Although she was born in England, in 1969, Alexandra Fuller lived in southern Africa throughout her childhood, the years recorded in her marvellous memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.
Marvellous? You can only marvel, surely, at a father who, meeting his 12-year-old daughter off the plane from boarding school in the UK, lights up a cigarette and then casually offers her one as well.
I thought a father like that would undoubtedly go to the dogs, but, no, here he is still, an English settler, clinging on in southern Africa and an important person in his daughter’s life, a man who knows what’s what, as does her mother: “We have breeding,” her mother says when refusing to let her daughter look at a sex magazine.
That sets the social scene, confirmed by rules such as no elbows on the table – but dancing on it is all right. And it’s okay to lob your bread roll at someone but not to cut it with a knife. And always bathe and dress before dinner. Why? “It’s just the rule,” says Dad. So they sit, parents plus Alexandra and her older sister, Vanessa, ready to dine dressed as for the captain’s table.
Except this is Rhodesia that morphs into Zambia, so Dad keeps his revolver to hand, and Mum keeps her Uzi on the chair beside her. “Safety on?” Dad checks each night. “Those things are liable to go off at the touch of a gnat’s testicle.”
And all around is Africa: bush babies, crickets and frogs chirping and clicking to say spring is on the way. And, to Dad, some less welcome sounds: “Bloody missionaries are always the first to arrive. Bibles then bulldozers . . . ”
By the time Alexandra is ready for employment the jobs have all gone to foreign volunteers, including Canadian engineers, English hydrologists and “Irish actresses teaching self-expression and theatre to abused and/or fallen women”.
Fuller’s first memoir of her childhood was full of exuberance and wildness, of remembered fears and sadness. A neighbouring missionary family, including four children, were killed by liberation forces (her phrase), the baby of the family bayonetted. Later she herself mourns a toddler sister who drowns in a neighbour’s pool.
And always a question:who is she? There are her mother’s Scottish relatives, her father’s English ones – all part of the batty backdrop embroidered by her father, now smoking a pipe and living in a self-appointed past. When she quizzes him about his family he holds forth about his illustrious ancestors, including one who was “descended from Hottentots”, at which point his wife interrupts: “Not Hottentots, Huguenots.”
One person is missing, though: the faithful mother substitute, that staple character of colonial tales who holds the fort while the colonial mother plays bridge and drinks at the club.
So no nurse, but there is Adamson, a nebulous figure who works in the kitchen, his spliff dangling from his lower lip, its ash falling into whatever he’s cooking. It is Adamson who urges her to get a move on, get married and have a child before the next rains. (He himself has nine.) But Fuller, though now engaged to Charlie, an American, is not too keen. Not yet.
Charlie’s arrival takes the story to a different and quite troubled level. In the childhood world there was fun and hope and scatty parents, but Charlie’s is an adult world in which a wife is expected to have at least some understanding of household expenses, of the ups and downs of financial markets, of the uncertainties of newly emerging governments.
Alexandra Fuller in her mid 20s had none of these. And although she fell in love – although the word is not mentioned much – with Charlie, who was running a safari and rafting business, her world darkened when his enterprise failed to prosper, forcing them to move to the US.
Charlie made lots of money in real estate, they had three children and she wrote half a dozen novels, none of which was published. Instead she drew on her childhood experiences and wrote Let's Not Go to the Dogs Tonight, which was – no surprise here – a runaway success.
In this current memoir Fuller negotiates marriage and parenthood and in so doing leaves behind the glorious thrill of not knowing what lies around the next corner. She has now been around that corner and found it wanting: her mother commutes between sanity and madness, the love light seems to have gone from Charlie’s eyes. Her father inquires if she would like to buy the farm, and of course she wouldn’t. “I’m not African,” she says – and, in any case, it’s no longer the Africa of her childhood.
If you want to know about that Africa, then perhaps you should go back in time and read Fuller’s first memoir. You won’t be disappointed.
