“Look at me, living like a king,” Dad would never fail to notice.
This was the year after the war.
Mum had sunk momentarily beyond reach, understandably.
She’d been far more appalled by the loss of the war than had Dad; unlike him, she hadn’t been expecting it. Mum hadn’t volunteered for the police reservists, and worn that awful uniform, only to lose in the end. For a start, it hadn’t been an easy look to pull off, grey, sanctions-era polyester, not designed to flatter, but Mum had somehow managed to achieve effortless fascist chic; the member in charge, Banquo Brown, had particularly remarked on it.
No one had consulted her about the Lancaster House Agreement. She’d refused to accept defeat. Mum vowed to fight on, alone if need be, like this was Dunkirk. The Blitz. In any case, Mum wasn’t able to handle the war’s loss with the degree of sportsmanship required. “It’s all over,” she said to me. Mum’s face had been hollow with grief when the results of Rhodesia’s first democratic election were announced over the radio. “You don’t understand, Bobo. We’ve lost everything. Everything.”
It’s possible she lost her mind then too.
Or it’s probable her mind had been lost for some time, but now the tide of war had gone out, and laid bare our insanity for all to see, or for it to be revealed. I mean, she was all of us, all of us Rhodesians; hurt, sore, surprised losers. She’d vowed to fight to the death; and even if everyone else had now forgotten that vow, she’d meant it.
“I’m not a coward, or a traitor,” Mum had said.
The experiment of a Marxist socialist nation wasn’t something she’d take lying down. So, though pregnant, her belly smacking against the pommel of her saddle, she fought with returning refugees; war-shocked ragbag groups of villagers making their way back home from Mozambique. On horseback she ran over the men beginning to clear the land above our dam. And she remained defiant when Zimbabwean soldiers, fresh recruits to a new nation from an old war, descended on the house and reminded us we’d already outstayed our welcome.
“No, we haven’t,” Mum said. “We were leaving anyway.”
She wept bitterly in private; drank bravely in public.
“Your mother has difficulty cutting her losses,” Dad had explained.
On the other hand, Dad excelled at cutting losses. He never looked back; he didn’t keep score. He had to be told only once; he was ready to leave in a hurry when a place had become irreversibly unwelcoming, or when a place had become too tame, or too crowded. He moved us always to lands ever more remote and uncontested. And then those lands would fill up, or again become contested, and he’d move us again, and then again.
Dad had hired on for a season as a cattle manager on a remote ranch, miles from the last tiny dot on the map of southeast Zimbabwe; he wasn’t being paid much, but our meat was free if he could shoot it. Also, although he was cattle manager, there were no cattle. Or there were thousands of cattle, but Dad had to find them first, and fence them in. “I needed a place to stall out for a year,” Dad said afterward. “I needed to give us a chance to catch our breath. It seemed perfect, the ranch.”
He thrived on movement.
Meantime, Mum hated transitions.
Transitions made her excitable, and excitability played up everything else that tended to go wrong with her. She had morning sickness and heart palpitations. Her fifth and final pregnancy was a difficult one, very trying. She’d endured weeks of bed rest at Mutare General, a lonely delivery, a painful recovery; and then the baby had died anyway, failure to thrive.
She was unsettled in her grief, the last of her lost children, a third child dead; her small pieces of comfort still in boxes on the veranda; her friends and family elsewhere. She was in no place to mother for a while. She wouldn’t even look at the dogs, the faithful little pack we had back then; we’d never known her this bad. For weeks straight, she stared out the window of the little white ranch house.
As far as you could see in all directions the land tipped away from itself, like a vast low dome, shiny with heat. Acacia trees appeared like occasional calligraphy against the sky. It was beautiful, but there was little comfort there. When the generator came on for a few hours every evening, Mum played Roger Whittaker’s “The Last Farewell” on the old 1970s record player, clicking the needle back and back and back.
She listened to that track until the vinyl warped.
