No 142 - Beautiful whales, beautiful words

 

My photo of a right whale off Puerto Madryn

It may be that I was a whale in a previous life: such is the intensity of emotion with which I respond to them. Deepwater pleasure at seeing them; coruscating grief at merely reading of unfeeling slaughter or their mystifying mass strandings. I remember that after seeing the film The Whale Rider I had to walk around the block before I could bring myself under control again. Strange, given that I’ve not seen them in their massive flesh all that often – mostly Southern right and Bryde’s whales spy-holing alongside our tour boat in Algoa Bay, also breaching off the coast of Puerto Madryn, Argentina. Now and then characteristic spouts spotted off our southern shores.

            Naturally I’ve read a fair bit.

            Much of the literature is dominated by two ur-texts. The first is of course the Biblical tale of Jonah being swallowed by a ‘big fish’ and then, thanks be to God, disgorged again. Trying to endow this gnomic parable with realism is futile: no whale is known ever to have spat up a human. But this fanciful depiction of God’s beneficence has been fatal for the whale: it became the archetypal sea-monster, the Leviathan, all but Satanic for the terror and disgust its imagery generated in the Western and Christian world. Not, it should be stressed, in at least some indigenous societies, such as the Inuit, which regarded the world’s greatest mammals with suitable awe and reverence. The historical Christian shuddering disdain for this element of the natural world has much to answer for; it arguably laid an essential foundation for commercial exploitation.

            This is clear from the several pages of literary quotations that preface the second ur-text, Herman Melville’s whale-sized novel, Moby-Dick. Many of those quotations are from the Bible: these and every single subsequent one over a millennium and a half characterise the whale as the fearsome monster, the savage Leviathan, vengeful, revolting, even as its oil becomes financially as attractive as gold.

            Melville’s 1851 novel – a very strange palimpsest of texts-within-texts, postmodern a century before postmodernism – is predicated upon that monstrosity. Though little approaching compassion infects this hunting story, it’s moot whether Melville didn’t regard his manic, possessed protagonist Ahab as the greater devil. Moby-Dick the whale is triply monsterised in being huge, albino, and responsible for taking Ahab’s leg. A revenge tale, then, as well as one of overweening machoism, brave little men tackling Leviathan with primitive equipment. Viciously obsessed, Ahab meets with his almost inevitable fate, going down with the whale. Serves him bloody well right.

            There is nevertheless much cultural wisdom and psychological depth in Moby-Dick. It works as a powerful foundation-text in Darren Aronofsky’s 2022 film The Whale, for which Brendan Fraser won a Best Actor Oscar. (The film has nothing to do with whales as such, but … I’ll say no more: just watch it!)

            Moby-Dick also powerfully underwrites one of the few Southern African literary texts centred on whales. It’s intriguing that such works are so sparse. Likewise, there seems to be no comprehensive history of Southern African whaling, unless there’s some material in Norway, the Norwegians being largely responsible for setting up the industry on our shores. Indeed, it’s a Norwegian captain who anchors, so to speak, the whaling quest in Laurens van der Post’s The Hunter and the Whale (1967). Arguably van der Post’s best novel, the story also involves the hunt for an especially large sperm whale (not the more common humpback or right whale). The van der Post-like narrator Pete (van der Post did claim he’d been out on a whaling expedition off Durban) promises captain Larsen access to shooting a famous elephant tusker in return for joining the whale hunt. Like Ahab, however, Larsen perishes in action – as does, one is left to presume, the harpooned whale.

            A century after Moby-Dick, however, attitudes had evidently shifted. Like virtually all other fauna on the subcontinent, driven to the brink of extinction by white men’s guns, whales were becoming scarce. Van der Post’s narrator, as well as other characters, tend to side with the whale in the struggle, and the whale itself is described quite lovingly in a couple of van der Post’s more lyrical passages. The whale's spouting is

             

a shining poplar of pearl in a mirage of early afternoon flame before it lost its silver stem in the dark-blue sea, to gather itself up swiftly into a cloud of mist and dissolve with the same suddenness that it had come. 

I thought it one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen: it reminded me of Tennyson’s description of the arm clothed in white samite which came out of the black water of Avalon to receive Arthur’s great sword back into its waters, which I had read two years before. Even today this whale spout holds place in my heart with the manifestations of nature that I treasure most.

 

 It would not be long before the economic bottom fell out of the blubber, oil and baleen market, and the whaling stations at Durban, Betty’s Bay, Donkergat and elsewhere were abandoned, to become the gaunt and haunted remnants of touristic whale tours today. Our poet Douglas Livingstone wrote of the station on Durban’s Bluff:

 

The old whaling station is ship-wrecked:

corrugated roofs, zinc walls flaking;

most of the cataracted panes smashed;

the sea clean now, the sand still tarry.

[...]

Intestines, hoses sliding about;

vats bubbling; the crane-chains clattering

– all that has stilled; the factory closed,

but always, I think, a bad prospect.

           (“Beach Terminal”)

 

Already we’re heading towards the kind of sacralising lament exemplified by Heathcote Williams’s Whale Nation (1988), its photographs interspersed with poetry, and backed by a more explanatory afterword. Though I wholly identify with Williams’s sentiments, I find the poetry a bit on the blunt side, some resonant phrases excepted. There is a certain numbing fascination in his listing of all the uses to which whale-bone, baleen and blubber-oil was put by Western civilisation, from propping up dowagers’ boobs to contributing glycerine for bombs.

            A better text, though of much the same sympathy, is Philip Hoare’s Leviathan (2008). This is part personal travelogue, part Melville-centred literary criticism, part paean to the bio-society of the whale. His responses to whales appear much like mine: he gives the lie to that old monstrous imagery of Leviathan, in prose that is consistently informative and mellifluously readable.

            Heathcote Williams famously also produced a parallel text, Sacred Elephant. And yet another text that links the greatest land and sea mammals is Lyall Watson’s Elephantoms (2003). Watson, (in)famous for his maverick Supernature, claims to have witnessed a Knysna forest elephant communing through infrasound with a Blue whale (the biggest species of all but exceedingly rarely seen on our coasts). Biologists assure me that such communication is highly improbable, the scene most likely invented. Still, the discovery of such communications, out of normal human hearing but quite amazing, far-reaching, mysterious, self-evidently complex yet essentially untranslatable, has revolutionised attitudes towards the value of whales. Interestingly, one pioneer of whale-song study was Roger Payne, as related in his book Among Whales (1995). (See also David Rothenberg’s more recent Thousand-Mile Song.) Roger Payne’s then wife, Katy, went on to adapt their equipment to record elephant infrasonic conversations (see her book, Silent Thunder).

