by Robyn Scott
Two days before Grandpa died, I learned I’d been accepted into the programme. Mum at once phoned the old Selebi house. She spoke to Henry. Henry said, “Ivor’s stopped talking, but I’ll tell him anyway. You never know, he might just understand.”
Forgotten in the flurry of funerals, we learned only long afterwards from Henry what had happened when the message was passed on.
Grandpa, who hadn’t spoken all day, was lying on the creaky old bed. His eyes were closed. Henry said, “Ivor, Robbie’s got into Cambridge.”
Grandpa opened his eyes and stared at Henry, briefly but fiercely alert again.
Then, slowly and softly, Grandpa Ivor said what were to be his last words – words that for me told not so much of one event as of the memories of fifteen years of a family in a country that had begun with him, and his two drunken brown fruit moths, fluttering in the last light of the day.
“That’s wonderful,” he whispered. “Wonderful.”
∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧
Epilogue
During the Christmas holidays of 2004, the five of us drove up from Cape Town to visit Molope Farm. The trees were taller, the grass thicker, the rivers and the birds as exquisite as ever. The farm was loved and cared for by its new owners. But in more than just title, it was no longer ours. Lulu and I recoiled at the sight of dead antelope horns displayed on the outside walls of the house. Feeling oddly relieved to depart, we drove back over the border, crossing the Limpopo where earlier that year the ashes had been tossed, pausing to peer into the muddy, sluggish waters, checking for crocodiles. We saw none.
It was the last time we visited the farm and crossed the bridge together, as a family.
In 2005, Mum and Dad separated. When Lulu, Damien, and I had left them, and they had left Botswana, the struggles and purpose that bound them together had gone too. Without these, the strain between two ferociously independent people, finding new wings and new dreams after twenty-five years of marriage in which both, in their different ways, had given up individual freedoms for shared ones, was too great.
I said, “If it’s not working, you should separate.” Lulu and Damien, though sad too, agreed. I tried to see it as just another great change, a readiness to leap into the unknown, which is so much a part of what I love about my parents, and how I will always remember them together. I succeeded, mostly. But one night, several months later, I awoke, startled by my own tears. I went to my computer and, still half asleep, gently splashing the keyboard, wrote feverishly – as I would never write in the sensible light of day – to Mum and Dad:
…However much I believe in looking forwards and changing always, inescapably, so much of us is what we have done, in the good times and the bad. And so much of this is only reachable through the lens of the people we have done it with. There are experiences and parts of me I only remember when I speak with my family, without whom these would otherwise be lost in the overflowing cupboard of memory, from the lack of someone to prompt, understand, or share amusement, and the people you meet in the future, regardless of how much you love them, cannot help with this. I feel sad at the love lost, and the pain this must cause, but I know that romantic love can be found again, with others. What makes me cry is the thought that, through losing each other, you are losing a part of yourselves. So I hope above all else that you might stay friends, or eventually rekindle your friendship, so that one day you can talk and laugh with each other and not forget those parts of you that exist only between you, and through your friendship. And, now selfishly, I hope that sometimes I, and L and D, might be there too; to remember those yet more subtle pieces in each of us that are reflected only in the presence of our whole family…
Mum and Dad stayed friends.
Mum continued her degree from Cape Town. While studying, she worked part-time, including as a nutritional adviser to a vitamin company, the co-author of two books on nutrition for children, and a researcher for a Web site featuring nonprofit organisations working in the field of HIV and AIDS in South Africa. In 2007 she graduated with distinction and began her Ph.D., continuing her master’s work into the effects of the micro-nutrient selenium on HIV and AIDS. As part of this, funding was obtained to run an ambitious clinical trial in the prisons in South Africa with the University of Surrey and the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre.
“It might even be groundbreaking, Robbie,” Mum told me, smiling.
