Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (33 page)

     Then, after about eighteen months,
I saw her with a tall dark handsome man. And it wasn’t long before Katie
renounced her vows.

     Of course, it was inevitable. She
had lived, not only in grief, but dread for over a year; but life and courage
come back, and the heart of her nature was love.

     And soon after that, I met my wife,
and within a year we were engaged.

     ‘I am glad,’ said Katie. ‘I am
always glad when something nice happens to people I like.’ She was a good
person.

     My fiancée and I became friendly
with the Marais. Danie was the nicest chap you could wish to meet: a gentle
giant. I played their piano. I had invited Katie to hear mine at one of the
candlelight suppers that never came off. It would have been a disaster.

     I played Spanish music, which
enchanted Danie, who had a romantic streak. Katie had romance as wide as the
plains of Africa, but it did not stretch to Spanish music, which she called
‘jerky’.

     ‘That’s rhythm,’ I protested.

     ‘It’s not,’ insisted Katie. ‘It’s
jerky.’

     She did not want anything ‘heavy’
either, which seemed to rule out the rest of my repertoire.

     Danie attracted me as much as
Katie. Not only was he gentle and sensitive, he had great strength, and I
respected him enormously. He also had a killer instinct, which I never had,
except in desperation, which is not the same thing. One night, at the bar of
the police club, I was telling him about the delights of war surgery - how
after I had fought for hours in the night, saving a life from a gunshot wound,
I felt too exhilarated to go back to bed before I had had a beer and music on
the record-player.

     Danie leaned back and laughed in
his beard. (He was in the police reserve.) ‘It’s funny you should say that,
Warren. What you have been describing is the way I feel after I’ve shot one of
the buggers.’

     Katie and Danie had something
elemental about them. They belonged to Africa and always would. They were made
for each other like the night and the day, like thunder and lightning - but I
hope they did not have too much of that in their marriage.

In 1977, Gareth decided to retire, at an
early age, and devote himself to enjoyment; like Rossini, whom Gareth resembled
in appearance and sanguine temperament, as well as loving his music. He sold
his farm and bought a place outside Marandellas in ten acres of land. He kept
sheep at first: the lean African things, of course, which look like greyhounds
(fat English sheep would have starved), but eventually found it too much
trouble, and settled for fruit-growing and bee-keeping. And I had a standing
invitation to stay. I returned the compliment, and Gareth came one week-end to
my place, but country mouse as he was, preferred to stay at home, so I was able
to visit him every six months with a clear conscience.

     And after the heavy and sometimes
harrowing work of the hospital, there was nothing more relaxing than to arrive
at Gareth’s place, after the 280 mile journey to Marandellas, finding myself
bowling down the Igava road, which dipped to the vast distance of the Highveld,
on whose crest Marandellas stood. And I had hardly put my bag away and washed
my face before I would get it into a pint of Gareth’s home brew - the only beer
I know which shares with the Congo beers the power of a strong bouquet.

     We talked. I talked more than
Gareth, Welshman as he was; unloading myself, as he had a peculiar power to
induce. He would have made a good psychiatrist. The best psychiatrists are made
of such earthy stuff - not the intellectual weirdos of popular imagination.
Though Gareth would talk often about bombing Germany, not in any boastful way,
but because that seemed to be the high point of his rather disappointing life:
not that he ever used such terms, and a more imperturbable and philosophical
chap you would go a long way to find.

     He read much in his lonely days,
mainly non-fiction: war, exploration; though his days were solitary rather than
lonely, as that is how he preferred them. He was a miller of Dee if ever there
was one, though while it would not be true to say he cared for nobody and
nobody cared for him, the numbers were limited and highly selective, at any
rate, on his side. Otherwise, he played golf once a week and enjoyed a drink
afterwards at the club.

     Gareth loved music, especially the
more melodious and romantic kind. He loved opera, but his favourite was
Tchaikovsky. We listened to records much while I was with him. He had a
peculiar aversion to Chopin, which I could not understand. Years later, he
admitted that Chopin had written some good tunes: he had been put off by the
wimpish way Chopin let that Sand woman push him around. A curious foundation
for musical criticism!

