African Laughter Page 4

  GIVING LIFTS

  It took me two hours to drive that short distance from Harare to Marondera, not because the car went so slowly; on the contrary, it was a powerful car that did not like being slowed. I kept stopping to salute this view, that cluster of toppling boulders, or at a turn-off to a farm I used to visit. No, the landscape had not lost its magnificence, nor grown smaller, the way things do, although I had seen the Arizona deserts, and California and Australia, been immersed in space and emptiness in various parts of the world. The road still rolled high in sparkling air, and, as you reached the crest of one rise, blue distances unfolded into mountains and then chains of mountains. But there was a new dimension to the landscape, because the War had ended only two years ago, and I was looking at a country where contesting armies had moved, often secretly, often at night, for, a decade. In these distances you do not see villages, it is still, apparently, an empty land, but that is only because huts melt and merge into trees, hills, valleys.

  I had been told by white friends, ‘On no account give any lifts to the blacks, it is dangerous.’ Public transport is bad and large crowds of black people waited at every stopping place. If a car showed signs of slowing, they crowded after it, shouting and waving. I stopped at a bus-stop and at once the car was surrounded. Such a scene would have been impossible in old Southern Rhodesia, where blacks had to know their place. I said to an old man who bent to peer into the seat near mine, ‘Get in,’ and he beckoned peremptorily to two women in the crowd. He opened the door for them to get into the back seat, and he got in beside me. He made threatening gestures at the crowd, who were expressing loud dissatisfaction. ‘Go on,’ he said to me, in the same peremptory way. I tried to start a conversation with him but he answered Yes and No, or not at all. I tried with the women, but he said, ‘They don’t know what you are saying.’ I could see from their faces this was not true. I said to him, ‘I am back in this country after twenty-five years. I was brought up in Lomagundi.’ He did not reply, and I was stupidly disappointed. What did I expect? My intelligence expected one thing, and my emotions another. About ten miles further on he commanded, ‘Stop here.’ I stopped. I could not see a building or road or even a path, only bush. He got out and went off, leaving his women to follow. They could not manage the door handle, and wrenched at it, irritated and angry, meaning these emotions to show. I opened the door for them. They got out and followed their man. Husband? Father? He wore long khaki trousers and a good thick jersey. They wore short colourful dresses and cardigans. Even thirty years ago, in country districts, this group could easily have been a man with an animal skin over his shoulders–monkey, leopard, or buck–and a loincloth, and he would be carrying a bunch of spears. Behind him women in the traditional blue-patterned cloth balanced pots on their heads. The man would have to go first to protect them from enemies or wild animals. These women still walked behind, when all three disappeared into the bush.

  There was little traffic. The pipeline bringing oil from Beira to Mutare had just been cut again in Mozambique by Renamo, the South African-backed rebel army, and petrol was hard to get. The newspapers were full of exhortations to save petrol. I did not stop to give a lift again on that stretch of road, because I was soon to see my brother, after so many years, and this needed all my attention.

  Going to see my brother was by no means as simple a thing as it might seem to people with normal family relationships. Normal? While the British Empire lasted (a short-lived empire, as empires go) it was common for families to be split, a son or brother somewhere in the army, female relatives working as missionaries (my mother’s best friend’s sister was in Japan) or (my uncle) being rubber planters in Malaya. When I was growing up in the bush, my parents so woefully in exile, the family was in England: step-grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins. Since I have lived in London, the family has been in various parts of Southern Africa.

  I can say that my brother and I have never got on and, with equal truth, that we always have. We have never agreed about anything, but when we have met (there have been stretches of years when we have not met at all) a mysterious understanding starts to work. It is the genes, so I’ve read: one shares a ground of genes. Similarly, when one falls in love apparently without rhyme or reason, in fact one yearns for one’s own recessive genes incarnate and flourishing in another person. Deep calls to deep. Just as well we cannot hear this conversation, the ultimate in narcissism.

  When he came out of the navy and before he married we did see quite a bit of each other, and this was the only time we did, as grown-ups. A year? Not much more. Not long. If I had left the state of being a True Believer behind I was still full of passionate principles, but at least I had learned it was a waste of time arguing about them. He knew that everything I thought was rubbish. In any case discussion, even ordinary talk, was difficult: gunfire in the War had deafened him, and he faced the world with a stubborn, slow, sweet smile, full of a readiness for goodwill. Our father was very ill, and we used to meet in a house where a man was slowly dying. Looking back at then, I see everything slowed, in slow motion, we hung about, we sat for hours on either side of a sickbed, we smiled a lot. When he was conscious my father talked, still talked, talked even now, about ‘his’ war, and always with grief, with rage. My brother did not talk about his war.

