Local Customs Read online

  Mrs. Bailey: I would’ve liked that bottle, just as a curiosity, you know, but it disappeared.

  Isaac: Onyame N’aa. God, He never sleep.

  Epilogue

  LETTY: ONCE UPON A TIME … or how do the French say it? Il y a une fois …

  Once upon a time there was a plain but clever little English girl who rolled her hoop and kept her nose in a book at the same time. Her neighbour was Mr. William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Review.

  And once upon a time there was a sturdy little Scots boy, a “douce laddie,” but rather solitary, but who dreamt of doing some great thing …

  They grew up; they married; they died.

  How sobering to be summed up like that in seven words, two commas, and a full stop. But I tell you this, if I could have roused myself from the fog that was so rapidly rising, if I had only had the chance to whisper to George before I died, I would have pressed his hand and whispered simply this:

  “No regrets, my dear, no regrets.”

  Afterword

  ONE SATURDAY VANCOUVER MORNING, in 1964, back in the days when mail was still delivered on Saturdays, a blue aerogramme was dropped through the mail slot in our front door. This act changed our lives.

  We were all sitting in the kitchen at the back of the house, enjoying our usual lazy Saturday “Full English” breakfast: bacon, fried eggs, tomato, mushrooms, and fried sourdough rye from Ernie’s Austrian Bakery, when we heard the mailman’s step on the porch.

  “I’ll get it,” my husband said, and headed down the hall.

  He didn’t return right away and I began to worry that there had been some bad news about his parents (in England) or mine (in the United States). When he did come back, he was holding an open air-letter and he had a funny smile on his face. “How would you like to go to Africa?” he said.

  That letter came at just the right moment in our lives. We had immigrated to Canada in 1959 and now owned a large if rather dilapidated house in Kitsilano and were parents of not just the infant daughter we had brought with us, who had just celebrated her fifth birthday, but another little girl, aged two and a half. My husband had a good job teaching art on the east side and I was a full-time mother and part-time graduate student, working slowly toward an advanced degree. Everything was fine, and yet we were feeling restless; too “settled,” perhaps, and had even sent inquiries to the Northwest Territories to see if they had any jobs available. An interview had been set up for the end of the month.

  The letter was from a former tutor of my husband’s back in England. He had been seconded to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology outside Kumasi in Ghana and his two years were up; he’d been asked to suggest a replacement. He got our address from an old Christmas card.

  We sent a cable saying YES YES YES and asked for more information. We cancelled the interview with the man from Yellowknife, put my Ph.D. on hold and in August we left for two years in Africa. The month before I had discovered I was three months pregnant, but that is another story.

  We took a train across Canada, then a short flight to see my mother (my father had been ill for some time and died in June), a train to New York City where we boarded a ship for England to see his parents and then another ship, the MV Apapa from Liverpool to Takoradi. The girls loved all the travelling and were exactly the right ages to be excited by all these adventures.

  The voyage out took two weeks, calm the whole time, but hot once we were round the Bay of Biscay. We stopped twice, once in the Gambia, where heavily armed soldiers brought bars of gold boullion on board, and once at Freetown, Sierra Leone, to take on a crowd of deck passengers: ten pounds to Lagos! I felt as though we were in some old movie or a Graham Greene novel — all the swirls of colour, the babble of languages, the heat. We finally arrived on our daughter’s third birthday, and halfway to Kumasi we stopped at an outdoor café (The Don’t Mind Your Wife Chop Bar) for snacks and cool drinks. She remembers the monkeys in the trees.

  The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, which became just the University of Science and Technology after Nkrumah was overthrown in a virtually bloodless coup, had connections to a small resort at Cape Coast, where one could, for a very small fee, stay on the beach in small chalets the pink colour of coconut ice and just relax. It was during Easter Break in 1965, that we went down. As well as swimming — careful of the undertow — making sandcastles, and enjoying fresh fish, we visited both Cape Coast Castle and Elmina. This was the first time that I saw the graves of George Maclean and Letitia Landon. Our guide, a young policeman, explained that Mrs. Maclean had been a famous English lady who wrote books and a mystery still surrounded her death. I’d never heard of Letitia Landon, but I was a writer and I liked mysteries, so I made a metal note of this. It took me almost forty years to get back to her.

  Beginning a research project is exciting, but also dangerous, unless you exercise some self control. It’s a bit like sitting next to a big bowl of peanuts; can you limit yourself to one or two? You find out a lot of interesting stuff that may not have anything to do with your book and when you look at your watch half a day has gone by! You learn to rein yourself in, but not too tightly.

  All four of the principal characters in Local Customs are real people: George Maclean, Letitia Landon, Brodie Cruickshank, and Thomas Birch Freeman. Cape Coast Castle still stands — I have walked in the bedroom where Letty died. Some years ago there was a movement to either tear it down or renovate it and open it as a hotel. Fortunately, neither of these ideas got very far off the ground. It is now a World Heritage Site, as is Elmina. The wind in the palm trees still rattles the leaves like bones.

  Acknowledgements

  There are many people I ought to thank, but most especially the secretary of the Methodist Church of England, who wrote me a letter that gave me access to a reader’s ticket for the archives at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where the papers of Thomas Birch Freeman are kept; the Canada Council, who gave me a grant a long time ago toward the first leg of the journey; the Rare Book Room at The British Library where, on my very last day in Britain, I found a small pamphlet by a doctor in 1830s London who was using hydrocyanic acid to help alleviate the pain of Female Complaints; Wendy Ewart who acted as chaffeuse and old friend on our wonderful trip to the Highlands; Sally Millar Marlow for her trip to St. Mary’s, Bryanston Square, and her sketch of the same; Alice Munro and Stephen O’Shea, both of whom encouraged me when no publisher would; as always, my cheerful typist, Carole Robertson; last of all, special thanks to Ian, who got me there in the first place.

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  Copyright © Audrey Thomas, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Editor: Shannon Whibbs

  Design: Laura Boyle

  Epub Design:Carmen Giraudy

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Thomas, Audrey, 1935-, author

  Local customs / by Audrey Thomas.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-0798-6 (pbk.).-- ISBN 978-1-4597-0799-3 (pdf).--

  ISBN 978-1-4597-0800-6 (epub)

  1. L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 1802-1838--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8539.H62L63 2014 C813’.54 C2013-902973-7

  C2013-902974-5

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

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