African Laughter

by Doris Lessing

  And now we were in Banket itself, grown to a little town, with the old Banket, ‘the Station’ visible only to the eye of History–mine. Then the centre of ‘the Station’ was a long low narrow strip of building like a shed with verandahs, called Dardagan’s, the Greek who owned the hotel, the butcher’s, the grocery, the kaffir truck store. A little room at the north end of the brick line was the butcher’s, with its zinc counter and the great metal hooks behind it where the bloody joints dangled. Outside, under the tree at the back, they cut up an ox or a cow, with its four stomachs spilling out sweet-smelling cud. A fly-covered carcass might be hanging from a tree. After the butchery, came the store, the next along the verandah, with its tinned fruits, its bully beef and its biscuits, and too, the bolts of cotton stuff. Sacks of sugar, flour, mealie meal, stood about on the cement floor, and trickles of tiny black ants had to be swept up by the store ‘boy’, always vigilant for these foragers. Next to the store on the same verandah, was the hotel, which consisted of the bar and the half dozen tables to provide meals for the commercial travellers or people going north to Northern Rhodesia. The bar, like all country hotels, was the moneymaker, with people in it, mostly men, every night. There were a couple of bedrooms. The kaffir truck store was separated from this building by a few yards.

  Here, on the verandah a half-grown girl dusty from having walked in the seven miles from the farm stood and looked through the fly-wire-screened door at a commercial traveller all long burned legs and burned arms and throat and in the khaki shorts and shirt worn by the farmers he visited selling cattle dip and wire and creosote and paint. He was sitting extended, legs out, so the chair under him was like a tilting temporary prop while he ate his way seriously and fast through a whole packet of Marie biscuits, and gulped the orange-red tea, strong enough to rip the lining off any stomach, and often wiped the sweat off his face: it was hot under that corrugated iron. The girl from the farm stood staring at a world of unattainable sophistication: a man who appeared on this verandah and then jumped back into his car and sped to stations further along the line, or to Lusaka, or back to Salisbury, a man who moved, just as he liked, and–it was necessary for the adolescent to believe this–chose a woman to share his bed when he did stop for the night. The fact was, since it was the 1930s, and the Slump, the traveller had grabbed hold of a job he was lucky to get, and he had a wife working somewhere as matron or housekeeper–anywhere she could have the children during school holidays. The traveller felt the pressure of that hungry stare, looked up and was just able to discern through the glare against the screen, the shape of a girl. Looking more closely, adjusting his gaze to the dazzle on the wire gauze, he saw she had long burned legs ending in ‘veldschoen’–those ancestors of the shoes known as hush puppies, and bare burned arms; a .22 rifle dangled from her hand, and her dress, incongruously, was a neat little number smart enough for town. For she had brought into the butcher six guineafowl, shot from the vast flocks that covered the farm with their clinking and their movement, running like dark shadows through the bush until they lifted themselves into the air to settle in the trees away from that pursuer, the .22. For the six guineafowl she had been paid just enough to buy a cotton dress-length from the store, which she would run up that night on the sewing machine in her bedroom–a dress that proved she was grown-up. But if this man actually came to open the gauze door, the girl would be gone, for she needed to watch, to observe, to dream, and the last thing she hoped for was a conversation which, she knew, would diminish the traveller into some captive of necessity, like her own parents.

  These little strips of building now stood locked and empty, ready to be demolished. Just as with the hotel in Macheke, I could not believe that such thin, shallow bits of building could have held so much life and so many people. Why, on mail days, or when there were dances or gymkhanas, hundreds of people might pass along those verandahs and in and out of the bar. The post office I knew is still there, among all the other buildings, a pretty little place. And, for the rest…energetic Banket is spreading fast, the new townships have black people in them properly housed–or at least, there are good houses, but who knows how many each has to hold?

