Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

  An ugly bungalow was built further back from the brow of the hill, and then someone – who? – shortened the hill by about ten feet, or more. The old house had perched on the crown, and the ground had slid down all around it. The earth from this truncation was shovelled down the sides of the hill, where once the oxen had laboured, straining up steep sides.

  And occupants came and went and left their mark: a line of neglected roses by a fence, some peach trees, which did not do well, any more than the pomegranates my mother had planted.

  And then there was the Liberation War. All the farmhouses became fortresses, surrounded by tall security fences, locked and barred at night, but not so high it was impossible for terrorists or freedom-fighters to lob over a grenade, or even clamber over themselves. Inside the houses, I saw the rifles and shotguns laid on the windowsills, and buckets of water set out to deal with incendiary attacks. The white farmers in those beleaguered farmhouses had a long, frightening war, and then there was a black government, and so many misplaced hopes, and then the ugly little tyrant Mugabe. The security fences and siege weapons did not defend the inhabitants from these attackers.

  And so my father, dreaming forwards instead of backwards, would have had to see all this District, once a byword for its efficiency, its wonderful crops of maize and tobacco, slowly begin to go back to the bush. For Mugabe’s cronies, grabbing the white farms, were not thinking of feeding the population, providing for them. They left the farms unused. In order to keep farms healthy and productive you need fertilizers, machinery, and all kinds of experts. If it is a dairy farm, you need veterinary surgeons. Without these, there is nothing; neglect, and the lands going back to the bush.

  The Old Mawonga Tree

  Visiting the farm in the early eighties, I was standing perhaps fifty yards away from where the house was. In front of me swayed a drunk black man, tall, very thin, poorly dressed, reeking of stale beer. With me was Antony Chennells, then from the Zimbabwe University. He was the best of companions for such trips, apart from the fact that he knew as much about old Southern Rhodesian history, laws, literature, people, black and white, as anybody could. His grandfather was Charles Coghlan, the first prime minister of Southern Rhodesia. It was hard for me to come back to the farm, to the kopje where the house was – to my memories. We were there, standing before this angry man, without permission from the owners of the farm, because we knew we had only to ask to get permission, and because being there was something of an impulse.

  ‘Why are you here?’ says the drunk man, belligerent and accusing.

  ‘Once I lived here. I was a child here,’ I said, bright and breezy, as if this was not bound to be a pretty awful occasion.

  He was too drunk to sneer properly, but he made the attempt.

  I said, ‘Our old house used to be there,’ and I pointed to where bushes and even young trees were springing up.

  I said, ‘The people who came after us cut the top of this hill off. A good fifteen or twenty feet, it looks like.’

  ‘No one has cut off the hill,’ says the drunk.

  He is, in fact, a mechanic, working for this annexe and the big farm it is now part of.

  ‘I assure you,’ I say, ‘this hill is much lower than it was. They threw the earth down the sides of the hill. That is why the track up here isn’t steep. It used to be so steep you had to change down into second gear to come up.’

  No, I was certainly not so silly as to think my love, and you could say knowledge, of this part of the country had a claim on him as a fellow countryman. Of course not. And yet…

  ‘There used to be a big tree just there.’ I pointed to a hundred yards or so down the front of the hill.

  ‘There was no tree there,’ said the man, swaying and leaning. ‘There was never any tree.’

  ‘We used to call it the mawonga tree.’

  ‘It is the wrong name,’ said the drunk.

  Interesting, watching history being unmade, the past forsworn.

  A little way down the side of the hill a few black women were listening and they were curious. They were probably, too, pleased at this little excitement in what must have been poor and uneventful lives.

  Some yards away was the bungalow someone had built. From the windows peered black children’s faces.

  Not asking his permission, since he would not have given it, we walked to where we could see the crowded windows. Suddenly, no children. I stood, peering in. The windows were shut, on a hot afternoon. Inside a dozen or so children were immured. They stood shyly together in the centre of the room. Just children, of all ages. Not a toy, piece of paper, exercise book, any kind of book; nothing for them to play with or use their minds on. Where was the nearest school? Banket. Unless there was a farm school somewhere.

