Alfred and Emily Read online

  Meanwhile my mother was trying to get the labourers to eat the vegetables she was growing so successfully. They liked the spinach, they liked onions. But while she explained about vitamins (yes, she did – ‘They have to know sometime, don’t they?’), they would not eat tomatoes. No, they would not, not then. She begged them to go to the vegetable garden and the garden boy would give them all the tomatoes they wanted. Or runner beans. ‘But cabbage is so good for them,’ she might wail. But not cabbage, not then. All that has changed. They took mealies from the fields, with or without permission, and a band of Nyasers passing through could strip a line of them. ‘Well, what do you expect?’ said my father. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘But it’s thieving,’ she protested. ‘What else would you call it?’

  ‘Well, old thing, I would say that is the right word for it, yes.’

  I haven’t mentioned the fruits we took for granted. Grenadilla vines grew wild in some parts of the country. Guava trees were in many gardens. Pawpaw trees – the big pawpaws were everywhere. So were avocados. Plantains did well, but not bananas. In more than one of the houses I lived in, lychees grew outside the kitchen door. Oranges, lemons, grapefruit: the old Southern Rhodesia grew everything, somewhere, and I haven’t mentioned the peaches, or the mangoes, from Mutare, or…

  In short, the diet enjoyed by the whites, and some of the better-off blacks, could not be bought now for money or for love. It doesn’t exist.

  Provisions – in Town

  The day starts early, with breakfast at seven: the offices open at eight. The meal is the full English breakfast. The men having departed, the women begin their day. If there are babies or small children, they will have to be kept pacified until the important business of the order books is complete. The delivery men arrive on bicycles, which they leave leaning against trees or gates, and they take the books through to the kitchen where the cook checks them and makes notes. Whichever arrives first he takes to the missus – ‘Madam’ was a later embellishment.

  The cook, whose real name isn’t used in this household, probably Isaac, or Joshua, or some resounding biblical name, says, ‘Missus, here is the fruit and veg.’ Each delivery boy has a little exercise book with the number of the house on it – let us say 183 Livingstone Avenue. Each page is dated; there is a stub of pencil attached by string to the little book.

  The lady of the house looks at yesterday’s order. Cook has ticked each item to say it arrived.

  She knows she must make sure there are plenty of onions, tomatoes, and something in the line of spinach. These are for the ‘boys’ – the servants. In Southern Rhodesia all the house servants were male, whereas in South Africa they were and are female. Why? Who can say, by now?

  She writes,

  2 lbs potatoes

  4 lbs onions

  4 lbs spinach

  1 pawpaw

  6 plantains

  6 oranges

  She says to the man who is waiting and watching her, ‘I’ve put spinach and onion. What else?’ Meaning, what else do you want? Fruit, at this stage of the colony’s development, was not what the servants wanted.

  ‘Pumpkin, missus.’ She adds, ‘1 pumpkin’.

  ‘Grenadillas,’ says the man.

  ‘Fruit salad for tonight.’ She writes, ‘3 lbs grenadillas’.

  ‘That’s all,’ says Moses, or Benjamin, or Jacob. He puts another little book before her. This is the grocery book, and there can be, usually is, a little tussle over this order, amiable or not, according to mood.

  She looks at yesterday’s order. Each item ticked.

  ‘Rice, missus,’ says the man.

  She says, ‘But we had five pounds of rice yesterday.’

  ‘We need rice, missus,’ he insists. And adds, ‘You had rice and stew, missus.’

  ‘Very well,’ she says, and writes, ‘5 lbs rice’.

  ‘Curry powder.’

  Now, the servants adore curry powder, which they might even sprinkle on their mealie-meal porridge – the sadza.

  She looks quizzical, but puts down, ‘1 tin curry powder’.

  ‘Sugar,’ he says.

  And now here is a real little bone for them to chew over.

  Never is there enough sugar. This man will provide food for any of his friends who drop in, his ‘brothers’, and probably his friends’ friends.

