The Setting Sun (3 page)

The author, with his minder, Kimwaga, and hyena cub c. 1957

Frightened by the commotion, perhaps, the snake pauses, turns, rears its hooded head and sways, as if on a puppeteer’s string. When his pursuer’s about four paces away, the cobra whips forward, spitting a long needle of liquid. The boy’s father flinches but doesn’t break his stride. The child averts his eyes, only to see the shadow of the
panga
in its awful rise and fall. For a while there’s complete silence, as Kimwaga, the cook and the boy approach warily. But his father’s soon laughing the tension away, setting the others off again
.

‘That’s the last time this bugger has the chicken eggs,’ he proclaims. ‘I told you to stay back,’ he adds sharply, as the boy goes to take his hand. His son pauses, uncertain. But the face softens
.

‘Curiosity killed the cat.’ His father shakes his head and puts an arm round the child’s shoulder
.

The boy loves that feeling. It’s as if his father’s skin and his melt together, making them one. He smells sweat and Old Spice and severed flesh. The snake’s head lies upside down, the bobbing target cleanly cut with a single blow. Its body, six feet long and thicker than the boy’s arm, with beautiful rust and black markings, continues to thrash blindly in a circle, a few paces away
.

‘Look,’ his father says, showing the palm of his left hand, sticky with milky spittle. ‘If that got in your eyes, you’d be in big trouble.’

Nonchalantly, he flicks the snake’s head over with the toe of his slipper. The tongue still flickers between white fangs. Sand clogs the eyes. The boy turns to see Kimwaga guffawing as he tries to steer the serpent’s body into the sack he’s holding. With the help of the cook, who exhales breath stale with last night’s beer, he eventually traps it. Then the boy’s father glances at his watch, grins and beckons them all to follow
.

‘Bring the bag,’ he tells his son
.

The boy does so unwillingly, glancing at Kimwaga for reassurance. His minder grins back, eyes wet with laughter. The sack pulsates alarmingly as the rope of muscle continues to work inside. It’s much heavier than the boy imagined and his biceps are soon red hot with effort
.

He follows the adults up the drive, to where the evergreen
manyara
hedge meets the ditch beside the road into the village. His father signals Kimwaga and the cook to wait where they can’t be seen. He motions the boy to get down in the ditch with him and they squat next to the culvert. The boy’s confused again. Isn’t this just the kind of cool, dark place snakes love to hide? Soon they hear the messenger’s bicycle wheezing up the sandy track, and the boy’s father puts one forefinger to his lips. Through the tall spring grass growing up from the ditch, the man comes into sight. When he’s a few yards away, the boy’s father opens the sack and the snake flails out into the road as if being confined has given it new energy. There’s a cry and the clanking sound of the bicycle falling. When the boy stands up, he sees the messenger running back the way he came, while the snake writhes sinuously into the verge on the other side. His father’s eyes brim with the effort of keeping quiet. But Kimwaga’s snorting giggle is uncontainable, setting off the cook’s bass gurgle. The boy laughs along, he doesn’t know why. Adults are such a mystery. More than anything he’s relieved to be rid of the snake. Once he’s sure the coast is clear, his father hauls him out of the ditch and they begin gathering up the manila envelopes
.

How vague, by contrast, is my sense of Bill’s life in India between 1938 and 1947. I’ve no memories, and even relics are few and far between. My younger brother has the police uniform he wore on his wedding day, his medals, a fearsome braided leather riding-crop, a Sam Browne belt and the red pennant from the front wing of his car. In an album compiled by his sister Pat, who phoned my school from Nairobi with news of the air crash, are some black-and-white photos from that phase of his life. Two show an eighteen-year-old
Bill uncomfortably stuffed into what looks like mess dress, black tails, wing collar and cummerbund. There’s one of a tiger hunt, the head of the unfortunate creature propped on an improvised tripod. The snarling trophy was part of the furniture of my African childhood, its glass eyes swivelling uncannily as one passed, as though calculating the moment for revenge. At the time, it never occurred to me that this was an odd thing to find in a game ranger’s house.

Another photo shows him in riding boots and spurs, astride a white horse, concentrating hard. There are others of men in various uniforms, presumably his comrades, and one page is captioned ‘Bill’s girl-friends in India’. Most are of someone called Beryl Grey. In the first, looking like an aviator in her bathing cap, she smiles coquettishly, toned forearms folded on the lip of a swimming pool. In an adjacent picture, she’s holding an infant with her own ash-blonde locks. Somebody’s wife? Below her is a brunette identified as ‘Maria, Bill’s fiancée’. She wears a forage cap and on one cropped shoulder of her uniform are three letters: ‘W.A.O.’. Women’s Army Ordinance Corps? She has a pretty, open face, with full lips and a slightly startled expression. Why didn’t they get married? I was disappointed that there wasn’t a picture of the Gaekwad of Baroda’s sister. Aunt Pat had once told me that Bill knew her ‘very well’, and scandalised the members of the Bombay Yacht Club by taking her in for a drink. It seemed an unlikely story. Surely the Indian princes and their families were exempt from the racial distinctions of the Raj?

‘He adored women, your father,’ Pat insisted, ‘they made him thrilled skinny to be alive. It didn’t matter who they were or where they came from, young or old as God. Before the war, he did social work in Wales one school holidays. He got on like a house on fire with the miners’ wives and daughters. One of them used to write for years afterwards. He was always so ga
llant.
’

The old-fashioned stress on the last syllable made Bill seem even more part of a bygone era.

Not for the first time, the cook’s wife has fled her quarters to take refuge in their house. She’s crying and, jiggling her baby on one hip, shows the boy’s mother the weal on her arm. One eye’s already closing. The indignant voice outside grows louder
.

