Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [59]
“Then why did you go back?” I ask.
“Well,” Mum says, “we still had those Rhodesian dollars in the bank from the Lytton-Brown settlement—a few thousand or whatever it was. That was one thing. And it was Africa, that was the main thing—we wanted to go back to Africa. We longed for the warmth and freedom, the real open spaces, the wild animals, the sky at night.”
FOR THEIR JOURNEY my parents packed up the two dogs, Mum’s collection of books, the two hunting prints, linens, towels, the bronze cast of Wellington (now missing its stirrup leathers) and the Le Creuset pots. Because of international sanctions against the country, Rhodesia had to be reached circuitously. Dad flew ahead via Malawi to find a job and somewhere to live. Mum followed on the SS Uganda from Southampton to Cape Town. “Oh, it was a wonderful little ship,” Mum says. “There were blue leather chairs in the wood-paneled smoking room and deliciously evocative oil paintings on the walls. And on either side of the chimneypiece, there was a set of enormous elephant tusks, a gift from the king of the Baganda to his country’s namesake ship. It was very romantic.”
And if that was not enough, Mum befriended the most glamorous passenger on board. “Paddy Latimer was en route to join her husband, who had a farm in South Africa. She had three little girls, one little boy, she was pregnant and she still looked simply gorgeous.” As the two women waved good-bye to England at Southampton, they realized they both had dogs. “Which was a tremendous bond, of course, so that was it,” Mum says. “We did everything together after that. Well, almost everything.” Paddy was the daughter of a ship-building family, “so she would swan up to eat at the top table with the captain and I’d be stuck with the rest of the povo.” But for breakfast and lunch and for the rest of the day, Paddy joined Mum.
In the mornings, the two women walked their dogs on the deck. They read, they wrote letters, they sunbathed. After lunch, they took languid siestas beneath the shade of days-old newspapers. Then in the afternoons they lazily plotted the world’s easiest costumes for the inevitable, dreaded Fancy Dress Party into which they reckoned they had to enter at least one child each. “Fig leaves,” Mum says. “What could be easier? So her little James went as Adam and you went as Eve, and you were terribly sweet, toddling hand in hand, fig leaves over your bits and pieces. I think the judges were quite impressed until James swiveled his leaves around—one on each hip—and started to engage in seriously unBiblical behavior with whatever was left hanging out.”
The farther south the ship sailed, the more Mum rejoiced. As Africa swelled into view, she pinned herself to the railings of the deck and felt the dampness of the last three years lift from her shoulders. When a hint of shimmering purple ribbon on the horizon bespoke Kenya, she held her face to the west and tried to inhale the perfect equatorial light. And as the ship veered around the tip of Africa, Mum held me up to the earthy, wood-fire-spiced air. A hot African wind blew my black bowl cut into a halo. “Smell that,” Mum whispered in my ear. “That’s home.”
Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round Two
Bo’s children on a visit back to southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, 2001.
To begin with, there are these scattered and unattached recollections: a snake in the honeysuckle creeper behind our house; Vanessa perspiring in her school uniform, valiantly persisting in her refusal to