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Authors: Christopher Hope
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to do with him.
I was tempted to ask whether this ignorance was not related to their excessively shrunken world view. Their notions of the world have contracted like a leather cloak left out in the rain. And rain is, perhaps, the key. During my stay in the Royal Guest-house it rained almost every day. And this excessive moisture, damp or liquidity has probably affected their sense of distance, shrinking the world to the size of a miniature toy no bigger than the wooden tortoise a boy carves and keeps in his pocket.
Yet, paradoxically, what is closest to them they consider very large indeed. Although the island, by our standards, is pitfully small, they talk about it as if it were twice the size of Africa. They can imagine nothing beyond it. Yet if you probe patiently, you will discover faint racial memories of the role they once played in the world, âlong ago and far awayâ, sometimes stirring in their hearts.
If they have forgotten past dreams of glory, except when racked by spasms of involuntary race memory, they have managed to increase their emotional purchase on three things: animals, gardens and the starving. Mr Geoff was always asking after the starving, of whom he had seen many pictures. He appointed me official spokesman. Were there many starving where I came from? Would they always be starving? And if they would be starving always, what possible good was there in feeding them?
Questions flowed from this amiable man. He was, he said, ever interested in the other manâs point of view. But, personally, he preferred plants. Gardens were his true love. Had it not been his duty to wrestle daily with ungrateful Children of the Sun, he would happily have cultivated his garden. A lovesome thing, God wot!
As we walked around the garden on our evening promenade, amid foxgloves and columbines, he spoke of his yearning for a time he believed to have been golden, when Englishmen lived better, sweeter, rural lives. Before their trees died, when they inhabited a land unenclosed by hedges, when their noble forebears ran with the rabbit, and talked to the robin, and wandered on a carpet of greensward thick with elms and thronged with hosts of golden daffodils.
I could grieve with him for this vanished time, since it recalled our own â which had lasted longer, and endedmore recently, with the arrival of the white visitors and the Queenâs soldiers.
In Bushmanland it had been the farmers who had destroyed our game. In England who had destroyed their trees? I asked.
Enemies from the Netherlands, or Low Countries, had unleashed a plague, came the bitter reply. A doubled-edged destruction. Trees which survived the plague were destroyed in a great wind conjured up by evil forces, somewhere âover thereâ, which had cracked its cheeks and huffed and puffed until all the rest fell down.
Knowing how tenderly he felt towards the slaughtered goats of my childhood, I was very surprised, as I walked alone one evening in the peace of this garden, to hear the long, keening sob of what I took to be a lynx trapped in the hunterâs wire snare. His cry echoes across the rocky desert, interrupted only for brief moments when, demented by pain, he pauses to try and chew through his own leg â¦
Although I heard these cries of pain most distinctly, I saw no sign of the victim. But for me the scent became overpowering. I knew its ingredients: fear, helplessness and the hot breath of death.
No wonder then that I stepped carefully around the columbines. For the fiercest thing in the world is a heavy steel trap. It takes the leg and holds it until the hunter returns, be that a day or a week.
I begged Minehost to allow me to end the suffering of the lynx who cried in the night.
He said, wonderingly, that he knew nothing of the lynx.
If not the lynx, it must be several jackals, I said, thoughI had not known that this animal was found on the island, a clever, sly, greedy person, who runs as if he has burnt his feet
I was tempted to ask whether this ignorance was not related to their excessively shrunken world view. Their notions of the world have contracted like a leather cloak left out in the rain. And rain is, perhaps, the key. During my stay in the Royal Guest-house it rained almost every day. And this excessive moisture, damp or liquidity has probably affected their sense of distance, shrinking the world to the size of a miniature toy no bigger than the wooden tortoise a boy carves and keeps in his pocket.
Yet, paradoxically, what is closest to them they consider very large indeed. Although the island, by our standards, is pitfully small, they talk about it as if it were twice the size of Africa. They can imagine nothing beyond it. Yet if you probe patiently, you will discover faint racial memories of the role they once played in the world, âlong ago and far awayâ, sometimes stirring in their hearts.
If they have forgotten past dreams of glory, except when racked by spasms of involuntary race memory, they have managed to increase their emotional purchase on three things: animals, gardens and the starving. Mr Geoff was always asking after the starving, of whom he had seen many pictures. He appointed me official spokesman. Were there many starving where I came from? Would they always be starving? And if they would be starving always, what possible good was there in feeding them?
Questions flowed from this amiable man. He was, he said, ever interested in the other manâs point of view. But, personally, he preferred plants. Gardens were his true love. Had it not been his duty to wrestle daily with ungrateful Children of the Sun, he would happily have cultivated his garden. A lovesome thing, God wot!
As we walked around the garden on our evening promenade, amid foxgloves and columbines, he spoke of his yearning for a time he believed to have been golden, when Englishmen lived better, sweeter, rural lives. Before their trees died, when they inhabited a land unenclosed by hedges, when their noble forebears ran with the rabbit, and talked to the robin, and wandered on a carpet of greensward thick with elms and thronged with hosts of golden daffodils.
I could grieve with him for this vanished time, since it recalled our own â which had lasted longer, and endedmore recently, with the arrival of the white visitors and the Queenâs soldiers.
In Bushmanland it had been the farmers who had destroyed our game. In England who had destroyed their trees? I asked.
Enemies from the Netherlands, or Low Countries, had unleashed a plague, came the bitter reply. A doubled-edged destruction. Trees which survived the plague were destroyed in a great wind conjured up by evil forces, somewhere âover thereâ, which had cracked its cheeks and huffed and puffed until all the rest fell down.
Knowing how tenderly he felt towards the slaughtered goats of my childhood, I was very surprised, as I walked alone one evening in the peace of this garden, to hear the long, keening sob of what I took to be a lynx trapped in the hunterâs wire snare. His cry echoes across the rocky desert, interrupted only for brief moments when, demented by pain, he pauses to try and chew through his own leg â¦
Although I heard these cries of pain most distinctly, I saw no sign of the victim. But for me the scent became overpowering. I knew its ingredients: fear, helplessness and the hot breath of death.
No wonder then that I stepped carefully around the columbines. For the fiercest thing in the world is a heavy steel trap. It takes the leg and holds it until the hunter returns, be that a day or a week.
I begged Minehost to allow me to end the suffering of the lynx who cried in the night.
He said, wonderingly, that he knew nothing of the lynx.
If not the lynx, it must be several jackals, I said, thoughI had not known that this animal was found on the island, a clever, sly, greedy person, who runs as if he has burnt his feet
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