by Boyd Varty
By the time Mom was living full-time in the bush, she had, in usual Shan style, expanded her résumé to include receptionist, chef, housekeeper, hostess, scullery maid, chambermaid, bartender, driver, human resources director, doctor, counselor, chemist, midwife, nurse, and gardener. Nine years later, Mom’s father called her in for a talk. “I need to ask you a question,” he said. “Do you think that guy’s ever going to marry you, or are you going to keep investing all this time and all this work?”
Mom must have been wondering the same thing, because the next year, twenty-five-year-old Shan Watson at last drew a line in the sand. “I have had enough,” she told my dad one morning. “This is now ten years of me doing, giving, creating, being the bloody backbone, never getting any of the glory, standing and cooking when everyone else is having fun. I’ve had enough. I’m out of here. But before I leave, I’m going on a few game drives. In fact, I am going on one tonight!”
Dad said, “But you can’t.”
Mom was flabbergasted. “Why not?”
“Well, I’ve got a full Land Rover, and it’s very important people.”
“Well, you tell them to get off that car because I’m going on a ride.”
Dad looked at Mom with big eyes. She stomped off and told all her mates, the unsung female support staff—by that time, there were two other women—“I’ve had enough, I’m out of here.”
Late that afternoon, she climbed into the back of the Land Rover for her game drive, giving one of her friends an earful: “I am up to here—” At drinks time, they stopped at the beautiful watering hole called Winnis’s Wallows. A full moon was rising. Dad came around to the back, reached up, and grabbed Mom’s hand. “Will you marry me?”
She looked down at him, thoroughly startled. “What?”
Dad said it again: “Will you marry me?”
“If you are serious, get on your knee and ask me properly.”
He got down on his knee and said for a third time, “Will you marry me?” He got no answer. They drove back to camp.
In all those ten years, Dad had never told Mom that he loved her. She was his best friend, his this, his that. But a declaration of love was something he reserved for a wife-to-be.
That night he held her hand. “So?”
She looked at him with grave hazel eyes. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious.”
Mom came to a decision. “Well, Davey, if you’re serious, we’ll go down to the office. I want it in writing.”
At this point in the story, Mom is likely to break out the actual tourist’s disclaimer form and turn it over to read: “I, David Varty, would like to marry you, Shan Watson, on”—at that point they had to go to the reservations book and come back and fill in the date—“15th of August, 1980.”
Once Dave had signed the form, Mom said, “Done.” She went back to all her mates. “So, Shanny,” they asked, “did you tell Davey you’re leaving us?”
She said, “No, we’re getting married.”
More than anything, visionaries need believers, people who keep them connected with the earth. That’s what my mom has been for my father. From the start, they complemented each other’s strengths. He could put the building up; she could invest it with feeling by adding the perfect touches. He could muster the group; she would make each individual feel cared for. The funny thing about leaders is that everyone sees them as leaders except for the people closest to them, who see them as human. It was my mother to whom my father turned for reassurance in the middle of the night.
In the face of all the hardship of getting their small safari business off the ground, Shan never blinked. “Be a chef? Well, I’ve never cooked a damn thing, but no prob.” “Oh, you want me to prepare this warthog with bristling jowl hair for Christmas dinner? Well, why not? I’m sure the guests will love it.” Once she tried to cook a warthog on a spit, but by the time it was ready to serve, hours later, the flies had gotten to it and it was teeming with maggots.
Mom remained unflappable. For a time, a landowner in the area banned the reserve from using a section of road, throwing up a wire fence that made it impossible to ferry guests from the nearby airstrip to the lodge. Mom’s solution was to pilot the Landi full of guests up to a section of the park fence, haul out a large pair of secateurs, cut through the fence, drive the guests through, hop back out to mend the fence with some wire improvisation, then be on her merry way—all the while smiling innocently at the guests like this was the most natural procedure in the world.
