African Laughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

years simply gallop!’ But at my age, every day went on for ever and I was determined to grow up as quickly as I could and leave behind the condition of being a child, being helpless. Now I wonder if those who dislike being children, who urge time to go quickly, experience time differently when they get older: does it go faster for us than for other people who have not spent years teaching it to hurry by? The journeys to Marandellas, occurring two or three times a year, were a way of marking accomplished stages: another four months gone, another rainy season over, and that’s a whole year done with–and the same point last year seems so far away. The journeys themselves, slow, painstaking, needing so much effort by my mother to get everything ready, so much effort by my father to rouse himself to face life and remain this damned car’s master (‘We would have done much better to keep horses and the use of our feet!’) were each one like a small life, distant, different from the ones before, marked by its own flavour, incidents, adventures.
    ‘That was the trip Mrs C. visited us in our camp. I thought she was a bit sniffy about it. Well, I think we have the best of it–you don’t lie out all night under the stars if you’re in the Marandellas Hotel!’ Or, ‘That was the time when our boy–what was his name? Reuben?’–(These damned missionaries!)–‘went off for two days on a beer drink because he met a brother in the next village, and he turned up as calm as you please and said he hadn’t seen his brother for five years. Brother my foot! Every second person they meet is a brother, as far as I can see.’ ‘Now, come on, old thing, be fair! Every second person they meet is a brother–do you remember that letter in the Rhodesia Herald ? They have a different system of relationships. And anyway, we did quite all right without a servant, didn’t we? I don’t see what we need a boy for on the trips anyway.’ ‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ said my mother, fierce. But what she did not say, could not say, and only her face ever said it for her, like that of an unjustly punished little girl: ‘It’s all very well for you! Who gets the food ready and packs the car and unpacks everything, and finds the camp site and spreads the bedding and looks after the children? Not you, not you, ever! Surely I am not expected to do everything, always, myself?’ And yes, she was; and yes, she did, always.
    When we reached Marandellas, we turned off the main road that led to Umtali, drove through the neat little township with its gardens and its jacarandas and its flame trees, and went for a few miles along the road to Ruzawi. Here the bush was full of rocky kopjes and small streams. The sandy earth sparkled. Well before reaching the school, off the road but within sight of it, a space was found among the musasa trees. The ‘boy’ cut branches to make an enclosure about twenty feet by twenty, but round, in the spirit of the country. This leafy barrier was to keep out leopards, who were still holding on, though threatened, in their caves in the hills. We could have lain out under the trees without the barricade for any leopard worth its salt could have jumped over it in a moment and carried one of us off. No, the walls were an expression of something else, not a keeping out, but a keeping together, strangers in a strange land. My parents needed those encircling branchy arms. But my brother, when he was only a little older, went for days through the bush by himself, or with the son of the black man who worked in our kitchen, and he slept, as they did, as some still do, rolled in a blanket near the fire.
    Inside this boma were made five low platforms of fresh grass, long and green and sappy, or long and yellow and dry, according to the season, and on these was spread the bedding. My brother was given permission to leave school and join us at these times for at least a night or two. And my parents always insisted that