Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller Page B

hopping about, trying to get her leg over the saddle, when Violet took off after the other horses.
    “I don’t know how I stayed on,” Mum says. “But I did. I somehow managed to scramble up into the saddle with the mare at full gallop, grab the reins and hang on while she flew up the maize field. And I beat the sons, both of whom had tumbled down antbear holes long before the finish line.”
    That December, Mum won the Dingaan’s Day race on Violet, outpacing Flip Prinsloo’s cousin Pieter by lengths. Flip was drunk with victory. He bought Mum slabs and slabs of chocolate at the Venus Bar and he offered to marry her off to his sons. “One was about thirteen and the other was already married,” Mum says. “But Flip said that didn’t matter. He said I could have either, or both—whichever I wanted.”
    “I don’t want your sons,” Mum told Flip. She didn’t want the chocolate either. She wanted Violet.
    Flip shook his head. “No, not the horse,” he said.
    “If I can’t have her, I won’t ride her,” Mum said.
    Flip fingered his hat. “Is that so?”
    “Yes,” Mum said.
    In the end, Mum and Flip struck a deal. She could borrow the horse all year for show jumping and hacking—anything she wanted—as long as she would ride for him every year on Dingaan’s Day.
    “Done,” Mum said, shaking one of Flip Prinsloo’s enormous hands.
    Flip fetched the brandy bottle from under his seat and took a long swallow. “Op Violet,” he said, offering Mum a sip.
    Mum put the bottle to her lips. “To Violet,” she agreed.
    So for the first time in her life, Mum won everything she entered: show jumping, racing, bending poles. “That mare had one speed: flat out. No one could stop her. I couldn’t stop her. But I could just about steer her and as long as I could stay on, we won, we won, we won. We won everything.”

Nicola Huntingford and the Mau Mau

    Donnie on the farm. Kenya, circa 1960.
     
    O nce a week my grandfather took Auntie Glug and Mum to one of the two movie theaters in Eldoret: either the Roxy or the Lyric. From one week to the next, Mum wallowed in the agreeable agony of having to choose between Rowan Tree fruit gums or Wilkinson’s dolly mixture. “By the time we arrived at the cinema, I’d be half dead with indecision because they were all such beautiful sweets,” she says. Then, having painstakingly selected the treats, Mum, Auntie Glug and my grandfather were shown to their seats by ushers who were dressed up like organ-grinders’ monkeys in funny little uniforms with fezzes perched on the side of their heads.
    The lights went down and, through the backlit mauve-gray gauze of cigarette smoke, the show began. First, a Pathé News reel, a jingoistic British production that always included something cheerful for the far-flung subjects. “The royal family doing something horsey or a factory in Manchester belching lots of patriotic smoke into a gloomy English sky,” Mum says. After the news, there was a pause while the adults refreshed their cocktails and the Indians who ran the movie theater sweated over the ancient, dust-rusted projection machines.
    “Finally, after much ado, the main event,” Mum says. “Usually a war movie with lots of wicked Nazis coming to a sticky end and heroic British soldiers prevailing against overwhelming evil. The sound system was awful, so we struggled if they showed a Western because we couldn’t understand their accents.” Mum gives me a reproachful look as if I were personally responsible for the shortcomings of John Wayne’s elocution. Then she continues in a more conciliatory tone. “Although their plots were very simple, of course, so it didn’t matter too much—a bunch of cowboys wiping out bunches and bunches of Indians.” Mum sniffs. “Very hard on their horses, we always thought.”
    She and I are having this conversation while driving north from Cape Town to Clanwilliam in the Western Cape, having rendezvoused for a holiday in South