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.
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,
