Alexandra, the Fuller story

Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Published by the Penguin Press, 2011
By Alexandra Fuller
Available at Amazon.com, US$14 (Bt430)
Reviewed by James Eckardt

In 2001 Alexandra Fuller wrote the best memoir of that decade: “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight”. It was a funny, tender, brutal, harrowing, lyrical account of her childhood growing up on a farm in Rhodesia in the middle of a war between white farmers and black insurgents.
She followed it with a darker book about the white veterans of that war, “Scribbling the Cat”.
A decade after her astonishing debut, she is back with a rollicking book about her mother, whom she formalises as “Nicola Fuller of Central Africa”, a bredtothebone white African – Kenya, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia – and who thoroughly despised her daughter’s memoir, calling it “that awful book”.
In “Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness”, the author goes back to her mother’s bloody and batty Scottish ancestors and to her glorious childhood in colonial Kenya, complete with horse races, polo games, costume balls and hunts with riding to hounds.
The cover photo, taken in 1946, shows a blonde, twoyearold Nicola Fuller hand in hand with her best friend, Stephen Foster, a baby chimpanzee wearing a matching blue jumper. They had tea parties together and took turns on the chimp’s tricycle.
Many years later, her daughter asked if her parents were not afraid of the chimp biting her.
“Mum gives me a look as if I have just called WinniethePooh a paedophile. ‘Stephen? Bite me? Not at all
– we were best friends. He was a very, very nice, very civilised chimpanzee.’”
Alexandra had a charmed young adulthood, too. Married at 19 to a
recently arrived English jack-of-all-trades, Tim Fuller, who
had bounced among jobs from Canada to Montserrat
to Barbados, she set up house in a beautiful sprawl
ing bungalow and won a shelf full of jumping tro
phies with her thoroughbred champion, Violet.
“Mum holds up her hands and makes a pair of horse’s ears with her
fingers. ‘For as long as I can remember, I have seen the world from
between the ears of a horse. That’s my view. Straight ahead, don’t
look down. Don’t look back.’”
Violet would die horribly when another horse drove her into a barbed-
wire fence. And the Mau Mau rebels were suddenly agitating
for independence from Britain. The uprising spelled the end to an idyll.
“Kenya, in Mum’s telling, was a land of such sepia loveliness, such fecundity,
such fulfilment, that it was worth dying for if you were white (if you were black
and you wanted to die for Kenya, that was another matter altogether. Then
you were an unpleasant, uppity Kikuyu anarchist).
“Mum made it clear that leaving Kenya was one of the great shocks of
her life. ‘I never thought I would leave,’ she says. ‘I had such a magical child
hood, filled with such magical people.’” So the couple settled in Rhodesia –
just in time for another uprising for independence. This period is covered
in Alexandra’s great memoir, and it’s really necessary to read it if one is to
derive maximum pleasure from this sequel.
The author went on to marry an American and settle in Wyoming. Her
parents lived in Malawi for a year and then moved to Zambia to set up a fish
farm and banana plantation. They’re still there today.
“People often ask me why my parents haven’t left Africa. Simply put,
they have been possessed by this land. Land is Mum’s love affair and it is
Dad’s religion.” Mum paid a steep price. Three of
her five children died in Africa and she was thrown into such deep depressions
that she was hospitalised for catatonia. But she always bounced back. Africa
was both the disease and the cure: “We longed for the warmth and the free
dom, the real open spaces, the wild animals, the sky at night.”
Mum is the star throughout. She loves drinking, dancing, dogs and
horses. She is quirky, prickly, headstrong and full of wild energy. Her two
daughters often find her exasperating, but delight in swapping stories about
her. The results are hilarious set pieces about their wildly eccentric childhood
and yet another “awful book”.