The Tin Heart Gold Mine

by Ruth Hartley

  Brendan grins.

  “You’re still young, aren’t you?”

  “Am I? Yes, maybe, and definitely still stupid!”

  Lara makes a wry face, annoyed with Brendan who is, after all, a little younger than she is. She berates herself, “I can’t bear the effort of selling my art any more – I don’t want to make art anymore – I don’t believe in myself any more – I don’t know what art is for anymore!” and the easy tears run down her face again.

  “You’ve been a successful artist, Lara.” Brendan says then he asks. “What’s different now? What happened to make Tim go away now? What changed for you both that has left you feeling so devastated?”

  Part Three

  The Safari Camp 1981

  Chapter One

  Chambeshi

  As soon as she stepped off the plane onto the scruffy unkempt apron at Chambeshi Airport, the smell of home, like the smell of oil paint, assaulted her nostrils with viridian energy, ochre drought, indigo rain and cadmium sunshine and Lara breathed with a deep happiness.

  “After art school though, Chambeshi felt less like home, too. Friends I used to know had left and there didn’t seem any place that I fitted in. I was still living at home and using Dad’s garage as a studio. I felt a bit like an overgrown pet dog.”

  The community which Lara knew best was the expatriate community in Chambeshi, but that also kept altering as people left or their children were sent off to school. Chambeshi was a vast landlocked country in Central Africa of which 70 percent was a non-agrarian wilderness. Its population was not large but, in the 25 years since Chambeshi had achieved independence, many people had shifted into densely populated shanty towns around the scruffy, urban work-in-progress known as Chambeshi City. Its government infrastructure, businesses and the farming and mining industries still depended on the skills and knowledge of a small expatriate community and the aid money attached to their services. Naturally Lara’s parents had good social connections with all the wheelers and dealers who make up such societies and they knew a couple, Bill and Maria, who had recently acquired a government concession to open a safari lodge in the famous Chambeshi National Park. In fact, Brian and Jane, both passionate about the bush, had taken Lara on camping holidays together with Bill and Maria every winter for as long as she could remember. Bill and Maria’s new lodge would operate only in the dry cold winter season, when it was possible to get equipment and vehicles across the rivers and into an area that would be a vast flood plain in the hot summer months of the rainy season. They could only offer seasonal work but it would be demanding. They needed to employ young people who were hardy enough to stand the heat and discomfort of the camp but who were sophisticated enough to cope with clients who had high expectations of comfort and service. Their employees would get some training but most learning would be on the job. By the end of the season they would be expected to take the clients out on game-viewing trips, to manage a four-wheel drive Land Cruiser in rough conditions, to know one end of a gun from another and to be able to use it in an emergency. They would have to recognise, identify and name birds, insects, plants and the smaller mammals. These kinds of skills could not all be picked up in one season, so Bill and Maria hoped that their employees would find some other work during the rains and be prepared to come back every year. Young people who already visited the National Park and had some previous knowledge from earlier visits and a real interest in wild life conservation would be more likely to fit in; otherwise it could be young people who had worked in other game reserves in other parts of Africa. Lara heard about the new camp during her last term at art school. She felt it was exactly what she wanted after three years in the grey of London winters. She had begged her parents to put her name up for one of the jobs even before she left London.

  “I will even cook, Mum!” she said, “I’ve been cooking for myself for the last three years in my digs.”

  Jane laughed, but she did admit that Lara had made a reasonable camp cook on the family’s frequent fishing trips. On one notable occasion, she had even made bread in a rough clay oven.

  “I’ll work for my keep, Mum,” Lara said.

  “That’s pretty much all you can expect,” Brian said drily.

  Lara got her job. Soon after she returned to Chambeshi, Maria collected her from her home in the city and they set off in a Land Cruiser packed with supplies on the long day’s journey into the river valley. Maria was a dusty-brown woman with blue eyes that, by contrast with her skin, seemed extraordinarily clear. Both she and Bill carried an aura of silence and spoke with the slow quietness that comes from years of solitary observation of wild creatures in remote places. Life in the bush had made them intensely practical. They accepted that nothing ever works out exactly as planned and the fine white creases around their eyes and mouths showed that they could laugh about it.

  The job wasn’t quite what Lara hoped. She was to look after the stores, see that orders were placed and fulfilled and help Maria plan the menus.

  “You’ll look after the herb garden. We’ll need fresh salads too. Know something about gardening?” Maria asked.

  “Mum’s taught me quite a lot,” Lara lied. She had watched her mother giving instructions to the two African men who kept their suburban plot trim and tidy.

  Lara had imagined herself out on game trips impressing the clients with her fantastic knowledge of wild life. Instead it seemed she was to be working at the camp helping Maria with the catering and laundry side of the business. Lara tried to hide her disappointed expression but Maria grinned.