  For the thirty years, almost, since we met–briefly–in 1956, we had kept in touch, with letters, at long intervals, giving facts. Sometimes he wrote me a polemic, but in fatherly style, thus: ‘If communists like you and McCleod think you can get away with it then I am afraid I have to tell you that our Affs are sensible people, and know which side their bread is buttered.’ This was just two months before the end of the War and the election of Robert Mugabe. (Ian McCleod was a Tory Minister.) From his point of view my very existence was an embarrassment, and for him to write at all must have been difficult. After all, the community he belonged to did not have much good to say about me (to put it mildly). It was hard for me to write to him.

  Then researchers turned up to interview him, as the brother of the author, and this way he learned that there were people who thought well of me. I understand that, considered as interviews, the results were unsatisfactory. If I had been asked, I could have said, Don’t waste your time. And, too, I was angry because of the lack of courtesy. I preserve the old-fashioned view that a writer’s life is her or his property, at least until we die. This view begins to seem quaint, if not eccentric. I was not even middle-aged when a would-be biographer presented himself, with evident confidence that I could scarcely wait to tell him everything about myself. Suppose you decide you don’t want a biography written at all? Writers who have left instructions to this effect have been ignored. A British judge decreed that Philip Larkin’s wish not to have his life laid open to the curious and the lubricious was ‘repulsive’. The only other people treated as if their wishes count for nothing are the mad. This attitude, that writers are fair game, can make life hard for their relatives. My brother had remarked, so someone told me, that the people who came to see him had a very funny way of looking at life, and that he was afraid I was in bad company.

  I knew it was unlikely he had ever read a word of what I had written, and at that time he had not. After all, he knew that what I wrote was communist propaganda.

  Everything about my life must seem wrong-headed to him. Except for the War years, (his war, the Second World War) and a couple of years after the War ended, his life was spent in the bush. He got up at five or five-thirty, was out of doors all day, and often spent hours walking by himself in the bush. He was always in bed by nine.

  Looked at impersonally, and I certainly had been forced to do that, my brother was interesting from a cultural point of view. My parents thought of themselves as modern people, and kept abreast of ideas and new writers. The books on our shelves on the farm, all classics, were only part of it. My mother had progressive ideas about education, admired Ruskin, Montessori. My father might quote Shaw and Wells in an argument. The battering lif
e gave them on the farm shook off that layer of culture. What came to the farm through the 1930s were newspapers from England, and Stephen King Hall’s Newsletter. It was politics that absorbed them, and that was because of the First World War and its aftermath, which caused both of them anguish and anger, since everything in England was being mismanaged, and what they believed in betrayed. The books on the bookshelves remained unread, except by me. They subscribed to book clubs, but the packages of books that arrived on maildays were nearly all memoirs and histories of the War.

  My brother did not read, as a boy, and later spent his life among people who did not read. This was partly because some books have ideas in them, and most of the whites in the Southern Rhodesian lager could not afford to consider ideas that might upset their idea of themselves as the noble and misunderstood defenders of civilization. Later, he took to reading the violent and semi-pornographic books you find in airports. He told me that when waiting for a flight to leave, he had been surprised to see so many books. He liked Harold Robbins and particularly Wilbur Smith. When he came to visit me in London I asked him, ‘Harry, why don’t you ever read any good books?’–because of my difficulty in seeing him as a successor to my parents. But he raised a puzzled face–it was genuinely puzzled, and he did not understand the question–and asked, ‘Good books? What do you mean?’

  It will already have been noticed that my brother was in fact equal with at least two schools of advanced criticism: the one believing that to judge any writer better than another is to be élitist; and the one that says that in any case it is impossible to tell any difference between Goethe, Cervantes, Tolstoy and Barbara Cartland.

  I asked him, ‘Do you remember all those books we had on the farm?’

  ‘Well, you were always a bookworm.’

  ‘No, you–do you remember all those bookcases and the books?’

  ‘I suppose so. But what I liked was being out in the bush, you know that.’

  ‘Do you remember that Mother used to tell us those stories, every night, when we were little?’

  ‘Did she? No, I don’t remember.’

  ‘She made up stories about the animals and the birds. Do you remember that long-running serial about the mice in the storeroom and their adventures? What about that story where the mouse knocked a rack of eggs off the shelf and fell into the egg mess and all the other mice came and licked it clean?’

  ‘No, I don’t remember, sorry to say.’

  ‘We used to beg her, night after night, more, more, more?’ He looks at me. I look at him.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘what could be as interesting in a book as what you see in the bush? An hour in the bush, watching what goes on, has any book in the world beat.’

  DO YOU REMEMBER?

  All the white farmhouses had, many still have, great security fences around them, because of the War. I stopped the car outside a fence that reminded me of pictures of internment camps, a good twelve feet high, of close mesh. Inside two large Alsatians bounded and barked, their tails all welcome. I got out of the car. About a hundred yards away inside the fence was a stout greying man I did not recognize, coming towards me. When I had last seen my brother he was young and good-looking. He stopped to peer at me. We stood at a distance, gazing, and our faces confessed everything.