Dad worked as a ship’s doctor, thinking of what to do next. While he was at sea, he had plenty of time to read, and one day came across some of the growing body of research on the medicinal properties of spices. Fascinated, he read more, forming hypotheses about the link between ancient hunter-gatherer diets and the health benefits of spices – which he decided to write a book about, compiling the latest evidence on the wide-ranging disease-preventing properties of culinary spices. In 2006 I helped him finish the book. By this time Dad was back in Cape Town, and had had another related idea. His old inexhaustible self, he was setting up a company to produce and sell a supplement containing a mixture of the most important spices.
“It’s the first in the world, Robbie,” Dad told me, smiling.
There has still been no phase III trial of the effect of sterols and sterolins on HIV and AIDS. “If I ever make my fortune from spices,” said Dad, “I’ll set up a trial.” Separately, Mum said, “Maybe one day I can do postdoc research on sterols and sterolins.”
And I wonder.
At university, I did my master’s thesis on the pricing of medicines in developing countries, examining the precedent set by the AIDS drugs, some of which, by 2005, had fallen up to thirtyfold in price. Damien did his honours in solar thermal physics, hoping to one day become a clean energy inventor and entrepreneur. By his final year of university he was ‘working frantically, which, to me at least, he disliked admitting. Once, after lecturing me at length on his latest incomprehensible class on quantum teleporta-tion, he said coolly, “I think, Rob, this is the closest I’ve ever come to being stressed.” Lulu got her university degree in Auckland, taking a year off to teach English in France. Lulu has Mum’s brilliant, patient teacher in her. One holiday, when the three of us met in England, we discussed how we’d love in theory to home-school our children. Damien and I both agreed we’d never have the patience, or be willing to make the sacrifice. “Maybe you could do it for us,” we suggested, half-jokingly, to Lulu.
In 2007, Mum and I drove up to Botswana from Cape Town.
At the border post, while Mum filled out forms, I looked on in dismay as a young customs official began to dig laboriously through the contents of our packed car.
Watching him, I thought wistfully of the magic doctor’s car sticker. Mum’s car had only the registration disc, still a Botswana number, on the windscreen. The back of the disc, in a creative attempt to deal with two of the country’s biggest causes of death, said: “Buckle Up and Always Use a Condom!” There was a picture of a seat belt strapped across a condom, which looked like: Don’t use a condom. “He ‘who tries to kill two birds with one stone,” Mum had joked, “bites off more than he can chew.”
We were crossing at the Ramatlabama border post, near Gaborone, and far from any of Dad’s old clinics. But as the car search dragged on and my forced innocent grin became exhausting, I decided to try anyway.
“I used to live here,” I said conversationally. “My father was a doctor.”
The official nodded and continued his meticulous excavation of a suitcase.
“But his clinics were further north. You probably wouldn’t know him. Dr. Scott,” I added hopefully.
The young man stood up, smiling. “I know Dr. Scott.” He closed the boot of the car and held out his hand, shaking mine warmly, up, down, and up again, in the friendly Botswana way.
Back in Cape Town, Dad did still have his doctor’s sticker, but on another car. He’d sold the converted bakkie when he and Mum had left Botswana. It had been bought by a funeral company, spray-painted silver, and used as a hearse.
&n
bsp; Botswana’s HIV infection rate has dropped slightly. But it has far still to fall to meet the country’s target for 2016, fifty years after independence, of no new infections. Around 80 percent of those who need drugs now have access to them, the widest reach in Africa. But the rollout has been slower than hoped; there are still problems finding enough skilled staff to conduct the intensive monitoring of patients, and those who develop resistance need new drugs that aren’t always available. In 2004, Botswana became the first country in Africa to introduce routine HIV testing. But people can opt out, and still there are those who don’t wish to know.
Waved through the border post, Mum and I set off on an epic week’s journey around Botswana visiting friends across the country.
