Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [42]
And although my father is profoundly English, by the time I am old enough to know anything about him, he is already fighting in an African war and his Englishness has been subdued by more than a decade on this uncompromising continent. In this way, the English part of our identity registers as a void, something lacking that manifests in inherited, stereotypical characteristics: an allergy to sentimentality, a casual ease with profanity, a horror of bad manners, a deep mistrust of humorlessness. It is my need to add layers and context to the outline of this sketchy Englishness that persuades me to ask my reticent father about himself: I am searching for the time before he was alone, for the time when he was part of a tribe and a place. I am looking for the person he was before he became the man who would never ask for help, even if not doing so meant our lives.
IF MUM’S CHILDHOOD was set in a happily cramped, converted World War II officers’ barracks under perfect equatorial light on the wind-blown gold of the Uasin Gishu plateau, the majority of Dad’s childhood was set in Hawkley Place, a coldly large Victorian house in Liss, fifty miles south of London. “I spent my whole life outside, watching the haying or trailing around after the cowman from next door,” Dad says. He opens his penknife and uses it to scrape out his pipe and absentmindedly checks the blade against his thumb. “So that was good fun,” he says.
Dad’s parents had spent the first years of their marriage stationed in China. “I think they might have been happy there,” Dad says uncertainly. But he can’t produce any proof or details because by the time he arrived on the scene, on March 9, 1940, in Northampton Hospital, England, any romance or affection that once may have existed between his parents had long since burned off.
“China,” Mum muses. “How wonderful! Where in China?” she asks, but before Dad can answer, Mum’s mind leaps to Doris Day. “Shanghai in the 1930s,” she says. “What do you think?” And then she starts singing about leaving for Shanghai and being allergic to rice. “Tra la la la la laaaaa!” she finishes when she runs out of words, which is pretty soon.
This is the second day of our South African holiday. Mum, Dad and I are sitting in the garden of a tranquil lodge in the Cederberg Mountains, drinking tea. In the background, Cape turtle doves are calling the day to a mournful close, “Work hard-er, work hard-er.” A flock of guinea fowl croon in the field in front of us. White egrets flock across the sky to their roost. The cliffs behind us are struck golden pink by the setting sun. But the rareness of this exceptional peace is made still more singular by the fact that Dad is sitting still and he is speaking.
“Most talk is just noise pollution,” he says. At home in Zambia, you can hear him stamping into the kitchen for his tea long before dawn, muttering a greeting to the dogs, lighting his pipe. He is usually out of the camp, pacing the length of the irrigation pipes, checking the height of the river long before the rest of us have managed our first cup of tea.
At lunchtime—when the farm’s staff takes an afternoon break and the land itself seems to exhale heat—Dad will retreat from the punishing sun and sit under the Tree of Forgetfulness with his Farmers Weekly or catch up with a month-old London Telegraph crossword puzzle, but the activity is less restful than it sounds. His pipe is constantly moving from mouth to ashtray, and then (tap-tap-tap) it is emptied, refilled, lit, extinguished, scraped out, refilled yet again and so on. Then at four o’clock, the lengthening shadows seem to act as an irresistible lure. He clamps his pipe between his teeth and strides out of camp, back into his bananas or around the boundary of the farm. In Dad’s ordinary day, there is no room for reminiscences.
DAD’S MOTHER, Ruth—“Boofy”—was the youngest of six Garrard daughters: Garrard, of the Crown Jewelers, the oldest jewelers in the world, by appointment to HRH, the Prince of Wales. “And being a Garrard, everyone supposed Boofy had inherited a lot of