17 

We returned to a new house and a city I could barely remember. I was only a year and a half old when we left Freetown for Koidu. The only reminders of our lives up-country were Big Aminatta, who was even bigger now, and Jim, the Old English sheepdog. Poor Jim. Twelve months of neglect had exacted their toll upon him. I caught sight of him wandering the grounds a day after we arrived, confused and listless, looking like he had a bad case of mange. It was only when I saw Jim I remembered that he had once been our dog. A memory bubbled up, but never quite surfaced. Gazing at Jim, my dog, who looked at once familiar and strange, produced a swimming sensation, of lives leaking one into the other. As for Jim, he didn't remember me at all.

The ministerial residence in Wilberforce was grand, certainly by African standards. In contrast to the pitched roofs and layered rooms of the colonial homes, the concrete house was built in the shape of a letter P, flat planes at one end, curved walls and balconies at the other. It was painted bright white, except for under the eaves and the pillars supporting the roof over the veranda, which had been daubed with turquoise.

At the front a sloping garden overlooked a view of the hills and the sea. At the back, the direction from which the house was approached, there was an expanse of empty land bordered by a row of concrete cabins that served as the boys’ quarters and several piles of gravel. The gravel had probably been there since independence; it gave the whole place an unfinished look, as though the money for the job had run out or the last occupants had left in a hurry. Given the sorry state of our government, either, or both, were entirely possible.

The rains were just beginning. The city looked burned out and exhausted, as if it needed a grand soaking to reach the depths of the earth, bring back the greenery and live again. The brief night-time showers did little more than leave streaks on the cars, on the painted facades of houses and down window panes. A year had passed and the populace had endured a lot; the jubilation had ebbed away a long time ago. People were becoming too accustomed to the lingering sourness of disappointment.

At the end of June our father presented his budget speech to parliament. He wore traditional robes: pure white with curls of gold embroidery cascading down the front and at the cuffs and hem, and a matching round cap. He had worked on his presentation round the clock.

In the Margai era the government misspent so flagrantly that suppliers refused their worthless IOUs and began to demand cash on delivery. Juxon Smith, with his customary zeal, had investigated the wealth of ministers and where he found evidence of corruption he forced the miscreant to repay the money. People relished the sight of big men cut down to size, but little cash was actually recouped. Juxon Smith raised taxes and went begging to the International Monetary Fund for the second time. We were nine million leones in debt.

New countries like ours were easy prey for western lenders, who persuaded leaders to finance new projects on credit. In the five years following independence, factories, roads and hotels flourished, springing up across the landscape. They were popular, too, yielding jobs and manufactured goods; they made people feel that our country was developing – never mind that they were bought at an inflated price or that repayments swelled each year, leaving every man, woman and child bound and the country in hock for years. Ministers, contractors and suppliers were satisfied. They built new houses and bought gleaming, growling cars with their cut of the deal. But greedy hands had strangled the golden goose. When the cars broke down there were no parts or trained mechanics to fix them. Houses begun were never finished. They turned into ruined building sites, bristling with steel girders, lacking outside walls so that rooms were exposed to view, like a doll's house. Homeless people moved into them, living their lives in front of an audience like actors on a stage, with velvet drapes of moss hanging down and hordes of brown and black African magpies screaming in the wings.

There was no more chocolate milk in triangular cartons. The milk-processing factory was closed; the company had gone bust, leaving the government with outstanding loans. Along the beach at Lumley, in the curve of the bay where I spent days of that holiday rolling in the surf, the Cape Sierra Hotel stood on the tip of the peninsula. The modern building was equipped with a swimming pool, luxury reception rooms and an outside dance floor, but the bedrooms were unoccupied half the year.

Our father called the Cape Sierra Hotel a folly, ‘mocking us all from Aberdeen Point’. He said so in his speech to the House of Representatives. The next day's newspapers wore his words across their front pages like a bandanna, alongside a picture of him sweeping into the house, confident and smiling. His first priority was to end the cycle of borrowing and bankruptcy. There were to be no tax rises. Ending diamond smuggling was the next priority, and in exchange for the assured security of their mines the diamond companies would pay an extra tax, a hypothecated tax to be used purely for development projects. It was a cautious budget, but an optimistic one. It reassured genuine international investors and won the confidence of local people.

