Twenty Chickens for a Saddle Read online

  Robyn Scott

  Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

  2008, EN

  When Robyn Scott was six years old her parents abruptly exchanged the tranquil pastures of New Zealand for a converted cowshed in the wilds of Botswana. Once there, Robyn and her siblings, mostly left to amuse themselves, grew up collecting snakes, canoeing with crocodiles and breaking in horses in the veld. In the shadow of one of Africa’s worst AIDS crises, this moving, enchanting memoir is an extraordinary portrait of an unforgettable childhood.

  Table of contents

  1: Grandpa’s Visitors

  2: The Cowshed and the Witch Doctor

  3: Kissing Snakes

  4: Ngaka and MmaNgaka

  5: Schools of Thought

  6: School

  7: Sunbeams and Chameleons

  8: Mum’s Experiment

  9: Shocking Experiences

  10: Grandpa Ivor

  11: Whispers About Lions

  12: The Clinics

  13: Lessons

  14: Living on the Fringe

  15: Christmas

  16: The Whole Family’s Half of An Island

  17: Prizes For the Gifted

  18: The Good Karma of Khama

  19: Fiddian Green

  20: Neighbours

  21: Good Neighbours

  22: School

  23: Lulu and Damien

  24: Mum

  25: Talking About Lions

  26: Elizabeth

  27: Dad

  28: Leaving Limpopo

  Epilogue

  Afrikaans Glossary

  Setswana glossary

  ∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧

  One

  Grandpa’s Visitors

  Above the bush, the pink and orange streaked sky had faded to grey. Inside, it was almost dark, and Grandpa, in his chair beneath the room’s only window, caught the last of the light. He sat completely still, smiling at our confusion.

  His whisper had silenced the conversation. “Look who’s joining us for drinks,” he had said. But nothing had moved. The door remained closed, the cat curled peacefully on the sofa. No new sounds interrupted the soft ring of chirps, rustles, and faraway hunting barks.

  We waited for an explanation. He gave none. His gaze alternated between us and the ceiling; his body remained still. One hand clutched a small glass, full with an equal mixture of red wine and grape juice; the other lay on the armrest, long fingers digging into the worn velvet covers.

  Then a flicker near the ceiling, and a shadowy creature plunged out of the gloom.

  Just above his head, close enough to brush wisps of thin white hair, it stopped – a giant brown moth, suspended with an unsteady flutter. The moth, joined moments later by a second, began a jolting orbit of his head.

  Grandpa gave a satisfied grunt. He lifted his glass and took a small sip. The moths, ignoring him, continued to circle, and just as carefully, he lowered the glass again. He sat motionless, his lips taut and flattened. He hadn’t swallowed, and as his eyes followed the moths, a drop of liquid grew at each corner of his mouth, pausing just before it was full enough to slide down his jaw.

  Suddenly, a dark butterfly shadow eclipsed his cheek: one of the moths, wings flat against his face, long proboscis reaching for a drop. The second moth descended on the opposite cheek. The first flapped away. It was magical and ridiculous: the ghostly, clumsy creatures taking off and settling again; Grandpa, until then so fiercely intimidating, looking like a gentle, badly painted clown.

  He smiled at those dowdy moths as if they were beloved pets; and only when they left, when the last traces of daylight had vanished and a paraffin lamp spluttered to life in the corner of the room, did he return his attention to his audience.

  ♦

  “Nice trick, Ivor,” said Dad, as the moths joined clouds of insects that appeared out of nowhere to dive-bomb the lamp. “But what these kids really want to see are snakes.”

  “Whaddaya say?” Grandpa leaned forwards and cupped his hand behind his ear. His voice was high-pitched and sounded strange coming from such a tall, imposing man. Squeezed between Mum and the cat on the sofa, Damien and I stifled a laugh. Lulu didn’t manage, giggled, and buried her head in Mum’s lap.

  Dad repeated himself.

  “Hard to please, eh?” Grandpa fixed his gaze on each of us, half amused, half accusing. He turned back to Dad.

  “Keith,” said Grandpa, pointing to a frayed brown armchair in the corner of the room. “Show the kids what’s under that chair.”

