of the sewing machine and, more recently the cinema and the transistor radio, modernity had barely touched Bodmin, or for that matter most of Cornwall apart from the mining areas, then in irreversible decline. Gran Tabb was unimpressed by modern ways and inventions, dismissing television (which barely anyone had at the time) as “Nothing but Panorama”. She wasn’t, I learned later, referring to the television programme ‘Panorama’  but to a distant ancestor of the cinema, a magic lantern apparatus she had seen in Penzance. She often used to say, “One day they’ll change the Bible” and didn’t know what to think when some of her family informed her that this had already happened, meaning a new translation. There was a huge family Bible with brass clasps in the house that I could barely lift, lavishly illustrated with line drawings; the introductory pages recorded the family weddings and births entered in now faded copperplate writing.
Amongst modern inventions,  an exception  was made for the car ― “I like motoring” ― but it was not really envisaged as a means of transport but rather as a continuation of her own father’s pleasure cab business. My uncle eventually managed to buy a small Austin and Gran Tabb would dress up elaborately for the occasion always wearing a large black straw hat that I referred to as ‘the Edwardian’. I do not think she ever travelled anywhere by train, indeed practically never left Bodmin once she settled there. She was horrified by my father’s decision to take my mother and me out to darkest Africa and allegedly sobbed her heart out, repeating “Never see she again ― and that dear boy”.
What of appearance? When I knew her, a wrinkled face but with good features still, pale skin and what I can only describe as an inquisitive expression: her most typical stance was standing on the granite and slate doorstep and peering round to see who might be coming up the street. She had very long hair which she lubricated with cold cream every morning and did up into an elaborate sort of bun  ― she had once been given lessons by an Italian hairdresser whilst a lady-in-waiting. She was a surprisingly cheerful person despite her difficult life: her husband got sunstroke and was honourably discharged from the Navy, in effect sent home to die. Since it was not actually wartime, she only got a miserable pension and had three kids to look after. In those days doctors would ask “Can you pay?” before they entered working-class houses and people only ever went into hospital to die, if that. But, strangely enough,  there is almost always a Good Samaritan who intervenes in such situations: in Bodmin it was Dr. Andersen who hardly ever charged his patients at all and occasionally bullied well-known specialists visiting him to go and see his poor patients pro bono. BUT his Bodmin co-practitioners said, “It’s all right for you, you’ve got private means, I’ve got children to educate”. People didn’t quite know what to make of  Dr. Andersen: on the one hand he was obviously a ‘good’ man but he was also known to be a freethinker or even an agnostic. Difficult.
There is, I think, little point in comparing ‘those days’ to these, and deciding which was best. But it is worth stating that, surprisingly, when doing just this in her reminiscences, my mother summed it all up by saying, “Then, less comfort but more freedom”. This sounds rather strange given the harsher laws and narrow views of people at the time. But what my mother probably had in mind was not social and political freedom but simply the freedom to move about. A medium-sized town like Bodmin had virtually no traffic even when I was around, and in my mother’s youth there would have been nothing but horses and carts. Children could (and did) wander about aimlessly wherever they wanted all day long in a way that is scarcely credible today.

My grandmother had few political or religious views; she responded to people, not theories. Like many other working-class people, she was grateful to the post WWII Labour government for introducing the NHS and other changes  and looked up to people like Nie Bevan as if he were a latter-day saint. But there was no sense that working people ‘deserved’  these benefits, they were more like surprising gifts showered from above, manna from heaven. Cornwall has always been a land  of fishermen, miners and low-income farmers barely scratching a living on the generally poor soil; it never developed an ‘industrial proletariat’ in the Marxist sense, miners being something of a class apart, especially the élite Cornish tin miners. There was in Cornwall very little hostility towards the gentry: there weren’t that many of them, they didn’t cause any trouble, and anyway people depended on them for employment as gardeners, coachmen, grooms, servants and the like. They lived their life and you lived yours; Church and State were immovable, timeless entities, neither good nor evil. Though Bodmin was a town, it was a provincial market town that depended on the immediate country around it, and the inhabitants had much the same attitudes as country people from whom they were barely separated. And country people have always been the despair of socialist revolutionaries for their passive acceptance, or even active endorsement, of social inequalities ― interspersed with occasional, sudden and unpredictable bursts of rebellion that just as abruptly subsided into torpor and indifference once again. Cornwall did have its revolts but they tended to be for reasons we would regard today as extremely bizarre, witness the Prayer Book Rebellion brought about by changes in the liturgy after the Protestant Reformation.   
