Sometimes the lower part of the crown of the hill was crowded with butterflies: the mysterious synchronicities of nature had meshed – the rains, the time of year, and that essential thing, plentiful cowpats on the track, since the water-cart had been up and down that morning, the oxen leaving their crusty sweet-smelling portions of – paradise. Sages of all denominations have used this vision thus: ‘So, Master, to what can you compare this life of ours?’
‘Our lives are as if a butterfly flutters in from the dark into a lighted place, sees beneath her a favourite food, flutters down and feasts on the ordure until she is replete – and then off she flies again into the dark.’
Probably the most exquisite sight I have ever seen is hundreds of butterflies, different ones, all sizes, fluttering their pretty wings and spread about over cowpats on the track.
Oh, what beauties, what a gorgeous sight, and the family stood as near as we could, marvelling. Then, one by one, off the butterflies drifted, back to their more ordinary delight: nectar.
If I choose to remember this vision, which I may do on a dark December afternoon in London, and not forgetting the benef-icence of the cowpats, I have to think too – honesty compels – of the other insects. Life is not, after all, exquisite butterflies with the afternoon sunlight on their wings.
Our house was in the middle of the bush, which was not twenty yards away in some places, and full of every imaginable insect. Some of them were a horror to me. One invasion was the worst. There is an insect, large, dark brown, with a bulbous body, and antennae, which came with the rains and was everywhere. My mother chided, the servants laughed at me, but I was sobbing, hidden in a corner. That was myself as a small girl, but I grew and the beetles, if that was what they were, went on appearing. I would be safe in my bed and then there they were on the mosquito net, a dozen of them, clinging with their little legs to the mesh, lopsided from the weight of their great bodies. I cowered under the bedclothes and screamed for help. My father, probably already in bed, laboriously arose.
‘Your hysterical daughter is at it again,’ he remarks, furious, but contained. He comes hopping on his clumsy crutch over the uneven floors and sees me crouching under the net, with the brown ugly things above me all over the net. He stands on one leg, holding on to the washstand with one hand, and brushes them off, using his crutch. They are scattered over the floor.
‘No, no,’ I cry. ‘They’ll climb up again, they’ll get back on the net.’ With what difficulty does my father reach for a towel, always holding on to the washstand, bend to scoop up the insects, which in my memory are emitting squeaks and complaints, then get to the door and shake them out into the night? ‘Shut the door, shut the door,’ I beg, though usually I did not allow that door to be shut.
He shuts it.
‘What are you so frightened of?’ he coldly enquires, turning with such an effort to manoeuvre himself and his crutch back to his room.
‘Beetles,’ he tells my mother, who has not budged from her bed: she thinks I should not be indulged in my irrational behaviour.
Well, what was I so afraid of to the point that I cowered, weeping, clinging to pillows?
There were other invasions, some I can hardly bear to remember.
In London Zoo they have classes for people with phobias. You become inured to furry, squeaking, hissing, biting things walking up your arms. Oh, no, no, don’t even think of it.
If I have moments of sentimentalizing the bush, I make myself remember how, when walking quietly through the trees, I might find myself in the middle of a spider’s web that clung like the poisonous one in an old myth or fairy story. The spider was vibrating with fury not an arm’s length away.
An ugly bungalow was built further back from the brow of the hill, and then someone – who? – shortened the hill by about ten feet, or more. The old house had perched on the crown, and the ground had slid down all around it. The earth from this truncation was shovelled down the sides of the hill, where once the oxen had laboured, straining up steep sides.
And occupants came and went and left their mark: a line of neglected roses by a fence, some peach trees, which did not do well, any more than the pomegranates my mother had planted.
And then there was the Liberation War. All the farmhouses became fortresses, surrounded by tall security fences, locked and barred at night, but not so high it was impossible for terrorists or freedom-fighters to lob over a grenade, or even clamber over themselves. Inside the houses, I saw the rifles and shotguns laid on the windowsills, and buckets of water set out to deal with incendiary attacks. The white farmers in those beleaguered farmhouses had a long, frightening war, and then there was a black government, and so many misplaced hopes, and then the ugly little tyrant Mugabe. The security fences and siege weapons did not defend the inhabitants from these attackers.
And so my father, dreaming forwards instead of backwards, would have had to see all this District, once a byword for its efficiency, its wonderful crops of maize and tobacco, slowly begin to go back to the bush. For Mugabe’s cronies, grabbing the white farms, were not thinking of feeding the population, providing for them. They left the farms unused. In order to keep farms healthy and productive you need fertilizers, machinery, and all kinds of experts. If it is a dairy farm, you need veterinary surgeons. Without these, there is nothing; neglect, and the lands going back to the bush.