Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  Five years later Dad reacted to his shape-shifting childhood, breaking generations of tradition. “Everyone expected I’d go into the navy when I got out of school, but I wasn’t interested. I always said that I wouldn’t mind going to fight if there was a war on, but I wasn’t going to play toy soldiers if there wasn’t.” Moreover, the sea baffled Dad and left him mostly unmoved. “You can’t dig a spade in it.” Instead, Dad went to agricultural college and before his last term was up, he had applied to emigrate to Canada. “I always had this idea that I wanted to see how the other half lived. And I wanted to go somewhere that still had wild land. Not quite the abominable snowman, but adventure of some sort, that’s what I was after.”

  Dad hired on as a field hand in Ontario. “The McKinneys,” he says. “Lovely people, but teetotalers.” It was twenty miles away by bike to the nearest pub. “All right in the summer, but I knew I’d freeze to death in the winter.” So at the end of the haying season, Dad answered an advertisement to grow tomatoes in the West Indies, bought himself a safari suit at a department store in Toronto and headed south.

  A little under a year after Dad got to Montserrat the tomato operation shut down. “Massive factory, not enough tomatoes,” he said. For a few months, he kicked about the Caribbean Beach Club—“sleeping under a palm tree, deep-sea fishing, sailing, tennis. It was pretty alcoholic”—until he washed up on a nearby island working at a beach hotel. “My boss was queer as a coot, so I had to spend my whole life walking backward,” Dad says. “Then the finale was when my bar bill exceeded my salary by about ten quid a month.” Dad was fired.

  Next, he was interviewed for a post as the aide-de-camp to the governor-general of Barbados. “My duties were pretty simple. In the morning I had to take Lady Stow’s Pekinese for their daily walk. In the evening I had to drink rum punches and play poker dice with the governor.” But this more or less extended cocktail hour came to an abrupt end when Sir John received instructions from the Home Office: in preparation for independence, Barbadians were to be employed wherever possible. No one could argue that a Bajan couldn’t walk a Pekinese or drink rum punches as well as an Englishman. Dad found himself out of work again.

  “Just about that time, someone mentioned a job in East Africa growing trees,” he says. “And that sounded all right to me.” Accordingly, Dad arrived in Kenya one afternoon in late November 1963, and the next morning he presented himself to Robert Stocker, of the Wattle Company, for a job interview.

  “Do you play rugby?” Robert asked.

  Dad peered over the desk. Stocker was second-row forward material, his bulging thighs barely fit under his desk. “Yes,” Dad said.

  Robert looked up, “Position?” he asked.

  “Winger,” Dad said.

  “Good.” Robert made a note in Dad’s file. “You’ve got a job.”

  Dad was paid almost nothing for doing very little. On Wednesday afternoons, he was expected to show up for rugby practice at the Eldoret Sports Club and on Saturdays he was expected for matches. For the rest of the week, he was given a clapped out Land Rover to drive around three or four thousand acres on the plateau. His job was to measure the girth of wattle trees and keep an eye on a few hundred head of cattle. “Sometimes on my rounds I’d see a Ugandan kob or the odd leopard,” Dad says. “And then the whole world would stop. I’d switch off the Land Rover, light my pipe and just watch the animals for an hour or two. I’d completely lose track of time, you know—it was absolutely marvelous.”

  PEOPLE OFTEN ASK why my parents haven’t left Africa. Simply put, they have been possessed by this land. Land is Mum’s love affair and it is Dad’s religion. When he walks from the camp under the Tree of Forgetfulness to the river and back again, he is pacing a lifelong, sacred commitment to all soil learned in childhood. “Bring me my Bow of burning gold,” Dad is singing again. Now he pauses and turns to Mum. “How does that hymn go, Tub?”

  “Bring me my Arrows of desire,” Mum sings. “Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!”

  “That’s right,” Dad says.

  “Bring me my Chariot of fire!” they sing together.

  Both my parents want to be buried on their farm in Zambia when the time comes. Accordingly, Dad has picked a baobab tree above the fish ponds for the site of his grave. “Just wrap me in a bit of sorry cloth and put me deep enough in the ground that Mum’s bloody dogs don’t dig me up,” he says.

