Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness

by Alexandra Fuller

Overview

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year Alexandra Fuller returns to Africa and the story of her unforgettable family.

In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller returns to Africa and to her unforgettable family. At the heart of this family, and central to the lifeblood of her latest story, is Fuller’s iconically courageous mother, Nicola (or, Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she sometimes prefers to be known). Born on the Scottish Isle of Skye to a warlike clan of highlanders and raised in Kenya's perfect equatorial light, Nicola holds dear the values most likely to get you hurt or killed in Africa: loyalty to blood, passion for land, and a holy belief in the restorative power of all animals. With a lifetime of admiration behind her and after years of interviews and research, Fuller has recaptured her mother's inimitable voice with remarkable precision. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is as funny, exotic, terrifying and unselfconscious as Nicola herself.

We see Nicola as an irrepressible child in western Kenya, then with the man who fell in love with her, Tim Fuller.  The young couple begin their life in a lavender colored honeymoon period, when east Africa lies before them with all the promise of its liquid honeyed light, even as the British empire in which they both once believed wanes. But in short order, an accumulation of mishaps and tragedies bump up against history until the Fullers find themselves in a world they hardly recognize. We follow Tim and Nicola as they hopscotch the continent, restlessly trying to establish a home, from Kenya to Rhodesia to Zambia, even returning to England briefly. War, hardship and tragedy seem to follow the family even as Nicola fights to hold onto her children, her land, her sanity.  But just when it seems that Nicola has been broken by the continent she loves, it is the African earth  - and Tim's acceptance of her love for this earth - that revives and nurtures her.

A story of survival and war, love and madness, loyalty and forgiveness, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is an intimate exploration of the author’s family and of the price of being possessed by this uncompromising, fertile, death-dealing land. In the end we find Nicola and Tim at a table under their Tree of Forgetfulness in the Zambezi Valley on the banana and fish farm where they plan to spend their final days. In local custom, the Tree of Forgetfulness is where villagers meet to resolve disputes and it is here that the family at last find an African kind of peace. Following the ghosts and dreams of memory, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is Alexandra Fuller at her very best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143121343
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/26/2012
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	132,335
Product dimensions:	5.04(w) x 8.23(h) x 0.72(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her midtwenties. In 1994 she moved to Wyoming, where she now resides.

Hometown:

Wilson, Wyoming

Date of Birth:

March 29, 1969

Place of Birth:

Glossop, Derbyshire, England

Education:

B. A., Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1992

Read an Excerpt

Praise for Alexandra Fuller’s Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

“[E]lectrifying . . . Writing in shimmering, musical prose . . . Ms. Fuller manages the difficult feat of writing about her mother and father with love and understanding, while at the same time conveying the terrible human costs of the colonialism they supported. . . . Although Ms. Fuller would move to America with her husband in 1994, her own love for Africa reverberates throughout these pages, making the beauty and hazards of that land searingly real for the reader.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Ten years after publishing Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Alexandra (Bobo) Fuller treats us in this wonderful book to the inside scoop on her glamorous, tragic, indomitable mother. . . . Bobo skillfully weaves together the story of her romantic, doomed family against the background of her mother’s remembered childhood.”

—The Washington Post

“Another stunner . . . The writer’s finesse at handling the element of time is brilliant, as she interweaves near-present-day incidents with stories set in the past. Both are equally vivid. . . . With Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller, master memoirist, brings her readers new pleasure. Her mum should be pleased.”

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Fuller’s narrative is a love story to Africa and her family. She plumbs her family story with humor, memory, old photographs, and a no-nonsense attitude toward family foibles, follies, and tragedy. The reader is rewarded with an intimate family story played out against an extraordinary landscape, told with remarkable grace and style.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Fuller] conveys the magnetic pull that Africa could exert on the colonials who had a taste for it, the powerful feeling of attachment. She does not really explain that feeling—she is a writer who shows rather than tells—but through incident and anecdote she makes its effects clear, and its costs.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“[A]n artistic and emotional feat.”

—The Boston Globe

“[An] eccentric, quixotic, and downright dangerous tale with full room for humor, love, and more than a few highballs.”

—The Huffington Post

“Cocktail Hour [Under the Tree of Forgetfulness] subtly explores the intersections of personality, history, and landscape in ways that are continually fresh and thoughtful.”

—Charleston Post and Courier

“Gracefully recounted using family recollections and photos, the author plumbs the narrative with a humane and clear-eyed gaze—a lush story, largely lived within a remarkable place and time.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“In this sequel to her 2001 memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, which her unflattered mum calls the ‘Awful Book,’ Duller gives a warm yet wry account of her British parents’ arduous life in Africa. . . . With searing honesty and in blazingly vibrant prose, Fuller re-creates her mother’s glorified Kenyan girlhood and visits her forever-wild parents at their Zambian banana and fish farm today. The result is an entirely Awesome Book.”

