Читать книгу The Present Moment - Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye - Страница 8

CHAPTER TWO

Mary was taking Wairimu’s pulse and the old lady was looking at her attentively. She knew that she must be quiet till the count was finished.

‘You’re Mary, aren’t you?’ said Wairimu. ‘You looked after me before.’

‘That’s right. It’s clever of you to remember.’

‘I remember because I used to be like you once, though you may not believe it. Only more flighty, perhaps.’

The girl smiled, and the old lady was gratified to see her that much better.

‘There’s something the matter, though, isn’t there? You don’t look well to me. Are you – overdue – is that it?’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Sorry, you think me rude. It is only that when you get old you can tell: perhaps that only means you have nothing to do except minding other people’s business. I think I would be a nurse if I were young now. But in my day there were only two choices, picking coffee or looking after men.’

‘And which did you do?’

‘Both.’

‘And I bet you didn’t miss out on a good time either.’

‘You can say that again. And you?’

The weariness came back into Mary’s face.

‘I guess if I’d been young then I’d have done both too. I’m still a student and – don’t tell anyone, now – last month I did think I was pregnant. Thank God I’m not. But what I do know is that I wouldn’t have had any help if I had been. He didn’t even answer my letter. Well, I suppose it’s better to find out too soon than too late, but it depresses you, doesn’t it?’

‘The old, old story,’ said Wairimu softly. ‘You don’t imagine there would have been such punishments for getting into trouble in our old laws, do you, if it hadn’t happened pretty often? Is he a student too?’

‘A student doctor. Nurses are just there to be trodden under their feet, I guess. My big brother warned me already. He helped to educate me and he would be just furious if he knew. He’s engaged to my friend Gertrude, the tall one over there, and I’m certain he’ll treat her right.’

‘Yes, I had an elder brother too,’ smiled Wairimu. ‘He died long ago, of course. He was the first one to tell me about Nairobi and I’m sure afterwards he wished he hadn’t. But cheer up. They say what can’t be cured must be endured, and old age is one of those things you can’t cure.’

Wairimu thought the young man would take her to Nairobi. Years afterwards she saw how foolish that had been, but when a fairy-tale figure appears in your life, do you not expect the surroundings also to burst into a fairy-tale? It was many years later that she saw children creating a fantastic world of drama in their playground and acting up to it. Then she realised how it had been with her in those few passionate days. Or like the film of Adam and Eve which she had seen in some outdoor church arena, with the serpent wriggling up all over again and someone in a seat behind her shouting out loud, ‘You fool, don’t eat it – don’t EAT it!’ and subsiding with a hiss of despair as the sempiternal wrong was enacted once more.

She knew him, of course. He was Waitito the son of Njuguna. Nobody came as close to home as that without your knowing his name. He had probably come to visit his friend and age-mate, Nyambura’s brother. But again it was days before she began seriously to wonder why Nyambura had not accompanied her to the river that morning, and she never put the question afterwards; what would be the good? As though there were not more serpents than one wriggling through the dirt, and how would Eve know – Eve who was older, after all, than Mumbi, if she remembered it right, though what she had learned afterwards never seemed so clear in her head as what had actually happened in those far-off days – how could she know that the serpent was not one of the good gifts she was surrounded with? It was something that had worried her once upon a time when she was having church lessons, time hanging heavy those days on her hands and limbs, how did those first people find out that they must fear a caterpillar but crunch up a locust, that a goat was good to eat but not a dog, that nettles could be tamed by water and fire but bright berries might kill. Perhaps the first Eve found these things only when she was put outside the garden, but Mumbi had the whole mountain.

The young man kept the golden haze about him even when he drew her out of the path into the chilly shade of the trees, and if he could put a spell on her so far outside custom (for even when custom was customarily broken there was a time and place for it, a known penalty and a known outcome), must he not also draw her into that world where custom did not rule?

She asked a lot of questions, those three days, about Nairobi, but he said it was not easy to get a place to build there and on the fourth day he vanished and there was no one she dared ask. Later she heard that he had come to arrange his marriage and he bought the girl, Miriam, a white cloth dress and had a service for her in the mission church, but before that happened Wairimu was away in the coffee.

