Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Read Online Free PDF

increased lately, especially where we lived on Robandi, right up against the Mozambique border where the view was spectacular but almost everything else was lousy.
    In April 1966, the year before my parents moved from Kenya to Rhodesia, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) launched an attack against government forces to protest Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. The uprising was swiftly and definitively suppressed. Seven ZANLA troops lost their lives. No Rhodesian forces died. After that, the war simmered along mildly with the odd attack or ambush here and there until 1974, when the ten-year conflict in neighboring Mozambique between the Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique rebels (FRELIMO) and the colonial Portuguese ended, and a new confrontation between the FRELIMO government and Rhodesian and South African–backed Mozambican National Resistance forces (RENAMO) began. Then, as if the uptick in violence in the neighboring state were contagious, the war in Rhodesia also picked up momentum. ZANLA forces based in Mozambique under the guerilla-friendly FRELIMO government came over the border into Rhodesia to lay land mines and conduct raids. War became our climate, something you didn’t feel you could do much about and that you might remark on casually, using the same language you might use to describe the weather: “Phew, things are getting hot this week.”
    We accepted the war as one of the prices that had to be paid for Our Freedom, although it was a funny sort of Freedom that didn’t include being able to say what you wanted about the Rhodesian government or being able to write books that were critical of it. And for the majority of the country, Freedom did not include access to the sidewalks, the best schools and hospitals, decent farming land or the right to vote. It now seems completely clear to me, looking back, that when a government talks about “fighting for Freedom” almost every Freedom you can imagine disappears for ordinary people and expands limitlessly for a handful of people in power.
    “Bullets, lipstick, sunglasses. Off we go. Come on, Bobo, quick march.”
    My feet poked out of two holes in the drum’s lid. I couldn’t walk very well. I had to waddle like a penguin. This amused Vanessa, and her peals of laughter echoed around inside the insecticide drum. Mum, with Olivia on her hip, helped me out of the big door, down the rough stone steps and onto the veranda. “Don’t fall,” Vanessa said, barely able to contain the hope in her voice. It was very hot inside the drum and sweat poured into my already stinging eyes and onto my increasingly stinging rash.
    “I’m boiling,” I whined.
    “One more word out of you,” Mum warned.
    We scuffled across the yard and into the driveway, and arrived at Lucy, the mine-proofed Land Rover, where a problem presented itself. I didn’t fit through any of the doors.
    “Oh dear,” Mum said. “An unforeseen hitch.” There was a silence while she had a think. I pictured her biting the inside of her lower lip and frowning. When she spoke again, she sounded struck by inspiration. “We’ll put her in the back.” She paused. “Darling,” she said, not to me, “go and fetch July and Violet.”
    So Vanessa called July from the kitchen and she fetched Violet from the laundry. Then there was general hilarity while July and Violet each considered how amazing it was that the madam had put her young daughter into an insecticide drum. Mum explained that when she was in labor with me in England, the radio was playing “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” which was prophetic because when I arrived, I really was, as promised, Not a Rose Garden (Mum has refused to waver from this story, even though I have since discovered this song became a hit for Lynn Anderson a full year and a half after I was born and therefore could not have been playing when she was in labor with me).
    “She had yellow skin and