—More Magazine

“Fuller brings Africa to life, both its natural splendor and the harsher realities of day-to-day existence, and sheds light on her parents in all their humanness—not a glaring sort of light, but the soft equatorial kind she so beautifully describes in this memoir.”

—BookPage

“Fuller revisits her vibrant, spirited parents, first introduced in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001), which her mother referred to as that ‘awful book’. . . . This time around, Nicola is well aware her daughter is writing another memoir, and shares some of her memories under the titular Tree of Forgetfulness, which looms large by the elder Fullers’ house in Zambia. Fuller’s prose is so beautiful and so evocative that readers will feel that they, too, are sitting under that tree. A gorgeous tribute to both her parents and the land they love.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“A sardonic follow-up to her first memoir about growing up in Rhodesia circa the 1970s, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, this work traces in wry, poignant fashion the lives of her intrepid British parents. . . . Fuller achieves another beautifully wrought memoir.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

PENGUIN BOOKS

COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS

Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her mid-twenties. In 1994 she moved to Wyoming, where she now resides.

For Charlie—guide extraordinaire—with my love

Table of Contents

Praise for Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Cast of Main Characters

 

PART ONE

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Learns to Fly

Nicola Huntingford Is Born

Nicola Fuller and the Fancy Dress Parties

Roger Huntingford’s War

Nicola Huntingford Learns to Ride

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Goes to Her High School Reunion

Nicola Huntingford, the Afrikaner and the Perfect Horse

Nicola Huntingford and the Mau Mau

 

PART TWO

Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode

Nicola Fuller and the Perfect House

Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round One

Nicola Fuller in England

Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round Two

Olivia

Nicola Fuller and the End of Rhodesia

 

PART THREE

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa and the Tree of Forgetfulness

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa at Home

 

Acknowledgments

Appendix - Nicola Fuller of Central Africa: The Soundtrack

Glossary

CAST OF MAIN CHARACTERS

Nicola Christine Victoria Fuller née Huntingford—the author’s mother, also known as Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, Mum or Tub

Timothy Donald Fuller—the author’s father, also known as Dad

Vanessa Margaret Fuller—the author’s sister, also known as Van

Edith Margaret Belfinley Huntingford née Macdonald—the author’s maternal grandmother, also known as Granny or Donnie or Mrs. Huntingford

Roger Lowther Huntingford—the author’s maternal grandfather, also known as Hodge

Glennis Duthie—the author’s maternal aunt, also known as Auntie Glug or Glug

Sandy Duthie—the author’s maternal uncle by marriage

Donald Hamilton Connell-Fuller—the author’s paternal grandfather

Ruth Henrietta Fuller—the author’s paternal grandmother, also known as Boofy

Tony Fuller—the author’s paternal uncle, also known as Uncle Toe

Alexandra Fuller—the author, also known as Bo or Bobo

PART ONE

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

 

—KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Learns to Fly

Mkushi, Zambia, circa 1986

Mum in an Eldoret theatrical production. Kenya, circa 1963.

 

Our Mum—or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself—has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe.

“At least she didn’t read you Shakespeare in the womb,” my sister says. “I think that’s what gave me brain damage.”

“You do not have brain damage,” I say.

“That’s what Mum says.”

“Well, I wouldn’t listen to her. You know what she’s like,” I say.

“I know,” Vanessa says.

“For example,” I say, “lately, she’s been telling me that I must have been switched at birth.”

“Really?” Vanessa tilts her head this way and that to get a better view of my features. “Let me have a look at your nose from the other side.”

“Stop it,” I cover my nose.

Table of Contents

Cast of Main Characters xi

Part 1

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Learns to Fly 3

Nicola Huntingford Is Born 12

Nicola Fuller and the Fancy Dress Parties 25

Roger Huntingford's War 41

Nicola Huntingford Learns to Ride 51

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Goes to Her High School Reunion 63

Nicola Huntingford, the Afrikaner and the Perfect Horse 77

Nicola Huntingford and the Mau Mau 90

Part 2

Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode 107

Nicola Fuller and the Perfect House 120

Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round One 133

Nicola Fuller in England 146

Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round Two 156

Olivia 171

Nicola Fuller and the End of Rhodesia 184

Part 3

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa and the Tree of Forgetfulness 199

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa at Home 216

Acknowledgments 225

Appendix: Nicola Fuller of Central Africa: The Soundtrack 229

Glossary: A Guide to Unusual or Foreign Words and Phrases 231

Editorial Reviews

Ten years after publishing Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Alexandra (Bobo) Fuller treats us in this wonderful book to the inside scoop on her glamorous, tragic, indomitable mother…Bobo skillfully weaves together the story of her romantic, doomed family against the background of her mother’s remembered childhood.

