Twenty Chickens for a Saddle Page 44

  Every two weeks, for eight years, Mum had crossed the Limpopo to go shopping in South Africa. When she returned, the bakkie would be overflowing. Boxes of fruit, sacks of vegetables, and bags of legumes and whole wheat flour fought for space with medicines, fencing wire, bricks, tiles, paint, pump parts, water pipes, horse feed, and generally one or two indigenous saplings – including, once, several fever trees, Acacia xanthophloea, which we’d planted in the garden: homage to our old love of Rudyard Kipling and his vision of a ‘Great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’.

  Fewer and less varied loads could provoke hours of searching delays at customs for other people. But everyone knew Mum, and most of the customs officials were patients of Dad’s. After updating her on their latest ailments, and thanking her for her standard gift of a newspaper, they’d mostly wave her on with no more than a cursory glance at the form and the bakkie. After particularly tedious shopping trips, and if she had an innocuous load, sometimes Mum would amuse herself by testing the familiarity. Over the years she’d successfully entered Botswana as ‘brick-layer’, ‘tile-grouter’, ‘homeopath’, and ‘Secretary of the Limpopo Agricultural Association’.

  This time, in 2002, the year we sold the farm, she settled for the standard ‘housewife’. She was returning to the farm from what would be her final trip to England before Botswana was no longer home.

  “Mma Scott, what are these?”

  The customs official stared curiously at the five yellow plastic pots in the back of the bakkie. Bright cloth circles, tied down around the rim in the style of a homemade jam jar, covered the tops of the grapefruit-size vases.

  Mum had hoped the vases would go unnoticed, as they had when her flight back from England had arrived in Johannesburg.

  Afive-h our drive later, standing at the border post to Botswana, she decided the truth was as good as any explanation.

  “They’re peace vases,” she said quickly. “They’ve been blessed by great spiritual masters from Tibet. I’m going to help bury them in special places around Botswana. Every country in the world is getting some. They’re intended to help protect the land and the environment, and discourage war and disease. They just contain herbs and ground-up stones.”

  The customs official nodded understandingly, took his newspaper, and waved her back through into Botswana.

  Rooted in ancient Tibetan tradition, the peace vases Mum carried from England had been created in 1991 – she had five of more than six thousand vases destined for worldwide distribution. The pots were to be buried in sacred or important locations in every country, with a particular intent to help war-torn, environmentally devastated, and famine- and disease-ridden places around the world. One of Mum’s old Oxford friends, Christine Whaite, was involved in the distribution in England and Ireland – there was a pot for Westminster, and a pot for Stormont Castle in Northern Ireland, handed over by the Dalai Lama himself.

  Asked, when she was staying with Christine, to help with the Botswana distribution, Mum had agreed at once, and as soon as she’d brought the pots to Botswana, a peace vase burial party was arranged.

  The six-man, two-four-by-four team that embarked on the trip around Botswana consisted of Alec Campbell, a world expert on the Baswara and their rock art; Alec’s wife, Judy; Alec’s son Niall, an expert on traditional medicine and healing (a white sangoma); Robyn Sheldon, the only Buddhist, then training to be a midwife; Christine Sievers (Jonathan Scott’s wife), an archaeobotanist then specialising in seed-analysis of Stone Age sites; Nomsa Mbere, a dentist training to be a lawyer, and then girlfriend of Ian Khama. And Mum.

  For five days the odd party drove across the country, camping beside and burying the small yellow vases in some of Botswana’s most splendid, sacred places. They began in Gaborone, placing the first vase at the top of Kgale Hill, which towers over the capital city. Driving five hours northeast, they buried the next at Nyangabgwe Hill, near Francistown, at a point near the summit where fraught Zimbabwe was clearly visible. Then they travelled two days northwest through Nata and past the great salt pans. Passing around the western panhandle of the Okavango Delta, they headed further west and buried the third pot in the beautiful Tsodilo Hills, in a sacred rainmaking site. The fourth was laid in the Okwa Valley, traced thousands of years ago by a now-dry ancient river. The fifth pot was to be placed later, but by then Mum would have left Botswana.

