A Twistmas Tale

Middlemarch Redux - My English Traits - Chapter 55

Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat,

Please put a penny in the old man’s hat

There are two reasons I’m pretty sure it was 1965 when that terrible thing happened with the turkeys.

The first is that my mother probably wouldn’t have agreed to invite Uncle Jack, Aunt Dorothy and our robust Eastern Cape cousins to spend Christmas at New Dell unless it was their last chance to spend some time at our fabled childhood farm before we moved from Hidcote to Rosetta in 1966.

The second is that when I snuck into the kitchen just after midnight in the hope of foraging a gobful of Christmas pudding left over from our festive lunch of pickled pork, sliced polony, roast potatoes, crackers, trinkets and multi-coloured Christmas hats laid out under the magnificent oak trees below the back veranda and I found my mother slumped in the little wooden kitchen chair and dabbing a tear from her cheek with a pale blue paper napkin, I remember hearing the faint strains of Hang On Sloopy by the McCoys throbbing from the green canvas tent Bruce had pitched in the sunken rose garden in the deep shadows beyond the holly tree to entertain his latest girlfriend, Linda van der Merwe.

Hang on Sloopy was the 29th biggest hit of 1965.

I can recall the specifics as vividly as this only because I had never, ever, seen her cry.

She was the living embodiment of keeping calm and carrying on; of never making a fuss; of that endearing English persuasion that if you can’t bring yourself to be nice, at least be polite.

The pastel palette of her emotional rainbow excluded the extremes of adoration and hate. Enthusiasms and passionate demonstrations of any and every kind, whether of love, loathing, uproarious laughter or lust, were viewed — in finely judged measures of escalating egregiousness — as unseemly, unsavoury or beyond the pale.

It ranged instead from benign approval, at the good end, to a tight-lipped aversion at the other. Between the two there was a delicate pendulum that moved, as deliberately and accurately as a needle in amber, from moderately pleasing to a mute and tight-lipped distaste.

Joy, when it occurred to her on rare occasions that the world was just as it should be, was expressed in a slightly ironic smile, as though she were taken aback by the possibility of actual happiness.

When she laughed it was for the medicine of it, invariably administered in several fingers of cane spirit quite a few rands cheaper than Mainstay.

But her moral compass was unfailing. She approved of good manners, fair-mindedness, kindness, common decency, thoughtfulness, restraint and circumspection in everything from primping to principles and politics. She was averse, by definition therefore, to showiness, rudeness, coarseness, callousness, carelessness and apartheid.

My mother didn’t exactly approve of Linda van der Merwe, but that wasn’t the wellspring of her tears. Nor, to be clear, was it because she had had enough of Uncle Jack, her sister-in-law Dorothy, or of their rambunctious Eastern Cape children. They were very dear, she said.

No, it was much worse than that.

Her list of aversions wasn’t very long, but it was very specific.

She was averse to excitements of any and every kind — to all entertainments that involved loud music, loud voices, loud noises and loud colours. And she was averse to crowds of any description.

I remember her driving me back to the campus of the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg in 1973 or ‘74. Commercial Road was busier than usual. We stopped at the robot on Church Street. She surveyed the traffic of cars, trucks, motorbikes and bicycles pressing around us on all sides. She sighed and said, as much to me as to the world in general, “Why can’t people just stay where they are…”

In normal circumstances, with the help of a small impi of Zulu maids, she managed and kept a spotlessly clean, well-provisioned and comfortably tasteful family home. She disliked shopping or cooking. The former she did out of necessity; the latter she left to Lena, the queen of the impi Zulu maids and the monarch of the kitchen. Unless, like the pickled pork, it demanded her particular attention.

Now, as Christmas drew ever nearer, it became clear from her frozen smile and the grim determination of her bearing that she was also averse to the prospect of performing the role of the hostess responsible for providing the accommodation, the drink, the food and the frivolities required to keep a large and noisy crowd of family and relatives fed, watered and entertained. For ten trying days.

Sadly, desperately and ironically in the context of this awful tale, she was also constitutionally averse to creatures with feathers and wings, i.e., birds of every species and persuasion. It was an aversion bordering on a phobia, or a phobia bordering on a pathological terror. She would blame it on “an unfortunate childhood incident” but refuse to elaborate beyond repeating the apothegm she used to encourage us to observe, in the face of the countless slings and arrows that came with the misfortune of living on a farm not a million miles from Mooi River, “We must put our best foot forward.”

It wasn’t quite the royal “we”.

So she bore these trials like Agatha of Sicily, and smiled the grim Christian smile she had inherited from her formidable mother. Until the turkey.

St Agatha

It had been a year in the planning.

Uncle Jack had insisted on a turkey for Christmas. It was his one and only condition for undertaking the nine hour drive from Lady Grey to Mooi River to privilege us with his visit. He would bring the Scotch. He knew my father couldn’t be trusted to pick out an acceptable variety from the Mooi River Bottle Store. If, indeed, they stocked anything at all that might resemble one. It was a well-meaning joke, but the seriousness of his intent regarding the turkey was conveyed by Dorothy to my mother, and from my mother to my father.

