Alan Milhouse often accompanied us on our trips outside the city. He was Lloyd’s best friend. On these trips, he and Lloyd shared a room, while I had my own. Alan was a man of quick enthusiasm; he spoke of the boiler at Lloyd’s cottage in Nyanga with such passion that he might have invented it.
Though Lloyd was far from being a recluse, in the gregarious Umwinsidale set, with its endless round of cocktail parties, braais and sundowners, cricket and tennis and polo parties, he was considered something of a hermit.
Alexandra always tried to introduce him to women. She pulled together an impressive list of divorcees, who all seemed, curiously, to be real estate agents, and single women who were usually farmers’ daughters called Debbie or Shirl, Sheila or Tracey, or jolly-hockey-sticks-type teachers with firm handshakes and Fatal Attraction hair.
Every woman she introduced to Lloyd was perfect, just the one for him; every one of them was clever: Alexandra was never able to distinguish between reading a scholarly work and reading Look and Listen, the TV and radio guide. When Lloyd stopped announcing our monthly visits to the farm, different women appeared, sent by Alexandra on errands that sounded spurious, even to me.
I particularly remember a woman called Avril, who sat too close to Lloyd on the couch, waving thin hands with rings on each finger in his face. She may well have had bells on her toes, too, like the fine lady upon the fine horse at Banbury Cross, but she did not stay long enough to get that comfortable.
All of Alexandra’s efforts were in vain. Lloyd remained Lloyd, aloof and slightly amused, marrying none of the women she thrust upon him. The only adult person in whose company he seemed able to spend great lengths of time was Alan Milhouse. Alan was always friendly to me, but he sometimes disconcerted me by giving me hugs when I least expected them, and by questioning me closely, his eyes searching mine, about how I was, and whether everything was well with me.
I know that I impressed Jimmy when I told her that Summer Madness was a mansion, like the large houses that are the fashion today. You see them in places like Borrowdale Brooke, which is really just a township on steroids, with houses like promontories bloated on brick and concrete.
I did not know until Summer Madness became my home that it was possible to fall in love with a house. It did not happen at once.
What was meant to be a simple farmhouse became a little temple to grace and beauty; all Doric pillars and columns. Along its length runs a veranda. I loved to sit there during a raging storm, as one with the elements but protected from them.
I had no jobs to do, no cleaning, no washing, no Mobhi to tend to and care for. When I was not reading, and when I became used to them, I played with the dogs, first Chocolate, the little dachsie that took to following me everywhere I went and slept on my bed, then, when she died, Mrs Harris, the golden Labrador. In the garden, I dug up toy soldiers that had been forgotten through the decades.
There were no raised voices at Summer Madness, no sudden squalls, no explosions. It did not matter that Lloyd spoke to his sister or her husband, to his gardener and jack-of-all-trades, Biggie, to Liz Warrender or to me: he spoke always in a tone of supreme politeness and wry detachment. Not even in those awful moments after I found him with Zenzo did he ever raise his voice, not even after he came back from those two weeks in the police cell did he shout or yell or look at me with anything like reproach.
He enrolled me at the Convent School in town, where, with four hundred other girls in blue skirts and beige blouses, we made prayers of supplication to the Blessed Mary, Ever Virgin, to pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our deaths. Catholic sisters with heavy shoes and equally heavy names taught me: Sisters Mary Gabriel and Ethelburga, Sisters Hedwig and Hildegarde.
At my new school, my life soon developed its own rhythm. The Dominican Convent was like the world outside, only in miniature. Money got me what a top girls’ school gives: slight arrogance, self-belief. The blue skirt and beige blouse declared me a Convent girl, belonging by right to the upper levels of the school system. The straw boater linked me to the girls who had come before and those who would come after. I assumed a new identity.
It helped that money also bought me good skin, courtesy of a dermatologist. At school, I eventually became just another girl in a blue dress, and when I entered the secondary, another girl in a blue skirt and white blouse. In time I gained the confidence that comes with any expensive private education.
