Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [34]
At the farm, Mum was left alone in a dimly lit sitting room while lunch was prepared. “All the furniture pressed against the skirting boards and a host of immensely chilling ancestors glared down from the walls,” Mum says. Lunch was an awkward affair: “A very severe wife, a couple of hulking sons and one crushed-looking daughter-in-law.” Except for the occasional outburst in Afrikaans, the family ate in silence. “I didn’t understand what they said, but it certainly sounded as if they were plotting to kill me,” she says.
Boiled mutton—“Grisly,” Mum says—was followed by stewed coffee and fried sweetbreads, and then Flip reached for his sweat-stained hat and pushed himself away from the table. “Time to race,” he said. The sons wiped their lips and stood up. They, too, reached for their veldskoen hats. “Kom,” Flip told Mum.
The farm was on the edge of the plateau, and even though the Prinsloos had been cultivating it for fifty years, the buildings looked inadequate and hasty in the face of all the earth and sky they were trying to command. The place had a haunted feel, as if it were in mourning for its old self. From a roughhewn livestock shed a syce emerged, leading three horses: two ordinary-looking geldings and a bay mare plunging at the end of her lead rope.
“Dit is jou perd,” Flip told Mum. “Violet.”
Mum was speechless.
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw her,” she says. “I don’t think she ever had two feet on the ground at any one time. She wasn’t tall but she had these long elegant legs, and a powerful chest. I could see, just looking at her, that she could run like the wind.”
“Well,” Flip said. “Op jou merka. First one to the end of the maize field wins.”
Without warning and certainly without waiting for my mother, the Prinsloo sons leaped onto the two geldings and took off along the edge of a maize field. “Those Afrikaners didn’t know how to train horses,” Mum says. “They just put very savage bits in their mouths and rode like mad.” Mum was still hopping about, trying to get her leg over the saddle, when Violet took off after the other horses.
“I don’t know how I stayed on,” Mum says. “But I did. I somehow managed to scramble up into the saddle with the mare at full gallop, grab the reins and hang on while she flew up the maize field. And I beat the sons, both of whom had tumbled down antbear holes long before the finish line.”
That December, Mum won the Dingaan’s Day race on Violet, outpacing Flip Prinsloo’s cousin Pieter by lengths. Flip was drunk with victory. He bought Mum slabs and slabs of chocolate at the Venus Bar and he offered to marry her off to his sons. “One was about thirteen and the other was already married,” Mum says. “But Flip said that didn’t matter. He said I could have either, or both—whichever I wanted.”
“I don’t want your sons,” Mum told Flip. She didn’t want the chocolate either. She wanted Violet.
Flip shook his head. “No, not the horse,” he said.
“If I can’t have her, I won’t ride her,” Mum said.
Flip fingered his hat. “Is that so?”
“Yes,” Mum said.
In the end, Mum and Flip struck a deal. She could borrow the horse all year for show jumping and hacking—anything she wanted—as long as she would ride for him every year on Dingaan’s Day.
“Done,” Mum said, shaking one of Flip Prinsloo’s enormous hands.
Flip fetched the brandy bottle from under his seat and took a long swallow. “Op Violet,” he said, offering Mum a sip.
Mum put the bottle to her lips. “To Violet,” she agreed.
So for the first time in her life, Mum won everything she entered: show jumping, racing, bending poles. “That mare had one speed: flat out. No one could stop her. I couldn’t stop her. But I could just about steer her and as long as I could stay on, we won, we won, we won. We won everything.”
Nicola Huntingford and the Mau Mau
Donnie on the farm. Kenya, circa 1960.
Once a week my grandfather took Auntie Glug and Mum to one of the two movie theaters