She used to wander away from the other girls and sit thinking. Her mother was worried and asked if she was ill. What, otherwise, was there to think about? If she feared her daughter was pregnant, there was soon clear evidence that she was not. They even asked if she was displeased with the marriage they were arranging. It was not that either. He was healthy and good-looking enough and as yet unmarried. It was not even that she would not pass the test of virginity, though that too was frightening. It was more that she had touched a magic world and been left behind.

To go to the coffee was also a new thing. It was one way of choosing for yourself. Otherwise for girls there was almost no choice. Boys might choose school or be marshalled into school, and as a consequence they might be chosen for one kind of work or another – in the time of the Great War, recently ended, many boys and men had been forced to go either to work or to fight – but for girls there were very few school places and as yet little choice: when you came home again there was still the marriage to be arranged. It was rumoured that the Sisters might try to keep the girls with them, but in fact the novitiate was not started till later when converts showed they really wanted it: the girl had no alternative to marriage until the coffee came.

You had to walk for about three hours – one of the other girls had pointed out the way. So, since it was not safe to go before light, you had better make an excuse for fetching water early in the morning – perhaps spilling a load the evening before and blaming it on a baby or a calf – so that it would be an hour before you were missed. Then you had to present yourself at the gate of the European farm and ask if they wanted workers. Usually they did. If they didn’t, she supposed you would have to trail home again and face a beating. But once you were taken on, given a place to sleep in the long, low buildings, a blanket and some staple food and taught which berries to pick and where to put them, they would not let you out even if your parents came to cry and shout for you. At the end of the month you got some money, and so you were like a man and could do a lot of choosing for yourself.

One or two girls may have gone there because they were pregnant. But more often it was because they felt overworked at home or harassed by an unkind stepmother. They might go planning for a certain object, like Lois, who went with Wairimu and had been baptised as a baby far down the mountain where her father was working at the time. She was engaged to a Christian and was determined to buy herself a white dress and a pair of shoes to be married in. Even those who did not specially mean to save, she told Wairimu, would buy themselves a yellow cloth to replace the leathers they walked in, and new ornaments. So they slipped away one misty morning, leaving the water-skins by the path, and before midday they were written on for the coffee.

Nobody thought of going for good. If you came home with your money and your experience it would be as a chooser and a doer, able to send your younger sisters to the river and have food brought from the kitchen. But in fact not many went home. When Wairimu left Lois there she had still not got her white dress and they heard that the fiancé was not pleased with her running away. There was more to being a Christian wife, he said, than dresses and shoes.

Wairimu was a strong girl, though not tall, and used to working hard. She was not shy – ever since that morning on the river path she had known that she could not go back to childish behaviour again – so she got along with people, sang about her work, joined in the evening dances, held her own against the men’s demands. The golden haze had never come back. None of them could put a spell on her and she always said no.

She had got her yellow cloth and an extra wrapper for cold days and a few more bangles, but she also kept some of her rupees. For the coffee had not brought her what she wanted, except just for avoiding the wedding day. She would have to go to Nairobi.

One day the young master was walking round inspecting the berries. The old master did not often do that: he left it to his foremen. The young man sometimes came for a couple of months. They said he was still at school in England, though he looked grown-up and dressed like a man.

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked in good Kikuyu, looking into her basket.

‘I want to go to Nairobi,’ she answered, taking the chance.

‘It’s a long way to Nairobi,’ he laughed.

‘But I want to go there. There is something I can do for you if you take me.’

She looked hopefully into his face and danced a few steps.

His colour changed as she did not know white people’s colour could change. He became red like the pinky-red in the ear-coils. Then he slapped her hard.

‘Keep your place,’ he shouted, and hurried away.

Well, she had made a mistake. Fortunately no one had seen it. But the next time she saw a rainbow pointing outwards and downwards she knew she must go.

You could walk it easily in three days – to Mbiri one day, Mbiri to Thika the second, Thika to Nairobi the third. But people did not walk alone. Besides, you were not supposed to leave your work without being signed off. You could be brought back, and that would be worse than a slap. She began to lay her plans.

