Close to the Sun

by Stuart Jamieson

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IN THIS WAY YOU BECOME IMMORTAL

  In early 1961, after finishing at Whitestone, I went on to Falcon College at the age of thirteen. Falcon had more students than Whitestone, around 250, and they came from all over central Africa. The school was in the bush thirty miles outside Bulawayo, on the site of a former gold mine called Bushtick. Mining had begun there in the 1920s and continued through the early 1950s. Eventually the gold played out and the shafts filled with water. Falcon opened in 1954 with an initial enrolment of thirty-four boys. The founders stated that they wanted the school to be “a place of dreams,” from which its graduates would go on to achieve great things.

  Essexvale, now Esigodini, was the nearest town, about ten miles away. Calling it a town was too generous. There was a gas station and a store that doubled as a pub. The countryside was the arid Matabeleland bush. The Essexvale estate was where Frederick Courteney Selous lived prior to the Second Matabele War, and where he returned in its aftermath.

  When I was at Falcon, the classrooms, dormitories, and administrative offices were still the old mine buildings. The school houses were Tredgold, Hervey, Oates, and Founders—named for Rhodesia’s early explorers and leaders. Tredgold, my house, was named after Sir Robert Tredgold, chief justice of Southern Rhodesia. While I was there, a fifth house was added—George Grey, a Southern Rhodesia pioneer who was killed by a lion.

  Ten miles of rough dirt road led to the school from Essexvale. Inside the cattle gate at the main entrance, the road was lined with jacaranda trees that produced beautiful mauve flowers in the spring. These lingered through early summer. Then the flowers fell to the ground as summer progressed, carpeting the roads in blue. We had lush grass fields for rugby and cricket that were unusual in Rhodesia. They were irrigated with water from the flooded mine. The old slag heaps and open mine shafts were strictly out of bounds, though protected only slightly by straggly and rusted barbed-wire fencing. Naturally, we routinely explored these off-limits areas and were beaten for it when we got caught. Because Falcon was out in the true African bush, accidents happened more frequently than at Whitestone. One of the most common injuries was snakebite.

  The school badge was a falcon with outstretched wings, and the school motto, Sic Itur Ad Astra, came from Virgil’s Aeneid. It translates to “Thus you shall go to the stars.” I believe Virgil meant, “In this way you become immortal.” Falcon represented the remnants of colonial Southern Rhodesia. We wore blue blazers and turn of the century–style straw boaters on Sundays. On weekdays our uniform consisted of khaki shirts and shorts, with long socks and brown shoes or leather sandals. We dressed for dinner in “number ones,” meaning long gray flannel trousers, white shirts, ties, blazers, and polished black shoes. Once a month, on a Sunday, we were given an exeat, Latin for “he may go out.” The pass allowed us to leave the school grounds for a day. Since Chris and I lived locally, unlike most of the other schoolboys, we could go home and see our parents, though we had to be back at the school before nightfall. This was a big improvement over the long confinements at Whitestone.

  We cleaned and polished the floors of the long dormitories and made our beds diligently. Morning and evening inspection was carried out by prefects—upperclassmen who had considerable authority over us. Prefects could administer beatings to younger boys, and there was no appeal if one took a disliking to you. One time when my brother, Chris, was a prefect, he ordered a friend of mine to cut the grass in front of Tredgold with a pair of nail clippers.

  On Sundays, inspections were done by the housemaster. At inspection time, we stood at attention at the foot of our beds. Shirts and trousers were precisely folded on the small locker that separated one bed from another and held all our worldly goods. Our housemaster was a tough and burly, growling Afrikaner named Van Wyke. We called him Twikkie, or Twik. Twik said little. He taught physics and mathematics.

