Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [4]
Mr. Vaas glared more and more fiercely. “Time to return to earth,” he said.
Mum’s eyes misted, but she nodded. “Roger,” she said. She knew then, she said afterward, that she’d never fly alone—as she had dreamed she might—across the high plateau of Zambia, down the escarpment and up the Luangwa River, elephants fanning out ahead of her, the light thinned by altitude and adrenaline into something approaching the perfect light of her childhood. “I took that little plane down and landed it and said good-bye to one more dream,” she said.
IN MEMORIAM of her dashed dream, Mum put the three volumes of Trevor Thom’s The Air Pilot’s Manual on her bathroom shelf next to Charles Berlitz’s German Step-by-Step and Commander F. J. Hewett’s Sailing a Small Boat. “Well you can’t win them all,” she says. And with her characteristic, if uneven, gift for magnanimity, she forgave My Dashing Little Sri Lankan, even after it became apparent, at least to her, that he was a spectacularly indifferent flight instructor. “As far as I know, not a single one of us passed even the written portion of the exam,” Mum says. But her chin goes up. “In any case, I flew, didn’t I? I flew.”
And it is true that no one can take away the day when she flew the plane up over the msasa trees, around the country club grounds and back down again onto the airstrip with a sunset at her tail, the bumpy landing into the face of the great, fiery hunter’s moon. The propeller spun to a halt. The cockpit door opened. Dust settled. For a moment the whole world stopped breathing. Then, while Mr. Vaas mopped his brow in the copilot’s seat, Beryl Markham and Karen Blixen had nothing on the way Mum emerged smiling from the cockpit, flashing a V for Victoria to her adoring fans, real and imaginary.
Nicola Huntingford Is Born
Isle of Skye, Scotland, 1944
The stairway in Waternish House. Scotland, circa 1940.
Nicola Fuller of Central Africa holds dear to her heart the values of her clan: loyalty to blood, passion for land, death before surrender. They’re the sorts of values that lead you to kill and that get you killed, and in every important way, they were precisely the kind of stubborn tribal values that you needed if you were bound and determined to be White, and stay White, first during Kenya’s Mau Mau and later during the Rhodesian War. They were decidedly not the values of the Johnny-come-lately White liberals who survived postindependence in those African countries by declaring with suddenly acquired backbone and conviction that they’d always been on the side of “the people” and that they had always embraced all of humanity and that inequality had always been so hard for them to witness.
“Oh dear,” Mum says, pained. “Embracing all of humanity? Must we? Isn’t that like born-again Christians?” (Mum has nothing against born-agains, but she has never recovered from the time she accidentally attended an evangelical service in England. “Suddenly there were all these weeping people trying to hold my hand.”) “Oh dear,” Mum says. “No, I don’t think so.”
Mum has fought for what she saw as Her Land in Africa, and she fought fiercely and without apology. So it’s confusing, but very instructive, to consider her political heroes (you can tell who she admires because she names her pets after them): Che Guevara, Josip Broz Tito and Aung San Suu Kyi. In other words, Mum admires leaders of “the people” while seeming to have absolutely no patience for “the people” themselves. On the other hand, I suppose it is only fair to disclose that she had a cat named Maggie Thatcher and she has named a new Jack Russell puppy Papa Doc. “He’s so dictatorial,” Mum wrote proudly in a recent letter. “He’s already taught himself to frown and he’s only six weeks old.”
NICOLA FULLER OF CENTRAL AFRICA was born in the front room of the housekeeper’s cottage on her mother’s family’s Waternish Estate on the Isle of Skye on July 9, 1944. Her mother was a Macdonald