African Laughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

our leafy circle at night, we listened to owls, nightjars, the mysterious cries of monkeys. Sometimes a pair of small eyes gleamed from the trees over our heads, as a monkey or wild cat watched, as we did, how the roaring fire of early evening sent the red sparks rushing up from the flames that reached to the boughs, but then, later, when it died down, the sparks fled up, but fewer, and snapped out one by one, like the meteors that you could watch too, when the fire had died. Or we might wake to hear how some large animal, startled to find this obstruction in its usual path, bounded away into silence. The moon, which had been pushed away by the roar of the fire, had come close, and was standing over the trees in one of its many shapes and sizes, looking straight down at us.
    Every night my father, my brother, myself, fought to stay up around the fire, but my mother wanted us to be in bed in good time, to be fresh for her goal, the actual visit to the school. For what was to us the best–the bush, the animals, the birds, the stars, the fire–was to her a means to the moment when she sat with the other parents on the stands watching her son batting or bowling or fielding or running races with the other little boys in their fresh white clothes. The sports field, a large area of pale earth, lay among eucalyptus trees. The school buildings were of a style called Cape Colonial, or Cape Dutch, white and low, with red tiles, green shutters. Everything was clean and tidy and there were green English lawns. I felt alien to the place. This was because I was alien to the English middle class, playing out its rituals here, as if on a stage. I knew even then they were anachronistic, absurd, and, of course, admirable in their tenacity. These were the ‘nice people’ my mother yearned for, exiled in her red earth district surrounded by people–as she was convinced–of the wrong class. Here we were invited to lunch, tea, supper, with the headmaster, and the other masters and mistresses; the rituals might go on for days, according to strict rules. But often my father was found lying on his back under the gum trees, and would not be budged by my mother, scandalized, hurt, that–as usual!–he so little valued what was her goal, her ambition, her raison d’être. In spite of our poverty, in spite of our struggles as farmers through this terrible Depression, in spite of his lack of interest, we were here, where we ought to be, with our peers, and her son was set on a path proper to him and to us. ‘You go, old thing,’ said my father, lying flat on his back, staring up through the loose green-fledged white arms of the gum trees and the always blue sky. ‘You enjoy it, I don’t.’ He was letting her down and he knew it, so he might get himself awkwardly up off the ground, manoeuvring that clumsy wooden leg of his, and go with her to tea, and to lunch, and to parents’ meetings. Or he might stay exactly where he was. Sometimes he was joined by other fathers, who, seeing him lying there at ease among the scented, brittle, gum-tree leaves, could not resist, so there might be two, three, or ten fathers staring at the blue sky through leaves, until summoned by their wives, while their delighted or shocked children watched them, waiting to hear what their mothers would say. ‘But what are you doing there? What will they be thinking of you?’
    This place was my brother’s place, not mine. Ruzawi was what my mother had to have for him, expressing depths of her nature which we understood and allowed for, even if ‘England’ and ‘Home’ were so far off. The Convent was what she had to have for me. Like Ruzawi it was a snobbish choice. To me it was a dark oppressive place full of women loaded with their black and white serge robes who smelled when it was hot. I knew it was a bad place, but not how bad, until I was grown up. I was there for five years and it did me harm: I am still learning how much harm. That unwritten law, that