by Robyn Scott
Mostly, as far as Lulu, Damien, and I were aware, we just played, and listened to Mum read to us, which, although she always pretended otherwise to Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry, was the only thing she did with any regularity, for any length of time. She read to us most days, and occasionally all day – from breakfast to dinner, stopping only for cups of rooibod tea, to tell Ruth what part of the house to clean, and for lunch, munched between paragraphs. The books were always books that also interested her: Joan Aiken, C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Peter Dickenson, Lucy Boston, Rudyard Kipling, J.R. R. Tolkien. Books with vast, rich stories that swallowed you into their worlds. Books that left you, when the last page had been turned and the dust, flies, and mind-numbing heat resurfaced in your consciousness, pining for the characters like left-behind friends.
So during Granny and Grandpa’s risky inquisitions, Damien and I kept our mouths full with fizzy drinks and salty crisps, which were both forbidden at home, and hoped Granny and Grandpa wouldn’t start asking us what we’d learned. And before long, though they never seemed entirely satisfied with Mum’s answers, another round of drinks would be poured, and the conversation would drift back to Phikwe gossip, Botswana politics, or stories of the old days.
Because we were often not sure what we had actually learned, and because it generally bore no resemblance to what adults expected normal children our age to be learning in school, what it was could really only be stumbled upon by accident.
Like the time that Grandpa Ivor and I leaned side by side against the rickety kraal fence, gazing across the empty, weed-and-desiccated-cow-poo-covered dirt, and speculated about the much-dreamt-of day when I would be looking at my own horse, standing in this kraal.
“Whaddaya going to call it, Robbie?” asked Grandpa.
“Dunno. I haven’t decided.”
“What ab out…” He paused dramatically and plucked at a strand of wire. “What about naming it after Alexander the Great’s horse? Whaddaya think of that?”
“Nah,” I sighed, still gazing dreamily across the weed-covered manure. “Bucephalus is a horrible name’.”
Grandpa swung around to face me ‘with a piercing blue-eyed stare. “Whaddaya say?”
“I think Bucephalus is horrible, Grandpa.”
“How old are ya again?”
“I’m nearly eight,” I said, impatiently.
Grandpa shook his head, his expression incredulous. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he bellowed, clutching and shaking a spindly fence post. “Bloody amazing. Amazing. Marvellous. What else d’ya know about Alexander the Great?”
I told him everything I could remember, which took a few minutes as Mum had recently spent several days doing nothing but reading to us from the huge book on Greek history. And Alexander’s story, as exciting as they came, was unforgettable. Astride his gallant horse, Alexander had not only conquered vast civilizations, he was also told, and believed, he was part god – a son of Zeus who, in the form of a snake, had seduced his mother, Olympias, taking advantage of her intriguing desire to sleep with snakes in her bed.
“I’m blown away,” said Grandpa, squeezing my shoulder as I concluded my account. “Ya make your old grandpa feel like a bloody ignoramus.”
Flukes such as this formed a key component of the arsenal Mum used to defend homeschooling. She collected these stories, generally exaggerated them, and, as soon as possible, relayed them to Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry. On this occasion, however, Grandpa Ivor – on counts of both speed and hyperbole – beat her to it. By the time we next visited the Phikwe grandparents, Grandpa Terry had already heard all about Bucephalus over whiskies in the golf-club bar, where Grandpa Ivor had been loudly waxing lyrical about his grandchildren’s unbelievable mastery of Greek history and mythology.
Ashared love of golf and whisky was the first of just three things that Grandpa Ivor and Grandpa Terry had in common. Even in this respect, they were opposites. Grandpa Ivor was a sporadic drinker – nothing, or so much he could barely stand up – and a sporadic golfer – mostly pretty average, with occasional bouts of genius. Grandpa Terry drank consistently – never nothing, never so much that he’d had to spend the night sobering up under the trees outside – and played consistently good golf, attested to by numerous trophies and a framed ‘hole-in-one’ certificate from a Johnnie Walker Whisky tournament, which hung on the door of the second loo.
“It’s there as a joke,” said Grandpa Terry, when I asked why he didn’t hang it beside the trophies.
