When she turned ninety, my mother sprang a final surprise on us. She started speaking in the voice of a stranger.

Her usual voice is what linguists call RP, Received Pronunciation, the “standard” accent of the British upper middle class, although it’s spoken by only around 5 percent of the population, mostly the privately educated. Now, abruptly, she begins to speak in a frightfully mannered, haute Edwardian fashion. Instead of “home,” she talks of heome. The “house” is the hise. Ears is “yes.” Sex are “burlap bags” (sacks). A crèche is what happens when cars collide or the stock market dives. And rather than being “happy” (something she would never admit to, anyway), she is now heppy.

To say heppy, your mouth must tense into a horizontal rictus, so linguists describe this posh patois as “happy tensing.” It is a memsahib bark that sounds so pretentious that we—my younger sister and I— assume she must be affecting it, as a joke.

“No one really talks like that anymore,” I tell my mother. “Even the Queen has brought it down a notch.”

We give it a few days, hoping that this antique aristocratic accent will vanish as abruptly as it arrived. But it sticks fast. So we give this new, fancier model of our mother the nickname “Empress Dowager,” or “Her Grace” (HG happen to be her initials too—Helen Godwin) for short, while we try to figure out where this alien voice has come from and why it has suddenly shown up.

The most obvious trigger, a mini stroke, is ruled out by her doctor.

I spent the first decade of my life trying to summon my mother’s attention, and she has spent the last decade of hers trying to summon mine.

Her Grace is not much help in our quest. She denies that her voice has changed at all. “I’ve always spoken like this,” she insists.

Always emerges as awelways.

The Empress Dowager makes two other changes around this time.

The first change is that, for no compelling medical reason, she takes to her bed, as if prematurely lying in state. And she acquires a new bed, one of those hydraulic ones you see in hospitals, adjustable both in angle and in height. Whenever we visit her now, she presses the control panel to elevate the bed, so that she can peer down at us in Solomonic judgment.

The second change is that despite having always been acutely conflict-averse, allergic to embarrassment, oblique in her diplomacy, she now sheds her social filters. Doctors call this “disinhibition syndrome.” Like a toddler, Her Grace now blurts out whatever happens to move through her mind, however peevish or splenetic this may be. Indeed, she seems almost to relish causing offense, especially to me, her geographically distant offspring, resident over the ocean in America.

My sister, Georgina, is the proximate one. She does all the dowager heavy lifting. She has carved out a bedroom for our mother, who cannot manage stairs, by erecting an office partition across the sitting room of her Canfield Gardens duplex in North London; a partition that brutally bisects the beautiful bay window, destroying the aesthetics of symmetry and reducing the remnant sitting room to little more than a corridor, the sole furnishing in which is a Zanzibari daybed, whose crimson cushions Bella, her hyperactive English springer spaniel, has ripped to shreds in lieu of flushing and retrieving the pheasants she was bred to hunt. Georgina and her teenaged daughter, Xanthe, congregate instead in the small, dark, subterranean kitchen, like Victorian belowstairs domestics.

To assuage my guilt at being the absent son, I frequently fly over from New York. And, as I always do, I overcompensate, sitting beside my mother’s bed for hours at a time, chatting brightly and reading aloud to her, in the belief that this will help her stave off dementia. But mostly I am trying to convince myself that I am a good son.

There is a sad symmetry to our relationship. I spent the first decade of my life trying to summon my mother’s attention, and she has spent the last decade of hers trying to summon mine.

*

At ninety, my mother measures her longevity against two pacers. Her Majesty the Queen, who is eight months her junior and whom she considers a colleague—they both served in the WRENS (the Women’s Royal Naval Service) during the Second World War. And her nemesis, Robert Mugabe, who misruled Zimbabwe for the last thirty years my mother lived there. He is one year her senior, and she is determined to outlive him.

Today I am reading to her from the Times, a news story about her erstwhile president.

My mother is always on the lookout for signs of a decline in Mugabe’s health. Having ruined Zimbabwe’s healthcare system, once Africa’s finest, in which my mother served for fifty years as a doctor, Mugabe regularly jets (privately, of course) to Singapore, secretly to be infused there with fresh blood. Vampiric analogies maraud my mother’s mind.

In recent TV coverage of him, seated at a table, Her Grace has spotted the president’s swollen ankles peeping from under his trouser legs. She diagnoses right-side heart failure. Doctors never really retire. Neither do African presidents, it seems. Africa has the world’s youngest population but its oldest leaders.

