see it, not really, ever again, not as I saw it the first time.
In 1992 I was standing, a couple of weeks after the first rains, in Banket, near a mafuti tree, a big one. The mafuti is a serious tree, its fronded leaves dark green, its trunk thick and safe. There is nothing frivolous about this tree. But growing at its root was an excrescence, like a sea creature, coral sheaths where protruded the tender and brilliant claws of new leaves, and these were like green velvet. You would never think they had anything in common with the sober leaves above them. And suddenly I remembered how I rushed up to the house, screaming that a monster was attacking the tree, it was a beetle the size of a cat.
I wake in the night. All round me, above me, is a rustling, creeping noise. I start up on my elbow, peer up through the white of the mosquito net. My heart is beating, but the rustling is louder. The square of the window lightens, once, twice. Wait, is that a car coming up the hill, the headlights … ? No, my parents’ room is dark, they are in bed, too late for a car. It is as if the thatch is whispering. All at once, as I understand, my ears fill with the sound of the frogs and toads down in the vlei. It is raining. The sound is the dry thatch filling with water, swelling, and the frogs are exulting with the rain. Because I understand, everything falls into its proper place about me, the thatch of the roof soaking up its wet from the sky, the frogs sounding as loud as if they are down the hill, but they are a couple of miles off, the soft fall of the rain on the earth and the leaves, and the lightning, still far away. And then, confirming the order of the night, there is a sudden bang of thunder. I lie back, content, under the net, listening, and slowly sink back into a sleep full of the sounds of rain.
Or it is just after we have been put to bed, and from the end of the house come the sounds of grown-up voices, and my mother playing her piano. I and my little brother talk in low voices, knowing we should be asleep. I continue my mother’s bedtime stories, of the animals in the bush, the mice in the storeroom. Then I try to frighten him with the dragon from St George and the Dragon. I frighten myself. The dragon is spread all over the thatch, fills the sky, claws spread out, fire rushing from its mouth. I know perfectly well there is no dragon, yet I am frightened. Similarly, when I have convinced myself there are wicked fairies in the corners of the room, I know I have invented them. When at last I start yelling for my mother to come, and she does, she says, soothingly, that there is no dragon, no fairies behind the curtains, I feel impatient, because that is not the point. I need to be scolded for preventing my little brother from sleeping, for ‘making things up’. Similarly, by myself at the very bottom of the hill, just where the lands start, I stand by an old gnarled and knotted tree, like the ones in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and imagine fairies so strongly I am not far off seeing them. When I populate the antheap with its curtains of Christmas fern and its spider lilies with fairies and goblins, what I create is an intense listening silence, and I know if I turn my head fast enough, when they don’t expect it, I’ll see them. Which does not mean I actually believe they are there. Just as I believe and do not believe in the tooth fairy. My disbelief in Father Christmas does not stop me from expecting reindeer and explaining to my brother they will come in through the window, since there is no chimney. Long earnest discussions in the hushed voices that go with the turned-low lamp and the shadows in the room, about reindeer and how fast they would have to fly from England to get here in time for Christmas, and if the reindeer would have to descend at intervals to feed, and what would they think of trees and grass, since what they like to eat is moss. When my brother tells my mother I believe reindeer will arrive for Christmas and they will eat musasa and mafuti leaves, it can be seen from her frown that she is working out how to balance reality and useful and necessary fantasy, and I at once hurriedly say that of course I don’t believe in Christmas reindeer.
My mother decided she had a bad heart. All her life she knew she had a bad heart and might die at any moment. In the end she died at the respectable age of seventy-three, of a stroke. Even as a small girl I understood the psychological advantages of a bad heart, and believed she was inventing it to get sympathy. I believed too that my father was not convinced by this heart.
Now I understand why she went to bed. In that year she underwent that inner reconstruction which most of us have to do at least once in a life. You relinquish what you had believed you must have to live at all. Her bed was put into the front room, because of the windows and the view to the hills, under the stern gaze of her father, John William, and his cold dutiful wife. All around her were the signs and symbols of the respectable life she had believed was her right, her future, silver tea trays, English watercolours, Persian rugs, the classics in their red leather editions, the Liberty curtains. But she was living in what amounted to a mud hut, and all she could see from her high bed was the African bush, the farm ‘compound’ on its subsidiary hill.
The doctor came often from Sinoia. They did not know as much then about anxiety as they do now. He prescribed bed rest. Doctor Huggins, her real doctor in Salisbury, when she appealed to him in letters, said, Why ask him when she had already had a doctor telling her what to do? Doctor Huggins – later Lord Malvern – was a testy character who did not believe in the need for a bedside manner, as a doctor or a politician: he was shortly to become Prime Minister.
Several times a day she summoned me and Harry to the bedside where she said dramatically, ‘Poor mummy, poor sick mummy.’ It is this memory that tells me how badly she had inwardly collapsed. ‘Poor mummy’ was simply not her style. As for me I was consumed with flames of rage. My little brother embraced her whenever he was asked to. I embraced her warmly, but then resented and repudiated the emotion. Soon I refused to go to the bedside when called there by the cook. ‘Mummy’s ill,’ my father directed me, and I snapped, ‘No, she isn’t,’ for the conflict was unbearable.
Meanwhile our education went on and I can only admire the self-discipline this must have needed. Standing by her bed, or sitting on it (’Don’t tire your mother. Don’t lean on her. Don’t …’), we learned our multiplication tables and did baby sums, but the reading lessons were already much too easy. She told us stories and she read to us.
Then Mrs Mitchell arrived, with her son, to ‘help’ my mother. Harry was still sleeping in my parents’ room. I shared a room with Mrs Mitchell. Her son was in the room at the end of the house.
I experienced her as cruel and her son as a bully. She drank. When she left – soon, after only a few weeks – caches of empty bottles were found under bushes, in cupboards. She always smelled of spirits. What was she really like? If she was being nursemaid and housekeeper for a sick woman, and had a boy, school age, she must have been desperate. Widowed? Deserted? In flight from a brutal husband? This was before the Slump, when women whose husbands were out of work took any jobs they could find.
All my childhood we were told how poor we were, how hard-up, how deprived of what was our right. I believed it. Then, at school, I met children from really poor families. There was a stratum of people, white, in old Southern Rhodesia, who lived just above hunger level, always in debt, in flight from debtors, with drink and brutality waiting to swallow them up. Recently a book was published called Toe-rags by Daphne Anderson, the story of a girl who survived a childhood at this level of poverty. Often it was the black servants who cared for her. She was exactly my age, and compared to hers my life was gentle and privileged. This book is not likely – yet – to be read by black people in Zimbabwe, where it is necessary still to believe that every white person is, and was, rich. White people have proved reluctant to read it, because they don’t like to think the whites in British Southern Rhodesia ever lived so low and so fearfully. The grandiose myths of White Supremacy are made to look sad and sick by this book, even though the beautiful author married well, as we say, when she was in her twenties, and lived happily ever after. I hope Toe-rags will soon find a place on the reading lists of history courses in Zimbabwe.
Mrs Mitchell came from this frightful level of poverty. She could not have shared my bedroom for more than a term, perhaps even a school holiday. It was an endless misery, endless fear. I lay in the stuffy dark under the mosquito net. She was under the other mosquito net. I heard the sounds that meant she
