Brits Behaving Badly

The decayed spa town where I grew up during the 1950s was full of people who had been ‘out in’ somewhere or other across the British Empire. If those two semi-detached prepositions denoted something special and exotic about dwellers in the Victorian mansions lining Graham Road or the Italianate Regency villas along the hilltop terrace known as Bello Sguardo, they also suggested a certain precariousness, that of an echelon abruptly robbed of its status and forced to live the life of bewildered refugees.

The Darbys, for instance, shuddered at memories of the Mau-Mau insurgency so rudely interrupting their glamorous days in the White Highlands of Kenya. Miss Winter, formerly out in Cairo, cursed the Suez crisis from the safety of her garden in Barnard’s Green where she burned an effigy of Colonel Nasser on a Guy Fawkes bonfire. Mr and Mrs Butterfield, glumly making do in Bank Street with a surly char- lady, bemoaned the lack of that devoted staff to be found amid the tea plantations of Ceylon. They might have taken a tip from Mrs Forman, two doors down from us, who peppered her conversation with talismanic phrases of kitchen Arabic ‘to remind me of the old days out in Aden’. As a boy I felt distinctly jealous of these people for having set foot in places I knew only from reading Wide World magazine and volumes of the Empire Youth Annual. I yearned to be out in wherever it was, the bwana, the sahib or the tuan in my sola topi and neatly pressed shorts, singlehandedly pacifying fractious tribes, dispensing justice in the shade of the neem and the baobab, or hunting kudu and wildebeest on the savannah. That there might be a different perspective on the whole experience of empire dawned on me only when, during my late teens, I came across the novels of Gwyn Griffin. For a brief period during the 1960s Griffin was a writer to watch, commended for ‘novelistic talents of a high order’, called ‘a master of the unexpected’, favourably compared with Graham Greene and given a blessing by Orville Prescott, great panjandrum of New York Times book reviewers. Most of what was meaningful in Griffin’s life had happened a long way away from the country his British parents called home. Born in Egypt in 1922, he had taken over a Sudanese cotton plantation by the time he was 18 and a year later joined General Wingate’s Gideon Force brigade fighting the Italians in Abyssinia. After the war he became a police superintendent in Eritrea, then contemplated a career in the Merchant Navy but settled instead for marriage to Patricia Dorman-Smith, a colonial governor’s daughter. The pair chose to live in a small town in Abruzzo, Italy’s most untravelled province, where Griffin set to work on a biography of Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, Abyssinia’s anglophile Italian viceroy, and wrote eight novels in ten years. He died in 1967 of a hospital infection picked up during treatment for a spinal injury. What happened to Patricia or, as the Italians charmingly put it, ‘What end did she make?’ Has Griffin’s archive found its inevitable shelving in an American university library? Did he write interesting letters and does anybody now alive still remember him? The world of his novels has become the more absorbing as Britain’s last empire-builders die off, and their ‘out in’ recollections have faded almost to the point of extinction. Our long post-imperial epoch has witnessed a competitive virtue-signalling between those for whom the wickedness of colonialism is beyond atonement and the revisionists who would have us believe that the whole project was an exercise in either absentminded philanthropy or studied benevolence. In Griffin’s world, one without the certainties of a Kipling, a Buchan or a Rider Haggard, the natives are fretful and their white masters have no idea how to find a dignified solution to the ending of empire. Whether, in any case, a people so emotionally and morally damaged as the British should ever have been allowed near it in the first place is the writer’s abiding theme. Africa, where Griffin spent most of his early life, provides him with the richest, most complex of settings. A Significant Experience (1963), for example, acrid and unsparing in its depiction of recreational sadism among officers in a military training camp, takes place in Cairo, but this is neither the ornamental Egypt of pyramids and mosques nor the leisured expatriate world of Zamalek and Gezira. Rarely if ever does Griffin indulge a taste for the purely scenic or picturesque. Freedom Observed (1963) was inspired by the ongoing crisis leading to civil war in the former Belgian Congo. Notable for being the writer’s only novel not to feature a single Briton behaving badly, it is also his finest work from an artistic point of view, combining expert narrative tautness with the kind of authenticity that avoids mere showing off. Its joint protagonists are an unlikely pair. Davina Schellman, American and rather too pleased with herself, posted as United Nations observer in a newly independent Francophone colony, fetches up alongside Jo-jo Everochet, spoilt Parisian brat turned police lieutenant, each of them an uneasy amalgam of brassy sophistication and hopeless naïvety. The epic journey along which fate shoves Davina and Jo-jo is fraught with the kind of incidental danger and misery which teaches them both to explore the reality of emotions they had hitherto been too blasé to acknowledge. We watch the two grow up against the background of Africa’s indifferent immensity.

