Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  An hour or so later, out of the corner of her eye, Mum became aware of Suzy racing back and forth from the bottom of the garden to the veranda, trying to get her attention. She dropped her paintbrush and ran out onto the lawn.

  “Vanessa was gone,” Mum says. “I looked around wildly. But I couldn’t see her and I couldn’t hear her. And then finally I noticed the pram, twenty feet off. Somehow the brake had come undone, and it had rolled away and tipped up. Vanessa was all bundled in the hood, covered in blankets. She was absolutely crimson in the hot sun.” Mum shakes her head. “I got such a fright,” she says. “That was it. I never painted again.”

  BEFORE THE DRY SEASON HAD ENDED, a further accumulation of mishaps and tragedies bumped up against history and by the beginning of the next short rains, my mother was in a world she couldn’t recognize. First, one of Dad’s polo ponies chased Violet through a barbed wire fence. “I found her standing in the paddock, her belly ripped open, her neck bleeding, her legs in ribbons,” Mum says. Mum sent an urgent note to Charlie Thomson up in Molo and meantime she tried smearing May & Baker powders and liquid paraffin on the wounds. Violet trembled. Blood gushed down Mum’s arms.

  Charlie arrived the next day. He shook his head. “Better to destroy her,” he said. “It really would be kindest.” But looking at Mum’s face, he surrendered and gave Violet something for the pain and something else to limit the spread of infection. “It would really be kindest . . .” he started to say again, but Mum shook her head. Charlie left. For another day and night, Mum stayed with Violet. Every six or eight hours, the alarmed ayah brought Vanessa to the paddock. Mum fed the baby distractedly, never taking her eyes off the mare.

  Dad came home on Friday afternoon to find both Mum and Violet half mad with exhaustion. Mum trying to hold the horse upright. Violet trying to die. “If I let go of her, she’ll give up,” Mum said.

  Dad stroked the mare’s neck. “Yes,” he said, “she will.” He waited with Mum an hour or so. Then he said, “All right, Tub.”

  “I know,” Mum said. She dropped the halter rope. The mare sighed, and then slowly lay down, first buckling her knees and then with an enormous effort collapsing her haunches. Mum pulled off her jersey and draped it over the horse’s shoulders. “Good-bye, Violet,” she said, tears running down her nose and onto the horse’s neck. Dad took Mum back to the house and sat her down at the kitchen table with a glass of brandy. He shut every door between Mum and the outside world. Then he went back down to the paddock, scraped as large a hole as he could into the ground and shot Violet.

  Mum went to bed for a week, and then another week. When she was tempted to stay in bed for a third week, Granny came down from Eldoret. She sat at the end of Mum’s bed with Vanessa on her lap. Mum fed the baby and drank the cups of tea that Granny brought her. She stroked Suzy’s ears and let the cat sleep on her pillow, but she couldn’t stop crying and she wouldn’t go outside. “What’s the point?” she kept asking.

  What Mum meant was that she’d lost the medium through which she understood her world. She had lost her compass, her frame of reference. “I could look between Violet’s ears, and I would know exactly where we were headed,” she says. At last, genuinely concerned by the unseemly depth of Mum’s grief, my grandmother took her to the doctor, thinking that they all might benefit from a dose of tranquilizers. The doctor did a few tests and then he came back into the office. “This is rather soon,” he said. Both Mum and Granny looked up. The doctor frowned at Mum, so pale and so thin. Then he looked at Vanessa, barely old enough to sit up on her own. “You should pace yourself a little better, Mrs. Fuller,” he said.

  Mum was pregnant again.

  WITH ANOTHER BABY ON THE WAY, Dad considered that two and a half years of driving the length and breadth of East Africa was enough. He wanted a farm, land on which to root his growing family. He pictured an East African version of Douthwaite: dairy cattle, a few good horses, year-round streams, rolling hills. He put money down on a place up in the highlands that fit that description, but before the deal could close, the land officer intervened. “He took me out for a cup of coffee,” Dad says, “and told me that the farm I was about to purchase was up for grabs.” Dad understood. “The new government had it slated for shambas. If I’d bought it, we would have been thrown off within a year and we would have lost all our investments.”

