Local Customs Page 5

  George said, “My secretary died while I was away, so I will have to leave you to your own devices until dinnertime; I expect both you and Mrs. Bailey would like to rest. I’ll see that tea and sandwiches are sent up for both of you and we’ll meet again around seven.”

  There was a rather large packing box in the corner. (It said: Fragile. It said This Side Up. It said, For Mrs. Maclean.)

  “Would you like me to open it?” George asked.

  “Of course I would.”

  He took a hammer that I hadn’t noticed (it was lying on top of the box) and proceeded to carefully dismantle the box, saving each piece of wood, each nail, each strap and piling them neatly in a corner. When it was all done, he stood up and the contents were revealed: a most exquisite escritoire.

  “Oh, George. How lovely.”

  “A belated happy birthday, Letty. I couldn’t present it to you until we landed. It even has a secret drawer with a separate key.”

  I threw my arms around him, which embarrassed him mightily. “We shall have no secrets from one another, so there is no need of such a secret drawer, but I do love the desk and know I shall use it constantly. You have made me so happy.”

  He left me then; Mrs. Bailey went to her own quarters, which were nearby, and within the half-hour there was a knock on the door and a young voice saying, “Cock, cock, cock.”

  “Come in,” I called, and so entered Isaac, carrying a covered tray. I discovered that he always announced himself, “cock, cock, cock,” as well as knocked; this was a great source of amusement to both George and myself. I suppose he was about thirteen years old — he wasn’t sure when I asked him — one of the “sense boys” who was training to be a servant, in this case, a cook.

  I nibbled on a sandwich, drank a cup of tea, closed the louvres, changed into a loose frock, and fell asleep almost immediately. I did not dream — why would I? Africa was a dream.

  That night we dined alone and the next morning George handed me a set of keys and I frankly confess I brought with me a plentiful stock of ignorance.

  “Are these for Mrs. Bailey?”

  “No, my dear, they are for you. As my wife, you are now the chatelaine of the Castle. I speak only of the domestic side. Everything else is under my supervision.”

  George

  THIS IS WHEN I DISCOVERED Letty had no idea about household management, no idea at all. She had never cooked, never weighed or measured anything, never written out a menu. I suppose, as a son of the manse, where a local girl might come in to help a few times a week, but otherwise all the cooking and all the ordering of supplies was done by my mother, and then my stepmother, I assumed my wife would have some rudimentary domestic skills at the very least. But Letty hadn’t lived at home for years; she was always resident in someone else’s home, with her Grandmother Bishop, then the Misses Lance, or visiting some friend or other. She had no idea how to go about things and I admit I was exasperated at her ignorance. My wife was a woman who had lived almost entirely in her imagination. I explained what I could and then I introduced her to Ibrahim, my cook of many years, and directed him to instruct her. I could see she wasn’t too pleased, but I’ll say this for her, she never complained, at least not to me.

  Letty

  YOU MAY WONDER WHY I NEVER seemed to be afraid in my first few weeks at Cape Coast. It was not as though I had seen many Negroes in London. Some of the great houses had Negro servants — I remember one charming little black boy who carried an enormous fan of white feathers — but they were always in the background. Servants serve, by definition.

  Here there were Negroes by the hundreds, ordinary people who led their lives in the town just beyond the Castle or set out in their dugout canoes to fish the surrounding waters.

  Even the prisoners who cleaned (always supervised by an armed officer or two) didn’t worry me. I was known to have a sensitive, rather nervous nature — why wasn’t I afraid?

  I’ve thought about this. I remembered the warnings of that dreadful woman in Eastbourne. She had obviously lived a life of fear out there. I don’t really have an answer. Perhaps, from the time I was carried ashore by those two giants, I felt as though I were living in a book, that nothing was quite real. When I woke up that first afternoon I wasn’t quite sure where I was and whether what I awoke to was really a dream.

  Later on, when things were left outside my door, when someone invisible to me stood there and laughed — then I was afraid. That was different.

