A FOREIGN COUNTRY:

GROWING UP IN RHODESIA

Nigel Suckling

Draft: © January 2021

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I – MUNALI – 5

II – LIVINGSTONE – 43

III – PARALLEL LIVES – 126

IV – LUSAKA – 212

V – GOING HOME – 244

APPENDIX – 268

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FOREWORD

As a child you have no measure of how fast the world around you is changing.

Because you’re developing so quickly yourself, you assume your environment is static and will carry on pretty much the same as you grow into it. This is true for everyone everywhere, naturally. Most old people can, if suitably primed, talk indefinitely about the changes they’ve seen in their lifetimes, even if they’ve never moved from the place where they were born; but some environments change more drastically than others, even without a war to spur things along.

One such was Northern Rhodesia in southern Africa in the 1950s and 60s. As white kids growing up then we had no way of knowing, as our parents almost certainly did, just how fragile and transient our conditions were – how soon and how thoroughly the country would become Zambia, with a completely different social order and set of faces in command. The country of course is still there. In many ways its urban centres now look remarkably unchanged due to relative poverty. The houses we grew up in, many of the streets, landmark buildings and landscapes we were familiar with are still recognizably the same, much more so in fact than in many parts of Europe. What has vanished is the web of British colonial superstructure into which

I and my siblings were born as privileged members, brief gentry on the cusp of a perfectly justified and largely peaceful revolution that was soon to brush us aside.

Then there was Southern Rhodesia, the tale of whose bloody transformation into Zimbabwe is much better known to the world, as is its following and equally bloody decline into chaos and then some semblance of stability under Robert Mugabe and beyond. It plays a supporting role in this account because although my sister, brother and I also lived there for several crucially formative years, we were insulated

3 for much of that time by viewing it from behind the ramparts of boarding school. We caught glimpses and a taste of it which I’ll also describe, but the north was really our home. Also, from Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing onwards, life in Southern

Rhodesia has been much better documented than the north and it seems to me that our way of life there in the closing days of Empire deserves more of a record. Northern

Rhodesia was always a rather neglected backwater. Apart from the Victoria Falls, which it shared anyway with Southern Rhodesia, its copper mines were its main attraction to the wider world. Even then it did not get full credit for this bounty.

During the Second World War it provided most of the copper needed by the Allies but it is unlikely many Americans in particular were aware of this. And the country was only once fleetingly visited by a reigning British monarch.

The approach I’ve adopted is much like that of a travel writer. Everyone’s childhood is equally intense and interesting to themselves and those around them.

There’s no reason why mine should be especially worthy of attention except that it just happened to take place in unique and largely forgotten circumstances that have since dramatically changed. To the best of my ability this is what it felt like growing up in the British Central African Federation in the 1950s and 60s, with some background information thrown in to give perspectives that I was too young to appreciate or be aware of at the time.

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- I -

MUNALI

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My earliest memory is of lying in a baby cot looking up at my dad, who was leaning over, beaming and pulling funny faces. I thought he looked wonderful and wanted to be just like him when I grew up, and I can still picture him now as he appeared then.

You may think it unlikely not only to be able to remember such a moment a lifetime ago, but also for a baby to have such notions. Well, that’s true up to a point because of course how can a baby have any concept of growing up, let alone wanting to be like another human being? But that’s not to say they don’t have feelings, or instincts like those that prompt freshly hatched ducklings to latch onto the first large creature they see and assume it’s their mother. Babies just lack the words and context to express and understand the instincts that drive them.

Probably the reason I still have this memory is that a few years later my brother Chris, my sister Lesley and I were playing a game in which we were comparing our earliest memories. Being the youngest I had the advantage, being that much closer to my beginning; and this cot memory was the earliest I could dredge up

– just a flash but it was as vivid as anything else in my memory then. The feeling of wanting to be like my dad was how I described and fixed the infantile moment in my later memory, the closest approximation I could reach to describe a feeling that at the time had been completely visual and instinctive. And the exercise worked because although not strictly accurate, it still conjures a true vision of the moment.

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To some extent all early memories must be like this – they are memories of memories of what originally happened, refreshed and reinterpreted along the way in the light of later experience, and remembered because in one way or another they were creative episodes in the story of our lives. Otherwise they would simply sink into the undifferentiated compost of experience, which is surely necessary if we are not to be swamped by the weight of the past.

So I’m not claiming any perfect objectivity here. What follows is just some of what I remember of growing up in another time and place with as little personal distortion as possible. Even so, much of it now seems like a dream. For both better and worse it is a lost world I will attempt to describe, with certainties and assumptions that often look as quaint now as those of the Victorians.

Another random early memory which I cannot date is of the first time I connected

‘chicken’ on the plate with the birds that clucked around farms and African

6 compounds and whose sole purpose I’d previously been aware of had been to produce eggs. ‘Is this the same chicken as the cluck-clucks?’ I asked. There was a sudden hush at the dinner table and nothing was actually said, but the realization dawned on me that the answer was ‘yes’. I stared at my plate comparing the remembered deliciousness of chicken meat with my new sudden scruples. Then the moment for vegetarian conversion passed and I tucked in hungrily.

Then (and more relevant perhaps to the point of describing another time and place) there was the party held for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 when

I was three years old. All the children in the neighbourhood came, and more besides who were presumably children of our parents’ friends. Our bikes and trikes were decorated with patriotic red, white and blue crepe paper ribbons and the treats were served up on the red-painted concrete veranda of our white bungalow. On the trestle table were some large china commemorative beakers with an ornamental portrait of the young and beautiful Elizabeth II surrounded by patriotic flags. Holding two of the mugs to my chest I strutted around saying ‘Hey look at me, I’m the Queen of

England’. There’s a little grey cloud attached to the end of that memory so I suspect it ended in disgrace and possibly even a slippering.

Corporal punishment was a standard part of our parents’ repertoire in those early years, at least for my brother Chris and me. For us boys the warning ‘Just wait till Daddy gets home’ was followed by a standard ritual. When he did arrive back from work, teaching just up the hill at Munali School, we were sent off to wait in the bedroom while the crime was explained. In due course our dad joined us we had to tell our side of the story, make our excuses and then bend over the bed to receive his prescribed number of whacks with the slipper. Chris tended to suffer more of this than

I did; partly I think because, as older brother, he was held more responsible for any

7 mischief we got into, which certainly wasn’t always the case and I often took advantage of the prejudice to drop him in it while I got off scot free; but also because he and our father naturally fought a lot anyway. ‘The trouble is they’re too much alike,’ our mother would often sigh as they fell into yet another battle of wills.

‘I’m nothing like him!’ Chris would mutter fiercely if he heard this, but Caryl would just smile knowingly.

I can’t remember what disciplines were applied to Lesley. At one of her birthday parties a couple of years later she went round surreptitiously polishing off the dregs of the adults’ drinks and was rushed off to hospital by car in a drunken stupor.

When she returned a few hours later, pale and contrite and mortified at having missed the end of her own party, I don’t remember any sanctions at all being applied to her.

Nor at any other time really. Perhaps it was a private matter between her and Caryl.

Another memory from around the same time is of the cry ‘Bafwa!’ ringing out in the distance. This was our African cook Dixon rounding us up at bath time in the evening. Sometimes Chris and I hid and pretended not to hear, just to see how long he would keep it up; which must have been very annoying for Dixon but perhaps our pretence was believed because I don’t recall ever getting into trouble over it and

Dixon was enough a part of the family not to hide his feelings much when he was cross with us children.

‘Bafwa! Bafwa!’

I don’t remember ever hearing anger or impatience in our cook’s call. This could just be the convenient gloss of nostalgia but it’s also quite possible he enjoyed the chance for a stroll outside with us to blame for any domestic delays. As I say, he never seemed shy of telling us off when we were naughty at other times, trying to steal snacks from the kitchen and suchlike.

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On the topic of servants, here’s an extract from the Northern Rhodesia Handbook dated 1953, a government advice manual issued to new European arrivals to the colony:

AFRICAN SERVANTS

The average household employs a cook, who also does the washing, a house-boy and a garden-boy. The ability, willingness and the general demeanour of African servants vary considerably, but most of them need constant supervision. The average wage for house-boys is between £2 and £2 10s. a month, for garden-boys slightly less and for cook-boys between £4 and £6 a month. Employers, besides paying wages, are expected to provide their servants with uniforms (khaki and white drill), housing and food. Wages and rations for the three servants mentioned above would therefore amount to about

£10 a month.

African girls are often employed as nurse-girls for young children. It is advisable to send them to be medically examined before engaging them. This service is performed free at Government hospitals or clinics.

The majority of African servants speak at least a little English, but it is in the employer's own interest to learn something of the native tongue. When speaking in

English, the householder should remember to talk slowly, simply and distinctly.

The African servant is normally good-natured and well-mannered. He appreciates good manners in Europeans and should be treated with tolerance and understanding, but not with familiarity. Discipline should be firm but fair.

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By way of comparing lifestyle, from a list in the same handbook of prices Europeans might expect to pay for everyday items, flour was 2s 9d per 5lb bag; beef and pork were about 2s per lb; beer about 1s per pint; imported whisky and gin about £1 per bottle; local brandy and gin about 13s per bottle; a dining room suite from £40 and a medium-sized car about £600-700. Income for a Government employed teacher would have been something like £12-1500 a year, so employing three servants would have cost less than a tenth of our dad’s salary.

However, I’m jumping ahead and out of the context available to me at the time of my earliest recollections, when Dixon was just a large figure of some authority within the family circle. He was a lovely, cheerful man, short and stocky, plump even, and he was to work for us throughout our time in Rhodesia. I say he was part of the family but of course this was only as true as it was of, say, servants and the British gentry in the nineteenth century. He was not completely of the family because he left after our supper to go home to the servants’ village nearby and his wife, who we rarely met. Even when he was with us he largely remained in his own realm, the kitchen. To a child’s eyes this was an awe-inspiring place because mostly we were not

10 allowed in and then at the back of it stood the big cast-iron wood-burning stove that was the living heart of most operations. High drama occasionally erupted when the beast just would not burn, or die for no reason in the middle of some crucially important operation. There were also the irons used for pressing our clothes. These were also solid cast iron devices filled with live charcoal from the stove. We were impressed by a sense of primal forces at work in the kitchen.

Its mystique was only enhanced when, coming home one night we were attacked by a snake lurking by the kitchen doorstep. Why we were going in through the kitchen rather than the front door, God only knows now. Perhaps our parents had lost a key or perhaps it was just the most direct way into the house from the detached garage beside it but whatever, there was great excitement and a bloody hunt for the snake later. We were very careful about steps and snakes after that, which was a common experience in Rhodesia; it was one of their favourite haunts.

Chris remembers of this incident our Granny standing well back fiercely clutching her daschund Trippin to keep it from entering the fray and getting fatally bitten. He also remembers another famous snake incident from Munali when a mamba was spotted in the big lantana hedge dividing our garden from the Martins’ next door.

All the African servants turned out to hunt the beast with rakes and brooms and any other weapon they could find. As they were all terrified of snakes there was a terrific din worthy of the Matabele wars till the wretched (though probably also deadly poisonous) creature was dragged limply from the foliage amid great celebration.

I’m sure the house and its kitchen appeared much less dramatic to our parents.

To them it would just have seemed a modern white bungalow with a corrugated iron roof and a cantankerous wood stove, the house being built to a standard though flexible pattern that was repeated in government houses right across Northern

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Rhodesia, usually with red or green painted concrete floors to defend against white ants. It was the second last in a hockey-stick shaped, unpaved lane of about a dozen identical houses running downhill from Munali School, homes for the teachers at the only African secondary school in the country that took some 250 students to complete sixth form standard. From there a lucky few went on to university in South Africa or

Britain. When independence came in 1964, most if not all of the ruling Cabinet had been educated there and President Kenneth Kaunda was proud to call himself a

Munalian after having taught there for a while. Our dad was on friendly terms with him before and after independence.

Another early memory from Munali is of rushing indoors with news of some terribly exciting discovery outside. Caryl was in the living room having tea with some other mothers.

‘Calm down, Nigel,’ she said. ‘Now say hello nicely to Mrs …’ and so on till

I’d properly and politely greeted each of our guests. ‘Now what was it you wanted to tell us?’

But by then the excitement had been ruined. I burst into tears and ran from the room. For years I harboured a lingering grudge about this incident which seemed to typify the stuffiness and formality of much of our colonial 1950s upbringing. Later however I came to suspect that while to some extent that may have been true, it equally illustrates a persisting tendency of my own to get terribly excited by new discoveries and assume that the rest of the world will automatically share my enthusiasm . . .

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So how did we come to find ourselves in Munali in the early 1950s? Well, our father hailed from Ilford in Essex, on the north-eastern edge of London. Beyond that, he was always rather vague about his family’s origins except to say that he believed they came from Norfolk. If true it means we might well be related to Lord Nelson of

Trafalgar fame because that’s where he grew up. His mother’s maiden name was

Suckling and her brother Maurice was an Admiral who gave young Horatio a leg-up into the Navy; and later as Chairman of the Navy Board sponsored him all the way to glory.

The other famous person to whom we might possibly be related on our dad’s side is the Cavalier poet Sir John Suckling, probably best remembered now for his poem ‘Why so pale and wan fond lover? Prithee why so pale?’ His more famous invention is the card game Cribbage which he developed from an earlier traditional game called Noddy. Sir John seems to have been a charming wastrel, champion bowler and card player (though some said he cheated) and occasional soldier. He died in exile in Paris at the age of 33, either from suicide by poison or drunkenness, after choosing the wrong side in a political dispute at home.

We’ve never really investigated either of these possible connections though.

Our father Norman was an only child, a lower middle class boy made good. His dad had worked for British Rail in administration, played classical cello and even composed a few Bach-like tunes. He had aspirations and Norman had fulfilled them, graduating from Queens College, London, as a geographer and mathematician. He also played the violin but only ever got it out occasionally for Christmas carol singing, any spontaneous joy in the instrument having been burned out by relentless

13 childhood training. Much the same happened with my sister Lesley and piano lessons later. She passed all her exams and often talked of getting a piano later in life but never really found a way of using her skills for simple enjoyment.

Then after Norman graduated the Second World War broke out and, as luck would have it, he was sent to India as a Captain in the army to map out the dangers of a Japanese invasion with the No7 Indian Air Service Company. In the event the invasion never happened so he had a very lucky war. The Japanese got bogged down in Burma next door, to which Norman could easily have been sent and then it might have been a whole different story in which we were never born; but that didn’t happen. Instead he got to visit the Taj Mahal by moonlight (though with only his sergeant for company, as he was fond of joking) and met our mother Caryl Theodora

Littlewood.

She had a much more colourful background, being second generation British

Raj, although her family in fact mostly originated in Ireland. In the nineteenth century when most Irish headed for North America or Australia, her family from around Cork had for some reason decamped en masse for India. Caryl’s mother Muriel (our

Granny) was born there and remembered travelling around India in an ox-cart as a child. By the time she died in England in the 1970s at the age of 93 she had witnessed within her lifespan the arrival in the world of the first cars, planes, radio, television and computers; plus two World Wars and Britain’s transformation from ruling the largest empire the world had ever seen to joining the European Common Market as just another member among equals. Mostly Granny seemed quite phlegmatic about these changes though and was an enthusiastic follower of the TV soap opera

Crossroads which ruled the British airwaves at the time.

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Granny married a half English cousin named Littlewood and had three children – Charles, Joan and Caryl – who were born in Allahabad, the capital of Uttar

Pradesh state in northern India, bordering Nepal. Our grandfather was in government service (something to do with telegraphs I believe) and the family moved around the state, to Meerut near Delhi and Lucknow, the state capital. Then as he had an elderly grandmother in southern India, our grandfather had himself transferred there, to

Bangalore and finally Madras where he retired. He died and was buried in Bangalore in 1941, aged only 58. Along the way the family lived a couple of years in the hill station of Ootacamund (Ooty) in the Nilgiri Hills, the Governor’s summer retreat from the heat of Madras.

Caryl and Norman married in 1945 and my sister Lesley was born the following year, making her the third generation to be born in India. On independence in 1947 our parents moved to England briefly before Norman, having had his appetite for colonial life whetted (not least by the weather) applied to the Colonial Office as a teacher and was sent to Northern Rhodesia. Where he really wanted to go apparently was China, but there were no British postings there so he had to settle for the Empire and Africa. Norman’s first posting was to Mongu where Chris was born. Mongu was the capital of Barotseland, the large western province of Northern Rhodesia, about which more will be said later. Then some time in the next couple of years he took the job at Munali, just outside the capital Lusaka in the centre of the butterfly shaped country.

Caryl’s sister Joan was already in Northern Rhodesia after having had a brief stint as a teacher in Haywards Heath in England. Her first posting was to Mufilira on the Copperbelt in the north, then she became headmistress of the Infants’ School in

Broken Hill (now Kabwe), about 90 miles north of Lusaka along the Great North

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Road. Kabwe is the home of the famous Broken Hill Man discovered in the course of zinc and lead mining in 1921 and long hailed as a missing link in human evolution between humans and Neanderthals, though its importance has since been questioned.

In Broken Hill (named after the Australian mining town) Auntie Joan lived with her mother, our Granny, in a wonderful thatched and rounded house or rondavel that looked rather like a traditional African house. Granny had apparently had auburn hair in her youth but she was already grey by this time and the only remaining trace of it was a touch of red in Caryl’s hair when the light caught it just right, a trait that has emerged in some of her grandchildren.

Chris remembers these trips to Broken Hill as major excursions, not surprisingly perhaps given the poor reliability of cars back then, the state of the roads

16 and lack of telephones if you broke down. We’d set off for Broken Hill as if going on safari, with a porous hessian water bag strapped to the front of the car to provide cool water for us (or the car) should we break down along the way. On the other hand, if you did break down someone would be sure to stop and help because that was something we did for others on occasion. Africans too would materialize out of the bush to lend an enthusiastic hand if you got stuck in a ditch or drift of sand.

The Great North Road lived up to its name to the extent that it was indeed a road that was distinctly more drivable than the dry, thinly forested savannah on either side; it also did head in a northerly direction, but much of the time it was little more than a patchily tarmacked dirt road. Still, that only added to the sense of adventure.

On one of our first visits to Broken Hill we kids were delighted to be handed piles of comics to read while the adults chatted – only to discover they were Christian comics designed to look like normal American ones but with preaching intent. We weren’t long fooled.

Then periodically Auntie Joan and Granny made the reverse trip to visit us at Munali in Joan’s blue and white Hillman car which she had christened Cleo. This was often so that Granny could stay with us for a while, hence her presence during the snake incident by the back door. We kids were very much in awe of Granny. She had about her the air of a regal Victorian matriarch, aloof and rather judgemental though she could soften at times, especially when talking about India. ‘The poor Indians,’ she would say of the turmoil the country had gone through after independence and its recurring famines. ‘They were much better off under the British.’ Caryl on the other hand (when Granny wasn’t around) told us she had been a big fan of Gandhi in the run-up to independence, using the tone of voice people now apply to Nelson Mandela.

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Surprisingly little was ever said about our departed grandfather and there were no photographs of him. All we learned was that he had been an avid follower of cricket and it was clear that Caryl had adored him and looked for traces of him in her sons. Our grandmother kept his prized collection of John Player & Sons cigarette cards featuring recent and current classic cars, which we often admired under her careful supervision. A Singer Sunbeam comes to mind as a model that looked terribly stylish at the time, plus the ultimately cool Riley RM series. She was also a great stamp collector with a wonderfully exotic (to our eyes) collection which we were occasionally allowed to view, with our sticky fingers firmly banished behind our backs. Chris caught the bug from her and eventually she gave him some of her albums.

Caryl also mentioned that her parents had indulged in Spiritualism in India, table-tapping séances and so on. In a similar vein was the tale of how our grandfather had once been on tour of his district and stopped for the night at one of the lodges reserved for touring officials. In the middle of the night he woke to see an apparition in the room – an indistinct glowing form about three feet tall. It seemed to be beckoning, so he rose from bed and followed it through the bungalow to a point where it rose and disappeared into the ceiling. The next day he sent some servants up into the loft and at that same spot they found the bones of a child . . .

Whether it was from her Irish background, Indian upbringing or natural inclination I have no idea, but Caryl tended to encourage fanciful thinking. When

Chris and I heard rumours that Father Christmas was not real, we determinedly stayed awake one Christmas Eve till we caught our dad in his black and white silk dressing gown tiptoeing into the bedroom with our stockings. He was very cross at being discovered and I suppose it was a bit of a shame to lose that happy Christmas illusion

18 but I did carry on for years believing, thanks to our Irish mother, that if you could track the end of a rainbow out in the midst of the African veldt you would find a leprechaun’s pot of gold; and that when we came across a circle of small toadstools around a larger one, elves had obviously been feasting there the night before.

The Bantu Africans do of course have their own traditions of little people, and these are not the very real pygmy Bushmen or San people who inhabited the country before the much larger Bantu came down from the north and drove them eventually into the Kalahari Desert. The Bantu equivalent to the leprechaun is the banasimpiningili, a small, dark breed of people with heads so large that if one should fall over, they have to wait till a friend comes along to help them up. Like Irish sprites they are said to live underground, have magical powers and can be quite malicious if you upset them. They are also very sensitive about their size, so if you should happen to meet one and they ask (as they apparently always do) ‘where did you first see me?’ the safe answer to give is ‘way over there’ and point far into the distance to give the impression they are really quite tall and easily seen from afar. (The Northern

Rhodesia Journal Vol.5 No.6 1964)

The elvish inclination in our family was reinforced by two classic children’s books that kept us enchanted at the time. One was Grimm’s Fairytales illustrated by Arthur

Rackham. The other was an equally vividly illustrated edition of Hans Anderson stories, though as both books were lost in one of our many moves I’ve never learned who the illustrator was. There was also an illustrated edition of Charles Kingsley’s

Water Babies and a downside to all this fanciful belief Caryl encouraged was that for a while I seriously believed that with enough determined practice it would be quite possible to breathe underwater. It must have been a serious mystery to our parents

19 when trying to teach me to swim at the main Lusaka swimming pool why I kept diving to the bottom and almost drowning. Mind you, Caryl herself couldn’t swim.

She blamed it on having been thrown into pools too often as a child by her brother

Charles and thus scared off swimming. With much perseverance she finally learned to swim about twenty years later, after we’d moved to England.

Another unrecognised literary influence at Munali was our much loved black and white cat Pinkle Purr. Only long after she was gone did I realise she was named after a character in a poem by AA Milne, whose Winnie the Pooh stories were also staple bedtime reading at Munali. This early love and appreciation of cats came in useful for a reality check years later. In Livingstone, in keeping with her enthusiasm for things mystical and strange, Caryl encouraged an interest in yoga, telling us about the yogis she used to see regularly in India. I’ve used yoga to keep fit on and off ever since, as did she till the end of her life. This led to shared curiosity about Lobsang

Rampa’s book The Third Eye after it was first published in the late 50s and the whole debate about whether or not it was genuine. I was inclined to believe the author’s claims of having been possessed by the wandering spirit of a Tibetan monk and avidly read all the following books until it came to one which he claimed to have been dictated to him by his cat. I was always a bit gullible about the supernatural but I knew cats quite well and even I couldn’t imagine they thought and behaved in the manner Lobsang Rampa described.

Besides the cat we also had a spaniel called Sherry for a while. She was bequeathed to us by some of our parents’ friends who had left the country, a common practice in Rhodesia. Sherry only lasted a year or so though before succumbing to some sudden and terminal illness.

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Munali School was situated a few miles outside the capital city Lusaka along the

Great East Road. This was named in contrast to the Great North Road which ran through the centre of town, whose main street was called Cairo Road in honour of it being a stage in Cecil Rhodes’ grand Imperial project of a Cape to Cairo highway going up the length of Africa and running purely through the pink British bits on the map. For much of its length it was grand only in the scale of its ambition but Northern

Rhodesians were particularly fond of it because as a backwater of Empire it made us feel part of a greater plan.

The Great East Road was similarly as much a concept as an actual highway and much less grand in conception because its purpose was simply to link Lusaka with Blantyre in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and thus help tie together the three countries of the short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, also known as the

Central African Federation, which lasted from 1953 to 1963. It now lives much more up to its grand title, at least within the bounds of Lusaka whose suburbs have spread out to engulf Munali. From being little more than a dirt track when we lived there, thinly lined by European houses with their own individual electricity generators and scattered African villages, it has developed into a four lane dual carriageway flanked by the teeming suburbs that have grown from those villages.

