African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [154]
‘It’s a shame,’ my mother said, with the social inflection she gave to such summonings of that real world of hers, England. ‘This part of the bush is just like English parkland.’ There we stood, the English family, while the black men swung their axes and the trees toppled, and the great bonfire roared, exploding sparks and black smoke where birds flapped and swung. They say birds are attracted to smoke because it gets rid of their parasites for them; wherever there is smoke, there are birds. My mother saw parkland, but I had been in that England of hers for six months, aged five, and I remembered my horror at the dinginess, the blackness, the wet, scene after scene that stuck in my mind meaning England, for years. Black wet ganglia of railway lines, under rain. A fishmonger’s slab where a black wet lobster futilely moved its legs. A room in a boardinghouse, and dark rain streaming down the windows. A row of little gardens, each as neat and pretty as an illustration in a child’s book and in one of them a sad man grinding his teeth and snuffling, and digging a fork into the soil as if he wanted to kill it. He stood in cold drizzle wearing a trench-coat soaked with patches of damp, and through the straps on the shoulders (made to hold the gloves officers wore) he had pushed limp hide gloves. They dangled from his shoulder like dead grey fingers.
The Hundred Acres Field, or the Big Land, stood on that November day bared for planting, a dark rich red. Across it curved the contour ridges made by my father. For sixty years that field has been growing crops, so something must have been done right.
And now the turn up to the house, a place where the cattle kraal had been, from where manure was taken across the track to be laid on the field. The kraal was gone, and gone the little patch of bush that for some reason was full of bauhinia trees, with their flowers like scraps of white silk crepe and a dry enticing smell. The hill was ahead: the road was now solid and good, and there was no need to balance and crawl over ruts and ridges. And then we sped up the hill among thinned trees, and were at the top. Gone was the big muwanga tree that once dominated all this landscape, full of honey which we cropped once a year, leaving enough for the bees. My parents used to say, ‘Well, you can bury us under the old muwanga tree’, meaning it was certainly not as good as an elm or an ash or an oak, but the next best thing. The old tree had been felled by lightning: even in our time the white trunk had a black lightning scar down one side.
There we stood at the top, and we turned our backs on the new ugly bungalow.
‘What did they mean, the hill has gone?’ Ayrton R. and I asked each other.
Yes, the top has been sliced off, making a flat and amenable place: stony ground sloped down sharply from the walls of our house. Quite a lot has been pared off: ten feet? Twenty? It is a sizeable plateau. Because the month was November, the bush was heavy and green–what there was left of it. The relief that came from finding myself standing on the top of a hill, one not imagined or invented, softened something else: on the hill the bush was sparse and damaged, and whereas once we looked out on thick trees and vleis, where a few fields lay scattered, now the bush has gone, and the scene is of wide fields climbing and stretching everywhere, with some modest strips of bush left in it. Here it is, the Banket soil, the red rich wonder-worker, and I suppose the question has to be, How is it this wealth of soil was allowed to stay so long unproductive under unstumped bush?
The country brings itself to a height here, at this hill: the landscape heaps itself up. The hill where once the farm compound stood is only slightly lower. A mile or so further, going towards the northern mountains, is Koodoo Hill, where my brother and I used to walk all day. It was full of game. The wild pig particularly loved it. Just as I remembered, this is