Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [30]
I look suitably horrified.
“I know,” Mum says. “We all stood in the stable yard in Nairobi staring at this apparition, but we were too polite to tell the friends who were supposed to be experts that they had selected a dud. Sawed-off legs and curved hocks”—Mum turns her elbows out in an impression of a horse with bad conformation—“which meant she’d just fall down in the middle of whatever you were doing. Oh,” she adds, “and she had an absolutely murderous disposition.”
Nevertheless Mum—brought up by her parents not to complain almost no matter what—gamely paid forty pounds of her own money for the horse (more than half a century later she remembers with undiminished resentment the exact amount), and the thing was hauled home in the back of a truck. “Well, Duckling wasn’t ideal,” Mum admits. “In fact she was pretty awful, but she was what I had.” So Mum entered show-jumping competitions as before, and as before she contributed significantly to everyone’s entertainment. “I usually left the arena unconscious, strapped to a stretcher, dripping blood,” she says with a happy smile.
For a year or two the homicidal, sawed-off Thoroughbred bashed Mum senseless week after week and Mum gamely hauled herself back onto the creature for more punishment. And then—beginning in the year Mum turned thirteen—an almost biblical series of events brought her Violet, a horse of such shining perfection that none of the scores of other horses she has owned since have ever quite rivaled that one, flawless animal.
“In 1957, there were terrific floods in Eldoret,” Mum says. “Water roared down the passageway, the choo was submerged, the cows and horses stood around up to their knees in mud, the roads washed away, the mud bricks on all the buildings got soggy, the walls sagged, the roof leaked, the laundry never dried, frogs moved into the house.” This went on for weeks and by the time the sun did come out again, the community was very rundown and measles broke out. “It started in the villages, then the old ladies next door got sick, then half the kids in my school got sick plus all the nuns. Then the Polish refugees keeled over and finally my father caught it,” Mum says.
My grandfather had to lie in a darkened room for a couple of months. “Doctor Reynolds told him not to read, but of course he did and ruined his eyesight forever.” And my grandmother was run ragged taking care of sick people. She took meat and milk to the Nandi villages; she ferried soup and bread up to the old ladies. She visited the sick boarding-school children and took clean linens to the nuns. She fed the Polish refugees—“Eldoret was smothered in them for some reason,” Mum says, “and they all insisted they were princesses and counts. Very unlikely, I would have said”—and finally she came back to bathe my grandfather’s rash in calamine lotion and give him his supper.
One morning, into this overwrought and distracted atmosphere, Flip Prinsloo arrived at the Huntingford’s door, the brim of his sweat-stained felt hat clutched in his fists, and asked to see Mrs. Huntingford. My grandmother ordered tea from the drunken Cherito and sat out on the veranda with Flip. It says something about my grandmother—and about Flip, for that matter—that the two of them waited for the tea tray to arrive in perfectly companionable silence. It also says something about the depth of Flip’s desperation that he had come to a British woman for help. “You see,” Mum explains, “in Eldoret, there was a big group of very British settlers, like our family. And then there was a quite big group of very Afrikaner settlers, like Flip. And of course the two groups did not mix at all.” Mum narrows her eyes. “The Boer War,” she says darkly. “Never, ever forget the Boer War, Bobo. They certainly haven’t.”
THE DUTCH ARRIVED in South