And now the roof of the house is a gleaming golden colour, laced with rose-pink and yellow; and so it stays until the rains of the first wet season dim the colours.
Meanwhile, the doors have been hung and the windows fitted; and this is not easy when the poles of the walls are likely to be uneven. Nor are those doors and windows ever likely truly to fit; for the wood of lintels and frames swells and contracts with the wetness and the dryness of the time of the year.
The floor is done last. More ant-heap earth is piled, and on it fresh cowdung; and it is wetted with the fresh blood of an ox and with water, and is stamped free of lumps. This mixture is laid all over the earth inside the house and smoothed down. It has a good, warm, sweet smell, even when it dries, which takes about a week.
Now the house is finished and can be lived in. The mud-skin of the walls has dried a pleasant light-grey, or a yellowish-grey. Or it can be colour-washed. The mud of the floor is dark and smooth and glossy. It can be left bare, or protected with linoleum, for after a time this kind of floor tends to scuff into holes and turns dusty, so linoleum is useful, though not as pleasant to look at as the bare, hard, shining earth-floor.
A pole-and-dagga house is built to stand for two, three, four years at most; but the circumstances and character of our family kept ours standing for nearly two decades. It did very well, for it had been built with affection. But under the storms and the beating rains of the wet seasons, the grass of the roof flattened like old flesh into the hollows and bumps of the poles under it; and sometimes the mud-skin fell off in patches and had to be replaced; and sometimes parts of the roof received a new layer of grass. A house like this is a living thing, responsive to every mood of the weather; and during the time I was growing up it had already begun to sink back into the forms of the bush. I remember it as a rather old, shaggy animal standing still among the trees, lifting its head to look out over the vleis and valleys to the mountains.
I wrote a poem once about a group of suburban town houses; which I could not have written had I not been brought up in such a house as I have described:
THE HOUSE AT NIGHT
That house grew there, self-compact;
And with what long hopeless love
I walked about, about-
To make the creature out.
First with fingers: grainy brick
That took its texture from the earth;
The roof, membranous sheath
On rafters stretched beneath.
Yet, though I held the thing as close
As child’s toy gathered in my hand—
Could shatter it or not;
No nearer truth I got.
Eluded by so frail a thing?
But if touch fails then sight succeeds.
But windows shadowed in
My face that peered within.
And through my shadowing face I saw
A room where someone lived, and there
The glow of hidden fire;
A secret, guarded fire.
Should I fail by closeness? Then
Move back and see the house from far,
Gathered among its kind,
No unit hard-defined.
And there a herd of houses! Each
Brooding darkly on its own,
Settled in the shade
That each small shape had made.
Till suddenly a mocking light
Flashed on from that one house I’d searched,
As if a beast had raised
His head from where he grazed.
And brilliant to my blinded face
As if with laughter openly,
These dazzling panes comprise
All dazzling gold eyes.
The house was built high, on a kopje that rose from a lower system of vleis and ridges. Looking from the windows you seemed on a level with the circling mountains, on a level with the hawks which wheeled over the fields.
My room was the third down from the top or end of the house; and it was very big and very light, for it had a large, low window, and a door which I kept propped open with a stone. The stones on the kopje were not of the quartz which cropped up all over the farm, but tended to be flattened and layered, and were brown, a light, bright brown, and when they were wet with rain, yellowish. To the touch they were smooth and velvety, because of the dust surface. Such a stone I used to prop my door open, so that I could look down on the hawks that hung over the fields, and watch them turn and slide down the currents of air with their stretched wings motionless. The great mountain ten miles off was the chrome mountain, scarred all over with workings; and it was part of the chain of hills and peaks over which the sun rose. The big field below the house was a mealie field. Newly ploughed it was rich reddish-brown, a sea of great, tumbling clods. From the path which ran along its edge, the field showed a pattern of clods that had fallen over from the plough-shares one after another, so that walking slowly beside it avenues opened and shut, lanes of sunlight and shadow. And each clod was like a rock, for the interest of its shape and colour: the plough-share cutting smooth through the hard soil left a clean, shining surface, iridescent, as if it had been oiled with dark oil.
