African Laughter (3 page)

THE BUSH

The family went often to Marandellas, whose name is now again Marondera, just as the real right name for Umtali would have been Mutare, if the whites had not overrun these parts. We did not go to Umtali, for it was then a distant place. I did not get to it until I was fifteen or so, and then Marandellas had become only one of the way-stations along a road where I visited farms, sometimes for weeks at a time. But as a child, Marandellas was the other pole to our farm, which was in the District of Banket, Lomagundi (or Lo Magondi) seventy miles to the north-east of Salisbury, and on the road north to the Zambesi valley. Nothing ever happened on our road but the routine excitements of flooded rivers, where we might have to sit waiting for the waters to subside for four or five hours before daring the drift that could have potholes in it from the flood; or getting stuck in thick red mud and having to be pushed out over freshly cut branches laid across the mud; or glimpses of wild animals…‘Look, there’s a duiker!’ Or a koodoo, or a little herd of eland. These being the stuff of ordinary life, and what we took for granted, it was only on the other side of Salisbury that the shock and tug of new impressions began, a shimmer in the air, like mental heat waves, which I knew were proper to the road to Umtali. Marandellas was about fifty miles south-east of Salisbury, but if you ask, What is a hundred and twenty miles?–then that is from the practical, unpoetical perspective. Our car was an Overland, contemporary with the first Fords, now taken out of car museums to star in films of the Great Depression. It was second-hand when we bought it, and thirty miles an hour was a great speed. Add this to the characters of my parents, and the journey became an epic endeavour, to be planned and prepared for weeks in advance. The most often spoken words in our house were, ‘But we can’t afford it!’–usually, triumphantly, from my father to my mother, to prove something was impossible, in this case to spend a week near Ruzawi at the Marandellas Hotel. My brother was at Ruzawi School, a prep-school conducted on English lines, and the trip would be so we could take part in a Sports Day, an Open Day, a cricket match, judged as successful according to how they mirrored similar events at prep-schools at Home. Impossible!–thank the Lord!–and he would not have to leave the farm and put on respectable clothes instead of his farm khaki and make small talk with other parents. For his ‘We can’t afford it,’ was not a symptom of meanness, but rather of his need, by now the strongest thing in him, to be left in peace to dream.

But my mother triumphed. Rolls of bedding, boxes of food, suitcases, filled the back of the car where the ‘boy’ and I fitted ourselves, and we set off. At the speed my father insisted on travelling, the seventy miles to Salisbury took three or four hours. (‘A man who has to use a brake doesn’t know how to drive a car.’) The Packards and the Studebakers shot past us in tumults of dust (these were the old strip roads and you overtook on dirt) for the Fords and the Overlands were already an anachronism. (‘Why give up your car when it is still working perfectly well just because
they
want to sell you a new one?’) To go from Banket to Marandellas in one day, or an afternoon, even on those roads, was easily done–by everyone else. We stayed at the old Meikles Hotel, but in the annex at the back, because it was cheaper. We ate a picnic supper in our room, because we could not afford the hotel dining-room. Afterwards we drank coffee in Meikles lounge, where a band played among palm trees and gilded columns.

Next morning, the car forced to accommodate even more food, we left early on the road to Marandellas, so there would be plenty of time to set up camp. The drive went on for ever, the miles made longer by the need to concentrate on everything. This is sandveld country, not the heavy red, brown and bright pink soils of Banket, and the landscape has a light dry airiness. Mountains and more mountains accompany the road, but at distances that paint them blue, mauve, purple, while close to the road are clusters of granite boulders unique in the world; at least, I have not seen anything like them elsewhere, or in photographs. The boulders erupt from pale soil to balance on each other so lightly it seems impossible a strong wind will not topple them. The great stones, a light bright grey, with a sparkle to them if you look close, but patched and patterned with lichens, radiate heat waves against the intense blue of the sky. Everyone who passes speculates about how long they have impossibly balanced there and enjoy notions of giants who have played with pebbles. ‘That one, there,’ I would think, fixing its exact shape and position in my mind, ‘it might have fallen off by the time we come back next week.’ But that boulder, the size of a hut or a baobab tree, contacting the one beneath it only for a square inch or two, had won the battle against gravity, and was still there in 1982 on that day I sped past on the road, not to Marandellas and Umtali, but to Marondera and Mutare, after so many rain storms, powerful winds, bolts of lightning; after half a century of history and the years of the civil war: the War of Liberation, the Bush War.

