Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  My grandfather, Roger “Hodge,” taught himself engineering and was hired to build the branch railway line from Eldoret to Kitale. “He had a donkey for transport,” Mum says, “but the donkey fell in love with a herd of zebra and ran away to be with them. After that Dad had to use a bicycle.”

  It wasn’t long after losing his donkey and taking up with a bicycle that my grandfather met and married my grandmother. Then war broke out and everyone reassessed their idea of home and loyalty, and my grandparents found themselves back in Skye from where my grandfather enlisted, lying that his mother was “Scotch” so that he could join up with the Cameron Highlanders. Seeing that he had grown up and worked in Kenya, the war board sent him to Burma and put him in charge of Nigerian troops.

  “Well, you know how the Brits are,” my grandfather told me once when my grandparents came out to visit us in Malawi. “They don’t know there is a bloody great difference between a Nigerian and a Kenyan, let alone between a Kikuyu and a Kalenjin or an Igbo and a Hausa.” My grandfather chewed on the end of his pipe, and belched a cloud of fragrant tobacco at me. “Can’t say I thought much of Nigeria,” he said. “All the Brits thought it was the prime spot, but it was swampy hot, for one thing, and smothered in mosquitoes for another. Burma wasn’t too bad. At least there was the war to take your mind off the bloody humidity.”

  My grandfather had amused gray eyes and a magnificently unapologetic Roman nose. Throughout the time I knew him, he talked about Burma now and again, but in disconnected snatches, as if his memories were like the bouts of amebic dysentery that occasionally haunted him after the war—appearing without warning, sometimes violently, and then disappearing just as suddenly.

  At some point during the war, my grandfather was wounded. “In Burma, I think. I don’t know how,” Mum says. “Of course, we didn’t really talk about it. I suppose shrapnel or something. He had this tennis ball–sized lump on his hip. Glug and I always begged him, ‘Show us your war wound! Show us your war wound!’ and he would drop his shorts so we could admire it. And then the next thing was, ‘Daddy, take your teeth out!’ because everyone had false teeth in those days. As soon as they turned forty, that was it—off they all went to the dentist—out with the old and in with the snappers.”

  But Auntie Glug says, “No, no, no. It wasn’t shrapnel in Burma. It was a rock in Nigeria. I’m sure of it. Someone threw a rock at him and he ended up with a very impressive lump on his hip.” She waves her cigarette at me. “I’m convinced that’s how he got his wound.” And she seems so certain that I consider accepting her version of events until my cousin Cait and I discover a telegram in the bottom drawer of the Welsh dresser in the Langlands dining room:

  Priority Mrs. EMB Huntingford

  c/o Mrs Macdonald

  Waternish House

  Isle of Skye

  Report received from India that Lieutenant R.L.

  Huntingford Queens Own Cameron Highlanders posted

  Black Watch serving with Nigeria Regiment was

  wounded in Burma on 7th March 1945. The Army

  Council express sympathy. Letter follows shortly.

  Under Secretary for State for War.

  Underneath the telegram my grandfather has written, “Correct report should have read ‘wounded but remains on duty.’ The R.A.F. dropped a 500 Ib bomb on the road in the middle of 5NR instead of on the JAPS!!!”

  Cait and I turn the paper over, but that is all that has been written. The telegram leaves the cause of the lump on my grandfather’s hip almost as confused as it was before. In the end, it seems safest to say that my grandfather was wounded at least once and possibly twice during the war, but whether it was a rock in Nigeria or the five hundred pounds of friendly fire in Burma that gave him the lump, we’ll never know.

  In 1943, my grandfather was posted briefly on the west coast of Scotland to guard against German warships in the Minch. His batman was from Inverness and so for a few glorious months from the late summer to the early winter of 1943, the war became a family affair—the batman able to visit his people in Inverness and my grandfather able to spend time at Waternish. The crofters on the Isle of Skye took to calling my grandfather “Major Macdonald,” perhaps because he bore such a striking resemblance to my grandmother’s gentle, shell-shocked brother Allan. “I think it must have been a happy time for my parents,” Mum says. By which she means she was conceived.

