Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [3]
We must have heard “Lillibulero” thousands of times. Maybe millions. Before and after every news broadcast. At the top of every hour. Spluttering with static over the garden at home; incongruous from the branches of acacia trees in campsites we have set up in the bush across the countryside; singing from the bathroom in the evening.
But you never know what will set Mum off. Maybe it was “Lillibulero” coinciding with the end of the afternoon, which is a rich, sweet, cooling, melancholy time of day.
“Your Dad was English originally,” I tell her, not liking the way this is going.
She said, “It doesn’t count. Scottish blood cancels English blood.”
By the time she has drunk a quarter of a bottle of whisky, we have lost reception from Bush House in London and the radio hisses to itself from under its fringe of bougainvillea. Mum has pulled out her old Scottish records. There are three of them. Three records of men in kilts playing bagpipes. The photographs show them marching blindly (how do they see under those dead-bear hats?) down misty Scottish cobbled streets, their faces completely blocked by their massive instruments. Mum turns the music up as loud as it will go, takes the whisky out to the veranda, and sits cross-legged on a picnic chair, humming and staring out at the night-blanketed farm.
This cross-leggedness is a hangover from the brief period in Mum’s life when she took up yoga from a book. Which was better than the brief period in her life in which she explored the possibility of converting to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And better than the time she bought a book on belly-dancing at a rummage sale and tried out her techniques on every bar north of the Limpopo River and south of the equator.
The horses shuffle restlessly in their stables. The night apes scream from the tops of the shimmering-leafed msasa trees. The dogs set up in a chorus of barking and will not stop until we put them inside, all except Mum’s faithful spaniel, who will not leave her side even when she’s throwing what Dad calls a wobbly. Which is what this is: a wobbly. The radio hisses and occasionally, drunkenly, bursts into snatches of song (Spanish or Portuguese) or chatters in German, in Afrikaans, or in an exaggerated American accent. “This is the Voice of America.” And then it swoops, “Beee-ooooeee!”
Dad and I go to bed with half the dogs. The other half of the pack set themselves up on the chairs in the sitting room. Dad’s half deaf, from when he blew his eardrums out in the war eight years ago in what was then Rhodesia. Now Zimbabwe. I put a pillow over my head. I can hear Mum’s voice, high and inexact, trembling on the high notes: “Speed, bonny boat, / Like a bird on the wing, / Over the sea to Skye,” and then she runs out of words and starts to sing, loudly to make up for the loss of words, “La, la la laaaa!” In the other room, at the end of the hall, Dad is snoring.
In the morning, Mum is still on the veranda. The records are silent. The housegirl sweeps the floor around her. The radio is in the tree and has sobered up, with a film of shining dew over its silver face, and is telling us the news in clipped English tones. “This is London,” it says with a straight face, as the milking cows are brought in to the dairy and the night apes curl up overhead to sleep and the Cape turtledoves begin to call, “Work-hard-er, work-hard-er.” An all-day call, which I nevertheless associate with morning and which makes me long for a cup of tea. The bells of Big Ben sound from distant, steely-gray-dawn London, where commuters will soon be spilling sensibly out of Underground stations or red double-decker buses. It is five o’clock Greenwich Mean Time.
When I was younger I used to believe it was called “Mean” time because it was English time. I used to believe that African time was “Kind” time.
The dogs are lying in exhausted heaps on the furniture in the sitting room, with their paws over their ears. They look up at Dad and me as we come through for our early morning cup of tea, which we usually take on the veranda but