Graham Donald reads “Crossing the Bar” by Lord Tennyson
The ‘bar’ is a barrier at the entrance to a harbour – so to ‘cross the bar’ means to go out into the wide ocean – a metaphor for death. The ‘Pilot” is God
On another memorable trip, we went to Mbuji Maya to inspect some diamond mines at the invitation of de Beers. A young man was deputed by the company to act as our host and guide for the weekend. The programme envisaged a trip by boat up the river from Mbuji Maya to visit the area where the diamonds were being dug, a night in the camp there and a return by the river to Mbuji Maya before flying back to Kinshasa. We arrived at the place safely and on time at about noon on the Friday. To our dismay, we were told that the Mayor of the city wished to honour us with a lunch. It was nearly 3 o’clock before we got away from lunch and went to the jetty. The young man from de Beers had organized two inflatable rubber dinghies. We thought we were going to travel on a river steamboat in the style of Joseph Conrad. It was not to be.
We watched in awe as these two inflatable dinghies with outboard motors went roaring up and down the waterway. I asked what was going on. The guide said they were just testing the engines. This was rather an ominous start. We piled into one of the dinghies and the other was loaded with our baggage and we proceeded up the river.
By this time it was between 3:30 and 4pm, and I asked about the length of our journey. I was told it was about 50 miles. I did some quick calculations and worked out to travel this distance in a dinghy would take several hours and darkness always fell promptly at 6 o’clock. I began to have grave doubts about this whole expedition.
About half an hour up stream on the Lualaba river, we gradually became aware that our boat was starting to leak and in danger of sinking. The second boat was summoned and in the middle of the stream the luggage was put on our dinghy and we transferred ourselves rather perilously into the baggage dinghy. As we proceeded up stream, we could see coming towards us the father and mother of a thunderstorm. A thunderstorm in Africa has to be seen to be believed. The sky was dark, lit with flashes of lightening and it began to get really gloomy.
We got through the torrential rain all right, but we then lost touch with the second boat with all our belongings on board. It must have pulled into the bank to effect the necessary repairs. We found ourselves in the single dinghy proceeding alone. It was getting darker and darker because of the storm, and also because night was falling.
Round about 6 o’clock we found ourselves getting into shallower water and it was clear that we were now on a much smaller waterway than the main river. I asked the de Beers man if he was familiar with the river. “No”, he answered, “As a matter of fact, this is my first visit too”. I turned to one of the Zairian crew and asked if he was familiar with this stretch of water. “ Oh yes” he said, “ I know it like the back of my hand”. It became painfully obvious that he didn’t, because within a few minutes we were stranded on a sand or reed bank in the middle of this narrowing tributary. We asked if the boat had provisions or equipment of any kind for use in emergency. We discovered that it did not. They had assumed that they would travel the 50 miles in a couple of hours. Fortunately, Janet had got anti mosquito cream, fresh water and, most important of all, a bottle of whisky. So we hauled the dinghy up onto what appeared to be the bank of the river (which actually turned out to be a floating island). Janet settle down in the middle with a man either side of her to keep her warm. We plied ourselves with whisky and tried to sleep. It was pretty awful in the darkness with the mosquitoes. During the night we heard a hippopotamus stamping beside us through the reeds into the water.
In the morning there was a miraculous vision. As we looked out over the river, we could see a bank of fog just above the water level. Gliding down it with only the only the head and shoulders above the mist were one or two fisherman in their small canoes. It was rather mystical. We couldn’t attract their attention and I don’t think it would have done much good if we had.
We eventually got back into our own boat and decided we must retrace our path. It was quite clear in the daylight that we had come adrift terribly the night before and were on a tributary of the big river. We went back down the river and located the main stream. We turned right upstream again and continued forging up the river. It was then that the man who “knew the river like the back of his hand” announced that we were running out of petrol. If we didn’t land, we would be stranded in the middle of the river with no means of power. We spotted a small hut on the bank. We were able to get to the bank, anchor the dinghy, and clamber out. The fisher family who were roasting or baking fish in an oven made out of an old oil drum offered us food, which we cravenly declined. The fisherman was badgered into shinning up a tree to knock down what we thought was a coconut, which we hoped to eat for breakfast. Sadly it was not edible. We sat on the bank wondering what we should do next.