In the draw for the weekly four-ball, Grandpa Terry, like all the other golfers, dreaded finding himself in Grandpa Ivor’s group.
Grandpa Ivor was always late, his game utterly unpredictable. The only thing less reliable was his temper, which could, depending on his mood, be directed at one of his fellow golfers, all of them, his Motswana caddie, golf balls, golf clubs, thorn-bushes, the angle of the sun, or the uneven greens, which were ‘browns’ on the dry Phikwe golf course. A passion for the game was Grandpa Ivor’s only concession to the norms of golf.
But off the course, after sunset, sitting beside the golf club bar, the two grandpas often chatted. Both great raconteurs, they enjoyed each other’s stories, and no one, whatever they thought of Grandpa Ivor, could fail to find him interesting. The two men also shared nearly two decades of history intertwined with Selebi-Phikwe and its mine, BCL – Bamangwato Concessions Limited, named after Botswana’s largest tribe, which owned the land around the town.
In 1967, a year after independence and the year underground exploration in Selebi began, Grandpa Ivor had moved to nearby Francistown. He was by now married to Granny Betty, a nurse, whom he had met flying a medical emergency to Rand Airport in Johannesburg and who had bravely joined him in his rudimentary bush caravan camp near the Okavango Delta before the move to Francistown.
Business in Francistown was good, and Grandpa’s Okavango Air Services was thriving. With Phikwe still to be built, and many of its executives based in Francistown, BCL frequently called upon Grandpa Ivor’s services. The mine soon became one of his most important clients, and in 1972, as BCL shifted its employees to Phikwe, Grandpa Ivor and Granny Betty moved too, settling in one of the geologists’ houses in Selebi, a convenient drive from the airport.
In 1974, a year after the mine became operational, Grandpa Terry and Granny Joan moved to Phikwe from Zambia, where they’d lived since leaving England in their early twenties.
Employed first as a prosecutor in what was then the Northern Rhodesian police force, Grandpa Terry had later worked on the copper mines, based in the small town of Kalulushi, where all three daughters had been born. In 1964, after Northern Rhodesia became independent Zambia, Grandpa Terry became closely involved in localisation programmes aimed at bringing Zambians into the skilled workforce. And ten years later, for this experience in particular, he was offered the position of personnel manager at Botswana’s new mine in Selebi-Phikwe.
At the time, the highly skilled mine employees were almost all expatriates. But all were on renewable two-year contracts. The intention was always to gradually replace the ‘expats’ with citizens, and Grandpa Terry’s responsibilities included producing regular localisation updates. BCL also sponsored large numbers of Botswana citizens overseas through business and engineering degrees.
While succeeding in this respect, the mine failed dismally in its main objective. Between the discovery of the deposits and the five-year process of sinking the shafts and building the town and smelter, the price of nickel and copper had fallen steeply, and the mine, from the day it started production, ran at a loss.
Meanwhile, vast, quickly accessible diamond deposits had been discovered several hundred kilometres to the north-west. Selebi-Phikwe was already the poor relation to the small town of Orapa, where the first diamond mine opened in 1971. Ten years later, when the BCL mine was still failing to repay its investors, it would be further overshadowed. In 1982 the world’s richest diamond mine – supposedly discovered when termites, seeking water for their
mounds, brought to the surface rock fragments associated with diamonds – opened a few hundred kilometres to the southwest in Jwaneng.
But diamond towns were ‘closed towns’. If those who were not mine employees wanted to visit, special permission was required, so they could be checked and traced if they made off with any diamonds. Even children needed permission. The few shops were mine shops, the residents all mine employees. Diamond towns did little to encourage the development ol small independent businesses and industries, which Botswana badly needed.
So the Botswana government, a major shareholder in BCL, insisted that the unprofitable mine be kept afloat. A small industrial area grew outside Phikwe, and nearer the residential areas, a range of shops opened, amongst them Granny Betty’s tiny, grandly named boutique, the Fashion Scene. Over the years, Grandpa Ivor also started a series of businesses. But flying was his only successful and lasting venture, and it was in the air that most people in Phikwe came to know and marvel at Ivor Scott.
