No Stopping for Lions (2 page)

Neil's wandering spirit was given wings by his parents' sense of impermanence. They had met and married in Northern Rhodesia and their children were born there, but there was always the notion that they'd be ‘going back home' to the United Kingdom. The family did return once, young Neil and his brother decked out in navy blazers, khaki shorts and little pith helmets, but the trip was short-lived. It may have come to an unsatisfactory conclusion for the family, but it seems to have taught Neil at an early age that moving around was the norm. Later on he could accept long train journeys to and from school and travelling about during short school holidays to stay with the families of friends. He learnt to take border crossings in his stride and to understand the vagaries of African bureaucracies and the mysteries of official paperwork.

It seems he was always travelling. After his family's move to the farm he and his brother, aged six and seven, spent the school week boarding in a hostel in the nearest town, three hours away. Both the school and hostel were run by his aunt, who by this time had left Itembwe and moved with the girls in to town. When life on the farm became unviable the rest of the family moved back to Mufulira in the Copperbelt and there were a couple of years of stability before the boys' secondary education had to be addressed. When Neil was eleven the two boys began their travels to school in South Africa, which involved a twice-yearly train trip of five days and four nights and meant that they were home for only seven weeks of the year. This wasn't unusual; each term saw a mass migration of children from the two Rhodesias heading to and from boarding schools in the provinces of South Africa. These trips were legendary, particularly when the boys were older. Whole trains, sometimes co-ed and sometimes segregated, passing through four countries and picking up unsupervised students who were oblivious to border crossings or authority as they concentrated on one thing: the opposite sex. The kids lurched from boredom to hormone-driven mania, and the days were filled with attempts to satisfy both. Neil tells great stories of hot tubs in the public baths of the Bulawayo station, saving his meal money by eating only watermelon for the whole journey, jumping train at one station to lie in wait for the girls' train to pass through, and developing a skill for hypnotism which made him a hero even after one episode went terribly wrong when his subject, as the race driver Sterling Moss, crashed and ‘burned alive'. This particular time Sterling Moss, who had driven the racetrack of his imagination with great skill many times before to the amusement of his schoolmates, took the scenario into his own hands. Unprompted and out of Neil's control, his car first spun off the track, then crashed and burst into flames. Sterling writhed and screamed that he was burning, and Neil found himself powerless to snap him out of it until the very last minute, when Sterling stiffened then went still. For a second the others feared that he'd ‘died', but to Neil's relief he had fallen asleep and woke up shortly afterwards, apparently none the worse for his near-death experience.

Neil's first real job was back in Northern Rhodesia with the Standard Bank and he was sent to their branch in Kasama, the main town of the country's north. He'd think nothing of hitchhiking 500 miles (800 kilometres) to work, taking a shortcut through the Congo and waiting days for a lift. Sounds heroic now, and today it would be foolhardy bordering on impossible, but those were more halcyon times. Once, having been dropped off near a village, Neil had to shake the hand of every inhabitant after the headman had gathered them in a deferential line. Another time, in the middle of the bush and miles from any white settlement, any other white person in fact, he sat down to an extraordinary three-course meal with the visiting district commissioner, attended by white-gloved servants.

He moved on to work for BP Southern Rhodesia in the country's capital, Salisbury, and while there he was called up to do National Service, a common requirement of many countries at the time. This was followed up by fortnightly territorials, and photos taken on one such training exercise show an almost unrecognisable Neil, as fit as Phar Lap and as pumped up as Rambo. He was transferred to Shell BP in Northern Rhodesia, now independent and called Zambia, but the grass of the outside world was too green to be ignored and the next year he resigned and headed for Europe. After twelve months of backpacking around there, living life to the full, finding new friends and working just long enough to finance the next leg, he thought he should knuckle down. So it was back to Africa and the University of Cape Town to study economics. More fun and games and new friends, and lectures in subjects that turned out to be pertinent and dynamic. Although the regulated life of a student was not for Neil and he threw it in after the first year, his study of African history and African government and law turned an interest into a passion and he left with a life-long interest in Africa's failings and fortunes.