THE WASHINGTON POST

[Fuller] conveys the magnetic pull that Africa could exert on the colonials who had a taste for it, the powerful feeling of attachment. She does not really explain that feeling—she is a writer who shows rather than tells—but through incident and anecdote she makes its effects clear, and its costs.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

[A]n artistic and emotional feat.

THE BOSTON GLOBE

An eccentric, quixotic and downright dangerous tale with full room for humor, love and more than a few highballs.

HUFFINGTON POST

“Another stunner… The writer's finesse at handling the element of time is brilliant, as she interweaves near-present-day incidents with stories set in the past. Both are equally vivid… With "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness" Alexandra Fuller, master memoirist, brings her readers new pleasure. Her mum should be pleased.” 

CLEVELAND PLAIN-DEALER

Fuller's narrative is a love story to Africa and her family. She plumbs her family story with humor, memory, old photographs and a no-nonsense attitude toward family foibles, follies and tragedy. The reader is rewarded with an intimate family story played out against an extraordinary landscape, told with remarkable grace and style.”

MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE

Electrifying…Writing in shimmering, musical prose… Ms. Fuller manages the difficult feat of writing about her mother and father with love and understanding, while at the same time conveying the terrible human costs of the colonialism they supported… Although Ms. Fuller would move to America with her husband in 1994, her own love for Africa reverberates throughout these pages, making the beauty and hazards of that land searingly real for the reader.”

Michiko Kakutani

…in this wonderful book…[Fuller] tells the story of her long and often troubled relationship with her mother with unflinching honesty.
—The Washington Post

Binka Le Breton

Alexandra Fuller's 2002 debut memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight described her experiences growing up in civil war-plagued Rhodesia during the seventies. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness places that picture in fuller perspective by presenting the story through the lives of Fuller's parents, her father Edward and, most especially, her Scottish mother Nicola. Told with sensitivity and an intimate sense of the family's epic struggles, this memoir captures the fury of Africa's revolutions more vividly than a dozen films. Now in trade paperback and NOOK Book.

A sardonic follow-up to her first memoir about growing up in Rhodesia circa the 1970s, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, this work traces in wry, poignant fashion the lives of her intrepid British parents, determined to stake a life on their farm despite the raging African civil war around them. Fuller's mother is the central figure, Nicola Fuller of Central, as she is known, born "one million percent Highland Scottish"; she grew up mostly in Kenya in the 1950s, was schooled harshly by the nuns in Eldoret, learned to ride horses masterfully, and married a dashing Englishman before settling down on their own farm, first in Kenya, then Rhodesia, where the author (known as Bobo) and her elder sister, Vanessa, were born in the late 1960s. The outbreak of civil war in the mid-1970s resolved the family to dig in deeper on their farm in Robandi, rather than flee, to order to preserve a life of colonial privilege and engrained racism that was progressively vanishing. While the girls dispersed as grownups (the author lives in Wyoming with her American husband), the parents managed to secure a fish and banana farm in the middle of the Zambezi valley in Zambia, and under a legendary Tree of Forgetfulness (where ancestors are supposed to reside and help resolve trouble) they ruminate with their visitors over the long-gone days, full of death and loss, the ravages of war, and a determination to carry on. Fuller achieves another beautifully wrought memoir. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

In her fourth memoir, Fuller revisits her vibrant, spirited parents, first introduced in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002), which her mother referred to as that "awful book." While that so-called "awful book" focused on Fuller's memories of growing up in Rhodesia during that country's civil war, this one focuses solely on her parents: their youth, their meeting, and their struggles to find a home on the continent they are both so passionate about. Fuller's mother, Nicola, the child of Scottish parents, grew up in Kenya, while her father, Tim, had an austere childhood in London. Tim wandered the world before landing in Kenya and meeting Nicola. Readers will recall the hardships the couple faced from Fuller's first memoir: the deaths of three of their five children and the loss of their home in Rhodesia. This time around, Nicola is well aware her daughter is writing another memoir, and shares some of her memories under the titular Tree of Forgetfulness, which looms large by the elder Fullers' house in Zambia. Fuller's prose is so beautiful and so evocative that readers will feel that they, too, are sitting under that tree. A gorgeous tribute to both her parents and the land they love.