  Dad raised an eyebrow and smiled, but didn’t enquire further. He stood up and walked slowly towards the chair. “Come on, chaps,” he said, grabbing the armrest, “not suddenly scared are you?”

  We all shook our heads. None of us moved. I didn’t trust myself to speak. Desperate as I was to see snakes, after all Dad’s stories about Grandpa Ivor’s wild, laugh-in-the-face-of-danger life, the prospect of whatever lay beneath that chair in this strange house was suddenly terrifying.

  I turned to Granny Betty, who sat quietly at the end of the long sofa, stroking the cat with a bony hand. An amused smile flickered across her face, but she remained silent.

  “Go on,” said Mum, smiling encouragingly, “Dad and Grandpa Ivor know what they’re doing. This is what you’ve been waiting for.”

  Grandpa glared at us. “Stand behind your father if you’re scared,” he bellowed.

  At least as scared of Grandpa’s disapproval, Lulu, Damien, and I reluctantly slid off the sofa and squatted behind Dad, who, with his legs as far back as possible, leaned forwards and began to pivot the chair slowly sideways.

  Holding our breath, poised to flee, we peered under the rising base.

  A black creature, a little smaller than my hand, crouched statuelike on the concrete floor. At one end were pincers, evil-looking but tiny compared with the fat, hairy tail, sharply pointed at the tip, which curled up and forwards over the wide body. Perfect, regular seams joined shiny black segments of the tail, body, and pincers, making it seem more like an exquisitely made machine than a real animal.

  Dad whistled. “Black hairy thick-tailed scorpion,” he said, emphasizing each word. “If you can’t see a snake on your first day, this is as good as it gets.”

  “Could easily kill one of you chaps,” added Grandpa.

  But the scorpion didn’t seem to be in the mood for killing anyone. It took off with ungraceful speed, scuttling towards the wall, “where it disappeared under a bookcase. Dad offered to try and catch it, but Grandpa said there were so many in the house already that Dad should just ‘leave the little bugger where he is.”

  Botswana is more than two-thirds desert. Selebi – Grandpa’s home and our destination on that first, bewildering day just before Christmas in 1987 – is in the other third, which gets just enough rain to miss out on the glamorous distinction of desert, and much too little to settle the ubiquitous red dust or support any but the hardiest of plants. Except for a few months of the year, that is, when the occasional storm cloud bursts and fat raindrops puff dust into the air and pummel sheets of water that flood the baked ground. In a good rainy season, the dry riverbeds that thread their way east to the Limpopo River might flow. Often they don’t. For nine months of the year, it is hot; for the rest, it is dry.

  There is no time of year when it is not hot or dry.

  A hundred and fifty kilometres from Selebi, the borders of Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe meet at the country’s easternmost tip. Here the Limpopo peels away from Botswana and heads towards the Indian Ocean. Botswana is securely landlocked. At any point in the country you are at least four hundred kilometres from the sea. But making up for the absence of sea and lakes, spilling hundreds
of kilometres across the dry sands in the north, lies the world’s largest inland delta.

  The bush surrounding the exquisite Okavango Delta, the ‘jewel of the Kalahari’, teems with all of Africa’s biggest and most impressive wildlife.

  The bush around Selebi teems with cows, goats, and donkeys. There are few fences, and the animals wander mostly unimpeded across the flat land. They are frequently killed on the roads, hit by local cars or huge trucks passing through on their long journeys between southern and central Africa. The land is overgrazed, and any lions, elephants, and rhinos that weren’t hunted left long ago in search of places with more food and fewer people. Only the small, dangerous animals, like snakes and scorpions, which don’t mind living alongside humans, are left. For by Botswana standards – a country the size of France with fewer than two million people – the region is populous. Cattle posts of five to twenty huts are sprinkled across the bush, and there are several bigger villages, the largest of which have electricity and running water.

  Selebi, which appears on maps as Selebi-Phikwe, consists of just three old houses and several concrete slabs that were once houses. A relic from the early years of the nearby copper and nickel mine, Selebi is the ghost part of town. By the late 1980s, when my parents abruptly decided to return to Botswana – ending a peripatetic decade that had spanned South Africa, England, and New Zealand, and produced three children – Grandpa Ivor and Granny Betty had long been Selebi’s sole residents.