The request had been made in early February. My father duly put the word out. It took a week or two for the local grapevine, rooted in Mooi River’s not altogether salubrious pub in the Argyle Hotel, to blossom with assorted possibilities.

Boet van Zyl had a goose. No one will know the difference when it’s been braaied, man.

No, it’s got to be a turkey.

The Hendersons have peacocks.

You can’t eat peacocks.

Of course you can. The Royal Family eats them every day for breakfast in Buckingham Palace. Tastes just like chicken but juicier apparently.

Like Americans.

It’s got to be a turkey.

I saw one at Cato Ridge once.

And so on until one night Blackie Swart said he’d bumped into some oke up the Kamberg road who was selling two of them along with his tractor.

I’ve got a tractor.

You don’t have to buy the tractor. I just said he was selling it as well.

How do you cook a turkey?

That’s why you should get both of the two of them, said Boet. Then you can slag one of them first like an experiment for your vrou Mrs Torr to see how to cook it best and save the second one for a lekker Kersfees.

My father rolled home with the news.

My mother approved of the idea even though it had come from the dubious Boet.

Despite their many obvious faults she had no need to rehearse, the Afrikaners were a race of very practical people. Her condition was only that she never set eyes on them, the turkeys, until they were slaughtered, plucked and ready to be put in the oven.

They were delivered in early March. My father fenced off a pen for the pair of them at the edge of the wattle forest on the hill above the kayas of the Zulu servants. They were fed and fattened. The turkeys.

They were strange, ungainly creatures that mated noisily, violently and often in frenzies of squawks and flying feathers.

Shame, man, it doesn’t last very long, opined Brer Bruce.

Li’l-sister Helen made a face.

We called the turkeys Dorothy and Jack outside of our parents' hearing. We were looking forward to our cousins’ visit even less than our mother was. Christmas wouldn’t be the same with those un-Natalian interlopers eating our lunch, breaking our new toys and spoiling the party.

At the end of July, Jack the turkey was slaughtered by Zuka, plucked by Lena and roasted for four hours in the Aga. My mother supervised the trimming and the dressing. My father carved it with his shining silver blades into the succulent and juicy feast that warmed our cockles on the coldest night of the year.

The verdict was unanimous:

My father licked his lips, put down his fork, and said, By Jove!

My mother confessed it to be surprisingly tasty. Or pleasantly delicious.

Five-year-old Brer Andy said. Mmmmm, turkey!

The rest of us were too busy devouring the last scraps of meat on the bone, like starving hyenas at a zebra kill after the lions had taken their share, to utter a sensible opinion.

Six months of boarding school hell would separate us from the wild freedoms of the farm — from the lost paradise of the Midlands’ rolling hills, sparkling streams, and from a forgotten encampment where a lone turkey waited for Christmas.

Jack, Dorothy and the cousins arrived on Dingaan’s Day, 16th December, the public holiday that celebrated the massacre of three thousand rampantly murderous Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in revenge for their rampantly murderous massacre at Weenen. The name would be changed over succeeding years to the Day of the Covenant, the Day of the Vow, and finally, in the present, to the Day of Reconciliation in the hope ending a familiarly hopeless cycle of bloody tit for bloody tat.

Jack, the turkey, was slaughtered and plucked on the 18th, hung out to flavour and tenderise until the 22nd, roasted for four hours on the evening of the 24th, and served for Christmas lunch under the magnificent oaks below the back veranda among the trinkets, crackers and colourful napkins that graced the white cloth of the Victorian teak table creaking under the weight of all that pagan abundance.

It was bronzed to glistening perfection. My father sharpened his splendid silver carving knife. Uncle Jack raised his hand to silence our salivating salaciousness before he, Aunt Dorothy and the cousins intoned in unison, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful.”

They were good Christians as well. Just to rub salt into the suppurating sores of our silent resentments.

My father reached for his splendid silver carving fork and stabbed it into the body of the beast. It rebounded back.

He stabbed again.

And again.

He tried with the knife.

Pointlessly.

He huffed and hacked.

Brer Rodney suggested the chain-saw, which occasioned a ripple of hollow laughter.

My mother recommended the pickled pork.

My father sat back in his chair.

I saw them glance at one another as though they had simultaneously understood what had happened.

In the long months of her loneliness, Dorothy had turned to leather. On the outside and the inside.

My thanks to Li’l-sister Helen for reminding me of this story just in time for Christmas.

She sent a message to me a few minutes after our call.

It was the same thing with Mum. You were in London then but I saw it happen. After Dad died she just faded away into nothing.

*

Hang on Sloopy faded into the night.

My mother dried her eyes and said, as much to me as to the world in general, “Poor little creature...”

Which took me all the way back to where it began:

"…the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

The last sentence of George Eliot’s Middlemarch

A few minutes later another note arrived:

How sad that it takes the empathy of animals to remind us how to be human.

H.