The Last Resort Read online

  It wasn’t one of the two farmhouses I had grown up in, and so it had none of the emotional pull a childhood home has on an adult. But it was easy to see why my parents had bought it a dozen years ago, soon after my father, a lawyer, retired and Helen, the youngest of my three sisters and the last of us four children, left home.

  A rambling 1950s ranch house, it was flanked on its east and west sides by giant fig trees and a pair of ghostly baobabs – knobbly, stout-trunked trees more suited to arid lowlands, and strangely out of place among the lush explosion of dahlias, vlei lilies, roses and geraniums that made up my mother’s garden. Its red corrugated-iron roof was common to many colonial Rhodesian farmhouses, while a handsome arched veranda was draped with twisted grapevines and fuchsia puffs of bougainvillea. Most spectacular of all was the view. From its high promontory you could watch the sun rise over Mozambique thirty-two kilometres to the east, see it set somewhere above the blue haze toward Harare in the west, and follow its arc in the day over the fields of rich and fertile farmland that carpeted the Mutare River valley below.

  And what farmland! If Zimbabwe was the Breadbasket of Africa, then this valley was a bakery, a fruit bowl, a dairy and a butchery. Maize, the nation’s staple crop, grew like a weed; ripe fields of wheat and barley stretched to the river bank; tobacco leaves the size of elephant ears spread to the foothills; and dairy and beef herds grew fat on the rich loamy pastures.

  I paused for a moment and looked down on the panorama.

  The Harare road I had just travelled snaked beyond the line of sycamores and acacias that marked the southern border of my parents’ land. But beyond it, I instantly saw something was wrong, out of place. Instead of the usual luminous green fields, all I could make out was delinquent bush and a few listless crops on rough, unploughed ground. Dozens of mud huts had sprung up where maize and tobacco once grew, and wood smoke wafted out of the thatch, like kettles steaming on bush fires.

  I knew then that the valley had been hit hard.

  I dumped my bags by the Adirondack chairs on the veranda and padded into the house. For a moment I thought my parents were out on their ritual afternoon walk – past the residential cottages they had built at the back of the land and down to the backpacker lodge. But then I surprised my mother in the kitchen. She was stirring a stew pot on the Dover woodstove and looked up at me with an excited shriek.

  ‘God, you gave me a fright!’ she squealed, and ran over. ‘Hello, my darling, it’s so good to have you home.’

  Then she added with a wry chuckle: ‘Welcome to the front lines.’

  My mother always laughed when she was anxious. It was her shield. Laughter and cigarettes protected her.

  I noticed she was thinner than ever, slender as a fence pole, and I could feel the crenellated ridges of her spine as I held her close. But she was strong, too: sinewy, coiled. The deep lines on her tanned face told the story of thirty years spent on African farms, and yet she was still strikingly beautiful. She had grey eyes, an aristocratic nose, and an almost theatrically English accent. She had been an artist, actress and drama teacher before she was a farmer. Although she had been born in Mutare, our hometown over the hills, in 1941 and could trace her ancestry in Africa as far back as the 1820s, her elegant, stagey manner would not have been out of place in a Home Counties village or on a West End stage.

  My father heard the commotion from his study and came barrelling through with the force of a rhinoceros.

  ‘Aha – so you made it, did you!’ he bellowed, and we hugged awkwardly for a moment, uncertain of this show of affection.

  A stocky, broad-shouldered man with enormous, rough, calloused hands, his grey hair had turned almost white in the three years since I had last seen him – was that age or stress? – but he still had a healthy thick mop, and his pale blue eyes were lively behind his wire-rimmed glasses. My father was sixty-six years old. He could have passed for fifty.

  ‘We were expecting you at lunchtime,’ said Mom. ‘Put your bags away, have a shower, and we’ll fix you a drink. We’ve got so much to catch up on.’ Then she added with another flourish: ‘My God, the stories we’ve got to tell you.’