Then it was back to Europe and work in a factory in Münster, ostensibly to learn German — but something odd was happening. Neil was feeling the opposite of restless for the first time. The notion that this life couldn't go on forever was lapping at his feet and he sensed that it was time for commitment, to put a stake in the ground. He had learnt enough to know that newly independent African countries such as Zambia would go through long and hard periods of adjustment in which the quality of life and opportunities for young white males would lessen considerably. South Africa was relatively stable then, but Neil found the regime of apartheid abhorrent and he couldn't see himself living there with any conscience. So instead of returning to Africa he went to Australia via the United States and an old girlfriend.

It was the time of Poseidon, when Australia was experiencing a mining boom and stock exchange floors were a hotbed of soaring shares and instant fortunes. Neil walked into a Sydney stockbroking firm and asked for a job. He chose this particular one because Neil made up part of their name and perhaps because of this cheeky reason he got the job as an operator on the stock exchange floor. He made big money, and good friends on the rugby field, and it didn't take long for him to decide that Australia was where he wanted to be; he became a citizen as soon as he was allowed.

Between then and when I met him three years later Neil had flown to Perth in a light aircraft, been stranded in Fiji during a cyclone and backpacked around New Zealand. The old need to be on the move was always there, but he compromised by staying put at the stock exchange and getting his light aircraft licence so that he could at least go flying on weekends.

In comparison, my upbringing was very pedestrian. I'd grown up in a New South Wales country town, Mittagong, at a time when a trip to Sydney with Mum, dressed in our Sunday best, took two and a half hours in a sooty steam train. We'd emerge at Central Station to the smells and sights of an altogether different, more glamorous life. It was escalators and lifts, and lunch at David Jones' sixth-floor cafeteria. La de da. Our family went away twice a year for school holidays, always in the car except very early on, just within the reaches of my memory, when it was by flying boat from Rose Bay to Grafton. May school holidays were spent on the south coast, Uludulla and later Batehaven, from where we'd go for drives inland in search of cheese and in-breds. In the September holidays we'd drive up to Mum's family home, a property outside Grafton, where we'd ride horses and collect bush lemons and watch proudly as Dad, originally a city boy but an ex–Light Horseman, mustered cattle with the best of them.

These commutes to holiday destinations were a necessity, a means to an end, and sitting just beneath the excitement there was boredom and bickering. Bedding stacked high under our feet in the backseat, our turns at the window being timed to the second, and stupid games that I never won. One successful year Dad bought all the kids a carton of Life Savers each and we spent the hours swapping rolls, making necklaces and rings with them, and having competitions as to who could keep one in their mouth for the longest time without chewing. I remember these trips as endurance tests but they must have cast the seed of adventure too. Back home it was a different matter: the car was our magic carpet, our escape from the mundane.

There were seven of us in the family, and on Sundays we'd all pile into the Ford Customline and go for drives around the district, exploring fresh landscapes and old back roads. Sometimes on a Saturday someone bored would say the magic words
let's go for a drive
and Dad would back her out and we'd be fighting for a window seat before he could say
where to?
Sometimes Mum would stay at home, overcome by the business of having five young children, and we'd bring her back souvenirs of our trip — a big brown feather, a waratah (not picked by us, honest), and once, a dead wombat we'd come across bloated by the side of the road.

Dad was an avid bushwalker and would take us up tracks on Mount Alexandra, behind Mittagong, where he taught us orienteering along with his love of the bush, and of photography too. We all had cameras, and we were very proud of Dad's movie camera, really an 8 millimetre cine camera. The older kids made home movies in which the final scene was always my younger brother on the ground in the last spasms of death. We all had bikes as well, and it was nothing to ride for miles, way out beyond the airstrip, to creep through the old cemetery or to check for zebra finches in my brother's bird traps.

My dolls were dressed in kilts and grass skirts, and my books were picture books of bullfighters in Spain and maharajahs in Rajasthan. I'd save copies of church missionary booklets and stare at the photos of New Guinea natives with albinos among them staring back flateyed and unsmiling. In high school I loved geography but had no time for history. It was the here and now I was interested in, and who all those people out there were and what they were thinking.