Her equanimity was shattered one day when Dad started experiencing chest pain so massive that everyone assumed he was having a heart attack. Even Dad thought he was going to die. They flew him to nearby Nelspruit—some seventy-five miles away—where he was put in the ICU. Mom, then his terrified bride-to-be, accompanied him. When Uncle John found out, he too was frantic. He drove like a bat out of hell to a nearby lodge and buttonholed the helicopter pilot there, screaming, “You’ve got to fly me to Nelspruit!”
“Listen,” the pilot told him, “I don’t even know who you are! I’m not taking you.” John decked him. When the pilot revived, Uncle John persuaded him to fly the helicopter despite his own rash behavior. They landed in the hospital garden. Mom was relieved to have Uncle John on the scene; it meant she could fall apart a bit. But then John worried that he, too, might be having a heart attack. He started doing jumping jacks and toe touches on the tarmac, “to get his blood flowing” to ward off the nonexistent attack. Then he flew into action, storming the hospital corridors. “Where’s my brother! Where in damnation is Dave Varty! Get me Christiaan Barnard! I want him flown here now!” In a crisis, Uncle John can sometimes be more of a liability because he screams and shouts, but if you need a door kicked down, he’s your man.
It turned out that Dad had a serious case of pericarditis—inflammation of the sac around the heart—and pleurisy. When he awoke in the ICU with Mom by his side, he told her, “I love you. I don’t ever again want to wake up without you by my side.”
They were married on August 15, 1980, with John as best man.
It has always amazed me that Mom was Londolozi’s first executive chef. The kitchen is not her strong point, although she can take a tough impala leg and turn it into a creditable breakfast, lunch, or supper. And she’s an absolutely brilliant manager, commanding Spook Sithole and Simeon, Londolozi’s gifted but wildly unpredictable resident cooks, with amazing results.
Back then, Dad and Uncle John raced through life with their heads in the clouds. Mom was the more practical one. She provided a semblance of order beneath all the chaos.
The Shangaan people loved her. It wasn’t unusual to find her unpacking and repacking a metal outdoor storage container five times on a scorching day. The Shangaans would stare at her in awe; they’d never seen a white woman work this hard.
My sister, Bron, was born in May 1982. Becoming a new mother did little to slow Shan down. Practically speaking, she couldn’t afford to, anyway; the business was in such a precarious state. Guests had graduated from mud huts to chalets with running water and en suite bathrooms. A swimming pool had gone in. There was a growing infrastructure and influx of guests to oversee. In the tradition of white South African mothers, Mom handed Bron over into the care of Lucy, a Shangaan nanny, and went back to work.
In midmorning, Dad would sometimes come back from taking guests on a game drive and assume child-care duties for a few hours after Lucy had gone home, so that Mom could have a nap. He would zip an infant Bronwyn into his large bush jacket, which smelled thickly of him and rain and soil. She would bake in his warmth while he lay on the bed, allegedly to rock her to calmness, but in minutes he’d fall fast asleep while she gurgled at him, alert and content, as galaxies of dust particles drifted through the beams of sunlight that cut through the cracks in our air-brick house.
I came along eighteen months after Bron. My parents had plucked a name for me out of the ether: Craig. In Shangaan culture, they say that a child will sometimes
cry for his name, ceasing his wailing only when he is taken to the sangoma, who will then tell the parents that an ancestor’s name is trying to come through the child. When my mother looked at me, she could never call me Craig. My ancestors cried through me and I was eventually named Boyd, after my great-grandfather Charles Boyd and my grandfather Boyd. A hint of my father’s father’s adventurous spirit has walked with me ever since. I wonder if he, too, noticed the arch of the ebony tree’s black bark above the greenery of the Sand River or how the paleness of the midwinter light makes you feel as if nature is whispering intimate secrets to you.
