She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (22 page)

“Yeah,” she says. “Be grateful you're not the black one.”

By the time a third biker pulls over, we are so numb to the situation that when he takes his helmet off and turns out to be a woman, with long blond hair and a weather-beaten face, the relief hardly registers. She approaches the two men and says something urgent to them in Afrikaans. I hear the name Piet and the word for “English.” She shoots us a concerned look, and it is clear, suddenly, that she has stopped to make sure her friends are OK. Abruptly, she holds out her hand, and the men obligingly remove their leather jackets.

At no point in this process does it occur to us to unlock the doors or get out of the car.

“It's no good,” says the biker, finally, withdrawing his head and gingerly approaching my window. He is still frowning as if this is our fault. “You'll have to find a garage. We'll give you a start.” The other man makes no eye contact at all. I ask the woman where they've come from, and she says, “The rally,” and indicates vaguely behind us.

Our thank-yous come out half-hysterical. “Thank you! Thank you!” And to Piet: “Thanks for saving the creature!” He stares at us blankly.

In the car we explode with the sudden relief.

“Thanks for saving the creature?”

“
Did you see the swastika?”

“How embarrassing would it be to be murdered by a man who thinks ‘Can I see the front of your bottom?' is funny?”

After giving us a push start, the biker had said the only way to guarantee the car wouldn't break down again was to keep the engine running until we got to our destination and called a mechanic. An hour later, as we pull up at a dusty fork in the road, I let my foot drift off the pedal. I am preoccupied with a building to my left, a whitewashed structure with a green tin roof. There is a large tropical tree in the front garden. The place my grandparents married is, seventy years on, as remote as it must have been then, one fork of the junction petering out into unsurfaced road, the other heading off between fields in the distance. By the time we sail around the corner, I have stalled the car. We crawl to a halt opposite the Babanango courthouse.

“FUCK.”

“Fuck.”

I have read in the guidebook of a bar called Stan's, where Michael Caine reportedly drank every night during the filming of
Zulu
. It is the only business the guide lists in Babanango. There is a single shuttered building farther up the track that might be Stan's, but it doesn't look very promising. “Maybe we can go and find coffee somewhere while the engine cools down,” I say unthinkingly, and we look at each other and burst into laughter.

As the dust settles, a car appears at the junction, draws parallel with us, and stops. The driver and his passengers, all black men, peer cautiously through our window. One of them says something we don't understand and then, addressing Pooly in English, asks if she is OK.

“They think I've taken you hostage,” I say. We grin and in unison say, “We're from England.” The other car erupts with laughter.

As the shadows around the old courthouse lengthen, we get out of our car. One of the men comes around to the driver's side and eases himself in. The other three arrange themselves at the back and start to push. The car is on a slight incline, and after moving forward promisingly teeters momentarily and then rocks back into its groove. It is then that a 4x4 pulls up, and a white man, in mirrored aviator shades and with a large, blond mustache and short-sleeved butter-yellow shirt, takes in the scene, focuses on me, and says something sharp in Afrikaans. Then, in English, “Do you need help?” There can't have been this much excitement in Babanango since Michael Caine passed through.

As the white man gets out of the car, the black men remove their hands from the trunk as if a charge has passed through it. The white man looks critically at Pooly. His wife mumbles something to him, along the lines, I imagine, of “Do something, dear,” and in one swift movement he skirts around the car's hood and approaches the driver's seat.

“We broke down, and these men are kindly helping us,” I say, which he ignores, and with a flick of his head he indicates to the man who'd been helping us to get out, which he does, instantly, and goes to the back of the car to stand with his friends. Out of the 4x4's window, the wife calls to me, “I had a Vauxhall Astra once! It was always doing this.”

In the driver's seat her husband starts whacking the gears about. Then he looks over his shoulder and shouts, “Push!” and the men push. The car starts.

“Lucky we were passing through,” he says. “Follow us as far as Isandlwana, and if you have any trouble, flash the lights.”

Pooly and I thank the black men. One of them asks for Pooly's number.

“Er,” she says, “I have a boyfriend.” The white guy stares.

We get back in the car. “‘I have a boyfriend'?”

“Oh, all right.”

“I think you should have given him your number.”

“I think you should go and ride in the car with your white friends.”

•   •   •

DOWN MORE REMOTE ROADS,
across a broken bridge, past endless brown land where the branches of the trees grow out flat from their shoulders, like Egyptian dancers. Occasionally the road has bright green patches, frayed at the edges, from some bizarre aid initiative to give South African children from the rural villages artificial football pitches. When we leave the main road, the white couple drive past, and with flashing lights and a friendly salute call out, “Take care, girls.”

It is dusk by the time we arrive, and Paul, the owner of the lodge, is pacing outside. “I was getting worried,” he says. We tell him meekly of our engine trouble and wait on the terrace while he makes us cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. We chose this place for its proximity to the battlefield and its views: it is on a hill, and, as advertised, the land stretches away before us on a breathtaking scale, disappearing to a blue line on the horizon. The only light is from a rival lodge twenty miles away.

Somewhere around here was the farm where my grandmother was sent during an early bout of consumption and which was left to my mother in Johanna's will. There was a photo of Sarah from this period, flanked by Johanna and Charlie in a desert landscape, and with a dog called Bill. “Such a nice old thing,” someone had written on the back. In another shot, she stood surrounded by family, everyone in their best dress, arms slung around each other in a slouchy pose that looked modern—as if one or other of her brothers might be about to throw a V-sign behind their sister's head. The men, shirtsleeves pushed up to their elbows, look guileless, freshly baked. I had looked at this photo and wondered why these people hadn't tried harder to take their dead sister's baby, and then wondered if I was being unfair. People have their own lives to lead.