            Communion of another, also invented nature is the core of Zakes Mda’s novel, The Whale Caller (2005). Set in Hermanus, it involves a kind of love-affair between the human ‘whale-caller’ and a Southern right whale named Sharisa. (There is a ‘whale caller’, apparently, though his kelp horn serves to summons tourists, not the whale.) It’s not in my view one of Mda’s better novels, but my colleague Wendy Woodward has made much of it as an example of more recent trends in granting animals increasingly more dignity, emotionality, individuality, and agency. Certainly, it shows how far we (bar some retrograde Norwegians, Russians and Japanese, who hopefully will die out before the whales do) have come from Moby-Dick.

  

This cover depicts killer whales,
which don't actually feature in the novel

          An interesting parallel text is set in a kind of Western Australian equivalent of Hermanus, in Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984). It’s a densely textured portrayal of Angelus, a rather rough little place whose sense of community, such as it is, has historically centred on whaling. One character reads excerpts from an ancestor’s whaling journal, which is roughly contemporaneous with Melville’s account. (Moby-Dick hovers throughout.) In the novel’s present, the last of the whalers, now equipped with big diesel boats, radar and explosive harpoons, are harassed by whale-loving protestors in Greenpeace-style rubber dinghies. While different views are thereby aired, Winton is too canny a writer to portray whalers as unmitigated evil, or the do-gooders as somehow unimpeachable.

            The sense of historic community – ‘Whaling is in our blood’ – is often raised as a reason to continue slaughtering animals for products we no longer need. One of the things Winton’s and the other novels highlight, however, is that communities and cultures are ever in flux, subject to vagaries of environment and economics. Moreover, because we are such inventive and mobile creatures, we can shift. Learn different jobs, inhabit different places. Whales, despite inhabiting such vast stretches of ocean, have in some ways a much, much narrower set of options and envelope of conditions within which they can live. May we ever leave them be, to sing the seas in their own unique way.

 

*****

No 141 – The use and abuse of animals: Albany 1820-21

 

Baines' painting of Grahamstown, ca.1850, shows animals as present but marginalised.

From my south-facing windows I look across the coastal plain towards Port Alfred and Kenton. The landscape is etched and scarred with innumerable human interventions: new roads and the traces of abandoned roads, new fences and the traces of old ones, fields of grass carved out of the infamously thorny Albany thickets. Powerlines and firebreaks and buildings.

            The “scratches on the face of the country”, so characterised by the early traveller John Barrow, pretty much began in this area with the arrival of the 1820 settlers. No doubt the plain had been variously modified by human presence, Khoekhoen, Bushman and Xhosa, long before the colonial invaders came. In 1820 there was scarcely a wagon-track between outposts; mostly they still followed trails opened up by the elephants. But they were quickly setting up surveyed farms on the land from which the Xhosa had been ejected, establishing homes and roads and mission stations and tiny outposts like Graham’s Town.

            The history of these often hapless and ill-equipped settlers has often been told, whether in hagiographic or embittered decolonial terms, but not, as far as I know, much with animals in mind. Jack Skead has exhaustively catalogued the early mentions of wild animals in the travelogues, but not the domestic. Sandra Swart’s admirable history of the horse in South Africa, Riding High, rather leaves the Eastern Cape out. Craig Patterson’s PhD study somewhat fills that gap. But what of all the other species, wild and domestic, whose presence was constant, but mostly only casually remarked? It seems to me there’s much yet to be explored of the intimate network of animal uses and abuses in this period. For it’s clear that in every aspect of society, whether Bushman, Xhosa or white settler, dependency on animals was total. They simply would not have survived without animals.

(This may still be true: I look down on the one hand on the white flecks of cattle let loose in the bush much as they were two centuries ago; some of them get periodically stolen, just like two centuries ago. One prominent cluster of buildings houses a dairy and a slaughterhouse; the business calls itself “Beefmasters”, which says all you need to know about the power dynamic there. On the other hand, several former farms have been amalgamated into a broad game ranch: with binoculars I regularly spot impala and eland and giraffe – all “extra-limitals”, by the way, which did not occur here in 1820. The grazers perpetuate the distinction between grassed fields and thicket, but new pressures on the vegetation are showing: the thorn trees that dominated one patch have been eaten down to the nub by the giraffe. The point is: exploitation of animals remains key to local human well-being.)

What of 1820?

I dip here into only three of the sundry diaries and memoirs dating to 1820 and 1821. It would take much wider reading to confirm or modify the impressions one gains from this limited sample. But here we go.

One is The Journal of William Shaw, edited for the Graham’s Town Series by WD Hammond-Tooke. Shaw was a Wesleyan missionary specifically assigned to the 1820 settlers of the Albany district (now Makana), later to the Kat River settlements further east. His journal for the years 1820-21 is sketchy compared to later years, and one hopes his sermons were less dull. He batted back and forth between farms and embryonic centres like Salem and Bathurst, praising God for everything, good or misfortunate. When he was thrown off his horse, he praised God that he’d suffered no “material injury”. When his horse gave out and was abandoned on the road, he praised God that the delay saved him from running into an elephant. No word on the fate of the horse.

This is typical of the offhand attitude he brought to animal presences. He rode here and rode there, but says next to nothing about the animals themselves. Though he did a good deal of exhausting walking, it’s clear that travel was entirely dependent on animals. Wagons come and go, but he says nothing of the teams of oxen that drew them under threat of the whip. Animals must have been looked after, but in a purely instrumental way. At outspans they were just left to find their own grazing. Inevitably, some would get lost, or rustled by Xhosa raiders, or taken out by lion, leopard or hyena. More than once Shaw’s horse couldn’t be found in the morning, obliging him to walk. Some horses, he recorded, succumbed to a “very peculiar complaint”, which he attributed to “an almost entire want of food”. Especially in drought conditions, the prevalent sour veld (Zuurveld) offered meagre pickings. In short, they starved.

As for wild animals, they were around. In some tracts “one is surrounded with bushes and hears nothing but an occasional scream from the Jackalls, a dismal hungry toned howl from the wolf”. Shaw recorded that one man, on a Sunday, set off to walk to Graham’s Town, but was turned back by two lions “en couchant”. So the fellow had to attend church after all, praise the Lord. Once he himself had to take refuge for a night in a “Hottentot” kraal; having no bread, they fed him broiled buffalo and milk. Interestingly, Shaw seems reluctant to eat “flesh as a substitute”. He may have been a closet vegetarian, but most people on either side of the shifting frontier were largely dependent on animal flesh for survival, whether ‘ranched’ or hunted in the wild. But, looking back on his first year in the district, Shaw wrote: “Within one year, desert places have been taken possession of by a multitude of men, the beasts of the field have very generally retreated to make room for them.”