  …Whatever one believes, Robbie, or doesn’t believe, these pots, and their intent, are a powerful symbol of what’s needed on the planet, and especially on this continent. On a lighter note, and before you accuse me of being too sentimental, what a pity you’re not still at the Convent – imagine what a back-to-school story this would have made – your mother, driving around Botswana burying sacred Buddhist pots…

  In early 2004, staying up late into the night because of the time zones, Mum phoned Lulu, Damien, and me. Lulu was at Auckland University, starting her psychology and languages degree. Damien was in Australia, in the middle of a psychology and physics degree at Sydney University. I was working in London, having recently finished my first degree in bioinfor-matics in Auckland. Dad was on a cruise ship near Alaska, in the middle of a three-month stint as ship’s doctor.

  Mum had to e-mail Dad the news that Grandpa Ivor had died.

  None of us could reach Botswana in time for the funeral. Grandpa had arranged with one of his good Indian friends to be cremated Hindu style, and the cremation had to begin before sunset on the day he died.

  Henry had been there when Grandpa died, in his sleep, just after one o’clock in the morning, lying on the bed in the old house. Jonathan arrived later in the day, and the two boys went to the funeral parlour to collect the body. Granny Betty, who was then barely able to walk and unable to move from the house, stayed behind, wreathed in cigarette smoke, in the company of her cat, the two fat dogs, the woman who was caring for her, and Ruth, who had moved back home to Selebi to work for Granny and Grandpa.

  The funeral parlour was a large warehouse, near a bottle store in the industrial area in Phikwe. The roof was corrugated iron, and inside it was sweltering. As they walked past a display room of gaudy coffins, Jonathan and Henry silently gave thanks Grandpa had not died at the height of summer.

  Mma Mosikare, the funeral proprietor, reminisced fondly about Grandpa. “I knew him well,” she said respectfully. “He used to fly bodies back to Zimbabwe and South Africa.”

  She pulled Grandpa out of the fridge. He ‘was naked but for a linen cloth wrapped around his thin hips. Jonathan and Henry put on rubber gloves and surgical gowns and washed his face, the top of his body, and his lower legs, blackened by the melanoma that, two years after his diagnosis, had killed him.

  Then they chose a coffin, which Mma Mosikare had kindly agreed to lend – given that it was a cremation that would not involve the coffin, and because Grandpa was an old friend.

  She offered a choice of any of the coffins on display, from the elaborately gilded and adorned to the simple pine boxes. Limited by Grandpa’s height, Henry and Jonathan selected a mahogany-veneered box with a split lid and a white satin lining. They lifted the body into the coffin and closed the lid over the lower half. The upper half wouldn’t close, which they realised after a few minutes was due to a raised headrest, operated by a crank mechanism.

  The crank, however, was stuck. Mma Mosikare’s assistant fetched a hammer and banged away at the mechanism beside Grandpa’s face. His head gradually sank, suffering only minor bumps from the hammer. When the body still wouldn’t fit, it became clear it was simply too long for the coffin. Henry removed the satin headrest altogether, and Grandpa’s head finally sank below the lid.

  But Grandpa’s mouth was now lolling open. Henry and Jonathan each tried closing it. Each time, it immediately reopened. Knowing he would be displayed on the pyre, they tried again, and still the mouth remained resolutely open.

  Later, when I heard the story, I smiled as I imagined Grandpa, determined to shout all the w
ay to his smoky grave in the sky.

  But this was not to be. Mma Mosikare spoke to her assistant, who fetched a small tube of Super Glue. “This will fix it,” she said matter-of-factly. She handed over the tube, which Henry and Jonathan reluctantly squeezed onto Grandpa’s lips, pressing them closed. From alcoholic grape juice to Super Glue – and I thought then that if Grandpa couldn’t shout to the end, he would have been pleased to go silenced by Super Glue, for which he had such deep admiration.

  The assistant went to fetch the hearse, a Toyota four-by-four. Standing in the parking lot, waiting for the car to reverse, Jonathan and Henry enquired about a nearby hearse with a badly buckled wheel.

  “The competition,” Mma Mosikare informed them gravely. “Sabotage.”