She was haunted, anyone could tell, and there’s no getting close to someone so haunted, there’s no talking to someone who is so straining to hear the words of their dead, so tuned in for their dead’s last song or final cry. She survived that haunting, though, in the end. In time, she broke away from her perpetual communion with the dead; she clicked onto a different sound track. “She always comes through,” Dad had reassured us. “She’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
* * *
—
MEANTIME, VANESSA AND I SPENT a lot of time in the back of a short-wheelbase Land Rover, out looking for cattle, lost. “I wasn’t expecting hills here,” Dad would say. “Not at all.” Then he’d glance at the sun; its position relative to the horizon. “All right, if worse comes to worst, we’ll follow it down, and see where it comes up in the morning.”
Or he’d be a bit taken aback by the total lack of any hills in any direction, even standing on the roof of the Land Rover, still no hills, and the air thick and blue with dry-season smoke. “Anyone know where we are?” Dad would ask the team of fencers who’d hired on from remote villages in the area to work with him rounding up cattle gone feral during the war, and fencing them in.
“Chibodo couldn’t speak their language either,” Dad said of his chief tracker, a Manyika who’d followed him from the farm to the ranch out of curiosity more than anything. “So we just walked about looking for cattle, and the men put in fences when they felt like it, which wasn’t very often because it was bloody hot and we were all getting paid peanuts.”
White settlers had staked a claim on the ranch in the early 1920s. They shot most of the lions, all the wild dogs, and the Cape buffalo. After that they stocked the place with hardy cattle and then they went bush mad; one of them wrote a memoir about it, My Life Was a Ranch, not about going bush mad but about all the excitement leading up to that point.
“They did not go bush mad. You’re making things up,” Mum corrected me sharply. “And it’s a very well written book. The way memoir should be done, in my opinion. It’s filled with vivid, amusing anecdotes and interesting characters, sympathetically drawn.”
“I know,” I said. “I read it.”
“Did you?” Mum pounced. “When? Do you remember? Do try to think. Because I loaned my copy to someone and I never got it back.”
From the mid-1940s onward, the ranch had been left in the hands of a series of managers, bachelors who strived to be ideal Rhodesians just like the Brothers H. A lot of them went bush mad too. Then, during the war, whites abandoned the place altogether; soldiers and insurgents skirted it. It was too remote, too empty for battle.
The cattle went wild and the wildlife began to creep back onto the land. Kudu, their heads lifted above the tops of the thick, golden elephant grass, steadily curious. Herds of fat zebra, pythons the length of a Land Rover, jackals, elusive eland, groups of warthogs, impalas everywhere; a few leopards coughing their way through the kopjes.
“I love the farm I’m on the best,” Dad said when I asked him which had been his favorite of all the lands he’d worked. “But I loved that ranch especially.” Then he reflected for a moment. “Luckily I think I was too incompetent at the time to do too much damage to the place.” He smiled happily at that thought. “Not often, but sometimes, it pays to be a bit useless, Bobo.”
* * *
—
THE MIRACULOUS RANCH in southeast Zimbabwe was the wildest land we ever lived on, the least scarred. It wasn’t a complete cure for what ailed, for th
e shocks and aftershocks of the war, and for all that had come with the war, but I think it was the beginning of the cure. Or the cure was ours for the metabolizing, if we knew it or not.
There weren’t roads, it was unpredictable; we’d get set off course avoiding a downed tree or an area of quicksand; or a river would be too washed out to cross where we were expecting, and then we’d be lost. “Temporarily surprised by our destination would be the more diplomatic way to put it,” Dad said, relishing it all.
He set up impromptu camps across the ranch, usually near a river for reference, if not for water. During the short wet season, the humid air was dense with insects; if it rained, the rivers churned red and swollen; we camped above the high-water mark in case of flash floods.
During the long dry season the veldt turned blond, the mopanes reached leafless grey branches into a bush-smoke yellow sky. We’d camp up against the riverbeds then, digging small wells, but also carrying water with us always, rationing water, noticing water, boiling water to make it safe for drinking.
Water and fire, there is no ground without them.
