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By Root 360 0

throat cancer. She left a cruelly unfinished life and—not wealth, exactly—but the impression of wealth. Wrongly assuming that my father would inherit a lawyer’s bounty, Lytton-Brown settled out of court the case my parents had brought against him for his refusal to pay their bonus. My parents banked the money—there was little else to do with it; because of UDI, Rhodesian dollars could not leave the country—and a week later they crossed into Botswana via Victoria Falls and set up a tented camp on the Chobe River.

“Your mother was very brave,” Dad tells me. “Your mother is a very brave lady.”

So I picture them in Botswana on the banks of the Chobe: Vanessa throwing all their silver teaspoons into the river; Dad fussing with his pipe and catching fish for supper; Mum downwind of a turpentine-scented mopane campfire with tears on her cheeks. “You’re all right, Tub?”

And Mum putting on a brave face. “You know how it is. Smoke gets in your eyes.” Then, singing the way she always has, out of tune but with an unerring knack of hitting the truest emotional note, “So I smile and say, when a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes. Smoke gets in your eyes.”

Nicola Fuller in England

1969

Van and Bo with grandparents in Karoi. Rhodesia, circa 1973.

Mum is profoundly superstitious: she will not walk under a ladder, nor will she look at a new moon through glass. She scratches an itchy palm with wood and tosses spilled salt over her left shoulder. She won’t close the windows in a thunderstorm, nor will she kill a spider. But in July 1968, for the first time in her life, she did not ritually touch the four walls of her room in Africa before embarking on the ship to England. And instead of leaving the doors open behind her, she made sure every door was firmly shut, and locked. “I didn’t want to come back to Africa,” she says. “Not ever.”

On the ship from Africa to England she carried these things: Vanessa; the fetal me (“conceived at the Victoria Falls Casino Hotel. A bit second rate, I’m afraid”); a hangover as a result of the excellent service on the train from Salisbury to Lourenco Marques (“It was my birthday, so the Portuguese waiters brought us gallons and gallons of free wine”); a few favorite books; two hunting prints; the Wellington bronze and the Le Creuset pots.

The MS Oranje (later known as MS Angelina Lauro) was the dreariest ship Mum has ever been on. “There were a lot of Zambian miners and American missionaries on board. It was not a hilarious amount of fun.” But what seems to have upset Mum even more than the dull company was that half the women on board had bought the same new dress as she had, “a shapeless thing in sludgy beige. It was all they had in Rhodesia because of sanctions—bolts and bolts of ghastly colored cotton made into one hideously unflattering pattern.”

Mum sulked in her berth and wouldn’t look out of her porthole. As the ship pulled out from the harbor, she turned her back on Africa and for the rest of the journey she refused to race up on deck with the other passengers whenever land was glimpsed: the faint, green blur of Kenya’s coast; the hot, orange shimmer of Somalia and Sudan. And as the ship was piloted through the Suez Canal, she ate white rice and complained that the reek of the canal was giving her morning sickness. She came on deck only when England was within sight. Then she stared at the island emerging out of the thick breath of a humid summer’s day, and she willed herself to feel British.

Nothing stirred.

TO BEGIN WITH, my parents rented a semidetached house in Stalybridge, Cheshire, from a merchant seaman. “There was no double glazing. You could see, hear and smell everything the neighbors did.” And whenever my parents tried to make the most of the long summer evenings the neighbors teased them. “There goes Gov’ment House having tea on lawn.” So Mum and Dad borrowed money, bought a rundown little farm near Glossop in Derbyshire and lived in the barn. “The roof leaked, drafts blew straight through chinks in the walls, there was no electricity, no running water