  I carried my bags through the living room, past the oak bookshelves, antique stinkwood chest and upright Carl Ecke piano now layered with a thin film of dust, and into the second spare bedroom on the east side of the house. The room had two narrow beds, the same beds Helen and I had slept in as children, and after a cold shower I lay on one of them and stared up at the ceiling as a column of ants moved inexorably toward a hornets’ nest in the corner.

  I cleared my head.

  They had bought the house and the land, 729 acres, in the winter of 1990, ten years after Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain, not so much as a business – although my father was always scheming up new ways to spin a buck, to make that elusive fortune – but to occupy the time on their hands now that he had retired and my three sisters and I had all left home.

  I was in my second year at university in South Africa at the time, continuing a litany of disappointments to my father by giving up playing cricket (or at least giving up playing it well; he’d once dreamed I would become an international) and by choosing to study what he considered the most unreliable of professions: journalism. ‘Get your foot on the first rung of the corporate ladder, my boy,’ he had told me, intending for me to pursue a business degree. I had switched courses as soon as he was out of sight.

  Back in 1990 there was nothing on this land but bush, stone and the rambling farmhouse owned by an octogenarian Afrikaner and his born-again Bible-thumping wife. My parents signed the title deed in the dark living room one Sunday afternoon as the old Boer’s scrawny herd of Afrikander cattle, bells tinkling around bony necks, chewed up the frosted remains of the front lawn, and his wife thumped on her Bible from a corner rocking chair in the gloom, warning my parents not of floods or drought or – and this might have been useful, I now realised – the next war that would one day come, but of a lack of television coverage.

  ‘No reception at all,’ the woman wailed. ‘None. Can’t get a bleddy thing out here.’

  The old couple sold up for better TV, and my parents were glad to buy. But what to do with it? It was a farm, but it wasn’t farmland. You couldn’t grow crops or raise livestock on those rugged hills, as the old man’s emaciated herd indicated.

  ‘Backpackers,’ Dad said to my mother as they tramped through the dense bush at the bottom of the property one summer afternoon in 1991.

  ‘What?’ Mom replied, incredulous, as a bus backfired like a machine gun on the main road.

  ‘Backpackers!’ he said excitedly. ‘Tourism. Everyone’s coming to Zimbabwe these days. We can turn this into a budget game lodge. Clear all this crappy bush, build a camp, some chalets, a restaurant and a bar. Bring in some antelope and zebra for foreign tourists to look at. You know they love that kind of thing.’

  My mother’s heart sank.

  On one hand, he was right. Back in 1991 Zimbabwe’s economy was starting to grow; tourism was booming, and although Robert Mugabe was already entrenched as an autocratic ruler of a one-party state, he was regarded, even in the West, as a model postcolonial African leader. The country was seen as a success story, a good place to invest in, and the currency was strong: one Zimbabwe dollar could buy you fifty US cents.

  But my mother knew enough about my father’s schemes and dreams to know that this sounded like more stress and hard work, and frankly, she wasn’t up for it.

  It had always been his idea to live on farms, even during the war.

  She thought of chickens, the 1970s, our first farm in the valley, on a twelve-hectare plot overlooking Mozambique, from where Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) insurgents would infiltrate to attack farms. She, the starry-eyed actress, the wannabe Liz Taylor, had been reduced to twisting the heads off poultry, an Uzi sub-machine gun over her shoulder, with four kids at her feet covered in blood and feathers and rooster shit, while he tended t
o his clients in town and his short game at Hillside Golf Club.

  And she thought of grapes – or the wine farm, as they called it. But the wine they made turned out to be less like the fine Pinotage they drank on our annual holidays at my grandmother’s island home in Knysna and more like a potent, lumpy red moonshine: wildly popular with black farmworkers in the valley, but against the law to sell to them without a licence. Which was the other humiliation: as a lawyer, my father specialised in obtaining liquor licences, mostly for hundreds of black clients who owned beer halls, bottle stores and bars in the townships and rural areas of the Manicaland district. For some reason he had failed to get a licence for himself.

  And now tourism? Christ, no! She would put her foot down.