  This was before Mugabe licensed the grabbing of the white farms.

  It hurt, seeing that house, and the children without any kind of – well, anything. Nothing. It was a way of making sure children were safe and out of mischief. Lock them up in an empty house…

  It hurts now. Give us education, give us books, give us exercise books – such is the cry, but perhaps not so much now, when there is so little food to go round, so little of anything. By now those children will be out-of-work adults.

  They might easily be dead, from Aids, or hunger.

  Long ago, in 1956, I was in Cold Comfort Farm, a ‘progressive’ farm that gave education to children and adolescents before the black government came. There I met an idealistic young man, planning to be a teacher, who said he wanted to be educated so as to help his people, ‘to give my life for my people’.

  Idealistic youngsters don’t necessarily turn out well.

  That idealistic youngster soon became Didymus Mutasa, a bosom crony of Mugabe. Not long ago he said it wouldn’t matter if so many people died of Aids or of anything else. ‘We would be better off with two million people less,’ said this man who has become one of the most corrupt, most unscrupulous black leaders in Africa.

  I wonder, did someone cut down the old mawonga tree? Was it really old? Did it fall down? These trees are studded among the lower-growing trees of the highveld; they are taller than the other trees, whitish-trunked, and their boughs do not grow flattish and layered like the musasas.

  Our tree was a sort of a landmark. It was always full of birds. Once a swarm of locusts came down from the north, settled on every tree, and loaded a branch of the mawonga. It broke under the weight.

  Bees lived in the tree. You could see the hole, from yards away, with the insects buzzing about. At intervals, a group of men came up from the fields and made a smoking fire at the right place under the bees. When the bees, noticing the smoke, began to buzz and fuss and also to fall dazed, the men leaned a naked tree trunk against the mawonga trunk and one clambered up. At the level of the hole he inserted his arm, brought out shards and combs of honey, which were put into a paraffin tin. He brushed off bees but did not seem much discommoded. Then he came sliding down. A basin full of honey, combs, bee bread were for us, for the house, but a couple of big tins went down to the compound.

  It must have been a large colony. They swarmed quite often. We would hear the swelling drone as the departing swarm passed over the house and away to find a place to make their new hives.

  Of that tree my parents said: ‘We’ll never get off the farm, and they’ll bury us under the mawonga tree.’

  ‘Well, that old tree will still be here when we are gone.’

  As it happened, it lasted not much longer than they did.

  The swallows, when they came, at about the start of the rainy season, swirled about the front of the house, and around the lower part of the mawonga tree.

  And when the swallows left, in April or May, my mother would mourn, ‘Oh, the swallows will be in England soon. They’ll get there before us. Can you imagine them dipping over the ponds? When the swallows came in spring you’d know summer would soon be here…’

  ‘I wish the rains would come properly,’ says my father.
‘Just look at those clouds. There’s not a drop of rain in the lot of them.’

  ‘They wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t going to rain soon,’ says my mother. ‘No rain, no insects, no swallows.’

  The name ‘mawonga’ is Shona, how it sounds. Names for this tree are Pericopsis and Angolensis.

  Provisions

  Two small children were at the table, which was inside the windows that were ‘just like the bow of a ship!’ so said my mother. There was a proper little commotion of a scene going on. The little girl was wailing that she wouldn’t eat her egg, and the boy echoed that he wouldn’t either. ‘I don’t like slimy eggs,’ said the girl.

  At which Daddy snaps, ‘What a damned disgrace. You won’t eat your eggs. Think of the starving little children in India.’

  These starving Indian children had a role in our family meals, and later I discovered that their fate was regularly appealed to when middle-class children disliked their fare.

  ‘Think of the starving Indian children’ was bound to get a laugh at school, for instance.

