Black British (4 page)

My father leaned forward and flicked his cigarette butt into the streaming waters that rushed through the porch following a downpour. Quick as a flash, a frog, using the flow to help him on his journey, flicked out its tongue and caught the lighted cigarette. Quicker than a flash, a snake caught up and swallowed the frog.

My father's startled gasp was followed by, “I've never seen that before. Isn't nature cruel?” And when his surprise had subsided, “Man, with all his intelligence is cruel, so why are we horrified when animals are just as cruel?”

No one offered an answer. We continued to stare in silence at the lighted porch when the sounds of
sulam
,
sulam
,
sulam
caught our attention. Half a dozen fat, over-fed
chipkalies
knew the sticky pads on the under-surface of their feet kept them safely anchored to the ceiling while they made a meal of the hapless
eechuls
.

“How much can they eat?” Lorraine was fascinated. “Their stomachs must only be the size of my thumbnail. How much can they
possibly
eat?”

The word went out. More
chipkalies
arrived, each trying to get closer to the light and a better feed. Fights erupted, tails were lost to the water below and it was only a matter of seconds before a body followed.

“Ugg!” exclaimed Lily, theatrically screwing up her face and shivering with distaste. She didn't have the stomach for the sight of a flabby, white underbelly of a lizard as it floated away to its fate, followed by another and then yet another.

“You know there's a hierarchy among animals,” said my mother. “You've just witnessed the food chain. That's all.”

Not to be easily shut down, Lily chose a joke at my expense, enunciating slowly and clearly, “No one will eat Lucy. She tastes terrible.” There was always time for sibling banter.

Living alongside the wildlife was a normal part of our lives. Most of the time we stayed in our environment and they stayed in theirs. Occasionally the boundaries crossed, as it did the time a snake came to our fowl-run looking for lunch.

It was an October afternoon, a euphoric time after the monsoons when the air is washed clean and the vegetation is fat and succulent. After months of drooping, struggling to stay alive, the plant life is sprightly, alert, ready to enjoy the next phase of living. The reptile life is also on the move, looking for a jolly good feed.

At eight years old Lorraine was deemed responsible enough to supervise her sisters' daily game of Treasure Hunt. She had shepherded us towards the fowl run to look for errant eggs that might have escaped the morning collection. As Lily and I skipped alongside her our incessant chatter was silenced by agitated hens, evidence something was amiss. Stopping short in our tracks we looked to Lorraine for leadership and found indecision. She was torn between curiosity and fear.

Curiosity won. We crept forward on high alert and found frightened hens clustered together in a tight knot in a far corner of their run, pressed hard against the wire enclosure, making it bulge outwards.

The reason was obvious. The snake had nowhere to hide as it lay half in and half out of the henhouse. The burnished pattern of its skin reflected the declining sunlight so it resembled the lush pile of the dining room carpet. I wanted to stroke it.

I didn't.

Turning as one, without discussion but with mental consensus and following instructions that had been drummed into us for as long as I could remember, we bolted back towards the security of our home.

“Snake!” We squeaked and shrieked in fifty different sharps and flats so our mother was left with no doubt that immediate action was required. Taking charge as she always did, she wasted no time in loading the rifle and setting forth alone to do what had to be done.

Later that evening she explained. Looking for food the snake had made good use of a hole in the wire enclosure of the henhouse, had slithered in for a quick feed and then hit bad luck on its exit journey. A hole in a fence that was big enough to accommodate its head and body would not expand to fit a lump that had once been a hen.

Snakes cannot move backwards so the python was trapped with its head on one side of the enclosure and most of its body on the other. In twisting and rolling to free itself, the poor creature had broken its spine and entrapped itself further. The rifle saved the reptile from being roasted alive by the sun the following day.

The incident was merely part of our everyday lives so we thought no more about it. It never occurred to us to wonder about the disposal of the dead snake though we knew it had to happen immediately or overnight the stink would attract blowflies, maggots and other carrion. There is no smell worse than the smell of a dead snake. But these were actions in the back story of our lives and didn't concern us. Lorraine, Lily and I danced on to the next day without a backward glance.

Until twenty years later.

Twenty years filled with growing-up experiences; twenty years, time enough for a mundane event to become a forgotten memory. It was twenty years later that I was wondering through the Burrens when I was reminded of that snake and at the same time discovered a fundamental truth about human nature.

The sun is higher in the sky now and it's burning my shoulders through a gap in the canopy. My companion notices my discomfort and silently shifts along the bench indicating that I should move too.

“It's hotter than it is in winter in Kanpur,” I tell him, but extraneous thoughts soon vanish. I'm enslaved by the emotional release of talking.

