Monday: Hat has acquired a guitar. She wants lessons. There isn’t a music academy in Outpost. There isn’t, as far as I am aware, a music teacher.
She grows increasingly distraught:
– But I’ve got a guitar now, and I shall never, ever learn how to play it and it will just sit here being useless, she sobs.
I have a rare light bulb moment and write a letter to our landlords at the Anglican diocese next door. The church band practices regularly outside tiny St Stephen’s at the end of our road. I see them as I drive past: strumming or drumming or fingering a keyboard beneath the shade of a mango tree, an electric cord snaking through the dust to add power and amplification to various instruments. Perhaps one of the players would be able to help?
Shortly after dispatching my letter a besuited gentleman, who introduces himself as Christopher, appears. He has found, he tells me, a guitar playing member of the band who is prepared to teach Hat. Hat, who has rushed eagerly out to greet our visitor, does a small jig to show how pleased she is.
– He can come on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, says Christopher.
– Gosh, I say, what’s his fee?– 25,000/- (about $20)
– Gosh, I say (again), that’s quite a lot for a lesson (do the math: it’s almost 400 bucks a month).
– No, no, no, not per lesson, Christopher assures me, that’s the total fee for teaching your daughter everything he knows about music and the guitar.
Either our new teacher, who is called George, does not appreciate how much Hat has to learn or he has little in the way of knowledge to impart.
Later, when we drive to the duka, Hat notices the band practicing. She leans far out of the car window, grinning and waving. A tall man, holding a guitar, waves back.
– Do you think that’s him, Mum, do you think that’s George?
– Perhaps, I say.
– Will he recognise me on Monday?
Probably. Given that she’s the only European child hankering for guitar lessons in a several hundred kilometer radius.
Tuesday: I receive the editorial report on my book. It is 14 pages long. It says that providing I’m prepared to do the work recommended (which is considerable), I could, possibly, with a kinder market (not one that favours the autobiographies of footballers wives) and a lot of luck, be in with the smallest hint of a chance at publication.
What do you think? Shelve it or give it a bash?
Wednesday: Husband returns from a day in the field with smallholders. He met, he says, a delightful old boy who did not know his age but remembers he was a young teenager at the start of World War I. We calculate he must be well over 100. Fit with it, observed husband: ”he walked with a stick and his teeth were falling out but he was all there and his hearing was perfect”.
I’d like to spend a day beneath a tree with him, drinking tea and listening to his stories. He must have a few.
Thursday: Hat and I walk the dogs. Hat is wearing a skirt and for reasons unknown suddenly drops a curtsey in the dust.
– did you have to do that, Mum, she asks.
– what?
– curtsey, when you were little?
I’m not that old I tell her. I’m not 108 like the old boy her father met yesterday. Even if I sometimes look it.
Friday: Hat watches a movie on the telly, Harriet the Spy. It prods a long buried memory to shuffle to the forefront of my addled brain: her older siblings and I watched the same film in a cinema in England as I awaited her birth. It’s why she’s called what she is: I hadn’t considered the name until then. It is about a girl of 11 who wants to be a writer. Like Hat: an eleven year old aspirant author. It’s why my own Harriet now wants a typewriter. A computer simply wouldn’t be the same.
– typewriters are a bit old fashioned, I tell her, it might be hard to fine one.
– but the Outpost is old fashioned, Mum …
What to say to that? It is. We’re in a time warp here. Dragging our feet in the dust, decades behind the rest of much racier well-heeled Tanzania.
– but why do you want a typewriter, I ask?
– I’d like to listen to the sound of the keys clacking.
The encouraging tune that accompanies writerly imagination.Perhaps that’s what I need …
Saturday: husband leaps out of bed very early to help a colleague butcher a pig they have purchased together. (This is an outpost, remember that: we don’t have the luxury of a selection of vacuumed packed meatcuts to choose from in the supermarket). He arrives home some hours later with kilos of pork including, I am thrilled to hear, the animal’s head. So that I can ”make brawn” apparently.
I wrinkle my nose at the suggestion so that husband knows exactly what I think of the idea.
I am definitely getting a typewriter. In hope that hearing the sound of my (pretence at) working as busy, important author will dissuade husband from making suggestions that I should occupy myself in kitchen in manner of 1920’s housewife.
– have you got a recipe then, for brawn?
And he begins to dig about my kitchen.
– Delia will have one, wont’ she?
– Delia is too young I tell him. Try Mrs Beeton.
He pulls Isabella Beeton’s tome on being domestic goddess down from shelf. Several families of cockroaches vacate the pages.
– they know it’s a good place to hide, observes husband sagely.
Most of my recipe books are: where once (whilst still hell bent on becoming DG) I cooked often (and badly and too hastily) the pages are splashed with cake mixture and tomato sauce and lemon pips. Infrequent forays into new culinary adventures, however, means recipe books rarely get an airing.
Or cockroaches, clearly, evacuation.