Before the rain

Posted on July 15, 2012 by memoirsofahusk

Kids sit on the kerb, poking hot tar with dirty fingers, making scabby stretch marks. Girls with shiny hair drift by in bright sunny dresses, cut with paper patterns from cheap pretty cotton.

It’s 1976, the long, hot, summer, and half the world is splashing at the Lido.

Hippy days already memories, she’s eking out the prettiness, sashaying round town in her long floral frock, risking bare feet on the scorching paving, one eye out for burning cigarette stubs.

Pub doors open wide in the baking city streets, dark interiors glossed in shades of black and purple, a touch of gilt here and there for light relief. The smell of Guinness seeps out, welcome as the scent of violets on the breeze – not that there is a breeze.

Bohemian Rhapsody peaked months ago, but that plangent piano wafts through every window with the scent of stale tobacco, hitching a ride on the dust motes dancing up the sunbeams.

She’s oblivious, that girl. Or is she? She frowns, quickens her steps for the Pier Head. Takes the ferry ’cross the Mersey. Walks to New Brighton. Brings the blisters back on the train.

The evening’s warm as ever. But there’s something melancholic sneaking through the lazy days. The never-ending, too good to last, sun-saturated, heat-hazed days.

Maybe it’s rain. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it will last, forever.

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A sinister cave, the Twins at St Clare’s & a rather radical departure

Posted on July 13, 2012 by memoirsofahusk

I don’t like caves. There’s one in Zambia I never want to see again, a jagged hole in a shard of grey rock that punctures a flat horizon. At night sometimes it hums. A jackal lives there – he ventures out after dark and slyly pads around, like an evil spirit on a malicious haunting. Owls swoop down as soon as the sun sets, screeching like lost souls. Nice place to camp. Not.

But I’m digressing. We were in Swaziland. That’s where I had my first experience of an African cave – more precisely, a rock shelter. Yes, as well as cooking up a storm each day and nagging people to take their malaria prophylactics I’d decided to join the dig.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I’m not built for shorts. I hate shorts. But it was hot. The bare rocks concentrated the heat. So I wore shorts, purple ones,  quite long and a bit flarey to disguise the thighs. I hadn’t thought about the rear view so much, but if you’re digging a pit you’re kneeling on the edge and leaning forward, head in the hole – so your bottom’s in the air. It began to worry me. But why? Who was going to see?

Not tagalongman. As each day passed his demi-god status seemed only to grow. I, meanwhile, played the skivvy. I washed his SOCKS in an outdoor sink. In cold water for goodness’ sake. What was my mental state? In need of a good talking to, that’s what.

Enter the dig boss, Tex. (Remember him? Nice eyes and – did I say? – very long legs). He’d noticed the socks thing and was not impressed. Every evening he’d join me to make appetisers in my kitchen tent.  Soon it was not just his tasty guacamole I was liking.

But what to do? We’re all together all the time – and sleeping outside, just feet from each other. Well, there’s only one time no-one’s watching, isn’t there? Think Enid Blyton and the Twins at St Clare’s – midnight feasts in the dorm and all that. Okay then, juveniles, think Harry Potter – clandestine jaunts in the invisibility cloak.

So. I wait till everyone’s asleep, edge myself carefully out of my sleeping bag and tiptoe through the slumbering diggers. There’s a little ledge partway down the escarpment that we called cocktail rock. A handy place for a midnight assignation, a mug of cheap red wine, or both. No, not everyone else was asleep.

But there’s only so much of this kind of thing you can do before people notice. Most people that is. The time had come, he had to be told.

Crikey.

Hell hath no fury like a demi-God’s protector when he’s scorned. The mighty director banished me. Cast me out into the wilderness.

So. I’m stuck thousands of miles from home with no money and a ticket to fly that’s not valid for weeks. Boy, what a few weeks they were.

Yet to come: pineapple fields, a murdered night watchman, the unlockable caravan. That mohair salesman & drugs. Car crashes at the Why Not Disco. Spoons. Etc.

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Socks and drugs and rocks that roll

Posted on July 5, 2012 by memoirsofahusk

Baby elephants are cute, yes? Ever been knocked flying by one? I have. Through a fence. I was leaning on it at the time. He was being ‘introduced’ back into the wild. I’d been feeding him oranges. That’s gratitude for you.

I was in Swaziland, ‘managing’ the camp for a bunch of archaeologists out in the bush. In practice that meant cooking over an open fire without falling into it or melting my jumper – and making sure everyone took their malaria pills. But I was also there because I was – the shame of it –  tagging along with a man. Tagging along and archaeology are a kind of leitmotif for me.

I was already a seasoned weekend digger, a dab hand at scraping out cesspits (I’m not making it up) in the City of London, on sites now groaning under glass and steel. This site, though, was out where the buses don’t run. Rhinos, yes, buses, no.

The ‘camp’ was perched on an escarpment near the border of Mozambique – where a civil war was raging at the time. Each evening I’d cook things like impala stew in my witch’s cauldron. On special occasions a nice young man from Texas would grill wildebeest burgers. The nights were cold but we slept out on sun-loungers, sheets of plastic tucked over our sleeping bags to protect us from the heavy morning dews.

Morning began with tin mugs of tea, half an hour’s drive in dodgy old Land Rovers, a walk along a dried-up stream bed then a climb up a rock face to reach a cave. There we’d get on our knees, stick our heads in a dusty hole and dig.  Except for tagalongman, who’d walk around debating things with the director – like the effect that baboons rolling rocks over, looking for grubs, would have on the landscape.

Now, even if you don’t get on your knees and dig, even if you’re just thinking great thoughts about baboons rolling rocks, you still have to walk through dusty, scrubby vegetation, which means you end up with dirty … socks. Yes, THE socks.

