Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  What Mum does not say is that by the time she came home from England, Kenya was an independent country. In May 1963, the Kenya African National Union won the country’s first general election. As news of the results were released, thousands of Kenyans ran through the rain-drenched streets of Nairobi cheering, “Uhuru! Uhuru!” Jomo Kenyatta, the seventy-three-year-old former secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association, addressed the nation, calling for tribal and racial differences to be buried in favor of national unity. “We are not to look to the past—racial bitterness, the denial of fundamental rights, the suppression of culture,” he said. “Let there be forgiveness.” On December 12, 1964, the Republic of Kenya was proclaimed, and Mzee Jomo Kenyatta became Kenya’s first president.

  “Yes, well,” Mum says.

  PART TWO

  O wye en droewe land, alleen

  Onder die groot suidesterre. . . .

  Jy ken die pyn en eensaam lye

  van onbewuste enkelinge,

  die verre sterwe op die veld,

  die klein begrafenis. . . .

  Oh wide and sad land, alone

  Under the great southern stars....

  You know the pain and lonely suffering

  of ignorant individuals,

  the remote death in the veld,

  the little funeral. . . .

  —DIE DIEPER REG. ’N SPEL VAN DIE OORDEEL OOR

  ’N VOLK, N.P. VAN WYK LOUW

  Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode

  Dad. Paris, 1958.

  Dad is an upholder of the stiff-upper-lip adage: “If you don’t have anything nice to say about somebody, then don’t say anything at all.” Consequently, he is almost completely silent on the subject of his family. To be fair, his family have been equally silent on their own behalf and conspicuous for their almost total absence from our lives. Although, with our congenitally bad plumbing, land mines on the roads, snakes in the pantry and so on, it’s hard to blame Dad’s relatives for their lack of interest in coming to visit us.

  Occasionally a relentlessly cheerful letter would arrive from England from Dad’s younger brother, Uncle Toe. And at Christmas, his wife, Auntie Helen, would sometimes send gifts of deliriously rare contraband (makeup for Vanessa and me, Irish linen tea cloths for Mum). But these infrequent communications seemed only to emphasize the enormous divide between the Fullers (us) who were sweating away in southern Africa and the Fullers (them) who we imagined were pinkly middling it out in Yorkshire or London or Oxford. And once or twice, at Mum’s insistence, we drove two hours west from the farm in the Burma Valley to visit the only relative of my father’s who had moved to Africa. “Cousin Zoo is blood family,” Mum told us firmly, “and blood”—she presented us with a fist—“Blood is blood.”

  Zoo was terribly English and scrupulously if dutifully hospitable. She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night. And although Zoo seemed genuinely fond of Dad, it was chiefly his wasted eligibility that concerned her. “Your father was terribly good looking, terribly promising,” she would tell Vanessa and me. “He was our absolutely favorite cousin.” Accordingly, she arranged for my parents to sleep apart while under her roof: Mum in a spare bedroom, Dad locked in the workshop. It was as if Zoo hoped that a single night’s separation could erase or undo this inappropriately wild colonial marriage.

  DAD HAD BEEN IN KENYA ONLY two weeks when he happened to be at the airport in Nairobi to meet the flight from England. “I suppose I was there to pick up someone, I can’t remember who,” Dad says. “All I remember is seeing this blonde get off the airplane in a pale blue outfit.” It was, of course, Mum, fresh from Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies. “Whew, you can’t imagine what your mother looked like, Bobo. Even from a distance, she knocked the wind out of a chap.” He leans over now and pats her hand. “Do you come here often or only in the mating season?” he asks. (It’s one of Dad’s old gags, borrowed from the BBC Goon Show, but Mum lights up as if it’s the first time she’s heard it.)

