Going Home - Doris May Lessing [16]
In the moonlight, looking down, it was a dim green sea, moving with light.
Soon the plants put out their frothy white crests; in the moonlight there was foam on the sea; and in the daytime, when the winds were strong, the whole field swayed and moved like a tide coming in. At this time the hawks hung low over the field with bunched, ready claws, working hard, so that from the house you looked down on their wide, stiff wings.
The rainy season passed; and the brilliant green of the field dimmed, and the sound of the wind in it was no longer a wet, thick rustle, but more like the sound of an army of tiny spears. Soon all the field was a tarnished silvery-gold, and each mealie-plant was like a ragged, skeleton scarecrow, and the noise of the wind was an incessant metallic whispering.
From the house now the field could be seen populated with black, small figures, moving between the rows and laying them flat. Soon the dark, dry earth was bared again, patterned with mealie-stooks, each a small, shining pyramid; and all over the soil a scattered litter of soft, glinting, dead leaf and stalk. Then came the heavy wagons behind sixteen oxen led by the little black boy who pulled six inches in front of the tossing, curving, wicked horns, with the driver walking behind, yelling and flickering his long whiplash in the air over their backs.
The field was bare completely, the stooks stripped of maize-cobs, the stooks themselves carried off to make manure in the cattle-kraals. It was all rough, dark-red earth, softly glinting with mealie-trash. In came the ploughs, and again the earth fell apart into the great shining clods.
This cycle I watched from my bedroom door, when I was not absorbed by what went on in the room itself. For after a decade or so of weathering, the house had become the home of a dozen kinds of creature not human, who lived for the most part in the thatch of the roof.
Rats, mice, lizards, spiders and beetles, and once or twice snakes, moved through the thatch and behind the walls; and sometimes, when the oil-lamp was flickering low, which it did in a steady, leaping rhythm till it flared up and out—in a way which I am reminded of by the pedestrian-crossing lights in the street outside my window, flicking all night on my wall in London—sometimes, as the yellow glow sank, a pair of red eyes could be seen moving along the top of the wall under the thatch. A mouse? A snake perhaps? For some reason they seldom came down to the floor. Once I saw a pair of eyes shining in the light coming through the window from the moon, and called for my parents to kill what I was convinced was a snake, but it was a frog. In the wet season, the frogs from the vlei two miles away were so loud they drowned the perpetual singing of the night-crickets; and the irregular pattering of frogs on the floor of my room was something I learned to take no more notice of than the pattering of rain from leaks in the roof. It must not be imagined that I am a lover of wild life. I am frightened of all these creatures—or rather, of touching them by accident in the dark, or putting my foot on one; but if you live in a house which is full of them, then your area of safety contracts within it to the bed. I never went to bed without taking it completely apart to make sure nothing had got into the bedclothes; and once safely in, with the mosquito net tucked down, I knew that nothing could fall on me from the roof or crawl over me in the dark.
The family attitude towards the role of mosquito nets is illustrated by a dialogue I overheard between my parents in the next room.
It was the first rains of the season, and the roof had begun to leak in a dozen places.