The most piteous case was a lad of seventeen, ‘caught in the cross-fire’. When I appeared he looked at me hopefully and cried, ‘Docketa!’ Alas, I was unable to save him, and that was the last word he spoke.
My last abdominal shot came a few days after the cease-fire. A white soldier fell out with his companion on the veranda of the Nilton Hotel. He drove home to get his rifle, came back with it and chased the other man along the veranda, before shooting him in the back. It was night, but there was no problem now about transferring him to Bulawayo, where the surgeon was able to save him. Good job for his assailant, as, if I had failed, he would probably have hanged for premeditated murder.
A certain Greek trader went up from Shabani to Gwelo. He had no car (but he carried four hundred dollars), so he hitched a lift from a white man who was going to the quarry, seven miles out of town, opposite my rural hospital at Lundi. The man warned him he would have to put him down at the roadside, where he would have to take his chance - in more ways than one. They probably thought little of it - a mere seven miles out. The man went regularly to his quarry, as I went to my hospital.
The little trader was unarmed: which re-opens my previous discussion about carrying weapons. For it was not guerrillas he fell among; who might have shot him on the spot, or even taken him prisoner and carried him to Mozambique (especially as he was not armed), like the remarkable cases of the white road-maker and the white farmer, who were decently treated and even spoke appreciatively of their captors, when they were later released, even before independence. One never could tell. A party of black road-workers was shot down on the spot, and thirty black tea estate workers were led out of their compound one night and massacred.
Our trader fell indeed among thieves - a rat pack of mujibas - young lads, described in the courts as ‘running with terrorists’: generally scouting, sitting on kopjes while about their normal avocations of minding cattle and goats in the tribal lands. Sometimes they formed packs, armed with imitation rifles with which they imposed on the simple people in order to rob them and gain favours from their womenfolk; no doubt, in imitation of their masters: otherwise, they would have no weapons but sticks and stones.
They did not strip our certain man of his raiment, but they robbed him; nor did they leave him for dead. God knows how they killed him, but his rags and bones were found in an old mine shaft three months later and brought to me in a box.
And as in any war, there were the funny incidents. Even at Inyanga, the police told us about an African farmer who drove over a land mine in his pick-up, fortunately hitting it with his rear wheel, or he would never have survived. Incidently, there was an innocent idea to begin with, even among the whites, that if you drove fast enough you would be away before the thing went off. Of course, that only ensured you made a higher journey through the air.
After rising the usual twelve feet, our farmer came down with a bang and sat half-stunned in his vehicle. When the police arrived, they asked him how he was. He replied: ‘I think I had a very bad blow-out.’
A mission was attacked in Matabeleland. All hit the floor except Father Murphy, who ran to his room and came out firing an automatic rifle, with which he drove off the attackers. (He, at least, had no scruples about killing people rightly struggling to be free.) The newspaper report concluded: ‘None of the other fathers knew Father Murphy kept a rifle in his room’ - like a packet of joints or a girlie magazine.
But the biggest comedy of the war was the Great Battle of Shabani. Historians are divided over the cause. The most popular theory was that it was started by a Portuguese (still not fully admitted to polite society) firing a revolver at a cat in his garden. The town, by now completely surrounded by the guerrillas in the countryside, entered and left in armed convoys by all three major outlets, was in a nervy state. Like the famous shot in Sarajevo, this one ignited a powder-keg. It was night. The DC’s people, the rawest and most nervous, began firing on the police camp. The police fired back at the DC’s place, and the army, which had a camp outside the town, fired on both. Soon all three were firing on one another without prejudice. I stood on my balcony and watched the tracers crossing the town in all directions. Then the boom!, boom! of mortar-bombs began. The whole thing went on for about three hours. The matron rang me and I asked her to clear the front bays of the wards, which was our usual preparation for mass emergencies. I did not bother calling in extra staff as I was sure they were all under their beds in their homes and wouldn’t budge. Otherwise, I decided to adopt an expectant policy. With one final boom!, all the lights in the town went out, meaning that they had hit the power station; when all at once the firing stopped, like little boys who realised they had gone too far. Needless to say, there was nary a guerrilla involved. Moreover, there was nary a casualty on any side, which was regarded with what I suppose was mixed relief.
Next day, an aeroplane, carrying a high-ranking officer, was seen to fly into our small airport, and a lot of awkward questions were no doubt asked.
The war produced other indirect medical consequences. Public health programmes were disrupted, including rabies control - the vaccination of dogs in the tribal areas. And we began to see cases. One was a little boy, bitten by a dog in the leg about a month before. Rabies virus travels up the nerves to the brain, and in an adult takes about two months from a bite in the leg and one month from the arm; and correspondingly less in a child. The case was obvious when the little boy’s mother offered him water, and he literally barked like a dog - hydrophobia (the old name of the disease), fear of water, the very sight of which provokes the painful spasms in the throat. I set up a Valium drip, and gave him an initial injection of the same through the tube. The little boy slept mercifully and peacefully for two days before he died. I was glad to see that the dreadful effects of the disease could be so easily controlled (more easily, in fact, than in tetanus, where the activity is in the spine, less readily reached by the drugs), though the outcome in the established case is universally fatal.