Another source is the chronicle of the rather less well-educated Jeremiah Goldswain, recently made available in a new edition by Ralph Goldswain. Again, the feisty Goldswain was more focussed on his innumerable setbacks than on the role of animals. Nevertheless, the settlers’ dependencies on animals is clear. Like Shaw, he rode horses or oxen when he could and walked when he couldn’t. Wild encounters were regular, as when he ran into “a very large buffalo. Had it not been for our dogs we should have been in a very awkward position.” Indeed, dogs are omnipresent, but seldom if ever individualised. He also followed tracks pioneered by elephants, though they didn’t always lead to your intended destination. Amongst his many commercial endeavours he tried bartering cattle, suffering like everyone else rustling by Xhosas or Bushmen; the former were often trying to retrieve beasts the settlers or British military had stolen from them in the first place. He mentions the heavy reliance on meat-eating, noting, for instance, supping off a sheep hanging up in a settler hut and roasted. This was after having his own house burned down, leaving him with nothing but his “sheepskin jacket”: the settlers were almost as dependent on animal-skin clothing and leathers as the Xhosa were. (All these examples being drawn from just two pages of Goldswain’s account.)

By far the most eloquent and liberal-minded chronicler of 1820-21 was the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle. He did write some poems regarding animals, as well as innumerable letters; the latter, finely edited into a volume by Randolph Vigne, are overwhelmingly involved with the legalities of land ownership and seeking relief from drought and Cape Town censorship of his views, and seldom linger on the animal presence. More fruitful for our theme is his memoir, African Sketches (accessible online). Here the constant background of conflict over domestic beasts and with wild beasts emerges more strongly; he devotes a whole excitable chapter to hunting anecdotes, not all his own, foreshadowing the popularity of African hunting-adventure books throughout the nineteenth century – the imperial century that would see the extirpation of almost all wildlife under the assault of European firearms. The effects are already evident in 1820.

But I want to focus on just one remarkably fine-grained description, which almost inadvertently reveals how deeply the animal was implicated in daily household living on the frontier. From his allocated Glen-Lynden, near Bedford, Pringle takes a ride towards Cradock, on “the light and hardy horses of this district”, following mountain paths cut by quaggas. In the Tarka valley, he drops in on the homestead of one Winzel Coetzer – named Elands-Drift, rather misleadingly translated as Ford of Elks. (Even names are animal.) Pringle regards it as a “fair average sample” of a Dutch-settler establishment. He is first greeted by a “host of some twenty or thirty dogs”, “growling guardians” fully primed to tear a suspicious visitor to shreds, dispersed only by the Coetzers “hurling at them a few of the half-gnawed bones and bullocks” horns which are lying about in profusion. A minor industry of stock-raising, slaughter and meat-eating lies behind this detail – mostly mutton in summer, when beef could not be properly cured. “Flesh, and not bread,” Pringle writes, “is here the staff of life”, and it’s not thought odd to have a dead sheep hanging in the voorhuis. The stock attendants – “Hottentots” – live in reed huts known as hartebeest-huijses. The more substantial Coetzer house reeks, probably literally, with animal products. The floors are made of the peculiarly hard prepared earth gleaned from ant-hills, though only those already raided by the aardvark – otherwise, Pringle almost chuckles, you’re liable to have another termite colony erupting under your feet. A skimming of cowdung on floors and walls also helps keep the fleas down. The unglassed windows are closed at night with untanned quagga skins; the reeds comprising the front door are lashed with thongs of bullock-hide. On the walls are hung a variety of animal-derived accoutrements: “hunting apparatus, dried flesh of various kinds of game, large whips of rhinoceros and hippopotamus hide (termed sjamboks), leopard and lion skins, ostrich eggs and feathers”. The men are wearing trousers of home-manufactured sheep or goat skin, and – sometimes – veld-schoenen of raw bullocks’ hide – a Hottentot invention. Juffrow Coetzer sometimes sold leather clothing she made; Pringle bespoke a jacket of springbok skin, with a gesture towards a localised fashion aesthetic in facings of leopard-fur, for 13 rix-dollars, about a pound sterling. He also purchased a leopard skin for a handful of gunpowder. The home-made soap certainly contained animal fat. All of these imply complex processes of economies far and near: the crafts of weapon- and whip-making, of the progressive obliteration of wild animals, of their hides’ integration into a commerce of prideful display and conquest.

            Though the family had established quite extensive orchards and gardens for a variety of imported fruits and vegetables, old Coetzer regarded his cattle as “de beste tuin” – the best garden. Pringle describes a complex of kraals and folds for the cattle and sheep, enclosed with thorn branches against “the nocturnal assaults of the hyenas, leopards and jackals”. Some of those sheep would be driven – on foot, that is – seven hundred miles to Cape Town. One heck of a journey. Though Coetzer possessed what Pringle estimated at 700 cattle, the herders seldom counted them, but could nevertheless quickly discover whether an individual was missing. It expressed, Pringle goes on to note, local Africans’ “interest in the welfare” of their herds, since by custom every youngster grew up with a cohort of beasts to cherish for the future, not least for paying dowry. Pringle shows at least some understanding of the profound cultural significance of cattle to the Xhosa people. This of course would reach a catastrophic denouement in the 1856 Cattle Killing. Pringle had by then long departed, but Jeremiah Goldswain witnessed it.

            Whichever way you look at it, the animals had a pretty rough time of it, most often fatal.

            This pinprick of a spot-check reveals both the ubiquitous dependency on the animal, as well as the paucity of attention yet paid to it. Get to work, O ye scholars!

            Incidentally, so far I have found no mention of either the domestic cat nor the donkey – both equally ubiquitous modern presences in Makana cultures. When exactly did they come in, I wonder?

 *****

Animal products more central in Baines's 1849 painting of an ivory sale in Grahamstown.

 

 

No 140 - Drunkenness in Graham's Town, 1830s version

Graham's Town, 1830, looking down High St, sketch by Guybon Atherstone.

In 1831, Graham’s Town wasn’t much to look at, though it was trying. The local European farmers were battling. Their sheep and cattle were constantly being stolen by Xhosa or Bushman raiders. The weather wouldn’t co-operate. There were water availability issues (ha ha). But trade was beginning to pick up, in all manner of goods, from hairbrushes to horses, wagons to wine. New jobs were being advertised. A court was trying and punishing people according to finicky statutes drawn up in Cape Town. There were several prisons (now mostly cafés). People complained that an abattoir was dumping its offal in the street, stinking the place out. 

And evidently a substantial number of people were getting drunk.