  I had not been at Falcon long when, one evening, as we were standing at attention in the dorm, a loud boom reverberated across the campus. The windows rattled, and a bright flash lit up the night. The explosion had come from one of the nearby buildings. A sixteen-year-old boy named Dawson had been working on a homemade bomb. He had probably found the explosives discarded somewhere in the old mines. The device was a metal tube that had been between his legs when it went off. Though grievously injured and blinded in the explosion, Dawson remained conscious. The sister from the school clinic rushed to the scene but collapsed in tears when she saw the severity of Dawson’s injuries. Smoking his habitual cigar, Hugh Cole, the headmaster, came down the road from his house to investigate. Dawson had been laid on the floor on a blanket.

  “I know you are here, sir,” Dawson said, “because I can smell your cigar. I’m sorry for the trouble.” He died about thirty minutes later on the back seat of the headmaster’s car, on the way to the hospital in Bulawayo. They cleaned up the blood the next day, repaired a hole in the roof, and picked up one of Dawson’s fingers in the outside flower bed. No one knew why Dawson had been building a bomb, though it was agreed that he was probably just planning to set it off for fun.

  The masters at Falcon were an odd lot, a mix of South African and English. It seemed the English in particular had come to Falcon as some sort of banishment, having failed at home or been judged temperamentally unsuited to teaching in a civilized country. One especially disagreeable man was a Latin teacher named Jenks, who walked with a limp, probably from an old war injury. Jenks was always dressed in a suit with a waistcoat, no matter how hot the weather. He was also a drunk. Most days he arrived at class wobbly. Sweating heavily and reeking of alcohol, Jenks was a tyrant. During one endless recitation, in which each student in turn read a page of The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar and then translated it, he skipped my desk and went on to the next person. I was puzzled, because he had seemed to be looking right at me. When the last person had finished, he returned to me, and said, “Jamieson, who has avoided participation by the skillful use of camouflage, will recite the next page.” Apparently he was so drunk he hadn’t seen me.

  I had my first girlfriend at Falcon. She was the daughter of the school’s carpenter, an Afrikaner named Van Deventer. Her name was Vilma, short for Wilhelmina. She was an attractive girl, with smooth features, blue eyes, golden skin, and long blond hair. She was an object of desire and salacious speculation for every boy in the school. She chose me when we were both fifteen, and we started to see each other. The opportunity to meet was limited. I was invited to her parents’ house for tea on Sundays, and afterward we went for walks together. I suspected that we were followed by a hundred eyes at a distance, so I was always on my best behavior. This was not what she wanted.

  We sent our laundry in a pillowcase to the school’s central laundry every week, and from there it went out to be cleaned. Every boy had a carefully memorized laundry mark, which had to be recorded on a list of what we sent in. Vilma’s mother ran the laundry. She complained to Twik that the laundry lists were sometimes inaccurate. Twik summoned us to a house meeting and warned that a caning was in store for anybody who made a mistake in their laundry list in future. Mrs. Van Deventer would henceforth advise Twik each week as to any errors, though I don’t think she knew this would result in beatings.

  One week I was named. I was surprised, because I was certain my list was correct. I had checked and rechecked it. It turned out that Vilma had wanted to see me in the laundry room, and this was the excuse to get me over there. But Twik was informed and I got caned. I liked Vilma, but not that much. The relationship ended.

  When I was sixteen, my father became ill. At first the only thing I noticed was that he was tired in the evenings and went to bed early, which was most uncharacteristic for him. What I didn’t know what that he had developed leukemia. I think he tried to tell me that he was sick, but I was at a difficult age. He might not have wanted to trouble me, because I had important school examinations coming up. One of the lasting regrets of my life is that that neither he nor my m
other told me that my father was terminally ill. There were so many things that I would have liked to say to him. Especially goodbye.

  Because I was away at school most of the time, I never got to know my father as well as I would have liked. Once he took me on a medical safari into the bush to treat natives in remote villages, and I was in awe of the work he did. My most intense memories, though, were from Chobe, where he taught me how to fish and where to look for animals coming down to the river, smiling at me in his bush hat and smoking contentedly. When he was finally taken to hospital, my mother said I ought to visit him. I did, still unaware that he was dying. I found him in bed in the Bulawayo General Hospital, where my grandfather had died. I think he was in pain and probably medicated. We spoke about inconsequential things for a few minutes, and then he started talking about the staircase by the side of his bed. There was no staircase there. I was alarmed. A nurse came in and told me that I’d better go. I went into the hallway and wept. I never saw him again. He died a few weeks later.

