Roses Under the Miombo Trees (11 page)

Now here was my young brother in this strange new environment, telling it as he saw it, discomfited by my shouting at a shop assistant in Desai's, ‘the store that has everything', as we attempted to buy him some canvas shoes: S
he always shouts at niggers and I find it most embarrassing! Because I expect them to be annoyed or offended. They never seem to be and Amanda says that they're so unintelligent that they simply don't take any notice of what you're saying.

My own everyday life being pretty uneventful, I had worried about how to amuse an 18 year old, and Mark bemoaned his inability to find any single (white) girls for him, our friends being all married couples. But Simon and I came from a family of do-ers, so it was easy for him to join Mark and me in our hard work. Soon he was clearing out old sheets of tin and asbestos around the property, helping Mark with one of his ingenious handyman projects, constructing a dog kennel out of found wood planks –
big enough to house a cow,
he wrote. Later he was roofing the hen house, and helping me make marmalade. And nephew Paul was good fun: ‘
Naturally he sleeps most of the day which is a bit boring, but he's usually good for a laugh when he's not; he thrashes around madly, clasps anything that comes to hand, be it uncle's finger or his nappy. When he was left alone this evening after his feed and before bed he howled until someone came to soothe him; when they did come he grinned wildly from ear to ear and flailed in all directions. Just bored, Amanda said! The dog is good sport when there isn't a baby available. Yesterday we frolicked on the lawn (which is like coconut matting) and I tried to teach it to chase a ball – at the moment it takes one look and runs away as fast as it can, but I'm getting on well and it's a good learner.

Paul and Uncle Simon enjoying a quiet read (note beer mug and ash tray)

Winter was now approaching and my letters home are full of thanks for parcels with sleeping bags for Paul and sweaters for us. Despite my complaints, winter was not really cold – a sweater in the evenings probably, a log fire if you had a chimney. More importantly, winter was the dry season and watering became a lengthy task, the lawn of tough kikuyu grass must be sprinkled at dusk, and all my little plants watered constantly. But our garden was not fenced and soon our relatively green oasis meant we were plagued by rabbits. While Simon was with us, we managed to borrow a shotgun from a neighbour and he would sit on the stoep at dusk with it, glass of wine to hand. I looked up ‘how to skin a rabbit' in Mrs Beeton, and failing to find it, followed the instructions in my American
The Joy of Cooking
together with helpful diagram (I should have watched more carefully when our mother dutifully ‘dressed' the furred and feathered game our father brought home from his shooting expeditions, grumbling over the scullery sink. She always said hare was the worst – ‘so bloody' she would shudder.) I remember how diverted Simon and I were by the instructions for preparing squirrel, with its diagrams of gloved hands grasping key parts of the creature, and feet in dainty lace-up ankle boots (the latter for holding down the tail while you pulled the skin off like a jersey). Forty years later, our local butcher tells me that grey squirrel is the ultimate in healthy, environmentally friendly meat – free range, plentiful, lean and organic!

An on-going theme throughout Simon's stay with us was the saga of Daniel's leave and its consequences for the household. I had been unable to stave this off any longer and it was agreed Daniel would have a month's long leave to go home. Simon's reports on this, more vivid than my complaints, start soon after his arrival:

Car washing on the dry lawn

22 May: Daniel is going to Nyasaland at the end of the month to get a wife. He has tried to get one here but they cost money. In Nyasaland they are free. He says he will provide a substitute while he is away and this morning a woman came round to offer her services but, as Mark was away, she couldn' t be engaged yet. She can do everything Daniel does except chop wood and (marvellous) she was once a sort of nurse and can therefore baby-sit
. (By ‘costing money' Simon was referring to the system of lobola, whereby payment is made to the family of the bride, in cash and/or in kind – often head of cattle).

28 May: Daniel has collected an African to take his place – a female called Maria (by us). They have been working together for a few days so that we hope she knows the ropes when Daniel goes on Weds. She has no English and can't cook so A is a bit apprehensive, but if she is trustworthy we can leave Paul with her when we go out.
(Up until then, our only options had been to take him with us in his carrycot, and leave him with friends if we were going to a restaurant or the cinema).

So to my great trepidation life without Daniel began:
7 June: Maria is far from a boon (please apply to [Uncle] Paul and[Aunt] Bets for a description of her setting the breakfast table) and stank like a midden until Daniel told her to wash. Daniel departed in a big grin and as bashful as a maiden in his smart new clothes carrying a suitcase and enough blankets to keep warm all the refugees in Europe. Re Maria, he said ‘If she doesn't work nice, madam, give her good hiding' – which of course is the way these African men treat their women.
(By the same post, I describe the departing Daniel as ‘looking like Dr. Banda in his black homburg'.)

My understanding of Mark's job, of how he spent his working days, was hazy. I don't remember him talking much about it, probably glad to put it behind him. By the time he got home, often to a late supper, he would be greeted by a lonely wife, desperate for his company and secretly envious of, as I saw it, his freedom to be out socialising, whilst with Paul in his cot I had only myself for company. Even if I had been free to go with him ‘on the road', I don't think it would have been considered proper. However, a visiting brother-in-law was another matter, and here is Simon's description of a day out with him:

We started at 7.30 and made for the bush, visiting a sawmill, a huge ranch that must have had about 55 million acres. The [private] drive was about 15 miles long and we hit our heads on the roof about once every 25 yards. The roads, once you get outside of town, are not tarred but are not uncomfortable at 50 miles an hour. We went to several gold mines and went down the shaft of one of them. When, however, the boss said that he thought they were about to begin blasting, you couldn't see Mark for gold-dust! We also visited a native reserve where there are 11 Europeans to 40 – 60,000 Africans – must drive them mad. We returned to Gwelo in the dark and had a well deserved drink at one of its numerous hotels; it's part of Mark's job to sit around in pubs because he can pick up many useful hints about people wanting petrol etc. Once there's a drink or two inside Mark his tongue is loosed; last night I could hardly stop him
.

