Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [45]
Dad hired on as a field hand in Ontario. “The McKinneys,” he says. “Lovely people, but teetotalers.” It was twenty miles away by bike to the nearest pub. “All right in the summer, but I knew I’d freeze to death in the winter.” So at the end of the haying season, Dad answered an advertisement to grow tomatoes in the West Indies, bought himself a safari suit at a department store in Toronto and headed south.
A little under a year after Dad got to Montserrat the tomato operation shut down. “Massive factory, not enough tomatoes,” he said. For a few months, he kicked about the Caribbean Beach Club—“sleeping under a palm tree, deep-sea fishing, sailing, tennis. It was pretty alcoholic”—until he washed up on a nearby island working at a beach hotel. “My boss was queer as a coot, so I had to spend my whole life walking backward,” Dad says. “Then the finale was when my bar bill exceeded my salary by about ten quid a month.” Dad was fired.
Next, he was interviewed for a post as the aide-de-camp to the governor-general of Barbados. “My duties were pretty simple. In the morning I had to take Lady Stow’s Pekinese for their daily walk. In the evening I had to drink rum punches and play poker dice with the governor.” But this more or less extended cocktail hour came to an abrupt end when Sir John received instructions from the Home Office: in preparation for independence, Barbadians were to be employed wherever possible. No one could argue that a Bajan couldn’t walk a Pekinese or drink rum punches as well as an Englishman. Dad found himself out of work again.
“Just about that time, someone mentioned a job in East Africa growing trees,” he says. “And that sounded all right to me.” Accordingly, Dad arrived in Kenya one afternoon in late November 1963, and the next morning he presented himself to Robert Stocker, of the Wattle Company, for a job interview.
“Do you play rugby?” Robert asked.
Dad peered over the desk. Stocker was second-row forward material, his bulging thighs barely fit under his desk. “Yes,” Dad said.
Robert looked up, “Position?” he asked.
“Winger,” Dad said.
“Good.” Robert made a note in Dad’s file. “You’ve got a job.”
Dad was paid almost nothing for doing very little. On Wednesday afternoons, he was expected to show up for rugby practice at the Eldoret Sports Club and on Saturdays he was expected for matches. For the rest of the week, he was given a clapped out Land Rover to drive around three or four thousand acres on the plateau. His job was to measure the girth of wattle trees and keep an eye on a few hundred head of cattle. “Sometimes on my rounds I’d see a Ugandan kob or the odd leopard,” Dad says. “And then the whole world would stop. I’d switch off the Land Rover, light my pipe and just watch the animals for an hour or two. I’d completely lose track of time, you know—it was absolutely marvelous.”
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK why my parents haven’t left Africa. Simply put, they have been possessed by this land. Land is Mum’s love affair and it is Dad’s religion. When he walks from the camp under the Tree of Forgetfulness to the river and back again, he is pacing a lifelong, sacred commitment to all soil learned in childhood. “Bring me my Bow of burning gold,” Dad is singing again. Now he pauses and turns to Mum. “How does that hymn go, Tub?”
“Bring me my Arrows of desire,” Mum sings. “Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!”
“That’s right,” Dad says.
“Bring me my Chariot of fire!” they sing together.
Both my parents want to be buried on their farm in Zambia when the time comes. Accordingly, Dad has picked a baobab tree above the fish ponds for the site of his grave. “Just wrap me in a bit of sorry cloth and put me deep enough in the ground that Mum’s bloody dogs don’t dig me up,” he says.
Mum has picked a tree within shouting distance of Dad’s. “On the other hand,” she says, “I expect a big, elaborate funeral.