On one of their first encounters, Grandpa Ivor was scheduled to collect Grandpa Terry from the small southern town of Lobatse. Grandpa Ivor had spent the morning across the border in Johannesburg, while Grandpa Terry delivered BCL papers to the Lobatse High Court. Later in the afternoon, Grandpa Terry was dropped off at the Lobatse International Airport – a deserted tar strip with a single, empty watchman’s hut at the end of the runway.
An hour after the scheduled pickup time, there was still no sign of Grandpa Ivor’s aeroplane. To pass the time, Grandpa Terry inspected the small hut. Inside was a telephone, with a number to call if you landed at Lobatse International from outside Botswana. The number was for customs and immigration, which would send its officers out to the quiet airport on an as-needed basis.
The sun neared the horizon. Grandpa Terry began to consider walking back into town. Grandpa Ivor, he reasoned, must have somehow got stuck in Johannesburg.
Grandpa Ivor had got stuck in Johannesburg – literally, after ignoring instructions from air traffic control and taxiing into a ditch at the airport. By the time the plane had been towed out of the ditch, Grandpa Ivor was running several hours late.
About to set off back to Lobatse, Grandpa Terry heard the buzz of the plane. A few minutes later Grandpa Ivor touched down. Remaining in the plane, with the engine running, he beckoned wildly to Grandpa Terry, who stood beside the hut.
Grandpa Terry pointed towards the hut and mimed making a phone call.
Grandpa Ivor shook his head. “No time,” yelled Grandpa Ivor, as Grandpa Terry reluctantly clambered into the plane. “It’s getting dark. They’ll take too bloody long. Hurry up, Terry. Haven’t got all bloody day. You wanna get home, don’t you?”
Back in the air, Grandpa Ivor radioed air traffic control in the nearby capital of Gaborone. He announced he would clear customs and immigration in Selebi, and provided ‘current’ coordinates far north of their location. They touched down in Selebi just as the last of the light disappeared. “Whaddid I tell you?” said Grandpa Ivor. “If we’d waited for those buggers in Lobatse, we’d have been too late to land.”
♦
But Grandpa Ivor, as Grandpa Terry later discovered, had been more motivated by the desire to avoid inconvenience than an after-dark landing. This time Grandpa Terry was part of agroup of mine executives attending an afternoon meeting in Johannesburg. The meeting ran late, and the plane took off not long before sunset. An hour and a half later, when they began to circle above the black bush around the Selebi runway, the darkness was absolute.
“What’s happening, Ivor?” asked one of the passengers.
“Just looking for the runway,” replied Grandpa.
After a worried debate in the back of the plane, someone ventured that Ivor should perhaps fly north across the border to Bulawayo, where there was a beacon and flare path to guide him in. Selebi had no flare path, and its beacon was, as usual, out of order.
“Nonsense,” yelled Grandpa. “It’s down here somewhere. Give me a minute.”
True to his word, after a minute, the plane started to sink into the darkness.
Grandpa Terry said nothing. By now he knew that where something interfered with Grandpa Ivor’s plans, he was as much unmoved by the discomfort of others as he was by the law. Like with cigarettes, which he used to chain-smoke, delighted when passengers joined in, ignoring those who objected. “Luckily I gave up the same time as Ivor,” Grandpa Terry would chuckle. The day Grandpa Ivor stopped smoking, he hung a large No Smoking sign in the back of his plane and thereafter admonished anyone who tried to light up about the dangers of smoking in an aeroplane.
But not all Grandpa Ivor’s passengers knew him so well. Shakily undoing his seat belt, one of the men stood up and clambered towards the front.
“Please, Ivor. For God’s sake. Go to Bulawayo.”
“Sit down,” ordered Grandpa. “You’re a danger to us all.”
A few minutes later, the plane touched down on the runway in what the then terrified passengers would afterwards say was one of the smoothest landings they had ever experienced. When Grandpa Terry asked how he’d done it, Grandpa Ivor explained that the regulars drinking at the runway club had heard him circling. Grandpa was often late, and everyone knew the drill. Someone had immediately driven his bakkle to face the runway, and Grandpa Ivor had used the two bright spots of the headlights to guide him in.
We, the grandchildren, were Grandpa Ivor and Grandpa Terry’s final common interest. But beyond a shared desire for our happiness, about us, as about most things, they felt very differently.