The coffee was taken by bullock cart from various parts of the estate to the factory. There the first processing was done, but it had to be worked over again in Nairobi, so it was packed into enormous bags, twelve to a ton, and sent out by lorry to the railhead, near Fort Hall. She could not even lift one of the bags, a bitter humiliation, since she considered herself grown-up and as strong as her granny. Her mother, always fussing over babies, was not quite in the same class. The men would lift the bags, two working together, on to the lorry which would take them to Nyeri town, where a coffee transporter would combine the loads from the different estates and deliver them all to the railway. The little estate roads were not in good enough condition for the big lorry to collect direct. The foremen grumbled at the expense of all this changing over, and the better profit that could be made if you were near the railway.

Wairimu made herself agreeable to the Kikuyu driver of a local lorry. She had once before got a lift of a few miles from him when she had taken a day off for shopping in Nyeri: that was her first experience of wheeled transport. He agreed, on certain conditions, to speaking for her to the long-distance transporters and telling her which day they would be travelling. She must go near the beginning of her ticket so as not to lose too much pay: if she asked to be signed off she would be questioned about her plans and perhaps laughed at again.

She slipped out of the lines early one morning, wearing her yellow cloth and ornaments, a small kiondo slung on her back. She was almost as excited as she had been when leaving home that first time. The air was cool and crisp, the earth road still damp and chilly beneath her bare feet. She had decided not to go home first. They would only try to detain her. They knew where she was, for her brother had been to see her once on his way to look for casual work in Nyeri town, so the whisper must have spread. At that time her father was still trying to avoid having to return the first goats paid to him towards her dowry. But he would not so demean himself as to come and wrangle with her away from his own homestead.

She waited by the roadside, out of sight, for the lorry to drive up to the estate, load and start its return journey. She climbed up among the huge sacks and enjoyed the jerky movement and the wind whistling by. In Nyeri town the driver introduced her to the turn-boy of the regular service, with whom he shared a room. She agreed to cook for them both that night, but the turn-boy had to negotiate with his Indian driver, so she had to part with one of her precious rupees as well. She had been paid three rupees for each thirty-day ticket. They rested on Sundays and could take other days off for sickness or visiting provided each ticket was completed within forty-two days. She had completed ten tickets in about a year and had managed to save about ten rupees – only now they were talking about changing the money.

It was a big climb into the high lorry and she did not see much of the countryside because she was half-hidden among the bags, but she had the sensation of going down and down, and when she stood up at an occasional halt everything looked familiar. The roads looked wide and smooth to her, though not to the driver. These were the same, she realised, on which the women had been forced to work until Harry Thuku had got a telegram from London saying they must stop. She did not quite know what a telegram was, but all the women praised Thuku and they were already singing songs about him as the Chief of Girls.

At Fort Hall there were a few stone buildings, a boma, donkey carts, a motor car or two. These must be what had made it Fort Hall instead of Mbiri. The driver told the turn-boy to put her off before they came to the railway, in case he were asked awkward questions, but the turn-boy had a better idea. He stopped another lorry just outside the town and consulted with his opposite number. Then he dragged Wairimu out of her hiding-place and over to the other vehicle.

‘You’ll have to put up a good story,’ he whispered to her, ‘but it will be better for you than waiting for the train.’

She had to confront the Indian driver herself, but found he spoke excellent Kikuyu: his father had a shop in the small town and he had grown up there, only going to Nairobi for a few years of primary schooling. She told him that she had a sick brother working for the railway in Nairobi and her aged father was not able to travel that far so had sent her to look after him. The Indian looked sceptical but he told her to hop up so long as she agreed to take care of herself in Thika where she was going to change loads and spend the night. She joyfully agreed and made the most of the ride, seeing the country grow flatter and more fertile as they passed. At Thika the turn-boy took her to a tiny shack beside the market and brought her a bowl of maize and beans to eat.

Next morning there were more wonders. Not only was the train to be seen near the road but you hardly passed five minutes – time to fill the water-skin, as she might have said then – without encountering traffic, people riding bicycles (some of whom were pointed out to her as European women), donkey carts piled with fruit, firewood or assorted bundles, motor cars (most of them the same Model T Ford as the master had at Nyeri, but she hardly knew that any were different), a few machines which were used, according to her companion, to till the fields, and occasionally huge carts pulled by teams of oxen which were heading for uncivilised areas where the roads were not properly made up. This one was swampy in places, and at Ruiru they passed strange machines where the river roared by, which could, he tried to make her believe, light huge lamps fifteen miles away. True, there were poles beside the road, too tall for any fence, and so they drove on, past tall houses and on to hard grey roads, and at last this was Nairobi, the other side of the river. They put her down at the corner of Government Road and Duke Street, on their way to the mills, gesturing towards the station in token reference to her story. There was an awe about everything then which had faded for her since. The sun was high: she sensed once more the golden haze. She had been right to follow her rainbow.

