Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

  THE SHORT NOVEMBER RAINS CAME, followed by the startled, green days of Christmas. Then the longer rains arrived in March and stayed all through May. Walking to school, Mum collected clogs of mud on the bottom of her shoes. The roads turned fluid and my grandfather had to put chains on his tires to drive anywhere. Then May dried into June and the long dry season started again.

  “What you saw first,” Mum says of the occasional, almost mystical arrival of the Somali horsemen, “was a pillar of dust coming from the edge of the plateau.” And by nightfall they were in Eldoret and you could hear the bells around the necks of the lead mares and the men shouting to one another in their exotic desert tongue. Their little campfires lit orange out of the grasslands, and the shapes of horses milling and men in silhouette ghosted the vlei.

  Hundreds of Somali ponies had arrived, worn muscular and sinewy having trekked almost the entire breadth of Kenya from the drylands of Somalia. “Only the fittest, sturdiest animals survived that long, difficult journey,” Mum says. The herdsmen—every bit as tough as the animals they had come to sell—were lean and secretive behind their white wrappings of desert garb, dry and folded as moths.

  Within the week, the horses were all taken over to Betty Webster’s place, one of Eldoret’s riding teachers. “She set up benches and a thatched shelter at her riding arena and there was an auction of all these fabulous ponies which, of course, I had to miss because of school. But my mother and father went. They were very keen on Somali ponies and they decided that a pony of my own was exactly what I needed to take my mind off what had happened to poor Suk.”

  Back in the early 1930s, before Thoroughbreds made it to East Africa, my grandfather had won the Kenya Gold Cup on his Somali pony, Billy. “Not much to look at,” Mum says. “They tended to be ewe necked, goose rumped, straight in the shoulder, and they were tiny—average height, about thirteen point two hands—but the main thing is they had endurance and they could run like the wind if they felt like it.”

  At the auction, my grandmother was taken with a sturdy gray gelding. She thought he had a nice direct way of looking at a person. A herdsman with sun-baked eyes and a lip full of khat agreed to let her ride the pony before she bought it. For the first and only time in his life, the creature behaved like an angel. He allowed his feet and teeth to be checked, he didn’t kick or bite, he willingly jumped every obstacle put in his path, he turned and halted nicely. My grandmother paid the herdsman a handsome sum and she named the pony Nane, Kiswahili for the large eight branded on his rump.

  “He never went forward again,” Mum says. “His only interest in life was food, which I suppose was understandable given he’d been on desert rations all his life until then.” Every morning before school, my grandfather galloped his Thoroughbred mare, Vanity, out on the racetrack and Mum trailed behind on Nane. “The racetrack had been where the Italian prisoners of war camps were, so there were lots of overgrown and collapsed latrines that you had to be careful not to fall down. Otherwise, it was a perfect place for a morning gallop.”

  Nane hated his morning gallop. “He saw it as an unnecessary interruption in an otherwise perfect day of resting and eating,” Mum says. He had a special trick of swelling himself up before beginning to buck, such inventive, furious twists and leaps that Mum was always dashed to the ground. “I could feel his neck puffing up and I’d start to shout, ‘He’s making his neck fat, he’s making his neck fat,’ and then he’d plunge and coil and I’d go airborne and hit the ground. But of course, with the minimum amount of fuss, I’d dust myself off and get back on again as soon as I could see straight. Then I’d ride to school, usually a bit battered and shaken. The nuns got angry with my father and said that I couldn’t learn anything if I’d been knocked out two or three times before breakfast, but I think they were just lousy teachers.”

  THE NUNS ORGANIZED GAMES in the afternoon at the convent and tournaments of various kinds on the weekends. “Hours and hours of tedious tennis,” Mum says. “But I never waited around long enough to hit a single ball.” Instead, she took riding lessons. “To begin I rode with Babs Owens. She had a very scary, vicious temper. She was famous for flinging herself off a horse if it was annoying her and biting it as hard as she could on the ear.” Babs would make Mum ride very rigidly, pressing a penny between her knees and the saddle. “If I dropped the penny—smack, biff, wallop—there was hell to pay.” Mum sniffs. “Babs’s husband, Cyril, had been a Japanese prisoner of war. And I’m sure that can’t have been much fun, but I imagine it was a welcome break from a life of domestic bliss with Babs.”

