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.*
My father
