Nicola Fuller and the Fancy Dress Parties

Mum and Auntie Glug as Alice and the White Rabbit. Kenya, circa 1950.

When she was six, Mum’s parents went on leave from Kenya to Britain, taking their two children with them. Of that three-week journey by ship from Mombasa to Southampton and back again, Mum remembers only three things: “They performed this ghastly ceremony when the ship crossed the equator. The passengers were dunked in buckets of water and beaten up with dead fish.” Then Mum remembers the ship stopping at Gibraltar, where she was dragged by her parents to see the Barbary apes. “It was stinking hot and we had to haul up to see the Rock, which was plastered in ravens and these ferocious, scary monkeys.” And finally Mum recalls, “The other thing—the most gruesome thing—was the Fancy Dress Party. It was awful, being paraded around the deck dressed up in some silly costume. I hated the whole ordeal.”

“Then why did you participate, if it was so gruesome?”

“You had to,” Mum says. “You were beaten into it.”

“With dead fish?” I ask.

Mum gives me a look. “No. Not unless you also happened to be crossing the equator at that exact same moment.”

SO HERE WE ARE: Mum, now in her early thirties, having apparently learned nothing from her experience as a child, dressing Vanessa and me up for the Davises’ annual Fancy Dress, an event I might not have dreaded at all if Mum hadn’t chosen costumes of such agonizing inventiveness that it’s a wonder they didn’t kill us.

“Why can’t I be like Vanessa?” I asked.

“Because,” Mum said.

“But I’m itchy,” I complained.

Olivia was only four months old, too small to be anything murderous, so Mum had dressed her in a homemade, rainbow-colored, tie-dyed onesie as the Summer of Love. Vanessa was a Rose, hypoallergenic and splendid in a pink tutu, pink tights and pink ballet slippers. I was I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in an old vest and a pair of knickers inside an empty insecticide drum on which Mum had pasted a few pictures of weeds cut from the pages of Farmers Weekly.

“No one’s going to understand what I am,” I pointed out.

“The clever ones will,” Mum said. “Now hold still. I don’t want to poke your eyes out.”

There was the sound of Mum attacking the insecticide drum with scissors.

“I think I’m getting a rash,” I said. “I can feel bumps.”

Mum started to sing, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometime. . . .” There was a pause followed by a couple more violent assaults against the insecticide drum. Then Mum said to Vanessa, “Go to the kitchen and fetch me a knife, would you Vanessa? Ask July for a nice sharp one.”

“I can’t breathe,” I said.

“Oh, buck up, Bobo.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier if I got out?”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“But then you won’t poke my eyes out.”

“Whoever said anything about poking eyes out?”

“You did.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

I could hear Vanessa rustle demurely back into the room. “Thank you, darling,” Mum said. She only called one of us darling when she wanted to imply that the other was not, at that moment, darling. “You’re such a big help,” Mum said.

I didn’t need to be on the outside of my insecticide drum to see the pink ruffles on Vanessa’s tutu puffing up.

“Now hold still, Bobo.”

There were flashes from a knife blade and two slits of light appeared.

“Are those near your eyes?”

“No,” I said. And then I reconsidered my close escape. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, very.”

“There we go then,” Mum said. “I’ll just get my Uzi and we’ll be off.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go,” I blurted with as much feeling as I could muster out of my nearly eight-year-old self. “I look stupid.”

“Now look here,” Mum said, “if you aren’t careful, you’ll get a jolly good hiding.”

While Mum got her gun, I weighed up the cons of a jolly good hiding versus the cons of arriving at a Fancy Dress Party dressed in an insecticide drum. I decided, on balance, that at least there would be Sparletta Creme Soda and Willards Chips at the Fancy Dress Party and that at least the Davises didn’t have frogs in their pool—or only a few. Not like our algae soup of a pool that had wild ducks, scorpions, thousands of frogs, tadpoles and the occasional Nile monitor. Plus, this would be my last party before I was packed off to boarding school forever and ever.

“Right,” Mum said. I heard her check the Uzi magazine for rounds. We were a year into the worst part of the Rhodesian War, and ambushes and attacks against farmers had increased lately, especially where we lived on Robandi, right up against the Mozambique border where the view was spectacular but almost everything else was lousy.

