Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Read online

“Yuck,” said Mum, whose own maternal hugs are stiff, reluctant and brief. “We just weren’t raised that way.” And then her eyes went pale and she spoke to me very slowly, as if explaining her culture to an alien visitor. “We are terribly British: stiff upper lip, no public displays of affection. It’s how my mother was raised, and it’s how we were raised—and I don’t think it did any of us any harm.”

  I refrained from pointing out that my grandmother, Mum and Auntie Glug had all spent time in institutions for the mentally unhinged. In any case, Mum would have countered the diagnosis, “Highly strung, I think you mean. There’s nothing wrong with being that kind of bonkers. It has nothing to do with not being hugged enough and everything to do with being so well bred, and that leads to chemical imbalance. We’re like difficult horses or snappy dogs; it’s not our fault. It’s in the blood.”

  In keeping with their arm’s-length style of parenting, the Macdonalds of Waternish were remarkably unimaginative when it came to naming their children. Boys were Allan or Donald and, at a stretch, Patrick. Girls were Flora. My grandmother, an unwelcome surprise, arriving twelve years later than her siblings, was Edith, but everyone called her Donnie. Before Donnie reached her teens, her father, Allan Macdonald, died. How he died is a matter of some dispute. Mum says Allan Macdonald broke his neck in a riding accident, but a distant Macdonald relative told me that he died from a bad cold.

  “Well, that might be,” Mum says impatiently, “but a broken neck certainly didn’t help.”

  In any case, the result was the same. Granny’s father was dead and her bad-tempered brother Donald inherited the estate. The death duties were crippling. Bad-tempered Donald sold every valuable painting and antique on the estate. He divorced his wife, citing exasperation at the way she ate apples, and he sent his son, Mad Cousin Patrick, away with her. Then he retreated to a tower on the north side of the house where he stayed for the remainder of his life while dry rot ravaged the rooms and a thick growth of green slime crawled over the cold stone walls down the hallways and into the kitchens.

  Meanwhile, Granny’s mother, who had not been provided for in her husband’s will because everyone kept thinking she’d die in the night of a bladder infection, sat in a basket chair in her bedroom waiting in vain for the Grim Reaper. It was so cold in the house that she went everywhere with an Aladdin paraffin lamp and she always wore at least five cardigans, the longest one on the bottom, layers and layers of shorter ones on top of that and a thick shawl around her shoulders.

  And then there was my grandmother’s elder brother, Shell-shocked Allan, a desperately good-looking but very sensitive man who had run away at the age of seventeen to fight in the First World War and had been gassed in the trenches, leaving him delicate and scarred. He kept a hundred cats and carried on a secret marriage with the village postmistress, with whom he had one son, named, of course, Allan (but known as Wee Allan to distinguish him from his father, which worked well until Wee Allan grew into a six-foot-four man of considerable if gentle bulk).

  “So Waternish House was quite suffocating by then, full to overflowing with damaged people and Muncle’s stuffed animals,” Mum says. “Moldy heads with bared yellow teeth and glassy eyes all leering down from the walls.”

  My grandmother escaped this Dickensian shelter to stay with the crofters who lived and worked on the estate. From them she picked up fluent Gaelic. She learned how to sneak up on razor fish by walking backward along the beach. She collected carrageen and swam in the warm currents of the Atlantic with wild otters and seals. She galloped her family’s crossbred Arabian Highland horses bareback across the heather. She spent her nights in the natural, warm clatter of the housekeeper’s lodge, a cottage made entirely of corrugated iron, so that nobody could hear anybody speak whenever the wind blew or whenever it rained, which was almost all the time, so no one bothered much with conversation. It was, in many ways, a charmed and feral childhood.

  Still, it was no wonder that when friends offered my grandmother free berth to Kenya in exchange for acting as au pair to their children, she fled the island of her ancestors and headed for the colonies. She was twenty years old. Until the day she left for Africa, she’d never been more than a hundred miles from her home. On her journey she took the native intelligence of her crofter upbringing; a suitcase of sensible clothes; a diary in which she recorded the day’s temperature and any other notable occurrence; and several dense biographies of various members of the British royal household, past and present.