Another case was a woman. As the ambulance brought her in, she went into choking spasms in the vehicle as it splashed through puddles on the road. Nor was she controlled with a Valium drip, but continued to stagger aimlessly round her bed. Obviously, the dose was too low. Rather than waste time adjusting it, I started large doses of Largactil, and she settled and also died peacefully after two days.
Then a rabid puppy attended a European children’s party. Its condition was discovered when it died a few days later, and the veterinary laboratory found the tell-tale Negri bodies in the brain. It had been vaccinated, too, but was obviously already infected at the time of vaccination.
Europeans tend to make more fuss about these things than Africans, even the colonial types of Rhodesia, whose anxiety threshold is much higher than in other places I had better not mention. So I organised a meeting of the parents concerned. This sort of thing, again, fell under the government medical officer.
I had already consulted with the animal health inspector and the secretary for health, and had formulated a policy. No one, as far as we knew, had been bitten. I did not go into the controversial business of licks in the face, thinking it an unnecessary alarm. I proposed vaccinating all the children under five, as unable to give an account of themselves, and offered it to any others concerned who wished it for their children or themselves. In the event, everyone opted for the fourteen-day ordeal of radial injections around the navel, which was the regime then. A telegram was even sent in pursuit of a woman who had gone to Israel, and altogether the government was set back a tidy sum. No cases developed.
As the war developed, nothing moved by night in the tribal areas except the guerrillas themselves; and we began to see other medical consequences - especially for the women in labour. In short, I had about a dozen cases of ruptured uterus brought in, after a night of obstructed labour. All of these I dealt with by subtotal hysterectomy, and lost only one - a woman who had been ruptured more than twelve hours and succumbed to infection. One might imagine
there were others who never made it to hospital. I never saw any at postmortem, but it was not usual to report natural deaths occurring in the tribal areas.
One day, about half-a-dozen people were brought in, suffering from strange symptoms: abdominal pains, mostly, and some developed paralysis. Some rapidly died, while others began to recover. They told a story of eating tins of meat they had found in the bush. I suspected botulism, and reported to the provincial medical officer. The DC seemed to regard the cases as more suspicious.
After a few days, I received a telephone call from the secretary. By then, the recovered cases had gone home: the dead had been buried. I probably wrote food-poisoning on the death certificates. The secretary requested exhumation of the dead for further investigation.
After a week, he rang me with the news that thallium had been found in the bodies. No further explanation was available.
After the war, I got the answer from one of the Selous Scouts. I was wrong when I said only the guerrillas moved in the bush by night. The Selous Scouts were a body of desperadoes, black and white, who lived in and off the bush for months at a time: tracking, engaging, and even infiltrating the guerrillas as spies. And they got up to dirty tricks. Leaving booby-trapped radio sets around was one of them, and so were the thallium-injected tins of meat. These things were aimed at the guerrillas, as the guerrillas’ land mines were aimed at the security forces, but in each case trapped more civilians than either.
For years after the war, guerrillas returned from Mozambique, reported stomach pains and stories about poisoned meat, which must have mystified doctors ignorant of these events. I encountered no more cases among civilians, though no doubt they occurred.
Before breakast one morning, I was called to a gunshot case in the European hospital. A local farmer and his wife had been taking their son and his friend to Gwelo to report for conscription. The younger brother, a lad of about fifteen, went too. All the men were armed. Call up was eighteen for all white males. Even so, eighty per cent of the security forces, police and army, was black.
The white party ran into an ambush, just outside town. It was most unusual at that hour. This was the last year of the war, and the guerrillas must have been getting very cheeky, or rather, they knew how thinly stretched were the security forces by the increasing demands made on them. The Land Rover was brought to a stop, and in the ensuing gun battle, father was killed and mother got a bullet in the belly. The others were unhurt, before the guerrillas, who never hung around for longer than ten minutes, made off.
As I walked to the hospital, I passed the young lad on the path in tears. His father was already in the mortuary.
Mother was a fat little woman. Although she had entry and exit wounds, she seemed to be comfortable, and the X-rays showed no free gas or other signs of injury. I decided to watch her. After a couple of days she began to leak faeces from the entry wound, but was otherwise still comfortable. Percy agreed that this was a fistula or track which had sealed itself off and would heal itself. We put the lady on a liquid diet, and so it did. Another abdominal shot that did well, thank God. The family even joked that Mother was so fat she was bullet-proof.
The war ended, not with a whimper, but a bang. Mandava, the large African township - never the leafy European suburbs - used to get hammered now and again by the guerrillas with mortar attacks, usually with little effect; though my one successful abdominal operation followed such a demonstration. For that is what I suppose they were - sort of gunboat diplomacy, to show the people who was boss - the kind of thing Richard Dimbleby used to say the natives (or whatever he called them) had learned from their colonial oppressors.
And at least one night, it was rather more than a demonstration, when the guerrillas entered the township itself, dragged the Muzorewa supporters from their beds, and executed them in the street, before the over-stretched security forces could turn up, an hour after they had gone.
