African Laughter Read online

  ‘Luckily he was drunk. We were watching the leaders going in and out of a hut where we were sure a girl was. They were having a good time with her. We could hear her laugh. The ones who made the longest and most fiery speeches got most time in the hut. I had given orders no one should open fire until I did. I knew they were itching to let go, with all those drunk ‘terrs’ reeling about. I waited until the girl came out of the hut to have a pee. Then we all threw our bombs into the hut. Girls were screaming, and I realized there were other girls in there. There was general firing for about a minute. The ‘terrs’ ran away into the bush. They didn’t know how many soldiers were out there in the dark. We could have been a whole battalion, not just four. One of us was hit by a ricochetting bullet. He died later.’

  The four went on lying in the grass, waiting. They did not know one of them was badly wounded.

  ‘He did feel blood trickling, but he thought it was just a scratch. We were listening to the groans of the wounded. We had no idea how many there were. Several times grenades went off. The usual trick, a grenade put under a corpse, or held under him by a wounded man–kamikaze stuff, the idea was we would get it, when we moved him. But sometimes the grenades went off when they weren’t supposed to. When the light came, there were several dead, including civilians, lying on the earth between the huts, and in the huts where I thought there was only one girl, were several dead ‘terrs’ and three dead girls. The girl who had come out to have a pee had a smashed hip. We gave her morphine and called in the choppers, and they took the girl and our wounded chap, but he was as good as dead by then, to the hospital. I followed the girl’s progress. It turned out she was three months’ pregnant. We gave her a new hip, and she kept the baby. I visited her in hospital. She was a pretty girl all right. She had already got herself engaged and she’s had another baby since. When we got back to where the prisoners were waiting for us, we sent them for interrogation. Then, we went on with our patrol. There were no more incidents that trip. Next week I read two lines in the Herald: “One member of the Security Forces killed, five civilians, eleven Terrorists. Does that answer your question?’ He was brisk, and businesslike, and unemotional, telling his tale.

  Then a group of fifteen or so were sitting around a table, joking how, when the election was being prepared, the Security Forces were sent to get evidence that the ‘terrs’ were contravening Lancaster House rules, with the aid of the Australians ‘who distrusted the Brits as much as we did.’ The Security Forces were able to wriggle to the edge of clearings where the ‘terrs’’ meetings went on, and made recordings. ‘We got all this evidence they were cheating, but of course the Brits didn’t do anything.’

  ‘But we were cheating too,’ said the farmer who had told me his story. ‘Everyone knew that. Our cheating and theirs cancelled each other out.’ He laughed. After a moment the others laughed with him.

  As Harry and I went to the car, the two youngsters from Harare were still sprawled under their tree in the dark. It was cold. Another youth bent over them, trying to shake them awake, while they groaned and complained but on a facetious note.

  ‘Never was anything like that in the old days,’ said Harry. ‘How can you say that!’ I demanded.

  ‘We kept up standards, then.’

  ‘Harry, I was part of the old days, have you forgotten? It was only when I got to England I realized how much we all drank. And you must have seen that too, when you got to England.’

  But he was not going to admit anything of the kind. Back there, in the old days, then, was paradise, a shangri-la, a lost perfection.

  At the security fence, he could not find the keys. I said, why not go to the neighbour’s house a mile away and get wirecutters. He did not like to think that a pair of wirecutters was all that had been between them and the ‘terrs’. No, he was going to climb it. Derring-do. There was I, a small girl again, watching my brother performing impossible physical feats, while I thought, intending the thought to show, Well, what’s the point of that!

  He did not find it easy. The fence was not only high, but at the top there was a three-stranded leaning-out section. It was this that stopped him. Down he slid, a heavy man, out of temper, out of breath, and locked out of his safe place. He banged at the gate and shouted for the servant–who was asleep–while handsome Sparta, elegant Sheba, defenders of the lager, barked and bounded and whined inside. Just as we were off to borrow the wirecutters, he found the key. At once he became humorous and laughed at himself as the big gate swung in, and the dogs overwhelmed us with love. Then the gate was locked, and we looked out through the wire from inside the lager.