  Then my grandparents sold the farm in Eldoret to a dozen small-scale farmers. (“The farmers came to the house with their money tucked around their bodies, in the folds of all their clothes, nothing bigger than a shilling coin,” Mum says.) For a few months, my grandparents lived in Nairobi, but eventually they set sail for England for the last time, settling in a semi-detached laborer’s cottage near Pangbourne with several crates of books; a smoke-ruined portrait of an ancestral Huntingford bride; carpets worn with the nesting of so many dogs; and a sofa that exhaled a cloud of red Eldoret dust when it was disturbed.

  Although they lived in England and then Scotland for the rest of their lives, my grandparents’ habits remained Kenyan settler—they grew most of their own vegetables in the garden, my grandfather cultivated and cured his own tobacco, they cooked their meals on a wood stove, they took a quinine pill every night and drank a stiff gin and French at eleven in the morning (after which my grandmother was inclined to walk in circles and blame a congenitally shortened left leg).

  “When my mother and father left Kenya that was the end of an era for us,” Mum says. “Glug was already in England at university, so we had no other family, and all our friends were leaving. Kenya lost its heart for us. So we looked around. Where else could we move? I knew I couldn’t follow my parents to England. My mother was heartbroken, but I knew I wanted to stay in Africa.”

  What Mum doesn’t say, but what she means is that she wanted to stay in White-ruled Africa. In some ways, she doesn’t need to say it. Most white Africans either left the continent or receded farther and farther south as African countries in the north gained their independence. The other thing Mum cannot bring herself to say—at least not in so many words—is that her determination to stay in White-ruled Africa was the costliest decision of her life. The worst kind of costly; life and death kind of costly.

  THE SOUTH AFRICAN GARDEN gathers itself for evening around us. Guinea fowls stop their crooning and roost in the trees by the stables. The sounds of crackling day insects are gradually replaced by the sounds of night: frogs bellowing from the creek, cicadas shrilling from the trees. The colors on the walls of the mountains behind us turn from pink to slate.

  “Look,” Mum says. “That sun is very nearly down.”

  “So it is,” Dad says.

  There’s a pause and then Mum flings her arms in the air, “Drought! Nicola Fuller of Central Africa is experiencing severe drought!”

  Dad laughs. “Waiter!” he shouts. “Barman!”

  “Help!” shrieks Mum. “Emergency!”

  Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round One

  Mum with Van. 1966.

  Dad with Van. 1966.

  The last day of our South African holiday dawns stifling hot. During the night a wind from the northern desert has blown the last of the moderate temperatures south. We’re all suffering from slight headaches—“self-inflicted,” Mum says—so we sit on the veranda after breakfast drinking tea, too lethargic to bother with our usual morning walk. Dad is smoking his pipe. Mum has a pair of binoculars resting on her lap in case she sees a bird and then the glasses flash to her eyes. “Look at that sweet little thing with a stripy head,” she says. She consults her bird book. “It’s a Cape bunting, I think. Oh dear, they say in here it’s a very common resident.” She glares at the disappointingly common bird. “We don’t get them in Zambia. Do we, Tim?”

  “Say again?” Dad says.

  “CAPE BUNTING!” Mum shouts. “NOT ONE OF OURS.”

  THE WORDS THAT CHANGED my parents’ lives were few enough and small enough to fit comfortably onto a postage stamp: “Wanted: Manager for ten thousand hectar
es in Africa.” The advertisement, tucked into the classifieds at the back of the Kenyan Farmers Weekly didn’t name the country in Africa on which these ten thousand hectares existed. It didn’t need to. “There was only one country on the continent whose name could not be mentioned,” Mum says. “Rhodesia.”

  At exactly eleven in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, on November 11, 1965, the Rhodesian government, led by Prime Minister Ian Smith, had rendered their country unmentionable by presenting a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The telegram announcing UDI was timed to arrive at Number 10 Downing Street precisely as Britain began its traditional two-minute silence to mark the end of the First World War. UDI expressly flew in the face of Britain’s assertion that there should be no independence before majority rule (NIBMAR).

