the village, the ancestors had held sway over the living. The spirits offered Africans a set of certainties through the endless cycle of the years in a perilous Eden. Rain, harvests, children, disease, drought and death. In return, the only obligation of the living was to honour the dead. The prophecy was not just that the antelope were to be killed, but that it was my father doing it that day, as a young man of just twenty-three, becoming the agent of irreversible change in that remote corner of Africa. Soon after he walked away from the village the land was cleared. Cotton was planted. Vast deposits of diamonds and gold were discovered. Mines were opened up. Roads, aircraft, politics, wars and AIDS followed. The rule of the ancestors was buried and forgotten. The new rulers were men who sat in faraway cities. They communicated with the people not via the spirit mediums but by telegram cables and telephones.
He walked out of BaZinza country and returned to his lake post at Mwanza. From there, he took the train down to Dar es Salaam to attend a friend’s wedding as best man. The night of the party, my father had his first nightmare. In his dream there appeared a shadow at his side. A man, but not a man. It threatened my father, who felt he had to attack the apparition before it harmed him. For most of the rest of his life, the dream came back repeatedly to haunt him.
Mother was full of theories to explain the nightmares. They were mild epileptic fits. Or Dad ate too much cheese at night. Or he had never outgrown his childhood terror of ‘Mrs Hicksey’, a ghost in Claremont, the English village house where he was brought up, that groaned in the attic and was in all probability a faulty water pipe. Nonsense, he said. My father believed he had been bewitched. For half my life I wondered what on earth he meant by that, until I grew to learn that I had fallen under a very similar spell.
My mother used to sit on my bed on Sunday mornings when I was small, telling me about the Burma war. As she spoke she painted her nails and I used to drink in the scent of varnish and picture her in my mind as a young woman on the jungle battlefields. When I urged her to she would go and fetch her box of keepsakes with its photos of her with her comrades in the women’s auxiliaries, bullet casings, folded parachute silk, Chindit griffon badges, a captured Japanese rising sun flag and a little silk wallet containing a Shinto poem praising the emperor, which a British soldier had looted from a dead man.
After spending her early years in India, my mother and her sister, Beryl, were sent to boarding school in Sussex. When the Blitz began Grandpa decided to bring them home to India. They sailed on the troop ship Orion. As their convoy zigzagged south through the Atlantic, U-boats sank two of the vessels. The blackout rules were so strict the cabin portholes were painted black and nobody could even smoke a cigarette on deck after dark. What struck my mother most about her first glimpse of Cape Town was that it was a blaze of lights. In India, refugees were pouring in ahead of the Japanese advances on Malaya and Burma. Mother was sixteen when she volunteered at the Casualty Section of GHQ Simla, where she made bandages and filled out name cards recording the wounded, killed and missing in action. The next year, in early 1944, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Service (Burma), based at Shillong, in Assam. Among their many tasks, the lady soldiers brewed tea in tin baths for the troops, typed letters and reports and sat on the beds of casualties, chatting about home or writing letters for those wounded who were blinded or had lost their hands.
The Allied forces at last turned back the Japanese advances at Kohima and Imphal. Thereafter they began to drive the enemy back eastwards. Mother’s unit followed the advance and she was never far behind the front lines. The auxiliaries’ CO, known as the General Memsahib, gave her a hand grenade – not to throw but to destroy herself with her honour intact in the event of being captured by the Japs. Even in the hospitals, patients had guns in case the Japs attacked and the medics had so many casualties to work on during a battle that Mother knew a young doctor whose hair turned snow white in a single day. During an air raid, she had to jump into a slit trench and she looked up at a dive-bombing Japanese Val that she told me ‘trembled like a silver leaf in the blue sky’.
For all that, what exotic places she saw. She travelled on trucks to Dohazari, in Arakan, Cox’s Bazaar, Cachar on the Bishenpur-Silchar track, where ‘Japs were hiding in the tea bushes’; then Dimapur, Kohima, Milestone 56 on the Manipur Road, and on up to Milestone 82 at Maram, then right into Burma. Blue mountains, tracks clinging to vertiginous valleys. ‘Hot,’ Mother said it was. ‘Sandy roads. Tall, tall, tall trees, going on forever. Long grass, green, green. No towns, no people, just camps and rivers…’ In her bathing suit and watched by commandos, she jumped into river pools to gather up fish stunned by cigarette-tin bombs. On the Manipur Road, ‘tuctoo’ lizards sang in the tall trees outside the basha huts where she slept. Bandicoots scuttled beneath her bed and in the darkness a gaur, a bison-like creature from the forest, tripped over her tent guy ropes.
She saw how battle had stripped the trees bare of branches and leaves. In one of her camps the path between the huts and the long-drop latrine was a line of shallow Japanese graves, half exposed by the monsoon rains. Out of one grew a beautiful blue orchid and my mother’s commanding officer’s only comment was ‘They’re good for the soil, dear’. In an American jungle base, she saw the dried heads of Japanese soldiers rammed onto the gateposts. It was here that she also saw her first movie in colour on the big screen: Esther Williams in Bathing Beauty, a synchronized-swimming extravaganza. Mother said the Americans were nice, but that the English soldier girls primly refused when the GIs asked them to play Postman’s Knock in the jungle in return for cans of pineapple juice and frozen chickens flown in from California.
Troops from all over the British Empire made up the Allied army in Burma. Mother encountered soldiers of the West African Division, such as the Nigerians who manned the anti-aircraft batteries. In an air raid once she saw them, illuminated by the muzzle flashes of their guns, dancing a jig after they had scored a hit. One evening the women heard the Africans humming and the sound grew to a crescendo of glorious, homesick singing. They sang, too, in deep voices that made Mother feel sorry for them:
Oh, when shall I see my home again?
My Mudda she is da, My Fadda he is da When shall I see my native land? When will I see my home?
In 1943 she fell in love. She would never tell me much about him, only that his name was Peter and that he was a young British officer in Thirty-six Division. After he was wounded in the leg by a grenade, she was given compassionate leave to visit him. She flew in a troop transport and then drove through the jungles until she arrived at Shillong. Here she waited for days in a house in the forest with two other young women auxiliaries whose husbands had been killed in action. One of them was a friend named Alison, who opened her trousseau, never worn, and offered Mother anything she wanted to borrow. That evening, she went on to an old hotel where Peter was convalescing and asked for him. ‘I sat trembling for a long time by a huge cedar fire. And then at last he came and found me waiting for him.’
When Rangoon fell, her unit was assigned to process POWs being released from the Japanese prison camps. The CO told the women to talk about only home and happy things to the liberated men. But all they wanted to discuss was what had happened to them. They remembered their ordeals with nonchalance while Mum took down their testimonies in shorthand. She recognised an ex-POW from her father’s Indian regiment and invited him and his friends over to the unit’s quarters for tea and chocolate cake. Tears in their eyes, all the men could do was stare, unable to eat or drink because they were so used to starving. She saw Peter and was with him when they heard the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Singapore, she turned down a posting in Japan to return to India. Grandpa was retiring from his regiment. As Mum, Beryl and Granny sailed for England from Bombay, the Royal Indian Navy was in the process of mutinying. It was the eve of India’s independence and my family had been in the subcontinent since the eighteenth century. Mum knew England only from boarding-school days cut short by the Blitz. She hated postwar London, with its whale meat and rationed eggs, but Peter was waiting for her. He was the true reason she went to London, to get married. But some time after the 1946 victory parade, he broke her heart and she cast about for an escape.
