Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [20]
Baths were taken under the vicious supervision of a drunken ayah, Cherito, who smacked Mum forcefully and repetitively but without any evident cause, as if she were merely practicing shot put or tennis and Mum’s body was in the way of a particularly powerful swing (Glug, however, escaped the unpredictable violence of even Cherito’s drunken temper, so ingrained was the Legend of Her Seizures and the fear that she’d have another one at the slightest provocation). “My parents would be in the sitting room or on the veranda, quite happily relaxing with some of my mother’s homemade wine while Cherito was swatting me around the bathroom, so they knew nothing of what was happening. And Glug never uttered a peep about it because it was all very good entertainment for her.”
My grandmother made wine out of potatoes, raisins, barley, figs—whatever she could get her hands on. “It was delicious, but she had no control over how strong each batch would be,” Mum says. “It was well known for visitors to leave our house and get terribly confused and end up in the wrong district—and sometimes the wrong country. They’d be on their way to Kitale and end up in Bungoma. Or they’d be expected in Kapsabet but find themselves in Uganda.”
With only the bitterly resented Glug for company, Mum missed Stephen Foster terribly. The donkey, Suk, which my grandmother had bought as a replacement best friend was a big disappointment. In my mother’s telling, he had a willful and devious nature, much like Glug, except with ears and a tail and without the Perfected Art of the Seizure. “Suk was not at all your storybook donkey,” Mum says. “To get anywhere at all, I had to be dragged around by a syce. The donkey sneered at him, ignored me and brayed like a steam engine. I think it was humiliating for all of us.”
And finally, most awful of all, it was decided that it was time for Mum to attend the convent, a school run by Irish nuns about half a mile away from their new home. Every morning, she was put into her uniform, a blue skirt and white shirt with a wide-brimmed black hat, “To keep the African sun off our faces.” She was loaded onto the sulking Suk and hauled to school by the syce. Then the syce and Suk would wait under the eucalyptus trees for three hours until Mum classes were over. After that, she would be put on the donkey, the donkey would be untied and the syce would be dragged from the end of the halter rope as Suk fled for the comforts of home.
As she got older, Mum was allowed to ride Suk over to the school alone. “By then my legs were long enough, and I could just about kick the wretched beast into action.” She tied the donkey up under the eucalyptus tree and went in to lessons. “Nicola is a disruptive influence in the class,” her school report read. Mum found learning difficult. She showed early promise as an artist, but the nuns didn’t care about art. Numbers made no sense to her at all, and even words were hard for her to grasp, “Our parents read to us every night, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Thompson Seton, that kind of thing. I adored stories and books, but I struggled with the nuns and their dreary lessons and it took me ages to learn how to read.”
Instead, she entertained herself by trying to coax one of the many cats that hunted in the school drains to come and sit on her lap. If the cat couldn’t be persuaded into the classroom, Mum jumped out of the window after it. And then, since she was not Catholic—“Anglican, of course!”—and therefore could not be made to kneel in the chapel with the other recalcitrant girls fingering their way through