 An extraordinary number of pages in the opening issues of The Graham’s Town Journal – the predecessor to Grocott’s Mail – are devoted to the attempt to establish a Temperance Society. The correspondence about it took the better part of a year to run its course – often long-winded, obscure, intemperate, and inadvertently hilarious. Court records, also summarised in the paper, make it clear that there was certainly a problem. Some horrendous, heart-wrenching stories involved alcohol. For example, in early 1832 one “Adam Robinson, European, stood indicted of Culpable Homicide, in having caused the death of Mary Wild, an infant of four years old, by giving her one teaspoonful of Brandy.” It seemed unlikely that a mere teaspoonful would have killed her, but other witnesses alleged it had been a whole cupful, or more. An autopsy was conducted by the famous Dr Atherstone, who used to live at the top end of High Street (the building is now another café). He found a lesion at the base of little Mary’s skull, apparently from being clubbed by a boy a week before, causing a slow internal bleeding. So, although the brandy might have been a precipitating factor, Robinson was found not guilty. 

Not surprisingly, the military was a particular vector for drunken violence. In April 1832 one S Webber was “charged with having contravened the 10th sec. Ordinance 34, by permitting liquor to be drunk in his house between the hours of 9 in the evening and six in the morning, on the 16th day of March last”. It seemed that four soldiers of the 98th Regiment, keen “to celebrate the festivities of St Patrick … had gone (as they expressed it) a little queer to the house”. That is, they were sozzled when they arrived, got increasingly unruly and, according to Webber, forced themselves back in when he tried to evict them. Someone drew a bayonet, a constable was injured. Your common-or-alehouse pub brawl, then. Webber was nevertheless fined 5 shillings. 

There was also no end of common theft, not least on the part of so-called Hottentots, allegedly particularly susceptible to the lures of grog. One Hendrick Michaels, for instance, was “charged with stealing from a wagon journeying from Algoa Bay to Graham’s Town, a quantity of wine, the property of Benjamin Norden” – Norden being a prominent trader and auctioneer who weekly advertised his traffic in various alcohols, among other goods. In court, it was recalled by “one old Hottentot with a wooden leg” that five casks had been tapped and “from 15 to 20 gallons were deficient”. Michaels “saw Dolph drunk, who gave him a cup, and told him to bring some wine out of one of the casks; [Michaels] did so, and drank one half of it, Dolph the other half”. He was given 12 months imprisonment, with hard labour. 

Petty as these instances seem, they were evidently pervasive enough, and the numerous extant regulations sufficiently weak, that a major meeting to establish a Temperance Society was held on 30 December 1831. It was spearheaded by local commander, Lt-Col Somerset, who testified “That the unhappy propensity to the use of distilled spirits is indulged to a most alarming extent in this colony, and is the chief cause of poverty, disease and crime … [A] most improper practice of giving Hottentots and other coloured persons sopies, or drams, had obtained too generally, … with very injurious consequences." He himself had witnessed "the appalling spectacle of six men led out and shot by their comrades [in the Native Corps] in expiation of the offences committed while under its baneful influence!” Not so petty. 

A later correspondent echoed the concern in an “analyzation of brandy”: "brandy, sir, … is so bewitching a poison, that it seems to entice a person on to destruction under the flattering idea of its being the only remedy for those evils which itself alone has created; for instance, sir, those alarming tremblings in the stomach … [B]randy, sir, also has a tendency to impair the intellectual faculties, by rendering the memory less retentive from its frequent attacks on the brain – the dignified seat of human understanding ..."

Still, Somerset’s points, however sensible, would be vigorously debated, even opposed. Prominent townsman Daniel Moodie had a very mild conception of a potential Temperance Society’s aims: "Members of Temperance Societies did not trust to precepts, they employed the mild influence of example; they did not pretend to be above temptation, but began by reforming themselves. Many persons opposed this society by sneers, because they thought it in vain to stem the torrent; but no one offered any argument against it."

Well, there would be plenty of argument. One early respondent, on 13 January 1832, claimed to be a “well-wisher to Temperance, but an anti-humbug”. Much of the subsequent correspondence would throw back and forth accusations of “humbug”. One persistent writer, who styled himself “Mountain Dew, alias Highland Whiskey”, trumpeted, “I confess my utter inability to perceive that the Temperance Society affords even a chance of compassing its object.” But there was no agreement on what that aim might be. In answer to Mountain Dew on 3 February, “Mountain Breeze” acknowledged the problem, but rather hard-heartedly opined that “this appalling vice ought in his opinion to be to be left to itself, and no merciful hand put forth to save others from approaching a gulph of wretchedness into which millions have been precipitated.” There was recourse to Plutarch and various poets, and to various American examples. Someone suggested replacing the dop wage with candy. 

A fortnight later, “Mountain Dew” alleged that “Temperance Societies are neither more nor less than associations of the wealthy for depriving the poor of the only restorer of ‘man overlaboured with his beings strife’ which their limited means afford them”. So there was a class element, too; as well as some sympathy for the tough lives of slaves and the otherwise impoverished. Why deprive them of a wee dram of comfort? And a week after that, “Lowland Common Sense” told Mountain Breeze that temperance societies “lead to deceit, hypocrisy and lying. … [He] has got into the clouds and would do well to descend from such airy regions”. Indeed, he said, one might as well establish an Anti-Sheep Stealing Society, for all the good it would do. 

Another correspondent noted that “even the Christian Divines of this Colony have been, and are, distillers, from the very parsonage and Glebe lands, and from their private estates, for the sake of furnishing the spirit to their fellow creatures.” We aren’t about to accuse our own pastors of humbug and cruelly depriving the poor, are we? 

Besides, there was a lot of trade going on; people worried that a Temperance Society would damage their businesses. “A Decayed Tapster” summarised the divisions of opinion: “I tell you the opinion of the world goes for nothing, besides they can’t all read. One refuses [support] because there are 2,000 signatures on the Temperance list; another because the scheme ‘has not even a chance of compassing its object’; one because no effort is required; another because our best efforts would be of no avail.” He cited a “former customer” who, when he asked the latter “to taste a ‘leetel’ drop more, said to me, I can’t drink any more, but pour it over me, I love the smell on’t.” Meanwhile “Tapster” had lost half his custom, and the price of brandy dropped 25%. He threatened to leave altogether, for some place where sincerity prevailed. Good luck with that. 

And what, “A True Briton” asked in trumped-up working-class argot, if these “new fangled Temporal Sisyties, as the parsons is now making sich a devilment about”, actually succeeded “to cast the gifts of Providence in his teeth”? Why, next thing you know “they’ll soon be getting up a Sisyty to prevent prevent people from eeting beef and muttin, because some dokters says that vegetable dyet is more holesomer as haminal food.” Vegetarianism! Horrors! Meanwhile, “em speetchified and preetchified so long about drunkenness, and blackened the Christemens and whitewashed the Ottentots so much, as you never seed in your born days.” In short, “its my pinion that such a Sesyty will cause nothing but ‘ternal skwabbels, and be a hexellent skool for pokrisy.” They should stick to their “Spiritual” activities and leave the rest of us to enjoy our “Temporal spirits”. 