  Fairly soon after reaching Kenya, Donnie met and married Roger “Hodge” Huntingford. For eleven years Donnie and Hodge tried to have a child, but the massive quantities of quinine my grandmother took to prevent and treat malaria also acted as an abortive. Not until the Second World War, when my grandfather was stationed in Burma and my grandmother had gone back to live on Waternish Estate, did she manage to carry a child to term.

  Once the war was over, my grandparents returned to Kenya with two-year-old Nicola in tow. “The men went out first to set things up again,” Mum says. “And then my mother and I came out on the first ship to bring women and children—a converted troop carrier, the RMS Alcantara.” Mum pauses. “In my memory, there were ten thousand women and children on that ship and one man—Mr. Branson, the haberdasher from Eldoret—but that can’t be right. Can it? Maybe there were two thousand women and children, and Mr. Branson the haberdasher.”

  On the train from Mombasa to Eldoret, Mum ran up and down the dining car and ate all the butter off the tables—pounds and pounds of butter, rationed in Britain but here for the taking—and by the time she got to Eldoret, she had acidosis. “I was seriously, seriously sick and had to be whipped straight off to Doctor Reynolds for a liver remedy.” Mum blinks at me in surprise. “Where were all the grown-ups while I was busy wolfing down the butter? I nearly killed myself with greed and no one stopped me.”

  ELDORET IS A TOWN SOUTH of the Cherangani Hills on the Uasin Gishu plateau, close to Kenya’s border with Uganda. Originally known as 64, it was sixty-four miles from the head of the newly built Uganda Railway, but then the settlement became more established and the settlers cast around for something that sounded more romantic—less like the location of a prison camp—and someone came up with Eldoret, taken from the Masai word eldare meaning “stony river.”

  “It was a bit bleak and windy sometimes and it could be very cold up at six thousand feet,” Mum says. “We had to light a fire almost every night. But compared to gloomy old Britain after the war, it was ecstasy. For one thing, the quality of light so close to the equator! And for another thing, the space. You could look across the plateau all the way to the horizon and you would see uninterrupted land for as far as anyone could hope to walk in a single day.”

  My grandfather worked as a government agricultural extension officer, going off on safari for two or three weeks at a time to remote parts of the country and leaving my grandmother and Mum “up country.” To begin with, until they could find a proper house, the Huntingfords lived in a tiny rented bungalow on the grounds of the Kaptagat Arms, the estate of Zoe Foster, whose husband had been a white hunter in Uganda.

  “The husband was gone by the time we showed up. I think he had been eaten by a lion or gored by a buffalo or whatever happened to those white-hunter types,” Mum says. “Anyway, Zoe seemed perfectly happy. She had two sons, a beautiful blond daughter called Mary and lots of animals. There was always a vicious but effective mongoose resident in the house, excellent for killing snakes—just like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Oh, and her garden was the most exciting in the whole area—a stream, a maze, beds of rhododendrons and roses, lavender and peonies, and a vivid lawn strewn with hippo and elephant skulls that the husband had shot over the years.” Mum’s voice takes on a singsong quality, as if she is reading from a storybook: “It was fantastic. I used to run away from our bungalow, which was on the edge of the estate, and go over to the main house and play in her garden with my first best friend, Stephen Foster.” Mum smiles at the memor
y. “Stephen and I used to take turns pushing each other on his tricycle. We wore matching romper suits. We had tea parties. We went everywhere together, hand in hand.”

  “Stephen was one of Zoe’s sons?” I guess.

  Mum frowns. “No, no, no,” she says. “Stephen wasn’t her son. Stephen was her chimpanzee.”

  There is a small, appalled pause while I try—and fail—to imagine sending one of my toddlers off to play with a chimpanzee (quite apart from the Jane Goodall abuse-of-the-animal concerns).

  “Weren’t your parents worried he would bite you?” I ask.

  Mum gives me a look as if I have just called Winnie-the-Pooh a pedophile, “Stephen? Bite me? Not at all, we were best friends. He was a very, very nice, very civilized chimpanzee. Anyway, my mother didn’t worry about me too much. She knew I would always be all right because everywhere I went Topper came with me.”

  “And Topper was?”