  That evening, he asked what I had been talking about with Hugh. The fact there had been this long conversation had been reported to him. I told him, we were talking about the Bush War.

  ‘What did you want to do that for?’

  ‘Well, you don’t seem to want to talk about it.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ And he began on a careful statement, like a formal briefing. ‘The men of my age couldn’t do the real fighting, worse luck. We did police duties. We visited farms, to make sure everything was all right. Or we investigated villages that were supposed to be sympathetic to the ‘terrs’. Sometimes we just drove up and down the roads in army lorries. Showing our teeth, you know. Often we slept out in the bush. Yes of course I enjoyed it, wouldn’t you? The bush, you know. Anyway, you people don’t understand anything about it. We were fighting for you, against communism. And now look at what’s happened.’

  Soon, he poured himself another brandy, and another–carefully, as usual–and then he was talking about his war, not the Bush War, but the Second World War, how he was in the Repulse when it was sunk, and then the fighting in the Mediterranean. His tone changed. I recognized it. What he wanted to tell me was terrible, but he wasn’t going to make much of it. How could he? He had been trained not to.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about the Repulse?’

  ‘You wouldn’t talk about it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I? That’s funny. I think about it all a good bit.’

  And now that was it, we were off, never mind about the Affs and the ‘terrs’, the Bush War and the inglorious Brits. This is what he wanted to talk about. His war.

  ‘I was down at the bottom of the ship. That’s where I was when the Jap bombs hit. We knew there were only a few minutes before the ship went down. The water was pouring in…did you know the Repulse and the Prince of Wales were supposed to be unsinkable?’

  ‘Yes, like the Titanic.’

  ‘Yes. Funny, the way we go on believing…I was standing at the bottom of the companionway, while the men climbed up past me…the stairs were already perpendicular. I just stood there. Someone said to me, “Aren’t you going to go up, Tayler? You’d better get a move on.” I went up those stairs like a monkey, and I walked down the slanting deck straight into the sea and I swam away as fast as I could. Lucky for me I’m a good swimmer. Some of the chaps couldn’t swim fast enough. We were in the water for hours. It was full of oil and rubbish from the ship and dead men floating. I trod water. I used as little energy as I could and I kept my nose and mouth above the oil. Then they came to pick us up out of the water. They said there were sharks but I couldn’t see any. They were probably keeping clear of the oil too. Wouldn’t want to be a shark in that mess.’

  ‘Well, that wasn’t very jolly, was it,’ I said, falling from long practice into the mode, or tone.

  ‘No,’ he said, looking carefully at me to see what I was saying. ‘No. A lot of my friends were drowned, you see.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it was just luck it wasn’t me. If that chap hadn’t said, you’d better get a move on, Tayler…’

  ‘Yes. And then?’

  ‘Oh, and then they patched me up and rehabilitated me. In Ceylon, that was. They gave us a good time in Ceylon. So I believe. I met someone not long ago, and he said, They gave us a good time in Ceylon. I pretended I could remember, but I couldn’t. Ceylon is a blank. I was there f
or weeks. It’s a total blank. It really is a funny thing what we remember…you saying things…I’ve been thinking hard the last few days…and then after Ceylon was the Med.’

  ‘And you were there quite a time.’

  ‘Yes, the Aurora. A good ship, that. A good lot of chaps.’

  ‘And there was that gunfire and you got very deaf.’

  ‘That was nothing, being deaf I mean. They gave me an operation, and then they gave me this hearing-aid. It’s a miracle, this hearing-aid. Sometimes I forget I was ever deaf…’

  A long silence. The fire burned in the wall, and the dogs lay stretched out, firelight moving on their soft fur.

  ‘No,’ said Harry. ‘That wasn’t the point, you see…’ A pause. ‘It wasn’t till the Bush War I understood something about myself. I suddenly understood I had been numbed for years and years. Only just the other day I said to myself, you’ve spent the best part of your life numbed. Frozen…’ A pause. ‘That wasn’t a very nice thing, suddenly knowing that.’

