The Weather in Africa

by Martha Gellhorn

  They collected the remains of the picnic. Ian folded their table cloth and stowed the hamper in the Landrover.

  ‘You write to me or send me a telegram any time and I’ll come and get you. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Baba, I do now.’

  Mwangi had prepared a feast which left them waterlogged and stupefied. Zena had been reading aloud, in her dove voice, ‘My Last Duchess’. They were both devoted to Browning as to Baroness d’Orczy, Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, all the battered books in Luke’s collection. Zena slept, in the curve of his arm, while Ian watched the fire burn down and tried to think of the future. After five years in that young ladies’ establishment, would Zena find Fairview alien and uninteresting? A citified girl, not the responsible person Luke asked for, long ago, who’d inherit Fairview and guard it with love? Had he again got to work on building a prison for himself, a lonely old age? If so, what of it? He was trying to make sure there were no prisons for Zena. In any case, one day some sod would come along – black, white, copper-coloured – to steal Zena from him. He only hoped the sod would be a good farmer.

  What’s the matter with you, Ian Paynter? Use your greying head. Think of the accidents. Who could ever have foreseen, when you were Zena’s age, that you’d be here, the man you are, with this particular child as the centre of your life? What about the accident that brought Zena, an infant more than half dead, to this farm? And the series of accidents that made her indeed your lawful daughter, and a bright steady little girl, able to cope with people much better than you can. Bad accidents too like going to the Karula Sports Club for the second and last time in nearly twenty years and meeting Grace. How does it cancel out? The worst, losing your family, against the best, Fairview and Zena? You won’t know until you’re dead, will you? And what’s the point in worrying about the future? Let the future take care of itself, since you certainly can’t. Be grateful now, man, be grateful.

  He picked Zena up, still sleeping, and carried her to her room.

  AFTERWORD

  Martha was fifty-two when she discovered Africa; apart from a brief visit to the Duff Coopers in Algiers in 1943, it was an entire continent that she had never visited. It was soon after the Christmas of 1961 and she was in London with her second husband, Tom Matthews. The weather was bitter and profoundly grey and weather, for Martha, was a source of perpetual despair, frustration or delight: she craved sun, heat, blue skies. The title of this collection of stories is no coincidence: the capriciousness of weather is a theme that runs through all of her letters and much of her published writing. Good weather, both blue and hot, spelt happiness; grey skies brought despondency. In the dark and cold of an English midwinter, both she and Tom, as well as Rosario and Lola, who looked after them, had flu. Martha had just sold a short story to a television company; she longed to get away, to be alone, to travel to a new place. It was not the first time.

  ‘The certainty of the shape of the days’, Martha Gellhorn once told a friend, ‘drives me mad.’ There is no better way to make the days uncertain than to travel and Martha, all her life, kept moving. She was born, as a few people are, restless. The details of the world fascinated her, not just its people and the minutiae of their lives, but landscape, smell, animals, the night sky, fish. She spoke of snorkelling her way around the world from Hawaii to the Seychelles with all her luggage in a small, zippered bag. ‘I mean to keep moving,’ she once told Diana Cooper, ‘guaranteed cure for accidie.’ One restless summer, when she was already in her eighties, she went to Turkey, Corsica, Switzerland and the Sinai desert.

  Born in St Louis in 1908, she was first taken to Europe by her German-born father when she was sixteen. From then on, she dreamt only of getting away from Missouri and exploring the world. Something interesting was going on somewhere and she wanted to be part of it. By the age of twenty-two, Bryn Mawr behind her, she was in Paris. The 1930s were spent in France, Germany, England and Spain, covering the Spanish Civil War with Hemingway. The Second World War took her to Czechoslovakia, Finland, the Pacific, North Africa, Italy, the newly liberated Occupied Territories, and Germany. Later came Mexico, where she lived for four years, and Italy, where she lived for a further two, Israel, Vietnam, South America, the Soviet Union, Poland. Occasionally she stayed for a while; mostly she kept moving.

  Her idea, now, to escape boredom, rain and cold, was to explore both East and West Africa, starting with Cameroon and Chad, then following the Nile from Khartoum to Entebbe, before travelling on slowly east towards Nairobi. She planned to be away two months, perhaps even three. After consulting old Africa hands, she packed a hot water bottle, a heavy sweater and woollen trousers, a broad brimmed hat, a box of paints, cards to play solitaire, binoculars, a medicine chest, lavatory paper, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, and a great many thrillers. She took her typewriter.

