or slim and jittery and invasive, spiders hanging in front of your face on webs spun in the night, lurking in your veldschoen, watching you from holes in the earth when you squatted to pee. It is a testament to the irrationality of humankind that when I look back at that time I think of those lethal but beautiful snakes with admiration and even affection, whereas the memory of harmless insects makes me shiver.
But I was under the mosquito net, so that was all right.
In the mornings I woke because the light had come, and the sunlight a warmth on my face. I checked the net for spiders and beetles, then jumped up and tied it into its daytime knot. I flung myself down on my back, and lay spread out, the sheet kicked off, sniffing all the delightful smells in that room. First, my own body, its different parts, each with its own chummy odour. The thatch was damply fragrant or straw-dry, according to whether it had rained. The creosote the rafters were painted with was tar-strong, like soap. The linoleum, already wearing into holes, released oily odours, but faint, like the oilcloth on the washstand. The enamel pail under the washstand might have pee in it, but I learned to sneak out with the pail and pour it down the hill into the earth, where it bubbled up yellow, sank, and dried almost at once. The toothpaste was clean and strong. My shoes – veldschoen – smelled of hide, like karosses. But I refused ever to have a kaross on my bed, for a kaross was too close to the beast it came from, and anyway, the rough reek of kaross made me think of Mrs Scott and I never, ever, wanted to think of that place again.
I heard the ‘boy’ take tea into my parents, knew they were getting up, slid into my clothes before I could be fussed into them. I wore little cotton knickers, a cotton dress, sometimes made out of an embroidered flour sack, and a liberty bodice. The Army—Navy catalogue regulated our lives, as it did those of middle-class children anywhere in the colonies. Well brought-up children wore liberty bodices with their tabs for suspenders and stockings in cold weather. Worn without stockings they wriggled up and left red marks on your stomach. There was a day when I said no, I was not going to wear one, not ever again. And in winning the battle for me I won it for my brother too. He was still wearing the tight binders that were supposed to prevent chills on the liver, while I had long ago refused to wear one. We were meant to wear cotton hats, lined with red aertex, with red aertex pieces hanging down our backs to keep the sun off our spines. But no, no, no, I would not. ‘No one wears a hat!’ I shouted – and it was true, the farmers and their wives did not cover their heads though the women might wear a hat for visiting. My mother’s pleas went for nothing: you will get deathly chills without your binders, bad posture without your liberty bodice, sunstroke without hats that have red linings. About the hats, it seems my mother and the Army—Navy Stores were right all the time. Recently (1992) I was at a skin specialist’s in London, and he said most of his income comes from white sun-worshippers in Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe.
I dressed myself as I had done since I was able to, whereas my little brother, now getting on for six, was still being dressed. He was supposed to be delicate, and often got bronchitis and was in bed with a towel over his head enclosing a basin of hot water that emitted the fumes of wintergreen, and friar’s balsam. Not for another two years would he refuse to be called Baby, refuse to be delicate.
When I went into my parents’ bedroom my father was putting on his wooden leg with its heavy leather straps, its bucket for his stump; my mother, in her flowered silk wrapper from Harrods, was dressing Baby. The Liberty curtains were still fresh. The whitewash glittered. The thatch above was yellow and smelled new. Years ahead was the gentle squalor that house at last subsided into.
We had breakfast in the room that overlooked the bush that stretched to the Ayreshire Hills. Mother in her fresh cotton dress, father in his farm khaki, the two healthy little children. The breakfast was the full English breakfast, porridge, bacon, eggs, sausages, fried bread, fried tomatoes, toast, butter, marmalade, tea. Also pawpaw in its season, and oranges.
That we should eat enough was my mother’s chief worry. Now I cannot believe how much we all ate. And when a bit of white egg slime or a burnt bit of toast was left my father demanded with anguish that we should think of the starving children in India. If children were starving in Africa, or hungry or malnourished down in the farm compound visible from the windows, then that it seemed was not our responsibility.
But one of the difficulties of this record is how to convey the contradictions of white attitudes. My mother agonized over the bad diet of the farm labourers, tried to get them to eat vegetables from our garden, lectured them on vitamins. They would not eat cabbage, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes – now eaten by all the black people. They pulled relishes from the bush, leaves of this and that, and they brewed beer once a week, known to be full of goodness. But an ox was killed for them only once a month. Mostly, they ate the mealiemeal of that time, unrefined, yellow, wonderful stuff like polenta, and peanuts and beans. In fact, that diet was one that would be applauded by nutritionists now, but was regarded as bad then, because of its lack of meat. There is a sharp little memory from then, and there were similar incidents throughout my childhood. My brother, or I, doing what we had seen others do, called the houseboy to bring us our shoes – which were in the same room. My father went into a shouting, raging temper – most unusual for him. He said how dare my mother allow the children to be ruined, how dare she let us call a grown-up man ‘Boy’. Did she not care that we would get soft and spoiled being waited on? He wouldn’t have it. He wouldn’t allow it. Usually my father didn’t lay down the law. But over this he did. Throughout my childhood he remonstrated with my mother, more in sorrow than in anger, about the folly of expecting a man just out of a hut in the bush to understand the importance of laying a place at table with silver in its exact order, or how to arrange brushes and mirrors on a dressing table. For very early my mother’s voice had risen into the high desperation of the white missus, whose idea of herself, her family, depended on middle-class standards at Home. ‘For God’s sake, old thing,’ he would urge, his voice softening as he saw the distress on her angry face. ‘Can’t you see? It’s simply ridiculous.’ ‘Well, it’s their job, isn’t it?’
After breakfast, I might go back into my room to read. Or go with my mother to learn – well, something or other. For if her wonderful lessons stopped when we went to school, she never ever lost an opportunity for instruction, and now I am grateful and wish I could tell her so.
My brother always went down on the lands with my father, and I often did too. My father sat himself on a log or a big stone, and watched the gang of ‘boys’ hoeing a field, or wrenching the maize cobs off the plants, or pulling up peanuts, or cutting down the great flat sunflower heads full of shiny black seeds. Most wore rags of some kind, many loincloths, or perhaps a ragged singlet and shorts that might easily be laced across a rent with pink under-bark torn from a musasa tree. As they hoed, they conversed, laughing and making jokes, and sometimes sang, if threshing peanuts from their shells with big sticks, or smashing the sunflower heads to release showers of seeds. When the bossboy, Old Smoke, came to sit with my father, his two attendant young men always standing respectfully behind him, the two men might talk half a morning. For when they had finished with the mombies, the probabilities of the rain, the need for a new cow kraal, or a new ditch to carry water from the compound, or the deficiencies of the Dutch farm assistant – but he only lasted a short time, because the Africans hated him so much – then they philosophized. At the African pace, slow talk, with long pauses, punctuated by ‘Yes …’, and from Smoke … ‘Ja …’ Then another slow exchange, and ‘Ja …’ from Old Smoke. ‘Yes, that’s it,’ from my father. Smoke might sit on a log or on his haunches, with one forearm over his knees for balance – when my brother and I tried it was no good, our limbs had already set into European stiffness. My father sat with his wooden leg out in front of him, his old hat over his eyes for the glare. They talked about Life and about Death and, often, about the Big Boss Pezulu (the Big Boss above, or God) and His probable intentions.
Meanwhile my brother and I were watching birds, chameleons, lizards, ants, making little houses of grass, or racing up and down antheaps where often we startled a buck lying up through the hot hours under a bush.
Hours
