• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Amore!” John replied.

IT NEED HARDLY BE SAID that by the time my parents finally climbed into John’s pickup and bumped across the valley to be shown Robandi Farm they had begun to see the world in distinctly rainbow shades. “The whole place was freshly washed in rain. The flamboyant trees on the driveway were in bloom,” Mum says. “The Persian lilacs were dripping nectar.” And the garden, lightly soaked, gave off the scents of frangipani and red earth. “We told John we must have the farm,” Mum says. “He agreed that it should be ours. That was it. I think we signed some sort of agreement on the spot.”

“Wait,” I say. “You didn’t walk around the fields first? You didn’t feel the soil? You didn’t inspect the barns or check the water supply?”

Mum gives me a look, as if I am the murderer of fairy stories. “We didn’t feel it was necessary. There was such a pretty view across the valley to John Parodi’s farm and beyond that to Mozambique, wasn’t there, Tim?”

“What’s that?” Dad says.

“A TERRIFIC VIEW OF MOZAMBIQUE,” Mum shouts. “FROM THE HOUSE!”

SO MY PARENTS BORROWED MONEY to buy the farm, and we moved from Karoi to the Burma Valley (two children, three dogs, two cats, one horse, some china, the linen, Wellington, the two hunting prints, a second-hand treadle sewing machine and the Le Creuset pots). Seen without the beneficial filter of every different color liqueur in John Parodi’s liquor cabinet, Robandi was rockier than would have been ideal and it was in a rain shadow. The flamboyant trees seethed with termite nests and nothing would grow under them. The house, which had looked mysterious beneath a canopy of fiery red blooms, was, on closer inspection, a dreary bunker. “But it was our own farm in Africa.” Mum sighs. “And we were so happy, so proud, so sure this was where we would spend the rest of our lives.”

Mum painted the outside of the house an apricot-peachy color. She brought out the treadle sewing machine and made curtains out of mattress ticking. She hung Irish linen tea cloths and china plates on the walls to augment the hunting prints, and she planted the garden with vegetation guaranteed to thrive on the maximum amount of neglect. Finally, she filled up the swimming pool, but without an electric pump and expensive chemicals, it quickly turned green and in a short while, played host to scores of frogs, a family of ducks, some geese and the occasional Nile monitor. “Well, there you go,” Mum said, squinting at the overall effect of the garden, the pink house, the verdant swimming pool. “Very soothing and picturesque, no?”

At night we ate Mum’s colorful vegetables fresh from the garden and her tough home-raised chickens tenderized into fragrant curries in the Le Creuset pots. “Ah, fantastico!” Mum took a sip of the cheapest possible Portuguese wine, and she clinked her glass against Dad’s, “Here’s to us,” she said, “there’re none like us. And if there were, they’re all dead.” And for a moment in that spluttering candlelight, with their two growing daughters, their pack of dogs, their one difficult horse, their wild swimming pool, it looked as if Mum and Dad might be happy here forever: Dad with his farm to shape into a southern African version of Douthwaite; Mum with her life to shape into something biography worthy.

And then, just a few months after we moved to Robandi, something happened halfway around the world that changed everything. In April 1974, revolutionaries marched through the streets of Lisbon holding red carnations to symbolize their socialist ideology. In the aftermath of the coup, Portuguese colonies in sub-Saharan Africa were immediately granted their independence and a million Portuguese citizens fled from those territories. Mozambique’s new Marxist-Leninist FRELIMO government announced it was supporting the ZANLA guerilla soldiers who were fighting majority rule in Rhodesia. In retaliation, the Rhodesian government funded RENAMO, an anti-Communist rebel army in central Mozambique. The border between Rhodesia and Mozambique was closed, and