  Two roads run off to the right of the main road north, fine new roads, and one follows the line of the old railway to the Ayreshire mine. We called it the Ayreshire track, though the railway sleepers were long ago displaced, or stolen, or might be stumbled over in the bush where they lay filling with water for mosquitoes to breed in.

  In the 1890s the Ayreshire mine was a big mine with its own hotel. Then and later it was notorious for the casual or cruel treatment of its workers. In our time it was no longer being mined properly, but was an open-cast working, owned by a man called McCauley. The men who worked for him hated him so much they sometimes strung wire from tree to tree across the track when he had been in Salisbury or in Banket and they knew he was coming back. The idea was that the car would run into the wire at windscreen level and turn over. But we all knew these wires were sometimes there and we watched for them. No car was overturned, and he died in his bed. He used to say that he had survived the trenches in France, and he wasn’t going to be killed by kaffirs. I remember wondering why such a wicked man was always so pleased with himself.

  To go from Banket to the farm, by car, might take an hour, not only because of my father’s idiosyncratic attitudes towards speed, but because, if it rained, the road would be red mud, in which we got stuck, over which we skidded. Or if it was dry, the wheels could sink in drifts of red dust. ‘Going into the Station’ was a state of mind, an odyssey. But if I walked then I might dawdle along the track for a couple of hours. Now the journey takes a few minutes.

  This new road, obliterating the old turns and twists and ups and downs, runs through field after field of the rich Banket soil, surely as beautiful as any in the world, red, soft, rich and mellow. The bush has been cleared to make these fields, leaving only strips here and there. Once this soil was proud to go sixteen bags of maize to the acre, and people all over the country used to quote it as an example of merit, but now, because of genetic miracles, it would scorn to go less than thirty or thirty-five, though forty is more like it. ‘This district could feed half of Zimbabwe on its own,’ says Ayrton R., who might be from Matabeleland, but clearly feels about Banket and its accomplishments like a parent.

  We passed the Matthews’ house, still in appearance just the same, and I waited for that moment when the long low grass-thatched house would appear, confirming so many dreams and nightmares, but there was the hill, yes absolutely and veritably a hill, it had not been vanished away, and on the top of it not the long house, but another, further back, a graceless greyish bungalow. But it was the field, the big field, rather, the Big Land, that was holding me. There it was, the Hundred Acres Field, stumped out by my father in 1925. We all stood there, my father, my mother, my little brother, then three years old, and a little girl. Four oxen, yoked together, dragged felled trees in chains, like criminals, to the edge of the cleared space, where they would burn.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ my mother said, with the social inflection she gave to such summonings of that real world of hers, England. ‘This part of the bush is just like English parkland.’ There we stood, the English family, while the black men swung their axes and the trees toppled, and the great bonfire roared, exploding sparks and black smoke where birds flapped and swung. They say birds are attracted to smoke because it gets rid of their parasites for them; wherever there is smoke, there are birds. My mother saw parkland, but I had been in that England of hers for six months, aged five, and I remembered my horror at the dinginess, the blackness, the wet, scene after scene that stuck in my mind meaning England, for years. Black wet ganglia of railway lines, under rain. A fishmonger’s slab where a black wet lobster futilely moved its legs. A room in a boardinghouse, and dark rain streaming down the windows. A row of little gardens, each as neat and pretty as an illustration in a child’s book and in one of them a sad man grinding his teeth and snufflin
g, and digging a fork into the soil as if he wanted to kill it. He stood in cold drizzle wearing a trench-coat soaked with patches of damp, and through the straps on the shoulders (made to hold the gloves officers wore) he had pushed limp hide gloves. They dangled from his shoulder like dead grey fingers.

  The Hundred Acres Field, or the Big Land, stood on that November day bared for planting, a dark rich red. Across it curved the contour ridges made by my father. For sixty years that field has been growing crops, so something must have been done right.

