Roses Under the Miombo Trees

by Amanda Parkyn

  We started at 7.30 and made for the bush, visiting a sawmill, a huge ranch that must have had about 55 million acres. The [private] drive was about 15 miles long and we hit our heads on the roof about once every 25 yards. The roads, once you get outside of town, are not tarred but are not uncomfortable at 50 miles an hour. We went to several gold mines and went down the shaft of one of them. When, however, the boss said that he thought they were about to begin blasting, you couldn’t see Mark for gold-dust! We also visited a native reserve where there are 11 Europeans to 40 – 60,000 Africans – must drive them mad. We returned to Gwelo in the dark and had a well deserved drink at one of its numerous hotels; it’s part of Mark’s job to sit around in pubs because he can pick up many useful hints about people wanting petrol etc. Once there’s a drink or two inside Mark his tongue is loosed; last night I could hardly stop him.

  Simon took to all our friends, whose welcome ensured a non-stop social life during his visit: They are all charming – unreserved, friendly and open. I like them very much, he wrote. Perhaps he sensed too what had drawn me to life in Rhodesia from the first – the classlessness of it. We had been brought up in a home where everyone was judged along class lines: their accent, language, behaviour – all were scrutinised against the template so vividly described by the novelist Nancy Mitford as ‘U’ or ‘non-U’ (U standing for upper class). Whole swathes of vocabulary were ‘out’: settee, note paper, toilet, pardon … such words betrayed non-U origins. How ridiculous it seems today, and how gladly I had, as I thought, put it behind me as I mixed with people (white people of course) from very different backgrounds. In fact I had absorbed all that ‘correct’ vocabulary, those ‘right’ ways of doing things, and was happily oblivious to what my own accent and behaviour told others about me and my background. I had also, without realising it, left one class system behind, only to enter another one even more rigid, based on the colour of your skin.

  Most of our Gwelo friends of that time were, I think, immigrants from Britain, either recent or having kept their links with ‘home’. They were also well educated, the husbands professionals or similar – Mike the schools inspector, Jack the teacher, Pete a designer for Bata, Mark’s colleagues Doug and Noel, Alex the vet. (The wives of course were all homemakers, most of us with young children). Simon distinguished between our friends and people he called ‘Rhodesians’, people with the strong accent very like South African, with its echoes of Afrikaans, but also perhaps – in the context of his letters – less well educated. Here he is, describing our trip to Bulawayo where an old university friend of Mark’s was captaining the British Lions in a rugger [sic] match against the Rhodesians:

  On Saturday morning the four of us set off in the little Morris for Bulawayo. It’s a 2½ hour journey – a hundred miles and deadly boring. We arrived at the Thompsons for a late lunch… then set off, just Mark, Amanda and myself, for Hartsfield. We had very good seats for which Mark paid: the game was quite good if one sided – the Lions won by 35 points to 6. The Rhodesians are a very rough lot – there were 6 injuries on the Lions’ side and none on the Rhodesians’; one Lion got his leg broken with a noise that ‘resounded like a rifle shot around the ground’ according to the newspaper. While he was being attended to, the coarse Rhodesians who had gathered in numbers to see the game gave an unpleasant display of their rough character, by shouting ‘take him off ’, ‘leave him to the vultures’, ‘get on with the game’ etc. etc. Amanda and I were in a fury over this and got very worked up, and I don’t blame us… When we got home we changed and went out to dinner with the T.’s to a good restaurant, I wore my kilt to the surprise and amusement of my friends the Rhodesians; I’m afraid I don’t like these Rhodesians; they have horrible short hair cuts and are very hearty and simple. They all look exactly alike and can be recognised a mile off (I shan’ t be having my hair cut in this country!). (Quite what Simon was doing with a kilt I cannot fathom, for we had no Scottish ancestry and it was hardly suitable attire for the sub-tropics.)

