African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [153]
These little strips of building now stood locked and empty, ready to be demolished. Just as with the hotel in Macheke, I could not believe that such thin, shallow bits of building could have held so much life and so many people. Why, on mail days, or when there were dances or gymkhanas, hundreds of people might pass along those verandahs and in and out of the bar. The post office I knew is still there, among all the other buildings, a pretty little place. And, for the rest…energetic Banket is spreading fast, the new townships have black people in them properly housed–or at least, there are good houses, but who knows how many each has to hold?
Two roads run off to the right of the main road north, fine new roads, and one follows the line of the old railway to the Ayreshire mine. We called it the Ayreshire track, though the railway sleepers were long ago displaced, or stolen, or might be stumbled over in the bush where they lay filling with water for mosquitoes to breed in.
In the 1890s the Ayreshire mine was a big mine with its own hotel. Then and later it was notorious for the casual or cruel treatment of its workers. In our time it was no longer being mined properly, but was an open-cast working, owned by a man called McCauley. The men who worked for him hated him so much they sometimes strung wire from tree to tree across the track when he had been in Salisbury or in Banket and they knew he was coming back. The idea was that the car would run into the wire at windscreen level and turn over. But we all knew these wires were sometimes there and we watched for them. No car was overturned, and he died in his bed. He used to say that he had survived the trenches in France, and he wasn’t going to be killed by kaffirs. I remember wondering why such a wicked man was always so pleased with himself.
To go from Banket to the farm, by car, might take an hour, not only because of my father’s idiosyncratic attitudes towards speed, but because, if it rained, the road would be red mud, in which we got stuck, over which we skidded. Or if it was dry, the wheels could sink in drifts of red dust. ‘Going into the Station’ was a state of mind, an odyssey. But if I walked then I might dawdle along the track for a couple of hours. Now the journey takes a few minutes.
This new road, obliterating the old turns and twists and ups and downs, runs through field after field of the rich Banket soil, surely as beautiful as any in the world, red, soft, rich and mellow. The bush has been cleared to make these fields, leaving only strips here and there. Once this soil was proud to go sixteen bags of maize to the acre, and people all over the country used to quote it as an example of merit, but now, because of genetic miracles, it would scorn to go less than thirty or thirty-five, though forty is more like it. ‘This district could feed half of Zimbabwe on its own,’ says Ayrton R., who might be from Matabeleland, but clearly feels about Banket and its accomplishments like a parent.
We passed the Matthews’ house, still in appearance just the same, and I waited for that moment when the long low grass-thatched house would appear, confirming so many dreams and nightmares, but there was the hill, yes absolutely and veritably a hill, it had not been vanished away, and on the top of it not the long house, but another, further back, a graceless greyish bungalow. But it was the field, the big field, rather, the Big Land, that was holding me. There it was, the Hundred Acres Field, stumped out by my father in 1925. We all stood there, my father, my mother, my little brother, then three years old, and a little girl.