Mom attacked motherhood in the bush the same way she attacked everything else: with an enormous sense of practicality and flair for improvisation. You couldn’t just run to the local pediatrician—the closest one was seventy-five miles away—so she kept a scale upstairs to weigh us every fourteen days, and she’d phone the doctor with the results. “Are we making progress? Are we on the right track?” She set up smart, practical structures and routines, which I found enormously comforting. As a small boy, I’d come into her room at five or six in the morning, when she’d still be in her jammies, with a tea tray waiting. “Come in, my chicken,” she’d say. I’d jump on the bed, telling her, “Maga teea” in Shangaan, as I’d learned from Lucy. Make me tea. After breakfast I’d play with the sticks and rocks I always carried in my pockets or haul around my model stegosaurus while she pottered around. At ten, Bron and I would have juice in the garden and she’d hand us off to Lucy.
Mom and Lucy trusted each other completely. Lucy was a large woman with a broad smile, a gap between her teeth, and a laugh that gurgled out of her. She was solid in a way that is uniquely African, the fat of her body firm as an inflated pontoon, her hands amazingly strong from years of manual labor. When I was very, very small, Lucy would tie me onto her back with a towel and sing to me: Tula tula tula, tula tula tula. The lilting tune had no beginning or end and was as soothing as a comforting balm. With one cheek pressed against her back, I might have had a limited perspective, but wrapped warmly in a towel, drifting off to sleep, I felt as safe as when I was tucked into bed by my own mother.
Lucy was part oracle, part enforcer. If Bronwyn wanted me to do something, she had only to place “Lucy said” in front of it and I’d hop to it. (She once told me, “Lucy said you could use the cardboard center of the toilet paper roll” because she was too lazy to go fetch the toilet paper I’d requested.) Anytime the smile faded from Lucy’s face, the stark contrast to her usual beaming grin made Bron and me concerned.
Lucy watched Bronwyn, and Bron, in turn, had the responsibility of looking out for me. In Africa there is nothing unusual in putting a small girl in charge of a very small boy. I still love to sit in rural villages now and watch the hierarchy of care play out in direct proportion to height. Survival here is about everyone contributing, no matter their age; the environment is too harsh for coddling. I once came upon an eight-year-old Masai boy shepherding his cattle, with no adult for miles around. We were all expected simply to get on with it.
Bron and I were left largely to entertain ourselves while Mom or Lucy busied themselves nearby. In the summertime in Africa, November through April, it’s bright and hot by six-thirty in the morning. The cicadas would be buzzing in the trees, and pearl-colored butterflies already making the rounds in the garden. It would be months before we could even think of a sweater or jacket again. I was happy in my own company, chasing a wasp as he made his rounds in our garden or watching the tenacious ants dedicate an entire day to walking up the pillars of the house; I found fulfillment in the company of a party of birds as they drifted silently through the garden. All the toys I needed were there for the foraging. Ant lions in their little conical sand holes absorbed hours of my time. I dropped large red ants into the traps and watched their doomed, primal struggle for survival. I spent most of my time immersed in wonder, oblivious to a big sister in charge of my safety.
Mom would come home to have lunch with us before returning to work. She’d be home for good at teatime, when we’d do crafts together, play in the yard, or go swimming in the river.
Sitting outside their huts in the village, the staff members idled wherever there was shade, sucking on summer mangoes and making little pyramids out of lychee skins. Bron and I likewise spent our summer days with a sticky layer of fruit juice dried into goo across our faces. And when the sun got too hot to bear, we would run through the sprinkler in the garden before being banished to the cool, dark recesses of our room to sleep out the afternoon.
“Mom, it’s too hot to sleep,” complained Bron, twirling one finger in her hair and sucking another, as she always did when she was tired or grumpy.
“Just put a wet towel over yourself and be still” was Mom’s answer.
I’d wake with what wisps of hair I had (I was practically bald as a child) plastered wetly to my head, in a horrible mood. Nothing could shake this ill humor from me until Mom picked me up and cradled me under her chin, giving me a chance to gather myself. Then I had my tea. Mom used to call it my “bad hour.”
Despite the discomfort of the summer heat, I felt connected to the universe and I knew who I was in the warmth of the moment, worshipping a mango.
