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By Root 367 0

Toe. And at Christmas, his wife, Auntie Helen, would sometimes send gifts of deliriously rare contraband (makeup for Vanessa and me, Irish linen tea cloths for Mum). But these infrequent communications seemed only to emphasize the enormous divide between the Fullers (us) who were sweating away in southern Africa and the Fullers (them) who we imagined were pinkly middling it out in Yorkshire or London or Oxford. And once or twice, at Mum’s insistence, we drove two hours west from the farm in the Burma Valley to visit the only relative of my father’s who had moved to Africa. “Cousin Zoo is blood family,” Mum told us firmly, “and blood”—she presented us with a fist—“Blood is blood.”

Zoo was terribly English and scrupulously if dutifully hospitable. She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night. And although Zoo seemed genuinely fond of Dad, it was chiefly his wasted eligibility that concerned her. “Your father was terribly good looking, terribly promising,” she would tell Vanessa and me. “He was our absolutely favorite cousin.” Accordingly, she arranged for my parents to sleep apart while under her roof: Mum in a spare bedroom, Dad locked in the workshop. It was as if Zoo hoped that a single night’s separation could erase or undo this inappropriately wild colonial marriage.

DAD HAD BEEN IN KENYA ONLY two weeks when he happened to be at the airport in Nairobi to meet the flight from England. “I suppose I was there to pick up someone, I can’t remember who,” Dad says. “All I remember is seeing this blonde get off the airplane in a pale blue outfit.” It was, of course, Mum, fresh from Mrs. Hoster’s College for Young Ladies. “Whew, you can’t imagine what your mother looked like, Bobo. Even from a distance, she knocked the wind out of a chap.” He leans over now and pats her hand. “Do you come here often or only in the mating season?” he asks. (It’s one of Dad’s old gags, borrowed from the BBC Goon Show, but Mum lights up as if it’s the first time she’s heard it.)

For her part, Mum was swayed by Dad’s baggy, knee-length Bermuda shorts. “Everyone else was in these horrible, tight little schoolboy boxer shorts with the pockets hanging out the bottom,” she says. So when Dad asked her to marry him, less than a month after they met, Mum said yes. Dad telegraphed England with the news of his engagement and the answer came back from his father, “Is she black? Stop. Don’t do it. Stop.” But my parents went ahead with their plans anyway. They were married in Eldoret on July 11, 1964. Photographs of that day are overwhelmingly (indeed solely) lopsided in favor of the bride: my grandfather is caught guffawing over a glass of champagne, my grandmother looks oppressed by the formal arrangement of flowers on her hat, Auntie Glug bursts out of her bridesmaid’s dress, Mum’s friends look drunk (in an outdoorsy, wholesome pukka-pukka sahib way).

No one from Dad’s side of the family came to the wedding, and their absence is the beginning edge of everything that followed. Mum is completely flanked but Dad is unsupported and what this will do to him is evident, the way his eyes already register a kind of wary separation from the rest of the world. Even with Mum by his side in each of these wedding photographs—maybe especially with her by his side (she overflowing with serene confidence, he with a monumental hangover)—Dad seems profoundly alone.

Perhaps because of this uneven beginning, we are defined less by my father than by my mother’s culture, people and family. Mum is African in her orientation, so we think of ourselves as African. She believes herself to be a million percent Highland Scottish in her blood, so we think of ourselves as springing onto African soil from somewhere wild and English-hating. My siblings and I are more than half English but this is hardly ever acknowledged. Even Hodge’s lengthy Anglican heritage (all those Church of England Bishops and vicars) is a footnote after the fact that he signed up to fight in the Second World War as “Scotch.”