People swarmed about. Roads were wider than she had ever seen. It was like a dream, but a dream without anyone to direct you where to go or what to do. And, like a dream, without edges to it – bare and patchy as it seemed in memory, everywhere you looked (even across the race course, even to the roads you had traversed the other side of the swampy river bed, even to the wide plains south of the railway workshops) it was still Nairobi.

All the same, she was getting tired. There was some money hidden away inside the kiondo but she did not know how to buy anything to eat from these strange buildings filled with men, or how to ask her way to a market. She did not understand most of what was being said around her, and began to see why people had said it would be hard to find anyone you knew in Nairobi (but in any case she did not know anyone). She had seen Indian shopkeepers in Nyeri, and an engineer or two coming to do repairs in the factory, but here there seemed to be Indians everywhere.

One of them pulled up a car near her and out of it stepped not another Indian, as she had at first thought, but a young Kikuyu man dressed in a suit such as the master would wear only on Sundays or for attending baraza in town, with a wide-brimmed hat and shiny European shoes. He shook hands with the driver of the car and started to walk away.

‘Thuku,’ a whisper went round the crowd, ‘Harry Thuku.’

Thuku! She had not seen him before but she knew he had been to Nyeri and they had all sung songs in praise of him because he had protested against the women’s road work and was going to free the people from forced labour and European taxes. This was seeing life indeed, and she felt an urgent need to participate, to make herself also known. She was about seventeen years old and she too was part of a new world. So she began to sing one of the praise songs, swaying in time with the music. Some people laughed, others clapped their hands out of beat, for which she did not see the reason. Thuku himself stopped and turned round.

‘So you know me?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Everyone knows you, sir, even if we did not see you when you came to Nyeri.’

‘But I do not know you. Who are you?’

‘My name is Wairimu wa Gichuru, sir.’

‘And what are you doing in Nairobi, Wairimu, if you come from Nyeri? Are your parents here, or do you have a husband?’

‘I came alone, sir, to see the city and find work.’

Some of the men laughed. A woman in European dress was about to take her arm.

‘Leave her,’ Thuku ordered. Then he spoke in another language to a man in the crowd.

‘Wairimu, you are brave, but you do not know how hard a thing you have undertaken. Your people ought to have explained to you. This friend of mine will take you to some Kiambu people who will teach you what you need to know. Perhaps they will give you some work for a while. Will you trust us to arrange that?’

‘Yes indeed, sir. Thank you, sir.’

He smiled again.

‘It is good to be brave and wise. People have said that I am brave. But sometimes it is wise to be a little afraid.’

The group dispersed as he walked away and the man he had pointed out signalled to Wairimu to follow. She went with him to a narrow, dirtier street and in it to a small corrugated iron building where men were eating and drinking tea. The foremen and clerks at the estate sometimes had tea and bread but she had never tasted any herself. The man indicated a bench she should sit on and a young boy brought her uji to drink and pieces of bread, at his command. The friend of Thuku – she later learned that he was called Tairara – went to talk to the man and wife, Samson and Nduta, who ran the tea room. Then he went away and left them to talk to her in Kikuyu.

First they asked whether she had run away from home, whether she had ever been married, if she had a baby or was expecting one. Well, they said, it was not according to their custom that she should be alone, but the world was changing and Nyeri was perhaps less strict than Kiambu. She could help them serve and wash the utensils: they would give her food and a corner to sleep in and, if she stayed, some money at the end of the month. They supposed she must know what Nairobi was like and how men were bound to pester her. That was her own affair but they did not want any trouble in the tea shop. Outside, they had no way to protect her, women being as few as they were and all the old rules set aside. Straight away she had better learn numbers in Swahili and the names of the main foodstuffs. This did not take long and she revelled in her own ability to learn.

