African Laughter Read online

  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 e
at 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.

  When I returned to Zimbabwe after that long absence, I expected all kinds of changes, but there was one change I had not thought to expect. The game had mostly gone. The bush was nearly silent. Once, the dawn chorus hurt the ears. Lying in our blankets under the trees on the sandveld of Marandellas, or in the house on the farm in Banket, the shrilling, clamouring, exulting of the birds as the sun appeared was so loud the ears seemed to curl up and complain before–there was nothing else for it–we leaped up into the early morning, to become part of all that tumult and activity. But by the 1980s the dawn chorus had become a feeble thing. Once, everywhere, moving through the bush, you saw duiker, bush buck, wild pig, wild cats, porcupines, anteaters; koodoo stood on the antheaps turning their proud horns to examine you before bounding off; eland went about in groups, like cattle. Being in the bush was to be with animals, one of them.

  Lying inside our leafy circle at night, we listened to owls, nightjars, the mysterious cries of monkeys. Sometimes a pair of small eyes gleamed from the trees over our heads, as a monkey or wild cat watched, as we did, how the roaring fire of early evening sent the red sparks rushing up from the flames that reached to the boughs, but then, later, when it died down, the sparks fled up, but fewer, and snapped out one by one, like the meteors that you could watch too, when the fire had died. Or we might wake to hear how some large animal, startled to find this obstruction in its usual path, bounded away into silence. The moon, which had been pushed away by the roar of the fire, had come close, and was standing over the trees in one of its many shapes and sizes, looking straight down at us.

  Every night my father, my brother, myself, fought to stay up around the fire, but my mother wanted us to be in bed in good time, to be fresh for her goal, the actual visit to the school. For what was to us the best–the bush, the animals, the birds, the stars, the fire–was to her a means to the moment when she sat with the other parents on the stands watching her son batting or bowling or fielding or running races with the other little boys in their fresh white clothes. The sports field, a large area of pale earth, lay among eucalyptus trees. The school buildings were of a style called Cape Colonial, or Cape Dutch, white and low, with red tiles, green shutters. Everything was clean and tidy and there were green English lawns. I felt alien to the place. This was because I was alien to the English middle class, playing out its rituals here, as if on a stage. I knew even then they were anachronistic, absurd, and, of course, admirable in their tenacity. These were the ‘nice people’ my mother yearned for, exiled in her red earth district surrounded by people–as she was convinced–of the wrong class. Here we were invited to lunch, tea, supper, with the headmaster, and the other masters and mistresses; the rituals might go on for days, according to strict rules. But often my father was found lying on his back under the gum trees, and would not be budged by my mother, scandalized, hurt, that–as usual!–he so little valued what was her goal, her ambition, her raison d’être. In spite of our poverty, in spite of our struggles as farmers through this terrible Depression, in spite of his lack of interest, we were here, where we ought to be, with our peers, and her son was set on a path proper to him and to us. ‘You go, old thing,’ said my father, lying flat on his back, staring up through the loose green-fledged white arms of the gum trees and the always blue sky. ‘You enjoy it, I don’t.’ He was letting her down and he knew it, so he might get himself awkwardly up off the ground, manoeuvring that clumsy wooden leg of his, and go with her to tea, and to lunch, and to parents’ meetings. Or he might stay exactly where he was. Sometimes he was joined by other fathers, who, seeing him lying there at ease among the scented, brittle, gum-tree leaves, could not resist, so there might be two, three, or ten fathers staring at the blue sky through leaves, until summoned by their wives, while their delighted or shocked children watched them, waiting to hear what their mothers would say. ‘But what are you doing there? What will they be thinking of you?’

  This place was my brother’s place, not mine. Ruzawi was what my mother had to have for him, expressing depths of her nature which we understood and allowed for, even if ‘England’ and ‘Home’ were so far off. The Convent was what she had to have for me. Like Ruzawi it was a snobbish choice. To me it was a dark oppressive place full of women loaded with their black and white serge robes who smelled when it was hot. I knew it was a bad place, but not how bad, until I was grown up. I was there for five years and it did me harm: I am still learning how much harm. That unwritten law, that mysterious ukase that forbids children to say to parents more than ‘It’s all right’, when asked ‘Well, how was school this time?’ made it impossible for my parents to know what went on there. Five years. Five years. Five child-years. What’s five years–when you’re grown up? Immersed in that time, Convent time, nun-time, with aeons to go before holidays came, which were a different time, equally long, endless, thank God, when I could be free and in the bush, I drowned in helplessness. Above all, I was abandoned by my parents. I was homesick to the point of physical illness: I knew why I was always ill at school, though they didn’t. When I asked my brother how he felt about Ruzawi, he said it was all right. But the people who taught him were not nuns, most of them peasants from southern Germany, frustrated and ignorant women. He was taught by brisk, matter-of-fact people who did not hang crucifixes with writhing tortured men on them, or pictures of meaty red hearts dripping with blood, on the walls of rooms where small children slept–children who walked in their sleep, had nightmares and wet their beds. At schools we were in different worlds, he and I, but were in the same world through the holidays. In the bush.

