I turned and faced the Outer Hebrides. There, between me and the sea, was the mass grave of hundreds of my ancestors killed in one of the bloodiest episodes in Scottish history. So many died that a wall was pushed over the bodies in lieu of a proper burial and the battle became known as “The Spoiling of the Dyke.” It’s a story everyone in my family remembers, not because it was so brutal or because so many of our ancestors’ lives were lost (that happened with depressing regularity if you were a Macdonald of Clanranald), but because it involved a rape, two fatal fires and a severed breast—a lively accumulation of drama, even by our standards.
Around 1577, a Macdonald defiled a Macleod maiden, “Or did something to annoy her at any rate,” Mum says. In response—“a slight over-reaction in retrospect”—the MacLeods chased three hundred and ninety-five Macdonalds into St. Francis Cave on Eigg and lit a fire at the cave’s entrance. The trapped Macdonalds suffocated. Clanranald, chief of the Macdonalds, spent all winter and most of the following spring plotting a suitable counter-revenge. “Yes, well,” Mum says. “Highlanders aren’t really turn-the-other-cheek sort of people.” Accordingly, on the first Sunday in May 1578, Macdonald warriors, concealed by a thick fog, snuck up on Trumpan Church in which many of the MacLeods from nearby crofts had gathered for worship. The Macdonalds barred the church door and then set fire to the thatched roof. All the worshipping MacLeods were burned to death, except a young woman who managed to escape by squeezing through a narrow window, ripping off one of her breasts in the process.
I squint through the heavy rain and imagine that young woman, bleeding and in terror, running through the fog, across the heather to Dunvegan castle. Upon hearing her calls for help, the MacLeods seized their sacred banner—“The Fairy Flag,” Mum says, enjoying this part of the story. “We’re very mystical, very savage people you know”—and descended on the scorched remains of Trumpan Church, where they cornered and slaughtered the Macdonalds before they could flee. “Wonderfully tribal,” Mum concludes approvingly.
I walked around to the small window of the ruined church. The window looked like something you might hope to shoot a skinny arrow through, but not anything you’d consider as a means of escape, even in dire circumstances. In any case, churches are supposed to be recognized as places you run into for refuge, not places you flee in terror. They are supposed to be universally recognized sanctuaries. But here my ancestors join all the worst villains in history—they are among those who have killed people in churches. I went back out to the view of the sea and kicked the spoiled dyke. A little black cloud scudded in from the Outer Hebrides and unloaded another small flood on me.
COLD AND WET—waterproofing goes only so far when rain begins to rise up as well as fall down—I repaired to the nearest pub. Steaming in front of a large pint of bitter, surrounded by American tourists swapping ancestral anecdotes and swatches of tartan, I reflected that Mum would hate to live on the Isle of Skye now. The incessant battles over land, the blood feuds between clan and family—those are all over. The best she could hope for would be a bar brawl and even that—judging by the determinedly cheerful nature of the people in the pub—would be over before you could get yourself nicely settled into a ringside seat.
It is true that in Mum’s opinion land is good, blood-soaked land is better and land soaked in the blood of one’s ancestors is best. And by those criteria, the Isle of Skye is premium earth. But I am sure the American tourists would irritate her with their attempts to connect to a violence for which they no longer have any stomach. And the sheep would bore her silly. Because even painted up as camels, Cape buffalo and elephants, sheep are still just sheep.
Nicola Fuller and the Fancy Dress Parties
Mum and Auntie Glug as Alice and the White Rabbit. Kenya, circa 1950.
When she was six, Mum’s parents went on leave from Kenya to Britain, taking their two children with them. Of that three-week journey by ship from Mombasa to Southampton and back again, Mum remembers only three things: “They performed this ghastly ceremony when the ship crossed the equator. The passengers were dunked in buckets of water and beaten up with dead fish.” Then Mum remembers the ship stopping at Gibraltar, where she was dragged by her parents to see the Barbary apes. “It was stinking hot and we had to haul up to see the Rock, which was plastered in ravens and these ferocious, scary monkeys.” And finally Mum recalls, “The other thing—the most gruesome thing—was the Fancy Dress Party. It was awful, being paraded around the deck dressed up in some silly costume. I hated the whole ordeal.”
