could be raped and murdered,” said Mrs Chakata, “but Chakata still won’t get rid of the bastard. Chakata would kick his backside out of it if he was a proper man.”
“He says it’s because of a debt of honour,” said Daphne.
“That’s all you get from Chakata. Whatever you do,” said Mrs Chakata, “don’t marry a blerry Englishman. They got no thought for their wives and kids, they only got thought for their blerry honour.”
It had always been understood that she was to go to England in 1940, when she was eighteen. But now there was no question of going overseas till the war should end. Daphne had been to see a Colonel, a Judge and a Bishop: she wanted to go to England to join one of the women’s services. They told her there was no hope of an exit permit for England being granted to a civilian. Besides, she was under age: would Chakata give his permission?
At twenty she took a teaching job in the Capital rather than join any of the women’s services in the Colony, for these seemed to her feeble organizations compared with the real thing.
She was attracted by the vast new RAF training camps which were being set up. One of them lay just outside the Capital, and most of her free time was spent at sundowners and dances in the mess, or week-end tennis parties at outlying farms where she met dozens of young fighter pilots with their Battle of Britain DFCs. She was in love with them collectively. They were England. Her childhood neighbour, John Coates, was a pilot. He was drafted to England, but his ship and convoy were mined outside the Cape. News of his death reached Daphne just after her twenty-first birthday.
She drove out to the camp with one of her new English friends to attend a memorial service for John at the RAF chapel. On the way the tyre burst. The car came to a dangerous screeching stop five yards off the road. The young man set about changing the tyre. Daphne stood by.
He said to her for the third time, “OK. All set, Daphne.” She was craning her head absently.
“Oh,” she said, bringing her attention back to him. “I was listening to the go-away bird.”
“What bird?”
“The grey-crested lourie. You can hear it all over the Colony. You hardly ever see it. It says ‘Go’way’.”
He stood listening. “I can’t hear a thing.”
“It’s stopped now,” she said.
“Are there any yellow-hammers here?” he said.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“They say ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’,” he said.
“D’you find them all over England?”
“I think so. Anyway, there are millions in Hertfordshire.”
She engaged herself to marry a flight-lieutenant instructor. He was killed the following week in a flying accident. He had said, describing his home near Henley, “Ghastly place really. The river simply walks over the garden. Father’s been doubled with rheumatism, but won’t move.” These words had somehow enchanted her. “The river simply walks over the garden,” and she knew that the river was the Thames and that the garden was full of English bushes and all the year round was green. At his funeral she felt that the garden had gone under the sea. His family lived not far away from the English Pattersons. “No,” he had said, “I don’t think we know them.” It seemed incredible that he did not know his neighbours of only fifteen miles distant. “No,” wrote the English Pattersons, “we don’t know the people. Are they Londoners come down since the war? There are a lot of Londoners …”
In the Christmas holidays after her twenty-first birthday she said to Chakata, “I’m giving a term’s notice. I’m going to Cape Town.”
“Have you had more trouble with Tuys?” he said.
“No. It’s just that I want a change. I should like to see the sea.”
“Because, if you have had trouble with Tuys, I shall speak to him.”
“Are you at all thinking of getting rid of Old Tuys?” said Daphne.
“No,” he said.
He tried to persuade her to go to Durban instead of Cape Town. “Durban is more English.” He did not like the idea of her staying with her father’s people, the du Toits, in Cape Town.
Cape Town made her hanker all the more for England. There was just enough of the European touch – old sedate Dutch houses, cottage gardens, green meadows, a symphony orchestra, a modern art gallery – to whet her appetite for the real thing. The fact that the servants were paler than those of the Colony, and more European in feature, suggested to her a proximity to England where servants were white. “We have no one left,” wrote the English Pattersons, “but Clara, and half the time we have to wait on her. She has lost her memory and she keeps thinking you are your mother. She thinks Toad is Uncle Pooh-bah. Aunt Sarah is a trial. She thinks we pinch her sweet coupons.”
Daphne longed to be waiting on Clara, to be accused by Aunt Sarah of stealing the coupons, to be washing up the dishes and climbing over stiles with the cousins whom she had never seen. Some of her relations were nicknamed after characters in The Wind in the Willows, Rat, Mole, Toad, others named from as yet unaccountable sources – her uncles Poohbah and The Dong, for instance. The du Toits could not quite follow the drift of Daphne’s letters from England when she read them aloud, herself carried away by the poetry of the thing. “Rat,’ she would explain, “is Henry Middleton, Molly’s husband. He’s in the navy …”
“Doesn’t he treat her right, then?”
“He adores her actually,” said Daphne, using the infectious phraseology of the letters from England.
“Why does she call him a rat, then?”
Chakata was right, thought Daphne, you simply can’t explain the English sense of humour.
She went to night-clubs in Cape Town, keeping steadily in her thoughts the fact, of which she was convinced, that these were but tawdry versions of the London variety.
The du Toits were members of an Afrikaner élite. They tolerated but did not cultivate the English. One of their cousins, an Oxford graduate now fighting in North Africa, came home on leave and made a bid for Daphne. Just at that moment she became attached to a naval officer who had arrived a fortnight ago in a corvette which had been badly hit. Ronald was the most typical, Daphne thought, Englishman she had ever met, and the most unaffected. The ship, he whispered confidentially, for no one was supposed to know it, would be in port for six weeks. Meanwhile, might they consider themselves engaged? Daphne said, oh really, all right. And regardless of anything the du Toits might speculate, she spent a night with him at a sea-front hotel. With the utmost indifference Ronald mentioned that, before the war, he had captained the village cricket team – “The squire usually does.” Daphne saw, in a vision, numerous long white-flannelled legs, the shadowy elms, pretty sisters in pastel dresses, the mothers in old-fashioned florals and the fathers in boaters, all cool and mellow as the lemonade being served, under the marquee by the lake, on trays borne by pale-faced, black-frocked, white-frilled maids. Daphne thought of the heat and glare of Chakata’s farm, the smell of the natives, and immediately felt bloated and gross.
A
