Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [64]
Dad was conscripted into the Rhodesian Army Reserves and Mum voluntarily joined the Police Reservists. She became a Red Cross emergency responder. Every few weeks, Dad put on his camouflage uniform and disappeared with six other Burma Valley farmers to fight in the Himalayas. Mum learned to run the farm in his absence. They slept with an Uzi and an FN rifle next to the bed, they ate with Browning Hi-Power pistols on their side plates and they taught Vanessa and me how to shoot to kill. They put sandbags in front of the windows and surrounded the farmhouse with security fencing. We bought an old Land Rover, mine-proofed it and named it Lucy. And Mum came up with her Olé! war cry, which we sang on Wednesday and Saturday evenings on our way to the Burma Valley Club, where Mum danced on the bar (gorgeous with her long auburn hair, her pale green eyes).
But in those early days, the war was more like the unwelcome threat of bad weather than something perpetually violent. “The big thing was to pull up your socks and carry on as effortlessly as possible,” Mum says. She was scornful of the ten thousand whites who left the country: “The chicken run,” we called it. And she had no tolerance for those who said black rule was inevitable. “Over my dead body,” she said. “Life must go on.”
So she taught Vanessa and me proper elocution for hours and hours. “There,” we said, trying not to flatten the end of the word. “Women,” we said, as if the word had only i’s and two m’s. “Nice,” we said, smiling over the i instead of rhyming it with “farce.” We rescued several dogs. We were given another horse. Vanessa was packed off to boarding school in Umtali. (“She pretends not to be able to read,” Mum told her teacher, “but she really knows quite a lot of Shakespeare.”)
I was given correspondence school lessons at home with an emphasis on what my mother considered the sacred arts of storytelling, and after lunch, before we both fell asleep in the limb-deadening afternoon heat, Mum read to me: The Jungle Book, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows. In the cool evenings, Mum sat with tea on her lap, eyes half closed. “Story of the Week,” she would demand. And I would tell her, “This week I rode through the river on my horse with one eye.”
“Hm.” Mum would smile. “Splashed is better than rode, don’t you think? I splashed through the river on my one-eyed horse, the dogs paddling next to me. . . . How about something like that?”
Then in the humid November of 1975, Mum felt suddenly overwhelmed by a familiar nausea. By early August of the following year, she was heavily pregnant. “A week or two left I would have said,” Doctor Mitchell told her, frowning. “And in this condition, must you be all the way out there on that farm? It’s not safe.” Almost on cue, the war suddenly escalated. On the night of August 11, 1976, the Mozambican army launched a mortar attack into the southern suburbs of Umtali. Vanessa—at boarding school—was herded with the other girls downstairs, where they were pushed onto the concrete floor and had mattresses thrown on them with such hurried force that some of them ended up with contusions. When she came home for the weekend, I admired her bruised knees, the egg on her forehead, and bombarded her with questions. Was she frightened? Did she see any dead bodies? Did she see a terrorist? But Vanessa only looked self-protectively bored, and Mum said, “Don’t go on and on and on about it, Bobo. It’s over now, isn’t it?”
The Rhodesian government issued thousands of prewritten air letters for white families to send to friends and relatives overseas with institutionally authoritative language that nonetheless accurately mirrored our internal denial: “No doubt you are worried about the situation in Rhodesia, particularly in view of all the sensational headlines and horrific articles which appear in the press,” the letter began. “What much of the world press does not wish to print are the true