Under My Skin

My father was sick nearly all the way to Cape Town, and then Beira. My mother loved every second. This must have been the last time in her life she enjoyed herself in the way of deck games or bridge, dressing up and dancing and concerts – very much her way, her style.

On this boat I disgraced myself. I was miserable. First there was the Captain, my mother’s chum, for she was up on deck with him when everyone else was in their bunks being sick in a Force 9 gale, and this established them in a teasing good-fellows’ friendship. Joking, joshing, baiting, pulling each other’s legs. ‘Ribbing.’ (Does this word come from the torture of tickling, great hands squeezing small ribs?) It was a most hearty jollity, and he was full of practical jokes. When I was dressed up in my party dress, he invited me to sit on a cushion where he had placed an egg, swearing it wouldn’t break. Since it was obvious it would break, I did not want to sit. My mother said I must be a good sport. I sat on the egg and it sploshed under me and spoiled my dress and the Captain roared and rolled about. I was not only angry but felt betrayed. My father was disturbed, but to be a good sport, he must have felt, was the main thing. When we crossed the Line, I was thrown in, though I could not swim, and was fished out by a sailor. This kind of thing went on, and I was permanently angry and had nightmares. I think my mother was having such a good time that her normal obsessive care for her offspring was taking a holiday, for she was not one to take nightmares lightly – if she had been told of them. Besides, was not Biddy there to look after us?

It occurs to me that when my mother became such friends with the German captain two tributaries of a river met. The joshing, ribbing, teasing and ragging came from the English public schools she so much admired, and they were originally inspired by the Prussian elite schools where cruelty was practised on children. The Captain was hardly likely to have been a member of the Prussian elite but then, these examples of good living filter down. And was my mother cruel? Absolutely not. But we can all do whatever it is that is the done thing. Well, nearly all.

In the evenings she put on her beautiful evening dresses and went up to dinner at the Captain’s table, to the parties, the dances, the treasure hunts. So did Biddy O’Halloran. We children were shut in the cabin and told to be good. My brother, as ever obedient, slept. I wanted to be where the fun was. But my mother said the evenings were for grown-ups and I would not enjoy it. But I knew I would enjoy it, and she knew I would enjoy it. I hated her. It was no good, the door was locked. I climbed up on to the dressing table and found nail scissors and cut holes in an evening dress. Small hands, the nail scissors were small, and it was hard manipulating them in the thick slippery material. I could not have done much damage, but it is the thought that counts. I was weeping and howling with rage. No, I certainly was not punished. But I was held on her knee through one of those scenes, her voice low, throbbing with reproach, intimate, while she talked about behaving well and about love – hers – and being good for the sake of being good.

And yet, while all these betrayals and injustices went on, the business of education went on too, for this was, after all, my mother’s main business. Tiny children were held up in their parents’ arms and instructed to watch flying fish, porpoises, the colours of sunsets, the trajectories of other ships whose funnels trailed smoke smudges across fair skies, the birds sitting on the rigging and on the rails, seagulls flying low after the ship to catch the scraps flung out to them by sailors, the phosphorescence on the waves at night, moonlight, and lifeboat drill – this last being far from an academic exercise, since her great love the young doctor had drowned for lack of a lifeboat. And, as a special favour from the Captain, we were taken down, down, through the world of bright corridors. And then, suddenly, we were in another world of oily metal stairways and big black pipes running and bending on steel walls. My brother and I clutched each other and stood looking down from what seemed a tiny platform, only part of a walkway into the bottom of the ship, where dirty half-naked men shovelled coal into the mouths of furnaces, one, two, three, four – more, we could not count them, and the flames reared up and flung red light on to naked sweaty torsos. These men looked up and saw two small clean children, the privileged, peering down at them with horror on their faces, and behind them the parents in their good clean clothes, and the Captain himself in this part of the ship where they did not expect to see him. And they swung their bodies hard in the rhythm of the work, while arcs of black coal reached from them to the flames, and then they looked up, and their white teeth showed in grimed faces. It was like the besprizorniki on the Russian railway platforms, it was the other world, where people had holes in their clothes and bones showed on their faces. I was afraid, looking down at the men who shovelled coal while the sweat poured off them, just as I had been looking out of the dirty cracked train windows.

