Roses Under the Miombo Trees (8 page)

once a week with the special cloth, along with

the silver teapot and the candlesticks.

The empty space gapes like a missing tooth

in a smile – eleven soup spoons. She checks

the kitchen drawers, the sink, the garbage bin,

runs to the compost heap and rummages through rotting vegetables. It must be somewhere.

Daniel
– she shows him the empty slot. Their landlady

had said
Keep everything locked, you can't trust them
.

Neighbours talk of marking levels on the Gordon's,

the sugar jar, of keeping tallies of tins. He's looking

startled, shakes his head,
No Madam, I don't know
.

It must be somewhere, Daniel. If you know, you must

tell me
. She waits. He's sweating now, but still

he shakes his head, no. She makes him help her

search each room, the flower beds by the stoep,

the compost heap again, desperate for a glint.

Daniel follows her, hangdog, past rows of mealies,

cabbages, carrots that need thinning, a sprawling

pumpkin patch. She looks at the closed door

of his kaya, back at his sweaty face. His
No, Madam

is urgent now, his eyes reproachful.

She stops. Above them, a turtle dove is purring

in a musasa tree. Absently she tugs at a straggling weed.

We have to keep looking, Daniel, it must turn up
.

Back in the cool of the house she closes the drawer

on the empty slot, clicks the lid down.

CHAPTER 4

‘Quite the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in
my life'

It is January 12th. I'm sitting on our shady stoep in my now well-worn sleeveless blue smock, my new friend Anne Smith beside me – beautiful, calm, reassuring Anne. She is holding her watch, saying ‘Well done – you're down to 6 minutes between contractions now.' Yesterday, on edge from the long wait and the heat, I convinced myself I could feel labour pains, was admitted, but it came to nothing and I was sent ignominiously home. This time feels different and I know it is for real …

Now I am in a small delivery room half-lying back on a high bed, my legs hoisted up in sort of stirrups, feeling tired from pushing, and the doctor – there are a lot of staff around – is saying something about my being too small, about forceps and anaesthetics. And even though I don't want this, I am going …

And that's how, at the last, I missed our son Paul's arrival at 8.20 that evening. I woke to hear my baby's cries but to my intense disappointment ‘
he was whisked away to rest – and after the forceps they thought it would be better for me to see him all tidy.
' So Mark, who had called in to see how things were going (husbands being expected to stay well away from the birth) was first to see him, and then to reassure me of what a fine son we had. Then
‘I was meant to sleep, but didn't manage very well, in spite of drugs etc. It was just that I was so excited to see my son and so thrilled altogether, I kept on waking up and smiling all by myself in the dark, till 5 a.m. when at last they brought him. Of course he was quite the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. I believe that in fact this wasn' t just the maternal eye of love, but that he was fine looking as babies of that age go, since he had had only a short struggle into the world, so wasn't a bit wrinkled or red. Mr. D – made a fine job of the forceps and there is hardly a mark to show … I just spend my time thinking how lovely he is!!

Then began ten days in the mothers' ward, where our every moment was controlled by nurses and we lived in a strict four hourly routine. The high points were when the babies were brought to us, when I was allowed to hold my son, to nurse him, wind him, unwrap his swaddling shawl and admire his perfect fingernails and chubby clenching toes. I lived for those times, but all too soon, in a rustle of starched uniform, nurses would bear our babies away to a separate nursery. ‘
Of course whenever one of the babes in the nursery yells, everyone worries that it's theirs being hungry, but the nurses will never tell!'
We were given lessons in bathing and nappy changing, but great swathes of time had to be passed reading magazines, thankful for visiting times – an hour in the afternoons (for friends) and evenings (mainly fathers). Mark was allowed to go down the corridor and peer at his fine son through a window, then we would gloat at how clever we had been, and he would bring me news of the outside world – of how Daniel was managing at home and of his work trips.

Why did not we mothers rise up, rebel, march down the corridor and claim our babies for ourselves? Well, because of course it was the way things were done then, best for mother and baby, we were assured. We were good girls and did as we were told.

At last the longed-for moment when Paul (still called by his pre-birth nickname of Bert) and I could go home, although unsurprisingly the regime left us, as new parents, ill-prepared for it:
Daniel was on the step to greet us, and terribly thrilled to see the ‘piccanin baas' [little master] – I'm not sure he's so thrilled now with all the nappy-washing! At this minute I even have a fire going with nappies airing on a horse, as it's drizzled all day, the drought broke while I was in the home, and now the garden is green and lush and full of weeds, and there's no sun to dry the washing. – well, can' t have it all ways! Our little Bert is very sweet and it's lovely to have him at home, I wish you could see him, he has such a dear face.

I had known as soon as we got home that I wanted the baby in our bedroom, in his carrycot beside my bed. But here was the problem: my job was home and baby, but Mark's was to go out and sell, to drive across his sales area making contacts, to nurture business relationships and write reports – this last being something he hated and made slow work of. He pointed out that he needed his sleep. So the baby went in his cot in the nursery, which suddenly felt a long way from our room – actually across a wide corridor and a landing that was large enough to serve as our dining room. I was worried I wouldn't be able to hear him cry (which of course I could, perfectly well). When he was asleep I would gaze at him in wonder at his beauty. But when, during the day, he went on crying even when he had been fed and changed, when I had checked his nappy for a pin that might have come open ( Dr. Spock said I could, but that it wouldn't have) – then I felt scared and inadequate. The first time it happened, I can remember suddenly realising, with a sense of near panic, that it was all down to me now – no nurses, no having him whisked away so I could rest. And yet here too was the loveliest thing I had ever set eyes on, our precious baby. It was an emotional roller coaster I had not expected and my anxiety leaps off the pages of those early letters home:

At night he has been very good so far, only shouting at the right time, for food. I regret to say that most of the day he yells. This I think must be wind, but I've tried everything, even a hot water bottle to not much avail. Apparently it will do him no harm to scream, but it harms me considerably, gets on my nerves and I can't rest.