  For her part, Mum was swayed by Dad’s baggy, knee-length Bermuda shorts. “Everyone else was in these horrible, tight little schoolboy boxer shorts with the pockets hanging out the bottom,” she says. So when Dad asked her to marry him, less than a month after they met, Mum said yes. Dad telegraphed England with the news of his engagement and the answer came back from his father, “Is she black? Stop. Don’t do it. Stop.” But my parents went ahead with their plans anyway. They were married in Eldoret on July 11, 1964. Photographs of that day are overwhelmingly (indeed solely) lopsided in favor of the bride: my grandfather is caught guffawing over a glass of champagne, my grandmother looks oppressed by the formal arrangement of flowers on her hat, Auntie Glug bursts out of her bridesmaid’s dress, Mum’s friends look drunk (in an outdoorsy, wholesome pukka-pukka sahib way).

  No one from Dad’s side of the family came to the wedding, and their absence is the beginning edge of everything that followed. Mum is completely flanked but Dad is unsupported and what this will do to him is evident, the way his eyes already register a kind of wary separation from the rest of the world. Even with Mum by his side in each of these wedding photographs—maybe especially with her by his side (she overflowing with serene confidence, he with a monumental hangover)—Dad seems profoundly alone.

  Perhaps because of this uneven beginning, we are defined less by my father than by my mother’s culture, people and family. Mum is African in her orientation, so we think of ourselves as African. She believes herself to be a million percent Highland Scottish in her blood, so we think of ourselves as springing onto African soil from somewhere wild and English-hating. My siblings and I are more than half English but this is hardly ever acknowledged. Even Hodge’s lengthy Anglican heritage (all those Church of England Bishops and vicars) is a footnote after the fact that he signed up to fight in the Second World War as “Scotch.”

  And although my father is profoundly English, by the time I am old enough to know anything about him, he is already fighting in an African war and his Englishness has been subdued by more than a decade on this uncompromising continent. In this way, the English part of our identity registers as a void, something lacking that manifests in inherited, stereotypical characteristics: an allergy to sentimentality, a casual ease with profanity, a horror of bad manners, a deep mistrust of humorlessness. It is my need to add layers and context to the outline of this sketchy Englishness that persuades me to ask my reticent father about himself: I am searching for the time before he was alone, for the time when he was part of a tribe and a place. I am looking for the person he was before he became the man who would never ask for help, even if not doing so meant our lives.

  IF MUM’S CHILDHOOD was set in a happily cramped, converted World War II officers’ barracks under perfect equatorial light on the wind-blown gold of the Uasin Gishu plateau, the majority of Dad’s childhood was set in Hawkley Place, a coldly large Victorian house in Liss, fifty miles south of London. “I spent my whole life outside, watching the haying or trailing around after the cowman from next door,” Dad says. He opens his penknife and uses it to scrape out his pipe and absentmindedly checks the blade against his thumb. “So that was good fun,” he says.

  Dad’s parents had spent the first years of their marriage stationed in China. “I think they might have been happy there,” Dad says uncertainly. But he can’t produce any proof or details because by the time he arrived on the scene, on March 9, 1940, in Northampton Hospital, England, any romance or affection that once may have existed between his parents had long since burned off.

  “China,” Mum muses. “How wonderful! Where in China?” she asks, but before Dad can answer, Mum’s mind leaps to Doris Day. “Shanghai in the 1930s,” she says. “What do you think?” And then she starts singing about leaving for Shanghai and being allergic to rice. “Tra la la la la laaaaa!” she finishes when she runs out of words, which is pretty soon.

  This is the second day of our South African h
oliday. Mum, Dad and I are sitting in the garden of a tranquil lodge in the Cederberg Mountains, drinking tea. In the background, Cape turtle doves are calling the day to a mournful close, “Work hard-er, work hard-er.” A flock of guinea fowl croon in the field in front of us. White egrets flock across the sky to their roost. The cliffs behind us are struck golden pink by the setting sun. But the rareness of this exceptional peace is made still more singular by the fact that Dad is sitting still and he is speaking.

  “Most talk is just noise pollution,” he says. At home in Zambia, you can hear him stamping into the kitchen for his tea long before dawn, muttering a greeting to the dogs, lighting his pipe. He is usually out of the camp, pacing the length of the irrigation pipes, checking the height of the river long before the rest of us have managed our first cup of tea.