  Mum has picked a tree within shouting distance of Dad’s. “On the other hand,” she says, “I expect a big, elaborate funeral. Sing ‘The Hallelujah Chorus,’ wear large expensive hats and fling yourself into the grave after me.”

  Nicola Fuller and the Perfect House

  Mum and Dad with dogs at Lavender’s Corner. Kenya, circa 1965.

  Nakuru, the Masai call it, “place of dust,” and I imagined the air gritty and restless, deviled with pillars of torn plastic. But when I visit in November 2004, it is the beginning of the short rainy season and stone-colored clouds are hanging over the Great Rift Valley. The damp earth is unmoving beneath a greening-blond savannah, and Lake Nakuru is pink with the ebb and flow of thousands of flamingos. Above the town, the Menengai Crater seems placidly mossy, not at all the demon-dancing Kirima Kia Ngoma of legend. Nakuru, it appears to me, is less a place of red dust than a place of mauve quenching.

  I search through all the colors of Nakuru and I find peripheral signs that British settlers were here—the sturdy War Memorial Hospital, a faded mock-Tudor pub, storm drains engineered as if by Roman invaders—but I do not find Lavender’s Corner. For this reason, the place stays in my memory as Mum has described it: “A lovely bungalow with a wood shingle roof, an enormous pepper tree at the bottom of the garden and lots of paddocks for the horses.”

  And in the same way that Lavender’s Corner stays in my imagination, perfect and somehow innocent, so does the version of my mother that lived in that miraculous house. She is twenty years old, and her beauty is classical and untested by time and the elements. And in this part of her story, she does not work, in the ordinary sense of the word. And she has not yet known grief, beyond the normal, relatively mild tragedies of a typical colonial childhood. In many ways, I barely recognize this person. She is someone else’s mother. She is not the broken, splendid, fierce mother I have.

  My parents moved into Lavender’s Corner shortly after their wedding. They brought Mum’s beloved Violet; a cat named Felix; a German Shepherd named Suzy (“one of the nicest dogs we ever had,” Dad says) and a few polo ponies (“Horrible, abused, rescued things that no one else would ride,” Mum says). There were also several suitcases of high-heeled fashion boots and winklepickers (“completely impractical, and they’ve given me bunions now, look!”); trunks of Irish linen; cases of Egyptian cotton; rolls of canvas; pots of paint; crates of china; a set of hunting prints; a few bits of silver; a bronze cast of the Duke of Wellington riding his favorite horse; and a set of Le Creuset pots and saucepans.

  “Imagine,” Mum says, “those Le Creuset pots have survived all these years. Even now, visitors see them in my kitchen as they come down the stairs in the garden and they say, ‘Oh, your pots, how orange and picturesque! I must take a photograph!’” What those visitors to the Tree of Forgetfulness can’t know is that they are not only photographing the Le Creuset pots but also the shadow of everything that has not made it this far. Each time Mum set sail or moved to another farm or gave up a country, she had to assess what would fit into a few boxes, what could squeeze into the back of a Land Rover, what could make it across the borders of an unpredictable African country. Considering that Mum has always moved with a full complement of animals and a sizable library, precious few other acquisitions have survived the shift from one place to the next. “Lost, stolen, broken, died, left behind,” she says.

  AFTER RETURNING FROM Mrs. Hoster’s College in England, Mum had been hired as a secretary at a law firm in Eldoret. “Doris Elwell, the other secretary, could type so fast sparks flew from her machine,” Mum says. “Well
, she’d been a typist for the Nuremberg Trials, so she had an unfair advantage. And then there was me: plink-plink-pause, plink-plink-pause. After every few lines—scrunch, scrunch, scrunch—I had to rewind the paper and pour gallons of Wite-Out on all my mistakes. It was a tremendous relief to everyone at Shaw and Caruthers when I got engaged to Tim because in those days, you weren’t expected to carry on working after you got married.”

  Settled at Lavender’s Corner—newly wed and cheerfully unemployed—Mum decided to focus on her art. She set up her easel on the veranda and began to paint. “What I saw in front of me,” Mum says, “the Rift Valley in every mood. You could do a different painting every single day of exactly the same view. The light, of course, changed all the time. And the savannah, you know, it’s not just a big blond blob.” And when she ran out of muse, she saddled up Violet and took Suzy for long, meandering rides. “The land wasn’t so chopped up by roads and fences in those days and you could go for miles.”