Gran Tabb often used to say towards the end of her life, “Don’t you be paying for a coffin, an old orange-box will be good enough for the likes of me.” At the time I felt embarrassed, not  knowing quite how to take this. Maybe Gran Tabb was genuinely bothered at the thought of her family being landed with the expenses of a funeral, but it’s more likely there was something else going on here. It expressed a vague sense that there was something wrong: after a hard and useful life to end up not even to be able to pay for one’s own funeral! The attitude was somewhere between resignation and protest, but closer to the former than the latter. Life was hard, life was unfair, but this wasn’t anyone’s fault, not the government’s, not the monarchy’s, not the social system’s, not even God’s. That was how things were and how doubtless they would always be. It has occurred to me, reading over what I’ve just written, that this sort of inherently pessimistic attitude towards life, call it defeatist or stoical as you will, may have somehow rubbed off on me, and is one of the reasons why I never really felt at ease with socialist doctrines even when I found myself morally obliged to endorse them. 

BATHURST

Bathurst, now called Banjul, is the capital of the tiny West African country, Gambia. The country is really little more than two narrow strips of land adjoining the Gambia river, Bathurst being a trading station  founded by the Portuguese centuries ago mainly for trading slaves, and subsequently named after Lord Bathurst when it became an English colony. Little remained of this grisly past except a couple of rusty cannon on Barra, an island opposite Bathurst, and the picturesque Christmastime celebration called Fanal  first instituted by the Portuguese when processions paraded round the streets at night bearing elaborate wooden imitation ships lit by candles inside ― a marvellous sight.   
        When I knew Bathurst in the forties and fifties it was a medium-sized sprawling town where Arab style ships docked loading groundnuts, the principal export crop, and occasionally, very occasionally, an English cargo steamship. Bathurst had been almost untouched by modernisation: there were extremely few cars, no cinema, no shops even in the normal sense, only one or two ‘stores’ with goods laid out pell-mell, one small pharmacy, perhaps an optician, a diminutive mosque hidden away amongst dusty streets, a few docks and that was about it. For a young boy to grow up in, it was perfect ― at any rate I thought so. Bathurst was just right in my eyes, traditional enough to be full of life, an amazing medley of different tribes and customs, but modern enough, for example, to have a hospital (which I never entered).
        The streets were incredibly wide and mostly unpaved, just dust and grit, with plenty of trees, some decorously planted but some that just got there ― at the end of our road was a giant mango tree, you just walked by and stretched out your hand to take one. One could wander around Bathurst all day without any risk of being run over or even jostled by passers — by unless, of course, you went to the bustling colourful market. At street corners bearded Berber tribesmen sat round charcoal fires brewing coffee, in the outskirts statuesque Jollof women, famed in West Africa for their looks, dressed in gaily coloured robes walked to market with large baskets, and I think even pitchers, on their heads, Syrian traders sat inside bazaars full of rolls of cloths and Persian carpets smoking hookahs. In the Marina, an extensive tree covered area near the beach, Moslems in immaculately laundered white robes unrolled their straw mats at set hours, bowed to the ground and when they sat up again  their brows were covered with a neat patch of brown sand. The government building in colonial mock classical style also looked incredibly white; in front of it were gardens full of Cana lilies and two sentry boxes with smart African soldiers in khaki and red fezzes holding rifles who never moved an inch. The ‘beach’ itself stretched for literally miles and there was rarely anyone on it ― strangely, the Africans didn’t swim much. Or maybe not so strangely, since jellyfish were brought in by the tide daily and lay marooned quivering on the sand glinting like jellied prisms in the sunlight. I regarded them with a mixture of fascination and disgust but, surprisingly, I can’t remember ever being stung though I bathed often. My father, however, was less lucky since one afternoon, while swimming further out to sea, he got attacked by a Portuguese-man-of-war (a sort of giant squid) and came out of the sea covered in blood holding his stomach together. He was rushed to hospital and retained a scar to the end of his life as if he’d been gored by a wild boar. But this was the only dramatic incident on the beach or elsewhere in Bathurst for our family.  
