rose-coloured strips. The palisade will have spaces in it for doors and windows.
On this frame is set the skeleton of the roof. More trees have been cut, slimmer ones, and laid slantwise from the tops of the wall-poles to a ridge in the centre. They are tied with strips of the fibre to this centre pole, which is an immensely long gum tree or thorn tree made smooth and slim, lying parallel to the ground.
Now the house will look like an immense birdcage, set in the middle of the bush. For the trees have not been cut back around it yet; and the grass is still standing high all around, long swatches of grass, a browny-gold in colour. One cannot build this sort of a house save when the grass is dry, at the season for thatching.
Standing inside the cage of rough poles, the sun comes through in heavy bars of yellow. Strips of fading fibre lie everywhere in tangles; chips of wood send off a warm, spicy smell.
Now it is time to make the walls.
From an ant-heap nearby earth is cut in spadefuls and laid in a heap. Ant-heap earth is best, because it has already been blended by the jaws of a myriad workers.
It is not always easy to find the right ant-heap, even in ant-heap country; for even ants cannot make suitable wall-earth where the ingredients are not right at the start. And, having found a properly composed heap, there may be snags. For instance, when we were building our house, the ant-heap we were working had three skeletons laid side by side, in such a way that showed these were the bones of chiefs of a tribe. Earthen cooking-pots buried beside the skeletons still showed traces of white meal mingled with the earth.
Our labourers would not go near this ant-heap again, for they feared the spirits of their ancestors. So we had to choose another. But meanwhile, some of the earth had already been pounded into mud for the walls; and so the walls of our house had in them the flesh and the blood of the people of the country.
To make mud for walls, a great heap of ant-worked earth is built up and wetted. Then the feet of the builders squelch it into the right consistency. Also, in this case, the feet of my brother and myself, who were small children.
To lay the mud on the poles it is carried in petrol tins from the men who are softening it to the men who are plastering; great handfuls are taken up quickly from the tins, before it can dry out, and slapped on to the poles. Sometimes there are gaps between the poles too wide to hold the mud; and then handfuls of grass are caught up and inserted and worked in with the mud. The smell of this mud is fresh and sweet, if the water used is good, clean water.
Soon all the walls are covered with a thick, dark mud-skin; and this is quickly smoothed over with trowels or flat bits of tin. Now the house is a house and not a frame of tree-poles; for the walls cannot be seen through.
Next, the long, pale grass is cut from those parts of the farm where it grows best and tallest, and is laid in piles ready for the thatchers. It is laid swathe over swathe beginning from ridgepole and working downwards, and each swathe is tied into place with the bush-fibre. The grass is laid thick, 18 inches deep; and finally the loose, long tips that draggle almost to the ground are cut off straight and clean with long, sharpened bits of metal.
And now the roof of the house is a gleaming golden colour, laced with rose-pink and yellow; and so it stays until the rains of the first wet season dim the colours.
Meanwhile, the doors have been hung and the windows fitted; and this is not easy when the poles of the walls are likely to be uneven. Nor are those doors and windows ever likely truly to fit; for the wood of lintels and frames swells and contracts with the wetness and the dryness of the time of the year.
The floor is done last. More ant-heap earth is piled, and on it fresh cowdung; and it is wetted with the fresh blood of an ox and with water, and is stamped free of lumps. This mixture is laid all over the earth inside the house and smoothed down. It has a good, warm, sweet smell, even when it dries, which takes about a week.
Now the house is finished and can be lived in. The mud-skin of the walls has dried a pleasant light-grey, or a yellowish-grey. Or it can be colour-washed. The mud of the floor is dark and smooth and glossy. It can be left bare, or protected with linoleum, for after a time this kind of floor tends to scuff into holes and turns dusty, so linoleum is useful, though not as pleasant to look at as the bare, hard, shining earth-floor.
A pole-and-dagga house is built to stand for two, three, four years at most; but the circumstances and character of our family kept ours standing for nearly two decades. It did very well, for it had been built with affection. But under the storms and the beating rains of the wet seasons, the grass of the roof flattened like old flesh into the hollows and bumps of the poles under it; and sometimes the mud-skin fell off in patches and had to be replaced; and sometimes parts of the roof received a new layer of grass. A house like this is a living thing, responsive to every mood of the weather; and during the time I was growing up it had already begun to sink back into the forms of the bush. I remember it as a rather old, shaggy animal standing still among the trees, lifting its head to look out over the vleis and valleys to the mountains.
I wrote a poem once about a group of suburban town houses; which I could not have written had I not been brought up in such a house as I have described:
THE HOUSE AT NIGHT
That house grew there, self-compact;
And with what long hopeless love I walked about, about – To make the creature out.
First with fingers: grainy brick
That took its texture from the earth; The roof, membranous sheath On rafters stretched beneath.
Yet, though I held the thing as close
As child’s toy gathered in my hand – Could shatter it or not; No nearer truth I got.
Eluded by so frail a thing?
But if touch fails then sight succeeds. But windows shadowed in My face that peered within.
And through my shadowing face I saw
A room where someone lived, and there The glow of hidden fire; A secret, guarded fire.
Should I fail by closeness? Then
Move back and see the house from far, Gathered among its kind, No unit hard-defined.
And there a herd of houses! Each
Brooding darkly on its own, Settled in the shade That each small shape had made.
Till suddenly a mocking light