  ‘What made you understand, then? Was it something that happened in the Bush War?’

  ‘Something on those lines, yes. It wasn’t a picnic, the Bush War.’

  ‘So I’ve gathered.’

  ‘No. I was watching some of the younger men, the ones who did the bad fighting, you know. I knew when they were switching off–you could see them doing it. I knew, you see, because I’d done it. I wanted to say, No, don’t do it, don’t do that, you don’t want to spend your life as I’ve done. You know, it’s like living inside a sort of glass jar. But they had to switch off. You can’t see your best friends being blown to pieces and then just go on as if nothing had happened. So now when I look at someone I can tell–I think, you’ve switched off: and a lot of the ‘terrs’ too, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Harry, does it strike you as odd that it’s only now you are saying you had a bad time in that war?’

  ‘I never said that,’ he protested at once. ‘A lot of people had it much worse than I did.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone would criticize you for exaggerating if you happened to remark you had a bad war.’

  He was silent, looking humorous, rueful, deprecating.

  ‘This bloody stiff-upper-lip business of yours–you pay a pretty heavy price for it.’

  He looked genuinely surprised.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t think one should make a fuss, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Why not? Do you realize, when I asked you after the War, how was it when the Repulse went down, you said, Oh it wasn’t too bad.’

  He was silent and then he began to talk about his son. My brother’s son, whom I have not met since he was seven or so, was in the Selous Scouts. For those who have forgotten, let us put it this way: the whites in new Zimbabwe were not talking about the Selous Scouts as the blacks did, or as they were spoken of in our newspapers in Britain; we do know that one person’s thug and murderer is another’s hero.

  This young man, who had distinguished himself in the Scouts, suffered a sudden conversion to fundamental Christianity, then took himself to Texas where he was trained as a preacher. He now preached to black and white in South Africa.

  ‘Pretty fiery stuff,’ says Harry, looking at me in a certain way.

  ‘Ah, you mean you go for it?’

  ‘I’ve been to some of their services. Quite a bit different from the good old Church of England. It quite sweeps you off your feet.’

  ‘Literally, so I hear. Have you been dancing in the aisles?’

  ‘Well, just about.’

  ‘Funny thing, his having that conversion, after that fighting. Would you agree it wasn’t pretty, what he was doing?’

  ‘You could say that, yes.’ A pause. ‘A conversion, you call it?’ he says, casual, pouring himself a drink, offering me one.

  ‘Yes. A sudden thing. Quite common really. People in great danger, scared stiff, they suffer conversion. They get God. The psychologists know about it.’

  ‘Interesting thing, that.’

  ‘Like astronauts.’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘Or people just about to fall off a mountain peak or lost in a small boat in the middle of an ocean.’

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t have a conversion. I’ve always gone to church.’

  He drinks, gulp after gulp, but carefully. It was as if he were listening to each mouthful as it went down. Suddenly I understood something: again, I could have seen it before: nothing is more exasperating than this, that you can flounder about in a mist, and then, all at once, everything is clear. What my brother and my father had in common was not genes: at least, genes were not why both were slow, hesitant, cautious, dream-logged men who seemed always to be listening to some fateful voice only they could hear: they were both men hurt by war. This thought was such a shock to me, illuminating all kinds of old puzzles, old questions, that I had to set it aside for the moment: Harry was obviously planning to say something difficult. His lips were moving together over words he was discarding as they came to him: his eyes stared inward. At last he lifted his head and made himself look at me.

  ‘You say we spent a lot of time together in the bush?’

  ‘Yes, every school holidays, sometimes all day. We used to take a bottle of cold tea and sandwiches and stay out from sunrise till after the sun went down.’

  ‘After that Japanese was here–funny chap he was–I read one of your short stories.’

  ‘Well, what did you think?’

  ‘It was about you and me in the bush. And the dogs. But it really got to me, that story. I couldn’t finish it. I didn’t remember anything, you see.’