     In the daytime (for I would stay
three nights), we went fishing one day and played golf the other. Gareth would
have a nap in the afternoon, while I sat with a book on his veranda, which gave
a lovely view across a
vlei
to a rocky
kopje
, about a mile away.

     Gareth had two dogs, both English
bull terriers. Joker, the elder, was becoming a social menace, as he noisily
fumigated any room he was in; but Gareth loved him more than the pretty young
bitch, Sally. The two dogs ran about the country together. One day, while I was
there, only Sally returned, with a four-inch gash in her leg, which I stitched
up while Gareth held her down. We thought they may have disturbed a leopard or
baboons on the
kopje
. Gareth hated baboons with a black Welsh hatred
which surprised me. Gareth was a good friend and a bad enemy. Joker never came
back. I tried to console Gareth, saying that he had gone down fighting and
would feel no pain. Better, too, than a painful old age; though Gareth would have
spared him that, hard as he would have felt it. And he felt Joker’s loss hard
then, for all my words.

     As for Sally, she soon got tired of
Gareth’s dull company, and took to wandering off to the African township, where
eventually she decided to remain. ‘Just like a woman!’ growled Gareth. ‘Serve
her right! Soon she’ll learn how the Kaffirs treat their women!’

     Gareth never had a servant: did
everything for himself, except for a girl who came in to wash and clean once a
week. He never had another dog after Sally left, male or female. I warned him
about security. Even he left his place sometimes, if only for the club or an
occasional run up to town, to buy brewing requisites chiefly. Then he took to
going away for holidays, and leaving his place alone was a worry. His nearest
neighbour was a hundred yards away. For longer periods he put the dogs into
kennel anyway.

     Indeed, he had some break-ins:
nothing much stolen; there was nothing much to steal, and that more of
sentimental than material value, though the former would weigh more with
Gareth. I advised him that the next best thing (better) to a fierce dog was a
fierce houseboy. Gareth had a
kaya
on his land, so he leased it out for
nothing, except the security of the place, to a strong honest fellow called Armando,
who settled in with his family. What is more, I was surprised to learn that
Armando’s pretty little wife, who certainly did not look the part, was a
witch-doctor. It certainly strengthened Gareth’s household insurance: he never
had another break-in after that!

On his little breaks, Gareth had
discovered the delights of the Troutbeck Inn. This large, comfortable hotel,
all in one storey except for the Lake wing at its feet, lies beside a lake in a
valley of the Eastern Highlands. It has a delightful nine-hole golf course, all
up wooded hill and down dale, with a closing shot across the lake. There is
trout-fishing, tennis, etc, and indoor games like snooker. It also had a piano
in the vast lounge which I played to Gareth and such other guests as cared to
listen. In the foyer is a log fire which is kept burning all the time, winter
and summer, and is always a welcome sight in the fresh and sometimes keen air
of the mountains. For it was not long before Gareth introduced me to the place
and we had the first of many holidays there, starting in the cold of winter.

     Meanwhile, the bush war was
spreading. The white farms between Marandellas and the Highlands were still
free, and remained so till the end, so we had to join no convoy, despite
Jimmy’s enterprise in the matter. The infiltration from Mozambique was
proceeding, north and south, and the guerrillas were beginning the permanent
occupation of the tribal areas, which eventually they would complete throughout
the country. Nevertheless, on the night of July 14, 1978, fireworks were added
by Comrade Mugabe to the other entertainments of the Troutbeck Inn.

     Gareth and I were sitting up in our
beds at 10.15pm, reading our books, in the East wing of the hotel. Everyone
else was in the bar. On our arrival, we had left our weapons at the desk, to be
locked up in the manager’s office, as was the practice in hotels in other parts
of the country. Suddenly we heard what sounded like a fireworks display from
the direction of the golf course, across the lake. Very soon I recognised it
for what it was. I said to Gareth: ‘That’s an attack!’

