Alfred and Emily Read online

  The drought went on, the milk was always less in the pails, and inside that elegant black calf raged an unappeasable hunger. If he had been out on the veld with his mother he would not yet have tried grass, he was too young, but milk did not satisfy him.

  And so my mother tried supplementary feeding, using the all-purpose, always-useful mealie-meal, ground maize, mixing it with a little milk. Both calves liked this food. Both were growing fast, and by the time the rains came and green poked through the old dried clumps, they were being fed with what was really diluted porridge. By now a panful was being cooked for them, and mixed with milk and water.

  It has to be said these calves were a nuisance, charming as they were. They were like dogs, intruding everywhere like dogs, or lying with them under the shade bushes. Their droppings had to be cleaned up and put on the garden. You fell over calves in doorways, on paths. The dogs thought they were honorary canines and one might see a dog lick a calf ’s ear, or a porridge-crusted muzzle, or use the close-cropping snap-snapping of their teeth to kill fleas or ticks, and the calves stood still, nervous, jumping and jiving a little, but they did not run away. The dogs came freely in and out of the house, pushing open the swing doors, but the calves could not do that, though they tried.

  They were growing fast. I tried to ride Demi. I made halters and bridles of strips of blankets, doubled and redoubled, but he snapped them at my first attempt, which left me lying bruised on the ground. He did not seem to hold it against me, though.

  Meanwhile my father said we did not know what we were doing, and when these two were sent back down to the herd, the others would not accept them. We were setting up a sad life for these pets of ours, who seemed to do as they liked.

  We had evolved dog biscuits, out of maize meal. We had never heard of polenta, but it was polenta we made. Long afterwards I read a description of how in an Italian kitchen the making of polenta was an occasion for the family to gather around. In our smoky kitchen, the black pot stood on the wood stove, bubbling, sending out the slightly acid smell of boiling water, and the maize meal, glittering gold, was trickled into the water and stirred until…This was the unrefined maize meal, full of flavour, not the tasteless refined stuff that is popular now.

  The baking tins were lined with dripping, which no longer exists. When beef was roasted on Sundays, it gave off a wonderful rich fat, which was set in bowls over an inch or two of dark jelly, to be eaten on toast. Or put into the baking tins for the dog biscuits. The maize porridge was smoothed down into the fat, marked in squares with a knife, sprinkled with coarse salt and baked. It was delicious. We children snatched what we could, so did the servants, the dogs waited in the kitchen for the stuff to cool, and the calves came to get their share. More and more had to be made of these dog biscuits, so crisp and salty and good, and the calves ate every scrap they were given.

  You would see a calf and a dog trying to nose each other out of the way of a square of the stuff and my calf, who was pretty big by this time, might push a dog over.

  ‘They will have to go back to the herd,’ said my father, but we delayed, or I did. I was fond of my unruly, bossy great calf.

  I used to sleep with my door open, held by a stone. This was despite the dogs that might jump in, and more than once a snake. I could not bear to close that door. My bed looked across the bush to the mountains of the Dyke, coloured blue and rose and mauve, where the sun came up.

  One night I woke and there in my room stood my calf, and he seemed undecided what to do. There was an empty bed between him and me, and he was about to shoulder his way into my parents’ room. I had to push him from my room, the great beast. My father spoke. ‘Enough,’ said he. ‘We can’t have herds of cattle roaming through the house.’

  ‘But he’s only…’ began my mother, about to say that he was only a calf.

  But he wasn’t.

  Down they went, the young black ox – he was nearly that – and his pretty black and white sister. The herd did not seem to mind. But the pair did badly. My calf did not become a young bull: his testicles were wrong, and he would not be inspanned or yoked. He seemed to remember a high place where the winds blew, not this bush where the heat bit like a scorpion. There the dogs didn’t chase you, as they did here, but licked your ears and bit off the ticks. There were caresses, and many little treats. He wasn’t going to be an ordinary old trek ox, not him. Then his sister calved, perhaps too young, and her calves both died.

  So, not a success, then.

  When I wandered about on the farm, I kept a lookout for my calf, and one day there was a thunder of hoofs and towards me came a big black ox with scything horns and the intention, surely, to renew old friendship. I ran to the nearest ant heap, luckily a tall one, and went up it. The ox stood looking up, but I had vanished.

  Those horns…Once I had rubbed the bristling little lumps while the calf lowered his head for me. His budding horns were uncomfortable. Did he remember, while he tossed those murderous horns about and bellowed, then wandered off again?

