grandmother who had died giving birth to my mother. The paintings had been rendered on sheets of tin and the paint had flecked in parts leaving dull pewter-coloured spots where the backgrounds of salmon and green had lifted. Alone on one wall was a hand-coloured steel engraving in a heavy walnut frame showing hundreds of Zulu dead and a handful of Welsh soldiers standing over them with bayonets fixed. They stood proud, looking towards heaven, each with a boot and putteed leg resting on the body of a near-naked savage. I had always thought how very clean and smart they still looked after having fought at close quarters with the Zulu hordes all night, each soldier seemingly responsible, if you counted the bodies and the soldiers in the picture, for the death of fifty-two Zulus. The caption under the painting, etched in a mechanical copperplate, read: The morning after the massacre. British honour is restored at Rorke’s Drift, January, 1879. Brave men all.
The tired old zebra skin which, along with everything else, I had known all my life covered the floor and the ball and claw legs of the lounge suite had been placed over the spots where they had worn the hair off the hide in their previous parlour existence. The only change in the room, for even the worn red velvet curtains had come along, was a small, round-shouldered wireless in brown bakelite which rested on the top of the bookcase where the gramophone had previously stood.
Perhaps only the outside of things had changed and the inside, like this room, largely remained the same. For a moment my spirits lifted. Just then my granpa walked into the room, tall and straight as a bluegum pole. His pipe was hooked over the brown tobacco stain on the corner of his bottom lip and he stood framed by the doorway, his baggy khaki pants tied up as ever with a piece of rope, his shirtsleeves rolled up to below the elbow on his collarless shirt. He looked unchanged. He took two puffs from his pipe so that the smoke swirled around his untidy mop of white hair and curled past his long nose. ‘There’s a good lad,’ he said. His pale blue eyes shone wet, and he blinked quickly as he looked down at me. The smoke cleared around his head as he raised his arms slightly and spread his hands palms upwards as though to indicate the room and the house and the predicament all in one sad gesture of apology.
‘Newcastle’s disease, they had to kill all the Orpingtons,’ he said.
‘They killed Granpa Chook,’ I said softly.
My mother put her hand on my shoulder and moved me past my granpa. ‘That’s right, darling, they killed all Granpa’s chooks. Come along now, it’s way past your bedtime.’
I hadn’t meant to say anything about Granpa Chook. My granpa, after all, had never known him. It just came out. One chicken thing on top of another chicken thing. He had been enormously fond of those black Orpingtons. Even Nanny had said they must be Zulu birds because they stood so black and strong and the roosters were like elegantly feathered Zulu generals. She had never commented on Granpa Chook’s motley appearance. While Nanny had never seen him at the height of his powers, like Inkosi-Inkosikazi she knew him to be different, an exception, a magic chicken of great power who had been conjured up by the old monkey to watch over me. Only on one occasion had she ventured the opinion that it was just like the old wizard to choose a lowly Kaffir chicken and a Shangaan at that, when, to her mind, he could have dignified the relationship with one of Granpa’s magnificent black Orpington roosters. If a chicken was to become home to the soul of a great warrior, why then could he not be an exemplary example of chickenhood? She had tut-tutted for a while and then, shaking her bandanna’d head, said: ‘Who can know the way of a snake on a steep rock?’ Whatever that was supposed to mean.
Nanny. Where was she now? Was she dead? Tomorrow I must speak urgently to my granpa. For, while grown-ups never talk to small kids about death, my granpa would tell me for sure. I would ask him when I returned his shilling to him in the morning.
I awakened early as always, and padded softly through the sleeping house to find myself in the kitchen. The black cast-iron stove was smaller than the one on the farm and, to my surprise, when I spit-licked my finger before dabbing it on one of the hot plates, it was cold. On the farm it had never been allowed to go out. The two little orphan kitchen maids Dee and Dum had slept on mats in the kitchen and it had been their job to stoke the embers back to life if the stove showed any signs of going out. This kitchen smelt vaguely of carbolic soap and disinfectant and I missed the warm smell of humans, coffee beans and the aroma of the huge old cast-iron soup pot which plopped and steamed on the back of the stove in a never-ending cycle of new soup bones added and old ones taken out. In the country food is a continuous preoccupation, not simply a pause to refuel. Country people know the sweat that goes into an ear of corn, a pail of milk, a churn of butter, bread warm from the oven and the eggs and bacon which sizzle in the breakfast frying pan. Food is hard earned and requires the proper degree of respect. This stove was bare but for the presence of a large blue and white speckled enamel kettle which looked new and temporary.