        The climate was ideal, sunny for nine months of the year but never unbearably hot since there was always an evening breeze coming in from the sea very similar to what you get in Los Angeles, a city which, with its palm trees, exotic shrubs and its Mexicans reminded  me powerfully of Bathurst when I visited it a few years ago despite its modernity. For nine months of the year it never rained in Bathurst, then there was the rainy season but it wasn’t as bad as the monsoon, it never rained all day and I can’t remember any big storms or hurricanes. Once the streets were flooded and people travelled around the town in boats but I don’t think any great damage was done while the African children had the time of their lives paddling around, there is nothing quite like bathing in rainwater. 
        What else do I recall? Africans passing each other in the street, inclining ceremoniously and saying “Shalam Aleikum”, with the reply “Shaleikum Shalam”. In my earlier days I had a bright red tricycle ― everything in Bathurst seems to have been either dark green, white or red ―  the only one I ever saw in the streets. Strangely, I never graduated to a bicycle and I can’t even remember seeing any. I used to go to the beach to collect cuttle-fish amongst the flotsam and jetsom and sell them to the silver-workers plying their trade in exchange for a few coins ― they used the soft but gritty inside to polish silver and other metals. (Keith Walton has suggested that they probably used them to make impressions in the very ancient ‘lost wax’ method of jewellery making.) For Bathurst still had a certain amount of pre-industrial ‘cottage industry’ except that there were no cottages, just stalls in the ground or on the sand.
        So, in Bathurst you had the variety and interest of a moderate sized town but without most of the inconveniences: there was no pollution, always plenty of room, beaches a stone’s throw away that stretched into the tropical sunset and fruit that could be picked from the trees or bought for a few coins ― some women eked out a livelihood just selling oranges on wooden dishes in front of their homes. The ‘houses’ were not exactly mud huts but often not much more extensive, almost all single storey, some were made from breeze-blocks and bits of timber, but it was nothing like the shanty-towns you get in Brazil, or for that matter in many cities in Africa today. The whole town as I remember it was a delightful mixture of orderliness and disorder. I would wander around all day either alone or with one or two friends (all African) entirely without supervision and without incident. I sometimes went into the Police Station or the Army Barracks to talk to the police or soldiers who never seemed to have much to do and were only too glad of the interruption. Everybody knew the little white boy from the Methodist Mission, and if they didn’t they would from now on. Gambia did not at the time  have a proper Army, only a small Task Force, and while I was there hardly needed that. Why? The simple truth is that Gambia had very little worth stealing, no diamonds like Sierra Leone, no minerals except a little bauxite that was soon exhausted, no oil, no factories and very few rich people to burgle ― the only really successful businessmen were the Syrian and Lebanese traders and there weren’t very many of them. There were a few cases of people breaking into Church halls to steal stuff for Jumble Sales or climbing up orange trees in private gardens, but no organised crime as such, no mafia, no teenage gangs even ― I myself had a sort of gang of my own but since we were all under twelve we weren’t capable of doing much harm, nor did we wish to. Since my time, even Gambia has had a putsch when, African style, soldiers took over while the President was out of the country but that was well into the future. In Gambia when I was there almost everyone was poor by today’s standards, even the Europeans (barring the Governor and his family), but I wouldn’t say there was misery. Up river, groundnut farmers scratched a hard living but they were at least independent producers and owned their own land. Women were worse off, I remember seeing some wading about in swampy land  trying to grow rice or other cereals while the men mostly lounged around ready to fight off non-existent wild beasts, what my grandmother would have called “Helping Dan to kill dead bees”.  