In Walvis Bay I met death for the first time, on the beach, a sea ebbing from sands where tiny fish lay dying in a sea-puddle. They wriggled and writhed and gasped, and then I saw that drifts of dead little fish lay all over the sands. ‘Are they dead?’ I asked, wanting confirmation, wanting the word to fit what I saw: my father and mother understood the gravity of the moment, and my father said, ‘Yes, I am afraid so,’ and my mother said, ‘Well, never mind.’ A howlingly beautiful sunset filled the sky and I understood: this is how things are and there is nothing to be done about it.

Somewhere in the Cape, ostriches ran high-stepping across scrubby sands with blue mountains far behind them. Distance. The empty distances of Africa. But the family went on in the ship around the coast to Beira, of which nothing remains in my mind, not the railway journey up to Salisbury, nor Salisbury itself, which was then a little town you could stroll across in twenty minutes, nor the twenty miles’ journey to Lilfordia, where we were to lodge while the farm was chosen.

Why ostriches, and not the ox wagons that still used the Salisbury streets, built wide so that the wagons could turn in them? Why the train in Russia but not the train Beira-to-Salisbury, surely equally exotic? Why remember this and not that? If I had decided to remember only the unpleasant, then why the ostriches, which were pure delight?

Lilfordia was the home of the Lilford family, later to be famous in the Bush War (the War of Liberation), because of Boss Lilford and his services to the white cause. Then it consisted of many rondaavels, solid and well-built thatched brick huts, scattered among shrubs which, we were at once warned, should not be approached incautiously, because of snakes. From the grown-ups’ voices – the Lilfords’ – it was clear these were no more of a danger than knocking a candle or a lamp over when playing too roughly, only something to look out for.

My father left us there and went off to look for a farm, I think, on a horse. This was when the white government was selling land to ex-servicemen for practically nothing, and when the Land Bank supported struggling white farmers on long-term loans. He would start farming on a loan. My parents had £1,000 and my father would have a pension because of his cut-off leg. He was also entitled to free repairs to his wooden leg, and, too, a spare one. This was well before the miracle legs of now, which can dance, climb, jump – do everything a normal leg does.

He chose the district of Lomagundi because it was a maize-growing area. It was in the north-east of Southern Rhodesia, very wild and with few people in it, and it stretched all the way up to the Zambesi escarpment. Banket, a large part of Lomagundi, not only grew good maize but had its name because it was full of quartz reefs similar to the rock formations called ‘banket’ on the Rand down south. So there were gold mines too. He and my mother must have realized by now that the enticements of the Empire Exhibition had little to do with reality. Fortunes had been made out of maize during the war, but were not being made now. But maize was what he wanted to grow. And that area was still being ‘opened up for settlement’. It would not have occurred to them that the land belonged to the blacks. Civilization was being brought to savages, was how they saw it, because the British Empire was a boon and a benefit to the whole world. I do not think it can be said too often that it is a mistake to exclaim over past wrong-thinking before at least wondering how our present thinking will seem to posterity. There was another reason why my parents’ view of themselves was similar to that of the English settlers on the eastern coast of America: they were colonizing an almost empty land. When the whites arrived in Southern Rhodesia thirty-four years before, there were, it is now believed, a quarter of a million black people in that land, roughly the size of Spain. When my parents arrived in 1924 there were half a million.

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My father was away some time and returned with the news that he had found a farm, or rather land that would be a farm – unstumped bush, quite undeveloped, nothing on it at all, not a house or a well or a road. My mother went off with him to look at it. They were driven by someone from the Land Department. Meanwhile we children were left with Biddy O’Halloran at Lilfordia. There it was that I reached the summit of childish wickedness. The hut where my brother and I were lodged also held Biddy. What must it have been like to share air and space with two little children, both of whom spent so much time on the pot? – for toilet training remained a sovereign prescription for good character. In the hut were two low beds, made after the fashion of the time. Into the hard mud floor were inserted short forked sticks. Into these forks were laid poles. On this square framework were laced strips of ox-hide. The lattices supported mattresses. There was a large metal cot for Harry. It goes without saying that Biddy liked my brother, sweet, obedient, delightful, the ideal little child; I would have preferred him too. There were two Lilford girls, to me big girls, ten or eleven, sunburned, bare-limbed, bare-footed, athletic and lean, unlike any children I had seen. They included little Harry in their games, but not me. I thought them sharp and sly and cruel. Their accent made them hard to understand. I was afraid of them. I longed to be included in their games. ‘Just now,’ they said. ‘Just now.’ Meaning perhaps – sometime – never. The sharp pain of exclusion.

