Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [19]
Telegrams jolted from Skye to Burma to inform my grandfather about the birth of his daughter. “I saw a letter he wrote to his mother from Burma saying that he was very excited about having a little girl,” Mum says. “But of course he didn’t see me until I was over a year old, and when he did finally see me, he picked me up and promptly dropped me on my head.” Mum preempts my wisecrack, “Yes, well a lot of things have been blamed on that little incident.”
But the clearest thing I learned about my grandfather’s war—and about his character—was from an undated letter written to him by one of his Nigerian troops whose obviously warm relationship with my grandfather seemed to exceed the startling, colonial-era salutation that begins:
Dear Master
Will you tell me your present condition? And what news of your family? I hope everyone is 50/50. As for myself, I want to report to you of this: we are no longer at Sandoway but in a township twenty-five miles to Rangoon. We left Sandoway on the 23rd of December 1945 to come here. From what I can see, Rangoon is a very big place but I can’t inform you that it is a nice place. Above all, it is a stinking hole, smelly and filthy.
Our current work is boring. We have about 4,000 Japs prisoners staying here with us and our only task is to guard them. That is all the work of 5 Nigeria Battalion. It is not hard work. But upon all that, everywhere else is off limits to us and the worst is there is no prospect of our going home.
So beloved master, that is all the news from the township. I hope you are doing well. Oh! I hope you will be kind enough to see about the picture I asked to send me.
I beg to pen down.
Thanks.
Yours,
John Okongo
John Okongo, right. Burma, circa 1943.
Nicola Huntingford Learns to Ride
Circa 1947–1950
Mum and Nane. Kenya, circa 1954.
If she had known then the score and depth of the tragedy that was to come, Mum might have borne the insults of her childhood with more fortitude, but the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy. And so for a few years from around the time Mum turned three, an accumulation of what she considered truly dreadful events occurred. And because they were the first real insults of her so-far small life, they remain vivid and searing for her even now.
First, her sister, Glennis (Auntie Glug), was born—she had yellow curls, dimples on each cheek and a willful, devious nature. “She managed to have some sort of seizure when she was quite young,” Mum says. “After that, my parents were terrified of smacking her in case she got herself into a state and had another fit. So no matter which of us had been naughty, I always got whacked and Glug got away with smirking at me.”
Then my grandparents left the paradise of the bungalow at the Kaptagat Arms and rented an old army officers’ mess closer to the town of Eldoret. My grandfather knocked rooms around to create a home out of the barracks. “It was very long and narrow,” Mum says, “but my father was very clever with stonework and building. He made false beams in the sitting room to make it look ye olde, and built a wonderful stone fireplace.”
There was no indoor plumbing so hot water was carried into the tub from the kitchen. The choo was a decent trek down to the bottom of the garden, “and often filled with bees and sometimes snakes,” Mum says, “which terrified me and contributed to a lifetime of reluctant bowels.” After dark, each family member was given a chamber pot, “gently steaming away under the bed and rusting the bed springs,” Mum says. “At bedtime, Glug and I had to sit on our pots until we performed. Ages and ages sometimes we had to sit there. Out of sheer boredom we used to have races sitting on our pots, hopping them across the bedroom floor.”
Glug was always getting