        Although there wasn’t any biology in the curriculum of the Methodist Boys’ High School, I seem to have had an early interest in wild life. I kept toads in an empty orange box filled with earth and used to hold them out to frighten Bassi, our cook, (since they were regarded as ill omened by the Africans) and give them a swim every so often in the enamelled metal bath we used ourselves. Later on I had a pet grass snake and God knows what else, and continued like that when I was in England. There was no running hot water in our house in Bathurst incidentally, water for a bath had to be heated downstairs on the wood-burning stove, and even we Europeans were still dependent on the bucket toilet system collected once a week by lorries. There was electricity for lighting, however, though most people lived by day anyway, the school opening early and closing at one o’clock. I slept in a camp-bed enclosed in a voluminous mosquito net, it was like entering another world, and instead of a rug to step out onto in the morning there was a leopard skin. The ceilings were very high and fruit bats flew in at night becoming quite a nuisance ― my father was always rushing around trying to shoo them out, the best method being to stun them with a quick blow to the nose. There were also plenty of cockroaches.
        What about schooling? That hardly entered into my list of prerogatives and I can remember hardly anything about it except taking part in a play ― life was strictly outdoors. I was the only white boy in the school — the government children presumably had private tutors — and the other pupils were a mixture of Christians and Moslems. I do not know how the fee system worked, probably something like a sliding scale where those who couldn’t pay had it virtually free. Everyone was keen to learn so there was no discipline problem. I did manage to be near the top of the class but there were two boys ahead of me, Kebba Marina and above all Drammeh. I have sometimes wondered what Drammeh did in later life, the last I heard of him he went to an agricultural college in Egypt which may have been more useful than learning unnecessary things in an English university his parents couldn’t afford. He was a quiet, studious boy and lived near the mosque in the Moslem quarter. I was surprised by the small size and unimpressive appearance of the mosque, hardly more than a flat house with a dome all made of beaten earth. But this was before the oil era when Khadaffi poured Libyan oil money into building African mosques and schools including in the Gambia ― the reason why sub-Saharan Africa never saw him as an evil dictator and supported him right up to the end. What I most remember of the Moslem quarter was the little boys with heads shaved except for a tuft on the top: this was apparently so that they could be easily grabbed and hauled up from Hell into the Moslem Paradise.
        Gambia was not just a melting pot of tribes but also of religions. The tribal people up river, the Jolas especially, were still animists and, sad to relate, were looked down on by the better-off black Christians in whose homes they sometimes ended up as servants. It was Victorian society all over again. There were still vestiges of weird folk customs in the style of the Padstow Hobby Horse. You got kankarang men completely dressed up in dried leaves arranged round their body attached to hoops, and they danced in the streets and suddenly lunged to grab a passer-by, especially a woman, who was then supposed to lie down as if dead on the ground while a rusty knife was passed over her throat ― without actually touching the skin I hasten to add. I watched this from the large windows or the small veranda of the second floor of the Mission building, fascinated. One hardly dares imagine what went on in the past. You also came across Africans who wore a leather pouch containing a talisman or other ritual object which was supposed to protect them. Our hard of hearing carpenter who came to mend the windows would show me his pouch and say, “You shoot me, I live”.
        The educated Africans were almost all Christian though they were in a minority compared to the Moslems: as I write, Islam has just been declared the official religion of the Gambia by the current President. When I was there though, there was absolutely no bad feeling between Christians and Moslems, though there were very few, if any, conversions. My mother, who ran a free literacy class in the evenings got on extremely well with the Moslems ― and incidentally in all my time in the Gambia I never saw a woman wearing the hijab. The Moslems were even praised by my parents for being ‘peacemakers’ which sounds absolutely incredible today, and it is true that they did try to break up fights starting up between Africans in the streets. Local Moslem knowledge of Islamic theology did not, however, go very far, I remember the chief of one village saying proudly to my father, “We have the Koran”, regarding it as a holy relic rather than  a book since I doubt if anyone in the colony could read Arabic at the time.