At dinner, under the influence of his wife, Christine, Paul's gruffness diminishes. We are the only guests and it feels, in the candlelight and with the darkness outside pressing in, as if we are the only remaining people in the world. Christine talks of being a miner's daughter who twigged apartheid was wrong only when she was in her mid-thirties. She grew up on mine compounds where it was enough, she says, to get through one's own existence without considering what anyone else was up to. Not, she says quickly, that this is an excuse. They ask Pooly where she is from, and she says, “Manchester,” and they say, “Ancestrally, I mean,” and she says, “Eritrea,” and for about ten minutes they can't get enough of this and ask her what she thinks the future holds for South Africa, until I snap, “It's a completely different part of the world,” and they blink and say, “We know.”

They talk about the difficulties of running their lodge in the shadow of the ritzy establishment across the valley, whose lights you can see twinkling in the darkness, a multimillion-pound resort where the Prince of Wales has stayed. “Although we had Christiane Amanpour once,” says Christine.

If South Africa is to have a future, she says, the different cultures will have to mix. Assimilation is the only hope of survival.

“In that case,” says Paul, “why aren't we eating with chopsticks?”

“Don't worry about him,” says his wife. “He says bizarre things sometimes.”

Later in the dinner, Paul says, with a sense of wonder, “Do you know, there are rocket scientists in South Africa, and no rockets?”

Christine looks at her husband fondly. “What you're saying is bizarre.”

The thing you do around here is take a battlefield tour. It was in this area in 1879 that the British colonial forces suffered one of their greatest defeats, at the hands of the Zulus. We ask Paul if he will oblige us the following day, and with the air of a man acting against his best interests for the greater good, he says he must point out that the lodge next door also offers a tour. “You might prefer to go with him,” he says. “He's probably better than I am. The market leader.”

Christine smiles tightly, and Pooly and I fall over each other to say, “Oh, no, we'd much rather go with you. Much rather.” He smiles, cautiously.

When we tell the couple how we were nearly murdered by bikers on the road, Christine laughs and dismisses it.

“But one of them had a swastika on his jacket,” I say.

“Oh, please. He'd hardly have known what it was.”

•   •   •

WE HAD DRAWN LOTS
for the rooms, and I had won, so after dinner I climb the stairs to a kind of whitewashed adobe turret with views over the valley. I stand for a long time at the window. Even if you were very sick, you would, I think, have every reason to feel optimistic looking out at this landscape, its vastness on a sympathy of scale with your will to live. I think of the one surviving quote that made it down from my grandmother—“I have everything to live for.” She had said it to her sister Kathy when the TB came back. Kathy told her daughter, Gloria, who told my mother, who told me. The notion that fiendishness can be conquered by beauty or love or good housekeeping is one that has kept women in bad marriages since the beginning of time, and yet I can't help thinking that they must have been happy; she couldn't have known. They must have been happy, she couldn't have known, because there she is in the photo, arms slung around her loving family, who didn't knock down the door when she died to take back the child but allowed her to be transported away.

Mum on her second birthday, December 16th, 1934. Her mother has written on the back: “Doing her Daily Dozen Exercising – To Auntie Violet and Uncle Dan, with fondest love, from Pauline.”

“If there had been the slightest doubt—” Gloria said to me, once.

“I know, Gloria.”

But there wasn't. There was “we three” and Bonza the dog. There was “Pauline, doing her daily dozen.” There was “From Sarah with love to Johanna and Charlie.” There was “I have everything to live for.”

From the top of the hill, the next morning, we look out across the boundless space of the valley. In the center is the rock of Isandlwana, in the shadow of which chips of bone occasionally surface and where families still travel in order to leave markers to honor their dead. People in this part of the world have long memories. Through binoculars, I find a small group of people surrounding a single figure: the market leader and his tour group.

School-trip-like, Paul has given us a work sheet with a timeline on it that explains how the morning will proceed:

GENERAL BACKGROUND

Zulu Kingdom

British Colonies

“Confederation” policy

SHORT DESCRIPTION OF INITIAL INVASION PHASE

Drive from Drift to Batshee river site

9.45 Guest go through museum (pay entrance fee)

Explain some points of interest, weapons, etc.

DRIVE UP TO NYONI RIDGE

Zulu manoeuvres

British manoeuvres

Durnford's arrival

Second alarm

Zulu attack

British retreat

Paul gets up from his chair and in a bravura performance over the course of the morning narrates to us, with gestures, the folly of Lord Chelmsford. He was the British commander in South Africa, ordered to expand the colony into King Cetshwayo's Zulu Kingdom. In 1879, he marched out, leaving his garrison undefended, whereupon a pincer movement of twenty thousand Zulu warriors rushed down from the hills and wiped out the encampment. When word finally reached home, London couldn't believe it, that a “native” army with spears could defeat the colonial forces. The British won, eventually, but lost more than half of their men and killed a thousand Zulus.

Tour guides, mindful of the sensitivities of their audience, substitute the word “arrogance” with “foolhardiness” and “bravery,” as required. “They must have been very hot,” say guests delicately, of the red-coated troops. At the site of the old barracks, Paul tells us the story of the British soldier who hid in a closet under a fur coat and fled the building disguised as an animal. At lunchtime, Christine drives to meet us with a homemade quiche. In the distance, the market leader can be seen, dressed in a fishing vest and surrounded by thirty people. He has a lot of equipment and hired hands, who carry chairs and folding tables and bags of provisions like something from an old-fashioned game hunt.