“Mugabe’s losing it,” she says cheerfully. “Have you noticed how his kaftans have pictures of his own face all over them?”

“They’re not kaftans, they’re dashikis.”

With age I’m inheriting my late father’s proclivity for pedantry.

“Well, whatever they’re called, I think he wears pictures of himself to remind him who he is. He’s getting dementia, I tell you.”

I worry that my mother is merely mirroring her own fear of succumbing to dementia before Mugabe does.

From the news report I am reading to her, she harvests more evidence for her diagnosis. During a ceremonial tree planting, Mugabe cannot figure out where to deposit his small silver spade of soil.

“In the hole, at the base of the sapling, Your Excellence,” his aides urge.

I am still in mid-flow of the Times article when my mother holds up her hand, imperiously palming me into silence. She regards me sternly over the rims of her bifocals.

“I can’t help noticing you speak rather oddly,” she says.

I refrain from pointing out that this seems rather rich coming from the late-onset Empress Dowager.

“What accent is that?” she inquires.

“Well, I suppose it’s a sort of Zimbabwean one,” I say.

The white Zimbabwean accent, a tiny subset of Anglo African accents, is fast becoming an archaic artifact of linguistic curiosity as whites continue to leave—some call it, “bred and fled”—dwindling to fewer than twenty thousand now.

But small though it is, Zimbabwean English ranges all the way from the Afrikaans-inflected, where “affluent” sounds like “effluent,” to over-elocuted, faux RP English. My own Zimbabwean accent amplifies according to several catalysts: how recently I was in Zimbabwe, how tired I am, and how much I’ve had to drink. After any of these I start pronouncing the “ish” sound as ush, “fish” evolving into fush, and “ill” as ull, “mill” becoming mull.

Today, it’s jetlag that fushes my fishes and ulls my ills.

“I speak like this,” I remind her, “because I was born in Zimbabwe— where you decided to give birth to me. And raise me.”

“Ah,” she says, noncommittal, as if taking it under advisement, that this may—or may not—be true. “Livestock is raised,” she points out. “Children are brought up. You’ve been in America too long.”

She cracks that central r like a bullwhip. Or, as I would call it, a “sjambok.”

Georgina speaks much posher than I do. She had elocution lessons from Mrs. Venning at school in Zimbabwe. At seventeen, Georgina had arrived at Mountview drama school in London, dressed in bright, vegetable-dyed cotton—fine for the Zimbabwean sunshine, but not great for the English damp. In an era when vintage was not yet cool, her only climate-appropriate articles of attire were Dad’s old trilby and Mum’s old tweed coat, scratchy and heavy.

At Mountview, Georgina had briefly embraced Mockney—the fake mash-up of Cockney that the progeny of the upper middle classes used in a vain effort to gain street cred—before settling on the Queen’s English. Georgina speaks proper now, she enunciates.

Finding that two pages of the newspaper are stuck together, I lick my thumb and forefinger to separate them.

“Really, Peter,” says Her Grace, dripping disdain. “How awfully vulgarian.”

In her new voice my name has become Pee-tar.

Peter is already a problematic name in America, where the t morphs into a d to become Pee-der. When I announce myself to doormen and receptionists using the Anglo version, with its tent pole t, they frown in puzzlement.

I ignore her, continuing to read from the newspaper, until I notice she is examining my profile, her eyes rheumy with inquisition.

“How would you describe your forehead?” she wonders aloud.

My brow is rather prominent, a dashboard abutting a windscreen, so, in jest, I reply, “Neanderthal?”

“Yes,” she promptly agrees. “That’s the word I was looking for.”

“Good grief, Mum, that’s enough now!”

She looks astonished.

“I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

“What other way is there?”

She shrugs.

“Anyway,” I say, stung into defending my Neanderthal brow-bros, “new DNA research shows that sapiens didn’t follow Neanderthals on the evolutionary curve; they overlapped and interbred with them. Apparently present-day Caucasians have up to three percent Neanderthal genes. Mine must have lodged in my forehead.”

Her sardonic mien tells me she has been highly selective in what she’s deigned to hear, harvesting only the bit where I cop to being neo-Neanderthal.

