The Dust Diaries (10 page)

I try to read the letters you wrote after this date, but it becomes impossible. Either Leonard was not always on hand, or your stubborn nature defeated your own eloquence as you tried to write without the aid of sight. The old papers, thin as skin are covered in ink, but no words make it through. There is just chaos on the page, a desperate tangled clue of half-formed characters. But you do continue to write, fifty or more letters. I don’t know if you ever sent them, but you never stopped the writing, as if even when you could not be understood, you still had something to say.

I reach for another box, an earlier one, and in this action I pass my hand back over a decade to where you are readable again. Here, there is the surprise of encountering events of history, suddenly intruding into your intimate correspondence. This to your brother on 15 June 1940:

I heard yesterday that Paris had fallen. I am indeed thankful that the sacred and beautiful treasures of mankind may have been left in peace. That noble Venus (in the Louvre is she not?) may outlive our crazy times now—all being well. Last night I was reading at Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’, and seeming to learn something of the perspective of Religion and Art, of Time and Eternity –

‘All breathing human passion for above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,

a burning forehead and a parched tongue’

That Venus surely may preach on now the abiding

Truth and Beauty for many a long year to come,

‘When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all

ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

I kept the 71
st
Anniversary of my birth this week. My love for you all always!!!

Yours ever Arthur S. Cripps

Most of the letters, though, are about your daily life, the pattern of weekly and annual events that informed your days and years in Africa.

There were some rather enjoyable new year Sports and Horse races on Saturday. I made no show or rather a very bad show in the 100 yards (I tried running bare foot like one or two of the others as I had no proper shoes), and wasted ray entrance money…Gouldsbury, my R.C. friend in the native commissioner’s office at the Range, won the high jump…

I take your letters back to the front desk and carry two more boxes to my table. The windows of the library are bruising into evening and I can see the street lights outside have come on, illuminating the leaves of the trees that hang above them. Opening the first of the boxes I find a large brown envelope which I tilt onto the table, emptying its contents onto the dark wood. A cascade of photographs falls out, a scattered pile of white-bordered rectangular images, curling at the corners. Moments of your life in no particular order. I feel a sense of relief at seeing these photographs spread before me; somehow it is in these images that I am convinced you will come even nearer to me. The camera never lies, apparently, and I have come to this library with a faith in its impartial eye. But the photos I find are awkwardly abstract, their stillness robbing them of life, the arbitrary moment existing in its own space only, with no before or after offered. The photograph on the cover of Steere’s book, however, is the only one I have ever seen of you, so it is still a surprise to suddenly have so much of you in one go: years and decades passing through my fingers as I sift through the pile.

In themselves they are ordinary photographs, sometimes badly framed or focused, of people standing and sitting, but their age, and their connection to you, makes each one a fascination. The faces of the people are modern, no different to those around me in the library. Yet I know the distance between them and me, of time and ideas. In the early ones the eyes that look back at the camera have no knowledge of modern warfare; the trenches of the Somme and the camps of Auschwitz have not happened for them, the atom has not been split. Inside their heads they inhabit a different world of ideas to the one I know, and that innocence is in itself beguiling.

I find one of you at Oxford, a posed studio shot taken by Hills & Saunders, your eyes impassive, looking out of the frame. You wear a high wing-collar shirt and cravat with a dark waistcoat. You look healthy, young, with full lips and neatly parted dark hair. I trace the resemblance of family members in your features: my cousin Andrew, my younger brother, and even me. The photograph next to this is also of you, but it is sixty years later and you are a different man. It is printed in a pamphlet-sized parish magazine,
The Link
, dated September 1952. You are sitting on an old trunk in front of two thatched rondav-els, their mud and daga walls painted with patterns. Again you are looking out of frame, but this time in profile, and from behind a pair of dark round sunglasses. You wear an old panama perched on the back of your head, an oversized light jacket, books bulging from its pockets, and battered shoes. One hand holds the side of the trunk you sit on, the other a clay pipe, your elbow resting on your thin crossed legs. Your face is sunken, the cheeks indented, as if sucked in by a vacuum inside you, and your mouth is down-turned. I do not think you know a photograph is being taken. The caption beneath it reads simply,
Arthur Shearly Cripps—Poet
. I place the two photos next to each other, and again I feel uneasy. There is something voyeuristic in my ability to have the boy and the old man in front of me, a lifespan laid out on the table, the beginning and end of an untold story which has, over those sixty years, written itself on your face and your body. I put them down and pick up another studio portrait, taken in 1912 and given to the Schultz family, in which you are dressed in your safari solar hat, safari jacket and white dog collar. You look straight into the camera, your chin locked at a defiant angle and your eyes burning into its lens. I look back at them, and they seem to be accusing me, challenging me. Asking me what I am doing there in your life so long after you died.