  Letty

  I LEARNED FAST, thanks to Ibrahim and young Isaac. Within a week I could scold with the best of them, give out the appropriate amount of salt, sugar, palm oil, whatever was needed, order dinner, always the same unless we were having guests: two fowl and some yam, fresh fruit. George said he could never get enough of the wonderful fruit out here, since fruit, except for a few berries, was unknown in the eastern Highlands where he grew up. Only once did I forget to lock up the meat safe and Mrs. Bailey — who had taken a shine to Ibrahim and was teaching him to make stodgy puddings, much to George’s delight — had gone down to the kitchen to remind the cook to soak some raisins for a Spotted Dick she intended to make and discovered two of the resident soldiers, faces slathered in grease and the carcass of a cold roast turkey under the table, where it had been hastily kicked when they heard her footsteps on the stair. Mrs. Bailey never told on me, I’ll say that for her, and it really was I who suffered, for I was to have enjoyed a bit of that turkey with some roast yam for my lunch.

  From the time we arose, just before dawn, and shared a morning cup of tea and some arrowroot (“cock cock cock” went Isaac, at the door) until seven in the evening, I rarely saw George. He was used to having his luncheon, which he called “relish” with various merchants and officers in the big mess hall. A long lunch, with far too much alcohol as far I was concerned. I began to understand all those other cases marked fragile, which had come up from the hold of the Maclean. Case after case of wine, but also brandy and rum, from which they made a punch with limes and sugar.

  George had a prodigious appetite, for even after a heavy luncheon he could still tuck into the evening meal and finish off with a pudding.

  “Letitia,” he said, “it is important to eat in the tropics; you must keep up your strength.” He always called me “Letitia” when he wanted to emphasize a point; my father had done the same.

  The Castle itself was like some great white ship, the enormous courtyard its deck, the soldiers’ quarters, except for their families, might have been the sailors’ quarters and “below decks” were the cells where the prisoners were kept: the “hold.”

  One hundred feet from one end of the courtyard to the other? I never asked, but it certainly seemed that large. I never really explored while I lived there, stuck mainly to our apartments and the dining areas, the battlements which looked out to sea.

  Every so often I said to myself, “Letitia, you are living in a real castle — at least it calls itself a castle and that’s good enough for you. And my husband, George Maclean, is ‘king of the castle,’ so I must be the queen.”

  After playing mistress of the Castle, I hurried to my room and wrote all morning. In the heat of the day I rested or read until it was time for dinner. The rainy season was supposed to be ending, but one afternoon the skies opened and a torrent of rain descended; I had never seen anything like it. It was Biblical, the sort of rain poor Mr. and Mrs. Noah must have experienced as they floated away with their menagerie in the ark. But it was over well before dark and the brief interval of coolness was lovely. These were the “small rains” George said, and soon they would stop altogether; then there would be no rain at all for at least four months and all the lush green would turn to brown.

  “If these are the ‘small rains,’” I said, “I hate to think what the large rains are like.”

  He said the people out here, black as well as white, longed for the Dry Season, for it was considered much healthier, with less chance of fever.

  “Will I get fever, Geo
rge, before the Dry Season begins?”

  “I hope not, Letty, you are such a tiny thing, but I expect you will.”

  “This first fever — is this what Matthew called the ‘seasoning’?”

  “It is.”

  “This is what the missionaries died of?”

  “That, and dysentery.”

  When we arrived all the little band of Wesleyans who had come ashore the previous January were dead, with one exception, Mr. Thomas Birch Freeman. The officers called the graveyard “The Stone Garden,” since its crop of gravestones seemed to flourish year after year after year.

  And yet I seemed to thrive. George caught a chill and was laid up for four days just after we disembarked — penance for his midnight dash through the fog — but I caught nothing. Indeed, I had never felt better in my life. The old trouble was there; like the poor, it was always with me, but I had my drops and the ache or pain or whatever it was that plagued me, was manageable.

