There are days, only every so often, when I wake in the morning having snapped sharply out of an all consuming dream; a mash of memories from 'The Land of the Lake' - a childhood in Malawi to which the soundtrack of fish eagles screaming is intensely commensurate to the experience.
Unforgettable.
Even in a dream it is just as heart stoppingly intense as the last day I heard it. It is a sound that cuts rapier-sharp through the moment, like the memory of it cuts through my present reality.
Once heard, never forgotten. It's power never diluted.
In the beautiful quiet of the early morning, I am sitting in the shade on a blue sun lounger that is parked on a perfectly manicured lawn up from a soft sandy beach that slopes under the gentle waves of a beautiful blue freshwater lake.
I'm wearing my swimming trunks and wearing a straw hat. Across to my right is the consistent and rhythmic tsk tsk tsk tsk of a lawn sprinkler, and further back, behind me are the gentle sounds of cutlery chinking and glasses chiming collectively as a large table is being laid for breakfast on the tiled veranda. To the left of me, over a short stretch of lawn and just behind the hedge, a boabab tree towers above all around in a quite spectacular fashion - it's volume of immense proportions.
Slowly, but steadily, the Adults are arising from their nightly slumber and small conversations are being made whilst iced and freshly squeezed orange juice is being poured. The smell of fresh coffee drifts across the lawn - although, at the age I am, I'm not yet a coffee drinker, although it is part of the vocabulary of social events.
Already creeping up the lawn toward me is a dividing line between the cool dark of the shade and the ferocious intensity of the sun.
A voice calls out that breakfast is now ready. Once all seated around the table, Grace is offered to a God that may or may not be aware of this microcosm of expatriate life on the shores of the ninth largest freshwater lake in the World. An estimated Two Million year old lake, although more recent evidence suggests a basin forming some Eight Million years ago where the East African Rift of two split tectonic pieces allowed it's formation.
But what do I know?
In this dream I've been transported back to life as it was when I was Twelve years old.
After the sociability of breakfast, the morning slows down to stop. The heat of the day slowly rises, and the silence matches the pace required to coexist with the heat.
A silence to be shattered by the fish eagle's scream.
That is my sound of Africa above all else.
Lake Malawi : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Malawi
Malawi : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malawi
'Journey'
at The Soden Collection in Shrewsbury.
OPENS Saturday 23rd July until Saturday 13th August
https://sodencollection.com
Journey in Print
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