“Furthermore”—I am warming to my theme—“it turns out that Neanderthals have had a bum rap. They weren’t the violent, knuckle-dragging analog to our genteel, intelligent sapiens. Quite the opposite. Neanderthals were the more artistic, the gentler, and we sapiens were the violent, homicidal ones.” I pause. “Nature’s thugs won out, and we are their heirs. As usual, history is curated by the victors.”

Her Grace, who grew up in England, now finds it confusing and depressing, a place she no longer recognizes, whose culture and values now seem foreign. For her, the past is another country.

Her Grace is clearly dubious of this update from the annals of anthropological antiquity.

“You lecture at university, don’t you?” she accuses.

“No, yes, well, sort of,” I admit. “But not on palaeoanthropology, and I’m only part-time, an adjunct professor.”

“I knew it,” she says.

*

Seeking to deflect from my defects—my accent, my looks, my déclassé habits—I examine the pastel seascape above her bed, a painting she has hung there in various landlocked Zimbabwean homesteads, from the Eastern Highlands on the border with Mozambique, to the lip of the Zambezi Escarpment, to the capital, Harare. It tries to capture the way the waves obstinately hurl themselves against the rocks. “[A] sea, swelling, chafing, raging, without bound, without hope, without beacon, or anchor. Torn from the hold of his affections and fixed purposes, he floats a mighty wreck in the wide world of sorrows,” as William Hazlitt described King Lear. And I can’t help thinking there is an element of Lear in this recently arrived Empress Dowager.

“Why do you always have that painting above your bed?” I ask.

She cranes up at it, appraising. “It reminds me of the systole and diastole of a heartbeat, clenching and unclenching,” she says. “But mostly, I just like colors.”

“It’s not exactly high art,” I murmur. I feel instantly ashamed, but my mother is unperturbed.

“Ah, art,” she sighs, “ruined since the time of Eden by self-appointed critics, inserting the worm of doubt into the joy of creation.”

And she begins to recite the bard of high Victoriana, Rudyard Kipling, her s’s assuming a hissing sibilance:

And the first rude sketch that the world has seen was joy to

his mighty heart

Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves; “It’s pretty, but

is it Art?”

I accept my rebuke silently.

To tune me out, Her Grace turns on the television. Her favorite show, Life on Earth, is playing. She finds natural history comforting. David Attenborough is intoning earnestly about lemurs. He explains that the lemur gently bites the giant millipede, triggering it to secrete defensive fluid that the lemur ingests “for narcotic effect.”

“Wow, lemurs get stoned by sucking shongololos—who knew?” I say, trying to row back from my earlier art attack.

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” my mother says, as though she has always known of this lemur drug-huffing habit.

*

Shongololo is what we call the millipede in our part of Africa. It comes from the Nguni word “ukusonga,” to roll up, which is what it does whenever it senses danger. The roll-up defense is one of the oldest in animal evolution, going all the way back to 500-million-year-old trilobites. Pangolins and hedgehogs still do it.

I wonder if my mother is doing it too, by taking to her bed, retreating from a disorienting, dangerous world. When we try to entice her out of the house now, she declines.

“I’m latibulating,” she says.

Apparently, it means to hide in a safe corner until conditions improve.

She pulls her purple peony-print duvet up to her chin, like a tortoise retracting into its shell, a defense copied by Roman soldiers in their testudo formation, joining their shields overhead to create a sheltering roof against the incoming shoals of enemy arrows.

*

The arrows unleashed at my mother during her half-century in Southern Africa have been many and sharp. She was overtaken by Zimbabwe’s civil war, in which her only son and her husband fought, and which claimed the life of her elder daughter, my sister Jain, at the age of twenty-seven, and Jain’s fiancé, when they drove into a Rhodesian army ambush three weeks before their wedding. My mother served as a doctor in Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital while HIV ravaged the population, before there was any effective treatment.

She saw a lifetime’s savings, pensions, and careful investments zeroed out by the worst hyperinflation the world has ever seen (the Zimbabwe dollar halved in value every day), reducing her to humiliating penury in old age. For a pittance, she continued to work well into retirement as a doctor, ministering to the medical staff she couldn’t bear to abandon in a hospital that was starved of resources and collapsing around her.

The final arrow, the one that pierced my mother to the quick, was the death of my father in 2004. In his last year, his feet were ravaged by gangrene from diabetes. He would sit on his bed while my mother knelt on the floor to unwrap the sodden bandages from his rotting feet while I tried not to vomit at the smell. Yet he refused to countenance amputation.