‘Send Eunice out or I will come in and get her.’

The boy’s never heard the cook talk like this. He rushes to the bathroom window which looks onto the yard. His father’s already on the kitchen steps, threatening to sack the man if he doesn’t go home at once. The cook makes to lunge past his employer and regain Eunice, who begins wailing. The boy’s father shoves him back. In a trice the two men are locked in a wrestling hold. The cook’s the same height but considerably broader than the boy’s father, though much of him is beer belly. Time is suspended, the two men completely motionless, heads resting on each others’ shoulders, as if companionably supporting one another. But through the cook’s torn shirt and below his father’s shorts, the boy can see muscle quivering with effort. It’s like when male buffaloes lock horns. Sometimes minutes pass as they push at each other, sinews standing out like cables, even through the thick hide, before one concedes. There’s no snorting and stamping now, but both men are breathing heavily and the boy has the same sensation of the earth trembling. He senses his whole world will be shaken to bits if the cook wins. The boy can’t bear to look any longer and runs to his room. But he can’t stay still. He has to go and help his father
.

By the time he’s evaded his mother’s snatch and got into the kitchen, however, his father’s walking back up the steps, tossing a piece of torn cloth towards the grate beneath the 44-gallon drum which heats their bathwater. There’s a graze on his neck and his face flushes with an expression of disgust as he wipes some drool off his shirt-front. The boy throws his arms round his father’s waist in sheer relief and won’t let go. Behind, he sees the cook stumbling towards his quarters. The rip in the back of his shirt is wider and the black skin beneath dusty. Otherwise everything’s eerily normal
.

‘We can’t sack him,’ he hears his mother say later. ‘He’ll take it out on Eunice.’

‘He should bloody well learn to appreciate her,’ the boy’s father complains. ‘Do you know, the bugger tried to touch me for an advance yesterday so he can get himself a second wife.’

‘It’s just the way they are,’ his mother rejoins, ‘we shouldn’t interfere more than we have to. Besides, where are we going to find someone who cooks like him out here in the bush?’

‘He’s a bloody bully when he’s had a drink.’

‘Tell him how quickly he could get his second wife if he stopped the booze.’

But Bill hardly ever mentioned India. He once demonstrated some unarmed combat moves he said he’d learned at police training school. They worked beautifully on me, but when my turn came, Bill was too stocky, my muscles too feeble, to unbalance him. Another time he explained that his poor hearing in one ear was the result of a perforated tympanum.

‘I was lured to a house by terrorists, who threw a home-made grenade into the room where I was waiting.’

‘What does terrorist mean?’ The word was cropping up increasingly on the radio in connection with the Mau Mau uprising in neighbouring Kenya, where Pat had married into a settler family, their farmhouse increasingly resembling a fortress.

There was a second wound, which used to fascinate and scare me, a lumpy patch of hard yellowish skin above his right knee. Another improvised bomb had done the damage, this one hurled during a communalist riot. When it particularly troubled him, my father would sometimes call us to his
bedroom and my brothers and I would take turns massaging the ache away, watching almost sorrowfully as the pain slowly evaporated from an expression grey as his eyes. It was an incomparable feeling when he needed us like that.

Looking back, I realise that, even if rarely mentioned, his previous life marked my African childhood in other ways. A few Indian words found their way into our vocabulary, including
tatee
, Bill’s word for pooh, whether ours or the dogs’. Another was desk-wallah. ‘I’m turning into a bloody desk-wallah,’ he’d moan, when paperwork kept him too long from safari.

Besides the threatening tiger-head, there were bronze figurines in the display cabinet, Shiva, Kali and – my favourite – the pot-bellied Ganesh with his elephant head. Once a ring-tailed mongoose set up camp in our garden. It was soon christened ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’.

‘Why?’

‘Gosh, you’re just like the elephant’s child in the
Just So Stories,’
Bill grinned, tweaking my nose gently in his knuckles, ‘such a one for questions. I’ll ask Gran to send you the
Jungle Books
when I next write. Then you can find out all about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.’

Two months later, they arrived from England. Perhaps that was the germ of my lifelong interest in Kipling, who became the subject of my first book.

There was an Indian flavour, too, in what we ate and drank. Bill’s favourite tipple was freshly squeezed lime-and-soda, a taste he’d acquired in the subcontinent. Except during our posting to chilly Ngorongoro in northern Tanganyika, he’d usually have one as soon as he got in from the office. I loved to aim the soda siphon into his chunky glass tankard, scattering the pips and betting which dimple they’d settle under. Racing my brothers to jump on his lap as the strains of ‘Lillibullero’ heralded the news from London, followed on Saturdays by the football scores, I’d triumphantly nurse his saucer of nuts,
lightly fried with chilli, while we anticipated the results from the announcer’s intonation. Sundays, we usually had curry with chapattis, dal, mango pickle so strong it stripped the lining from your mouth and – when it could be ordered from the coast – Bombay Duck. The moment the tin was opened, the fetid stink betrayed it as fish, however, dark and stringy as a chocolate flake.

‘Why’s it called duck, then?’ I inevitably asked.

Bill shrugged with an amused look. ‘Things aren’t always what they seem in India.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll have to go and see for yourself.’

I’d stare, heart racing, as he speared a fragment into the pot of pickle, manoeuvred out a chunk of mango and crunched it all together in his mouth. No one, surely, could consume such a combination and survive. But Bill simply laughed, ha-ha breath fiery as a flame-thrower. His maroon slippers also came from Bombay, the leather uppers conserved through periodic re-solings, instruments of terror when we children misbehaved.