  Why didn’t my father say, Think of the hungry children in the compound? But he never did. Deprivation has had to be a long way off to be effective. And I don’t think the children in the compound were starving or went hungry. The compound was for the farm labourers and we were supposed to know how many were there. That is because by law a farmer had to provide rations, mealie-meal – the staple food – peanuts, beans, weighed out once a week, the boss-boy supervising. All the labourers in this district were from Nyasaland: this area was on the path southwards for the men, and some women, who walked south, for days stopping at this farm or that. They stopped where there were relatives, or the boss-boy was a relative. Thus my father might joke, ‘We may think we are in control but don’t you believe it. The boss-boys are.’ Now, if a party of Nyasalanders went through the compound some stayed, if there was a chance of work. Then there were a good many more on the farm than was officially the case. That meant the rations would be stretched. That meant some children might be hungry.

  ‘Damn it, Smoke,’ my father would expostulate. ‘You tell me there are twenty-five in the compound, and I’ve provided twenty-five rations. But you are asking for more.’

  ‘Yes, Baas. My brother came last night and he has his wife with him.’

  ‘Am I employing him?’

  ‘No, Baas, but he will look for work next week.’

  These ‘brothers’ caused instant and inevitable misunderstanding, for every relative designated a ‘brother’ was owed hospitality.

  ‘And so, how many children?’

  At which old Smoke (because he smoked dagga hemp) was evasive and mumbled, ‘Not very many.’

  ‘But there aren’t meant to be children in the compound.’

  ‘No, Baas.’

  ‘So how many people are really living down there?’ my father could have asked, but did not, because then old Smoke would have had to lie.

  But for the evening of the day their rations were given out old Smoke had the keys to the storeroom.

  So, if there were no starving children in our compound I am sure none had boiled eggs and toast and butter, let alone marmalade and jam.

  In April 2007, the BBC ran a series about Edwardian food. ‘This is what our grandparents ate.’ Impossible: so far has our diet evolved away from those imposing heavy meals. But the food on our table was impressive enough, and when I escaped from it, as food became lighter and healthier, I would look back and marvel.

  Breakfast: various kinds of porridge and the new cornflakes, then bacon and eggs and sausages, with tomatoes and the delicious fried bread, which is no longer the same now that beef dripping has become obsolete. Toast, butter, marmalade. Then there was morning tea, with biscuits and scones. Lunch was cold meat, various kinds of potatoes, or made-up dishes, like cauliflower cheese or macaroni. Then pudding. Afternoon tea, with more scones, biscuits, and cake. We children had supper, and plenty of it – too much – and the starving Indian children often played their part. Dinner, when we got older, was a proper meal, with roasts, chops, liver, kidneys, tongue, and wonderful vegetables from my mother’s vegetable garden. And puddings. This amazing diet was going on through the seventies, the eighties…At my brother’s lunch table there it all was, at my son John’s. And, yes, they did both die of heart-attacks but surely one has to ask, how did they survive so long?

  When I remonstrated with my brother about meals that would fuel a labourer, a navvy, he replied, ‘But we have to keep up our standards.’

  In other words, it was eating that said, ‘Look what I can afford to eat.’ This was true everywhere in the legacies of the British Empire. And we may hear Australians even now laugh helplessly, describing Christmas meals that Dickens would have recognized, including the pudding, and mince pies, with the thermometer at ninety. I don’t know how often I watched my father saying, ‘Oh, God, do we have to have a Christmas dinner? I want to plant out the tobacco seedlings – replant the mealies – make the silage.’ And that scene went on (does it still?) on 25 December because standards had to be kept up.

  The heavy Edwardian meals went on in our house at least until the early thirties. But new ideas were brewing, and the parents succumbed to a hundred diets and fancies, some of them like those that are around today. In our household Nature magazine came in with the Observer and the newsletters about English politics. We knew about roughage, vitamins, cooking vegetables the right way. I was sent to visit friends of my parents for a fortnight and was overthrown by encountering the opposite of everything my parents then believed. ‘Meat!’ insisted my hostess. ‘It’s the only thing. And you are a growing girl – meat.’ If I put forward the latest theories from home – the necessity of salads, steaming vegetables – I was overthrown by burning convictions absolutely opposite to those of my parents. This happened more than once. I had hardly reached my teens when I was in possession of all the latest fads of the time. I have in my lifetime seen every commodity lauded as essential, or despised as bad – sugar has always been Very Bad Indeed.