Now I began to steal, ridiculous things like pots of rouge, ribbons, scissors, and money too. I lied about everything. There were storms of miserable hot rage, like being burned alive by hatred. When my parents came back and asked, But why scissors? I said I wanted to kill Biddy. They knew what I needed was a regular nursery routine, an ordered life, but how and when? Before that could happen, there must be a home, and it wasn’t built yet. We set off in an ox wagon on the road north. The road was then a track, and it was January, the rainy season, so the track was mud. The wagon was drawn by sixteen trek oxen. Into it went three adults and two children, and necessities, but the trunks of smart clothes, curtain materials from Liberty’s, heavy table silver, Persian carpets, a copper jug and basin, books, pictures and the piano, would come on later, by train. We were five days and nights in the wagon, because of swollen rivers and the bad road, but there is only one memory, not of unhappiness and anger, but the beginnings of a different landscape; a hurricane lamp swings, swings, at the open back of the wagon, the dark bush on either side of the road, the starry sky. It was a covered wagon, like the ones in American films, like those used by the Afrikaners in South Africa on their treks away from the British, north, to freedom.

We were again lodged with strangers, settler-fashion, paying our way, this time at a small gold mine, a couple of miles from the hill where the house would be built. It was managed by people called Whitehead, and owned by Lonrho. Nearly everything was, then. Lonrho was the successor to the British South Africa Company, which had helped Rhodes annex Southern Rhodesia, and for a long time it was referred to as ‘The Company’, and certainly not with affection. Again, there were many rondaavels, and a shack that was the central house. Beyond pale mine dumps stood up the grasshopper-like mine machinery. Beyond that was the mine store and then the compound of crowding thatched huts. Pawpaw trees, guava trees, plantains, marigolds, cosmos, cannas, moonflowers and poinsettias: these were the plants that then marked white occupancy.

Before farming could begin, at least a hundred acres of trees must be cleared, and the tree stumps dragged or burned out of the soil. Farm machinery and cattle must be bought. The house must be built, and the kraals for the cattle and sheds for the machinery.

The farm was a thousand-odd acres of bush, but there was some arrangement that enabled my father to use adjacent, non-allocated government land for grazing, and this land in our time was not settled, so ‘our’ land went on indefinitely to the Ayreshire Hills. There was no one at all living on that land, black or white.

Only one incident remains from that time that went on for months, later to be described by my parents, looking at each other with the awed, incredulous faces that accompany such moments of recognition, ‘God, that was an awful time, awful, awful!’ How did we live through it? – is the unspoken message that goes with the words. The small children, my brother and I and two others, were being settled for the night in a rondaavel on beds that had mosquito nets tucked tight down around us. An older girl came in with a candle, and set it down on an up-ended petrol box, so the flame was not more than a few inches from a net. My mother came in to check for the night, saw the candle, and shot across the room, clutching at her heart with one hand while she reached for the candle. She said in a voice hushed by urgency. ‘What are you doing? What can you be thinking of?’ It was true. If I had thrust a leg or an arm out the net would have reached the candle, and the hut would have gone up in flames – it was thatch on pole and mud walls. My mother stood there, the candlestick shaking in her hand, the flame trembling, candle grease scattering. Meanwhile the culprit wept, only now imagining possibilities. ‘Why?’ my mother went on in a low appalled voice. ‘How could anyone in their senses do such a thing?’ I have never forgotten her incredulity. Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.

My parents did not understand the Whiteheads, found them shifty and unsatisfactory, though soon they would become familiar with people who farmed, went broke, mined, succeeded, part-succeeded or went broke, farmed again, owned mine-stores – did anything that came to hand. Inside this same hand-to-mouth, hit-and-run pattern some people made fortunes. Others died of drink. The Whiteheads were not in any sense educated. They knew nothing but this settlers’ life. My mother disliked them, and they must have found her more than a trial. As for my father, he was doing the books for the mine, and would for a couple of years after he was on his own. Already we were worried about money. There was an unpleasantness about the books. Mr Whitehead was either careless or dishonest, and he blamed my father. I have described this, humorously, in In Pursuit of the English, but for my parents it was the chief horror of ‘God, that was an awful time.’ There was nothing funny in the living of it.