The road went up. The road went down. Roads do this everywhere, but never as emphatically as on those journeys at thirty miles an hour, the car labouring to the top of a crest and reaching it in a climax of achievement, then the reward of a descent freewheeling into the valley, then the grind up the next rise, in second gear, because second gear is a solid, responsible state to be in, top gear has something about it of frivolity, even recklessness. Each crest brought another magnificent view, and my mother exclaimed and directed our attention in her way that mingled admiration and regret, as if such beauty must have a penalty to pay in sorrow. Meanwhile I was cramming into my mind, like photographs in an album, these views and vistas that would never stay put, but were changed by memory, as I would find out on the next trip. A ‘view’ I had believed was fixed for ever, had disappeared. A coil of mountains was lower than I remembered. A peak had come forward and attracted to itself a lesser hill. A river had changed course and acquired a tributary I had simply not noticed. Perhaps there had been a different ‘view’, and I had been mistaken? No, because
that
hill, there, near the road, had not changed, and I had used it as a marker. Yet how I had laboured over that view, my eyes stretched wide in case a blink shifted a perspective or spoiled my attention, my mind set to receive and record. I was in a contest with Time, and I knew it. I was obsessed with Time, always had been, and my very earliest memories are of how I insisted to myself, Hold this…don’t forget it–as if I had been born with a knowledge of its sleights and deceptions. When I was very young, perhaps not more than two or three years old, someone must have said to me, ‘I’m telling you, it’s like this.’ But I knew that ‘it’ was like that. They said: ‘
This
happened,
this
is the truth’–but I knew
that
had happened,
that
was the truth. Someone trying to talk me out of what I knew was true, must have been the important thing that happened to me in my childhood, for I was continually holding fast to moments, when I said to myself, ‘Remember this. Remember what really happened. Don’t let yourself be talked out of what really happened.’ Even now I hold a series of sharp little scenes, like photographs, or eidetic memory, which I refer to. So when I fought to retain a ‘view’, a perspective on a road, the little effort was only one on a long list. Time, like grown-ups, possessed all these slippery qualities, but if you labour enough over an event, a moment, you make a solid thing of it, may revisit it…Is it still there? Is it still the same? Meanwhile Time erodes, Time chips and blurs, Time emits blue and mauve and purple and white hazes like dry ice in a theatre: ‘Here, wait a minute, I can’t see.’

Time passed slowly, so very s-l-o-w-l-y, it crept and crawled, and I knew I was in child-time, because my parents told me I was. ‘When you are our age, the years simply gallop!’ But at my age, every day went on for ever and I was determined to grow up as quickly as I could and leave behind the condition of being a child, being helpless. Now I wonder if those who dislike being children, who urge time to go quickly, experience time differently when they get older: does it go faster for us than for other people who have not spent years teaching it to hurry by? The journeys to Marandellas, occurring two or three times a year, were a way of marking accomplished stages: another four months gone, another rainy season over, and that’s a whole year done with–and the same point last year seems so far away. The journeys themselves, slow, painstaking, needing so much effort by my mother to get everything ready, so much effort by my father to rouse himself to face life and remain this damned car’s master (‘We would have done much better to keep horses and the use of our feet!’) were each one like a small life, distant, different from the ones before, marked by its own flavour, incidents, adventures.

‘That was the trip Mrs C. visited us in our camp. I thought she was a bit sniffy about it. Well, I think we have the best of it–you don’t lie out all night under the stars if you’re in the Marandellas Hotel!’ Or, ‘That was the time when our boy–what was his name? Reuben?’–(These damned missionaries!)–‘went off for two days on a beer drink because he met a brother in the next village, and he turned up as calm as you please and said he hadn’t seen his brother for five years. Brother my foot! Every second person they meet is a brother, as far as I can see.’ ‘Now, come on, old thing, be fair! Every second person they meet is a brother–do you remember that letter in the
Rhodesia Herald
? They have a different system of relationships. And anyway, we did quite all right without a servant, didn’t we? I don’t see what we need a boy for on the trips anyway.’ ‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ said my mother, fierce. But what she did not say, could not say, and only her face ever said it for her, like that of an unjustly punished little girl: ‘It’s all very well for you! Who gets the food ready and packs the car and unpacks everything, and finds the camp site and spreads the bedding and looks after the children? Not you, not you, ever! Surely I am not expected to do everything, always, myself?’ And yes, she was; and yes, she did, always.