There’s a great deal more of this argy-bargy, until the steam seemed to go out of the effort. By January 1833, a correspondent could write: “Pray Mr Editor, what has become of our Temperance Society? Have those who lately in your columns so nobly advocated its cause become thus soon cold and indifferent to its interest?” They had “become the butt of ridicule to those who have all long been opposed to it”. 

Meanwhile, men continued to fight each other and rape women while under the influence; others to complain about adulteration of grog with “some pernicious and poisonous mineral”, causing “violent spasms” and death. The Thompson Brothers continued to advertise for the well-to-do “a quantity of very superior claret”, while “Quarles, Harris & Sons celebrated Port and Sherry Wines”; and letter-writer “Q” would complain: “I wish some of your correspondents would inform me why so much Cape Beer is sent to Graham’s Town? We have two Brewers here, cannot they brew sufficient? Or is the quality so bad that the public prefer Cape Beer? In either case it calls aloud for competition.” 

The market prevailed, of course. If you are unlucky enough to get caught up in the broil of Grahamstown-Makhanda’s New Street of a Saturday night, two centuries later, you’ll be forgiven for thinking not much has changed. 

*****

No 139 - Imagining zoo animals

 

The huge black bear patrolled the edge of the water, pacing menacingly back and forth. Perhaps he was protecting a smaller bear slumped against a rock shelf behind him. No one said much. A baby squealed; a man flicked a cigarette butt which fizzled out in the moat. The bear paid not the slightest attention to either. He paced on, back and forth, until you noticed that on each and every pass he made his great feet landed in the exact same rhythm on the exact same spots. You could see that those particular slabs were worn pale with repetitive use. Far from being menacing, this bear was bored out of his skull. It was a classic case of a repetitive-movement syndrome exhibited by animals whose condition of unnatural entrapment has utterly crushed their spirits.

It was London Zoo in 1979, and I’ve loathed zoos ever since. Many have improved on the cramped, sterile quarters I saw that day, but many have not. Over the years some zoos have developed sophisticated scientific rationales for still keeping animals imprisoned, but I’m seldom convinced. Some try to breed endangered species, others characterise themselves as “orphanages”  or “sanctuaries” devoted to saving the animals from yet worse confinements. There’s something in that; but ... I visited a Big Cat Sanctuary in the US, where a black jaguar rescued from a circus paced its cage with the same repetitive motion of the London bear. Hopefully it was en route to something better, though he could never be wild again. Even in the Sanctuary’s bigger, more vegetated pens, a solitary serval was clearly stressed by the visitors peering in and making stupid kitty-kitty noises, which would have been interpreted by her as threats.

Just about all the world’s animals are now entrapped or constrained by human activity in some way, whether by “park” fences and walls and roads, by snares or gin-traps or bullets or hooks or strychnine, cages or garden fences, collars and chains, by the destruction of habitats and food sources, by the interruptions of migration routes on land and air and sea, by the intrusive sounds of shipping and airliners and chainsaws and wind farms, by the ravages of the wildlife trade that Vanda Felbab-Brown calls the “extinction market”. Less intentionally, perhaps, human activities have laid down a planet-wide, finely-meshed net of intrusion, poison, disease and deprivation that subtly but lethally affects even the most remote colonies of Antarctic penguins and the plankton-eaters of the deepest ocean trenches.

But zoos are a peculiarly self-serving variety of anthropocentric animal confinement.

It dawned on me that my bookshelves harboured a number of literary works concerning zoo animals. What does this literature have to say about the phenomenon?  Speaking of black panthers, it feels appropriate to start with Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous poem, “Panther” (here in my own translation from the German, which naturally I prefer to anyone else’s):

 

His eyes are so tired now that they observe

nothing beyond these circling bars:

to him, no furnishings but a thousand bars,

and behind the thousand bars, no world.

 

His supple grace, elastic and contained,

pacing and pacing his shrunken ring,

is a dance of power about the dying

centre where a massive will stands drained.

 

Just once, or twice, the curtained pupil

is soundlessly unveiled – an image gleams,

glides through that intensity of limbs –

and in the silence of the heart, is stilled.

 

Says it all, I think.

As Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier richly chronicle in their big book, Zoo, the history of zoos is a long one, entangled with the development of human power over the natural world, through increasingly powerful technology and the urbanisation that alienated many from nature. For centuries wild animals were captured for human entertainment, collected by or gifted amongst potentates as reflections of their power and self-regard. So rarely seen were some of these animals that they were walked literally across continents and became celebrities. At what psychic cost to the bound and chivvied animals one can only guess.

            Michael Allin relates just such an epic trek, by a giraffe whom humans named Zarafa. Zarafa (1998) is an historical account – Allin conceived it as a novel but found the facts quite compelling and colourful enough. By 1824, when Zarafa (the Arabic word from which ‘giraffe’ derives) was born and captured in the Sudan, 17th-century ‘cabinets of curiosity’ and the European elites’ 18th-century ‘menageries’ were giving way to less artificially designed ‘gardens’, later to be termed ‘zoological gardens’ – zoos. Colonial conquests were making more exotic specimens available, and after the French Revolution the gardens were increasingly taken out of aristocratic hands, democratised and commercialised. Muhammed Ali of Egypt’s gift of a giraffe to Charles X of France was a bit of a throwback, then, entangled with the aftermaths of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt. Also, the zoological sciences were becoming professionalised, and an actual ‘scientist’, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, was assigned to make sure the poor animal survived the 500-kilometre walk from Marseille to Paris. She did, despite what must have been the terrifying noise of enraptured crowds all along the route. She died in 1845, and remains, stuffed, in the museum at La Rochelle. Zarafa is a lively period-piece, though less about the giraffe’s experience than about the human culture she found herself entrapped by.