  At lunchtime—when the farm’s staff takes an afternoon break and the land itself seems to exhale heat—Dad will retreat from the punishing sun and sit under the Tree of Forgetfulness with his Farmers Weekly or catch up with a month-old London Telegraph crossword puzzle, but the activity is less restful than it sounds. His pipe is constantly moving from mouth to ashtray, and then (tap-tap-tap) it is emptied, refilled, lit, extinguished, scraped out, refilled yet again and so on. Then at four o’clock, the lengthening shadows seem to act as an irresistible lure. He clamps his pipe between his teeth and strides out of camp, back into his bananas or around the boundary of the farm. In Dad’s ordinary day, there is no room for reminiscences.

  DAD’S MOTHER, Ruth—“Boofy”—was the youngest of six Garrard daughters: Garrard, of the Crown Jewelers, the oldest jewelers in the world, by appointment to HRH, the Prince of Wales. “And being a Garrard, everyone supposed Boofy had inherited a lot of money,” Mum says. “Actually, her chief Garrard inheritance was thick ankles.” Mum looks complacently at her own slim, tanned legs. “Poor Boofy,” she says.

  What nobody says, but all of us know, is that Boofy was a catastrophic drunk, a legacy from her spectaculary alcoholic grandmother who died after falling leglessly backward into the fireplace. It would be logical to suppose that this would have put Dad off drinkers for life. On the contrary, nothing short of drinking a bottle of gin before breakfast for a decade at a time will convince Dad that a person has a real problem with alcohol. Moreover, a hangover is almost the only ailment for which he is likely to consider offering a person a consoling aspirin. Heart attacks, diabetes, influenza and migraines he regards as purely psychological. But admit to the effects of a late night and Dad is uncharacteristically caring. “Bad luck,” he’ll say, doling out a couple of tablets, “it must have been something you ate.”

  Dad’s father, Donald Hamilton Connell-Fuller, was a commodore in the British navy (the position doesn’t translate to civilian life, where he was relegated to the rank of captain). To the world Dad’s father presented a witty, charming and devastatingly handsome front. But, “No, not tolerant,” Mum says. “And he had cold blue eyes like a dead fish.” She puts down her teacup for a moment and gives me her best impression of a flayed haddock. “He was very ambitious and he had a very short temper.” Donald made captain in 1942, when he was just thirty-three years old, and commodore shortly after that, but he never did make admiral, or even rear admiral, and he was bitter about it. “It didn’t help that wives were supposed to be supportive in those days, and poor Boofy would show up at regimental dinners with a flask of gin in her handbag and had to be carried out feet first before the fish course was served,” Mum says.

  Concerned and preoccupied with their own deep disappointments and thwarted ambitions, the Fullers didn’t do much with their two young sons. There were no books at bedtime or visits to the cinema, no evening walks and very few meals together. “Sometimes we would be allowed on the battleships, and that was exciting,” Dad says. “And once in a while, my father played golf with Toe and he shot rabbits with me. Plus, there was one summer he took us both on a caravanning holiday in Ireland.” Dad pauses. “A lonely beach and it rained every day.”

  Even from the distance of so many years and with the whole beautiful, fierce continent of Africa between me and the sodden Irish beach, I can feel the gloomy failure of that holiday in the pit of my stomach. “Oh God, that’s awful,” I say.

  “The English after the war,” Mum explains. “So unhappy. So gloomy. So much boiled cabbage.”

  BY NOW IN OUR SECLUDED kloof in the Cederberg, the doves in the tree above our heads are wing clattering into their night’s sleep. A single baboon in the cliffs barks a warning and the warm world feels leopard watched. A breeze picks up in the meadow and blows the cereal scents of grass and old heat-struck earth toward us. On an ordinary evening, we would have moved inside—a central African’s reflex against malarial mosquitoes—but on this inimitable night, none of us stir, the way no one gets up and leaves between movements at a concert.