She was amazed by her luck. Although supposed to be working most daylight hours, she was soon able to find pretexts for going out to buy provisions or help someone with a load to the station. She was fascinated by the streets, where ox-carts still mingled with the motor cars and at night big lights (just as the turn-boy had told her at Ruiru) shone from poles along the wayside.

In shop windows there were white people standing and sitting to display the clothes – it took her some time to realise they were not alive – and some of the buildings were higher than the tallest tree. Inside, people said, you walked up stair after stair, like the four that led up to master’s bungalow at the coffee. Water came out of pipes – not many of them: you had to queue for a turn to fill your bucket. Some people preferred to go down to the river, but Nduta refused to use river water for tea or cooking. When you slopped through the marsh and reeds to get to the bank (for there was nowhere else you could decently have a bath, and even so there would be men prowling about) you could see why. For this was not like the river that came down from the mountain and people had not respected it. Sewage and hospital waste poured into it, rubbish and dead cats floated in it, rats invaded the garbage heaps left beside it, the only natural life connected with it was the loud croaking of the frogs at night. It was only after heavy rain, which could fall even out of season in Nairobi, that its pace would increase and the water might seem clean as it gurgled along, but then it would overflow its banks and still more refuse would be carried into the stream when the water subsided again.

She learned in a rough and ready way to recognise the different kinds of people. There were arrogant Somali, with their elaborate headscarves and bony features: some of them condescended to oversee labour on the estates, demanding enamel dishes, tea and special times to pray, but now she saw their women for the first time and learned a new concept of elegance. There were big, black Luos, Uganda people with white robes and commanding eyes, Kamba porters and woodworkers with their pointed teeth – good mechanics, they were reckoned up country – Goans, like brown Europeans, deft, jerky, decorative, and Hindu and Muslim Indians in every kind of dress and every walk of life. Arabs and coast people came often to the tea room, speaking in a way the inland people seemed to understand but did not imitate: Nduta said they avoided bars because of their religion. The men were very clean; there were only a few women, but Wairimu was studying them carefully. Then there were the Europeans, hundreds of them, it seemed, in the middle of town, because many of them had work there instead of being hidden away in kitchens and workshops like the other races. By complexion, tilt of the head, clothing, tools carried and, most especially, by the state of their boots, you gradually got to identify European official, farmer, soldier, railwayman, police. The women all seemed to be young – though people said the ones with the shortest hair and skirts were the youngest – but even here you could soon learn the difference between a visiting farmer and a town wife. Many of them were not married at all, she was told, but served in shops (European shops, of course) or wrote things in offices, earned their own money, bought dresses or cooking pans or groceries for themselves (you could see the parcels being carried out by shop attendants to a waiting vehicle), some even drove their own cars. Indeed there was a lot to think about.

Wairimu delighted in the different food smells, horse smells, tobacco smells and cosmetic smells that wafted across the pavement from each group. She was interested and amazed by the skin colours and textures, more various than she had dreamed of, and the voices that ranged from gruff and guttural to shrill and staccato like those the old people said you used to hear at night when the forests were thick and full of life.

She was summoned from her reverie by the kitchen attendant. Clothes would be brought tomorrow, they were told. Everyone was expected to be very clean and to be wearing something decent underneath so that they could be fitted without making anybody ashamed. Please remind everyone to be ready early in the morning. Well, there was some pleasure still in getting a new dress, just as there used to be in selecting the six goatskins, turning and matching them this way and that to make the best of the colours and the patterns. Of course she would remind the ladies and inspect them too. Seventy-eight years had never yet taught her to mind her own business.

The local donors’ committee had come up with thirty dresses and two of the ladies had come down to distribute them. It was an occasion they always enjoyed, an opportunity to give pleasure through their generosity and to show how free they were with the old women, patting them on the shoulder and helping to pull the garments over their flabby chests. It was an agony for Matron, who knew that the gifts got together must vary greatly in their appeal and durability, and also that at least half of them would be too small. One of the ladies was an Asian diplomat’s wife, the other a Kenyan lawyer, glad to find excuses to get out of the house during her maternity leave. She had hopefully brought along a sewing kit for alterations, but Matron was envisaging long weeks of complaint as she presided, smiling, over the coffee and biscuits. She wrote out a list of the residents under the headings large, medium and small and advised the visitors to divide the dresses in the same way to reduce the area of dispute, and to call in ten ladies at a time. Then she firmly withdrew. Let the charge of favouritism land on other heads for the time being.

