LITMIR.BIZ

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we also celebrated Christmas and Easter, showing respect for all. Then for the Islamic feasts the cook Ali would slaughter a sheep and people would come to our house to help break the fast. My father was always extremely generous to those who had less than us and usually invited six or seven poor families to take away packages of meat, dates and bread – food many of them came to rely on.

      One day when we were expecting guests for lunch, I came upon Ali about to carve up my pet goat Orggi, which he’d already caught and slaughtered. When I became hysterical and tried to stop him, he told me that my kid was to be cooked for the feast. I was eventually pulled away from the scene kicking and screaming, but continued to howl until Dad came home. ‘They killed my friend and are going to feed him to the guests!’ I wailed. Goodness alone knows what he thought. In spite of his attempts to comfort me, I couldn’t understand how Dad could allow them do such a thing to my playmate. I never got over it.

      Even though my father worked every day and stayed late, people who needed him out of hours would still seek him out, so there was often someone knocking at the door with a problem. No matter if he was hungry and about to put a spoon to his mouth, if someone called he’d put it down, rise from his chair and tend to their needs. My mother hated that. She often claimed that the hospital was his first wife and that he spent more time there than with us. ‘Where are you running off to again? Why even bother to come home?’ she’d say, or ask, ‘Why do you have to do this? Why can’t someone else do it?’ She considered the patients who called at our house trespassers on our privacy and complained bitterly that this was our home, not a hospital. ‘Besides, what if one of them brings disease into our house?’ she’d cry, exasperated.

      Dad never argued with her and tried to explain that people couldn’t help it if they got sick at all times of the day and night. He was passionate about his work and he loved to be needed. With an open face and an open heart, smiling and happy, he’d never turn someone away or tell them, ‘I’m too busy, come and see me tomorrow.’ Instead, he’d sit and listen to their problems. My father was just as generous with his money. There were so many people on his list of charitable donations each month that he must surely have lost count. People I thought were relatives often turned out to be the orphans of a school friend or the wife of a football teammate who was on hard times whose bills were being paid for by Dad.

      Everyone assumed he was extremely wealthy, which only led to more name calling by some of the kids in my neighborhood, who’d say, ‘Why do you want to play with us, rich girl?’ I remember running home to ask my mother what their insult meant. She explained that we weren’t as poor as many others, adding somewhat bitterly that we’d be even richer if my father wasn’t quite so generous with our money.

      In the same magnanimous way, Dad decided to help improve the education of some local boys and our younger male cousins by hiring a teacher to come to our house every afternoon, except Friday. These boys already attended the local school – forbidden for girls – but the teaching there was limited and Dad hoped to expand their horizons. He paid for a blackboard, chalk and textbooks, and set everything up on our verandah where the pupils squatted on the cement floor with their books on their knees. Many of them were the boys I tagged along with, including Hassan Kayd, so whenever they stopped kicking an old tennis ball around in the dust to hurry to lessons at my house, I would follow. I think now that this was my father’s intention all along.

      It was for me to choose whether to carry on playing outside or be curious enough to see what the boys were doing. He knew I had an enquiring mind and hoped that this would pull me in the right direction. So, from the age of six or seven I’d sit on the edge of the verandah listening in or writing out my alphabet as I learned English, how to do calculations, and discovered a bit more about the world. The teacher never told me that I couldn’t be there, but if I ever tried to answer a question he’d shush me and tell me not to interfere. I knew my place; I was allowed to stay because it was my father’s house but I couldn’t take part – even if I knew more of the answers than the rest. My mother didn’t mind me joining in either because it meant a couple of hours’ peace, and stopped me from running wild in the streets.

      Those lessons were such a revelation to me. In a colonial region where people spoke and wrote in either Arabic, English, Italian or French, we Somalis didn’t yet have a written language of our own, just an oral one. It seemed like magic then that I could put letters from the English alphabet together to make a word, and then words together to make a sentence. Newly inspired, I’d pick up a book from my father’s bookcase and flick through the pages looking for a ‘T’ or an ‘S’ and then – oh my gosh – there they were! Every day brought a new discovery and I remember the moment I spelled out the word for cat, and was so excited because I had one of those. Reading opened up the miracle of forming something meaningful in my head. I’d always spoken a little English, but now I was able to decipher the mysteries of the alphabet and the secret language between my parents.

      ‘Could you leave me some M-O-N-E-Y before you go?’ Mum would ask my dad, and I could finally understand what she was asking for. Enthused with my newfound knowledge, I began to read my mother’s Illustrated London News, Woman, and Woman’s Own magazines, which had to be read with the greatest care and passed on unspoiled to the next woman whose name was listed on the cover. I loved those 1940s magazines with their Western fashions, hats and colourful clothes. The lives they depicted seemed like a million miles away from my own in hot, dusty Somaliland.

      I wanted to read everything I could after that. I still do. My brain was hungry for knowledge and information. I needed to feed that hunger and when my parents saw me staring intently at the pages of a book, they asked what I was doing. ‘Reading, of course,’ I replied.

      ‘Let’s see what you’re reading,’ my father said, thinking I was just pretending but, to his amazement, he found that I was reading and learning to pronounce new words. There then began an ongoing family discussion about what to do with a girl who was teaching herself to read in a country where there were no schools for girls. Both my parents had been educated and recognized my yearning. After much debate, they decided to send me to a mission school. I think my mother hoped that the discipline would be the making of me, while my father hoped it would open the door to higher education and eventually nursing. Little did he know.

       ***

      Djibouti City was four hundred kilometres away from Hargeisa, but it was the natural choice for my schooling rather than Aden because I could lodge with my Aunt Cecilia. Her businessman husband had been killed several years earlier in a road accident while she was pregnant with her fourth child. When the shipment he was transporting to Ethiopia was looted after the accident, she lost the income from it too. Widowed and penniless, she never remarried and single-handedly raised all her children – Rita, Sonny, Tony and Madeleine who were older than me but familiar from family visits.

      The first I knew that I was going to be educated was when my parents asked me if I’d like to go home with my cousins after their summer holiday that year. It must have been 1945, and although the war was still going on elsewhere, our corner of Africa was safe.

      ‘Really?’ I asked, astonished.

      ‘Yes, really,’ my father confirmed. ‘Well, you want to go to school, don’t you?’

      This momentous event happened in my eighth year, which proved to be the most significant of my entire life. Going to a proper school for the first time felt like such a milestone. I had never been out of Somaliland, so from the moment I left my eyes were like saucers at the wonder of it all. To make ends meet, Aunt Cecilia worked as a dressmaker and a teacher in a domestic science school. For extra income, she took me in and, later, my brother Farah. She also homed my cousins Gracie and her brother Maurice – the motherless children of an uncle whose wife had died in childbirth – all of us sharing one large apartment that was permanently filled with music, chatter and noise. My aunt was a most resourceful woman and another powerful role model. She had the energy of twenty horses and her determination helped shape me.

      Cecilia ran our lives like a military operation. Speaking only English and French so that I’d learn my two new languages quickly, she paired me up with the older kids to do chores such as polish our shoes and make

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