Roses Under the Miombo Trees

by Amanda Parkyn

  I suppose it could be said that I had ‘broken Daniel in’. More accurately, I think, he had learned to cope with my impatience and was good at soothing my short temper with many a ‘yes madam’ and ‘no madam’ in his soft voice. He was very fond of Paul, the ‘piccanin baas’, often pronouncing him approvingly as ‘too clever’ or ‘growing too big’. He would push mashed vegetables or fruit through a sieve for Paul’s lunch, just as I had watched as a child our cook Mrs Hoverington doing for my little brothers. I remember one occasion when some unfamiliar taste made Paul turn his head determinedly away in disgust. Daniel watched my mounting impatience as I vainly tried to push the spoon between his firmly clamped lips – ‘Come on, just a bit!’ – and his soft ‘No, madam’ instantly defused the situation as he hurried forward to offer a plate of mashed banana, Paul’s favourite.

  On the Back Road

  The sun burns through her shirt, and she thinks

  of the seedlings in her front border –

  double petunias, rainbow zinnias, stocks

  for evening perfume, of puddling them in

  last night, and how each one shelters now

  under its little paper hat, reminding her

  of her father on the beach, beneath

  his knotted handkerchief.

  The pram bumps along the rain- gouged

  ruts and potholes, joggling the baby into sleep.

  A grader must have passed here years ago,

  its steel blade smoothing the bulldozed earth,

  leaving heaps of spoil for verges and a road

  still waiting for new settlers’ bungalows.

  And there, where scrubby grasses spill

  over the dusty track, a delicate flame lily

  bobs in the wind, its flared orange petals

  shouting at the sun.

  CHAPTER 5

  An unexpected visitor: of racism, language and

  locums

  Out of the blue, a telegram from home, making nonsense of Mum’s argument about unaffordable airfares, for it announced the imminent arrival of Simon, the middle of my three younger brothers. He was 18, waiting to go up to Oxford in the autumn and I suppose at a loose end. Now was his chance to ‘see Africa’, Mum thought, making a few trips around the country using us as a base. Perhaps he could get a temporary job to pay his way, though Mum’s offer of £2 a week towards his keep was more than enough on our budget. We were delighted: for me it was the first direct family contact for 15 months, and for both of us a way of showing them our lovely son. We felt sure Simon could see plenty of the country by hitchhiking, though we were less optimistic of any paid work.

  What excitement! There was just time for me to write suggesting that Simon catch the train from Salisbury: it will be a suitable introduction to Rhodesia Railways, though the train will take him 9½ hours instead of 3½ by car. He arrived hot and dusty, full of tales of the slowness of the train, and wonderment at the small crowds assembled wherever it stopped. I remember him saying incredulously ‘they were just sitting – doing absolutely nothing’. As well as bringing all the news of home – our parents’ house move and attendant dramas – he bore, incredibly, a small package of carefully wrapped lilies of the valley, which arrived ‘ fresh and smelling gorgeous’ – such a powerful reminder of an English May. I am touched now, thinking of my mother gathering the little bouquet of her favourite flowers, packing it so carefully to keep it fresh, sending it to the daughter she couldn’t allow herself to visit.

  Mine were not the only letters home our mother kept; many of Simon’s from that visit have survived, a bundle of bulging airmail envelopes plastered with small value stamps, and giving detailed accounts of his stay – detailed because, as he explains now, our parents had instructed him to tell them all about our life and of course their grandson. Some of his letters are even headed ‘from your correspondent’, the language heightened for amusement and excitement, as indeed mine was from time to time, for as both of us knew, Mum would be likely to share our news with all and sundry. She was a great correspondent within our large extended family, and I can also see her now, down the hill at Worsfolds Stores and Post Office, talking to Miss Bowles through the grill as she collected her family allowance. Miss Bowles had only to enquire ‘… and how are the children?’ for Mum to pull from her well worn leather bag rustling airmail sheets to quote the latest accounts of our doings.