My new women friends rallied round of course, admiring him and assuring me over endless cups of tea that this was normal, but this only temporarily eased my distress at the baby's crying. Did I ever wish my mother was there to help me, not 6000 miles away? No, I am afraid I didn't, fearful that she would have taken over, like the nurses in the home. They had never revealed whether they did any supplementary feeding between the official ones, and so whether my milk supply was adequate. A Child Welfare Sister arrived, said perhaps he is hungry, lent me baby scales for one day to check what he was getting. Of course, despite the fact that on weekly weighings he was gaining an ounce a day, I immediately decided that his crying was indeed hunger. It was all too easy to lose confidence in my own milk production and to start to supplement with a bottle.

Yet in spite of my anxieties, it is the joy I remember most vividly. There were quiet moments, just him and me together in the small hours of the night, as I carefully changed his nappy, wondering at the perfection of him. I would sit feeding him close to the open window, with the smell of warm night air heavy with rain, wind him looking out on the bush-dark night. His head would drop heavy against my shoulder, and I would stroke the soft folds of his nape, breathing in his baby scent to the pulsing shrill of cicadas.

Our attempts to keep my parents briefed on their grandson's first few weeks were dogged with mishaps, reminding me how difficult it was in those days to keep in touch with far-off loved ones. The fastest option was a telegram, which would be phoned through to the recipient, then followed up with the tickertape strips pasted onto a form. So on 13 January they received ‘Baby born last night Amanda and son both well' – any more would have been too expensive. A couple of days later I wrote a long letter which seems, untypically, to have taken over a week to reach them. Meanwhile my parents had sent a congratulatory telegram, but alas, no-one told us that they had also prepaid for our reply, so I responded with another (slow) letter. At last a phone call was organised: you had to book international calls to reserve your ‘slot' on the wires so to speak, then sit and wait for the phone to ring and the operator to announce, ‘You're through caller'. If you were cut off (which happened frequently) you must jiggle the phone hook to attract the operator's attention and get reconnected. It was still a huge thrill though, as I wrote on our first wedding anniversary, 4 February 1962:
Thank you so very much for telephoning, and I'm only sorry they kept cutting us off. Still it was lovely to hear your voices – amazing how they really sound like you at that distance … Oh dear, hearing you makes me wish we could see you all, and especially for you to see Bert, what fun it would be
.

At about this time we discovered the best way to ensure Paul settled for the night: Mark had to give evening film shows on the company's products in two local farming towns and rather than leave me behind, we stowed the carrycot on the back seat and set off along the dirt roads. As the car bucked along the corrugations, silence fell in the back, and I was able to leave him there peacefully asleep – creeping out from time to time to check on him – till we got home.

Soon we were packing for Mark's long leave of five weeks, which meant that we could visit his parents, who lived in Cape Town. I am astonished to read that we had contemplated driving the 1,000 or so miles – a journey of a full three days at least. True, in that part of the world we were all geared to driving huge distances without thinking too much of it, because you had to. But I think it also shows how little we had understood the demands and needs of a new baby. Although I was thankful that bottle feeding had helped to settle the baby and me into a quieter routine, it was hardly ideal for the much longer journey we were about to make. Mercifully we decided we could just afford the air fares, and leaving Bulawayo on a lunchtime plane, and with a two and a half hour stop over in Johannesburg, we arrived tired out at 9.30 that night.

I called Mark's parents Mother and Dad, as he did, for it would have seemed over-familiar for me to use their first names. Dad was a big man, portly now, with a booming bass voice that was to earn him the name of Boompapa with his grandchildren. He had spent his career with an international oil company, first in India, then Hong Kong, where, on a business trip to Manila, both Mark's parents were taken prisoner by the Japanese for four years. Finally, reunited with their two sons, who had been taken to Australia for safety, they were posted to South Africa, based in Cape Town. Mother was a small neat lady (woman doesn't seem a suitable term for her somehow) who was a perfect foil for her husband, and who, I came to learn later, knew how to deploy her strong will with great tact and skill. Throughout her husband's overseas career she had planned for their retirement back in England, in a pretty cottage somewhere. But when it came to it, all his continued business interests were in Cape Town, as were most of their friends, and so they had stayed, keeping their British passports and visiting England once a year. Mother had found her English cottage in the southern suburbs of Cape Town; it was painted black and white, with leaded paned windows, full of Ercol oak and floral chintz. The garden, shaded by oak trees, was tidied and watered by a garden boy, and the blue shadow of Devil's Peak (a shoulder of Table Mountain) was a reminder that this was Cape Town, not the Cotswolds. Indoors was the province of Lily, stout and capable in her royal blue overall and white apron, queen of the kitchen and senior member in Cape Town of her extended family, many of whom came there to work from the Eastern Cape. She lived in a servant's room built in my parents-in-laws' back yard, visiting the family in one of the ‘locations' on her two half days off, one being Sunday after the roast beef and Yorkshire and the apple pie had been cooked, served and cleared away.