Alfred and Emily (20 page)

‘You'd never see anything like this in Piccadilly, old girl,' my father reminded my mother. ‘Sometimes I think it's all worth it, these nights. Sometimes when I wake in the morning I think of the night coming, and sitting here…'

‘Worth it!' my mother would say, in a low voice, because what was he saying? That the long misery on the farm was justified by the moon, the stars…Yes, he was saying it and probably thought it, too.

My brother and I cycled everywhere on the native paths through the bush, sometimes miles from home. Our favourite places were what were then called the Ayrshire Hills, where we

knew there were leopards. But in all the years of haunting those hills we only once saw a leopard, and that was its tail disappearing into a cave. But we did find Bushmen paintings, then of no interest to anyone, hardly noticed. There is a whole industry now, full of interpretations of those lively little figures on the underside of rocks, at eye level, or our eyes lifted because of a rock rabbit, or snake, or – we hoped one day – that elusive leopard, feet above where anyone could reach today, and there more wonderful pictures, of men and of animals, but it was the animals you had to admire. ‘Just look at that – it's an eland, an ostrich.'

‘An ostrich
here?
There must have been ostriches. You couldn't just
imagine
an ostrich, could you?'

The parents listened differently to our tales of the Bushmen paintings. My mother tended to feel that anything of interest here, on the farm, lessened the possibilities of getting off it, but my father was fascinated. ‘All those hundreds of years – thousands, I shouldn't wonder, the Bushmen were here, it was the Bushmen who lived here…' And we imagined the little hunters running through the bush, in twos, threes, or in bands.

‘They were here long before the Bantu.' That was how the blacks were then described. ‘Waves of Bantu came down from the north, killing and plundering and…'

The word ‘
bantu
' means people, that's all.

‘I wish I could see these paintings…' So it must have been before my father got diabetes and became so very ill. And my
brother and I were ten, eleven, thirteen – that kind of age.

‘I must see for myself…' and while my mother expostulated, my father took his stick, and got into the car. We cycled ahead, so he could follow. The old car, the Overland, ground along on the rutty tracks, and then could go no further. My father got out, keeping his eyes on us, cycling just ahead. Then the bicycles could not go on as the ground lifted into rocky slopes, and we put them under a pile of brush and walked. A bicycle cost five pounds – a year of wages. To find an apparently abandoned one would have been better than a pot of gold to a labourer.

It is not hard for energetic children to clamber up through stones, rocks, fallen trees, but for my father it was hard. But on he went, slipping on swathes of yellow grass, stumbling over rocks. And on we went ahead, our eyes on a certain little rocky
kopje
, always looking back to see if this one-legged man could follow. We knew that wild pig liked this area, warthog, let alone snakes. But on my father went and towards the end of that precarious, for him, ascent, he was pulling himself up, grasping bushes, stumps, anything he could grab and hold on to. And there was the final granite slope up which he lay, inching himself along, and then the flattish earth under the great overhang of rock. Here the paintings were so far up that one had to imagine the little people propping tree trunks or even big piles of stones so they could reach their painting place. My father pulled himself the last few feet and said, ‘Just look at that.' The animals of that far-off time were right before
us, all kinds of buck – and was that a crocodile? A spotty flank – yes, a leopard, and yes, the ostrich, yes, it
was
an ostrich, people could mock as they liked.

There sat my father, staring. And then, having looked till he was tired, he turned himself around and looked back, over the bush, and there a long way off was the shambling house we lived in.

‘I sometimes do think it's all worth it,' said my father, defiantly, as if he imagined my mother overhearing.

It is such magnificent country. I saw it again, not so long ago, and in my mind were the tribes of Bushmen, and then the Bantu, differently named now but certainly killing and plundering, since that is what humans do.

It was not, as a child, that I didn't know what a wonderful landscape I lived in – I knew it well enough – but going back after so long, it hit home hard. This was where I and my brother rode and ran and shot game for the pot. It was not our playground – you can't describe that serious bush-wise pair as children who played.

‘My God,' said my father, staring, staring, at bush and
kopjes
and trees and hills and rivers…

And slowly we went back, down to where the bicycles lay concealed, to the old car and home.

My father described the Bushmen paintings to my mother. His mind was full of time, of history.

‘Don't you see, old girl? It's like England. You know, we had Picts and Scots and Angles and Saxons and Vikings and the French…and each invasion raped and plundered and the
priests killed the priests of the former invasion and there was a new set of kings and courtiers. Don't you see? It's just the same. The Bushmen lived here for thousands of years, some say, and then this lot came and then we came, the whites, and who after us? The Arabs, I shouldn't wonder, but someone will…And each wave destroys what was here before.'

My mother's view of history was narrowed down to her daily task, which, though it was never called a clinic, or given any sort of descriptive name, was in fact a clinic, and she was its nurse.

