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By Root 1429 0

shores they never left. Here the sun got up and went down pronto at six and six, the colours were strong, the heat burned and snapped, you lived high on the Altitude, among dramatic skies. It never snowed. When I was young I was infinitely separated from Europe. Except through literature. When I came to England and became Prohibited, the Africa I knew was out of reach. Separation of my landscapes has always been my fate. But, a few days after I returned to London after this trip in 1988 I saw a weatherman point to the weather map on television and remark that the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone over Southern Africa was influencing the air masses, hot and cold, to the north of it, and they in turn were shaking and shocking the weather in our skies, the skies of England. I sat on my London sofa, the curtains drawn tight to keep out December, and the certain and immutable walls that had kept my inner landscapes apart vanished in a chart of rivers of wind and oceans of air, the two worlds joined more swiftly than Concorde can do it, or those machines still being evolved which one day will travel from London to Harare, London to Tokyo, in a couple of hours.

But this resolution of impossibilities was still a month ahead.

No, it was distance, what had happened to distance, which was the real theme of my return to the farm.

It was a brilliant day, when Ayrton R. and I set off. We went through the northern suburbs of Harare while I ticked off events and people: this happened here, this happened here; no, it is not possible that people survive what they do survive, what we all survive, that is the point–and thank God we do forget it all, except on voyages like this one.

But wait…is that true…perhaps it isn’t true? Suppose one was able to keep in one’s mind those childhood miseries, the homesickness like a bruise on one’s heart, the betrayals–if they were allowed in lie in the mind always exposed, a cursed country one has climbed out of and left behind for ever, but visible, not hidden…would then that landscape of pain have less power than I am sure it has? There is a fish called the Angler Fish, that looks as evil as if it has chosen to illustrate a morality tale. It cruises just under the surface of the sea, watching for migrating birds who decide to risk a few hours sleep rocking on the waves. Then this brute of a fish sneaks up, snatches at sleep-loosened feet and drags the bird down, down…

On we drove over the good smooth urban roads, but when memory expected a sudden bumpy encounter with the country roads nothing happened, on we went rolling high and safe, infinitely far from the bush and the past. Yes, I had been in The District only a few weeks ago, and on a farm not far from ours, but the approach had been on a different road, one that did not share my childhood, or those journeys of then, the interminable journeys in child-time…‘When will we get there?’ ‘Soon.’ ‘But when’–as the valleys and hills jogged slowly by, the road twisting among clumps of tall grass and piles of rock. It was over this road I drove my father into Salisbury, in the old car, he a diabetic in danger of coma, my mother beside him in the back seat, watching his face, her calm fingers on his pulse. The road then was a track, corrugated in long slow waves of soil from Salisbury all the way north to the Zambesi. If I drove fast, the corrugations jarred the sick man so that he gasped out pleas for me to stop. So I stopped, then drove slowly at about five miles an hour, up and down, from the ridge of one corrugation to the next, dodging between potholes…essential to get him to hospital fast, at once, but if I went fast those corrugations would kill him. How many times did we make that journey? But I have forgotten. And then they built the strip roads. Roaring north now on this wonderful road I searched for the old strip roads, broken threads that appeared by the railway lines and disappeared into grass. Those fragile foot-wide ribbons of tarmac marked a stride forward into a new technology–Southern Rhodesia invented the strip roads–and thereafter journeys