  Sacks of mealie-meal stand in the pantry, with sacks of beans and peanuts. But the sugar sack is always mysteriously getting thinner and lower.

  She says, ‘We had a ten-pound sack of sugar last week.’

  ‘Sugar, missus,’ he says softly, and she writes, ‘10 lbs sugar’. One by one, jams, honey, coffee, tea are added and then that is done, the grocery book, and here is the little book that carries such a charge. This is the butcher’s book.

  I returned to Southern Rhodesia less than ten years after I left it and was immediately surprised by the amount of meat. Every fridge was stacked with it, including the vegetable trays. ‘We couldn’t have eaten all that meat,’ I cried. ‘Impossible!’ But we did.

  And all the servants loved meat, nyama, and wanted more.

  Yesterday’s order read:

  5 lbs best beef for roasting

  2 lbs liver

  2 lbs bacon

  2 lbs rump steak

  Now, the liver from yesterday’s lunch was only half eaten.

  She ought to ask, ‘What happened to the leftover liver?’

  She doesn’t.

  She and her husband would eat the roast tonight. There was a lot of the stew left over from last night.

  ‘Ah, how was the stew?’ she attempts to jest, knowing better than to ask, ‘I wonder how many people helped you eat it.’

  ‘The stew was very nice, missus,’ he says promptly. ‘Do you remember? You and the Baas said it was a good stew.’

  ‘And so it was.’

  She writes:

  2 lbs ox kidney

  3 lbs mince

  2 chickens

  Chickens were then not an everyday meal, but eaten on special occasions: she plans a Sunday lunch party.

  ‘And we’ll have another roast on Sunday too,’ she says.

  She would like to order brains, but this man’s tribal customs do not permit him to cook brains and certainly not to eat them.

  Shoulder of pork

  4 lbs sausages

  And now she orders the meat for them, ‘the boys’: ‘4 lbs boys’ meat’. This meant all kinds of scraps and bits and bones. Much later I ate ‘boys” meat, cooked by a clearly star cook. The little bits of this and that and bones, cooked in a thin tin-can type of container, with some onions, were utterly delicious. ‘3 lbs soup meat’: more scraps and bones, and the servants had most of this. ‘3 lbs dogs’ meat.’ This was more bone than meat: big bones lay about on the lawns and had to be cleared away.

  From time to time complaints were made by the ‘boys’ that the dogs’ meat was better than theirs. They resented the dogs and their privileged status.

  ‘And now what else?’ asks the lady of the house, thinking how sad that this colony’s lamb was not worth eating.

  ‘Tongue?’ suggests the man.

  They all liked tongue.

  ‘That butcher’s brawn is very good,’ he says.

  ‘3 lbs brawn’, she writes. Neither she nor her husband likes it, but why not?

  ‘If you order a piece of ham I can make pea and ham soup,’ he says. He claps his hand on his knee, to show which bit of pig she should order.

  She writes, ‘knuckle of ham’, and hands the book back to him.

  He glances over it to make sure all is there.

  She tells her husband that she enjoys ‘sparring’ with Joshua – or whoever.

  ‘Provided you understand he is taking advantage of you,’ says the master of the house and the wage-earner, establishing his authority.

  ‘Oh, go on, what does it all amount to?’

  ‘Quite a lot if you ever add it together.’

  Outside the three
delivery boys are on their bicycles, each leaning with a foot on the veranda. The cook throws the little books, one, two, three – neatly caught – and off they cycle, down to the shops, which are no more than a mile or so away.

  Done, she thinks. Everybody’s fed – I hope.

  And now is the time for the children, or if she has none, soon she will go off to a morning tea party at the house of another wife, where there will be scones, biscuits, cake, a whole range of goodies, the achievement of this household’s cook.

  When the girls exchange recipes, they are for cakes and puddings; meat can and does look after itself. They might mourn that there should be another animal invented: ‘Beef, beef, beef, – sometimes I think I’ll be a vegetarian.’