“Then why did you participate, if it was so gruesome?”
“You had to,” Mum says. “You were beaten into it.”
“With dead fish?” I ask.
Mum gives me a look. “No. Not unless you also happened to be crossing the equator at that exact same moment.”
SO HERE WE ARE: Mum, now in her early thirties, having apparently learned nothing from her experience as a child, dressing Vanessa and me up for the Davises’ annual Fancy Dress, an event I might not have dreaded at all if Mum hadn’t chosen costumes of such agonizing inventiveness that it’s a wonder they didn’t kill us.
“Why can’t I be like Vanessa?” I asked.
“Because,” Mum said.
“But I’m itchy,” I complained.
Olivia was only four months old, too small to be anything murderous, so Mum had dressed her in a homemade, rainbow-colored, tie-dyed onesie as the Summer of Love. Vanessa was a Rose, hypoallergenic and splendid in a pink tutu, pink tights and pink ballet slippers. I was I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in an old vest and a pair of knickers inside an empty insecticide drum on which Mum had pasted a few pictures of weeds cut from the pages of Farmers Weekly.
“No one’s going to understand what I am,” I pointed out.
“The clever ones will,” Mum said. “Now hold still. I don’t want to poke your eyes out.”
There was the sound of Mum attacking the insecticide drum with scissors.
“I think I’m getting a rash,” I said. “I can feel bumps.”
Mum started to sing, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometime. . . .” There was a pause followed by a couple more violent assaults against the insecticide drum. Then Mum said to Vanessa, “Go to the kitchen and fetch me a knife, would you Vanessa? Ask July for a nice sharp one.”
“I can’t breathe,” I said.
“Oh, buck up, Bobo.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if I got out?”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“But then you won’t poke my eyes out.”
“Whoever said anything about poking eyes out?”
“You did.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
I could hear Vanessa rustle demurely back into the room. “Thank you, darling,” Mum said. She only called one of us darling when she wanted to imply that the other was not, at that moment, darling. “You’re such a big help,” Mum said.
I didn’t need to be on the outside of my insecticide drum to see the pink ruffles on Vanessa’s tutu puffing up.
“Now hold still, Bobo.”
There were flashes from a knife blade and two slits of light appeared.
“Are those near your eyes?”
“No,” I said. And then I reconsidered my close escape. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, very.”
“There we go then,” Mum said. “I’ll just get my Uzi and we’ll be off.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go,” I blurted with as much feeling as I could muster out of my nearly eight-year-old self. “I look stupid.”
“Now look here,” Mum said, “if you aren’t careful, you’ll get a jolly good hiding.”
While Mum got her gun, I weighed up the cons of a jolly good hiding versus the cons of arriving at a Fancy Dress Party dressed in an insecticide drum. I decided, on balance, that at least there would be Sparletta Creme Soda and Willards Chips at the Fancy Dress Party and that a
t least the Davises didn’t have frogs in their pool—or only a few. Not like our algae soup of a pool that had wild ducks, scorpions, thousands of frogs, tadpoles and the occasional Nile monitor. Plus, this would be my last party before I was packed off to boarding school forever and ever.
“Right,” Mum said. I heard her check the Uzi magazine for rounds. We were a year into the worst part of the Rhodesian War, and ambushes and attacks against farmers had increased lately, especially where we lived on Robandi, right up against the Mozambique border where the view was spectacular but almost everything else was lousy.
In April 1966, the year before my parents moved from Kenya to Rhodesia, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) launched an attack against government forces to protest Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. The uprising was swiftly and definitively suppressed. Seven ZANLA troops lost their lives. No Rhodesian forces died. After that, the war simmered along mildly with the odd attack or ambush here and there until 1974, when the ten-year conflict in neighboring Mozambique between the Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique rebels (FRELIMO) and the colonial Portuguese ended, and a new confrontation between the FRELIMO government and Rhodesian and South African–backed Mozambican National Resistance forces (RENAMO) began. Then, as if the uptick in violence in the neighboring state were contagious, the war in Rhodesia also picked up momentum. ZANLA forces based in Mozambique under the guerilla-friendly FRELIMO government came over the border into Rhodesia to lay land mines and conduct raids. War became our climate, something you didn’t feel you could do much about and that you might remark on casually, using the same language you might use to describe the weather: “Phew, things are getting hot this week.”
