I had hoped to avoid politics in this book, as I had in my position as a doctor in Rhodesia; but perhaps they will not avoid me.
Frankly, I did not see right or wrong on either side; at any rate, in simple terms. I knew that Comrades Mugabe and Nkomo were ‘on the side of history’ (if not each other’s), and that Smithy on his blasted heath was as mad and wrong-headed as any old Greek defying the wrath of the gods. But this situation, I saw, not in moral terms, but as tragic. Both sides were right and both sides were wrong, and there was nothing anybody could do about that: which I take it is the essence of tragedy.
I must confess that if I had had sons of military age, I would have done my best to get them out of Smithy’s clutches: not for them to bear the sins of the fathers. But, for myself, I saw these as the last days of the Empire, which, with all its faults, I regarded as one of the great creative enterprises of mankind; in which I found my own fulfilment, for I was not in Africa for any empty philanthropic ego trip.
I hope there is some moral interest in the above. The sensible reader may wonder why I bothered to justify myself.
For a year or two, some spirits had been advocating combining districts in certain cases, so that the doctors would have the benefits of two heads and time off duty. Meaning they should choose the superior hospital and run both their districts from there. At Umvuma, David Taylor had already suggested that I should join with Enkeldoorn, but being too independent, or cussed, I had resisted the idea.
Now I found myself approaching Jock with a similar proposal, based on my hospital, which was larger and better equipped than his. I had broached the idea soon after my arrival at Shabani, but he was as reluctant as I had been at Umvuma: I discovered that other doctors at Shabani had made the same proposal without success. However, in time, I did succeed where others had failed, due partly to our growing friendship and mutual confidence, and, perhaps more forcefully, to other events: the most important being the Wall.
As the security situation worsened, the authorities erected a wire fence around the small town of Belingwe, with a gate, to be closed and guarded at night, like some medieval town. And Jock’s house and beloved hospital were left outside the wall.
There was some talk about expense, which did nothing to appease Jock. He was not afraid, at any rate, for himself. But he was certainly not happy about Joyce. Besides which, there was the insult of the position.
The final indignity represented by the wall and the gate emerged when Joyce had to knock on the latter for permission to enter after dark to attend her bridge parties, to have the muzzle of a rifle thrust in her teeth.
That clinched it for both of them. But there remained one problem: Jock’s nine-foot Bechstein. The available house at Shabani was a two-storey one, near the main gate, called the ‘bottom house’, as the internal hospital road sloped down to the main road. The doors and rooms of this house would never have admitted or accommodated the concert grand. I lived in the ‘top house’, a single-storey house above the hospital, among trees, altogether more spacious. I had a Steinway upright, but this would fit comfortably in the bottom house. So, it was agreed that I would give up the top house to Jock and Joyce, and move into the other one.
This was done, and the Bechstein and the Scotts comfortably installed, to begin a happy association between us for the next six years, until Jock retired.
Every Wednesday the Scotts gave me supper - taking pity on the lonely bachelor. Radio Rhodesia broadcast a concert that night - on discs, though there were, in fact, two amateur orchestras in the country: Salisbury and Bulawayo. Jock had played violin in the Bulawayo Symphony Orchestra. The man who ran the radio concerts was a Mahler enthusiast, so we got a Mahler symphony about once a month, which was a trial to Jock, but fortunately sufficient Beethoven, Brahms, etc, most other weeks. Then I would bash the piano before departing.
Once, when I was called to the hospital from my own place, not on a Wednesday night, I heard Jock playing. The Chopin studies came cascading down the hill with a technique almost at professional level. ‘You didn’t hear the wrong notes,’ said Jock, when I told him next day. Once only did he play to me: his technique was of a high level, but his performance lacked finesse.
Jock had perfect pitch. Not only would he name any note I played at random on the piano. One evening, a tree frog was trilling its single note after the rain. I asked Jock if he could name it. ‘E flat,’ he answered, without hesitation. When I checked him on the piano, he was correct.
He could recognise the make of the more famous violins or pianos by their tone, he told me. I never asked him about orchestras, but I expect he could recognise the more famous ones too.
The mine had a surgeon when I arrived in Shabani - a chunky little Pole in his fifties, called Marek. He gave me a lot of help and instruction. He could be brilliant, and sometimes less so: which can be said for most surgeons. I have seen no surgeon more dextrous. Henry, at Umtali, was a virtuoso; and Ian was a sound craftsman. But Marek could open the abdomen with a single slash, without touching anything within, which I never saw anyone else do. He did this when I called him in to a man with a ruptured spleen - a case I had seen only once before - in Ghana, and failed with in my early days. Marek was into the abdomen and had the pedicle ligated in seconds: the organ was completely avulsed and it is a wonder the man ever reached the operating table.
I had a gunshot wound - a man shot in the throat with an enormous haematoma (bleed) that so distorted the anatomy I could not find the windpipe to insert a tube; for the man was choking. Luckily, Marek was in the hospital at the time, and I called him. He took the knife from my hand without scrubbing up, found the windpipe in seconds, and got the tube in.
