CHAPTER THREE
She was so determined to sleep that she even missed the soldier marching by again. Perhaps he had moved house (whatever passed for house) or had chosen the Refuge particularly as his audience.
‘Lef’ ri’ lef’ ri’,’ today he was really drilling in style, causing the traffic to slow down as he followed one side of the road, stopping and starting to his own orders.
‘Might as well have a band,’ commented Nekesa. ‘I remember before I went to Uganda there were often military bands in Nairobi, European ones, I mean, in those days. Livelier than we get now, with always the same DA-DA da-da-da DA-DA. Everyone used to turn out to watch.’
‘Better they had been thinking about their freedom,’ growled Mama Chungu.
‘You can think and still watch.’
‘Nobody wanted to be watched in the forest,’ put in Wairimu. ‘Quiet you had to be, deadly quiet, or else you were a dead man.’
‘Can’t we leave it alone?’ asked Priscilla. ‘The Emergency finished twenty years and more ago. We are free now. Let us not keep chewing over it.’
‘Some of us had losses,’ insisted Mama Chungu. ‘You may not like to be made to remember it, but it’s true. We cannot get away from it.’
Indeed we cannot get away from it, thought Priscilla. But we can try to keep it in the past instead of living haunted with the images of blood and iron.
She looked curiously at Mama Chungu, who had spoken so little of herself since she had been picked up from the pavement and brought to the Refuge that some of them thought she had no memory at all. No one knew where she had come from. But memories, of course, need not speak in loud voices. They may gibber at a tantalising distance like a bat in the rafters, or swoop upon you like a moth, soundless but soiling you with a residue of filmy substance. They are the more terrifying if they wake you up, unaware of where you are, or weave about from real places to the fantasy of story-books or the falsity of postmarked letters. Perhaps, after all, Mama Chungu was resuming shape, particularising herself, and the birth-pain of which she used to babble was not that of the mother but of the newborn child.
‘Rubbish,’ Rahel used to say when Priscilla tried to steer away from Emergency talk. ‘I’ve had to do with fighting all my life. What’s the use of pretending our menfolk can do without it? But I admit it was a tough time for you in the fifties. My Vitalis was a young private then, and it turned him up some of the things he saw. Young men don’t talk all that freely to their mothers, but he told me some things that seemed to haunt him, feeling he was taking it out of his own people. (Not that anyone spoke of freedom fighters then. Not where we lived, anyway. We were taught to feel superior to them and with their jobs and houses falling our way it wasn’t too hard.) But I used to tell him it’s not up to a soldier to choose his side. Other people have to do that, and sometimes they get the chop for it. A military man takes his orders the same as a bus driver. No good saying “I’d fancy a run to Nakuru today instead of Mombasa.” Once you do that, every rut in the road will be your fault. Stick to your orders, I said to him. It lets you out of taking responsibility.’
‘And look where that got us,’ Wairimu would retort. ‘Sharing a house with twenty-eight other old busybodies who praise peace and talk war, without a man in sight except the Reverend coming to tell us to mind our women’s business.’
Wairimu was by far the oldest, so she felt she had a right to slander old age if anyone did. She looked on Rahel, ten years younger, as her lieutenant, but one already failing in health. Sophia actually came between them in age but she was set apart, not by her colour, not by lack of experience (for they all respected her conversion and her tribulations), but by something less definable. It was not only her lack of the countrywomen’s skills, for Priscilla might also have seemed town-born if you did not know better, and Nekesa could hardly tell a potato from a groundnut till it was dug up and put on the market. There was some other timeless quality about Sophia that kept her out of the age-ranking order, friendly enough to all but not near neighbour to any.
‘Isn’t this a bit extreme?’ the donors’ representative had said when the Vicar brought her to see the Matron and go through the record books. She was a sandy sort of person, all pale and dappled, standing for some kind of corporate European personality.
‘I mean you have to be able to observe a lot of heartbreak to get the funds administered properly. It is a bit like the love of God: you take it in full of feeling and then have to learn to live with it inside the bounds of society. But we have been trained to think that it is only white people who can be completely ignored by their relations. These old bodies seem to have survived disaster after disaster.’
‘Of course the cases are extreme,’ said the Vicar gently. ‘Ours is not a very wealthy country. We don’t give out our resources to help the middling poor unless they have had other kinds of distress. Most of us have been middling poor at one time or another in our lives.’
‘Yes, yes, I see. Everywhere there are disasters. But one is dwarfed by disasters without any savings or security to relieve them. Care is one thing. The rebuilding of utterly shattered lives is another. Of course people were doing this with displaced persons in Europe at the end of the war, or after partition in India, but where society has not broken down. . . .’
‘Do our old ladies look shattered to you?’
‘No indeed, that is the wonder. Except the one who keeps nattering about her baby. Of course the one in bed has had a stroke by the look of her – I didn’t see that entered in the record. But still she has a kind of serenity about her, even after all those troubles.’
‘In England, you see,’ the Matron took it upon herself to expound to the Vicar, ‘people will take their old folks to a home, even if they have to pay quite heavily for it. They are more easily defeated by the care than by the expense. We are not like that, though there are a few who abandon their relations. And usually those who are willing to pay can employ someone to do the work at home.’ She had now turned her attention to Mrs Reinhold. ‘Wages are not so high, and in the countryside a helper might not even demand a wage, just expenses paid now and again. So those we get here are really problem cases.’
‘Now, now, Matron,’ the Vicar interrupted. ‘They are people with problems. They are not themselves problems. That is what Mrs Reinhold is saying.’
‘Of course I did not mean to imply. . . .’
‘And we know that the Lord is able to deal with every problem,’ went on the Vicar firmly, ‘and He sends people like you, Mrs Reinhold, to assist.’
‘Yes, I agree,’ said the social worker cautiously. ‘I happen to agree, though I’d be a bit careful about saying so when a number of very good and devoted people think they have sent me themselves. And on their behalf I should like to say how much we appreciate the care you are giving here. But surely not every one of these residents is an out-and-out Christian? And yet they have a resilience, a self-confidence that is hard to find among institutional cases – if you will allow the word for once, Vicar – and not to be taken for granted among people who have been buffeted so much in ordinary life. I mean, even a shared disaster – an earthquake wiping out a town, for instance – gives people an urge to support one another and put a brave face on it. Much of my work is concerned with that kind of situation. It is all these individual tragedies that reduce me to a jelly.’
‘You seem to be holding up very well for a jelly, Mrs Reinhold,’ answered the Vicar gallantly. ‘But I think perhaps you have a different time-scale for disasters than ours. Don’t forget we had the first man – a sort of raw material for Adam – in Kenya. William the Conqueror and Genghis Khan and Hitler, all these people are mere episodes for us. We have lived, traditionally, a very eventful life as regards plagues, famines, migrations, raiding parties. I don’t think any of these ladies grew up in the expectation – I don’t say not in the hope – of a calm course of life in which your husband was always nice to you, your children mostly stayed