We accepted the war as one of the prices that had to be paid for Our Freedom, although it was a funny sort of Freedom that didn’t include being able to say what you wanted about the Rhodesian government or being able to write books that were critical of it. And for the majority of the country, Freedom did not include access to the sidewalks, the best schools and hospitals, decent farming land or the right to vote. It now seems completely clear to me, looking back, that when a government talks about “fighting for Freedom” almost every Freedom you can imagine disappears for ordinary people and expands limitlessly for a handful of people in power.
“Bullets, lipstick, sunglasses. Off we go. Come on, Bobo, quick march.”
My feet poked out of two holes in the drum’s lid. I couldn’t walk very well. I had to waddle like a penguin. This amused Vanessa, and her peals of laughter echoed around inside the insecticide drum. Mum, with Olivia on her hip, helped me out of the big door, down the rough stone steps and onto the veranda. “Don’t fall,” Vanessa said, barely able to contain the hope in her voice. It was very hot inside the drum and sweat poured into my already stinging eyes and onto my increasingly stinging rash.
“I’m boiling,” I whined.
“One more word out of you,” Mum warned.
We scuffled across the yard and into the driveway, and arrived at Lucy, the mine-proofed Land Rover, where a problem presented itself. I didn’t fit through any of the doors.
“Oh dear,” Mum said. “An unforeseen hitch.” There was a silence while she had a think. I pictured her biting the inside of her lower lip and frowning. When she spoke again, she sounded struck by inspiration. “We’ll put her in the back.” She paused. “Darling,” she said, not to me, “go and fetch July and Violet.”
So Vanessa called July from the kitchen and she fetched Violet from the laundry. Then there was general hilarity while July and Violet each considered how amazing it was that the madam had put her young daughter into an insecticide drum. Mum explained that when she was in labor with me in England, the radio was playing “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” which was prophetic because when I arrived, I really was, as promised, Not a Rose Garden (Mum has refused to waver from this story, even though I have since discovered this song became a hit for Lynn Anderson a full year and a half after I was born and therefore could not have been playing when she was in labor with me).
“She had yellow skin and black hair. That’s why we call her Bobo,” Mum explained, “because she looked just like a little baboon.”
Violet and Vanessa dissolved into more conspiratorial giggling.
“See?” Mum said, “Violet thinks your costume’s amusing.”
“Could we just get on with this?” I said.
So July and Violet each seized an ankle and thrust me into the vehicle while I stood rigid inside my insecticide drum. I could smell the greasy-meat scent of the dogs’ supper on July’s clothes and the green laundry soap on Violet’s hands and arms, but now the usually comforting domestic scents had an isolating, excluding effect. The dogs circled around us and whacked the drum with their tails. Their excited panting made me feel even hotter.
“Right,” Mum said. “Off we go.” She climbed into the Land Rover and Vanessa-darling got in on the passenger side. “Hold on to the baby,” Mum said, handing Olivia to Vanessa. Then she whistled and a couple of lapfuls of dogs leaped in with them. The Land Rover jerked off down the hill and bumped past the orchard. I could feel it go over the culvert at the bottom of the driveway where the cobra lived. I yawed against the window as Mum took a left onto the main road at the bottom of the farm. I pictured Vanessa, billowing pinkly in the front seat, the wind flapping her two long, blond braids in which Mum had entwined pink and white roses made out of loo paper. And I pictured Mum driving, dogs on her lap, her gun out the window, checking her hair and lipstick in the rearview mirror.
“I can’t stand up back here!” I cried, “slow down!” But my protests were lost under the roar and rattle of Lucy’s engine. The fact that I wasn’t, at that moment, being beaten by dead fish was small comfort.
