I can see now, through our letters, how much more of a burden our situation must have been for Mark than for me. I, in my role as follower, as loyal wife, found that by not thinking about the future too deeply, I could stay optimistic, with a naïve confidence in his future career. Besides, I was soon to be going home, and my letters are full of practicalities about push chairs, cots and possible toys for the grandchildren. I was going home to a place where, even in a house I had never seen, everything else would be familiar. Each piece of well-worn old furniture, every picture and wall mirror, every table setting – the faded pretty china, the twirly silver candlesticks, the napkin rings we had each had since we were little – all would be just as I had always known it. The grandfather clock would tick and whir, Mum’s dented saucepans would clatter in the kitchen, her clutter of letters, bills and messages on scraps of paper lie in drifts by the phone. There would be croquet on the lawn, beyond it Pa’s apple trees, and surely an asparagus bed, a fruit cage and tall globe artichokes. My Gran – Mum’s mother – had just moved into a little house across the road; there I would find her, her Chinese carpet in the drawing room, the chiming carriage clock on the mantelpiece, her Steinway grand piano with its double piano stool for duets, a faint smell of pot pourri and her lively voice: ‘Darling! How wonderful to see you!’. I had all this to come, to show my children and make them part of. Whilst Mark, sole breadwinner, would be stuck with working out his two months’ notice in Broken Hill, certain only of what he did not want to do for a living.
By the end of January we had decided: Cape Town it would be, a choice welcomed by both our parents. And a big thing is the better communications with you, and mail ships not so expensive as planes to Zambia. With an unaffordable quote for moving all our furniture, I set about turning out cupboards, and suddenly we were the ones having sales of small items, flagging up larger ones for later offers. Almost nothing need be thrown away, for any battered utensil or torn sheet would fetch a few pennies. The fridge found a new home in Fort Rosebery, our double bed a new lease of life in an African’s home in the township. In the end we kept little but our chintz-covered suite and small tables. Even the dining room table and chairs in some dark hardwood, that Mark had stripped and polished so lovingly, were up for sale. But my desk, an antique but solid oak bureau given to me by Gran, at which I had written so many letters home, would go with us no matter what it cost. (Today, refurbished, it stands in Caroline’s home, its pigeon holes and little drawers cleared out, looking better than ever.)
Lake Tanganyika regatta: M.V. Triton and dinghies
At about the same time there was a cheering treat: the Yacht Club executed a long discussed plan for a regatta on Lake Tanganyika. Somehow all the dinghies were transported down in advance, trailers bouncing down the 28 miles of dirt road. We left home early for what turned into an unforgettable day. There were spectators both on the overlooking cliff-top and on the shore, with such interest in the event that Ann Parton and her helpers prepared lunch for 60 Abercornians. At that lower altitude the heat was tremendous, and a paddling area was set up in the shade for the children. How different from little Lake Chila! We were to sail off Niamukolo Point, with Peter Parton’s M.V. Triton as committee boat some 200 yards off shore. Those vast expanses of water (I still had a niggle of anxiety at the immense depths below us) and a fine wind at the start made for superb sailing, then the wind dropped and races, now much slower, had to be rationed, each sailor having a turn at two long races. Lighter winds gave me a bit of an advantage, and I proudly wrote home that I had tied equal first in one with Colin and another chap! which made an excellent excuse to leave the boats down there for a tie-breaker the following weekend. To end the day, William Winterton, about to return to England after his year’s voluntary service, hosted a barbecue at his caravan, the centre piece a whole roast lamb on a spit. The follow-on day was just as good, with a rice salad lunch and ‘plenty of time to improve our suntans’, though Mark was busy supervising the Liemba’s unloading into the fuel depot, and I finished only third overall.
February, then, was our last month in Abercorn. We had been married for four years now, celebrated by inviting the Bowmakers and Colin to dinner, suddenly nostalgic:
- Remember how cold it was, and how my veil was whipped up by the wind for the photos? I said
- A year later we were in Cape Town with Paul, and Dad cracked open a bottle of Krug, said Mark, adding: …and two years ago we were still in Gwelo, waiting for your Ma to visit …
- And last year I was enormous and fed up, and Caroline arrived two days later!
Her first birthday was a low key affair, overshadowed as it was by packing and promises of buying her better toys in England. She was now able to walk, and quite apart from having to keep even more vigilant track of her, we had to deal with Paul’s frustration as his newly assertive sister attempted to join his games or seize his toys. There were frequent incidents that ended in tears on both sides. Then, what with the children and I getting tonsillitis, measles spreading in the township and a worsening rabies outbreak, it began to feel as though things were conspiring to make our last weeks difficult. This place is a hotbed of disease, I wrote dramatically, with Mark overworked as mother’s help. Then the company joined the conspiracy, perversely ordering Mark to spend his last full working week at a sales conference in Broken Hill, thus cutting short our last weekend among our Abercorn friends before our departure on the following Friday.
Last trip on Lake Tanganyika: still ‘the blonder the better’
Still, we had one last good day down at Lake Tanganyika: Mark’s manager Peter Hare, brassed off with his own impending demotion to Salisbury, drove up for a last trip on the company. We borrowed Alan’s fisheries launch for the morning, and despite storms circling around, managed to get to the Kalambo Falls for a last look at the storks floating above the spray.
Mark’s replacement, Dick Hurlbatt, had already been up for two days to look around: He is probably going to have our house, they are keen gardeners, he seems quite nice. He’s full of enthusiasm for the job – poor soul, I added darkly. He would have two weeks overlap with Mark, so the first would be spent largely away from Abercorn. I began to plan introducing him and his wife Jane around – until they arrived, one of their children with full-blown measles. Feeling guiltily inhospitable, we had no alternative but to avoid them.
Abercorn had one last social event in store for us: I had been involved in organising, in the new post-independence spirit, a multi-racial fund-raising dance in aid of a university for Zambia. We decided on the TVMI as venue, being neutral territory, not exclusively associated, as the club was, with the white population. Tickets were sold as widely as possible and many of us whites went in support of this good cause, together with numerous smartly dressed local Africans. There was however one problem, for none of them had brought their wives, and the resulting shortage of female dance partners meant an exhausting but also laughter filled evening for us women who were there. No sooner had one sat down to mop one’s face and rest aching feet after gamely twisting to Chubby Checker, than another smiling black face would appear, and one was swept off to rock ’n roll to ‘Love Me Do’.
My memories of our last days in Abercorn, apart from that evening and our breathless laughter, are at best hazy, blurred I think now by the mix of emotions I was having to deal with. I know, only because my letters tell me, that my last club AGM went off well, and I expect I was warmly thanked for all my hard work. We invited 12 to meet the Hurlbatts, who presumably had found a baby sitter for their children (the second one now having caught the measles), and it apparently went off fine. There was, I wrote, one last sailing regatta on little Lake Chila, at which I tied first with Alan, my long-held ambition to beat him finally thwarted. And I am touched now to read, in an issue of Abercornucopia that must have come out just before our departure, a warm send-off piece John Carlin had written about Mark’s and my contribution to Abercorn life, even referring to me as ‘Abercornucopia�
�s dear Amanda’. Dear John – I realise now how very fond I was of him too.
The Barrs, bless them, kindly invited us to stay for the last three nights in their official residence’s guest house in the grounds, as all but our suitcases had gone on the removers’ van or to local buyers, from whom we had made the fine sum of £150 ‘to put aside for our next home’. We were, I wrote home, invited out every night of our final week, and each evening must have been a reminder of how many good friends we had made and the unspoken fear that we might never meet again, for who knew where we might all end up living?
As I wrote my last letter home, my thoughts were clearly darting ahead, back to present practicalities, then ahead once more: I think I just about have a warm outfit for each to arrive in. I must say I dread leaving here by plane, everyone coming to the airport to wave, and feeling one won’t see little Abercorn ever again. See you SOON! I can’t wait – but am depressed at leaving poor Mark for 6 weeks… so many goodbyes to be said ……
However, said they had to be, with many a last hug amongst a throng of well-wishers on the tarmac at the little airfield. From an early age I had learned not to cry, and boarding school from the age of nine had given me plenty of practice. But now, strapped into our seats in the little plane as it rose from the airfield, I peered through the window at the tiny figures waving and waving, the image blurring with my tears. Then we were into cloud, and the captain was, as usual, warning of turbulence. Hastily I wiped my eyes and turned to attend to the children.
In Lusaka there was a last link with Southern Rhodesia, for it now held our friends John and Shirley Macdonald, last seen in Bulawayo expecting their much longed-for baby. Their Hilary and our two played as Mark and I geared ourselves for the following day’s flight, the VC10 that would take me and our children to London’s Heathrow Airport, via an evening refuelling stopover in Nairobi. It was another departure I dreaded, this time with a longed-for arrival at its end.
‘We’ve made it,’ I thought, as I heard the VC10’s engines change their note, then the pilot’s announcement. The children had enjoyed bustling Nairobi airport, and had slept thereafter. Somehow we were now changed into our skeleton winter wardrobe, Caroline, who had only ever worn cotton tops and a nappy, a sleeveless frock for best, very puzzled by leggings, but shoeless. Paul, who usually went barefoot, at least had a pair of wide Bata sandals, with warm corduroys and his only sweater.
I remember clearly how, as we stood at the top of the long flight of steps from the plane, the freezing night air caught in my lungs. It was four a.m., the airport bright with lights and bustle in the darkness. And after we had queued through passport control and customs, after I had found all our luggage and loaded it onto a trolley, after I had settled Caroline into the little hand luggage basket and shown Paul how to help me push the trolley through the last barrier, there, all lined up waving and smiling, was my family. Heaven knows what time they must have got up, to be there to meet us, but here were the dear familiar faces of my Ma and Pa, and of my three brothers Will, Simon and James.
In my parents’ new cream Rover I watched the dawn come slowly, first over suburban rows of little brick houses, the roads so neatly edged with kerbstones, and then over an unfamiliar more rural landscape as we left the sprawls of London behind, heading north towards their new Cambridgeshire home. A weak sun appeared, low in a pale sky, as the small neat fields sped past, hedgerows and winter stubble rimed with frost, a church spire appearing among the skeletons of bare trees. Paul stirred and woke, looked sleepily around. ‘Look, Paul,’ I said, pointing out of the window, ‘this is England.’ ‘England’ he repeated experimentally.
At some deep level I recognised the four years that had passed for what they were – vivid years full of growing up and learning, of building a family and making friends, all in the bright, hot sunshine of colonial Africa. As the little plane had risen above Abercorn, I had already sensed that it was a life that could never be recreated elsewhere. But young Amanda was not one for looking back; now I and my two beautiful children were home, where a part of me would always belong, and that for the moment was enough.
POSTSCRIPT
It has been a long journey, this travelling back to such a distinctive period in my life. The writing process has often been an exploration, part archaeology – bringing up to the light old memories, documents, photos – part further education to overcome my own ignorance, part my attempts at interpretation in the light of all of these.
I had remained over the intervening years largely ignorant of both countries’ earlier histories and cultures and of how these could explain much of what came after. So the journey has involved a lot of reading, from history to novels to web explorations on Wikipedia and its links to other sources. It has also required many a ‘dig’ through layers of memory, often frustrated at its quixotic unreliability. I discovered that, while I could be prompted to recall much more than I had expected, there were also strange ‘black holes’; a face, a name, a voice had inexplicably migrated to some inaccessible part of my brain. Yet other memories – a particular moment, a scene, even an emotional state – are indelibly etched and can be summoned at will. Sometimes my interpretation of what I was working on could change, much like the shifting patterns we see through a kaleidoscope. A quick shake – in my case a session of dead-heading in the garden, a solitary walk, a night’s sleep – and presto! a pattern could be transformed, if I was lucky, an insight gained.
Parts of the journey have been hard, the road stony. The appearance of my brother Simon’s letters home from Gwelo, an 18-year old’s account of our life, forced me to think much harder about my young self, and in particular her attitudes and behaviour to black people. Indeed, early on I thought of the writer of my letters as ‘her’, as a different person whom I could observe and write about, but not as my self. After all, I reasoned, I have changed so much over 40 plus years, and it is true that there is much of young Amanda’s attitudes and behaviours that I am happy to have left behind. But as we have journeyed together over these years of writing and of exploration, I have come to accept that she is part of me.
Writing my way through those four Rhodesia years, I have also found myself thinking more and more of the people whose lives touched ours, often in significant ways, sad at how we had lost touch with so many. My only constant link to that time has been Jiff and Alan Bowmaker, Jiff and I steadfast correspondents, godmothers to each others’ youngest, graduating over the decades from air letters to audio tapes to emails. They left Abercorn later the same year as us, for Salisbury, Alan ultimately to the university there, and where their second son, James, was born. The family fetched up in South Africa where Alan ran Durban’s Sea World, retired to a farm near Pietermaritzburg where they and son Philip raise day-old chicks.
But where are others we knew at that time? At my PC, checking for news of Zimbabwe whilst following the tortuous negotiations between President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU/PF and challenger Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC, I found myself registering on a website for those nostalgic for the old days of Rhodesia / Zimbabwe. There I scanned lists of names from our old suburb in Gwelo/Gweru, to no avail so far. I had long ago heard that Jack and Joy Crouch, who were so supportive of me as a young mum in Gwelo, had headed for Canada. John and Shirley Macdonald went, I think, to Hong Kong. As my focus headed north to Abercorn, I discovered a website for old Northern Rhodesians and there I registered again, found so many people doing the same, searching for old school mates, work colleagues, even one for his father, with a sad ‘we lost touch’.
One early stroke of luck was news of the existence of the Northern Rhodesian Pensioners Association, through whose kind offices my letters reached four old friends. Gavin and Caroline Barr, whom we saw so much of in Abercorn, are now happily living in Kent after a career that had taken them to various parts of the world. Ian and Barbara Mackinson, last heard of visiting my parents on Boxing Day 1964, are living in Hampshire not far from many of their family. Ian had returned to Zambia af
ter independence to help build its new civil service, and his memoir, Footsteps in the Dust, has been invaluable in teaching me more about the British administration of Northern Rhodesia, his career for 15 years until independence. Facebook at last yielded up a connection with Colin Carlin, living with a large family in Bath and enjoying many a ‘When we … ’ reminiscence of Abercorn days with his own network. Through him I learned that his parents John and Sheelagh retired to South Africa’s Garden Route in the late 1960’s, then for health reasons moving to Cape Town. Sheelagh, after John’s death there, moved to London to live happily with Colin and his new family. Another chance search with Google unexpectedly and delightfully put me in contact with Sisters Amabilis and Romana, now both living in adjacent convents in Uxbridge, U.K.
But what of Daniel and Inez, of Uelo and Friday, who polished our floors and ironed every garment, minded our children, dug and watered our gardens? I wonder now what might have happened to them? We can at best speculate, and for that we must look at what has happened to the countries they lived in. Daniel and Inez returned to Nyasaland as we left Gwelo, just before the country gained its independence as Malawi in 1964. Under Dr Hastings Banda (he of the homburg hat and little fly whisk) it became a one-party state, his dictatorial regime only ending 30 years later with the first multi-party elections. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, tiny (smaller than England), landlocked, with none of the mineral wealth of its near neighbours Zambia and the Congo, its jewel that other lake at the end of the Great Rift Valley, Lake Malawi, third largest in Africa. Agriculture is the main activity, tobacco its principal export, child tobacco pickers ‘poisoned by nicotine’ according to a recent report from international children’s organisation Plan. Average life expectancy is around 50 years, poverty, AIDS and HIV having taken a dreadful toll on the health of the people. Given all that, Daniel and Inez, who would be in their 70’s now, will be exceptionally old in their community if they are still alive. Still, that is how I like to think of them, senior citizens in their village, their children and grandchildren around them.
Roses Under the Miombo Trees Page 18