  Phikwe, which lies ten kilometres away, is the real town; home, when we arrived, to around 40,000 people, most who directly or indirectly derived their living from the mine. Among them were Grandpa Terry and Granny Joan, Mum’s parents, who like most Phikwe residents visited the old town only in passing, travelling to or from the little bush airport that, together with the nearby mineshaft and Grandpa Ivor’s house, comprised the only still used part of Selebi.

  The airport had a tall glass control tower, two faded orange windsocks, and a small customs and immigration building. It was here that my brother, sister, and I first set foot in Botswana, unloaded onto the baking tarmac with the eight frozen turkeys that Grandpa Ivor had packed under the seats when he collected us in Johannesburg.

  I was nearly seven, Damien was five, and Lulu was three.

  The air on the runway smacked us like a hot wave.

  Snakes, lions, and every other fantasy vanished. Heat overwhelmed me as I stood, stunned, in the fierce, dry, completely still air. It was unfairly, unbelievably hot, heat like nothing I had ever felt before. Normal thought, in this temperature and blinding light, was suddenly impossible. Mesmerised, I watched shimmering waves float above the dark tar. Beyond the runway fence posts, the flat green scrub seemed frozen behind the wobbling veil of heat. The almost white sky was empty; nothing stirred in the bushes; a few black cows stood motionless, sleeping beside the fence.

  Heat was the only thing moving.

  Mum and Dad seemed unperturbed, smiling and chatting as they hauled bags out of the plane. Lulu, Damien, and I stood, bewildered, sheltering in the shadow of the wing, quietly waiting for instructions. Eventually, with all our suitcases retrieved, we left Grandpa Ivor fiddling with the switches in the cockpit, and Mum and Dad herded us towards the small building beside the control tower.

  Inside, it was breathlessly stuffy and not much cooler. A small fan whirred ineffectively from a stand on the concrete floor in the corner of the room. After an unexplained wait – there was no one else in the queue – a uniformed customs officer instructed Mum and Dad to open all our suitcases on a scratched wooden desk. With a suspicious scowl, he began slowly rummaging through layer after layer of clothes, books, and toys. He looked disappointed each time he reached the bottom of a bag.

  “Why’s he taking so long?” I whined. “What’s he looking for?”

  “Nothing.” Mum squeezed my shoulder.

  “I’m so hot.”

  “Shhh, Robbie,” hissed Dad.

  “Why are you smiling like that?” As soon as the officer had approached us. Mum and Dad’s excited-to-be-back smiles had been replaced by fixed, unconvincing grins.

  Both ignored me and continued to grin wildly at the slow, grumpy officer.

  Then suddenly the officer was grinning too. “Dumela, Mr. Scott,” he said, as Grandpa Ivor, carrying a bulging sack, strode towards the desk.

  As they exchanged greetings in quick, soft Setswana, a puddle spread across the floor beneath the sack of defrosting turkeys. The officer didn’t seem to notice. Still smiling, he turned to Dad. “Ee! The Madala’s son,” he said warmly. “Welcome to Botswana.”

  Ignoring the dripping sack and the unchecked suitcases, he stamped our forms and waved us on. Minutes later, we were outside, uncomfortably installed in the tiny, battered pickup truck that Grandpa called his bakkie. Mum and Lulu sat in the front; Dad, Damien, and I in the back, wedged amongst the bags and seven turkeys. Grandpa kept the last one out. “Christmas spirit,” he said, striding back towards the building, the dripping bird clutched under his arm. He disappeared inside, emerging, empty-handed, almost immediately.

  And one turkey less, we set off to our new home.

  Grandpa’s house was the last and only stop on an overgrown kilometre-long track that wound through a seemingly endless expanse of small grey thornbushes, short, brilliant green mopane trees, and the occasional graceful knob-thorn tree reaching high above its neighbours. Around the house, all but a few of the tallest trees had been cleared, and the little building stood low and dilapidated on the bare red dirt. With nothing to separate the house and the dirt – no flowerbeds, or paving, or gravel – the dust had crept up the walls and formed a foot-high orange band on the whitewashed bricks.

  From a distance, it was hard to see where the house became dirt.