Dad had a khaki canvas safari tent; it had holes in the roof and rips in the floor, it leaked insects, but it could accommodate a camping cot, a stool, a trunk, and a paraffin lamp. Dad had hung a small mirror on the front tent pole, and he shaved there; the scrape-scrape of his razor mixing with the cool call of emerald-spotted doves at dawn, the turpentine scent of the mopane logs in the fire heating water for tea.
Vanessa and I shared a little orange-and-blue tent, also canvas, but sun-rotted and bent. It smelled as if feverish children had vomited in it, which we had. We had ancient camp cots; their rusty metal legs sagged and teetered when we turned over. We learned to sleep very still, the way you sleep in boarding school, as if dead, so as not to excite the attention of the matrons.
Mostly, we stayed in camp while Dad and the men searched for feral cattle or fenced the sky or tilted at the sun. The days were long, hot. We dozed in the shade, dug tiny boreholes in the dry riverbeds; I arranged impromptu concerts for Vanessa. At night we sat around two fires; the four of us outsiders quietly around a small fire, the dozen or so local fencers noisily around a big fire.
Dad didn’t say much beyond what was necessary. Cephas Chibodo only made noises to the fire, as he tended it, “Eh, ehhhh,” he’d say, turning a log a little, coaxing an ember into flame. Vanessa and I didn’t talk much either. There wasn’t much to say. We were here; the sky turned above us; the air was solid with insects and frogs chorusing. Beneath us, the ground surrendered the day’s heat. Water in the kettle popped and hissed.
We went to sleep not long after dark.
Then we’d hear Dad shouting before dawn. “Chibodo! Moto! Fuga moto!” And we’d hear Cephas Chibodo making a fire. The kettle would begin its song again. “Right!” Dad would be giving marching orders; our tent would get a shake. “Rise and shine!”
One foot in front of the other, he and Cephas Chibodo walked back and forth across that enormous tract of wild ranch. They dead-reckoned fence lines, miles at a time. Sometimes the fencers came behind, slowly, with metal posts, shovels, and hammers; it was heavy work.
They made a sound like gunshots, hammers on those posts.
Ka-pow, ka-pow, ka-pow.
Then they tracked cattle. Some days Vanessa and I were allowed to tag along. On those days, we lost ourselves, or found ourselves, in my father’s and Cephas Chibodo’s wake. They walked quickly, eyes lifted to the clouds of dust ahead of us; the cattle were wily and bush-savvy, but they kicked up a storm. “Three miles an hour will keep you in business,” Dad told us, if we’d begged to come along.
I learned—or, I really understood—what three miles an hour felt like in my body; I had to run to keep up. I didn’t bother to swat away the flies; I stopped asking if anyone knew where we were. Walking was serious business, and Dad and Cephas Chibodo walked for hours at a time. The goal was to cover ground and find cattle, not to stop and admire the view.
Admiring the view was for when you were lost; when you were lost, you could breathe a bit, take stock. Being lost put Dad at ease; it froze his perpetual motion. He’d be propped up against a tree, a cigarette between his lips. Someone would have built a fire; the kettle would be on to boil. Dad had looked peaceful then, eyes half shut against the sun, smiling a little; surveying the swell or the swoop or the skim of the land, comparing it to where we’d just come from. “That was the wildest place we ever lived, Bobo. You could really fall off the map out there.”
* * *
—
DAD HAD ALWAYS BEEN GOOD WITH MAPS, in theory. He’d been the navigator in a rally in East Africa a couple of times; although I don’t think he ever made it to the finish. “That sticky black cotton soil in a Ford Anglia; the worst roads in the world,” Mum said in his defense. “Most of the cars sank to their sumps two miles from the starting flag. The East Africa Rally’s not just Formula One, you know, round and round, no chance of getting lost.”
Anyway, it’s not possible to learn the lay of the land from paper, or in a car, and especially not in a car sunk to its sump. You have to learn it with your feet. So although Dad could trace topographical maps in his head, and translate what he saw into hills and ridges and valleys, it took time for him to put that realization into his body.
When Dad first came to East and southern Africa he’d wildly underestimate distances, or he’d miscalculate the ruggedness of the terrain; he’d be taken by surprise, the beautiful ferocity of it all. It took a few years for the smallness of England to wear off, for the rigidity of his education to melt, for the sheer vast scale of southern Africa to register; it was bigger even than his dreams of it during his sad, cold, lonely British childhood.
