the crumpled aerogrammes and flimsy sheets
rustling from airmail envelopes.
Here in the margin, 15 December 1961,
I’d written our phone number – had added
‘a party line I fear, so we’ll ring you’.
Gwelo 362327: studying the digits, I’m seized
with longing to reach for the phone: to check
the country’s codes, punch in the numbers,
wait for the connecting hums and clicks, to hear
the faint ring-ring … ring-ring … and then at last
my own young voice, bright with energy: ‘Hello?’
Our house in Abercorn: brother Will with Paul on the embryo lawn
With the travellers: L to R Simon, self, Mark with Paul, Will
Happy days: Abercorn Yacht Club on a typical Sunday
Rigging dinghies for a sail, Colin Carlin (R) supervising (Paul’s minder Uelo out of shot!)
Will (L) with Carl Kuhne, Robin Crosse-Upcott and Cessna – International Red Locust Control Service
Westie’s stores on Marshall Avenue, Abercorn’s main street
Romance – and oil supplies
Mpulungu: S.S. Liemba, sacks of dried fish and brother Simon (R)
Mark, his clerk and Paul at Mpulungu depot
Sisters Romana (L) and Amabilis: a day off on the lake
Hats and gloves for Caroline’s Christening: Caroline with her godmother Jiff and me, plus guests
Kalambo Falls: holding Paul tight, with his Cape Town granny
Lake Tanganyika regatta picnic: self proposing a toast as Caroline balances against Dad’s knee, centre foreground
PART II
Northern Rhodesia
CHAPTER 8
Abercorn – a very particular place
Sometimes, still, I will meet someone who was ‘out in Africa’ – Rhodesia, they might say, perhaps Northern Rhodesia for a while. Place names are exchanged and – surprisingly often considering its size – Abercorn is mentioned. ‘I lived there’, I will say, and we’ll smile at each other: ‘Ah yes, Abercorn …’ For it was indeed a very particular place.
I say ‘was’ not only because it is called Mbala now, having reverted after independence to its pre-colonial name, but because the Abercorn I knew and the life I led there as a very young woman revolved around a community of some 200 white people, a colonial settlement that was, we found, already changing. But I am getting ahead of myself. In June 1963 the little weekly Dakota delivered Paul and me to Abercorn’s airfield through bumpy turbulence and into a rainstorm. How mightily relieved I had been to escape the Copper Belt where we had spent a fortnight best forgotten: while Mark was in the office on his induction, I had attempted to manage with Paul and nothing to do in the hotel from hell. It was a struggle to get the kitchens to produce anything suitable for a toddler’s meals, let alone when he needed them; there was no safe place for him to play or run around and oddly, no hospitality forthcoming from local company wives. And I was suffering from morning sickness, this time much worse than with my first pregnancy.
There was therefore something deeply comforting about being met off the plane by a friendly face – Audrey Scotcher, wife of Mark’s predecessor, with two of her six children in tow. ‘We’ll go to the hotel later,’ she said, ‘first we’re out to tea’. From her car I glimpsed a main street of sorts, with a couple of general stores, some kind of municipal office building, then bungalows, widely spaced along dirt roads, with flat-topped spindly African trees – ‘miombo’ I later learned – through which shone little Lake Chila, Audrey pointing out the Yacht Club’s boat house on the opposite bank.
So, over cups of tea, the second person I met was Jennifer Bowmaker, whose husband, Alan, was a provincial fisheries officer, their little Jeanne a year younger than Paul. Children and their toys at our feet, we discovered we had good friends in Cape Town in common; somehow that anchored me, gave me a sense of being in a place not so strange after all, however far it might be from ‘civilisation’.
