Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round One

Mum with Van. 1966.

Dad with Van. 1966.

The last day of our South African holiday dawns stifling hot. During the night a wind from the northern desert has blown the last of the moderate temperatures south. We’re all suffering from slight headaches—“self-inflicted,” Mum says—so we sit on the veranda after breakfast drinking tea, too lethargic to bother with our usual morning walk. Dad is smoking his pipe. Mum has a pair of binoculars resting on her lap in case she sees a bird and then the glasses flash to her eyes. “Look at that sweet little thing with a stripy head,” she says. She consults her bird book. “It’s a Cape bunting, I think. Oh dear, they say in here it’s a very common resident.” She glares at the disappointingly common bird. “We don’t get them in Zambia. Do we, Tim?”

“Say again?” Dad says.

“CAPE BUNTING!” Mum shouts. “NOT ONE OF OURS.”

THE WORDS THAT CHANGED my parents’ lives were few enough and small enough to fit comfortably onto a postage stamp: “Wanted: Manager for ten thousand hectares in Africa.” The advertisement, tucked into the classifieds at the back of the Kenyan Farmers Weekly didn’t name the country in Africa on which these ten thousand hectares existed. It didn’t need to. “There was only one country on the continent whose name could not be mentioned,” Mum says. “Rhodesia.”

At exactly eleven in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, on November 11, 1965, the Rhodesian government, led by Prime Minister Ian Smith, had rendered their country unmentionable by presenting a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The telegram announcing UDI was timed to arrive at Number 10 Downing Street precisely as Britain began its traditional two-minute silence to mark the end of the First World War. UDI expressly flew in the face of Britain’s assertion that there should be no independence before majority rule (NIBMAR).

The next day, on November 12, 1965, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 216 condemning UDI as an illegal construct of “a racist minority.” On the same day, the front page of the Rhodesian Herald announced, UDI RHODESIA GOES IT ALONE. Above that headline, in smaller letters, was the news that state censorship had been imposed. On that day, for the first time in its history, blank columns of white space appeared in the newspaper. In the minds of the Rhodesian government, the country was now entirely independent of Britain and it was—and would remain—governed by the white minority.

The “ten thousand hectares in Africa” turned out to belong to John Lytton-Brown, a Kenyan settler. “We didn’t know him,” Mum says. “He wasn’t really one of our set.” Not a pukka-pukka sahib, in other words. Dad applied for the job and in January 1967 he set sail from Mombasa to Cape Town en route to Rhodesia. He took with him a change of clothes, a sleeping bag and his Black’s Veterinary Dictionary. Mum stayed behind to pack up Lavender’s Corner. “I didn’t hear much from Tim once he got to Rhodesia because of UDI,” Mum says. “No telegrams, no phone calls. Letters had to go via Malawi, postmarked Blantyre.”

My father’s first letter from Rhodesia was cryptic. “Dear Tub,” he wrote,

I’ve settled down alright at Berry’s Post. We’re not far from the Hunyani River. It’s a bit off the beaten path. There’s 400 acres of cotton, 200 acres of maize, 200 acres of sunflowers. Also 400 head of cattle. There’s rather a dry spell here so the government is practically giving livestock away to anyone with a bit of grazing. It’s a bore that we can’t all be together. Soon enough, though. I do miss you.

Lots of love,

Tim.

A month later, Mum gave away what she could not carry and boarded a ship in Mombasa with Vanessa, Felix the cat, and Suzy the dog. She took her favorite books, the Duke of Wellington bronze cast, a couple of the hunting prints, a few linens, and the orange Le Creuset pots. “You could feel Rhodesia long before you got there,” Mum says. “You could sense this outlaw nation, this rebel state.” And I can tell she likes those words—outlaw, rebel—and how they fit in with the idea she has of herself. “British warships patrolled the Mozambique coast to prevent anything getting into Rhodesia via Beira. South African and Rhodesian passengers weren’t allowed off the ship. I thought it was very exciting.”

But Mum was quickly disillusioned. On the train north from Cape Town to Bulawayo, she watched in horror as the landscape turned drier and harsher and flatter. When Dad had written that “there’s rather a dry spell here,” it was a colossal understatement. In fact, the country was in the throes of one of the worst droughts on record. In Matabeleland, cattle had begun dying of thirst before Christmas. By January 1967, the late-planted cotton had grown only six inches and defeated farmers had begun to plow it under.

