they brought us second-hand paperback books and atlases and foreign-language dictionaries and old magazines, and I stayed up at night reading about this other world, extending my French vocabulary, learning English and the capitals of European countries.
I read about a pop band called the Spice Girls and a nun called Mother Teresa and a beautiful princess who died in a tunnel in Paris and a woman who spent eighty-one days rowing alone across the Atlantic Ocean.
So it obviously was possible, getting away to somewhere else, if you were brave enough.
I could take my whole family somewhere better. We could leave the colline, catch a boat up the lake, walk through Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo, up through the Central African Republic into Chad, through Niger to Algeria, and then we’d reach Morocco, and I’d seen on the map that there was a tiny strip of sea, thin as a river. We could cross it by boat and go and live in the south of Spain.
Perhaps we would find a new life.
But the years passed, and we didn’t find a new life. Everything went on just the same.
Except something was about to change.
The one thousands were coming to an end.
We sat, all of us, on 31 December 1999, crouched on our haunches, our bare brown feet caked in red mud, looking expectantly over Lake Tanganyika, whose waters flowed over our borders and out beyond, imagining that something extraordinary might happen as we crossed over at midnight to the new millennium.
‘It’s the longest lake in the world,’ I said to my brothers and sisters, trying to copy my father’s jolly tone of voice, though the exact timbre of it was fading away from me, six years from his death. I found it hard to conjure it at night inside my head but I could still see his big wide smile and his twinkling eyes.
‘It’s the second deepest and the second largest, after Lake Baikal in Siberia,’ I said. ‘It holds 18 per cent of the world’s fresh water – and the fish in the lake are so special and so colourful that they are sold all around the world to rich men who like to keep them in glass boxes in their dining rooms.’
‘Do soldiers break in and smash the glass boxes?’ said Zion.
‘They don’t need soldiers in those countries,’ I said, authoritatively – I was fourteen years old now, my voice had broken and I was growing body hair. ‘No, these rich men live in peace.’
‘Peace?’ said Zion, creasing his brow.
And he and I walked across the hillside, looking up at the sky.
‘Let’s imagine that the clouds are boats,’ I said, crouching down and putting my arm around Zion’s shoulder, just as my father did with me when I was a little boy. ‘And let’s imagine that they’ll dip down to earth, Little Bro, and we’ll climb in, you and I. And, you know what? We’ll float right across the border of Burundi and way over the whole continent of Africa to the sea.’
‘Will we really?’ said Zion.
‘Really really,’ I said, and I wished it was true. I wished I could make things not as they were. I wished I could save Zion from the place where he’d been born.
My mother had always been fond of knitting, sewing and tapestry, and she tried to interest us in terrible craft projects where you made stuffed owls or knitted blankets for dolls.
She offered a special service for Stanley Hope Uniforms, which involved embroidering names onto PE bags, pencil cases, aertex shirts, anything really.
The minute we were born, our names were sewn and embroidered and painted and framed, with creeping flowers twisting and turning on the ascenders and descenders.
Barbara Cook at number 2 was inspired by my mother’s craft work, and it was this that sent her off to art classes, and this that caused her to start wearing wrap-around Indian skirts, which didn’t go well with her leather slip-on court shoes, flesh-coloured tights and anoraks.
Helen Dunnett at number 3 (who had a very thin grey whippet) liked to crochet things such as little boys’ ties, babies’ bonnets and holders for toilet rolls – and even a coat for the whippet, in pale green.
The craft craze must have been contagious because before you knew it, over half of Willow Crescent’s women were crafting away in their spare time, creating rag dolls, candles in the shape of triangular prisms, baby clothes, three-dimensional special-occasion cards – you name it, they made it.
My mother said her dream was to have a craft room, like my father had a study, but, although he was out of the house six days a week, he never once offered to share.
His study (the third bedroom) was the only part of the interior of the house of which he was in charge. His desk was immaculate, his dark green files hung in alphabetical order and his cork boards were papered in taut rectangles. He was also in charge of the double garage and the extra single garage and the garden, in which not one thing was out of place.
It was Barbara Cook who had the idea of the Willow Crescent Craft Fair. Everybody agreed that Number 1 would be the best location for it, not only because of our larger-than-average garden, but, in the event of rain, our immaculate double garage, with the additional single garage for the side shows, which the children would organise.
‘We’ve been thinking of a way to raise funds for the farm school where Graham Cook goes,’ said my mother to my father. ‘We all thought a Craft Fair would be a good idea.’
‘Lovely,’ said my father. ‘That would give the Cooks a bit of a boost.’
‘Yes, exactly,’ said my mother, allowing this burst of good-heartedness to flourish before slipping in the suggested venue.
‘I wouldn’t want everyone tramping over the carpets to use our toilet,’ said my father.
It was some hours later, when my mother and father had undergone several circular arguments and become rather tetchy with each other, and by which time Julia and I had gone to bed, listening out anxiously, in case our parents were about to get divorced, that we heard my father exclaim, ‘I shall damn well build an outside toilet.’
My father laboured on this outside toilet through the spring and summer, and when it was finished, he painted it, and bought a special red/green lock to show if the toilet was vacant or occupied. My mother made an arrangement of dried flowers for the shelf, and bought one of Helen Dunnett’s crocheted toilet-roll holders – in what Helen called burnt russet.
After that, my father looked a little lost on Sundays, as if some great purpose had been removed from his life.
My mother and her friends held committee meetings every five minutes around our kitchen table, and the children started planning side shows like Count the Number of Sweets in the Jar or Guess the Weight of the Cake.
I offered to sort through the second-hand toys and put prices on them, which, I discovered, my mother would over-write in permanent marker. Amongst them, I found the ugliest rag doll with yellow plaits, a brand-new Peter Rabbit and a drawn-on doll with one arm and one leg, and, in my fury about the wasted time I’d spent pricing the toys, I pulled off her remaining limbs, feeling strange. I put her torso and her separated arm and leg in my bedside drawer, and then I wrote a story where a dead baby was wrapped in cellophane like the un-used Peter Rabbit.
I asked Julia to read it so somebody would know how terrible I was inside my mind where you don’t always have control of things. She hesitated, breathed deeply and said, ‘Everyone has strange thoughts. And maybe you’ve read too many horrible things about Burundi. But we’ll burn it anyway, shall we, Aug? Because that would also be quite fun, don’t you think?’
I did think, but now I wish I hadn’t made her read that story.
I hear her childish voice so clearly,