  There was a small, private funeral. We went to the local church at Hillside, and then my brother and I went out to the cemetery for the burial. My mother was too upset to go. A heavy feeling of loss washed over me when my father was in the ground. To this day I cannot attend funerals without anguish. A memorial service was held at Bulawayo’s cathedral, which was filled to overflowing, probably for the first time in its history. Most of the people who came were black, which was unusual then. Many of them approached me after the service and shook my hand, saying what a great man my father was.

  My father’s death occurred just as momentous changes were taking place in Rhodesia. Within a couple of years, Ian Smith and his right-wing cabinet would declare independence from Britain, and Rhodesia would become an outlaw country. British sanctions were invoked and many things became scarce, particularly gas. Liquor was also hard to come by, and when Rhodesia started making an unusually strong alcohol from sugarcane, the joke was that you could buy a bottle and then decide whether to use it as fuel for your car or to get drunk.

  Antigovernment activities, including terrorist raids against innocent white citizens, were on the increase. The government did its best to suppress reports of what was happening, and the newspapers became so heavily censored that their front pages were often half-full of blank spaces. I had been planning to go away to London for medical school for a long time. It had not occurred to me that I might not have a home to come back to. Now it did.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AN UNSPOILED LAND

  Philip Henman was born in England, attended school there, and then went to Argentina to seek his fortune. He worked as a cowboy, or gaucho, on the Argentinean pampas, where he learned Spanish and became an expert horseman and skilled cattle rancher. In time, he moved to Rhodesia, where he bought Frederick Courteney Selous’s ranch at Essexvale. His children were about the same age as me and my siblings, and our families had been friends for years. My sister, Margy, and Philip’s daughter Jill shared a love of horses and spent many hours riding together. His son, David, a year younger than me, was my frequent companion.

  Philip sold Essexvale and was appointed general manager of the Nuanetsi ranch, which, at two and a half million acres, was the largest cattle ranch in the world. You could drive for two days without leaving the property. The ranch had two centers of operation, the main headquarters in the south, and the northern headquarters, which were in a small town called Triangle, a hundred miles from the center of the ranch. Nuanetsi spanned an area from near the southern boundary of Rhodesia to Fort Victoria, halfway up the country. On its eastern flank, the ranch bordered Portuguese East Africa, now Mozambique.

  I loved visiting Nuanetsi when I was growing up. But I was surprised and angry when two years after my father’s death my mother married Philip, who’d lost his wife to brain cancer. I liked Philip, but I thought it was too soon for my mother to remarry and wondered silently how their relationship had come about. Nonetheless, I had a stepfather now, and from then on, when I was not in school, I spent most of my time at Nuanetsi.

  The main house at the southern headquarters in which we lived had a large lawn. Like Serondella, it had a corrugated iron roof. I stayed in one of the guesthouses, which was made of mud mixed with straw and painted white. It had a thatched roof that made it cooler during the day. We took afternoon tea on the lawn under the shade of a tall tree. A semi-tame monkey called Jeremy stole sugar lumps from the tea table when no one was looking.

  Philip insisted I always carry a gun for the walk from my quarters to the main house, as it was possible to come across a dangerous animal at any time. This caution was well founded. One morning a cook, carrying her baby on her back, went to the vegetable garden. It was in a fenced-in area near the river. She swung the gate open and started in without seeing the hippo that had somehow gotten inside the fence and was grazing on the vegetables. Caught off guard, the hippo charged toward the open gate, crashing over the cook and killing both her and the infant.