  My poor Demi was a useless creature. When I was at school, they made a feast of him for the labourers, and they did not tell me. I was careful not to ask. For years, wandering out by myself, I would imagine I heard the thunder of hoofs and see that great, clumsy, affectionate beast charging up to me. But at the back of my mind was a summons, not to ‘a good school in England’ but to a life so far from anything in Banket, Southern Rhodesia, that it had all the glamour of Never Never Land. It was summed up by the brown fibre ‘Wanted on Voyage’ trunk that sat behind a curtain in my parents’ bedroom.

  In there were clothes as good as anything in the rare fashion magazine that might be blown into the house. To touch them, play with them, yearn over them was what I begged for. And my mother said, ‘No, no. What for? What good would it do you?’ and ‘You aren’t going to learn anything useful, pawing over my old frocks.’

  But then, one day, just like that, she said yes; some new disappointment must have overtaken her, telling her that, no, she would never wear those frocks, those feathery boas, the brocade shoes, the satin evening cloaks, whose hems were weighed with deep strips of diamante or embroidery.

  The middle part of the trunk held the frocks, and as we opened it, moths flew up.

  ‘I should have put in more mothballs,’ remarked my mother, as dry as you like, almost indifferent, just as if she was not about to see her precious dreams for the frocks disappear into moth holes. She sat there, my mother, while my avid grubby clumsy hands took off layers of crisp white paper – well, not so crisp now. I laid on the floor a sage green lace dress, with long sleeves and, in the front, covering a deep V, a wisp of the palest pink chiffon, or some scrap of flesh-coloured stuff. ‘A dinner dress,’ murmured my mother. ‘I never actually wore it. It was too formal for the voyage.’ A dinner dress! People wore clothes especially made to eat their dinner in? ‘It’s for a dinner party, you see,’ she remarked, in that offhand voice, dry from keeping the tears at bay.

  There it lay, on the floor, the tissue paper in rolls and puffs around it.

  It was mid-calf, 1924. Since then skirts had climbed to the knee and were low again, on the dresses that were winsome and girlish and feminine. I took out a slithery mass, which, laid on top of the sage dinner dress, then lifted up to see, consisted of two sheets of midnight blue sequins, back and front, on a backing of dark blue chiffon.

  ‘I wore that,’ murmured my mother, ‘on the last night of the voyage at the captain’s table. People noticed it.’

  I held it up. It was heavy. ‘Just look at those gorgeous sequins.’ Tiny holes appeared in the chiffon. The sequins dragged in places because the moth had got at the material they were stitched on.

  That was a dress to admire, not to love.

  The next was a dark blue confection, with a plain round-necked top, falling from the hips in layers of tulle, or chiffon, or something like that. The moths had had a real go at those skirts.

  ‘That’s a ball dress,’ she remarked, ‘
but since I bought it, there hasn’t been a ball.’

  Then came a black lace dress, the skirt again falling from the hips, over an emerald green lip. There were lace sleeves to just above the elbow.

  The idea would be, said my mother, instructing me, to wear a bracelet under the lace on one arm.

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  And then the frock, the beauty of them all, held up by me so that she could see it. It had the palest grey top, of chiffon, and on the chiffon were traceries of crystal beads. The lowest part, from the hips, was of slightly darker grey, like water rather than mist, and the crystalline tracery on that was a little heavier. The top had wide straps, made of the material with crystals on it folded over. There was a wisp of a little jacket, designed to show the patterns of beads.

  ‘Oh, oh,’ I moaned, ‘just look, oh, just look.’

  And she did just look, and saw…‘I’ve never worn it,’ she said. ‘When I saw it hanging there I knew it was my dress. I had to have it, I paid much too much…’ and she put out her hand, a fine, elegant hand, worn with farm work, and stroked it.

  It was full of moth holes.

  There was another dress, of fine green linen. Like the others it flared from the hips to a hemline marked by a deep band of white embroidery. The neckline and the sleeves had the embroidery too.

  But when and where would one wear it?

  ‘Imagine,’ said my mother, dry as the dust that hung in the air, ‘what people would say if I put that on in Banket.’

  ‘But what is it for?’

  ‘That’s a garden-party dress.’

  A garden party!

  ‘You know the park in Salisbury? Well, imagine it with English trees, and English shrubs and flowers. There would be music, you see, and a big marquee with tea and refreshments.’

  And now she was crying, and wiping her eyes.

  A dress in georgette – something delicate.

  ‘Look, autumn colours,’ said my mother, ‘just like a beech wood in autumn.’

  The skirt was to mid-calf, in ‘handkerchief ’ points, each one defined by a brown bead.