More than anything else, I felt an incredible sense of freedom: not from want but from scrutiny. I had not yet found home, but I found a place where I could belong.
6
It was a strange time to be living in a white family. Independence had come five years before. The news was filled with reburials of mangled corpses whose names would never be known, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the new shrine at the Heroes Acre, and roll calls of the names of the fallen in Mozambique. A government minister had suggested a ritual ceremony to propitiate the spirits of the dead, lest they return as vengeful ngozi spirits. A tomb was erected to the Unknown Soldier. Kingsway became Julius Nyerere Avenue. North Avenue became Josiah Tongogara Avenue, and Railway Avenue became Kenneth Kaunda.
The ‘Year of the People’s Struggle’ was followed by the ‘Year of Consolidating the People’s Struggle’, the ‘Year of Transformation’, the ‘Year of the People’s Socialism’ and the ‘Year of the Child’.
It was a time of building a new nation, but there was conflict and upheaval. There were weekly explosions of landmines that had been planted in the forests during the war then forgotten about. The Mozambican rebels were waging war on the eastern borders. Our soldiers were sent to protect the Beira Corridor that gave the country access to sea routes. The apartheid government in South Africa was bombing targets all over Southern Africa. There were rumours of massacres in the south.
But at Summer Madness, I had long wet weekends in the library or sunny days in the tree house. On our trips out of Harare, I watched the countryside sweep by in a rush of green. The wars and troubles were, at the closest distance, only reports on the news bulletins, and at the furthest, distant murmurs, far-off rumours that did not penetrate the ordered tranquillity of my new life.
The war closest to me was the one that had passed, and it came to me through Ian’s stories as he talked about the hot extractions he had been part of, and the Afs he had shot. He terrified me by telling me that he had shot a boy my size, who had been a spy for the terrorists. ‘He was as small as you are,’ he said as he winked at me. ‘Just two tickeys and a brick high.’
When I saw him again after my return home, it was hard to see the old Ian in this broken man in his wheelchair, his mouth permanently gaping, all liver spots and dribble. The once-upon-a-time hater of Afs and zots and kafs was clinging to the woman who cared for him, a woman from Chipinge who cleaned him and fed him and sang him Shona songs. He barely noticed when Alexandra left the room, but wept openly when his carer left.
My life found its total absorption in Umwinsidale. I made only one friend at school, a girl called Mercy, who came to the Convent in form two. She was a scholarship girl with milk-bottle spectacles. Her greatest value to me was that she did not ask questions that I did not want to answer. It also helped to have a friend because it meant that people did not think me stranger than I already was.
I did not want anyone to know that my parents had sold me: that was between Lloyd and me, and any time I got close to any of the girls I liked, I backed away, fearing the inevitable questions that further intimacy would have obliged me to answer.
I enjoyed my lessons and the library, but for the most part, school to me was a sort of temporary exile from Summer Madness. Umwinsidale had Liz Warrender and Sandy Knight-Bruce. They were Lloyd’s friends, but I soon came to see them as part of my life. Liz must have been in her fifties then, a weathered woman with leathery skin who wore jodhpurs every day I saw her, except on the day of Poppy’s funeral.
She smelled of a combination of gin, Charlie perfume and
manure, with a dash of wet dog thrown in. She was the source of almost everything I knew about Lloyd’s family: Lloyd had inherited her from Poppy. ‘If the dog does not bite you’, the sign on Liz’s gate said, ‘the owner will shoot you. If you survive you will be prosecuted.’ Her cocker spaniel, Russet, was a mass of nerves and allergies. There was no dog more terrified of anything that moved.
Liz needed more protection from her maid, Rebecca, than from outside trespassers. Liz no longer knew how many times she had sacked Rebecca, but each time, Rebecca refused to go. Even when she did not pay her, Rebecca still stayed, helping herself to anything Liz left lying around. When Liz confronted her about the thefts, Rebecca insisted that the things were hers.
