Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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This one is written in present tense and, like Dylan Thomas, there is much that goes unexplained that creates a sense of chaos that is appropriate for her life as a child. This was a great book, pulling me into a very different world from my own, but describing everything in a brisk, vivid way that made it easy to picture.

Violence is not just a backdrop; this violence, and the lack of political stability in the countries she grows up in, shapes her family (and contributes to her mother’s descent into alcoholism and madness). This is her story - of a civil war, of a quixotic battle with nature and loss, and of a family's unbreakable bond with the continent that came to define, scar and heal them. She nurtured her daughters in other ways: She taught them, by example, to be resilient and self-sufficient, to have strong wills and strong opinions, and to embrace life wholeheartedly, despite and because of difficult circumstances. The latter was effective since Fuller doesn't get bogged down in the day-to-day mendacity that is life and she can focus on events and stories that give a full picture to growing up (white) in Africa.One girl used the toilet while the other held a candle high to check for "snakes and scorpions and baboon spiders. Fuller weaves her story back and forth between an intimate portrait of her family and the violence surrounding them.

No one starts a war warning that those involved will lose their innocence - that children will definitely die and be forever lost as a result of the conflict; that the war will not end for generations and generations, even after cease-fire have been declared and peace of treaties have been signed. Her mother dances after a bath and the towel slips to expose “blood smeared” thighs; her own belly is distended by worms. Fuller sees the adults around her with the fierce penetration of someone who has moved beyond blame.This is a profoundly personal story about growing up with a pair of funny, tough, white African settlers, and living with their "sometimes breathlessly illogical decisions", as they move from war-torn Zimbabwe to disease and malnutrition in Malawi, and finally the "beautiful and fertile" land of Zambia. Then my mind would wander to America, and how parents took their kids across it in covered wagons, and how dangerous that was because sometimes entire families were killed or died from starvation or other causes. By opting not to romanticize her family life, Fuller allowed her Mum, Dad, and older sister to shine as “hard-living, glamorous, intemperate, intelligent, racist, … taciturn, capable, [and] self-reliant.

By the time she is eight, the war is in full swing; her parents veer from being determined farmers to being blind drunk whilst the author and her sister, the only survivors of five children, alternately take up target practice and sing Rod Stewart numbers from sunbleached rocks. When she is obliged to wash in water a black child has used she is surprised to discover that “Nothing happens … I do not break out in spots or a rash. It is perhaps closer to misery lit, although the tone is mostly light, and the worst episodes glossed over. Given the surface-level dissonance of a white family claiming an African identity, Fuller works hard to demonstrate how their roots, their loyalty, even their identities are all inexorably bound to the earth.Spiky euphorbia hedges which bleed poisonous, burning milk when their stems are broken poke greenly out of otherwise barren, worn soil. I won’t try to describe them – I couldn’t do them justice, and besides, you should go read the book.

Captured wild cattle give "reluctant milk" and even after adding Milo milkshake powder, "nothing can disguise the taste of the reluctant milk". She grows up during the bush war that helped turn Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, and she survives that too, in the gung-ho colonial style.

She had absorbed the notion that white people were there to benevolently shepherd the natives, but came to question it when she met Africans for herself. And I'm quite grateful that my first day of school photo does not feature me clutching an Uzi for protection. I DID enjoy some parts of the story, I thought her family were colourful and although it was a bit dark at times, humorous too.