“All the crops finished. Nothing left,” he said.
But the gongs were still beating, the men still shouting, and Margaret asked: “Why do you go on with it, then?”
“The main swarm isn’t settling. They are heavy with eggs. They are looking for a place to settle and lay. If we can stop the main body settling on our farm, that’s everything. If they get a chance to lay their eggs, we are going to have everything eaten flat with hoppers later on.” He picked a stray locust off his shirt and split it down with his thumbnail—it was clotted inside with eggs. “Imagine that multiplied by millions. You ever seen a hopper swarm on the march? Well, you’re lucky.”
Margaret thought an adult swarm was bad enough. Outside now the light on the earth was a pale, thin yellow, clotted with moving shadows; the clouds of moving insects thickened and lightened like driving rain. Old Stephen said, “They’ve got the wind behind them, that’s something.”
“Is it very bad?” asked Margaret fearfully, and the old man said emphatically: “We’re finished. This swarm may pass over, but once they’ve started, they’ll be coming down from the North now one after another. And then there are the hoppers—it might go on for two or three years.”
Margaret sat down helplessly, and thought: Well, if it’s the end, it’s the end. What now? We’ll all three have to go back to town. . . . But at this, she took a quick look at Stephen, the old man who had farmed forty years in this country, been bankrupt twice, and she knew nothing would make him go and become a clerk in the city. Yet her heart ached for him, he looked so tired, the worry lines deep from nose to mouth. Poor old man. . . . He had lifted up a locust that had got itself somehow into his pocket, holding it in the air by one leg. “You’ve got the strength of a steel-spring in those legs of yours,” he was telling the locust, good-humouredly. Then, although he had been fighting locusts, squashing locusts, yelling at locusts, sweeping them in great mounds into the fires to burn for the last three hours, nevertheless he took this one to the door and carefully threw it out to join its fellows, as if he would rather not harm a hair of its head. This comforted Margaret; all at once she felt irrationally cheered. She remembered it was not the first time in the last three years the man had announced their final and irremediable ruin.
“Get me a drink, lass,” he then said, and she set the bottle of whisky by him.
In the meantime, out in the pelting storm of insects, her husband was banging the gong, feeding the fires with leaves, the insects clinging to him all over—she shuddered. “How can you bear to let them touch you?” she asked. He looked at her, disapproving. She felt suitably humble—just as she had when he had first taken a good look at her city self, hair waved and golden, nails red and pointed. Now she was a proper farmer’s wife, in sensible shoes and a solid skirt. She might even get to letting locusts settle on her-—in time.
Having tossed back a whisky or two, old Stephen went back into the battle, wading now through glistening brown waves of locusts.
Five o’clock. The sun would set in an hour. Then the swarm would settle. It was as thick overhead as ever. The trees were ragged mounds of glistening brown.
Margaret began to cry. It was all so hopeless—if it wasn’t a bad season, it was locusts; if it wasn’t locusts, it was army-worm or veld fires. Always something. The rustling of the locust armies was like a big forest in the storm; their settling on the roof was like the beating of the rain; the ground was invisible in a sleek, brown, surging tide—it was like being drowned in locusts, submerged by the loathsome brown flood. It seemed as if the roof might sink in under the weight of them, as if the door might give in under their pressure and these rooms fill with them—and it was getting so dark . . . she looked up. The air was thinner; gaps of blue showed in the dark, moving clouds. The blue spaces were cold and thin—the sun must be setting. Through the fog of insects she saw figures approaching. First old Stephen, marching bravely along, then her husband, drawn and haggard with weariness. Behind them the servants. All were crawling all over with insects. The sound of the gongs had stopped. She could hear nothing but the ceaseless rustle of a myriad wings.
The two men slapped off the insects and came in.
“Well,” said Richard, kissing her on the cheek, “the main swarm has gone over.”
“For the Lord’s sake,” said Margaret angrily, still half-crying, “what’s here is bad enough, isn’t it?” For although the evening air was no longer black and thick, but a clear blue, with a pattern of insects whizzing this way and that across it, everything else—trees, buildings, bushes, earth, was gone under the moving brown masses.
“If it doesn’t rain in the night and keep them here—if it doesn’t rain and weight them down with water, they’ll be off in the morning at sunrise.”
“We’re bound to have some hoppers. But not the main swarm—that’s something.”
Margaret roused herself, wiped her eyes, pretended she had not been crying, and fetched them some supper, for the servants were too exhausted to move. She sent them down to the compound to rest.
She served the supper and sat listening. There is not one maize plant left, she heard. Not one. The men would get the planters out the moment the locusts had gone. They must start all over again.