‘That’s my bag,’ said Liz.
‘No, medem,’ Rebecca said. ‘It is mine.’
‘I know perfectly well what is mine, Rebecca.’
‘You are mistaken, medem,’ Rebecca said.
From Rebecca’s mouth, the word medem fell with a particular contempt that was more pointed than if Rebecca had called Liz by her first name.
Liz often snuck into Rebecca’s quarters to steal back her things, and Rebecca would take them again. This is how things were with them; Rebecca would steal something, and Liz would take it back.
Liz’s house was often filled with Rebecca’s relatives. They walked along Umwinsidale Drive in little knots, with little bundles on their heads. It was not unusual for Liz to walk into her kitchen and find Rebecca laughing with two women she had never seen as they drank her tea. ‘This is my sister, medem. This is my aunt. They are staying a few days only, just a few days.’
The few days would turn into months, and Liz would retreat in fear, feeling like an interloper in her own home.
She could easily have sold her house to move into a smaller place, but she could not bear to leave her horse, Copperplate. She could not afford to keep him, so she housed him at the Compton-Jones’s stud farm on Hazlemere Lane. In exchange for Copperplate’s keep, she trained and exercised their horses. No one understood horses like Liz; she had remedies for colic that were better than any vet’s.
She had been a jockey once, one of Rhodesia’s only female jockeys, she said, but that lot couldn’t put up with her. She was paid far less than she was worth; like her servants, the Compton-Joneses thought they were doing her a favour.
Whenever Liz came over, Lloyd would say, ‘Quick, hide the gin. Here comes Liz, on the cadge again.’ But the gin bottle would come out all the same.
In Mharapara Street, MaiWhizi peered through the curtains and polished her veranda. Liz was more direct; she simply went from house to house, picking up as much as she left behind. I soon discovered that she came to know as much as she did because she and Lloyd were the only whites in Umwinsidale who spoke fluent Shona. Liz picked up her gossip from the maids and gardeners.
She liked to tell the story of how she had gone one night to the compound that had sprouted behind her house, and was offered a drink of masese, a traditional beer drunk from a shared container, by Rebecca’s son. Never one to turn down a free drink, she had taken up the proffered calabash, drunk deeply and passed it on to the next drinker. From that night had come the nickname her domestics gave her, Mukanya, not only for her monkey-like face, but also as a sign that she was one of them, and accordingly deserved a totem name.
The other neighbour that I saw often was Sandy Knight-Bruce, who lived in a cottage on Hazlemere Lane. He could have been any age from thirty-five to sixty. Like the waiter in the Shaw play we did for O level, he seemed to be a man whom age could not wither, because he had never bloomed. He played three musical instruments, and had wanted to be a concert violinist, but he thought his face too ugly. ‘No one wants to see a violin below this, my dear,’ he used to say. I had seen uglier faces in Mufakose, faces disfigured by scars, and thought he was not as hideous as all that.
Sandy’s great vanity was that he was descended from Edward Plantagenet. He had spent most of his life working on a family tree that proved one of his ancestors was born on the wrong side of the Plantagenet sheets. As further confirmation of his royal lineage, he had a huge portrait of his presumed ancestral monarch in his living room, and always made sure to sit in a chair beneath it, the better to draw the eye of the viewer to the resemblance. But as the resemblance was really confined to the hairstyle, I often reflected that I, too, would have resembled Edward Plantagenet if I had worn my hair as he did.
For every day that I knew him, Sandy wore a cricket jersey and cream flannel trousers with white canvas shoes. He was going bald but that did not prevent him from wearing what little remained of his hair long, reaching his shoulders, while at the same time affecting one of those sweep-overs that are supposed to give the illusion of hair. He looked like a cross between the incarnation of Doctor Who played by Peter Davison and a male version of Miss Havisham.
I had no facility at all for music and never got beyond the basics. I preferred to be riding or reading instead of doing endless scales. It was just as well, because Sandy was not a particularly good teacher.