On child raising, Grandpa Ivor had as much regard for protocol and the opinions of others as he did as a pilot. University was the only thing he cared about, having always regretted not going himself when he left the air force after the ‘war.
Grandpa Ivor never questioned that Mum – who wasn’t a teacher and thought a syllabus stifled creativity – was just as capable of getting us to university as anyone else.
Grandpa Terry did.
“Blossom. Damien’s nearly seven. And he can hardly read. Doesn’t that concern you? Even a little?”
“He’ll read when he’s ready, Dad. I’m not going to force him.”
“You don’t have to, Linny.” Grandpa was entreating. “Send them to Kopano – it’s a very good school. They have people trained to do these things.”
“He shouldn’t be forced. By anyone. That’s my point.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“Trained teachers sometimes get it wrong. Look at all the kids who start school already speaking several languages. You learned French for years at school. Can you speak it?”
Grandpa began to say something, but Mum continued hotly. “Children often learn best in unstructured situations, when they don’t know they’re learning. Especially if they’re having fun. So, please, just give me a chance.”
“We want to, Lin, of course – and we will – we’re only naturally concerned.”
Mum gave a happy defiant smile. “Well, don’t be.”
And then Granny noticed that Lulu, Damien, and I were watching curiously. She frowned at Grandpa. “Glasses are empty, Terry.”
“Sorry, dear. How remiss of me.” Grandpa sighed and got to his feet. “The same again?” he asked unnecessarily, as he headed to the bar. “A dash stronger, perhaps? I certainly need a stiff one.” And once again the sun set on Kagiso Street to clinking ice cubes, resigned laughter, and muted discontent.
Before the doubtful faces of those evenings, I’d never questioned Mum’s explanation of homeschooling. She’d deliver it passionately and romantically; as a story, which had always made me feel lucky to be part of something rooted in that intriguing time when your parents were together, before you.
“You know,” she’d begin, “my last year at university was an epiphany.”
That was the year that she had met David Jenkins, a pioneering researcher into the health benefits of dietary fibre. Eyes sparkling, Mum would tell us how she’d
been swept along by his passion for his work; how, for the first time, grades became secondary to knowledge. “He revolutionised my outlook on health, and on education,” she would sigh dramatically. “1 only realised then that I’d spent most of my education half asleep – learning how to pass exams well, and very little else.”
Sparked in university, Mum’s fascination with the role of nutrition in health and disease never waned. Nor did she ever forget her awe at the pleasure of becoming really interested in something. “And that transformative year lives on still” – Mum would smile – “in my whole-wheat bread and homeschooling.”
“How come they’re always so upset about it?” I asked, as the car crunched across the gravel and swung out into the dark, quiet road.
“Well, I suppose they’re a bit hurt,” said Mum. “They made sure I got the best education on offer. And now they think I’m saying, ‘Thanks very much, but I have a better way’.”
“But you are.”
“Well, I suppose I am, in a way. But I’m really very grateful. Look what I learned in the end,” she said, her voice becoming grave. “That if you love what you are doing, the joy of learning stays alive. I want to pass that on to my children.” She paused, dreamily. Then she said, “And I suppose they’re also a bit worried you’ll get left behind.”
“Will we?”
“‘Course not.”
“Sure?”
“Sure, Robbie.”
Granny and Grandpa were also worried about the side effects of homeschooling. “What about socialising with other kids, Linny? Are they going to fit in later on?” To which Mum would retort that we played very well with each other, and went to ballet and tennis lessons with other children. “Anyway, I don’t want to have this discussion any more. Stop worrying. They’re making lots of nice friends their own age.”
So it was sheepishly that Mum told Granny Joan the guest list of Lulu’s fifth birthday party: Grandpa Ivor, Granny Betty, Grandpa Terry, Granny Joan, Mum, Dad, Robbie, Damien, Maria (Dad’s nurse), Somebody (Dad’s other new nurse – “because I don’t employ just anybody”), Beauty (Dad’s Phikwe clinic cleaner), Matthews, Ruth, Moretsana (Ruth’s teenage daughter), and Geor-gina (Ruth’s ancient mother, who was Granny Betty’s maid and hardly spoke English).