I'd been in Sydney for two years and was about to sit my final radiography exams when I met Neil in a pub. He was the blind date for my flat-mate and in my ignorance I thought that his unfamiliar accent was from somewhere in the United Kingdom, like the rugby mates with him. This accent plus his unusual phrasing was a bit of a turn-on to a country girl who'd never been outside her own country, rarely even her own state, and when the flat-mate declined an impromptu visit to Luna Park my hand shot up in a flash. We still have a strip of photos taken that night: three couples crammed into an instant photo booth, me looking startled after the uncharacteristic number of beers I'd downed earlier in an attempt to appear sophisticated and worldly. We fell into bed on the second date, fell in love on a Queensland beach and were married within a year.

Early married life was not quite the bed of roses I'd imagined. Living blissfully together was overshadowed by the banalities of keeping house, sticking to a budget, watching Saturday rugby games with other new and uninterested wives. Before the wedding I'd sit in my car outside Neil's flat under cover of darkness just to catch a glimpse of him; now I saw him every day, all the time. Where's the romance in that? Before, I'd spend ages on my clothes and make-up before seeing him; now he'd come home to find me in hair rollers, with cucumber slices on my eyes. Neil wanted rugby training nights and I wanted flowers. He wanted to travel; I wanted to shop. The one thing we both wanted was each other, it was just that we didn't know how to compromise or to share.

Neil did, however, know what to do about it and twelve months after our honeymoon we both quit our jobs and headed overseas for six months. This first trip outside Australia was a bombshell for me. It was one thing reading about these places, but actually being there, surrounded by strange languages, different customs and unusual smells, not to mention the volumes of people, was the first time in my life that I felt truly intimidated. France was our first stop and after flying into Charles de Gaulle airport we caught the train in to the George V Métro stop. I was ready to come home after my first mumbled, laughable attempts at ‘
Ou est rue Vernet, s'il vous plaît?
' And Neil did laugh. It was his reaction as much as my inadequacy that upset me, and I've hated that part of Paris ever since. My confidence improved as we went along but unfortunately my linguistic skills didn't.

We had many arguments in these first months of our holiday as I came to grips with new environments and experiences. I suspect that I was hard work, becoming despondent when I couldn't make myself understood and sulking when Neil's strict adherence to budget deprived me of a souvenir or a second bottle of Coke. On top of this, being together for 24 hours a day for weeks on end was trying on both sides, and small things like ordering beans and bacon over artichokes and bacon turned into a battle of wills. But gradually, without being conscious of making compromises, we began to consider the other person and settled into a comfortable alliance. Or maybe we just got tired of disagreeing.

By the time we got to Africa four months later I believed myself to be a seasoned traveller. We arrived in Nairobi, took a room at the Norfolk Hotel and ordered something to eat. After some time I answered a knock on the door and, whoa, got the fright of my life as all I could see in the gloom was a plate of sandwiches and a row of white smiling teeth. I was going to have to get used to seeing black faces in dark places.

As soon as we'd landed in Nairobi there had been an immediate though subtle change in Neil. He became less of a cajoler and more of a teacher; he wanted to show me something special of his and share with me its wonders. I thought him confident and in control in Europe, but here he was comfortable, at home with his history, and the new rapport we'd acquired in Europe made it easier for him to convey this to me.

Our funds were getting low so we set off from Nairobi for Arusha in Tanzania using local buses, Neil and I sitting grandly up front in first class. However, not everyone appreciates the concept of user pays, and the Maasai we picked up along the way squashed into the front section with us. I remember it being close and uncomfortable, but that was a small price to pay for the excitement of sharing space with such extraordinary people. One lean, beautiful youth couldn't take his eyes off the inappropriate red and yellow raffia sun hat I'd carried all the way from Sydney, while I constantly stole glances at his smooth chocolate head, stretched earlobes, and rows and rows of bright beaded jewellery. Then, not yet out of Kenya, we were passing through a lightly wooded area when a face appeared over the treetops — a giraffe! In the wild, just hanging around! I could hardly believe it; this was the Africa I'd only ever read about and imagined, and the moment is one that is still with me after all these years.