Hallowed Ground Read online

  Freddie saw his parents giving each other a knowing but sanguine stare. Why do parents always assume that significant looks are less likely to be noticed than words, when the opposite is true?

  Freddie finally passed the binoculars to Clara whom he generally adored, occasionally resented and often over-indulged.

  As the chill passed through his heart, he reached instinctively into his pocket.

  The warm wood filled his hand with its familiar shape, the flat disk of the head and the round body with its arms outstretched in an embrace, gave him comfort. It was the lucky charm his grandmother had given him. His father’s parents had owned a farm in Zimbabwe when it was still called Rhodesia. That is where his father had been born, before they were evicted.

  ‘What is it?’ he had asked his grandmother as she gave it to him.

  ‘It’s an Akuaba doll.’ She had told him the story, which he now recounted in his head.

  Akua, an African woman, was desperate to have a baby: a ‘ba’ as they call it. She tried for many years with no success. In despair, she went to the local priest. He carved her the doll of a baby, laid it on the altar, blessed it, gave it to her and told her to care for it as if it were her real baby. So, she carried the wooden baby in a pouch as she worked the fields. She talked to it, lay it next to her as she slept. Then, miraculously, she gave birth to a real baby, just as the priest had said. The story spread like wildfire and African women have worn Akuaba dolls ever since.

  ‘Why do you want me to have it?’ he’d asked his grandmother.

  Then she had fixed him with a penetrating gaze. ‘Because, Freddie, I wouldn’t have given birth to your father without it. Your father was an African child and therefore, in some way, so are you.’

  This phrase had thrilled him at the time, and it thrilled him again now, watching the foggy coast of this ancient continent.

  Later, just before she died, his grandmother had asked him to give the Akuaba charm to Clara when she was older.

  ‘It is really a charm for women. I’m sure you understand.’

  He had nodded solemnly but didn’t understand at all. He felt displaced and angry. So, he never fulfilled his vow to hand the charm to Clara and it remained his guilty secret. Which is why it often stayed in his pocket or was worn secretly under his shirt.

  ‘Everything all-right, Freddie?’ asked his father, catching the turbulence in his son’s far-away look.

  Freddie was startled by his father’s searching eyes. They look so like his grandmother’s. It is as if he was gazing at her face-to-face, again.

  ‘Of course, why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Oh, because we’re travelling again. More change. More loss of friends. More things for all of us to adjust to. It’s hard at your age.’

  His father’s voice was kind.

  Freddie nodded both in agreement and gratitude.

  ‘This is Africa, Freddie. This could be something extraordinary.’ Returning to the continent where he was born, filled Ralph’s veins with electricity.

  Freddie latched on to his father’s excitement, picked up Clara and swung her round the deck.

  Anne contemplated the foggy shoreline ahead. Something in her ached for the neatly-mown lawns and gentle summers of her Sussex upbringing. Part of her wanted Freddie and Clara to grow up with the same simple certainties. On the other hand, looking at them excited and curious as another country came into their lives, gave her another satisfaction.

  ‘Why does Freddie have to go to boarding school?’ Clara asked her mother. ‘Why can’t he stay home with the rest of us?’

  ‘Because the best school for him only has boarders,’ Anne replied.

  ‘But it’s so close to us in Windy Hook or whatever it’s called.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Anne, and with the logic she sometimes found easy to conjure, ‘he is going to be close and so we’ll see him all the time.’

  ‘Well, weekends and holidays,’ Freddie corrected. ‘Anyway, Pumpkin, this means you get to choose the best bedroom,’ he said to Clara as she ran at him pummelling hard. Freddie held her in a bear-hug, but rather too tightly. She squealed.

  ‘Careful you two,’ said his mother.

  Anne sidled close to Ralph and slipped her arm through his.

  ‘We’re going to be all-right, aren’t we?’ she asked him.

  ‘Of course, we are!’ he responded. ‘Should be docking in Walvis Bay anytime soon.’