When we reached Marandellas, we turned off the main road that led to Umtali, drove through the neat little township with its gardens and its jacarandas and its flame trees, and went for a few miles along the road to Ruzawi. Here the bush was full of rocky kopjes and small streams. The sandy earth sparkled. Well before reaching the school, off the road but within sight of it, a space was found among the musasa trees. The ‘boy’ cut branches to make an enclosure about twenty feet by twenty, but round, in the spirit of the country. This leafy barrier was to keep out leopards, who were still holding on, though threatened, in their caves in the hills. We could have lain out under the trees without the barricade for any leopard worth its salt could have jumped over it in a moment and carried one of us off. No, the walls were an expression of something else, not a keeping out, but a keeping together, strangers in a strange land. My parents needed those encircling branchy arms. But my brother, when he was only a little older, went for days through the bush by himself, or with the son of the black man who worked in our kitchen, and he slept, as they did, as some still do, rolled in a blanket near the fire.

Inside this boma were made five low platforms of fresh grass, long and green and sappy, or long and yellow and dry, according to the season, and on these was spread the bedding. My brother was given permission to leave school and join us at these times for at least a night or two. And my parents always insisted that the black man must sleep inside the lager, safe, with us.

This involved all kinds of illogicalities and inconsistencies, but I was used to them, and took them for granted until I was much older. Reuben (or Isaiah, or Jacob, or Simon, or Abraham, or Sixpence, or Tickie–for they never stayed long) made up his own smaller fire outside the boma, and cooked his maize porridge on it, eating, too, the foods we were eating, bacon, eggs, steak, cake, bread, jam. While we sat at night around the big fire, gazing at it, watching the sparks whirl up into the trees and the stars, he sat with his back to a tree, turned away from us, looking at his own smaller fire. Later, when we were in our pyjamas inside the blankets, he was called in, and he wrapped himself in his blankets, and lay down, his face turned away from us to the leafy wall. In the early morning when we woke he was already gone, and his fire was lit, he was sitting by it, a blanket around his shoulders, and he was wearing everything he owned–tattered shirt, shorts, a cast-off jersey of my father’s. These mornings could be cold, and sometimes frost crusted the edges of leaves in cold hollows. In our part of the country, so much hotter, there was seldom frost.

Later I had to wonder what that man was thinking, taken on this amazing trip in a car (and few of his fellows then had been in a car) to a part of the country too far away for him normally to think of visiting, days and days of walking, with the white family who were choosing–briefly–to live just as his people did, exclaiming all the time how wonderful it was, but preserving their customs as if they were still inside their house. They put on special clothes to sleep in. They washed continually in a white enamel basin set on a soap box under a tree. And they never stopped eating, just like all the white people. ‘They eat all the time,’ he certainly reported, returning to his own. ‘As soon as one meal is finished, they start cooking the next.’

Now I wonder most of all, with the helpless grieving so many of us feel these days, when we remember the destruction of animals and plants, about the reckless cutting down of those boughs, and of young trees. When we left a site the rubbish was well buried, but the wreckage of the encircling boughs remained, and we would see it all there a few months later, on our way to making a new enclosure with fresh boughs. Above where our fires had roared, the scorched leaves hung grey and brittle. In those days the bush, the game, the birds, seemed limitless. Not long before I left Southern Rhodesia to come to London I was a typist for a Parliamentary Committee on sleeping sickness, reporting on the eradication of tsetse fly, recording how, over large areas, the hunters moved, killing out hundreds of thousands of head of game, kudu, sable, bush buck, duiker, particularly duiker, those light-stepping, graceful, dark-liquid eyed creatures which once filled the bush, so that you could not walk more than a few yards without seeing one.