Every morning, sitting all round the kitchen and sometimes well down into the bush, the labourers, men, women and children, waited for my mother. These people all, every night, slept in smoky huts where a log burned. They had their heads wrapped in blankets or cloth, and in the morning this waiting crowd could have been like a crowd of theatre extras told to say ‘rhubarb'. The sound that came from them was ‘
Chefua, chefua
', which means ‘fire', and they pointed to their chests and their throats, telling my mother that they felt they were burning.

‘Respiratory diseases,' my mother would say, sounding angry because she was impatient. ‘Do they have to wrap up their heads, do they have to…' Yes, it is cold on the highveld (Kipling's word) in the winter, and cold when it rains. The burning smoky log is for heat. A burning log there has to be.
And that meant that among the people waiting for my mother every morning were babies who had toddled into the fire and were badly burned. If you looked at a crowd of labourers, their hoes rising and falling, there were always two or three with twisted or damaged legs and feet: they had been babies who had toddled into a fire.

‘What am I to do?' demanded my mother of Fate, the Almighty, somebody. She provided aspirin and cough medicine and bound up the burned babies. Or she sent a note to the hospital in what was then Sinoia, Chinoia, and a whole family would go walking to the hospital with the burned baby on some woman's back.

‘We can't afford it,' my mother would say. ‘Do you realize? On what we spend on medicines for them, we could take a holiday, we could…'

Other farmers' wives might dish out some aspirin or Epsom salts, but there was nothing like my mother's morning assembly anywhere near. People would come a mile, three, four, to sit on the earth and murmur,
‘Chefua, chefua
.' Then the precious copper basin my parents had brought from Persia lost its status as a bedroom ornament and, setting it on the stool, my mother poured some aromatic or other into hot water and made the worst of the
chefua
sufferers, a towel over their head, sit and breathe in fire-killing fumes.

This was a popular attraction, but even more so was the stethoscope. They waited in lines to have the instrument hung around their necks and marvel at the sound of their own hearts.

My mother had the blackboard, on which she taught us arithmetic and spelling, brought out on its easel, and she drew a heart in red chalk. Standing in front of a crowd of Nyasas who knew no English, she instructed the cook to interpret. She explained the heart, its mechanisms, and used her two fists to demonstrate the pumping.

‘Ah!' said the people. ‘Ach!' Many exclamations.

My father watched, with the dogs sitting on their backsides, interested, and probably cats, and he said, ‘Well now, old thing, and what do you think they have understood from all that?'

‘But they have to know,' said Sister McVeagh, fierce, impatient. ‘They have to know these things some time, don't they?'

‘But when they catch a buck or a rabbit and they cut it up, they must see the heart then?' said my father.

‘And what about the lungs? Their lungs must be black with woodsmoke.' To the cook, ‘Tell them they simply must not breathe so much smoke,' said my mother.

My father said to the cook, ‘What do you say the heart is for?'

This man spoke and understood a good bit of English. He did not read or write, though. ‘The heart is for making the blood move,' said he. ‘No heart, no good – dead,' he said, and added the word for ‘death', and ‘dead', in a variety of tones and languages. Everybody in the crowd laughed and clapped.

‘There you are,' said my father.

But stethoscopes are not immortal and the one my mother
had brought from England gave up the ghost. She said she would order another, but then her clinic had to do without a stethoscope. Cough mixtures and Epsom salts and aspirin, ointments for the burned babies and splints for broken bones. And, kept handy because there were so many snakes, the snakebite outfit, which saved more than one life.

How was it my brother and I were not bitten? Now I marvel. But we were used to seeing a snake slither off into the grass, like the leopards' tails in the hills. I did once nearly pick up a puff adder, which specializes in looking slow and sleepy, but that was as near as I got to death by snakebite.

My father's mind slid so easily back into historical events, Bushmen, Bantu and who would succeed us whites, but I wonder what he would have said had he foreseen what was to come.

Fast forward, then! Forget the little brown hunters with their lethal bows and arrows, painting their lives and their animals on to every suitable rockface. Soon the family would leave the farm. It would be impossible to keep my father alive there: for one thing there were more comas and crises and rushed visits into town – if you can use the word ‘rushed' for a deadly five-hour trip sliding from rut to rut over the difficult roads.

