Under My Skin. Doris Lessing
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being settled for the night in a rondaavel on beds that had mosquito nets tucked tight down around us. An older girl came in with a candle, and set it down on an up-ended petrol box, so the flame was not more than a few inches from a net. My mother came in to check for the night, saw the candle, and shot across the room, clutching at her heart with one hand while she reached for the candle. She said in a voice hushed by urgency. ‘What are you doing? What can you be thinking of?’ It was true. If I had thrust a leg or an arm out the net would have reached the candle, and the hut would have gone up in flames – it was thatch on pole and mud walls. My mother stood there, the candlestick shaking in her hand, the flame trembling, candle grease scattering. Meanwhile the culprit wept, only now imagining possibilities. ‘Why?’ my mother went on in a low appalled voice. ‘How could anyone in their senses do such a thing?’ I have never forgotten her incredulity. Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.
My parents did not understand the Whiteheads, found them shifty and unsatisfactory, though soon they would become familiar with people who farmed, went broke, mined, succeeded, part-succeeded or went broke, farmed again, owned mine-stores – did anything that came to hand. Inside this same hand-to-mouth, hit-and-run pattern some people made fortunes. Others died of drink. The Whiteheads were not in any sense educated. They knew nothing but this settlers’ life. My mother disliked them, and they must have found her more than a trial. As for my father, he was doing the books for the mine, and would for a couple of years after he was on his own. Already we were worried about money. There was an unpleasantness about the books. Mr Whitehead was either careless or dishonest, and he blamed my father. I have described this, humorously, in In Pursuit of the English, but for my parents it was the chief horror of ‘God, that was an awful time.’ There was nothing funny in the living of it.
My father rode over every day to supervise the beginning of the farm, for already there was a ‘bossboy’, Old Smoke, from Nyasaland, who had brought his relatives with him, and a good part of each morning was spent in long, meditative consultations between the two men, who usually sat at either end of a fallen log, watching the labourers at work. Both men smoked, my father his pipe, and Old Smoke dagga, or pot. That was why he was called Old Smoke. My mother usually walked over for at least part of the day, and took us with her, so we could watch the cutting of the trees, the stumping of the lands, the new cattle in their kraals, the digging of the wells. Two wells were dug, according to the findings of the water diviners – everyone used diviners then for wells and, later, for boreholes. Above all, we watched the building of the house. The grass for the thatch of the house was still green in the vleis, but the pole and mud walls of the house could go up, and they did. This process I described in Going Home, the making of a house from what grew in the bush, and no house could ever have for me the intimate charm of that one. In London you live in houses where other people have lived, and others again will live there when you have moved or died. A house put together from the plants and earth of the bush is rather like a coat or dress, soon to be discarded, for it probably will have returned to the bush, from fire, insects, or heavy rains, long before you die. The minute the grass was ready, the roof went on, for the priority was to get away from the Whiteheads.
My parents had chosen a site which the neighbours all warned would give them trouble, on top of a hill, which meant dragging everything up and down the steep slopes by oxen. It was the beauty of the place, that was why my father chose it, and then my mother approved it. From the front of the house you looked north to the Ayreshire Hills, over minor ridges, vleis and two rivers, the Muneni and the Mukwadzi. To the east, a wide sweep of land ended with the Umvukves, or the Great Dyke, where crystalline blues, pinks, purples, mauves, changed with the light all day. The sun went down over the long low ranges of the Huniyani Mountains. In the rainy season it was extravagantly, lushly beautiful, mostly virgin bush, but even where it had been cut for mine furnaces the bush had grown up fresh and new. Everywhere among the trees the soil was broken by ridges and reefs of quartz, for this was a gold district, and on every reef of protruding rock you could see the marks of a prospector’s hammer that had exposed a crust of fool’s gold – pyrites – or the little glitter of mica.
Weeks before the house was finished, when it was still a skeleton of poles stuck in the ground, then poles covered with a skin of mud, then a roughly thatched house, with holes that would be windows, my parents were sitting on petrol boxes in front of it (where soon they would be in deck chairs), and they watched the mountains, or the sunset, or cloud shadows, or rain marching around and across the landscape. I sat on my father’s good leg and watched too.
When the house was done, perched on the top of the hill, the bush was cleared not more than thirty yards in front, and on either side. At the back where the garage and store huts were, trees had been cut for a hundred yards or so. The real bush, the living, working, animal-and-bird-full bush, remained for twenty years, not much affected by us in our house, and right until my parents left it in the middle of the Second World War, you might startle a duiker or a wild cat or a porcupine only a few yards down from the cleared space. Two rough tracks led down from the house to the fields in front, and a steep path through thick trees and bush to the well. Down the hill in front of the house was a big mawonga tree, its pale trunk scarred by lightning, an old tree full of bees and honey. What impresses me now is not how much effect our occupancy had on the landscape of the farm, but how little. Below the hill on one side was the big field, the hundred acres, and there were smaller fields here and there. Cattle kraals, tobacco barns – and the house on the hill. The farm labourers’ village on a lower hill merged into the bush, as our house did.
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL was not different from most first houses built by settlers who, when they arrived in the colony, were nearly always poor. Usually they were brick and corrugated-iron shacks, one room, or two. The most attractive houses of those early days were like the Africans’. An African family had a group of huts, each hut for a different purpose, and early settler houses were often half a dozen thatched huts, or brick or pole-and-mud, sometimes joined together by pergolas covered with golden shower or bougainvillea. The floors were of brick or red cement, more often of stamped dung and mud. The African huts had no windows, but the white huts always did, sometimes French windows, gauzed in, so it seemed like an aviary. The floors had on them reed mats or animal skins. The first beds could be strips of ox hide on poles. The furniture stores were miles away in Salisbury, and wagons brought the furniture out; even when they were brought by train, the tables and chairs would have to be trekked from the station to farms over bad roads. Farm sales, as farmers went bankrupt, which they so often did, recycled furniture among the farms. Furniture was often improvised from bush timber by any black man who showed he had an eye for it, and sometimes from petrol or paraffin boxes. In those days petrol and paraffin came in four-gallon tins, two in a box. A settee could be made from them. Sideboards, writing tables, dressing tables, were made with two or four boxes on their ends, with a board across, and boxes set horizontally on them. These exercises in spare living were civilized by curtains made from flour sacks. The flour came to the farms in thick white sacks which, when washed, went soft and silky and took dye well. Or curtains were of embroidered hessian.
If you were really hard-up, all that had to be bought was a Carron Dover wood-burning stove. Every farmhouse had one – or nearly every farmhouse: a just-arrived young settler might live for a season in a mud hut, and his kitchen was an open fire under a corrugated-iron roof.
The houses outgrew themselves, were demolished, to be replaced by the solid brick, ceilinged houses that announced success, or remained as the core of a spreading farmhouse, full of rooms.
The talent for invention, for improvisation, was never lost. Even in a house owned by ‘a cheque book farmer’ (I heard the old envious phrase in 1988 about a black farmer, by one who did not yet have a cheque book), there might be hessian curtains or hangings embroidered red and orange and black with wools, or appliquéd in the geometric patterns fashionable at the time because of ‘the jazz age’. Or the white flour sack curtains, dyed. I have seen a farmhouse full of antiques – real ones from England and Scotland – with bedrooms where at the windows hung glazed chintz, the beds valanced in chintz, but with a fire