Janet and I thought that if we had not seen any sign of any help by midday we should get into the dinghy and float down stream using the current to get us back to where we started, some 20 or 30 miles away. At 5 minutes to 12, just when we were going to act on this manly decision,we heard this “putt, putt, putt” of an outboard motor and saw the second dinghy coming towards us downstream. It had passed us in the night, reached the diamond mine, not found us there and had come back to find us.
They happily had some petrol and we could therefore continue our journey, arriving at the camp at about dusk. To our horror, the Zairians announced that we had to leave next morning at crack of dawn as there was another banquet waiting for us downstream 50 miles away. At about this time, Janet and I became irritable and said we had not come all this way to turn round and go back again: we would spend the night there, look at the mines in the morning and go down at leisure, either the next evening or even the day after.
This was rather grumpily agreed to and we went to sleep in hammocks in a tent. There were mosquito nets, but when we got up in the morning we found there was an army of huge brown ants tramping through the tent. As I got out of my hammock, ants climbed up my trousers. It was a most unnerving and disagreeable experience. However we did return safely by river to Mbuji Maya and thence to Kinshasa, sadder and wiser and thankful to get home.
So there I was, in the car with my Uncle Graham driving to Aberdeen. We had had a big family party the previous night and I had not slept well. What is worse, I was suffering from a hangover. I was looking out the window with my forehead pressed against the cold glass. Graham was talking as he drove, and I could tell by his tone of voice that he was trying to explain something very important to me. It was all about King Arthur and the reason why the sword Excalibur had to be thrown back into the lake. I wasn’t listening too closely and I inadvertently let out a yawn.
Graham was deeply offended and stopped talking immediately. I apologised, and asked him to continue his story and and explain why it was that Excalibur had to be thrown away. But he refused. He pouted. He sulked as only a middle-aged gay man can. I asked him again, but he did not want to return to the subject.
Later, when we got to Aberdeen, we were searching for a parking space outside my grandmother’s house. “There’s one right there” I said trying to be helpful “You can just reverse right into it”. But Graham then told me that he didn’t know how to reverse a car. It was something that he had never learnt. “So how did you get your driving license?” I asked. It turns out that during Graham’s time in Nigeria, as a District Officer for the Colonial Service, he had bought a car and then investigated how to go about getting a driving license. Checking out the rulebook, he was pleasantly surprised to find that he himself was in charge of issuing driving licenses. So he took himself for a brief spin around the block, patted himself on the back and wrote out his own driving license. And drove on that license for the rest of his life, never having learnt to reverse.
Graham Charles William Donald was born on 5th January 1933 in Inverurie near Aberdeen, delivered by the same doctor, Dr.Gill, who had been there for his two elder brothers Alan and Robin. Tragedy was to strike three years later when his father, Robert Donald died of a stroke at the age of only 43. So Graham never really knew his father, and spent most of his life searching to fill that void. He was brought up by his ambitious and driving mother. She, having been left a penniless widow, fought hard to bring up her four children alone. The youngest child, Elisabeth, was born after her father died.
Graham was his mother’s favourite. He was a cheerful and happy child, welcoming guests with charm and smiles. But she could never understand why he didn’t settle down with a good woman, and remained ignorant of his homosexuality until her death in 1980. Graham died four years later.
Sir Alan Donald, British Ambassador to Indonesia, was entertaining important guests at the residence in Jakarta when a servant interrupted the dinner party and came to tug at his sleeve. “There is a phone call for you” he said. “Not now” replied Alan “take a message”. But the servant insisted it was important, so Alan went out to the hallway to take the call. It was the authorities in Bangkok calling to inform him that his brother Graham had committed suicide by jumping out of a hotel window in the notoriously seedy, red light district of Patpong.
Alan and Graham were born 18 months apart and so were extremely close during their childhood. The eldest brother, Robin, was three years older than Alan and so had a more distant relationship with his two younger siblings, reinforced by the fact that after his father died, he had to become “the man of the family” and so wore a lot of responsibility on his shoulders. The youngest child, Elizabeth, was 3 1/2 years younger than Graham and was always the baby of the family, and being female had a different outlook from her brothers.
