Free The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers Page A

the touch of flies on their flanks, and somewhere in the distance a tractor turned waves of cut hay in a field. But already I was interested in you. A missionary in Africa. A poet. And a relation, tenuous, the shared blood thinned by marriage and time, but still a relation. It was enough to ignite an interest, and enough to send me inside the cool of our thick-walled longhouse to look for you, leaving my immediate relations outside in the sun while I looked for a distant one inside instead.
    And this is where I first saw you, in my father’s study on the cover of a book I took down off the shelf that late summer’s afternoon. It was jammed between a collection of yellow and yellowing National Geographies and an old Penguin Classic. The title on the spine had been faded to ghost-writing by years of low evening suns through the facing window, so I pulled it out to take a closer look, turning it over in my hand. And there you were, in a sepia photograph washed orange, standing outside a thatched hut, your battered hat in your hand, your tall body sloping to the left as you posed awkwardly for the camera, and your broken boots gaping at your feet like two panting puppy dogs. You’re wearing a dog collar, bright in the sun like a hoop of hot steel about your neck. Your face is handsome, a strong face, but somehow mistrusting of the camera, which your eyes look past, way past, out of the photograph altogether.
    I open it and smell the musty, damp smell of old books. The smell I think of as that of the sixties, associating it as I do with my parents’ ageing student books. It is these that occupy many of the shelves in this room, a mix of classic literature and sociology, their jackets faded like the spine of the book I am holding. Both sets of books are often faithfully inscribed on the title page, sometimes with love notes written beneath: on a paperback of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, June 1964. To mydarling Eryl. Yours always, David . Yours always. Love between the covers. I flip this book open, but there is no written inscription inside. Just a gold address sticker, with the name and address of my great aunt on it. Elizabeth Roberts. My grandmother’s sister, and, I realise standing there, your niece.
    I close the book again and take another look at you. You do not look like an ancestor of mine. You are tall for one thing, and I am not. You look English. I am Welsh. At least, I look Welsh, and feel Welsh. And then there is that dog collar. Where do I stand in relation to that? I have often intellectualised God out of existence. I have claimed, in arguments, that man has outgrown the need to rest his troubles on the shoulders of a deity. I have spoken against organised religion. I have written academic essays about the inbuilt ideological obsolescence of Milton’s Paradise Lost , how the very system of belief the poet tries to explain deconstructs itself in exposition. I am secular and of my time. I am twenty-two years old. I know nothing and I am confused about my intentions in the world. Only the night before I stood in the top field and looked out over the hedge at the sunset cloaking the hills red and considered a letter on my desk from the army: an invitation from the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters to visit their barracks.
    The title of the book is written above your head: God’s Irregular: Arthur Shearly Cripps, A Rhodesian Epic . Then below, beneath your feet, the name of the author, Douglas V. Steere. Steere. This, then, is the man who had written about you: the man who first organised your life, made chapters out of it, gave it headings. Who made you history. And over the next few days it is Steere who introduces us, who is our go-between as I read about your life in his words.
    When I finish the book I know about you. I know the shape of your life, I know the facts. Your birthday, your deathday. I know you were one of the young men at Oxford who listened to Bishop Gore as he outlined the blueprint of a new