Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Read online

  IN MEMORIAM of her dashed dream, Mum put the three volumes of Trevor Thom’s The Air Pilot’s Manual on her bathroom shelf next to Charles Berlitz’s German Step-by-Step and Commander F. J. Hewett’s Sailing a Small Boat. “Well you can’t win them all,” she says. And with her characteristic, if uneven, gift for magnanimity, she forgave My Dashing Little Sri Lankan, even after it became apparent, at least to her, that he was a spectacularly indifferent flight instructor. “As far as I know, not a single one of us passed even the written portion of the exam,” Mum says. But her chin goes up. “In any case, I flew, didn’t I? I flew.”

  And it is true that no one can take away the day when she flew the plane up over the msasa trees, around the country club grounds and back down again onto the airstrip with a sunset at her tail, the bumpy landing into the face of the great, fiery hunter’s moon. The propeller spun to a halt. The cockpit door opened. Dust settled. For a moment the whole world stopped breathing. Then, while Mr. Vaas mopped his brow in the copilot’s seat, Beryl Markham and Karen Blixen had nothing on the way Mum emerged smiling from the cockpit, flashing a V for Victoria to her adoring fans, real and imaginary.

  Nicola Huntingford Is Born

  Isle of Skye, Scotland, 1944

  The stairway in Waternish House. Scotland, circa 1940.

  Nicola Fuller of Central Africa holds dear to her heart the values of her clan: loyalty to blood, passion for land, death before surrender. They’re the sorts of values that lead you to kill and that get you killed, and in every important way, they were precisely the kind of stubborn tribal values that you needed if you were bound and determined to be White, and stay White, first during Kenya’s Mau Mau and later during the Rhodesian War. They were decidedly not the values of the Johnny-come-lately White liberals who survived postindependence in those African countries by declaring with suddenly acquired backbone and conviction that they’d always been on the side of “the people” and that they had always embraced all of humanity and that inequality had always been so hard for them to witness.

  “Oh dear,” Mum says, pained. “Embracing all of humanity? Must we? Isn’t that like born-again Christians?” (Mum has nothing against born-agains, but she has never recovered from the time she accidentally attended an evangelical service in England. “Suddenly there were all these weeping people trying to hold my hand.”) “Oh dear,” Mum says. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Mum has fought for what she saw as Her Land in Africa, and she fought fiercely and without apology. So it’s confusing, but very instructive, to consider her political heroes (you can tell who she admires because she names her pets after them): Che Guevara, Josip Broz Tito and Aung San Suu Kyi. In other words, Mum admires leaders of “the people” while seeming to have absolutely no patience for “the people” themselves. On the other hand, I suppose it is only fair to disclose that she had a cat named Maggie Thatcher and she has named a new Jack Russell puppy Papa Doc. “He’s so dictatorial,” Mum wrote proudly in a recent letter. “He’s already taught himself to frown and he’s only six weeks old.”

  NICOLA FULLER OF CENTRAL AFRICA was born in the front room of the housekeeper’s cottage on her mother’s family’s Waternish Estate on the Isle of Skye on July 9, 1944. Her mother was a Macdonald of Clanranald. The clan member crest badge shows a disembodied arm brandishing a disproportionately massive sword emerging from the top of a castle. The clan motto, which I’m not sure anyone takes too seriously, is “My hope is constant in Thee.” The war cry, which I think everyone takes very seriously, is Dh’aindeoin co theireadhe e, which translates from the Scottish Gaelic into English as “Gainsay who dare.”

  It took me a while to recover from the discovery that Mum’s family actually had a war cry, but then I thought about Mum and I realized that if you didn’t have a war cry to go with that attitude, you’d have to invent one. During the bush war in Rhodesia Mum forwent her family’s Gaelic war cry and took up a personal war cry. It was borrowed from Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and was about being a bandit from Brazil, being the quickest on the trigger and shooting to kill, which was about the extent of Mum’s interest in the lyrics. In fact she quite often didn’t make it past the opening word—a loudly shouted “Olé!,” which kept it simple for everyone who did not speak Gaelic but confused those of us who spoke absolutely no Spanish. Vanessa and I translated the word as “Hooray!” But the meaning was clear either way. My mother was here, she was armed, and you bet your insurrecting Commie ass she was dangerous.