  Wasn’t this new property supposed to be the beginning of a leisurely, bucolic retirement? He could consult part-time as a lawyer and play golf; she would start painting again and play bridge. They would host dinner parties for their friends and, in between, travel the world, visiting their children, who for some unknown reason had not chosen to live a rural life in a remote corner of Africa.

  But my father’s mind was set. He had a stubborn lawyer’s knack for never losing an argument, and the fierce pioneering streak of his own people. His mother, Gertruida Johanna Gauche, was an Afrikaner of Dutch and Huguenot descent whose ancestors arrived in the Cape in the mid– and late 1600s. He had roots here, blood in this soil.

  He also had a way with words. ‘If we build it, they will come,’ he told her, a line she found rather convincing at first, until she discovered he’d stolen it from Field of Dreams, which he watched time and time again on the VCR.

  Inevitably, backpackers it was, and within three years they had built it. They erected an electric game fence around the perimeter and stocked the land with those zebra and antelope: sable, kudu, impala, bushbuck, a dozen eland. They drew the design for the lodge on a napkin up at the house, and broke ground just back from the Harare road in 1992. A handsome two-storey timber-and-brick structure with a cathedral spire of a thatched roof, it had an open-plan restaurant and bar on the top floor and sweeping saligna wood decks out front and back. The front deck overlooked a ceiling of acacia trees and the lush farms in the valley below. On the ground floor were a kitchen, rows of bunk beds for backpackers and an art gallery; on newly planted lawns surrounding the lodge was a camp site and a dozen thatched chalets modelled on African huts, all set around a gleaming swimming pool that glowed luminous blue at night under the valley moon.

  In a nod to the adventurous young travellers they hoped to attract, they named it Drifters, and after hiring a wizened old n’anga from a neighbouring farm to bless and protect the place, they opened in 1993.

  And blow my mother down if they didn’t come!

  By the mid-1990s Drifters was attracting hikers, backpackers and overland travellers from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, America and Europe, here for cheap food, cheap lodgings and game walks. Lonely Planet gave it a glowing two-hundred-word review, raving about the game trails and Friday-night pizza bake. Townies – residents of Mutare, among them many of my parents’ friends – would regularly drive nineteen kilometres over the mountain pass for late nights of beer and brandy and pizza, and soon the tight-knit community of white farmers whose crops and livestock grew so well in the valley made it their watering hole, too. It was known for miles around as the best backpacker lodge and bar in the country.

  At the back of the land, meanwhile, on the slopes of two rugged camel-humped hills and on a grassy vlei in the saddle between, my father built the second wing of his empire: sixteen simple two-bedroom brick cottages with sweeping valley views, which he planned to sell or rent out as holiday and retirement homes. Much to my mother’s horror, he cashed in his entire pension to do so – a Z$40 000 fortune supposed to see them through rough times – and then sold the beautiful home in Knysna that he’d inherited in 1990. She panicked: What will we live on if this fails? But the gamble paid off. The cottages were soon all snapped up, so by 1999 my parents had not only an itinerant crowd of international tourists and white locals drinking at their lodge bar but also a permanent residential community on the land behind it. By the turn of the millennium business was booming. My parents had taken a barren range of hills in Africa with nothing on it but bush and stone and turned it into a thriving resort. They had staked a claim on the land in Africa and were sitting pretty.

  And now?

  Now the backpackers were long gone. The restaurant-bar was deserted. The cottage residents were eyeing the exits. Except for dwindling savings in South Africa left over from the sale of the Knysna house, my parents’ only source of income was drying up.

  I woke with a start. Mom was calling me from the veranda.

  I heard a hornet screech and looked up. The ants had reached the nest.

  I had the distinct impression my parents were trying to hold back a tide.

  ‘It’s like holding tickets to an execution,’ my mother said grimly, sipping her Bols, the ice tinkling in the glass. ‘You’re never sure who’s next or when it’s your turn, but you know it’s going to happen – and soon.’

  I had joined them on the garden chairs on the front lawn. It was dusk. The sun threw a brilliant blood-red veil over the bruised sky, and the wood fires in front of the mud huts in the valley below began to glow brighter as night fell, as though a constellation had crashed to earth. The view was one of the reasons they had fallen in love with the house.

