Alfred and Emily Read online

  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.’

  Sister McVeagh

  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 a
nnexe 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?

  Insects

  Sometimes the lower part of the crown of the hill was crowded with butterflies: the mysterious synchronicities of nature had meshed – the rains, the time of year, and that essential thing, plentiful cowpats on the track, since the water-cart had been up and down that morning, the oxen leaving their crusty sweet-smelling portions of – paradise. Sages of all denominations have used this vision thus: ‘So, Master, to what can you compare this life of ours?’

  ‘Our lives are as if a butterfly flutters in from the dark into a lighted place, sees beneath her a favourite food, flutters down and feasts on the ordure until she is replete – and then off she flies again into the dark.’

  Probably the most exquisite sight I have ever seen is hundreds of butterflies, different ones, all sizes, fluttering their pretty wings and spread about over cowpats on the track.

  Oh, what beauties, what a gorgeous sight, and the family stood as near as we could, marvelling. Then, one by one, off the butterflies drifted, back to their more ordinary delight: nectar.

  If I choose to remember this vision, which I may do on a dark December afternoon in London, and not forgetting the benef-icence of the cowpats, I have to think too – honesty compels – of the other insects. Life is not, after all, exquisite butterflies with the afternoon sunlight on their wings.

  Our house was in the middle of the bush, which was not twenty yards away in some places, and full of every imaginable insect. Some of them were a horror to me. One invasion was the worst. There is an insect, large, dark brown, with a bulbous body, and antennae, which came with the rains and was everywhere. My mother chided, the servants laughed at me, but I was sobbing, hidden in a corner. That was myself as a small girl, but I grew and the beetles, if that was what they were, went on appearing. I would be safe in my bed and then there they were on the mosquito net, a dozen of them, clinging with their little legs to the mesh, lopsided from the weight of their great bodies. I cowered under the bedclothes and screamed for help. My father, probably already in bed, laboriously arose.

  ‘Your hysterical daughter is at it again,’ he remarks, furious, but contained. He comes hopping on his clumsy crutch over the uneven floors and sees me crouching under the net, with the brown ugly things above me all over the net. He stands on one leg, holding on to the w
ashstand with one hand, and brushes them off, using his crutch. They are scattered over the floor.

  ‘No, no,’ I cry. ‘They’ll climb up again, they’ll get back on the net.’ With what difficulty does my father reach for a towel, always holding on to the washstand, bend to scoop up the insects, which in my memory are emitting squeaks and complaints, then get to the door and shake them out into the night? ‘Shut the door, shut the door,’ I beg, though usually I did not allow that door to be shut.

  He shuts it.

  ‘What are you so frightened of?’ he coldly enquires, turning with such an effort to manoeuvre himself and his crutch back to his room.

  ‘Beetles,’ he tells my mother, who has not budged from her bed: she thinks I should not be indulged in my irrational behaviour.

  Well, what was I so afraid of to the point that I cowered, weeping, clinging to pillows?

  There were other invasions, some I can hardly bear to remember.

  In London Zoo they have classes for people with phobias. You become inured to furry, squeaking, hissing, biting things walking up your arms. Oh, no, no, don’t even think of it.

  If I have moments of sentimentalizing the bush, I make myself remember how, when walking quietly through the trees, I might find myself in the middle of a spider’s web that clung like the poisonous one in an old myth or fairy story. The spider was vibrating with fury not an arm’s length away.