Of course the residents enjoyed themselves at first, holding up and fitting, admiring themselves in a mirror brought for the purpose from Matron’s quarters, having photographs taken. But as the actual allocations were made discontent began to show. In the large category Rahel was no problem: if it was long enough, not much else mattered. Priscilla was so used to fitting into things that the shirt-waist that was too narrow for any of the other tall women suited her very well: it happened, in fact, to be trimly cut and sedate in colour. Sophia got hold of the most glamorous dress of all.

‘You’ll be able to put a buibui over it when it wears into holes,’ Mama Chungu commented acidly.

Bessie was easy-going in the medium class. She was used to regarding a dress as a raw item that would go through various metamorphoses before it dropped into grey and musty rags. Nekesa was satisfied with the print dress she got, though they had to borrow a wide belt from another outfit to cover the gap at the waist fastening. The ‘small’ group were the most constrained, most having substantial muscles, in spite of their apparent skinniness, compared with the teachers and secretaries from whom the clothes had come, but Wairimu managed to land a sturdy dress with red and purple flowers by leaving the zip undone under her shuka.

‘You see,’ she said next day, pouting, ‘Sophia got the best of the dresses. She always comes in for favours.’

‘It fitted her,’ Priscilla answered patiently. ‘I liked it, but it would have hung like a sack on me. And you are shorter – it would not fit you.’

‘I am not saying I wanted it. But they favour her. Just because she is a convert. Why didn’t they send her back to Mombasa?’

‘Why didn’t they send you and me back to Nyeri? Because there is no one to look after us there. But for her it is worse, because she is now a Christian and some of the family would take revenge on her. I hear that her son will not even have her name mentioned in his house.’

‘Sophia, Sophia,’ repeated Wairimu. ‘We hear it often enough for goodness sake. Fat and flabby and flaunting herself like a young girl. Look at her hands – never did a hard day’s work in her life. And all those bangles – jingili, jingili, jingili!’

Wairimu tossed her head in a way that might once have been called flaunting and remembered just in time that it was forbidden to spit on the cement floor.

‘Work for them is different,’ said Priscilla gently. She did not feel at all gentle, remembering how long it was since she had held a hoe herself. Remembering that she was as tall as Sophia and had once had heavy limbs and loins that would have rounded out with bearing children, breasts that were eager to be filled and fill again.

She had seen Mombasa several times, the first long ago in the war days when Jim was a baby and she had gone down with Mrs Bateson during the school holidays to help. Mr Bateson was busy on the farm and could not go. She had seen, even then, that the women worked. Those outside the town dug their vegetables and kept their chickens and goats, but inside were people who lived on money like Europeans. They traded, made sweets or mandazi for sale, sewed, plaited mats or baskets, bargained at great length, looked after their homes with satisfaction. True, in that hot sun and staying close to home, you might have thought them lazy in movement. But they were not lazy in the things that concerned them.

Sophia was pleased with the new dress. It had cunning pleats and big sleeves and a pattern of sequins. Some diplomatic lady of mature age and figure had once had it made for cocktails, for leisurely hours on ships or terraces. She felt queenly in it, as she remembered in her young womanhood poring for hours over materials in the bazaar and making them up with such long delight to emphasise every good point in her figure. So that one shuddered with pleasure, even under the modest buibui, waiting for the other women to pull and touch and handle the fine work. This one would be hard to wash, she knew, especially in cold water, to dry in a dusty compound, but one could not always be prudent, and in a place like this death stalked around the corner: one need not for ever be thinking of making things last.

As a child she had been taught to be careful, but not too careful. In her pleasure at the new dress she dared to think back to those days – endlessly warm days; even when the rain pelted down and made streams of the alleys of the old town, pools all over the too-flat roads of the new town, you were paddling in warm water, still comfortable. You were always crowded, but not in want, and the air was fragrant with spices, oiled bodies, coffee, fish, salt, tar. Perhaps this was why the Refuge always felt so empty, the vacant atmosphere of disinfectant and boiled potatoes, the clean earthy smell that clung to these Kikuyu women and the sour, outlandish, yesterday’s gruel of those others from the west. It was not that she did not like them, but they seemed to lack any notion of pattern, ordered their words in grunts and cackles.

