Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [15]
“Stephen was one of Zoe’s sons?” I guess.
Mum frowns. “No, no, no,” she says. “Stephen wasn’t her son. Stephen was her chimpanzee.”
There is a small, appalled pause while I try—and fail—to imagine sending one of my toddlers off to play with a chimpanzee (quite apart from the Jane Goodall abuse-of-the-animal concerns).
“Weren’t your parents worried he would bite you?” I ask.
Mum gives me a look as if I have just called Winnie-the-Pooh a pedophile, “Stephen? Bite me? Not at all, we were best friends. He was a very, very nice, very civilized chimpanzee. Anyway, my mother didn’t worry about me too much. She knew I would always be all right because everywhere I went Topper came with me.”
“And Topper was?”
“A dog my father had rescued,” Mum says.
WHICH MIGHT EXPLAIN WHY, when I was packed off to boarding school in Rhodesia for three months at a time, and missed the lousy farm with every fiber of my being, my own rescued dog wrote me letters more regularly than Mum did, and certainly with more affection:
“My Dearest Bobo,” Jason King (my dachshund, bailed out of the Umtali, Rhodesia, chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), wrote in January 1977:
I’ve been out riding with Mum and the horses every day this week. I’ve learned how to climb trees to chase lizards. I keep getting stuck high up in the Flamboyants and July has to climb up and rescue me.
Sally has been very naughty and went hunting for three nights last week. She took Bubbles with her. I think they were chasing baboons. Sally came home with a bleeding tongue and sore paws and dripping with ticks. It serves her right. Bubbles got all the way to the river before one of the boys saw him. They were both lucky not to get caught in a snare.
I hope you are working hard at your lessons and being good for your matrons and teachers. Tell Vanessa that she is supposed to share her tuck with you. I miss you very, very much, especially at tea time. I sleep on your bed every night and on your chair all day.
Lots and lots of love,
Your beloved friend and the biggest supporter of the Bobo Fuller Fan Club,
Jason King
oxo
Roger Huntingford’s War
Hodge with Nandi tribesmen in Kenya, circa 1930.
Auntie Glug, Mum’s younger sister, now lives in a small village in Scotland with her husband, Sandy; a passionately adored dog called India and a couple of cats. Their three children are grown and have left home, but Langlands Lodge feels like a place that has never given up on raising children. Its prevailing odors remain nursery comforting: warm toast, freshly brewed tea and stewed plums. If my parents had been killed in the Rhodesian War, Vanessa, Olivia and I would have come to live in Langlands with Auntie Glug and Uncle Sandy. In this way, the house has always felt like a refuge, a place of certainty and safety. I sleep profoundly here (fourteen hours at a stretch) and I eat without restraint, grazing my way steadily through Uncle Sandy’s casseroles, his wheatie buns, his greenhouse grapes (a habit that has earned me the Langlands’ nickname Niece-Weevil).
Auntie Glug hasn’t lived in Africa since 1967, but she still dresses like a Kenyan settler woman of a certain era—men’s clothes, work boots, a red handkerchief tucked into her sleeve—and she smokes like a soldier. The boxes of photos and letters that I dig out from under the stairs smell of her cigarettes but also of my grandfather’s pipe tobacco, the homegrown, home-cured crop he used to hang in his garage in England. The smell of