Leaving Before The Rains Come

I don’t often get to listen to Radio 4's Book of the Week because of work but I took leave a couple of weeks ago which happily coincided with some bright sunshine and the serialisation of Alexandra Fuller’s new memoir Leaving Before The Rains Come. You may remember the first memoir of her African childhood Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and the second volume Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness in which Fuller is unsentimental about coming of age in a family of white settlers in war-torn Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in the seventies.  This book examines what happens after she met Charlie, an American running a safari company in Zambia.

Leaving Before the Rains Come is like catching up with old friends - Bobo (Alexandra) her sister Van (face-of-the-eighties), their mother (Nicola Fuller of Central Africa), stoical father Tim and mildly stoned cook, Adamson, are all here.  Fuller is brilliant at conveying the beauty and stupefying heat of the landscape.  Living with Charlie and their first baby, Sarah, in a cottage on the banks of the Zambezi river she has to purchase a 'wearable mosquito net cloud' and nurse the baby under it because of an outbreak of yellow fever.  When the heat becomes unbearable in February she moves the bed out onto the veranda:

And, lying under the mosquito net with my child and my husband next to me, listening to the shouting hippos, the pulsing night insects, the shrieking bush babies, I fell deeply back in love with the land of my childhood.

 It is when they decide to move to Wyoming, that illness, debt, pressures of work and an accident take their toll on the marriage and Fuller struggles to reconcile her hardy South African self with risk-averse American middle-class life.  However, the memoir really gets into its stride during her Wyoming years and Charlie's family are charming with an intriguing history. 

In an interview Louise Erdrich once said ‘To be mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.'  Fuller's conflict has made for a poignant and highly-readable memoir.

There's none like us ...

In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller relays the story of her mother or 'Nicola Fuller of Central Africa' as she sometimes refers to herself.  Born on the Isle of Skye, Nicola Fuller moved to Kenya with her parents at the age of two.  Having lived in Africa pretty much all of her life she still considers herself 'one million per cent Scottish.'  She spends her Kenyan childhood show-jumping, attending convent school and playing with her pet chimpanzee.  She has unhappy stint at a secretarial college for young ladies in Kensington and then returns to the longed for equatorial light of Kenya.

Disembarking from the plane at Nairobi with newly blonde hair and wearing a blue linen suit she is spotted by the young Tim Fuller recently arrived in East Africa to work on a tree farm.  He falls in love with her and as a handsome couple 'there's none like us' they settle in Kenya and later manage a farm in Rhodesia. Alexandra Fuller intersperses the story of her parents with her own memories of a Rhodesian childhood, her mother driving her daughters to a fancy dress party in the land rover, checking her hair and lipstick in the rear-view mirror and positioning her gun out of the window.  Fuller writes beautifully of the 'sepia light' of Kenya and the wind 'red with dust' blowing from Uganda.

But this book is not just a story of Africa, it's the story of her mother who lived through the terrible violence of Rhodesia's struggle for independence and buried three babies on African soil.  Yet she retains a wonderful Nancy Mitford style humour.  When she sees predatory rich European women seeking sexual favours from young men she asks 'Why can't they just go to bed with a good book?'
This is no tale of the glamorous and foolish Happy Valley set.  Fuller's parents lived and worked on the land and still continue to run a fish and banana farm in the Zambezi valley today.

As a young woman Nicola Fuller hoped to inspire a classic African memoir such as West with the Night, The Flame Trees of Thikka or Out of Africa.  I'd say she has.