  My grandmother named her first child Nicola Christine Victoria—three Christian names to make up for all the children she had miscarried on the way to having this one—Nicola to commemorate a Nichols branch of their family; Christine after the housekeeper on Waternish who helped my grandmother give birth and Victoria because Mum was born a little over a month after D-day.

  Including Nicola Christine Victoria, three children were born on Waternish that day, which made it something of a baby boom. What made the other two children memorable and worthy of sharing a headline with my usually headline-hogging Mum was the fact that one was eventually diagnosed with a form of dwarfism and one was born with her feet on backward. “How lucky,” my grandmother is said to have remarked upon hearing the news. “That’ll come in handy if she wants to catch razor fish.”

  “Why razor fish?” I ask.

  “Razor fish,” Mum explains, “live in the sand along the shore. You sneak up on them by walking backward.”

  IN SPITE OF LIVING ALL but a fraction of her life in Africa, Mum considers herself one million percent Highland Scottish, ethnically speaking. Her father was English, but Mum says that doesn’t count; Scottish blood (especially the Highland sort) cancels English blood. As if to prove this, Mum cries when bagpipes play; she once attempted to slip a suitcase full of haggis through Zambian customs (to be fair, she was experiencing a manic episode at the time) and her eyes actually change color from green to yellow when she is excited or is about to go certifiably mad. Mum is also a bit fey, which means that she has access to worlds unseen, has funny feelings about things, insights, prophecies and visions. She believes in ghosts and fairies.

  She inherited this gift from her two million percent Highland Scottish mother, ethnically speaking, who was so fey that she could predict the future with astonishing accuracy. “It’ll all end in tears, you’ll see,” my grandmother used to say several times a day. My grandmother could actually talk to fairies and see ghosts with casual ease, especially after her second midmorning gin and French, which became the habit of her later years (but this is also the woman who claimed that the reason she walked in circles after eleven a.m. was that one leg was shorter than the other, so it’s hard to know).

  I, on the other hand, don’t seem to have inherited Mum’s passion for violence. I am not fey like my grandmother. I don’t make unilateral declarations of independence every time we all have too much to drink. My eyes are dark green and stay that way, no matter how angry or excited I get. I can see that Scotland is beautiful, or that parts of it are, but I don’t fall to my knees as soon as I land on the Isle of Skye and begin inhaling the peat. Plus, even though one of my legs is shorter than the other, I very rarely walk in circles, even when drunk.

  “Which just goes to show you,” Mum says. “You must have been swapped at birth. You’re missing that clan loyalty. Fidelity to family above all else. Blood, blood, blood.” To rub it in, she has started introducing me to people as “my American daughter.” Then she leaves a meaningful pause to let my otherness, my overt over-there-ness sink in, before adding with a mirthless laugh, “Careful what you say or do, or she’ll put you in an Awful Book.”

  In this way, Mum has made it clear that the blood of her ancestors has come to a screeching halt in the blue walls of her veins. Contaminated by my American ordinariness, condemned for my disloyalty, my veins are the equivalent of a genetic tourniquet. I am not a million percent Highland Scottish. I am not tribal. I have no patience with nostalgia. I’ve relinquished w
onderful Old Africa and crossed the Atlantic to join the dull New World. And worst of all, I have Told All in an Awful Book, like on the Jerry Springer Show.

  THE MAN IN CASPER, WYOMING, whose job it was to interview candidates wishing to become naturalized American citizens in The Cowboy State had been in the military for most of his adult life. His jaw had been wired together and he was forced to speak between gritted teeth, which made him sound as if he were barely containing a deeply felt rage against the world in general and against future immigrants to the United States in particular. He asked me a few questions about the Constitution and the American War of Independence. He asked how many stars were on the American flag and what color they were. And then he got to the Deeply Personal Questions.