My father rode over every day to supervise the beginning of the farm, for already there was a ‘bossboy’, Old Smoke, from Nyasaland, who had brought his relatives with him, and a good part of each morning was spent in long, meditative consultations between the two men, who usually sat at either end of a fallen log, watching the labourers at work. Both men smoked, my father his pipe, and Old Smoke dagga, or pot. That was why he was called Old Smoke. My mother usually walked over for at least part of the day, and took us with her, so we could watch the cutting of the trees, the stumping of the lands, the new cattle in their kraals, the digging of the wells. Two wells were dug, according to the findings of the water diviners – everyone used diviners then for wells and, later, for boreholes. Above all, we watched the building of the house. The grass for the thatch of the house was still green in the vleis, but the pole and mud walls of the house could go up, and they did. This process I described in Going Home, the making of a house from what grew in the bush, and no house could ever have for me the intimate charm of that one. In London you live in houses where other people have lived, and others again will live there when you have moved or died. A house put together from the plants and earth of the bush is rather like a coat or dress, soon to be discarded, for it probably will have returned to the bush, from fire, insects, or heavy rains, long before you die. The minute the grass was ready, the roof went on, for the priority was to get away from the Whiteheads.

My parents had chosen a site which the neighbours all warned would give them trouble, on top of a hill, which meant dragging everything up and down the steep slopes by oxen. It was the beauty of the place, that was why my father chose it, and then my mother approved it. From the front of the house you looked north to the Ayreshire Hills, over minor ridges, vleis and two rivers, the Muneni and the Mukwadzi. To the east, a wide sweep of land ended with the Umvukves, or the Great Dyke, where crystalline blues, pinks, purples, mauves, changed with the light all day. The sun went down over the long low ranges of the Huniyani Mountains. In the rainy season it was extravagantly, lushly beautiful, mostly virgin bush, but even where it had been cut for mine furnaces the bush had grown up fresh and new. Everywhere among the trees the soil was broken by ridges and reefs of quartz, for this was a gold district, and on every reef of protruding rock you could see the marks of a prospector’s hammer that had exposed a crust of fool’s gold – pyrites – or the little glitter of mica.

Weeks before the house was finished, when it was still a skeleton of poles stuck in the ground, then poles covered with a skin of mud, then a roughly thatched house, with holes that would be windows, my parents were sitting on petrol boxes in front of it (where soon they would be in deck chairs), and they watched the mountains, or the sunset, or cloud shadows, or rain marching around and across the landscape. I sat on my father’s good leg and watched too.

When the house was done, perched on the top of the hill, the bush was cleared not more than thirty yards in front, and on either side. At the back where the garage and store huts were, trees had been cut for a hundred yards or so. The real bush, the living, working, animal-and-bird-full bush, remained for twenty years, not much affected by us in our house, and right until my parents left it in the middle of the Second World War, you might startle a duiker or a wild cat or a porcupine only a few yards down from the cleared space. Two rough tracks led down from the house to the fields in front, and a steep path through thick trees and bush to the well. Down the hill in front of the house was a big mawonga tree, its pale trunk scarred by lightning, an old tree full of bees and honey. What impresses me now is not how much effect our occupancy had on the landscape of the farm, but how little. Below the hill on one side was the big field, the hundred acres, and there were smaller fields here and there. Cattle kraals, tobacco barns – and the house on the hill. The farm labourers’ village on a lower hill merged into the bush, as our house did.

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THE HOUSE ON THE HILL was not different from most first houses built by settlers who, when they arrived in the colony, were nearly always poor. Usually they were brick and corrugated-iron shacks, one room, or two. The most attractive houses of those early days were like the Africans’. An African family had a group of huts, each hut for a different purpose, and early settler houses were often half a dozen thatched huts, or brick or pole-and-mud, sometimes joined together by pergolas covered with golden shower or bougainvillea. The floors were of brick or red cement, more often of stamped dung and mud. The African huts had no windows, but the white huts always did, sometimes French windows, gauzed in, so it seemed like an aviary. The floors had on them reed mats or animal skins. The first beds could be strips of ox hide on poles. The furniture stores were miles away in Salisbury, and wagons brought the furniture out; even when they were brought by train, the tables and chairs would have to be trekked from the station to farms over bad roads. Farm sales, as farmers went bankrupt, which they so often did, recycled furniture among the farms. Furniture was often improvised from bush timber by any black man who showed he had an eye for it, and sometimes from petrol or paraffin boxes. In those days petrol and paraffin came in four-gallon tins, two in a box. A settee could be made from them. Sideboards, writing tables, dressing tables, were made with two or four boxes on their ends, with a board across, and boxes set horizontally on them. These exercises in spare living were civilized by curtains made from flour sacks. The flour came to the farms in thick white sacks which, when washed, went soft and silky and took dye well. Or curtains were of embroidered hessian.