Simon took to all our friends, whose welcome ensured a non-stop social life during his visit:
They are all charming – unreserved, friendly and open. I like them very much,
he wrote. Perhaps he sensed too what had drawn me to life in Rhodesia from the first – the classlessness of it. We had been brought up in a home where everyone was judged along class lines: their accent, language, behaviour – all were scrutinised against the template so vividly described by the novelist Nancy Mitford as ‘U' or ‘non-U' (U standing for upper class). Whole swathes of vocabulary were ‘out': settee, note paper, toilet, pardon … such words betrayed non-U origins. How ridiculous it seems today, and how gladly I had, as I thought, put it behind me as I mixed with people (white people of course) from very different backgrounds. In fact I had absorbed all that ‘correct' vocabulary, those ‘right' ways of doing things, and was happily oblivious to what my own accent and behaviour told others about me and my background. I had also, without realising it, left one class system behind, only to enter another one even more rigid, based on the colour of your skin.

Most of our Gwelo friends of that time were, I think, immigrants from Britain, either recent or having kept their links with ‘home'. They were also well educated, the husbands professionals or similar – Mike the schools inspector, Jack the teacher, Pete a designer for Bata, Mark's colleagues Doug and Noel, Alex the vet. (The wives of course were all homemakers, most of us with young children). Simon distinguished between our friends and people he called ‘Rhodesians', people with the strong accent very like South African, with its echoes of Afrikaans, but also perhaps – in the context of his letters – less well educated. Here he is, describing our trip to Bulawayo where an old university friend of Mark's was captaining the British Lions in a rugger [sic] match against the Rhodesians:

On Saturday morning the four of us set off in the little Morris for Bulawayo. It's a 2½ hour journey – a hundred miles and deadly boring. We arrived at the Thompsons for a late lunch… then set off, just Mark, Amanda and myself, for Hartsfield. We had very good seats for which Mark paid: the game was quite good if one sided – the Lions won by 35 points to 6. The Rhodesians are a very rough lot – there were 6 injuries on the Lions' side and none on the Rhodesians'; one Lion got his leg broken with a noise that ‘resounded like a rifle shot around the ground' according to the newspaper. While he was being attended to, the coarse Rhodesians who had gathered in numbers to see the game gave an unpleasant display of their rough character, by shouting ‘take him off ', ‘leave him to the vultures', ‘get on with the game' etc. etc. Amanda and I were in a fury over this and got very worked up, and I don't blame us… When we got home we changed and went out to dinner with the T.'s to a good restaurant, I wore my kilt to the surprise and amusement of my friends the Rhodesians; I'm afraid I don't like these Rhodesians; they have horrible short hair cuts and are very hearty and simple. They all look exactly alike and can be recognised a mile off (I shan' t be having my hair cut in this country!).
(Quite what Simon was doing with a kilt I cannot fathom, for we had no Scottish ancestry and it was hardly suitable attire for the sub-tropics.)

An invitation from our landlords, the Cummings's, gave us the chance for a trip to visit their new farm – little more than a smallholding really – near Selukwe, some 30 miles away. I loved these drives away from dull Gwelo into the bush and the countryside here was hilly and green with trees, ‘the horizons unimaginably vast' as Simon wrote. We found them down a very rough track, living quite happily it seemed, in very primitive conditions. Their house was constructed out of a sort of wattle and daub, of mud plastered over a wooden woven frame, with a thatched roof and stamped earth floor. Dividing interior ‘walls' were no more than wooden stakes close together still awaiting some sort of coverage. With no mains services they were, like all country white folk, dependent on a generator and a borehole, their privy a long-drop in the little outhouse, or ‘piccanin kaya' as it was called (p.k. for short). A clearing in the bush contained an enclosure for pigs and chickens and a substantial vegetable plot. I think now that we were all secretly shocked to see white people living so like Africans, but they seemed perfectly content and we marvelled at their determination and resourcefulness. Recently I was enchanted to find, in Doris Lessing's memoir
Going Home
, a lyrical description of her childhood home in Southern Rhodesia, a house that must have been built in much the same way. Lovingly she describes the frame of long tree poles, the mixing of mud from suitable ant heaps till the walls were covered in ‘a sweet smelling mud-skin'; the roof thatched with long pale grass, and last the floor – more ant-worked earth mixed with fresh cow-dung wetted with fresh ox blood and water, stamped down and smoothed. To her the house was a living thing, responsive to the weather's moods, over the years becoming home too to small mammals, lizards and insects, occasionally a snake. Only the white ants posed a threat to the house's structure. As a child Lessing knew the geography of every inch of her bedroom's uneven, patched walls and floor, loved it too much to return years later to find out what had happened to it. We missed all of those possibilities, saw only a primitive and uncomfortable dwelling, driving thankfully back to our brick built, corrugated iron roofed homestead.