  And now the turn up to the house, a place where the cattle kraal had been, from where manure was taken across the track to be laid on the field. The kraal was gone, and gone the little patch of bush that for some reason was full of bauhinia trees, with their flowers like scraps of white silk crepe and a dry enticing smell. The hill was ahead: the road was now solid and good, and there was no need to balance and crawl over ruts and ridges. And then we sped up the hill among thinned trees, and were at the top. Gone was the big muwanga tree that once dominated all this landscape, full of honey which we cropped once a year, leaving enough for the bees. My parents used to say, ‘Well, you can bury us under the old muwanga tree’, meaning it was certainly not as good as an elm or an ash or an oak, but the next best thing. The old tree had been felled by lightning: even in our time the white trunk had a black lightning scar down one side.

  There we stood at the top, and we turned our backs on the new ugly bungalow.

  ‘What did they mean, the hill has gone?’ Ayrton R. and I asked each other.

  Yes, the top has been sliced off, making a flat and amenable place: stony ground sloped down sharply from the walls of our house. Quite a lot has been pared off: ten feet? Twenty? It is a sizeable plateau. Because the month was November, the bush was heavy and green–what there was left of it. The relief that came from finding myself standing on the top of a hill, one not imagined or invented, softened something else: on the hill the bush was sparse and damaged, and whereas once we looked out on thick trees and vleis, where a few fields lay scattered, now the bush has gone, and the scene is of wide fields climbing and stretching everywhere, with some modest strips of bush left in it. Here it is, the Banket soil, the red rich wonder-worker, and I suppose the question has to be, How is it this wealth of soil was allowed to stay so long unproductive under unstumped bush?

  The country brings itself to a height here, at this hill: the landscape heaps itself up. The hill where once the farm compound stood is only slightly lower. A mile or so further, going towards the northern mountains, is Koodoo Hill, where my brother and I used to walk all day. It was full of game. The wild pig particularly loved it. Just as I remembered, this is a group of hills or high places, making a centre for the wide ring of mountains. The Hunyanis to the north-west, the Umvukwes (or the Great Dyke) to the south-east, and, in front, the Ayreshire Hills, that stood up on that afternoon sharp and clear…unchanged. Well, of course…but why of course, when so much has changed? No, they could not have blasted the tops off those hills, but at their feet, where you can’t see it from this hill, is the new dam which will be the third biggest in the country. Looking out from where the front of the house was to the Ayreshire Hills it seems the bush is unchanged, but hills and valleys hide the new farms.

  I stood and looked out at ‘the view’ which was why my parents had built the house where they did, and which fed their eyes and their hopes for all the years of being on that farm where nothing went as they wanted.

  It is beautiful. It was more beautiful than I expected, because of those inexplicable warnings from my brother. ‘Don’t go back, it will break your heart.’ What had broken his heart? Soon I understood. Not that our old house had gone, for it had to, being built of mud and thatch. Not that they cut the top off ‘our’ hill. No, it was the bush. It had gone. Where he had spent his childhood were interminable red fields, his bush–gone. When the forests that covered Europe after the end of the last Ice Age made way for fields and herds do you suppose that people who had spent their youth under great trees, wary equals with wolves and bears, returned after absence to find their own real place gone, and went about warning others still exiled with, ‘Don’t go back. Whatever you do, don’t go home or you’ll break your heart.’ And spent the rest of their lives in mourning for trees that had expired in smoke?

  I stood there, needless to say limp with threatening tears, unable to believe in all that magnificence, the space, the marvel of it. I had been brought up in this place. I lived here from the age of five until I left it forever thirteen years later. I lived here. No wonder this myth country tugged and pulled…what a privilege, what a blessing. And yet my poor mother spent all those years grieving that her children were being badly done by, should be in some conventional school in England.

  But now it was time to turn myself around and look at that new house. If somebody tried to build a house that embodied everything my parents hated, it would be this one. A graceless lump of a dark bungalow, painted to look dull, it crouches twenty feet or so back from where our house was, and perhaps fifteen or twenty feet lower.