  My Brother Harry Tayler

  It was the early days of the Second World War: British battleships were in the Pacific Ocean on their warlike pursuits. They were the Repulse and the Prince of Wales. Both were unsinkable. Just like the Titanic. Is it permissible for ratepayers and concerned citizens to wonder about the later fate of the ‘experts’ who have such untrue ideas about the capacities of the big ships? Do they become knights and lords? Are they transferred to other committees to pronounce on the viability of shipping?

  My brother was on the Repulse. The Japanese sank both ships in twenty minutes. When the news came through it stunned us. Those hundreds and hundreds of men drowned…but more definite news took longer. Where was it to come from? War correspondents were not yet roving the Pacific. Then survivors told their stories and slowly it all came out. My brother wrote a letter, which did not arrive at once. He was not one of the world’s letter-writers, my brother.

  ‘It wasn’t a very nice experience,’ he admitted. On that dreadful morning, when the bombs hit, he was standing by a companionway going up to a deck while men were hastening past him, when someone said, ‘Are you going up, Tayler?’ Thus propelled, he went up the ladder, and found the ship already sinking. He walked down a slanting deck into the sea, and swam away with a swarm of survivors. He was far enough away when the Repulse went down. He was in the water for some hours, surrounded by corpses, oil, wreckage, and the sharks were around but were put off, probably, by the oil. Then a British ship picked them up and took them to Ceylon. There they told their tales to reporters, and were allowed to recuperate. Harry was assigned to the Aurora where he spent the rest of the war, in the Mediterranean. There he went pretty deaf, from gunfire – more than he had been: he was going deaf even in his teens.

  I met him in Cape Town. It happened like this.

  My first child, John Wisdom, was never one to put up uncomplainingly with difficulties and annoyances. The birth of my second child, his sister, shocked him. Never in my life have I heard such howls of rage, betrayal, when he realized that this new creature, this baby, was here to stay. He attacked the baby, but also attacked me, pummelling me with already savage little fists. ‘Why have you done this – to me?’ was the message.

  Consultations. I was a bit frazzled myself. While I have heard many a man say something like ‘My grandmother had eight children in eight years and was never a day the worse for it’, it is my belief that having babies too fast takes it out of women. A woman who lived in the next house begged to be allowed to look after the little girl: she had wanted girl children, and did not get them. I would take John right away to the coast where he would have his mother to himself, day and night, and recover.

  I have written about the journey to Cape Town, five days in a coupé the size of a small pony box. Sometimes veterans of life may be observed looking back over the years and wondering which of their experiences was the worst. I aver that being shut up with a hyperactive small boy for five days in a small space comes pretty high on a list of unlikeable experiences. But, then, there was the sea at last and the hotel. It was on the front at Sea Point, and the hotels along there were dedicated to pleasure, signalled by the strings of coloured fairy-lights each wore on its front. The hotel was crammed. The survivors from the Fall of Singapore had just arrived. There was every kind of traveller caught by the war, forced into accommodation much worse, it was easy to guess, than most were used to. There were all kinds of official, bureaucrat, clerk, lacking their own quarters, which were probably requisitioned for the war effort.

  Among them were some Quakers and to them I owe a conversation I needed badly. While it could not be said that I found the Southern Rhodesian regime attractive, I had never heard anyone describe it without prejudice. It must be remembered that in 1924, the year my parents arrived in the colony, there had just been a plebiscite or some kind of vote taken about whether this new land wanted to be South Africa’s sixth province or not. All the Rhodesians voted, ‘No, we shall be a British self-governing colony.’

  The Quakers, half a dozen officials, hearing that I was from ‘that obstinate little country’, started discussing it. Much to my advantage.

  ‘Really…there could be nothing more ridiculous. They are going it alone, so they say. There are a hundred thousand whites governing half a million natives [the then correct word for the blacks]. But every time we – South Africans – pass a law, they copy it and pass the same law. They copy each one of our Land Laws. So why not stay a part of South Africa? Have you ever visited there? British this, British that, it makes you sick…’ And so on. This made me think, as they say, to good purpose.