  In 1962 mass tourism had not yet reduced many of the game parks to little more than zoos, nor had civil war made large parts of Africa too dangerous for visitors. It was immense, empty, full of animals Martha had never seen; emerging from colonial rule, it was a continent in transition and, in the absence of wars, transitions intrigued her.

  French West Africa was not a success. She found it humid and she loathed the dense jungly swamps; the white people she encountered appalled her with their stories of colonial grandeur. The sun, in a bleached sky, reminded her of a fried egg and she complained when her skin turned grey and not brown, and a blister on her heel became septic and oozed. A young guide lost her deep in the bush.

  In East Africa, however, she discovered all that she had imagined. Here flights of flamingos rose into clear sky above grazing wildebeest and zebra; here forests of bamboo grew behind banks of brilliantly flowering creepers. The air was dry and soft, the sun dazzling. She looked at giraffes, the animals she liked best of all, pale and creamy, invisible against the thorn trees.

  And so when, three years later, her marriage to Tom Matthews foundered, it was to Kenya that Martha returned, to a rented house on the beach at Nyali, where she planned to sit and write in the sun wearing only a hat and a bathing suit, and from where she would make forays into the interior to see wild animals. The house itself, filthy and dilapidated, provided her with a long comic article for a magazine, just as a first visit to a game park to interview animal scientists for an American aid programme led to furious rows. But Martha was happy. ‘I have been consciously and ecstatically happy for two hours and ten minutes,’ she told Diana Cooper. ‘I’m not only really at home in my skin, at last, but the skin is spiffing.’

  It was not long before she decided that she needed an actual home in Africa, thinking that she would spend seven months each year there, the others divided between St Louis and her mother, and London. Through friends in Nairobi, who had a farm at Lake Naivasha, Martha found a plot of land high on the slopes of Mount Longonot. It was remote, up five miles of track nearly impassable in summer dust and winter mud; but the skies were vast and she could see across the Rift Valley to the blue mountains beyond, ‘golden and hazy and impossibly beautiful’. At dawn, once her house was built, she stood and watched the giraffes striding silently out of the mist. ‘I know Africa is my place’, she wrote to a friend in London. ‘Because there is everything to learn, everything: as long as my head and my legs hold out, I’ll never come to the end of it.’

  As a writer, Martha was, above all, a superb reporter. She was endlessly curious about the natural world around her and about people; she observed it all and she pinned it down, with detail and shrewdness. Her reports from the Spanish Civil War, from Vietnam and Israel, were models of lucidity and accuracy, and she had a duty, she believed, to bear witness to evil, corruption and the poverty and misery of the powerless, subjects she described with carefully controlled passion. She had, as the writer James Cameron observed, ‘a cold eye and a warm heart’. Yet all her life she felt fiction to be the superior art form. Her longing, always, was to write the p
erfect novel.

  If she found non-fiction hard, writing draft after draft, tearing up pages and starting again, it was nothing to the agonies she endured over fiction. ‘I have lost my eye, ear, nerve, and am probably no longer a writer,’ was a sentence repeated in letters to friends all her life. Often, what started out as a novel would later be pruned, recast, then cut in two to make a novella. Short stories were Martha’s most accomplished form of fiction, the characters depicted in succinct and telling detail, but not deeply developed, their exchanges taut and revealing, but seldom explored. Like all her writing, they were also minutely researched. Gathering material for this collection, she fired off questions every day to her friends in Nairobi: ‘What wooden floors would have been laid in 1920 in a farm house built at six thousand feet? What kind of creepers would have thrived at that altitude?’

  But was it fiction? Till Death do us Part, ostensibly about a war photographer called Bara, his wife and a great woman friend, was in truth about her long and close relationship with Robert Capa, killed not long before in Indochina; just as The Fall and Rise of Mrs Hapgood, about a woman who, having been betrayed by her husband, rebuilds her life again, is really a portrait of the break-up of her marriage to Matthews. So close in fact were many of her stories to real life that they sometimes led to trouble. When in the 1950s she wrote a novel called His Own Man, around the story of an art historian in Rome, the married mistress by whom he has twins and the domineering, amoral woman who falls in love with him, the protagonists were so clearly identifiable that an injunction prevented the book from being published in Britain.

  Of all the stories Martha wrote, none, perhaps, was as autobiographical or as poignant as By the Sea. Having described its central event in a series of anguished letters to close friends, she then sat down to turn it into fiction, inventing a cast of characters and a background, but keeping the narrative unchanged.