  ‘Gosh,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ was what I said.

  And so here I was, back in the life of the verandahs. What way of life, anywhere in the world, is more agreeable? The house consisted of rooms set side by side, with kitchen and storerooms behind them, and at one end a tall trellis to keep off the wind and carry creepers. The verandah went right along the front. My brother built his house, working side by side with a black builder, adding to the place as he could afford it. A large garden, full of shrubs, sloped to the fence. We relaxed in deep chairs, looking at the garden, where the gardener was dragging a hose about. At our feet lay the two dogs. At once the tea came, brought by the servant: the life of the verandahs depends on servants. In my time, then, this house would have had three, four, even five servants, all of them underpaid and underemployed. Now the same work is done by one servant, usually a man, who cooks, cleans the house, organizes everything. There is a minimum wage.

  We sat exposed in strong afternoon light and examined each other, not concealing it.

  ‘Well,’ says Harry at last, ‘it does us in, doesn’t it, well, I mean, life does.’

  ‘You could say that,’ I say cautiously, thinking that my father might have said exactly that, in that tone, humorous, philosophic, but with a satisfaction in the inevitable erosion of good which–for some reason or another–justified him.

  ‘In one way and another it does us in. And you look the worse for wear.’

  ‘Fair wear and tear,’ I say.

  He nodded. ‘Fair wear and tear is one thing,’ he says, and looked at me in the eyes to make sure I would pay attention. ‘I don’t think I’m going to get over this one.’ His wife had died the year before, and he had taken it hard. ‘I have to warn you,’ says Harry, ‘I’m not the man I was. I feel as if a part of me’s been shot clean away.’

  ‘All right,’ I say.

  Meanwhile I had realized there was something new. Harry became a little deaf when he was not yet twenty. The gunfire in the Mediterranean only made worse what was already bad enough. For a time after the War he was very deaf, in spite of an operation by one of the great ear specialists. You had to shout, and what you said had to be simple. Now he had an efficient hearing-aid. He was talking at his own real pace, in his own style: a cautious man, slow to react, but not cut off by silence from what he saw around him.

  ‘When you’re young you think you’re going to get over anything that happens to you,’ I say.

  ‘Did you think that? I don’t believe I ever thought about it. Well, you don’t get over some things. There are things that happen…and not the obvious things either. Did I tell you I went to the farm?’

  This was rhetorical, for how could he have told me?

  As he mentioned the farm, a silent No gripped me. In 1956, I could have gone to see the farm, the place where our house had been on the hill, but I was driving the car and could not force myself to turn the wheel off the main road north, on to the track that leads to the farm. Every writer has a myth-country. This does not have to be childhood. I attributed the ukase, the silent No to a fear of tampering with my myth, the bush I was brought up in, the old house built of earth and grass, the lands around the hill, the animals, the birds. Myth does not mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth.

  ‘You aren’t thinking of going back?’ asks Harry. ‘I was, yes.’

  ‘Then don’t. I’m warning you. There are farms all over the place now. And I couldn’t even find the hill at first.’

  ‘Couldn’t find the hill?’

  ‘I drove past the turn-off because I couldn’t see the hill. Then I realized I was expecting to see the old house up there, and so I went back. To cut a long story short, they sliced the top off our hill.’

  ‘Sliced off…’

  ‘Yes, There is a plateau up there. It is flat. God knows what it cost them, cutting it off and levelling it.’

  I am filled with anguish. Harry gives me a cautious glance and hesitates.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Right, but you won’t like it.’

  ‘But it was a steep hill. I know things look big when you’re a child, but it was a good-sized hill, wasn’t it? I used to sit at the door at the back and look down on the hawks circling over the big field.’

  ‘And at the bottom of the hill we had to change into second gear to get up it at all.’

  ‘And the car used to slant so steeply we used to joke it would fall over backwards.’

  ‘And when we rode down the hill on our bicycles we went flying so fast…’

  ‘And we looked down over everything, barns, the cattle kraals, the Ayreshire track.’

  ‘You still do that, look down, but wait, they planted fruit
trees and you’d never believe it once was just wild, just the bush.’

  We look at each other in horror.

  ‘Fruit trees? What happened to the big muwanga tree? The grove of acacias? Do you remember, we called them butterfly trees? The caterpillar tree–it was always full of caterpillars, it looked as if it had felted over and the cocoons were inside the felt…’

  ‘I don’t remember the caterpillars. But I told you, just don’t go back. I don’t know how to explain it, but it did me in. When I got back here from that trip, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t get over it. And the animals are all gone. The birds are gone. I kept dreaming about the old house. And then Monica died. I feel everything is gone.’