MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NiCOLSON
FREQUENTLY in this column have I urged people to keep a diary. Few personal habits are easier to contract ; few forms of self-discipline are more rewarding. All that is required is a type- writer, a stock of quarto paper, a minimum degree of will-power and a box in which to keep the diary as it accumulates. Any evasion or postponement of my daily entry leaves me with a feeling of discomfort, as when one postpones shaving or forgets to clean one's teeth. Conversely, as the sheets accumulate in their box, as year after year my diary is stowed away in the filing cabinet, I have a real, and not merely a spurious, sense of achievement ; that daily ounce of added energy has enabled me to store some at least of the fallen rose-petals ; the hungry generations have not got me completely down. I have been told that Mr. Winston Churchill regards all diarists as lice upon the locks of history. It may be that he feels that time is so short and human energies so limited that it is a sin to pause even for a few minutes to record one's deeds. It may be that he regards the diarist as a sneak guest, as a "parasite with pencil nigh," as a man who, lacking the force of character to impress himself upon his contemporaries, seeks by catching those contemporaries in their weaker moments to acquire posthumous renown. Or it may be simply that the diarist is to him a man who confides to his journal the activities which he is too timid to give to life. My own diary, when I reread it, strikes me as a charitable document. It contains not one word which could bring a blush to the cheeks of posterity, not a sentence which could cause pain to the most sensitive grandchildren of the contemporary great. Particu- larly moving, I find, are those passages in which I convey a portrait of myself. It is the portrait of a man who, although not unaware of the humanities, leads an ardent life of self-denial ; of a man who has not been narrowed by austerity, but who remains tolerant, humane, alert ; of a man who, although his eyes are fixed upon the stars, is happy meanwhile to share his bread-crumbs with the sparrows. It is a beautiful portrait, composed in the pointilliste manner by the accumulation of detail ; as I gaze upon it, I feel a lump forming in my throat.
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Of the many rewards which accrue to the constant diarist, one of the most agreeable is the contemplation in tranquillity of the pains and pleasures of his past. Whatever satisfaction Narcissus may have extracted from the arid enjoyment of his own reflection, must have been slight in-comparison to the solace which I derive when I gaze into the pool of my middle life. It seems strange to me that, although I have lived for six decades upon this kindly earth, although I have been granted an unmerited share of happiness and enjoy- ment, although my days are still crowded with delight, my memory is a dour and critical companion. All the foolish things which I have said or done during the last sixty years are as fresh to me as snow-drops in the February sun. Yet there must have been moments when I did successful, and not unsuccessful, things ; there must have been a few sparse instants when I made bright and clever remarks and not silly remarks ; there must have been times when I behaved with tact and delicacy instead of crunching clumsily. My memory. is so unkind that it does not permit me to recall these moments of illumination ; always, in the watches of the night, it brings before me the dark moments of ineptitude, always it presents me with the reflection, not of Narcissus, but of a bewildered Caliban, a zany and an oaf. My diary, I find, is far kinder to me than is my memory. As I turn the pages, I come upon passages which disclose remarkable prescience, charm and vigour. I am thus abundantly grateful to my diary ; it is a constant comforter ; whereas my memory is a beast.
* * * It is entertaining also, when a spare moment offers, to turn back to one's diary and to ask oneself "What was I doing this day ten years ago?" The other evening, before the thaw came, and when the snow still whirled in fury round my window, I went to the filing cabinet in order to deposit there, with fingers numb with cold, my diary for 1946. As I turned over the ,files, I came across a neat
packet inscribed "Diary for 037." I extracted that packet and re- turned to crouch by the fire. I turned to the date Tuesday, Febru- ary 2nd. Suddenly I was transported away from the snow-fields of Kent to the soft hot air of a Uganda night. I had gone out that year to the equator as a member of the De La Warr commission on African education. On the night of February 2nd we had climbed up from Kampala to the little hill where Fort Lugard stands ; we were to witness a jamboree of African boy-scouts. The cubs, when we arrived, were being instrucetd by their elders in the Scout code. "They go round and round," I read in my diary, "in a choral circle murmuring a formula which sounded like 'Cub mowa bata langa.' I ask what that means. It means 'Cubs don't get tired.' They then change their tune into 'Cubs boto kuuki mwanga.' That means 'Cubs do not think only of themselves.' Round and round these children strut, proudly raising their hands in the scout salute, yelling out their formulas. And then ea bugle sounds in the night and the cubs are taken away and the boys come in. It is getting dark and the lights of Kampala twinkle below us. They light a huge bonfire which is far too hot on such a night. They dance round the bonfire singing the scout song. The song is reborn in the African night ; the fire throws sparks into the air ; great thunder clouds are massing in the west ; and the boys dance wildly, like black greyhounds leaping ; the dance becomes mysterious, ancestral ; and from Kampala below us comes the sound of tribal drums throbbing."
* * * * I turn the pages of my diary and find myself waking, but a few days later, upon the roof of Gordon's palace at Khartoum. I had been woken by the sound of the Egyptian and the British flags being hoisted creakily upon the flag-staffs. "A distant muezzin calls," I recorded, "and I lie on my camp-bed watching the kites circle above me and the early sun turn to amethyst the Kerere hills." It was on that day that I had an interview with an old man who had been garden-boy in Gordon's day. We showed him some photo- graphs of the house as it had been in 1885. He was quite intelligent on the subject and pointed out to us that what seemed in the faded photograph to be a large grey shrub was in fact Gordon's private elephant tied to a tree. "He then took us," I recorded, " to the place where Gordon was murdered. He says there is no doubt at all that he was murdered on the steps. He told us that when the Mahdi's dervishes broke into the compound they did not at first find Gordon himself ; not that he was hiding, since he was waiting in the dining-room ; but they spent almost an hour massacring the Coptic clerks who had climbed into the trees of the garden. Then they approached the palace itself. Gordon came out of the dining room on to the verandah and shouted to the Sudanese guard below in his bad Arabic. 'Shoot! Shoot!' he shouted. A dervish then hurled a spear at him, which made him swing round and then stand for a moment before he toppled down. They then severed his head and almost cut him to pieces. The remains were thrown into the river ` at the place where the soldiers wash.' He was quite frank about it all. He had not witnessed the scene himself, but had obtained full details next day from someone who had. He had him- self been hiding in the town and had adopted dervish clothes. I expect this is the most authentic account we can hope to get."
* * * * Always since that day the Sudan has been peopled for me by gigantic ghosts. And as I turned my diary while the snow whirled outside, other ghosts were with me. The ghosts of hot nights in Uganda ; the ghosts of glimmering sunrisos upon the roof at Khartoum ; the ghost of Robert Bernays who was my companion throughout these adventures and who was drowned in the Ionian Sea. A gentle ghost, a loving, laughing ghost, a ghost whose memory for me will never fade. More vivid to me than all the hours of the House of Commons are those days and nights we spent together steaming slowly down the Nile. How entranced he was in those days by the rich life which opened before him! And he was killed so needlessly ; there was no need for him to have been killed.
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