Petina Gappah - The Book of Memory

In my tree house at Summer Madness, mercifully far from the swimming pool, I spent long days reading Lloyd and Alexandra’s old books. I captured the castle. I went deep in the sea of adventure. I danced with Markova at Sadler’s Wells, with Drina in Switzerland, and with Posy and Petrova and Pauline. With the Lone Pine Five, I hunted German spies on the Yorkshire Moors.

To Middle-earth and the Secret Garden I went, to the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees. I brought Beth March back from the dead, and instead killed off Amy and married Laurie to Jo.

When it was too wet or cold to go outside, I stayed in the library, a dark, cool room at the back of the house, from which I could hear the burr of the swimming pool engine. In the library, and up in the tree house, I found the happiest and most peaceful moments of my life at that difficult time.

Crippled by fear and longing for home, I was saved by books. The worlds I travelled to allowed me to escape the pain of being uprooted from Mufakose. I had never seen so many books gathered in a single space as I saw in that room. I felt less afraid when I thought of all the other people who seemed to have had harder lives than mine. I disappeared completely to occupy the world of whatever book I was reading.

As I read more and my English improved, I often spent days in Lloyd’s library. I spent hours before the television, watching Flambards , and Flipper , fascinated by adverts for Sunlight and Colgate.

I sometimes cried myself to sleep in the first months with Lloyd. When I did sleep, it was to wake from the terrible dreams in which the Chimera spoke in my mother’s voice. It strikes me now that I was scared of many things in that first year: going to bed, the swimming pool, Alexandra, MaiJethro even, but I was never afraid of Lloyd.

I had thought him very old when I first met him, but I was seeing him through the eyes of a child, to whom all grown people are ancient. In reality, he was just over thirty-five when I came to live with him. If you want a physical description beyond the black-and-white blurs you have seen in the papers, then I would say he was tallish and thin, with ash-blond hair that he wore to his shoulders, and an amused face, as though he had just that minute remembered a joke someone had once told him.

The early years also come to me with the sounds of the eighties. Lloyd and I listened to cassette tapes by Fleetwood Mac and Depeche Mode. I hear ‘Take On Me’, ‘Personal Jesus’, as we drive under the umbrella trees on our approach to Nyanga, to Mutare to stay at La Rochelle, to Matopos to stand on top of the world, and to Mana Pools to track elephants — or at least, for Lloyd and Alan to track the elephants while I read in the tent, or listen to Salt-N-Pepa on my Walkman.

Alan Milhouse often accompanied us on our trips outside the city. He was Lloyd’s best friend. On these trips, he and Lloyd shared a room, while I had my own. Alan was a man of quick enthusiasm; he spoke of the boiler at Lloyd’s cottage in Nyanga with such passion that he might have invented it.

Though Lloyd was far from being a recluse, in the gregarious Umwinsidale set, with its endless round of cocktail parties, braais and sundowners, cricket and tennis and polo parties, he was considered something of a hermit.

Alexandra always tried to introduce him to women. She pulled together an impressive list of divorcees, who all seemed, curiously, to be real estate agents, and single women who were usually farmers’ daughters called Debbie or Shirl, Sheila or Tracey, or jolly-hockey-sticks-type teachers with firm handshakes and Fatal Attraction hair.

Every woman she introduced to Lloyd was perfect, just the one for him; every one of them was clever: Alexandra was never able to distinguish between reading a scholarly work and reading Look and Listen , the TV and radio guide. When Lloyd stopped announcing our monthly visits to the farm, different women appeared, sent by Alexandra on errands that sounded spurious, even to me.

I particularly remember a woman called Avril, who sat too close to Lloyd on the couch, waving thin hands with rings on each finger in his face. She may well have had bells on her toes, too, like the fine lady upon the fine horse at Banbury Cross, but she did not stay long enough to get that comfortable.

All of Alexandra’s efforts were in vain. Lloyd remained Lloyd, aloof and slightly amused, marrying none of the women she thrust upon him. The only adult person in whose company he seemed able to spend great lengths of time was Alan Milhouse. Alan was always friendly to me, but he sometimes disconcerted me by giving me hugs when I least expected them, and by questioning me closely, his eyes searching mine, about how I was, and whether everything was well with me.

I know that I impressed Jimmy when I told her that Summer Madness was a mansion, like the large houses that are the fashion today. You see them in places like Borrowdale Brooke, which is really just a township on steroids, with houses like promontories bloated on brick and concrete.

I did not know until Summer Madness became my home that it was possible to fall in love with a house. It did not happen at once.

What was meant to be a simple farmhouse became a little temple to grace and beauty; all Doric pillars and columns. Along its length runs a veranda. I loved to sit there during a raging storm, as one with the elements but protected from them.

I had no jobs to do, no cleaning, no washing, no Mobhi to tend to and care for. When I was not reading, and when I became used to them, I played with the dogs, first Chocolate, the little dachsie that took to following me everywhere I went and slept on my bed, then, when she died, Mrs Harris, the golden Labrador. In the garden, I dug up toy soldiers that had been forgotten through the decades.

There were no raised voices at Summer Madness, no sudden squalls, no explosions. It did not matter that Lloyd spoke to his sister or her husband, to his gardener and jack-of-all-trades, Biggie, to Liz Warrender or to me: he spoke always in a tone of supreme politeness and wry detachment. Not even in those awful moments after I found him with Zenzo did he ever raise his voice, not even after he came back from those two weeks in the police cell did he shout or yell or look at me with anything like reproach.

He enrolled me at the Convent School in town, where, with four hundred other girls in blue skirts and beige blouses, we made prayers of supplication to the Blessed Mary, Ever Virgin, to pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our deaths. Catholic sisters with heavy shoes and equally heavy names taught me: Sisters Mary Gabriel and Ethelburga, Sisters Hedwig and Hildegarde.

At my new school, my life soon developed its own rhythm. The Dominican Convent was like the world outside, only in miniature. Money got me what a top girls’ school gives: slight arrogance, self-belief. The blue skirt and beige blouse declared me a Convent girl, belonging by right to the upper levels of the school system. The straw boater linked me to the girls who had come before and those who would come after. I assumed a new identity.

It helped that money also bought me good skin, courtesy of a dermatologist. At school, I eventually became just another girl in a blue dress, and when I entered the secondary, another girl in a blue skirt and white blouse. In time I gained the confidence that comes with any expensive private education.

More than anything else, I felt an incredible sense of freedom: not from want but from scrutiny. I had not yet found home, but I found a place where I could belong.