A typical lesson would see me sitting at the piano, hitting the wrong notes while Sandy winced in mock pain. He would then show me how to play it right, then he would play another piece to illustrate the mechanics of the first, and then another piece, and yet another, until he ended up playing his favourite songs to me, before ending the lesson with, ‘There, dear child, you see how really simple it is.’
After the lesson, I ate Sandy’s biscuits and drank Mazoe while he talked about the play he had seen that week. ‘You should have seen it, dear one – oh, the spectacle, the impact!’
We soon abandoned all pretence of lessons, and instead I sat while he showed me his albums of press cuttings. When he was feeling less cheerful, he talked at length about Eastern mysticism, about chakras and auras and transcendental meditation. He had also met Lord Lucan and dined with him on a tea estate in Kenya. ‘Sat there, he did, quiet as anything,’ Sandy said. ‘Not a peep from him. Not one blasted word to anyone the whole evening. Smoked a hundred cigarettes if he smoked one.’
With Liz I passed my time much more profitably, riding on the Umwinsidale downs or in her dog-smelling house, looking through her jockeys’ autographs. Pride of place went to Lester Piggott, Fernando Toro and Johnny Sellers, who had all been racing at one time or the other at Borrowdale Park.
I loved the story of the peppered moth. I did not see it then as science, but as a story, simplified in my mind so that I saw always the same moth fluttering through time, Biston betularia, the predominantly white-coloured moth with its dark speckles perching on the clean trees of pre-industrial England, more common and surviving longer than its predominantly black-coloured cousins.
Then, as mankind progressed and machines spewed the triumph of their industrial ingenuity into the countryside, soot collected on the trees and the black-coloured moths with white speckles prevailed over their white cousins, survived hidden from predatory birds, camouflaged by the soot of ages. And as England cleaned itself up again, the predominantly white-coloured moth reappeared.
I loved the story of the peppered moth because it seemed to me that it was the only creature that understood what it was to be black and white. Like the peppered moth, I adapted to my changing environments. Then Poppy had that last fateful stroke and died, and Lloyd and I met Zenzo and everything changed between us.
7
More than fifty women came in two trucks last Thursday, an unusually large number to arrive all at once. They chanted, danced and ululated as they entered the prison. The guards were forced to dispense with the usual routine.
Synodia’s voice was drowned out by the chanting and singing. They were simply herded into the cells as they were. There were not enough uniforms for all the women, so they were spared the humiliation of casting off their clothes while Mathilda and Patience examined their naked bodies.
They sang all night and stamped their feet. In the canteen in the morning, they shook
their bottoms at the guards as they performed vulgar dances to popular church songs, replacing the Satan of the original lyrics with the government.
Their arrival was our first real imitation of the upheavals outside Chikurubi. For the last year, the election has been just another thing happening outside, an external event that has little to do with our reality here. With these new prisoners, the election finally came to the prison. They were all supporters of the opposition party and had been rounded up by the police after a riot in one of the townships. Their frenzied denunciations of the government, their fearless confidence, were our first intimation that there might be change on the horizon.
The new prisoners had not learned that the only response is deference – instant and absolute deference – eyes down, humility in every movement, submission in the tone of voice. At the prayer meeting the next morning, the women interrupted Synodia with long and loud prayers interlaced with political slogans. When Synodia tried to lead them in a song, they openly defied her. Instead, they sang their own party songs. Two of the women stood with their backs to Synodia, shaking their bottoms in rhythm to the music.
At breakfast, they refused to eat the food and instead sang and jumped on the tables. Truncheons and whistles failed to quell the riot, and it was only after Synodia called for guards from the men’s section that any order was restored at all.
We spent the weekend in lockdown, leaving only when the guards from the male section came to shepherd us to meals. On Monday morning, the guards came back and pushed the new women roughly out of the cells and into the truck. I thought they were going to court, but Loveness told me that they were simply being moved to another place. ‘It’s how they deal with these opposition people,’ she said.
The Book of Memory Page 15