But what’s the use of that, Margaret wondered, if the whole farm was going to be crawling with hoppers? But she listened while they discussed the new government pamphlet that said how to defeat the hoppers. You must have men out all the time, moving over the farm to watch for movement in the grass. When you find a patch of hoppers, small lively black things, like crickets, then you dig trenches around the patch or spray them with poison from pumps supplied by the Government. The Government wanted them to cooperate in a world plan for eliminating this plague forever. You should attack locusts at the source. Hoppers, in short. The men were talking as if they were planning a war, and Margaret listened, amazed.
In the night it was quiet; no sign of the settled armies outside, except sometimes a branch snapped, or a tree could be heard crashing down.
Margaret slept badly in the bed beside Richard, who was sleeping like the dead, exhausted with the afternoon’s fight. In the morning she woke to yellow sunshine lying across the bed—clear sunshine, with an occasional blotch of shadow moving over it. She went to the window. Old Stephen was ahead of her. There he stood outside, gazing down over the bush. And she gazed, astounded—and entranced, much against her will. For it looked as if every tree, every bush, all the earth, were lit with pale flames. The locusts were fanning their wings to free them of the night dews. There was a shimmer of red-tinged gold light everywhere.
She went out to join the old man, stepping carefully among the insects. They stood and watched. Overhead the sky was blue, blue and clear.
“Pretty,” said old Stephen, with satisfaction.
Well, thought Margaret, we may be ruined, we may be bankrupt, but not everyone has seen an army of locusts fanning their wings at dawn.
Over the slopes, in the distance, a faint red smear showed in the sky, thickened and spread. “There they go,” said old Stephen. “There goes the main army, off south.”
And now from the trees, from the earth all round them, the locusts were taking wing. They were like small aircraft, manoeuvring for the take-off, trying their wings to see if they were dry enough. Off they went. A reddish-brown steam was rising off the miles of bush, off the lands, the earth. Again the sunlight darkened.
And as the clotted branches lifted, the weight on them lightening, there was nothing but the black spines of branches, trees. No green left, nothing. All morning they watched, the three of them, as the brown crust thinned and broke and dissolved, flying up to mass with the main army, now a brownish-red smear in the southern sky. The lands which had been filmed with green, the new tender mealie plants, were stark and bare. All the trees stripped. A devastated landscape. No green, no green anywhere.
By midday the reddish cloud had gone. Only an occasional locust flopped down. On the ground
were the corpses and the wounded. The African labourers were sweeping these up with branches and collecting them in tins.
“Ever eaten sun-dried locust?” asked old Stephen. “That time twenty years ago, when I went broke, I lived on mealie meal and dried locusts for three months. They aren’t bad at all—rather like smoked fish, if you come to think of it.”
But Margaret preferred not even to think of it.
After the midday meal the men went off to the lands. Everything was to be replanted. With a bit of luck another swarm would not come travelling down just this way. But they hoped it would rain very soon, to spring some new grass, because the cattle would die otherwise—there was not a blade of grass left on the farm. As for Margaret, she was trying to get used to the idea of three or four years of locusts. Locusts were going to be like bad weather, from now on, always imminent. She felt like a survivor after war—if this devastated and mangled countryside was not ruin, well, what then was ruin?
But the men ate their supper with good appetites.
“It could have been worse,” was what they said. “It could be much worse.”
Flavours of Exile
AT THE foot of the hill, near the well, was the vegetable garden, an acre fenced off from the Big Field where the earth was so rich that mealies grew there, year after year, ten feet tall. Nursed from that fabulous soil, carrots, lettuces, beets, tasting as I have never found vegetables taste since, loaded our table and the tables of our neighbours. Sometimes, if the garden boy was late with the supply for lunch, I would run down the steep pebbly path through the trees at the back of the hill and along the red dust of the waggon road until I could see the windlass under its shed of thatch. There I stopped. The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds—rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jewelled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes. Around the fence grew lemons, pawpaws, bananas—shapes of gold and yellow in their patterns of green.
In another five minutes I would be dragging from the earth carrots ten inches long, so succulent they snapped between two fingers. I ate my allowance of these before the cook could boil them and drown them in the white flour sauce without which—and unless they were served in the large china vegetable dishes brought from that old house in London—they were not carrots to my mother.
For her, that garden represented a defeat.
When the family first came to the farm, she built vegetable beds on the kopje near the house. She had in her mind, perhaps, a vision of the farmhouse surrounded by outbuildings and gardens like a hen sheltering its chicks.
The kopje was all stone. As soon as the grass was cleared off its crown where the house stood, the fierce rains beat the soil away. Those first vegetable beds were thin sifted earth walled by pebbles. The water was brought up from the well in the water-cart.