  Freddie turned back to face the shore and his new home, whilst Clara sat on his knee.

  ‘I don’t want you wandering off on your own,’ her mother, Ilana, had said as Selima and her father, Darius, left the house.

  Yet despite this, Selima could not resist the adventure, the sheer adrenaline of exploring alone.

  She loved the coast around Swakopmund. It was a landscape she had grown up with. The sand floated on fleeting currents of ocean air, in millions of red and orange pixels. Yet to a human eye, even the eye of someone as perceptive and alive to the great outdoors as Selima, it never changed in any fundamental sense.

  Selima van Zyl had always wanted to be a boy. She hated the fact that her breasts were starting to grow, and she kept them as hidden and flattened as possible. Being fourteen was a pain. The changing shape of her body disobeyed her feelings. She always preferred her black hair to be short and straightened its curls, whenever she could be bothered. It hadn’t touched her shoulders since she was tiny. Her skin was dark: more like her mother’s than her father’s. Her smile was broad and infectious especially when she was outdoors. She had, by common consent, inherited her mother’s beauty. Yet, unlike her mother, she was allergic to dresses.

  Selima thought of the Langstrand dunes as a vast playground. It would be the envy of others the world over if only they could see it. There must be millions of little sandpits and playgrounds the world over she reasoned. How hard it must be to turn them into something magical. She imagined them like the playgrounds in Swakopmund: scrappy spaces in parks and schools, gestures to the great outdoors. To Selima, Langstrand was the playground of giants. She could imagine them, vast and gangly, their thick legs striding across the dunes to the sea.

  Her father, Darius, ran sand dune tours for tourists around Swakopmund. Well, he seemed to do many things. Her mother, Ilana, always described him as ‘an entrepreneur.’ Yet, as she got older, this seemed too grand a term for her father.

  Darius van Zyl was a comparatively old father for Selima, already in his late forties. However, his outdoor life made him look younger. He had a rugged look inherited from several generations of South African farmers. They had been tough survivors and so was he: a ‘solidly-built’, stocky man with broad shoulders. His hair was a dark ginger, and he’d grown and kept, a neatly-trimmed beard since his late teens.

  She had watched him, over the years, switch between various hopeless schemes. At one time he had tried to export African parrots to Europe. Then he set up an artisan ice-cream business near the Aquarium. All of them failed. He was cheery though, full of hope, and Selima adored his energy. She worried though in the aftermath of his disappointments, when he spent long periods on his own, staring at the sea from his top-floor study. Even she could not touch him in those moments.

  Darius’s parents had owned a farm on which her father had been raised. He had told her that, after the Namibians gained independence from South Africa, their land had been ‘reclaimed’ by the Government and returned to the people.

  ‘It was right to claim it back,’ he had said. Yet she always sensed that he was bitter about it. His cheerfulness couldn’t hide his sense of being dispossessed. She often thought about how different her upbringing might have been if she’d been raised on that farm. She felt she might have loved it. But then, she wouldn’t have had her dunes…

  Her father took people in his sturdy, faithful and much-abused Land Rover, for adventures over the dune
s. This involved dramatic drives along the beaches, as the South Atlantic pounded and threatened to hem them in with its furious, fast-moving tides. His favourite trick was to put the car on cruise control at low speed and jump out, walking beside the car, with his astonished passengers left in the driverless vehicle.

  In the school holidays, whenever possible, and the tourists are willing, Selima went along for the ride with her father, and this was one of those days.

  She loved it when Darius let rip and pointed the Land Rover head down a steep ridge, bringing cries of delight mixed with fear, as the passengers went on a roller coaster ride down the vast sandy playground and then back up to wide horizons on the crests.

  The highlight of their daytrips was always sandboarding. There were those who treated it like a professional sport, with all the cool and kudos of being ‘the new snowboarding’. What Selima loved though, was improvising: taking a front-door-sized piece of hardboard, lying on your stomach, lifting up the front end of the board to reduce friction, and launching yourself face downwards from the top of a large dune.

