Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [38]
Mum sulked and wouldn’t talk to anyone for weeks. “Luckily no one would buy her,” Mum says. “She was so difficult. Anyway, lots of people were leaving and everyone was trying to get rid of their animals. No one wanted to take on more responsibility.” In the end, Flip Prinsloo couldn’t sell Violet and he had to give Mum the mare for nothing. She smiles. “So that was one good thing that came out of the Mau Mau.”
Although most of their friends had packed up, my grandparents didn’t immediately consider leaving Kenya. “Certainly Australia was out of the question,” Mum says. “And I don’t suppose my parents felt they had any reason to be in Britain. Dad felt Kenyan. It was his home.” So instead of leaving, the Huntingfords bought half a farm on a long, low basin about five miles north of the racetrack. Catherine Angleton, the rich one-legged English widow with whom my grandmother had boarded during the war, bought the other half on the condition that her son Martin could come out to Kenya and live on it.
“Auntie Glug told me Martin was smelly and had a prehensile forehead,” I say.
“Did she?” Mum says, frowning.
“Yes,” I say.
“I suppose you’re going to go putting that into an Awful Book,” Mum says.
“Well?” I persist.
“Oh, I suppose,” Mum admits reluctantly. “Yes, there was a bit of a problem so none of the girls wanted to go out with him and that led to much more serious problems.”
“Like what?” I ask.
Mum gives me a look. “Just more serious problems,” she says darkly.
MUM WAS NEARLY SIXTEEN BY the time the Mau Mau uprising had been quelled in January 1960. Fewer than a hundred Europeans had been killed. Official British sources estimated that British troops and Mau Mau rebels had killed more than eleven thousand black Kenyans, but in a 2007 article in African Affairs, the demographer John Blacker estimated the total number of black Kenyan deaths at fifty thousand, half of whom were children under ten. The insurgency had been quashed, but news of atrocities British soldiers and white settlers had committed made headlines in Britain and the British lost their stomach for the colony. “Independence was inevitable,” Mum says.
In preparation for self-rule in Kenya, African leaders pressed for the resettlement of those Kikuyu who had been incarcerated in the labor and concentration camps during the Mau Mau. In July 1960, government officials arrived on the Huntingfords’ farm and begged my grandparents to take in a Kikuyu family. My grandfather looked out at his little farm, with its freshly planted windbreaks and carefully contoured lands. “I don’t see why not,” he said.
Duly, the Njoge family set up their homestead upwind of Martin Angleton’s little thatched shack. Martin traveled downwind to welcome them to the farm. “And the next thing you know people started teasing my father at the club, asking him if he had put up the banns.” Mum blinks at me, as if the astonishment of this moment has not yet worn off. “It turned out that Martin had gone and got himself engaged to Mary Njoge.” Mum narrows her eyes. “Well, the wedding went off without a hitch. Everyone brought a fish slice or whatever it was. And that was that—the new Kenya.” Mum pauses, “So you can say what you like, but we were all very progressive.” She has to search for the other word. “Yes,” she says at last, “egalitarian.”
IN 1961, THE YEAR SHE turned seventeen, it was decided something should be done with Mum. “My parents wanted me to learn how to be useful and that wasn’t going to happen as long as I stayed in Kenya.” They sent her to Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies in London and put her up in a women’s hostel in Queensgate. “I’ll never forget—as soon