Driving as far north as Francistown, we met Seloma Tiro at the Marang Hotel, where he’d once married Neo and reconciled Dad and Grandpa Ivor. Seloma told us sadly that he was now divorced. He’d driven down to meet us from Nata, where he was still living. Northgate filling station had continued to thrive; the half of an island still stood untouched. Over a long lunch beneath the tree canopy, Mum and I discussed our planned AIDS orphan project with Seloma. “That’s beautiful,” he said after delightedly accepting our request that he become a trustee of the organisation. Then he told us, casually, that he was already involved with a trust, which he’d helped found, that provided support to the more than four hundred AIDS orphans of Nata village. It was the first of its kind in Botswana. Seloma shrugged off admiring comments. “It’s your family who taught me about giving,” he said, waving away our embarrassed protests. In a country of fewer than two million, AIDS is estimated to have orphaned nearly one hundred thousand children.
Back in Phikwe, we met two Peace Corps workers who were starting an AIDS orphan support project. When we learned where the project would be based, Mum and I smiled in wonder. Before being abandoned, the building, which stood beside a small koppie, had been a bingo hall. But years before that, it had once, too, been an unsuccessful coffin factory.
♦
Early one morning we drove out to Selebi, passing the old baobab and turning onto the red dust drive-way. Now, returning, just as Dad promised I would, I could smell the dust differently – dry and rich, like nothing else, anywhere. For a moment, I wanted to choke with longing on the particles and the memories.
Mum’s painted hornbill sign was still nailed to the marula tree. Someone had tried to pull it off, and the bottom, which read ‘No Through Road’, had curled up, barely visible. But the top nails had held fast, and though the sign had faded, it still clearly read ‘Scotts’.
We turned down the road, not sure what to expect.
The cowshed and Grandpa’s house were both lived in. But neither of the two Batswana people who greeted us could speak much English, and we discovered little beyond the fact that the new residents had cows. The Aeronca in the shed had long gone to be restored, along with the Piper Colt. The caravans were nowhere to be seen. But the termite mound still towered over the witch doctor’s field, though smaller than I remember.
Mum and I stopped at the gate beside Grandpa’s house. Smiling at each other and the once mystery tree – identified at last a few years before we left Botswana – we ran our hands down the now unmistakeable trunk.
“Adansonia digitata,” Mum said thoughtfully. Then she frowned. “You know, I still can’t help kicking myself I didn’t work it out for so long. I really should have guessed it was a tree that changed its leaf and bark pattern as it matured.”
I said, “At least neither of you did. You’re equal.” We took pictures, for Dad, Damien, and Lulu. The mystery tree had become a baobab – our very own baobab that we’d had all along, standing there between the two houses, growing slowly in disguise. It was still only about six metres tall. But in a few hundred years, when all who ever knew it as anything but a baobab are long gone to dust and skies, there will stand one of Africa’s greatest trees; gigantic and splendid on the red dirt, reaching up above the bush into the endless blue and starlit heavens.
Knowing so intimately the endless fragmented memories that comprise a childhood, one may risk, by proximity, being blinded to the magic of the stories woven across these years. So it was for me, and I therefore owe, first of all, great debts of gratitude to Patti Waldmeir, who said that here was something to write about, and to Michael Holman, for making the next leap: insisting there was, moreover, a book to fill, and relentlessly encouraging me as I began the daunting process of excavating the memories, and learning, by trial and much mortifying error, how to assemble them into a form fit for the page.
To my family, I owe thanks for so many things, beginning, of course, with their inadvertent gift of this story. For their conscious role, I am above all grateful for the enthusiastic support I received from the moment I declared my intention to commit their characters to the page; testament, if nothing else, to the survival beyond this story of their addictive cocktail of reckless confidence in one another and an astounding ability not to care what the world might think. Pages could not do justice to their and others’ many, varied contributions, but I have attempted to provide a more comprehensive acknowledgment on the Web site, www.twentychickens forasaddle.com. For now, suffice it to say that the book could not have been written without the tireless assistance – recollecting, inspiring, critiquing, and fact checking – of Linda, Keith, Lulu, and Damien. My grandparents Joan and Terry McCourt, and Jonathan Scott, Christine Sievers, and Henry Scott also provided invaluable help and guidance.
