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By Root 1428 0

asked ‘Well, how was school this time?’ made it impossible for my parents to know what went on there. Five years. Five years. Five child-years. What’s five years–when you’re grown up? Immersed in that time, Convent time, nun-time, with aeons to go before holidays came, which were a different time, equally long, endless, thank God, when I could be free and in the bush, I drowned in helplessness. Above all, I was abandoned by my parents. I was homesick to the point of physical illness: I knew why I was always ill at school, though they didn’t. When I asked my brother how he felt about Ruzawi, he said it was all right. But the people who taught him were not nuns, most of them peasants from southern Germany, frustrated and ignorant women. He was taught by brisk, matter-of-fact people who did not hang crucifixes with writhing tortured men on them, or pictures of meaty red hearts dripping with blood, on the walls of rooms where small children slept–children who walked in their sleep, had nightmares and wet their beds. At schools we were in different worlds, he and I, but were in the same world through the holidays. In the bush.

Or in the green circle of the boma. There he might tell stories about the goings-on at his school, but I recognized these as mostly invented to entertain the parents. The convention at his school was that feats and exploits should be described in a way that was both boastful and modest. The feats themselves, climbing dangerous rocks, or forbidden roofs, or trees, or going into pools where crocodiles had been seen–these were boasts, because all were foolhardy. But his descriptions made nothing of the dangers, for that was the modesty prescribed by their school. I recognized the convention from books in the bookcase on the farm: Stalky and Co., Kipling generally, Buchan, Sapper, the memoirs of First World War soldiers. You could cross from one side of a deep gorge on a rope the thickness of an eyelash, or go into fire to rescue a comrade, or wriggle yourself on a six-inch outjut three storeys up a building from one window to another, and you could tell everyone about it, but the voice had to have a certain negligent humour about it, and then it was all right.

I would watch my brother’s face, as he told these–permissible–tales out of school. It had the prescribed humorous modesty. Behind that was something else, an obstinate and secret excitement, and for the time he was speaking, he was not there by the fire at all, not with us, he was back in the moment of danger, the thrill of it, the pull of it.

We two had a pact that I don’t remember being made, though it must have been: it was that we should help each other not to fall off to sleep, should unite against our mother’s determination we should. This meant our two piles of sweet-scented grass must be close together, causing humorous comments from the parents, for usually we were not so affectionate. We lay down on our backs, so as not to miss a moment of moon and stars and up-rushing sparks, but with heads turned towards each other.

‘I must stay awake, I must, I must,’ I fought with myself, watching my brother’s long dark lashes droop on his cheek: I put my hand to his shoulder, and he carefully shook himself awake, while I saw how his body began to shape itself into the curve he would sleep in. I might have time to prod him once, twice–but then he was gone, and in the morning would accuse me of failing as a sentry against sleep. Meanwhile I lay rigid, face absorbing moonlight, starlight, as if I were stretched out to night-bathe. I knew that this lying out with no roof between me and the sky was a gift, not to be wasted. I knew already how Time gave you everything with one hand while taking it back with the other, for this lament sounded whenever my parents talked about their lives. This lying out at night might never happen again. On verandahs–yes, but there always seemed to be mosquito nets and screen wire between you and the night. And it didn’t happen again. I never again slept out under the sky in Africa, though I have in Europe. I was right to