Up in the high veldt it was just as dry. Cultivated crops wilted blue in the fields, wild trees on the kopjes failed to leaf out and thirsty snakes swarmed to Berry’s Post to drink the dog’s water. “The farmhouse was a funny Spanish style with these big French doors,” Mum says. “My first morning there, I found Vanessa looking through the glass eye to eye at a cobra bellied up to her on the other side of the door, tongue flickering. I was so terrified, I hired Tabatha the next day to follow Vanessa around everywhere.” Mum, appalled by the hostility of the land, its dusty loneliness, the unrelentingly dry wind, couldn’t envision an occasion for her winklepickers.

Within weeks of arriving, Suzy died of tick fever and then Felix was murdered. “We think by the workers,” Mum says. “There was a nasty undercurrent in that part of the country. They resented UDI and they didn’t like whites. I suppose that’s why they killed our cat.”

And then, their second month on the farm, my parents woke up in the middle of the night, shocked conscious by a sensation of being watched. “There, standing at the bottom of the bed was the manager who had worked on the farm before us.” Mum’s eyes go pale. “Well, his ghost anyway. He had shot himself six months earlier, so he wasn’t really there.” Even on this very warm South African morning, Mum rubs her arms as if cold. “Look.” Mum presents me with the evidence of gooseflesh on her skin. “To this day, I get chills talking about it. I’ll never, ever forget looking at someone who was not really there, but he was there. It wasn’t a bad dream, it wasn’t a hallucination, it was real.” Mum’s chin goes up. “Especially being Scottish from the Isle of Skye, I know there are ghosts and fairies in our midst.” Mum lowers her brow and clarifies, “Proper fairies, not gays and stuff like that.” She takes a sip of her tea and then scans the garden with her binoculars to see if any acceptably uncommon birds have shown up. “No,” she says at last, “the ex-manager had come to warn us that Lytton-Brown was a crook. He hadn’t paid the ex-manager and he wasn’t planning to pay us. He was going to wait until it was harvest time and then fire us and take all the profits. Wasn’t he, Tim?”

Dad grunts. “Say again.”

“FIRE US AND TAKE ALL THE PROFITS!” Mum repeats.

BY HARVEST TIME, Mum was eight months pregnant. As predicted by the ex-manager’s ghost, Lytton-Brown fired my parents as soon as the crop was in and refused to pay them for their season’s work. “It was a terrible blow because we had worked so hard and had produced such good yields in spite of the bad rains,” Mum says. Dad began legal proceedings, but in the meantime, my parents were homeless and almost penniless. They lived out of their car, “a dubious 1950 Chevy, straight-six engine that would pass anything but a petrol station.”

Winter came early and hard. “Pawpaw trees turned black and fell over,” Dad says. “The low veldt was scorched with frost. People’s boreholes froze solid. I don’t know how many farmers went broke, but you could see them on the streets of Salisbury on the bones of their asses.” Dad got a job as a bouncer at Salisbury’s only nightclub, La Boheme.

“A very sleazy joint,” Mum says. “Zilla the Snake Charmer, that sort of thing.”

I stare at my father. “Zilla the Snake Charmer?” I say.

Dad blushes and tampers with his pipe, tapping ash out of the bowl and refilling it with tobacco.

“No, Bobo, those were desperate, desperate times, and they called for desperate, desperate measures,” Mum says. “It wasn’t an easy job—you can just imagine the customers all having a good time, armed to the teeth. And you know what Rhodesians are—they can’t see a snake without wanting to blow its head off.”

MY PARENTS’ SECOND CHILD, Adrian Connell Fuller, was born on a bitterly cold day in early winter at the Lady Chancellor Maternity Home in Salisbury. “It was a very difficult, very lonely labor,” Mum says. “Terribly cruel treatment. All the nurses and doctors were attending other people. They just left me to get on with it. I suppose they knew I was the homeless, penniless wife of the bouncer at La Boheme, so they didn’t care about me.” But then the child was born, a blond, blue-eyed son, and Mum was overwhelmed with joy. “The happiest day of my life,” she has told me, “was the day I held that little baby in my arms for the first time.”

When Adrian was a few weeks old, Dad found work building a smelting plant on a nickel mine near Shamva, fifty miles northeast of Salisbury. Dad had never built anything bigger than a chicken coop in his life, “but the money was okay, so I talked my way into it,” Dad says. “I had to do something. Four of us couldn’t live off the wages of a bouncer.” Dad worked all the hours he could get, leaving Mum before dawn and returning after dark.

Mike Dawson, a farmer near Shamva, let my parents live rent free in a cottage on his farm until they could get their feet under them. “You will never, ever forget the kindness of strangers,” Mum says, pushing a work-blunted forefinger into the palm of her hand for emphasis, “Such selflessness, such generosity.” Mike’s wife, Cherry Dawson, was a depressed Australian. “I think she tried to be kind, but we were all struggling. We all had problems. She wasn’t from Africa so she didn’t have that open-door policy that we all grew up with. We were an added burden for her.” Moreover, Adrian’s system seemed shocked by the very bitter winter.