  The speed of descent depended on your angle, the balance of your weight and your degree of nerve. Selima, who had been sandboarding since she was six, had no fear and invariably showed up even the bravest of beginners. In particular, she loved beating boys, changing their swagger to respect. She loved the rush of sand-warmed air on her face as she sped, almost out of control, down to the sandy abyss.

  At this particular moment, she had ‘duned’ beyond her father and his German guests. She was on the top of her own slope, alone, enjoying the rebellion, her mother’s voice receding rapidly in her head.

  She looked out to sea. The earlier fogs had started to burn away under the African sun, and she could see a cruise ship heading down from the Skeleton Coast to Walvis Bay. She could just make out people on the deck staring out at Swakopmund. She wondered about them and their distant, matchstick lives. Why were they coming to her country? Where might they have sailed from?

  Just then she heard the Land Rover top the crest.

  ‘Selima? What the hell are you doing?’ Darius shouted. ‘I’ve told you about running off before. I don’t want you to be on the dunes alone, especially when I am responsible for other people and they have kindly agreed for you to come along.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad!’

  ‘Now come on. Deputy Tour Leader back to base!’ He could never be cross with her for long. He adored her too much and she knew it. Ever since he read her stories, aged six, and she used to pincer him with her legs, she’d known exactly how to win him.

  She lifted her sand-board, tucked it under her arm and reluctantly strode back to the Land Rover balancing on the dune edge. She gazed seawards again. There was something about that ship now floating into the distance that she couldn’t quite fathom.

  ‘So, is the school you’re going to teach at, anything like this?’ Hannah asked her mother, as they pushed open the heavy doors of the dining hall. Sarah gazed back at her. She detected excitement and mild panic in her daughter in equal measure as they toured her new school.

  Hannah Chiang had her own unique style. From her thirteenth birthday onwards - now a year ago - she had insisted on shopping for clothes alone, or with a carefully hand-picked friend, but never with her mother. She was obsessed with vintage shops and her clothes were an eclectic blend of the hippy-ish and the bygone. Sarah, actually loved her daughter’s style. She saw it as a direct inheritance of her rebellion against her own mother. Hannah’s mono-lid eyes were a beautiful, crescent shape and a dark, haunting brown. Her olive skin glowed with a burnished health. Asian and English met beautifully in her face and in her gracious, slim body. Sarah’s pride interrupted her answer.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t have the history of The Augustineum,’ her mother replied. ‘It’s a faith school, like this one, but much more modern.’

  ‘That sounds more like me. I hate being formal, you know that. Like you. Why can’t I just be at your school?’ Hannah pleaded.

  Her mother sighed and linked arms with her.

  ‘Can you think of anything more embarrassing than having your own mother as a teacher at your school?’ her mother asked.

  ‘A few things,’ Hannah replied. ‘Like my father being a teacher in my school,’ she said nodding towards Li Chiang who had stopped in the corridor behind them to ask a passing teacher yet another penetrating question about the curriculum.

  Li Chiang had a face as round as a moon. His features were neatly perched on its surface, perfectly symmetrical. His cheeks dimpled when he smiled. His long, thin lips had a small gash at each end like parentheses. He wore fashionably thin, high-tech glasses. He was slim, of average height, with an almost exaggeratedly straight-backed posture like a visiting dignitary.

  ‘Li?’ Sarah called out down the corridor ‘we’re waiting for you... again!’

  Li would not be hurried by his wife, or anyone in fact, and his back seemed to stiffen in resolve as he added a supplementary question to his first.

  ‘How his new work colleagues are going to cope I don’t know,’ Sarah added. ‘Mind you they’ll probably end up adoring him. So many people do.’

  ‘How much uranium does Namibia actually have?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘A lot it seems. That’s why he’s been posted here. It’s just lucky I managed to get a teaching post.’

  Li Chiang was a mining engineer, raised in Beijing. He had gone to England as a student, before completing his Masters, back in China. He had met Sarah, Hannah’s mother, at University. She was learning Mandarin whilst he was learning English. Their cultures met in the middle, in Hannah in fact.