My father’s final wish was to be cremated. But the only crematorium, Warren Hills, where we had buried my sister, no longer worked. So, I begged permission from the local Hindu pandit to burn my father at their open-air site, and then had to help build the pyre and wait through the night while he burned, to collect his remains. It turns out that flames are no match for the femur. Loading one’s father’s bones into a bucket, I can report, graphically reinforces one’s own sense of mortality.

After that, my mother came to England for a hip replacement and spent six weeks recuperating with Georgina. But when it came time to fly home to Zimbabwe, she just couldn’t bear to return to the shell of her former life, overwhelmed at the idea of coping in a failed state without her husband. So, she never did.

She was cheated out of her house, her sole remaining asset. Now she finds herself in England with no income of her own besides a miniature pension from her Second World War naval service a lifetime ago.

A doctor accustomed to being the one who cares for others, she hates the idea of being a burden. But now she must rely on her children for her own survival.

And though we’re happy to provide, and we tell her that often, she insists on contributing, spending her days applying for little parcels of charitable money from professional and religious organizations, money that is constantly audited and which she must repeatedly reapply for, even as she grows befuddled by the burden of the bureaucracy.

Her Grace, who grew up in England, now finds it confusing and depressing, a place she no longer recognizes, whose culture and values now seem foreign. For her, the past is another country.

She still misses her husband desperately.

“Do you know,” she tells me wistfully, “your father drew me a special map of how to drive to the hospital from home without ever having to turn across the traffic, because he knew how I hated that. And a separate map for the return journey.”

Now she must navigate her life without his specially drawn maps.

One of the very few visitors my mother will let into her latibulation is Alison, a music teacher in her sixties, who went to high school in Zimbabwe with my elder sister. Alison helps fill the Jain-shaped hole in Mum’s life. And Mum is around the age Alison’s mother would be. Each serves as a substitute for the missing. Their psychological puzzle pieces press perfectly into place.

*

There’s an old Jewish proverb that only those who have been forgotten are truly dead, but I have trouble remembering my older sister now. She was an elementary school teacher, and I keep her photograph and her craft work on my wall—batiks and collages, mostly. Like a little shrine, I suppose. They are so faded now, and tattered, it’s hard to make them out. One is a grove of trees, constructed of string glued to canvas. Sometimes, when I pass by, I trace my fingers over it. Touching something once touched by her.

Whenever I do, I try to manifest her. Seven years older than me and sixteen years older than Georgina, Jain was more maternal to us than our mother. I can picture the upward curl of Jain’s smile, her lighthearted exasperation with the slowness of others, hear the peal of her laughter. But not the whole. She’s been dead now longer than she was alive. And when she was killed, I lived on a different continent, saw her irregularly, so her death didn’t present itself to me daily. Rather, it crept up on me, and still does, in accumulating waves, breaking over me, drowning me in her absence.

I can still remember the moment I heard the news. Cambridge in spring, April 22, dawn. I am lying in bed, half-awake; the alarm has already gone off and there is half an hour before my eight-man crew will take to the tranquil River Cam to row.

There was something about rowing that helped calm me after military service; this was my therapy, exercise until exhausted, five or six times a week. The consoling dip and splash of the blades, the nudge of speed as the lacquered shell leapt at the catch of each stroke, and the flick of the synchronized finish as eight blades cleared the water and feathered together. Interdependent oarsmen in a galley, the atavistic thrill of teamwork.

We Godwins are paragons of stoicism….Our threshold is so high that catastrophe barely registers on the Richter scale of our forbearance.

The black-suited porter bangs on the door to say there’s a longdistance call for me. I pull on sweats and follow him downstairs through a quad billowing white with cherry blossom. He slides open the glass partition to the porter’s lodge and hands me a black Bakelite receiver, shiny with wear. My father’s voice is flat and tight as he tells me, without preamble, “I have terrible news, Pete. Jain has been killed.” Then his voice trails off, and all I can hear is a bass groan, agonizingly heavy, ponderous and final. I am a dead weight, falling and falling and falling, into this nihilistic sound.

Years later I heard a recording of a black hole, a star imploding in on itself. And I recognized it, that same dystopian symphony, those massive, terminal groans as the whole universe turns in on itself and is swallowed by nothingness.