But alas, in other matters, his reach exceeded his grasp. A guerrilla was brought in with his jaw smashed by a bullet. The police wanted to question him. ‘Maybe vee can do somesing viz vires,’ said Marek. I thought: ‘we have ways of making you talk’. Alas! there was nothing to be done with wires - not then, or by us, at any rate; and I sent the man to Bulawayo.
Unlike Henry, he also fancied himself as a gynaecologist. Certainly, he could do a good caesar and hysterectomy, but he thought he could do the highly specialised business of repairing vesico-vaginal fistulas - the hole, so many African women develop between the bladder and the vagina after obstructed labour. After a failed attempt of Marek’s, which I had to transfer to Bulawayo, a gynaecologist sent me a cautionary letter referring to him. When I passed the message on to Marek, he retorted: ‘Who eez zees boy? I voz doing VVFs before he knew vot a vagina voz!’
Later, came another surgeon to the mine. Their establishment was simply for three medical officers: if they had specialist degrees, so much the better. They all did general practice, anyway. Percy was a retired British Army surgeon, an old-fashioned debonair type, rather like Noel Coward. From the first, he and Marek clashed like rival prima donnas or the editors in Eatanswill. It was an elemental antipathy, unequalled by nature since her last experiment with the cat and the dog.
Percy’s opinion of Marek was unutterable - or should have been in the eyes or ears of the Medical Council - but that did not stop Percy uttering it; nor did he care whom he uttered it to. At an open air luncheon of a fishing party, which must have included half the local angling society (needless to say, lay people all, except Percy and me), Percy aired his views of Marek. ‘Did you hear what he did to poor, dear, old Mrs Blenkinsop? Bless my soul! I felt positively ashamed for my profession!’
Marek could hardly have sued him for slander, even if litigation was popular in Rhodesia (which it was not), as he would have been hampered by the usual handicaps existing between the pot and the kettle. He had no hesitation in criticising Percy’s work, even when it was wide awake and listening to him. ‘An outdated operation! Nobody does it now.’ I have seen him more than once spread Percy’s notes and X-rays round the duty room to demonstrate Percy’s supposed shortcomings to all who ran and read, or merely listened, including the cleaners.
I had a feeling that Percy was Jewish, although he never said so. Jock agreed when I put it to him. ‘He has all the Jewish touches,’ he said. Jock and Joyce played bridge with Percy and his wife, Marguerita. ‘He’d lend you a thousand dollars as soon as you asked him, but he’d fight you for five cents at the card table.’
One night, the police brought Percy to me for suspected drunken driving. The case was completely irregular: they had got him out of his bed three hours after the incident in question. But he was so emotional, like a ham actor overplaying an outraged Shylock, that I feared for a horrible few minutes that he was drunk. ‘Don’t talk to me, you scoundrel!’ he shouted at a black police constable. ‘I’ll report you to your superiors tomorrow. I’ll report the lot of you. Just see if I don’t! The magistrate is a friend of mine. I play golf with him. Just wait till he hears about this, damn you!’ I went through the prescribed routine: even without the blood test it was obvious that he was cold sober. They let him drive his car home: they had let him drive it to the hospital, just to botch their case completely.
Another, more tangential clue, I thought I saw when I told him one morning: ‘I was saying to my mother - I mean, my wife!’ Percy chortled at the Freudian slip with what seemed an ancient wisdom, more than Anglo-Saxon. He would have chortled deeper had he heard my wife the other day call me ‘son’, and I twenty years older than her.
I have a talent for improbable friendships, as the reader may have noticed. Koos was a mine captain, a big Afrikaner, by common consent the strongest man in the town, white or black. His moustachioed face was like Bismarck’s Pomeranian grenadier’s: I even think he had a touch of the Zulu in him (one can never tell with those people), of which he would have been more proud than otherwise, for he had not a scrap of racialism about him. He had had a hard life - brought up in some South African orphanage - and he drank too much. But he had soul.
He painted. He spoke several languages, including African ones. He played guitar and sang a little, and had a good collection of books, mainly of the scientific encyclopedia kind. And he was a music lover. The first record I heard in his house - he had a place with a bit of land outside town - was the Hammerklavier. And then I gave him Mahler.
Talk about Chapman’s Homer and the road to Damascus! Mahler’s music rolled through the big soul of Koos, as he said, ‘like the surf at Cape Town, crashing over me’, and reverberated like thunder from the African heavens. ‘Ag, man! Why didn’t you introduce me to Mahler before?’
In the widely-spaced houses of Africa, you can make as much noise as you like. (Among the closely-spaced houses of most of the blacks, they don’t care, anyway, and sleep through anything.) So, black or white, it tends to be a noisy culture. In the pubs and clubs, the white Rhodesians would bawl at one another across twenty yards. Even their private conversations could be heard that distance. You could tell the Pommies by their conspiratorial whispering groups in corners. So there was never any problem about raising Mahler at three o’ clock in the morning over a crate of beer, as Koos and I did more than sometimes.
Koos spent half his time in the TA, as did all the whites under 56, who were not actually in the army or police reserve. Out in the bush, he did his duty as bravely as any, but his heart was not in it.
