Then he saw a girl he knew - a white nurse or teacher. There were unattached white females on the Copperbelt, but they were greatly outnumbered by the male ditto. I lost sight of him.
She could have been a wholesome influence on him, but it didn't happen. I don't know if she leant him any money. At any rate, it could not have accounted for what I saw next.
When I saw him again, he had undergone a terrible change. Fangs were protruding over his lower lip. Fur was sprouting from his cuffs, and, in his two-inch nails, he was clutching fistfuls of chips - not dollar ones, but ten-dollar ones. His pockets were stuffed with more of the same. He staggered from table to table, his face flushed and his eyes glazed with booze and greed. He seemed not to hear or see me when I asked him what was going on.
But it all came to nothing. When at midnight Father Bunloaf brought the proceedings to a close with a short prayer, he had lost everything.
Harry came out actually as a locum - for about three months. Then he went back to UK as a surgical registrar. He meant to return to Kitwe the following year. I asked him if he ever took a holiday.
'What do you call this?' he answered, bending over his snooker cue in the club at 4.30 in the afternoon. Certainly, company work was the lightest a doctor could get in Africa (except private practice). Samreboi was busy enough, but that was an exception.
A year later he came out again, as ebullient as ever. One morning, we noticed the appearance of more than one little black boy in the clinic bearing the Christian name of 'Bowen'.
Of course, this is a compliment to the doctor, commonly when the doctor has delivered him - which would only be in complicated and therefore memorable cases anyway; otherwise it would have been a midwife.
But Harry came in for a good deal of ribbing on this matter. He looked superior about it.
'Nothing to do with me, chaps, what they choose to call their offspring. I expect the president comes in for a lot of the same sort of thing.'
Julie came out for a short tour at the beginning of 1971. She was a lithe, gipsy-looking girl from Australia. I called her a 'socialist missionary'. A hundred years before she might have been a Christian missionary - or she might have been a George Eliot, more likely the latter. She had enough 'moral earnestness' about her to satisfy F R Leavis.
Like the girl in the Nun's Story, she was not very happy to find herself assigned to the management hospital, which was mostly white. I don't know what she expected. The whole company service seemed to her old-fashioned: geared to curative medicine with little attempt at preventive medicine, which was mostly left to the government. 'They don't even have an under-fives clinic,' complained Julie, which was a fairly new idea then. Perhaps she had a word with somebody, because soon afterwards they instituted them in the mine clinics, which were situated in the townships. She also thought the management hospital hopelessly uneconomic, which it certainly was. They should have opened it up as a private hospital to the public, who would have welcomed it and made it pay. I don't think Julie was thinking quite in this 'capitalistic' direction, however. This was a suggestion I made, but it was never taken up.
You will see that Julie's orientation was towards public health. She was a fine clinician, but not enthusiatic about surgery or obstetrics ('hated them, in fact'). The chief medical officer, a hopeless old sexist, suggested that as an unmarried woman doctor she should concentrate on child medicine. Julie was far from being a rampant feminist: she was a very balanced person; but she reacted: 'Why the hell should I do that, Warren? I suppose he thinks I'm a frustrated old maid, or something.'
(Joe Cooper was something of a paternalist into the bargain. Every Friday we had lunch at the management hospital, where Joe held a mortality meeting on all the deaths of the week. I supposed this served a purpose. Among other things, he would lay down the treatment regimes nearly every week, and more or less treat us like a bunch of soldiers, if not school-kids. On one occasion he said: 'As you know, I believe in treating doctors like responsible adults.' Andy Crookes doubled up in silent laughter, only saved from Joe's eyes by the fruit bowl on the table.)
Julie had a dry Australian sense of humour. She took a photograph of the local Party office, with its Orwellian slogan prominent outside: UNIP IS IN POWER FOR EVER: (OBOTE STREET BRANCH). The point being that Obote, the tyrant of Uganda, had been recently deposed (and now UNIP is no longer in the driving seat). She did not realise, nor did I till later, that this was a risky action. She might have been arrested as a South African spy, which would have been a bitter fate for Julie. What's more, some forms of humour don't travel as far as Julie: the idea of trying to make an African court see the joke boggles the mind.
I took Julie out to the Catholic mission. We went in my car and made a picnic of it. There were two lovely black nuns there. I said it was a waste for them to be nuns. Julie frowned: 'I don't believe in what they stand for, but I don't know -' I could see the warning lights of feminism ahead (though too crass a word for Julie, as I said) and dropped it.
We sat and had lunch by the dam. A butterfly settled on Julie's knee. 'He thinks you are a flower.' 'Gee! Thanks, Warren.' Of course, I was half in love with her. She used to say, 'You're the only person I can talk to here, Warren.' Which was surprising, as I was pretty conservative. 'Have you always been as right wing as this, Warren?' 'More so in the past.' 'Christ!'
When I told her I was a Christian - though not in an orthodox sense - she protested: 'O, you can't be a Christian, Warren! There's so much going on in the world.' I suppose she viewed Christianity as an otherworldly religion. I could have pointed out that many Christians thought there was enough to do in the world. And most important, that Christianity was the basis of everything she 'stood for', which was Western liberal democracy. But I did not think of these things till long after, so did not say so.
At the mission we saw a dog lying on its side, under the wooden steps of a ward. It was salivating profusely and panting, its staring eyes unblinking. They thought it had been bitten by a snake, and Brother Joseph was going to shoot it.
Later I heard of an outbreak of rabies in the district - mainly among pigs. One woman died. We had seen our first case of this disease. I have seen many more since, animal and human.
I took Julie up to Lubumbashi (the old Elizabethville) in the Congo, which was famous for its restaurants. It was an older city than Kitwe and looked Continental - I remember the old Belgian sets in some of the streets. Julie liked the Continental atmosphere. I told her how the British nearly got Katanga, and she said thank God they didn't! So then we had a furious argument. We had several, though most of the fury was on my side. I told her about the two systems: the indirect rule of the British, which worked through the native institutions; and the Franco-Belgian system of direct rule, which treated the Africans more or less like apes, and ran everything down to ground level through the notorious agents de postes, who practically cut out the African headmen, ie, abolished even their NCOs. And look at education! British Africa wound up with five universities. The French didn't have secondary schools till after the Second World War; and what about the famous 'twelve graduates' of the Belgian Congo at the time of independence? As for the famous 'multiracialism' - that was best summed up by one British district commissioner as 'sleep with them, but don't shake hands with them!'
In all this I had the advantage of a greater knowledge of Africa, where Julie confessed, the British beat the Aussies. I would not have that advantage now.
Then came a famous scene in a restaurant. Teasing her of course, I said Hitler was a socialist. 'That's what he called himself - a "National Socialist", didn't he?'
Julie turned white. I thought she was going to bring up the frogs' legs I hadn't enjoyed much seeing on their way down. She got up, trembling, and walked to the door. There she paused. It would be unworthy to suggest she wondered how she was going to get back to Kitwe - 150 miles away. I prefer to think she chose to 'master herself' (if that is the word); and she returned to the table.
Ju
lie did not get on well with most of the whites on the Copperbelt. There were many Rhodesians and South Africans, who had (with some exceptions like the Millers) fixed racialist attitudes. But they were not half as virulent as the shoals of little Andy Capps and Alf Garnetts from UK, who greatly outnumbered them, and to whom racialism was then a new religion, which they embraced with all the fervour of the convert. At least one of these annoyed Julie with his attentions.
At a party - one of those boozy all-white affairs Julie hated - Len sat next to her and 'fancied' her right away. Len could have been Alf Garnett's son and (unlike his disappointing lefty Liverpool son-in-law) the apple of his father's eye. Len knew about Australians, or at any rate, knew of them, for he would not have met many at that time, even in his East End. If he had, he might not have taken the risk he did with Julie. But he did know they were 'colonials', like Rhodesians and South Africans, with whom he had discovered much in common.
Learning that Julie was a doctor, he decided on the philosophical approach.
'Don't you fink, Julie, it'd be better to leave these Kaffirs jist to die orf of all their 'orrible diseases? I mean, the world'd be a better plice wivout 'em, wouldn't it? We could even run the mines wiv machinery.'
After about ten minutes of this, in which Julie's frozen silence failed to register, Len reckoned he had earned a kiss. He slipped a hairy paw round Julie's neck.
His suit did not prosper.
'Git off me, you colonialist fascist pig!'
Now given Len's understanding of Australians, this was like collecting a belt from Father Christmas.
(Well, that is the usual way I tell the tale. But, of course, Julie would never call anyone a pig in earnest - unless he was hurting a child, or something. I think she gave a shrug and a kind of snarl, but the reaction was certainly surprising to Len.
As the Irishman said, 'What do you want: a story, or the truth?')
Before dismissing Len from these pages, it is worth recording that even Andy puzzled him. Andy was giving a plangent rendering of Carrickfergus -
I wish I kne-ew a handsome boatman
To carry me o-over the sea to die.
When he had finished, Len asked: 'What was that? "A 'andsome boatman?" Is that meant to be a bloke singing that song, Andy?'
Julie was brilliant. Later she got the Himalayan MRCP (specialist degree) in one go, and a public health diploma. Thereafter, she returned to Africa, where she has remained ever since, working mostly among the blacks. She can speak at least two African languages fluently, and must know the customs through and through. I urge her to write her memoirs. They would contribute far more of solid knowledge at any rate than these ramblings of mine. Compared with her I am Bertie Wooster in the bundu.
Sister Steadie lived up to her name (at any rate, her husband's name: whether he did I do not know), and she would have no nonsense on her ward - and this is no old battle-axe I am talking about, but a small pretty woman of thirty.
We were at the head of men's surgical on the morning ward round, she and I, she pushing the little trolley which carried the case notes. Three policemen entered the ward, comprising a big-booted sergeant and two plain clothes CID characters in pork-pie hats and dark glasses like Tonton Macoutes. They bore down on one of the beds, and the Tonton Macoutes grabbed a prostrate patient and pulled him up by the shoulders.
'Sergeant!' rang the clear bell-like voice of Sister Steadie, as she stared not at them but at the wall in front of her.
'Yes, madam?'
'Come here.'
The Tonton Macoutes dropped the body and the trio trudged up the ward. All the patients capable of doing so sat up in their beds and began to take notice.
When they reached teacher's desk, Sister Steadie, now looking the sergeant steadily in the eye, demanded quietly:
'Would you like me to come into your office like that, unannounced?'
'Yes, madam.'
'What?'
'No, madam.'
By now the patients were beginning to wriggle, as if they had all discovered ants in their beds.
'What can I do for you?'
The sergeant fumbled for a scrap of paper in his breast pocket.
'We got dis name, "Boniface".'
'Well, you've got the wrong man, haven't you?'
'No, madam.'
'What?'
'Yes, madam.'
‘For your information Boniface is too sick to be interviewed.'
'Yes, madam.'
'And you won't get much information out of him when he is better, because he is a boy of eight.'
'Yes, madam.'
'So I think you had better return to the station, don't you?'
'Yes, madam.'
'Good morning, sergeant.'
'Morning, madam.'
They turned about and trudged back again down the ward. By this time, the patients, who did not feel free to laugh in the humanistic democracy of Zambia, were all in epileptic convulsions, and every bed the trio passed beat like a tribalistic drum. The sergeant stared ahead of him like a frustrated rhinoceros, while the Tonton Macoutes eyed each patient in passing, as if they were trying to remember every one of them.
It was about this time that Billy came to share house with me. He was an instrument technician at the hospitals. His wife had left him, taking the children, and going off with another man, who had even taunted Billy in the club with his achievement. 'Ay, lad, and ye're welcome tae her!' retorted Billy, telling me he was glad to have the answer on the tip of his tongue then and there instead of in the back of his head a day later.
He was a small Scot. To describe him, I have only to say that he was the physical image of Beethoven, whom he resembled also in dauntless character, if not quite in genius (which is no sarky way of saying he was a fool - he was a member of MENSA); and I have only to see the defiant features of the great composer on an LP sleeve, and mentally give him a Glasgow accent, to have Billy before me again.
Incidentally, he loved classical music, though I do not think he had gone into it much, and I was able to enrich his experience with my large collection of LPs. With unaffected good taste, he soon put Mozart at the top of his pops, closely followed by Beethoven himself and Brahms. For the emotionalism of Tchaikovsky he had no time. 'What's he trying tae prove?'
If Billy was dauntless in spirit, physically I have never known a more courageous man. One night, coming out of the club, we were too late for the mine restaurant - it was Wednesday and we had given our cook the evening off - so we decided to go for take-aways at a place bearing the interesting name for Central Africa of the ‘Eskimo Hut’. We hung about, waiting for the queue to shrink, when Billy noticed a small black boy, who had seemed to make more than one appearance at the end of the queue. It became plain that every time he reached the hatch where the food was served, someone bounced him aside. Billy approached the lad.
'What's going on, son?'
'Please, sir. I want some food.'
'Come with me.'
Meekly the bare-foot child followed the sturdy Billy, like the page of Good King Wenceslas. At the head of the queue was a black giant who must have stood seven foot in his socks, with lateral dimensions to match. The boy pointed him out as the latest of his tormentors.
By some movement like a practised chess player, which I hardly saw, Billy replaced the large black piece with the black pawn on the same square.
'Give this lad what he wants, Papadopoulos!' he commanded.
Meanwhile, the black giant looked around for the cause of this sudden change of gambit, which seemed as irregular to him as it must have done to Capablanca, and saw only a small chunky white man as the possible agent. He looked discontented.
Now Billy had not been brought up on the streets of Glasgow not to recognise the first signs of discontentment and know how to allay them. He faced the black giant, or rather, he directed an evil stare upward to meet the discontented downward one: and when Billy wanted to, he could look very evil indeed. I was reminded of the honey bad
ger/elephant situation described earlier in these pages; and besides being the fiercest animal in Africa, the first thing the honey badger goes for is the pudenda.
The black giant seemed to become uncomfortably aware that his own were about on a level with Billy's teeth. Thereafter, he seemed to grow smaller by the minute.
'So what's the matter with you, then?' spat Billy.
'O, nothing, sah!'
'Then take that dirty look off your face!'
'Yessah!'
'AND GET YOUR HANDS OUT OF YOUR POCKETS!!!'
'YES-SAH!'
By the time he sprang to attention, the black giant looked no bigger than Billy.
One day there was a 'card sale'. This meant all the Party bullies were out on the streets selling membership cards in the Party at fifty cents each. Needless to say, the sales were not unpressured.
They were often shameful. People parted with their fares at bus stops, even mothers taking their children to hospital, who had to walk long distances instead. And they blockaded the supermarkets, where they supplemented the work of the checkers. To be exact, they did this outside the doors, not because of anything to do with legality, which was exclusively the Party's affair in Zambia anyway, but because it needed less workers to cover one or two doors than half-a-dozen check-outs.
Outside the OK Bazaar they had placed a school desk, where a couple of bully officers sat with a ledger and a cash box. They rarely accosted Europeans, but these were some of the more ardent spirits. As Billy entered the store, they asked him in a tone Billy did not like if he wanted to buy a Party card.
'No!' snarled Billy. 'I do not. Do I look like an effing Zambian?'
They were about to let him pass, but Billy had not finished with them yet.
'I am going into this store to make my legitimate purchases. When I come out, I do not expect to see you or this desk here. If I do I will throw it and you into the street!'
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 13
