Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller: book review

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (2011) is set in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the Zambesi Valley from the 1960s. It is about the author’s Scottish mother, Nicola Huntingford Fuller.

Nicola Huntingford grew up in Kenya in the 1940s. Alexandra Fuller traces the early years of her grandparents and parents in Part One, at the time of the British Empire in east Africa. Here Nicola meets Timothy Fuller and they are engaged in 1964. It was a time of ‘flawless perfection’ until the rise of the Mau Mau fighting for Kenya’s independence in the Sixties.

In Part Two, from Kenya, Nicola and husband Timothy Fuller, moved to Rhodesia in 1967 to manage a farm. Their daughter Vanessa was one years old. Their second child Adrian was born soon after their arrival and died in infancy. In 1968, the family travelled home to England where Alexandra was born in March 1969. They returned to Rhodesia, the civil war, and farming life.

There is another birth, wars, Timothy fighting in the Himalayas, a drowning, guerilla forces, a death, a new name for the country (Zimbabwe), a new prime minister (Robert Mugabe), a nameless baby, another death, and the eventual ‘defeat and heartbreak’ – the end of the farm.

Part Three is about The Tree of Forgetfulness. After 30 years, two countries, and four farms, Nicola’s final years are now ‘without the routine of the seasons.’ But then, Nicola and Timothy in 1998 buy a fish and banana farm in the Zambesi Valley, at a time when both Vanesssa and Alexandra are married with children.

This is an interesting memoir set in interesting political and social times, full of family madness and family compassion.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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