Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [35]
The lights went down and, through the backlit mauve-gray gauze of cigarette smoke, the show began. First, a Pathé News reel, a jingoistic British production that always included something cheerful for the far-flung subjects. “The royal family doing something horsey or a factory in Manchester belching lots of patriotic smoke into a gloomy English sky,” Mum says. After the news, there was a pause while the adults refreshed their cocktails and the Indians who ran the movie theater sweated over the ancient, dust-rusted projection machines.
“Finally, after much ado, the main event,” Mum says. “Usually a war movie with lots of wicked Nazis coming to a sticky end and heroic British soldiers prevailing against overwhelming evil. The sound system was awful, so we struggled if they showed a Western because we couldn’t understand their accents.” Mum gives me a reproachful look as if I were personally responsible for the shortcomings of John Wayne’s elocution. Then she continues in a more conciliatory tone. “Although their plots were very simple, of course, so it didn’t matter too much—a bunch of cowboys wiping out bunches and bunches of Indians.” Mum sniffs. “Very hard on their horses, we always thought.”
She and I are having this conversation while driving north from Cape Town to Clanwilliam in the Western Cape, having rendezvoused for a holiday in South Africa. I have come from Wyoming and Mum and Dad have flown from Zambia to meet me. It is the end of the cold rainy season, and the air outside is humming in anticipation of the ferocious heat of summer, which is gathering strength, moment by moment. Each day begins with a memory of chill, but by noon baking waves are rocking the ground. Mum looks out the window, but I can tell she isn’t seeing the citrus farms, neatly laid out like strung jewels on pale sandy soil along the Olifants River, nor is she seeing the ash-purple fynbos that smothers the flanks of the mountains here. In her head, Mum is back in Eldoret, in a stuffy, smoke-filled cinema and it is the early 1950s.
“And of course they never forgot the national anthem,” Mum says dreamily, putting her hand over her heart. “Every show they played ‘God Save the King’—or ‘God Save the Queen,’ whoever it was—and you had to leap to your feet respectfully, God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen. God Save the Queen!” Mum is singing softly, “La la la la! Send her victorious, happy and glorious, Tra la la la la la laaa la la! God save the Queen.”
She resumes her speaking voice and says with pride, “Did you know that Princess Elizabeth was actually in Kenya when her father died?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Did you?” Mum’s voice expresses doubt that I could really know such a wonderfully imperialistic fact. “Yes, well, she and Phil were staying at the Tree-tops Lodge in the Aberdares in February 1952.” Mum’s eyes go moist. “And they say Elizabeth went up to her room as a princess and came down as a queen, like in a fairy story. We all thought it was very significant, very appropriate that she ascended to the throne in Kenya.”
Mum pronounces the name of the country with a long, colonial-era e—Keen-ya (/ki nja/), as if Britain still stains more than a quarter of the globe pink with its dominion. I, however, pronounce it with a short, postcolonial e—Kenya (k nja). It irritates my mother when I say “Kenya” and she corrects me, “Keen-ya,” she says. But her insistence on the anachronistic pronunciation of the country only adds to my impression that she is speaking of a make-believe place