        The Christians themselves were a motley band, often more divided amongst themselves than with the locals. There was a Roman Catholic Cathedral and school, an Anglican Mission, my father’s Methodist Mission and various evangelicals passing through on their perilous mission to bring the gospel to far away villages in the interior. Many of these American evangelicals were barely financed at all and claimed to ‘live on faith’ ― but they always seemed to survive.
        All in all Bathurst sounds something out of the Arabian Nights, as indeed it was for me. Some philosophers have wondered whether, if there was abundance everywhere and everyone was nice to each other, people would die of boredom. Possibly, there is something in this line of thought but Bathurst was not so entirely insulated from the darker side of life to make this prospect imminent. One very occasionally saw people in ragged clothes, there were dangerous snakes, storms and above all disease (though not yet AIDS) and we took pills for malaria at every meal though still got it. I remember being frightened when I heard about a man in a nearby village who chopped up his wife into little pieces ― almost certainly he was mentally disturbed ― but this was the only serious crime I ever heard of. Naturally, as the son of a white man, I had advantages that the locals did not have, though our style of living was so modest by today’s standards that one could hardly call it privileged. For many locals life was doubtless far from ideal but half the trouble was that the Gambians (rather like the Polynesians) did not appreciate their own advantages, namely the benign climate, the space, the beautiful trees and shrubs, the abundance of fruit, the absence of crime and warfare. They probably imagined that all countries were like this and that in England the fabled advantages of modern life that they knew from magazines would be added on to what they already had. Those who did make it to England got a rude awakening when confronted with the abysmal climate, the cramped urban environment and general unfriendliness of the English ― not so much because the English were, or are, racist as because citizens of the modern world are just too busy trying to  ‘get on’ in life to take it easy and enjoy themselves as the Africans were used to doing. For Gambians the tantalising giant shadow of the West hung over the blue skies of Bathurst, darkening and depreciating everything by comparison. Whereas I, who had actually been there, saw things otherwise.
          Also, for single European men, Bathurst must have seemed a dull spot indeed, no hotels, no bars, no cinema, no discotheques, and above all no girls. The odd daughter of a clergyman or an engineer who ended up in Bathurst like a migrating Monarch butterfly had all the white young men of the colony at her feet without batting an eyelid. I vaguely remember   some story well after my time of the bitter rivalry between an  Italian chef and an Englishman over a pretty young white girl which ended up with adultery, fighting in the street, and, if I am not mistaken, even murder. One friend of my parents, a tall, handsome Scot, brought his fiancée out to see whether she’d like colonial life, but she scuttled back in no time and that was that. My parents thought Malcolm might marry a native woman but in the end he didn’t, and he gradually declined into being just another aging white man caught between two worlds with no social prospects in either of them ― he worked as an accountant in a small Danish trading firm ― and, like a Graham Greene character, he ended up taking to drink. So Bathurst was not quite “all things to all people” but certainly to me at the time and at that age (4 -11) it was about the nearest thing to Arcadia or the Fortunate Isles that this world could possibly offer.   

The Shadow of Religion

the previous chapter about my early life in Bathurst, West Africa, gave the impression that during this time I led a charmed life. And so I did, as far as I can remember, and, although I am well aware that memory can play tricks, I do not think it can turn dark into light, or light into dark. There were, nonetheless, one or two issues that I remember vividly that didn’t affect me too much at the time but, retrospectively, could be seen as portents.