If you were really hard-up, all that had to be bought was a Carron Dover wood-burning stove. Every farmhouse had one – or nearly every farmhouse: a just-arrived young settler might live for a season in a mud hut, and his kitchen was an open fire under a corrugated-iron roof.

The houses outgrew themselves, were demolished, to be replaced by the solid brick, ceilinged houses that announced success, or remained as the core of a spreading farmhouse, full of rooms.

The talent for invention, for improvisation, was never lost. Even in a house owned by ‘a cheque book farmer’ (I heard the old envious phrase in 1988 about a black farmer, by one who did not yet have a cheque book), there might be hessian curtains or hangings embroidered red and orange and black with wools, or appliquéd in the geometric patterns fashionable at the time because of ‘the jazz age’. Or the white flour sack curtains, dyed. I have seen a farmhouse full of antiques – real ones from England and Scotland – with bedrooms where at the windows hung glazed chintz, the beds valanced in chintz, but with a fire screen of embroidered hessian, and bookcases filling whole walls made of painted petrol boxes.

Our house was different from these first houses only in its shape, built long, sliced across for rooms. A photograph of Mother Patrick’s and her nurses’ hospital in the early 1890s – the Dominican nuns were the first women in the Colony – is almost identical with that of our house, before it sprouted verandahs and porches and then another room joined to the house by a pergola. Inside it was better furnished than most: for instance, the living room where the dining table, made from bush timber, was set so we could look over to the hills as we ate. The pale grey mud of the walls had been left unwhitewashed, because it looked so nice with the Liberty curtains. The chairs, a settee, bookcases had been bought from a farm sale. The writing table was of stained petrol boxes, and John William McVeagh and his second wife, the daughter of the dissenting minister, looked through mosquito gauze at the verandah and the rows of petrol and paraffin tins painted green that held pelargoniums. The next room, my parents’, had proper beds and mattresses, the curtains were Liberty’s, the rugs were from Persia, the copper washbasin and jug stood on a petrol box washstand. Next door, at first my brother’s and my room, then mine, there were reed mats on the floor, the bedspreads were of flour sacks dyed orange, the washstand and dressing table of petrol boxes, painted black. The little room at the very end had reed mats, and a petrol box wash table and dressing table. It was in this room that Biddy O’Halloran lived for a year. She embroidered the white flour sack curtains all over in glowing silks that were still fresh twenty years later.

Nor was there anything remarkable about the oil lamps that had to be refilled every morning, for those early farms did not have electricity. Nor the water cart under its shed of thatch, with its two casks side by side whose taps were never allowed to drip, for even a cup of water was costed in terms of the energy of the oxen who three or four times a week pulled the heavy barrels up the hill. Nor the lavatory, twenty yards down the hill, a packing case with a hole in it over a twenty-foot hole, standing in its little hut, with a thatch screen in front of the open door. And not the food safe, either, double walls of chicken wire filled with charcoal where water trickled slowly from containers on the top, dripping all day and all night, the food kept cool because the safe was set to catch any wind that blew. When a farmhouse took a step forward into electricity, running water, or an indoor lavatory, neighbours were invited over to inspect the triumph, which was felt to represent and fulfil all of us.

My mother must have realized almost at once that nothing was going to happen as she had expected.