So Alan and Graham were a tight unit, playing together, getting into scrapes together and then laughing about it afterwards. They both won scholarships to the same private school – Fettes – and both went on from there to Cambridge, overlapping with each other throughout these educational stages. Their upbringing was almost identical: same trauma of a lost father, same schools, same home, same jokes, same dreams of escape from a rather overbearing mother and the limiting confines of Aberdonian society.
Even after leaving University, they were joined, not just by the double helix of their shared DNA, but also by a strange spiralling interaction of locations. Graham, in the Colonial Service (and later as a teacher), and Alan, in the Diplomatic Service, both worked in Africa, in Greece, and in the Far East, though not always at the same time. So, for me, the essential question is this: how is it that two balls, shot from the same cannon at the same angle of elevation, could have two such different trajectories? One ascending to glory and knighthood, the other suicidally depressed, surrounded by prostitutes and self loathing.
In Jungian psychology, the psyche has three parts: the primal id, the moralistic superego and the ego which mediates between the two. In an uncanny prefiguring, two millennia earlier, Socrates had a similar concept. He likened the soul to a charioteer driving two horses – one white, one black. The white, noble steed is driven by good thoughts and deeds galloping along the true path of righteousness and morality. The black horse is driven by baser desires and bolts off course whenever it sees something it wants. The job of the charioteer is to control these two opposing impulses, and keep the chariot steady.
Graham often said that his problem was he could never control the black horse. But at a meta level, maybe the two horses were Alan and Graham with the charioteer being Providence or Serendipity. Or, to complete the triangle, maybe the charioteer was Janet, Alan’s wife, who was also at Cambridge with the two of them and to whom Graham addressed his most confessional letters. His letters to his brother Alan were typically serious, factual and rather businesslike, it was to Janet that he revealed his soul.
Brillat-Savarin once wrote “ Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”. With Graham, it was not so much “you are what you eat”, but “you are what you read”. Both his parents were English teachers, as was he. So his letters are shot through with literary allusions, and he expressed it himself most personally through another person’s words. I have tried in my footnotes to unpick and explain these literary references, to better illustrate who Graham was. For Graham was his library, and his library was Graham.
Graham’s correspondence fluctuated between proper long letters and joking postcards. In fact, you could read the barometer of his moods by looking at his choice of missive. When things were going well, it was always postcards; a cheerful way of touching base with a joking reference to a sometimes incongruous picture on the front. He would buy handfuls of blank postcards on his travels, and then send them to friends later at his leisure. When things were not going so well, it was long letters filled with introspection and angst. In the last year of his life, it was only letters. Interestingly, in all his writing he was meticulously about adding the date. It was as if he wanted to consciously make a historic record. It may have been only a throwaway joke on a postcard, but it seemed he wanted it to be added to the oeuvre.
Graham was a man with no reverse gear – he never learnt how to do it. He would often refer to himself as “Toad of Toad Hall”, the protagonist in “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame. This comic character was a ridiculous but lovable optimist, chasing his enthusiasms and always getting into scrapes with the law.
Graham was born both too early and too late. Too early, because the law and social attitudes to homosexuality changed in the 1980s; being gay became perfectly acceptable, even unremarkable, in society. Too late, because Graham was perfectly cut out for the British Empire. His public school training, his love of Kipling and other Imperialist Victorian writers, and his fierce national pride (though for Scotland more than England) made him a perfect recruit for a role in the colonies – either as an administrator or a teacher. For him, the empire ended too soon, and those jobs that many before him had easily found, dwindled and then finally fizzled out. As did he.
I never did discover why Excalibur had to be thrown away. Part of the reason for starting this project was that I hoped that, maybe, the answer to that question might be in the huge quantity of letters from Graham that my father had kept. Sadly, I never found it. Was it something to do with a purity that was too good for this evil world? I can speculate, but I will never know for sure. It is one more secret that Graham, who had many secrets, took to his grave.