  One afternoon I asked Mr. Freeman how it could be that I, miserable sinner, should be spared, when five of his party had succumbed within the first few weeks of landing on these shores. Surely God must have a wicked sense of humour?

  But more of Mr. Freeman in a few minutes. Mr. Freeman is like a character in one of Shakespeare’s plays who has little or nothing to do in Act I, but features prominently from then on.

  The actual cleaning of the Castle rooms was done by the prisoners, guarded over by a soldier with a bayonet. They took forever to do anything, not that they were stupid, simply lazy. George told me that when two of Captain S’s men ran away and were caught, they said they couldn’t abide the way the soldiers stood so close to them, they couldn’t carry on a private conversation. At any rate, the present lot took all morning to do what a good old English char could accomplish in an hour. Still, I suppose it keeps them out of mischief. They do love “waxin’” day, when the few floors that are made of wood or painted cement are waxed. They strap heavy bricks on their sandals, the bricks covered with a duster, throw down gobbets of floor polish, and glide across the floors like Dutchmen on the canals. The parquet floors are beautiful, but the white ants think so, too, and what looks solid on the surface can be completely eaten away underneath. The floors in all of our apartments, except my bedroom, are paved with marble squares, black and white, like a chessboard, much more durable, but they do show every bit of grime and are slippery directly after mopping.

  The town is spread out behind the Castle and that part which is occupied by the poorest classes consists of houses made of swish with palm-leaf roofs. In the parts of the town where Europeans live — the merchants — or wealthy natives, the houses are very different, made of brick, whitewashed, with flat roofs and green shutters. They are really most attractive. The two principal streets are very wide and lined with umbrella trees. The chapel is at one end of the main street, directly facing the Castle.

  Beyond the town there is a series of hills, covered with dense brushwood or “bush.”

  Chickens and children wander freely, women walk to and fro with babies strapped to their backs; men sit under a huge silk-cotton tree, talking and playing a game they call Oware.

  I had never seen another woman’s breasts until I came to Cape Coast and at first I found it quite shocking, but what shocked me even more was the way the men of both races — except for Mr. Freeman, of course — ignored this nakedness.

  Women of childbearing age wear their cloths tucked up under their armpits, but the young and the old leave their bosoms exposed. They wear no supporting undergarments of any kind and the old women’s breasts hang down almost to their waists. However, it seems that no one ever mocks these old crones or shows them any disrespect.

  There is so much insect life here! Termites chewing away, mosquitoes whining at night, driver ants who can deliver a sting like a wasp, things munching, marching along, relentless armies of minute destroyers. And spiders! Huge spiders. Everything seemed excessive out here and vaguely — or not so vaguely — tinged with malevolence. There were only two things I grew fond of: the little geckos that hid behind picture frames waiting for unsuspecting flies, and the orange-tailed lizards that sunned themselves on the battlements and gazed at me with such ancient, knowing eyes. What we have seen, they seemed to say; what tales we could tell. Ibrahim, whose English is quite good, told me that small boys like to grab them by the tails, which the clever creatures divest themselves of immediately and scamper to freedom. Apparently their tails grow back, but never quite as long. I could not but think of Shakespeare’s “wanton boys.”

  George (as he headed off for the day): All right Letty? Any complaints?

  Me: No complaints, Dear.

  George: Right then. See you just before dinner.

  George: Why shouldn’t I have believed her? Letty was never a person to hide her feelings. If she said things were fine, what reason did I have to assume anything other? If she had been unhappy, I would have been the first to know it.

  Letty

  ON THE THIRD EVENING, before George came down with fever and chills, and after my brain had stopped trying to convince my body that we were still on the rocking ship, after I could get “a proper night’s rest” (his words), we gave a small dinner party so that I could be introduced to the principal merchants, the few officers who weren’t dead and Mr. Thomas Birch Freeman, head of the Wesleyan Mission to the Gold Coast.