  “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Nazi Party?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you,” the man asked, “have a family history of insanity?”

  In this situation, Mum would have felt the warm sensation of a student receiving an examination question on a subject for which she had prepared all her life. She would have settled herself comfortably in her chair, arranged herself for the long haul and begun with, “As a matter of fact, there is a long line of mental instability in our family going back centuries: funny moods, mental wobbliness, depression, that sort of thing.”

  But I, shaking my head for added emphasis, looked the man straight in the eye and answered firmly, “No.”

  Thus, having denied my own mother and most of her ancestors, I entered Scotland in the early autumn of 2002 as a foreigner. My brand-new blue American passport looked very flat and shiny, and as a consequence, a little counterfeit, as if I were a spy for hire, equipped with temporary documents. I rented a car and drove west across Scotland until the roads turned into single tracks and the scenery began to take over with craggy violence. Just like the postcards, there really were sheep everywhere and sheep had the right of way (they stood in the middle of the road and looked baleful as I crept around them), but once I got to Skye, the triangular yellow signs that warned of sheep on the road had been altered to depict elephants, camels and Cape buffalo. Beware elephants on the road. Beware camels on the road. Beware Cape buffalo on the road.

  I leased a cottage for a week and then, of course, it rained. Not an ordinary sort of rain, or even an ordinarily heavy sort of rain, but the kind of rain that was like standing under the sea the moment Someone Almighty decided to tip it out on top of you. The wind blew so hard the car alarm kept going off. Seagulls gusted past the cottage windows, backward. For four days I stayed indoors, refusing to believe that weather like this could last forever. On the fifth day, I wrapped myself up from head to toe in waterproof materials and ventured out with map and notebook to a great chunk of wild land on the northwestern claw of the island.

  I was guided as much by snatches of conversation I’d had with Mum and Granny over the years as I was by my map. The land, the sky and the sea were all the same rain shade of gray that made distinguishing landmarks impossible, but I eventually found the grand old house of Waternish Estate, a great crumbling building with black holes where its windows used to be, holes that made it look unseeing, un-alive. I parked along the roadside and walked onto the grounds, feeling like a trespasser not against whoever owned the place now but against Mum’s riotously romantic idea of her ancestry.

  Coming out into a clearing, I was struck immediately by the strange spectacle of a monkey puzzle tree growing on the edge of what had once been the lawn. I had seen old black-and-white photographs of this tree from the 1920s, but nothing could have prepared me for its utter South American foreignness on this wild, coastal Scottish property.

  “Probably planted by Major Allan Macdonald in the early 1800s,” Mum said. “The major took a great interest in horticulture and farming. He had a prize herd of Highland cattle and he also loved cairn terriers. He actually started the breed, or whatever you say when you invent a dog. He bred them to kill all the wild otters around the estate that were messing up his fishing.”

  Aside from the killing of otters (Mum had wept for a week after reading Gavin Maxwell’s autobiography, Ring of Bright Water), it was clear that Major Allan Macdonald had Mum’s firm stamp of approval. Being a loyal one million percent Scottish Highland Macdonald of Clanranald, Mum won’t say a word against cairn terriers even though she bears a scar on her lip where one named Robert savaged her when she was a young woman. “Well, it was my fault,” she said. “I surprised him and cairn terriers don’t like surprises.”

  Major Allan’s son, Captain Allan—known to the family as Muncle—was also fond of dogs and cattle. He sailed one of the last convict ships to Tasmania in the late 1840s. He took several cairn terriers with him on the journey, and family lore has it that he brought back two Tasmanian Palawa Aborigines in their place. Supposedly, the Aborigines lived, until their deaths, on Waternish Estate along with a pet deer that Muncle (an avid hunter) had blinded, but not killed, and a pack of yappy terriers.