Not long ago I was sent the unpublished memoirs of a young English woman, with small children, who found herself in the bush of old Rhodesia, without a house, for it was still to be built, no fields ready – nothing. And particularly no money. She too had to make do and contrive, face snakes and wild animals and bush fires, learn to cook bread in antheaps or cakes in petrol tins over open fires. She hated every second, feared and loathed the black people, could not cope with anything at all. Reading this, I had to compare her with my mother, who would be incapable of placing a vegetable garden where a rising river might flood it, who never ran from a snake or got hysterics over a bad storm. Another manuscript, this time from Kenya, was the same: wails of misery and self-pity, and what seemed like an almost deliberate incompetence in everything. The two memoirs reminded me of what was worst for my mother. Hard to believe that the first thought in the minds of the two memoir writers, with everything they were being tested by wildness and hardship, was this: were they still middle-class people, ‘nice people’? But so it was. Similarly, my mother was unhappy because her immediate neighbours were not from the English middle class. How was it that my father, who, after all, must have at least noticed her preferences, chose a district where all the ‘nice people’ were miles away, on the other side of the District? Is it conceivable he really never understood how important it was to her? Or, perhaps, finding the land was all he had strength for, and then he had to make a farm from nothing, and start a kind of farming he had not imagined. He had always wanted to be a farmer, but in his mind were the patterns of English farming he had seen all around him as a boy.

Both of them believed, and for years, that a change of luck would bring them success. She might not have seen at once that her crippled husband would not be able to dominate the bush, and that they would never make the fortunes promised by the Exhibition, but she did see that the life of dinner parties, musical evenings, tea parties, picnics was gone. That meant she felt checked in a deep part of her. Going to Persia she had taken all the necessities for a middle-class life. Coming to Africa, she had clothes for making calls and for ‘entertaining’, visiting cards, gloves, scarves, hats and feather fans. Her evening dresses were much more elegant than anything likely to be worn even to Government House then. She probably thought that was where she would be invited. She might have defied her father to be that common thing, a nurse, but she never had any intention of giving up the family’s status as middle-class. Her children would fulfil her ambitions and do even better. So in that first year, when she took a good look at her circumstances and her neighbours, she only postponed her ambitions. The farm would shortly be successful, and then she could go home to England, put her children into good schools, and real life would begin.

Meanwhile, she could not have made more efficient, ingenious, energetic use of what she found around her in the bush, on the farm.

And now I come to the difficulty of reconciling child time and adult time. There was a stage of my life – I was already in England, and trying hard to make sense of my life through a strict use of memory – when I understood that a whole tract of time had disappeared. There was a gulf, a black hole. Years and years of it – so it seemed. And yet the record of outward events is clear. In January 1925, the family was in Lilfordia. Between January and June 1927, I was at Mrs Scott’s. Yet I had already been at school for a whole term at Rumbavu Park. All these hazy, interminable memories had to be fitted into one year and nine months. Impossible. I simply gave up. But later had to come back, and back … and was forced to concede that between my stamping around in the mud and water that would make the plaster of our house, and my going to school, was – less than two years. And even now I feel incredulous, it can’t be so. But it was so. Between January 1925 and September 1926, the following things happened.

All of us, the whole family, had malaria twice, badly. The new lands of the farm were stumped, the farm furnished with its necessities, the house built, and we moved into it. Biddy O’Halloran left, good riddance on both sides. My mother had a breakdown and was in bed for months. Mrs Mitchell and her cruel twelve-year-old son came and then left. I learned to read and triumphantly entered the world of information through print on cigarette packets, grocery packaging, the big words on top of newspapers, the Army—Navy catalogue, words written under pictures … and then, books themselves. My brother and I did lessons from the correspondence courses organized for farmers’ children by the government.

That was the pattern of events, and it has little to do with what I remember, the chronicle in child time.

Biddy O’Halloran is leaning on my father’s shooting stick, and we are in the big field, below the hill, grasshoppers and butterflies everywhere. She has had her appendix out, and she is telling my little brother that if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut a grasshopper will jump down into his appendix and claw its way out through his stomach. He is crying with terror. ‘Of course it’s not true,’ cries my mother later, at bedtime, while my brother sobs. But years later my brother told me he had an irrational fear of grasshoppers; I was able to tell him why. ‘Do you mean to say that’s all it was?’ he demanded, trying to laugh, but shocked that what had so influenced him and for so long had been so insignificant.

Biddy O’Halloran had fair skin, and in the ‘vee’ of her cotton dress it was flushed a gentle red. A child’s close stare revealed it was a mottle of scarlet and cream. Two small children gravely discuss how red jelly and cream got under Biddy’s skin. ‘It was poured into a hole and then it spread.’ We made excuses to get close, were rebuked for staring, came away to tell each other there wasn’t a hole. So she must have spread the jelly on, and it got through the skin. ‘Mummy, how did the red jelly and cream get under Biddy’s skin?’ ‘What red jelly? What nonsense!’ The mystery was discussed gravely, scientifically, as we sat together under the eaves of the thatch, the cats and dogs in attendance. ‘But perhaps it isn’t jelly, it’s blood from the roast beef!’ ‘But what are the white bits then?’