  The next day, on November 12, 1965, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 216 condemning UDI as an illegal construct of “a racist minority.” On the same day, the front page of the Rhodesian Herald announced, UDI RHODESIA GOES IT ALONE. Above that headline, in smaller letters, was the news that state censorship had been imposed. On that day, for the first time in its history, blank columns of white space appeared in the newspaper. In the minds of the Rhodesian government, the country was now entirely independent of Britain and it was—and would remain—governed by the white minority.

  The “ten thousand hectares in Africa” turned out to belong to John Lytton-Brown, a Kenyan settler. “We didn’t know him,” Mum says. “He wasn’t really one of our set.” Not a pukka-pukka sahib, in other words. Dad applied for the job and in January 1967 he set sail from Mombasa to Cape Town en route to Rhodesia. He took with him a change of clothes, a sleeping bag and his Black’s Veterinary Dictionary. Mum stayed behind to pack up Lavender’s Corner. “I didn’t hear much from Tim once he got to Rhodesia because of UDI,” Mum says. “No telegrams, no phone calls. Letters had to go via Malawi, postmarked Blantyre.”

  My father’s first letter from Rhodesia was cryptic. “Dear Tub,” he wrote,

  I’ve settled down alright at Berry’s Post. We’re not far from the Hunyani River. It’s a bit off the beaten path. There’s 400 acres of cotton, 200 acres of maize, 200 acres of sunflowers. Also 400 head of cattle. There’s rather a dry spell here so the government is practically giving livestock away to anyone with a bit of grazing. It’s a bore that we can’t all be together. Soon enough, though. I do miss you.

  Lots of love,

  Tim.

  A month later, Mum gave away what she could not carry and boarded a ship in Mombasa with Vanessa, Felix the cat, and Suzy the dog. She took her favorite books, the Duke of Wellington bronze cast, a couple of the hunting prints, a few linens, and the orange Le Creuset pots. “You could feel Rhodesia long before you got there,” Mum says. “You could sense this outlaw nation, this rebel state.” And I can tell she likes those words—outlaw, rebel—and how they fit in with the idea she has of herself. “British warships patrolled the Mozambique coast to prevent anything getting into Rhodesia via Beira. South African and Rhodesian passengers weren’t allowed off the ship. I thought it was very exciting.”

  But Mum was quickly disillusioned. On the train north from Cape Town to Bulawayo, she watched in horror as the landscape turned drier and harsher and flatter. When Dad had written that “there’s rather a dry spell here,” it was a colossal understatement. In fact, the country was in the throes of one of the worst droughts on record. In Matabeleland, cattle had begun dying of thirst before Christmas. By January 1967, the late-planted cotton had grown only six inches and defeated farmers had begun to plow it under.

  Up in the high veldt it was just as dry. Cultivated crops wilted blue in the fields, wild trees on the kopjes failed to leaf out and thirsty snakes swarmed to Berry’s Post to drink the dog’s water. “The farmhouse was a funny Spanish style with these big French doors,” Mum says. “My first morning there, I found Vanessa looking through the glass eye to eye at a cobra bellied up to her on the other side of the door, tongue flickering. I was so terrified, I hired Tabatha the next day to follow Vanessa around everywhere.” Mum, appalled by the hostility of the land, its dusty loneliness, the unrelentingly dry wind, couldn’t envision an occasion for her winklepickers.

  Within weeks of arriving, Suzy died of tick fever and then Felix was murdered. “We think by the workers,” Mum says. “There was a nasty undercurrent in that part of the country. They resented UDI and they didn’t like whites. I suppose that’s why they killed our cat.”

  And then, their second month on the farm, my parents woke up in the middle of the night, shocked conscious by a sensation of being watched. “There, standing at the bottom of the bed was the manager who had worked on the farm before us.” Mum’s eyes go pale. “Well, his ghost anyway. He had shot himself six months earlier, so he wasn’t really there.” Even on this very warm South African morning, Mum rubs her arms as if cold. “Look.” Mum presents me with the evidence of gooseflesh on her skin. “To this day, I get chills talking about it. I’ll never, ever forget looking at someone who was not really there, but he was there. It wasn’t a bad dream, it wasn’t a hallucination, it was real.” Mum’s chin goes up. “Especially being Scottish from the Isle of Skye, I know there are ghosts and fairies in our midst.” Mum lowers her brow and clarifies, “Proper fairies, not gays and stuff like that.” She takes a sip of her tea and then scans the garden with her binoculars to see if any acceptably uncommon birds have shown up. “No,” she says at last, “the ex-manager had come to warn us that Lytton-Brown was a crook. He hadn’t paid the ex-manager and he wasn’t planning to pay us. He was going to wait until it was harvest time and then fire us and take all the profits. Wasn’t he, Tim?”