  I am haunted by those two alleged Palawa. God only knows what awful memories they stored inside their souls from their native land, but their ability to tell of their ordeals was locked in their tongues on this strange, Gaelic-speaking island. “By the 1820s horrible things were happening in Tasmania,” Jan Morris writes in Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress. “Sometimes the black people were hunted for fun . . . sometimes they were raped in passing, or abducted as mistresses or as slaves. The sealers of Bass Islands established a slave society of their own with harems of women, employing the well-tried discipline of slavery—clubbing, stringing up from trees, or flogging with kangaroo-gut whips. In one foray seventy aborigines were killed, the men shot, the women and children dragged from crevices in the rocks to have their brains dashed out.”

  On December 1, 1826, the Tasmanian Colonial Times announced, “We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. We say this unequivocally SELF DEFENCE IS THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE. THE GOVERNMENT MUST REMOVE THE NATIVES—IF NOT, THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS AND DESTROYED!”

  At my most charitable, I imagine that Muncle might have rescued the two Palawa, and brought them back to Waternish so that they might avoid the genocide that was surely their fate in Tasmania.

  “I doubt it,” Mum says. “I don’t think Muncle was that sort of man.”

  I have seen photos of Muncle with his terriers and his deer, but the Palawa are ghosts, appearing nowhere. I have no way of knowing, even, what gender or age they were. So in the absence of any evidence I picture two homesick, middle-aged men sitting in this rain-lashed garden under a tree from South America with a blind deer, driven to distraction by ill-tempered and unpredictable terriers.

  “That’s so awful,” I say to Mum. “Where are they buried?”

  “Well, they wouldn’t have been buried in the cemetery because they weren’t Christians.” Mum pauses. “They were heathens.” I can tell from the way she says it that she likes that word—heathens—and its Somerset Maughamesque connotations. “But there’s a very nice little pet cemetery behind the house. I suppose it’s possible they’re buried there.”

  “Buried with those snappy dogs,” I say.

  “Oh,” Mum says, “I don’t know. It wouldn’t bother me.” And then her eyes go a threatening yellow. “You’re not going to put that in an Awful Book are you?” she says. “You’ll have Aborigines crawling from one end of the island to the other, digging the place up looking for ancestors.” Then she thinks about it. “Well, I suppose we don’t own the estate anymore, so it doesn’t matter.”

  Waternish Estate was sold to a Dutchman in the 1960s when Bad-tempered Donald died. In turn, the Dutchman sold a part of the estate to the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan. Donovan was the first of the British musicians to adopt the flower-power image. He is most famous for the psychedelically fabulous smash hits “Sunshine Superman,” �
��Season of the Witch” and “The Fat Angel,” and for being the first high-profile British pop star to be arrested for the possession of marijuana. Donovan has a history of being deeply groovy and of being most often confused with Bob Dylan, which reportedly annoys Donovan quite a lot.

  “Sometime in the early seventies, Bob Dylan bought part of the estate,” Mum tells me. “But he put a water bed on the second floor of the house for whatever it is these hippies get up to, and it came crashing through the ceiling.”

  “Not Bob Dylan,” I say. “Donovan.”

  “Who?” Mum says.

  THE ONLY LAND to which the Macdonalds of Waternish have any claim anymore are mounds in the graveyard of the ruined Trumpan Church near Waternish Estate. There are two small mounds with my grandparents in them and one larger mound containing a whole lot of my murderous, murdered ancestors. I drove toward the sea and found my grandparents’ graves. I stared down at them, wondering which one was my grandfather and which my grandmother. Mum was still trying to remember the dates to put on her parents’ headstones, and until then the graves were unmarked. “Isn’t it dreadful,” she says. “I just can’t think when they were born.” But this is how it has always been with our family. Whole lifetimes are reduced to one or two quixotic or iniquitous footnotes. When we were born and when we died are not important. After all, anyone can be born and die, but not everyone can Collect Aborigines or Begin a Breed of Dogs.