  “A dog my father had rescued,” Mum says.

  WHICH MIGHT EXPLAIN WHY, when I was packed off to boarding school in Rhodesia for three months at a time, and missed the lousy farm with every fiber of my being, my own rescued dog wrote me letters more regularly than Mum did, and certainly with more affection:

  “My Dearest Bobo,” Jason King (my dachshund, bailed out of the Umtali, Rhodesia, chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), wrote in January 1977:

  I’ve been out riding with Mum and the horses every day this week. I’ve learned how to climb trees to chase lizards. I keep getting stuck high up in the Flamboyants and July has to climb up and rescue me.

  Sally has been very naughty and went hunting for three nights last week. She took Bubbles with her. I think they were chasing baboons. Sally came home with a bleeding tongue and sore paws and dripping with ticks. It serves her right. Bubbles got all the way to the river before one of the boys saw him. They were both lucky not to get caught in a snare.

  I hope you are working hard at your lessons and being good for your matrons and teachers. Tell Vanessa that she is supposed to share her tuck with you. I miss you very, very much, especially at tea time. I sleep on your bed every night and on your chair all day.

  Lots and lots of love,

  Your beloved friend and the biggest supporter of the Bobo Fuller Fan Club,

  Jason King

  oxo

  Roger Huntingford’s War

  Hodge with Nandi tribesmen in Kenya, circa 1930.

  Auntie Glug, Mum’s younger sister, now lives in a small village in Scotland with her husband, Sandy; a passionately adored dog called India and a couple of cats. Their three children are grown and have left home, but Langlands Lodge feels like a place that has never given up on raising children. Its prevailing odors remain nursery comforting: warm toast, freshly brewed tea and stewed plums. If my parents had been killed in the Rhodesian War, Vanessa, Olivia and I would have come to live in Langlands with Auntie Glug and Uncle Sandy. In this way, the house has always felt like a refuge, a place of certainty and safety. I sleep profoundly here (fourteen hours at a stretch) and I eat without restraint, grazing my way steadily through Uncle Sandy’s casseroles, his wheatie buns, his greenhouse grapes (a habit that has earned me the Langlands’ nickname Niece-Weevil).

  Auntie Glug hasn’t lived in Africa since 1967, but she still dresses like a Kenyan settler woman of a certain era—men’s clothes, work boots, a red handkerchief tucked into her sleeve—and she smokes like a soldier. The boxes of photos and letters that I dig out from under the stairs smell of her cigarettes but also of my grandfather’s pipe tobacco, the homegrown, home-cured crop he used to hang in his garage in England. The smell of rum and earth are as fresh for me as the instant memory this scent retrieves of his guffawing, irreverent laugh.

  Auntie Glug has inherited from her parents a holy belief in the restorative nature of gardening and animals and she is unapologetically earthy. Several years ago she went to India and came back wearing salwar kameez and eating with her fingers (the salwar kameez didn’t last—not practical in the winter and she kept setting them alight with her cigarettes). She is also the only person I have ever met who has returned from that country enthusiastically endorsing its latrines. “Very sensible,” she said, “all that healthy squatting.”

  From where I am sitting in her morning room, she appears in her garden as something ancient and essential in our people. Warped by the old Victorian glass windows; morphed by an old shirt of my grandfather’s and a pair of tie-waisted corduroys; shadowed by India, over whom she bends once in a while to consult and pet, she gives the impression of being ageless, genderless, doggedly Macdonald of Clanranald but also a product of East Africa, of that particular time and place when there were really no limits on how well or badly, sanely or madly a white person had to behave. “Don’t talk to me about behaving,” Auntie Glug says, giving one of her badger growls. “Bugger that.” (As a result of Auntie’s standard nonconformity—gardening until midnight while teaching herself Spanish, controlling air traffic over Dundee while knitting and teaching herself Spanish—it is sometimes a little difficult to tell when her natural eccentricity crosses into territory better understood by the professionals.)

  No Macdonald of Clanranald is entirely at home in a house that does not have animals and ghosts. Accordingly, there is in Langlands Lodge the ghost of a little white dog (killing, as it were, two birds with one stone). My cousins say they’ve heard it clatter up and down the stairs at night, and until my grandmother died in 1993, she saw it with such persistence she began to doubt it was a ghost at all and began to leave milk and food for it on the landing.

