My earliest memories - The trees

1971/72 - The trees.

I have tried to write this story several times but have never managed to convey the sadness and horror of it fully. I could not write and share it before my father died and maybe I still should not share it. It is the story of my earliest memories.

We were living in a small village called Hilldrop in South Africa. I think Rudyard Kipling lived there once but don’t quote me on that. I cant find it on any maps and maybe it no longer exists. Just a fairytale place in my youngest memories. It was beautiful, spacious and sunny and everywhere there were massive old, ancient trees. I remember the drive up to the village. All six of us in the yellow station wagon bouncing along the dusty road. The steep pink banks higher than the car and on top of them the trees, so tall their tops touched the pure blue sky. Me standing on the back seat my head out the window and my face in the wind. Pure joy. I cant have been more than 3 years old. My sister was still a toddler and my brothers would have been 2 and 4 respectively. It was a very happy time. We were living a bohemian life and my father loved being away from the town, an independent business man who was striving to get his shoe factory off the ground. I remember the house it was nicknamed the pillbox because it was perfectly square with a veranda that ran the entire circumference of it. It was massive and we must have lived there a few years as my first memory is of me sitting on the floor as a toddler, still unable to talk or walk but I can to this day see this single image of it. You could see right through the house. Sitting on the dinning room floor the front door to one side and far in the distance beyond the kitchen the bright white rectangle of the back door on the other side. The house, the floor in cool darkness and these two brilliant hot sunny rectangles to either side of me. To see through, to see both sides at once. It was a magical feeling, a feeling of being between two worlds, that has stayed with me always.

I remember the day of the visit. I remembered it suddenly a few years ago with shock and clarity as if I had just watched a movie of it. We were to have lunch with a wealthy couple who lived further down the road from us. We had to dress up and be on our best behaviour because clearly my parents wanted to impress as much as possible.  When we reached the house my father told my mother to put me out in the garden. So she led me out into this massive open space where the grass was almost as tall as me and sat me down amongst the wild flowers and butterflies and told me to wait there till she fetched me. It was a beautiful day, the sun high in the sky and a gentle breeze. I felt at one with it as though I belonged to the wildness of it. Then it changed. The heat, the sun, the moisture it gathered together as a summer storm. The breeze turned cold as the temperature plummeted. The sky turned purple and the wind whipped at the tall trees in the distance. Then the screaming began. A howl of desperate sadness a terrifying scream that tore through the air. My mother came rushing up behind me. Leave him! I heard my father shout. Nooo! My mother shouted back at him then at me get up! Hurry hurry get in the car get in the car!

The lady was wailing and screaming and tearing at her husband who was holding her back around the waist. She was trying to grab at me a look of anger and desperation on her face. I clambered into the car and we drove off without another word to the people who only a short time earlier had been so important to us. I stuck my head in between the two front seats and spoke the first full sentences of my life. “Why do they hate us?" I asked my mother. My mother replied, "because a branch fell from the tree we were all sitting under and killed her baby girl and she had only one and we have four". “Were you going to leave me?” I asked looking at my father. "No" my mother replied, "of course not". My father stayed silent, stared straight ahead and drove on. I think that this was the moment that everything changed for him, for me, for us. A dream, a fairytale turned malevolent. All the tall trees potential killers of little children. We didn’t stay there much longer. We moved into the town and my father got a  job as an accountant. The work he had done before Hilldrop and what he did for the rest of his working life.