  Li joined them in the Dining hall having exhausted some poor, bedraggled Physics teacher.

  The faint smell of over-cooked vegetables for the first supper of term was pervasive, triggering a feeling of faint dread in Hannah.

  ‘Ah, one thing you can always rely on: the smell of school food is pretty much the same everywhere,’ her father observed.

  The school buildings were mainly modern, but with mementoes of its Victorian past studded around the place in statues, mottoes and stained-glass windows that were re-housed in slightly odd, modern settings. It felt like trying too hard. However, the school also opened out on to beautiful courtyards and a large garden filled with succulent plants, shrubs and hardy trees that had learned to withstand the most disrespectful and frequent of climbers. The garden was beautifully kept and the pride and joy of the school.

  ‘Why the Augustineum? It seems such an odd name for an African school,’ Hannah queried as they nosed into its corners.

  ‘Well, many of these schools were started by missionaries,’ Sarah observed.

  ‘Indeed,’ a voice boomed from behind them ‘It’s named after the very unlikely-sounding Augustine of Hippo.’

  They turned around to see a tall, black, gracious man dressed in a grey, lightweight, elegant suit. His beard was white and trimmed to an elegant shape, like topiary. His hair was a motley of white and grey and elegantly combed back. His face was rounder and more affluent looking than many Namibians. He wore bi-focal glasses perched half-way down his nose like a theatrical prop.

  ‘We know him as the Father of the Church,’ he said. ‘Luther, loved him, and Protestantism is of course our main religion in Namibia. Our main, inherited religion I should say.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ her father said.

  ‘Apologies, I should have introduced myself. I am Jacob Ubuntu, Headmaster of this literally august institution. You must be, Hannah,’ he said, shaking the hand of his pupil before that of her parents to show his carefully-judged priorities. ‘I am delighted to welcome you to Windhoek and to our proud and historical school.’ He added cordially, ‘Do you know Namibia at all?’

  ‘Only what we have read in guide-books,’ Sarah replied, ‘which, of course, is very superficial.’

  ‘Useful n
onetheless and I am always delighted when someone reads anything about Namibia,’ Ubuntu said. ‘We are fairly obscure in the eyes of the world. I am very pleased that you are joining our international community here. We spoke, a few times, on the phone. You’ve moved here because of work I believe.’

  ‘Yes, I am here to plunder your soil, Mr Ubuntu, I am afraid,’ her father admitted.

  ‘Ah well, many have done that,’ Ubuntu responded. ‘Well, Hannah, you will be pleased to hear you are not alone in the school. We have a growing number of Chinese students. Indeed, I’ve wondered whether I should start learning some Mandarin myself.’

  ‘I can help you with that, sir,’ Hannah said, keen to impress her new mentor.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Ubuntu, ‘I look forward to it. Have you seen your dorm yet?’

  ‘That’s just where we were heading,’ Sarah intervened.

  The Headmaster pointed them in the right direction and then turned to greet other new arrivals with his gracious tones and carefully considered phrases.

  ‘Well, he seems someone with whom I am happy to trust my daughter’s education,’ Li said as they walked away.

  ‘I agree,’ Sarah responded with the authority and knowledge of a fellow teacher. ‘Hannah what do you feel?’

  ‘Yes, I think I like him,’ Hannah replied, adding, ‘I’m scared though. What if I don’t make any friends? What if people think I’m a freak? Here we are, this must be mine…’

  Hannah thought that her parents must have been relieved not to have to answer her question. She knew that there was no answer that would comfort her. Anyway, here was her new dorm.

  The door swung open on a room that could best be described as basic. She had expected that. The beds had metal frames like hospital beds. There were four of them, arranged symmetrically with wardrobes in between for your clothes and to give some sense of privacy. Hannah felt the mattress on the nearest bed. Unforgiving to the touch but not disastrous. She never had problems sleeping anyway. God forbid she would start now.