We were to rent a house, but the Scotchers’, although overlooking Lake Chila, was too large and expensive for us and we were advised that other possibilities were coming up. Meanwhile the Lake View Hotel outside town fulfilled its name, the view this time being over Lake Tanganyika some twenty miles and two thousand feet below. And beyond, in the far distance, I could see for the first time the misty blue bulk of high mountains behind which, I knew, lay the Congo. I thought of it with a sort of dread, for all its violence, coup and counter-coup continued to be regularly reported in the papers, with the exploits of mercenary forces, the seemingly endless slaughter and bloodshed. The hotel though was restorative, being everything the previous one had not been: ‘so easy with Paul, gardens all round, no road worry, large verandah, meals easily got and a nice manageress … the car won’t be here for a week [it was being transported by road] but I don’t need one till we settle a house … The planes come in Weds/ Thurs, NB for posting ex U.K Sun/Mon. My mother underlined this last bit of that first letter from Northern Rhodesia, for it was to dictate a schedule which was to become an important feature in our respective weekly routines.
Abercorn was where we were to live, but much of the focus of Mark’s job as an oil company rep. was elsewhere. Firstly he had a huge geographical area to cover, albeit sparsely settled, on very rough dirt roads, dusty in the dry season, often all but impassable in the rains. And then there was the company depot down at Mpulungu, a small fishing port on Lake Tanganyika. Every alternate Sunday the S.S. Liemba steamed down the lake from Kigoma in Tanganyika, towing a petroleum products laden barge, to be discharged into the company’s storage tanks. This routine, together with the size of his ‘patch’, was to make substantial demands on Mark and on our life together.
Over those first weeks we began to get our bearings. Abercorn stood – Mbala still stands – on the escarpment above Lake Tanganyika at the end of the western Great Rift Valley. It was Northern Rhodesia’s most northerly town, and on early maps of Southern Africa in the 1890’s there it is, marking the British Empire’s stake in the region. Now however it lay at the end of the Great North Road, most of which was unmetalled, and as we had been warned, was also some 400 miles from the nearest railhead, with all the implications for access to supplies. It is also the country’s highest town, some 5,400 feet (1670 m) above sea level, which meant that despite being so much closer to the Equator than where we had been living, the climate was pleasant, avoiding the extreme heat that met you as you descended to Mpulungu. Among its 200 or so white residents – the ‘Europeans’ – were the settlers on their outlying farms, civil servants with the Northern Rhodesia Government, others working for related organisations. There was a town management board for a township area that included around 3,500 Africans of the Bemba tribe, these latter still mainly living at that time in Mbulu township a short distance from the ‘centre’. Two hospitals were run by nuns of a Roman Catholic order, the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, one in the township, the other a bungalow near Lake Chila opened only for the occasional white patient. Abercorn was headquarters of the International Red Locust Control Service (IRLCS), its planes and later helicopters monitoring and spraying the marshlands of Northern Rhodesia’s Mweru swamp and the Rukwa Valley in southern Tanzania. The organisation was shrinking now and its staff houses becoming available to rent.
The political situation was very different from our previous postings too. I should admit here that it was only recently that I fully understood the difference between a colony (for example Southern Rhodesia) and a protectorate, which was Northern Rhodesia’s current status. Whilst the former had always been left pretty much to its own devices, with a British-appointed Governor General, the latter was run by an administrative service recruited, trained and employed by the Colonial Office in London. Its people worked even in the remotest corners of the country, administering everything from justice to health to infrastructure development, and working closely with local
chiefs. All this is vividly described in Ian Mackinson’s autobiography Footprints in the Dust in his account of his years as one of those administrators. As I now recognise, it was a world away from my own English-speaking, small town based experience of life in the country.
Although Northern Rhodesia shared half its name with its southern neighbour, it was a very different country, ‘a vast, scarcely developed, hardly populated area with a tiny metal spine’ as Doris Lessing described it in her 1957 memoir Going Home, the ‘metal spine’ being the towns of its Copper Belt where two great mining companies extracted and exported its vast mineral wealth. South of the Copper Belt was the country’s capital, Lusaka. The European population was concentrated in these urban areas which, to the Africans, were places to find work, from which they returned to their rural homes.