The bush in the summer literally fizzes with energy, the sound of bees, wasps, wood borer beetles, and cicadas embodying the frequency of life. In the afternoons Dad and Mom would take me and Bron out into the bush. Lulled by the rocking of the Land Rover, with the scents of the summer grasses and sages crushed under the wheels and the whirring of dung beetles as they cruised the summer air, I’d often fall asleep on the front seat. I’d wake up with my head on Mom’s legs. Bron would be on Dad’s lap, steering the Land Rover as he sang to her, the words of the songs drifting with our thoughts, each of us lost in our own worlds.
Sometimes we would stop at our favorite pan, or watering hole, next to a termite mound that had a sharp ridge for a top and two conical sections that gave it the look of a rhino. Dad would stop the Landi, have a good look around for predators, and then say, “Okay, go for it!” and off Bron and I would run to ride our rhino.
As the afternoon wore on, rays of religious light arched across the sky, and the world became washed in sepia tones of yellows and golds that deepened until the vibrancy of the colors seemed impossible. The day seemed to hang suspended for a long moment as the sun tiptoed along the ridge of the mountains and everything began to recede into a mood thick as treacle. Then, in a moment made more sudden by the preceding slowness, the sun dipped in a trail of blues, rippling out from the horizon into an eventual faint purple that was the transition from day into dusk.
A pair of frogs perched on the picture frames in the living room. They were like ornaments that moved around the house, as if by a poltergeist; Bron and I never knew where they might appear next. They croaked before it rained, like an early warning system. The flies that zipped in through the front door to escape the heat of the day would beat themselves against the windowpanes, pushing against an invisible barrier with all their frantic force, perhaps thinking that pure rage could make a whole wall move. An aura of moths rotated in a mist around what they thought was the moon, duped by an artificial porch lamp. The lizards roamed the courtyard like shrunken dinosaurs, pouncing on insects that had wounded themselves in the nightclub atmosphere under the porch lamps. The geckos likewise gorged at the lamps. I took the animals’ stories as my stories. I believed I, too, could move walls with pure force, that the porch light was the truth of the moon.
Immersed in nature, I knew I was a part of God’s creation. They say that spiritual experience creates the illusion that we’re connected to everything. I’ve always felt that spiritual experience is dropping the illusion that we’re not. Growing up at Londolozi nourished that sense in me from my earliest years.
Mom and Dad often had to visit with the guests in the boma in the evening, leaving me and Bron in Lucy’s care. Sometimes we would go to the boma with Mom and Dad, and Bron and I would
play in the river sand that made up the boma floor. When we began to tire, Mom would take us to a nest she’d devised of pool lounge chairs and blankets just outside the circle of firelight where the guests dined. She’d make a big show of tucking us in, and we would fall asleep with the scent of burning wood under a bowl of stars, knowing that Mom and Dad were close. It was a gentle time, and we were the beloved young ones of the village.
I was happiest, though, when Mom put me into my own bed herself and sang to me, soft and lilting: “The sun’s gone away and the moon’s not come / And the lambs and the kids they have all gone home. / And the stars are twinkling up in the sky / And it’s time for Boydie to go bye bye bye.”
I had a sense of being loved but not terribly fussed over when I was a child. Worrying over small imperfections while living in the bush would be a recipe for madness. After all, Mom had two babies in diapers at a time when the house had no electricity. Sterilizing bottles and nappies was a huge job, requiring a great drum of hot water—what we called a donkey boiler. I always wore Bron’s hand-me-downs—with two kids eighteen months apart, Mom wasn’t going to waste anything, and she refused to get too technical about which baby wore what. She just plucked clothes from the pile, and if I ended up in a pink shirt now and again, no worries.
As Londolozi became more successful, Mom’s wardrobe necessarily expanded. There were stylish dresses, even the occasional glamorous gown, for when she needed to travel abroad to conferences as our ambassador or play hostess to a gala in one of the camps. But she always seemed to prefer her standard uniform of a crisp white oxford shirt, practical khaki pants, and white takkies, or sneakers.