Afterwards, my boldness surprised me and made me a little anxious. I was now a married man, with a family to raise in this land. At the next medical workshop, I inquired of a black friend in the PMO’s office: ‘What sort of person is the provincial governor?’
‘He’s a nigger. Why do you ask?’
I explained about the bad impression I must (as I meant to) have given at the meeting.
‘Don’t worry. You are a doctor. He used to be a garden boy. If you shouted at him, he would call you “sir”.’
Ah well, the poor man is dead now, anyway.
2 - Family Life
Our first child, Michael, was born in Bulawayo. His mother was what is known as an elderly primigravida - having her first baby over the age of thirty - and there was no specialist gynaecologist in Shabani.
To begin with, he was rather lean: his mother’s family carried the greyhound genes. But soon, on his mother’s milk, though never even plump, he grew to a cuddly little creature, we called ‘Baby Bear’, always with a merry smile, and into everything, like any other healthy baby in the world.
Then Michael started keeping us awake - not through crying, but when he was able to climb out of his cot. Then he would come scrambling on to our bed, where we were sitting up, I reading Trollope to Terry: a habit we kept up for best part of a year, until it fell away, as such things do. ‘Baby Bear’ with his merry grin would want to join in. ‘He is just like a baby bear,’ said Terry. But soon we were calling him ‘Night-life’, which sounded like an African name. ‘Sentencing Night-life Manyonda to six months’ imprisoment, the magistrate said, “This kind of thing has got to stop”,’ as the newspapers used to say. But stopping it was another story.
Michael was born in March. In September, we took a holiday at Kariba. We were in an open boat, game-viewing. We drew up on a bank, where there was a pride of lion at their kill, a buffalo, no more than fifty yards away. Michael decided to start crying, a thing he rarely did, having no idea of the lions, of course. The guide asked Terry politely if she could keep that baby quiet: he could see the chief lion was thrashing his tail, and looking restless. He had already explained that the animal could be on us in two seconds. Terry felt wretched, and tried, not very successfully, to keep Michael quiet with her finger in his mouth. All were very relieved when we pushed off.
Every Saturday night, we had supper out, mostly at the hotel, even before Michael could walk, and he would crawl to neighbouring tables, being a friendly, outgoing little chap; so his mother, who was very much mindful of other people’s comfort, hardly got her meal for getting up to fetch him back. Then he discovered the piano, which he was able to play and hold on to by a simultaneous process, with the delighted waiters, in their fezzes, holding their napkins, standing watching him, and applauding when he finished and crawled back to us.
Sometimes we varied it with supper at the mine club. One night there, Michael crawled about outside and found an old Coke bottle, which he picked up and gave a good licking. On Monday morning, his first birthday, he developed vomiting and diarrhoea. Oral rehydration therapy was new then, and I had had much success with it. That is what we gave Michael: simple sugar and salt mixture.
By the Wednesday, he was very ill indeed. He had grown peaky and listless, all his ebullience gone. A heart-broken Terry told me he was bringing back all the solution she gave him. I found her sitting silent downstairs. Michael was asleep in his bedroom. I said: ‘You don’t mind him shupering (causing trouble) when he is like this.’ I could not keep the sob out of my voice. I knew then what it was to be a parent.
By Friday, it was the same. We became alarmed. I told Terry to take him to the private doctor at the mine.
And when he got into the doctor’s office, Michael sprang to life, and started playing with the doctor’s books. He had been absorbing as much of the solution as he brought back, and, with his mother’s devoted nursing, it saved his life.
Michael was fifteen months old, when Mary was born, at Shabanie Mine Hospital. (Yes, the name was different from the town.) Michael’s nose was not exactly out of joint, but he didn’t show much enthusiasm for this event. He was silent as I drove him home, until he saw a cow, and said ‘cow’. He liked cows.
He stayed with some Dutch friends, while Terry was lying in. I went round to be with him in the evenings.
