The Pure Gold Baby. Margaret Drabble

but doubted if she ever would.

      She had noted that tolerance of mental disability and mental disturbance appeared to have diminished with the advent of Christianity: ‘lunatics’ had rarely been attacked in the old tribal days, as one theory held that if you killed a lunatic, you would catch his lunacy. This superstition had served a useful purpose, Jess seemed to suggest in her thesis, and it was a pity that it had been undermined by science and by the Christian religion.

      She now, several decades later, disagrees with her 1960s position. She now thinks that Christianity has had, overall, globally, historically, in Africa and elsewhere, a favourable impact on our perceptions of mental disability and birth defects and congenital irregularities. It has been kinder, for example, to twins and the mothers of twins. Some African cultures slaughter twins at birth. The mothers of twins, like slaves, were attracted by Christianity. They were reluctant to slaughter their babies and glad of a reason to defy tradition.

      Jesus did not have views on twins, as far as we know, but we believe we know that he favoured the simple-minded.

      Jess was then in most ways a child of her secular, progressive time, and distrusted missionaries on principle. She disapproved of Livingstone as a proto-imperial trader with a gun, as she had been taught to do at SOAS. She did not share his view that commerce inevitably elevated culture. She noted with interest the cool detachment of his comment that ‘the general absence of deformed persons is partly owing to their destruction in infancy’, and his equally detached views on abnormality or transgression summed up in the African term tlolo. But she could not prevent herself from being moved by his tender accounts of the tree-frog and the fish-eagle, the forest and the mountain and the waterfall. He had seen the natural world too closely for any kind of comfort, but he had loved some of its manifestations. Livingstone, like the lobster-claw children, worked on in her memory.

      She read his diaries and letters, and worried about the poor orphan Nassick boys, the young Bombay Indians who faithfully accompanied him as servants on his travels. Jess always worried about orphans. She used to try to tell me about the Nassick boys but it was a complicated story and I’ve never worked out quite who they were, though their unhappy name has stuck with me. They hadn’t featured in the school-prize version of Livingstone’s travels that I’d read.

      Jess’s supervisor Guy Brighouse had spent some years with a dry, grey-black-skinned, long-legged and dwindling tribe that made, according to him, the most sophisticated pots in Africa, and the most beautiful conical dwelling places man or woman had ever seen, of wattle and decorated clay. These mason–potters were dying out, according to Guy’s theory, through aesthetic despair, as modernity overtook them. Plastic and corrugated iron were killing them. Their hearts and souls were dying.

      Jess liked Guy, and the freedom of his fancies. He was considered a wild card at SOAS, but she liked that too.

      She managed to work into her thesis a mention of the children with fused toes, but to her regret was not able to find out anything more about them. Livingstone did not seem to have met them, though he noted the dwarf, the albino and the leper, and Guy, who had seen them, did not show much interest in them. Nobody then or now seemed to have studied them. Did they and their children and their children’s children play still by the shining lake upon the immortal shore?

      The analogue of the children continued to haunt her. She found documentation of a cluster group of the families of similarly afflicted children in Scotland: the parents had told the eminent investigating statistician that the little ones didn’t miss their fingers and toes – ‘Bless’ee, sir, the kids don’t mind it, they don’t miss what they’ve never had’ – and that they were remarkably adept with the vestigial digits which they did possess, with which they produced fine handwriting and needlework.

      Jess had noted how deftly the lake children had punted their small canoes.

      Of all the explorer narratives, Jess liked Mungo Park’s best. She was touched by this lone romantic Scottish adventurer’s desire to see the best in others, even in those who were exploiting him, robbing him, exposing him mercilessly to lions and starvation. A child of his time, he wished to believe in the universal goodness of human nature. And he did meet with some goodness in Africa, as well as much cruelty.

      Jess liked best the episode when he was denied hospitality and shelter by the suspicious king of a tribe near the Niger and forced to sit hungry all day beneath a tree, and to take refuge at night in its branches from wild beasts, as nobody would give him food or accommodation. But he was befriended by a woman returning from her labours in the field. Observing that he looked weary and dejected, she heard his story with ‘looks of great compassion’, took him to her hut, lit him a lamp, spread a mat for him and fed him with a fine fish broiled on the embers. She assured him he could sleep safely in her hut, and during the night she and her female company sat spinning cotton and singing an improvised song:

      The winds roared, and the rains fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk, no wife to grind his corn. Let us pity the white man, no mother has he …

      This song can bring tears to Jess’s eyes whenever she wants.

      The less friendly and more avaricious Moors were puzzled by Park’s pocket compass and the way its needle always pointed to the Great Desert. Unable to provide a scientific explanation comprehensible to them, Mungo Park told them that his mother resided far beyond the sands of the Sahara, and that while she was alive the iron needle would always point towards her. If she were dead, he said, it would point to her grave.

      As it happened, his mother outlived him. He came to a sad end, though not on this recorded expedition. He pursued his fate.

      Jess found these stories deeply touching.

      Mungo Park didn’t think much of the slave-trading, intolerant and bigoted Moors, who hissed and shouted and spat at him because he was a white man and a Christian. They abused him and plundered his goods and refused to let him drink from the well. He had to drink from the cow trough. They ill-treated their slaves and their womenfolk.

      He preferred the native Africans with their simple superstitions and their kind hearts.

      Mungo Park was an Enlightenment man.

      Who could have foreseen what would happen to the Blackstock Road in the next millennium? We didn’t. Nobody did. The mosque and the halal butchers took over from the barrels of salt pork, and young men with beards from the West Indians and the Irish. The friendly Arsenal at Highbury, home of the Gunners, moved to the glittering Emirates Stadium, built and sponsored by money from the Middle East, and Miss Laidman married the head of a college of further education and went to live in North Kensington. The balance of power and the balance of fear shifted. But by this time many of us, like Miss Laidman, would have moved on to more up-market neighbourhoods. Some of us are still there, in the old neighbourhood, and our properties have appreciated a hundredfold, as properties in London do, but the area is still not what you would call fashionable. Those of us who are loyal to it appreciate it, indeed love it. Some streets, with their modest little mass-produced brickwork and tile decorations, have hardly changed at all. There are old lovingly pruned rose bushes growing still in small front gardens. They predate the booms and slumps of property.

      Blackstock Road has not yet, as I write, become gentrified, and may never become so. It was peaceful then, when we were young. Shabby, but peaceful. There were little shops, selling small cheap household objects, bric-à-brac, groceries, vegetables, stationery. Locksmiths, hairdressers, launderettes, upholsterers, bookmakers. A lot of people taking in one another’s washing. It is much the same today, although most of the shop-owners now come from different ethnic groups. There are fewer of the old white North Londoners. They are dying off, moving out. It remains on the whole a peaceful neighbourhood, though there have been eruptions of violence and suspicion, and one spectacular police raid by hundreds of uniformed officers that revealed, I believe, a tiny cache of ricin.

      Even a tiny cache wasn’t very pleasant, some of us old survivors thought, although we made light of it, laughed about