     First, the irregular crackle of
automatic rifles, then the steady hammering of a machine-gun, then the
boom!,
boom!
of mortars and rockets, solemn and sinister in the night. I knew you
had to get two walls between yourself and a rocket-propelled grenade, which
burned its way through the first one and exploded inside. I told Gareth, we had
better crawl into the corridor.

     We doused the lights and got down
on the floor, or at least, I did. I was about to reach up for the door handle
when, glancing over my shoulder to see if Gareth was following me, I saw his
stout form silhouetted in the window. He had actually opened the curtains, and
said: ‘It doesn’t seem to be coming this way, Warren.’

     Then all the lights in the hotel
went out, as the manager raced for his office and threw the master switch.

     Meanwhile, firing was coming from
the hotel itself. The people in the bar ( who had
not
put their weapons
in the manager’s office) had broken the windows, and were firing back, Wild
West fashion.

     When the shooting started, two
‘bright lights’ had been patrolling the front of the hotel. These were police
reservists, sent to guard hotels and farms and suchlike exposed country places;
so called because they mostly came from the bright lights of the city. They had
crossed beneath the large globe lights of the hotel’s central steps, and were
as exposed as could be. They hit the ground and started firing with their
rifles across the lake. When the lights went, they somehow broke into the Lake
wing, whose french windows stood behind them, and fired back from some cover.

     The guerrillas, a party of about
thirty, were ensconced in a pine wood, across the lake. They had got a mortar
on the tenth tee - a long-range speciality of the course, for stronger players,
crossing the lake - which gives the range to the ninth hole: 350 yards. Add
another fifty and they had the range of the hotel. They got one bomb on the
terrace in front, and another in the car park behind, nicely ‘bracketing’ the
building. Then they got a third one on the roof, which blew a hole in it over
the foyer. The rockets all flew over the hotel and landed harmlessly in the
open ground beyond.

     The people in the bar and the
bright lights aimed for the flashes of the guerrillas’ weapons, including the
mortar. The firing grew too hot for the mortar-handlers, who, after three
shots, decamped. The evidence of all this we saw next day: the flash burn of
the mortar on the tenth tee
(
probably a recoilless rifle
)
, the scores of the bullets within feet of it, the
pine trees gashed with high-velocity bullets, discarded AK magazines, and even
an RPG left in the little wood.

     Meanwhile, Gareth’s bulky form
filled the window. Suddenly he exclaimed: ‘Good God, Warren! Why haven’t we got
our weapons? It will all be over without us!’

     Pausing only to don dressing-gown
and slippers, he shuffled into the corridor, and I followed him likewise. We
got to the foyer and saw the starry sky through the big hole. Someone with a
rifle challenged us. I answered nervously: ‘Dr Durrant and Mr Baker.’ Gareth
wanted to find the manager and retrieve his .303. Like Dr Watson, I had brought
my revolver, which would not have made much contribution, even if I had
Gareth’s enthusiasm, which I did not. I was not afraid, but neither was I
interested in gun-fighting. But the manager was too busy firing himself, and
Gareth and I had to sit in the smoky corridor.

     And in ten minutes, it was all
over. No one was hit on either side. The guerrillas suddenly stopped firing and
made their way back over the hills. Smoke continued to fill the corridors. It
was coming from a mattress, smouldering in the Lake wing. The manager had it
pulled out on to the lawn.

     The lights came on and everyone
gathered in the bar, in the euphoria which follows a happy issue on such
occasions. The bar was riddled with bullets. Most of the bullets had gone high,
as is common in such exchanges. All the windows were shattered from the
activities of both sides. The ceiling was scored all over. The big mirror
behind the bar was shattered, and many of the bottles in front of that. Every
room in the Lake wing was riddled, but the East wing, out of the line of fire,
escaped. Wire furniture on the terrace was smashed by the first mortar bomb.
The second had done little damage in the car park. All this, too, we discovered
next day.