Our most gracious and beautiful mother

Photo: Westminster College: View from Mount Carmel

As my mother lay in bed, the day before she died, unable to speak, and we were flying down on an A40 jet that Chris had practically commandeered, my father read this to her twice and he told me she smiled.

"Where my parents live is the most gracious and beautiful dwelling place I know. Australia doesn't sit well with me, though I once dreamed of the dark green mountains of New Zealand on the edge of the sea.

The last time I visited Matumi was mid winter, there was such a light diffused among the trees and plants. It was as if everything was shining in the embrace of some giant invisible luminous being. Matumi shone with revealed meaning. The leaves, the grass, the rocks and flowers. Distances were shortened. The mountain across the vally was as clearly defined as the giant aloes in the driveway.

My mother, with the spare and masterly strokes of a zen master, has crafted Paradise out of a mountainside. Reluctantly, she rubs out the charcoal of a tree here and there - and behind the tree she reveals further mountains, distance and new vistas.

A kilometre below, from the throne-like height of the breakfast table, through the overhanging leaves of a thorn tree, is a miniature Serengeti. Like a small Japanese temple garden: if you look carefully you can begin to hear the tread of buffalo and Wildebeest and beyond our own particular Mount Carmel is, indeed, Sicily and the distant walls of the rift valley, the Ethiopian higlands, the road to Hargeissa and the circular ruins of Zimbabwe. You see the value of Matumi is that it is contiguous.

From the gallery window stretching along the side of the house you can see birds coming and going. Sometimes, migrating, they slam into the clean glass breaking their necks on nothing.
Down below in the valley is the river bank with the giant fig tree flowing in a trickles or torrents, depending on the time of year. Baboons steal macadamia nuts, and are shot by the farmers for their trouble. In the early morning deer break into the herb garden and graze on purple lettuce and coriander. Puff adders, pythons, mambas and boomslang. Mongeese, frogs, bush pigs and it has always been my plan to sleep outside, preferably high on peyote, but I have been too much of a pussy to do that.

At the end of one corridor hangs a large portrait of my father painted by Harry Voight, in the dining room a large painting of Yeoville market, by my uncle and in the lounge the large mate painting, white and orange, of giant birds. Masks, drawings, books, carvings, photographs, chairs, screens, wooden carved trunks full of old arab coins, daggers, cloths from the Philippines and West Africa and Sri Lanka, huichole eggs. No guns, no alarms. An inner courtyard in Mexican pink with pots and statues and flowering creepers.

Pictures of sets of grandparents and tribes of capering children, then sweet, now taller and self-aware.

And through the house flow people whose stories were the very weave of modern South and East African history and tomorrow morning I'll be there. My holiday to Paris is cancelled, and my little family went off on their own. Instead my brother has commandeered an A340 and soon, by hook or by crook, we'll be in Matumi, which is hot in summer, all be arrayed around a king-sized, white-sheeted bed."


After the flight, from the airport we brothers drove for three hours to be at mom's side and we arrived to keep dad and mom company. 35 minutes after we got there mom died.