  An invitation from our landlords, the Cummings’s, gave us the chance for a trip to visit their new farm – little more than a smallholding really – near Selukwe, some 30 miles away. I loved these drives away from dull Gwelo into the bush and the countryside here was hilly and green with trees, ‘the horizons unimaginably vast’ as Simon wrote. We found them down a very rough track, living quite happily it seemed, in very primitive conditions. Their house was constructed out of a sort of wattle and daub, of mud plastered over a wooden woven frame, with a thatched roof and stamped earth floor. Dividing interior ‘walls’ were no more than wooden stakes close together still awaiting some sort of coverage. With no mains services they were, like all country white folk, dependent on a generator and a borehole, their privy a long-drop in the little outhouse, or ‘piccanin kaya’ as it was called (p.k. for short). A clearing in the bush contained an enclosure for pigs and chickens and a substantial vegetable plot. I think now that we were all secretly shocked to see white people living so like Africans, but they seemed perfectly content and we marvelled at their determination and resourcefulness. Recently I was enchanted to find, in Doris Lessing’s memoir Going Home, a lyrical description of her childhood home in Southern Rhodesia, a house that must have been built in much the same way. Lovingly she describes the frame of long tree poles, the mixing of mud from suitable ant heaps till the walls were covered in ‘a sweet smelling mud-skin’; the roof thatched with long pale grass, and last the floor – more ant-worked earth mixed with fresh cow-dung wetted with fresh ox blood and water, stamped down and smoothed. To her the house was a living thing, responsive to the weather’s moods, over the years becoming home too to small mammals, lizards and insects, occasionally a snake. Only the white ants posed a threat to the house’s structure. As a child Lessing knew the geography of every inch of her bedroom’s uneven, patched walls and floor, loved it too much to return years later to find out what had happened to it. We missed all of those possibilities, saw only a primitive and uncomfortable dwelling, driving thankfully back to our brick built, corrugated iron roofed homestead.

  By the end of June we were eagerly awaiting Daniel’s return and Maria had been ‘let go’ with some relief on my part – perhaps also on hers. Simon meanwhile made various touristic forays – to the Victoria Falls, to the great Kariba Dam on the Zambezi river, and to the beautiful Eastern Highlands, fetching up in Bulawayo visiting our cousins John and Toni, where he was press-ganged into helping with the decorating of their splendid bungalow and was given the visitors’ tour of the local Dunlop tyre factory. With news of a live classical concert there, and encouraged by Mark, I drove down with Paul anchored in his carrycot (the carrycot however not anchored to anything), to join him and hear the visiting Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. This was a rare treat for me, and with Paul safely installed with his little cousins Yvonne and Nigel, Simon and I had a night out, including after the concert ‘a cuppa at a drive-in’. We are recognisable in the Bulawayo Chronicle’s photo of the audience, sent home with an arrow pointing to ‘Us!’. It reminds me of how much I missed music during those years, let alone live music; I was forever writing home with lists of classical LP’s I would like for Christmas or birthday.

  We drove home next afternoon to find no Daniel and, with Mark still at work, two hungry animals. Simon reported: Daniel hasn’t come back yet (it is now Sat.eve.) Maria quit a few days ago and I’m glad I’m here because A cannot be expected to do things like water the veg. garden, make fires as well as feed Paul and cook. Added to all this A. is suffering from a bad back – she says it is muscular – and both Mark and the doctor say she must take it easy for a couple of days so we all buckle to and get along v. satisfactorily. Mark thinks she ought to go to bed but she won’t; if she has to, I am sure I can look after myself and Paul. As regards the latter there is nothing I can’ t do (tho’ I must say the changing of nappies (the unveiling as A. and I call it) is a bit distasteful to me).

  Brave Simon, prepared to step so wholeheartedl
y into the breech! The ‘bad back’ was a weakness in our family, with my father frequently laid up with a slipped disc, and Granny once frozen into immobility over the sideboard as she carved a chicken. I had already, aged 19, had two prolapsed discs removed, so any recurrence would have felt traumatic. Nonetheless, despite all offers of help, I would have felt it quite wrong to rest – that would have been giving in to it.

  All our friends now warned us that we had lost Daniel for ever (despite a promised bonus on his return of £6) – or joked that the Malawi freedom fighters had caught him. But on 4 July a letter arrived, announcing he had found a wife and would we please meet him from the train on Sunday 31st June. Had he meant last Sunday, 1 July, we wondered? But then why wasn’t he here? All we could do was wait, but by 5 July he had not appeared.

