Roses Under the Miombo Trees (29 page)

However, said they had to be, with many a last hug amongst a throng of well-wishers on the tarmac at the little airfield. From an early age I had learned not to cry, and boarding school from the age of nine had given me plenty of practice. But now, strapped into our seats in the little plane as it rose from the airfield, I peered through the window at the tiny figures waving and waving, the image blurring with my tears. Then we were into cloud, and the captain was, as usual, warning of turbulence. Hastily I wiped my eyes and turned to attend to the children.

In Lusaka there was a last link with Southern Rhodesia, for it now held our friends John and Shirley Macdonald, last seen in Bulawayo expecting their much longed-for baby. Their Hilary and our two played as Mark and I geared ourselves for the following day's flight, the VC10 that would take me and our children to London's Heathrow Airport, via an evening refuelling stopover in Nairobi. It was another departure I dreaded, this time with a longed-for arrival at its end.

‘We've made it,' I thought, as I heard the VC10's engines change their note, then the pilot's announcement. The children had enjoyed bustling Nairobi airport, and had slept thereafter. Somehow we were now changed into our skeleton winter wardrobe, Caroline, who had only ever worn cotton tops and a nappy, a sleeveless frock for best, very puzzled by leggings, but shoeless. Paul, who usually went barefoot, at least had a pair of wide Bata sandals, with warm corduroys and his only sweater.

I remember clearly how, as we stood at the top of the long flight of steps from the plane, the freezing night air caught in my lungs. It was four a.m., the airport bright with lights and bustle in the darkness. And after we had queued through passport control and customs, after I had found all our luggage and loaded it onto a trolley, after I had settled Caroline into the little hand luggage basket and shown Paul how to help me push the trolley through the last barrier, there, all lined up waving and smiling, was my family. Heaven knows what time they must have got up, to be there to meet us, but here were the dear familiar faces of my Ma and Pa, and of my three brothers Will, Simon and James.

In my parents' new cream Rover I watched the dawn come slowly, first over suburban rows of little brick houses, the roads so neatly edged with kerbstones, and then over an unfamiliar more rural landscape as we left the sprawls of London behind, heading north towards their new Cambridgeshire home. A weak sun appeared, low in a pale sky, as the small neat fields sped past, hedgerows and winter stubble rimed with frost, a church spire appearing among the skeletons of bare trees. Paul stirred and woke, looked sleepily around. ‘Look, Paul,' I said, pointing out of the window, ‘this is England.' ‘England' he repeated experimentally.

At some deep level I recognised the four years that had passed for what they were – vivid years full of growing up and learning, of building a family and making friends, all in the bright, hot sunshine of colonial Africa. As the little plane had risen above Abercorn, I had already sensed that it was a life that could never be recreated elsewhere. But young Amanda was not one for looking back; now I and my two beautiful children were home, where a part of me would always belong, and that for the moment was enough.

POSTSCRIPT

It has been a long journey, this travelling back to such a distinctive period in my life. The writing process has often been an exploration, part archaeology – bringing up to the light old memories, documents, photos – part further education to overcome my own ignorance, part my attempts at interpretation in the light of all of these.

I had remained over the intervening years largely ignorant of both countries' earlier histories and cultures and of how these could explain much of what came after. So the journey has involved a lot of reading, from history to novels to web explorations on Wikipedia and its links to other sources. It has also required many a ‘dig' through layers of memory, often frustrated at its quixotic unreliability. I discovered that, while I could be prompted to recall much more than I had expected, there were also strange ‘black holes'; a face, a name, a voice had inexplicably migrated to some inaccessible part of my brain. Yet other memories – a particular moment, a scene, even an emotional state – are indelibly etched and can be summoned at will. Sometimes my interpretation of what I was working on could change, much like the shifting patterns we see through a kaleidoscope. A quick shake – in my case a session of dead-heading in the garden, a solitary walk, a night's sleep – and presto! a pattern could be transformed, if I was lucky, an insight gained.