Many others who helped in this book’s creation appear too in its pages and I would like to express my gratitude to Seloma Tiro, Charlie and Robyn Sheldon, Lyn and Melaney Nevill, Nomsa Mbere, Jean van Riet, Jean Kiekopf, the Blair family, Jenny Dunlop, Tiffany McGaw, Laura Hudson, and Nicola Anderson. For steering me away from some of the myriad traps that face an expatriate writing about Botswana, I owe an additional special thanks to Seloma and Nomsa. In this respect, I have also found valuable Denbow and Thebes Culture and Customs of Botswana, with which I cross-checked relevant parts of the text. By its nature, however, a story told through the eyes of a child and a teenager, informed mostly by the experiences of one eccentric family, will inevitably produce a selective portrait of a country. I hope the reader will understand and forgive it as such. To everyone else I write of, I owe thanks too: a story is only as good as its characters and I am fortunate to have grown up surrounded by so many fascinating people, leading lives to rival fiction. It is here appropriate to note, too, that in a few instances where necessary to protect identities, I have used fictional names. Finally, at least amongst those who shared the Botswana I write of, I would like to thank Ann O’Connell and Karan and Raj Chathley, who, though not mentioned in this text, were so generous to Ivor and Betty, and who made such a great difference to their final years.
Since the conception of this book, many others have given generously of their time and knowledge. For their counsel and support, I am grateful to Christine and Robin Whaite, Sangeeta Puran, Janet Ginnard, Drazen Petkovich, Tulsi Bramley, Lauren Lindsay, Jack Turner, Alan Williams, John Parr, Peter Sievers, Chris Sherwell, Ian Harrison, and the whole Unite and Feinstein clan; for their invaluable critiques of the early text I am indebted to Michela Wrong, Caroline Penley, and Sidney Buckland, as I am, for their encouragement, to Alexander McCall Smith, Peter Godwin, Samantha Weinberg, Judith Todd, and Phillip van Niekerk, and, for their inspiration, to Jacobus Pansegrouw and the remarkable members of the Group of Hope.
To thank all those who have played a part in the publishing of this book is impossible here, but I am, in particular, deeply grateful to Ann Godoff at The Penguin Press, for her brilliant editorial touch and wisdom; Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury; Jeremy Boraine at Jonathan Ball; Arabella Pike; David Eldridge; and to all the wonderful people at DGA, agents and friends, who have worked so hard for this book. I am especially indebted to the wise and tireless David Godwin – lion and alchemist of agents – whose enormous levels of determination and c
reativity only rise when the road becomes bumpy, and who has played such a crucial role in making this book what it is. Lastly, I owe infinite thanks to Mungo Soggot, who believed I could write this book, helped in its writing, and with such good humour survived me as I wrote it.
∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧
Afrikaans Glossary
bakkie Pickup truck.
bliksem To beat up.
boerewors Spicy sausage with a high fat content.
Boerperd Breed of small, tough horse.
braai Barbecue.
broek Pants.
doek Woman’s headcloth, often worn by maids.
dominee Preacher or pastor.
donner To beat up.
duwweltjie ‘Devil’s thorn,’ a small, hard thorn with three sharp spines.
ja Yes.
jirre Wow (corruption of Here, meaning ‘Lord’; slang).
kaffirs Black people (slang; derogatory).
kak Shit.
kakhuisies Shithouses.
kerk Church.
kif Cool, great (slang).
koppie Small hill, often comprised of large boulders.
kraal Enclosure used for animals.
lekker Good, great.
meisie Girl.
mense People.
moer To beat up.
oke Guy, chap (slang).
perd Horse.
sjambok Animal hide whip.
sis Expression of disgust (slang).
skool School.
snaakse Funny, strange, eccentric, queer.
tannie Woman, often an older woman; also ‘auntie.’ Used as a mark of respect.
veldskoen Tough leather shoe.
voetsek Go away (rude and emphatic).
weerstandsbeweging Resistance movement.
windgat Show-off.
Yissis Jesus (slang).