So they did ‘get-off-the-farm' at last, did they? What a come-down, what an anticlimax! They went into a horrid little bungalow in a suburb, everything they both hated, and our farm was bought, its true status revealed by its being an annexe to a big farm. Our house did not last long. For years I
had been used to seeing how, if there was a bush fire as close as a couple of miles, our house's thatch would be soaked in water…but there was no water on our hill. Water came up by Scotch cart, two barrels on a wooden frame drawn by two oxen who strained up certain parts of the road. This bounty of water sat under a roof of thatch, for coolness, but when the fires were near, the oxen might be straining up and down that steep road half a dozen times in an afternoon. Against the thatch were laid ladders and tree-trunks and men ran up and down pouring water on to it. Then, if a spark did land, it must go out. But once the family left and the house was empty, the next fire sent a wave of flames from the bush – and up went that house, which now, it has to be admitted, was pure fantasy. Not that I saw that for years. Small children live in a reality that excludes the mad fantasies of adults.

I was adolescent before I actually saw that house, understood it…A little girl does not see more than she can understand.

My mother had brought from Persia a cloth that, spread on a small table, was soon laden with books and ornaments, but the edges were visible. It was a khaki cotton, but the border was of small coloured pictures, appliquéd figures in subtle but strong colours. I would sit and marvel, the pictures at eye level. A donkey, and behind it a boy with a stick…a man in a long dress wearing a tall, ugly black hat…a tree with tiny red fruits…a rosebush…a woman with her head in a black shawl thing…a snake – no doubt about it – with a red flickering tongue…a large black bird, but then, as I edged my way

round the almost floor-length cloth, the donkey was repeated, black this time, and the bird, white instead of black.

I was learning to sew, with a kit that had come over the sea from England. Squares of material, gauze, hessian, something like floor matting, but for a doll's house, cotton, trouser material – khaki. I had a box full of needles, some of wood, almost the size of a finger, some metal, but blunted. And there were my attempts, stitches an inch long, on material that had puckered, despite my efforts. That was what I could achieve. ‘Never mind, you'll do better.' But look at the pictures on this cloth's edge. Minute stitches, fairy stitches. On the black bird, the stitches were black, on the white donkey, they were tiny strokes of white; each picture had half a dozen different colours of thread, and what thread, as thin as a hair. That cloth's edge was a marvel. I sat there wondering and admiring, not believing that I – or any ordinary human – could ever do the same. Oh, just look, that tree, green as a tree is, had little blobs of red, and its companion tree on the other edge was
green, but with yellow blobs, and the stitches were red and yellow and the stick the boy was going to hit the donkey with was not a thin streak of appliquéd cloth but was of black satin stitch. ‘You see that there – that's satin stitch, it's used for filling in, yes, look over here…' And another cloth showed large hanging fruits, yellow and orange and red, each filled in with the delightful tiny stitches. ‘Satin stitch – you see?'

There was a large box, but perhaps it wasn't so very large, of brass, with figures on it of a dull metal, and here were scenes not unlike those on the cloth with its enticing edges. At least, here was a little donkey, here was a bird and, yes, a tree.

That is what a small girl sees, feels.

By the time I understood that house, the curtains were faded and fraying, and the coloured edges of the cloth had lost their brilliance. But what an extraordinary house my mother had created, back there in 1924, from trunks crammed full of plenty from Liberty's and Harrods. The floor was of shiny black linoleum, but as the tree roots rotted under it, hollows and bumps displayed the Persian carpets in ways their weavers had never intended. Those rugs had worn down to their elemental threads. But imagine that shiny black floor with the new wonderful Persian rugs…The sitting-room walls my mother did not whitewash, because the greyish-brown of the mud set off the lively colour of the Liberty patterns. The cupboards and tables, all of black-painted boxes, were striking, combined with those patterns that my mother had seen long ago on Liberty's shelves. There were cushions, hangings and
cloths from Persia, and some of their patterns are alive in my mind now. In the bedroom on the washstand was the wonder of a basin and jug in copper, which gleamed – this time against whitewash – but which had to be scrubbed and polished once a week because it went dull so fast, particularly in the rainy season.

In my room the curtains were of strong orange so that when the sun rose they flamed and burned…

This house, what a feat of the imagination it was…and what guests did my mother imagine she would entertain in it? They said, the parents, that it had been built to last four years – but how could that be? In four years they would have made all that money promised by the Southern Rhodesian stall at the Empire Exhibition and they would be able to get-off-the-farm and go back to England? No, no, none of it made sense, not to a scornful, accusing adolescent, who could acknowledge the charm, the impossible heartbreaking charm, of that old mud-and-thatch house, but since she was of the age for consistency, reason, sense, consequences, she simply could not accept that house as a reasonable thing.

Well, it wasn't.

And soon the flames swept in…and what did the many tiny inhabitants of the house do then? For in that thatch lived varieties of beetle and spider, the hornets made their nests in the walls, mice scurried in the rafters, the borers shed their white dust down on to the floor…I could imagine a tiny screaming and protesting, but that did no good, the house
burned, and the next big wind would blow away the ashes. Who would ever know that here had stood this house of dreams, none of which included an ignominious ‘getting-off-the-farm' into the suburb of a war-swollen town?