My oldest grandson’s mind also works in ways very familiar to mine. He is a writer too and also has the luck of his Molnar grandfather’s athleticism. On the other hand, I see in my oldest great-grandson the same intense, thoughtful consideration before he enters any activity that I saw in my son’s face at the same age. I also see the optimism of my mother moving through me and on to some, while others of my descendants have to struggle at times with shadows.
My mother’s life, apart from the periods of intense grief at family deaths, was very secure and happy. She was dearly loved, tall and beautiful, musical, a reader, clever with her needle. After high school she took a year of teacher training at Macdonald College. It was there that she met my father who had come with some other boys from McGill out to Macdonald to a dance. He was immediately struck by the sweetness of Jennie Ireland — as her name then was. After their marriage he changed not just her last name as was normal, but also her first. Jennie became Jane, his way of establishing that she was his now. And he took her away to southern Africa where they spent the first five years of their marriage.
The African years had an impact on all of us, not just on Ruth, who was born there. The stories of their life there became family mythology: our father’s long stretches out on the bushveldt with his “boys,” really men, of course, but everyone used the colonial terminology. Africans were “boys.” Children were “picannins.” He had encounters with lions, water buffalo and rhinos. Urged on by his “boys” he shot an elephant. He became thin and brown and wore two hats to ward off the sun. He contracted malaria over and over, and suffered worms that burrowed under the skin. At night he gazed at the sky to plot the next day’s trek by the stars. He once walked a hundred miles, trying to save a man mauled by a lion. The man, an American would-be Great White Hunter who had somehow at one point insisted on tagging along, wounded a lion and then refused my father’s advice to “never, ever follow a wounded lion into the long grass.” His torn body — my father had to shoot the lion in order to rescue the dolt — was increasingly consumed by gangrene over the days it took my father and his “boys” to carry him to a hospital. He died just before they got there.
That was a warning all his children took seriously and we keenly awaited our chance to follow it.
Mother went out to him eighteen months after he went himself, when at last he was able to have a sort of home base even if he was still mostly out on the veldt. She kept house for him, with the help of a “boy” called Gibson, in a shack with furniture they made themselves out of dynamite boxes. She had her first baby in a tiny rondavel hut with a midwife in attendance. She always claimed it as her favourite birthing experience, much richer than her later ones, knocked out and oblivious in Montreal and Toronto hospitals and in bed for two weeks afterwards, a nurse sitting by the bedside. I imagine she also must have relished creating her role as a mother far from the influence of her own mother whose Victorian anxieties about a baby’s feeding and (especially) bowels, and essential fragility, inevitably would have intruded. She didn’t even tell her mother a baby was expected, writing of her pregnancy only when she knew the cable announcing the birth would have arrived. Letters took six weeks. When the baby was a little older, mother had another houseboy, a “picannin” called Saucepan, to help her. His task was to return toys the baby threw out of her cot.
It was that first experience of hers that made me insist, in 1958 when it absolutely was not done, on having as natural a birth as I could arrange in Montreal. I found what I later learned was possibly the only doctor in Canada at the time to allow such a thing. There were no childbirth classes or any sort of instruction so I sent to England for a book I’d heard of, Childbirth Without Fear, by Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, and I practiced the breathing exercises, by myself, and in due course pushed out my son Paul while watching in an overhead mirror, both of us fully engaged in the event, though only I remember it. Nowadays of course this is how most women give birth, and my elder granddaughter even had her third little boy as a “water birth,” her husband her only helper as the midwife was delayed in traffic. But in my day it was decidedly not the norm, and I was following in my mother’s African footsteps.
My parents’ African years inspired, it occurs to me now, the independence I’ve always sought, my rejection of what others do if I suspect herd-following, my hunger for adventure, also my competitiveness, also my tendency to stoicism.
~
I did get to Africa, eventually, even if I never had to correctly make the decision about a lion and long grass.
In February 1992 I went to Zimbabwe. In my parents’ years in Africa in the late 1920s and early 30s it had been Southern Rhodesia, a colony controlled by a very small group of whites, and it still had that name until not long before I got there. Majority rule was won only in 1980.
The many descriptions of my parents’ African life, especially my father’s stories, had created the background mythology for my childhood and I had always wanted to go there, to be in the place of his early adventures. I wanted to know my father better by experiencing, at least a little, what had been a such a major creator of who he was: being out on the African veldt.
I travelled alone, and was so for most of the time there, as I wanted to be — I notice my surroundings more when I am alone. I spent time in Harare. I found a small place to stay called the Brontë Garden Hotel (such an apposite name for me who has always loved the Brontës). There was a fascinating variety of other guests: aid workers, Africans in business suits and old “Rhodies.” I talked to everybody and found that the Rhodies in no way accepted majority rule and were scandalized and disgusted that Africans were eating in the dining room and not just there as waiters. There were no other tourists but there was a Canadian couple. The husband was taking up a position at the university and they hadn’t yet found a house.
From the Brontë I ventured forth by bus (despite warnings from the Canadian High Commission that a white woman couldn’t possibly go by bus) to various places, some nearby, some more distant. I took a bus to a Safari Lodge at Hwange, where I went on Land Rover trips into the jungle at dawn and dusk, and I bused down to Bulawayo.
For a while I stayed on a farm with another Havergal Old Girl, Mary, who had married an African. She was now a widow and the matriarchal centre of her late-husband’s family. Unlike other white people I visited, there were no fences around her property and the farm was crisscrossed by paths, along which people passed all day, women carrying sometimes huge burdens on their heads, men walking alone or in small groups.
There was a nest of cobras under the windows of my bedroom and there were no screens. I thought of Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and at first didn’t dare keep the windows open at night despite the heat. I soon gave in. I needed the air. “The cobras never come into the house,” Mary claimed. No one explained how one once got into the enclosed courtyard. Luckily no snake awoke me by slithering over my face.
One day while I was still at Mary’s, we — Mary, Vu, her son of eleven, and two of Vu’s friends — went for a picnic into the Matopo Hills. Some of these hills are enormously high single boulders; others look like haphazard piles of several giant boulders. All are bruise-dark and dramatic, gods in stone. It has been a holy place forever. It is where Cecil Rhodes, in an extreme example of appropriating others’ culture, commanded his burial place to be.
We poked into caves to see ancient paintings of hunters. In one, a painting of a rare white rhino gives the cave its name. Mary made a fire by a pretty lake and cooked our lunch. The lake looked tempting. In Canada I definitely