Thunderstorms

(This is one of a series of articles I wrote dealing with memories of an African childhood. To read the first of these, click here)

We had thunderstorms last night in Lawton. I was awoken about 3:00am by the noise and lay there in the dark, watching the flashes and counting the seconds to the thunder. As we all know, this tells you how far away the storm is, a second for every mile, they say. And, of course, the intervals varied, sometimes far away and at others almost overhead. It was those that came closest that made me think of Africa.

Everyone knows that little start we get with the near misses. The brightest flash and almost immediate crack and boom surprises us, no matter how used to electrical storms we get. And I should be used to them, having once lived on the lightning's punch bag. But still I get that involuntary jump.

I think our storm last night was fairly typical of those on the great plains. It was like an African storm in that the flashes came repeatedly and close together, lighting up the room as though the paparazzi were besieging some hapless celebrity outside. Rain pecked at the windows and the thunder was almost constant, growling in the distance and then shaking the house with a big one overhead. And yet it was also unlike any storm I've known in Africa in one respect. It went on for three and a half hours.

On the African savannah there are really only two seasons. The dry season lasts from late February until the end of October. It can get cold at night in June and July and frosts are not uncommon. But the days are clear and bright with constant sunshine. As the year progresses, the heat builds and even the nights become almost unbearable. October is known as suicide month in Zimbabwe for the heat becomes so oppressive and inescapable that death sometimes seems a preferable option.

In November, if you're lucky, the rains come and stay for three months, tailing off into February. If the rains don't come, you have a drought. There is nothing worse than a drought in Africa; the heat goes beyond unbearable, the humidity mounts until you beg for mercy and each night you lie sweating into the sheets, praying, begging, entreating for rain. But even in a normal season, the relief that the first rains bring is such that people run out into it and play in the overflowing storm drains.

When Africa relents and decides to grant you rain, it gives in abundance. In fact, it doesn't rain, it pours. In hilly country you can see it approaching as a marching, gray wall of water. When it reaches you, the first great drops raise puffs of dust from the parched red ground and the air becomes filled with the indescribable but oh, so welcome, smell of wet earth. Then the deluge commences and in moments you are immersed in a world of driving water, pouring from the heavens as though you had entered a waterfall, transforming the land into rushing streams and raging rivers.

It lasts for half an hour. Rare is the African storm that lasts for longer than that. It moves on to soak other areas, leaving the air sharp and cool, and the earth refreshed. Later that day it will repeat the performance and every day for the next three months it will rain at one o'clock in the afternoon for half an hour and again at five for the same length of time. You could set your watch by it. There are reasons for this (it's called convectional rainfall) but I have promised myself not to go into geographical matters like that.

Rather would I return to the matter of lightning and thunderstorms. And I have said that I once lived on the lightning's punch bag. Allow me to explain.

For the last three years of my time in Africa, I lived in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city. It is situated on an open plateau that crumbles at its southeastern edge and drops down into more broken country. There is a small, rocky hill at this edge, the highest point for miles around and a crazy but rich man from New Zealand decided that it was just the place to build a house.

He did this in a most unusual way, first blasting a huge hole into the rock that formed the summit of the hill. With the stones wrenched from the ground in so violent a manner, he then built his house over the pit that he had created. Most houses in Zimbabwe are single-storied brick constructions that look very similar to the average suburban home in America. But our New Zealander wanted two stories and that is what he built, a strong, square block of a house with one corner bulging outwards to prevent it being a perfect cube.

He built it to last. The walls were seven feet thick, all of stone, and the floor above the pit was made of concrete. The pit itself he divided into two, one half becoming a cellar, the other an enormous water tank fed by rainwater channeled down through a pipe from the roof. And in the cellar he put a pump to force out the stored water to feed the garden in times of drought.

The lounge occupied the bowed corner of the house and into this great curved wall he let in a window fully twelve feet long and seven feet high. In the master bedroom above, the bow window was repeated, just as wide but only four feet high. And into the water tank beneath the lounge, he put fish to eat any algae that grew.

This New Zealander had made his fortune in the scrap metal business and to the house he brought the things that no-one would buy. In the windows he created traceries of metal that required close inspection to recognize. In one window was the cooling element from an old refrigerator, sinuous as a snake, in another, huge bolts were welded between steel bars to make a pretty design. An old VW Beetle's front fender formed the mantel above the vast fireplace in the lounge, painted white to match the walls so that its true nature was not apparent. Into the thick walls he set old refrigerators that now performed the duty of closets. And in the master bedroom, concealed at the back of the largest closet, there lurked a secret gun safe.

From the house the two-acre yard sloped downwards in all directions and he built rockeries with strange and rare cacti, gardens of unusual flowers, all shaded by flat-topped acacias. A dirt driveway led down from the front of the house to the gate and a thin and straggling lawn bordered the front fence.

The house could be seen from far off, appearing on the horizon like a watchtower at the edge of the city. It was a strange sight in Africa, an oddity that few fancied inhabiting. But he lived in it, our crazy New Zealander, him and his wife, until the family grew and he built another even larger place a few hundred yards farther down the hill. They moved into the new house and, eventually, the time came for the old man to retire. Now he found within himself a hankering to return to the greenery of New Zealand. So he just upped and left his dream houses on a hill in dry and dusty Africa; left them in the hands of a realtor to rent out to others as strange as himself.

I forget who had the lower house but we had the one at the summit. We loved it the moment we saw it, not daring to believe that such an incredible place could be going for as low a rent as they were asking. It was our last house in Africa and it played a part in our final decision to leave. There came a time when we wanted to buy it and enquired the price. When the answer came and it was within our means we had to consider it seriously. It was then that we realized that we could not buy it; indeed, would be fools to buy any house in a land where the future held nothing but trouble and doubt. The time to leave had come.

But it was a good place to live in those few short years. Cold in the winter nights, it's true, but cool in the hot summer. We had space as never before, large rooms and a fascinating garden to wander in. I found what I took to be a coil of wire in the rockery, then realized when I tried to pick it up that it was a plant of some drought-resistant kind. Tiny pebbles in that same rockery were really a type of cactus called, fittingly, "living stones". We even had a ghost for we would leave the cellar door closed and locked when we went out, only to find it open on our return.

We also had thunderstorms. As I have said, that hill was the highest point for miles and our house was the tallest thing on it. As if that weren't enough, those rocky outcrops that are the hills of Africa acted like magnets to any electrical activity in the air. So we had thunderstorms aplenty and several times the house was struck. Fortunately, the old New Zealander had the foresight to fit the house with a lightning conductor and we weren't harmed.

But there is nothing quite like being in a house when lightning hits it. There's no warning flash before the sound; they come in the same instant. The bang is so loud that you hardly notice that the world has suddenly gone white. It's the suddenness of it. There's no time to be scared or cover your ears. Wham, and you've nearly leapt out of your skin. Even when you've been through a few of them, there's no way to prepare yourself for that. It gets you every time.

So I know a bit about thunderstorms, you see. Although I never saw an African storm last for as long as three hours, I've seen them flash as fast as a flickering old movie and huddled in the core of their cacophony of sound. There's a house in Africa where they just love to gather and have their target practice. I lived in that house.

(to read the next of the African Memories articles, click here)