Going Home - Doris May Lessing [12]
But that first house crumbled long ago, returned to the soil, was swallowed by the bush; and so I was glad after we had had dinner to go out again in the car, ostensibly to look for someone whose address we did not know, but hoped we might find by chance—in fact to get out of the town into the bush.
In five minutes we were there.
And now for the first time I was really home. The night was magnificent; the Southern Cross on a slant overhead; the moon a clear, small pewter; the stars all recognizable and close. The long grass stood all around, tall and giving off its dry, sweetish smell, and full of talking crickets. The flattened trees of the highveld were low above the grass, low and a dull silver-green.
It was the small intimate talking of the crickets which received me and made me part of that nightscape.
Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier between me and the steady, solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures.
It was only so the first night; for at once habit took over and erected its barriers; and if I had had to fly back to England the next day, I would have been given what I had gone home for.
For to stand there with the soft dust of the track under my shoes, the crickets talking in my ear, the moon cold over the bush, meant I was able to return to that other house.
There are two sorts of habitation in Africa. One is of brick, cement, plaster, tile and tin—the substance of the country processed and shaped; the other sort is made direct of the stuff of soil and grass and tree. This second kind is what most of the natives of the country live in; and what I, as a child, lived in. The house was not a hut, but a long, cigar-shaped dwelling sliced several times across with walls to make rooms.
To make such a house you choose a flat place, clear it of long grass and trees, and dig a trench two feet deep in the shape you want the house to be. You cut trees from the bush and lop them to a size and insert them side by side in the trench, as close as they will go. From the trunks of living trees in the bush, fibre is torn; for under the thick rough bark of a certain variety of tree is a thick layer of smooth flesh. It is coloured yellow and pink; and when it is still alive, newly torn from the tree, it is wet and slippery to the touch. It dries quickly; so it is necessary to have several labourers stripping the fibre, with others ready immediately to use it for tying the trees of the walls into place. At this stage the house will look like a small space enclosed by a palisade—tall, uneven logs of wood, greyish-brown in colour, laced tightly with yellow and rose-coloured strips. The palisade will have spaces in it for doors and windows.
On this frame is set the skeleton of the roof. More trees have been cut, slimmer ones, and laid slantwise from the tops of the wall-poles to a ridge in the centre. They are tied with strips of the fibre to this centre pole, which is an immensely long gum tree or thorn tree made smooth and slim, lying parallel to the ground.
Now the house will look like an immense birdcage, set in the middle of the bush. For the trees have not been cut back around it yet; and the grass is still standing high all around, long swatches of grass, a browny-gold in colour. One cannot build this sort of a house save when the