“O.K. What food?”
Lateef passed him a sheet of paper, containing a list of provisions with which we would be willing to part. The woman read it out to him.
“No meat. We have enough. It stink too quick. More chocolate.”
Finally, the barter was agreed. Knowing what had had to be paid in the past, I realized that Lateef had struck a fair bargain. I had expected him to be forced to pay much higher. Perhaps for all Augustin’s bluff manner, his surplus of food was not as great as he pretended and was experiencing hardship in other respects. It occurred to me to wonder at his insistence on weapons.
We moved outside the tent to where our handcarts were and off-loaded the agreed amounts of food. The business side accomplished, we were conducted through the tent and into a small clearing. Augustin paraded us proudly past his wares.
There were approximately three times as many men as there were available girls. We agreed to behave in a reasonable fashion, and divided ourselves into three groups. We then drew lots as to the order in which we would go to the girls. I was in the group which selected the lot for the first of the three. While the others waited we walked up to the line of girls, who stood waiting for us as if they were troops on inspection.
All of the girls were Negroes. It appeared they had been chosen by Augustin personally, as they were similar in appearance: tall, full-breasted and wide-hipped. Their ages ranged from youthful middle-aged to one girl who was obviously in her early teens.
I selected a young woman of about twenty-five. As I spoke to her she bared her teeth as if I were to inspect those, too.
After a few words she led me away from the clearing to a small tent at the very edge of the encampment. There was little room inside the tent, so she took off her clothes outside. As she did so, I looked round at the other tents I could see and observed that outside each one the other women were similarly disrobing.
When she was naked she went inside. I took off my trousers and laid them on the ground next to where she had put her clothes. I followed her inside.
She was lying on a rough bed made out of several old blankets thrown on the ground. There were no flaps at either end of the tent, and had she been a few inches taller, both her head and her feet would have protruded.
As I entered the tent, the sight of her naked, outstretched body aroused me. I crawled in between her legs and lay down on top of her. I ran my left hand down between our bodies, caressing first her right breast, and then reaching down and holding tightly the tuft of brittle black hair.
I supported myself with my right arm at first, then as she put her arms around me, allowed it to rest down by her side. As I entered her I felt the cold hardness of metal by her side. Taking pains not to show my awareness of this, I explored as far as I dared with my fingers, and at length decided what I could feel was the trigger and guard of a rifle.
As we copulated, I managed to push the rifle away from us and towards the edge of the tent. I am satisfied that my movements were sufficiently unobtrusive, as she showed no sign of awareness. Finally, the rifle was about twelve inches away from us, yet still covered in part by the blankets.
My preoccupation with the presence of the weapon had lessened my sexual desire and I found that my erection had diminished, even though I had continued to make movements against her. I returned my attention to the girl and her body. Because of what had happened I took much longer than normal to come to a climax, and by the time I finished we were both perspiring freely.
Afterwards we dressed and returned to the clearing. From the ribald comments of the other men I gathered we had been away longer than anyone else. My girl lined up with the others and the second group of men went over and made their selections.
As they moved in pairs towards the outlying tents, I stepped past the others, through the tent with the trestle-table where Augustin and his woman sat in earnest conversation, and out to where we had left the handcarts.
I walked past them into the trees.
Twenty yards away I turned and looked back. Augustin was watching me suspiciously from his tent. I made a lewd gesture towards my crutch, indicating that I was about to urinate, and he waved to me. I walked on.
When I was out of sight of the encampment I turned and walked in a broad circle, keeping the camp on my left. After a while I turned in towards it again, and approached it cautiously. I came to the camp from the side. No one saw me.
Using every available tree and bush as cover, I moved around until I was opposite the tent where I had been. Again making sure that I was not observed, I crawled up to it on my hands and knees. I lay beside it on my stomach, the boundary rope directly above me.
Inside, the man was insulting the girl, cursing and blaspheming and insulting her race, pouring out verbal excrement about the colour of her skin. She replied with groans of passion.
I slid my hand under the flap of the tent, found the rifle, and gripped it. With a slowness that nearly panicked me, I slid it out, then made for the cover of the trees. I secreted the rifle in the wildly growing brambles of a hawthorn bush, then returned to the camp.
As I went past Augustin he made a vulgar comment about urine. He was eating the chocolate and had brown smears on his chin.
With the closing of the college I found mys elf in the second major financial crisis of my life. For a while we existed on our savings, but within a month it was clear I would have to find an alternative occupation. Though I telephoned the administrative section of the college on several occasions, I was rarely able even to obtain an answer, let alone a satisfactory resolution to the predicament. In the meantime, I applied myself to the task of obtaining employment.
It should be understood that at this time the country was passing through a phase of extreme economic difficulty. The balance of payments policy on which John Tregarth and his government had first come to power was seen to be working badly, if at all. As a result, prices continued to rise, and an increasing number of men were made to be unemployed. At first confident of myself and my Master’s Degree in English History, I toured the offices of publishers intending to pick up some temporary position as an editor or adviser. I was soon disillusioned, finding that the world of books, like virtually everything else, was cutting back on expense and staff at every opportunity. With a similarly universal sequence of sadly shaking heads, I found that the way into some form of clerical work was also barred. Manual labour was, by and large, out of the question: since the middle seventies the industrial labour-pool had been directed by the unions.
At this stage I grew extremely depressed and went to my father for assistance. Though he was now retired he had been managing director of a small chain of companies and still had some influence. Neither of us cared for the brief contact into which this brought us, as we had not communicated except formally and politely for several years. Though he managed to obtain for me an insignificant position in a cloth-cutting factory, I never found a way to express fully my gratitude. When he died a few months later I tried unsuccessfully to feel more than a few minutes of regret.
With the more immediate aspects of the personal financial crisis solved, I turned my attention to developments on the national scene. There was no sign of a halt to the progress of events which were taking away the state of affairs I chose to think of as normal. It was of great significance to me that the government had closed the college. Though at first there had been a public outcry about the seemingly arbitrary way in which the universities were being dealt with, popular interest soon passed to other things.