The Munali buildings were new, the school having been relocated around the time of my birth from Fort Roseberry in Luapula Province in the north east of the country, where it had been founded in 1939. Living at the school was pretty much like growing up in a small village and we were lucky in having several kids our own age nearby, children of the other teachers. Next door in the last house of the unpaved

21 street lived the Kings whose boys Trevor and Colin were about the same age as Chris and me, so we played quite a lot together. Sometimes their dad took us scorpion hunting, presumably to collect specimens for Biology classes at the school. This involved a short drive, or sometimes even just a stroll into the bush with their dog.

This was a trained Rhodesian Ridgeback that would sniff out the scorpions and excitedly start to dig out their burrows. The trick was to yank him away just before the scorpion stung him fatally on the nose. Then Mr King stepped in to coax the scorpion out of its hole and into a jar. This was always terribly exciting. Even though we were warned to keep well back out of danger, there was always the chance of the dog, or even Mr King himself being stung and, we supposed, dying spectacularly on the spot. To our disappointment neither ever happened as he clearly knew what he was doing.

On the other side lived the Martins, with whom we were most friendly and we lived in and out of each others’ houses. Lesley was particularly chummy with their daughter Joanna who was about her age while Chris palled up with their son for similar reasons. I was left rather awkwardly with Penny who was my age but of course her being a girl raised complications. The others once shut us in a cupboard for our first kiss. We did the classic ‘Let’s not but say we did’ and Lesley then immortalised the supposed moment with a drawing showing us snogging out in the garden in broad daylight. Then there were other kids further up the road like the

Lyons, though their daughter Valerie was a fair bit older than us, almost an adult in our eyes. Her sister Rosemary was closer to Lesley’s age though.

Although we lived out on the edge of Lusaka, and hence also on the margins of the bush (or bundu as Rhodesians called it), we felt under no real threat from Africa’s

22 more famous predators. There were no lions or leopards nearby, and no large river to harbour crocodiles and hippos. But we did occasionally hear the call of hyenas in the night, which was quite chilling. Hyenas were cowardly, we were taught, and usually kept well away from humans, but they had powerful jaws and a hungry pack was more than a match for any person. It felt good to be solidly indoors when they howled and laughed in the distance to the background chirruping of cicadas.

We also sometimes felt our vulnerability in the winter dry season when bushfires threatened. These were quite common and often started deliberately to clear land for planting but they could easily get out of hand or start spontaneously. I only remember one occasion when one came seriously close to our house, reaching as far as our back yard. Everyone on hand in Munali turned out to fight the blaze – teachers, pupils and servants – till finally it was beaten and a firebreak cleared in the hard reddish earth between the still smouldering waste and our back gardens. As soon as possible, Colin King and I sneaked out to lay some grass across the firebreak to try and reignite the excitement, but to our disappointment we failed and our rekindled fires were quickly stamped out by the servants.

Mostly though it was Africa’s snakes, scorpions and bugs we learned to watch out for, which could be just as deadly if less dramatic than the large wild animals.

And then there were those that were just mildly unpleasant, like the stink bugs that let off a disgusting smell if you happened to squash one, the hairy caterpillars that could give you a nasty rash and the venomous centipedes that could give you a nasty sting – as opposed to the completely harmless chongololos – millipedes with hard, shiny segmented shells that curled into spirals when threatened. We sometimes had races with them. We’d first tap them to make them curl up into a wheel and then roll them down a slope and see, when they eventually uncurled, which one was first across the

23 finishing line. Of course, they often headed off in a completely different direction when they did uncurl, but it was a bit of entertainment anyway.

The bugs that most come to mind in relation to Munali though are what we called Christmas Beetles, which were not beetles at all and no relation at all to the

Christmas Beetles of Australia. In fact I believe they were a strange kind of spider.

There were two varieties distinguished mainly by size. The larger ones were about a third of an inch long and most resembled little fat, cubic cushions covered in bright crimson velvet and with a row of tiny red legs along each side. They lived underground and would occasionally tumble to the surface like bright gems when flowerbeds were being dug. The other variety was similar but with a much smaller, round body. You occasionally find very similar creatures in English gardens, but I’ve yet to see any of the larger variety here.

Another bug that entertained us on and off throughout our time in Africa was the ant lion – an ugly little creature with enormous pincers. Ant lions dig perfect little conical pits in the sand to catch passing ants which tumble down the slope into them and then are unable to escape because their efforts just trigger miniature landslides that tumble them back to the bottom of the cone. There the ant lion lurks, hidden behind the sandy wall from which it pounces and devours its victim. With pieces of grass we used to pretend to be ants and yank the ant lions out when they pounced.

Then we’d watch them burrow busily backwards under the soil again and begin patiently digging a new trap. What we didn’t learn at the time though was that these creatures are actually the larvae of a kind of dragonfly. Or that they have the curious property of lacking an anus and thus not ever having to go to the toilet until they mature and metamorphose; which knowledge I’m sure would have delighted us at the time.

24

There were also ticks which likewise came in two forms – small flat, hard bodied ones and large fat ones that burst when you tried to pull them off, while their heads stayed embedded and grew a new body. So we believed anyway, I wouldn’t vouch for the truth of it. The main thing to do was not panic but wait till you had tweezers before removing them.

Finally there were Matabele ants famed for their marching columns that were supposedly able to eat any creature that gets in their way, including immobilized humans. Occasionally we came across columns of these in the bush and it was actually easy enough to keep out of their way but there were tales of sleeping or injured humans and much larger animals who had been reduced to bones by them and we were occasionally bitten by stray ones. Very painful, and like ticks they carry on biting even after you break off the body. Apparently rural Africans use them as makeshift stitches to close up cuts.

Being the youngest of our family had its occasional hazards. One day I tagged along with the older kids to explore a waterhole not far off in the bundu. A tangled tree stump was floating in it and by virtue of being the smallest person present I was nominated as test pilot to see if it could carry passengers. So I was lowered onto the stump and it was pushed out into the open water, where it proceeded to sink. The end of the affair is a bit hazy in my memory but plainly I survived without ill effect – bilharzia, snakebite or any of the other misfortunes that could have come of it.

Bilharzia, a vicious disease carried by freshwater snails in stagnant water, was something we were particularly warned about from infancy. Though rarely fatal it can be crippling, especially in children, and is generally reckoned the second most debilitating disease in Africa after malaria. It was a popular belief with us that you

25 could check if bilharzia was present by seeing if the snails’ shells spiralled clockwise or anticlockwise. I’ve no idea if there’s any truth in this and in fact it’s a parasite infesting snails that causes the disease; and anyway it was always hard to remember, as with water spiralling down a plughole, which was the right supposed configuration.

The safest thing was only to swim in swift- running water.

Incidentally, regarding the direction of water going down the plughole in the northern and southern hemispheres, I put the theory to the test once during one of our trips to England and it seemed to be proved – the water had gone one way in Rhodesia and the other way in England. So you can imagine my excitement on the ship journey back to Africa when I filled up a basin as we were right over the Equator and pulled the plug, fully expecting to see the water rush straight down without any swirl. That didn’t happen of course, much to my disappointment. Theoretically the hemisphere you’re in does influence how a basin empties but so minutely that any other factor

(such as how the basin is filled or the shape of the plughole) will completely outweigh this.

I was also once Lesley’s guinea pig for the effects of biting into a raw chilli.

Years later while visiting her in Texas I reminded her of this and she was mortified.

She remembered very well and with some pride tricking a boy up the road into eating a chilli, as justified revenge for some slight or other, but had forgotten all about having first tried it out on her little brother. I bore no resentment though. Although she ruled Chris and me like a queen when we were small, we both adored her and were willing slaves. When we grew too big for her to dominate physically she resorted to tickling and psychology, which were just as effective.

Chris and I occasionally amused ourselves by going to a slope overlooking the

Great East Road and collecting car licence plate numbers. I know, a more pointless

26 occupation is hard to imagine, but for some obscure reason we dutifully filled notebook pages for a while with reams of numbers and jealously checked each other’s lists for repetitions. With hindsight one almost suspects our parents for having instigated the hobby as a means of keeping us out of mischief, although to be fair it probably was a bit more interesting than car number spotting might have been in

England at the time.

There were a lot fewer cars for a start so that most towns had just one or two letters in their registrations. There were also a lot fewer towns so it was immediately obvious whereabouts in the country they came from and roughly how old they were, if that was not clear from the model. For instance the number of the Hillman we acquired on our trip to England in 1953 (replacing an old black Vauxhall with indented chrome strips along the bonnet) was K1850 which meant that it was the eighteen hundred and fiftieth car to be registered in Lusaka, whose population was then about 40,000 (as opposed to around two million today, half the population of the entire country back in the 50s). For most towns the letter was simply the first letter of its name but Livingstone had already bagged the L because it was the country’s capital until 1935. So when Lusaka took over it had to make do with a K that possibly stood for Kabulonga, a large African township on the edge of town. The lettering system was far from perfect but you usually knew exactly where a car was from, or at least the country in the case of exotic visitors from outside. You can see that some of the number-spotting stuck.

Another game we occasionally played on the Great East Road was to leave a brick in a paper bag in the middle of it, on the grounds that some drivers just could not resist swerving a little to pop a paper bag . . .

27

The lord of our little universe at Munali was the headmaster Hedley Roberts, a forceful man with bushy eyebrows who looked rather (I imagined at the time) as God must look, though without the beard and flowing locks. Munali students were older for their class than their European counterparts, presumably because competition for the limited number of places meant it took longer to make their grades. Norman often complained that his students were only interested in topics directly relevant to their exams, but as far as we could tell there were plenty of sports and other activities such as plays put on by the students, which we dutifully attended. The Shakespeare mostly went over our heads, though we did try to pay attention because one of the Munali teachers happened to be called Shakespeare and his nickname with our parents was

‘Bill’. The teachers were also keen on amateur dramatics just for entertainment so the school hall was almost as familiar to us teachers’ kids as to the Munali pupils.

We also went to Christmas parties there with a lot of African kids about our own age, presumably the children of the African school staff because I don’t

28 remember there being any black teachers at that time; though there certainly were soon afterwards when, to begin with, black teachers had to live separately from the whites. The first African teacher permitted to live in white accommodation was

Kenneth Kaunda, the future president of the country, during a stint of teaching he did there. Or possibly the children just belonged to the local African troops of cubs and brownies because most of them wore those uniforms for the occasion.

Props from school plays quite often ended up back at our house, such as a giant ink-bottle which we turned into a play house for a while. I can’t remember or imagine what play it was from (The Magic Ink Pot?) but there is one production that does stick in the mind. In it Norman played a wizard complete with pointed, starry hat. At one point in the play he was dragged off to his doom by some invisible offstage force and I was terrified we really would never see him again. Another memorable production was of Annie Get Your Gun which let the teachers all dress up as cowboys, which they liked to do at the slightest excuse anyway, such as barn dances. American culture was enormously popular in the wake of the War. Everything to do with it was revered, even Davy Crocket hats which had a burst of popularity in the 50s. Cap-firing Lone Star toy cowboy pistols were standard boys’ toys for us, as in Britain and America itself in the 50s, though for one of the fancy dress parties we had at Munali I went dressed up as an Indian rather than a cowboy.

Munali School was the backdrop to the first years I remember in Northern Rhodesia, but the first school I actually went to after kindergarten was the Dominican Convent in Lusaka. I had been terribly jealous when Chris joined Lesley there and embarrassed by still going to kindergarten, but although he was two years older than me I only had to wait a year before joining them too.

29

I think this was an accident of birthdays. The Rhodesian school year began in

January and my birthday was right at the beginning of that month, whereas Chris’s was on the first of March so the mathematics of bureaucracy meant that while Lesley was two forms ahead of him at school, I was just one year behind. Apart from the climate and the servants busy in the background there was nothing particularly

African about our school. It could almost as easily have been in Britain; or perhaps

Ireland, seeing how the majority of nuns were Irish, as were the priests we met at church. The pupils and teaching staff were all white and the curriculum only marginally allowed for our being sat in class four or five thousand miles from the heart of Empire.

What was very African was the school run. The tame route was to head into town along the Great East Road and then skirt southwards round the near edge of the city before heading out again towards the Woodlands area where the convent stood; but more often Caryl drove us the direct cross country route along dirt tracks through the African villages of Kalingalinga and Pemba where our passage was greeted by

African kids yelling, waving and running alongside the dark blue Hillman Minx, often propelling their toy cars. These were wonderful constructions, home-made from wire and any other scrap material that came to hand and they were not just models but could be driven from a standing (or running) position by means of a steering-wheel whose wire column was several feet long. Sadly, although we admired these artefacts, it never occurred to us to try and make our own because it was something only

African kids did; as was happily running around in rags, which we took for granted that they did not mind. It would be nice to report that we felt some pangs of guilt at our relative good fortune, dressed as we were as neatly as any British school kids; but

I’m afraid not. The closest we came to it was occasionally wondering why the African

30 kids seemed so happy in their rags or often no clothes at all, and we supposed they were just used to it.

Another behaviour we observed with fond interest, but no intention of copying, was the African way of greeting old friends. It was a wonderfully affectionate ritual – first they would clap their hands softly together, bobbing their heads slightly like the Japanese before shaking hands or hugging. A further African gesture we often saw was the flicking of the forefingers of one hand when anyone has made some particularly witty remark. Curiously this tic has crept into the American mainstream through cool black actors in movies; and from there it has spread, like the

‘high five’ across the Atlantic to young Britons emulating black gang culture. A strange migration of custom due to slavery and the astonishing persistence of some human mannerisms.

The thrill of finally going to ‘big school’ myself did not last long, possibly due to the style of my first teacher Sister Theresa, who was a little dried up prune of a nun with a brisk, unfriendly manner. Things improved when she was replaced in due course by another who was her polar opposite – a large, jolly, matronly nun who seemed to have genuine interest in the children she taught, though sadly I cannot now remember her name.

Chris and I got into fairly spectacular trouble one afternoon at the convent when we bunked off with a couple of other boys and went to explore the school dump where we found some planks and old tins of paint with which we made a wonderful mess. I’m guessing that the dump was the debris of building work that was going on at the time. We set about a war game, building trenches and hideouts amidst the rubbish. It was from these defences that we spied on Caryl and some nuns when they

31 came looking for us. They had no chance as we were much too well dug in.

Eventually we got hungry and gave ourselves up in the hope of getting some tea.

What we did get was no tea and a beating, with Chris as ever being blamed for having led me astray. The adventure was almost worth it though because at least it stuck in the memory.

After dropping us off at school, Caryl would go to work at the Public Works

Department or PWD in the centre of town where she was a secretary. We took it for

32 granted that she worked and only later realized that many colonial wives didn’t. What they did all day I can’t imagine as they had servants to do all the housework.

Presumably they spent their time planning social engagements.

Among our parents’ particular friends were the Wilsons. They were slightly older and their sons were almost grown-ups in our eyes. I would guess that Mrs

Wilson had acted as a kind of mentor to Caryl in settling into Lusaka social life beyond Munali because, picking up the mood from her, we kids regarded Mrs Wilson with a degree of awe; not quite as much as with Granny but she was definitely more than just another of our parents’ friends. They also had a rather grand English style house in the city that was full of fascinating curios and antiques which we gazed on in wonder when we went for tea, a very polite affair during which we kids were expected to be mostly seen and not heard, though in a kindly enough way. This was one lingering impression from growing up in the colonies – that older people were much more confident and treated with far more respect than back in Britain, while children were expected to be much more deferential and keep their opinions to themselves. It was one of the first contrasts I noticed when we later moved to

England. The youth rebellions of America and Europe, as with clothes fashions, took a decade or so to percolate out to the colonies.

One treasure at the Wilson’s that I found particularly fascinating was an ornate

Chinese Chequers board set into a table top and played with exotic (to a marble- collecting boy’s eyes) marbles. At the time I assumed the game was as genuinely

Oriental as the ivory Mah-jong set our parents had brought from India, and this added to its allure. Years later I was rather disappointed to learn that it was actually a

European invention later given a spurious origin by some canny American games publisher. Occasionally we were allowed a closely supervised game of Chinese

33

Chequers but more commonly we were released after tea into the garden to play while the adults talked. Our favourite game was based on Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree stories. These involve a magical tree which is inhabited by pixies and other strange beings that can transport the protagonists to all kinds of fantastic and often scary worlds; but to get home they have to return to the tree before it moves on, which always involved some last minute drama. Well, after picking a suitable tree in the garden that was our most common game, mostly invented and arbitrated by Lesley, who somehow managed never to get stranded in a strange world herself while Chris and I usually had to scramble furiously to get on board in time.

I was reminded of this game a few years later when Norman, after some tour in the bush, mentioned that the Africans had a curious tradition of certain spirit- inhabited trees being held sacred. No-one could harm the trees and fugitives who managed to reach one could claim sanctuary, much like sanctuary seekers at European cathedrals in the Middle Ages. Chris also has vivid memories of our game and weaned his own son on the Blyton stories that prompted it; while his teacher wife was renowned for the spirited renditions of them she gave her young classes in London.

In the absence of TV or even much family oriented radio, card games like whist and board games like Monopoly and Cluedo were regular evening entertainments. Mah- jong was a particular favourite, not least because of our parents’ wonderful hand- carved ivory set. This had no Roman numerals which meant that for one suit we had to learn Chinese numerals plus the meaning of the characters on the wild tiles – the

Mah-jong equivalent of Jokers in a card pack though there are a lot more of them.

Besides the tactile novelty of Mah Jong tiles and the pleasant ritual of ‘building the

Great Wall of China’ at the start of the game, there were wonderfully poetic names for

34 the special hands you can play like ‘Moon Rising from the Bottom of the Sea’. This required winning the game with a particular tile that looks like a full moon. Our parents had also brought from India a Carrom board, a billiards-like game played with flat discs instead of balls on a square board with pockets in the corners. It’s a romantic illusion that in ‘the old days’ before mass entertainment families used to sit around in the evenings having deep and meaningful discussions as in some Chekhov play but I doubt many families anywhere could bear such unrelieved intimacy; games and stories have always helped oil their clockwork.

In Rhodesia the climate also helped relieve family pressures. There were no long dark winter nights to endure being shut in together with the house shuttered against howling blizzards outside. In winter it occasionally got chilly enough to wear a thin jumper during the day and light a wood fire in the living room at night, but that was about it and that was always a fun novelty anyway. For most of the year the evenings were a welcome relief from the blazing heat of the day, enlivened in summer by occasional vast thunderstorms that rocked the sky and shook the landscape. Also the time of sunset varied by only an hour or so from summer to winter, so there were no long dark evenings to contend with. The climate encouraged outdoor sociability – meeting neighbours for Sundowners, which meant watching the sun set from a balcony with a drink in hand while servants got the dinner ready and kids played in the garden; or having a braaivleis, which was the Afrikaans word for barbecue meaning literally ‘roast flesh’, the barbies being mostly home made from oil drums sawn in half and welded onto a frame. Our parents also sometimes visited a country club with swimming pool, tennis courts and the like where they would meet up with friends. Norman was always keen on any energetic sport; Caryl less so though she sometimes played tennis rather genteelly.

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At Munali there were also regular school events – plays, concerts, barn dances and so on; but the greatest social event in our year, as for most people in Lusaka, was the annual Agricultural Show. As the title suggests, it was primarily a commercial event for farmers but as with County Shows in England and elsewhere it was much more than that, it was the town’s great annual celebration of itself. The main thing that mattered to us kids was the Luna Park which visited town at the same time. This was a circus cum funfair with a big wheel, bumper cars and all the rest. It was in the circus around 1956 that I first became aware of rock ’n roll when the clowns performed a skit on Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock in a circus ring decorated as a giant clock face. Norman later bought the song on an EP for us (or possibly for himself as he always had a taste for pop music) and thus warmed our musical taste buds for Elvis Presley and all the other rockers who followed.

For water sports at Lusaka beyond what local swimming pools could offer, one had to go to the Kafue River about thirty miles south. We didn’t go often enough for our parents even to aspire to owning a boat, but they had friends who did and who would take us out for picnics and rides on the river. There was great excitement one year when someone imported from Florida one of their characteristic shallow- bottomed Everglades ‘airboats’ driven by a huge caged propeller at the back, which was perfect for the reed-choked shallows of the Kafue; though I don’t believe the idea ever caught on. Probably their range on the Kafue was too limited for most tastes and they were not much use on the open, swift-flowing stretches of the river where wind and currents probably make them hard to control.

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4

One of the perks of working for the colonial government was that every three years civil servants were given a six month, expenses-paid long leave back Home in Britain.

Home with a capital H was one of those colonial terms that was probably not immediately obvious to visitors, and even caused some confusion among those who used it. Usually the context made it clear though, and even the way people pronounced the word so you could almost hear the capital ‘H’. As in: ‘We’re going

Home on leave next month.’ To insiders it was clear that you were taking the family back to Britain for your triennial semester at the heart of Empire. While saying

‘We’re off home now’ just meant you were going back to where you were currently living. The generous holiday arrangement I’m sure was designed to stop government workers from going too native and perhaps starting to identify more with the ethos of the colony than the wishes of the Colonial Office in London; and I’m also sure it was to a large extent effective. Farmers and other non-government workers who did not have this luxury tended to be much more obviously ‘Rhodesian’ than our family and their circle, and more inclined to ignore the liberalizing pressures that came from

London, which were often dismissed as interference from ‘Poms’ who had no idea of conditions on the ground.

This discouragement from going native extended in our family to constant attention to our accents and reprimands whenever, for example, we said ‘yis’ for

‘yes’, which is how Rhodesians tended to pronounce it; similarly ‘yah’ for the same thing which, like much of our slang, was borrowed from Afrikaans and is presumably related to ‘Ja’ in German or Dutch. Also popular was the Afrikaans term ‘voetsek!’ pronounced ‘footsack’ meaning roughly ‘go away’ but with emphasis. Surprisingly,

37 given the popularity of most things American, our parents were equally discouraging of us adopting US slang and habits. Even saying ‘OK’ was stamped upon, as was eating with just a fork in your right hand even when there was nothing to cut up on the plate, which was apparently a sloppy American custom. Correct table manners were drummed into us at an early age as if there was some danger of suddenly being invited to dinner with the Queen. Naturally as we grew older we paid less and less attention to all this, particularly when we were away at boarding school most of the year in

Southern Rhodesia, but our accents probably did remain milder than that of

Rhodesians in general.

I have only the haziest recollections of our first trip Home, which must have been soon after our Coronation party in 1953 – just an impression of London, vast, sprawling, foggy and grey; the streets in the centre being laced with sparkling overhead wires for the electric trams that were soon to be phased out. This must have been around the time of London’s Great Smog that killed thousands of people and led to the Clean Air Act of the mid-50s that dramatically banished the city’s world famous ‘Pea Soupers’; so we probably experienced some of the last of those great fogs in which you could barely see where you were going even by day.

Also a strong image of a snowed in farmhouse somewhere up north, possibly

Yorkshire, where we stayed; and a general impression of cold, damp greyness broken by flashes of lush green beauty when the winter sun came out. For some reason our parents chose to visit England in the winter and that really was quite exciting for us because of the contrast with Rhodesia where the very occasional slight frost was front page news. Possibly the contrast was half the point, so we could see England at its

38 greatest possible contrast with Rhodesia; although it’s also just as likely that we came then because the six months included the long Rhodesian school summer holiday.

Of other memories it’s impossible now to say which are from that first visit or the one that followed three years later – feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square, being disappointed by Buckingham Palace but totally impressed by Windsor Castle and the

Tower of London with its Crown Jewels; making snowmen, paddling in chilly streams, building sandcastles on the beach while wrapped in duffle coats and scarves, getting blue knees because of the curious British insistence then that boys wear shorts whatever the weather; and the like. With the short trousers I’m guessing that with the relative cost of clothes back then, parents reckoned that boys’ knees were cheaper to mend than long trousers.

I remember some details of our second trip in 1956 much better though, beginning with taking off in a Vickers Viking from Lusaka airport for the three day flight to

England. I immediately made a fool of myself with a question on the children’s quiz handed out by the stewardess to keep us occupied. ‘The propellers of our plane started by spinning clockwise, which way are they spinning now?’ Something like that was the question. I stared long and hard at the prop on our side of the plane and it was pretty obvious to me that it was now spinning the other way, so that’s what I wrote down. The humiliation when my brother Chris got the right answer took several hours to overcome.