And sometimes, from the height of the house, looking down, these clean, shared surfaces caught the sun all over the field at the same moment so that a hundred acres of clods glittered darkly together, flashing off a sullen light; and at such times the hawks swerved off, high and away, frightened.
Then the harrows drove over the field, side by side, the heavy, shining oxen plunging and scrambling over the great earth-boulders; they drove over it again and again, till the beasts walked easily, setting their feet down in soft tilthed soil; and the field was flat, without shadows, an even reddish-brown. And so it stood a while, waiting for the rains. During this time the air was full of dust, for the wind-devils danced and played continuously over the field; and sometimes columns of whirling, fiery red dust mingled with fragments of last year’s mealie-stalks that glittered gold and silver, stood in the air higher than eye-level from the house; and the hawks were gone out of the dusty air into the clean air-currents over the far bush. Through the dust that shone a soft red at sunset and sunrise, the great soft-stepping oxen moved, two by two, in front of the planters; Afrikander oxen with their long, snaky horns; and behind the planting machines the small, white, flat seeds popped into the earth and were covered. The flocks of guinea-fowl moved down out of the bush at dawn and at sunset after those precious mealie-grains, flocks of sometimes fifty, a hundred, two hundred birds; and my brother and I, waiting in the bush with our rifles, saw them as industrious as farmyard birds over the hidden mealie-seeds.
Now the long tension of the dry season had built up into a crescendo of bad temper and irritability and anxiety that means the rains will come soon; and at night, lying in bed, I saw the lightning dance and quiver over the mountains while the thunder growled. The long stretches of bush and field were dark; this was the only time of the year the fields were dark, for all the light had gone into the electricity that darted along the edges of the cloud-masses.
And then, one night, I would wake and hear a rushing and a pouring and a rustling all around; the rains had come. Over my head the old thatch was soaking and swelling, and in the weak places the wet seeped through, so that from half a dozen patches of roof over my room came a soft dulcet pattering. I crept out from under the mosquito net to set basins and jugs to catch the drops; and looking out from the door into the wet darkness a battering of rain ricocheting up from the earth came as high as my waist so that I had to step back fast into dryness. But until the lightning drove down through the wet and broken cloud-masses it was dark; when the light came, it drove down the shining rods of white rain, and showed the trees crouching under the downpour and a thick dance of white raindrops like hailstones a foot deep all over the earth.
So I would go back to sleep, lulled by the roar of the rain outside and the splash of the roof-leaks into the basins. In the morning I was woken not by the w
armth of the sun on my bed but by a new intenser glare of light on my eyelids: the air had been washed clean of smoke from the veld fires and of dust, and the skies had lifted high and bright, and the trees were green and clean. The sun had come close again, shining free and yellow direct on to the big field, which was now a dark, rich, sodden red, a clear, red space among rich, sodden foliage. The thatch was still dropping long stalactites of shining water, and it was as if the house was enclosed by a light waterfall.
By midday the wetness had been whirled up into the air in clouds of steam; the big field steamed and smoked; and it was as if one could feel the growth being sucked up out of the mealie-grains by the heat and the wet.
During the first days of the wet season the storms and the showers advanced and retreated, and we watched the drama from the kopje-top; the now rich green bush stretching all around for miles would be blotted out suddenly in one place by a grey curtain, or the clouds would open violently overhead, enclosing us in a grey, steaming downpour. Below, the field was already showing a sheen of green. From the path beside the field, walking, the field was again opening and shutting, but now in avenues of green. Each plant was an inch high, a minute, green, divided spear, as crisp as fresh lettuce, and in the heart of each a big, round, shining globule of water.
Now the farmer would be pleased if the rain stopped for a week or ten days, so as to drive the roots down into the earth and strengthen the plants. Sometimes he was obliged; and the field of mealies stood faintly wilting, limp with thirst. But however the rain fell, the green film over the dark earth thickened, so that soon there were a hundred acres of smooth, clear apple-green that shimmered and rippled under the hot sun.