  Everything in the house was falling apart; sofas fraying, bedspreads peppered with holes, kitchen counters chipped. The walls were whitewashed, but layers of dust had settled on the ledges where the bricks hadn’t been properly aligned. Daylight streamed through every window, but, enclosed by the dusty walls and dark concrete floors, every bright room was nonetheless strangely gloomy.

  Dust cloaked and dulled everything: the painting of a sad-looking black lady breastfeeding a baby, a medal hanging on a ribbon, a large black-and-white aerial map. Beneath these – the only interruptions to the otherwise bare lounge walls – an ostrich egg, a china bell with the faces of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, and a tarnished golf trophy decorated the tops of crowded bookshelves. Where they had been shifted slightly, their old positions were precisely remembered by darker, cleaner circles on the wood.

  In Grandpa’s tiny, overflowing study, maps and yellowing hand-drawn charts covered the walls almost entirely. Piles of tattered flight log books, some reaching higher than me, leaned precariously against tall grey filing cabinets. Much-fingered books and magazines jostled for space in every corner. In the centre of the room stood a desk with a pale green typewriter, half covered in a sea of papers, scribbled notes, diagrams, and envelopes.

  Opposite the intriguing chaos of this room, across a dimly lit corridor, was Granny Betty’s study: tidy by comparison, thick with the smell of cigarettes and air freshener, home to a breath-takingly large and unlikely collection. Hundreds of jigsaw-puzzle boxes – big and small, enough to fill the grandest of toyshops – were stacked around the room: atop a dark wardrobe, under a dresser, in an open cupboard. I tried to count them and lost track. The room must have held more than a lifetime’s work.

  Low tables pushed against the walls displayed three almost finished pictures. Gleaming with bright poppies, country cottages, and sunsets, these made colourful, incongruous interruptions to the sombre furnishings. The puzzles varied in the size and shape of their pieces, but each, caught in its state of incompleteness, was curiously similar. In every vast picture, the gaping holes shared the same blue edges, the same loose blue pieces scattered within them.

  “I get so tired of skies.” Granny Betty sighed, frownin
g at one of the blue-rimmed gaps.

  Granny Betty, Grandpa Ivor’s second wife and Dad’s stepmother, sighed as if she were tired of life. Frail, softly spoken, hobbling, she was everything that Grandpa Ivor was not. Even her smile was sad. Only when she laughed, and her face was transformed by shining blue eyes and a wide, white false-teeth grin, did she really look happy.

  After showing us the rooms in the centre of the house, Granny led us out of the back door, passing through a long kitchen, where rubber pipes ran out of an ancient stove, through an oversized hole in the wall, and joined two tall gas cylinders that stood sentry under the window. Outside, a few paces beyond the kitchen door, a rusty freezer sat alone in the middle of the dirt. Its lid was thick with grit, dry leaves, and bird droppings, and a spiky bush had crept halfway up one side.

  Supporting herself against the lid, Granny explained that years ago a spitting cobra had slithered into the maze of pipes at the back of the freezer. When, after several hours, the snake had shown no signs of wanting to come out, Grandpa had dragged the freezer outside. He had never got around to taking it back indoors.

  Grandpa, unabashed, just laughed, “We’re hoping it’ll work by solar power!” he announced, patting the freezer and dislodging a small cloud of dust.

  Granny and Grandpa slept in a converted veranda at the front of the house, the strangest bedroom I had ever seen. At one end of the long narrow room stood Granny and Grandpa’s sagging double bed; at the other, a warped Ping-Pong table, piled high with a jumble of pipes, wood, rolls of plastic, old radios, and unrecognisable machines. Beneath the table, several dusty engines squatted on the concrete floor, crammed tightly beside each other and an assortment of smaller unmemorable objects tossed in amongst them.

  At this, the Ping-Pong table side of the room, casting the chaos in a strange soft light, faded green shade cloth stretched from a three-foot-high wall to just below the eaves. Clearly visible through these gauzy windows, just outside the front of the house, stood a haphazardly packed shed the size of a single garage. In the centre of the shed, surrounded by more engines and more junk, rested a battered old aeroplane fuselage. The wings of the aeroplane had been removed. Suspended by fraying loops of rope, they now hung inside, from the bedroom roof – one above the Ping-Pong table, the other above Granny and Grandpas bed.