  This over-full, noisy hotel pleased John and, above all, there was no baby sister. He had a very good time. To the veranda of this hotel one day came Midshipman Harry Tayler, an amazingly good-looking young man, who had every woman in the place peering at him through the windows or making excuses to take tea on the veranda, so as to watch him.

  And now I could hear what had happened with the Repulse.

  ‘You see,’ said my brother, ‘I think I got a bit of a shock. I only realized that afterwards. I was in a bit of a daze, for weeks. Ceylon is a blur, you see.’

  ‘How long were you in the sea, waiting to be picked up?’

  ‘I don’t know. They tell me it was hours. It seemed like days. The water was warm – that wasn’t a bother. But there were a lot of dead people floating about. And I had known some of them. The sun was too hot. It was burning me. I had blisters from the sun. I tried to keep my head wet. There were other people hanging on to anything that floated, and calling out for help. I saw a report in The Times, I think, from one of the other survivors. He said there were sharks. I didn’t see any. What self-respecting shark would want to be in that oil? But when you come to think of it, I suppose the oil was quite a help with the sunburn.’

  ‘Do you ever think about the man who told you to go up the companionway to the deck?’

  ‘Yes, that was lucky, if you like. I only just got up to the deck and swam away before the whole ship went down. I would have gone with it. But you see, Tigs [my childhood name], you can’t really take it in. Not something as enormous as that.’

  ‘Do you think about it?’

  ‘Not if I can help it. It simply wasn’t very nice, any of it.’

  And now imagine this conversation going on, but it was decades later – the sequel. Harry, who had gone through the war in the Mediterranean, was treated for his deafness in London, but he didn’t get a really good hearing-aid until he was old. He married, had children, had jobs all to do with his amazing knowledge of the bush, the veld, the animals, the plants, and then the blacks won their war and were the government, and Harry said he couldn’t live under a black government, and he went down to South Africa, before there was a black government there too and then, much too young, he got a heart-attack and died. Meanwhile we met, several times, in my kitchen in London. During those years we had not been good friends. He supported the whites in the war, and I was on the side of the blacks. So when we met, both old now, there was a great deal to tell each other. When we could. We had so little in common, my brother and I, that it was often hard to find subjects to talk about. I took it for granted that I had to keep quiet, keep my mouth shut, when
he began spouting the stock platitudes about the inferiority of the blacks, and he often looked tolerant, meaning that my views on this and that were uncomfortable to him.

  But then, not so long before he died, he said he had something to tell me. He wanted me to understand something. His wife had died by then, of a heart-attack, and he was lonely. He was suffering that need of the old: he needed to explain something before it was too late. Tell somebody, anybody, as if what he had to tell could have no reality unless it was in somebody else’s mind too.

  During the Liberation War, my brother was not a combatant because he was too old, but the farmers too old for actual fighting were out most nights in lorries or armoured cars, keeping in touch with the white farms by radio or dropping in to see if everyone was all right. There were ambushes on the roads: the freedom-fighters might mine them, it was dangerous, though not as bad as actually being in the army, and Harry, like all those men, thoroughly enjoyed it.

  When pacifists, or people trying to limit war, decide to forget that some men thoroughly enjoy war, they are making a bad mistake.

  My son John, that once-belligerent little boy, loved war. He adored crawling through the bush, armed to the teeth, in great danger.

  Three times now I have heard men talking over past happy times with the men they were fighting. They have everything in common.

  One was my father, who used to visit a German small-mine worker (a small-mine worker was put down a trench, or a shaft, for the sake of a few pennyweight of gold, for as long as a chancy seam lasted). German and English ex-servicemen: they had been in the Trenches at the same time in the same area. They would discuss for hours how they were on this patrol or that, were nearly wounded – before they actually were – discuss the competence or otherwise of their officers.

  The roads were rutted and had potholes. Jolting around in old lorries was the worst part of those nightly sorties. One night the lorry Harry was on, with other men at the back, crowded together, went into a rut or hit a boulder and Harry had a bad jar, all over his body, but there was a blow to his head, which smashed against the back of the cabin.