Booklist

If you loved Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight—and I certainly did—you'll want to bury yourself in this sequel. Fuller here focuses more fully on her mother, Nicola, who was born on the Isle of Skye but raised in Kenya and was passionately devoted to family, land, and her belief in the goodness of animals. Then came both personal tragedy and continental upheaval, as Nicola and husband Tim found themselves constantly on the run with their old world collapsing and a new world looming. Now they've found some peace sitting under their Tree of Forgetfulness, a tradition taken from the locals, who gather under such a tree when disputes are to be settled. Everything that made Dogs wonderful reading seems to be here, too: the deep comprehension of sorrow, certainly, but also the dead-on portraits, leavening wit, and, finally, generosity. Get the reading group guide and go to town.

Library Journal

In "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness," Ms. Fuller revisits her childhood, focusing more on her parents' experience than her own. Along the way she conveys the magnetic pull that Africa could exert on the colonials who had a taste for it, the powerful feeling of attachment. She does not really explain that feeling—she is a writer who shows rather than tells—but through incident and anecdote she makes its effects clear, and its costs.
— Wall Street Journal

Martin Rubin

"Cocktail Hour" hits the mark. It may be regarded as a prequel, or a sequel, to "Dogs." It hardly matters. The two memoirs form a fascinating diptych of mirrors, one the reflection of a child's mind, the other of an adult's. Images bounce and refract over the years; the reader catches a glimpse of the adult in the child, and the child in the adult. Taken together, as they ought to be, the books transport us to a grand landscape of love, loss, longing and reconciliation.
— New York Times Book Review

Dominique Browning

Electrifying…Writing in shimmering, musical prose… Ms. Fuller manages the difficult feat of writing about her mother and father with love and understanding, while at the same time conveying the terrible human costs of the colonialism they supported… Although Ms. Fuller would move to America with her husband in 1994, her own love for Africa reverberates throughout these pages, making the beauty and hazards of that land searingly real for the reader.” — Michiko Kakutani, THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Ten years after publishing Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Alexandra (Bobo) Fuller treats us in this wonderful book to the inside scoop on her glamorous, tragic, indomitable mother…Bobo skillfully weaves together the story of her romantic, doomed family against the background of her mother’s remembered childhood.” — THE WASHINGTON POST

“Another stunner… The writer's finesse at handling the element of time is brilliant, as she interweaves near-present-day incidents with stories set in the past. Both are equally vivid… With "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness" Alexandra Fuller, master memoirist, brings her readers new pleasure. Her mum should be pleased.” 
— CLEVELAND PLAIN-DEALER

“Fuller's narrative is a love story to Africa and her family. She plumbs her family story with humor, memory, old photographs and a no-nonsense attitude toward family foibles, follies and tragedy. The reader is rewarded with an intimate family story played out against an extraordinary landscape, told with remarkable grace and style.” — MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE

“[Fuller] conveys the magnetic pull that Africa could exert on the colonials who had a taste for it, the powerful feeling of attachment. She does not really explain that feeling—she is a writer who shows rather than tells—but through incident and anecdote she makes its effects clear, and its costs.” — THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“[A]n artistic and emotional feat.” — THE BOSTON GLOBE

“An eccentric, quixotic and downright dangerous tale with full room for humor, love and more than a few highballs.” — HUFFINGTON POST

From the Publisher

Revisiting her family story first introduced in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001), Fuller (The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, 2008, etc.) employs her mother's exceptional life as a pivot point for chronicling her parent's perseverance overcoming personal tragedies and the political chaos of mid-20th-century Africa.

The golden-hued life of white settlers in Kenya, ensured by the trappings of the British empire, was already a mirage by the mid 1960s when Fuller's parents married. In 1964, the Republic of Kenya was born, ending white rule. For several years, the young couple lived idyllic lives, but the political climate was deteriorating. Like many "jittery settlers" Fuller's grandparents sold their farm and returned to Britain, never to return to Africa. Fuller's mother was devastated, and she and the author's father remained but "receded further and further south as African countries in the north gained their independence." The family resettled into a new home in Rhodesia, but a family tragedy soon found them, precipitating the family's relocation to England, where the author was born. The dreary, rain-soaked island held little appeal for the family; Fuller's mother recalls, "We longed for the warmth and freedom, the real open spaces, the wild animals, the sky at night." After returning to Africa and borrowing money for a farm in Rhodesia, the family found themselves engulfed by civil war. After another devastating family loss catapulted Fuller's mother into a cascade of breakdowns, their luck turned when the Zambian government issued them a 99-year lease on a farm. During a 2010 visit, Fuller's parents were happy and at peace, their farm "a miracle of productivity, order and routine."

Gracefully recounted using family recollections and photos, the author plumbs the narrative with a humane and clear-eyed gaze—a lush story, largely lived within a remarkable place and time.

Kirkus Reviews