Excerpt from Up Against It in Nigeria

In doing so I found myself gradually writing what Boswell or Lander would have called a journal, but what I prefer to describe as a small-chop diary - that is to say, a collection of incidents, in more or less chronological order, written, as they would have been told, at the Witching hour of small-chop, with scarce a camouflage of persons or localities. In these reminiscences questions of Administration have been left severely alone.

But this is all very ordinary stuff which might have happened to anyone 1 it may be exclaimed. So much the better. It will then convey, I hope, a reasonable picture of the life of the average Political Officer in its essential features in this country as it was, is, and, in spite of the Railway and Political Memoranda, ever shall be. From it the newcomer may pick up a wrinkle or two between the lines: while the old bird may look backwards, and take it, as it is meant, not unkindly.

I shall probably be accused of coming the old coaster in my allusions to those days, and that time but it must be remembered that men and things die and change out here with remarkable rapidity, and that 1918 is as far removed from 1908 in Nigeria as 1908 is from 1838 in the civilized world. Nobody gets more irritable than I do with the prosy gentlemen who refer to the events of nought four and nought six and so on, as if they were speaking of some landmark in the Dark Ages, or an old vintage. And yet how many of those cheery bush-whackers we knew so recently as nought anything are alive to-day! Not too many - certainly not 40 per cent. Of the characters mentioned in this book and those who are, if we may believe the West African Pocket-book, are so solely by virtue of the drinks they have not, and the quinine they have taken - in my own case some grains!

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