        The first concerned religion. Although my father was sent to Africa by the Methodist Missionary Society, he never took orders but remained a lay missionary. Often a mission station consisted of three persons, the first a pastor, the second a teacher and the third a doctor. My grandfather, Rebus Mules, whom I scarcely knew because he died when I was still very young had desperately wanted to be ordained as a Methodist minister but failed his final examinations, reputedly because he spent too much time on parish work. He came from a poor Cornish family and only went to theological college because some benefactor paid for him. He thus did not have the means to stay on and retake the examination and was obliged to get a job as a Singer Sewing Machine Representative though he was extremely active in the Cornish Church as a local preacher and an educated man when there were extremely few people in the St. Austell clay mining area who received further education. He probably hoped that my father would pick up the torch and himself get ordained but, though my father  did get to Bristol University to read history and was a local preacher even in his teens, he never seems to have considered becoming ordained. Being a lay missionary suited him perfectly since it was a more adventurous life than having a parish in England and there was much less pressure to conform. Although he had some disappointments  in life, my father lived in an era when it was still possible to believe wholeheartedly in the Christian religion as well as in socialism, education and democracy. Already in his later years, he found it more and more difficult to reconcile his belief in Christianity with his extreme left-wing political views and he was so flabbergasted when the Berlin Wall came down that he never once referred to the incident, nor for that matter to the Gulag.
        Anyway, I was brought up within the Christian religion. What effect did this have? Early on, very little: my father was not one of these Victorian parents who got their children to study the Bible before they could even walk. I do not think young children have much natural interest in religion, they take the world as they find it and don’t feel any need to ask “Who made it?” However, towards the age of nine or so, I became extremely pious ― though this probably didn’t make much difference to the way I behaved. I remember writing down faults in a little notebook and wanting to “have a perfect day”, that is, a day when I didn’t do anything wrong ― I don’t think I would have quite used the word ‘sin’. However, I found this quite impossible: always egotistical thoughts got in the way. I suppose eventually common sense took over and I dismissed the whole business ― for the time being.
        More serious was the concept of ‘eternity’. I never discussed this with my parents or with anyone but from a quite early age I felt a sort of dread of the very concept of eternity. This had nothing to do with whether one went to Hell or Heaven, it was simply the idea of ‘endless time’ that I found horrible. I decided that if ‘eternal life’ was ever offered to me, I would refuse it ― a  strange philosophical position for a nine year old boy to adopt. I repeat, this had nothing to do with punishment or suffering, only with the idea of infinity. I remember staring with fascination and horror at the label of a pot of Bear Honey on the breakfast table which portrayed a bear holding a jar of Bear Honey with a label on it portraying a bear holding a jar of Bear Honey, and so on ad infinitum. A little later on, I got tangled up in a similar ‘infinite regress’ when I thought about the thought of the thought of the thought of the thought of….
        Did all this have any subsequent repercussions on my life? Yes and No, or rather No and Yes. At around the age of twelve or thirteen, in England this time, I heard a real Hell Fire sermon delivered by a Methodist lay preacher ― my father was not present and he strongly objected to this sort of thing I hasten to add. The preacher was a brilliant orator and literally had the audience in this small Cornish chapel spellbound ― but spellbound with fright. It is about the only time in my life when it was true to say you could hear a pin drop. The preacher mentioned various signs of the coming end of the world when everyone would be judged and, in particular, he said that sunspots foretelling this had recently been seen. When I returned to my grandmother’s house that evening, I took down a Children’s Encyclopedia and looked up ‘sunspots’. The book said, amongst other things,  that sunspots had already been seen by the ancient Egyptians. I was extremely relieved and, more to the point, decided on the spot that official religion was a load of repulsive rubbish and that I wanted no more to do with it. At boarding school in my teens, I was known as ‘anti-religious’ though not exactly as an atheist: I made a watered down paganism my religion which I imbibed from my favourite authors, Shelley, Yeats and Arthur Rimbaud. But this was not the end of my love/hate relationship with religion which continues to this day ― although the society has changed so much that I sometimes find myself, as always swimming against the current, defending religion against the enveloping materialism and consumerism as the lesser of two evils.  SH 11/09/2025