African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [155]
I stood and looked out at ‘the view’ which was why my parents had built the house where they did, and which fed their eyes and their hopes for all the years of being on that farm where nothing went as they wanted.
It is beautiful. It was more beautiful than I expected, because of those inexplicable warnings from my brother. ‘Don’t go back, it will break your heart.’ What had broken his heart? Soon I understood. Not that our old house had gone, for it had to, being built of mud and thatch. Not that they cut the top off ‘our’ hill. No, it was the bush. It had gone. Where he had spent his childhood were interminable red fields, his bush–gone. When the forests that covered Europe after the end of the last Ice Age made way for fields and herds do you suppose that people who had spent their youth under great trees, wary equals with wolves and bears, returned after absence to find their own real place gone, and went about warning others still exiled with, ‘Don’t go back. Whatever you do, don’t go home or you’ll break your heart.’ And spent the rest of their lives in mourning for trees that had expired in smoke?
I stood there, needless to say limp with threatening tears, unable to believe in all that magnificence, the space, the marvel of it. I had been brought up in this place. I lived here from the age of five until I left it forever thirteen years later. I lived here. No wonder this myth country tugged and pulled…what a privilege, what a blessing. And yet my poor mother spent all those years grieving that her children were being badly done by, should be in some conventional school in England.
But now it was time to turn myself around and look at that new house. If somebody tried to build a house that embodied everything my parents hated, it would be this one. A graceless lump of a dark bungalow, painted to look dull, it crouches twenty feet or so back from where our house was, and perhaps fifteen or twenty feet lower.
Past it down the hill were some women and children. Ayrton R. went to talk to them, and returned to say they did not or would not speak English. It could be seen through the windows that the place was full of children, staring out, as we smiled, gesticulated our need to talk to them. A lot of children.
We gave up and wandered over the back of the hill. Once it had tall thick grass, where no one ever went except my brother and I, to reach the big vlei at the back of the hill, full of birds and game. There were also, though we did not know the plant then, thickets of marijuana and sometimes a mile or so of bush was saturated with the reek of it, a rough hairy smell, like sweat.
Here was the scene of the pawpaw drama. My mother planted pawpaw trees tastefully where they would look nice, but found they languished. Pawpaw seeds thrown on to the rubbish heap produced a grove of trees that dropped the pinky-yellow globes all around them, so many they were not gathered. The earth there was fed with pawpaw flesh.
Not far from where the women stood watching us was where our lavatory had been. It was a deep pit, and over it an inverted packing case that had a hole in it, and over that a little hut, screened by grass fencing–like the lavatories of nearly everyone in The District.
Everywhere over the flat place that tops the hill are disused brick buildings, and, half hidden in grass, a brick and concrete line with rusty iron rings which had been for pigs, or perhaps cows. A barn was