  Past it down the hill were some women and children. Ayrton R. went to talk to them, and returned to say they did not or would not speak English. It could be seen through the windows that the place was full of children, staring out, as we smiled, gesticulated our need to talk to them. A lot of children.

  We gave up and wandered over the back of the hill. Once it had tall thick grass, where no one ever went except my brother and I, to reach the big vlei at the back of the hill, full of birds and game. There were also, though we did not know the plant then, thickets of marijuana and sometimes a mile or so of bush was saturated with the reek of it, a rough hairy smell, like sweat.

  Here was the scene of the pawpaw drama. My mother planted pawpaw trees tastefully where they would look nice, but found they languished. Pawpaw seeds thrown on to the rubbish heap produced a grove of trees that dropped the pinky-yellow globes all around them, so many they were not gathered. The earth there was fed with pawpaw flesh.

  Not far from where the women stood watching us was where our lavatory had been. It was a deep pit, and over it an inverted packing case that had a hole in it, and over that a little hut, screened by grass fencing–like the lavatories of nearly everyone in The District.

  Everywhere over the flat place that tops the hill are disused brick buildings, and, half hidden in grass, a brick and concrete line with rusty iron rings which had been for pigs, or perhaps cows. A barn was up here, too: surely unintelligent, for everything would have had to be dragged up the hill by cart or lorry. Where our barns had been down near the track–nothing at all. The bricks had been brought up here to make these now ruinous buildings. But there were not enough bricks lying about to make the statement: here was a cow shed, here a garage, here a pigsty. Here were only the spare bones of buildings, for the bricks had been taken off somewhere else to make new buildings, and this was a lying melancholy.

  What I was looking at was not only the scene of our old life, that had left no traces, nothing, for the ants and borers and termites had demolished it all, but at the remains of another later effort, which had failed. Everything here spoke of failure.

  They have planted fruit trees, my brother had complained–fruit trees!

  And there they were, lacking water and in bad shape, orchards too big for a family, a homestead, but not large enough to be commercial. From these trees they could have picked enough peaches to take into the Station for resale to farmers coming in for their mail–and who almost certainly had their own peaches–but no one could have made a living from them. No, what we were looking at, I was sure, was just such another effort as my parents’–who were always trying a little bit of this and a little bit of that. One might believe that their spirit had infected the people who came after them.

  Did they too dream about finding gold? We searched in the scrub for my father’s old prospecting trenches, and there they were, though the shafts he had dug every
where so he could inspect a promising reef were all filled in. If our successors carried a prospector’s hammer so they could chip a bit of a rock off an outcrop then it was no more than most farmers did, in The District, which was named Banket after a gold-bearing reef on the Rand.

  We walked back to the new house. There was a little strip of newly watered marigolds. My mother’s passionate, knowledgeable gardening, that always had to fight with the rocky crown of the hill, was being continued here, in this brave little display.

  Again we tried to communicate with the children. Were these Squatters? Was the farm being run as an annexe to one of the enormous high-tec farms of The District? Was this the black manager’s house, and in it his many children, relatives, friends’ children?

  Strongly present were the ghosts of my parents. My father, I knew, was laughing, for this scene, so admirably contrived by the Grand Storyteller confirmed everything he had always known about the vanity of human wishes. My mother’s face was brave. ‘It’s just as well, I could imagine her saying, in her sprightly social voice, looking at the awful suburban bungalow, at the crowding black faces in the windows where the panes were cracked, where torn curtains hung–‘It’s just as well we don’t know what is going to happen, isn’t it?’ And then, taking firm hold of the situation, ‘I wonder if they’ve tried growing pelargoniums? They do well up here. Perhaps I’ll just have a word…’

  As for me, I stood trying to see into that dark room, past the many faces, and thought that these children were no more remote from civilization than I was, as a girl, with the wonders of the world in books and even the cities of South Africa far off because of our poverty.