  They loaded the coffin, and the hearse drove to the hospital, where the mourners were waiting. From the hospital, the procession of vehicles set off along a bumpy dirt road out of Phikwe, cars and donkey carts stopping respectfully as they passed. The road was the old road between Selebi and Phikwe, which we’d ridden along many times on the way to our riding lessons. The track was badly potholed, and the cars lurched along slowly.

  They stopped, in a cleared area, bet-ween two big koppkd. At the centre of the clearing stood a large rectangle of stacked mopane logs. Grandpa’s body was placed on the pyre, and the cloth removed from his face according to Hindu tradition. Many of the Christian mourners, already awkward or disapproving, looked away uncomfortably.

  Standing beside the pyre, Henry gave a brief speech, in which he paid tribute to his father – a man loved by many but ‘bereft of the ability to receive love’ – and praised his strength, in a lifetime of unfulfilled dreams.

  Now, as the eldest son, Henry was asked by the Hindu priest to assist in the blessing of Grandpa’s spirit. Prayers were recited while slivers of wood were tossed onto a fire beside the pyre. Flowers and rice were sprinkled on the body. The braver mourners placed rice in the eyes and on the lips, and the priest spread ghee with a wooden spatula across the mopane logs and the linen cloth.

  A burning torch ignited the mopane wood and ghee in bright orange flames that quickly enveloped and obscured the body in a furious blaze. The mourners drove away, leaving the grand pyre burning against the last pink and orange light of a splendid, cloudless Botswana sunset.

  Two guards remained to watch the body through the night.

  The next morning, Henry scooped up the ashes into two earthenware jars.

  One half, he sprinkled beneath a baobab on the Phikwe Golf Course. It was the second baobab Henry had suggested; the first, he’d been told, was already standing watch over another old golfer’s ashes.

  The remaining ashes were to be tossed into the Limpopo by Jonathan on his way back to South Africa. He said good-bye to Granny Betty, who before they parted, and despite never having shown any interest in Hinduism, suddenly announced she wanted to go in the same way as Grandpa. Promising her he would make sure she did, and remembering just in time to take Grandpa’s fishing rods, which were the only things he wanted, Jonathan hurriedly climbed into his car and set off for the border.

  After nearly a hundred kilometres, far along the road between Selebi and the Tuli Block, Jonathan realised that in his haste to pack the fishing rods and to discuss Granny Betty’s cremation, he’d forgotten the ashes. Several hours late, having returned to collect them, he reached Martin’s Drift border post. Having passed through the Botswana side of the border, he drove over the Limpopo and parked his car. Then he walked back into the centre of the bridge, and poured the grey flakes into the sparkling brown water.

  Where they would drift slowly down past Molope Farm, a few molecules perhaps travelling much further east, and eventually reaching the Limpopo river mouth, where they’d float off into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

  Where perhaps they’d some day meet with a few particles of the half of Granny Mavis’s ashes tossed into the ocean just two months later, when she died, unexpectedly and in perfect health, in her little house in Durban. She, too, had asked for a Hindu funeral, and but for the enclosed furnace, she was cremated in the same way as Grandpa. The other half of her ashes was placed around the statue of a Buddha, where a tree was planted in her memory.

  And perhaps, eventually, in the great waters of the Indian Ocean, particles of hers and Grandpa’s ashes would meet the ashes of Granny Betty, who died just a month after Granny Mavis.

  This time, Dad and Mum managed to make it to the funeral. Henry again gave a speech, and, assisted by Dad, he performed the same rituals that he had just three months earlier performed on Grandpa Ivor.

  Then the boys stood back as a flame was placed against the mopane wood.

  But now, where Grandpa Ivor had months before blazed so quickly and so splendidly, Granny Betty and her ghee-covered pyre caught alight and burned painfully slowly: slow in death as in life, as if reluctant to meet the skies that had once so tired her.

  Some of Granny Betty didn’t burn at all. When the boys collected her ashes in the morning, the metal joints from her wrist and two hip replacements were lying in the ashes, perfectly placed, along with several of her bones that had resisted the flames altogether.