  In late 1943, my grandfather returned to Burma, and my grandmother—finally able to hold on to a pregnancy in the malaria-free chill of a British winter—went to the south of England for her war effort. She worked as a farm laborer near Southampton and boarded with a rich widow in a grand old house nearby. The widow, Catherine Angleton, had a wooden leg as a result of a bout with cancer, “but she dressed very nicely with stockings, tweed skirts and very good shoes,” Mum says, “so you really couldn’t tell.”

  As a major port and industrial area, Southampton had been a particular target of the Luftwaffe during the war. At the end of February 1944, when my grandmother was four and a half months pregnant, there was a major raid on the city. “Apparently, every time there was a bomb I jumped,” Mum tells me. “I’m very sensitive to loud noises. It’s why I always look a bit sour at children’s birthday parties in case someone pops a balloon.” Recognizing that air raids didn’t suit the temperament of her fetus and fearing there would be more attacks on the town, my grandmother took the train up to Waternish to wait out the pregnancy.

  Telegrams jolted from Skye to Burma to inform my grandfather about the birth of his daughter. “I saw a letter he wrote to his mother from Burma saying that he was very excited about having a little girl,” Mum says. “But of course he didn’t see me until I was over a year old, and when he did finally see me, he picked me up and promptly dropped me on my head.” Mum preempts my wisecrack, “Yes, well a lot of things have been blamed on that little incident.”

  But the clearest thing I learned about my grandfather’s war—and about his character—was from an undated letter written to him by one of his Nigerian troops whose obviously warm relationship with my grandfather seemed to exceed the startling, colonial-era salutation that begins:

  Dear Master

  Will you tell me your present condition? And what news of your family? I hope everyone is 50/50. As for myself, I want to report to you of this: we are no longer at Sandoway but in a township twenty-five miles to Rangoon. We left Sandoway on the 23rd of December 1945 to come here. From what I can see, Rangoon is a very big place but I can’t inform you that it is a nice place. Above all, it is a stinking hole, smelly and filthy.

  Our current work is boring. We have about 4,000 Japs prisoners staying here with us and our only task is to guard them. That is all the work of 5 Nigeria Battalion. It is not hard work. But upon all that, everywhere else is off limits to us and the worst is there is no prospect of our going home.

  So beloved master, that is all the news from the township. I hope you are doing well. Oh! I hope you will be kind enough to see about the picture I asked to send me.

  I beg to pen down.

  Thanks.

  Yours,

  John Okongo

  John Okongo, right. Burma, circa 1943.

  Nicola Huntingford Learns to Ride

  Circa 1947–1950

  Mum and Nane. Kenya, circa 1954.

  If she had known then the score and depth of the tragedy that was to come, Mum might have borne the insults of her childhood with more fortitude, but the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy. And so for a few years from around the time Mum turned three, an accumulation of what she considered truly dreadful events occurred. And because they were the first real insults of her so-far small life, they remain vivid and searing for her even now.

  First, her sister, Glennis (Auntie Glug), was born—she had yellow curls, dimples on each cheek and a willful, devious nature. “She managed to have some sort of seizure when she was
quite young,” Mum says. “After that, my parents were terrified of smacking her in case she got herself into a state and had another fit. So no matter which of us had been naughty, I always got whacked and Glug got away with smirking at me.”

  Then my grandparents left the paradise of the bungalow at the Kaptagat Arms and rented an old army officers’ mess closer to the town of Eldoret. My grandfather knocked rooms around to create a home out of the barracks. “It was very long and narrow,” Mum says, “but my father was very clever with stonework and building. He made false beams in the sitting room to make it look ye olde, and built a wonderful stone fireplace.”