Parts of the journey have been hard, the road stony. The appearance of my brother Simon's letters home from Gwelo, an 18-year old's account of our life, forced me to think much harder about my young self, and in particular her attitudes and behaviour to black people. Indeed, early on I thought of the writer of my letters as ‘her', as a different person whom I could observe and write about, but not as my self. After all, I reasoned, I have changed so much over 40 plus years, and it is true that there is much of young Amanda's attitudes and behaviours that I am happy to have left behind. But as we have journeyed together over these years of writing and of exploration, I have come to accept that she is part of me.

Writing my way through those four Rhodesia years, I have also found myself thinking more and more of the people whose lives touched ours, often in significant ways, sad at how we had lost touch with so many. My only constant link to that time has been Jiff and Alan Bowmaker, Jiff and I steadfast correspondents, godmothers to each others' youngest, graduating over the decades from air letters to audio tapes to emails. They left Abercorn later the same year as us, for Salisbury, Alan ultimately to the university there, and where their second son, James, was born. The family fetched up in South Africa where Alan ran Durban's Sea World, retired to a farm near Pietermaritzburg where they and son Philip raise day-old chicks.

But where are others we knew at that time? At my PC, checking for news of Zimbabwe whilst following the tortuous negotiations between President Robert Mugabe's ZANU/PF and challenger Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC, I found myself registering on a website for those nostalgic for the old days of Rhodesia / Zimbabwe. There I scanned lists of names from our old suburb in Gwelo/Gweru, to no avail so far. I had long ago heard that Jack and Joy Crouch, who were so supportive of me as a young mum in Gwelo, had headed for Canada. John and Shirley Macdonald went, I think, to Hong Kong. As my focus headed north to Abercorn, I discovered a website for old Northern Rhodesians and there I registered again, found so many people doing the same, searching for old school mates, work colleagues, even one for his father, with a sad ‘we lost touch'.

One early stroke of luck was news of the existence of the Northern Rhodesian Pensioners Association, through whose kind offices my letters reached four old friends. Gavin and Caroline Barr, whom we saw so much of in Abercorn, are now happily living in Kent after a career that had taken them to various parts of the world. Ian and Barbara Mackinson, last heard of visiting my parents on Boxing Day 1964, are living in Hampshire not far from many of their family. Ian had returned to Zambia after independence to help build its new civil service, and his memoir,
Footsteps in the Dust
, has been invaluable in teaching me more about the British administration of Northern Rhodesia, his career for 15 years until independence. Facebook at last yielded up a connection with Colin Carlin, living with a large family in Bath and enjoying many a ‘When we … ' reminiscence of Abercorn days with his own network. Through him I learned that his parents John and Sheelagh retired to South Africa's Garden Route in the late 1960's, then for health reasons moving to Cape Town. Sheelagh, after John's death there, moved to London to live happily with Colin and his new family. Another chance search with Google unexpectedly and delightfully put me in contact with Sisters Amabilis and Romana, now both living in adjacent convents in Uxbridge, U.K.

But what of Daniel and Inez, of Uelo and Friday, who polished our floors and ironed every garment, minded our children, dug and watered our gardens? I wonder now what might have happened to them? We can at best speculate, and for that we must look at what has happened to the countries they lived in. Daniel and Inez returned to Nyasaland as we left Gwelo, just before the country gained its independence as Malawi in 1964. Under Dr Hastings Banda (he of the homburg hat and little fly whisk) it became a one-party state, his dictatorial regime only ending 30 years later with the first multi-party elections. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, tiny (smaller than England), landlocked, with none of the mineral wealth of its near neighbours Zambia and the Congo, its jewel that other lake at the end of the Great Rift Valley, Lake Malawi, third largest in Africa. Agriculture is the main activity, tobacco its principal export, child tobacco pickers ‘poisoned by nicotine' according to a recent report from international children's organisation Plan. Average life expectancy is around 50 years, poverty, AIDS and HIV having taken a dreadful toll on the health of the people. Given all that, Daniel and Inez, who would be in their 70's now, will be exceptionally old in their community if they are still alive. Still, that is how I like to think of them, senior citizens in their village, their children and grandchildren around them.