Mary started life looking like me: after two years, she began to look like her mother. In her earlier stage, although she looked so like me that Terry said you could put her down anywhere in the district and she would be returned to the hospital, she had brown hair and was very pretty, as she continued to be at all stages. Michael by now was a little blond angel.
I discovered a curious thing at the time. I could eat off their plates: I mean those of my wife and children, but off no one else’s. This is the curious miracle of ‘one flesh’. It persists to this day, and will remain, as far as my wife and I are concerned; but one day our children will outgrow it. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, etc. But this runs on too far ahead.
Michael liked to eat his evening meal, sitting on the concrete outside the veranda: a bowl of mealie porridge. Sometimes, before my own meal, I would join him, sitting on the step. One day, he put down his bowl and came running towards me, his loving little arms outstretched, and they and his face covered with porridge. Involuntarily, I shrank back. He tripped over my foot, went flying, banged his head and cried bitterly, his dirty little face crinkled up. I never felt so mean in my life. I picked him up and hugged him, porridge and all.
At bedtime, Michael liked to race round the front garden in his bare feet and little dressing-gown, just after dark. One night, as he was doing this, a police Land Rover pulled up in the road outside. A policeman got out and held up a six-foot cobra, they had just run over. ‘This snake just came out of your garden, doctor.’ That was the end of Michael’s evening romps.
As Michael became more active, we had a four-foot wire fence put up, round the front garden, with a gate. One lunchtime, I happened to open the front door. A skinny little black brat in his rags was on the lawn, about to snatch Michael’s football. The poor kid had never possessed such a thing in his life: a bundle of rags would be the best football he ever got. No doubt he came in by the gate: he was about ten years old. He didn’t leave that way. Without touching the football, he took off and leapt the four-foot fence like an impala.
Once, we let the nurses’ children in to play football with Michael. Alas, they were too old for him, and Michael never got near the ball. He ran after them in tears and was lucky not to get trampled. We found younger friends for him after that.
Anderson was now getting old and unsuitable for children. I pensioned him off, and we engaged a nanny, Norah, a rather sad girl. She had reason to be, as she could not have children, despite the best efforts of the provincial gynaecologist, when he visited the hospital. By now, all the specialists were making district visits every month, and greatly we appreciated them.
But Norah had some little nieces and nephews, who used to stay with her in the kaya, and these would play with our children, especially on the pedal-car we bought for Michael’s birthday, and the trolley, Terry’s father made for the children.
And there were many white and Indian and other black children for them to play with. These came to their birthday parties, for which Terry organised a regular treat. She hired a donkey-cart and its owner, and the high spot of the party was a drive up and down the hospital road for the children, accompanied by their mothers on foot. This started with Michael’s second birthday, and the poor fellow was sick after the drive. His third birthday was his first of unalloyed enjoyment.
And not for nearly two years did he see rain in his life. Two, or even three years followed each other without rain. People starved in spite of the hand-outs of grain and the work programme they were given to pretend to earn them. One poor fellow collapsed and died on the work programme: ‘probably through starvation,’ as the PMO said. The usually dry
country was now arid, and the fierce sun, unsoftened by the seasonal rains, beat down with hammer blows, as I wrote to people in England, after Hopkins, under which earth ‘winced and sang’. One had to go to work, but Sundays found us pent up in the house by the terrific fire outside, as we might have been by the snows of Canada. Not till four o’ clock in the afternoon did we take a turn up the hospital road and out the top gate, Terry pushing the shaded push-chair with Mary in it, Michael tripping along beside us under his little bush hat - round the back roads of the seedy little town, with their untidy gardens and security fences, with barking dogs exploding behind every one - round to the Selukwe road to the bottom gate and home again. And I wondered how long an English girl would last in a place like this - like the Scottish girls at Umvuma - and was glad, not for the first time, I had married a native, who didn’t know any better.
Every other Sunday, when I was not on duty, we would go to the Anglican church, where I played the harmonium. Little white kids would run up and down the aisles, try to join me at my work, even climb on the altar; while black children, in bow-ties and best frocks, sat in good little rows, looking on at this behaviour with round eyes of astonishment. At the end of the service, I would allow Michael to have a go on the harmonium, when he would render his own composition, of the atonal school, which I called Foggy Night on the River.
