40	JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS
because there's a billiard table; people are rather more
dashing, get a little drunk and tell indecent stories;
but not if there's a woman present. I had never
found myself in a place which was more protective to
women; it might have been inhabited by rowing
Blues with Buchman consciences and secret troubles.
Everyone either had a wife at Hill Station and
drank a bit and bought chocolates at the week-
end and showed photographs of their children at
home:
("I'm afraid I don't care much for children.")
("O, you'd like mine.")
or else they had wives in England, had only two
drinks, because they'd promised their wives to be
temperate, and played Kuhn-Kan for very small
stakes. They played golf and bathed at Lumley
Beach. There wasn't a cinema that a white man
could go to, and books of course rotted in the damp
or developed worms. You developed worms too your-
self, after you'd been out a little time; it was inevit-
able; nobody seemed to mind. Freetown, they told
you, was the healthiest place on the Coast. The day I
left a young man in the educational department died
of yellow fever.
Worms and malaria, even without yellow fever, are
enough to cloud life in 'the healthiest place along the
Coast'. These men in the City bar, prospectors, ship-
ping agents, merchants, engineers, had to reproduce
English conditions if they were to be happy at all.
They weren't the real rulers; they were simply out to
make money; and there was no hypocrisy in their
attitude towards 'the bloody blacks'. The real rulers
came out for a few years, had a Ion? leave every eigh-