Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (37 page)

     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.

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.

     As The Boy in the folk play said,
in my Ghana days: WHEN YOU DO GOOD, YOU DO IT TO YOURSELF.

One day, Lilian told me she had heard
from the new matron on the telephone: ‘A nice young voice,’ she said. And a few
days later, Terry arrived.

     It is a widespread belief among men
that women are materialistic little marital calculating machines from the age
of two, thinking of only one thing: the great prize, Man; while men, the poor
things, are innocent as the wild deer, until the luckless day they are brought
down by the huntress. Bernard Shaw has written a lengthy play on that very
proposition. I don’t know about other men, but my own thoughts were as
marital-materialistic as the proverbial frustrated spinster’s.

     I was due to go on long leave soon
after Terry’s arrival. Quite shamelessly, before she came, I calculated that if
this new matron looked like promising material I would postpone my leave and
concentrate on her.

     I first set eyes on her when Lilian
brought her to the duty room of the European hospital. She was a tall dark
woman of about thirty, no particular looks, and rather shy. Over the next days
and weeks, I studied her. She had intelligence and force of character, but I
did not fall in love with her.

     I did, however, show her
operations: I took her to Jock’s hospital (he was then on leave) - things I had
not done for previous matrons. But I did not postpone my leave.

     When I was in England, I sent her
postcards (which I had never done for matrons before), but while I climbed the
hills of my beloved Lake District or swam in the coves of my beloved Cornwall,
and sojourned in all my other habitual leave places, including the bricks and
mortar of my native (and more mundanely beloved) Merseyside, I did not think
often of Terry.

     When I returned, I thought it would
be polite to call on her at her house. I did not have a gift: there was no
reason why I should, but I took her crumpets and a pot of jam, which my Cornish
cousin had given me.

     Terry gave me tea, but had little
time to linger, as she had a squash date at the club. The scales fell from my
eyes: I saw her beauty, and felt sure then and there that I wanted to marry
her.

     Then I got a shock. She said: ‘I’m
leaving, Warren.’ And she didn’t mean for the club.

     My heart fell. I didn’t ask her
where she was going. I asked her what she was going to do. I hope I don’t have
to explain what I meant by that.

     She said she was going to Salisbury
at the beginning of the new year to study for the matron’s diploma.

     I almost laughed with relief. It
was now October. That gave me three months to do my stuff.

     I gave her supper. We sat on my
balcony with sundowners. A flamenco record was strumming on the record player
downstairs. Terry liked this. She had made a long tour in Europe with a girl
friend, and worked in London for a time. Otherwise, she was a second generation
Rhodesian, brought up on a farm near Gwelo. She had three older sisters, all
married. It was not a big farm, and her parents had never been rich. Terry had
been brought up quite hard. But she had been to a good state boarding school in
Gwelo. She had trained as a nurse and midwife in South Africa.

     We talked about marriage - I mean
in a general way. Terry said: ‘It’s not a tragedy, Warren, if you don’t get
married.’

     This struck me with the force of a
revelation. I hated my celibacy and thought about marriage with the obsession
of the proverbial old maid. Yet here was a vital young woman who seemed to
regard the subject with indifference. What she showed me was a freedom of the
spirit, without which true love is impossible.

     I exploited the limited resources
of the little town. Fishing and country walks had been curtailed for some time
by the war. There was the mine club and the golf club, where I enrolled Terry
in the hackers’ section, where I already belonged. We gave each other supper
and we had music: LPs, or when I played the piano. It was the music that
softened her most. Her eyes would grow liquid, and I thought she was beginning
to love me. After three weeks I had told her I would marry her.

     Long ago, I used to write poetry.
Now I broke a silence of years for Terry.

Softly as a leopard, you come down

The path behind my house,

Your feet pausing, balancing on the ground.

I look, and you are there, where the
path was empty

just before:

Electric as a leopard in the evening.

How often shall I stand on my
balcony, after you have gone,

And look for the leopard presence,
and see the ghost of it:

The electric, silent presence in the
garden?

     Terry’s feelings for me fluctuated,
I could see it, between involuntary tenderness and a fearful withdrawal. For
there was one barrier, or rather gap - the gap of twenty years between us.

     One night, as I left her house, I
took her in my arms and kissed her for the first time. She said, ‘O, Warren,
don’t let’s get too involved!’ I took no notice. As I walked home, I felt again
the joy of youth after years in the desert.

     The time came for her to leave, and
it seemed I made no progress:

I get ready

For your going away.

My soul sinks

In resignation,

Then rouses up

For one last fight for you.

Some memories will be hard to lose:

Your way of looking at me sometimes,
with all your

Sweetness on tip-toe, as if

You half began to love me.

No matter, it is written somewhere,

One way or another,

And will soon enough be read.

     Terry went away. In her first
letter, she said she would never be so foolish as to marry a man so much older
than herself. But other letters sounded different, and in one: ‘Come if you
want’.

     So, of course, I went up to
Salisbury, and stayed in a hotel near the nurses’ home, where she was
convented. I went up as often as I could, at least once a month. But Terry was
wayward: to and fro with me, caught between attraction and fear. We must have
parted and come together half a dozen times.

     Then one day, it seemed final:

In the fair modern city where you
live

Are lodged my last lancing memories
of you:

The purring handsome cars in the
luminous evening,

The wide streets clouded with
blossom-dripping trees;

And the new day opening like a flower
in the city like a flower,

The great sun standing in the
panorama of the sky,

Between the tall flashing buildings
that rode like ships above    

     the trees;

Evenings with you in velvet restaurants,

On terraces above the
streaming-lighted street:

City where you never felt at home