  ‘What, nothing?’

  ‘No. I realized then I didn’t remember anything very much before I was about eleven or twelve. At least, I remembered quite a bit about school, but nothing about the farm.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘You could say nothing.’

  ‘You don’t remember things like lying in the rocks on Koodoo Hill and watching the wild pig–they were only a few feet away? Or hiding in the long grass at the edge of the Twenty Acres to watch the duiker come down at sunset? Or climbing trees to hide so we could watch what went on in the bush?’

  ‘No, I don’t, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You don’t remember when that wild pig with piglets chased us up the tree and we threw bits of bark and leaves at her to make her go away? But she actually tried to climb the tree after us…stood with her feet on the trunk and grunted at us? And we were laughing so hard we nearly fell out of the tree?’

  A long silence.

  ‘I blocked all that off too, didn’t I?’

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘Then there must have been a reason why I blocked everything off.’

  ‘I think there was.’

  ‘But you didn’t block off, you remembered it all.’

  ‘But perhaps we had different ways of surviving.’

  ‘That’s a strong word,’ he said, his eyes hard. ‘It’s the word I use.’

  He sat thinking, drinking judiciously. At last he said, ‘I’ve told you, I know a thing or two about blocking things off…’ And now he kept his eyes on my face, to make sure I wouldn’t overstep some mark or other. ‘I’ll tell you something. If you’ve blocked things off, then there’s a reason for it. If you’ve any sense you let sleeping dogs lie. That’s where these psychologist chappies are wrong. In the Bush War things from the other war kept coming back, but I couldn’t see why I felt so upset.

  Why did I block them off? But I could tell there was something pretty bad there, because if there wasn’t, why did they get to me? Anyway, I haven’t told you everything, and I’m not going to. There are things you should shut up about. And don’t think I regret the Bush War…I’m not going to mind kicking the bucket when my time comes. I’ve had that, lying wrapped in a blanket looking up at the stars and listening to the owls and the nightjars–not that there are many of them around these days. No, I’m glad I’m Taking the Gap.’ He turne
d away, because his eyes were full of tears. He poured himself another dose, and then looked at me again. ‘I’ve visited where I am going. It’s in the Transvaal. We think it is getting pretty bad here–the bush, but down there it’s all enormous ranches with miles and miles of beaten-down dirty over-grazed grass. There’s no bush.’

  ‘Makes sense, you’re going there, since that’s what you care about more than anything.’

  ‘At least I won’t have to watch it being destroyed here, and that is what is happening.’

  ‘It’s a tragedy,’ I said, not knowing I was going to. ‘Do you realize who would understand you best in this country? About the bush, I mean. The Africans, that’s who, and you won’t talk to them.’

  ‘What do you mean, I won’t talk to them? When I was out in the bush as a boy with the cook’s son, what do you think we did? What about the builder at the school? Solomon, his name was. We used to sit and jaw for hours and hours about life and everything. What about the chap who built this house with me?’

  He waits for me to challenge him with some point of my dogma, and then says, ‘Anyway, it’s not true that only the Affs would understand me. Any old Rhodie would.’

  ‘Nonsense. Half the old Rhodies know as much about the bush as some poor black kid in Brixton knows about the English countryside.’

  ‘Of course I mean the right kind of Rhodie.’

  ‘People like you.’

  ‘If you like.

  ‘Nine o’clock,’ he says. ‘Time for bed.’ He gets up, goes to the door, turns and sees me reaching for my notebook. ‘Are you taking down things I say to use in evidence against me? I don’t care provided you write down the bloody stupid things you say, too.’

  In the morning he drove me to a road that ran past a plantation of blue gums. When he was working at his old school, Ruzawi–for he went back as manager of the place, because there he could be out of doors all day–he asked to be allowed to plant trees. We left the car well-locked, though he was unhappy about it. ‘You can’t leave a car for five minutes without some skellum stealing it. Everything has to be locked up. Everything has to be barred. It’s like living inside cages.’