  Then Babs’s temper must have become too much because my grandparents shifted Mum’s lessons over to Betty Webster. “I adored Betty,” Mum says. “I think she was like a lot of Kenyan women of that time. She marched around in corduroys and a man’s shirt, very self-sufficient, very tough and independent and always trailed by a herd of dogs.” Nane didn’t improve much, but Mum’s love of riding swelled beyond measure. “I can’t separate horses from my childhood, or Betty Webster from my love of horses,” she says. Mum holds up her hands and makes a pair of horse’s ears with her fingers. “For as long as I can remember, I have seen the world from between the ears of a horse. That’s my view. Straight ahead, don’t look down. Don’t look back.”

  ABOUT A YEAR AFTER SHE GOT HIM, Mum entered Nane into a show-jumping competition at the Eldoret Agricultural Show. “I think we managed to scramble over about three jumps, but the moment there was a suggestion of a spread, he dug his heels in, made his neck fat and then gave all the spectators their money’s worth in an unscheduled rodeo. Still, I was expected to leave the arena smiling pleasantly.”

  The afternoon of Mum’s humiliating defeat at the spread, Betty Webster rode her favorite gelding in the stadium event. “Around she went in beautiful form, sailing over everything. Then right in front of the grandstand there was a very tricky gate. Betty must have miscalculated the distance, or messed up her approach, because the gelding hit the jump in such a way he flipped right over it, head over heels, and landed on top of Betty.” Mum describes the expanding stillness of the moments that followed. Everyday noises were unnaturally amplified—the hadeda ibis calling from the racetrack, horses shouting to one another from the collecting ring. “Then Betty’s gelding scrambled to his feet, but Betty continued to lie there, very pale and still. She wasn’t dead, but she was unconscious and you could tell from the way she was lying at such an unnatural angle that she’d broken her neck.”

  The riderless horse, reins slack around his legs, galloped away toward the arena gate, leaving the crumpled rider in the wreck of the jump. Someone ran out and grabbed the horse. A few others scrambled over the fence and ran toward Betty. She was loaded into the back of a car and driven off to the hospital. “One young man—I don’t remember his name now—took her gelding,” Mum says, “and bravely finished the round for her. He might have been shaking like a leaf, but he did it. Then he went on and rode the gelding for the rest of the weekend. The show must go on; we all understood that.” Mum pauses. “That young fellow won on Betty’s gelding, so on Sunday night, he took the cup to the hospital and put it on the pillow by her head. She never regained consciousness.”

  Betty’s coffin was put on a large old ox cart. All her dogs were loaded up and sat among piles and piles of garlands. The cart was pulled by two black Percherons to the churchyard. “It was very tragic of course,” Mum says, “but we thought it was a very right and proper ending for Betty.”

  Mum thinks for a moment. What she says next confirms for me what I’ve always known about her without ever having had the words to put into this knowledge. In her view, the immediate peril of a situation is always weighed against the glamorous obituary that might be written if the thing killed you: “I suppose that’s why I’ve never seen the dangerous side of riding. For me it was always a brave and gallant sport, and if it did you in, it was a glorious way to go.”

  Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Goes to Her High School Reunion />
  Mum and Dad, newly engaged. Kenya, 1964.

  When I was a child, Mum presented Kenya to me as a place of such forbidding perfection that its flawlessness shattered in the telling and what I was left holding on to were shards of equatorial light. Even the hinted-at, subsurface revolutionary tactics of the Mau Mau fighters, who were agitating for independence from British rule, were part of the romance. Kenya, in Mum’s telling, was a land of such sepia loveliness, such fecundity, such fulfillment that it was worth dying for if you were white (if you were black and you wanted to die for Kenya, that was another matter altogether. Then you were an unpleasant, uppity Kikuyu anarchist). Mum made it clear that leaving Kenya was one of the great shocks of her life. “I never thought I would leave,” she says. “I had such a magical childhood, filled with such magical people.”