In the moonlight, looking down, it was a dim green sea, moving with light.
Soon the plants put out their frothy white crests; in the moonlight there was foam on the sea; and in the daytime, when the winds were strong, the whole field swayed and moved like a tide coming in. At this time the hawks hung low over the field with bunched, ready claws, working hard, so that from the house you looked down on their wide, stiff wings.
The rainy season passed; and the brilliant green of the field dimmed, and the sound of the wind in it was no longer a wet, thick rustle, but more like the sound of an army of tiny spears. Soon all the field was a tarnished silvery-gold, and each mealie-plant was like a ragged, skeleton scarecrow, and the noise of the wind was an incessant metallic whispering.
From the house now the field could be seen populated with black, small figures, moving between the rows and laying them flat. Soon the dark, dry earth was bared again, patterned with mealie-stooks, each a small, shining pyramid; and all over the soil a scattered litter of soft, glinting, dead leaf and stalk. Then came the heavy wagons behind sixteen oxen led by the little black boy who pulled six inches in front of the tossing, curving, wicked horns, with the driver walking behind, yelling and flickering his long whiplash in the air over their backs.
The field was bare completely, the stooks stripped of maize-cobs, the stooks themselves carried off to make manure in the cattle-kraals. It was all rough, dark-red earth, softly glinting with mealie-trash. In came the ploughs, and again the earth fell apart into the great shining clods.
This cycle I watched from my bedroom door, when I was not absorbed by what went on in the room itself. For after a decade or so of weathering, the house had become the home of a dozen kinds of creature not human, who lived for the most part in the thatch of the roof.
Rats, mice, lizards, spiders and beetles, and once or twice snakes, moved through the thatch and behind the walls; and sometimes, when the oil-lamp was flickering low, which it did in a steady, leaping rhythm till it flared up and out—in a way which I am reminded of by the pedestrian-crossing lights in the street outside my window, flicking all night on my wall in London—sometimes, as the yellow glow sank, a pair of red eyes could be seen moving along the top of the wall under the thatch. A mouse? A snake perhaps? For some reason they seldom came down to the floor. Once I saw a pair of eyes shining in the light coming through the window from the moon, and called for my parents to kill what I was convinced was a snake, but it was a frog. In the wet season, the frogs from the vlei two miles away were so loud they drowned the perpetual singing of the night-crickets; and the irregular pattering of frogs on the floor of my room was something I learned to take no more notice of than the pattering of rain from leaks in the roof. It must not be imagined that I am a lover of wild life. I am frightened of all these creatures—or rather, of touching them by accident in the dark, or putting my foot on one; but if you live in a house which is full of them, then your area of safety contracts within it to the bed. I never went to bed without taking it completely apart to make sure nothing had got into the bedclothes; and once safely in, with the mosquito net tucked down, I knew that nothing could fall on me from the roof or crawl over me in the dark.
The family attitude towards the role of mosquito nets is illustrated by a dialogue I overheard between my parents in the next room.
It was the first rains of the season, and the roof had begun to leak in a dozen places. I had already lit my candle and set out the pails and basins; and I knew that my father was awake because I could see the fluctuating glow of his cigarette on the wall through the crack of the door which did not close properly.
I knew that he was waiting for my mother to wake up. At last I heard him say in a sort of hushed shout: ‘Maud, Maud, wake up!’ Nothing happened and the rain roared on.
‘Maud!’
She woke with a crash of the bedsprings. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s raining.’
‘I can hear that it’s raining.’
‘The roof’s really bad this year,’ he said. ‘Like a sieve.’
‘When the grass swells, it won’t be so bad.’
‘It’s worse than it was last year.’
‘We’ll get the thatching boy up in the morning,’ she said sleepily, and turned over.
‘But it’s raining,’ he said desperately.
‘Go to sleep.’
