Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

The cock starts crowing early on Leonard’s farm, around five-thirty, but it isn’t this that wakes me the next morning but the tap, tap of Leonard working on his typewriter in his study next door. Sitting down to a breakfast of fried eggs and toast, Leonard hands me a slip of paper across the table that explains his early activity. It is the schedule for my stay with him, meticulously typed out and numbered, day by day:

FARM;— 16⁄54; Maronda mashanu S.S.C. F:–

Our Valuable Mr. Owen Sheers; Programme;–

Tuesday: 23rd November, 1999:–

Visit: Cripps’ Shrine: 9. A.M.—

Wednesday: 24th November; 1999:–

Mass at Maronda Mashanu Church near School, 9: 30 am –

Visit All Saints Wreningham; Acompanied by Subdeacon M.M. Maranyika and Others.

Thursday: 25th November, 1999:–

Leave for: Masvingo

Thank you:

L.M.T. Mamvura.

After breakfast five of us leave Leonard’s to walk to your grave at the old Maronda Mashanu church, taking the road I walked yesterday away from Chivhu. I walk with Leonard, who is wearing a pin-stripe suit jacket over his jumper and cardigan and a dark felt trilby-type hat. He walks with a stick, which he swings out in front of him at every step. On my other side is Horatio, wearing a woollen hat and a woollen jumper with a pattern of knickerbocker glories repeated over it. He walks with his hands behind his back, asking me about life in Britain. He wants to know what we ask for there: do we ask God for rain? No, I tell him, where I come from there is no need to ask, the rain just happens. Horatio’s wife, Faith, and Leonard’s cousin walk behind us, carrying a selection of waterproofs and bright umbrellas in case the rain happens again here. However much I try to slow down or wait for them the women always remain a few steps behind us. The morning is cool, but warming up quickly. A school bus passes us, and Leonard waves to the children packed in its open windows. Horatio kicks at some damba shells left on the road by baboons, who have cracked them open to scoop out their insides.

Your church lies off the road, down a narrow track through bush trees and a cluster of euphorbia. As Leonard pushes through the branches with his stick I feel a mounting sense of anticipation. My relationship with you started a long way away, in books and libraries in Britain. Then you inhabited me, the idea of you, incongruous and foreign to my surroundings while I worked in London. Travelling on the underground, driving to work on a breakfast TV show at four in the morning through the city’s lamp-lit streets, you were always there somewhere. And now I have come to find you at last, in the patch of Africa you made your home for fifty years.

The ruins of your church stand in the middle of a clearing at the base of a small tree-covered kopje. They have been halted mid-disintegration, their stone walls held together with new cement, so they stand at head height, one large rough stone circle leading into another, smaller circle. I recognise its shape from the photographs I saw in Oxford, even though the precariously sloping thatched roofs have long disappeared. I follow Leonard into the clearing, past a tiny ron-davel which must have been yours and into the church, through a gap in the larger stone circle. The remains of three rough pillars rise from the soil, like menhirs or standing stones, and then past these, there is you. A neat, smooth-bordered rectangle sculpted from the soil with a simple white cross at its head and bright blue plastic flowers in clay pots settled in its red earth. I stand above it and imagine you there, a long key in the lock of tin’s grave.

Above the grave there is a concrete canopy, peeling a confetti of white paint. Horatio tells me this was built because the rain never fell on you, so when you were buried here, the rain stopped and the country suffered a drought. They built this canopy shelter so you would bring the rains. He swears that as the last pole supporting the canopy was made secure in the ground, the rain came and didn’t stop for three days until the ground had recovered from its thirst.

Leonard and Horatio leave me alone with you for a couple of minutes, but Leonard is soon back, anxious to show me the rest of the area. From the church we go into your rondavel, which has been preserved, complete with its conical thatched roof. Inside the floor is smooth, a mixture of polished mud and cow dung. I feel the walls and remember a line from one of your letters about helping the Matabele workers build the school at Wreningham: ‘ Slapping sloppy masses of wet earth on a wall made of rough timber israther agreeable .’ Leonard stands against the wall opposite me and a dappling of sunlight falls across his face from the hole at the top of the roof. He points to it and explains that you always left a hole in the roofs of your buildings so the birds could fly in and out of your churches and your huts. He goes on to describe what was in this rondavel when you lived here. Your mattress, a large trunk stuffed with your letters and your books, a wooden cross and a picture of your mother propped in the one slit window. Nothing else. I look at the floor and try to imagine you here. The rondavel is tiny, and a tall man like you could probably touch both sides of it when lying down. I wonder how you coped in here after the openness and freedom of the veld.

Leonard continues to guide me through the physical landscape of your life. He shows me the patch of ground where you grew your own pipe tobacco, the river in which you baptised him and hundreds of others, and the place on top of the kopje where you came to meditate. Then, looking very serious, he says we must have lunch, and we leave your church and your grave and walk back up the road to his farm. On the way back I am quiet, thinking about what happened when I was alone at your grave. While I was there I found myself speaking to you. I hadn’t expected to, and thinking about it now as we walk back to Leonard’s I realise that this speaking was perhaps a form of prayer. I can hardly remember the last time I prayed in earnest. I think probably when I was sixteen and my grandfather lay downstairs, dying. Since then the idea of it seemed redundant, a childish fancy, but now I had found myself praying again. It is what I did when faced with your grave, above anything else. Speak to you, ask you questions and listen to the silence of your reply.

♦

Over the course of that afternoon and the following day Leonard guided me through what remained of you here in Mashonaland, the physical and the metaphysical. I visited your school in Maronda Mashanu where the children filed out into the central square to line up under a huge baobab tree, singing as they marched ‘We walk in the light of God’. Leonard was tired by now, so he left Moses and Horatio to accompany me to your other school beneath the two huge gum trees of Wreningham, waving us off from the gate of his homestead. As soon as we were out of sight a change came over the two men, like schoolboys away from the teacher. Moses asked me about women in Britain and Horatio about my job. After half an hour walking along the road we stopped at a beer hall, a bare concrete building with faded Coca Cola signs painted on it. Inside was a crude bar, stacks of Scud beers and crates of Castle Lager. Moses and Horatio bought a couple of bottles each, opening one with their teeth and stuffing the other one in their pockets, giving me a wink as they did. At the school hundreds of children stared at me cautiously before rushing up as one to shake my hand and ask ‘ Makadini?

On the Wednesday morning a mass was held at the new church in Maronda Mashanu. I walked there with Leonard while Sabethiel went on ahead of us with a canvas bag of altar objects clanking over his shoulder and his too-big Wellingtons slapping against his shins as he ran across the fields.