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By Root 1352 0

we all drank too much. Alcohol, sex and politics: endemic intoxications possessed us. Exhausted with our lives in the big city, Salisbury, we took ourselves down to Macheke at weekends, not every weekend, but often, whole groups of us, in the cars we owned or borrowed. What happened in Macheke I described, changed for literary reasons, in The Golden Notebook. But how much changed? All writers know the state of trying to remember what actually happened, rather than what was invented, or half invented, a meld of truth and fiction. It is possible to remember, but only by sitting quietly, for hours or sometimes for days, and dragging facts out of one’s memory. That means thinking yourself back into that scene, that car, that bedroom. Thus you create parallel truths: what really happened, what did not happen. But you soon begin to think, why all this effort? Memory in any case is a lying record: we choose to remember this and not that.

‘Do you remember, Doris, when we…?’

‘No. Not a thing. But do you remember…?’

‘No. Are you quite sure we did that?’

Mashopi was painted over with glamour, as I complained in The Golden Notebook. When we see remembered scenes from the outside, as an observer, a golden haze seduces us into sentimentality. And what we choose most often to remember is the external aspect of events: sparks flying up into boughs lit by moonlight or starlight, their undersides ruddy with flame-light; a face leaning forward into firelight, not knowing it is observed and will be remembered. But what was I really feeling then?

I do remember a good deal of what I really felt at Macheke. Why are those impressions so strong, from that time? After all, the War went on for a long time, years of it. I lived in different places, with different people. I was different people. Between the efficient young housewife of my first marriage, and the rackety ‘revolutionary’ of 1943, ’44, ’45 there seems little connection. Even less between those two and the young woman who–still always in crowds of people who changed, came from everywhere in the world, were always on the move–was developing the habit of privacy, writing when she could, increasingly thinking her own thoughts, increasingly self-critical. And yet we all know what the connection was: it is the sense of self, always the same–and that is the consoling, the steadying thing, that whether you are two and a half, or twenty, or sixty-nine, the sense of yourself, who you are, is the same. The same in a small child’s body, the sexual girl, or the old woman.

Memories of Macheke came from different layers of the past, and the first was when I was still a young girl. From a car window I saw dusty blue gums by the railway lines, and under them two sad baboons with chains around their waists attached to ropes which were fastened to the tree trunks. And why was that so hurtful a sight? Because it was a reminder of another. I was five years old, and in London after Persia but before Southern Rhodesia, and just as you went into the London Zoo was a cage of black iron bars, like a parrot’s cage, and in it was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, I don’t remember which, only my horror at this creature in a cage just large enough to accommodate it, hands grasping the bars, small red eyes glaring in a rage of hate and misery. On the packed brown earth under the blue gums the two baboons lived out (I hope) short lives, tormented by louts of all ages who came to jeer at them.

Later, during the War, it was under these eucalyptus trees that we, the group from Salisbury, sat drinking white wine from Portuguese East Africa, and where ‘we’, the group at Mashopi, drank white wine, with the railway lines a few paces away on one side, and the main road, Salisbury to Umtali, on the other.

As the sad black youth and I approached Macheke, I said I wanted to stop for a little, because I had been here during the War. But understood even as I spoke that he would think that I meant the Bush War, ‘his’ war. The mists of history had begun to seethe and billow like boiling milk and I did not even attempt to explain.