  The valley had been hit hard by the land invasions: the white commercial farms were being plucked off one by one. From their high vantage point in the hills my parents had a grandstand view of the chaos, spectators at the Colosseum.

  ‘It’s not exactly what we bargained for when we bought the bloody place,’ my father grinned wryly, his feet up on the lawn table.

  Out of 50 white farmers in their part of the valley, almost half had lost their homes now, and I was shocked to discover how close my parents had come to the violence.

  ‘See that place down there, through the tree line?’ Dad said, pointing to a run-down farmhouse across the road, a kilometre or so from where we sat.

  I nodded.

  ‘That was Frank Bekker’s place. He was one of the first. He was a regular in the bar at Drifters. An interesting bloke. His grandfather was a bloody tracker for Cecil Rhodes when the first whites came here. Jeez, that got a bit nasty.’

  My mother gritted her teeth and whistled softly.

  ‘Nasty,’ she echoed.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘About thirty war vets moved in and started staking out plots in his vegetable fields,’ my father explained. ‘We could see it happening from up here, but there was nothing we could do. They call themselves ‘war veterans’ or ‘settlers’ or ‘new farmers,’ but really they’re squatters, too young to have been in the war at all, just sent in by the government to cause shit.’

  I flinched a little at the word squatter.

  For eight years now I’d lived in a famous street of squats near the Oval Cricket Ground in South London, a tumbledown row of Victorian mansions built in the 1800s for the servants of Buckingham Palace and abandoned in the 1970s. The house was an embarrassment, right next to a scrapyard, but it was free, and paying no rent in London had given me freedom to become a travel writer, to visit all the exotic countries I’d dreamed of visiting as a child bored out of my mind on remote farms in Africa. For a second I wished I was back in London, and I wondered what Grace, my girlfriend, was doing. She hadn’t been impressed by my squat. ‘Hard to know where the house ends and the scrapyard begins,’ she had said. She should see Frank’s place…

  Dad continued: ‘Frank called the police, who did nothing, of course. In many cases the police escort war vets onto farms. One night he and his wife were attacked in their house. We didn’t hear a thing from up here, but he was cut in the head with an axe. Somehow he fought them off. He speaks fluent Shona, and he heard the leader shout at the others: ‘What’s
wrong with you – you can’t kill one white person?’ The police accused him of attempted murder at one point. He tried to keep farming, but in the end it got too dangerous and they left.’

  I looked down at the house again. It was alarmingly close. You could practically throw a rock at it. A fire burned in the dusty front yard, and a dozen people, little dots from this vantage points, milled around. Were they war vets? New farmers? Settlers? Squatters? Could they see us up here? Somewhere in the giant fig tree an owl hooted.

  ‘After that it just became a roll call,’ Mom said. ‘Now we go into town and hear about a friend losing their home in the same way we used to talk about a flick we’d seen at the Rainbow or a rugby match: “So the Bennetts were booted last week.” “Did you hear about Truscott?” “Brian and Sheelagh James have lost their chicken farm.”’

  She paused, whistled again. ‘Really, it’s like waiting for an execution.’

  ‘The Truscotts lost their farm?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, ja,’ said Dad. ‘You won’t believe what happened to them.’

  The Truscotts were old friends of my parents’ who’d farmed eight kilometres to the east. My father used to take me guinea fowl hunting on their estate as a boy, and their son Ivan, who ran it with his father, Rob, had been a school friend of mine.

  ‘They lost it a few months after Rob finished paying off the fifteen-year loan he took to buy it. But get this. Just before he was finally booted he held an auction of all the farm equipment – tractors, pumps, irrigation pipes – just to try to salvage some money. Guess who turns up to bid? Simba Makoni, the bloody finance minister. Anyway, the same war vets who took the farm raid the auction and drive off with his equipment. Rob pleads with the minister to stop them, and Makoni just says to him: “Don’t look at me. I’m Finance, not Law and Order.”’

  My mouth fell open.