Our journey took three days because we stopped off for two nights on the way, first at Nairobi then Cairo. With hindsight it’s obvious why there was tension in

Cairo, with the Suez crisis in the air. In fact it’s surprising we stopped there at all but that’s what we did. All I knew as a six year old was that our parents seemed nervous

39 and hurried us along the streets when we went out to a restaurant for dinner. There was gunfire in the distance and we passed a dead donkey in the street, which most impressed the sense of danger on us kids, though it probably had nothing at all to do with the political unrest.

On arrival in England our parents settled us in with our grandparents Edie and

Syddie in Ilford on the Essex side of London before taking off on a tour of mainland

Europe (or ‘the Continent’ as it was then fashionable to call it) in their new white

Vauxhall Velox. Nana and Gramp lived at 78 Hastings Avenue in Ilford, a 1930s three bedroom, semi-detached, stucco faced house with bay windows and stained glass in the front door panels, similar to hundreds of others in the streets around it.

Their house was snug and cluttered compared to what we were used to, with glass and china ornaments everywhere, the most delicate in glazed cabinets. As Norman was an only child who had long since left home, the sudden presence of three boisterous young children wanting to play with their ornaments must have been a nightmare for them. Chris and I shared a large bed with a bolster down the middle and learned the

British winter rituals of hot water bottles and getting dressed and undressed very quickly by a dust-smelling electric radiator. We learned about the danger of chilblains if you warmed your hands and feet too quickly after playing in a frozen garden and the pain of thawing hands after playing in snow.

Gramp still worked on the railways then so at the end of the day we’d go to meet him at Barkingside station. I’m sure Nana must have taken us there the first few times but I only remember the occasions Lesley, Chris and I went alone, venturing cautiously through the bustling streets like tourists on a very damp and chilly safari.

Once we spied through broken fencing on a gang of youths kicking cans about on a bombsite and Lesley, as our fount of worldly wisdom, told us brothers all about the

40

Teddy boys currently terrorizing London. They sounded scarier than lions but we survived the near encounter unchallenged.

At the weekend Gramp, who was a keen gardener, set us jobs to do around the garden or tidying the shed while he supervised, leaning on a shovel while he contentedly puffed on a cigarette. Later in life after a weak chest had forced him to give up smoking, he said that he didn’t mind too much apart from missing the cigarettes he’d enjoyed while gardening. In letters after we were back in Africa he would say ‘I’m afraid the gnomes have got into the shed again and undone all your tidying up,’ and of course to begin with I completely believed him, having a mental picture of the mischievous creatures creeping out of the bushes at night to undo all our good work.

Our parents’ grand continental tour culminated in a visit to Switzerland from where they returned to regale us with a slideshow of their adventures and souvenirs such as cowbells and a music box in the shape of a Swiss chalet. Then after a round of

pantomimes and shopping in London we

moved to a holiday house called Greenlow

they had rented in Middleton-on-sea near

Bognor Regis in Sussex. This became our

base for trips around England; the

impressions of which have probably now

merged, as I said, with those of our first

visit.

Our travels on this occasion took us to

Cornwall via Stonehenge. This led to my

41 assumption at the Minack outdoor theatre at Land’s End was that it too was some ancient structure, lending the place an exaggerated grandeur, though it was a dramatic enough location in itself. At the theatre we improvised a play in which Caryl was enthroned as the Queen of Sheba, a part she took to perfectly naturally, while we were her minions. We also visited the Little Chapel or Grotto in the Channel Islands,

Fountain Abbey and various other English landmarks that wove together an impressionistic tapestry of Home at the back of our minds. This was reinforced by

Norman’s traditional Christmas gift of a Giles cartoon annual which, after first having been thoroughly perused by him kept us kids just as entertained. Every few years he would have these annuals bound together in hardback and they took pride of place on the bookshelves next to Shakespeare. The politics in the cartoons naturally went right over our heads but the family at the heart of them became almost an imaginary set of relations living in North London, the brilliant cartoons fleshed out by our memories of

England.

For our return journey, presumably because of the Egyptian crisis, we flew back across the Sahara, landing at Aoulef in Algeria and Kano in Nigeria where we were fascinated to see swords and daggers worn openly by the Arabs and on plentiful sale in the markets, though sadly our parents refused us the money to buy any.

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- 2 -

LIVINGSTONE

5

When I was about seven and soon after our long leave in England, the family moved from Lusaka 300 miles south west to Livingstone, home of the famous Victoria Falls which we had visited several times before, but without expecting ever actually to live there. Changing jobs after a long leave was quite normal in the colonial service. As in the armed forces every three year cycle was considered a ‘tour’ after which you could expect to be given something completely different to do. It was probably more unusual that we and most of the other Munali families had stayed in place for two or more of these tours; perhaps it was to establish or maintain continuity in what was still a quite fledgling institution.

So Norman had moved on from school teaching to a more general post in the

Northern Rhodesia Information Department, a broad remit that included producing tourist information, African-language newspapers, radio broadcasts, newsreels and slideshows which were sent out with mobile cinemas touring remote villages around the countryside. Often he made radio broadcasts himself from a small studio seventy miles up the road in Kalomo when a Livingstone correspondent was called for, and sometimes we kids were allowed to sit in at the back of the studio while he made his broadcast. We were terribly impressed. Caryl had also taken a new job at the

Livingstone museum and for some reason (presumably a shortage of government accommodation) it was the museum that provided our first temporary homes. There was a lot of give and take like this between different government departments because

43 the people who ran them all mixed socially and the Information Department was closely involved with the museum anyway.

Our belongings were packed into large wooden crates and sent by rail while we followed in the new Vauxhall with Pinkle Purr in a wicker basket. Most furniture was left behind because it was the custom for government employees to be provided with basic furniture along with their houses wherever they were posted. Much of this furniture, as with the packing cases, was produced by African prisoners being taught useful skills for their release. The drive took five or six hours because although there was little traffic and long intervals between towns, the main road was quite rough in places, often consisting of a single strip of tarmac just wide enough for one vehicle, which had to be half-abandoned when meeting anything coming the other way so you’d pass each other in a cloud of dust, half riding the tarmac and half on the usually corrugated red dirt verge. Sometimes even major roads were completely unpaved, or had two even more slender strips of tar down the middle rather like fat railway tracks.

In the long winter dry season dirt roads became corrugated and it was like driving along an endless washboard. The towns we passed through from Lusaka became a litany we came to know by heart – Kafue, Mazabuka, Monze, Pemba, Choma,

Kalomo, Zimba and then a final long stretch to Livingstone.

Our first view of Livingstone that evening was from a ridge about ten miles to the north, from where we could see the sodium lights of the railway yards. That probably sounds quite bleak but out in Africa which really was, and probably still is, a mostly dark continent at night they did not seem bleak at all. To us the railway lights were beacons of civilization, not just a relief from the endless darkness outside our headlights but they marked the journey’s end. To celebrate our arrival we had dinner at the Excelsior Cafe not far down Mainway, as the town’s main street was called.

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The cafe always held a certain nostalgic glamour from then on, even though we hardly ever ate there again because there were more interesting places such as the

Riverside Restaurant on the Zambezi close to the Falls. Another restaurant we quite regularly visited was in the opposite direction, north of the town out near the airport where our parents had some good friends. Digby the man was called and he was something very senior in running the airport, which made Chris and me smile because of Dan Dare’s sidekick Digby in the Eagle. There was an aviary at this restaurant filled with colourful Zambezi lovebirds which, with hindsight is a bit odd because they were common enough in the wild. Similarly odd was the cage full of monkeys when there were wild baboons and monkeys hanging around trying to steal your dinner. The caged monkeys had a glum, bored air which they occasionally relieved by masturbating at mothers with small children, usually eliciting some shocked exclamations and a rapid covering of children’s eyes.

Our initial house in Livingstone was borrowed from our mother’s new boss Dr. John

Desmond Clark, the acclaimed archaeologist and pioneer in the study of ancient and especially African cultures, who was Curator of the Rhodes Livingstone Museum, as it was then known. Later it became the David Livingstone Memorial Museum because

Cecil Rhodes was not remembered with any great affection in independent Zambia due to the devious way in which he had annexed the country for the British Empire in the first place. David Livingstone on the other hand was remembered fondly because of his genuinely good intentions towards the native people and his eventually successful efforts to suppress the slave trade previously endemic in that part of Africa.

Also, our first President, Kenneth Kaunda, grew up on a Scottish mission in the north

45 of the country where David Livingstone and fellow Scottish missionaries had been particularly influential and so was naturally inclined to honour the explorer’s memory.

People have argued quite plausibly that Livingstone’s explorations helped lay central Africa open for colonization and exploitation by Europeans. He more or less admitted this himself in his writings when he declared that his aim was to introduce the three Cs to the natives – Christianity, Commerce and Civilization – and use these tools to raise them out of their conditions of poverty, endemic warfare and widespread slavery that was not just due to the Portuguese, Arab and other slave traders roaming the interior, but was normal practice anyway between the Bantu tribes. But whatever the ins and outs of it, there is no doubt of Livingstone’s good intentions and the fearless dedication with which he went about his mission. So despite some nationalist misgivings, Kaunda’s patronage saw to it that Livingstone’s name remained attached to the museum and town and it is in fact the only city in Zambia still to have a non

African name; something which is unlikely to change now.

Technically Desmond Clark’s wife Betty was his secretary but in practice she was much more than that. She was his collaborator and illustrator for all his main research and had actually run the museum during his absence in the Second World War while away fighting the Italians in Ethiopia and Somalia, while fitting in some archaeology there on the side. The Clarks were off travelling when we arrived so we got the use of their house for a while in return for looking after their Dalmatian dog Bowker, named after a friend of theirs. Because of their frequent travels this became a permanent arrangement, much to our delight at acquiring a new family member. The Clarks remained much attached to the dog though, and continued to visit him even after our

46 move to England eight years later (though naturally they did also come to see our parents).

While staying at the Clarks’ house Chris, Lesley and I were terribly excited one day by digging up some flint arrowheads among the roots of a tree in the garden.

Thinking we’d made some great archaeological discovery that would impress the distinguished Doctor, we could hardly wait to show them off on his return from travel.

Being one of the world’s leading experts on prehistoric African stone tools, he was sadly not fooled for a moment. They were the wrong type of arrowheads in the wrong place and it turned out they had been planted by the Clark children to try and fool their parents.

The house was a spacious bungalow standing at the top of Falls View road, so named because from there you had a good view downhill of the cloud of spray rising from the Victoria Falls a few miles south. Like most European houses in Rhodesia,

European or American tourists would not have been overly impressed by either its size or grandeur but I suppose it must have seemed a mansion to the African servants who lived in a few bare brick shacks at the end of the garden, much like village huts apart from being square-built instead of round, and having corrugated iron or asbestos roofs. Servants’ homes like this were called kias, pronounced like the greeting hiya.

I’ve no idea of the word’s origin but it meant somewhere between ‘hut’ and ‘house’ while ‘rondavel’ was the term used for round, usually thatched structures like Auntie

Joan’s in Broken Hill that resembled traditional African huts but were built with

European techniques and usually found in tourist spots.

Having servants living so close was a novelty for us kids because in Munali

Dixon and the other servants had all lived some way off in their own village. Several things stand out from this first experience of observing servants off-duty. One,

47 especially with hindsight, was their apparently unforced friendliness towards us three white kids spying on their social life as they sat around a cooking fire in the evenings eating sadza (maize-meal porridge) with a little meat and gravy. The second was the curious game they often played with rows of little holes in the ground and handfuls of pebbles or seeds. It was fast-moving and the logic completely baffled us, especially when the players and spectators suddenly burst into laughter or clapping or snapping their fingers every now and then, presumably because of some particularly clever manoeuvre. Only much later did I learn that this was a variant of the ancient family of mancala games found right across Africa and the Middle East. The third novelty was their habit of casually catching and eating passing bugs attracted to the open cooking fire, which they seemed to relish much like pub snacks in England. Later I got to know some white farmers’ sons who did the same and always rather envied their culinary courage without ever getting brave enough to try it myself.

After the Clarks’ return we lived for a while in the house of the museum’s Keeper of

Prehistory, Ray Inskeep, who also happened to be away. By now our cook Dixon had joined us, installed in the servants’ quarters at the end of our garden with a brand new wife. I don’t remember questioning too much what had become of the old one till one afternoon while cycling down to Scout Cubs I met her outside the Clarks’ house at the top of Falls View, which was on my way.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her, somewhat astonished.

‘Looking for my husband, what else?’ she replied. ‘I was told that this is where he now lives.’

‘We’ve moved,’ I said. ‘Just around the corner along there and up the hill.’

‘Show me, please.’

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‘I can’t, I have to get to Cubs.’ I pointed to my uniform by way of explanation.

I was aware of the uneven importance of our two predicaments considering the trouble she must have gone through to reach Livingstone, but also I did only just have enough time to get to Cubs without being told off for being late yet again and I hadn’t been doing too well there lately, having recently failed my hygiene badge among others. (How do you cut toenails? The perfectly truthful answer I gave, because that’s exactly how I did do it, was ‘Just the same as fingernails.’ Wrong. You apparently should cut them straight across to prevent them getting ingrown. This was complete news to me and as it happens the advice didn’t actually work because, despite religiously following it ever after, I still suffer from impressively ingrown toenails.

Though that may have been due to my taste for winklepicker shoes as a teenager.

Although I felt a bit ashamed at not helping Dixon’s wife more, I stuck to my guns. ‘I’m really sorry but look, it’s very easy. Just go along the road here, take the first right turn, up the hill and it’s the big white house on the right. Mr Inskeep’s house. Ask anyone and they’ll show you. Mr Inskeep’s house.’

She obviously did have no problem finding the place because when I arrived home from Cubs later there was a furious, screaming row going on in the servants’ quarters at the end of the garden. Quite how it was resolved I never learned, but the outcome was that Dixon’s first wife stayed on, at least for a while, as did his new wife in what must have been a very strained ménage a trois.

Incidentally, something I was curiously unaware of at the time, given the Rhodesian hunger for recognition by the world, was that our country was actually the birthplace of the worldwide Scouting movement, Baden-Powell having learned his bush-craft skills from the American tracker Frederick Russell Burnham while taking active part

49 in Cecil Rhodes’ Matabele wars. You’d imagine that our troop leaders would have made much of this when we joined but I only remember learning of it much later.

Until then I’d assumed Baden-Powell had developed his ideas in India or Malaya. Or perhaps I was just not paying attention when we were told about it. I do remember

Baden-Powell’s daughter making a tour of Rhodesian scout troops amid great fanfare and perhaps with hindsight that is why she took the trouble.

One of the other most memorable things about Mr Inskeep’s house, from a kid’s point of view, was the large plywood packing tube we found in the garage, big enough to hold a person. With the aid of some old electrical switches, fuse boxes and other paraphernalia in the garage (plus much imagination of course) Chris and I converted it into a one-man rocket inspired by those in Dan Dare, of which like most middle-class, Eagle reading British boys of the time we were passionate fans. Beano and Dandy were guilty pleasures we could only enjoy at friends’ houses but as it happened, Chris and I consumed the respectable Eagle avidly, as Lesley did her equally respectable Girl comic until either she grew out of it or the magazine folded, which would have been about the same time in 1960. The Eagle kept going longer and one of the compensations of being sent to boarding school later was, at the start of holidays, being able to rip through a whole term’s worth of comics in one go.

The only other memorable incident in relation to Mr Inskeep’s house was an odd little episode which probably only stuck in my mind because Dixon got furious with me about it. I was digging in the patchy, neglected garden at the back of the house one day when my spade smashed a large buried bottle filled with some light, unidentifiable liquid. Dixon happened to be passing and he shouted at me in sudden, inexplicable rage. ‘No! No! No!’ he shouted, followed by a stream of unintelligible

50 invective in some African tongue. Then he shooed me away impatiently and I left him to clear up the mess.

The only explanation I could think of at the time was that it was a bottle of some kind of illicit home brewed alcohol that Dixon had hidden there, because he always was an enthusiastic drinker and frequenter of beer halls. Only long after leaving Africa did I learn about witch bottles and wonder if perhaps this had been one and that was why Dixon had got so angry, or possibly just scared.

Witch bottles are commonly found in Europe buried in the walls or gardens of old houses. They are usually filled with urine and/or blood, along with briars, thorns, needles and other sharp objects, plus a carved name or effigy of its owner. The idea is to fool passing evil spirits or malign spells into thinking the bottle is its owner and trapping the demon or spell inside the bottle with the thorns like some genie in a lamp. Hence the peril of smashing one, because this releases any trapped demons or spells. The practice is not confined to Europe, though. Similar objects are found all around the world, including southern Africa where before the arrival of glass bottles they used horns, gourds and other containers. The substance of the ‘bottle’ matters less than its contents and the motive behind its preparation.

In fact David Livingstone himself mentions something similar in the journal of his discovery of the Victoria Falls: “On the northern side [of Kalai, an island about

25km upstream of the Victoria Falls] I found the kotla [memorial] of the elder Sekote, garnished with numbers of human skulls mounted on poles: a large heap of the crania of hippopotami, the tusks untouched except by time, stood on one side. At a short distance, under some trees, we saw the grave of Sekote, ornamented with seventy large elephants’ tusks planted round it with the points turned inward, and there were thirty more placed over the resting-places of his relatives. These were all decaying from the effects of the

51 sun and weather; but a few, which had enjoyed the shade, were in a pretty good condition. I felt inclined to take a specimen of the tusks of the hippopotami, as they were the largest I had ever seen, but feared that the people would look upon me as a

‘resurrectionist’ if I did, and regard any unfavourable event which might afterward occur as a punishment for the sacrilege. The Batoka believe that Sekote had a pot of medicine buried here, which, when opened, would cause an epidemic in the country. These tyrants acted much on the fears of their people.”

(Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa Ch 26)

In an article on witchcraft in The Northern Rhodesian Journal (Vol 1, No 1, 1950)

W.V. Brelsford, the magazine editor, wrote: “Another case concerned a man sending out his nephew to collect a hair of a child of his enemy. He put the hair in a medicine horn and buried the horn close to the house of his enemy. When the enemy’s child became sick the nephew became frightened and revealed to the headman what his uncle had made him do, and the medicine horn was dug up.”

The Northern Rhodesian Journal ran from 1950 (coincidentally also the year of my birth) till Zambian Independence fourteen years later. It was a high minded periodical partly founded and run by Desmond and Betty Clark whose declared aim in its opening editorial was: “We hope to bring to the general reader glimpses of the past history of this country and to place on record the events that have made recent history; we shall relate the memoirs of men [sic] who have helped to mould the shape of our lives here or of men who have interesting tales to tell; we shall open our columns to those who want to discuss facets of the wealth of animal and plant life of the Territory; we shall write on the vast and variegated native culture that impinges on us at all times; and,

52 in fact, we shall be glad to publish anything of Northern Rhodesian interest that we believe to be of permanent or of literary value.”

Its opening articles were on the nineteenth century slave trade in the country; a personal reminiscence of Lewanika, the Paramount Chief of Barotseland (North-

Western Rhodesia) of whom more will be said later; and an account of David

Livingstone’s death memorial near Lake Bangweulu in the far north of the country by

Desmond Clark. The journal was a familiar presence in our home long before we moved to Livingstone and our parents used to read aloud any stories they thought we might enjoy. Such as one about a party of Europeans who ignored African taboos to explore a prohibited holy mountain; they all mysteriously perished soon afterwards.

Our dad became joint editor of the journal for the last two years of its existence.

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As kids we had no idea of Dr Clark’s international fame, but we were well aware that he was a man of great consequence and master of the museum, which was a large focus of our lives in Livingstone. In a way it took the place of Munali School as the social backdrop of our lives. We did occasionally visit our father’s office on the other side of town but there was not really much of interest to us there and he was usually too busy to give us any attention, if he was even there at all because he spent much time travelling about the country in Land Rovers. His office was an early building with wooden floors that had somehow survived the white ants and other bugs that had turned builders to laying concrete floors. These meant we could slip unnoticed through ventilation hatches into the space between the wooden office floors and the ground beneath, a warren of low-ceilinged cellars where we found some interesting junk and enjoyed hearing our father and his colleagues shuffling obliviously overhead, most of them with a pack of 30 or even 50 cigarettes in the breast pocket of their white office shirts. Norman did this too, always checking he had a full pack of

Peter Stuyvesant in his pocket before leaving for work. Most evenings it would be empty because offering round your cigarettes was a standard courtesy at both business and social gatherings; as it was of course back in Britain then, although Rhodesians probably did it much more because the cigarettes were so relatively cheap. Caryl was never to my knowledge a smoker though when they were younger she had apparently rolled cigarettes for Norman when they were driving; but at social gatherings she would often accept a cigarette and wave it about elegantly just to fend off the constant offers. For a while she even had a long Audrey Hepburn type cigarette holder, which I

54 imagine had the double attraction of keeping the cigarette well away from her face while at the same time providing an elegant tool for conducting conversations.

Desmond Clark was a tall, slim and distinguished looking person with a neat moustache and pointed beard. He was always friendly and courteous but we would not have dreamed of trying to take advantage of his good nature. His wife Betty was much more down to earth in all ways, stocky, approachable and bristling with energy.

They are less famous to the general world than the Leakeys in Kenya but in archaeological circles they were afforded similar respect and did even work with the

Leakeys on occasion. In 1991 the Clarks were the first foreign archaeologists in forty years to be allowed to dig in China and in his 2002 obituary at the University of

California, Berkeley, where he taught for many years after leaving Livingstone,

Desmond Clark was hailed as a ‘monument to the field of archaeology.’

In Livingstone we finally moved into a house of our own at 10 Kingsway, a road named in honour of King George VI’s brief visit in 1947, the first time a reigning

British monarch had visited the town or even, for that matter, the country. This road

(since renamed John Hunt Way after a popular white Livingstone curio dealer who was an enthusiastic supporter of majority rule) ran parallel to and a block uphill from the Mainway so that all the principal attractions of the town – shops, swimming pool and cinema – were within easy strolling distance. The museum was also less than a block away, a brief walk for our mother going to work.

We were always made welcome when visiting Caryl at the museum, often for completely trivial reasons such as to ask for pocket money or display some injury acquired while out adventuring. The other members of staff were equally accommodating and took us on tours of the fascinating workshops behind the scenes.

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Most of the activities there were naturally beyond our comprehension but some we could appreciate, such as the production for sale to tourists of three dimensional plaster of Paris models of the Victoria Falls and the zigzagging sequence of gorges below them, each of which had once been a lip of the waterfall. As you’ve probably gathered by now, we had a very educational upbringing and soon became acquainted with the geology of the Falls and how they had been formed. We even had pointed out to us on a detailed map where the next zig (or zag) in the gorge sequence had already started to form at the western Devil’s Cataract in preparation for when the waterfall would move another step upstream. I don’t think we quite appreciated though how many thousands of years this was likely to take and imagined it was a fairly imminent event.

On one visit to the rock collection at the museum when I expressed an interest in malachite, the green striated mineral from which copper is extracted, the Clarks’ son John made me a lovely polished sample on a grindstone and was then laid up for a couple of weeks from breathing the toxic dust. A visit to the museum’s carpentry shop similarly opened my eyes to the joys of woodwork, the simple, functional beauty of screws, hinges, carpentry tools and planed wood, and the pleasure of fitting them all together to make something useful. I spent many happy hours with the African foreman there who patiently showed me the rudiments of the craft while going about his job. He was not a full time teacher though and most of the first footstools, shelves and so on that I made at home were not particularly useful or easy on the eye.

Disappointed, I somehow acquired a mail order catalogue of Dryad carpentry tools and started pestering Norman to broaden our home tool collection. His response was not very sympathetic. ‘A poor craftsman always blames his tools’ he quipped and mostly resisted my demands for more sophisticated ironmongery; but luckily he was a

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bit of a handyman himself, knocking up folding picnic tables, bookshelves and the

like, so our home tool collection slowly expanded anyway. In return, feeling a bit stung by his accusation, I reined in my demands and tried a bit harder with the tools we had.

Much of our shopping, incidentally, was done by catalogue because of the limited range of shops in Livingstone, especially for Caryl’s sophisticated taste in fashion; to cater for which she not only bought from catalogues but made dresses herself from patterns ordered from London. She always looked like a film star when they went out for the evening.

Chris and I also used to sneak into the museum’s clock tower when the guard was distracted. The tower rooms were used for the storage of wonderfully mysterious scientific equipment like some mad scientist’s laboratory; the whole space presided over by the strong but leisurely ticking of the clock. From the top floor two rows of horizontal slit windows provided panoramic views along Mainway in one direction

57 and downhill along the road to the Falls six miles away in the other, the column of their spray clearly visible on the horizon like a bush fire. Ungratefully, after some of these ventures into the tower, we stopped the clock’s pendulum on the way out. The other annoying trick we sometimes pulled was to stand casually near the red beam that counted visitors into the museum and flick our hands rapidly across it when no- one was looking, leaving the staff to wonder at the sudden but curiously invisible flood of visitors that day.

