African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [148]
THE OLD FARM
And now it was time to stop being childish. I had to go back to the old farm. To make sure that the driving wheel would finally be turned on to the right road, I was not going to be behind it. This business of writers’ myth-countries is far from simple. I know writers who very early build tall fences around theirs and afterwards make sure they never go near them. And not only writers: all the people I know from former dominions, colonies, or any part of the earth they grew up on before making that essential flight in and away from the periphery to the centre: when the time comes for them to make the first trip home it means stripping off new skin and offering exposed and smarting flesh to–the past. For that matter every child who has left home to become an adult knows the diminishing of the first trip home.
A child’s world is full of enormities, every neighbour or uncle or auntie or the shopkeeper on the corner is easily transferable to the world of fairy tales or of comics, but once grown up, she or he goes home to find they are just people after all. And that is the point, finding oneself so diminished because those powerful arbiters are. But in The District–so we referred to it, as if there could be only one district (just as there is no people in the world who has not called itself, in its beginnings, simply, The People)–in The District, Lomagundi, they were all outsize and fit for tales and epics, because the white farmers lived at distances from each other, and everything they did was visible, and everything they said too, because those were the days of the district telephone lines when there might be up to twenty farms on one line. They still exist. Lonely people listened in to conversations, or even joined in. There could easily be a three-way or four-way conversation going on, as if they were sitting together in a room. It was as if they all lived on stage, every characteristic or event enormified by storytelling: the word gossip is surely suitable only for small streets and crammed populations? And the Africans assisted this by their custom of giving the whites names, like those in epics: Angry Face, The Woman With Two Husbands, The Fire-haired Son, The Man Who Barks Like a Dog.
Take the Matthews, our nearest neighbours. He was Big Bob because he was six foot six, weighty, looked as if he had been carved out of beef well-marbled with fat. She was Little Mrs Matthews, being five feet tall, plump, dainty. His brutalities to the natives were discussed with disapproval. ‘He doesn’t know his own strength, that’s the trouble,’ was the nearest anyone came to acceptance of Big Bob’s excesses, fifty, sixty years ago. He had been a policeman in Glasgow. Easy to imagine him strolling along wet dark pavements, hands behind his back, truncheon under his arm. Easy to imagine her in a pretty-curtained parlour. When my brother and I dropped in on our bicycles she would be in the kitchen cooking: tea cakes, girdle cakes, pancakes, oatcakes, fruit cakes, sponge cakes, tarts, pies, gingerbread, fruit bread, parkin. All these would appear on the table for that supremely Scottish meal, tea. Their house was full of ‘store furniture’, in other words, glossy heavy suites and wardrobes. Sometimes nieces visited, and then Little Mrs Matthews and the girls danced Scottish sword dances, kilts flying, slippered feet as neat as cats’ tripping around the sword hilts. If they had stayed in Scotland would they have been remarkable? But what about the weight of Bob, the height–he would have been material for notoriety wherever he lived, and those fists…‘Good