What, I wonder, if they had chosen to remain in Southern Rhodesia? Under Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front, elected when we lived in Gwelo, things would have gone on the same for a while, as ‘Smithy' pressed the British Government for independence. Frustrated, he signed the country's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, and with the tacit support of South Africa settled down to survive international sanctions. (When I visited the Bowmakers in Salisbury briefly in 1970, I found a beleaguered but defiant white community, proud of its self-sufficiency amidst empty shop shelves and roads full of elderly cars.) Through the 1970's though, nationalist groups escalated guerrilla attacks into a full-scale ‘Bush War' or ‘Chimurenga', the traumatic effects of which were felt by everyone, black and white, country or city dweller. An estimated 20,000 people died. UDI failed however, not because of sanctions, but the ebbing away of support from Rhodesia's neighbours; by March 1980, after the London Agreement ceasefire, Robert Mugabe had been elected and the country became the independent state of Zimbabwe. (I have a family connection here: my father, then deputy director of the Joint Intelligence Bureau in London, had been tasked with advising Prime Minister Harold Wilson on the likely effectiveness of sanctions as a way of bringing down Smith's regime. He was unequivocal in his advice that it would fail. When it did and Wilson was challenged, he claimed that he was only following his civil servants' advice. Pa, relating this to me some time later, remained incandescent with rage at this dishonesty and never forgave Wilson.)

The Marxist Mugabe was, as Martin Meredith's ‘State of Africa' makes clear, always committed to the creation of a one-party state, as well as being a believer in violence to achieve his ends. Zimbabwe under his increasingly despotic rule has slid tragically from being the ‘bread basket of Southern Africa' to a broken country in need of aid of every kind, violence the currency of government. With the collapse of a previously effective health care system, average life expectancy has plummeted to a level similar to Malawi's, Aids and HIV gaining a grip among a people weakened by starvation. As I write this (in 2009) the attempt at power sharing with Morgan Tsvangirai's opposition Movement for Democratic Change, elected in 2008 but blocked from taking power, has failed to convince the international community that a promised programme of aid should yet be implemented.

Up in Zambia, those two bright cheerful young men Uelo and Friday stayed on in Abercorn, though not I think to work for our successors. They would be a little younger than Daniel now, perhaps 60-something. Maybe they continued to live in the Mbala area, though if they were ambitious for wider opportunities they would have had to travel further afield, as the town became even more isolated from the rest of the country. Perhaps they went down to Mpulungu which has fared better, becoming, so Colin Carlin reports, ‘a thriving trans-African trading centre, with merchants from across the continent flocking to buy and sell local produce, fish and almost everything else. The Liemba still steams down the lake, but has long since ceased to tow that oil barge down from Tanzania, supplies now coming in on Zambia's joint rail link with Tanzania, the TAZARA Railway, built in the 1970's by Chinese from north of Lusaka across to Dar es Salaam on the coast.

As for Abercorn – Mbala – it has been left isolated, with roads degraded, the Great North Road that used to pass Abercorn diverted now to the east, and the little airport taken over by the Zambian Air Force, all scheduled and private flights stopped. Recent photos show Lake Chila much as it was, though with no sign of any sailing dinghies, and according to Colin the Yacht Club is now a ZAF Officers' Mess. The Tanganyika Victoria Memorial Institute, the dear old TVMI, where once we went to the fortnightly film shows and which housed the little library, now ‘makes a handsome Town Hall for the Mayor', writes Colin. Once a key outpost of early British colonial control, the town is a quiet backwater, its Greek and Indian traders and its expat. community long gone.

Sadly, this lack of transport has hindered the development of both agriculture and tourism in the area, despite all that it has to offer. As for the country, its first president Kenneth Kaunda, like his Malawi neighbour, soon recognised the attractions of a one-party state, and remained in power until he was ousted in 1991 in elections vigorously campaigned for by the Movement for Multi-party Democracy. By this time the mineral-rich country with its huge potential wealth had slipped to being one of the world's poorest. Average life expectancy is around 43 years, HIV/Aids the main cause of adult deaths.