Before the Knife

I was going to say that my first memory of our life in Africa was at Riley's Hotel in Maun, at the top of Botswana, on the edge of the Okavango Delta. But that isn't so. It's just that I tend to skip over the first place we lived in, as if I'm still trying to forget it the way I did then. That way, for a short while, it can seem, just like the first time, somehow not to have happened at all. Old defenses rush to the rescue so that even now, whenever I think of our life in Africa, I go directly to the Kalahari. I blot out the years from three to six, when my mother and I were like the first finger and thumb of a glove that held me safely in place in the world, and gave her a measure of safety that was taken from her just as suddenly and shockingly as it was from me.

Our life in Africa actually began in Swaziland-a tiny African kingdom held in the fist of the Republic of South Africa. At that time, the British government's district commissioners oversaw the colony, and my father was sent out from England to be one of those men who strode around wearing the hard hats, khaki uniforms, and knee-length socks of the Empire. We'd come out on the boat, and since I was only about three and a half at the time, I'm not sure how much I remember of that first sea voyage out. I seem to see the boat pulling out of the dock at Southampton and the paper streamers connecting, for those sad, fleeting moments, those on the boat to those on the shore. I seem to see my grandmother and my aunt far, far below, standing on the quay, stout women wearing dark clothes. My grandmother was bitter and silent when we said good-bye; she would barely kiss us and her face was stiff with anger. She'd been through all this before: my father had run off to India when he was twenty, leaving her and Ireland behind, vowing never to return to the miserable, rain-soaked poverty. Now he was at it again, taking us into another exile-this time into the dark, godforsaken hell of Africa.

My sister and I were born in India around the time of Partition and Independence, which came in 1947, and at the time of our births, my grandmother had reached her determined hand across the ocean, and insisted we be baptized as Catholics. My father-deep hater of priests and the Holy Roman Church-handed us over like lambs. Now he was trying to get away from his mother again, only this time he was escaping to Africa, and this time he wasn't going alone-he was taking my mother, my sister, and me with him.

After the British had pulled up stakes from India and headed home to England, my father hadn't been able to settle along with the rest of them. At that time, England's overseas colonies, apart from India, were held firmly under imperial domination. You had only to glance at an atlas to see how much of the world was painted red, the scarlet mark of British conquest and possession, the boot on the neck of the dispossessed. And all of this vast empire was somehow, quaintly, thought of simply as England, a frontier that stretched as far as destiny was wont to go.

India, in getting rid of the Empire, and splitting off Pakistan, had covered herself with a different kind of red. My parents, who had met and married in India, had to get out with the rest of the British and make way for independence and freedom. For England and her empire, it was the death knell, the beginning of the end, worse even than the uppityness of the wretched Boers in South Africa who'd tried the same thing some fifty years before. In India the dream died hard. English emotions were wrung at the death of the Raj. With India gone, the Empire began to sink down into the sea. In a dozen or so years, as red faded to pink, the imperial shade would be no more than a sign of decadence and corruption. Sharp new colors and brave flags now began to flutter over colonies where once the British had played polo and instilled a certain kind of order and gentility that was better suited to Oxfordshire or Surrey.

This giddy last fling of India under the Raj had got into my father's blood. As a young man, he'd found himself with complete dominion over more than a thousand Indians, and he'd liked it. The son of a policeman, born into poverty in Ireland in 1914, he'd found in this remote but exquisite satellite of the British Empire a place to exercise a deep need for power. It was a heady time in India, with insurrections and sectarian uprisings stirring the hot winds of independence. In Europe the war was raging, but my father was out of it. In India he'd joined the British Police, and later the Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi, where he and my mother were married and my sister and I were born. On his watch, a mighty nation was torn into two bleeding halves, and with independence, the British were thrown out, and he with them. Before you knew it, British India was no more.