Apart from mischief like this the most entertaining aspect of the museum for us was probably the music staged regularly in the courtyard. The performers dressed up in traditional African costumes and played similarly traditional instruments – drums particularly, accompanied by wooden xylophones, thumb pianos, whistles and so on. Examples of these instruments were also to be found in the museum galleries along with all the other paraphernalia of pre-colonial life – pots, tribal costumes, shields, bows, spears and even some imitation but completely non-functional

European style rifles. There was also a good collection of startling masks and shaman costumes.

One gallery was naturally devoted to David Livingstone himself with displays in glass cases of his clothing and equipment, brass instruments, letters, extracts and illustrations from his journals. Despite all doors to the museum generally being left wide open for the cooling breeze there was a faintly musty aroma to the place that varied from gallery to gallery so the Livingstone one smelled distinctly different from those displaying pottery or whatever. His characteristic scarlet jacket seemed tailored for a remarkably slight man; but bold too, being the complete opposite of camouflage.

Livingstone was famed for the fearlessness with which he approached often hostile native chiefs accompanied only by his native guides and porters, and the charm with

58 which he usually won those chiefs over. The miracle was that he eventually died of disease rather than at the point of a spear.

Among the archaeologists at the museum was an African called Yeta. This struck us as a bit unusual because it was rare to see Africans in senior positions (and public toilets, for instance, were still segregated for blacks and whites), but it made less impression on us kids than that he was related to the Paramount Chief or Litunga of

Barotseland, Northern Rhodesia’s large western province. Chris had been born in

Mongu, the Barotseland capital, but I only knew the place from photographs, chiefly of the colourful annual migration of the Litunga from his dry season palace to his flood one when the summer rains cause the Zambezi to break its banks and become a vast shallow lake in that region.

This Kuomboka Ceremony is some three centuries old and is still a major event in the Zambian calendar (though of course largely for the sake of tourists, as with Trooping the Colour in London). Thousands of spectators gather to see the

Paramount Chief conveyed to his upland palace in a massive barge with a hundred paddlers. On top of the barge’s cabin is a large carved black elephant, symbol of his

Lozi tribe. Other barges follow with the chief’s principal wife and prime minister and there are smaller outlying dugout canoes scouting for enemies (nowadays imaginary but this must once have been a very necessary precaution as the Litunga would have been most exposed to his foes on such occasions during the often devastating wars that preceded his country becoming a British Protectorate). The most famous

Paramount Chief was Lewanika (1842 – 1916) who was largely responsible for the existence of Northern Rhodesia, or at least the veil of legality under which the territory became attached to the British Empire.

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Stanley Jones in The Northern Rhodesia Journal (Vol 5, No 4, 1964) wrote:

“Worried by threats of rebellion within and invasion from without, Lewanika sent messages to his even more famous contemporary, Khama, Chief of the Bamangwato of

Bechuanaland, seeking his advice about the advisability of coming under British protection. Two pioneer missionaries - Arnot and Coillard - also advised him to take this course. Eventually, in October 1897, Robert Coryndon, the first Administrator of North-

West Rhodesia and afterwards Governor of both Uganda and Kenya, came up to visit him in his capital at Lealui and he accepted a British Protectorate under the British South

Africa Company which had a charter from Queen Victoria to exploit and administer various parts of Central Africa. This followed a looser and vaguer agreement made in

1890 chiefly for mineral and ivory rights in return for a subsidy of £2,000 a year.”

Lewanika was an interesting person who was middle aged before he met his first white man, after an adventurous and often bloody life of ruling, losing and then regaining his kingdom. He did this with much help from King Khama of

Bechuanaland (now Botswana and still ruled, at least nominally, by a descendant of that same King Khama), hence the seriousness with which he later took Khama’s advice about becoming a British Protectorate, to stave off the threat from the

Matabele (Ndebele) south of the Zambezi, the Portuguese in the east and west and others from other directions, including Arab and other slave traders. The Lewanika

Concession, which was the form his treaty with the British took, was the foundation of the Northern Rhodesia Territory and, to begin with at least, both parties were equally happy with the arrangement. The British got access to the minerals they were after and the Africans got peace. Lewanika became a fervent supporter of the British

Empire, especially after his visit to Britain in 1902 for the coronation of Edward VII, during which he enormously impressed everyone with his dignity and composure. In

60 return he was impressed by the warmth and interest with which he was received and he continued to write to and receive letters from some of his hosts to the end of his life. He also finally banned slavery within his kingdom, both dealing with foreign traders and the domestic kind in which defeated enemies or debtors were traditionally used as unpaid servants. This was often a quite benevolent arrangement and in old age these ‘slaves’ were usually allowed to return to their home villages. In a way this custom might have paved the way for the relationship between British settlers and their servants during our time in Rhodesia.

The honeymoon didn’t last but this period of the early twentieth century shows how colonialism might have worked out very differently in Africa. Well, parts of it like Northern Rhodesia anyway. All it would have taken is a bit more respect and consideration from the Europeans along with a greater keenness for integration and the inclusion of Africans in running the country. There was much more of this in

Northern than Southern Rhodesia, especially in our parents’ circle. The country could not have worked so well without it since Europeans were so wildly outnumbered (by about 70 or 80 to 1) it would only have taken one night of the long knives to remove the European presence altogether; but stark racism was still all too common and was poison to the dreams of David Livingstone and the other more idealistic pioneers (as opposed to those who were just looking to get rich in Africa).

A good example of this is given by Richard Hall (The High Price of Principles

Penguin, 1973 p.44) who describes how Kenneth Kaunda, future president of Zambia, was a teacher and scoutmaster in the late 1940s. He had some interest in politics but his main concern was supporting his family and getting on with his job. Then one day he went into a bookshop in Mufilira on the Copperbelt and was thrown out into the street by two white miners for having the temerity not to wait meekly at the hatch

61 opening onto the street reserved for Africans. Politics suddenly became Kaunda’s driving ambition. Elsewhere Hall comments that Afrikaans miners on the Copperbelt acted as if it was just an extension of South Africa and their trade union was simply a branch of that in their homeland. Richard Hall, incidentally, was a friend of our parents and Norman’s chief photographer when he later moved into directing newsreels and documentaries. One of his arms was noticeably larger than the other from wielding the massive movie cameras of the time.

So, racism was real enough in Northern Rhodesia even if it was relatively mild compared with countries to the south, but the Paramount Chief of Barotseland was a bit of a special case in which even the standard prejudices were largely set aside.

Stanley Jones (The Northern Rhodesia Journal Vol 5, No 4, 1964) summed up a typical (if at the very least patronizing) view among whites: “Like so many ruling coteries in Africa, Barotse chiefs and indunas are of quite different and superior stock from those over whom they exercise authority. I always found that I could instantly recognise one of them, even if I had no previous knowledge of his identity, by his features, dignified bearing and je ne sais quoi. I am inclined to agree with a theory put forward to me once that their ancestors must have been civilised people who flourished long ago at Zimbabwe and its outposts in Southern Rhodesia, a theory in some degree supported by the patterns woven into basketwork and straw mats made by them, which much resemble those found in the ruined walls of Zimbabwe.”

Some of the glamour of this special respect for Lewanika and his family rubbed off by association on Yeta at the museum, whose very name indicated that he was from the Barotse royal family. I’ve no idea how being African affected his social life in Livingstone, but certainly within the museum he was treated as equal to the

62 other archaeologists. I believe that after independence he became Director of Cultural

Services for Zambia.

While on the topic of race relations in Northern Rhodesia and my parents’ stance, it is perhaps worth mentioning that from our early days in Livingstone we used occasionally go to dinner with the Nayees, an Indian family our parents had known before. At the time I assumed this had been in India, and that’s not impossible, but it seems just as likely now that they somehow became friends elsewhere in Northern

Rhodesia.

These visits were wonderful glimpses into the exotic other. From the outside the Nayees’ house looked pretty much like any European house apart from being in an area of town reserved for Asians, but the walls inside were covered with bright paintings of Hindu deities with multiple arms, legs and heads, and both statues and paintings of elephant-headed Ganesh, god of prosperity and shopkeepers. I took an instant and lasting liking to Ganesh because of our own Rhodesian elephants roaming free just down the road. The atmosphere was rich with incense and spices and the food was like nothing we kids had tasted before, infinitely subtler and richer in flavour than the curries we had at home. Here we were first introduced to the now almost mundane Bombay Mix (which we just called Hot Stuff), to chapattis and samosas, gulab jamins and golden wheel jelabis dripping with syrup, and a host of other dishes that I cannot now remember or name.

I’ve no idea how unusual such fraternization across the race divide was.

Probably more than we realized at the time because we just naturally took our parents’ attitudes as the norm; but our parents had a wide circle of friends so it clearly did not make them social pariahs, as might well have happened in Southern Rhodesia or

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South Africa. An example of the curiously mixed attitudes of broadly liberal white

Rhodesians was the attitude towards yoga. In the 50s and early 60s its popularity

(mostly among women) rapidly grew, echoing trends back in Britain and America.

Now imagine the conversation at a Livingstone sundowner – dusk air pleasantly cooling after another baking day, cicadas in the background, drinks in hand, servants flitting about in the background providing all the necessary – picture the talk after the

Livingstone Mail had announced that an Indian yoga master was in town offering professional coaching to all the white female Livingstonians . . .

Sadly I never learned the outcome. Did Caryl go? Probably I’d say. But if she did, how many of her fellow yoga fans went along? And how many heated marital and indeed civic discussions were involved? It would be fascinating to go back and be a fly on the wall when the topic came up in the mayor’s office.

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7

One problem with moving to Livingstone was losing the ready-made friends we’d had around us at Munali, plus those we’d made at school. This led to a useful lesson about nostalgia that stuck. Soon after our move I was complaining to my mother, as children will, that there was nothing to do in Livingstone compared to Munali. She said patiently ‘But you were always complaining that there was nothing to do there dear, while here we have a whole town on our doorstep.’ Which, when I thought about it, was perfectly true. Because we’d left the place, all our childish adventures in Munali had compressed into a connected narrative, skipping all the boring bits. What I was complaining about really was the lack of friends to share new things with, but of course once we started school and got to know a few people that all changed; and with growing independence plus bicycles there really was a lot more adventure to be had for a child in Livingstone. In a couple of years the Victoria Falls themselves often became our unsupervised playground.

Our house in Livingstone was old by Rhodesian standards and much more spacious than the Munali one. It showed signs of having been adapted to different circumstances by previous tenants, as we in turn were to do. Basically it consisted of three large, high rooms completely surrounded by a meshed-in veranda (to keep out the mosquitoes and myriad other bugs, including fireflies). Two corners at the back of this veranda were bricked off to make two smallish rooms, the one on the right being the bathroom and the one on the left the dining room. The space between them was half open to the breeze and had become the kitchen, while the old kitchen was a separate stuffy block just to the back of the house and separate from it. This had become simply a store room for various kitchen necessities, including sacks of mealie

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(maize) meal for the servants. When my pet mice escaped into it, the old kitchen briefly became a mouse paradise necessitating a complete emptying of the place and a massacre of them all. Tiny pink mouse babies tumbled from every bit of sacking while their parents scampered for their lives. I seem to remember the head count was about two hundred, and this was just a few weeks after the pets had escaped.

From the back of the house on the left an extension led past a pantry to another large room which had once been for guests and whose high plaster ceiling had decorative moulding around the edges, which along with other touches lent the house a feeling of antiquity which was new to us. It was probably not really that old though and certainly could not have dated from before about 1905, when the town was moved from its old unhealthy and dangerous location beside the Zambezi up onto its present hill. My guess is that it was built in the 1930s.

Chris and I were given this guest room and its slight detachment from the house proved invaluable in coming years for night-time excursions, prowling round the town in the dark and occasionally ‘roof-rattling’. Roof rattling was a particularly irritating (for the recipients) practice of young Rhodesian troublemakers invited by the prevalence of corrugated iron roofing. What you did was sneak up on a house in the dark, preferably when the occupants were fast asleep and then sling handfuls of rattling stones up onto the roof. If you wanted to be really annoying, you came back to the same house again half an hour later . . .

With hindsight what is quite remarkable is that such hooliganism was only practised by white kids. We never met any gangs of young Africans prowling around looking for mischief on our excursions. Partly this was because only young African children lived with their parents in the servants’ quarters attached to the European and

Asian houses (I’ve no idea how this was enforced or what happened to the older black

66 kids) and it was several miles to the nearest African townships like Maramba. But even so you’d imagine that this would be no great obstacle to rebellious young

Africans keen to annoy the Bwanas. Similarly, there was next to no housebreaking apart from when we and other boys occasionally broke into houses when their owners were away on Long Leave and had a root around. Most houses could be broken into with a sharp knife, if they were even locked at all, but we never came home from a trip expecting to have been seriously robbed, or ever heard of it happening to our friends. A slight mystery.

Completely separate from the house and off to the right against the boundary of the half-acre garden was another former guest room which we used for storage and as a playroom, apart from the time when our parents got so fed up with hearing us fighting in our bedroom that Chris was banished to the old guest room outside. I was jealous, but in due course we made our peace and Chris moved back into the house. Later, as the family grew, the two lengths of veranda at the sides of the house were partitioned off as rooms with clear plastic-coated mesh to let in light while keeping out the breeze on chilly nights and, like frosted glass, giving a degree of privacy during the day.

We also had a tree house built in a large tree overhanging a path that ran past the left side of our house up towards the back streets. This was our route for going adventuring at night, although if the path hadn’t been so handy it would have been no great problem creeping away from the house on the other side because the two half- acre building plots there were vacant and filled with scrub and cactus. Our garden was shielded from the path by a euphorbia hedge whose fleshy stems exude a poisonous milky liquid that stings the skin and (so we were told) blinds you if it gets into your eyes; but this hedge had been neglected and there were gaps enough to squeeze

67 through. Our dad hired some African workers to fit the platform and basic structure of the tree house securely and we were left to tidy up the details, including (under his supervision) making a rope ladder from a length of rope and several chopped up broom handles, of which we were very proud. Part of the fun of our tree house was that people walking past on the path below were often unaware of it, so we could eavesdrop on them. Not that we ever heard anything very interesting really. For a while after receiving a pair of toy Morse code devices for Christmas, Chris and I set them up between our bedroom and tree house but we never did really get familiar enough with the code to say anything useful and it was in fact easier just to shout, as with the tin can and string telephones we’d made in Munali.

At the top end of the garden beyond a straggly hedge were the servants’ quarters and beyond them an alley running past the servants’ quarters of the other houses on Kingsway. One day while wandering along this track I heard a peculiar screeching, squealing noise coming from beyond a wall. Hoisting myself up, I watched an African woman leisurely cutting the throat of a young pig – very Jude the

Obscure.

The opposite side of Kingsway, looking towards Mainway, was pretty much scrub used as an informal car park by people working or living nearby. Off to the far right was the museum. To the left of that was a parade of half a dozen or so shops set back from the main road with their own parking and flats above the shops. On the near corner of this was Cunningham’s Chemist which is memorable for many reasons, not least the argument that happened when their pedigree red setter gave birth to some black and white spotted mongrels and our dog was the only Dalmatian in the neighbourhood . . .

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Bowker was also responsible for another drama on that patch of scrub. Rabies was not least of the many African perils of which we were constantly warned and it was second nature when approaching any strange dogs to look for signs of erratic behaviour or foaming at the mouth. One day the cry of ‘Mad dog!’ went up in the street outside. I went out for a look only to find that it was Bowker racing up and down the bit of wasteland and foaming like Vesuvius at the mouth. I ran over and tried to catch him, unable to believe he would bite me even if he did have rabies, but he dodged past and shot off towards the town centre. I went and grabbed my bike and chased after him, following a trail of shrieks and fleeing Africans, down through the

Indian shops of the backstreets and finally catching up with him near the railway tracks at the foot of Livingstone’s hill near the historic North Western Hotel. Here he had run himself ragged and let me approach. Luckily for me he didn’t have rabies, and luckily for Bowker he’d not passed any farmer with a rifle. We never did find out what his problem was but after I got him home he recovered soon enough. The chances are that he’d tried to eat something poisonous, or possibly a bee.

Chris and I made friends with the Cunningham’s son Stephen, who was about our age. In the window of their chemist’s shop, as was common at the time, were two large glass amphorae containing clear green and red liquids. Almost certainly they were just coloured water but to a child’s eyes they epitomised the mystery of chemistry and I assumed they contained exotic and very expensive chemicals that were the basis of all that went on in the lab at the back of their shop where they mixed up prescriptions. This place looked really fascinating, like some alchemist’s workshop in Toby Twirl, a cartoon character rather like Rupert Bear whose adventures we enjoyed in Christmas annuals. Occasionally we stole chemicals to play with. On one memorable occasion we attempted to make a bomb, thanks to a handy recipe for

69 gunpowder in Pears Cyclopaedia. The sulphur and saltpetre came from the chemist’s and we made charcoal in the wood boiler outside our bathroom generally used for heating our water. We packed our explosive carefully into a jar along with nuts, bolts, pebbles and any other shrapnel we could find, along with a fuse and planted it in the culvert under our neighbour’s drive. Years later Chris was reminded of this adventure by IRA pipe bombs.

Why we wanted to blow up their culvert, I’m not quite sure because we had nothing against the Barlows and were even quite friendly with their son Ken. One pleasure of going round to their house was that they had yellow-bound monthly editions of the Daily Mirror from England which were wonderfully and rather naughtily exciting compared with the staid newspapers in our house, like the Daily

Telegraph and London Illustrated News. It was thanks to the Barlows that we were first introduced to Andy Capp and the exotic species of which he was an emblem – the British working class, who were as alien to us as our Africans would have been to them. Probably we only targeted the Barlows’ drive because it was handy and we thought we’d be less likely to get into trouble than if we blew up our own. However, for whatever reason we planted our bomb in their culvert, lit the fuse and ran off to a safe distance. Sadly it did not demolish the drain as spectacularly as we’d hoped but there was quite an impressive flare. We decided the problem was using a jar rather than a can or something more solid like that; but secretly we suspected it was our dodgy homemade charcoal.

Cunningham’s Chemist was also a useful source of spending money because

Steve used occasionally to raid his parents’ till. You’d imagine we’d just blow these ill-gotten gains on sweets and junk toys, and that did sometimes happen, but more often we used to visit Murdoch’s Model Bakery for a freshly baked loaf which we’d

70 scoff as if we were starving, or some of their wonderful steak and kidney pies for sixpence apiece. The last I heard, there was still a business operating under that name in Livingstone. On another occasion I acquired an African axe with our ill-gotten gains from the big curio shop on Mainway that sold African made craft goods to tourists – wooden animals, finger pianos, traditional masks and weapons and the like.

This was very possibly the shop whose proprietor John Hunt later gave his name to our road because it was the largest in town and gave employment to a lot of African craftsmen who also sold their wares down at the Falls. I gave the axe to our unwitting parents as a Christmas present and they hung it fondly on their sitting room wall for years.

Other memorable residents of the parade, living above the shops, were the Fenton-

May family who swanned around town like royalty in an enormous Rolls Royce.

Their elder son Roland carried this same aristocratic air but the younger one Vivian behaved quite normally, as we learned later at boarding school.

Another of the shops sold shoes which as far as we kids were concerned were basically two brands – Bata or Clarks. Bata shoes were cheap and cheerful but functional and, considering the outdoor lives we led, an eminently sensible choice for our parents to get us. But they were also rather downmarket and recognizable at a hundred yards. Clarks shoes were rather prim but classy and expensive, so you can guess which brand we always wanted. Occasionally our parents relented and bought us the Clarks and for at least a few days we repaid them by walking stiffly around trying not to crease or scuff them, but I doubt if they ever really got their money’s worth from these indulgences.

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The shop also sold the ubiquitous Bata flip-flop worn by Africans, Asians and

Europeans alike; a truly democratic product, though there was debate among

Europeans as to whether it was a good thing that Africans were adopting them. The argument against was that traditionally most Africans went barefoot and as a result the soles of their feet were as tough as leather. But once they started wearing flip- flops their feet softened so they were then compelled to keep buying footwear after that. On the other hand, from the Africans’ point of view, going barefoot meant quite often cutting your feet quite badly on minor perils like sharp stones, glass and thorns.

Flip-flops weren’t much defence against long thorns but they did at least provide cushioning from many other daily aggravations. Bata ‘tackies’ or tennis shoes were also popular African footwear, often with the toes cut out for ventilation.

Looking straight ahead from our house and to the left of the parade you could see through some trees clear to Mainway and the large Indian store – Rama’s – where we sometimes bought drinks and ice cream. To the left of the scrub patch were some public toilets clearly labelled for blacks and whites and to the left of these were some quite modern government offices.

Livingstone, like most Rhodesian small towns, looked very much like some place in the southern United States, and for much the same reason in that it had been laid out in a neat grid pattern from the outset with spacious streets that allowed for large vehicles. American cars and trucks were also common, at least partly because their soft suspension was well suited to our rough and often corrugated dirt roads, so we were almost as familiar with the latest Chevrolet Impala or Plymouth Fury as we were with the new Vauxhall Cresta or Sunbeam Rapier. There was even a mighty black 50s Cadillac cruising around town with a monstrous, snarling chrome bumper

72 with projecting fangs. I believe it belonged to the mayor. Chevrolet pickups were also popular with farmers and seemed almost as sturdy and long-lasting as the ubiquitous

Land Rovers.

A bonus for us kids was the system of storm drains under the town built to guard against the occasionally torrential summer rains. These drains were big enough to walk through standing almost upright and provided us with a secret network of tunnels running right under the town. We never discovered anything of great interest in them but there was always the possibility that we might, plus the pleasure of having our very own secret passageways for getting invisibly around town and popping up wherever we chose. Hopefully we would have had the sense not to use them when there was a summer downpour.

Our complement of servants in Livingstone generally comprised Dixon, a house boy and a garden boy. Yes, I know – it was a terribly patronizing custom of Rhodesians to call their grown African servants and workers ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ no matter what their age. It was done quite openly and unselfconsciously and was probably an expression of most Europeans’ underlying presumption that Africans were kind of like children who were too irresponsible to manage their own affairs and needed to be told what to do for their own good. The house boy’s job was to do everything around the house, basically, that Dixon didn’t do. So he was butler, cleaner and general dogsbody. He would bring out the meals and serve drinks when we had guests, do the household shopping and anything else that Dixon or our parents told him. In turn he got to supervise the garden boys who came and went quite rapidly. Many of these were in fact quite young boys often called Sixpence, or Tickie (Rhodesian slang for a silver sixpenny piece) or Tuppence, though whether those were their real names or not I

73 have no idea. Possibly they were just work names adopted by casual and itinerant labourers who didn’t expect Europeans to grasp or remember their real names.

The house boys lasted longer. There was one called Enoch who lasted a fair time but kept pretty much to himself so we never really got to know him at all and I’m not even sure he could speak much English. All communication was channelled through Dixon. The only one I clearly recall in Livingstone was Tresfor who was a pleasant, polite, young man who seemed to go about his duties with quiet efficiency.

So it was a shock when he was suddenly dismissed under a cloud involving fiddled shopping expenses. Dixon alone remained constant, living at the end of the garden with his two wives and various children. I believe his first wife left after a while and

I’m not too sure the other one stayed the same. However, his domestic life was none of our concern and within our household he remained a constant and reassuring fixture.

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8

Around the time we moved to Livingstone Lesley was sent off to a convent boarding school in Bulawayo, three hundred miles away down the Rhodesia Railways line in

Southern Rhodesia. Our parents’ motives were probably mainly educational. I believe there was a small secondary school in Livingstone going up to the second form, after which students had to become boarders elsewhere. Livingstone was after all quite a small town with a European population of only about 3,000. There were good, free

Government schools elsewhere in the country for which our parents would only have had to pay modest boarding fees, but there was also pressure from the Catholic

Church that if you could possibly afford it, you were obliged to give your children a good Catholic education. So off Lesley went to board at an expensive convent like some kid in an Enid Blyton (or these days Harry Potter) story, and I doubt if she was given any more say in the matter than Chris and I were later about going to a Jesuit school in Salisbury.

We boys meanwhile were sent to the local Catholic primary convent school a quarter of a mile or so downhill from the museum on the road to the Victoria Falls.