In April 1966, the year before my parents moved from Kenya to Rhodesia, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) launched an attack against government forces to protest Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. The uprising was swiftly and definitively suppressed. Seven ZANLA troops lost their lives. No Rhodesian forces died. After that, the war simmered along mildly with the odd attack or ambush here and there until 1974, when the ten-year conflict in neighboring Mozambique between the Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique rebels (FRELIMO) and the colonial Portuguese ended, and a new confrontation between the FRELIMO government and Rhodesian and South African–backed Mozambican National Resistance forces (RENAMO) began. Then, as if the uptick in violence in the neighboring state were contagious, the war in Rhodesia also picked up momentum. ZANLA forces based in Mozambique under the guerilla-friendly FRELIMO government came over the border into Rhodesia to lay land mines and conduct raids. War became our climate, something you didn’t feel you could do much about and that you might remark on casually, using the same language you might use to describe the weather: “Phew, things are getting hot this week.”

We accepted the war as one of the prices that had to be paid for Our Freedom, although it was a funny sort of Freedom that didn’t include being able to say what you wanted about the Rhodesian government or being able to write books that were critical of it. And for the majority of the country, Freedom did not include access to the sidewalks, the best schools and hospitals, decent farming land or the right to vote. It now seems completely clear to me, looking back, that when a government talks about “fighting for Freedom” almost every Freedom you can imagine disappears for ordinary people and expands limitlessly for a handful of people in power.

“Bullets, lipstick, sunglasses. Off we go. Come on, Bobo, quick march.”

My feet poked out of two holes in the drum’s lid. I couldn’t walk very well. I had to waddle like a penguin. This amused Vanessa, and her peals of laughter echoed around inside the insecticide drum. Mum, with Olivia on her hip, helped me out of the big door, down the rough stone steps and onto the veranda. “Don’t fall,” Vanessa said, barely able to contain the hope in her voice. It was very hot inside the drum and sweat poured into my already stinging eyes and onto my increasingly stinging rash.

“I’m boiling,” I whined.

“One more word out of you,” Mum warned.

We scuffled across the yard and into the driveway, and arrived at Lucy, the mine-proofed Land Rover, where a problem presented itself. I didn’t fit through any of the doors.

“Oh dear,” Mum said. “An unforeseen hitch.” There was a silence while she had a think. I pictured her biting the inside of her lower lip and frowning. When she spoke again, she sounded struck by inspiration. “We’ll put her in the back.” She paused. “Darling,” she said, not to me, “go and fetch July and Violet.”

So Vanessa called July from the kitchen and she fetched Violet from the laundry. Then there was general hilarity while July and Violet each considered how amazing it was that the madam had put her young daughter into an insecticide drum. Mum explained that when she was in labor with me in England, the radio was playing “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” which was prophetic because when I arrived, I really was, as promised, Not a Rose Garden (Mum has refused to waver from this story, even though I have since discovered this song became a hit for Lynn Anderson a full year and a half after I was born and therefore could not have been playing when she was in labor with me).

“She had yellow skin and black hair. That’s why we call her Bobo,” Mum explained, “because she looked just like a little baboon.”

Violet and Vanessa dissolved into more conspiratorial giggling.

“See?” Mum said, “Violet thinks your costume’s amusing.”

“Could we just get on with this?” I said.

So July and Violet each seized an ankle and thrust me into the vehicle while I stood rigid inside my insecticide drum. I could smell the greasy-meat scent of the dogs’ supper on July’s clothes and the green laundry soap on Violet’s hands and arms, but now the usually comforting domestic scents had an isolating, excluding effect. The dogs circled around us and whacked the drum with their tails. Their excited panting made me feel even hotter.

“Right,” Mum said. “Off we go.” She climbed into the Land Rover and Vanessa-darling got in on the passenger side. “Hold on to the baby,” Mum said, handing Olivia to Vanessa. Then she whistled and a couple of lapfuls of dogs leaped in with them. The Land Rover jerked off down the hill and bumped past the orchard. I could feel it go over the culvert at the bottom of the driveway where the cobra lived. I yawed against the window as Mum took a left onto the main road at the bottom of the farm. I pictured Vanessa, billowing pinkly in the front seat, the wind flapping her two long, blond braids in which Mum had entwined pink and white roses made out of loo paper. And I pictured Mum driving, dogs on her lap, her gun out the window, checking her hair and lipstick in the rearview mirror.

