Free The Double Comfort Safari Club by Alexander McCall Smith

nephew,” said Mma Felo. She looked at Mma Ramotswe. “He is very good with his hands, you know. He is one of those natural mechanics.”
    Mma Ramotswe smiled, in spite of the memory of her van, in spite of that pain. “I know about such people, Mma. I married one.”
    Mma Felo agreed. Her own car had been repaired by her nephew on more than one occasion, and he had fixed her fridge, and washing machine, and many other small things about the house. “Everything would fall to pieces without such people,” she said. “The whole country would fall apart, bit by bit.”
    For a moment Mma Ramotswe imagined a Botswana without mechanics, without people like Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and Mma Felo’s nephew. Nothing would work, and it would be like living full-time at some remote cattle post, where there was only sky and bush and the sweet smell of the cattle; where water would have to be fetched from remote wells where the bucket-winding mechanisms would eventually fail; where the roads would disappear because there would be no tractors and no graders to repair them. There were places like that in Africa—places where the mechanics had gone, or had never been in the first place; where the wind blew in dusty eddies about decaying buildings and broken masonry and signs that had long since ceased to be intelligible; where people had simply given up, had worked hard, perhaps, and dreamed, and then just given up. That was not Botswana, of course, but one had to be watchful.
    “You are right about that, Mma,” she said. “We would miss people like that.”
    She thought for a moment. It would be terrible if all mechanicswere to be lost, but it would be unbearable if one mechanic, in particular, were to go. But that was a morbid thought, and she put it out of her mind; she and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni were intending to grow old together, not for some time yet, of course, but at some distant point in the future. They would go to a village somewhere—Mochudi, perhaps—and sit under a tree on two stools and watch the cattle walk past. She could do crochet, perhaps, making tablecloths for other women to sell outside the Sun Hotel in Gaborone, and talk to grandchildren. Even if they would not be grandchildren by blood, the children of Motholeli and Puso would be grandchildren as far as she was concerned. They would play at her feet, and she would cook for them and sing to them the songs that she had forgotten at the moment but which she would learn again by the time she became a grandmother. Yes, that was an intriguing idea. Modern people had forgotten the old songs—the songs that the grandmothers of Botswana used to know; she could set up a course to teach them those songs again so that they could sing them to their grandchildren when they came along.
Mma Ramotswe’s Refresher Course in the Old Botswana Culture;
that’s what it could be called. Or they could call it
How to Love Your Country Again
. And Mma Makutsi could be an instructor too, in the old typing skills, perhaps, keeping alive the memory of typewriters when people had thrown them out in favour of computers. And shorthand, a skill that her assistant said was being learned by fewer and fewer people, even at the Botswana Secretarial College itself; she was sure that Mma Makutsi would not want that to be lost.
    THAT WAS SATURDAY . On Sunday she went to the Anglican cathedral with the children, leaving Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni lying in bed, enjoying his one long sleep of the week. When she returnedshe would make him his Sunday breakfast, which consisted of
boerewors
and eggs and wedges of bread. “A man’s breakfast,” he would say, smiling. And Mma Ramotswe would nod in agreement, but with the unexpressed mental reservation that there were plenty of traditionally built women who would relish a breakfast exactly like that, if it were not for the guilt they would feel afterwards.
    Puso went off with the younger children to the Sunday school run in the general-purpose room of the