The convent was presided over by the short, squat and fearsome Sister Bernadine, popularly known to us (well behind her back) as Old Bernibum. The popular image of nuns as saintly, unworldly creatures did not always or even very often match the reality of being taught by them. Some were indeed lovely, gentle people but many were not at all; pretty much like people in general, really. Becoming nuns did not make them saints, nor did it entirely remove their femininity. The convent stood next to Livingstone’s St Theresa’s Catholic Church which was run by Franciscan priests who wore grey, monk-like robes. One Sunday going to church I was intrigued by the

75 spectacle one of the priests – a short, sturdy, bearded man – holding court to a fluttering circle of nuns who laughed and simpered girlishly at his every word in a manner totally unlike any behaviour they ever displayed to us at school.

It was at the convent that one of the nuns showed us a dramatic and lifelike crucifixion painting whose viewpoint was looking down on the cross which was itself suspended in mid-air over a landscape that could have been the Sea of Galilee. ‘And do you know children that the artist was so keen to make it lifelike that he had himself tied to a cross first?’

We didn’t know of course but were suitably impressed. It was years later that I realized the painting was by Salvador Dali – his Christ of St John of the Cross – and I wondered what the nun would have thought of most of his other paintings, let alone his lifestyle. Also she wasn’t quite right about him tasting crucifixion for himself – he much more sensibly hired a stuntman to pose for him.

Among the priests next door was Fr Albert, a tall avuncular man who had known our parents before – not at Munali I don’t think but before that, either Mongu in

Barotseland where Chris was born, or Fort Roseberry in the north-east of the country where the family had lived briefly before my memories begin. I vaguely recall being shown a photograph of him outside some church they had attended at the time. As with the nuns, Fr Albert’s mundane humanity was once made all too plain when for some reason I followed him up the ladder into the church bell tower and happened to look straight up his monk’s habit to a pair of sensible white Y fronts …

I got to know Fr Albert quite well because for reasons obscure to me now I became a regular altar boy at the church, pedalling down there on my bike to serve at

Mass before school. I even attempted the Novena a few times. This was a wonderfully

76 optimistic Catholic superstition that if you could attend Mass on the first Friday of nine consecutive months you had a guaranteed pass to Heaven (a realm in which I unquestioningly believed at the time). It seemed a simple enough trick to ensure eternal bliss (or, more to the point, to avoid eternal damnation) but somehow I never quite managed it. It occurred to me years later that there was maybe a strange kind of logic in the belief – if you were the kind of person who could actually complete a

Novena, you would probably also be immune to the usual range of earthly temptations. Our Granny had done it several times. She had also taken the teetotal pledge so it was a bit of a puzzle years later when she acquired a taste for cider with her Sunday lunch. ‘But cider isn’t alcoholic, is it?’ she once asked when this conundrum was hinted at. Deafening silence followed her comment and no-one had the heart to enlighten her.

At the convent, where boys and girls were mixed, I fell in platonic, chivalrous love with Molly Lee, whose family had a farm by a tributary of the Zambezi where we visited them once. I still remember the number of the battered grey Land Rover in which she and her siblings were brought to school – L3119. I never actually declared my love to the divine Molly of course but it must have shown because her brother

John punched me one day for no other obvious reason.

Our mother’s Irish connections came in handy when making new friends at the convent. When I mentioned that I’d palled up with a boy in my class called Dave

Macnamara, Caryl said ‘Oh, we used to have some Irish cousins called Macnamara.’

So from then on Dave and I claimed to be cousins, which provided a bit of solidarity against boys who wanted to push us around. Not that the bullying was worse than you get at any other primary school – nothing like what Chris and I were later to face at St

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George’s. Much later in life I chose Macnamara as a nom de plume when asked to write a book about leprechauns as it didn’t seem appropriate for the author to have an

English surname.

Apart from fear of Old Bernibum the convent school was pleasant enough and had the benefit of finishing early in the afternoon when our parents were still at work

so we could pretty much do

as we liked with half the

day. I remember once

racing up the hill and along

Mainway to the Capitol

cinema to try and beat the

queue for an Elvis film,

King Creole I think it was.

The Capitol was an Art

Deco creation built in 1931 and was one of the main hubs of our professional entertainment. After seeing King Creole Chris and I and half the other boys in

Livingstone, as around the world, went home to practice Elvis’s charismatic sneer and coax our hair to stand up in Teddy boy quiffs with the aid of large dollops of

Brylcreem.

Another memorable film we saw at the Capitol was The Island of Lost Women which our mother took us to see. The plot involved some men crashing their plane onto a tropical island where some gorgeous and naive young women have grown up in ignorance of men and the wider world (shades of both The Tempest and Forbidden

Planet). As this tale unfolded and the young women pranced around in ever skimpier costumes a pool of awkward silence engulfed us kids as we tried to fathom why our

78 mother had so purposefully brought us to see what was about the closest you could get to a soft porn movie at the Capitol in the late 50s. Was this some kind of sex education lesson? Caryl gave nothing away. With hindsight she had almost certainly thought she was taking us to see something quite different, possibly even a modern movie version of The Tempest due to some review she had read in the local paper, but in best colonial tradition she betrayed not a hint of embarrassment and indeed said nothing at all about the film afterwards, leaving us to puzzle over her motives for ourselves.

If it was some kind of attempt to introduce us to the notion of sex, it was the only sex education we ever received from our parents because the topic simply never arose. Nor did we learn anything at school beyond dark warnings that it was a sin even to think about sex unless you were first married and intent on making babies.

Some boys at school did biology and I suppose there must have been some mention of it there, but most of us did Latin instead. Personally, when rumours first reached my ears (via Chris) about how babies really were made I simply refused to believe them.

Back in Munali I had wrestled with the question. I could just about understand how people had babies because they got married in church, after which of course God knew that it was time to send them children. But how did it work with animals that never went to church at all? Our parents were completely unhelpful: ‘You’ll understand when you’re older Nigel.’ It was like the time I asked my mum how petrol made a car go, though I suspect that with the car she simply wasn’t too sure herself.

The trouble with sex, if the rumours were true, was that it meant our parents had done the deed, which was absolutely inconceivable. Then when Caryl became pregnant again in 1958 there arose the even worse possibility – that they were still

79 doing it. How was that possible? Dark suspicions began to gather around their weekend siestas, when we were banished from the house to play outdoors.

With hindsight I would guess that our parents were not particularly inhibited about sex in their own lives or they would not have had such a large family, though of course that was at least partly to do with being Catholic and not officially allowed to use contraception. They probably just had no idea how to discuss it with kids, most likely because their own parents had never discussed it with them. They were probably just leaving us to figure it out for ourselves as they’d had to do. On another occasion they came home from the cinema in some excitement and Caryl said:

‘You’ll never guess what we just saw – a man dressed up as a showgirl, singing and dancing and we never guessed it wasn’t a woman till the very end when he took off his top!’ It was their and our first introduction to female impersonator Danny la Rue, that odd character who, like Liberace, skated acceptably along the edge of being openly gay at a time when it was still a criminal offence. Once again we boys in particular were left baffled by this glimpse into the murky adult world of sexuality.

Caryl was also fond of using the phrase ‘before they were even a twinkle in their mother’s eye’ which was completely baffling until we’d grasped the emotional and physical dynamics of reproduction – and then it was slightly shocking.

It must have been about this time that Chris and I decided we were too old now to have our baths supervised by our mother. Nothing was ever actually said but one evening when she came in to scrub our backs as usual, she found us wearing our tartan swimming trunks and after that we were left to take baths by ourselves without anything being said.

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However, while still on the topic of cinema, there was always great excitement in town at any movie set in Africa. This would become a major topic of conversation for weeks, with delighted discussion of all the film’s inaccuracies that hid a pride at our way of life being deemed worthy of the world’s interest. Then apart from the occasional feature we saw at the Capitol, Chris and I were great fans of the kind of

Saturday afternoon serial adventure that later inspired Lucas and Spielberg’s Indiana

Jones movies, though I seem to remember we went to some church hall and not the cinema to watch these. Apart from the radio, cinema provided most of our professional entertainment in Livingstone. The rest was home made. Amateur dramatics were a regular feature of our parents’ lives, as in Munali, and we always went along to watch their productions. For some reason the performance I best remember is of some friends of theirs singing There’s a Hole in my Bucket and being tickled by ingenious circularity of the song’s plot. Scottish and country dancing also played a large part, along with a lively round of drinks parties and other social events.

Colonials worked hard at their entertainment, though it must have helped having servants around to do all the practical chores.

Looking back on it, I suspect that was the main luxury of colonial life, the servants and the leisure time they freed up for Europeans who otherwise lived pretty much on the scale of their counterparts back home. Their cars and houses were of roughly equal standard and they were paid much the same, but the cheap servants, cost of living and the contrast with the mass of the African population’s material conditions made our lives feel luxurious. Also I suppose there had never been any hint of food rationing in the 50s – food was plentiful and cheap in Rhodesia. Prime steak was everyday fare and even chopped up straight into the mincer for variety. There must also have been the heady confidence that comes from being in charge. The entire

81 white population of the country was only that of a modest British town, but they were effectively running a country of four million people and several times the size of

Britain. There were one hopes checks and balances against corruption but on the whole it was very easy for Europeans to get ideas off the ground and into action.

Someone always knew someone who could help with planning permission or whatever and there was an endless supply of cheap labour.

On the morality of having servants, an interesting twist was thrown up in the

1970s when a couple of Lesley’s friends at Cambridge in England landed a contract in

Zambia. Naturally they wanted to know all we could tell them about the place and were excited by what they heard except: ‘But of course we wouldn’t dream of having servants to wait on us.’ They did though once they got there, after being accused of selfishness for depriving Africans of the much needed jobs.

Inspired by Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, I began collecting animals soon after arriving in Livingstone. Chameleons roamed the mosquito mesh over our bedroom windows, their eyes entertainingly swivelling in opposite directions and bringing the added benefit of keeping down the flies and other bugs. We also buried an old tin bath as a pond in the garden beyond the outside kitchen and stocked it with the smaller breed of turtle that lived in the Zambezi; also with tilapia fish to give the turtles something to hunt besides the mincemeat on which we fed them. We used to catch these fish with bottle traps similar in principle to the larger reed traps

Africans used. We’d knock out the tip of the indent on the bottom of a champagne bottle, put some bread in it as bait in and then sink the bottle on the end of a line in the

Zambezi. Come back later and you’d almost always find the bottle full of small tilapia. They usually didn’t last long in with the turtles but some fish were cannier

82 than others. There had been no sign of any fish for a while when we decided one day to clean out the pond. We’d built an island of rocks in the middle for the turtles to climb out and bask themselves and when dismantling this we came across several plump tilapias which had been hiding from the turtles in the gaps. As a reward we set them free in the river, though it didn’t stop us catching more tiddlers to entertain the turtles.

I also collected tortoises. The small ones we kept in a chicken wire run and once when I was cleaning it out I was devastated to cut through a clutch of eggs with the spade. Caryl said not to worry because they almost certainly hadn’t been fertilized and so would not have hatched anyway. As I had yet to grasp the concept of fertilizing chicken eggs and had assumed that all the ones we ate would have otherwise hatched out into chicks, I failed to understand this and Caryl as ever declined to clarify the basic principles of reproduction. I did however see the hatching of some baby tortoises at the kennels where I helped out for a while and they were beautiful little things, perfect miniatures of the adults.

The larger tortoises, a foot or so in length, were free to roam the garden at the end of long clothes-line wires. I was a bit shocked when our dad first got out his drill and made a hole through the tortoiseshell just above a rear leg, but after a brief lesson in biology realised that of course it didn’t hurt the creature at all and it gave them a degree of freedom. Sometimes they took advantage of this and escaped, presumably by gnawing through the line, but thanks to Dixon and the servant grapevine they were usually recaptured.

We also acquired guinea pigs. Sometimes I took one into school hidden in my shirt to show the other kids, which can’t have been a lot of fun for the animals but as far as one can tell with guinea pigs they seemed happy enough. They also survived

83 my attempts to train Bowker not to pounce and pick them up in his mouth ready for a good shaking. My reasoning was that if I liked the guinea pigs and also liked the dog, they should be able to like each other. After all, cats and dogs were natural enemies but they’d always made good friends in our house. After Bowker had still attacked them about a dozen times despite my direst warnings, I realized his natural instincts were just too strong and gave up. The poor dog probably assumed I was trying to teach him to catch them. One hopes there’s some truth in the notion that guinea pigs can’t remember anything for more than five minutes.

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9

From the beginning the Victoria Falls were an important part of our lives in

Livingstone. We often took drives that way to give the dog a run and occasionally stopped at the Riverside Restaurant for tea or a meal. This rondavel style restaurant beside the river, half a mile or so above the Falls, was later displaced by a large hotel complex on the Zambian side. For entertainment at the restaurant there were vines which climbed like rope ladders up into the trees. At least once I climbed too far, lost my nerve and had to be patiently talked down by our dad.

There were also mischievous little grey vervet monkeys trying to steal from the tables. Once when we were there with some old friends visiting from Lusaka, my mate Robert Webster and I tried to catch a baby monkey to take home. Our strategy consisted of using Rob’s little sister to distract the baby’s mother while we snuck in behind and tried to snatch her offspring. Needless to say it ended with Rob and I running empty handed for our lives in one direction and his sister running the other way with a furiously screeching maternal monkey on her heels. I don’t remember it ending in blood though, unlike with Bowker when he got chased by monkeys.

Often when out for a drive we used to turn right about halfway to the Falls and follow the Maramba River past the Museum’s Craft Village to where the Maramba joins the Zambezi. Along this road we’d let the dog out of the car to run beside it and quite often there would be monkeys for him to chase. Usually they just scattered and took to the trees but on one occasion they fought back and ended up chasing Bowker, who came out of it with a nasty bite on his bum that took weeks to heal with the aid of some yellow ointment.

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Where the Maramba joined the Zambezi we’d follow the road sharp right going upstream along Riverside Drive past the Game Park towards Old Livingstone.

We occasionally visited the Game Park along the way, which was a bit of a cheat really because within its fenced enclosure you could see examples of most Rhodesian fauna in the space of half an hour (as opposed to the unfenced Game Reserve on the south bank of the Zambezi where they could wander and hide as they liked). Giraffe, elephants, eland, kudu, springbok, duikers, porcupines, warthogs, buffalo and a heap of other creatures were all obligingly on hand in the Game Park to remind us of the still largely wild country beyond the towns where we lived. They also had pangolins, wonderful scaly anteaters rather like armadillos that would roll up into an armoured ball when threatened. Like most of the other animals there (apart from lions, leopards and rhinos) we did also occasionally come across pangolins in the wild near ants’ nests – great towers of dried mud often much taller than a person.

The principal remnant of Old Livingstone was a rather spooky though well tended cemetery and a pillar marking where the old ox carts used to come ashore. Old

Livingstone had been abandoned in 1905 because of crocodiles and fever. Two years earlier 11 out of 31 settlers had died of Blackwater Fever or malaria. The settlement, also called the Old Drift, had sprung up there in the nineteenth century because it was the most practical crossing of the Zambezi for several hundred miles downstream.

Some ox carts were simply floated across but others were unloaded and their goods ferried across on canoes to be loaded onto other carts. A hazard early travellers had to guard against was of being deliberately marooned mid-river on an island by their guides and having the price of crossing drastically raised. This was a continuation of an old local trick of luring enemies onto the islands and just leaving them there to the mercy of the crocodiles, hippos and starvation. Many bands of marauders from the

86 south are known to have perished completely this way because some islands are so large it is not at all obvious that they are islands till you meet a wide stretch of crocodile infested river on the far side, and your enemies have made off with your canoes behind your back.

By all accounts the Old Drift was a bit of a Wild West town. Henry Rangely, the first magistrate in the region in 1902 observed in passing through: “It was quite an orderly little place, but the pub kept open all night if there was custom, and an American gambler ran a roulette table in the bar, with a very monotonous, ‘Round and round the little ball goes and where she’ll stop nobody knows. Now gentlemen make your stakes, if you don’t speculate you can’t accumulate . . .’

“There was a pole-and-mud eating house connected with the bar run by a man and his wife. She did the cooking and he the waiting. I do not think there were any bedrooms, although there may have been one or two mud huts.

“The Old Drift owed its importance to the fact that all stores for the Tanganyka

Concessions and the Northern Copper Company, as well as for the North-Western

Rhodesian Government and the traders in the Barotse Valley, came up through there from the south, the owner of the store and bar doing a large business as forwarding agent.”

A more pithy view was expressed by a certain Mme Coisson in a letter from 1905 in the collection of the Livingstone Museum: “No wonder there are so many sick people, when one considers the way they live. What is extraordinary is the fact that they are not all dead. They spend whole nights drinking and playing cards and they do not take care of their health, as though they were made of iron. It is a bad place, this Livingstone, and

Mr Stones [a new Methodist Minister] will have much difficulty in establishing a church.

Last Sunday he did not conduct a service because he had no congregation, although he

87 had visited people on the Saturday to invite them. They had almost all gone for picnics on Sunday morning. Of course, amongst them are some good people who suffer from the present situation, but they are very few.”

The above quotes taken were taken from The Victoria Falls ed. Brian M Fagan, 1964.

For more colourful details of life in Livingstone’s early days through the eyes of a resident see the Appendix.

Another favourite spot for family picnics which we usually had to ourselves was above the Songwe Gorge. This is the sixth of the zig-zagging gorges below the Falls

where the Songwe River joins the Zambezi by means of some rapids and a waterfall.

In the course of its steep descent the river has created one particularly beautiful place with everything a family could ask of a picnic spot in Africa – waterfalls, pools,

88 rocks, small caves and, most important of all, no crocodiles. Being fast-moving water there was also no danger of bilharzia.

Although Livingstone was many hundreds of miles away from the Copperbelt in the north, I got very excited once by finding that rocks near the Songwe picnic spot contained traces of green copper ore. I imagined we had stumbled on hidden mineral wealth that all the experts had missed. Sadly, enquiries at the museum revealed that they knew all about the traces of malachite but there was not enough of it locally to justify digging and geologically there was certainly no prospect of discovering a rich copper mine at the Victoria Falls. Possibly in honour of this incident our parents took a photo of me at the spot tapping away at a small cliff with hammer and chisel. They entered it into a competition at their photographic club under the title The Geologist and presumably it won some kind of commendation because they then kept it in a silver frame on the mantelpiece for a few years.

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The scenic route to Songwe Gorge involved turning left off the main Falls road onto

Hubert Young Drive soon after crossing the Maramba River. This road was named after the British Governor from the late 1930s, Sir Hubert Winthrop Young. Young was notable for having questioned the whole basis of mineral rights in Northern

Rhodesia (especially regarding copper) whereby most profits were siphoned straight out of the country by Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa company, with a healthy slice going to the British Treasury. As Governor, Young campaigned hard with the

Colonial Office in London for more of the revenue to be used to develop native interests in Northern Rhodesia. This did not make him very popular either in London or with the BSA and he was eventually packed off with much relief to both parties to be Governor of Trinidad and Tobago in 1938. (Richard Hall, The High Price of

Principles, Penguin 1973, Ch 5).

Hubert Young Drive was

not quite as grand as it

might sound, being just a

dirt track through the

bundu, but by climbing

above the Zambezi valley

it did provide some

panoramic viewpoints over

the river and its many

islands, including one from a wooden platform built into the branches of a large baobab tree. Bulbous baobab trees (also called upside down trees, bottle trees and breadfruit trees) were common around Livingstone, as across much of Africa. The seed pods were popular for the

90 sharp, nutritious powder they contained called Cream of Tartar which was a delicacy for both Africans and Europeans and which I was very impressed to learn went by the scientific name of potassium bitartrate. I used to think of baobabs as the elephants of the tree world as opposed to the more common mopane trees and acacias, the spindly, umbrella-topped ones which were the giraffes. I can’t say I became any great expert on African trees and plants while growing up but some from Livingstone do stand out in the memory. Another is the pod mahogany (afzelia) because it was the source of one kind of lucky bean which the Africans used as beads in necklaces and other jewellery. These were black and red seeds about an inch long that came in a woody pod resembling an enlarged and very tough runner bean. There were also smaller, rounder and shinier lucky beans which were also red and black. I’m not sure where they came from though it was possibly something called the coral tree. The roots of the pod mahogany tree were apparently used as an African folk remedy for bilharzia.

Another interesting seed we used to find around Victoria Falls was vegetable or palm ivory, little round nuggets a couple of inches across that really do look and feel like elephant ivory once they’ve hardened. They come from a palm peculiar to the rainforest by the Falls and fed by its constant spray. I believe their seeds wash down from the vast rainforests far to the north in the Congo Among their many other ornamental uses they were commonly used as knobs on the end of ceremonial African fly whisks and sjamboks – hippo or buffalo hide whips used to drive cattle. Well, that’s their most uncontroversial function but they have naturally lent themselves to other forms of corporal punishment and became infamous in apartheid South Africa in the hands of the police. However, as a kid all I knew was that sjamboks, like ceremonial African fly whisks, looked rather cool and I wished I could have one, but somehow it never happened, and if it had I can’t imagine what use I would have

91 found for it. Probably, as with the native axe I gave to our parents, it would just have hung on the wall as decoration.

At the Baobab Lookout the Hubert Young Drive was joined by a link from the

Riverside Restaurant and another dirt road led off to various scenic spots along the lower gorges, including Songwe, Candelabra and Katonta Pools. At the third gorge you could look down on the hydro-electric power station fed by a canal cut from just above the eastern cataract of the Falls. This tiny slice of the daily torrent of water was enough to provide electricity for the whole of Livingstone and the surrounding area.

The power station was almost drowned by a dramatic flood soon after we arrived in

Livingstone and was only just saved by the hasty erection of a defensive dam wall.

According to our dad, the trolley running down to the turbine house gave a wonderfully scary ride but we never got to try it.

If instead of turning left into Hubert Young Drive you kept straight on along

the river towards the Falls,

there were some sandy

picnic spots where the road

approached the Zambezi.

These were pretty much like

being at a river beach

anywhere in Europe where

you could build crude sand

castles (the sand didn’t stick

together very well at all, even when damp) and run about – apart from the crocodiles sunning themselves out on the islands where, luckily, they preferred to stay during the day, keeping well away

92 from human activity; along that stretch of the river anyway. The Livingstone Mail regularly carried stories of African women being taken by crocodiles while washing clothes or bathing further upstream. Also you didn’t go walking around there at night because then the crocs came ashore and were horribly fast runners over short distances. Then, passing the Riverside Restaurant you came to the Eastern Cataract of the Falls themselves, one of the main viewpoints during the rainy season. Here you were usually greeted by curio sellers displaying their wares on mats on the ground, plus monkeys and often baboons on the lookout for anything they could steal.

At night we sometimes drove that way (watching out carefully for hippos and crocs wandering into the road) to go for a meal at the Riverside Restaurant or maybe to view the lunar rainbow. This was a rather ghostly phenomenon that occurred on summer nights when there was plenty of spray over the Falls and a large moon that creates a bright halo in which you can just discern hazy colours. With the muted, continuous thunder of the cataract in the background, the chirruping of crickets and gusts of damp air in the face it really is a quite magical experience.

Of the Victoria Falls themselves well, the multitude of pictures and documentaries that have been made probably do them more justice than anything I could say here; though even they fail to convey the full ground-trembling awesomeness of the mile wide waterfall in full summer flood. When viewing the cataract from just a few dozen yards across the gorge it’s easy to understand why the local tribes felt in the presence of the gods there and why they came to the islands on the lip of the waterfall to make sacrifices to them and consult oracles, each local tribe having its own island.

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10

Sometimes when visiting the Falls we ventured into Southern Rhodesia, crossing by way of the 1905 rail and road bridge that spans the second gorge below the Falls at a height of about 400 ft (the highest bridge in the world we proudly claimed), giving a spectacular view of them beyond the Boiling Pot, as the churning pool between the first and second gorges is colourfully named. The bodies of hippos, crocodiles and even people occasionally washed up there but, much to our disappointment, never while we were visiting. It was a steep, damp climb down by way of the jungle-like

Palm Grove to the edge of the Boiling Pot, and the baboons that hung out down there were often quite intimidating, being the size of dogs and with horribly large and dirty fangs, but they never did actually attack and you did get one of the best views of the

Falls, looking up at them through the narrow cleft through which the river is squeezed after pouring itself over the cliff.

On one occasion we joined a children’s birthday party on the train for a friend,

Brendan Burns, embarking at Livingstone for the leisurely trundle of ten miles or so across the bridge to the next station at the township of Victoria Falls on the far side of the great river. On special occasions we visited the Victoria Falls Hotel there for tea.