  He picked up my hand, bent low over it as though he were going to kiss it (I saw George’s look of astonishment), but merely shook my hand, said, “Mrs. Maclean.” His hand was rough as a cat’s tongue, his work-hardened, pinkish palm. He didn’t say much that evening, although when the bottle went round he put his hand over his glass and laughed — hee-hee-hee — saying he preferred “Adam’s Ale,” thank you.

  The dinner was excellent: a fish course, the fish resembling our mullet, then roasted yam and roasted plantain, then a ground-nut stew, something I had never tasted before and quite liked, although it was too spicy. I couldn’t believe my eyes when all of the men added more red pepper from little saucers that had been set up and down the long table. As it was, my nether regions suffered the next day, as I was sure they would. Joloff rice. Fresh pineapple spears. Wine and more wine.

  They were all very gallant towards me and I enjoyed myself immensely, although I wasn’t so naive as to think they weren’t sizing me up. I think they expected some sturdy Highland lassie and not this tiny Londoner.

  “Do you read poetry, Mr. Hutton?”

  “Not if I can help it.” But said with a smile. “I’m afraid you’ll find us rather a rough lot compared with your friends back in London.”

  Mr. Freeman: After meeting her, bets were taken on how long she’d last. The general opinion was that she’d be dead within a fortnight. What had Maclean been thinking of? Hard to imagine him as so besotted he’d marry a slip of a woman like this, but then, I barely knew him.

  Letty: How wonderful it was to sit at dinner with a group of attentive men, even if they didn’t read poetry. Dinner parties bring out the best in me, although I thought if Mr. Freeman said, “Adam’s Ale! Adam’s Ale” one more time, as the bottle went around, I would scream. I made him pay for that a few days later.

  “Tell me, Mr. Freeman, when Adam delved and Eve span, is it possible he was cultivating the grape?” I asked.

  “I’m sure he was cultivating all manner of good things.”

  “Well, we don’t know how long it was before the First Couple were banished from the Garden, but suppose there was time for the vines to flourish and Adam to discover the delights of fermentation?”

  “And so …?” He didn’t quite see where this was going, but I could tell he was uneasy.

  “And so, could ‘Adam’s Ale’ have been wine, not water?”

  “I am not a Biblical scholar, Mrs. Maclean, just a simple man with a mission. Perhaps that is a question for someone with more knowledge than I possess.”

  “But suppose you are denying yourself the benef
it of alcohol — and is it not generally acknowledged that there are benefits — because of a misinterpretation?”

  “I would not take alcohol in any case.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I took a pledge.”

  “I see.”

  I was wrong to tease him. He was probably the good Christian he presented himself as, but I didn’t care for him at all. I tried, because George liked him. Well, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t try very hard.

  George: You don’t like Mr. Freeman, do you?

  Me: Not much. He thinks he’s an Englishman.

  George: He is an Englishman, born and bred in England. The fact that he’s a mulatto doesn’t make him any less an Englishman.

  Me: Haven’t you noticed how he says “we,” all the time, “We must work hard to educate and save these benighted souls.” No sense of fraternity with them at all. He told me that he is “heartbroken” at their ignorance of civilized customs. He seems to look down on the natives from a great height. It bothers me; it reminds me of that dreadful woman in Eastbourne, with all her whispered insinuations.

  George: Are you defending the local customs? Have you become an expert in four weeks?

  Me: Brodie has been helping me to understand.

  George: Ah, Brodie Cruickshank. You’re cavalier.

  Me: Thus we hear the first mention of the fourth principal actor in this tale. But we have to get back to Mr. Freeman.

  Mr. Freeman

  MY FATHER WAS A FREED SLAVE who had worked for years at the plantations in Jamaica. I do not know if he came from this area or farther along the Guinea Coast, but he was definitely an African from Africa, snatched when he was a small boy and marched down to the Coast, shackled at the neck, just one in a long line of terrified men, women, and children. He may have been confined here in Cape Coast Castle; I’ll never know because he couldn’t remember very much from the first part of his journey.