THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN FINDS HER WAY HOME
by author Paula Hawkins
It was the smash hit novel The Girl On The Train – about a woman who feels like an outsider – that transformed the fortunes of author Paula Hawkins. Now, in a rare personal piece written exclusively for GH, she tells how a visit to the country she left nearly 20 years ago made her finally realise where she truly belongs...
Ididn’t kiss the tarmac. When I landed in Harare, I found it was no longer possible. At the new, improved Harare Airport, you reach the terminal through enclosed walkways, rather than on the ground. I have to say I was a little disappointed. Falling to my knees on that ground would have felt appropriate, so long has my self-imposed exile been. It has been 18 years since I last set foot on Zimbabwean soil, and in the interim, the country has suffered extraordinary turmoil: farm invasions, drought, political violence and hyperinflation.
At the same time, I have gone through some upheavals of my own: three relationships, two house moves, one career change and five novels. Four of them you won’t have heard of, but the last one, The Girl On The Train, you just might have done. The book’s success – exciting, gratifying, terrifying – has not changed who I am, but it has opened up possibilities and opportunities that I never imagined I might have. And it prompted, in a roundabout way, my return to the country of my birth.
I was born in Harare in 1972, when it was still known as Salisbury. I left 17 years later – somewhat reluctantly – when my father, an academic, decided to take a sabbatical. I wasn’t unexcited by the move, but I was 17. I was happy at school and part of a large, close-knit group of friends. Leaving them was devastating.
And London was London: cramped and diverse, thrilling and glamorous. And lonely. I travelled to my sixth form college on the most rickety and unreliable section of the District Line, I stared out of the train window and looked into the houses I passed. I imagined the lives of the people I saw, I idealised them, I daydreamed myself into their lives (sound familiar?).
I wasn’t exactly Rachel from The Girl On The Train. I wasn’t drinking gin in a tin or stalking my ex, but I was an outsider. I was surrounded by people from whom I felt disconnected. The other students at college seemed so much older, wealthier, more worldly. I struggled to make friends – people assumed I was South African because of my accent and, no matter how vociferously I contradicted them, this highly unpopular
designation stuck.
I dropped the accent. I moved to Paris, where I fell in love and had my heart broken. I grew up quickly. I moved back to the UK for university and discovered that, in actual fact, England suited me rather better than the white suburbs of Zimbabwe ever had. I liked the bad weather and the beautiful clothes, the self-deprecating humour and tolerant attitudes. I embraced a new, large, close-knit group of friends. I acclimatised.
I returned to Zimbabwe every Christmas to visit my parents until 1998. And then I stopped, suddenly. It was the Millennium year – everyone was paranoid about the Millennium Bug, about air traffic control. And, after that, I was short of money, or I couldn’t get the time off work, or the political situation had deteriorated in Zimbabwe. On and on it went, and every year my family came over to visit me, so going back didn’t seem crucial.
The longer I stayed away, the more nervous I felt about returning. I wondered how I would feel about seeing the house I grew up in, I worried that Zimbabwe didn’t feel like me any longer. When I went back, I knew I would be an outsider again.
The catalyst for returning was an encounter with Petina Gappah, a Zimbabwean author. We were on a panel together at a literary festival talking about the ‘difficult women’ we write about in our novels. She is persuasive, and when she invited me to Harare to do an event, I found myself saying yes.
I flew in on a furiously hot Friday last December to a Harare
I looked into houses and daydreamed myself into people’s lives
[continued from previous page] strange and familiar. The city was green from the recent rains, the earth was the same deep red I remembered, the Flamboyant trees bore the same bright orange flowers. The house I grew up in is the same; the garden more lush than I remembered, the trees impossibly tall. When I sat down to do a bit of work at the desk in my bedroom, I may as well have been doing my Latin homework – so recognisable were the grooves in the desk, the feel of the chair beneath me.
It was the oddest feeling – dizzying, almost – to return somewhere to which you haven’t been for almost two decades and to feel almost instantly completely at home. When chatting to my mother in the kitchen, I found myself wandering over to the fridge, opening it and staring at its contents, exactly the way I used to do as a teenager.
Much has changed, too. The succession of much-loved Labradors we had when I was a child has ended; the current dogs are a pair of delightful mongrels who lounge around in armchairs in a way that would have never been tolerated in my youth. Standards, as my father is fond of saying, are not being maintained.
This is evident in the streets I used to ride my bicycle along, the ones on which I learnt to drive – I wouldn’t care to drive them now that they are riddled with deep, treacherous potholes. Long defunct street lights rust where they stand, some bending precariously across the road. There are beggars at the crossroads, usually blind people, often accompanied by a child who acts as guide, moving from car to car.
It is hard to overstate how difficult the collapse of the economy has made life for the average Zimbabwean. Almost three quarters of the country’s 15 million people live below the poverty line. More than four million live with acute food insecurity. The jobless rate is estimated to be around 70%.
That, of course, is in the formal economy. In the black market, which is where the vast majority of people scrape a living, an entrepreneurial spirit flourishes. Freelancers conduct traffic at particularly nasty junctions in exchange for donations from grateful drivers. Groups of men tout their services fixing the lethal potholes that open up overnight on suburban roads. And in the rural areas, farmers struggle to break free of the grind of subsistence farming.
On a brief trip to Guruve in the north of the country, I visited a group of women doing just that. With help – advice and training, but no financial input – from a group of charities including Oxfam, women who have traditionally worked the land for very little reward are banding together, primarily so that they can raise finance in order to invest and develop their small farms.
The results are encouraging: of the women I spoke to, almost all have seen tangible benefits: they had been able to invest in water pumps, better fertilisers, tanks to farm fish. They’d been able to pay for secondary school education for their children, too – not always a given in the rural areas.
Perhaps more unexpected – and of even greater value – were the intangible benefits. There was a confidence about the women I spoke to, a sense of real purpose, of ambition to better their lot. And this greater economic independence is gradually altering domestic life: women are healthier, and so are their children. Rates of domestic violence have fallen. Incidence of suicide has fallen. Among the women I spoke to, there was real optimism, real hope.
On my last night in Harare, my mother told me a story. A couple of weeks previously, she’d been driving into town when she’d almost been run off the road by a Kombi Taxi – the commuter taxis that get Zimbabweans around the capital with almost no regard for health and safety whatsoever. Leaning precariously out of the taxi’s sliding side door was its tout – the young man who hollers out to potential customers for business.
As this particular taxi rounded a corner up ahead, the door to which the tout was clinging detached itself from the rest of the car: man and metal went flying, skidding across the road, narrowly avoiding being crushed beneath the wheels of a lorry. The traffic stopped. Mum leapt out of her car to help. The young man struggled to his feet. Laughing a little self-consciously, he dusted himself off, picked up his door, and returned to his taxi. Within a couple of minutes, he was off again, leaning out of his vehicle, calling for the fare.
The story struck me as a good allegory of the entire country: permanently chaotic, teetering on the brink of disaster, falling down and picking itself up again, facing the next obstacle cheerfully, in good faith. A triumph of hope over experience, certainly, but one which is hard not to admire.
On the day I left, I said tearful farewells at the airport. I knew I wouldn’t leave it another 18 years. But I knew too that I probably won’t ever return for good. Although I’m sure I won’t ever love it quite like I love Zimbabwe, London is home now, it is where I have built a life for myself and, finally, where I feel I belong.