By the end of the day there were half a dozen inverted objects on the floor around the house: two china cups in the sitting room; a plastic toy cooking pot and a second glass in the hallway; and in the bathroom a toilet roll with a wad of paper wedged into the top. They were put there by the three of us: my sister, my brother and me, and we waited for our father to come in. This was our daily routine. When he arrived he went round the house picking up each object and dispatching the creature beneath, while we followed behind gazing at him with a mixture of disgust and admiration.
You could hear the crack and crunch of the cockroach as its skeleton gave way underfoot, pale innards spurted out. We were in awe at the way this grotesque feature didn’t seem to bother our father, who would squash a cockroach with his bare feet. If you caught him at a particular time, when he was still in his pyjamas in the morning, say, and asked him to kill a cockroach for you, he would go right ahead and stamp on it with his naked feet.
My mother had a story about cockroaches that took place in the same house. We’d just moved up-country, where my parents planned to set up a clinic, the only one for hundreds of miles. For several months my father had scouted the regions looking for a suitable spot and finally settled on Koidu, three hundred miles to the east, right on the border with Guinea, in the heart of the diamond-mining region. He rented a rambling bungalow with several wings, set within its own compound, with the idea of turning one wing into a ward for in-patients and living in the others. My mother and we three children left our noisy, downtown flat in Freetown and flew to Koidu in a plane that bounced from town to town across the interior of the country, while my father drove up in our Austin with the dogs and the luggage.
When we arrived it was late into the night. My parents stacked our belongings in the main room and my mother set up cots for us in one of the bedrooms, camp beds for my father and herself in another. In the early hours of the morning, when it was still black, she awoke to the sound of my cries. She rose and came to me, turning on the lights as she passed through the house. She soothed me and returned me to my cot. Just as she was back in her bed and falling asleep again she heard me crying. This happened three times.
The fourth time she didn’t bother to turn on the lights. She paused at the door to my room and as she looked around she saw that the walls seemed to be moving. My mother decided that she must be exhausted or else still dreaming and lingered a while in the dark at the bedroom door. Yet beneath her gaze the entire room seemed to have lost density: ceiling, floor, walls, even my cot heaved. Her baby was still shrieking. She flicked the light switch. Nothing. Turned it off and waited. Slowly the walls turned fluid again. She ran to fetch her husband, who was still sleeping deeply on his camp bed. As they stood at the door of my room, she showed him what she had seen, flipping the lights on and off.
He saw it, too. He rubbed his face, yawning widely. ‘Cockroaches,’ he said, and he turned to go back to bed.
My father’s feet had strong, yellowish soles. He told us that he didn’t own a pair of shoes until he went away to secondary school, and up until that time he had to walk five miles to classes and back again. This deeply impressed us, at the first telling. I disliked wearing shoes and at first I assumed the story’s purpose was to let us know that shoes didn’t matter. After all, my father managed without. Both of us had the same broad, long, flat feet: African feet. While I was growing my feet shot out first, ahead of the rest of my body. By the time I was eleven they were size seven and I barely cleared five foot. I was an L-shaped child.
In fact, our father’s story was a multipurpose parable with ever-extending dimensions of meaning. At its very simplest it was a warning against the dangers of catching hookworm by wandering outside without shoes on. I learned that one the hard way. They burrowed through the skin on the soles of my feet and made a home in my bowels.
Then the story was an inducement to be grateful for what you had. My father grew up in the villages, where life was very harsh indeed. There were no hospitals and very few schools. When Ndora, my grandmother, was sick the family had to take her all the way to Rotifunk, on the other side of the country, where there was a mission hospital. In Freetown there were several hospitals to serve the British administrators and their Creole civil servants, but these were not open to people from the country. They walked most of the way, carrying pots of food and sleeping mats on their heads. When they got to the hospital, amenities there were so basic that the doctors could not come up with a diagnosis. So they shrugged and sent her away, telling the relatives to bring her back if she got any worse. As if that were possible.
Five months later she died, leaving a six-month-old baby girl and her two beloved boys. Our father was five years old then. That evening as he was sitting among the men at the back of one of the houses he heard a high-pitched, rhythmic wail coming from the street. It was a Bondu elder, speaker for the secret society of women, and she was holding a broom up to the sky. That was the sign that one of the village women had died. A fragment of her song came across: ‘…the one from Rothomgbai’ – my grandmother’s village. Then he knew Ndora was gone.
Soon afterwards, our father ended up being the only person in his entire family to go to school just because his mother had died. The missionaries had opened a school nearby in Mamunta. The days passed and nobody came to enrol their children in the new school, so the missionaries approached the chief, who listened to what they had to say and then passed an edict: each household from the villages neighbouring Mamunta would volunteer one child to the new school. None of the women wanted her son to be chosen. People were very suspicious of education back then; they said that people who went to school never came back. With no mother to defend his interests my father was elected to go. Fourteen years later, when he left for Britain to become a doctor, he thanked them and they were pleased they were right. See, they said, he’s leaving for ever, as we knew he would. This was the final meaning of my father’s story: it was about the value of education and not shoes at all. Do well in school and thank God you had an education, because lots of people don’t even know its value.
In fact the new school was closed within the year after the head teacher was caught having an affair with one of the paramount chief’s wives. The headmaster was fined, which was the correct punishment. But the cuckolded chief wasn’t satisfied and he closed the school down as well, saying that there would be no more white man’s education in Mamunta. Privately Chief Masamunta, who was also my father’s uncle, arranged for his own two sons and his nephew to be transferred to another mission school in Makeni some miles away.
My mother didn’t have African feet like ours. She had European feet. They were similar in the sense that they were quite big, but the arches were high and the soles smooth and thin and pale as paper. I had my father’s feet but, on the matter of cockroaches, my mother’s western sensibilities.
Gradually the cockroaches moved on as we swept the house out, washed cupboards down and covered the thick green and blue gloss on the walls with white emulsion. We hired a local man to help us with the work, and under our mother’s instruction he cut down branches from the trees and pushed them into the earth around the edges of the compound to protect the house from the churning dust of the road. When the rains came the branches flourished miraculously and our house was enclosed in an elegant screen of trees; we were all astonished and delighted, my mother as much as the rest of us.
My father bought iron beds and mattresses for the maternity ward and my mother donated my cot for the newborn babies. Within a very short time word got around that the clinic had opened and new patients began to arrive; every day the line of people trailed out of the waiting area and onto our veranda.
Our father worked ever longer hours. He ran two clinics in the centre of town – one for prescriptions, the other for minor surgical procedures: cataracts, circumcisions and the like. He tried hard to persuade people to bring their boys to him, instead of cutting the foreskin the traditional way, by a cleric