matter of savings and pensions, but the very effect of going to the war in the first place.
Everything that he says about his war experiences circles back to the fact that he is no longer wanted in his home place by his wife. So that when the dog of his story seems to stray away and meander about, no, it is just an illusion, because in fact it always doubles back to Miriam. He talks about prostitutes and killing, but not because he seems to feel such things are what has caused his dilemma. And they are not, at all. It is something much more mysterious. The largeness of the difference between how he thinks about the world and how I think about it is actually what makes him interesting to me. His guilt is not the usual guilt of a European man like me.
When he first left his village to join the Gold Coast Regiment he had no idea he would be away for three or four years, without any leave. His local chieftain came to the village one evening and, speaking passionately about the English king, and the danger to the Gold Coast from the French in Sierra Leone, moved him to leave his wife and young children and join up, even though he was not particularly young. He told his wife he would be back by the end of the rainy season, or failing that, soon after. Of course he had no idea when he would be back, he knew nothing about that, he knew nothing about the world, he had actually never seen a town before, let alone a place like Accra.
Anyway, before he quite knew what was happening, he and his new comrades were bumped across Africa to Kenya, where they were put in a camp outside Nairobi. Here they sweltered for nine months. Tom took a prostitute to cook for him and share his bed. There was immense rivalry for these women. There were pitched battles on the outskirts of the camp, where men laid into each other with ferocity. White soldiers were involved too, fellas from South Africa and Rhodesia.
Then they were transported through Arabia and India to Burma, where Tom learned to hate the Japanese and give them no quarter. They killed every prisoner they took.
After the war he was a year waiting to be demobbed, stuck in Burma. The war was long over when he got back to the Gold Coast, and his people, hearing no news of him, had presumed he was dead, and had already held their ceremony of mourning. This meant, he said, that he was in fact dead, or at least, a walking ghost. So when he came to the outskirts of his village, and people cast their eyes on him and wailed in wonder and horror, he was sprinkled with sacred dust by the witch doctor, to try to return him to the living.
But Miriam, his wife, had also believed him dead. She didn’t think the witch doctor sprinkling him with dust changed anything. In her great fear of the dead she wanted nothing to do with him and asked him to go away again, which, in his grief and confusion, he did.
He returned to Accra and poked about for work. He joined the protest march with his fellow ex-soldiers. He was arrested as an agitator and tortured. It was Mr Oko, as a liaison officer with the UN, that got him out of prison.
Hearing all this, I understood better his relative silence in the first months knowing him. Why would he say any of this to a strange whiteman, when it was better just to get on with the bit of work and keep his history to himself?
*
Summer brought Mai home. She had written regular and passionate letters to me from the English school. Now she sent me a postcard to meet her at Rosses Point that Sunday. Her great friend Queenie Moran was now working as a district nurse in Sligo, and Mai was able to tell her father she was going down to see her.
I motored out to the Rosses, through a delinquent sequence of sunlight and rain-clouds, and parked on the little headland where the long flight of steps goes down to the strand. The last cars were turning on the sandy clifftop and the walkers heading homeward. The early dark began to take possession of everything. I knew the motor bus
Everything that he says about his war experiences circles back to the fact that he is no longer wanted in his home place by his wife. So that when the dog of his story seems to stray away and meander about, no, it is just an illusion, because in fact it always doubles back to Miriam. He talks about prostitutes and killing, but not because he seems to feel such things are what has caused his dilemma. And they are not, at all. It is something much more mysterious. The largeness of the difference between how he thinks about the world and how I think about it is actually what makes him interesting to me. His guilt is not the usual guilt of a European man like me.
When he first left his village to join the Gold Coast Regiment he had no idea he would be away for three or four years, without any leave. His local chieftain came to the village one evening and, speaking passionately about the English king, and the danger to the Gold Coast from the French in Sierra Leone, moved him to leave his wife and young children and join up, even though he was not particularly young. He told his wife he would be back by the end of the rainy season, or failing that, soon after. Of course he had no idea when he would be back, he knew nothing about that, he knew nothing about the world, he had actually never seen a town before, let alone a place like Accra.
Anyway, before he quite knew what was happening, he and his new comrades were bumped across Africa to Kenya, where they were put in a camp outside Nairobi. Here they sweltered for nine months. Tom took a prostitute to cook for him and share his bed. There was immense rivalry for these women. There were pitched battles on the outskirts of the camp, where men laid into each other with ferocity. White soldiers were involved too, fellas from South Africa and Rhodesia.
Then they were transported through Arabia and India to Burma, where Tom learned to hate the Japanese and give them no quarter. They killed every prisoner they took.
After the war he was a year waiting to be demobbed, stuck in Burma. The war was long over when he got back to the Gold Coast, and his people, hearing no news of him, had presumed he was dead, and had already held their ceremony of mourning. This meant, he said, that he was in fact dead, or at least, a walking ghost. So when he came to the outskirts of his village, and people cast their eyes on him and wailed in wonder and horror, he was sprinkled with sacred dust by the witch doctor, to try to return him to the living.
But Miriam, his wife, had also believed him dead. She didn’t think the witch doctor sprinkling him with dust changed anything. In her great fear of the dead she wanted nothing to do with him and asked him to go away again, which, in his grief and confusion, he did.
He returned to Accra and poked about for work. He joined the protest march with his fellow ex-soldiers. He was arrested as an agitator and tortured. It was Mr Oko, as a liaison officer with the UN, that got him out of prison.
Hearing all this, I understood better his relative silence in the first months knowing him. Why would he say any of this to a strange whiteman, when it was better just to get on with the bit of work and keep his history to himself?
*
Summer brought Mai home. She had written regular and passionate letters to me from the English school. Now she sent me a postcard to meet her at Rosses Point that Sunday. Her great friend Queenie Moran was now working as a district nurse in Sligo, and Mai was able to tell her father she was going down to see her.
I motored out to the Rosses, through a delinquent sequence of sunlight and rain-clouds, and parked on the little headland where the long flight of steps goes down to the strand. The last cars were turning on the sandy clifftop and the walkers heading homeward. The early dark began to take possession of everything. I knew the motor bus
Similar Books
