Leaving Before the Rains Come Read Online Free

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giggle in bed, cry when you sing carols, not cry at funerals, kill salmon, drink seriously, put the ‘Great’ into Britain and the ‘Hooray’ into Henry, and live in the country.”
    I objected: I didn’t want to put the “Great” into a nation I barely knew or the “Hooray” into some Eton-educated bon vivant; I wanted to live in the wild African bush, not in some denatured bucolic English field; I admired the full-throated Zambian way of mourning the dead with shaved heads and ululating lamentation; and pearls and navy blue were all wrong for a Southern Hemisphere summer. Also,
The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook
featured Princess Diana on the cover, the supposed epitome of Sloanedom, but she was a terrible advertisement for British upper-class insouciance. Even two short years into her marriage to Charles, she looked tragic and barely breathing, as if the killed salmon had got its revenge and a tiny nonfatal but obstructing fishbone had wedged in her throat. Mum agreed, “Yes, Di is a bit of a drip. They should have put someone outdoorsy and horsey on the cover.” She paused and then added without any degree of subtlety, “Now you, for example, Bobo, are
very
outdoorsy and horsey.”
    But for me, there was no going back, no skipping the African years and reabsorbing into Britain as if Rhodesia’s bush war and tough boarding schools and the giddy freedom of living on outsized ranches and the “whole of bloody Africa to play in” hadn’t lodged like hardy parasites in my English/Scottish blood. And regardless of my mother’s idea that marriage to the proper person was an acceptable career choice, I was never going to marry a Tory aristocrat with deep pockets and a pile in the country. “I don’t blame you, Bobo,” Dad said, uncharacteristically taking sides. “I think all the decent chaps died out with Churchill and that other bloke.”
    “What other bloke?” I asked.
    “I don’t know, but there must have been at least one other.”
    No one thought to tell me that it was all right to make a career choice that didn’t involve having a husband, although from the start Dad had been clear that I had to be able to stand on my own two feet. But the specifics of what that meant seemed to elude him—if I could change a flat tire, shoot a gun, and ride a horse, I think he thought it was enough. Also no one thought to let me know that my British passport, while a useful way to get off the continent, was no way to stay. And if anyone had asked what I wanted—if it had been my choice—I would have given up my British passport without a second thought and exchanged it for a Zambian one.
    I was accidentally British, incidentally European—a coincidence of so many couplings. But I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look African; and yet here I still was. That seemed to me to prove a point. Someone had planted me in this soil and I had taken fierce hold. And although I had no illusions—this land wasn’t mine to inherit, none of it belonged to me—I couldn’t help knowing that I belonged to it.
    When I was finally taken back to the UK on holiday, I felt panicked and unknowable and unknown there. I wasn’t British. I didn’t sound British. I didn’t feel British. I sat at lunch with relatives and old family friends, miserable with the choice of utensils. Why invent such a test? Who needs so many ways to get food into their mouth? It made me want to eat with my fingers. It wasn’t that my parents hadn’t taught me what knife and fork to use in the event that more than one of each be presented, or that the correct response to “How do you do?” is not, “Fine, thanks,” but rather a nod of the head. I knew what to do and say, but to me it was like a foreign language. The moment I was