for Recreation and Study;
Bad Company and Places to Avoid;
Relations with Commonwealth Co-citizens of the Mother Country.
And so on and so forth, dear man. And may I advise you’ (he looked at his watch) ‘to hurry up and read them? Because your clients will be turning up for interviews within the hour. Meanwhile I shall say goodbye to you and wish you the good fortune that I fear you’ll so much need.’
‘Might I enquire,’ I said, reluctant even now to see him go, ‘to what fresh colonial pastures you yourself are now proceeding?’
A look of mild triumph overspread his face.
‘Before the month is out,’ he answered, ‘I shall be at my new post in one of our Protectorates within the Union of South Africa.’
‘South Africa? Good heavens! Won’t you find, as a British colonial official, that the atmosphere there’s just a little difficult?’
In statesmanlike tones he answered: ‘South Africa, Pew, is a country much maligned. Perhaps they have found a logical solution for race relations there. That is the conclusion to which I’ve rather reluctantly come. Because if my year in the Department has taught me anything, it’s that the Negro’s still, deep down inside, a savage. Not his fault, no doubt, but just his nature.’ (He stood there erect, eyes imperiously agleam.) ‘Remember that, Pew, at your Welfare Officer’s desk. Under his gaberdine suit and his mission-school veneer, there still lurk the impulses of the primitive man.’
He waved – as if an assegai – his umbrella, I waved more wanly, and lo! he was gone out of my life for ever.
Alone, I picked up the dossiers, crossed out his name, and wrote in its place my own: Montgomery Pew. Then, like a lion (or monkey, possibly?) new to its cage, I walked round my unsumptuous office examining the numerous framed photographs of worthy Africans and West Indians, staring out at me with enigmatic faces, whose white grins belied, it seemed to me, the inner silences of the dark pools of their eyes.
2
Johnny Macdonald Fortune takes up the tale
My first action on reaching the English capital was to perform what I’ve always promised my sister Peach I would. Namely, leaving my luggages at the Government hostel, to go straight out by taxi (oh, so slow, compared with our sleek Lagos limousines!) to the famous central Piccadilly Tube station where I took a one-stop ticket, went down on the escalator, and then ran up the same steps in the wrong direction. It was quite easy to reach the top, and our elder brother Christmas was wrong to warn it would be impossible to me. Naturally, the ticket official had his word to say, but I explained it was my promise to my brother Christmas and my sister Peach ever since in our childhood, and he yielded up.
‘You boys are all the same,’ he said.
‘What does that mean, mister?’
‘Mad as March hares, if you ask me.’
He looked so sad when he said it, that how could I take offence? ‘Maybe you right,’ I told him. ‘We like living out our lives.’
‘And we like peace and quiet. Run along, son,’ this official told me.
Not a bad man really, I suppose, so after a smile at him I climbed up towards the free outer air. For I had this morning to keep my appointment at the Colonial Department Welfare Office to hear what plans have been arranged there for the pursuit of my further studies.
In the Circus overhead I looked round more closely at my new city. And I must say at first it was a bad disappointment: so small, poky, dirty, not magnificent! Red buses, like shown to us on the cinema, certainly, and greater scurrying of the population than at home. But people with glum clothes and shut-in faces. Of course, I have not seen yet the Parliament Houses, or many historic palaces, or where Dad lived in Maida Vale when he was here thirty years ago before he met our mum …
And that also is to be one of my first occupations: to visit this house of his to see if I can recover any news of his former landlady – if dead, or alive, or in what other circumstances. Because my dad, at the party on the night I sailed right out of Lagos, he took me on one side and said, ‘Macdonald,’ (he never calls me John or Johnny – always Macdonald) ‘Macdonald, you’re a man now. You’re eighteen.’
‘Yes, Dad …’ I said, wondering what.
‘You’re a man enough to share