She remembered as a little girl the excitement of people always coming and going. The rails still ran through the streets all the way down to Kilindini port, with trolleys pushed by men in uniform, carrying Europeans and other important people or crates and parcels for the big ships. In spite of the conflict between Arab and Swahili, everyone took notice when the town crier went round, with his buffalo horn and little stick, to make the announcements, or when the elders turned out richly dressed for the seasonal religious ceremonies. She remembered the lamplight procession and the fireworks after they heard that the Great War was over and that King George had won it, and the other time, when she was about ten years old, that Swahili and Somali had all at once been lumped together with the ‘natives’ from inland and had to carry passes. At least Mombasa prided itself on still having more civilised men than other places, exempt from some of the ‘native’ ordinances because they could read and write, interpret from Arabic to Swahili or English, and were engaged in government service or skilled in the law.

She did not go to madrasa with her brothers but learned at home to read a little in the old script and count for trading purposes. So when, long afterwards, they wanted her to read the Bible (she who had a memory like Scheherezade and could have driven them crazy with story-telling from the five books and other ancient memories) it was not too hard to learn the new letters with their intrusive a-e-i-o-u, all starting unpropitiously from the left side.

By the time she matured she was expert in weaving the mats which her mother took to market. Around this time her uncle, the one who carried his coffee-pot round the town, clinking the cups together in advertisement as nowadays the ice-cream man rings his bell on hot days, married a young wife who was expert in sewing and from her Fatuma – she was not yet Sophia – learned the art of needlework.

Her first marriage occurred at the time when the port grew dull for lack of business, sisal and coffee fetching so little that it was not worth buying sacks and putting them on the train. This did not prevent the customary ceremonies and the formal dowry payment. Fatuma made no objection to the match and, after the public proclamation that her virginity had been demonstrated, the couple were not reluctant to be enclosed for the seven days traditional fungate honeymoon. Ali had managed to keep his job as a clerk at the docks and had furnished a neat apartment for her, two upstairs rooms, where his friends would come to drink coffee and read the newspapers, one of them even to play the accordion. This surprised her, for it was generally considered to be a Christian instrument, used to accompany the seductive and debilitating beat of the waltz or quickstep. She was more accustomed to vigorous group dances, to the high wail of the long trumpet or massed drums, heard behind canvas screens when a ceremony was going on in the old town. But keeping a job was no joke in those days, and Ali was always having to pay out to assist some less fortunate colleague or sometimes, she suspected, to protect his seat in the rickety office where there were fewer and fewer invoices to write. (But in retrospect the old crafts and diets of the island survived in perpetual sunshine, as they had survived many another trial of history.)

Ali was lean and muscular, dressed ordinarily in white shirt and shorts, with the white embroidered cap pressed firmly on his curly hair. On Fridays he would expect his long white robe to be spotless and would take Hassan, similarly dressed, to the mosque while she stayed behind with the little girls. Before each Idd he would give her money for the fabrics, embroidery thread, whatever else she needed to turn them out smartly to his credit.

Indeed, the memory of her first marriage was punctuated not so much by births and miscarriages as by fragments of her art – a sailor suit she had made for Hassan to wear when some Governor or other was arriving at the port, a shimmering loose gown for carrying a baby that had slipped away when she was barely showing, a white-sprigged bed cover she had quilted for the wedding of a Goan teacher’s daughter.

In Sophia’s memory the strike seemed to be the beginning of the end. It was a good thing – Ali said so, and therefore she must believe it. Although they continued to live in the old town way, in which Muslims considered themselves a cut above the inland people, Christians or pagans, kaffirs all, except for a few who had seen the light and were beginning to follow civilised ways, Ali was one of those who resented the Arab feeling of superiority. This feeling had grown since the Arabs, despite all their talk in the Coast Arab Association, had kept the votes for a Legco member to themselves. So Swahilis had begun to talk about unity with inland Africans, and once one started to think about them as brothers it was impossible not to see that they were suffering. Their wages were extremely low for a place where you could not even partially apply the theory that food was coming free from the home place; a house, however overcrowded, was hard to get and sure to cost more than the small allowance paid to those who did not get a room in government quarters; worse than that, the casual labourers might not get more than a few days’ work a month. Disorders and riots had occurred before. Now, Ali said, it was time to show what organisation and solidarity could do.