Both children were now at the piano, especially Mary, who would sit for hours extemporising what sounded like Bartók. She had a prejudice against the black keys, so I suppose she was reproducing the pentatonic scale, the master was so devoted to.
Michael could certainly recognise a tune from at least eighteen months. He heard Rubinstein on a record playing the Polonaise Militaire, and said, ‘Daddy!’, which was very flattering. Once, when I was playing a record of the Dysart Pipe Band, he turned up the sound, before I could stop him, and fairly blasted himself off his feet. He sat down and cried, and I hoped it hadn’t put him off Scotland for ever, if only for the sake of the Caledonian branch of the family.
Having children, of course, we had pets. We started with cats. First a kitten called Tabby, a girl; then a few months later, Tiger: same mother, next litter. Tabby did not seem to recognise her brother; spat at him, cuffed him, and generally tried to persuade him he was not welcome; until Tiger grew big enough to hit back: one day when Tabby forced him into a corner and he stood up on his hind legs and lashed out like Mohammed Ali. After that Tabby left him alone.
These cats did not last long; seemed half wild, and ran off, or else got killed by the dogs the medical assistants kept at their quarters.
These dogs also got the rabbits that succeeded the cats: a present from the vicar. They came with a special underground bunker, a sort of iron affair with a single entrance. One night there was a dreadful canine uproar, and next day we discovered that the rabbits had been dug up and presumably eaten.
All these disappearances we explained to the children as voluntary departures to cat land or rabbit land.
And as I said, I had a whole new large family to call my own. In pride of place was the patriarch, Terry’s father, who invited me to call him ‘Bill’, as a concession to my age, as I was the oldest of his sons-in-law, who called him ‘Dad’. He was a tall rangy man, then about sixty-five, who looked like what Australians used to look like, before they got so comfortable. In fact, he looked and spoke so like Ian Smith (except for his dark hair) that when Smithy appeared on telly one night (this being, of course, after independence), complaining about something, Michael said, ‘Granddad!’
Bill had had the proverbial American career: cowpuncher, inn-keeper, veterinary hand, small farmer - never making any money for all his toil - and now was security officer on a pig farm, near Salisbury, where he lived in an old Rhodesian-type farmhouse: two rondavels connected by a middle section - the sort of place Terry was brought up in and ran about in her bare feet (as I discovered when she kicked me in bed, with a kick, as I told her, like a horse). Bill had a natural refinement: a dirty joke was abhorrent to him. He was a great reader and letter-writer in a fine copperplate hand, a great consulter of dictionaries. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the country: its history, its ‘trades, their tackle and trim’, everything that stirred or grew in the bush. He spoke Shona fluently, and when he came fishing with us, he would sit down with some passing African and chat with him for hours, having the man’s life story out of him in the course of an afternoon, with a sociability and command of the language for which I could only envy him both. His attitude to the Africans was respectful but distant. Like D H Lawrence (whose stories he enjoyed when he found them on my shelves), he would have no ‘mixing and mingling’, and miscegenation was not in his book. He stretched himself when one daughter married a ‘Dutchman’, and one granddaughter later an ‘Italian’, but that was his limit.
Bill was born in the country, as was his wife, Betty. She was of Irish stock, and Bill blamed anything that went wrong in the family on those genes. (Incidently, his own parents came from the west of England, and he claimed descent from the Saxon kings of Essex.) Betty was an Irish pixie, ‘all sense and spectacles’, as I first saw her, sitting up in bed, reading Hansard (Zimbabwe), of all bedtime reading. She had worked as hard as her husband, not only at keeping the family going, but at such things as book-keeping, being an expert on income tax. Sadly, she died before Mary was born, though she lived to hold Michael in her arms.
Most of Bill’s relations were in Salisbury, Betty’s in Bulawayo: these being the older generation.
