Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller Read Free Book Online

stuck high up in the Flamboyants and July has to climb up and rescue me.
    Sally has been very naughty and went hunting for three nights last week. She took Bubbles with her. I think they were chasing baboons. Sally came home with a bleeding tongue and sore paws and dripping with ticks. It serves her right. Bubbles got all the way to the river before one of the boys saw him. They were both lucky not to get caught in a snare.
    I hope you are working hard at your lessons and being good for your matrons and teachers. Tell Vanessa that she is supposed to share her tuck with you. I miss you very, very much, especially at tea time. I sleep on your bed every night and on your chair all day.
    Lots and lots of love,
    Your beloved friend and the biggest supporter of the Bobo Fuller Fan Club,
    Jason King
    oxo

Roger Huntingford’s War

    Hodge with Nandi tribesmen in Kenya, circa 1930.
     
    A untie Glug, Mum’s younger sister, now lives in a small village in Scotland with her husband, Sandy; a passionately adored dog called India and a couple of cats. Their three children are grown and have left home, but Langlands Lodge feels like a place that has never given up on raising children. Its prevailing odors remain nursery comforting: warm toast, freshly brewed tea and stewed plums. If my parents had been killed in the Rhodesian War, Vanessa, Olivia and I would have come to live in Langlands with Auntie Glug and Uncle Sandy. In this way, the house has always felt like a refuge, a place of certainty and safety. I sleep profoundly here (fourteen hours at a stretch) and I eat without restraint, grazing my way steadily through Uncle Sandy’s casseroles, his wheatie buns, his greenhouse grapes (a habit that has earned me the Langlands’ nickname Niece-Weevil).
    Auntie Glug hasn’t lived in Africa since 1967, but she still dresses like a Kenyan settler woman of a certain era—men’s clothes, work boots, a red handkerchief tucked into her sleeve—and she smokes like a soldier. The boxes of photos and letters that I dig out from under the stairs smell of her cigarettes but also of my grandfather’s pipe tobacco, the homegrown, home-cured crop he used to hang in his garage in England. The smell of rum and earth are as fresh for me as the instant memory this scent retrieves of his guffawing, irreverent laugh.
    Auntie Glug has inherited from her parents a holy belief in the restorative nature of gardening and animals and she is unapologetically earthy. Several years ago she went to India and came back wearing salwar kameez and eating with her fingers (the salwar kameez didn’t last—not practical in the winter and she kept setting them alight with her cigarettes). She is also the only person I have ever met who has returned from that country enthusiastically endorsing its latrines. “Very sensible,” she said, “all that healthy squatting.”
    From where I am sitting in her morning room, she appears in her garden as something ancient and essential in our people. Warped by the old Victorian glass windows; morphed by an old shirt of my grandfather’s and a pair of tie-waisted corduroys; shadowed by India, over whom she bends once in a while to consult and pet, she gives the impression of being ageless, genderless, doggedly Macdonald of Clanranald but also a product of East Africa, of that particular time and place when there were really no limits on how well or badly, sanely or madly a white person had to behave. “Don’t talk to me about behaving,” Auntie Glug says, giving one of her badger growls. “Bugger that.” (As a result of Auntie’s standard nonconformity—gardening until midnight while teaching herself Spanish, controlling air traffic over Dundee while knitting and teaching herself Spanish—it is sometimes a little difficult to tell when her natural eccentricity crosses into territory better understood by the professionals.)
    No Macdonald of Clanranald is entirely at home in a house that does not have animals and ghosts.