  When I was sixteen, I read James Fox’s White Mischief. The book is an account of the infamous Happy Valley set, a group of aristocratic flappers who came out to Kenya between the two world wars, shot lots of animals, behaved very badly and died in hedonistic droves. Hunting accidents, plane crashes and drugs and alcohol killed a fair number of them. Murder, venereal disease and suicide took a few more, and the whole disgraceful party teetered on January 24, 1941, with the discovery that the thirty-nine-year-old Josslyn Hay, Twenty-second Earl of Erroll, had been shot on the Nairobi-Ngong road after a decade of scandal, divorces, affairs and dalliances.

  Notables of the Happy Valley set included Sir Jock Delves Broughton, Alice and Frédéric de Janzé, Lady Idina Sackville, Diana Caldwell, Jack Soames, John Carbery and Kiki Preston, none of whom I had ever heard of. I asked if these were the magical people of Mum’s miraculous childhood. She shook her head and her eyes went pale. “The Happy Valley set were not us. No, they were very careless, very irresponsible and very boring. Nothing like us at all.”

  “I thought you said Kenyan people were so fun and interesting,” I said.

  “Not that lot,” Mum said.

  “How were you different?”

  Mum looked as if I’d beaten her up with a dead fish. “In every way,” she said. “We were pukka-pukka sahibs. They were cruel and silly. Wastrels.” And then my mother took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you an awful story about that lot,” she said. “A really shocking story.”

  Mum and I were sitting at the veranda at the German-owned farm in Mkushi, Zambia, to which we had moved in the mid-1980s. It was the end of the dry season, not long after I had finished reading the James Fox book. The air was stung with the salty scent of burning msasa from forest fires. Dad had started plowing in preparation for the spring rains and dust from the fields added to the forest-fire smoke to create a yellow-gray sky. A mob of cows were wandering up from the dip, bellyaching for their calves. The herdsmen whistled and shouted, “Ha! Ha!” Our stubborn, rearing, bucking, biting bush ponies were grazing placidly in the home paddocks. A large yellow sun was making its way toward the hills in Zaire. I remember details like this because the story Mum told me that late afternoon was the first time I felt that the tranquil homeliness of Zambia was far preferable to Kenya’s thrilling glamour.

  “Shortly after my mother arrived in Kenya from Scotland, she took a position with a wealthy white hunter from the Happy Valley set,” Mum said. “The white hunter, Inky Porter, was rich and spoiled, but I wouldn’t say that she was an aristocrat.” Mum looked disapproving. “Aristocrat implies good breeding, noblesse oblige.” Mum sniffed to demonstrate that Inky Porter’s behavior fell well short of the mark. “Anyway, this awful Inky Porter had found herself inconvenienced with a pregnancy right in the middle of the hunting season, so she hired my mother to help with the baby.”

  “Your mother was a nanny for Inky Porter,” I clarified.

  Mum blinked. “No, no, no,” she said. “Nanny doesn’t sound right.”

  We went back and forth for some time on a suitable noun. I suggested maid or child minder.

  “No,” Mum said. “She was more than that.”

  “Nurse?” I tried.

  “No, she wasn’t a nurse.”

  I attempted governess and au pair, but Mum refused them too. The way I looked at it, there was no getting around the fact that my grandmother was a nanny. The way Mum looked at it, I didn’t understand class at all. “Don’t forget, my mother was from a very good family,” she reminded me. “She would not have been simply a nanny.”

  So my grandmother was a not-simply-a-nanny for a not-worthy-to-be-called-an-aristocrat white hunter named Inky Porter. “And Inky Porter,” Mum said, “liked to drink gallons of gin and sniff mountains of cocaine. She was a big fan of adultery and intrigues, and she was very bored with the idea of children. So the moment her baby was born, Inky Porter handed it over to my mother, then she pushed off to Uganda to shoot lots of animals, drink gallons of cocktails and generally make up for lost time. But the poor baby was born absolutely pickled in gin and withdrawing from cocaine. It was awful. The infant died in agony—seizures, fevers, tremors—in my mother’s arms when it was only a few days old.”