  “Don’t worry; you get breaks outside the camp too. Guest comfort is our top priority. The chaps who do the game trips just don’t want to do this and they’re no good at it anyway. This is seriously an important job. Clients spend more time in bed or in the bar than in the bush. Wait and see.’’

  Lara hadn’t seen looking after people as a job. She felt sidelined and was surprised at the feeling of fury that began to burn inside her. Why was she different from the boys? Did this prove that the grumblings of feminism that she had ignored from Gillian were relevant to her also? What choices did she have? She had been through art school imagining that she could immediately make a living as an artist, found that not to be true, opted for a job that seemed both dangerously glamorous and uniquely demanding and here she was being asked to work as a junior housekeeper. Lara was used to winning – to having things work out well for her. She had won the grudging respect of her fellow students and achieved a good enough degree at art school. She had thought that if she bided her time now she could probably get to be a safari leader too.

  Maria watched her with a grin.

  “Yah, you tell me. It looks like us dames get the indoor jobs and the blokes get the real work but just wait till you meet some of the clients. You’ll be happy not to spend four hours in a jeep with some of them and then have to sit with them at meals and afterwards in the bar. Give it a go, girl!”

  “Oh I want to!” Lara insisted and she vowed to herself that she would be the best at everything she tried to do and then still be able do what she wanted to most of all.

  In fact Bill did most of the game trips in that first year. The camp was new, not yet well-known and Bill and Maria were hands-on until their new employees could prove their worth and become acclimatised. The team included two young men, Jason, a South African, who had a biology degree and had worked on game camps in Botswana and Zimbabwe, and Trevor, who had grown up on a farm in Somerset and had come straight from high school. They were enthusiastic young men, tough and physically adept. They needed to be all of that when driving out in the wild on rough tracks in vehicles that were not new and had been pushed to their limits on many previous occasions.

  Lara, Jason and Trevor looked each other over on their first meeting secretly assessing each other as possible sexual partners. Physically they were all fit and Jason passed the test of desir
ability as far as Lara was concerned. Instinct also meant that they looked for each others’ qualities and personality traits. Were they reliable, generous, intelligent, adaptable or selfish, insensitive and domineering? To discover these traits would take time. As yet Lara didn’t have much understanding of her own propensities and limitations but after her art school experiences she had a better insight into her own desires.

  Chapter Two

  Housekeeping in the Bush

  “You have to know what needs doing and – how to do it.” Maria said to Lara. “That means you have to do all the jobs yourself first. You have to teach the camp staff how to clean, make beds and so on. These guys come from local villages round here. They’ve never seen sheets and pillows or flush toilets or detergent. They wanna work but cleaning isn’t what men do around here. Give them respect, especially the older guys. Don’t tell them – show them how. African men and women live separate lives. Personal hygiene stuff is private. Naked bodies – y’know – tits is okay – normal y’know – they don’t mind that so much but nothing else. They work hard but they’re proud – insult any of them and there’s big trouble with all of them.’’

  Maria was a good mentor. Lara remembered Jane’s many house servants and thought with embarrassment of the humiliation they had been unwittingly subjected to by her mother as she stood over them while they cleaned the shit off the toilet bowls. No wonder they quit so regularly.

  Lara’s first winter in the valley was not as she dreamed. It was extremely hard work but she enjoyed herself much more than she could have imagined. She liked having responsibilities even if it was for housekeeping. In any case housekeeping in the bush was always a challenge. Frogs had to be lifted from the toilet pans, spiders from the basins, bats and swallows encouraged not to roost and nest among the roof joists of the bedrooms, snakes had to be caught and taken, without being harmed, some distance away.

  The camp site had once been a modest and very utilitarian hunting lodge consisting of a large room with a veranda on three sides and, circling it, a scatter of round brick huts thatched with elephant grass. Bill and Maria called them rondavels, a South African term for a traditional single round dwelling. The separate kitchen was a lock up storeroom with a roofed area over a wood stove and a sink on concrete blocks. Maria and Bill had added a toilet and shower onto each rondavel and put new mosquito-proof windows and a bar and veranda into the lodge. The area was fenced and grassed and a site chosen for a modest swimming pool and a barbecue area with a good view across the valley and the river. If the first couple of seasons went well, Maria and Bill had plans to expand and improve the camp.

  Maria was very happy to have Lara’s companionship in the camp while the men went out exploring the game reserve, looking at the rainy season damage to the rough roads and tracks that they would use with their clients and discovering what patterns of behaviour had been established by the various wild animals in the area. Bill and Maria had first come to the National Park as research biologists straight from university and they knew it very well indeed. Maria’s knowledge of the local creatures was as good as Bill’s and Lara learnt from her even while she was based in the camp. She could soon name all the birds and insects and small creatures that inhabited the vicinity.

