Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Alexandra Fuller
Simon & Schuster
“I expect a big, elaborate funeral. Sing the Hallelujah Chorus, wear large, expensive hats and fling yourself into the grave after me.”
Nicola Fuller, aka “Nicola Fuller of Central Africa” – the formidable and unhinged mother of Alexandra Fuller, author of the international best-seller Let’s Not Go To The Dogs Tonight – is determined always to take centre stage.
As Alexandra tells us on page one, her mother had always wanted a writer in the family, “not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life, for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe”.
Fuller’s previous rendition of the Fuller clan’s travails, Let’s Not Go to the Dogs Tonight, was clearly not what Nicola had in mind, given the reputed four-year hiatus in their relationship following the book’s publication, or, as the family refers to it, “That Awful Book”.
But Alexandra does have her mother to thank for steering her towards writing, and her family for providing a lode from which to draw her material.
When Alexandra was five, Nicola stopped teaching her the maths section of the Rhodesian school correspondence package, telling her: “Numbers are boring. Anyway, you can always pay someone to count for you, but you can never pay anyone to write for you.”
“Now,” says Alexandra, “Mum paused and gave me one of her terrifying smiles. ‘What do you think you’re going to write about?’
“Then she took a long sip of tea, brushed a couple of dogs off her lap and began to live a life Worthy of Fabulous Literature.”
And her life does have the makings of a play or a novel, which she’d probably want adapted for the big screen: the tea parties with a chimp in Kenya, her perfection as an equestrian a-straddle the perfect show jumper Violet, the “good woman in Africa”, the hot nights and foreign tongues. As Alexandra puts it, it’s as if she were “speaking of a make-believe place forever trapped in the celluloid of another time, as if she were a third-person participant in a movie starring herself, a perfect horse and flawless equatorial light. The violence and the injustices that came with colonialism seem — in my mother’s version of events — to have happened in some other unwatched movie, to some other unwatched people.”
If Let’s Not Go To the Dogs Tonight was Fuller’s autobiography, Cocktail Hour tells the tale of her mother’s life, from her birth in 1944 on the Isle of Skye, through Kenya and Zimbabwe and to the Zambian farm she and her husband currently own and manage; and the home of the Tree of Forgetfulness.
Nicola was never one for doing things in small measures. We are introduced to her on a day in the recent past, after the years that fill the pages of Dogs Tonight and The Tree of Forgetfulness, as she is taking a flying lesson from “my Dashing Little Sri Lankan” on the Fullers’ current fish and banana farm in Zambia. “We will show them all what real courage looks like,” she tells the Sri Lankan. “We will be Blixen and Finch Hatton of Zambia.”
Regardless that Nicola spent almost her entire life in Africa, she insists that she is “one million percent” Highland Scottish, and is full of the kind of jingoism that must have taken a marvellous amount of suspended disbelief to feel that Scottish and that African simultaneously. Patriotism seldom makes place for two countries in its jealous heart.
But, says Alexandra, her mother “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 post-independence in those African countries by declaring with suddenly acquired backbone and conviction that they’d always been on the side of ‘the people’.” And it is nothing short of a miracle that they did survive, mostly.
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is a kind of literary accessory, a prelude and a sequel to That Awful Book, as Nicola calls it. As well she might. “Nicola Fuller of Central Africa”, as she envisions herself, comes off as a relentless racist and a dedicated alcoholic, fearless but deluded, complete with her visions of herself as a pilot and her penchant for beautiful horses, if not men, dramatically hauling the family from African colony to colony in the hope of finding a verandah where the lights may still be undimmed by African independence.
But White Mischief it was not. Where the jet-set of Kenya’s Happy Valley realised the gig was up, the Fullers only dug their heels in deeper. They were made of much tougher stuff, and in fact looked down their noses at the party people who left just when Africa hotted up.
The conflict in Zimbabwe had long become a personal fight for the Fullers, for their land and for their lives: “The war had gone on so long and had become so desperate that it wasn’t a civil war anymore so much as it was a civilians’ war, a hand-to-hand, deeply personal conflict.
“The front line had spread from the borders to the urban areas, to our doorsteps, and if we didn’t all have bloody hands, we were all related by blood to someone who did.”
Nicola was tough. She could ride shotgun on a Land Rover, and mine-proof it in order to get the two Fuller daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa, to their boarding schools. She and Tim slept with shotguns. She moved house and farm often enough, and in some instances fast enough, to moonlight as a removal company, she show-jumped, she danced and she drank steadfastly.
The clan was constantly surrounded by hounds and horses, some of whom only bring more heartbreak. But in these war-torn times they lose much more than animals: they are divested of their land in both Kenya and then Rhodesia, and suffer the unspeakable tragedy of losing three children, the last unravelling Nicola almost entirely, leaving her a glazed-over husk who at one point spent an intermission “strapped down in the mental ward” and plied with “various doses of mad pills, happy pills, panic pills and sleeping pills”.
But, despite all, where others would have been less perversely tenacious, not to mention dead, the Fullers never give up on Africa. “Land is Mum’s love affair and it is Dad’s religion,” writes Alexandra. The family refrain is: “There’re none like us, and if there were, they’re all dead.”
The Tree of Forgetfulness suffers in comparison to Dogs Tonight – the writing is not the problem (it’s captivating) – but perforce repeats a substantial amount of what we already know from the previous book.
And somehow one feels that Alexandra is to a degree expiating “That Awful Book”.
Nicola, though, will surely be satisfied that this time she didn’t have to share the spotlight with Alexandra.
l Verbaan is a prize-winning journalist and a fiction editor. - Cape Times