Just before New Year, it happened again. I stood on my balcony, observing the flashes from the hills, and hearing the bangs in the long-suffering township, and nerving myself for casualties, which happily never came. But the peace treaty had not long been signed at Lancaster House. It wanted but two days to the ceasefire, and here they were, trying to kill their own people yet again.
I reflected that the post-independence elections were not far off. Shabani, near the border with Matabeleland, was by way of being a marginal seat. This must be a shameless electioneering ploy to persuade the waverers with the only kind of persuasion that counts in Africa; for the voters well knew, from the direction of the firing, which party it was coming from. I wondered what they would say in Britain if Mrs Thatcher mortared a marginal seat in the Tory interest.
Two days later, peace broke out.
8 – Romance
I met my wife because, like Maria in The Sound of Music, I did something good.
It began on the veranda of the Nilton, when Jock and I were having a sundowner. Jock said: ‘You’ll have to do something about that matron.’
The matron in question was Lilian, a middle-aged lady of charm and ability, but from what Jock was telling me, she seemed to be succumbing to that disease, fatal to Europeans in the tropics, of idealism.
I had not noticed it myself. I was a poor judge of matronly performance, as I didn’t take much notice of matrons, as long as they left me in peace. But Jock seemed to think it was serious. As I seemed nonplussed, and no doubt recognising that administration was not my strong point, he offered to get in touch with the secretary, and I rather weakly acquiesced.
A few days later, the secretary rang me up. He said he would be delighted to come down. (I presume Jock had invited him.) He told me, himself, he had been ‘gunning’ for Miss Harrison for years. I did not take this as a reflection on her competence, which even I could see was unquestionable. I rather got the feeling of Ted Heath on the subject of Maggie Thatcher.
And a few days after that, he arrived - by air, at our little airport. I went to pick him up in my car. He was a dry little man in a grey suit, accompanied by a brawny official with a submachine-gun. We were still in the last year of the war, and if they had come down in the bush, they might have had to defend themselves; but after the secretary’s words about ‘gunning’, it made me think twice about his intentions towards Lilian.
They got into my car: the secretary in the back, his shotgun beside me. By the barrier stood an unprepossessing individual who looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, whose business it was to raise it. This person had a medical complaint, and someone had told him there was a doctor in the car.
After raising the barrier, instead of standing back and minding his own business, the man approached the vehicle. He must have been new in town, as he did not recognise me. Between myself in a safari jacket and the person in a city suit on the back seat (which is well understood in Africa to be the place of honour), there was little doubt in this person’s mind as to which was the doctor. To make sure he addressed the secretary.
‘Are you a docketa?’
‘Er, yes -’ murmured the secretary in a guarded tone. He hadn’t handled a stethoscope in years.
‘I got dis tooth.’ Whereupon, the man put his head through the open window, and placing his fingers in his mouth, thrust his open jaws and his halitosis under the secretary’s nose.
The secretary said: ‘I am sure, if you apply to Dr Durrant at the government hospital, he will attend to you.’
‘Are you a docketa?’
‘Would you drive on, please, Dr Durrant?’
The secretary was closeted with Lilian for some time, during which she tendered her resignation from the service - that drastic!; though I don’t know what Jock and I had expected.
The secretary re-emerged, gave us the news and took a cup of tea. Then he left, declining our offer of lunch.
Next day, Lilian had sufficiently recovered to telephone me at my house before breakfast. She said she realised it had ‘all been her fault, and would I give her a second
chance?’ I said I would speak to the secretary about it. I need not repeat what I have said more than once in these pages about myself and administration, except to wheel on the old adage that good doctors make poor administrators, and good administrators make poor doctors; which I suspect got its start from doctors who were poor administrators.
Anyway, when I rang the secretary, as the reader may imagine, he hit the roof - at any rate, he fell silent for a few seconds.
‘Dr Durrant!’ he snapped. ‘I thought we had arrived at a decision about this matter. Now the matron can plead the indulgence of a superior officer. You have hopelessly compromised the situation, and put me in an impossible position!’
I said nothing. The secretary said he would have to re-think the question. What he would do, he did not know. He would let me know in due course, but it would not be soon.
Then it occurred to me that I had known Lilian of old - at Gwelo, where she had been a deputy or something. I remembered her there as pleasant and relaxed. It seemed to me that she might be easier in a position where she was not the boss. I duly rang the secretary again with this idea.
The secretary may not have expected to welcome any more suggestions from me, but he saw the merits of this one. In short, Lilian, in due course, was given a lateral transfer to a deputy post in a larger institution, where I hoped she would be happy, as well as those around her.
(Now I ask myself: did I mean she was not fit to be ‘in charge’? In fact, the question did not occur to me: I have merely described the expedient that did occur to me to get her out of her scrape. Now I like to think I was sending her ‘back to school’, as I was sent back to school, from which I hope she emerged as happily as I did.)
But if Lilian had gone when she would have gone but for my intervention, she would not have been replaced by the person who replaced her at the later date, whom I would never have met; and that person was Terry, my future wife.
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 30