  For a while Mum and I stared silently into the empty space held by Inky Porter’s dead baby. “And that is why I am so impatient with all this celebration of that Happy Valley crowd,” Mum concluded. “All these books and films and carry-on that make their lives seem so glamorous. No one talks about the poor dead baby.” Then Mum spoke slowly, for emphasis and so that I would never again make the mistake of muddling up her—or any of her family—with the Happy Valley set. “We didn’t live like that in Eldoret. We were surrounded by pukka-pukka sahibs, proper gentry. People like Betty Webster and Zoe Foster—good, wholesome, outdoorsy types.”

  Everyone Mum knew had lots of dogs and horses. They all played cricket or rugby twice a week and went for long, improving walks every evening. On the weekends, the whole community show-jumped or entered gymkhanas and raced their ponies. “Which was quite exhausting and didn’t leave much energy for too much funny nonsense,” Mum said. And once or twice a month, the district dressed up at amateur theatricals, sang naughty songs and satisfied the very British need to see men in drag. “We had lots and lots of good, clean fun,” Mum said.

  WHEN I WAS IN MY final year of high school in Zimbabwe, Vanessa took a year off doing very little for a television show in London (a sign above her desk asked the really very good question, “What DOES Vanessa do?”) and backpacked around Africa on trains and buses, by boat and by foot. When she came home—sunburned and much thinner as a result of being too vague and polite to refuse any food offered to her no matter how long it had been sitting out in the sun smothered in flies and thereby spending much of her year trying to find clean loos in remote places—I peppered her with questions about Kenya. Had she seen Mum’s childhood home? Was the light perfect? Had she met any pukka-pukka sahibs? But Vanessa had frustratingly little to say on the matter of Kenya. She had gone as far as Nakuru to see the hospital in which she had been born and then she had spent a fortnight on the coast in a cheap hotel that turned out to be a brothel.

  “There were people knocking on the door all night,” she said. “‘Kissy-kissy five shillings.’”

  “How fascinating,” I said.

  “Oh goodness,” Vanessa said, “you’re just like Great-Uncle Dicken.” She shut her eyes. “No it wasn’t fascinating. It was yuck.”

  I LEFT HOME, married and moved to Wyoming with my American husband. I got on with the business of raising children and I wrote the Awful Book. For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to go to Kenya and see the place for myself, but there didn’t seem much point in going without Mum, and Mum was barely talking to me, let alone agreeing to family holidays. Then, two years after the Awful Book was published, Auntie Glug had a mania-induced brainstorm to attend her high school reunion in Kenya. She called to tell me about her plan and to ask me if I knew Mum and Dad’s phone number in Zambia.

  “You’ll have to write them a letter,” I said. “They haven’t answered their phone in months.”

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bsp; “Typical,” Auntie Glug said.

  “I think it’s because of the Awful Book,” I said.

  “Yes, well,” Auntie Glug said.

  “I want to go to your reunion,” I said.

  “You’re not an old girl,” Auntie Glug objected.

  “I’m oldish,” I said.

  I could hear Auntie Glug taking a long drag off her cigarette.

  “Please, Auntie,” I begged.

  “Well if you’re going to be a tag-along Niece-Weevil,” Auntie Glug said, “I’ll leave it up to you to get your mum and dad to come along too.”

  BUT FROM THE VERY START, Nicola Fuller of Central Africa was not keen on the whole idea of the reunion: “Not really my sort of thing.” She made a face. “They’ll all be pretending they’re so thrilled to see someone to whom they haven’t given a second thought in forty years.”

  We had been sitting under the Tree of Forgetfulness on my parents’ fish and banana farm in the middle Zambezi valley for the better part of a mediocre box of South African wine. I was trying to be persuasive and nonchalant at the same time, attempting to appeal to Mum’s highly developed sense of adventure without arousing her extraordinarily overdeveloped sense of mistrust (which had been on code red since the publication of the Awful Book). She took a sip of wine. “And another thing,” she said. “They’ll all have read the Awful Book and they’ll be counting my drinks. I’ll resent that.”

  “Maybe they’ll be drunk themselves,” I tried.