‘But it’s raining on me.’
‘You’ve got your mosquito net down, haven’t you?’
‘A mosquito net has holes in it.’
‘A mosquito net will absorb a lot of water before it starts to leak.’
‘It has already started to absorb the water.’
‘What if I slung another mosquito net over the first?’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to move the bed?’
‘Oh. Yes. I suppose so.’
My father spent a large part of his nights sitting up in his bed smoking and thinking. Sometimes, if I lit my candle for something, he would say cautiously: ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes, it’s me, I’m only just…’
‘Well then, go to sleep.’
‘But I’m only just…’
‘You’re not to read at this time of night.’ And then, after a moment, ‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘Hear that owl? It must be in the tree right outside.’
‘It sounds to me in the bush at the bottom of the kopje.’
‘Do you think so? You know, I’ve been sitting here thinking. Supposing we caught an owl and crossed it with one of your mother’s Rhode Island Reds. What do you think would happen?’
‘Almost anything, I should think.’
‘I was being serious,’ he said reprovingly from the dark room next door. ‘I don’t suppose they have thought of that, do you? An owl and a chicken. They could graft the seed somehow if they wouldn’t do it naturally. A rat-eating chicken. Or a chicken-eating chicken.’
A stir in my mother’s bed.
‘Shhhhh,’ my father would say hastily. ‘Go to sleep at once.’
Or: ‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘You know the centre of the earth is all molten, so they say?’
‘Well?’
‘Bound to.’
‘You’re not much good, are you? No imagination. Not a scrap of imagination between the lot of you, that’s your trouble.’
Walls are by nature and definition flat; and having lived for so long in London, when I hear the word wall I see a flat surface, patterned or coloured smooth.
But the wall that faced my bed was not flat.
When the workmen had flung on the mud, naturally it was a little bumpy because no matter how you smooth on mud over poles, if there is a knot on the pole where a branch was chopped off, or if the pole had a bit of a bend in it, then the mud settled into the shape of bump and hollow. Sometimes, because of the age of the wall, a bit of mud had fallen out altogether and had had to be replaced, much to my regret, for the exposed poles showed themselves riddled with borer holes and other interesting matters. Once there was a mouse-nest in the space between two poles. There were five tiny pink mice which fitted easily into about an inch of my palm. The mother mouse ran away, and I diluted cow’s milk and tried to drop it off the end of a bit of cotton into the minute mouths. But a drop is always a drop; and for a baby mouse as if someone had flung a bucket of milk into its face. I nearly drowned those mice, trying to work out a way to make a drop of milk mouse-size. But it was no use, they died; and the jagged space in the wall was filled in with new mud.
The wall had been colour-washed a yellowish-white; but for some reason I have forgotten, after the brown mud had been filled in, it was not painted over, so that there was a brown patch on my wall.
I knew the geography of that wall as I knew the lines on my palm. Waking in the morning I opened my eyes to the first sunlight, for the sun shot up over the mountain in a big red ball just where my window was. The green mosquito gauze over the window had tarnished to a dull silver, and my curtains were a clear orange; and the sun came glittering through the silver gauze and set the curtains glowing like fire. The heat was instant, like a hot hand on your flesh. The light reached in and lay on the white wall, in an irregular oblong of soft rosy red. The grain of the wall, like a skin, was illuminated by the clear light. There were areas of light, brisk graining where Tobias the painter had whisked his paint-brush from side to side; then a savage knot of whorls and smudged lines where he had twirled it around. What had he been thinking about when his paint-brush suddenly burst into such a fury of movements? There was another patch where he had put his hand flat on the whitewash. Probably there had been something in his bare foot, and he had steadied himself with his hand while he picked his sole up to look at it. Then he had taken out whatever was in his foot and lifted his brush and painted out the handmark. Or thought he had. For at a certain moment of the sunrise, when the sun was four inches over the mountains in the east, judging by the eye, that hand came glistering out of the whitewash like a Sign of some kind.
NF (1957) Going Home Page 4