The country’s nationalist movement had always opposed the idea of Federation, seeing it as a way for its southern neighbour, so close to South Africa and with its much larger white population, to take advantage of their country’s mineral wealth and to draw it closer to a quasi-apartheid system and legislation they so detested. Northern Rhodesia’s Africans wanted to keep their land, not be constrained within overcrowded Native Reserves. They wanted the independence their northern neighbours had already achieved.
With Harold Macmillan’s Wind of Change speech during his visit to the African colonies in 1960/61, with the rapid gaining of independence of all France’s colonies south of the Sahara, with Britain’s West and East Africa colonies gaining theirs too, break-up of the Federation became inevitable. In October 1962 the final version of Northern Rhodesia’s new constitution produced an African majority on its Legislative Council, as neighbouring Nyasaland’s had. By the end of that year (just as we were to learn of our impending move from Gwelo to Abercorn) all support for the Federation was at an end. Nyasaland, under its nationalist leader Dr. Hastings Banda, back from England where he had practised as a G.P., was to secede. In March 1963, after continued wrangling between the parties, and the Southern Rhodesian elections that had brought in the Rhodesia Front, the British Government decided that Northern Rhodesia too must be allowed to secede. Independence was in sight at last and the Central African Federation would, by the end of 1963, be no more. Final elections to the legislative council in the coming January 1964 would lead to self-government.
At last we found a suitable house that we could afford – which meant that it was time to engage a servant and to get used to shopping in this new environment. In such a rural area, there was not a great pool of trained servants to choose from; I think we took on someone recommended by one of the families leaving as we arrived. So we took on Daudi, a tall, silent man with what I read as a slightly disdainful expression, which made me feel very uncomfortable. His first task was to rid all our furniture of the layers of dust that it had accumulated on its journey along hundreds of miles of dirt roads. I had established to my relief that he could bake bread. I had been very anxious about this, needlessly as it turned out, discovering that it was one of the routine skills servants learned for Abercorn’s white households (the District Commissioner’s cook, I recall, had been trained at a bakery and could whip up all sorts of breads from cottage loaves to plaits and poppy seed rolls).
Shopping needed a different routine from Gwelo. There were three general stores on the main street, Marshall Avenue, though as we had been warned they carried a limited range largely for the local African market. Our main port of call was Westwoods Stores – known to all as Westies – with its butchery next door for cheaper cuts and servants’ ration meat, nothing fancy. However, if you wanted dairy products, or particular cuts of meat, you had to order them from Ndola, whence they were delivered once a fortnight in a refrigerated truck. Never having been a great planner, this took some getting used to, particularly as so much of the entertaining we did was at short notice, for if any company men were in the area, we would inevitably invite them round for a meal. I recall depending a great deal on tins, including ghee for butter and evaporated milk for cream in emergencies. I was longing to be installed in our permanent home and start up a vegetable garden too.
At last we were able to move in. It was another iron-roofed bungalow, this time with a wide entrance set back between its two front rooms, forming a sort of terrace. Oddly, there was no stoep. It was the last house on a small dirt road that meandered off into the bush, heading to nowhere we needed to go. I tried hard to become accustomed to Daudi, but wrote home ominously ‘I don’t care for him, he’s not a patch on Daniel but there’s no choice up here.’ I think now that, while Daniel was undoubtedly more skilled and with an easier temperament, the size of our Abercorn house did not help. In Gwelo we had had large rooms and an extensive garden too, with Daniel deployed in both. Here we had a much smaller bungalow and I felt oppressed by this constant looming presence, silently resistant to my attempts to get him to do things my way. Fortunately both Paul and I liked Uelo, our young and cheerful garden boy, who didn’t mind being told how to work, and who played happily with Paul while I was at my sewing machine, initially altering curtains for our smaller rooms.