THE PATTERN LOOKED LIKE THIS: Adrian woke up with a frighteningly high temperature and Mum gave him paracetamol syrup. Then because Mum didn’t have a car or a telephone, she ran from the cottage over to the main house with Adrian in her arms, trailing Vanessa. She begged Cherry for a lift to the clinic, fifteen miles away in Bindura. “I could tell Cherry resented the intrusion, let alone the cost of the petrol ferrying me back and forth, which I could never afford to repay.” By the time Adrian got to the clinic, his fever was back down because of the paracetamol and Mum was told to take him home.

A day or two passed. Mum put blankets on the cottage’s dry lawn and prayed that fresh air and the weak winter sun would somehow penetrate her child’s body and boost his strength. Then the next morning, Adrian would again throw a frighteningly high temperature, and again Mum trickled paracetemol down his throat and ran to the main house. “It was obvious they were all thinking I was just a neurotic new mother. But I wasn’t. It was such a bad winter, we were so hard up and Adrian just kept getting sicker and sicker.” So then Mum wrapped Adrian in wool blankets and kept him inside. And for a day or two, this appeared to be the magical formula to keeping her son well.

Until it wasn’t.

THEN MUM HOPED that warmer weather, or rain, would change the atmosphere, settle the dust. And like women everywhere and for all time, she stared at the sky and begged the universe to do something to heal her child. And in due course, the very cold season gave way to a warm, dry September. After that, October came, hot and humid, but still it did not rain and still Adrian did not thrive.

By the third week in October, clouds had been banking against the high veldt violent with thunder for a month, but when the rain fell, it hung like a half curtain in the sky, not touching the earth. And one morning in that third week, not unusually, Adrian woke with a fever and he was crying, a constant, monotonous cry as if he no longer had the energy to express the precise nature of his illness. Mum gave him paracetamol and tried to nurse him, but Adrian wouldn’t eat and his fever stayed high even after a second dose of medicine. Once again, Mum wrapped him in a blanket and ran to the main house to beg a lift from Cherry. On the way to the clinic, Mum put her lips against the soft fluff of hair on Adrian’s hot skull and silently she implored him, “Please don’t give up. Don’t give up. It’ll get better, you’ll see.” And she closed her eyes and did her best to picture Adrian at twelve, at eighteen, at thirty, as if her sheer will could drag him beyond his infancy. And then she bargained with God that if He was going to take a life, let it be hers. “I just couldn’t see how I would ever take another breath if Adrian died,” Mum says.

As Mum is telling me this, I realize that I can’t remember a time when I did not know about Adrian, as if knowledge of him crossed the placenta and went directly into my own cells. But in every important way, I know nothing about what happened to him. When I was young, Mum would sometimes spill his story, but never when she was sober and so the story grew soggy and more confused and refused to hold together. But on this late, hot morning in the Cederberg, I am forty years old and we are not drunk and Mum’s narrative is relentlessly clear. Now, even as I am beginning to know the details of this story, I already know how it ends. My impulse is impossible: I want to reach back through the years and protect my young parents from what happens next.

On that hot afternoon, Dad got a message at the nickel mine from Mum. He hurried back home to find her waiting in the driveway, Vanessa in her arms. My parents drove to Bindura as fast as the Chevy would go, but Adrian was no longer at the little clinic. He had been taken by ambulance to the children’s hospital in Salisbury. So now I picture my parents racing into town, Mum pale and thin at twenty-three with Vanessa on her lap, Dad helpless and unprepared at twenty-seven. They are both frantic.

Adrian was not in any of the cots in the hospital’s general ward and it took some time for my parents to find him, isolated in a white cell at the end of the private wards. “He was strapped to a board, his little arms pinned down as if he were on a crucifix, with intravenous drips coming out of his head.” Mum’s voice is so soft I can hardly hear her. “And he was still crying, that dry, monotonous little cry.” Vanessa, aware of impending tragedy, did the only thing she could think of to make everything normal. She asked for lunch. And the nurse, matter-of-fact in the way of most Africans, told my parents not unkindly that they had a choice: they could either take Vanessa for a meal, or they could stay and watch their son die. “It was meningitis,” Mum says. “And it was too late.”

NOW THERE IS A LONG, long silence. I look out at the Cederberg Mountains, flattened gray in the noon sun. In the intensifying heat, the garden is utterly subdued. The weaver birds in the bougainvillea have given up their usual quarreling. Even the common Cape buntings have melted back into their rocky hideouts. The wind has died completely. The whole country seems crouched and serious in anticipation of the six months of dry heat to come. Somewhere in the servants’ quarters a cockerel crows. Dad has his head in his hands.