  There was no indoor plumbing so hot water was carried into the tub from the kitchen. The choo was a decent trek down to the bottom of the garden, “and often filled with bees and sometimes snakes,” Mum says, “which terrified me and contributed to a lifetime of reluctant bowels.” After dark, each family member was given a chamber pot, “gently steaming away under the bed and rusting the bed springs,” Mum says. “At bedtime, Glug and I had to sit on our pots until we performed. Ages and ages sometimes we had to sit there. Out of sheer boredom we used to have races sitting on our pots, hopping them across the bedroom floor.”

  Glug was always getting malaria because she would threaten to have a fit every time anyone tried to make her take a pill. “Doctor Reynolds had to drive out from Eldoret to give her injections,” Mum says. “Glennis would flip herself backward and forward across the room to get away from him and he’d have to try to catch her. One time he made a dive for her and he got his foot stuck in her chamber pot. I remember him skipping around the room in fury. Of course we were both wheezing with laughter, malaria injection quite forgotten.”

  Baths were taken under the vicious supervision of a drunken ayah, Cherito, who smacked Mum forcefully and repetitively but without any evident cause, as if she were merely practicing shot put or tennis and Mum’s body was in the way of a particularly powerful swing (Glug, however, escaped the unpredictable violence of even Cherito’s drunken temper, so ingrained was the Legend of Her Seizures and the fear that she’d have another one at the slightest provocation). “My parents would be in the sitting room or on the veranda, quite happily relaxing with some of my mother’s homemade wine while Cherito was swatting me around the bathroom, so they knew nothing of what was happening. And Glug never uttered a peep about it because it was all very good entertainment for her.”

  My grandmother made wine out of potatoes, raisins, barley, figs—whatever she could get her hands on. “It was delicious, but she had no control over how strong each batch would be,” Mum says. “It was well known for visitors to leave our house and get terribly confused and end up in the wrong district—and sometimes the wrong country. They’d be on their way to Kitale and end up in Bungoma. Or they’d be expected in Kapsabet but find themselves in Uganda.”

  With only the bitterly resented Glug for company, Mum missed Stephen Foster terribly. The donkey, Suk, which my grandmother had bought as a replacement best friend was a big disappointment. In my mother’s telling, he had a willful and devious nature, much like Glug, except with ears and a tail and without the Perfected Art of the Seizure. “Suk was not at all your storybook donkey,” Mum says. “To get anywhere at all, I had to be dragged around by a syce. The donkey sneered at him, ignored me and brayed like a steam engine. I think it was humiliating for all of us.”

  And finally, most awful of all, it was decided that it was time for Mum to attend the convent, a school run by Irish nuns about half a mile away from their new home. Every morning, she was put into her uniform, a blue skirt and white shirt with a wide-brimmed black hat, “To keep the African sun off our faces.” She was loaded onto the sulking Suk and hauled to school by the syce. Then the syce and Suk would wait under the eucalyptus trees for three hours until Mum classes were over. After that, she would be put on the donkey, the donkey would be untied and the syce would be dragged from the end of the halter rope as Suk fled for the comforts of home.

  As she got older, Mum was allowed to ride Suk over to the school alone. “By then my legs were long enough, and I could just about kick the wretched beast into action.” She tied the donkey up under the eucalyptus tree and went in to lessons. “Nicola is a disruptive influence in the class,” her school report read. Mum found learning difficult. She showed early promise as an artist, but the nuns didn’t care about art. Numbers made no sense to her at all, and even words were hard for her to grasp, “Our parents read to us every night, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Thompson Seton, that kind of thing. I adored stories and books, but I struggled with the nuns and their dreary lessons and it took me ages to learn how to read.”

  Instead, she entertained herself by trying to coax one of the many cats that hunted in the school drains to come and sit on her lap. If the cat couldn’t be persuaded into the classroom, Mum jumped out of the window after it. And then, since she was not Catholic—“Anglican, of course!”—and therefore could not be made to kneel in the chapel with the other recalcitrant girls fingering their way through endless rosaries, she would be banished to sit under the eucalyptus trees, which she found agreeable enough. She spent her time drawing in the dirt, peeling the bark off the trees, lolling on Suk’s back, staring up into the leaves pulsing against the sun-stained sky and daydreaming until she calculated it was time to go home. Then she untethered the donkey, grasped her arms around his neck and galloped back for tea.

