African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [149]
But the question is, what was it in Big Bob, and in Little Mrs Matthews that took them out of Glasgow before the First World War to farm in old Southern Rhodesia among all those wild animals and the savages? What restlessness, or ambition, or crime, or romanticism, well concealed behind conventional looks, took them so far from home? And, similarly, with all the rest of our neighbours. If you saw them at Church on Sunday–Presbyterian and Church of England services alternated at the village hall–those sober Sunday-dressed-and-hatted people, eyes down over hymnbooks, their voices measured to ‘Rock of Ages’ and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, it was easy to imagine them back ‘Home’ from where, surely, they need never have taken flight? But that wasn’t true. Every one of them had something concealed, not evident but powerful, which had brought them out here to The District to spread themselves over so many acres of land stolen from the blacks, farming with all the energy of poor people who remember poverty.
The District was full of misfits, for better or worse, who had found England, Scotland, too small.
Now when I think of these people, among whom I grew up, this is what interests me: what were they before they sold up their furniture, put themselves on the slow boats to Cape Town or Beira, and then on the trains to Salisbury, there to scatter and look for land, risking everything in a country they knew nothing about? Every one of them arrived in The District in the same state as the families stepping off ships on the shores of New England or Virginia, their minds full of tales of danger and riches. And, too, of thoughts of freedom.
Going back to the farm, so commonsense told me, not to mention friends, was bound to be an anti-climax. This turned out not to be true, though I did not expect to have my ideas shifted about as they were.
First, there was this business of the weather, or, if you like, the climate. On that day I was driven by Ayrton R. to The District, everyone was worried about the rain. After those satisfactory but brief rains weeks ago no rain, none. Yet it was late in November. Tucked away at the back of our minds is the notion that our new weather sciences should be bringing the weather to heel: that when we say the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone the words should be enough to force the masses of warm wet air that rise off oceans and forests into the right place so they may clash with the high pressure areas south-east near Mozambique. But the skies were a bright calm blue, not a sign of rain-tension, black silver-edged clouds unfolding up into the zenith, lightning flickering low on a horizon, thunder like a promise. Everyone was thinking ‘a drought’, but no one was saying it, yet: superstition. If you say ‘drought’ then that makes it real.
I did not want to see the old farm thinned by dryness and dimmed by smoke from bush fires: a harsh and denuded thing is the bush before the rains have come, like a literal depiction of a state of mind I was afraid of–though I had dreamed it often enough. Isolation. Being excluded. Exile from the possibilities of the world outside the farm. I wanted the bush in its lush and luxuriant aspect, the rainy season landscape, and I was almost sure I would find it. After all, reports did say it had rained in the north-east, if not enough. Above all, the migrant birds had arrived. Even when the dry season dust was still velvet on your skin, those travelling birds announced the rainy season. And, better even than that, in that long-ago then storks and swallows brought news of places it was hard to believe I would ever see, for England was situated in a region of the mind as different from Africa as the atmosphere of one recurring dream is from another. There were snows, mists, shallow sunlight, long twilights in a pastel country where birds cried along chalky