This had been built around the same time as the bridge and as part of the same ambitious railway project that was intended to span the continent from south to north.

It was a large, white and very grand establishment on the south bank with another spectacular view from the gardens of the railway bridge and the Falls’ spray beyond.

Equally interesting to us kids were the giant tortoises that roamed the manicured gardens. Like Texans, we Rhodesians enjoyed having everything bigger than you could find in England – the country was several times the size, the tortoises were

94 giants and even our land snails were the size of English moles. I’ve often wondered if that’s why Lesley ended up living in Texas years later. When we visited her there in the 1990s it all felt very familiar, including some social attitudes.

Lesley was living near Houston then where she had a dressmaking studio but she and her husband had a plot of land a couple of hundred miles away in East Texas, where he grew up. While visiting there she took us to meet some neighbours who had restored their home as a kind of living museum of how it had been a century or so earlier. It was quite a large and immaculate house which we duly admired and praised; then they took us on a tour of the garden.

‘And this’ they proudly announced, ‘is our Uncle’s house restored to how it was when he lived here.’ It was a one or two roomed shack at the end of the garden packed with everyday household goods like packets of tobacco, flour and tea as if someone was indeed still living there – except that the bric-a-brac was all obviously antique. Well, we duly admired this too while privately thinking that the family had obviously gone up a lot in the world, comparing the shack with the nearby house.

Then it dawned on my wife and me that the uncle they were talking about was not a family member but a servant, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Hmm – slightly tricky for

British liberals knowing how to react, especially given the pride with which the place was being shown to us and obvious affection with which our hosts spoke of their

‘uncle’. On reflection though it was no different to us in the 1960s having Dixon living in a pretty basic brick shack at the end of our garden.

However, when crossing the Zambezi to the south bank we more commonly just had ice creams at a café before exploring the local attractions. These included the Devil’s

Cataract at the western end of the Falls where water always flows because it is

95 significantly lower than the eastern cataracts, which dry up in the winter. Near the

Devil’s Cataract stands a heroic statue of David Livingstone to commemorate his being the first known European to set eyes on the wonder in 1855. Curiously, he was at such great pains not to exaggerate his discovery that all his estimates (height, width etc.) were half or less of the reality, though he was aware of his natural tendency to underestimate distances and bemoaned his lack of instruments to make accurate measurements. The statue is not actually at the spot from which he first saw the Falls although that’s the assumption many visitors make. His first view was from an island on the lip of the cataract, towards which the statue is looking, and this inspired the famous quote mentioned in almost every tourist guide to the Falls: ‘scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.’ Or African gods of course.

Going to the right of the statue took us to the Rainforest, a green expanse of tropical jungle watered by the constant spray of the waterfall and like no other habitat for hundreds of miles. It could as easily have been a slice of Congo jungle and in fact many of the plants probably had been carried down the Zambezi all the way from its springs on the Congo/Angola border. You often got soaked in the Rainforest but it hardly mattered because in summer it was a gentle spray and you dried off quickly enough once you left. Within the forest were all kinds of exotic creepers and plants, in particular some bright scarlet flowers like spiky spheres, commonly called fireballs, which always caught my eye.

Going the other way from David Livingstone’s statue takes one to the Big

Tree nearby on the south bank, so called because it was the largest baobab tree in the region, being over 70 feet (22m) in circumference and about 78 feet (24m) tall. It is rumoured to be over a thousand years old, possibly two. Beyond that was the game

96 reserve where large herds of all kinds of animals roamed, though you could never be as sure of spotting anything interesting as in the Game Park on our side of the river.

To begin with we kids only visited the Falls and Zambezi River with our parents, being only about seven, nine and eleven years old when we moved to Livingstone, but over the next six or seven years the Falls increasingly became our playground when we were home from boarding school.

The Livingstone convent only took boys up to the end of primary school so about a year after we moved to Livingstone, Chris was sent off south to St George’s

Jesuit boarding school in Salisbury (Harare), 600 miles away by train in Southern

Rhodesia. For a year I became an only child during the school term, but the novelty of this was overshadowed by our mother’s pregnancy and the birth in May 1959 of our sister Jacky, the first of three new arrivals to come at two year intervals. Lesley, Chris and I used to joke that the parents got bored once they’d packed us off out of the way to boarding school and so had gone for a second family. Not long after Jacky was born I came home from school one afternoon to hear a blazing row coming from our house. Granny, Caryl’s mother, had come to stay awhile with her daschund Trippin and had obviously fallen out with our dad over baby care because he was yelling:

‘I’ve had more children than you now so I think I know what I’m doing!’

I beat a tactful retreat, returning much later when all was quiet. The atmosphere at dinner that night was stiff but if I hadn’t heard it for myself I would never have guessed there had been a blazing row earlier. Granny herself, with her generally reserved manner anyway, gave next to nothing away. Norman was easier to read but overall Queen Victoria would have been proud to see such high emotion so thoroughly bottled up.

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It was possibly after this stay of Granny’s that Auntie Joan returned from holiday in South Africa to astonish us with the announcement that she was getting married and moving to South Africa. As usual with kids, we’d assumed that her spinster state and running the school in Broken Hill were permanent conditions. To make the whole affair even more intriguing, Joan was marrying a full-blown

Afrikaner and was changing her name from Littlewood to van Rensburg, which was about as Afrikaans as you could get besides van der Merwe, the archetype of many

Afrikaner jokes. Such as: van der Merwe was watching a rugby test against the British

Lions at Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria. In the packed stadium, there was only one empty seat – next to van der Merwe.

‘Whose seat is that?’ asked his neighbour.

‘My wife’s,’ says van der Merwe.

‘But why isn’t she here?’

‘She died.’

‘So why didn’t you give the ticket to one of your friends?’

‘They’ve all gone to the funeral.’

The joke is a bit stale but you get the idea. Afrikaners were not noted for their sensitivity.

At the time I formed the impression that Auntie Joan and soon-to-be Uncle Frans had met romantically on a train while Joan was holidaying in South Africa and that it was a whirlwind affair, but that was not the case at all. He was a fellow teacher in Broken

Hill and they’d met on the tennis court there. The South African holiday was probably to meet Frans’s family and explore the possibility of moving there. The wedding took place in South Africa too but we didn’t go, which now seems a bit odd but we didn’t

98 really register this at the time. Probably it was the complication and expense of the whole family going that ruled it out.

Afrikaners occupied a slightly odd niche in the racial topography of Rhodesia.

For most purposes people were divided quite tidily into European, Asian, African and

Coloured (mixed race), but Afrikaners stood slightly apart. By their very name they declared themselves to be Africans, distancing themselves from the mainly Dutch and

German stock from which they were descended, but at the same time they were white and entitled to all the privileges and advantages of Europeans. They were the white tribe of Africa and for them there was no colonial ‘Home’ back in Europe. Their church was the Dutch Reformed Church and their language too had evolved away from the original Dutch. Also Holland was a country whose liberalism they mostly despised. You got the impression, even as a child, that they considered us white

Rhodesians amateurs in the business of living in Africa. With some justification as it happens because they had arrived and settled in the Cape about the same time as the

Bantu had moved into the north of South Africa, driving the Hottentots and Bushmen before them.

So there was great excitement over one of these exotic beings joining the family and I think it was Lesley who raised the further mind-boggling possibility that we might soon acquire Afrikaner cousins – which actually turned out not to be the case because they did not have any children. In practice Uncle Frans turned out to be disappointingly normal. He had the South African accent but in all other respects behaved pretty much like any other European we knew, so we came to the conclusion that maybe it was just the farming and mining Afrikaners who were notably different from other Europeans.

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11

1959, my last year at primary school was eventful on many fronts. In the wider world this included the opening of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi, the border between

Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Even for kids this was a tremendous event. We’d been bombarded for years with cinema newsreels and talks at school about the tremendous feat of engineering taking place on our doorstep. We already had the biggest waterfall in the world (we dismissed rival claims about Niagara with contempt), were the second largest producers of copper in the world and now we were going to acquire the world’s largest man-made lake, about 150 miles long and 20 to

30 miles wide. We knew all about coffer dams and the death rate among the Italians, who were the main contractors, and the African construction workers from all over

Rhodesia and neighbouring countries. I seem to remember that the death toll in the dam’s construction was about 100, most of them Africans and including one group that was drowned in wet concrete and thus almost became part of the dam itself, like the human sacrifices in the foundations of ancient city walls, except that their bodies were dug out of the hardened concrete and buried properly. In the cinema we’d seen black and white newsreels of the giant earth-moving vehicles clearing the ground, massive diggers with chains slung between them that scoured large swathes of landscape like horsemen of the apocalypse so that dead trees would not snag the nets of future fishermen. We also followed the progress of Operation Noah which over a couple of years rescued wildlife trapped on shrinking islands by the rising waters of the lake. Some 6,000 large animals were recorded as being rescued this way, and countless smaller ones.

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We heard much less about the 40,000 or so Tonga tribespeople on either side of the river who were displaced from their ancestral homes and burial grounds by the rising waters (and who also had sometimes to be rescued from shrinking islands), but that is perhaps unsurprising given the colonial conditions and, according to surviving records, the minimal consideration given to the environmental side effects of the new lake. Even Operation Noah was apparently a last minute improvisation in the face of international outcry about the impending massacre of wildlife.

Up to this point the Tonga had many reasons to be grateful for having come under British protection. Compared to the Matabele (Ndebele) to the south, the

Bemba in the north and even the Lozi in Barotseland to the west they were a timid, unsophisticated people and whenever those tribes were short of cattle, grain or slaves they were in the habit of raiding the Tonga. But with British rule came the ending of slavery and inter-tribal raids and warfare so for possibly the first time in their history they were left for half a century just to get on with their simple lives in the hot and humid Zambezi valley, with only minimal supervision by mostly benevolent British district officials. (This, of course, was the great self-justification for Empire – the Pax

Britannica, so named in conscious imitation of the Pax Romana; the idea being that after conquest (or in Northern Rhodesia’s case stealthy theft) the subjects were given peace, order and prosperity in exchange for their self-determination.)

For the Tonga there was some health care and education provided by a few scattered missions, and a few Tonga graduated from these to live and prosper in the cities, but most ignored the blandishments of civilization and clung to their traditional ways of subsistence agriculture, hunting, fishing and barter. Those living close to the river benefited from its annual flooding which fertilized their gardens and even when the rains failed they no longer went hungry because the Government would truck in

101 emergency supplies from other parts of the country, enough to prevent starvation without being so generous as to discourage the Tonga from cultivating their own crops when conditions improved and thus falling into dependence culture. This was a consciously formulated colonial policy.

But with Kariba Dam and its vast lake all this was to end and no-one even thought to consult the Tonga about it. Many of them are still fighting for adequate compensation because the lands they were moved to were generally less fertile than they were used to and required completely different farming methods. They received little thanks for abandoning their ancestral homes. New homes were provided for them on a like-for-like basis and, in Northern Rhodesia at least, some modest financial aid was given to encourage the move, there being no legal way actually to force it, but it was not really very generous. In Southern Rhodesia the laws were different because the country had been self-governing since 1923 and there the Tonga were simply told to move with little effort at persuasion. Most suffered increased poverty after their resettlement but most also accepted the changes fatalistically. Some in Northern Rhodesia did protest at the time though, even resorting finally to violence.

In June 1958 a District Commissioner and District Officer were stoned by some villagers in the chiefdom of Chipepo when the officers tried to pressure them into accepting the removal of their entire village. The Chipepo people were a particularly difficult case. The other Tonga groupings along the northern bank of the

Zambezi had a relatively easy option in the face of the rising lake – simply moving ten or fifteen miles away from it into the foothills of the 3,000 foot escarpments lining both sides of the great valley. This was something they had often done anyway in the past when threatened by other tribes and there was an accepted way of taking the spirits of their ancestors with them – trailing a certain kind of tree from the old shrines

102 to the new. They would lose their riverside gardens fertilized by the annual flood but could compensate with more slash and burn agriculture, which many had practised anyway so they were familiar with the techniques.

The Chipepo (the name applied to the people, village, district and chief) did not have this option. The foothills and escarpment itself behind them were already occupied by another branch of the Tonga and there was room for only about a third of the 9,000 Chipepo there. The rest would have to move downstream a hundred miles to beyond the dam where suitable uninhabited land had been found for them at the junction of the Lusitu and Zambezi rivers. This area was fertile with annual floods and had a climate similar to what they were accustomed to, unlike up on the high plateau where it was cooler and drier, but to the tribesmen it just seemed unimaginably far to move. For a start they could not take their ancestors by trailing trees because the journey in part would be along paved roads and through modern settlements. This in itself was no small thing because to the Tonga their ancestors were felt to be living presences playing an active role in their everyday lives. Also they could not be sure that other religious practices such as rainmaking would work in

Lusitu, so they imagined they might just starve there. Their part of the Zambezi, the

Gwembe Valley, had sheltered them for generations beyond memory, they could simply not conceive of living elsewhere and with strange neighbours.

According to The Shadow of the Dam by David Howarth (Macmillan, New

York 1961) local Government officials were quite aware of and sympathetic to all these problems from the Chipepo people’s point of view and did all they could to ease the tensions, but of course far away in Lusaka and Salisbury there was no way a few thousand very primitive tribesmen were going to be allowed to derail their grand

Kariba project for such nebulous reasons. So the stage was set for the Battle of

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Chisamu when the peaceful Chipepo people went to war for the first time in the best part of a century, summoned by war drums beating in earnest.

When the District Commissioner (DC) arrived at the end of August with several platoons of armed police to enforce the removal to Lusitu he found all the local men of fighting age, some four or five hundred, ranged against him by the village of Chisamu with whatever weapons they could lay hands on – spears, axes, pangas (large slashing knives like short swords) knobkerries, shields and even a few ancient muzzle-loading rifles from the nineteenth century.

There followed an impasse for several days with much posturing and hollow threats from both sides, but neither quite bringing themselves to initiate bloodshed.

Although armed (both European officers and African constables), the police had never since the coming of British rule to Northern Rhodesia ever actually fired on any rural

Africans. The closest they had come to this had been the forceful suppression of riots on the Copperbelt some years before, but quite different conditions had prevailed there. In Tonga country where District Officers (DOs) generally went about their business on foot, unarmed and even unescorted, no-one was keen to set a bloody precedent even in a situation as fraught as this.

The stalemate was almost broken by the Governor of Northern Rhodesia himself, Sir Arthur Benson, arriving in full ceremonial pomp with a military band and more armed police. On arrival at the police camp he left his escort and proceeded alone but for the local DO Alex Smith to the Chipepo camp where he strolled about chatting to various groups like polite visiting royalty and behaving as if they were not armed to the teeth for war. He invited them to enjoy the music of his band that evening and to an indaba (conference) the next day where they could discuss their differences. This display of courtesy and quite astonishing personal courage won the

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Governor his indaba but sadly not all the charm and pomp he could lay on at that event could change the situation. In the end the villagers still refused to move to

Lusitu. For a start many were still not convinced of the reality of the coming flood, thinking it impossible that anything being built fifty miles or so downstream might affect them. What seemed much more likely was that their area chief Chipepo (who had been among the Governor’s party trying to persuade them to move) had sold the land behind their backs for European settlement. This and their many other reasons for not wanting to move outweighed any trust in both him and the colonial government.

Eventually the Africans attacked and the police opened fire, killing eight of the protestors and injuring another thirty two before peace was restored and the rebels caved in. A year or so later fifty of those who had moved to Lusitu suddenly died for no apparent medical reason. These and other deaths from dysentery and measles that year were attributed by their fellow Tonga to ‘bad spirits’, or to the inability of their own ‘good spirits’ (Barimo) to protect them because they had been left behind in their old homelands, now deep under water.

It did not help that the Kariba Gorge was a particularly sacred place not just to the

Tonga but to all the tribes around. It was rather like in Britain someone deciding to plant a giant windmill on Glastonbury Tor or Stonehenge. Apparently the Tonga confidently expected the Zambezi river god Nyami Nyami to destroy the dam, which would cut him off from his wife who lived downriver. Nyami Nyami is generally depicted as a serpent with a fish’s head and was believed to dwell with his wife in

Kariba Gorge, exactly where the dam was built. The unusual floods of the Zambezi in

1957 and 58, the same ones which had almost drowned our power station at

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Livingstone, were widely seen by Africans as his angry attempts to destroy the dam, as were the earth tremors that followed its completion. Many Africans confidently expected the dam to fall, but European technology triumphed.

It long struck me as a curious coincidence that a place long revered for its spiritual power should turn out to be the exact spot best suited for generating electrical power; but quite likely it was the sudden strangling of the mighty river at Kariba and its roar of pent up fury as it forced its way through the narrow gap that first led

Africans to hold the place in reverence – just as at Victoria Falls, the roaring transformation of the Zambezi gave people the impression of the gods being very near

– and that same constriction made it the ideal spot for positioning the dam.

Meanwhile in Southern Rhodesia the Tonga were invited (well, simply ordered) to choose new homes in sparsely inhabited areas up on the escarpment above the Zambezi valley and well away from the new lake so they would not interfere with proposed tourist developments, which were to be European owned. Some practical help was given towards building new villages but there was little cash compensation.

The average cost of relocating each person in Southern Rhodesia was £59 compared with £134 in the north. Because of distance most lost touch with their northern cousins and even the use of their own language as they were absorbed by neighbouring tribes.

However, apart from its impact on the Tonga the dam was very successful in most other ways, producing a man-made feature that, unlike the Great Wall of China, really can be seen from outer space. Since the 1960s it has steadily provided cheap and clean power for the mines of the Zambian Copperbelt, the country’s main source of foreign revenue, and much of the electricity for Zimbabwe, both countries having previously been mostly dependent on coal for industrial electricity. Even more

106 remarkably, this joint operation survived the hostility between independent Zambia and Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and continued under the increasingly erratic rule of Robert

Mugabe. Kariba Lake has also produced thriving fishing and tourist industries so although the Tonga lost out, many others in both Zambia and Zimbabwe have prospered from it.

One purpose the dam completely failed to achieve though was to bind the

Central African Federation together. This was part of its original aim and one reason

Kariba was chosen instead of a similar but much less ambitious project on the Kafue

River which would have served Northern Rhodesia’s needs quite happily but left

Southern Rhodesia to solve its own energy problems. The two territories were forced to co-operate over the dam but divergent political pressures were already forcing them apart and the Federation was to be disbanded a few years after its completion.

Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were irreversibly heading for majority rule while in

Southern Rhodesia its white minority was defiantly digging in.

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The other big event of that year as far as the family were concerned was that the time had come again for our triennial long leave, so we prepared ourselves to fly off to

England for another soggy grey winter in Bognor Regis. As ever, this prospect was a lot more exciting to us than to our counterparts in, say, our dad’s home town of Ilford, where we’d once again be visiting our grandparents. It was even exotic to some of our friends who were stuck with surfing the Indian Ocean in Durban or Lourenço

Marques. For us there was romance in the winter fogs and snows ahead and the peculiar beauty of bright winter days in England when your fingers and toes are freezing, even possibly a real Christmas-card Christmas with snow as shown on the cards we dutifully hung up at the height of our sweltering Rhodesian summer. There was the novelty to look forward to again of chilblains and also television, which had not yet reached our part of Africa. There was the dizzying excitement of London at

Christmas – London, the hub of the Empire that still spread vast swathes of pink across the wall chart maps of the world at school; London where our dad seemed so much at home, delighting in taking familiar (to him) byways to glittering palaces of toys like Hamleys.

On top of this there was the prospect of getting a new car in England and the plan was for us to ship it back with us to Cape Town and then drive home right up through South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, mostly camping along the way. The car we had chosen (the flattering illusion being given us kids that we had some say in the matter) was a grey Peugeot 403 estate car, of which I had piles of brochures and pictures pinned up in the bedroom. This was the model later made famous by

Columbo, the 70s TV detective, with its gaping oval radiator looking like a jet intake.

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At least, that’s how it looked in 1959 and the rest of its features and lines were just as exciting. To most people now it just looks like an unremarkable dumpy late 50s saloon with a weird front end, but at the time it was a picture of lithe and faintly exotic elegance that was very popular in Rhodesia.

Aviation technology had improved since our previous flights to Britain, which meant planes could now fly overnight. This gave us the chance to see for ourselves just how dark the Dark Continent really was at night; which meant that mostly there was no light at all to be seen on the ground in any direction. The heavens above were ablaze with stars but without a moon the earth was inky black. Just occasionally a smattering of lights drifted by below like a fallen constellation signalling some town or city, and by these we traced our progress up Africa on maps we were given to pass the time, lulled by the Vickers Viscount’s droning turboprop engines. The contrast when it came to circling over southern England as we prepared to land by night at Heathrow was startling. The whole country looked like one great big city and I wondered how people could bear living so densely packed together.

Having baby Jacky to look after meant that our parents could not this time abandon us with the grandparents in Ilford while they swanned off on a road trip in their new Peugeot. Also I would guess that for Lesley and Chris at least education had to be taken more seriously than on previous trips. So after a brief Christmas stay in

London in which we went to see Peter Pan in pantomime, we once again moved into

Greenlow, the house we’d rented last time at Middleton on Sea near Bognor Regis in

Sussex. Chris and Lesley were enrolled in the local secondary school in Bognor while

I was sent to a convent primary there, St Mary’s. So this time we got to see fewer of

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England’s more famous and picturesque sights but got a better taste of what normal life there was actually like.

As before, England in winter had its own exotic charm for us and sometimes

Lesley, Chris and I would meet up after school to walk the three miles or so home along the chilly beach instead of catching a warm bus. Luckily our holiday home had a large conservatory at the back where we could play when the weather got too grim.

This also served as a handy workshop for my ongoing interest in woodwork, spurred on by some inspirational TV programmes backed by instructions in the Radio Times showing how to make interesting devices like the pantograph – a beautifully simple device of angled rods which lets you scale drawings up or down – or a harmonograph that uses two independently moving pendulums to create delicate, infinitely varied patterns of netted lines, rather like early computer art of the 1970s, or the pin and string abstract pictures that were also popular then.

More immediately, since snow had fallen, the Radio Times also printed plans for how to build your own toboggan, which we enthusiastically did. It was a rather clunky device by today’s standards but it did the job well enough for us to have a bit of fun with it.

While we were at school the parents took baby Jacky on sightseeing trips around the area, less wide-ranging than on previous visits; so it was a much more domesticated holiday than before, a slice of normal English life with outings for us at the weekend to places like Arundel that Caryl and Norman had scouted out during the week.

Because the car had been imported from France and was soon to be exported again to

Africa we were driving around with French number plates. This led to an entertaining

110 outburst when Norman had a near miss with a truck at a junction. ‘Bloody Frogs!’ the truck driver roared out of his window. ‘Why don’t you learn to drive properly?’

Sometimes we got to just hang out with friends in Bognor at the weekend. I’d made a new pal at the convent called Tom Gallagher. Tom had, he informed me, cracked the secret of getting off with girls. ‘It’s quite simple’ he told me, ‘you just catch their eye and make a sign to them like this.’ He demonstrated how you held your hand palm backwards down by your leg and poked your thumb forward between the first and second fingers. ‘Then if they’re up for it they’ll give a sign like this,’ which was the same thing but without the sticking out thumb.

‘And this really works?’ I asked, suitably amazed.

‘Oh yes’ Tom replied confidently, ‘all the older kids know the signs, especially girls. My brother told me all about it.’

‘Then what happens when, you know, you get to the point . . ?’

‘When you get your willy inside her you jiggle it about a bit and then you pee.’

‘What? You pee inside her?’

‘Yeah. It’s s’posed to be brilliant. Girls like it too.’

I gulped. It didn’t sound quite right and anyway, what if you weren’t ready for a pee? However, we decided to give it a try anyway and met up in town one Saturday armed with pocket money for our girl hunt. We spent the day hanging out in shops and cafes in the grey rain, printing metal labels with our names on them at the green

British Rail station (presumably those machines were for tags to go on luggage) and meanwhile waggling our fingers like mad at any girl whose eye we could catch while all the time resisting emptying our bladders. The most responses we got were a few

111 puzzled giggles but mostly we were completely ignored. So much for initiation into mating and to be honest it was quite a relief.

At the end of the holiday we took a Union Castle Lines ship – the Carnarvon Castle I think it was – from Southampton with our new car in the hold. The two week voyage was pretty much like being at a holiday camp with organized activities like fancy dress competitions and parties to keep the passengers entertained.

