Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [40]
At school, however, the matrons gave us milk of magnesia for our bowels even when we told them we were “marvelous.” The teachers thought what? and loo were uncouth. They corrected Vanessa and me, and told us to say pardon? and lavatory. Meanwhile, half the students at our school thought being posh meant excessive primness and drinking their tea with a raised pinkie. The other half didn’t care at all about manners and cultivated a deliberate unposhness. I did my best to fit in.
“Well, it’s up to you,” Mum said. “But don’t blame me if you’re invited to tea with the Queen, and don’t have a clue how to behave.”
BY DECEMBER 1963, it was decided that all that could be done for Mum at Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies had been done. “After two whole years, I still couldn’t type and I couldn’t do shorthand.” Her eyes flame. “They tried to tame me and they failed.” A week later, Mum left London and landed in perfect, equatorially lit Nairobi. “I had my hair dyed blond and cut shoulder length, very sophisticated,” she says. “Those were the days when you dressed to the nines to fly and I wanted to look my best for Kenya.” She wore navy blue winklepickers and a pale blue linen suit. “Off the rack but it gave the impression of being very posh—short enough to be intriguing but not so short as to upset the horses.” Mum smiles. “And oh, I’ll never forget the first breath of Kenyan air when I stepped off that plane—so fresh, so fragrant. And the light was so perfect, such unpolluted clarity.” She gives me a look. “Lots of people have tried to write about it, you know, but hardly anyone can capture it. You had to be there. You had to see it for yourself.”
What Mum does not say is that by the time she came home from England, Kenya was an independent country. In May 1963, the Kenya African National Union won the country’s first general election. As news of the results were released, thousands of Kenyans ran through the rain-drenched streets of Nairobi cheering, “Uhuru! Uhuru!” Jomo Kenyatta, the seventy-three-year-old former secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association, addressed the nation, calling for tribal and racial differences to be buried in favor of national unity. “We are not to look to the past—racial bitterness, the denial of fundamental rights, the suppression of culture,” he said. “Let there be forgiveness.” On December 12, 1964, the Republic of Kenya was proclaimed, and Mzee Jomo Kenyatta became Kenya’s first president.
“Yes, well,” Mum says.
PART TWO
O wye en droewe land, alleen
Onder die groot suidesterre. . . .
Jy ken die pyn en eensaam lye
van onbewuste enkelinge,
die verre sterwe op die veld,
die klein begrafenis. . . .
Oh wide and sad land, alone
Under the great southern stars....
You know the pain and lonely suffering
of ignorant individuals,
the remote death in the veld,
the little funeral. . . .
—DIE DIEPER REG. ’N SPEL VAN DIE OORDEEL OOR
’N VOLK, N.P. VAN WYK LOUW
Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode
Dad. Paris, 1958.
Dad is an upholder of the stiff-upper-lip adage: “If you don’t have anything nice to say about somebody, then don’t say anything at all.” Consequently, he is almost completely silent on the subject of his family. To be fair, his family have been equally silent on their own behalf and conspicuous for their almost total absence from our lives. Although, with our congenitally bad plumbing, land mines on the roads, snakes in the pantry and so on, it’s hard to blame Dad’s relatives for their lack of interest in coming to visit us.
Occasionally a relentlessly cheerful letter would arrive from England from Dad’s younger brother, Uncle