I turn away to the other photographs, to the other stages of your life played out in the work of light on paper. You in your long black priest’s cassock under the African sun. Your church, its five high-domed thatched roofs like a patch of giant termite mounds rising from the flat earth, a crude wooden cross topping their disorder. You aged seventy-two, your eyes obscured by the round medical sunglasses, standing beside E. Ranga, an African evangelist who stares solemnly into the camera, taut in his European suit, shirt and tie. A black-and-white postcard of a ship, the
Hertzog
, white spray about its prow and two lines of signatures signed above and below it, one in the sea, one in the sky.

One photograph in particular catches my eye. It is a wedding photo, taken outside the entrance to your church at Maronda Mashanu. You stand in the background, wearing a black hat folded at the sides and your long white, pleated vestments. Yours is the only white face, and the rest of the wedding party stand in front of you, just the bride sitting down, the groom, bridesmaid and best man flanking her. They wear suits and dresses that appear a brilliant white. The old camera cannot cope with the midday heat reflected, and all of you shine out against the grey of the church and the veld, an angelic haze surrounding you as if your bodies are on the point of diffusion, burning brightly in the brief dilation of the lens. In the corner of the photograph, hard to see on first looking, a ribbed dog slouches past, its shrunken belly pulled taut against its spine, its thirsty tongue hanging loose from its jaw.

There are other photographs not of you, and I find myself scanning the ones of the women, in their high lace collars and neat buttoned dresses, the line from Steere’s book—‘
a persistent rumour of a love affair
’—still repeating in my head. I do not really know what I am looking for, a face to attach to this suggestion perhaps. But I find none. There is a photograph of your mother, Charlotte, your sisters Edith and Emily, but no woman whose name has any reason to arouse my suspicion. And it is the same with the letters. You wrote to everyone: family, friends, societies, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the
Manchester Guardian
, even 10 Downing Street, but there are none to anyone who could be guessed at as a lover. There is over fifty years of your correspondence here. I have to assume that the rumour was just that. A rumour.

The windows of the library have passed through grey to a deep blue to black, and it is time for me to go. I place the fragments of you back in their envelopes, tie the boxes with string and hand them in to the librarian. As I walk out through the marble-floored hallway I pass under the huge stone head of Cecil Rhodes, set in a backlit alcove above the entrance. The light casts a long shadow from his angular jaw across the wall and the irony of your letters being kept here, in the library of the man whose actions you spent a lifetime working against, does not escape me. I carry on out into the street where autumn leaves are falling through the shafts of street lights and a line from a Yeats poem comes to mind: ‘
the yellow leaves fell like faint meteorsin the gloom
’. Pulling my coat about my neck I walk on down the road, my breath fogging before me, wondering, as your photographs and letters make their journey back into the darkness of the stacks, if it is always this way: the light and the dark, the stone and the paper, the money men swallowing the spirit men in boxes.

On my way out of Oxford I pass my old college and I decide to go in and take a look. As I stand with my back to the street the library squats at the far end of the front quad, its lit windows casting long gold rectangles on the lawn in front of it. To the right of the library is the old bell tower and then the chapel, ornate in the corner. I walk towards the arches of its stained-glass windows, through a scattering of students leaning on their bicycles, talking.

At the chapel evensong is about to begin, so I walk inside. Epstein’s anguished Lazarus stands bound and huge in the ante-chapel, its Hopton Wood stone pale in the dim light. He looks over his shoulder up the aisle towards the altar (or appears to—his eyes are closed) and there is something pained about his face. As if he is regretful, a reluctant waker, unwillingly disturbed from the dead.