“That snake was such a mundane part of our lives I never thought I'd meet it again – in Ireland, of all places.”

He looks enquiring.

I continue.

Leaning against the wooden barrier at the Cliffs of Moher I stared out over the Atlantic Ocean, secure in my anonymity as I blended in with other travellers. I was completely unaware that an elfin of coincidence that only happens to other people was about to happen to me. Out of the blue a hopelessly pseudo-Irish brogue broke my reverie with a banal greeting: “Lucy! What are you doing here?”

I froze. Unwilling to relinquish the catharsis of my solitude I continued to focus on the Aran Islands in the distance. With perseverance that bordered on insensitivity the stranger chatted on as though we were long lost friends. It took several moments before it registered that he knew my name and several more before it dawned on me that his familiarity was strangely familiar. I turned to face him and was knocked sideways.

My third cousin Fergus, who had left Kanpur when I was a tot, who I hardly remembered but with whom I shared a set of great-grandparents, had recognised there were no prospects for him in Kanpur and twenty years earlier had followed the example set by many of our cousins and migrated to a foreign country to realise his ambitions. It was sheer chance that he was at the Burrens at the same time as I, had recognised me because I'm the spitting image of my mother, and was now standing before me grinning from ear to ear.

“Come to lunch on Saturday,” he invited as the conversation progressed, smirking to tell me he was enjoying a private joke. “I've got something to show you.”

And there it was! It took a moment for me to remember the python. Shrivelled and withered with age it lay in its sealed glass case and for a moment I was transported back to another life, a different world. I'm not sure what my expression said as I stared at that snakeskin.

Fergus rushed to explain. “The servants wouldn't touch a dead snake so your mother sent us a message asking for help. I knew I'd be leaving Kanpur in a few months, probably for good, so I wanted something fun to have from the old home. The Tannery in Jajmau did it for me.”

His words were commonplace but when I looked up at him I knew the meaning was so much more complex. The snake was a tangible part of his past, a connection to his boyhood years and the land of his birth. It was a link to his personal history.

At that moment I realised there is an inherent human need in each of us to know what went before us and how we are related to it and therefore to each other. It's this knowledge that anchors us to our identity, to our sense of belonging to a family, a people, a place. It forms a platform on which we can build our confidence, our individuality, our uniqueness. Without it we are like a cork on the ocean, buffeted by the tide, with no affiliation to anything, going through the motions of living while part of our psyche is home to a black hole.

Such is the strength of that need to belong that Fergus, who'd left Kanpur when I was still a child, who'd lived through a life time of distracting experiences in a totally different environment, still recognised me, knew my spot on the family tree, owned the same stories I owned and had retained a snakeskin from that long-ago, idyllic October afternoon.

CHAPTER 3

SOPHISTICATED SECURITY SYSTEMS

I blink and St Thomas Church comes back into focus in front of me. I see the new whitewash on the facade of the brick building, the recently repaired chips and cracks of the front steps and the polished pattern of the verandah floor. I know Midnight Mass will be celebrated to usher in the New Year and the church's official birthday. I wonder if I can attend.

There'll be crowds, I'm thinking. Will it be safe for a single woman to be out on her own at that hour of the night? Awareness of my own safety is second nature to me.

Living as we did, isolated from the local people by language, culture and custom, we were ever mindful of the hostility directed at us, which was both subtle and complicated. The majority of the population was lower working class, that is, the people who were slightly more prosperous than the servant class. Living in hovels without electricity or running water they were poor, and angry at the lack of prospects for a better life. Their numbers were augmented by the servant class, who lived multiple people to one room. If they were lucky.

To protect ourselves and our possessions all the windows of the house had thick built-in iron bars and all the doors had top and bottom bolts. My sisters and I were never without adult supervision. From a very young age we were regularly reminded of
what happened to that Mortimer girl
when she was silly enough to walk home alone at dusk after an evening movie. Added to that was the story about our cousin Dorothy. She had been bicycling down a deserted Albert Road after Morning Mass when two thugs lunged at her. Thankfully, luck was on her side when she was able to speed away on her modern bicycle. Her pursuers' machines were rusty and well past their prime.

Periodically there was reference to the British Commander-in-Chief's young daughter, who was abducted at knifepoint from a place that was later nicknamed Scandal Point. No detail was even mentioned; it was considered too gruesome and corrupting for young ears. But the implication of assault and gang rapes hung in the air, exerting the power of its threat over us.

The police and justice systems were overloaded, underpaid and corrupt, no protection at all. Constant vigilance was our only option. It was a way of life that we took for granted.