Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [5]
It took me a while to recover from the discovery that Mum’s family actually had a war cry, but then I thought about Mum and I realized that if you didn’t have a war cry to go with that attitude, you’d have to invent one. During the bush war in Rhodesia Mum forwent her family’s Gaelic war cry and took up a personal war cry. It was borrowed from Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and was about being a bandit from Brazil, being the quickest on the trigger and shooting to kill, which was about the extent of Mum’s interest in the lyrics. In fact she quite often didn’t make it past the opening word—a loudly shouted “Olé!,” which kept it simple for everyone who did not speak Gaelic but confused those of us who spoke absolutely no Spanish. Vanessa and I translated the word as “Hooray!” But the meaning was clear either way. My mother was here, she was armed, and you bet your insurrecting Commie ass she was dangerous.
My grandmother named her first child Nicola Christine Victoria—three Christian names to make up for all the children she had miscarried on the way to having this one—Nicola to commemorate a Nichols branch of their family; Christine after the housekeeper on Waternish who helped my grandmother give birth and Victoria because Mum was born a little over a month after D-day.
Including Nicola Christine Victoria, three children were born on Waternish that day, which made it something of a baby boom. What made the other two children memorable and worthy of sharing a headline with my usually headline-hogging Mum was the fact that one was eventually diagnosed with a form of dwarfism and one was born with her feet on backward. “How lucky,” my grandmother is said to have remarked upon hearing the news. “That’ll come in handy if she wants to catch razor fish.”
“Why razor fish?” I ask.
“Razor fish,” Mum explains, “live in the sand along the shore. You sneak up on them by walking backward.”
IN SPITE OF LIVING ALL but a fraction of her life in Africa, Mum considers herself one million percent Highland Scottish, ethnically speaking. Her father was English, but Mum says that doesn’t count; Scottish blood (especially the Highland sort) cancels English blood. As if to prove this, Mum cries when bagpipes play; she once attempted to slip a suitcase full of haggis through Zambian customs (to be fair, she was experiencing a manic episode at the time) and her eyes actually change color from green to yellow when she is excited or is about to go certifiably mad. Mum is also a bit fey, which means that she has access to worlds unseen, has funny feelings about things, insights, prophecies and visions. She believes in ghosts and fairies.
She inherited this gift from her two million percent Highland Scottish mother, ethnically speaking, who was so fey that she could predict the future with astonishing accuracy. “It’ll all end in tears, you’ll see,” my grandmother used to say several times a day. My grandmother could actually talk to fairies and see ghosts with casual ease, especially after her second midmorning gin and French, which became the habit of her later years (but this is also the woman who claimed that the reason she walked in circles after eleven a.m. was that one leg was shorter than the other, so it’s hard to know).
I, on the other hand, don’t seem to have inherited Mum’s passion for violence. I am not fey like my grandmother. I don’t make unilateral declarations of independence every time we all have too much to drink. My eyes are dark green and stay that way, no matter how angry or excited I get. I can see that Scotland is beautiful, or that parts of it are, but I don’t fall to my knees as soon as I land on the Isle of