  Meanwhile, Dad landed a lucrative position with a German veterinary-supply company. “Four hundred people applied for that job,” Mum says, “but Tim got it because he swotted up in Black’s Veterinary Dictionary—‘Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming’—that sort of thing. But what really impressed the Germans was Tim’s extreme Britishness. The Germans were thrilled. Until they hired him, they hadn’t been able to operate competitively in a former British colony for zee obvious reasons. Isn’t that right, Tim?”

  “What?” Dad says.

  “ZEE GERMANS!” Mum shouts. “UNABLE TO OPERATE IN EAST AFRICA BECAUSE OF ZEE WAR.”

  ON MONDAY MORNINGS, Dad left Mum on the veranda. “She was always surrounded by her animals, reeking of paints and turpentine,” he says, and drove for days, all over Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, selling supplies to remote large-animal veterinarians. “You could go for miles without seeing much sign of human life. Maybe the odd Masai herdsman or a couple of Samburu warriors waiting in the shadow of an acacia. If you saw another car, you got so excited you stopped and introduced yourself.” But Dad found comfort in the emptiness: the lonely ribs of a long, gravel road; a makeshift bed under wild stars in an insect-sung night. “Once you’ve had a taste of that,” Dad says, “you can’t go back to the madding crowd.”

  On Friday evenings, Dad returned to Lavender’s Corner. For the occasion, Mum got out of her artist’s smock and put on something respectable. “Pedal pushers and a nice linen shirt,” Mum says. Then Dad smoked his pipe at the kitchen table and listened to Mum chatter on about her week, while she made a casserole or a curry in the Le Creuset pots. They ate dinner late, with a couple of bottles of cold beer, and watched the moon make its slow traverse across the Rift Valley.

  On the weekends, Mum and Dad turned to more patrician pursuits. Dad played polo. Mum show-jumped. They both hunted. “If you could call it hunting,” Mum says. “It was more like cross-country of the worst nature.” The hunts took place in Molo. At more than eight thousand feet, Molo was one of the coldest communities in the country. Some distance off the main Nairobi road, pressed up against the Mau Forest, the settlers were isolated, uninhibited and uncensored.

  “Happy Valley wastrels,” I say.

  Mum shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No, no, no. The Happy Valley wastrels were gone by then. Well, maybe there was the odd survivor limping about. But no, the Molo people just got up to a little bit of common-or-garden hanky-panky. That’s all.”

  The hunts were organized by an English horse vet named Charlie Thompson, who thoroughly approved of all sorts of blood sports: dog fighting, cock fighting, wife swapping. He had an eagle nose, tiny dark eyes, smoked a pipe and walked as if his hips had been locked into their joints. He had lost his riding muscles in some bizarre accident years earlier, about which no one would speak. “The mind boggles,” Mum says, but that didn’t stop him from riding his stallion, Amos, every chance he got. “Oh, that horse was a magnificent animal, wasn’t he, Tim?”

  “Oh yes,” Dad says. “Yes, that was a very nice horse, a black Thoroughbred with a bit of warm blood in him.”

  While I am sitting there in astonishment that my parents can remember the name, breeding and color of this long-ago stallion, Mum resumes, “Charlie just strapped himself into the saddle, a classic English seat, and off he’d go. He rode like mad! He had proper hounds too, but instead of foxes, we went after reedbuck.”

  Hunts would traditionally begin with one of Charlie’s famous dinners: piles of mashed potatoes, a leg of some recently slain game animal, beans boiled to death, gallons of bad wine. He lived in a dark cedarwood house furnished with worn leather chairs and moth-eaten animal-skin rugs. On the walls, there were the usual collection of mangy mounted heads and tarnished Indian sabers. “About a thousand bad-tempered dogs were draped everywhere, glaring at you as you ate,” Dad says. And there was a parrot. “You would ask for the gravy and the parrot would shout, ‘And you can fuck off too!’” Dinner usually ended with port in front of the fire. The generator was switched off at about midnight, and the guests faltered to bed with candles. “And then the corridor creeping started,” Dad says. “Mum and I kept our door locked.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” Mum says. “Those people had to leave their children in a pram at the bottom of the garden until it was time to send them to boarding school because they all looked like the neighbor.”