Walking under the pipework of the organ I feel the beauty of the building shed itself over me, its distilled atmosphere entering the body like clean air. A carved reredos covers the end wall behind the altar and I remember how I once came in here alone, when the place was empty, and spent an hour up close with the saints there, studying their faces, the details of their fingernails and skin creases, each one an individual. I never took part in the religious life of the college, but this reredos had always drawn me. It made me think of
Jude the Obscure
and the craftsmen who made it, the dust on their hands as they coaxed each of these saints from the stone, as if they had always been there, waiting for the tap of the chisel to break them into existence.

I take a seat at the back, on the right, but first I check for a wood carving under a misericord that my grandmother once showed me. Lifting the folding seat, I find that sure enough, it is there. Two people caught having sex with impressive contortion, conker-coloured, hidden under the dark wood of the seat.

The choir file in, extravagant in their surplices, the ruffs holding their heads as if on platters. Boys as young as ten or eleven alongside the older students of the college. I catch glimpses of trainers and jeans under the heavy red cloth of their cassocks. They peel off into facing rows, and stand there serious, their faces lit by the candles that burn on tall holders before them. The students bear marks of their lives before and after this service—highlighted hair, the odd earring, travelling bands on a wrist—but the younger boys are more timeless, their neat haircuts parted like wet feathers across their heads. The whole thing seems a little ridiculous. But then the organ rouses itself and they sing, their mouths opening simultaneously, as if operating on one mechanism, and a sound disproportionate to its origin unfurls up into the rafters of the chapel.

I don’t think I will ever have a relationship with a god in the way you did. Perhaps the modern imagination will not allow such a thing, or perhaps I know of too much harm done in the name of gods. As I sat there, however, with that singing uncoiling into the air, something happened: a tuning in of the mind, a spiritual awareness, a consequence of sound and place—call it what you will, but there, in that evensong, I felt a connection with a presence larger and greater than the present and the self. Perhaps it was the clarity of the notes clearing my consciousness, but I was aware of it, whatever it was, out there, beyond the thick stone walls, past Epstein’s pale Lazarus, outside the hushed cloisters. History, the collective soul, I still have no name for it, and I didn’t then either. I just knew I wanted to be part of it, always pitched at a higher note, and I knew that would be impossible, and that is why I wanted it.

Shutting my eyes I rest my head back against the wood of the pew and let the music envelop me while I try to think about what I have learned of you today. But it is hard, you still come in fragments. I do know though, that you were not, as I had once thought, a child of your time, but rather a child outside time. Today, reading your ideas, your hopes, your aspirations, I realised that your talent was one of disasso-ciation: an ability to stand aside from the ideas and codes of the day and see them in the long view of humanity. Despite the prejudices of those about you, you maintained the capability to see anyone as everyman and it is this, above all, that has impressed me, and once again I feel I want to know more about who you were, about how you lived and why. Because now I have disturbed the dust of your life, I know it will not settle until I do.

Fort Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia

Mrs Cole was disappointed. When Bishop Gaul announced after the service last Sunday that the young priest relieving Archdeacon Upcher at Enkeldoorn would pass through Salisbury on his way to the mission, she had immediately offered to lay on a dinner of welcome. Since then, she had been looking forward to the visit of Father Cripps. For the first time in months she woke with a sense that there was something on the horizon, an event to prepare for and anticipate, rather than the familiar dull ache of lethargy she usually associated with her cramped bedroom. Her husband had been away at the Boer War for over six months now, and the pioneer spirit he once so valued in his wife had dwindled even further in his absence until she found each day merely something to be endured, rather than embraced as a challenge. The basics of living, shopping, preparing meals and washing had become daily trials that drained her of energy and enthusiasm. It was not a change in her character that Mr Cole would have liked to see. He was, as he would remind anyone who would listen, ‘one of the originals’, one of ‘Rhodes’ Apostles’ who had trekked up into Charter territory back in the i88os. A bullish man, who placed high value on ‘backbone’, ‘spirit’ and ‘mettle’. As a member of Dr Jameson’s staff who had risen to the post of Civil Commissioner for Salisbury he believed completely in Rhodes’ dictum on the life and duty of the pioneer: ‘
Those who fall in thecreation, fall sooner than they would have done in ordinary life, but theirlives are the better and the grander
.’ Mrs Cole’s life did not feel better or grander. It just felt harder, and empty. And she did not really cherish the idea of falling sooner than anyone else either, or indeed, falling at all.