  Uncle Sandy is two million percent Scottish and a pilot. He plays the bagpipes at all our family funerals and weddings, kitted out in the proper attire (a mere glimpse of his bagpipes and sporran makes Mum weep). Uncle Sandy can tell you next week’s weather just by looking at the clouds over the Sidlaw Hills; he can dead reckon the speed of the wind to within a knot or two and he can tell, without looking, when the rooks have come in from the fields to roost in the forest near Langlands. Because of his job, he is off traveling much of the time, but when he is home, he stations himself in the kitchen and cooks the kitchen to a steam, as if the act of leaving behind frozen tubs of chili and freshly baked bread and bottles of plum jam means that he is never really gone from Langlands.

  It is in this creaking, ghosted home, fragrant with Uncle Sandy’s cooking, the BBC ancient-rhyming the Shipping Forecast from the kitchen and the old grandfather clock in the dining room creaking as if time hurt to tell, that I touch the corner of my grandfather’s war in two scraps of paper. The first is his enlisting agreement, signed June 13, 1940. “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King George the Sixth, His Heirs and Successors, and that I will as in duty bound, honestly and faithfully defend His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, in Person, Crown and Dignity against all enemies, and will observe and obey all orders of His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, and of the General and Officers set over me. So help me God.”

  There appears my grandfather’s signature.

  Below that was written “Have you received a notice paper stating the liabilities you are incurring by enlisting?” Next to which my grandfather had penned, “Yes.”

  “And do you understand and are you willing to accept them?”

  “Yes.”

  MY GRANDFATHER’S FATHER was a vicar in the Church of England. “There are bishops and vicars going back as far as you like on that side of the family,” Mum says. “Scholars, you understand. It wasn’t as if God sent down a great bolt of lightning and inspired them—nothing that easy—not like preachers and missionaries. All of our family had to go to something like university for seven years—ages and ages, in any case—and speak Latin and Greek and Hebrew. One of the Huntingford bishops is buried under the floor of Winchester Cathedral, or there’s a plaque there, anyway, commemorating him. He was head of the college. No one liked him very much. I thi
nk his flock—or whatever it is that Bishops have—mutinied.”

  At the turn of the century, my grandfather’s father looked at his growing family—three young boys—and decided that he couldn’t raise them on a vicar’s income in England. So like a lot of other people buying into the myth of East Africa’s munificence, he thought he’d try to make a go of it in Kenya. “Everyone thought they could go out there and grow coffee, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded and my grandfather wasn’t the least bit interested in coffee, he was too spiritual, too otherworldly, too learned and scholarly to come to grips with farming, so that failed,” Mum says. “He built a church somewhere, but the thing burned down. And then the youngest of the three boys, Tony, became terribly ill.”

  The child was raced to the Eldoret hospital, but he died of septicemia. He was ten years old. “I don’t think the family ever recovered from Tony’s death. His parents went into a deeply profound mourning. They didn’t really care about money or much of anything practical to begin with, but after Tony died, they gave up caring about worldly things altogether.”

  My grandfather’s oldest brother, Uncle Dicken, grew up to become a linguist and an anthropologist, and he wrote the first dictionary of the Nandi people. “He lived with the Nandi for ten years, knew all their customs and everything. This was back in the late 1920s and 30s when it wasn’t very fashionable to go off and live with the natives, but he didn’t do it in a creepy sort of way, he was studying the people.” Mum narrows her eyes at me and says, “I just know you’re going to put that in an Awful Book and make it sound as if he went native, but he didn’t. He was very British and very proper, and I am sure he didn’t touch a young Nandi maiden or anything horrible like that.”

  This remark made me think Uncle Dicken must have done something to unnerve Mum, an impression that was enhanced when I discovered a paper titled “Sexual Growth Among the Nandi of Kenya” that cited his work. The sex life of a Nandi boy, according to the research of my great-uncle Dicken, “begins as soon as he has emerged from the seclusion of circumcision (kakoman tum) and a girl’s when she reaches the age of puberty, i.e. about twelve. . . .”