On docking at Cape Town Caryl and Norman booked us all into a hotel for a few days so we could look around, visit Granny, Auntie Joan and Uncle Frans at

Rondebosch nearby and make ready for our great trek. Our most spectacular excursion was a cable car ride up Table Mountain and a walk around the flat top during which I seem to remember the view was mostly obscured by cloud – the mountain’s famous ‘tablecloth’ that so often sits on its flat top. As a geography teacher Norman took the opportunity to explain in detail that this was a perfectly natural phenomenon caused by the damp winds flowing in off the ocean being condensed by being forced up the steep mountainside into cooler air.

Then after a tour of the Stellenbosch vineyards and other Cape Town attractions the six of us piled (or in baby Jacky’s case was bundled) into the grey

Peugeot estate for the long journey north, following the trail of the famous

Voortrekkers whom we had learned about at school. The car’s roof rack groaned under its burden of camping gear and I imagine the first few nights of setting up camp must have been a logistical nightmare for our parents, establishing a routine in which all but Jacky had a part to play.

Chris and I had our own tent which we were expected to manage pretty much for ourselves, but everyone had to lend a hand with the piece de resistance of our

112 dad’s holiday plan. This was a large green square canvas tent custom made in

England to attach snugly to one side of the car, whose doors opened into it. The arrangement was that Lesley and baby Jacky would sleep on the folded-down seats in the back of the estate car, while our parents slept in the large tent which doubled as our living quarters before bedtime. The beauty of this setup was that the baby could sleep snug and safe inside the car but Caryl had only to open the car door to reach her if she woke up.

Mostly we stopped at campsites, at least to begin with, but sometimes we just camped where we found ourselves. On one of these occasions I complained to my dad about the lack of a toilet. Exasperatedly Norman waved his arms at the infinite darkness and said: ‘You’ve got the whole of Africa behind you, what do you need a toilet for?’ Fair enough but as we were in the middle of nowhere there was no knowing what was out there in the darkness. On another occasion a howling thunderstorm crashed onto us and we had to break camp in the dark with baby Jacky crying and the gale slapping us wetly around and trying to snatch away our tents. We retreated in disorder to the comforts of a sturdy motel. I’ve never really been able to enjoy the sound of rain on a tent since then and after my own daughter was born we waited a couple of years before even contemplating going camping with her.

Much of the journey is now a blur and I don’t suppose that for most of the way we were any more appreciative of the glorious landscape than any other kids on a long car journey. The contrasts with both England and Rhodesia did make some impression though and some highlights stand out. Being a more temperate part of

Africa than we were used to, much of South Africa is stunningly beautiful because of the greenery, especially along the Garden Route which we took from Cape Town and which runs eastwards along the south coast. We stopped near the town of George for a

113 while to see some ostrich farms and visit the Kango Caves near Outdshoorn. These caves, with biblically named features such as the Angel’s Wing, the Pulpit and the

Twelve Apostles, were especially entertaining for Chris and me. About two thirds of the way through the tour, the party divided. Those prepared to squeeze through a horribly claustrophobic passage and otherwise take a few more risks could carry on viewing the next set of caves known as the Devil’s Workshop, while the less agile or brave had to exit. So we left the parents and Jacky behind and carried on feeling like real explorers.

The Drakensburg Mountains were also inspiring, even to kids squabbling in the back seat, resembling as their name suggests vast, spiky dragons stretched out across the landscape. One incident stands out there. We’d stopped to set up camp and

Norman got into conversation with a passing African on a bicycle who asked politely where we were heading. ‘Harare’ Norman replied, which, with hindsight, seems even more strikingly tactful than it did at the time. Almost any other Rhodesian at the time would simply have said ‘Salisbury’, the name ‘Harare’ then being reserved for the

African township outside Southern Rhodesia’s capital city.

For me enjoyment of the journey was also dulled by the knowledge that at the end of it lay boarding school, which I was not looking forward to at all. Unlike at

Munali when I’d envied Lesley and Chris and was impatient to join them at school, boarding school held few obvious attractions, least of all the Jesuit school that Chris had occasionally described in not very reassuring detail the previous year. However, that’s by the bye. Going to Salisbury on our way home added several hundred miles to the journey and I’m not sure why we made the detour, but at least part of the purpose was to visit St George’s School and allay my misgivings about going there.

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On the way through Southern Rhodesia we called in at Fort Victoria (now Masvingo) to visit the Great Zimbabwe ruins. In 1531, Vicente Pegado, Captain of the

Portuguese Garrison of Sofala in Mozambique, had described them thus: “Among the gold mines of the inland plains between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers there is a fortress of marvellous size built of stones, and there appears to be no mortar joining them.... This edifice is almost surrounded by hills, upon which are others resembling it in the fashioning of stone and the absence of mortar, and in one of them is a tower more than 12 fathoms [22 m] high. The natives of the country call these edifices Symbaoe, which according to their language signifies court.”

Thanks to Caryl’s museum connections we were given a personal tour of the ruins by an archaeologist in charge. She it was who informed us of the then little known fact that the famous ruin that featured on Rhodesian £5 banknotes was just the largest and grandest of dozens, possibly hundreds of similar structures scattered across Southern Rhodesia and northern Transvaal. There was some embarrassment in

Southern Rhodesia at the time about the ruins, or at least about the possibility that they had been built by black Africans. In Northern Rhodesia this was widely accepted, particularly in the circles in which our parents moved, but in the south it jarred with the paternalistic notion that Africans were like children who needed firm government and were of their own initiative quite unable to achieve anything beyond a subsistence level of culture.

Much more popular was the notion, first conceived by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, that these were the ruins of King Solomon’s Mines or the home of the Queen of Sheba; that they had been built by Jews, Phoenicians, Arabs or anyone in fact other than the ancestors of the Shona still inhabiting the country. In fact after

UDI in 1965 suppressing any such notion became the active policy of Ian Smith’s

115 government – any books or studies promoting the achievements of Shona culture were banned and archaeologists were often refused entry to the country in case they stirred up controversy. Many examples of this are documented in Censorship of Historical

Thought: A world Guide 1945-2000 : Greenwood Press 2002. Interestingly enough, this report is equally critical of Robert Mugabe’s succeeding government, though for quite different kinds of censorship.

According to Paul Sinclair, Curator of Great Zimbabwe in 1975 (quoted in

None But Ourselves by Julie Frederikse, Penguin 1984): “I was the archaeologist stationed at Great Zimbabwe. I was told by the then-director of the Museums and

Monuments organization to be extremely careful about talking to the press about the origins of the [Great] Zimbabwe state. I was told that the museum service was in a difficult situation, that the government was pressurizing them to withhold the correct information. Censorship of guidebooks, museum displays, school textbooks, radio programmes, newspapers and films was a daily occurrence. Once a member of the

Museum Board of Trustees threatened me with losing my job if I said publicly that blacks had built Zimbabwe. He said it was okay to say the yellow people had built it, but

I wasn't allowed to mention radio carbon dates... It was the first time since Germany in the thirties that archaeology has been so directly censored.”

Desmond Clark’s own opinion at the time (The Prehistory of Southern Africa, Pelican

Books, 1959) was that the ruins were quite obviously of African origin. The use of stone for building massive walls was maybe unusual for southern Africa but the layout of the walls is typically Bantu. He illustrated his case by comparing ground plans of the Zimbabwe Great Enclosure and the Barotse Paramount Chief’s current dry season residence and they are indeed very similar in layout; that is to say a high

116 oval enclosure within which was a smaller one containing the chief’s residence and various other subdivisions for his wives and immediate retinue. Clark’s theory was that the builders were inspired to build in stone by contact with the Arab and

Portuguese settlements on the east coast with which they had for centuries been trading gold, ivory and slaves. There was also a ready supply of easily fractured granite at Zimbabwe, which was not the case when the centre of power shifted and the

Shona reverted to wood and dried mud buildings.

Most archaeologists today agree with Clark that the Zimbabwe ruins were built by Bantu tribes and that they were probably abandoned simply because the centre of power moved some 350 miles north with the extension of Monomotapa’s empire on the Zambezi River by an offshoot of the Zimbabwe people. For a while

Great Zimbabwe was maintained as a ceremonial capital but then gradually fell into decay as the empire itself fell apart.

There is a curious footnote to the whole rumour about King Solomon’s mines

– the discovery, or rather proof of a ‘lost tribe of Israel’ in Africa, the Lemba or

Venda tribe in Zimbabwe and across the Limpopo River in northern Transvaal. The

Lemba’s oral tradition has always maintained that they are descended from a band of

Jewish priests who migrated into Africa in biblical times. They also have many customs distinct from their neighbours such as male circumcision, stars of David on their graves, the wearing of skull caps and avoidance of pork and other flesh containing blood. They also have a long tradition of avoiding intermarriage with other tribes (although this must have happened because physically they look pretty much like their neighbours). Thanks to Professor Tudor Parfitt of the University of

London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, DNA testing proved in the early

2000s that male Lemba do indeed share a distinctly Semitic gene with the Jewish

117 priestly caste and that their migration into Africa probably happened about 3,000 years ago. The Lemba also have a tribal heirloom called the ngoma lungundu which is claimed to be a replica of the Ark of the Covenant and has apparently been used as a weapon in battle. It appears to be a magical drum and went on display in Harare to great fanfare in 2010. Carbon dating though shows it to be only about 700 years old and interestingly enough there is a Lemba legend saying that the original ngoma lungundu exploded about that long ago and a replacement was built incorporating surviving fragments of that original.

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13

From Great Zimbabwe we carried on to Salisbury with its lush parks and wide streets.

Among the city landmarks which caught our eyes was the Pearl Assurance building, a tall office block topped by a large sculpture of a shining sphere set on a tripod. Later on this proved a useful guide for finding the way around town on our occasional days out from school. We also admired the Meikles Hotel which had the highest reputation in the city, and the Meikles store which provided our St George’s uniforms, including the scarlet blazers that enabled us to be spotted from half a mile away when in uniform.

A more immediate wonder for us kids though was the Mermaids’ Pool we visited ten or fifteen miles or so north east of the capital towards the Mazoe district, whose oranges and their juice were ubiquitous across southern Africa. This pool was fed by a waterfall running down a sheet of rock angled at around 30 degrees, which was half its attraction because the game was to ride the water down this slope on truck and tractor tyre inner tubes, while hoping not to bounce out of the tube and tumble down the rock itself, which regularly happened. It looked painful but we heard no reports of serious injury. On this first visit we kids were only allowed to ride the lower part of the slide but that was exciting enough really. This lower stretch could also be done without a tube if you had a tough backside, which we often later did when visiting with the school and seniors were monopolizing the inner tubes.

The other main attraction there we called a ‘foofie slide’, better known these days as a zip slide. This was a steel cable attached to a high platform in the trees on one side of the pool and ending just above the water itself on the other. You rode it by hanging onto a bar attached to a pulley and then the pulley was hauled back to the top

119 by a long cord. This was brilliant, possibly better even than the waterfall slide because at the top it really was quite a long drop to the water and you knew it would sting if you lost your grip, but in the circumstances it was easy enough to hang on till you were bold enough to drop. At that time there was a thriving cafe at the pool where

Coca Cola was running a promotion campaign with small figurines of African wildlife in a classy matt plastic that felt like ivory. Apparently the pool is almost abandoned these days and the tea room and restaurant have fallen into ruin. The water slide still works though, and some visitors rather enjoy its abandoned state and the lack of crowds.

While in Salisbury we visited Hartmann House, the junior section of St George’s where I would be spending my first two years. It was a fresh white modern building just down the hill from the main school, both of which were surrounded by the city’s

Botanic Gardens, There was nothing I could find any fault with and the headmaster

Father Farwell seemed a jolly man who immediately hit it off with Norman. It was the concept of boarding school itself that I had problems with. But, as mentioned earlier, there was little other choice in Livingstone. If not St George’s I would have had to board anyway in a couple of years at some government school in Northern Rhodesia.

From Salisbury we drove down to Bulawayo, stopping off at the Matopos

Hills to admire the view, Cecil Rhodes’ tomb and the San (Bushmen) paintings nearby. The name of these hills in Ndebele means ‘bald heads’ which exactly describes how the hills look, jutting out of the scrubby forest and providing wide views over the surrounding area. That sort of sudden hill could be found scattered around Southern Rhodesia and are called kopjes or koppies from the Dutch word for

‘head’.

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Driving home along the road from Bulawayo to Livingstone we passed

Wankie with its vast colliery and huge game reserve but only stopped there briefly

because by now we were

keen to get home and it

was a place we could

easily come back to from

Livingstone, being only a

few hours’ drive away.

The name of the place has

since been Africanized to

Hwange, no doubt to stop

the sniggering jokes and allow the coal, available in most hardware stores in the region to be marketed as something other than ‘Wankite’. We had a photo of Caryl standing by the Wankie sign with a mischievous smile that we only understood many years later.

Despite pressing on, night had fallen as suddenly as ever while we were still on the road and we were mostly asleep when the Peugeot screeched and slithered to a sudden standstill. Through bleary eyes we kids peered through the windscreen at an enormous pile of steaming dung in the middle of the road which we had just managed to stop short of; and just beyond this pile in the headlights loomed the even greater bulk of the elephant which had produced it. We had braked just short of skidding into the beast with who knows what consequences for both it and us. Baby Jacky had been jolted awake and began to cry. Whether this was a good thing or not I have no idea.

For what seemed an age we were frozen like this, the elephant flapping its ears and twitching its tail. Then it ambled off into the darkness.

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In 2009 I received this snapshot of our parents’ lives in Livingstone in 1960 at the end of our great camping trip. It came from a friend they had made on the ship carrying us from England to Cape Town and with whom they kept in touch for the rest of their lives.

IMPRESSIONS of AFRICA 1960 by Cathy Dawson

I arrived in April. The weather was perfect, blue sky, hot sun every day. The sunsets were magnificent. The tropical trees and plants were so colourful, and after a horrible English winter, Africa seemed like Paradise. I used to go on to the flat roof of the hospital at dawn, (after night duty), and watch the sun rise. From there I could see the spray from the Victoria Falls.

I had joined the Federal Nursing Service of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; Livingstone was my first post. A new hospital for Europeans had been very recently opened. The day that

I arrived by train from Cape Town, another nurse arrived, Elizabeth Thomas (Liz). She had been transferred from Enkeldoorn [now Chivhu], in Southern Rhodesia. There was no accommodation for us in the Sister’s Mess and we were allocated an empty ward in the new hospital. Not a very encouraging start to a new life! However shortly after our arrival, the Matron went on long leave. Her replacement came from Umtali; a past pupil of Cheltenham Ladies College, she thought Northern Rhodesia very primitive. She refused to live in the Matron’s house, preferring the safety of the Sister’s Mess. Liz and I were friends and we were delighted with the offer of a house to share. We had a great time, as we were very independent of the hospital environment and made many friends.

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At that time, life for Europeans was very privileged, and segregated. The European hospital served the three broad bands of white society in the Livingstone area: the

Government employees, the Railway employees, and the farmers and traders. Each group had their own doctors, and in fact mainly socialised within those groups. There was a “pecking order” within the social groups, which was not so apparent in towns, but quite dominant in bush stations. Fortunately, young single girls were so rare that we were welcome everywhere.

There were many Afrikaans farmers in the area; the land seemed good for farming despite the fierce Zambezi valley climate. The main health problem that I recall was malaria. Many people took prophylactic anti malarial tablets. Certainly newcomers were so advised. Malaria was so common that on admission with a raised temperature, routine blood slides were taken, before administration of an anti malarial injection. Children often were affected, and enteric infections were also common.

Nigel, your parents travelled to Livingstone via the Garden Route in South Africa, so when they arrived we renewed our friendship. They were so hospitable, and as they were very sociable they introduced Liz and I to the Musical Society, the Scottish Dance group,

the Amateur Dramatic Society, and probably others. As I recall, your father was the

Information Officer, and your mother was PA to Dr. Clark, at the Livingstone Museum.

We all managed a very hectic lifestyle; I look back on that time as very special. I

remember especially your father as the King in “The King and I.” he suited the part so

well. I enclose some photos for your interest.

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Livingstone Mainway. Look at the cars! The Matron’s house in Livingstone.

(Left) Me in the dress your mother made for me as a chorus member in Oklahoma.

(Right) A snapshot of your parents at our Silver Wedding party in 1987.

I left Livingstone in November ’60, for Fort Jameson, then Lundazi, Abercorn, Kasama, and finally Lusaka. I met William Dawson, (Wilf) in Lundazi. He was a forestry officer based in Nyasaland, on the Vipya plateau, a wonderful, wild place. We were married in

Lusaka in 1962. We moved back to the UK in 1964, with two little daughters. And the rest as they say is history.

On rereading the above, I suppose [our life in Livingstone] was a bit hedonistic, but in my next postings I saw more of the real Africa. In Lundazi, for a short time I was the only white medic, and had to suture and treat emergencies. Once we had a suspected

124 case of leprosy, and had to isolate the patient before sending him on to Fort Jameson by

Land Rover. The saying that the more you know and see, the more you realise how little you know; was very apparent to me then.

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- 3 -

PARALLEL LIVES

14

Soon after our return from England the time came to join Chris at St George’s

College. A big black metal trunk appeared with my name and address neatly painted on it in white lettering. Nametags were sewn onto all the clothes I was to take, as stipulated in a list from the school, along with my school identity number which was

192. My prisoner’s number as I glumly thought of it.

Then the day of departure came. When the Rhodesian Railways steam train chuffed and whistled into Livingstone station it was packed with school kids from further up the line – Lusaka and even the Copperbelt 200 miles beyond that. One of those Copperbelt boys was Brendan Tiernan who went on to become a teacher at St

George’s and eventually headmaster. So, many boys had already been on the train for a couple of days and nights. If there were any other passengers aboard, they were not evident. The train, or at least the carriages we were in, seemed reserved for boarding school kids bound for Southern Rhodesia. Chris already had friends among the boys of course but he nobly (or perhaps under orders) stuck by me and we shared a sleeping compartment that night, during which I had a panic attack and he did his best to calm me down. We never mentioned this incident afterwards and if it had arisen I probably would have denied all memory of it, but I was very grateful to him at the time.

But there were compensations to the long journey, as I was soon to discover on this and subsequent trips. For a start there were the Superman, Batman and other

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American comics our parents provided for the journey. These had been thoroughly perused by Norman first on the transparent excuse of checking the suitability of their content, but it was plain he simply enjoyed them as much as we did. There was also alcohol on the train, peddled by senior boys to the juniors and no doubt greatly watered down, though at that age of course just the whiff or idea of alcohol was enough to send us a bit mad. I also discovered something that’s often forgotten by those nostalgic for the age of steam trains – that you had to guard against getting smuts from the coal in your eyes because they were really painful. When stepping across the open space between carriages or sticking your head out of the window for fresh air you had to do so with your eyes half shut.

The train travelled the 300 miles to Bulawayo overnight and there we had a day just to wander freely around the shops, parks and cafes of the city with a whole pound burning a hole in our pockets – almost half as much as the rest of our term’s pocket money at school. For footloose schoolboys this was pretty much a recipe for heaven. Common sense suggested that the less we spent that day, the more we could enjoy at the school tuck shop for rest of the term, but the temptations of a spending spree were always too great to resist and I certainly never managed it.

On the walk into town we passed African stalls – often no more than a piece of sacking on the dirt or pavement beside the road – selling all kinds of strange and wonderful animal parts, bundled herbs and medicine or mutu bags containing unimaginable ingredients. Then we passed the grander Asian stalls and shops selling exotic fabrics and jewellery, plastic and gold bangles mixed indiscriminately. On one of the stalls was a miniature book with tiny oriental writing in a locket meant to be worn on a chain around the neck. I was interested but the sari-dressed Asian

127 stallholder was clearly uncomfortable. ‘But if I sell it to you, can you promise to treat it with the proper respect?’ she asked with a concerned frown.

I was a bit taken aback, never having been questioned before by a shopkeeper about the care I was going to take of something I wanted to buy from them. Then I guessed that of course it must be some kind of holy book, something like a Hindu

Bible perhaps. Almost certainly it was a Koran but I hadn’t even heard of Islam then and assumed that all Indians were Hindu like the Nayees, which actually was quite understandable since most Indians in Livingstone were just that. Muslim Indians tended to congregate in other towns and where both lived side by side there was little interaction between the two communities.

‘Yah of course I promise,’ I replied confidently, answering her continuing doubt with a winning smile. So with a lingering unease she sold it to me. Of course I didn’t really treat it with anything the respect she was hoping for. I did keep it for years undamaged or profaned but truthfully it was no more than an exotic curio, this miniature book in exotic, unreadable script. If it had been a miniature dictionary or copy of Tom Sawyer I would have been equally happy. I kept it in my metal cash box of treasures along with a miniature pack of playing cards, a live .303 rifle bullet I’d found among our dad’s things and a collection of keys which over the years often proved invaluable. One in particular seemed to be a kind of skeleton key that could unlock just about any drawer or cupboard with a particular and common make of lock.

On this first occasion in Bulawayo I just tagged along with Chris learning the ropes, but later we usually went separate ways with friends in our own year. This was one of the first things you quickly learned about St George’s – the hierarchy. Older boys were your seniors with growing degrees of command over you and you could

128 not really be friends with them. I immediately learned this with a Livingstone pal

Robert Rademeyer. We’d been great buddies at home and had got up to all kinds of mischief together, but he was a year ahead of me at school so not only could we not be friends any more but I had to defer to him. In fact he later became a bane of my life, using his one year seniority to pick on me at every chance. It was a proud and happy day when I heard through the grapevine that Chris had thrashed him in a punch-up, particularly as Rob was supposed to be one of the tough guys and though

Chris was in the school swimming team so quite athletic, he was not known as a fighter. Rob made my life even more unpleasant after that of course, but the quiet satisfaction of knowing Chris had thrashed him made it easier to bear.

Sometimes, if Lesley had already started term, we visited her at the Dominican

Convent in Bulawayo where we would make rather stilted conversation under the beady eye of some nuns. Even though it was obvious enough from our looks that we were her younger brothers, there was no question of a convent girl being left alone with boys. Such was the fear of sex that the girls were not even allowed to see their own bodies but had to take baths with a kind of cape around their shoulders. A side benefit of this was that Lesley was lightning fast at the pool or beach changing into or out of her swimming costume with complete modesty.

First form newcomers like me were at the absolute bottom of the pile at St George’s and could expect to be bossed about at every turn. Luckily our first two years were spent at Hartmann House, the semi detached junior section we had visited on our way up from South Africa. There you only had to endure a year of being bossed around by the form above till you got the chance to do the same to the fresh intake. Then you went up to the big school and it all started again on a grander scale.

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Although nine or ten might seem a tender age to send a child to boarding school, many of the boys at Hartmann House (mostly from farms with no real schools anywhere nearby) had been boarding since the age of six at St Michael’s, the Primary section of the school. So there was already the outline of a pecking order established when I arrived. Undisputed champion of our year was Matt Winchester, a giant of a boy who was six foot tall by the age of twelve, though thereafter the rest of us began to catch up. Then there was Rob Ford, a tough farmer’s son whose older brothers were sporting heroes of the upper school. Malcolm ‘Baldy’ Baldwin was a short, wiry red-haired boy, pretty tough but it was his temper you watched out for in a fight because he just went berserk. These and a few others formed the central clique of the year and apart from Matt Winchester who simply didn’t get challenged, they’d won their places by their readiness and ability to fight. The rest of us slotted in accordingly, the pecking order being decided by ‘friendly’ wrestling. These bouts could escalate quite rapidly because there always came a point where one or other of you had to quietly concede victory or else fight to the finish. Other boys were often surprised by my strength because I was a skinny kid, but I lacked the killer instinct even to aspire to joining the inner circle. In fact I didn’t have a serious fight in my entire time at St George’s which was quite astonishing to look back on because it was quite a violent place. I got pushed around and beaten up a few times by seniors but that was just something you just had to endure occasionally and you weren’t allowed to hit back anyway, but I never got into an angry battle with anyone in my own year.

However, that’s jumping ahead. After my initiation by Chris into the joys of killing time in a strange city – hanging out in cafes listening to pop music, trying to shoplift in Woolworths, ogling and later trying to chat up girls in the parks and so on

– we boarded the train again for the overnight ride 300 more miles up the track to

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Salisbury where we rode from the station in the open back of the school truck, jeering at any boys we saw from rival schools. First night in the dormitory was not a happy one despite the pink bedspreads and neatly knotted mosquito nets hung over the beds.

There were muffled homesick sobs coming from some beds that first night and I shared the sentiment but managed to contain it. One of the first lessons of survival at boarding school was learning to contain your feelings. A few rare souls like ‘Baldy’

Baldwin got away with indulging their emotions but most of us learned stoicism and most of all not to show fear.

