After breakfast, I might go back into my room to read. Or go with my mother to learn – well, something or other. For if her wonderful lessons stopped when we went to school, she never ever lost an opportunity for instruction, and now I am grateful and wish I could tell her so.
My brother always went down on the lands with my father, and I often did too. My father sat himself on a log or a big stone, and watched the gang of ‘boys’ hoeing a field, or wrenching the maize cobs off the plants, or pulling up peanuts, or cutting down the great flat sunflower heads full of shiny black seeds. Most wore rags of some kind, many loincloths, or perhaps a ragged singlet and shorts that might easily be laced across a rent with pink under-bark torn from a musasa tree. As they hoed, they conversed, laughing and making jokes, and sometimes sang, if threshing peanuts from their shells with big sticks, or smashing the sunflower heads to release showers of seeds. When the bossboy, Old Smoke, came to sit with my father, his two attendant young men always standing respectfully behind him, the two men might talk half a morning. For when they had finished with the mombies, the probabilities of the rain, the need for a new cow kraal, or a new ditch to carry water from the compound, or the deficiencies of the Dutch farm assistant – but he only lasted a short time, because the Africans hated him so much – then they philosophized. At the African pace, slow talk, with long pauses, punctuated by ‘Yes …’, and from Smoke … ‘Ja …’ Then another slow exchange, and ‘Ja …’ from Old Smoke. ‘Yes, that’s it,’ from my father. Smoke might sit on a log or on his haunches, with one forearm over his knees for balance – when my brother and I tried it was no good, our limbs had already set into European stiffness. My father sat with his wooden leg out in front of him, his old hat over his eyes for the glare. They talked about Life and about Death and, often, about the Big Boss Pezulu (the Big Boss above, or God) and His probable intentions.
Meanwhile my brother and I were watching birds, chameleons, lizards, ants, making little houses of grass, or racing up and down antheaps where often we startled a buck lying up through the hot hours under a bush.
Hours went by. Years … A bottle full of tepid sweetened tea would be produced with cake, biscuits, scones. Old Smoke would share this with us. More hours passed – years. Then the sound of the gong from the house. Men who had been at work since six or seven in the morning had an hour off, twelve till one. The gong was a ploughshare hit with a big bolt from the wagon. Then we drove up to the house where my mother had been working all morning, sewing mostly, clothes for her husband, her children, herself – she was always smart. Or she had cooked. She made jams, bottled fruits, invented crystallized fruit from the flesh of the gourds that fed cattle, filled rows of petrol tins with the sweet yeasty gingery water that would make dozens of bottles of ginger beer. And, like all the farmers’ wives, she invented recipes from mealies, which were not called sweetcorn then. Because we were all poor, or at least frugal, saving money when we could, the women were proud of what they could do with what they grew. Not till I went to Argentina, which grows the same crops as Southern Africa – pumpkins and maize, beans and potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions – did I find anything like the same inventiveness. We ate the green mealies cut off the cobs and cooked in cheese sauces, or in fritters and milk puddings or in soups with potatoes and pumpkin. The maize meal was made into cakes and pancakes, as well as different kinds of porridge, or added to bread. There were a dozen ways of cooking pumpkin. Young peanuts found their way into stews, peanut butter made all kinds of sauces and breads. We ate … how we did eat. Lunch was a big affair, meat, always meat, for this was before anybody but a real crank gave up meat. We ate roast beef and potatoes, or steak and kidney pies, or stews, or shepherd’s pie, and potatoes and half a dozen vegetables from the garden down the hill near the well. Then heavy puddings, and cheese.
Then, it was time to lie down.
‘But I’m not sleepy, Mummy, Mummy, I’m not sleepy.’
It was no good. In this climate, or on this altitude – and either might be cited as evidence against me – little children must lie down in the afternoons. I begged, I pleaded, even wept, not to be forced to lie down while my mother’s voice got increasingly incredulous. ‘What nonsense! What’s the fuss about?’ She did not know I was facing eternities: she looked forward to a few minutes snatched from the responsibilities of child-rearing, to write a letter Home. The orange curtains were drawn across the green gauze of the window, and the stone that propped the door put aside. ‘Look, here is the watch,’ and she arranged it on the candlestick by my bed. I had learned to tell the time because of the agonies of afternoon naps. My dress was pulled up over my head. She stood holding the coverlet back. I slid in. She turned away, her mind already on her letter. Now I was glad she had forgotten me. She shut the door into their bedroom where my little brother was already asleep. At once I nipped out of bed and pulled the curtains back again for I hated that stuffy ruddy gloom.
I lay flat on my back looking up. The cool spaces under the thatch welcomed me. Yes, and there will be an end to it, just as there was yesterday, and the day before. A lost bee buzzed about, tumbled to the floor, buzzed loudly, and I had an excuse to get up again to let it out of the door, but I did not dare replace the stone, set the door ajar. On my back, arms stretched, I took possession of my cool body, that thudded, pulsed and trickled with sounds. I flexed my feet. I tested my fingers, one by one, all present, all correct, my friends, my friend, my body. I sniffed my fingers where smells of roast beef and carrots lingered. The golden syrup of the steamed pudding sent intense sweetness into my brain, and made my nostrils flare. My forearm smelled of sun. The minute golden hairs flattened as I blew on them, like wind on the long grasses along the ditches. Silence. The dead, full, contented silence of midday in the bush. A dove calls. Another answers. For a moment the world is full of doves, and down the hill wings break in a flutter of noise, and the black shape of a bird speeds across the square of my window. My stomach gurgles. I put down a forefinger to prod the gurgle but it has moved downwards towards … but I had already gained full possession of my bladder, and had learned to ignore the anxious queries it sent up: should you take me to the lavatory? My hands slid, like a doctor’s, down over my thighs to my knees. There was a spot there somewhere, if you prodded it, then just behind the shoulder there would be an answering tweak of sensation. The two places were linked. There were other twinned patches of flesh, or skin. I kept discovering new ones, then forgot where they were, rediscovered them. Just above the ankle … I lay on my back with my legs in the air and pushed my forefinger into the flesh all around the ankle bone – there it was, yes, and miles away, under my ribs, there was a reply, a sensation not far off pain; it would become pain if I continued to press, but I had already moved on, mapping my body and its secret consonances. Did I dare look at the watch? Surely the half hour must be nearly up? I had been lying there for ever. I sneaked a look – no, impossible! The hand must have got stuck, I snatched up the watch, shook it. No, it was alive, all right, and only three minutes had passed. A howl of protest, hushed at once; had she heard, would she come in? I shut my eyes, lying rigid, pretending to be asleep. But dangers lurked in the pretence, for one could easily drop off, and I was not sleepy. I lay listening with my whole body, my whole life … from the other bed I heard a sound like the disturbance of air when a small trapped moth flutters. My friend the cat was there. I jumped up and leaned over her, she was lying curled, and her grey silky fur moved with her breath; she was, like me, enclosed in her own time, in the time of her breath. I was convinced she understood the anguish of afternoon sleep, the half hour which never passed. I touched her little grey paw with my finger, and it tightened as I slid my finger inside it. The claws, like tiny slivers of moon, dug into my flesh and went loose. She made the little sound