His wife owned the main garage in town. She was a Cockney, name of Byron, and claimed descent from the poet, which I suppose a lot of people could. Over the garage, they had one or two flats, one rented by Sister Mutema, from the government hospital.
Most of the African staff were either sympathetic, if not actively involved, with the nationalist cause, though we hardly suspected it at the time. Sister Mutema was a key worker.
Koos, who knew the Africans better than most, must have guessed this. Once, he saw a trail of blood leading to Sister Mutema’s door. ‘Harbouring terrorists’ and ‘failing to report the presence of terrorists’ were serious offences. Koos got a mop and washed it up. It was all in character with the man. He could face his enemy in the bush: shopping people was not his trade.
He must have been a difficult husband. Every now and again, he would throw up his job and take off: once to a mine in the north-west, once to South Africa. He would return to town in strange moods: one time raging on a fishing outing about God knows what; once, sitting in my house, where he confessed: ‘Sometimes I wish I could die in my sleep.’ I remembered Schubert said the same thing.
On his South African excursion, his wife, an Italian-looking, passionate woman, herself, who really loved him for all the terrific rows they had - Anita told me, Koos was working with a couple of blacks, unloading steel pipes from a lorry, when the blacks suddenly pushed one of the pipes into Koos’s stomach - for no reason, just the white man. ‘And there’s no one less racist than Koos,’ cried Anita. Koos ended up in hospital, but not before he had put his two assailants in their hospital as well.
Sister Mutema had a secret lover. The most unmilitary specimen you ever saw in battle fatigues. He sat in his camouflage at my table on the veranda of the Shabani hotel and poured out his sad story to me over his beer.
This was Cecil, about thirty, some kind of office worker, trapped in the police reserve. Part of his duties was guarding the government hospital at night. This was simple enough. Mostly they sat in the sisters’ common room in the European hospital, drank tea, flirted with the white sisters a bit, and slept. The black sisters also used this common room, where Cecil must have met and fallen in love with Sister Mutema.
Sister Mutema was a handsome woman. She was a nicer person than Winnie Mandela, but fell little short of her in force of personality: in other words, she could have eaten Cecil for breakfast. And, needless to say, she was totally unaware of his existence.
The rabbit-like Cecil appealed to me. ‘I think Sister Mutema’s got something against me, doc. I can tell by the way she looks at me. I think it must be this uniform. Honest, doc, I never asked to be given this uniform. I’ve got nothing against the bloody Kaffirs. I only wanted to be left alone. Do you think you can make Sister Mutema understand, doc? I’d like to get to know her, really.’
I finally had a word with Sister Mutema - after the civil war. At an earlier date, she might have had him slain, like one of the old queens of Ireland, when their subjects looked too high. I’m sorry to say, she did not even laugh.
In 1979, Smith held his first one man one vote election (when Muzorewa became prime minister, or something, under Smithy’s control), in which even foreigners like Anderson and me were allowed to vote. I filled in the forms. Anderson’s wife was living with him then. ‘What is your wife’s name, Anderson?’ Anderson was then polishing the floor. He straightened up on his knees, smacked his forehead, and exclaimed: ‘Ah, bassie!’ He scuttled off to the kaya and after a few minutes came back.
‘Sarah!’
There is a love which need not speak its name.
Rhodesia was always an easy-going place. It was in this year, I think, that the secretary for health telephoned me one morning with the question: ‘Dr Durrant, are you aware that you have not been registered with the Medical Council for the last five years?’ It was a rhetorical question: of course I was not aware. The reminders had followed me around a number of changes of address and then lost me: my own part in the disaster need not be gone into. I had been practising illegally for five years. He told me I had better get on to the Council soonest and send them fifty dollars. I don’t know what happens to one in UK in such a case: it would certainly make a British doctor tremble.
Jock also was off the register for two years. A Dr Scott had died, and the Medical Council buried the wrong man. I never inquired how it took them (or Jock) two years to discover the error.
It was not long after his arrival in Shabani that Jock and I did a combined operation. I was wakened at daybreak by a telephone call. The night sister told me someone was on the line from the JOC (Joint Operational Command - military, of course, not surgical). But it was not a war casualty. A man’s voice came on. ‘There’s been a
derailment on the Buchwa line, doc. There’s a guy trapped in the wreckage, and they reckon you’ll have to amputate his leg to get him out.’
We were to meet at the small airport outside the town, where they would pick us up in a helicopter. ‘We’ would include Jock, whom I called to give the anaesthetic. We arranged to meet in theatre.
There I got an amputation pack from the night sister, and Jock collected syringes and Pentothal. I planned to do an emergency guillotine amputation under tourniquet and finish the job at the hospital.
We drove to the airport, and there was the chopper. We climbed in with the pilot and the gunner, who sat beside a large Browning cannon. The helicopter was modified to disembark troops rapidly. It had no seat belts and no sides. I am not very good on altitude. I sat on a box seat and clutched it with sweaty hands. Jock, the old RAF man, sat unperturbed. I never knew anything make Jock nervous, anyway.
We lifted off and sped like a flying carpet across the tawny earth, already vibrant with the morning light. Below we could see women outside their huts, about their household chores, and little naked children. Faces looked up at us.
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 28
