Sugar Dreams

Even if the south-eastern seaboard of Africa has never been a Bloomsbury, it has had its moments. Angus Wilson’s mother was a Durban girl, and Fernando Pessoa spent his schooldays there. But given the few exceptions, that littoral has hardly been bookish. Among the 250-strong community in which I grew up, all but about thirty were Zulu-speaking workers and their families, many of whom were illiterate. Of the remainder, most were Indian tractor drivers and mechanics and their wives and children, who spoke Tamil and Telugu by choice. That left only a handful of us who had English as our mother tongue. And that linguistic ratio was repeated across much of the surrounding countryside.

I presume to know this because my parents owned a sugar plantation among the rolling hills of the Natal coast. Unlike the farms that sweltered on the flatlands beside the sea, ours was on a slight escarpment ten miles inland, at the lowest altitude where mist can survive before it is combusted by the humidity and the heat. Looking eastwards from our rambling bungalow, one could see the Indian Ocean in the distance, across an uneven trough of sugarcane whose multitude of swaying stalks had a compelling, even hypnotic, motion. Several miles to the north was the Doornkop sugar mill, to which we carted our cane. In the early evenings, as the tractors gunned homewards down the green corridors, I remember its hooter echoing up through the valley in a clear, clean sound that seemed to punctuate my parents’ sundowner ritual on the veranda. The clink of ice against crystal and the hush of the soda siphon, and the periodic toots of the hooter, seemed to me, as a child, to be just night sounds, like the chatter of monkeys or the cry of a bushbaby. After supper, in that pre-television era, my parents and I would read, each bathed in the glow of a standard lamp. My mother’s fare was the family sagas of John Galsworthy and R. F. Delderfield and Winston Graham, while my father navigated the historical byways of Robert Graves and John Bagot Glubb. At some point in those early years he joined the Folio Society and I remember, still with a frisson, the arrival of those elegant volumes in their cardboard slipcases: Saki’s short stories, Goodbye to All That, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of HMS Bounty. Before my departure to boarding school, the rhythm of my reading was set by the weekly arrival of my Hotspur magazine. How the magazine navigated its way to me, I realize now, was a remarkable feat of endurance and ingenuity. Printed somewhere in England, it was ferried down the Atlantic in the belly of a mail-ship that rounded the Cape and ploughed onwards to Durban, whence it was lugged up the coast by train. At Stanger, our nearest town, it was packed into our estate’s leather postbag, before being loaded on to a bus headed inland to deeply rural areas like Otimati and Maphumulo. Once the aged Bedford or Leyland had grumbled up a gradient named Mount Albert, it paused at a T-junction beside a plantation of bananas. While it jettisoned passengers, with their boxes and their chickens, the conductor would toss the bag to one of our gardeners, who strapped the precious cargo to the crossbar of his bicycle, where it hung like a dewlap as he retraced his route homewards through the cane. No later than two o’clock in the afternoon the bag would appear on a counter in the kitchen where I would unlock it excitedly and then devour the stories and comic-strips while the sun beat down on the corrugated-iron roof and the cicadas shrilled in the trees outside. After the pages had been picked clean, I would return to the more substantial diet that was then providing me with the foundations of a lifetime of reading. Greater than the Tiger and Lion annuals, and Enid Blyton, were the usual classics enjoyed by English children, albeit in my case at one degree removed: The Wind in the Willows; Winnie the Pooh; Three Men in a Boat; England, Their England. But pride of place must go to Kipling, not only because of my family’s imperial antecedents but because of his genius. Fragments of the Just So Stories and the Jungle Book have so embedded themselves in my consciousness that I carry them with me still. This bond was strengthened a decade later when I was a schoolboy at Haileybury, for in a glass case in the vaulted gloom of the library was the original manuscript of Stalky and Co.: spidery, inky and crisscrossed with doodles. And six years later still, during my national service in the South African Army, I was reminded of him again when I found myself in a camp on the country’s northern border. Beyond the sandbagged redoubt lay the Limpopo, and despite the intrusive sandbanks and the channels of limpid water, I could see the great, grey-green greasiness of the imagined river that many years earlier had become my truth. But back then on the farm, of all Kipling’s works ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ had the greatest resonance. Much of its power lay in the way it replicated life in a hot climate where a heightened sense of danger, both real and illusory, overlays the fact of existence. Mongooses like Rikki-Tikki were abundant: they haunted our garden and the cane, and the bush that hugged the watercourses dividing the fields. Even when they tested our patience by stealing a chicken or a bantam, they were forgiven, for the simple reason that they killed snakes. For we had cobras too, and mambas, one of which so dominated a corner of our garden that gardeners refused to work in its vicinity. During the swelter of summer, all but the foolhardy ventured outdoors warily. But even inside it wasn’t necessarily safe: years earlier, in Rhodesia, while heavily pregnant, my mother had stumbled on a cobra in the bathroom and had fallen badly, losing the elder sibling that I never had. If mongooses and snakes were the most dramatic comparisons between Kipling’s Indian world and my African one, there were others. Darzee, the tailor-bird, and Chuchundra, the musk rat, have their African cousins. And in the heat and the essential foreignness of cultures like Teddy’s and mine there resonated a restless dichotomy that made the Segowlee cantonment very similar to our Natal bungalow and garden in their clearing in the cane. Several miles beyond the Doornkop mill, where the sugar fields gave way to the thorn trees of the Tugela valley, was a cairn that marked a long-forgotten skirmish in a long-forgotten conflict. The centenary of the Bambatha Rebellion three years ago regenerated its legacy locally, but to the world at large such a small uprising by a segment of the Zulu people against the colonial authorities is of no real interest, even if its ingredients of oppression and fear are as relevant today as ever. The skirmish that the cairn commemorated was called ‘Macrae’s Store’ after a trading post of that name nearby. One evening in mid-1906 a column of troops was ambushed there by an impi of rebels. A dog barked before the trap was sprung, so saving the colonists, who killed forty rebels with only one loss to themselves. For me as a child it was exciting to imagine the chants of the warriors and the crackle of gunfire; but there was also, as I discovered later, a tenuous literary connection. The commander of the colonial column was Major Sam Campbell, a prominent Durban doctor who had answered the call to arms. But notably too, he had a further accomplishment: he was father of the more famous Roy. And even further northwards from our house, past the sugar mill, and the skirmish memorial, and across the hills of Zululand, is Entumeni where a young William Plomer helped his father in a trading store in the 1920s. It was there, writing rapidly by torchlight in the evenings, using a hard pencil on thin paper, that he wrote Turbot Wolfe, his thrilling debut. That he lampooned his bigoted neighbours and celebrated the dignity of the country people was indication enough that he would soon move on, which he did, to London, and the life of a writer and literary midwife, bringing James Bond, among others, into the world. Before he left Natal, Plomer famously collaborated with Roy Campbell and a young Durban journalist named Laurens van der Post on a short-lived satirical magazine called Voorslag (‘whiplash’ in Afrikaans). Congregated in a cottage overlooking the sea at Sezela, on the coast south of Durban, they lived for a year like bohemians before the project foundered. Seventy years later, I visited Campbell’s daughter Teresa, then an elderly woman living impecuniously in a pension in Sintra. From that fairytale hamlet in the hills above Lisbon, so beloved of Byron and Southey and Hans Christian Andersen, she showed me the house nearby at Galamares where her parents had lived, and their grave in the cemetery of Sao Pedro. While her memories of Natal had faded, I recollected that van der Post had written of a night at Sezela when Campbell, accompanied by his friends, and with Teresa as an infant in his arms, had strode along the beach in the moonlight, declaiming his poem ‘Tristan da Cunha’ to the crashing and booming waves:

Snore in the foam; the night is vast and blind; The blanket of the mist about your shoulders, Sleep your old sleep of rock, snore in the wind, Snore in the spray! The storm your slumber lulls, His wings are folded on your nest of boulders As on their eggs the grey wings of your gulls . . .

In the late 1970s, weighed down by the uncertainties of Africa, my parents sold the farm and emigrated to the Isle of Man. There, blasted by chilly winds and clasped by the clamminess of a cold sea, they attempted to establish a bridgehead, but the siren-call of Africa was too beguiling and several years later they trekked southwards again. While this was happening I was studying Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College, Dublin, deciphering the codes of another caste that had been overrun by history. For why else would a white youth from Africa have taken himself on pilgrimages to Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee and Drumcliff and Coole and Lissadell, and to the imprint of Bowen’s Court in the lee of the Ballyhouras, if not to seek an Atlantis that had long sunk beneath the waves? And why else nowadays would a middle-aged man find The Maneaters of Kumaon and Woodbrook and Lord Jim so compelling if the world that speaks to him is not a mythical one? Further, why does a volume of Camus’s essays, with its elegiac memories of the beach at Tipasa, where the gods speak in the scent of absinthe leaves and flower-covered ruins, and where at certain hours the countryside is black with sunlight, accompany me everywhere? I think I know the answer: because in some landscape of the soul it is on a gentle escarpment among sugar fields, with the blueness of an ocean glittering in the distance, that my story began.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © John Conyngham 2009