African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [8]
I put the flowers in the back seat of the car and drove east on the old road to Umtali.
THE BUSH
The family went often to Marandellas, whose name is now again Marondera, just as the real right name for Umtali would have been Mutare, if the whites had not overrun these parts. We did not go to Umtali, for it was then a distant place. I did not get to it until I was fifteen or so, and then Marandellas had become only one of the way-stations along a road where I visited farms, sometimes for weeks at a time. But as a child, Marandellas was the other pole to our farm, which was in the District of Banket, Lomagundi (or Lo Magondi) seventy miles to the north-east of Salisbury, and on the road north to the Zambesi valley. Nothing ever happened on our road but the routine excitements of flooded rivers, where we might have to sit waiting for the waters to subside for four or five hours before daring the drift that could have potholes in it from the flood; or getting stuck in thick red mud and having to be pushed out over freshly cut branches laid across the mud; or glimpses of wild animals…‘Look, there’s a duiker!’ Or a koodoo, or a little herd of eland. These being the stuff of ordinary life, and what we took for granted, it was only on the other side of Salisbury that the shock and tug of new impressions began, a shimmer in the air, like mental heat waves, which I knew were proper to the road to Umtali. Marandellas was about fifty miles south-east of Salisbury, but if you ask, What is a hundred and twenty miles?–then that is from the practical, unpoetical perspective. Our car was an Overland, contemporary with the first Fords, now taken out of car museums to star in films of the Great Depression. It was second-hand when we bought it, and thirty miles an hour was a great speed. Add this to the characters of my parents, and the journey became an epic endeavour, to be planned and prepared for weeks in advance. The most often spoken words in our house were, ‘But we can’t afford it!’–usually, triumphantly, from my father to my mother, to prove something was impossible, in this case to spend a week near Ruzawi at the Marandellas Hotel. My brother was at Ruzawi School, a prep-school conducted on English lines, and the trip would be so we could take part in a Sports Day, an Open Day, a cricket match, judged as successful according to how they mirrored similar events at prep-schools at Home. Impossible!–thank the Lord!–and he would not have to leave the farm and put on respectable clothes instead of his farm khaki and make small talk with other parents. For his ‘We can’t afford it,’ was not a symptom of meanness, but rather of his need, by now the strongest thing in him, to be left in peace to dream.
But my mother triumphed. Rolls of bedding, boxes of food, suitcases, filled the back of the car where the ‘boy’ and I fitted ourselves, and we set off. At the speed my father insisted on travelling, the seventy miles to Salisbury took three or four hours. (‘A man who has to use a brake doesn’t know how to drive a car.’) The Packards and the Studebakers shot past us in tumults of dust (these were the old strip roads and you overtook on dirt) for the Fords and the Overlands were already an anachronism. (‘Why give up your car when it is still working perfectly well just because they want to sell you a new one?’) To go from Banket to Marandellas in one day, or an afternoon, even on those roads, was easily done–by everyone else. We stayed at the old Meikles Hotel, but in the annex at the back, because it was cheaper. We ate a picnic supper in our room, because we could not afford the hotel dining-room. Afterwards we drank coffee in Meikles lounge, where a band played among palm trees and gilded columns.
Next morning, the car forced to accommodate even more food, we left early on the road to Marandellas, so there would be plenty of time to set up camp. The drive went