            The same might be said about a parallel story, J M Ledgard’s Giraffe (2007). Here the year is 1975, and a team of Czechs are in Africa capturing a whole clutch of giraffes to be shipped to Prague, home to one of the more prestigious European zoos. Colonial-style plunder continuing, in effect. The novel begins with a section related from the giraffe’s point of view, a tricky thing to pull off, especially when the giraffe starts naming boats and countries and relaying conversations translated from the Czech. There are only a couple more short such passages, however; the novel is otherwise about the humans’ journey into a country undergoing a kind of identity crisis as part of the “Communist moment”. The animals have to be transported by barge through West Germany, an ideologically unsettling experience for the crew. Among the latter is a Saint-Hilaire figure, a haematologist: how do giraffes pump blood  all that way up to their brains? After all this, little is learned; the giraffes are really just pawns in games of commerce, theatrics, and national pride – a sordid cocktail of motives governing most zoos ultimately. But the verbal flesh Ledgard puts on these bare bones is extraordinary: poetic, haunting, unflinching. The fate of the giraffes likewise: a grievous echo of Cold War paranoias about zoonotic pandemics – and prescient, given the more recent Covid outbreak.

            Most zoo animals are fated to be obtained by violence and to die behind bars. A few may be born in captivity; even fewer escape. But escape they will – like the tiger in South Africa recently that had finally to be shot by its ‘owner’/captor. Conservation value of all that: zero. Some inmates may be liberated by compassionate humans. This is the theme of Russell Hoban’s delightful and quirky Turtle Diary (1975), in which an ill-matched couple hatch a plot to liberate two turtles from London Zoo, and release them into the ocean at Polperro on England’s south coast. The unlikely thieves are deftly portrayed in the film of the book, by Vanessa Redgrave and Ben Kingsley. (I went on a Hoban pilgrimage to Polperro, disappointed to find that this was clearly not where the film ended up, charming though it is.)  

            Another escape story, even more fantasial, is Nancy Farmer’s children’s novel The Warm Place. I’ve written about this elsewhere, so here will just say it involves a group of talking animals conspiring, with the help of one small human, to escape a North American zoo and get back to Africa. (Indeed, if you Google lists of zoo novels, the vast majority are children’s stories.)

           

A reverse sea-borne journey is described in Yann Martel’s magnificently odd novel, Life of Pi (2003). This might be explored in the colonial/postcolonial context, too, since the eponymous Pi is son to a zoo owner in Pondicherry, India, mimicking the dynamics of Western zoos. (Not that India doesn’t have its own venerable history of capturing and taming wild animals, notably elephants.) Pi’s Indian zoo has proved commercially unviable, however. As Pi puts it, zoos have become pretty “precarious ... neither big enough a business to be above the law nor small enough to survive on the margins. To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech ...” (Tell that to the Chinese, who have many zoos, some of them reportedly horror-shows – notoriously for Zimbabwean baby elephants, gifted in mediaeval potentate-style to President Xi.)  Pi tries to suggest that zoo animals, when adequately treated, are content to settle into conditions safer than the wild. Puzzlingly, many still try to escape. In the novel, the animals are not freed but shipped across the Pacific to other zoos in North American. Unfortunately, the ship goes down in a storm, leaving Pi stranded on a lifeboat with a few animals, including an orang-utan, a zebra, a hyena and the tiger. It’s a microcosm of wilderness, and a mocking echo of the Ark (which some zoos also call themselves). After all the cruelty, terror and deprivation, Pi is nevertheless rather miffed when ‘Richard Parker’ the tiger finally walks away from him without a backward glance. So would all wild animals, given the chance.

One more big cat, in local context. Henrietta Rose-Innes’ fine novel Green Lion (2015) is set in a slightly-futuristic Cape Town, centred on the remnants of a zoo alongside Table Mountain (fenced off as an enclosed reserve). One of two zoo lions has mauled its keeper; the second, of course, eventually absconds, to become the elusive, almost mythical terror of local urban civilisation. There are echoes here perhaps of Nadine Gordimer’s short story, “A Lion on the Freeway” (1980), whose setting is haunted by the roar of lions in the nearby zoo – tragic precisely because there is no lion on the freeway, reclaiming his country.)

Zoos, I hazard, are first and foremost venues of ‘power-over’ rather than ‘power-for’, places where the ‘wild’ can be trammelled and effectively subordinated to human society, consumed only in digestible bits, decontextualised, infantilised. Arguments that the public are fruitfully educated by viewing captive animals are flimsy, argues staunch and controversial anti-zoo writer and literary scholar Randy Malamud, notably his book exploring a swathe of older literary works entailing zoos, Reading Zoos. A very short version can be found in an article, aptly named “The Captivity Industry”. It is co-authored with elephant-activist Gay Bradshaw, who has also been involved in efforts to move a destitute elephant out of less-than-ideal conditions in Pretoria Zoo. That environment minister Barbara Creecy seems slow to act, and the Zoo proprietors are recalcitrant, exemplifies the subordination of the animals’ well-being to commercial self-interest and legalistic obstructionism.  They haven’t absorbed the lesson and emotional burden of our Arja Salafranca’s sensitive poem, “The elephant is unhappy” – a sadness read, as with Rilke’s panther, in pure body language.

            I’m not presenting a fully-worked argument about the value of zoos here, but it seems significant that all the works cited seem to valorise the animals’ escape. (Maybe I unconsciously self-selected, of course.)  But given that humans have wiped out at least half of non-human animal life since 1970, it is clearly human incursion on the rest that needs to be caged.

Oh, but AI robots will take over from humans soon, and they’ll have no need for nature, animals, potable water, functioning ecosystems, or anything else! Or would they?

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No 138 - Last letter from Dunkirk, 1940

 

I was scratching through ancestral papers, as one does in one’s footloose retirement, and rediscovered a remarkable thing: a tightly folded letter tucked in a small envelope. The envelope bears an inscription: “Geoffrey’s letter to Pon from Dunkirk, May 1940.” Another hand, which must be my mother’s, had written above “Geoffrey” the word “uncle”, and above “Pon”, “aunt”. Now I knew that Geoffrey Hobson Matthews was my grandfather’s brother; “Pon” was the family nickname for Honor, their sister. I knew that Geoffrey had become a priest, and I remembered that he had been killed at Dunkirk, where some 300 000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force were being desperately evacuated ahead of the Nazi invasion of Belgium. I have a photographic print of him in military uniform. Yet somehow I hadn’t fully absorbed the drama of this letter.

Geoffrey Herbert Berrow was born to John and Alice Matthews on 12 December 1903 at Stanley Lodge, Monmouth, Wales. “From the start,” wrote a cousin and family chronicler David Pontifex, “he was a child of character and full of quaint remarks”. He began his education at St Benedict’s in Ealing, long a Matthews haunt. He remained there during the First World War, while his older brother Bernard was, ironically, dropping small bombs on the Germans in France from his Sopwith Camel.

Geoffrey seemed bent on becoming a priest from the earliest age: his father’s diary records a remarkable sermon on miracles he delivered at the age of 3. He joined the Benedictine community at Downside Abbey in 1922, spent a year of study at Sant Anselmo in Rome, and was ordained priest on 1 July 1928. Just a month later Bernard, who had gone to Kenya to try his hand at farming, died of blackwater fever (malaria), leaving his wife Mary pregnant with their second daughter – my mother.