“I can’t stand up back here!” I cried, “slow down!” But my protests were lost under the roar and rattle of Lucy’s engine. The fact that I wasn’t, at that moment, being beaten by dead fish was small comfort.

THIRTY YEARS, two countries and four farms later, Vanessa, Mum and I were sitting under the Tree of Forgetfulness at Mum and Dad’s fish and banana farm on the Middle Zambezi River. Something about the quality of heat, and the itchy burn from the windborne, stinging hairs of buffalo bean, reminded me of the day of that long ago Fancy Dress Party.

“Do you remember when you made me be I Never Promised You a Rose Garden at the Davises’ Annual Christmas Fancy Dress party?” I asked Mum.

“Oh God,” Mum said. “Here we go. Another traumatizing repressed memory come back to haunt us.” She looked around. Then she flung her arms in the air. “Shrink! Someone fetch the child a shrink!” Mum does exactly this gesture when her drink runs dry at a party: she flings her arms in the air and shrieks, “Drought! Nicola Fuller of Central Africa is experiencing severe drought!”

“Olivia was the Summer of Love and Vanessa was a Rose, all dressed up in a pink tutu,” I said.

“Was I?” Vanessa said.

“Yes,” I said.

“No, I wasn’t,” Vanessa said. “I was From Russia with Love.”

I frowned. “Really?”

“Yes,” Vanessa said firmly, “in a hat made out of fermenting, flea-infested carpet. And I had to wear a baking red shirt, billowing black pants and Mum’s riding boots.”

“I think you’re mixing up fancy dress parties. I distinctly remember you were a rose,” I said.

“I wish,” Vanessa said.

“From Russia with love I fly to you,” Mum sang. She paused and went on conversationally, “I remember that film. I made Dad drive all the way to Nairobi so we could watch it. They had vodka shots lined up at the bar.” She sniffed. “Hm, well, the film must have made quite an impression on me if I wasted a perfectly good carpet on Vanessa’s fancy dress costume.” She took a breath and continued to sing, “Much wiser since my good-bye to you . . .”

“See?” Vanessa said.

“I’ve traveled the world,” Mum sang, “to learn I must return to Russia with looooooooo-oooove!”

“Well, I remember I had to sit in the back of the Land Rover and you, Mum, Olivia and the dogs sat in the front,” I said.

“Straitjacket!” Mum shouted.

“And only the front part of the Land Rover was mine proofed,” I said.

“Tranquilizers!” Mum shrieked.

“So if we’d gone over a land mine, you, Olivia, Mum and the dogs would have been fine. But I would have been blown up. Wouldn’t I, Mum?”

Vanessa started laughing. “That’s hilarious,” she said.

“Wouldn’t I have been blown up if you’d gone over a mine, Mum?” I asked.

Mum let her arms drop by her side. “I suppose that’s right,” she said. She paused, and then continued, “But if I’d known then that you were going to grow up and write that Awful Book, I might have actually aimed for one.”

“Mum!”

Mum sighed. “You know, you’re just like Christopher bloody Robin. That wretched child also grew up and wrote an Awful Book even after all those lovely stories and poems his father wrote for him. He went on and on about what a rotten parent A. A. Milne had been and about how A. A. Milne hadn’t hugged Christopher bloody Robin enough.” Mum, a dedicated fan of all things Pooh, shuddered. “Luckily,” she said, “I don’t think many people read it and I am sure hardly anyone took it very seriously.”

Mum with her first best friend, Stephen Foster. Kenya, circa 1946.

OUR FAMILY’S overwhelming attachment to animals and their apparent lukewarm attachment to their own offspring (quite different from a passionate connection to “blood”) go back at least as far as my grandmother’s childhood, which is where anything close to reliable oral history ends. Mum’s younger sister, Auntie Glug, remembers my grandmother as a remarkably efficient caretaker and a very capable nurse, deeply interested in her children’s welfare but quite unable to hug her children.

“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 memory. “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