  In real life, this is what happened. On Saturday January 19th, 1974 Martha, who had rented a house on the beach at Kilifi for some winter swimming, set out in her car to visit friends. The road was empty. Along a straight stretch a small boy suddenly scrambled out of a ditch to her left and darted in front of the car. Martha braked, wrenched the driving wheel over to the right and the car veered off across the verge, tumbled down a slope and turned over; but not before she heard an unmistakable soft thud. She hit her head and passed out. When she came to a few seconds later everything was quiet around her, just as it had been, except that in the middle of the road lay the curled up body of the small boy. Later, she thought that she remembered a mewing sound; then he was dead.

  From the other side of the road now appeared two older girls; adults arrived, shouting and gesticulating. One leant into the car and yanked Martha’s hair. When the police arrived, they took away her passport and placed the small boy’s body on to a stretcher. Though it was quickly concluded that the accident had not been Martha’s fault, and though friends repeated, again and again, that there had been nothing that she could have done, Martha was haunted. She could neither sleep nor write. ‘I should have been dead,’ she kept saying. ‘I have always said that when you think you have gone through the worst in life, just wait, there will be worse; but I never imagined anything like this.’ When she described what had happened to Leonard Bernstein, he quickly wrote back: ‘You absolutely must, repeat must, not give in’. Diana Cooper’s advice was more practical: ‘Write a story about it. The method is said to heal.’ And so Martha did. By the Sea is one of the saddest stories that she ever wrote. It is not only about death but about loneliness, the emptiness of life when there is no one in it who ‘looks at you as no one else ever can’.

  The Weather in Africa was published in 1978, by which time Martha had given up her house on Mount Longonot, saying that its uncertain weather was too cloudy and that the altitude was causing her to see black spots. But something about the small child’s death had for the moment broken her great love for Africa, and she told friends that she was perhaps not meant to be there at all, that she did not belong and never would.

  It was other weather, now, that came to obsess her: the weather in Wales. At the beginning of the 1980s she bought a two-hundred-year old ‘doll’s house’ six miles from Chepstow, and put in heating enough to defy the coldest days. It was, she wrote, ‘ideal for a dwarf with the soul of a lighthouse keeper’. Soon, she was filling her letters to friends with weather reports. In winter, she told of days when the fog rolled up across the fields from the Bristol Channel and she could not leave the house for fear that she would never find it again. One particularly hot summer, when she gardened from early morning in her bathing suit, producing crops of courgettes, strawberries and melons, she talked of discovering a beach of magical white sand, but that the water was so cold that it was fit only for polar bears. After several months of ceaseless rain, she declared that Wales should stick to growing mushrooms. Its climate was bound to lead anyone normal to ‘neurosis, melancholia, probably schizophrenia’.

  But Martha did not abandon Africa altogether. She was a Scorpio and Scorpios, she would say, were great survivors. For the rest of her long life, whenever the clouds and rains of Europe drove her to a frenzy of despair, she would take off for blue skies, most often on the beaches around Mombassa, where her close friends, Ruth and Sol Rabb, had a house at Nyali. Here, in a garden full of flowering shrubs, she sat contentedly at her typewriter in her hat and bathing suit, describing in letters sea like velvet, a white, coral-sand beach so long that she never reached its end, a rich underwater world of brilliant colours so absorbing that she burnt the back of her legs as she snorkelled. Africa, she told Leonard Bernstein, was ‘the capital of my soul’.

  Caroline Moorehead

  London 2006

  61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL

  Email: info@travelbooks.co.uk

  Eland was started in 1982 to revive great travel books which had fallen out of print. Although the list soon diversified into biography and fiction, all the tides are chosen for their interest in spirit of place.

  One of our readers explained that for him reading an Eland was like listening to an experienced anthropologist at the bar – she’s let her hair down and is telling all the stories that were just too good to go into the textbook. These are books for travellers, and for those who are content to travel in their own minds. They open out our understanding of other cultures, interpret the unknown and reveal different environments as well as celebrating the humour and occasional horrors of travel. We take immense trouble to select only the most readable books and many readers collect the entire series.

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  Copyright

  First published by Allen Lane in 1978

  First published by Eland Publishing Limited

  61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 1984

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Martha Gellhorn

  Afterword © Caroline Moorehead

  The right of Martha Gellhorn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–906011–88–8

  Cover Image: Mount Kilimanjaro © Royalty-free/Corbis

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