We had hardly settled in when we had news of our next house guests. My eldest brother Will was just coming down from Oxford and had some months to kill before writing exams for the Civil Service. He and Simon, now also at Oxford and with the long summer vac. before him, had hatched a plot to travel overland and visit us. ‘It’s not that far, is it?’ they said to each other over an atlas in the college library. Only around 6,000 miles, via Marseilles, Alexandria, Cairo, Khartoum, Nairobi and across Tanganyika to the border with Northern Rhodesia. The single communication we received from them en route was from Cairo, where they were trying to get visas for Sudan, and where Will learned of his law degree from a back number of the Times in the British Council’s reading room. We could only hope they would turn up some time. I got busy with fresh curtains for the guest room.
Out of the blue I was approached by Dave Millar, who with his wife Dido ran the little primary school for white children, and who was to direct the next amateur dramatics production. This was an American comedy and suddenly they were short of a leading lady – would I please, please audition for the part? It didn’t matter, apparently, that my last appearance on a stage had been as an extra in a school production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance; they would coach me, show me the ropes and I would have a very experienced leading man for my husband!
It sounds fun, I thought. Flattered, curious and unable to resist the challenge, I agreed to audition – was immediately offered the part and, ignoring my pregnancy and the obvious heavy commitments on my time, accepted. The play was The Gazebo and had been on in London’s West End a few years before, then made into a film. The plot swirled with deception, intrigue, blackmail and mistaken identity, yet was amusing and light and of course all ended happily. I was to play Nell, television actress and loving wife of successful playwright Elliott, living on Long Island. His was the biggest part, played by an experienced amdram actor, an older man who worked in local government. The third large part, of the couple’s neighbour, a district attorney, was taken by Chris Roberts, the medical officer, and there were a number of smaller character parts. I was on stage a good deal of the time and had seven costume changes over the three acts.
I was immediately swept into the hard work of line-learning and a routine of endless rehearsals over four weeks, while Mark, when he was not away, helped to construct the set. We started with dialogue, moved on to movement and gestures and dovetailing our parts. I was fortunate in having my leading man – we’ll call him Roy – to show me the ropes. Fortunate, that is, until, thrown together in frequent rehearsals as an affectionate couple, he suddenly decided that he had fallen in love with me. Roy himself did not really attract me, I think I was mainly seduced by the flattery of being so desired by an older, married man (in his late 30’s I would guess). Nothing happened between us other than a few clandestine, relatively chaste meetings
and, naïve and simplistic as I was, I was sure that the whole thing would die down without anyone knowing about it. Perhaps it would have, had it not been for his wife discovering that Roy’s attentions were elsewhere. She demanded he pull out and end it (which would also have meant the end of the production). When he refused she took their several children and departed to the bush camp down at Mpulungu, whereupon the news was around the community in a trice. Someone broke it to Mark as he returned from a business trip; he, poor man, was devastated, whilst I, faced with the reality of what I had allowed to happen, was horrified and embarrassed. My defensive wail of ‘but we haven’t done anything!’ was of course only of limited comfort to him. Deep down I felt very bad about it, both for him and for our relationship, but also for myself, wondering what people would think of me, in such a small community where I was as yet hardly known. Mark was also under great pressure from his new job, which did not help either of us. Somehow we patched things up, managing to have some quiet weekend time together with golf, bridge with our new neighbours the Crosse-Upcotts, and Sunday sailing. However, Mark must continue to travel, spending nights away from home, and I to rehearse, practising my portrayal of a successful actress and affectionate wife whilst in private fending off Roy’s pleas for time alone together. Of course none of this reached my letters home, merely: It still seems to need hours more rehearsal but I suppose it will work out. Bookings are going well anyway. Today I must gather my wardrobe of seven outfits together! I was getting rather tired, [by now I was 3 ½ months pregnant] with late rehearsals and too much other activity as well, so I am now taking things easier during the day (no golf etc.) and feel a lot better.
Roses Under the Miombo Trees Page 11
