By midday the wetness had been whirled up into the air in clouds of steam; the big field steamed and smoked; and it was as if one could feel the growth being sucked up out of the mealie-grains by the heat and the wet.
During the first days of the wet season the storms and the showers advanced and retreated, and we watched the drama from the kopje-top; the now rich green bush stretching all around for miles would be blotted out suddenly in one place by a grey curtain, or the clouds would open violently overhead, enclosing us in a grey, steaming downpour. Below, the field was already showing a sheen of green. From the path beside the field, walking, the field was again opening and shutting, but now in avenues of green. Each plant was an inch high, a minute, green, divided spear, as crisp as fresh lettuce, and in the heart of each a big, round, shining globule of water.
Now the farmer would be pleased if the rain stopped for a week or ten days, so as to drive the roots down into the earth and strengthen the plants. Sometimes he was obliged; and the field of mealies stood faintly wilting, limp with thirst. But however the rain fell, the green film over the dark earth thickened, so that soon there were a hundred acres of smooth, clear apple-green that shimmered and rippled under the hot sun.
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. I had already lit my candle and set out the pails and basins; and I knew that my father was awake because I could see the fluctuating glow of his cigarette on the wall through the crack of the door which did not close properly.
I knew that he was waiting for my mother to wake up. At last I heard him say in a sort of hushed shout: ‘Maud, Maud, wake up!’ Nothing happened and the rain roared on.
‘Maud!’
She woke with a crash of the bedsprings. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s raining.’
‘I can hear that it’s raining.’
‘The roof’s really bad this year,’ he said. ‘Like a sieve.’
‘When the grass swells, it won’t be so bad.’
‘It’s worse than it was last year.’
‘We’ll get the thatching boy up in the morning,’ she said sleepily, and turned over.
‘But it’s raining,’ he said desperately.
‘Go to sleep.’
‘But it’s raining on me.’
‘You’ve got your mosquito net down, haven’t you?’
‘A mosquito net has holes in it.’
‘A mosquito net will absorb a lot of water before it starts to leak.’
‘It has already started to absorb the water.’
‘What if I slung another mosquito net over the first?’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to move the bed?’
‘Oh. Yes. I suppose so.’
My father spent a large part of his nights sitting up in his bed smoking and thinking. Sometimes, if I lit my candle for something, he would say cautiously: ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes, it’s me, I’m only just …’
‘Well then, go to sleep.’
‘But I’m only just …’
‘You’re not to read at this time of night.’ And then, after a moment, ‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘Hear that owl? It must be in the tree right outside.’
‘It sounds to me in the bush at the bottom of the kopje.’
‘Do you think so? You know, I’ve been sitting here thinking. Supposing we caught an owl and crossed it with one of your mother’s Rhode Island Reds. What do you think would happen?’
‘Almost anything, I should think.’
‘I was being serious,’ he said reprovingly from the dark room next door. ‘I don’t suppose they have thought of that, do you? An owl and a chicken. They could graft the seed somehow if they wouldn’t do it naturally. A rat-eating chicken. Or a chicken-eating chicken.’
A stir in my mother’s bed.
‘Shhhhh,’ my father would