Honor, Bernard, John, Geoffrey and
Monica Hobson Matthews, ca. 1910.

  Geoffrey – now Dom Gervase – taught at Downside and Ealing Priory Schools, in the holidays travelling with Honor as far as Poland. When the Second World War broke out, along with other Downside old boys, he joined the BEF, and was assigned to a Casualty Clearing Station (CCS). He wrote several letters during this time, which David Pontifex had, but I haven’t seen them – apart from this typewritten one to Pon. It was the last he ever wrote; somehow the letter, added to over several days, got away. Its last entry is 30 May 1940. He mentions having written to Pon. Within 48 hours he was dead, exactly how no one knows. On his body, folded into his psalter, was discovered the neatly handwritten diary he had kept throughout his time in the BEF, which found its way back to Downside Abbey. You can see a few extracts of it on their website, which lavishes praise on his self-sacrifice.

There are intriguing differences between the two accounts. Though he didn’t exactly sugar-coat it, his account to Pon lacks some of the diary’s details, omits to mention that he was actually on the beaches on the last couple of days, and adopts a slightly more offhand and upbeat tone. He doesn’t mention that a handful of chaplains drew lots to see who should leave or stay. The last line of the diary reads: “a priest certainly should stay”.

Here is the letter.

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                                                                                                            No. 2 C.S.S.

                                                                                                            B.E.F.

                                                                                    Friday, May 24, 1940

 I am typing this on my bed. I have no table. I sent a field card off to you this afternoon. No post is going from here, but we heard that there was one going from No.1 C.S.S. about ten miles away; so we all dashed off cards and despatched them by someone who was going there. It was the first chance since I have been back; but I hope you had my letter from Boulogne? I don’t know when this will get off. The only thing to do is to write, and to post when one can.

            My leave seems to have ended years and years ago. It is all so different out here now!

            After writing to you at the harbour station at Boulogne I had to decide what to do. I could get no news at all of the unit and all of us were told to stay put pending instructions – which might not be forthcoming. Two chaps (major O’Meara, who sent off my wire from Dover; and Lacey, the United Board, whose leave was over before mine), left by train (civvy train) for Arras. The line was so blocked by refugee trains and hospital trains that it took three hours to get as far as Etaples, and I didn’t arrive at Arras until after midnight. In the train I learned that Courcelette, the little village where I sang Mass on the Sunday before my leave, had been bombed and destroyed. There was a big petrol dump there.

            I can’t describe the tension in Arras. It was awful. The town was of course in complete darkness; cars were gliding about without lights and refugees were trying to sleep in the open streets. I crossed the square and wandered into a big hotel just opposite the station; it had been abandoned, but the side doors were open. Two French soldiers were standing nearby. One of them said, “Are you a priest? All right you can go in. You will find a bed in Room 19 on the third floor; but sleep lightly and be ready for grave news.” So I went up to room 9 on the third floor, washed and shaved in cold water, and slept on an unmade bed, without undressing, to the wail of air raid sirens. I was the only soul in the building, and it was about as weird an experience as you could wish!

            At 6 o’clock I knocked on the door of an Augustinian convent and asked if I might say Mass. The nuns got everything ready for me and attended in full force; and just after the Communion there was a hefty air raid that lasted until I left the altar. Lots of bombs were dropped and thirty people were killed in the streets by Boche machine-gun fire. The noise was appalling.

            The Rev. Mother gave me breakfast in the convent and I then collected my bag from the empty Moderne and repaired to the station, where I received a sharp but friendly rap on the knuckles, from the Military Authorities, for having come up from Boulogne on my own!

            I remained at the station from 7.30 until lunch-time, trying unsuccessfully to get news of 2 C.C.S. from the R.T.O. in his office. At 8.30 a Boche plane swept down on us, dropped several bombs (which fell wide, but not as wide as one would have wished) and then began to let loose a hail of machine-gun bullets on all present. The Boche bullets pinged uncomfortably loudly on the stone platform, within a yard or two of me, and I leapt with unwonted agility into the R.T.O.’s office. No sauntering, I mean!

            Shortly afterwards, the aviator (or it may have been another one) was brought down and taken prisoner. They brought him into the station under escort: a boy of 18: his left arm was broken and his right eye was cut and bruised. The French soldiers left him standing against a wall, while everyone ogled him. I felt unreasonably sorry for him and bunged some cigarettes at some French wounded, who were waiting for a hospital train, I am afraid for the sole purpose of giving him one too. He said “Thank you” in English; but his hand trembled so that he upset the packet. He tried to pick them up but I lit his and prevented him. After standing the whole thing exceedingly well for some time, his nerve gave and he began to moan and cry out; the bruises had spread all over his face and he was obviously in a bad way from shock. They took him into a waiting room and laid him down on a wooden bench; but they wouldn’t do anything else for him. When I went in to see him he cried in English “help me, help me!”, but quite quietly. I suggested that one of a number of pillows, lying nearby, might be put under his head; but I nearly got lynched for suggesting it! After a bit he recovered somewhat; and the last I saw of him was his being put on a hospital train with the French wounded.

            There were air raid alarms all through the morning. I spent the time helping to bundle the aged of the refugees into what trains were going, until at mid-day word came through that every British troop was to be out of Arras immediately. Most of them had already left.

            I had to decide then between returning to Boulogne or somehow getting forward to where our 3rd. Corps was, in the Bethune area. I was told that it was just possible that I might get some news there of the C.S.S.; but that if I didn’t somehow get out of Arras without delay the consequences would be very serious. In other words the Boche were about to enter.

After some hesitation (actually getting on to a Boulogne hospital train and getting off again!) I climbed with my suitcase on to a lorry laden with ammunition, feeling like half a dozen suicide squads whenever I thought of what would happen if the joint went up! I left thereon at 1.30; and exactly twenty minutes later the station was bombed to bits and more than 100 people were killed, mostly refugees. I find it hard to get the thought of them out of my mind: two or three trains packed with them; others huddled together on the platforms and  just inside the station doors. I heard about it later from the R.T.O. He congratulated me on getting away and told me that his office had got a direct hit just after he left it; that two trains had direct hits also; that there was practically nothing left of the station and that the sight was too awful for words. So maybe ‘twas your prayers that sent that ammunition lorry along in the nick of time!           

The lorry took me to 3ed. Corps H.Q. and I at once went to the R.T.O. there to ask of news of the unit; and there I had the most incredible luck, for seated in the office was Colonel Graham (C.O. of No.2 C.C.S,) and a few yards away was the whole outfit – with Master Maurice Summers and my own little car! They were actually on the move and called there en route to get instructions! I put my suitcase on to my car and there we were! Much tail-wagging on all sides!

