Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [50]
Mum went to bed for a week, and then another week. When she was tempted to stay in bed for a third week, Granny came down from Eldoret. She sat at the end of Mum’s bed with Vanessa on her lap. Mum fed the baby and drank the cups of tea that Granny brought her. She stroked Suzy’s ears and let the cat sleep on her pillow, but she couldn’t stop crying and she wouldn’t go outside. “What’s the point?” she kept asking.
What Mum meant was that she’d lost the medium through which she understood her world. She had lost her compass, her frame of reference. “I could look between Violet’s ears, and I would know exactly where we were headed,” she says. At last, genuinely concerned by the unseemly depth of Mum’s grief, my grandmother took her to the doctor, thinking that they all might benefit from a dose of tranquilizers. The doctor did a few tests and then he came back into the office. “This is rather soon,” he said. Both Mum and Granny looked up. The doctor frowned at Mum, so pale and so thin. Then he looked at Vanessa, barely old enough to sit up on her own. “You should pace yourself a little better, Mrs. Fuller,” he said.
Mum was pregnant again.
WITH ANOTHER BABY ON THE WAY, Dad considered that two and a half years of driving the length and breadth of East Africa was enough. He wanted a farm, land on which to root his growing family. He pictured an East African version of Douthwaite: dairy cattle, a few good horses, year-round streams, rolling hills. He put money down on a place up in the highlands that fit that description, but before the deal could close, the land officer intervened. “He took me out for a cup of coffee,” Dad says, “and told me that the farm I was about to purchase was up for grabs.” Dad understood. “The new government had it slated for shambas. If I’d bought it, we would have been thrown off within a year and we would have lost all our investments.”
Then my grandparents sold the farm in Eldoret to a dozen small-scale farmers. (“The farmers came to the house with their money tucked around their bodies, in the folds of all their clothes, nothing bigger than a shilling coin,” Mum says.) For a few months, my grandparents lived in Nairobi, but eventually they set sail for England for the last time, settling in a semi-detached laborer’s cottage near Pangbourne with several crates of books; a smoke-ruined portrait of an ancestral Huntingford bride; carpets worn with the nesting of so many dogs; and a sofa that exhaled a cloud of red Eldoret dust when it was disturbed.
Although they lived in England and then Scotland for the rest of their lives, my grandparents’ habits remained Kenyan settler—they grew most of their own vegetables in the garden, my grandfather cultivated and cured his own tobacco, they cooked their meals on a wood stove, they took a quinine pill every night and drank a stiff gin and French at eleven in the morning (after which my grandmother was inclined to walk in circles and blame a congenitally shortened left leg).
“When my mother and father left Kenya that was the end of an era for us,” Mum says. “Glug was already in England at university, so we had no other family, and all our friends were leaving. Kenya lost its heart for us. So we looked around. Where else could we move? I knew I couldn’t follow my parents to England. My mother was heartbroken, but I knew I wanted to stay in Africa.”
What Mum doesn’t say, but what she means is that she wanted to stay in White-ruled Africa. In some ways, she doesn’t need to say it. Most white Africans either left the continent or receded farther and farther south as African countries in the north gained their independence. The other thing Mum cannot bring herself to say—at least not in so many words—is that her determination to stay in White-ruled Africa was the costliest decision of her life. The worst kind of costly; life and death kind of costly.
THE SOUTH AFRICAN GARDEN gathers