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