  Despite being in the middle of the African bush, a hundred miles from the nearest town, we dressed for dinner and enjoyed elegant meals by candlelight. Electricity was supplied by a diesel generator, which only ran at night. The generator had to be started manually but was turned off from my parents’ house by a switch on the wall. They would flicker the lights ten minutes before shutting down the generator to give all the managers time to light candles or kerosene lamps.

  Nuanetsi was a vast paradise of unspoiled land with every kind of wildlife ranging free. People came from all over the world to hunt at Nuanetsi. It wasn’t long before I felt completely at home there. I explored the ranch endlessly, usually on foot with a rifle in hand. One of my favorite places was about three hours’ walk from the main house to a waterhole. A large baobab tree, which had been hollowed out by bushmen, stood beside the water. The room inside was twelve feet wide. I would sometimes stay the night inside the tree, sleeping on the ground next to a fire to keep lions away. In the cold dawn, as the sun climbed above the horizon, elephants, buffalo, zebra, giraffe, and many kinds of antelope emerged from the bush to drink. They stood together without fear, though when lions appeared only the elephants stayed. Knowing that this scene had been repeated every day of every year for many thousands of years warmed me in the morning chill.

  A black man named Joni Fulamani was employed by the ranch to deal with troublesome lions and other animals that preyed on the cattle. Born in 1906, he was locally regarded as the greatest hunter and tracker who ever lived. Joni had worked at Nuanetsi since 1930. He had killed 120 lions, forty leopards, fifty-five hyenas, and hundreds of wild dogs—numbers that today would be appalling but that back then were a fact of life on a cattle ranch. Joni was in his fifties when I first knew him. Although I grew fond of Philip over time, it was Joni who really stood in for my late father when I came to live at Nuanetsi. I wanted to learn everything from him, and whenever I was at the ranch I spent as much time in the bush with Joni as I could.

  Joni was humble, usually dressed only in khaki shorts and sandals. He had a stubbly beard that was going white. Although Africans were not permitted to own guns, an exception was made for Joni, and he was never without his Lee-Enfield .303, an old British service rifle, and ten rounds of ammunition. I thought this gun was an inadequate weapon for dangerous game, though in Joni’s hands that didn’t seem to be the case.

  Joni had scars that were a testament to his life in the bush. One day three lions killed six young purebred bulls, eating their fill before wandering off. Joni tracked the lions to a stand of trees, where they had decided to lie up and sleep off their meals as lions do in the heat of the day. He killed one with a shot to the head that woke up the other two. Joni wounded a second lion that disappeared into the bush. The other ran off.

  Joni followed the wounded lion, a dangerous thing to do, but no hunter willingly leaves a wounded animal to die slowly. Joni picked up the blood trail and moved forward. The lion had flattened itself in a patch of tall
grass, watching. As Joni came near, it seized him by the leg. Falling backward, Joni dropped his gun. He grasped the lion by the neck as it tried to bite his head. Joni nearly passed out as the big cat’s hot, foul breath washed over him. Then Joni’s dog, Setta, ran up and bit the lion on its hind leg. Roaring, the lion whirled on the dog, which jumped back. The lion turned back to Joni, clamping its jaws on his right arm. They struggled once more. Joni thought he was about to die when Setta again bit the lion from behind. The lion let go and hesitated for a moment. Joni managed to grab his rifle and shot it dead.

  Another time Joni came to my stepfather to ask if he would pay for a new pair of sandals. Philip demanded to know why Joni thought that he ought to be responsible for buying his shoes. Joni apologized, explaining that his sandals had been damaged in the line of duty, holding up the mangled footwear. Philip asked him what had happened. Joni told us that he had caught a problem leopard in a steel leg-hold trap. When he approached the animal, it had broken free, tearing off half its leg, and charged him. Joni was knocked down but had been able to shove his right foot into the leopard’s mouth. He used his left foot to fend off the claws that were trying to disembowel him. I had no trouble picturing all of this—Joni on his back parrying a leopard with his feet while coolly squirming close enough to his gun to grab it. I still have that leopard skin with its one short leg. And Joni got his new sandals.