THIRTY YEARS, two countries and four farms later, Vanessa, Mum and I were sitting under the Tree of Forgetfulness at Mum and Dad’s fish and banana farm on the Middle Zambezi River. Something about the quality of heat, and the itchy burn from the windborne, stinging hairs of buffalo bean, reminded me of the day of that long ago Fancy Dress Party.
“Do you remember when you made me be I Never Promised You a Rose Garden at the Davises’ Annual Christmas Fancy Dress party?” I asked Mum.
“Oh God,” Mum said. “Here we go. Another traumatizing repressed memory come back to haunt us.” She looked around. Then she flung her arms in the air. “Shrink! Someone fetch the child a shrink!” Mum does exactly this gesture when her drink runs dry at a party: she flings her arms in the air and shrieks, “Drought! Nicola Fuller of Central Africa is experiencing severe drought!”
“Olivia was the Summer of Love and Vanessa was a Rose, all dressed up in a pink tutu,” I said.
“Was I?” Vanessa said.
“Yes,” I said.
“No, I wasn’t,” Vanessa said. “I was From Russia with Love.”
I frowned. “Really?”
“Yes,” Vanessa said firmly, “in a hat made out of fermenting, flea-infested carpet. And I had to wear a baking red shirt, billowing black pants and Mum’s riding boots.”
“I think you’re mixing up fancy dress parties. I distinctly remember you were a rose,” I said.
“I wish,” Vanessa said.
“From Russia with love I fly to you,” Mum sang. She paused and went on conversationally, “I remember that film. I made Dad drive all the way to Nairobi so we could watch it. They had vodka shots lined up at the bar.” She sniffed. “Hm, well, the film must have made quite an impression on me if I wasted a perfectly good carpet on Vanessa’s fancy dress costume.” She took a breath and continued to sing, “Much wiser since my good-bye to you . . .”
“See?” Vanessa said.
“I’ve traveled the world,” Mum sang, “to learn I must return to Russia with looooooooo-oooove!”
“Well, I remember I had to sit in the back of the Land Rover and you, Mum, Olivia and the dogs sat in the front,” I said.
&nbs
p; “Straitjacket!” Mum shouted.
“And only the front part of the Land Rover was mine proofed,” I said.
“Tranquilizers!” Mum shrieked.
“So if we’d gone over a land mine, you, Olivia, Mum and the dogs would have been fine. But I would have been blown up. Wouldn’t I, Mum?”
Vanessa started laughing. “That’s hilarious,” she said.
“Wouldn’t I have been blown up if you’d gone over a mine, Mum?” I asked.
Mum let her arms drop by her side. “I suppose that’s right,” she said. She paused, and then continued, “But if I’d known then that you were going to grow up and write that Awful Book, I might have actually aimed for one.”
“Mum!”
Mum sighed. “You know, you’re just like Christopher bloody Robin. That wretched child also grew up and wrote an Awful Book even after all those lovely stories and poems his father wrote for him. He went on and on about what a rotten parent A. A. Milne had been and about how A. A. Milne hadn’t hugged Christopher bloody Robin enough.” Mum, a dedicated fan of all things Pooh, shuddered. “Luckily,” she said, “I don’t think many people read it and I am sure hardly anyone took it very seriously.”
Mum with her first best friend, Stephen Foster. Kenya, circa 1946.
OUR FAMILY’S overwhelming attachment to animals and their apparent lukewarm attachment to their own offspring (quite different from a passionate connection to “blood”) go back at least as far as my grandmother’s childhood, which is where anything close to reliable oral history ends. Mum’s younger sister, Auntie Glug, remembers my grandmother as a remarkably efficient caretaker and a very capable nurse, deeply interested in her children’s welfare but quite unable to hug her children.
“Yuck,” said Mum, whose own maternal hugs are stiff, reluctant and brief. “We just weren’t raised that way.” And then her eyes went pale and she spoke to me very slowly, as if explaining her culture to an alien visitor. “We are terribly British: stiff upper lip, no public displays of affection. It’s how my mother was raised, and it’s how we were raised—and I don’t think it did any of us any harm.”