NF (1957) Going Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

they are a climate of their own; pavements, streets, walls—even parks and gardens—are an urban shell.
    But in Africa the wildness of the country is still much stronger than the towns.
    But even so, this house was wrong; it was not this that I had come home to find. For me all houses will always be wrong; all bungalows, cottages, mansions and villas will be uncomfortable and incongruous and confining. I only like blocks of flats, the most direct expression of crammed town-living. I did not understand why this should be so for a long time, until I took to dreaming nightly of the house I was brought up in; and then at last I submitted myself to the knowledge that I am the victim of a private mania that I must humour. I worked out recently that I have lived in over sixty different houses, flats and rented rooms during the last twenty years and not in one of them have I felt at home. In order to find a place I live in tolerable, I have not to see it. Or rather, I work on it until it takes on the colouring suggested by its shape, and then forget it. If, in anunguarded moment, I actually see it, all of it, what it is, then a terrible feeling of insecurity and improbability comes over me. The fact is, I don’t live anywhere; I never have since I left that first house on the kopje. I suspect more people are in this predicament than they know.
    But that first house crumbled long ago, returned to the soil, was swallowed by the bush; and so I was glad after we had had dinner to go out again in the car, ostensibly to look for someone whose address we did not know, but hoped we might find by chance—in fact to get out of the town into the bush.
    In five minutes we were there.
    And now for the first time I was really home. The night was magnificent; the Southern Cross on a slant overhead; the moon a clear, small pewter; the stars all recognizable and close. The long grass stood all around, tall and giving off its dry, sweetish smell, and full of talking crickets. The flattened trees of the highveld were low above the grass, low and a dull silver-green.
    It was the small intimate talking of the crickets which received me and made me part of that nightscape.
    Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier between me and the steady, solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures.
    It was only so the first night; for at once habit took over and erected its barriers; and if I had had to fly back to England the next day, I would have been given what I had gone home for.
    For to stand there with the soft dust of the track under my shoes, the crickets talking in my ear, the moon cold over the bush, meant I was able to return to that other house.
    There are two sorts of habitation in Africa. One is of brick, cement, plaster, tile and tin—the substance of the country processed and shaped; the other sort is made direct of the stuff of soil and grass and tree. This second kind is what most of thenatives of the country live in; and what I, as a child, lived in. The house was not a hut, but a long, cigar-shaped dwelling sliced several times across with walls to make rooms.
    To make such a house you choose a flat place, clear it of long grass and trees, and dig a trench two feet deep in the shape you want the house to be. You cut trees from the bush and lop them to a size and insert them side by side in the trench, as close as they will go. From the trunks of living trees in the bush, fibre is torn; for under the thick rough bark of a certain variety of tree is a thick layer of smooth flesh. It is coloured