  MUM HAS TO GO BACK sixty years to recall the convent and those nuns, but the bits she pulls up from her memory are bright and sharp, kept polished and immediate by a deep and abiding hatred for the place and for the women who ran it. “Sister Bede used to smack our hands with a ruler so hard the ruler often broke. Sister Philip caned us around the back of the legs until she raised welts.” Mum pauses and her eyes go pale. “They smacked me and punished me and banished me, but it just made me more difficult and defiant and determined not to learn.”

  One day the nuns blocked all the drains and gassed the school’s stray cats. “Dozens of cats, corpses everywhere,” Mum remembers. “Their poor little poisoned bodies piled up in heaps, swelling in the sun. If you’d put them tip to tail, they would have gone all the way around the school buildings. And the next day we were overcome by the awful stench of burned fur and flesh when the gardeners doused them in fuel and set fire to them. It was too awful. Too, too wicked.”

  Mum considers that the nuns became bloodless and heartless because they weren’t allowed to drink and gamble or have any fun, while the priests were allowed to get drunk and bet on horses at the racetrack. “The nuns were supposed to be above all earthly desires and temptations. They weren’t even allowed to be observed eating. They had a furtive dining room at the back of school where they had to eat behind closed doors and closed curtains. No one could ever see them do anything biological. We schoolchildren had an ongoing argument about whether or not nuns really did eat, and if they did, what happened at the other end. Of course, I think they took all their irritation and disappointments and repressed urges out on us.”

  After four years at the school, Mum had a fairly good idea that hell involved nuns and convents, so when an inferno worthy of Hades exploded in the blue gum trees near the school, it was not a surprise, but what was a shock was that Suk, as usual, was tethered to one of the trees. It was toward the end of the long dry season; the wind had been red all day with dust blown in from Uganda and settling on everything like powdered blood, the sun blistered out of a high, clear sky. Finally at noon that day, the volatile eucalyptus sap caught fire. From her desk in the classroom, Mum saw the flames out of the corner of her eye and was in a full run toward her donkey before her mind fully understood what her body already knew. But before she could run into the flames, she was caught fast in the powerful grip of Sister Philip’s manly hands.

  “I could feel the explosion of those trees in the pit of my stomach,” Mum says. One tree after the other blew up, each flaring limb and trunk bringing the fire cl
oser and closer to Suk. The little donkey tugged and strained at his halter, but the rope held fast. Mum watched helplessly as a wall of fire consumed the tree under which Suk fretted. The donkey disappeared from sight and his screams were lost in the roar of the oily flames. Mum felt the world contract into the denial that comes with tragedy, the refusal to believe that time cannot be stopped, reversed, undone. “No! No! No!”

  Then, out of the flames, singed and braying in pain and fright, the donkey staggered, flesh and fur hanging from his back in charred strips. His halter rope had burned through, and was dangling under his chin. Mum tried to squirm out of Sister Philip’s grip, but the woman’s hands only squeezed tighter.

  “Let me go!” Mum cried. She twisted and kicked in the vice of Sister Philip’s grasp, but she could not get free. Then she swiveled her head and looked up at the nun and what she saw chilled her then, and stayed with her forever. “Sister Philip was staring at Suk with furious, cold blue eyes under her bushy ginger eyebrows. I knew then that she had put the Evil Eye on him. She’d started that fire.” Mum nods. “I’ve never had any doubt about it. That bloody nun was a witch.”

  My grandmother nursed the donkey back to health with liquid paraffin and May & Baker antibiotic powders, but Suk sensibly refused to go anywhere near the school again. Anyway, he remained completely bald over much of his body, “and you can’t ride a bald donkey.” So for some months Mum was forced to walk to school every morning alone, and when she was sent to sit under the scorched eucalyptus trees, she could no longer lounge on the back of her donkey, staring up at the sky. Belatedly, and to her heartbroken surprise, she found she missed Suk’s obstinate, scheming companionship.