Or long, thoughtful stares at an adult’s fingernails, where there is a pale blob in the pink of a nail. ‘Mummy, why didn’t God finish your nail?’ ‘What do you mean, finish?’ Look, there is a hole.’ ‘What hole? That isn’t a hole!’ The hairs on an adult’s forearm, each golden stalk in its little pit of brown skin. The smells. Biddy had a sour smell, sharp and hurtful to the nose, when she splashed on cologne. My mother’s smell was vigorous and salty. My father’s male and stale and smoky.

We watched from the edge of the bush my mother showing Biddy how to put bloody rags into a petrol tin to soak, under the thatch of the house at the back. The look of dramatic secrecy on my mother’s face, her lowered dramatic voice. The deliberately languid, irritated movements of Biddy. We knew the ‘boys’ were not supposed to see the contents of this tin. We crept up to the tin when the women had gone and speculated: Biddy had cut her finger or her foot – that must be it. But why didn’t mummy want the boys to know? We were always cutting ourselves, or had bruises, and sometimes the ‘boys’ washed the blood off for us. Why then …?

The adult world, with its disorder, its lack of sense, its mysteries, two small children trying to get things into their right place, call them by their right names …

I lie on my bed, reading Walter de la Mare’s The Three Royal Monkeys. One of the monkey brothers eats an orange, which he thinks is conveniently divided into segments for pulling apart and eating. I cannot make sense of this. The orange segments I am eating as I read are too big for my mouth. Yet I am bigger than the little monkeys we see racing about in the trees just down the hill, and which sometimes come into the house and investigate the rafters before running back into the trees. Did the monkey in the book mean those tiny globules of orange juice, each in its little bag, which I burst on my tongue, flooding my palate with scent and taste? But surely that couldn’t be it: globules aren’t segments. I lie and wonder, read, and think … The Royal Monkeys must be much larger than the little bush babies we know. When they pull the orange skins apart their fur prevents them feeling the showers of sharp juice that come out. The spray lives in the pores of the orange skin. When a visitor comes who has rough-pored skin on her face and neck, I stare secretly at the pores where water is standing. If pulled apart, would that skin send out a spray of …? ‘What is that child staring at?’ ‘Doris, why are you staring? It’s rude.’ I turn away, run off, sit under a bush down the hill, pull a leaf off a bush, look at the veins on the leaf and the pores between them. I pull the leaf apart but there is no strong-smelling spray on my face and hands. On the bush is a chameleon. I watch it creep with its slow rocking motion up a branch. And then suddenly … I rush screaming up the hill to my mother, sitting in her chair, beside my father, looking out over the bush. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ ‘Mummy, Mummy …’ ‘But what is wrong?’ ‘The chameleon,’ I weep, hysterical, terrified, ‘The chameleon …’ ‘What chameleon?’ ‘It was sick and all its insides came out.’ I run back down the hill. Behind me come my mother and my little brother. The chameleon is sitting quietly a little further up the branch, its eyes swivelling about.

I am in shock, it is like a dream. I saw the chameleon’s insides come out and … it happens again, and I scream. ‘Shhh …’ says my mother, holding me tight. ‘It’s all right. It is catching flies, can’t you see?’ I am shuddering with disgust and fear – but with curiosity too. I stand safe inside her firm grasp. ‘Wait,’ she says. The club-like tongue of the chameleon darts out, a thick fleshy root, and disappears back inside the chameleon. ‘Do you see?’ says my mother. ‘It’s just its way of feeding itself.’ I collapse into sobs, and she carries me back up the hill. But I have acquired adult vision; when I see a chameleon, part of my knowledge of it will be that it darts out its enormous thick tongue, but I won’t really see it, not really, ever again, not as I saw it the first time.

In 1992 I was standing, a couple of weeks after the first rains, in Banket, near a mafuti tree, a big one. The mafuti is a serious tree, its fronded leaves dark green, its trunk thick and safe. There is nothing frivolous about this tree. But growing at its root was an excrescence, like a sea creature, coral sheaths where protruded the tender and brilliant claws of new leaves, and these were like green velvet. You would never think they had anything in common with the sober leaves above them. And suddenly I remembered how I rushed up to the house, screaming that a monster was attacking the tree, it was a beetle the size of a cat.