*

Only afterwards did I realize that I was the one they had expected to die. This is my survivor’s guilt. If any of us had to be ritually sacrificed to the gods to keep the rest of the family safe, it was supposed to be me. I was the one who went to war at eighteen, straight from high school. Drafted in due to a sudden law change (by a Rhodesian government short of white conscripts) that ended military service deferments for students studying abroad, just before I could make my escape.

I wrote about my war in Mukiwa, my coming-of-age memoir, and I find it hard to go back into it all. Suffice it to say, what I saw sucked the youth clear out of me and set me on a new trajectory. And when I eventually made it to England, I was different. I was altered in ways I still don’t fully understand, as I don’t know what kind of man I would have become had I not gone to war. But somewhere I grieve for him too, that man I might have been. I was so young, understood so little of life. I was reading a Leslie Thomas novel at the time, The Virgin Soldiers. And I remember thinking, Lord, please don’t let me die before I have known love. Before I have loved and been loved.

*

“Do you remember how you heard?” I ask Georgina.

Of course she does, each moment is chiseled into the marble of her memory.

She was eleven, just out of hospital for tonsil removal, when Mum woke her to tell her Jain was dead. You’re pulling my leg, said Georgina. She had just read that phrase and was using it for the first time. No, said Mum. It’s real. They bundled her into the car and drove straight to the death site, near Shamva.

Georgina finds one of Jain’s shoes inside the crushed car and the other one in the bush nearby. They are flatform flip-flops with rainbow soles and white straps, and though bloodstained and too big, Georgina slips them on. She wears them continuously until they fall apart. She wears them to an Eisteddfod music festival, though the dress code calls for black gowns and bare feet. The shoes are ugly and distracting, the judge scolds. Georgina bursts into tears. But her duet with her best friend Ellah still wins first prize.

Among Jain’s clothes she also finds a jokey T-shirt that has the slogan Handle with Care printed across the chest. Georgina has yet to develop breasts, and the T-shirt is much too big for her. When she wears it, the words are over her stomach.

“What should we handle with care?” someone teases her.

“Me,” she says. “You should handle me with care.”

*

Growing up in “colonial” Africa, we were taught that sentimentality was to be despised, that we had to be tough, to bear our mantle of responsibility. To whom much is given, much is expected, my mother used to say. Noblesse oblige. My father was more succinct. Belt up, he said whenever we showed signs of weakness or emotion, which were the same things to him. “Get a grip.”

We Godwins are paragons of stoicism. Pain is something we pretend happens to other people. Our threshold is so high that catastrophe barely registers on the Richter scale of our forbearance. We continue to feel privileged, fortunate, even as adversity sideswipes us.

It reminds me now of the notices posted on Japanese roller coasters when they banned screaming because it spread Covid. The notices ask riders instead to “Please scream inside your heart.” And that’s what we did as a family after Jain was killed. In our separate ways, we screamed inside our hearts. Never out loud, and never together. We suffered in silence, alone. The light behind my parents’ eyes went out, and it never really burned again. They switched from robust middle age to being abruptly old.

*

My father is dead more recently than Jain, sixteen years now, but already I can no longer conjure him. Until recently I could do so effortlessly. The Gold Leaf cigarette smell of him, his eccentric uniform—safari suit and desert boots, his walrus mustache—the timbre of his over-precise English, learned as a foreign language. The way he chewed his tongue in the side of his mouth when concentrating, as I’m told I do. His engineering exactitude, despising sloppiness in all things. His allergy to sloth.

But slowly the corporeal essence of him is slipping away. I am losing him for a second time as he leaves for that limbo occupied by the memory of Jain. Both are becoming spectral. Vague, mythical. I now miss the idea of them, as much as the physical persons.

Jain’s death, though more distant, leaves perhaps the deeper wound. Maybe because it is a preview of my own death. A curtain-raiser to my own mortality. A sibling’s death does that even more than a parent’s. When a parent dies, especially of the same gender, it places you next on the disassembly line. When a sibling dies, then death is right at your elbow, jostling you directly, without a generational buffer.

But the loss of Jain is something deeper too. It’s a premonition of cosmic loneliness. The soul-sucking sadness of solitude. A glimmer of the worst the world has to offer. Not that it harbors any particular hostility towards you, but worse, far worse, that it is supremely indifferent to your fate.

__________________________________

From Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss, and Occasional Wars by Peter Godwin. Copyright © 2025. Available from Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.