  IN THE MORNING, everyone gathered out in the yard for the hunt, the hounds thrashing and whining and twining themselves around the horses’ legs. “You had to be careful if you had a mare like Violet because Amos was terribly excitable,” Mum says. “If you weren’t paying attention, the next thing you knew you had Charlie and Amos sidling up, everything sticking out. . . .” A stirrup cup was brought out to the riders. “Usually dry sherry,” Mum says, “of which you needed a big strong dollop because it could be awfully cold and the hunt was always bloody dangerous.”

  Then the horses lined up to leap out of the wooden enclosure. “It was before anyone had taught their horses to jump barbed wire, so there was no other way around,” Mum says. “We’d all scramble over these impossibly high livestock pens and then off we’d go through the mist, along the edge of the forest, the hounds baying and the reedbuck springing out ahead of us, usually getting away, thank God.” Mum sighs. “Violet just loved it. She would gallop like the wind—such a big heart, such lungs, the altitude didn’t bother her at all. We were always streaks ahead of everyone else.”

  “Even Amos and Charlie?” I ask.

  “Especially Amos and Charlie,” Mum says.

  THEN, IN EARLY AUGUST 1965, at a Charlie Thompson hunt, for the first time in her life, something happened to Mum’s nerve. “We were supposed to leap out of this hideous kraal as usual, and I’d done it heaps of times before. But on this day suddenly my heart just wasn’t in it. I suppose Violet felt me hesitate because she faltered and I tumbled off.” In the end, Dad had to ride Violet over the kraal and Mum walked around. She finished the rest of the ride, but she was uncharacteristically shaken by her fall.

  Back at Lavender’s Corner, Mum just felt like lying in bed all day. “Of course Suzy would get fed up and make me take her for walks, but exercise made me feel queasy,” she says. “The smell of paint made me dizzy. Food turned my stomach. So off I went to the doctor and I explained that I had taken this spill at one of Charlie Thompson’s hunts and that I still wasn’t feeling right. And he did a couple of tests and told me I was pregnant. I was very indignant. I said, ‘No, of course I’m not. You don’t get pregnant from falling off a horse. Everyone knows that.’”

  However, by early September, the evidence of an impending baby was undeniable. Mum surrendered to her condition and began reading Shakespeare to her womb. “All the studies in those weird, gawd-help-you parenting books said reading aloud to your fetus produced serene, intelligent babies,” Mum says.

  “But Shakespeare?” I ask.

  Mum blinks defensively. “Well, a person might as well start with
Shakespeare and work her way through the rest of literature from there.” So by the time of her birth, on the evening of March 9, 1966, at Nakuru’s War Memorial Hospital, Vanessa Margaret Fuller had been exposed to King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, most of Coriolanus, several sonnets and all the major comedies. She was blond, blue eyed and preternaturally calm. Mum shrugs. “How was I to know it was going to put her off reading for the rest of her life?”

  MUM BROUGHT HER NEW BABY back to Lavender’s Corner and her perfectly-lit, cinematic life continued on schedule. Vanessa slept through the night from about the day she was born. “She hardly ever fussed. I just fed her occasionally and put her in a pram at the bottom of the garden,” Mum says.

  “Because she looked like the neighbor?” I ask.

  Mum gives me a look. “No, Bobo, Vanessa did not look the least bit like the neighbor, more is the pity for your Awful Books.” There’s a pause while Mum allows me to feel deeply ashamed of my cast aspersions. “No,” she continues. “I put her at the bottom of the garden so that I could get on with my painting.” My mother sighs. “Well, I thought she’d be all right because she was a very placid child and she had Suzy to look after her. Suzy was very protective. God help anyone who got anywhere near Vanessa’s pram.”

  And so one sunny, bright morning in late June, Mum put Vanessa under the pepper tree, as usual, and returned to the veranda to paint. Vanessa was still too young to sit up or do much of anything except continue to process the indigestible amount of Shakepeare that had been read to her as a fetus. Meanwhile, the dry season had started, and the light had taken on a quality of bushfires and dust. “Oh, the colors that day. I’ll never forget. It was all ocher with shades of purple,” Mum says. “You know? One gets absorbed by the world.”