into Salisbury were no longer nightmares, took only three or four hours of careful driving. As for the old dusty and muddy tracks that were the first roads, they are no longer visible, though I daresay if one stopped the rush northwards, got out of the car, climbed down the embankment and searched in the thick after-rains grass, there would be traces of those roads we dawdled, slid and skidded over, or waited on patiently for hours so a river might go down. But now you don’t notice the rivers running full with rain or sluggish under the bridges. Soon, long before memory and dream landscapes say is possible, there is the Dyke. That chain of mountains full of crystalline lights and blue distances, what a pity my mother did not know they are linked with the Rift Valley and the Indian Ocean, or are for romantics who refuse to listen to pedantic objections. Her memories, her talk, were full of the sea. She was London-bred, made by streets, but the sea was her mind’s hinterland, and a tumble of granite rocks, or ruffling sweeps of white cloud high above a red sunset brought out of her talk of waves crashing on reefs or storms at sea. Later I discovered that her mother, Emily Flower, she who died in childbirth with her third, was the daughter of a lighter-man on the Thames, so seas and rivers were in her blood. As we say. She was proud she was such a good sailor, that on that terrible journey on the oil tanker on the Caspian, when her husband and children were ill with seasickness, and later on the voyage out to Africa when the gales were so bad all the other passengers lay in their bunks longing for death, she was up on the bridge with the captain. On the farm, six thousand feet up, she yearned for the sea but we could not afford it. She was shockingly imprisoned on that farm. No one we knew went to England for holidays. If someone in The District went Home then it was for medical treatment or to say final farewells to aged parents. Even the ‘cheque-book farmers’ on the other side of The District went Home seldom, and we all talked about their trips as travellers’ tales out of our own experience. The richer farmers did go to Durban; we did not.
But if it had been known then the continent would split and the Indian Ocean…then sea-spume and sea-winds and Arab trading ships would have been added, in the talk we listened to as children, to the gold-bearing reefs, quartz outcrops, Arab trading safaris and Arab miners who in those days were supposed to be the reason for the ancient mine workings that we stumbled on as we picked our way through long grass.
If only we had known the real history of that area…We believed it had been inhabited when the whites came by people not much more advanced than hunter-gatherers; yes, they did have unimportant little fields of grain and gourds. The fact was that for centuries it was a tale of large and small kingdoms, wars, conquests and coups, traitors, treaties and spies, with the Portuguese there not only as traders, far from it, they were sometimes king-makers and more than once rulers, too. It was all like Shakespeare’s plays about the Plantagenets, much more satisfying than sentimental notions about the Arabs.
From Harare to the Dyke was a moment, while I kept trying to slow the journey to match this turn of the road, that descent of a hill, with the past, but it was no use, the Dyke was behind us and in no time at all we would be in Banket.
It was on this trip that I understood, in my own self, in my bones and my blood, how this had happened once, long ago, in Europe. Big towns were so far off that people might go there once in their lives, or they knew people who had. The village where they bought what they did not grow needed a day to reach, walking, or on horseback. A fearful or excited night in an inn, and then home, with tales to surprise the neighbours. And then suddenly, happening within a generation, good roads, coach travel, and the world shrank. What had been out of reach was within touching distance. The rough tracks that had followed paths discovered by the necessities of walking,