Eventually Mum breaks the silence. She says, “I remember walking out of the hospital and being so shocked that the world was still there. All the jacarandas were in blossom. Salisbury looked so beautiful. The flower sellers were in Meikles Park, the agapanthus were out, the jasmine was so sweet. And I thought, ‘How can the world look normal? How are people walking around? How can everyone not understand that the world has come to an end?’”

The doctors tranquilized Mum until her grief receded to a place so deep that she was the only person who could hear it. In this way, everything about Adrian’s death became a devastatingly slow injury, shards of hurt surfacing sometimes unexpectedly decades later the way pieces of shrapnel emerge from soldiers’ wounds years after they have been hit. “It’s the most terrible thing to go home and you walk into the nursery and all his things are there—the toys, the cot, his nappies,” Mum says. “It’s the most horrible thing that can happen to anyone. So I just thought, ‘I’ve got to buck up.’ And I did what I could to get on with my life.”

Then Mum shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No, that’s not true. I didn’t get on with my life. I couldn’t. Vanessa kept asking, ‘Where’s the baby? Where’s Adrian?’ No one tells you how you should handle the situation, and I handled it very badly. I couldn’t stand it. I asked Cherry to look after Vanessa for a few days. I took more of those awful tranquilizers and I lay in a dark room with a pillow over my head. I didn’t want to hear anything. I didn’t want to see anything. I wanted to stop. Just stop being.”

Three days after Adrian died, Dad spent half his month’s wages on a two-piece suit from an Indian tailor in the second-class district. Then he drove to the children’s hospital, picked up the small urn they gave him and interred Adrian’s ashes at the Warren Hills Cemetery in southern Salisbury.

“All alone?” I ask.

Dad’s eyes threaten to brim. “Well, it’s not the sort of thing you send invitations out for.”

As Adrian’s ashes were closed into the wall, the season’s first rain began to fall. Water pooled at my father’s feet on the hard earth. It ran down his face. The suit from the second-class district shrank, the sleeves crawled up his arms, the legs receded up his calves, and blue dye ran on the red soil. Dad stood in place and memorized everything: the rangy lilac bushes, the pied crows, the cold rain on hot earth, the small and lonely grave.

A few years ago, my parents went back to look for it, the bronze marker with my brother’s name on it, but along with anything else of value in that cemetery, the marker had been ripped off, melted down and sold or used for something else. I had always believed that Adrian’s grave was unmarked, but it was more than that: his grave had been unmarked after the fact. In this way, Adrian is most African: a victim of circumstances, he lies anonymous in that beautiful, bloodied soil, with no date to mark either his birth or his passing. His grave as good as empty. “You can’t blame desperate people for that,” Dad says.

Mum looks up and her eyes are bright. “Yes, you can,” she says. She is adamant. “Yes, you must.”

And it seems to me that both my parents are correct. Whether out of desperation, ignorance or hostility, humans have an unerring capacity to ignore one another’s sacred traditions and to defile one another’s hallowed grounds: the Palawa Aborigines lost on Waternish, the Macdonalds trapped in St. Francis Cave on Eigg, the MacLeods burned in Trumpan Church, the Boers dying in British concentration camps, thousands of Kikuyu perishing during the Mau Mau, the Rucks family hacked to death in Kenya’s White Highlands, Adrian’s grave desecrated. Surely until all of us own and honor one another’s dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.

BEFORE THE END OF the next disappointing rainy season (another drought), Boofy—worn out by gin, cigarettes and disappointment—finally died of throat cancer. She left a cruelly unfinished life and—not wealth, exactly—but the impression of wealth. Wrongly assuming that my father would inherit a lawyer’s bounty, Lytton-Brown settled out of court the case my parents had brought against him for his refusal to pay their bonus. My parents banked the money—there was little else to do with it; because of UDI, Rhodesian dollars could not leave the country—and a week later they crossed into Botswana via Victoria Falls and set up a tented camp on the Chobe River.

“Your mother was very brave,” Dad tells me. “Your mother is a very brave lady.”

So I picture them in Botswana on the banks of the Chobe: Vanessa throwing all their silver teaspoons into the river; Dad fussing with his pipe and catching fish for supper; Mum downwind of a turpentine-scented mopane campfire with tears on her cheeks. “You’re all right, Tub?”

And Mum putting on a brave face. “You know how it is. Smoke gets in your eyes.” Then, singing the way she always has, out of tune but with an unerring knack of hitting the truest emotional note, “So I smile and say, when a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes. Smoke gets in your eyes.”