  Gloom descended again, and my back had had enough of running the house, even with Simon’s support. It got horribly dirty and dusty as the dry season progressed, and I am sure none of us even attempted to polish those acres of red cement floor. It seemed to take all day for us to do little else but laundry, which must be washed by hand in a stone sink, the ironing (including both sides of every towelling nappy), cooking and attending to Paul. Mark and Simon chopped wood for the boiler, but who got up early to light it for those morning showers, I wonder? At any rate, there were no more leisurely elevenses over endless cups of tea for us. Simon, now comfortably used to being waited on, wrote to the parents: it was ghastly – all that washing up etc and no time to call one’s own. With still no Daniel, and expecting a weekend visit from our Bulawayo friends the Thompsons, their three boys, grandma and nanny, I decided to take on a temporary replacement – or rather, in the event, three in succession. Down to the Labour Exchange in town we went, expecting to find plenty of candidates, since there were few jobs beyond the least skilled open to black people. Job segregation was applied on the same lines as in apartheid South Africa, so in those days, and with the benefits of accommodation and rations, domestic work was I think relatively popular. (This was to change in the 1980’s, when democracy brought an explosion in job opportunities and of colleges offering vocational education and training, and domestic work became a lower status option, and hence the province of women. However, by 2008 rampant inflation in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe meant its status had changed once again, as the cost of travelling to work could exceed the salary for the job, and it was a prized role once more, with its free accommodation, water, electricity and of course no unaffordable travel costs.)

  However, for us in May 1962, there was a difficulty, as we discovered: we lived 6 miles out of town and few of the candidates were willing to come that far. The first one we managed to engage was, I wrote, ‘no good’, then there was ‘quite a nice creature called Charlie’; he however ‘dropped all the silver onto the draining board from a height of a foot and when I reprimanded him, he sulked for hours’. He was despatched, taking all Daniel’s cooking utensils with him. Finally came Levi, who had a family and was desperate to acquire a good reference, in order to secure further employment. We drove him home, with his large wife, several children and baggage crammed into the Mini, and installed them in Daniel’s kaya. Levi seemed competent and the relief in the household was palpable. To celebrate, we went out on the Friday night to gamble our small change at the Smiths’, returning late to the complete surprise of being greeted by a delighted Daniel. I remember the moment clearly: he was ‘ absolutely worn out and covered in coal dust and beaming from ear to ear. He had come by train and got held up for a week at the border of P.E.A. [Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique] for not having a smallpox inoculation, had to have it there and wait until it ‘took’.’ Next morning we met his wife, a beautiful silent young woman who spoke no English, whose name – that is, her name for Europeans – was Inez. I improvised and gave her one of my dresses as a wedding present, and soon Daniel had her pressed into service at the washing line and in the vegetable patch in front of their kaya.

  And so with sighs of relief, we could return to domestic normality. The Thompsons’ weekend visit passed easily enough, with Levi kept on for the weekend to help, so that madam, much relieved, wrote home ‘it became more a question of direction rather than labour’. Daniel and his new wife, however, were spending their first nights in his kaya in the company of a strange couple and their several children.

  Daniel’s absence had made me infinitely more appreciative of him; I would like to think that it also made me a better ‘madam’, more tolerant of his memory lapses, kinder to him when my own insecurities tipped me into ill temper, but I cannot be sure of that.

  In late July Simon returned for the last time from one of his sight seeing trips and his final departure was looming. In his last week with us his letter records six evenings out of seven spent either in town – his thank-you dinner for us, the cinema for Ben Hur – or at dinner parties to say farewell. Our friends had enjoyed his company, found him very sophisticated for an 18 year old and treated him as an adult, my mother when he got home commenting on how much he seemed to have grown up. He had also assiduously worked at mimicking a Rhodesian accent, with its squeezed vowels and many a ‘Ja’ and ‘Ag men!’ My last fling with him was to drive him to Salisbury to catch his Comet, leaving Paul with the Crouches for a night, and staying over with my old CID friend and colleague Barbara Yates. I felt miserable seeing him off, looking longingly at the sleek new Comet on the tarmac, set for England. Barbara cheered me up by absconding from the CID and we ‘did the town’, buying much needed lengths of material and shirts for Mark: I got some super material and have made myself sage green linen-Dacron slacks and gingham Dacron over blouse to match, v. smooth. But the best thing was just to see all the fashions and shops, to spur me on to make an effort. One gets into a fearful rut here and I found I wasn’t bothering. Despite all our friends and our lovely homestead, Gwelo never felt anything other than second best to me.