  “Anyway,” Dad says, at last, “there was always Noo. She was very good, very kind.” And it does seem telling that the presence of a Norland nurse, Irene Stanland—“Noo”—is felt on the edge of every photograph I have ever seen of Dad’s childhood, her off-camera, sterilized hands hovering at the ready to pluck my uncertainly smiling dad and his younger brother back to the nursery, where they were expected to be Seen But Not Heard in the manner of Blackie.

  Blackie was Noo’s passionately adored cat. Even in the ration years after the war, the cat ate a pound and a half of prime steak a week. When he eventually died of complications from obesity, Noo had a taxidermist in London stuff him in an upright, sitting position. So there he sat on her bedside table, flatteringly slimmer than he had been in life and commendably uncomplaining. “It’s just the way it was in those days,” Dad says. “You spent your whole life sitting bolt upright and you only spoke when spoken to.”

  It was the earth—the ground beneath his feet—that was the chief joy of Dad’s childhood. Every Christmas, and for several weeks of the summer, Dad and Uncle Toe were shipped off to Douthwaite Estate in the Yorkshire Dales to stay with their grandparents, Admiral Sir Cyril and Lady Edith Fuller. “I can close my eyes,” Dad says, “and picture that whole estate perfectly. Five farms all put together, rolling hills. Lovely, deep loam. . . .” Dad rubs his fingers together, as if he can even now feel the peaty softness of that old land, “No, you don’t find soil like that every day.”

  Three miles of driveway led up through pastures in which dairy cows grazed picturesquely. In five-acre coppices pheasants were bred, streams were full of trout and fields were teeming with rabbits and foxes. “We used to sing that hymn at chapel, you know?” Dad takes a breath and begins to sing softly into the supporting warmth of the South African night, “And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green?” He shakes his head, smiling, and taps out his pipe in his hand, the burned tobacco making a little black pyramid of ash in his palm.

  Dad remembers his grandmother Lady Edith as very elegant and thin. He doesn’t remember Admiral Sir Cyril at all and my great-grandfather therefore remains insouciantly handsome in a photograph I found for sale at a retailer of “Fine Historic and Autographed Documents” in Missouri of all unlikely places. On the back of the photograph is a barely grammatical and ambiguous note: “On Saturday His Majesty conferred about fifty two Decorations on Naval and Military Officers, one of the officers, Captain Cyril Fuller, R.N., received three Decorations, the C.M.G., the D.S.O., and the Board of Trade Bronze Medal for Saving Life at Sea. Caption Fuller has rendered conspicuous service in Nigeria, and the Board of Trade conferred their medal on him in recognition of this gallantry when a whaler capsized in the Njong River. On that occasion he endeavored to rescue the crew, and while trying to right the boat was twice pulled away by the struggling natives. He succeeded however in saving a number of lives.”

  I wonder aloud what the natives might have been struggling to do.

  Dad sucks on his pipe in silence for a while. “Did they have whalers on Nigerian rivers?” he asks at last. “I suppose they
must have.” He looks mildly shocked. “Imagine that,” he says.

  WHEN HE WAS THIRTEEN, Dad’s parents got a divorce—“a terrible, terrible thing in those days”—and Hawkley Place was sold. “After that,” Dad says, “we were a bit homeless during the holidays.” Donald went to sea and stayed there more or less permanently. Boofy bought a country cottage in Sussex (“Very good address, rather shabby house,” Mum adds), just large enough for herself and Noo. Home, such as it was, evaporated and in its place came broken holidays, the uncertainty of half-unpacked suitcases, the panic of unbelonging.

  Uncle Toe and Dad were shipped off to various kind and/ or dutiful relatives. “I remember one lot, the Shaws,” Dad says. “They were a fun, sporting family. They had about four hundred dogs, a Shetland pony in the kitchen and there was always someone hobbling about with a broken arm or a broken leg. One year, Cousin Anti went off to the Himalayas for about six months to find the abominable snowman. I was very impressed.”