The pet that failed
Nicholas Harman
MY WARRIOR SON by Mary Anne Fitzgerald Michael Joseph, f16.99, pp. 341 Peter Lekerian was brought up in Nairobi's fearful sprawl of slums, and is Maasai, those thin-legged people who, when they are at home, carry spears and believe they own all the world's cattle. Mary Anne Fitzgerald was (and remains) a sparky journalist from South Africa, with small earnings, lavish spending habits, two daughters and an ex-husband. When Peter was 12 she decided to adopt him. This odd book tells how that experiment went wrong. It is absurd, sometimes funny, always at cross-purposes, full of wonderful descriptions, misplaced love and unlimited self-regard.
It began when another white benefactor stopped paying Peter's school fees and Miss Fitzgerald agreed to pick up the tab. She wanted to know all about the boy; the answers kept changing and were often untrue, either because she heard what she wanted to hear, or because Peter said what he thought would please her, or because there are no words in English for Maasai customary relationships, and the Maasai vocabulary does not cover adoption. More- over, the Fitzgeralds are women, with Mary Anne in charge of the family and its prop- erty. Maasai women are themselves the property (like cattle, but carrying less prestige) of their clan and of the men who buy them — after mutilation, to make sure they feel no sexual pleasure, a disgust- ing rite she witnessed and painfully describes.
Peter could have no idea what his role was expected to be, and Mary Anne (he calls her MA, or sometimes Mum) had not given it much thought. He, his friends and his ill-defined relations therefore treat his benefactress mainly as a money mountain: `I felt like an American Express gold card,' she writes and, realising that she would soon be asked for even more, 'My main concern was that I would accidentally reveal my resentment over what I'd given.' Giving mere money was not enough. She longed to give parental love, plus school- ing, a job and a suitable girl. But for that she needed time which she did not have, what with cherishing her daughters (one into body-piercing, one running a rape crisis centre) on a freelance's precari- ous income. In due course, expelled from Kenya for accurately describing its rotten government, she brings Peter to join the girls in England, again without having thought what to do with him there. So she literally farms him out, first to a kind dairy- man, then to a kind couple who keep goats. Peter, baffled by Britain's mechanical agri- culture and social arrangements, fails to see the point, puts off saying so, and finally insists on going home in a rush — a pas- sionate but reasonable decision that she describes as a 'descent into bubbling mad- ness'.
Some 20 years ago there was a fashion for books about making pets of Siberian otters, Arctic hares and other beasts that looked cuddly in the photographs. The final twist was that the animals hankered for the wild and came to sad ends. This story is the same but the other way round, the boy treated as the ill-matched pet. The Regency road rage author's kindness turns out cruel, her altru- ism selfish; poor bemused Peter is blamed for not being what he was never shown how to be.
This flaky story is told, though, in bril- liantly evocative prose. If you want to know what it is like to walk in the Kenyan bush, or ride in an African minibus, or sleep in a Maasai hut, the author's brief, vivid phrases will evoke the smells and sounds. The view of London from behind an `African' mask reveals an exotic city; on a Hampstead roof garden Miss Fitzgerald harks back to home by piddling in a flower- pot.
Peter and his would-be Mum meet again in Kenya. The chronology is opaque, but he seems to be 20 or so, and would think him- self demeaned if seen doing women's work, such as carrying the tea and sugar she has bought for the woman who may be his real mother. He demands a plastic bag to con- ceal the effeminate burden, and when it is refused chucks the sugar-bag to the ground. It bursts. 'Cool down, MA! Be reasonable!' he shouts. It is much too late for that.
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