Right. I’m just saying ‘no’ to drugs for today (it involves a mohair salesman – there isn’t time before your cuppa goes cold).

So, still to come in the socks, spoons, sunsets and stones saga: the washing of the socks. The pornographic ‘Why not?’ disco. Percy Sledge. Enforced exile and wooden spoons. A nice young man. And drugs.

Time for a glass of wine.

Party on!

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Anyone for brains?

Posted on July 2, 2012 by memoirsofahusk

I’ve never eaten brains, but I did once watch someone do it.

I remember the meal through a retrospective filter of nausea, not because of the brains, but because next morning  I flew into Matsapha, Swaziland, in a small plane. Matsapha is a little airport surrounded by steeply menacing hills and we spiralled into it like water down a plughole. That rapid descent really did for my equilibrium. Or should I say, started the process, because this was the trip that changed the course of my life.

The brain-eating episode had been in Johannesburg, where white-gloved waiters served at our white-clothed table and looked on impassively as we gorged. Sorry, dined. The memories of that particular trip to South Africa are a bit ragged now, but several things stand out. The sullen faces and blank, evasive eyes of black people at the airport. The black men in suits or overalls lounging around lamp-posts and street corners. The place where Steve Biko ‘died’. The empty first class (white) and packed third class (black) carriages on the train to Pretoria and most starkly – for me – the signs on the station platform benches: slegs blankes – whites only. No, don’t even think about sitting on a bench if you’re black. It was 1982.

I had thought long and hard about that trip, a kind of corporate family visit to Philips (I worked for the Dutch parent company at the time). Bands were refusing to play in the country, Barclays Bank was being boycotted (hey, there’s an idea!) for operating there and no-one of  a liberal persuasion was admitting to visiting the apartheid state. For a naïve young woman born in one British multi-racial city and brought up in another it came as a total and utter shock.

But that’s not what changed the course of my life. Shifted my axis slightly, yes, but didn’t re-set it.

That’s where the socks came in.

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And the bandoneon played on

Posted on June 27, 2012 by memoirsofahusk

Have you ever heard of the bandoneon?

It’s an instrument that messes with your head, a kind of accordion, a lethal mental weapon for the emotionally inclined.

…I’m standing at the bar.

The bartender’s giving me that look and polishing the glasses just a  bit too long. They already have a nice shine on them. He’s been polishing them since the last hard drinker left.

Yeah, that’s me. Drinking alone. No-one to share the pain.

Raindrops on the window turn to fireflies in the street light. The darkest hour’s heading my way. Midnight packed her bags a while back and I’m still staring at my glass, like I was then. Just after she left.

It’s half empty, the glass.

I flick open the pack of cigarettes and put the last but one to my lips. Joe the Bar strikes a match, quick as a bolt of lightning.  OK, so that bit was pure imagination. A guy can’t smoke in a bar any more, no matter what life just chucked at him.

I throw back the other half and the glass makes a sound like a taut drum on the hard wood. The bartender raises an eyebrow. I shake my head. Enough’s enough, even when your girl’s walked out into the cold dark night leaving your heart still beating – just.

The bandoneon plays on.

And I get back to reality. A woman, well past any flush of youth. Yeah, different flushes now. Thinks she can see inside the head of a man, at a bar, with a drink, in a novel by Raymond Chandler. Or Georges Simenon. As if.

Damn that bandoneon.

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Socks & spoons, sunsets & stones – a sibilant start to something

Posted on June 24, 2012 by memoirsofahusk

Did you really mean to be here? Hmm. I’m not convinced. But not wishing to disappoint in case you tripped over this site by accident and stopped to read, here’s a taste of things to come.

Based on the premise that no-one reads the first blog the first day it’s up, I’m going to start very small, aim very high and not say very much. It would be a waste, wouldn’t it?

Here goes.

Socks. Wet socks to be specific. These humdrum items were very important in my life, in fact they were, without exaggeration, life changing.

Spoons. These are very useful weapons when facing burglars on a pineapple farm – if you’re deluded. I don’t mean cake-baking sized spoons, but large wooden spoons of the type often used to stir mealie-meal porridge or nshima  in Africa.  (Even so – deluded.)

Sunsets. Everyone loves a good sunset and Africa has a few. One a day in fact. They can be spectacular, depending on where you happen to be at the time. The one that’s heading rapidly through the pastel-pink-sugar-almond stage to the black grape phase on the banner is in the Luangwa valley, Zambia.

Stones. Here we get a bit technical. It’s where some people perk up and others glaze over. Archaeology. Cleavers, choppers, flakes, microliths, burins, cores…. And digging, blisters, camping, long-drop (and not so long drop) loos, tsetse flies, AK47s, lovelorn youth and so on.

There we have it, just some of the exciting topics you can look forward to in the coming days, months, years – or whenever I finally get around to sorting out the blog’s appearance to my satisfaction and begin to have a clue what I’m doing. Until then, if you’d like to read something I’ve written that is a bit more grabby from the start you can always tuck into ‘A Wake of Vultures’ which is available from the Cosi & Veyn website as a paperback and on Kindle as an ebook. Quarter of the profits go to the Liverpool University Africa Endowment Fund  (see – it’s not just a cheap piece of blatant self-promotion!).

Oh – and did I say – this is a memoir so I can write in it whatever I want – a memory, a plan, an adventure – or total fiction. Yes, my blog, my rules! I can also delete your post if you are unpleasant. Trolls be warned, you’re wasting your time.

It’s also MINE, all mine. Don’t plagiarise me and if you quote me say so. Thanks.

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