  There is something guilt inducing about reading letters not intended for my eyes, even though I have been given them by their author. Serve you right, I say to myself, as I read what is, in parts, a very different account of our life from that of my own letters, let alone from the memories in my head. Some comments are simply surprising, others downright uncomfortable – reminiscent of the sudden unexpected view of one’s body in a fitting room with angled mirrors, and thinking Goodness, do I really look like that? – only worse. I keep reminding myself that he was 17, I only 23, and it was all a long time ago. And after all, we were both writing from our own, very different, experience.

  How happy I was at Simon’s visit! We had a lot to catch up on when he arrived, and my loneliness, especially during the weeks when Mark was away, comes through in his descriptions of us endlessly talking over cups of tea, and of car journeys passing swiftly as we chatted all the way. There are early glimpses of Mark and me as a couple in Simon’s letters home:

  Amanda and Mark are very happy; they both work hard. Amanda is the same Amanda and Mark is Mark. Amanda talks a lot and Mark little. Amanda talks to me about everything – we spend a good deal of time over cups of tea; the biggest topic with her is Paul and baby theory in general – an inexhaustible subject and one that is new as well as interesting to me. Later on he comments: Mark was placid as usual [in the face of one of my outbursts of impatience]. He deals very well with A’s moods, either taking no notice or laughing and he’s marvellously patient … she is terribly submissive, loving him as she does. The other day when she had forgotten to take the order into town, she said ‘You must be so angry with me for being so stupid.’ Mark of course couldn’t care less and said words to that effect!

  He was delighted with the luxury of life with a live-in servant: It’s a long time since I’ve strolled into the dining room to a ready made breakfast and the biggest coffee cups you ever saw – v. pleasant. Mark goes for a run every morning! He was less keen however on the way we dealt with Daniel: If he forgets the butter he is talked to in very stern terms and warned what will happen to him next time. A and M say he would never remember anything if he wasn’t shouted at and I’m beginning to see that perhaps this is so. … the blacks one has dealings with are generally servile and ‘sir-ing’ the whole time, Daniel especially – a thank-you from me produces three or four from him. This afternoon he came into the drawing room to say goodbye (he always says goodbye when he goes 50 yards down the garden to his kaya!); my reply of ‘good afternoon Daniel’ evoked ‘yes, yes, yes master …mumble mumble…’ and a hasty backward shuffling of feet out of the door.

  The letter is a sharp prod to my conscience, puncturing the balloon of my vague and comfortable illusion of having been a decent, benevolent employer. I can see young Amanda back in that dining room, noticing that there is no butter on the breakfast table. She is exasperated, has told Daniel so many times and yet he still forgets. ‘Daniel!’ she shouts, ‘the butter!’, scowls at him as he hurries in. It is the same whenever he forgets something he has been instructed, or fails to understand. She does not learn patience, feels no need to do so; after all there is no-one to hold her to account for her behaviour, which she would not consider racist. Even her husband would not criticise her, something which is very important in their relationship.

  Yet suddenly I am remembering that it had not always been so – that when that 20 year old English girl had arrived in Africa back in 1959, she had behaved rather differently. In Lusaka, still new to her ‘au pair’ role, her cousin had sent her down to the labour office at the Boma to hire a replacement houseb
oy. In the shade around the edges of the large courtyard squatted dozens of men, hoping for work, their eyes seeming to follow her as she hurried into the employment office. She felt a worm of embarrassment, but at the same time an uncomfortable sense of power – her power over them, she with a job to offer, so many of them waiting. And shopping downtown one day, she had watched a sour-faced young white woman behind a counter responding to a hesitant black customer’s I want pencil with a snarl of You gotta say please or you don’ t get anything! Please, you hear? Don’t you have any manners? Sharply in her haughty English voice young Amanda had interjected: How can he learn manners if you treat him like that? The woman only glared uncomprehendingly. Later, living in Salisbury, she began to attend services at the Anglican church in one of the smarter suburbs, for she had been brought up to go to church regularly and still felt it was the right thing to do. One Sunday she listened to the vicar sermonising on the evils of universal suffrage, then being promoted by the British government: In U.K., they don’t have it! Criminals in prison don’t, lunatics in asylums don’t … what they don’t understand is that not everyone here is fit to have the vote! She wanted to stand up, to denounce him as a racist, or at least to stomp out, muttering her disgust. But she did not – though she did not go back to that church. She was young and idealistic in a vague, un-thought-through sort of way, but also naïve, without the resources to argue a case in the face of the standard rebuttal of: ‘You Brits just don’t understand – it’s different here’. And, desperate as she was to fit in to this delightful new life, she had got the message: we have no truck with Britain and the Brits here – you must leave all that behind.