  Or in the green circle of the boma. There he might tell stories about the goings-on at his school, but I recognized these as mostly invented to entertain the parents. The convention at his school was that feats and exploits should be described in a way that was both boastful and modest. The feats themselves, climbing dangerous rocks, or forbidden roofs, or trees, or going into pools where crocodiles had been seen–these were boasts, because all were foolhardy. But his descriptions made nothing of the dangers, for that was the modesty prescribed by their school. I recognized the convention from books in the bookcase on the farm: Stalky and Co., Kipling generally, Buchan, Sapper, the memoirs of First World War soldiers. You could cross from one side of a deep gorge on a rope the thickness of an eyelash, or go into fire to rescue a comrade, or wriggle yourself on a six-inch outjut three storeys up a building from one window to another, and you could tell everyone about it, but the voice had to have a certain negligent humour about it, and then it was all right.

  I would watch my brother’s face, as he told these–permissible–tales out of school. It had the prescribed humorous modesty. Behind that was something else, an obstinate and secret excitement, and for the time he was speaking, he was not there by the fire at all, not with us, he was back in the moment of danger, the thrill of it, the pull of it.

  We two had a pact that I don’t remember being
made, though it must have been: it was that we should help each other not to fall off to sleep, should unite against our mother’s determination we should. This meant our two piles of sweet-scented grass must be close together, causing humorous comments from the parents, for usually we were not so affectionate. We lay down on our backs, so as not to miss a moment of moon and stars and up-rushing sparks, but with heads turned towards each other.

  ‘I must stay awake, I must, I must,’ I fought with myself, watching my brother’s long dark lashes droop on his cheek: I put my hand to his shoulder, and he carefully shook himself awake, while I saw how his body began to shape itself into the curve he would sleep in. I might have time to prod him once, twice–but then he was gone, and in the morning would accuse me of failing as a sentry against sleep. Meanwhile I lay rigid, face absorbing moonlight, starlight, as if I were stretched out to night-bathe. I knew that this lying out with no roof between me and the sky was a gift, not to be wasted. I knew already how Time gave you everything with one hand while taking it back with the other, for this lament sounded whenever my parents talked about their lives. This lying out at night might never happen again. On verandahs–yes, but there always seemed to be mosquito nets and screen wire between you and the night. And it didn’t happen again. I never again slept out under the sky in Africa, though I have in Europe. I was right to struggle to stay awake, but soon felt myself failing, and tried hard, and saw my mother bending over the fire in her pyjamas, dropping wood into nests of sparks, her face, for once, not presented to be looked at, but full of emotions I was determined would never be mine. ‘I will not, I will not. Remember this moment, remember it,’ I admonished myself, seeing the fire-illuminated face of that powerful woman, but she looked like a small girl who had had a door slammed in her face. The moment went to join the others on a list of moments that I kept in my mind, to be checked, often, so they did not fade and go. And I fell asleep and woke with the sun on my face, not the moon, my brother curled like a cat, my mother already at work folding up the bedding, and perhaps the ‘boy’ still asleep, his back to us. Or it was in a thick whiteness that sometimes in the very early morning rolled through the trees and over us, a mist that clung to our eyelashes and our skins, and made us all shiver as we sat drinking mugs of hot sweet tea around the revived fire. This mist was the guti of the Eastern districts, and we never saw anything like it in our district, and so it was part of the excitement of these trips, another bonus, to be watched for and welcomed. When it was cold and damp like this, and we sat waiting for the sun to climb higher and dispel the mist, we were kept around the fire and my mother summoned Isaiah–or Joshua, or Aaron, or Matthew, or Luke, or John–away from his little fire and made him sit inside the hot reach of ours, but perhaps a yard further away than we were. ‘You’ll catch cold,’ she fussed at him, as she did at us, pressing on him more mugs of the sweet tea. And then, it seemed always suddenly, the mist thinned and went and left us sitting in the brilliant sunshine.