Our father had a brilliant mind, combined with unshakable self-belief. He had set about mastering his new job in a matter of months. Brian Quinn, the IMF's representative, who used to teach at an American university, lent him Samuelson's Principles of Economics. Our father spent his days at the ministry and his evenings with his team of advisers, cramming his head with information just as he had during late nights in the front room of my parents’ tenement flat when he was a medical student. For a man of his ability it wasn't an impossible job: ours was a tiny country with a rudimentary economy. And besides, what alternative was there? This was government in the newborn states of Africa. Lines of graduates, trained specialists: these did not exist. Africa had to make do with what she had. In many countries it proved disastrous, but it could also be exhilarating. Within the struggle there were moments like these when suddenly everything seemed possible.

At home, though, the ephemeral hopefulness that follows a reunion had already drifted away. By 1968 our parents’ marriage was a bowl patterned by a thousand hairline fractures; it was not to survive the holiday.

They had been apart for more than a year. They had both had other relationships. My mother arrived from Aberdeen to find a pair of hair combs and a jar of skin-lightener in the bedroom.

Over those hot, wet months, while mildew grew on our new suitcases in the cupboard, we watched as our parents acted out the inevitable dénouement of their marriage. Their war was conducted with the weapons of silence and withdrawal. There was not even the comfort of an angry confrontation, no vivid scenes to focus our floundering emotions or anchor the insecurity in something solid.

One morning we all had breakfast together. Our father took his coffee heavily sugared, and he asked my mother to pass the sugar bowl. She carried on, blandly eating her breakfast as though she hadn't heard. He repeated himself in a clear, even voice. We all looked up – everyone, that is, except my mother, who had suddenly turned stone deaf. Her eyes were fixed somewhere on the centre of the tablecloth, as though she were examining a stain. I slipped out of my seat and with one foot on the floor I stretched out towards the sugar bowl. It was just out of reach. My fingers fumbled on the rim as I tried to drag it closer. The bowl toppled and fell. Crystals scattered on the white tablecloth. Now look, my mother exhaled in exasperation. I climbed back into my seat as she began to scoop the sugar up; then she replaced the bowl – exactly where it had been before, next to her elbow.

Our mother was the first person in her family to marry a foreigner. Our father was the first person in his to marry for love. When the passion leached out of their union and left a colourless husk, he offered her something else. An African marriage, my mother pronounced with scorn, where the men and women do their own thing. She could not accept such a compromise, for she was a European woman who deserved nothing less than to be loved and cherished.

Our mother always denied what others talked about openly: that she was pregnant when she married my father. Times changed and women married or lived alone, kept their maiden names, worked at their own careers, had babies out of wedlock – still our mother clung to her position, which became less tenable as the years mounted. I always thought she was protecting her reputation, in an old-fashioned sort of way. But in time I began to see her motivations might be different: she wanted people, us especially, to see her marriage as an act of daring, precipitated by true love. It should have been a brave, compelling love, the love of myths. And yet the prosaic truth hinted at a different reality. It had been an inauspicious union, sadly flawed at its inception.

That holiday our mother spent her days with friends, old and new. Somehow in that fractured atmosphere she blossomed nevertheless. She loved the sun and soon her skin flushed pink and gold, streaks of nacre shone in her hair. When she was around our father her mouth hardened into a straight line and she stared into the corner of the room, but when she was with her friends she seemed radiant.

Our father focused on his official engagements. He flew to Israel with his economic adviser to persuade the Israeli government to buy back the oil refinery they had built. It was overpriced and, since Sierra Leone had no oil to speak of, useless. He rose early and spent long hours at the ministry. In the evenings he played tennis at the Hill Station Club and often we joined him, fetching the balls that rolled into the corner of the courts, or pitched over into the hedges on the other side of the fence. Weekends we all went to the beach as a family, to Cape Club, where we spent our afternoons playing on an old wreck. The boat was washed up on the sand, beached so that it was beyond rescue and would never sail again. But for that one holiday it was still a boat and we played in the cabin, spinning the wheel this way and that. Gradually, the gentle waves tore into the hull, pulling it apart until eventually, years later, I could only find a snag of rusty metal in the sand.

Much of that holiday is lost to me now, although curiously I recollect with great clarity events leading up to it as well as those that took place shortly afterwards. Perhaps the atmosphere at home discouraged me from forming memories. I have seen the photographs: me at the beach, hand in hand with Big Aminatta, my hair a mass of dense ringlets, crystals of salt sparkling like precious stones on my darkened skin. In another shot I am leaning over the balcony overlooking the garden at Minister's Quarters, my feet on the lowest rung, laughing wildly at who knows what, and that wild hair again, blowing across my face. They are happy images, there's no doubt. Yet they exist in a vacuum with barely a corresponding memory alongside.