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A Burning Issue

This is the tale of a baby, a book and a candle. The setting is the Sudan, the baby is our first-born, two-month-old Natasha, and the book is a great twentieth-century Italian novel. As for the candle . . .

One may as well begin with the baby.

Natasha Su-ming Sakina Plowright was born on 22 February 1966 in Omdurman, a stone’s throw from the Mahdi’s tomb, to my wife Poh Sim and me. She weighed 8lbs 6oz and was bright blue. Her nearest neighbour in the nun-run hospital was a Greek grocer’s baby weighing in at over 10lbs. We carried ours home in triumph and a Moses basket to our eccentric, edge-of-desert house, set in a garden full of mongooses.

I was working in the Sudan for the British Council, and Poh Sim, born in Malaya, had interrupted her M.Phil. on John Ford – the playwright, not the movie-maker – to join me. We’d been married eighteen months. Her reading taste was far wider and deeper than mine and among the writers she introduced me to were W. B. Yeats, whom I’d never read, and the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, whom I’d never heard of. The novel that really spoke to her was his last, La Luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires), written in 1949. It’s a powerful tale of the return of an Italian American who’s made good to the remote Italian village where he grew up before the Second World War. You never know the narrator’s name but you get to know everybody else in that small place intimately, particularly his old friend Nuto, a Zorba-like figure, exemplifying courage and freethinking in the otherwise narrow and cruel society they’ve both grown up in. Gradually, terrible events unfold, and always there’s that sense of the secret which, for me, marks out great fiction. Italo Cal

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This is the tale of a baby, a book and a candle. The setting is the Sudan, the baby is our first-born, two-month-old Natasha, and the book is a great twentieth-century Italian novel. As for the candle . . .

One may as well begin with the baby.

Natasha Su-ming Sakina Plowright was born on 22 February 1966 in Omdurman, a stone’s throw from the Mahdi’s tomb, to my wife Poh Sim and me. She weighed 8lbs 6oz and was bright blue. Her nearest neighbour in the nun-run hospital was a Greek grocer’s baby weighing in at over 10lbs. We carried ours home in triumph and a Moses basket to our eccentric, edge-of-desert house, set in a garden full of mongooses. I was working in the Sudan for the British Council, and Poh Sim, born in Malaya, had interrupted her M.Phil. on John Ford – the playwright, not the movie-maker – to join me. We’d been married eighteen months. Her reading taste was far wider and deeper than mine and among the writers she introduced me to were W. B. Yeats, whom I’d never read, and the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, whom I’d never heard of. The novel that really spoke to her was his last, La Luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires), written in 1949. It’s a powerful tale of the return of an Italian American who’s made good to the remote Italian village where he grew up before the Second World War. You never know the narrator’s name but you get to know everybody else in that small place intimately, particularly his old friend Nuto, a Zorba-like figure, exemplifying courage and freethinking in the otherwise narrow and cruel society they’ve both grown up in. Gradually, terrible events unfold, and always there’s that sense of the secret which, for me, marks out great fiction. Italo Calvino expressed this perfectly when he wrote: ‘Each one of Pavese’s novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say and which can be expressed only by not mentioning it.’ What gives this one an extra punch is something Pavese definitely didn’t mention: that he was at the end of his tether after a broken love affair and had already stockpiled the sleeping pills with which he would kill himself five months after finishing the novel. Poh Sim had been telling me about The Moon and the Bonfires shortly before Natasha was born and I wanted to read it. But she’d left her copy in Kuala Lumpur and there were none in the bookshops of Khartoum. And then at some embassy do I sat next to the learned, and – as it turned out – fastidious, wife of a Second Secretary and we got talking about books. Yes of course she’d read Pavese and actually she had a copy of The M&Bs sitting on her bookshelves only a few streets away. Could I . . . ? I could, provided I was immensely careful with it and returned it promptly. We might even have an in-depth discussion one evening. So the next day I brought it home, a slim paperback, with a bright red moon and a golden bonfire on the front cover. And began to read. And was hooked. And then Natasha arrived. She was a restive baby and we had no idea what to do about it or how to keep her cool at night. We tried putting her on the veranda just outside our open-shuttered window with wire netting round her. Because of the mongooses that sometimes ate more than snakes. But she didn’t like it there so we brought her cot inside, next to our bed, under the water-cooler and that was better. Provided we didn’t switch any lights on. And this is where the candle comes in. Natasha seemed to find candlelight soothing and I liked reading by it, just before I fell asleep. I must have got about halfway through Pavese’s masterpiece when, one particularly hot evening, Poh Sim and Natasha asleep beside me, I joined them, the book still in my hand and the bedside candle still burning. I don’t know who woke first, but it was to a small conflagration. The flame had caught the book which had fallen to the floor, the moon was being devoured by the bonfire, and the edges of the rush bedside mat had caught fire. We leapt out of bed, stamped on the candle, book and mat, and put the fire out before, amazingly, Natasha woke. The humans were safe but literature wasn’t. And what to do about the wife of the Second Secretary who would not, we thought, be amused. A plan was hatched: a London pianist was due to give a concert in Khartoum in a month’s time under the auspices of the British Council. If we could track down a copy of the same edition of the Pavese in Foyles – was it still in print? – and get it to the pianist whom I vaguely knew, he could bring it with him, sandwiched between music scores and cigars, and we could gently hand it over as if it were the ‘original’. Luckily there had been no signature or Ex Libris in that, and it had been in pristine condition. Well, a copy was found, the pianist was willing – all seemed well. But then the enquiries began. She’d very much like the book back as she needed to refer to it urgently. Surely I must have finished it. Give me another week, I said. She did. Well, could she have it? It’s somewhere in the house, I said – you know how untidy we are. Just give me a few more days. She did. Well, had we found it? Not quite, I said. Well it must be somewhere, she said, I’ll come over and look myself. Better not, I said, Natasha is still very wary of strangers and. . . Oh for heaven’s sake, she said. And then, by God or embassy duties she was distracted, and the pianist flew in, the concert was a success, and the book was handed over. I did eventually tell the Embassy wife: to her great credit she laughed, and we remained friends. But I never finished The Moon and the Bonfires. Until the other day when I found a new translation in our local bookshop. Another paperback with a haunting close-up photo on the front of children in shadow behind a crackling bonfire. I went back to the beginning and was spellbound as before. But this time – I was 28 then, I’m 80 now – it seemed much less a piece of history. The fascism that Pavese wrote about has returned to Italy, and hostility to those outside the local community is back with a vengeance. And the meaning of that moon and those bonfires has changed – dangerously so. And, by the way, if you’re worried about the baby, she stopped being blue after a few hours, has grown up wonderfully, and loves books.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 62 © Piers Plowright 2019


About the contributor

After the British Council, Piers Plowright worked for BBC Radio and Poh Sim taught at Royal Holloway College. Natasha is now Head of Communications at the Photographers’ Gallery in London.

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