“It was a miserable house,” he said of those early years with his ill-matched parents. “So as soon as I could, I walked out of it; a garden, a backyard, a stable, hedgerows. Inside, I could never tell which was what and who was who. But outside, things made sense. Things that were supposed to sting stung. Things that were supposed to bite bit.”
By the age of seven—showing a precocious talent for planning well ahead, a talent not necessarily exercised through the remainder of his life—Dad had already calculated his only sensible option. “I informed my nanny,” he said, “as soon as I’d fulfilled my childhood obligations, I’d bugger off to Africa.”
Noo, he called his nanny; she’d raised him from birth, the sober, stern, nurturing witness to his childhood. To show the seriousness of his intentions, he drew her a picture of a giraffe, and on the back of the picture, in a considered hand, my father announced he expected he’d be leaving by the first possible boat in about eleven years for either Cape Town or Mombasa. He showed her both places on the globe in the nursery.
“What a good idea,” Noo agreed.
She helpfully prepared Dad for this certain future by taking him on little rambles on the South Downs, pointing out birds and rabbits.
“She made sure I knew the difference between a wren and a chaffinch, the difference between a coal tit and a blue tit; all their songs. We collected their eggs; she showed me a cuckoo chick in a dunnock nest. I learned all that from her. She really tried. We tromped miles and miles through the mud together, Noo always in her great white nurse’s cape; it scared up the pheasants.”
Still, it really wasn’t enough; hedgehogs, badgers, water rats, the rare otter, it was barely toothy enough for a Beatrix Potter storybook, let alone for a soul-wounded, red-blooded child. As far as my father could see, the only cure for what ailed him was the opportunity to become irredeemably lost, and that was a rare treat in 1950s England. Also, there was almost zero opportunity to be killed by a predator on a casual afternoon outing.
Dad loved old maps for the promise of spaces still filled with wilderness, for places unmarked by the crosshatch of development, for the possibility of land without roads. It didn’t occur to him a
t the time that it wasn’t endless. “I saw the last of the best of it, Bobo,” he told me years later. “I’m glad I didn’t realize at the time.”
Gone so quickly; over so fast.
Mum, raised in western Kenya and steeped in the glory of empire, loved old maps too. Compulsively nostalgic, and a hoarder by nature, she keeps old atlases on a special bookshelf. She refers to them during the BBC’s news and culture radio shows; they’re her friends, like her pets.
“Now let me see, Azerbaijan. Ah, well, back when this atlas was published, it wasn’t even a separate country. It was just a bit of purple bubble gum stuck on the western heel of the Soviet Socialist Republic’s hobnail boot.” Mum would offer this information smugly. “This atlas is quite old,” Mum would say. “Quite old,” she’d repeat, approvingly running her hands over the pages.
She likes atlases in which it’s still the cold war, but she adores leafing through atlases in which Iran is still Persia, Zimbabwe is still Southern Rhodesia, Botswana is still Bechuanaland, and Sri Lanka is still Ceylon. Her fascination is in a world that has existed chiefly in the imagination; a place of heat, denial, nostalgia, and juleps.
“I find great comfort there,” Mum says. “In those lovely old stories of people going to far-flung parts of the empire. They were always racked with fever. They were forced to drink like fish. They had to make it up-country during the monsoon season.”
So when Mum refers to “going up-country,” although she has the empire in her head, India specifically, she means something entirely different. She means driving from the hot, low Zambezi Valley where the farm is, up the Muchinga Escarpment to the place my mother calls Alcatraz—the little cottage Vanessa and Rich built for my parents near the Rock.
Both Alcatraz and the Rock are perched on the summit of a small, glorious kopje near the Kafue River. The verandas of both places overlook the hills surrounding the little river town of Kafue. Kafue, with its old blue-and-white colonial-era police station, its green mosque, its gabled storefronts and buzzing open-air markets.
Travel Light, Move Fast Page 6