As you see from my using my typewriter, I got hold of some of my kit that I left behind when I went on leave; but most of it, including my altar kit and my large suitcase, is still on a train somewhere and can’t yet be got at. An awful nuisance as I now want my altar kit badly. Fortunately I brought out a new supply of Oils with me this time. We are opening up in full tonight. Till now we have only had fairly light cases, owing to our being unable to stay for more than a few hours in one place.

We have been all over the shop and I have been sleeping in woods and under haystacks and on the top decks of ambulances. Now we are established in an evacuated school on the Belgian frontier and I suppose we shall stay here unless a move is indicated.

German planes fly overhead all day and all night and there has been a lot of bombing all around. A few moments ago 12 Boche planes went past, ‘mid a colossal shindy from A.A. guns. It is a bit uncomfortable (but no more than that) to hear and see them incessantly. No one bothers about them unless they are bang over us; then all have to get under cover.

 Saturday, May 25

 I saw St Omer bombed by about 30 planes on Tuesday, when we were three or four miles away. It was the most spectacular thing I have seen in that line. We were up on a hill and looked down on the whole show while it was on. We could hear the Germans machine-gunning people on the roads.

            The plight of the refugees (mostly Belgian) has been pitiful beyond words. The roads have been thronged with them, and things have been happening so quickly that it has been quite a common sight to see them making first in one direction and then all returning and trying to get away in another. I gave the Last Sacraments to one poor man who was dying by the roadside. They were all so patient and there has been no panic at all; just the most awful suffering.

            I was not able to say Mass from the day I left Arras until yesterday; but I went once to Holy Communion, seizing the moment, never giving a thought to the fact that I had broken my fast in the small hours of the morning while we were travelling. And that Thursday was the feast of Corpus Christi didn’t dawn on me until that afternoon when I went into a church on our road.

            On Wednesday it was decided to evacuate all the nursing Sisters to England, as things have been rather hot for them (this war is entirely unlike the last and there is no safety ‘behind the lines’) and the C.O. asked me to take them to Dunkirk. We set off in an ambulance at 8.00 a.m.’ the driver, nine sisters, and myself (I in front with the driver). When we arrived at a town just outside Dunkirk we were stopped. Dunkirk was being bombed. While we were waiting there I ran into Frs. Coghlan and McCreton, to my delight and theirs. I was the first of our chaplains they had made any kind of contact with since the flap began. Later we pushed on into Dunkirk; but the bombing had put the harbour temporarily out of action and the only thing to do was make for Calais – rather perilous in view of the German spearhead advance towards Boulogne. Also they have odd tanks dashing around all over the place!

            We got out of Dunkirk just in time to avoid a second raid on the town, during which I hoicked the sisters out of the ambulance and into a ditch for shelter. Then we tried to get onto the Calais road; as no one quite knew what was happening between there and the coast. We had to turn back and I found a farmhouse where I unloaded the sisters and got rooms for them. It seemed that we were stuck.

            After a few hours, however, we were allowed to push on again by a very round-about route; and the road was so congested with refugees that our progress was slow and very difficult. We reached Calais at last at 6 p.m., to find that it had been having a good old bombing just before. The harbour station had been hit and fires were blazing away all round the docks. A boat was expected to leave for England in the morning; so I parked the sisters on the Area Commandant, a Colonel Holland, and bade them a tender farewell – to my enormous relief!

The job then was to get back again. I had taken my leave kit with me as it was very doubtful whether one would succeed. I could have come to England for the asking: the pass was made out for myself and the sisters, in case there should be no getting back from the port. The driver and I set off at 7.30, hoping for the best, and did in fact get back here (the unit had come here during the day) at about midnight – driving without lights, past thousands of troops, guns, tanks and ammunition lorries being rushed up to the defence of Boulogne and Calais. The roads and bridges were all mined, ready to be blown up to stop the Boche, and we had to zig-zag our way between barrels of gunpowder. There were several huge fires at Dunkirk, which had evidently been bombed again since we came through, and the flames were shooting up ‘mid great columns of smoke. Later we passed through a town that had been bombed to pieces since our driving through it in the morning; a terrible sight now in the darkness, with great holes in the streets, houses yawning open from direct hits, and every window smashed for miles.

 Sunday May 26.

 I had to call this off yesterday because the Boche came over in fairly full force (eighteen planes) and dropped a shower of bombs on us, six hefty ones falling very close. I went down to the wounded (lying on stretchers on the floors of the school, because of course this isn’t a hospital but a clearing station). It was pretty awful. The whole place seemed about to fall and most of the windows crashed to pieces. It was so horrid listening to the whine of the bombs and the frightful explosions. The large and very beautiful parish church, just a hundred yards away, got a direct hit and was smashed up completely. I found the Tabernacle door blown open, the lid blown off the ciborium, the lid of the lunette also blown right off, and the Hosts covered with dust and plaster; I climbed over the debris (which was beginning to smoulder) and took the Blessed Sacrament to a house nearby – for which I was patted on the back by some French soldiers. It was terrible going into the wrecked houses to look for the people; but I got a great kick out of the fact that Dabbs the C. of E. was in a cellar – though he came out after a bit and was very kind to the populace. No civilians were killed but a good number were killed. I anointed the French soldier just before he died, and a few hours later I buried him; for which I received the official thanks from the C.O. of his regiment. I want never to have to go through the like again; but I suppose one will! It was comforting to find that the breeze was blowing inside the most hardened warriors just as much as it was inside me!

            Lots of love to all the family; and thumbs up! Jerry is gabling on a knock-out; but we’re not knocked out yet and our turn will come!

            Pray for the wounded. They are so good and patient. Some of the cases are very pathetic.

            I haven’t had any mail since I came back. No one has. I do hope you are out of London!

            Your very loving,

                                                Geoffrey.

30.5.40

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The folded, typewritten letter I possess looks rather authentic, but must itself be a copy: ‘copy’ is in fact written on the envelope, I guess by David Pontifex, who must have sent it to my grandmother. Or possibly after the war Honor (Pon) took it on her visit to Kenya, where Mary had married Alban Mitford-Barberton, and was raising Bernard’s two girls on their farm near Kitale. My mother, then a young girl, recalled meeting Pon, and perhaps did so again when she visited England later. Pon died in 1967.

 After 1945 everybody thought that Europe had finally exhausted its appetite for war. Not as far as Putin is concerned: the scenes of devastation, numbed refugees, the casualties buried where they died, described by Dom Gervase, are shockingly being exactly replicated in eastern Ukraine. Insane.

*****