  So yes, as that young woman, I had learned the terminology: black people were ‘natives’, ‘blacks’, ‘munts’ or – often in an abusive or otherwise denigratory tone – ‘kaffirs’. Or, of course, as employees they were simply ‘boys’ or ‘girls’. People of mixed racial origins were ‘coloureds’. Simon’s letters often refer to ‘niggers’, a term still in common use in Britain then, though I do not recall hearing it used in Rhodesia, even among recent immigrants. However, there was much that I had failed to learn about the people among whom I was living, indeed had not even attempted. Longer-term settlers, who with their blunt language and behaviour I would have perceived as less ‘liberal’ in their attitudes to black people, in fact engaged with them far more directly and personally, both in awareness of their culture and in learning their language(s). At the very least they would use the simple pidgin that had evolved between the races, first as Fanagalo in South Africa and later as Chilapalapa in the Rhodesias. It was often referred to as ‘kitchen kaffir’ and shared words from local Bantu languages with some English and Afrikaans thrown in.

  Over sundowners and at braaivleis, I had already heard plenty of Rhodesian jokes, the point of which was to show how stupid the African was, usually because he had misunderstood the white man’s English. Recalling one or two of these now serves to remind me of how often I judged a black person as unintelligent simply because they did not speak English sufficiently well for us to communicate effectively. There was no question of my learning their language, it never occurred to me to attempt it, for it was my assumption that they should speak mine. In this I suspect I was typical of the British immigrants who had settled in the country in their thousands during the 1950’s, most with no experience of employing servants, let alone ones from a very different culture from their own (and for whom the Federal Government’s leaflet, with its guidance on pay, accommodation and rations had been created). The fact of the matter was that in the midst of this very enjoyable white Rhodesian life, there was still something very foreign and disquieting about its African-ness, something of which I was barely aware at the time. In his A History of Rhodesia Robert Blake quotes Frank Clements’s Rhodesia: the course to collision, describing among the British immigrants of the 1950’s an insecurity, a vague unease, at the scale of Africa, the extremes of weather, and ‘the ever present black faces, unreadable, exotic and separate, the high chattering incomprehensible voices [that] filled them with a sense of menace’. Yes, I think now, that chimes with my memories – of how often I felt discomfited by the presence of so many, to me, inscrutable black faces. Easier to keep them at a distance than to engage with them. Better to shout and hope that they would understand my English.

  Now here was my young brother in this strange new environment, telling it as he saw it, discomfited by my shouting at a shop assistant in Desai’s, ‘the store that has everything’, as we attempted to buy him some canvas shoes: She always shouts at niggers and I find it most embarrassing! Because I expect them to be annoyed or offended. They never seem to be and Amanda says that they’re so unintelligent that they simply don’t take any notice of what you’re saying.

  My own everyday life being pretty uneventful, I had worried about how to amuse an 18 year old, and Mark bemoaned his inability to find any single (white) girls for him, our friends being all married couples. But Simon and I came from a family of do-ers, so it was easy for him to join Mark and me in our hard work. Soon he was clearing out old sheets of tin and asbestos around the property, helping Mark with one of his ingenious handyman projects, constructing a dog kennel out of found wood planks – big enough to house a cow, he wrote. Later he was roofing the hen house, and helping me make marmalade. And nephew Paul was good fun: ‘Naturally he sleeps most of the day which is a bit boring, but he’s usually good for a laugh when he’s not; he thrashes around madly, clasps anything that comes to hand, be it uncle’s finger or his nappy. When he was left alone this evening after his feed and before bed he howled until someone came to soothe him; when they did come he grinned wildly from ear to ear and flailed in all directions. Just bored, Amanda said! The dog is good sport when there isn’t a baby available. Yesterday we frolicked on the lawn (which is like coconut matting) and I tried to teach it to chase a ball – at the moment it takes one look and runs away as fast as it can, but I’m getting on well and it’s a good learner.

