Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

The next day I visit Laci and Pelline’s son, Miki, on his own nearby farm. Like most men his age Miki was conscripted to fight in the War of Independence. There is a framed photo of him in his parents’ house, in uniform, his blond hair curling from under a beret, leaning against the armoured plate of a Humvi. Now though, he is a farmer like his father, and a keen polo player and race horse owner. He shows me a video of his winning mare, a 15.2 bay, galloping from the pack in the last furlong to cross the line, ridden by his favourite piccaninny jockey. Taking me outside into the garden he points out features of his house in relation to races won. The pool — the Gold Cup; the extension — the Jockey Club steeplechase; the new stables — the season’s opening meet at Borrodale. He is amiable, popular with his workers and possessed of the easy physical sturdiness of many white Zimbab-wean men. A sense of Africa in the blood, of an outdoor life. A heritage of being obeyed and making your own world from what you find in front of you. After a game of tennis (Miki wins, playing like a farmer, bare-chested, holding the racket like an axe and chopping at the ball) I ask him about the land disputes. He nods his head. He has already told me that in principle yes, some of the land should be redistributed, but it is a matter of how and to whom. He also points out that three quarters of the whites’ farms were bought after independence, and that no one complained then.

‘It’s a problem,’ he says. ‘The last lot went straight to Mugabe’s cronies, and then they did nothing with them. The farms are still there, just wasting, isn’t it? And those bloody war veterans. I’m telling you, most of them weren’t even born when that war happened. But there has been no serious trouble yet.’ He pauses, watching his kids splashing in the pool. ‘Some guy was badly beaten a few farms away, but I think he was British Intelligence. No one has tried anything here.’

Like his father, who came to Zimbabwe with nothing, I feel Miki would not take kindly to anyone who did try something. Both, I sense, would defend their farms to the end, and if necessary, with their lives. As I drive Miki’s old pick — up back down the shaky road to his parents’ farm, it is this that worries me. This potential for violence, seeded under the soil, planted in the very land that gives this country both its strength and its identity.

I drive through the farm’s boundary fence, its wire sitting neatly along a straight line; lush green lawn on this side, African dust veld on the other. As I do, I pass from Miki’s world of swimming pools, stables and sprinklers into the world of the workers’ rondavels: goats tethered to poles, chickens shaking themselves into the earth. Children wave from the side of the road, laughing at the strange white man driving their fathers’ boss’s car.

The Marondera Hotel is waking to business: green-boiler-suited gardeners watering the pot plants, receptionists and waiters arriving in commuter taxis that unload their passengers, turn on full lock and sputter off back into town, trailing clouds of dust in their wake. Canon Holderness told me down the crackling line of my hired mobile that he would meet me here at 9.30 AM He arrives exactly on time, pulling up in front of the hotel in a long beige 19605 Chevrolet Coupe’ and looking small behind its large, thin steering wheel. I pick up my bag and walk towards the car as he opens the driver’s door to get out and greet me. He is old, but looks much younger than his ninety years. A half-crown of white hair about his bald, freckled head, a straight nose, full cheeks and lively eyes. He wears a pair of sky blue shorts and a matching safari shirt. The shorts fall to just above the knee but his legs are barely exposed. A pair of thick white woollen socks are pulled up his shins, folded neatly at the top, leaving just his knee caps on show, like the tops of two bald heads.

He extends his hand, ‘Owen Sheers? Hello, Richard Holderness. Please, get in. We’ll go to my place. Do you like Coke?’

♦

‘Oh, he was too much for most of the white Rhodesians, for the average church-goer. They didn’t understand him. But I thought I must find out the secret of this chap, because the influence he had on the people on the mission was so profound. They were the best genuine Christians I had ever met. So I think I wrote to him and said may I come and visit you, and he said you’re very welcome. So, I went alone, I left my wife at the mission and drove across to Enkeldoorn. When I got there he was living in a hut, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Well, when I arrived he pulled his mattress out and put it under a tree for me to sleep on and he slept on the floor. I stayed there several days and I like sleeping under a tree so we enjoyed that. He used to walk into Enkeldoorn to get his post, which was about an eight-mile walk, and I would walk with him. And blow me, trying to keep up with him walking was something!’

I am sitting in Richard Holderness’s front room, drinking a glass of Coke while he talks about his memories of you. His voice is steady but high, cracked at the edges by age. The room is filled with books, boxes of papers and photographs of his family. There is one of his grandson, recently killed by a crocodile while on a canoeing trip.

Like Betty Finn a few weeks before, Richard has also been telling me about his own life in the country. Also like Betty, he too fell in love with a poet, falling in love with her poem before he had even met her. It was published in the Rhodes University student magazine when she was twenty. Knowing it by heart, he recites it to me;

How narrow is my faith if I should dream

of easy virtue and the world’s esteem

of flights of joy without the vales of sorrow

thinking no trial will test my faith tomorrow.

In such a soft, rewarded life as that

where would we build the men we marvel at?

Wherein would virtue lie? What be our goal?

How would love prove itself or lift the soul?

When he did met the poet who wrote the poem, a young girl called Lockie, he married her, his twenty-year-old college sweetheart, and they lived at missions together throughout the country ever since. From the day they were married they were hardly ever apart he tells me. When they retired they built a retreat in the mountains at Bonda and lived there together, in the clear air, among the mountain streams. And then, some years ago now, she died and Richard came here, to the Borrodale Trust: a community of bungalows, neat lawns, high walls and an automatic barrier at the exit and the entrance.

At first, when he talks about his wife, he is excited, often saying ‘we’ when he means T, as if with her he, alone, no longer existed. But then, as he talks of the later years his voice slows and he grows thoughtful. Like Betty Finn he assures me that love, a true love, does not fade, but grows. He stands up from his armchair and leads me into his bedroom where he takes down a book from the bookshelf. It is a copy of C.S. Lewis’s poetry. Without saying anything he opens the book, which falls apart at an often-opened page. He reads the poem there, aloud:

Joys that Sting

Oh doe not die , says Donne, for I shall hate

All women so . How false the sentence rings.

Women? But in a life made desolate

It is the joys once shared that have the stings.

To take the old walks alone, or not at all,

To order one pint where I ordered two,

To think of, and then not to make, the small

Time-honoured joke (senseless to all but you);

To laugh (oh, one’ll laugh), to talk upon

Themes that we talked upon when you were there,

To make some poor pretence of going on,

Be kind to one’s old friends, and seem to care,