  ‘I suppose I could wear that here – if there was a party. No, not really.

  ‘I’m being very silly,’ she announced, and swept herself up to her feet. ‘You’d better have these,’ she said. ‘You can use them for dressing up. Or cut them up, if you feel like…I don’t care…’ and she ran out of the room to find a place to cry, I suppose.

  A dress in silver lamé: the material was silver threads and black woven together. It was going black in patches. It smelled deathly. It had black jet beads around the neck and armholes. They were falling off. They lay scattered about over the other dresses, the floor, like tiny black ants.

  And so those lovely frocks did get cut up, and when I was older with a few more inches grown, I tried to put what was left of them on.

  But they were not what I wanted to wear, for nineteen-twenties fashions were being mocked, jeered at, ridiculous. It was not till the sixties and the mini-skirt that anyone had a good word to say for those low-waisted frocks.

  When I wore one wrapped around my twelve-year-old, thirteen-year-old person, or saw the dog wearing the grey chiffon with crystal beads, which I and my brother put on him, as a joke, my mother looked hard and saw me, dressed in the uniform of an English girls’ school, because ‘getting-off-the-farm’ had more potency with every year that passed and was further away.

  If my mother dreamed sometimes aloud of London, herself as a girl or young woman, going with friends to a play, to the Trocadero, concerts, picnics in the parks, my father dreamed too, but while he would go along with her flights – ‘Oh, imagine if we were there now, in Piccadilly’ or ‘Do you remember the chestnut seller?’ – he was dreaming of very different landscapes.

  Often I, my brother or both were sent down to the lands with a bottle of cold tea to find my father. We might pass the labourers watched by the boss-boy, and find my father, by himself, watching…It might be a chameleon’s slow swaying progress along a branch, or weaver birds making their nests over water, in the wet season, or, in a wooded corner that was usually full of spiders, a web that stretched from tree to tree, the spider, a nasty black and yellow job, on guard in a corner.

  My father was fascinated by spiders, but I stayed behind his shoulders where the spider could not leap out at me. The sheet of web would quiver as an insect landed on it, and the spider ran on its strong black legs to grasp it. In a minute the moth or beetle would be folded in sticky web and positioned where later the spider would come. ‘Imagine,’ my father might say, ‘how that moth must be feeling. It can’t move. I wonder if it can see the spider there. It’s just as well we are all so shut inside ourselves. Imagine if we could feel what that poor moth is feeling. It would be awful.’ I liked going down – bicycling or walking – to find my father, who might even say, ‘I don’t want to stop watching this spider,’ or a bird feeding a nestling. ‘I’ll come up for lunch a bit later.’ But then he got diabetes and he had to come up, to inject himself with insulin and test his urine, standing near the little spirit lamp, holding the test-tube over the flame.

  ‘I sometimes think he doesn’t really want to get off the farm,’ my mother would say, hearing that, no, my father wouldn’t come to lunch now – ‘There’s a spider, you see.’

  Keeping my father in insulin was a precarious business. It was made somewhere in South Africa. The makers put a parcel of it on the train north, and at Salisbury somebody went to intercept it, and later put it on the train to Banket. It reached the post office, and the man telephoned to say the precious stuff was waiting. Another man on a bicycle, or we, the family, went in to get the insulin. No refrigerator. There was a contraption used by many farmers before they could afford one. A great tall box, a safe, with sides of doubled chicken wire, stood in tins of disinfectant to keep out the ants, in a shady place. Between the wire sides was a layer of charcoal. All round the top of the safe were little runnels of tin, with holes. These were kept full of water, which leaked down through the charcoal. Except on the very hottest days, yes, it kept cool, but there was always worry about the insulin.

  When my parents did at last move into Salisbury the whole business of diabetes eased because there was a refrigerator.

  If it was no longer so easy for my father to spend hours down on the lands, watching, contemplating, more and more did he like to sit out in front of the house, watching. He would watch the veld fires burn their slow way on the hills that were four or so miles away. Or, putting his head back, watch the heavens. I was allowed to stay up, and then my brother too, because ‘It will be good for you.’ We lay back in our deck-chairs, like my father, counting the shooting stars. There were many. And the stars were bright and near. ‘Look, there’s the Southern Cross’; ‘Look, there’s Orion…the Plough, the Pleiades…’ My mother kept saying, ‘It’s time for bed,’ but my father would say, ‘Let them be.’ He was dazed with starlight, wonder, or if the moon was around, then the moonlight was like a spell, keeping us in our chairs.

  ‘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.