The doorway from the kitchen led out onto a wide back stoep which, unlike the front of the house, was level with the ground and looked out into a very large and well tended garden. The fragrance of hundreds of rose blossoms filled the crisp dawn air and I observed that stone terraces, planted with rose bushes, stretched up and away from me. Each terrace ended in a series of six steps and at the top of each set of steps an arbour of climbing roses bent over the pathway. Blossoms of white, pink, yellow and orange, each arboured trellis a different colour, cascaded to the ground in colourful loops. The path running up the centre of the garden looked like the sort of tunnel Alice might well have found in Wonderland. Six huge old trees, of kinds I had not seen before, were planted one to each terrace. It was a well-settled garden and I wondered how it came to be Granpa’s. Nothing on the farm had ever seemed to be well settled except the bits which had broken down forever.
I now saw that our house was situated a little way up a large hill, which accounted for the steps in the front and the terraces behind. Beyond a dark line of mulberry trees at the far end of the garden and a stone wall enclosure which stretched halfway across the last terrace, the hill of virgin rock and bush rose up steeply. It wasn’t an unfriendly-looking hill and its slopes were dotted with aloe, each tall, shaggy plant carrying a candelabra of fiery, poker-like blossoms. A crown of rounded boulders clustered, like currants on a cupcake, at its very top.
As I walked up the path, I saw that each terrace carried beds of roses set into neatly trimmed lawn, though the last terrace was different. On one side it contained the stone wall enclosure too tall for me to see over; on the other it was planted with hundreds of freshly grafted rose stock behind which, acting as a windbreak, stood the line of mulberry trees.
Except for the strange and beautiful trees and whatever might lie behind the stone wall, no plants other than roses appeared to grow in this very tidy garden. Only the fences on either side testified to the sub-tropical climate. Quince and guava, lemon, orange, avocado, pawpaw, mango and pomegranate mixed with Pride of India, poinsettia, hibiscus and, covering a large dead tree, a brilliant shower of bougainvillea. At the base of the trees grew hydrangea, agapanthus and red and pink canna. It was as though the local trees and plants had come to gawk at the elegant rose garden. They stood on the edges of the garden like colourful country hicks, jostling and pushing each other, too polite to intrude any further.
I decided to explore behind the stone wall a little later and ducked under the canopy of dark mulberry leaves. The ground under the trees had been completely shaded from the sun and was bare, slightly damp and covered with fallen fruit. As I walked the moist berries squashed underfoot, staining the skin between my toes a deep purple. I hadn’t eaten since lunch with Big Hettie the previous day, and I began to feast hungrily on the luscious berries. The plumpest, purplest of them broke away from their tiny slender stalks at the slightest touch. Soon the palms of my hands were stained purple and my lips must have been the same from cramming the delicious berries into my mouth. Above me the birds, feeding on the berries, squabbled and chirped their heads off, the leaves and smaller branches shaking with their carry-on.
Emerging from the line of mulberry trees clear of the garden, the first of the aloe plants stood almost at my feet, its spikes of orange blossom tinged with yellow two feet above my head. In front of me, stretching upwards to the sky, the African hillside rose unchanged, while behind me, embroidered on its lap, tizzy and sentimental as a painting on a chocolate box, lay the rose garden.
Without thinking I had started to climb, skirting the rocks and the dark patches of scrub and thorn bush. In half an hour I had reached the summit and scrambling to the top of a huge, weather-rounded boulder I looked about. Behind me the hills tumbled on, accumulating height as they gathered momentum until, in the far distance, they became proper mountains. Far to my left an aerial cableway strung across the foothills into the mountains remained motionless, work had not yet started for the day. Below me, cradled in the foothills, lay the small town. It looked out across a vast and beautiful valley which stretched thirty miles over the lowveld to a slash of deep purple on the pale skyline, an escarpment which rose two thousand feet to the grasslands of the highveld.
It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. The sun had just risen and was not yet warm enough to lap the dew from the grass, but it was sharp enough to polish the air. I could see the world below me but the world