The vast spaces of this land had never been surveyed or plotted and such charts as there were had been pieced together from all sorts of data collected from forgotten sources – the dubious information of slave-traders, government information by bearded pioneers, military mapping parties which more often than not had become lost themselves in the wilderness of bush and swamp.

Seventy years after Heart of Darkness we are in Mistah Kurtz’s country once again, fully replete with ‘The horror! The horror!’ Novelists, interviewed by the media more frequently nowadays than when Griffin was writing, are often at pains to convince us that their characters take them over, becoming the book’s real authors. I don’t believe this. Darcy proposes, Jane Austen disposes. Trollope’s overarching vision of Barchester had finished off Mrs Proudie long before he heard those two clergymen whinging about her at the club. Amid so much to engage us in Griffin’s work, his decisions as to the damned and the saved are as ruthless as those of God Almighty in a medieval doom painting. Consider the inexorable verdicts handed down at the close of Shipmaster (1961), set on an ocean liner sailing from Naples to Sydney with an Italian crew and a distinctly rum, ill-assorted group of passengers. Its elderly captain, Onestinghel, dies en route, leaving his hard-bitten, charmless second officer Serafino Ciccolanti in command as the vessel plunges into the eye of a typhoon in the South China Sea. The storm’s force swiftly reduces her to ‘a broken, listing hulk, like a waterlogged corpse full of frightened maggots’. Serafino’s control of both crew and passengers is challenged not just by the weather but by a profound culture clash between the British contingent and their fellow passengers. The former are a collection of washed-out colonial officials, failed ex-servicemen and their wives and a surly mob of migrants down in tourist class. Tension between them and the Italians, simmering well before the typhoon, erupts in open revolt as the radio room is destroyed, a hydraulic crane crashes into the sea and the liner’s engines stall. When Serafino is bullied into authorizing the lifeboats to be lowered in the eye of the storm, we can feel the author licking his lips at the prospect of dispatching all the most objectionable characters to certain death. Is it altogether insignificant that as the ship limps into the Australian port of Broome, those Griffin rescues should include a drunken Dutch engineer, a superannuated Habsburg countess, a Straits Chinese millionaire and most of the Neapolitan crew, while not a single Briton has been allowed to survive? Sustained criticism of his own empire-building kind for their arrogance, greed and presumption underlies another of Griffin’s novels, Sons of God (1964). Returning from leave in Alexandria to his post as police superintendent in an East African harbour town, Cecil Spurgeon has brought a wife home with him. To his peers at the Club, who have written off the 49-year-old as a bit of a no-hoper, this is a matter for cynical amusement, more especially as Solange is 19, attractive and French. Their wedding night is indeed the disaster we expect, but her heart has already sunk at the prospect of settling down in Seawinds, Cecil’s tatty bungalow whose only other resident is a bad-tempered parrot named Plumbago. Solange is accompanied by her brother Leon, adolescent, artistic and profoundly contemptuous of all that Cecil stands for. The latter’s professional reputation becomes compromised when he lets a suspected terrorist escape, so giving his rival, Lillicoe of Port & Marine, the opportunity to seize the coveted post of deputy commissioner. When Solange, having started an affair with a handsome tugboat captain, tells her husband she is leaving him, his standing in the colony’s hierarchy seems ready to evaporate. Whereupon Griffin, with demonic narrative finesse, reverses the whole scenario in a nail-biting showdown as the fugitive is hunted through the harbour, the worthiest and most glamorous perish, Lillicoe is trounced and the blunt edge of Cecil’s plodding mediocrity renders him a hero at the Club. In the book’s closing scene, he sits down to pen a letter to The Cranstonian, his old school’s magazine, after a reassuring glance around the Seawinds drawing-room, complete with Plumbago asleep on his perch. Such peace, we realize, is illusory. There will be further, more violent terrorist outrages, down will come the Union Jack and the eponymous Sons of God will shortly slink home to live off stale crusts of imperial vanity and hubris. ‘They are a most peculiar race, an odd mixture of malevolence and mysticism,’ observes Captain Onestinghel in Shipmaster. Solange Spurgeon reaches a similar conclusion, grasping the truth that a certain type of Englishman never grows up. Their schooldays stay with them for ever, complete with ‘the trivial secrets and deceptions of the adolescent, the stylized snobberies of the school prefect, the continual fierce competition for prestige and status, the unwritten rules, the xenophobic distrust and dislike of all outside the school gates.’ The meal Griffin made of all this in his various novels and a short-story collection, A Scorpion on a Stone (1965), tastes all the richer just now, as the country he was evidently determined never to call ‘home’ enters what promises to be its most ticklish era of post-imperial fragmentation and implosion.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Jonathan Keats 2024