  Now, this preoccupation with health in our house did not prevent my father getting diabetes, or my mother complaining of a hundred ills. Meanwhile, her need to stuff me with food made me miserable, because I was getting fat. Yes, nothing has changed. While I was not subject to the awful girlie magazines with their prescriptions, I and the girls I knew did not want to get fat. I devised a diet for myself, which impresses me because of its determination that I would not succumb to malnutrition. For three or four months I ate tomatoes and peanut butter, thinking that between them they would give me adequate vitamins. It worked. I lost weight while my mother wept and bewailed, but that also because I was acquiring my adult figure, which wasn’t bad at all, and which she hated.

  If there was ever a woman who would have been happy to see her little daughter never leave fairy childhood behind, then it was my mother. I started to make myself dresses, I earned money, and throughout this process she exhorted, complained, warned of all kinds of disastrous ends for me.

  I recommend this diet, tomatoes and peanut butter, to slimmers, but I don’t know what the experts would say. Of course, tomatoes just in out of the hot sun, peanut butter made from fresh peanuts, just out of the ground, yes, these are not easily got, and certainly not in London, with all its piled plenty.

  And what of my father, while I refused to eat, except my chosen two foodstuffs? He was too ill, he was so dreadfully ill, but now might easily have said, ‘Think of the hungry children in Britain,’ for the Slump had set in. The swathes of the working class ate bread and marge sprinkled with sugar, or bread and dripping, drank strong tea heaped with sugar. Soon I was to meet RAF men, when the war came, whose childhoods had been like this, or similar. ‘How about the hungry children [June 2007] in Darfur, in the Congo, in…Zimbabwe, in…’

  Sometimes it is asked, rhetorically enough, ‘What will our descendants blame us for as we now blame the slave traders?’ Surely that is easy enough. They
will say that one half of the world stuffed itself with food while the other half was hungry. Easy to imagine some prime minister, hoping for a good mark from history, apologizing for the disgusting greed of us, his forebears.

  I do not see how there can be forgiveness of what we are doing.

  Probably the most disgusting sight in the world is to watch plates carried out of an American restaurant, still piled with food, and see the garbage bins in the street piled high with uneaten food. As disgusting as seeing the same in England, food that would feed thousands of hungry people. Hungry and dying. They die, they are dying as I write this…

  Well, would you forgive it? I doubt it.

  But while children in Britain, not to mention parts of Europe, were going without, here in old Southern Rhodesia the food was better than anything you can get now. The vegetables were grown without pesticides and artificial fertilizers. The meat had never heard of hormones. Chickens had a healthy life: no one had heard of battery chickens. And what very good use was being made, on the farms, of what was grown. Some of those concocted dishes have disappeared from memory, I think. For instance, all the different dishes made from what we call sweetcorn, the fresh maize kernels, the cobs just brought up from the fields.

  The mealie kernels in a cheese sauce, baked so it had a slight crust, or cooked in batter, similarly with a crust, all kinds of soups and stews. There was a sort of vegetable stew consisting of maize, pieces of pumpkin, onions, beans, potatoes, with or without a little meat, according to the vagaries of the new diet rules. When I went to Argentina, we asked the driver allotted us to let us eat where he did, in the restaurants for the locals. And there I encountered this stew again, but it had chilli in it and tomatoes. And now we come to the pumpkin, which no one seems able to cook in Britain. Pieces of pumpkin are sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and allowed to caramelize. Delicious, particularly with roast meat. Or pumpkin fried with onion, or mashed with cinnamon and nutmeg. Pumpkin soups. And, best of all, pumpkin batter fritters, crisp and spicy.