“Water is gold,” grumbled my father, eating peas which, he reckoned, must cost a shilling a mouthful. “Water is gold!” he came to shout at last, as my mother toiled and bent over those reluctant beds. But she got more pleasure from them than she ever did from the exhaustless plenty of the garden under the hill.
At last, the spaces in the bush where the old beds had been were seeded by wild or vagrant plants, and we children played there. Someone must have thrown away gooseberries, for soon the low-spreading bushes covered the earth. We used to creep under them, William MacGregor and I, lie flat on our backs, and look through the leaves at the brilliant sky, reaching around us for the tiny sharp-sweet yellow fruits in their jackets of papery white. The smell of the leaves was spicy. It intoxicated us. We would laugh and shout, then quarrel; and William, to make up, shelled a double-handful of the fruit and poured it into my skirt, and we ate together, pressing the biggest berries on each other. When we could eat no more, we filled baskets and took them to the kitchen to be made into that rich jam, which, if allowed to burn just the right amount on the pan, is the best jam in the world—clear sweet amber, with lumps of sticky sharpness in it, as if the stings of bees were preserved in honey.
But my mother did not like it. “Cape gooseberries!” she said bitterly. “They aren’t gooseberries at all. Oh, if I could let you taste a pie made of real English gooseberries.”
In due course, the marvels of civilisation made this possible; she found a tin of gooseberries in the Greek store at the station and made us a pie.
My parents and William’s ate the pie with a truly religious emotion.
It was this experience with the gooseberries that made me cautious when it came to Brussels sprouts. Year after year my mother yearned for Brussels sprouts, whose name came to represent to me something exotic and forever unattainable. When at last she managed to grow half a dozen spikes of this plant in one cold winter that offered us sufficient frost, she of course sent a note to the MacGregors, so that they might share the treat. They came from Glasgow, they came from Rome, and they could share the language of nostalgia. At the table the four grownups ate the bitter little cabbages and agreed that the soil of Africa was unable to grow food that had any taste at all. I said scornfully that I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. But William, three years older than myself, passed the plate up and said he found them delicious. It was like a betrayal; and afterwards I demanded how he could like such flavourless stuff. He smiled at me and said it cost us nothing to pretend, did it?
That smile, so gentle, a little whimsical, was a lesson to me; and I remembered it when it came to the affair of the cherries. She found a tin of cherries at the store, we ate them with cream; and while she sighed over memories of barrows loaded with cherries in the streets of London, I sighed with her, ate fervently, and was careful not to meet her eyes.
And when she said: “The pomegranates will be fruiting soon,” I offered to run down and see how they progressed. I returned from the examination saying: “It won’t be long now, really it won’t—perhaps next year.”
The truth was, my emotion over the pomegranates was not entirely due to the beautiful lesson in courtesy given me by William. Brussels sprouts, cherries, English gooseberries—they were my mother’s; they recurred in her talk as often as “a real London peasouper,” or “chestnuts by the fire,” or “cherry blossom at Kew.” I no longer grudged these to her; I listened and was careful not to show that my thoughts were on my own inheritance of veld and sun. But pomegranates were an exotic for my mother; and therefore more easily shared with her. She had been in Persia, where, one understood, pomegrante juice ran in rivers. The wife of a minor official, she had lived in a vast stone house cooled by water trickling down a thousand stone channels from the mountains; she had lived among roses and jasmine, walnut trees and pomegranates. But, unfortunately, for too short a time.
Why not pomegranates here, in Africa? Why not?
The four trees had been planted at the same time as the first vegetable beds; and almost at once two of them died. A third lingered on for a couple of seasons and then succumbed to the white ants. The fourth stood lonely among the Cape gooseberry bushes, bore no fruit, and at last was forgotten.
Then one day my mother was showing Mrs. MacGregor her chickens; and as they returned through tangles of grass and weed, their skirts lifted high in both hands, my mother exclaimed: “Why, I do believe the pomegranate is fruiting at last. Look, look, it is!” She called to us, the children, and we went running, and stood around a small thorny tree, and looked at a rusty-red fruit the size of a child’s fist. “It’s ripe,” said my mother, and pulled it off.
Inside the house we were each given a dozen small seeds on saucers. They were bitter, but we did not like to ask for sugar. Mrs. MacGregor said gently: “It’s wonderful. How you must miss all that!”
“The roses!” said my mother. “And sacks of walnuts . . . and we used to drink pomegranate juice with the melted snow water . . . nothing here tastes lik
e that. The soil is no good.”
African Stories Page 70