  At the same spot, in the middle of the bridge over the Limpopo, Jonathan and Henry – driving back together to South Africa – tossed into the water the ashes, the bones, the metal joints, and the earthenware pot.

  And so the remains of Grandpa and his two wives – who had each, till their ends, both loved and despaired of him – drift somewhere out there.

  Grandpa Ivor had been diagnosed with cancer in 2002, the year we left the farm. “I’ll beat it,” he’d said. “Gotta look after Betty. I’m as strong as a bloody ox.” But although Granny had long looked ready to die, it was she who hung on determinedly, desperate to outlive him.

  As Grandpa had sickened and begun, undeniably, to waste away, he started to talk more freely about the war, the subject he could never before bear to discuss. On one long evening with Mum and Dad, he spoke about being ‘tail-end Charlie’, the last plane in the formation, telling them how the terror was so great that he’d had to pull his penis out of his suit and pee uncontrollably in the plane as he flew.

  On another occasion, he told Jonathan about a period several years into the war, when almost everyone he knew had died. By then, he’d been numbed by death. If the bombers missed their targets, he would turn around and fly back into the face of trained anti-aircraft fire, an almost suicidal stunt. Grandpa, by then, simply didn’t care, flying – and living – wildly, with a reckless abandon that was thought to be the reason he was famously never promoted. By the end of the war, by which time he was training other pilots, Grandpa Ivor had become affectionately known to all as the Lost Leut.

  But if his wild behaviour prevented his advancement through the ranks, his bravery did not go unnoticed. In June 1944 he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, an honour he’d always shrugged off. When Jonathan sorted through the old house after Granny Betty’s death, he found a letter typed on faded pink paper:

  Lieutenant LA. Scott D.F.C.

  c/o O.C., 45 AIR SCHOOL.

  ♦

  Dear Scott,

  Following up my signal of event date, I send you my heartiest congratulations, together with those of all Officers and Other Ranks in the South African Air Force, on the award of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  Your courage, determination and devotion to duty are an inspiration to us all and you have set a splendid example to all those now in training to do their part in time to come.

  The South African Air Force is proud of you.

  Yours sincerely,

  MAJOR GENERAL

  DIRECTOR GENERAL OF AIR FORCE.

  All this had a high price, though. After the war, Grandpa wanted nothing to do with the military, refusing even their offer of a free university education, which he would later deeply regret. Instead, he went out on his own and started a business. The business went bankrupt, and the ho
use was seized, leaving Granny Mavis and the three small boys with nothing.

  Towards the end, Granny Mavis spoke too, with a mixture of bitterness and affection, of Grandpa’s endless war nightmares, which had led, ultimately, to the destruction of their marriage. Tortured by his memories, Grandpa would go on drinking binges for days, leaving his young sons and his wife with no word of when he’d return. When he’d eventually left to try and find some sort of peace in the wilds of Botswana, he was running as much from his demons as from a broken marriage.

  None of these revelations and reflections, however, was enough to heal the wounds between Grandpa and Dad. Father and son remained distant to the end, and in Grandpa’s final years, after we left Botswana, it was Mum who kept him up-to-date with the family’s news:

  About her and Dad’s sea voyage, in 2003, from Cape Town to England on the RMS St. Helena, when Dad had worked as a ship’s doctor for the first time.

  About Lulu, when she did a chef’s course in her gap year at Ballymaloe in Ireland, and smuggled out her live mussels in her apron, tossing them back into the sea; and later, when she started university and decided, as well as psychology, to study French and Spanish. “Seeing she can already speak Latin.”

  About Damien, who complained that he didn’t get to blow up enough things in his degree; who’d phone any of us prepared to listen, regardless of whether we understood, to tell us about complex concepts in physics, just as he’d told Ruth about hydraulics and pistons under the ironing board, all those years ago.

  And about me, as I battled for six months to get accepted for a master’s degree at Cambridge, for which I was not technically eligible. This saga Grandpa followed avidly, loving the struggle, and that it was for a great university, the only education he’d ever felt strongly about, and particularly enjoying the fact the course was geared to entrepreneurial business. “Chip off the old block,” he said, delightedly.