I wake in the night. All round me, above me, is a rustling, creeping noise. I start up on my elbow, peer up through the white of the mosquito net. My heart is beating, but the rustling is louder. The square of the window lightens, once, twice. Wait, is that a car coming up the hill, the headlights … ? No, my parents’ room is dark, they are in bed, too late for a car. It is as if the thatch is whispering. All at once, as I understand, my ears fill with the sound of the frogs and toads down in the vlei. It is raining. The sound is the dry thatch filling with water, swelling, and the frogs are exulting with the rain. Because I understand, everything falls into its proper place about me, the thatch of the roof soaking up its wet from the sky, the frogs sounding as loud as if they are down the hill, but they are a couple of miles off, the soft fall of the rain on the earth and the leaves, and the lightning, still far away. And then, confirming the order of the night, there is a sudden bang of thunder. I lie back, content, under the net, listening, and slowly sink back into a sleep full of the sounds of rain.

Or it is just after we have been put to bed, and from the end of the house come the sounds of grown-up voices, and my mother playing her piano. I and my little brother talk in low voices, knowing we should be asleep. I continue my mother’s bedtime stories, of the animals in the bush, the mice in the storeroom. Then I try to frighten him with the dragon from St George and the Dragon. I frighten myself. The dragon is spread all over the thatch, fills the sky, claws spread out, fire rushing from its mouth. I know perfectly well there is no dragon, yet I am frightened. Similarly, when I have convinced myself there are wicked fairies in the corners of the room, I know I have invented them. When at last I start yelling for my mother to come, and she does, she says, soothingly, that there is no dragon, no fairies behind the curtains, I feel impatient, because that is not the point. I need to be scolded for preventing my little brother from sleeping, for ‘making things up’. Similarly, by myself at the very bottom of the hill, just where the lands start, I stand by an old gnarled and knotted tree, like the ones in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and imagine fairies so strongly I am not far off seeing them. When I populate the antheap with its curtains of Christmas fern and its spider lilies with fairies and goblins, what I create is an intense listening silence, and I know if I turn my head fast enough, when they don’t expect it, I’ll see them. Which does not mean I actually believe they are there. Just as I believe and do not believe in the tooth fairy. My disbelief in Father Christmas does not stop me from expecting reindeer and explaining to my brother they will come in through the window, since there is no chimney. Long earnest discussions in the hushed voices that go with the turned-low lamp and the shadows in the room, about reindeer and how fast they would have to fly from England to get here in time for Christmas, and if the reindeer would have to descend at intervals to feed, and what would they think of trees and grass, since what they like to eat is moss. When my brother tells my mother I believe reindeer will arrive for Christmas and they will eat musasa and mafuti leaves, it can be seen from her frown that she is working out how to balance reality and useful and necessary fantasy, and I at once hurriedly say that of course I don’t believe in Christmas reindeer.

My mother decided she had a bad heart. All her life she knew she had a bad heart and might die at any moment. In the end she died at the respectable age of seventy-three, of a stroke. Even as a small girl I understood the psychological advantages of a bad heart, and believed she was inventing it to get sympathy. I believed too that my father was not convinced by this heart.

Now I understand why she went to bed. In that year she underwent that inner reconstruction which most of us have to do at least once in a life. You relinquish what you had believed you must have to live at all. Her bed was put into the front room, because of the windows and the view to the hills, under the stern gaze of her father, John William, and his cold dutiful wife. All around her were the signs and symbols of the respectable life she had believed was her right, her future, silver tea trays, English watercolours, Persian rugs, the classics in their red leather editions, the Liberty curtains. But she was living in what amounted to a mud hut, and all she could see from her high bed was the African bush, the farm ‘compound’ on its subsidiary hill.

The doctor came often from Sinoia. They did not know as much then about anxiety as they do now. He prescribed bed rest. Doctor Huggins, her real doctor in Salisbury, when she appealed to him in letters, said, Why ask him when she had already had a doctor telling her what to do? Doctor Huggins – later Lord Malvern – was a testy character who did not believe in the need for a bedside manner, as a doctor or a politician: he was shortly to become Prime Minister.