  CHAPTER 6

  The sudden intrusion of politics and an election

  shock

  The centre of my life though were my husband and my baby, his development an endless source of fascination and pride. I was now keeping a baby book, recording clinic weighings, additions to his diet, his vocal explorations (squeaks and shrieks) and physical prowess, soon to include his first crawling, backwards off the carpet. As he grew so, slowly, did my confidence as a mother. I stuck in what few little black and white photos we had, sending others, along with regular proud reports of all this progress to his grandparents, together with descriptions of him gnawing on a drumstick and on a piece of biltong (dried meat) given him by the butcher. He was on diluted evaporated milk, I wrote, since ‘until the rains come there is no goodness in the cows’ milk’. I couldn’t wait to show him to his grannies – Mother, who was coming up in a couple of months’ time, and Mum, who had at last decided to visit us the following year, sailing to Cape Town and thence onwards by plane.

  Daniel meanwhile seemed happy with his new wife, indeed had started to oversleep, much to Mark’s rage as it meant no boiler lit and a cold morning shower. I bought Daniel a large tinny alarm clock, which helped most of the time. Inez padded silently about, helping her husband with the endless laundry, hoeing between rows of vegetables. You could see he was proud of her, though in front of us he would speak sharply to her, to show who was boss. On Daniel’s afternoons off they would go out, Inez often wearing the dress I had given her. And on Sunday afternoons they would go to church somewhere, he in his suit and homburg hat, she in a frock with a white hat and gloves, walking off down the hot dusty track.

  I remember watching Inez as she settled in, walking in that slow, stately African fashion, so different from my own hurried pace, back to her kaya. She is wearing a pink overall that hides her shape, but even so you can see that she is beautiful. She pauses by the baby’s pram parked in the shade of a cluster of spindly musasa trees and peers in, and suddenly I think: She’ll be next. With Paul awake more of the time, I have started to entrust her with taking
him in his pram for little walks in the afternoon, and I am planning to teach her how to feed him his tea while I cook our supper, or make mulberry jam from the big old tree at the back, or run up a romper suit on the sewing machine. I try to coax her to use a few English words – baby, pram, nappy – but she is very shy. We pay her a pound or two a month – a fraction anyway of Daniel’s wage for much more skilled work.

  At about this time I acquired – I cannot recall how, but it must have been through Mark’s business network – a nice little temporary part-time job. The Midland Show was approaching, the big event in Gwelo’s calendar, and I was engaged by one of the tobacco companies to hover around at their various events and offer cigarettes to the visiting farmers, all for the princely sum of £2/10/- per hour, which was riches indeed to me. What a contrast between this casual rate for me as a white worker and the going rate for our domestic servants! Job reservation meant that the market forces determining ‘white’ and ‘black’ occupations were entirely separate and unrelated. I did not feel the least bit guilty about it, in fact I doubt whether I made the connection – it was just the way things were.

  I was in my element, finding this new role quite easy, a little like passing the nibbles at my parents’ cocktail parties: On Thursday I started my new job, in the Members Enclosure before lunch. I wore my white linen dress (straight) plus State Express yellow sash, and held a silver salver with cigs and a gas lighter! It was quite a success, and all the farmers in for their one treat of the year were thrilled. It was very good weather. Friday was hectic, and Joy took Paul over for nearly all the day. I had a hairdo, spent lunchtime working, had lunch with Mark in the Enclosure (he spent a lot of time at the Show of course), a Sundowner party 5 – 6 working, and then the Arkwrights and Orners to supper before the Show Ball! Amazingly enough all went well, I had a fabulous hairdo which carried me through the day, and had everything organised beforehand. The Ball was good fun, we had a good table and a nice party, and the Salisbury Police Band were really hep man – we were all twisting madly by 1 a.m.!