Wilderness: The Grasscutter Rat
Chapter 5 in which we flee our second war zone and find our path
This is the sixth chapter in Wilderness: In Search of Belonging. This is my story, about my search for belonging and seeking solace in nature. You can read the earlier chapters here.
I remember fragments from when I was five, and we were living in Nigeria: the time I stood in front of the long grass at the bottom of the garden, listening to the rustling of insects and knew I wanted to be a zoologist but wasn’t brave enough to venture any closer; lying in bed at night looking up at the mosquito net, which sagged in the middle, and being terrified that a giant spider would creep across it, the net dipping ever closer to my face as I slept.
Once James, my new step-father’s cook caught a greater cane rat or grasscutter that was living in the drain under our house. Cane rats can grow up to 60cm and weigh between 3 to 5 kilos, one of the largest rodents in Africa, they’re considered a delicacy and are now being farmed in parts of Africa. The cook invited me to eat the rat with his family that night, but I was too shy.
Another time my mother had set up a paddling pool for me in the cool inner courtyard of my step-father’s house. I was in a white vest and pants; she was in a beautiful African print dress, ready to go out. She hosed me with cold water for a joke; outraged, I snatched the hose back and turned it on her. She was, of course, furious.
In 1975 there was a military coup. It was, fortunately, bloodless. Colonel Joseph Nanven Garba announced on Radio Nigeria that he and other army officers were removing General Yakubu Gowon as head of state and commander-in-chief. Gowan was out of the country at the time. My step-father, whom I’d called Uncle James since I first met him when I was two-year-old, had returned to Nigeria as a Professor and Head of Department of Government at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. He’d been trying to bring resolve the protracted civil war in Nigeria peacefully for years, and perhaps, as a result, was thought to know too much about Nigerian politics by the new leaders.
We were told we had 24 hours to leave the country.
Whilst I was at nursery, my parents ran round the house with friends, pointing to the items they wanted to keep, and their friends promised to ship them to the UK when they could.
Years later we would receive a random selection of furniture: a black leather pouffe, a walnut rocking chair with roses intricately carved down the sides, a set of side tables resting on wooden elephants with real ivory tusks, a collection of Yoruba brass sculptures.
The day we were deported, one of my parent’s friends quickly made me some gifts for the journey; I boarded the plane that evening clutching a tie-dye bag filled with coconut macaroons, a patchwork dog called Henry, and my two favourite toys: Red Teddy and Yellow Teddy. I still have them today, Henry and the bears, safely tucked into my daughter’s bed.
The rest of our luggage was packed into our car, which was shipped overseas. When the car reached England, a few days later, it had been completely emptied of all our belongings and stripped back to the chassis: even the tyres and the hub caps had been stolen.
I was distraught. I’d left my only other toy - a green Corgi car with doors that opened and a purple interior - in a side-pocket. It had been taken too. The new government froze my fifty-year-old step-father’s bank account and seized his savings and pension.
So now we were in the UK. We had nothing: no house, no income, no work, and of course, no car.
We only had what were carrying when we boarded the plane.
Later I would write a thriller, My Mother’s Secret, about a woman who has to go on the run and is given a different identity by the police. Even with a new career as a baker, a different life and a family, she is always ready to leave. She thinks about what she would take:
‘Suppose you’re on your own, like I am now, and something happened to you, and you couldn’t get back, what would you need? What would be important to you? When you think about it like that, it’s surprisingly little.
A credit card and a passport; a driving licence. Mini first-aid and wash kits. A decent moisturiser, lipstick and lip balm.
It’s surprisingly freeing because, of course, you can’t take what is most important to you: your family and friends. I have photos, though, printed out, not just on a phone. Mobiles are easily lost, aren’t they? And two recipes, the ones I think I couldn’t live without.
But all of it, when it comes down to it, is dispensable.
Almost everything is.’
Almost everything is.
Somerset, August
Obviously I should have listened to my husband, Jaimie, and his objections to getting chickens so soon after we moved in. It was stressful trying to cope with looking after animals when we still getting used to living in a new place, dealing with the fall-out of an unfinished build and negotiating the school run, which was sometimes derailed when a tree fell across the bridlepath, or cows ambled down the road. We hadn’t quite realised how much time, effort and attention it would take to care for a few hens.
I was right about them setting us on our path, though. It’s two years since we moved to Somerset. After our hen Sunny’s untimely death at the jaws of a Weimaraner, Andrew, the local farmer, gave us two old chickens to keep our remaining hen, Lulu, company: Jasmine called them Floss and Romily.
Romily’s feathers are black, shot through with peacock-green. She’s bolder than the others, once flying onto the table when we’re having a picnic and eating Jasmine’s cucumber off her plate. We’ve named the plot of land where we keep the chickens, Willow Field, after the first rescue hen who died the day after we got her. The previous owners had owned horses and this small field had largely been used as a giant manure heap. We levelled the midden and tried to keep on top of the exceedingly good crop of nettles and brambles all the horse poo produced.
But over the past couple of years, as we’ve moved the chickens around the field, cordoned in by a green plastic fence, they’ve eaten the grass and the dandelions, gradually clearing the weeds away. I sowed wild flower seeds and Jasmine threw seed bombs over the bare soil. This summer, half the field is thick with ox-eye daisies, buttercups and tall stands of teasel, scarlet pimpernel creeps across the edge of the path and the heads of clover are heavy with bees. The chickens make tunnels through the dense foliage and dust-bathe beneath glorious royal-purple borage and dusky-lilac phacelia flowers.
We are standing on the path, we just don’t know where it will lead or even how to follow it.
That is, until we come across a remarkable story, in a remarkable book, written by a remarkable woman, and we decide to visit her.