This section also introduces one of my favourite formal devices: the A-Z. I have used it with some regularity in my non-fiction (and it will be encountered later, several times) for the signal reason that it allows me to squeeze a quart into a pint pot or at least give the illusion of so doing. The strict logical progression of the alphabet paradoxically forces you to be arbitrary: you have to find something that fits a “Q” or an “X” or an “O” or a “V” even when nothing appears obvious or forthcoming. An A-Z of a given subject (a painter, a borough of London, an iconic writer) somehow seems more all-inclusive than a measured essay of exactly the same length. The necessary darting around, as you try to fit the letters to a relevant subject — makeshift invention requiring you to hammer a square peg into a round hole from time to time — inevitably assures a skewed, disparate and eccentric account that, when it works, produces a richer, more accurate portrait.
Memories of the Sausage Fly
The ant-lion builds its traps in sandy soil. It fashions — somehow — a geometrically perfect inverted cone. At the tip of the cone the ant-lion lurks, buried and invisible, waiting for any small insect to tumble in. When this occurs, the ant-lion at first makes no move. The walls of the cone are so smooth, the sand-grains they are composed of so fine, that only the largest insects can gain any purchase. As the smaller victims slither and scrabble on the steep sides of the cone, the ant-lion spits — or flicks — more sand at them, causing them to tumble down into the cone-tip where they are dragged beneath the sand and devoured.
The largest ant-lion cone I ever saw was about three inches deep; the predator itself half an inch long. I caught it underneath our house in Signals Road, Achimota, in what was then the Gold Coast. The house was built on six-foot concrete piles. Beneath it was sand, pocked with ant-lion traps. A lunar landscape of immaculate craters. Hundreds upon hundreds of ant-lions. A no man’s land for any small crawling insect. Our particular ploy was to dig out a small ant-lion and drop it in the hole of a larger one.
I always think of ant-lions when I think of our house in Achimota. It is the first of our houses in Africa that I remember, though we had lived in two before that. At the time I was born we lived in a converted officers’ mess, made of mud bricks and with a corrugated-iron roof. Achimota was about six miles from Accra and the coast. On the huge beaches, ten-foot breakers would cream in from the Atlantic. We weren’t allowed on the surf beaches until we were older and could belly-surf, but there were rocky stretches with rock pools burgeoning with submarine life. Sitting in a rock pool, waist deep in blood-warm water, aged five. Life was good.
We moved away from Achimota to Legon, three miles further inland, to the new campus of the University of Ghana. We lived in a large U-shaped house, painted white with a red-tiled roof. There was a large stoep, big enough for thirty to gather on, that gave on to the enormous garden and a view of the surrounding countryside — grass-covered hills, clumps of small tough trees.
The insect I associate with the house in Legon is the velvet mite. These completely benign creatures were the size of a fingernail, a brilliant coruscating red, and did indeed seem to be covered in a sort of velvety fur. They were the only insects I’ve ever encountered that you could stroke. At certain times of the year, particularly after the rainy season, they proliferated, and the grass around our house hotched with them. My sisters and I used to ranch velvet mites, gathering them in their hundreds into makeshift twig corrals. There the mites would mill around aimlessly, square feet of shifting scarlet velvet, a boiling carpet of red.
We moved to Nigeria, to Ibadan, in 1963. Our house on the university campus there was long and straight. The garden was surrounded by a dense hibiscus and poinsettia hedge and was full of trees: frangipani, cotton trees and tall elegant casuarina pines. I would borrow our gardener’s machete and chop at the frangipani trees. Bury the curved blade (made in Czechoslovakia) in the bole, which was soft and yielding. The tree bled a white milk that dripped all day. Later I bought my own machete for five shillings. It was useful for hacking things down. Ibadan is set in the middle of tropical rain forest, things grow at an enormous speed. I cut two poles and stuck them in the ground to support our badminton net. When I came back from school three months later they had turned into trees.
The insect I associate with our house in Ibadan is the sausage fly. It’s not really a fly at all but some kind of bloated ant that grows wings and takes to the air after rain. The sausage fly is about an inch long, a hard shiny banger-brown, hence its name. In the evening, after it has rained, you shut all your windows. Wings unfold from the carapace of the sausage fly and they take to the air in droves. They are not very good in the air — it isn’t their natural element — and it’s as if they have only borrowed the wings for the day. They steer haphazardly for the nearest light. Inside the house you can hear them carom into the windows and wire mosquito-netting. Squadrons veer unsteadily around exterior lights. They only have their wings for an hour or so. The sausage flies touch down and their wings fall off. A lot of them die as a result of mid-air collisions, flying into walls and such like. The next morning the veranda is crunchy underfoot with their hard bodies, and brilliant fragile drifts of discarded wings lie in the corners. The surviving sausage flies have resumed their earthly existence and have crawled off somewhere to complete their life cycle.
My father went out to West Africa during the Second World War. He was in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was based in Lagos, Jos, in northern Nigeria (where they grow strawberries and new potatoes on the plateau all year round) and in the Gold Coast. We have a picture of him, very young and thin, sitting on a cane chair outside a grass hut some time in 1945. He came back to the Gold Coast in 1951 with my mother, planning to stay a few years only. He remained until 1977, until he was forced to leave because of ill-health. He had contracted a curious and rare disease called “Q” fever. He had been a doctor working in Africa all his life and eventually Africa was literally the death of him.
His work began very early in the day. He would work through until two in the afternoon when he returned home for lunch. He would sleep until four and then go and play nine holes of golf. In the evening my mother would join him and their friends on the stoep of the golf club (drink was plentiful, very cheap and on credit). Perhaps there would be an impromptu supper-party later on. There was nothing frenetic or debauched in this social round — it was a far cry from Happy Valley — but in comparison to the life that most of these members of the professional middle class would have been living in Britain in the fifties it must have seemed paradisiacal.
They could lead this life because everyone had servants. My parents had only been in the Gold Coast a week when one morning they discovered a small old man sitting on the kitchen steps. He said his name was Kofi and he had heard they needed a cook. Kofi was our cook for the next eleven years. He and his family lived in a village some two miles away. In Legon our house had servants’ quarters, a simple, not to say crude, concrete cottage a few yards from the main house. This was occupied by Kofi’s son, Kwame, who was then in his twenties. He is now a major in a tank battalion in the Ghanaian Army. Kwame used to babysit for my parents. My sisters and I would often spend the evenings in his hot concrete room, eating the very peppery fried plantain that he would prepare on a small cast-iron charcoal brazier in the corner.