  Dad grunts. “Say again.”

  “FIRE US AND TAKE ALL THE PROFITS!” Mum repeats.

  BY HARVEST TIME, Mum was eight months pregnant. As predicted by the ex-manager’s ghost, Lytton-Brown fired my parents as soon as the crop was in and refused to pay them for their season’s work. “It was a terrible blow because we had worked so hard and had produced such good yields in spite of the bad rains,” Mum says. Dad began legal proceedings, but in the meantime, my parents were homeless and almost penniless. They lived out of their car, “a dubious 1950 Chevy, straight-six engine that would pass anything but a petrol station.”

  Winter came early and hard. “Pawpaw trees turned black and fell over,” Dad says. “The low veldt was scorched with frost. People’s boreholes froze solid. I don’t know how many farmers went broke, but you could see them on the streets of Salisbury on the bones of their asses.” Dad got a job as a bouncer at Salisbury’s only nightclub, La Boheme.

  “A very sleazy joint,” Mum says. “Zilla the Snake Charmer, that sort of thing.”

  I stare at my father. “Zilla the Snake Charmer?” I say.

  Dad blushes and tampers with his pipe, tapping ash out of the bowl and refilling it with tobacco.

  “No, Bobo, those were desperate, desperate times, and they called for desperate, desperate measures,” Mum says. “It wasn’t an easy job—you can just imagine the customers all having a good time, armed to the teeth. And you know what Rhodesians are—they can’t see a snake without wanting to blow its head off.”

  MY PARENTS’ SECOND CHILD, Adrian Connell Fuller, was born on a bitterly cold day in early winter at the Lady Chancellor Maternity Home in Salisbury. “It was a very difficult, very lonely labor,” Mum says. “Terribly cruel treatment. All the nurses and doctors were attending other people. They just left me to get on with it. I suppose they knew I was the homeless, penniless wife of the bouncer at La Boheme, so they didn’t care about me.” But then the child was born, a blond, blue-eyed son, and Mum was overwhelmed with joy. “The happiest day of my life,” she has told me, “was the day I held that little baby in my arms for the first time.”

  When Adrian was a few weeks old, Dad found work building a smelting plant on a nickel mine near Shamva, fifty miles northeast of Sali
sbury. Dad had never built anything bigger than a chicken coop in his life, “but the money was okay, so I talked my way into it,” Dad says. “I had to do something. Four of us couldn’t live off the wages of a bouncer.” Dad worked all the hours he could get, leaving Mum before dawn and returning after dark.

  Mike Dawson, a farmer near Shamva, let my parents live rent free in a cottage on his farm until they could get their feet under them. “You will never, ever forget the kindness of strangers,” Mum says, pushing a work-blunted forefinger into the palm of her hand for emphasis, “Such selflessness, such generosity.” Mike’s wife, Cherry Dawson, was a depressed Australian. “I think she tried to be kind, but we were all struggling. We all had problems. She wasn’t from Africa so she didn’t have that open-door policy that we all grew up with. We were an added burden for her.” Moreover, Adrian’s system seemed shocked by the very bitter winter.

  THE PATTERN LOOKED LIKE THIS: Adrian woke up with a frighteningly high temperature and Mum gave him paracetamol syrup. Then because Mum didn’t have a car or a telephone, she ran from the cottage over to the main house with Adrian in her arms, trailing Vanessa. She begged Cherry for a lift to the clinic, fifteen miles away in Bindura. “I could tell Cherry resented the intrusion, let alone the cost of the petrol ferrying me back and forth, which I could never afford to repay.” By the time Adrian got to the clinic, his fever was back down because of the paracetamol and Mum was told to take him home.