  Paul and Uncle Simon enjoying a quiet read (note beer mug and ash tray)

  Winter was now approaching and my letters home are full of thanks for parcels with sleeping bags for Paul and sweaters for us. Despite my complaints, winter was not really cold – a sweater in the evenings probably, a log fire if you had a chimney. More importantly, winter was the dry season and watering became a lengthy task, the lawn of tough kikuyu grass must be sprinkled at dusk, and all my little plants watered constantly. But our garden was not fenced and soon our relatively green oasis meant we were plagued by rabbits. While Simon was with us, we managed to borrow a shotgun from a neighbour and he would sit on the stoep at dusk with it, glass of wine to hand. I looked up ‘how to skin a rabbit’ in Mrs Beeton, and failing to find it, followed the instructions in my American The Joy of Cooking together with helpful diagram (I should have watched more carefully when our mother dutifully ‘dressed’ the furred and feathered game our father brought home from his shooting expeditions, grumbling over the scullery sink. She always said hare was the worst – ‘so bloody’ she would shudder.) I remember how diverted Simon and I were by the instructions for preparing squirrel, with its diagrams of gloved hands grasping key parts of the creature, and feet in dainty lace-up ankle boots (the latter for holding down the tail while you pulled the skin off like a jersey). Forty years later, our local butcher tells me that grey squirrel is the ultimate in healthy, environmentally friendly meat – free range, plentiful, lean and organic!

  An on-going theme throughout Simon’s stay with us was the saga of Daniel’s leave and its consequences for the household. I had been unable to stave this off any longer and it was agreed Daniel would have a month’s long leave to go home. Simon’s reports on this, more vivid than my complaints, start soon after his arrival:

  Car washing on the dry lawn

  22 May: Daniel is going to Nyasaland at the end of the month to get a wife. He has tried to get one here but they cost money. In Nyasaland they are fr
ee. He says he will provide a substitute while he is away and this morning a woman came round to offer her services but, as Mark was away, she couldn’ t be engaged yet. She can do everything Daniel does except chop wood and (marvellous) she was once a sort of nurse and can therefore baby-sit. (By ‘costing money’ Simon was referring to the system of lobola, whereby payment is made to the family of the bride, in cash and/or in kind – often head of cattle).

  28 May: Daniel has collected an African to take his place – a female called Maria (by us). They have been working together for a few days so that we hope she knows the ropes when Daniel goes on Weds. She has no English and can’t cook so A is a bit apprehensive, but if she is trustworthy we can leave Paul with her when we go out. (Up until then, our only options had been to take him with us in his carrycot, and leave him with friends if we were going to a restaurant or the cinema).

  So to my great trepidation life without Daniel began: 7 June: Maria is far from a boon (please apply to [Uncle] Paul and[Aunt] Bets for a description of her setting the breakfast table) and stank like a midden until Daniel told her to wash. Daniel departed in a big grin and as bashful as a maiden in his smart new clothes carrying a suitcase and enough blankets to keep warm all the refugees in Europe. Re Maria, he said ‘If she doesn’t work nice, madam, give her good hiding’ – which of course is the way these African men treat their women. (By the same post, I describe the departing Daniel as ‘looking like Dr. Banda in his black homburg’.)

  My understanding of Mark’s job, of how he spent his working days, was hazy. I don’t remember him talking much about it, probably glad to put it behind him. By the time he got home, often to a late supper, he would be greeted by a lonely wife, desperate for his company and secretly envious of, as I saw it, his freedom to be out socialising, whilst with Paul in his cot I had only myself for company. Even if I had been free to go with him ‘on the road’, I don’t think it would have been considered proper. However, a visiting brother-in-law was another matter, and here is Simon’s description of a day out with him: