After lunch, I would bash his piano: a concert Bechstein, no less. I found it a heavy instrument to play: like driving a heavy lorry without much in the way of power-assisted steering. Jock said all grand pianos are like that. I don't believe it!
He never played to others himself, either on piano or violin: too self-critical, I think. He had a record-player and a fair collection of LPs, and the house was full of books. Jock's musical taste was pretty catholic. If he had a blind spot (or deaf ear), it was Mahler, whom he regarded as a dangerous lunatic, and was amused that Mahler had consulted Freud. At that time, I was developing an enthusiasm for Mahler, which was to become incurable (as Jock might have put it), but we never came to blows on the subject.
I was now carrying a heavy revolver and a cowboy belt full of bullets on my journeys out of town, in the received wisdom that if you ran into an ambush you drove through it, but if you were brought to a stop and showed no evidence of a weapon, they would come in and finish you off. Jock never carried a weapon, and here I think he was wise - at any rate, as far as his own district was concerned. Doctors were rarely attacked where they were known, and with a weapon, one might have got into an avoidable disaster. Outside one's district it was another matter.
Some doctors were killed, it is true. The guerrillas raided the clinics for drugs, which the staff readily supplied. Perhaps those doctors actively interfered and got into trouble: others turned a blind eye or, like Jock and me, were unaware of what was going on.
Jock had a sardonic turn of humour, which he was presently exercising on the Swedish missionaries in his district - or rather, not in his district. These people had been advised to leave by their organisations and had gone, leaving only the African nurses. Jock assumed the self-imposed task of supervising their medical establishments. And Jock was a devout atheist.
The task was self-imposed because so far from it being expected of him, various people were becoming anxious about the way he continued to drive all over his district as if it were not only as big as Norfolk, but Norfolk itself. I confined my outings to his place and our rural hospital at Lundi, seven miles out of town. Sometimes Jock would take Joyce with him in the battered Audi when she felt like a breath of fresh air. Joyce was a typical Cockney sparrow. Together they embodied the expression: 'London can take it!'
When questioned, Jock would reply that nobody was going to put him off his job; and add, he had had a good innings, anyway. Incidentally, as to his prospects thereafter, whenever the subject arose, he would smile sceptically and say: 'Dr Scott's carbohydrates, fats and proteins will melt back into Mother Earth.'
First the police, then the DC advised caution. Finally, the latter wrote to the secretary for health, who wrote to Jock in similar terms. Jock kept this letter to produce for the diversion of his friends. He did make some concessions. He submitted for a time to a police escort, but this was impracticable: Jock and the escorting vehicle seemed to come unstuck, or never meet - not, I fancy, without some contribution on Jock's part. Next he agreed to check with the police if the road was safe. Once, after receiving this assurance, he came upon a bridge, recently blown up. It was only a short walk further to the clinic, so Jock completed his journey on foot. When he returned to town, he told the police: 'I've got news for you!'
Finally, he got warnings in uncertain English from the guerrillas themselves, which he told me about but kept secret from his wife; as I discovered when I blew the gaff, fortunately when it was all in the past. After the war, the local guerrilla chief told me: 'We used to see Dr Scott every day, but we never shot him because we knew he was working for the people.' When I retailed this to Jock, he laughed in unbelief. More plausible to his cynicism was another explanation I got from one of his clinic nurses, also in the 'aftertime' (in Churchillian term): 'We needed Dr Scott to sign the drug requisitions' - on which, of course, the guerrillas also depended.
This does not explain the warnings from them. I can only say that many of their actions seemed arbitrary. The most rational suggestion I can make is that such policies as they had evolved through trial and error.
Jock and I stood in for each other on leave and other times when one was off station. Long leave (90 days) overseas must have been a trial for him, when he had the burden of both districts: I mean, he was then over sixty. When I was away, he would visit my hospital once a week. If they had an emergency, he would come over, as Shabani hospital was larger and altogether better equipped than Belingwe, which was little more than a rural hospital. How he managed to do caesars there, I do not know: and yet Mav had done massive bowel resections there, years before Jock; though, in the absence of a mortuary, he used to do his postmortems under a tree. No connection, of course!
But I used to feel for Jock as my long leave drew to an end. From Edinburgh once, when I had still two weeks to go, I sent him a card: 'Hold on. The Campbells are coming!' (Heaven knows what the Scottish postal people made of that.) He preferred me to take my leave first, so he had something to look forward to and keep him going.
When he was away, I would drive out to his place once a week and do a clinic and ward round and, of course, they would send emergencies to my hospital.
Jock had a 'thing' with the police, whom he called the 'Gestapo'. There was nothing political about this: he called Smith's police the Gestapo, and later, he called Mugabe's police the Gestapo.
In 1976 Jimmy retired. He stayed on in the house at Umtali with Carlos, but things got difficult when Carlos's wife, Maria, arrived and Jimmy felt in the way. They had furious Latin rows which sounded to Jimmy, lying low in his own room, like murder in the house. Moreover, Maria had a phobia of cats and I had left behind two.
The cats, brother and sister, had been given me by a policeman in Umvuma after a cobra walked into my house one night, but fortunately left when it saw me. Cats are as good as mongooses when it comes to snakes - and less antisocial. (Les Cady in Ghana had a pet mongoose which tried to eat his guests.) Maria had driven the cats out of the house and Jimmy did not know what to do about it. I told him they would look after themselves. They would find forage in plenty round the hospital bins, along with the dogs and the lunatics. One learns to be a bit heartless in Africa.
The last straw came when Jimmy wrote to me: 'The Antoninis have discovered tea-bags. Now, Warren, you know how I love my tea - but if there is one thing I cannot stand, it is tea-bags!'
I told him to come and join me in Shabani, and as soon as my house had been repainted and my furniture was installed, he came. He brought his few possessions with him, the largest after his car being his desk, which had gone with him everywhere for many years, to which he was greatly attached.
We planned a holiday over Christmas - a safari to Victoria Falls. Gareth came down in his pick-up, bringing a couple of rifles, and we went in my car.
The more you enjoy your work, the more you enjoy your holidays. Dull work, I suppose, makes for dull holidays and a dull life altogether. I don't know: that is one trial I have been spared, thank God. So it was always with the greatest zest that I sat behind the wheel and hit the high road on the first day.
If Barchester was ‘always afternoon’, Africa was always nine o’clock in the morning; that was its most characteristic hour: the eternally young continent, raring to go.
We passed the sign to Balla Balla, and Jimmy for the umpteenth time told us about the English public school man he met who called the place 'Blah-Blah'. We stopped at the hotel there for a drink. Over the bar was a notice: 'FREE BEER TOMORROW'. After independence, when the clientele broadened, the notice disappeared. Some humour is simply not transcultural.
At Essexvale we stopped for a bar lunch, and Gareth got his first experience of the Lennon effect on the ladies. When we left, they all kissed Jimmy good-bye, as if they had known him sixty years instead of sixty minutes.
Jimmy crackled with Liverpool humour. 'That lot were all right, fellows,' he said. 'But I have noticed - perhaps you can explain this, Warren - I have noticed that the older I
get, the younger are the women I am attracted to. Mind you, I suppose I'm like a dog chasing a car: I wouldn't know what to do with it if I caught it!'
It was not ofter Gareth wept, with laughter or anything else: he was the phlegmatic Welsh type, which does exist, after all; but he wept now.
At Bulawayo we stayed at the old Selborne Hotel. Jimmy retired early to bed: early to rise. Gareth and I took a stroll in the quiet streets, had a night-cap, and followed him, long before midnight.
Next day, we took the Falls road. Jimmy took a turn at the wheel. We came to a cross-roads. The car stalled, and Jimmy could not get it going again. He went red in the face and started cursing so loud that a man in a car diametrically opposite, about fifty yards away, got out and called: 'Who are you swearing at, mate?' Jimmy shouted back: 'I'm swearing at this bloody car!' The man shrugged: 'O, that's all right, then,' and got back into his seat. When shortly after, Jimmy stepped out for a packet of cigarettes, Gareth remarked to me: 'He's a fiery old beggar, isn't he?'
Indeed, Jimmy’s temper was legendary, though when I knew him the legend was mostly in the past, as legends would be. He had become teetotal, not because he was an alcoholic, but for the same reason you don’t throw petrol on a fire. I believe a spectacular fight in a Merseyside tavern, followed by a rueful confession, led to this decision many years before.
When he entered a water-hole with us, he always ordered a pot of tea. In the five-star Montclair Hotel, on the road to Inyanga, the waiter asked him if he was a resident. ‘A resident!’ retorted Jimmy, rather wasting his Liverpool humour on the waiter. ‘Do you think I would stay in a crummy joint like this? I only come here for the tea.’
We lunched at the Half-way House, and stopped in the afternoon at the Baobab. The African barman told us about a guerrilla who walked into the African bar (perhaps he wished to discourage his fellows from patronising the white establishment), opened up on the line of drinkers, missed everyone, and killed himself with his last bullet, which bounced off the wall. 'It served him right,' commented the barman, in a Sunday school tone of voice.
Then, in the late afternoon, as the wide, monotonous Matabeleland Bushveld begins to dip towards the Zambezi valley, we saw the spray cloud of the Falls, rising in steam from the bush, fifteen hundred feet: Mosi oa Tunya, the Smoke that Thunders. Soon we were in the ambit of that thunder, which continues in the background, in the pauses of the day, in the watches of the night, powerfully but unobtrusively, like the engines of a great ship.
We put up at the Casino Hotel, and walked to the Falls next day. Christmas is a good time to see them, just after the rainy season has started. By April, the spray cloud is so dense, they are practically invisible. In October, at the end of the dry season, they are at their lowest and though always beautiful, not at their most impressive. Livingstone first saw them in November, which is a good time after fair rains. I have seen them a dozen times, at all seasons. Nothing can stale the hypnotic power of the massive white waters, plunging for ever into the abyss.
At the hotel swimming pool, we met Japie van Blerk, the cheeky DO cadet from Umvuma. He had since gone into the army and was now demobbed. He was staying at the cheap chalets in the town. Then on Christmas Day, a sad thing happened.
Jimmy became afraid at the expense of our holiday. We proposed to go on to Kariba, down the great lake, and stay at further expensive hotels there. Jimmy was now on an exiguous pension, but he had, in fact, secured another post to go to at a Catholic boys' boarding school, near Wankie. Nevertheless, he was afraid, and wished to turn back. He was quite prepared to make his own way, and was not going to disturb us in any way.
We had planned to take Christmas dinner in the evening at the Victoria Falls Hotel, no more expensive than the Casino, but older, with its own Edwardian charm. Jimmy got cold feet and took his Christmas dinner by himself at the Wimpey.
Young Japie, whose heart was as light as his pockets (but he was forty years younger than Jimmy), was glad to join us for dinner and for the rest of our holiday. We had a merry supper, and even made jokes about poor Jimmy. 'It was Christmas Day in the Wimpey. The tears were falling fast.'
Next day, Jimmy secured a lift to Balla Balla. That still left him 80 miles to Shabani. He told me later, he stood at the side of the road while car after European car drove past him. Finally, one stopped and he was rescued from the boiling sun. I asked him if he had had his hat on. 'Of course I had my hat on! D'you think I was going to give myself sunstroke into the bargain?' I explained that under his broad hat, his face was as dark as an African's. His limbs were burnt dark too. Not many Africans wore shorts, but that was a minor point. Whites rarely stopped for Africans. Prejudice apart, they left them to their own kind, who made a charge for the service. Africans would rarely pick up a white man because they would not expect a fee. At the lucky moment, perhaps, Jimmy took off his hat to expose his famous 'eggy' head.
But for ever after this incident, Gareth, in his deep Welsh way (I mean an Englishman would not have taken it so personally), felt profoundly disappointed in Jimmy: in a sense, never forgave him, as if he had let him down in some way. Myself, I was indifferent. Jimmy was an old friend, and I felt that somewhere in his life, in his Liverpool childhood, perhaps, he had been infected with the deadly fear of poverty, which men can harbour even when they have grown rich: something I have missed, and I suppose Gareth too; although Gareth had never had life handed to him on a silver platter.
We left the Falls and drove to the Mlibisi ferry on Lake Kariba, 60 miles across some very wild country: a dirt road. I must have seemed nervous, as that little devil, Japie, actually read my thoughts: 'Are you worried about land mines, Warren? I wouldn't worry about land mines: you won’t know anything about it if you do hit one.' The confidence of youth!
We stopped a couple of nights at Mlibisi, and tried to catch tiger-fish. The African ghillie first caught two or three bream, to use as bait, with an ease that astonished us and provoked our envy after the many fishless afternoons we had spent beside the dams and rivers of Umvuma. Then he drove a motorboat while we trawled for the fish. Japie caught one wretched thing, barely half a pound: he must have foul-hooked it. Later, I was to catch them easily off Fothergill Island from an anchored boat.
One night we boarded the car ferry and set sail down the 170 mile lake. Next afternoon, everyone was ordered below decks as we went through Chete gorge, where a Canadian tourist had been shot dead on the upper deck from the bank. When we came to the midmost part of the lake, the boat stopped to let people jump into the sparkling clear water and bathe. We old men, including that young old man, Japie, were too lazy. The crew assured us the crocodiles never came into the middle of the lake. Later, I read in the paper a letter from a Wild Life official who said this was a fond illusion: crocodiles moved all over the lake - no doubt, when they saw the car ferry coming!
We spent two nights on the boat and arrived at Kariba town in time for breakfast. The town and its situation rather resemble the same in Switzerland or North Italy, except that, with a population similar to say, Locarno, it is scattered over a much wider area, and Kariba lake must be ten times bigger than Lake Maggiore.
At Makuti, we picked up a young Englishman who had joined the Rhodesian army: a mad type with ideas about the Master Race and the survival of the fittest. Even the Afrikaner, Japie, thought him barmy. A number of outsiders joined the Rhodesian forces, mostly Americans who had been in Vietnam, and very strange people some of them were: not all, but definitely some.
We dropped him at Sinoia, where we spent the night. We dropped Japie in Salisbury, next day, and went on to Umvuma, where we arrived in time for the DC's New Year party. The early-nighter, Gareth, gave this a miss and went home to his farm. Ted, the stationmaster, had accompanied him to Shabani and brought his pick-up back to Umvuma.
Jimmy stayed with me about three months and in the New Year went to Wankie to take up his new post. In April, I got a message from a friend that he had died - suddenly, according to the friend,
who was in the house at the time. Jimmy was singing in the bathroom. Suddenly the singing stopped. The house fell very silent. When the friend went to investigate, Jimmy was dead on the mat.
He was cremated, and a memorial service held in the Catholic cathedral at Umtali. I attended. I had to travel from Shabani the day before to catch the dawn convoy from Fort Victoria. (No convoys out of Shabani then, but soon after.) I was surprised that few people attended the service: Jimmy was so out-going. I realised that essentially he was a very private person: the few friends he had were true friends, and what man can say more?
I wrote to his sister in England: 'Jimmy was one of the life-givers. He was like nine o' clock in the morning. He was like the first day of the holidays.' And he was.
I suppose the cliche, ‘gay bachelor’, refers to men under thirty: there may be gay bachelors over that age, but they never included me. After the age of thirty, until I met my wife, my life was a grey desert, relieved by the occasional oasis, which invariably turned out to be a mirage - as the Irishman said. However, a mirage is better than nothing: ‘tis better to have loved and lost...! Indeed, it is more than nothing, for any love, even unrequited, is a treasure and advances us in spirit.
I first saw Katie across a crowded floor - in the cricket club, in fact. I had been in Shabani a year. I asked the man I was with: ‘Who is that beautiful woman, over there?’
He smiled. ‘That’s Katie Woolfson. She’s a widow. Her husband was killed by a land mine two years ago.’
I did not lose time in introducing myself. ‘I don’t think we have met...’
‘Yes, we have. You gave my baby second prize in the baby show last year.’
‘Only second prize!’
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 26