It alerted government and employers to labour problems. It was not able to do much else. Only the Conservancy Department had given proper notice of their intention to strike. The Municipality therefore recognised a dispute and came up promptly with a very small offer. The night soil workers accepted it but the sweepers did not, so that although there was not a sanitary emergency, the rubbish piled up. Casual workers at the port were the first to come out but the ‘permanent boys’ had too much to lose: however when the strike spread to the African Marine Company police stopped all work in the port for fear that strikers would carry out their threat to invade the dock area. Pickets did their best to bring building to a halt and also to call out domestic servants, but some domestic employers and hotels were accommodating their staff or driving them home.

Permanent labourers on the railway did not actually strike – they presented their demands and were promised investigation. This greatly weakened workers’ co-operation, but even so about six thousand people were off work at the same time. The Texas Oil Company paid off their daily workers and brought staff from Nairobi. The Mombasa Electric Light and Power Company signed off strikers and engaged new staff locally. Dairy workers settled their dispute within a day. So unity was sabotaged and people drifted back to work. Only the very poorest got much out of the interim award, and the planned further investigations were postponed in the excitement of war breaking out.

To Fatuma it just seemed messy, outside forces spilling over in the untidy order of island life. Rubbish piled up in the streets and round the fish market, goods lay undelivered, some of them rotting, gangs of unemployed wandered about, no greater hazard to life and property than usual but irritating, the extra police making a great show of breaking them up while, as a result, new groups formed up like a wave behind them. It gave her a funny feeling, but she tried to believe Ali that it would make for improvement in the long run.

Then, almost before one was back in routine, war. Knowing as usual, Ali said the awards, the restraint on police action, had been to keep the people loyal in case they were needed to fight. There was no very promising alternative to be loyal to, from what one heard of the Italians in Ethiopia, but even so in 1940 the government managed to lock up some political activists on a charge of being in touch with the enemy, and to ban three political groups.

It was not what older people thought of as a war, with soldiers nipping across the boundary to shoot one another beside the railway while you stood back and waved flags. This war meant work – the port full of ships, carrying troops, carrying food, carrying mail, which sometimes failed to arrive and was always wanted in a hurry. Everyone was busy. Everyone was tired. There were long queues for goods in the authorised shops, high prices in the others. Routes, and so manifests, might have to be changed at the last minute, documents delayed to reduce the risk of careless talk. One morning a load slipped and crashed down from overhead. Ali was crumpled, reduced, died on the way to hospital. He was buried, as is customary, at sundown. Overnight, order was reversed, and all Fatuma’s faiths disintegrated.

Eleven years they were together, good years, until the disaster that in her mind marched always with the troubles of the Second World War, when you had to pretend to be an Arab to qualify for a rice ration and your menfolk were too busy in the port to come home to their beds. But all that was behind her now. . . .

The cement floor was chill and damp to the touch. Draughts reigned under a cloudy sky. One had to speak to these faded old ladies in simplistic terms, dull and devoid of ornament. Admittedly, she did not know their treasured languages, but they prided themselves on knowing hers, and drained it of cadence and colour as they spoke.

Sophia smoothed the new dress lovingly. Once she would have scorned to wear anything that had been on another woman’s body. But this was neutral. It held no perfume of other days, no fragment of shell or fish scales, no healthy smell of babies bathed at sundown, of hard soap or new cloth redolent of dress, of coconut oil and peppers, cloves or rough sticks of cinnamon that were good to chew. No kohl, no hennaed patterns on the skin, no moist, milky breasts, no mystery here behind neat curtained windows where clerks and technicians and their lumpy wives lived in bland discomfort as the whites had taught them. Selecting the gayest of her wrappers as an invocation to warmth, she cocooned herself under the blanket in the hope of dreaming herself away.

‘No, good, Soph-i-a,’ said Matron sharply. ‘You will complain to me again that you can’t sleep at night because of somebody coughing or somebody snoring, and you use up all your sleep in the daytime.’

But Sophia hugged herself more tightly and kept her eyes closed.