When we visited Granddad, taking the week-end off, we sent a message by ‘Granddad’s spider’. There were always one or two of these creatures - wall spiders - on the walls of the house. We told the spider to run up to Salisbury to tell him we were coming, and sure enough, the children would see the creature there before us. And what a long hot drag it would be in the car, with the two discontented little ones, unless they were mercifully asleep, with a welcome break at the hotel in Enkeldoorn on the way; and the same ordeal coming back. I would fall asleep at the wheel and Terry would take over. Thank God it was past the days when we had to carry guns and take the chance of an ambush, with or without a convoy. But that was before our married days, I am glad to say.
At least the days on the farm were a welcome break, and the children could see the pigs and run away from the geese, and ‘drive’ the tractor, as well as slip into Salisbury to the amusement park.
Brother-in-law Boyce (the ‘Dutchman’) and his wife, Terry’s sister, ‘Dozie’, had a real farm - all 15,000 acres of it, a ranch near Gatooma. (‘Dozie’ was, of course, a pet name: most of Terry’s family had pet names like the Victorians.) Their homestead could have been called ‘Groot Schuur’, like Rhodes’s, it was so large, and looked more like a ‘big barn’ than the original. It was a simple house with an asbestos roof and mosquito-screened veranda, and measured 100 feet by 60. But inside was spacious luxury. First, the veranda itself, as wide as an English lane, where tea was served, extra beds put out, and, at the back, pumpkins and butternuts laid out to ripen, the deep freeze kept, and all manner of junk. Part of this was closed off as a garage. And on the veranda the children could play football and hockey, or just cycle back and forth. Within, were large rooms and many bedrooms, where one could retire and read in the heat of the afternoon. Around the house was a large garden, within the security fence, with magnificent trees in the front, surrounded by lawn. At the back, sheds for tractors and bakkies (pick-ups). Beyond the fence were the ‘lands’: the cultivated fields, planted with maize, sorghum, sunflower, cotton; and stretching beyond all, the Bushveld.
At four, when the main heat was off, we would take a stroll, beyond the gate, either to the left, among the lands; or to the right, where the dusty road soon entered the virgin bush, with the telephone line running above. Sometimes one saw game - a duiker or kudu; and once I saw a gymnogene, a weird-looking hawk, with a yellow face and feet. Then, when the children were tired, we would turn back for sundowners on t
he lawn.
Boyce was a hearty extrovert: you could hear him bawling Afrikaans or English down the telephone, half-way round the house, as if he didn’t believe in the efficacy of the instrument; and a generous host, as was Dozie, a tall handsome woman with the cool of a duchess. And Boyce used to bawl at the workers, but I think they loved them both, if only from something that happened in the war.
The present building was not their first house. The first was burnt down. Boyce was away with the TA. Dozie looked after the farm, but left every afternoon to sleep in town. One day, she drove out, past the workers’ compound, as usual, unaware that the guerrillas were hidden there.They could have shot her easily, and I believe it was significant that they did not. I do not wish to be invidious - some good people got shot - but it was widely believed that the popularity (or otherwise) of the baas and his family (at least, in some cases) had something to do with it. When Dozie had gone, they broke into the house, drank all the liquor, and had a regular party, before burning the place down. What the Koks missed most was three generations of hunting trophies.
They had three children - some of our children’s many cousins - two tall sports-mad lads, and a daughter, I thought looked like Princess Di.
Terry’s oldest sister, Rosemary lived with her husband, ‘Muk’, in Bulawayo. Rosemary was a slim, energetic woman, rather like her mother, who kept a spotless house and was never idle, always making things. She was devoted to her beautiful garden.
Muk was a colonel in the infantry, and, ironically, had fought for both Smith and later Mugabe, in the insurrection of 1981, when the Matabele swept down from the north, like a wolf on the fold, but found, not a fold, but Smith’s old regiments, black and white (Muk’s was a black regiment), who stopped them and saved Mugabe’s throne at Entumbane, near Bulawayo.
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 35