  Next, Lara was employed to make the signs for the door of each rondavel and for the bar, then for the paths and trees. Lara made a wry face at using her artistic training and skills in this way. Experience had taught her that like many fine art students she didn’t necessarily have good design skills and that the commission might prove a disappointment. A delicate line drawing wouldn’t work but the drawing must be an accurate as well as an artistic portrayal of nature before she herself would be satisfied. She also knew that while she could fob off Bill and Maria with second rate work she wouldn’t be able to live with it. They imagined she could do it quickly but she was a perfectionist who hated to compromise. Maria had several suggestions about names for each hut.

  “Little creatures or birds I think,” she said. “Not the big five – lion, leopard, rhino, buffalo and elephant – thought we’ll also show the clients lizards, squirrels and frogs – any little animal specific to the camp area.”

  “That’s a nice idea,” Lara responded. “Have to think what other art materials I have that won’t fade though and that also suit my style.”

  When Bill gave her wooden boards to use and some gloss house paint Lara could see the surface would be difficult to work on but it also gave her an idea. She would make little painted reliefs and each sign would be placed in a position on the hut that was appropriate to the creature’s habitat. The surfaces she had to work on were crude. She would have to use acrylic paints and glues and simplify the images without falsifying them. The signs took much longer than Bill expected, but Lara did them well. Each rondavel had a lively patterned creature caught at the moment before it vanished from sight. A blue-headed lizard clung to the edge of the sign, a sun squirrel flicked its tail as it darted away, a bush baby stared out as it clutched the sign with damp fingers. Lara made the signs appear three-dimensional by incorporating twigs, bark and stones onto them.

  She had worked from her own sketches and these earned such admiration from everyone at the camp that she was encouraged to make more for herself. Her folders filled up with paper covered in ink, brush and crayon. Hasty quick drawings based on fleeting observations. She had to keep looking, keep remembering, nothing stood still for her – the work was all about movement and change in light and shadow.

  Jason and Trevor had started camp life sleeping in the storeroom with the camp provisions but then were moved into a large tent together. Lara was given the most tumbledown of the rondavels all to herself. She was lucky, she thought, and she cleared a space to use as a studio and improvised a table from a plank and concrete blocks and an easel from some thin tree branches. Midday in the valley was unbearably hot. After lunch the clients usually took a long siesta. Lara spent this time drawing and painting. There was no electricity in the valley. After dark a generator provided light in the dining area and guest rooms, but was turned off when the bar closed. The gas camping light was not good enough for Lara to work at night. In any case the light cast on the white paper attracted so many insects that Lara had to keep brushing them away, which meant she often smudged her work.

  Chapter Three

  Brendan 1997

  “I was so busy I didn’t have much time to make art while I was in the bush. I was frustrated by that – felt as if I was disabled somehow. My hands would start drawing at the first opportunity even before my brain knew what I was trying to do – as soon as I had paper and something to make a mark with I would scribble madly. I kept seeing things I needed to make notes about or sketch – always carried a sketch book and pen – a habit from art school – though pencils were less likely to let me down and I could always sharpen them. I carried a penknife everywhere. Drawing where people can see what you’re up to is a real problem – they always want to talk about it while instead you need to have the head space not to explain or speak. You are in a different world while you are working – even grunting or going “uhuh” is distracting. Also you need to work your way into a sketch – there are so many you discard or keep only as a reference – so many lines that are tentative or light before you can make those powerful marks in the right way. I couldn’t be rude to the clients – can’t believe how many would ask me to draw something for them like I was a performing monkey or something. Then of course there is the flattery which is not a bit helpful.”

  “It was so dusty and dirty – There were lots of little creatures that walked across my paper – or ate it – termites would eat anything that you left undisturbed for a day or two. I didn’t have an endless supply of materials either.”

  “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to turn into drawings either. The skies are vast – the landscapes ever changing and huge – no creature stays still for long – there
was so much observation required. The photos I took were most unsatisfactory and I didn’t want to tap into professional wildlife photos – that was their personal vision not mine. Everything I attempted was very experimental. It was only when I got back to the city and shut myself into the studio that I realised I had actually begun to know what wild animals looked like and how they moved. Only then could I make my hand begin to translate my knowledge into real drawings – the paintings would come later. It was also then that I first began to look at all the smudges, the mistakes, the holes made by insects, their tracks across the paper and see them as something I could use and learn from and incorporate into my work.

  “I so loved what I was doing. I so loved the bush.”

  Chapter Four

  At Home

  Lara’s first season ended too soon for her. She had made no plans to look for any other work, rather hoping that Bill and Maria would take her on the following season. Her hopes were met. Trevor had decided to return to England to study environmental sciences so Maria and Bill asked her to stay on for an extra month and then return a month earlier the following year. They said that they might need her help for part-time jobs over the rainy season if she felt able to stay on those conditions. Lara said yes, of course. Then she told her parents that she wanted to spend Christmas with them and stay on afterwards until the next safari season. Jane raised her eyebrows a little but Brian looked pleased.

  “It’s only for the time being”, Lara reassured them.