Pretty soon life at Hartmann House settled into a pattern as we learned the written and unwritten rules, of which there was a seemingly endless number drawn from the British public school tradition that you generally learned the hard way by finding yourself in breach of them. A lot of these concerned where you could and couldn’t go in the school at certain times; and each year as you progressed through the school your rights and liberties were increased. Apart from sports and occasional escorted visits to the big school, our life was quite self-contained at Hartmann House, the place being named after one of the Jesuit founding fathers of the school, which had begun in a Bulawayo shack in 1896 and moved to Salisbury in 1926 after the bequest of some land on the select hill in the city surrounded by the Botanical

Gardens.

Fr Farwell was the head of Hartmann House and although a good deal less jolly and approachable than he’d appeared when greeting our parents, he seemed a decent enough priest who accepted his later fall from grace with quiet dignity. There was also an elderly priest Fr d’Adhemar who quietly went about his business without impacting too much on our lives. Occasionally he’d drift through the dormitories at night, presumably to make sure no-one was misbehaving, and if there was any

131 mischief going on it would cease until he had passed; but no-one was afraid of him and we were still too young to take advantage of any perceived weakness in our teachers. There was also a white-haired Matron who bustlingly organized the laundry, packing and unpacking for the holidays and, possibly, the catering; although that may have been managed by another lady. The Matron was friendly enough and I suppose she was meant to be a kind of mother figure for pupils, though you wouldn’t dream of talking to her about anything besides laundry. Kids who missed their mums just had to live with it.

The other female on the house staff was Mrs Thompson, the nurse, who had a brisk, no-nonsense manner and expected you to take your inoculations or any other treatment like a man, though otherwise she was friendly enough in a brusque sort of way. We saw quite a lot of her because in Africa we were constantly being inoculated against one disease or another, lined up in the corridor outside the sick bay waiting for our names to be called. In alphabetical order, naturally. Chris and I were given a hard enough time at boarding school because of our surname, which naturally lent itself to colourful and obscene improvisations, but its place in the alphabet was another reason to curse it because it meant always being near the end of queues. In the line for inoculations this meant having to watch the other boys emerge nursing their wounds; and I’m sure many of them used to ham it up sometimes just to inflame our fears, however brave a face they had put on for the nurse. I swore I’d change my surname by deed poll as soon as I was old enough, but when that day finally came I found I’d grown quite attached to its oddness. It has the advantage that at least people tend to remember it though you do have to be careful to pronounce the S at the beginning quite clearly over the phone with strangers, because it can come across as an F . . .

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I’m sure all the brisk jabbing we had done to us as kids had something to do with the mild needle phobia I developed, because only recently I learned that Chris also has one. I learned not to mention it though, to dentists in particular, because it only makes them nervous and clumsy. My current dentist just thinks I happen to prefer a bit of pain to the rubber-lips after-effect of injections.

Then there was Fr Walsh nicknamed ‘Texas’ for obscure reasons that I never fathomed. He was in charge of the dormitories and showers and definitely did play a large and often unwelcome part in our lives. Texas used to play musicals loudly in the space between the dorms so that the sound flooded the upper floor of the school building. Thus we became intimately acquainted with the music for Seven Brides for

Seven Brothers, Oklahoma, Oliver and many other shows. If you weren’t careful you also got to be waltzed around by Texas, for which reason you soon learned to be wary on the way back from cleaning your teeth in the shower block to your dormitory in the evenings. I got caught like this once, having neglected the usual precaution of making sure I was with a group. It was not a pleasant experience, especially the graze of his bristly cheek on my own. I quite liked much of the music though.

Texas also had a games room off to one side of that space between the dorms with all sorts of entertainments such as a wooden maze set on a tilting platform through which you had to negotiate a steel ball bearing without falling into any of the holes. You still see similar toys in traditional games shops today. The only trouble was that there was usually a queue for the room and you had to be in favour with

Texas to get in. Generally it didn’t seem worth it, though some boys obviously thought it was and they became his coterie of ‘pets’ that he took out for jaunts and treats at the weekend in his black sit-up-and-beg Ford Popular. You can probably

133 guess the cloud of scandal under which this all ended, but that was still a couple of years ahead and at the time we just had to live with the situation as we found it.

More usefully, Texas also ran a kind of shop for luxury goods from the town at reduced rates. With our limited pocket money there was not much I could ever afford apart from key chains. It became a fad to have the longest possible key chain so what we did was buy several, carefully pry open the metal links and then join them together. They had a leather fob at one end with a slit to fit over a trouser button and I suppose the point of the chain was so that you could fish out your keys without having to rummage through the rest of the junk in your pocket; but by the time we’d added several chains together this usefulness was somewhat offset by the danger of tripping over them.

We also enhanced our key chains with what we called Scooby-doos – braided charms made from bright electrical wiring from which we’d extracted the copper core. There was a range of patterns you could make and competition to be the most inventive. Looking back, it was a curiously innocent and un-macho fad for boys who were more commonly to be found gathered baying around a fight or some boy burning insects with a magnifying glass, but at the time we were completely unaware of any contradiction. Under a different name this craze resurfaced much later in my daughter’s primary school and I gained brief kudos for being able to show her all the tricks. I’m not sure now where the money came from but on other occasions Texas’s

‘shop’ also came in useful for parental Christmas and birthday presents – a Parker 45 pen for Norman and a bottle of Chanel No 5 for Caryl.

Among our lay (non-religious) teachers was Mrs Peabody, a rather fearsome woman in whose class we were generally well behaved. She told us once that on a trip to the

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Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia a mining engineer had let her in on a supposedly great secret – that the great vein of copper ore they mined surfaced again over the border in the Congo, whose mines would be just as rich if only they knew. We were terribly impressed by this piece of insider knowledge although if it really was a secret then, it soon became common enough knowledge and it has mainly been politics and the price of copper that have hampered development in what was then the Belgian

Congo.

Some of our evening study periods were held in Mrs Peabody’s class and for some reason I often got to sit at her desk, I tried out my skeleton keys on her locked drawer till I found one that fitted. I didn’t do more than root around curiously among her papers and the items she’d confiscated from pupils, but this led to trouble. Soon afterwards I entered her class one morning to find some commotion going on.

Everyone seemed to turn towards me as she explained: ‘Someone’s broken into my drawer and stolen things.’

‘It wasn’t me’ I said guiltily, though perfectly honestly.

‘If the cap fits, wear it!’ she declared triumphantly and I was both punished for the crime and banned from evening study in that classroom. The unfairness of this rankled for years and knowing that Mrs Peabody had been wrong was scant consolation, but eventually I came to the grudging conclusion that perhaps a crude sort of justice had been done. If I hadn’t been shouldering a degree of guilt for showing off to the others with my keys, perhaps I would have reacted differently and not attracted her suspicion.

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15

The pupils at Hartmann House were probably a fair sample of the white population of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, with a Catholic slant since only a handful came from other religions. So the majority were Southern Rhodesians with only a fifth or so from the north and a smattering from Nyasaland and further afield such as two brothers from Pemba, an island off Zanzibar on the east coast of Tanganyika (as it was then still called). The majority were of British or Irish descent but there was a fair sprinkling of other Europeans, particularly Italian, and we had one Greek called

Byron in my class who had the curious habit when wearing a long sleeved shirt of blowing his nose into the rolled up cuff instead of into a handkerchief. Apparently this was a common Greek custom but it mildly horrified us and must have puzzled the laundry staff.

In the upper school there was also a Greek gym teacher who had been a weight lifter in his national team at the Olympics and looked the part, being built like the proverbial brick outhouse. No-one ever gave him any cheek. He also taught boxing for those who were interested (a few years earlier it had been compulsory) and whenever he caught boys fighting he would put them in the ring for a proper refereed battle with gloves. One benefit of the racial topography of Rhodesia was that national differences like these were considered quite marginal really. We were first of all

European and where you originated from in Europe was really just a matter of minor curiosity. Coming from the Republic of Ireland was only marginally more exotic than being fully British and being Italian or Greek was only slightly more so than that.

There was probably more territorial rivalry between which parts of the

Federation you came from. Southern Rhodesians tended to look down on those from

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Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland as being provincial, and this attitude grew as both those territories edged towards majority rule, but still this was a quite minor issue for mild joshing that barely affected real relationships. A far bigger divide was between day boys and boarders. Friendships did cross the divide, helped by weekend invitations to day boys’ homes, but on the whole day boys were not really taken very seriously because they were not part of all that went on out of school hours, which is what really defined life there.

For instance, the chapel at Hartmann House was rumoured to be haunted, so one night in my first year about half a dozen of us sneaked out of the dormitory and went to investigate. The chapel was slightly detached from the main school building and built on top of a large circular concrete water tank that had once served as a reservoir for the town, before new and larger ones were built further up the hill. It was empty now and in fact our tuck shop was housed in its echoing depths, from which we could buy not just sweets and crisps but other colonial luxuries such as condensed milk and tubes of French mustard which were just as highly prized.

It was terribly exciting creeping through the sleeping school and by the time we reached the chapel door by way of a short bridge, we were keyed up for anything.

The door was unlocked so in we went, tripping over each other in our eagerness not to get separated. There must have been a big moon that night because we could dimly make everything out, although the only direct light was the small candle in a red glass holder above the altar, indicating that God was present in the consecrated host within the tabernacle. Whispering and jostling each other we waited till someone hissed:

‘Over there!’ pointing towards the shadowy altar. It’s impossible now to say if there really was anything there but for just a moment I really did believe I could see a paler

137 shadow drifting out of the darkness over on the left. We fled in panic and it’s a miracle we weren’t caught as we scampered recklessly back through the school to our dormitory.

The next day we discussed the matter and although no-one could agree on exactly what we’d seen or even in fact where we’d seen it, everyone agreed that we had seen something and it must have been the ghost because if the faint figure had been a prowling priest we would have been in deep trouble; which is probably how the legend of the Hartmann House ghost was perpetuated from generation to generation.

Part of the frisson of this adventure was that although we were no better behaved than any other boys our age, most of us were genuinely religious in the sense of not doubting the existence of heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo (though limbo, where un-baptized babies and virtuous non-Catholics went, has since been quietly abolished) and all the rest. When we bought miraculous medals or holy cards we really did believe that we were purchasing so many years remission of suffering in

Purgatory (the exact number was clearly printed on the cards) which we could either offer up to the departed or set against our own almost inevitable period of torture there after death. We really did believe priests had a magical direct line to heaven whatever their personal shortcomings, and that any Catholic had the power to baptize a dying baby and thus permit it to enter heaven rather than just float around in limbo forever.

Our trespass into the chapel was skating along the edge of sin, even though we’d done nothing actually wrong there. Most of us were quietly horrified when one day after Mass one boy took the communion wafer out of his mouth and offered to pass it around to prove there was nothing special about it. No-one took up his offer

138 and we wouldn’t have been at all surprised by a bolt of lightning out of the blue or his suddenly contracting some nasty and terminal disease. He didn’t, although he did come to be rather shunned for this and other weird behaviour. You probably have to have been brought up a Catholic at the time to appreciate the superstitious haze which then coloured our perceptions of the world.

There was another redundant water tank about the same size nearby that was strictly out of bounds, not being on school property, but we got to investigate it anyway by sneaking out and climbing in through a hatch. It was pleasantly spooky and full of echoes but we found nothing particularly useful or interesting there. This expedition did lead though to finding a couple of feral kittens which we took back to school and persuaded a day boy, Tim Rose, to take home with him to rear. The woods around St George’s were full of wild cats. They were not true African wild cats but domestic moggies that had taken to the bush. Even so, the kittens we found proved untameable and apparently ran off as soon as they were old enough to fend for themselves.

At the end of my first year at Hartmann House Chris’s form moved up to the big school and ours got to be ‘seniors’ for a year. This was quite fun, even knowing it would not last. Some boys took it quite seriously and would call ‘juniors’ over and grill them as we’d often been grilled the year before. The bullying was not serious at

Hartmann House though; that came later, but we got a taste of how the system worked.

For a start I learned at first hand how difficult it was for friendship to survive a gap in classes. I’d had quite a good friend the year before in Kim McCarthy but he was held back a year, presumably because he was struggling with lessons. I made a

139 conscious effort not to let this affect our friendship but soon had to abandon it; and not just because others in my year made it awkward, though they might well have done if I’d persisted, but because my own attitude towards him inexorably changed.

Some sort of veneer settled over him that made him ‘other’ i.e. a junior. It was very odd feeling this change of perception happening and being unable to prevent it. You couldn’t fight the system too much at St George’s, it was too well established and besides, your main concern on the whole was fitting in with as little grief as possible.

At least, though, I didn’t take to picking on Kim as Robert Rademeyer was increasingly to do with me when I moved up to the big school.

The second year at Hartmann House was much more relaxed than the first, partly because there was no form above us but also because by now I and other new boys had grown used to the peculiar rules and mores of boarding school and had made some good friends, friendships which remained pretty constant throughout our time at

St George’s. During the first term of that second year the matron brought to me at supper time news of my brother Alistair’s birth. Having the event announced to the whole table at which I was sitting was faintly embarrassing, given the fog of guilt and shame that still shrouded the whole topic of sex, an awkwardness Catholic doctrine eagerly inflamed and played upon. The mind boggled that our parents were still actively and possibly even enthusiastically engaged in making babies and now all my friends knew about it . . .

Once I’d joined Chris and Lesley at boarding school we three older siblings led parallel lives. There was school in Southern Rhodesia, which was pretty much a world in itself and about which we told our parents very little, then there were the quite generous holidays back home in Livingstone. With our parents both working when

140 not busy looking after baby Jacky – then Alistair and Sandra who followed at two year intervals – our holidays were wonderfully free-ranging. We also largely avoided the problem most boarding school kids have of lacking friends at home in the holidays, because several other St George’s boys did live there and to some extent there were also the local kids we had known previously while going to the local convent, though those friendships did gradually wither and fade into the background.

Also, distance was no great object. I had a new boarding school friend Mike

O’Connell who lived in Mazabuka, two hundred or so miles up the road towards

Lusaka, but visits both ways were easily enough arranged. Government Land Rovers were forever plying the highway between Livingstone and Lusaka on various errands, so it was easy enough for Norman to arrange lifts for us in them.

During what was probably my first visit to Mike late in 1960 his parents went out to dinner leaving us on our own. That sounds a bit odd now – parents going out and leaving two ten year old boys alone in the house – but there seemed nothing unusual about it at the time. Presumably now we were St George’s boarders Mike’s parents trusted us to be responsible enough not to do anything stupid. Little did they know, but actually the adventure of that evening was not because of any mischief we got into. It was something that happened to us.

About halfway through the evening the ground began to tremble, barely perceptibly at first but gradually building and building till finally the whole house was shaking, glasses were rattling in the drinks cupboard and ornaments and pictures falling off the walls. For some mad minutes we imagined we were in the path of some vast elephant stampede but when we could see nothing out of the windows we had simply no idea at all of what was happening and were in a complete panic, cowering behind the sofa. Then finally the shaking subsided as gradually as it had come, with

141 occasional resurgences like a dying thunderstorm; and when it had faded completely the house was still standing and we were unharmed.

I can’t really remember what state we were in when Mike’s parents came rushing home. I can picture them bursting in but not what met their eyes. I think we were probably quite calm by then because no real damage had been done, but we probably looked less brave than we hoped. Quite likely we imagined they might blame us for the mess the place was in. The explanation we were soon given by

Mike’s parents’ was that the tremor had been caused by the land settling under the weight of the rapidly growing Kariba Lake (while some Africans of course believed it was their protesting river god Nyami Nyami trying to undermine the dam). This completely calmed our ten year old nerves because, I suppose, it quelled our wilder speculations and brought the event back into the rational scheme of things.

This explanation was a bit optimistic though, as it has turned out. It wasn’t just the land settling in a manner you’d expect to die out after a few years. Tremors have continued ever since. According to a World Commission on Dams Case Study,

November 2000: “The reservoir is located in a tectonically active area, at the southern end of the African Rift Valley. Since its construction and filling in the early 1960s, Kariba has caused numerous earthquakes in the area, 20 of them in excess of magnitude 5 on the Richter scale.”

Incidentally, another unlooked for consequence of the dam was the explosion of Kariba Weed on its spreading waters. This was Salvinia Molesta, a plant that originated in Brazil but had become a popular pond ornament with colonials that had then somehow found its way into Kariba Lake where it floated on the surface in rapidly growing mats that choked the life out of the waters below. It reached epidemic

142 proportions in the early years of Kariba but apparently this was contained by the introduction of an aquatic grasshopper that feeds upon it.

I believe Mike’s father was headmaster at the local Codrington primary school, named after an early colonial administrator who had encouraged African education and promoted African participation in local government. In fact he is credited as one of the architects of Northern Rhodesia who helped set a quite different tone there to that in Southern Rhodesia, and also made him quite unpopular down there. Mike’s father took us on a tour of his workplace because that’s what usually happened in

Rhodesia. We kids were forever being taken on tours of farms, factories, maize mills, biscuit, scent and candle factories, offices and any other workplace going. Possibly these visits were arranged beforehand when they happened not to be busy, but the managers and owners of these places always seemed delighted to take the time to show kids around. In return we usually were quite entertained; they seemed wonderful places where everyone was proud to show off what they did and the African workers too always seemed smiling and welcoming. But we were also easily distracted from the serious stuff we were being shown. For example, what most sticks in the mind from a tour of the Mulobezi sawmill in Livingstone is the push-button gear change in the manager’s vast Chrysler Imperial that seemed like a grounded spaceship with fins and acres of curved glass and brake lights like jet engines, the whole beast seeming on the edge of rising into the air and shooting off into the sky on an antigravity motor.

However, all I remember of Mike’s dad’s tour was being shown around the servants’ quarters, of which everyone was immensely proud so I’d guess they were new. A senior servant invited us politely into his home to meet his wife and have tea, which we did. The small house was immaculately white and clean, with the

143 ubiquitous red-painted concrete floor and modest, European-style furniture that I’d guess had been handed down by the teaching staff. Our hosts were clearly very house- proud so I hope we kids were gracious enough to make our appreciation clear.

Caryl called in during this stay in Mazabuka. She was driving to Lusaka in the grey Peugeot with baby Jacky for some medical tests. I didn’t think much of it at the time because of our regular doses of inoculation. It shows how little we communicated as a family sometimes because during this visit and her chatting to

Mike’s parents Caryl conveyed no hint of the anxiety which must have been on her mind. It was only later when I was back home in Livingstone and the results of the tests came through that it was announced to Lesley, Chris and me that Jacky was completely deaf. It came as a total shock, though in retrospect it explained some odd behaviour – the peculiarly intense clapping of our parents’ hands to get her baby attention and so on. I’ve no idea how long they’d guessed the truth. Apparently it’s quite common not to realise a baby is deaf until they are a year or more old.

Personally I’d had not the faintest suspicion. I’d even been running an experiment of singing Jacky my current favourite pop songs in her cot to see if she’d remember them when she grew up.

Jacky’s deafness became, as with most families in which it happens, just part of the norm. We learned to live around it and for Alistair and Sandra it was just a situation they were born into. The immediate problem for Jacky though was that as soon as she reached kindergarten age at three she too was packed off to a special needs boarding school in Bulawayo.

Regarding communication within the family – around this same time Norman was in a very strange mood one Sunday lunch. We only discovered the reason a week or two later when Chris, who was a great letter-writer at the time, next wrote to Nana

144 and Gramp in England, a duty that had somehow fallen on his shoulders. He was told only to address it to Gramp because Norman’s mother, our Nana, had died. Our granddad sold their house in Ilford after that and took to travelling constantly around

Britain, using the free rail pass he’d been given on retirement from British Rail and staying in a network of Methodist hotels.

And regarding letters, it always rather puzzled me as a child that Caryl should be happy to receive letters addressed to ‘Mrs Norman Suckling’ rather than at least being credited with her own first name. Was this some kind of prescience on my part for the kind of feminism that in the 1970s encouraged my own wife to keep her original surname after marriage? Well, possibly, but it just struck me as odd that when if anything hers was the more forceful and charismatic personality she should be content with merely a ‘Mrs’ to denote that she was a different person from him, a nameless sidekick. Despite growing up in the 50s and early 60s it never occurred to me that women were in any way the subservient gender. They obviously tended towards different occupations than the men but none of the women in our lives seemed to defer in any way to their partners.

Another new friend from St George’s in Livingstone itself was Nick Bulloch who lived just a few streets up the hill towards the airport. We moved in slightly different circles at school but in the holidays I quite often hung out with him and his younger sister Clare. I stayed with them once for the weekend when I just happened to have a nasty boil at the top of my right leg which was causing real burning agony, though I tried to ignore it. The first night it was hard to sleep because of the pain. I thought I’d managed to keep it successfully to myself till Nick’s mother said next morning at breakfast: ‘Nigel I’m shocked. I wouldn’t have believed you knew such dreadful

145 language.’ Apparently I’d been swearing in my sleep as my boil burned. Very embarrassing. But that evening when I had a bath at their house I got a worse surprise.

Lying there in the steaming hot water (don’t ask me why we had hot baths in Africa when it was generally pretty hot anyway) I eyed my throbbing red boil, which had a curious hole in the centre. Then suddenly to my horror it sprouted a head and a white, maggot-like body emerged from the hole and waved about. I tried to grab the creature but it slipped through my fingers back inside my leg.

When I described all this at the European hospital the nurse said: ‘What you have, Nigel, is the grub of a putse fly burrowing around inside you. It’s a kind of maggot. Don’t worry, we’ll soon have it out.’ Saying which, she hoicked down my pants and underpants and then at a leisurely pace tipped some ether into my ‘boil’s’ hole, waited a while for it to take effect, then inserted a barbed needle rather like a crochet hook (possibly that’s exactly what it was). With this she dragged out the monster, a maggot over an inch long.

‘They can grow up to six inches, you know’ said the nurse, ‘so you’re lucky we caught it so soon.’ I now suspect this was a wild exaggeration designed to cheer me up, but at the time I took her at her word and it did actually work; I did feel that

I’d had a lucky escape. They gave the maggot to me as a keepsake in a clear little bottle of formalin where it jumped up and down for a few hours before dying. I felt no pity. I kept that bottle for years in my cashbox of treasures as proof of the story. The only problem was that the monster did rather shrink after death and no-one was totally convinced as to my claim of its original monstrous proportions; and possibly of course my perceptions were exaggerated by the horror of having had the thing living within me and eating my leg from the inside.

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Years later I bumped by chance into Nick in London’s Victoria Station, at least partly proving the old London saying that if you stand there long enough you’ll meet everyone you know.

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16

After becoming a boarder our Livingstone adventures in the holidays became steadily more interesting. For a while Ken Barlow next door became a good adventuring buddy and he’d cycle with me and Chris out towards the Falls and see what we could find. Sometimes we stopped just beyond the Maramba River where there was some kind of crocodile farm. In a comfortingly solid cage of steel railway sleepers there was a monster crocodile at which we could safely throw stones. I hope it never escaped because its revenge on white boys could have been terrible. Also nearby on the Maramba River was the Craft Village. This was a project run by the museum to show people how local African tribes had lived before Europeans came along and changed everything. This was interesting enough but rather educational and we only

148 visited it with our parents. Also I’d guess there was an entrance fee that put us off and the colourful dances and concerts staged regularly there could be seen for free in the museum courtyard. We also suspected that the ‘villagers’ went home at night to their saucepan radios and square-cornered brick houses.

Saucepan radios were a recurring background feature of our lives in Rhodesia, along with the oil lamps in every house, testament to the recent and not altogether reliable arrival of mains electricity in the towns. Similarly, many homes still had paraffin-powered fridges and ‘meatsafes’ which predated even these – mesh-lined boxes on tall legs for protecting fresh meat from flies and scavengers.

Saucepan radios had been designed in 1949 specifically for conditions in rural

Rhodesia and Nyasaland by the Ever Ready Company of Britain. The aim was for a cheap and durable battery-powered Short Wave radio that could sell for less than £5, which was reckoned all that farmers and African villagers could afford. The casing was quite literally a ten inch saucepan without a handle, painted bright metallic blue and with a hole punched in the base for a loudspeaker, the rest of the space being filled with valves, circuit board and other components. This then sat neatly on top of the large battery that powered it. Apparently about a quarter of a million were made and scattered across the Empire as far as Malaya. By the early 60s Europeans in

Rhodesia had mostly moved on to transistor radios, many assembled in a Bulawayo factory and branded Supersonic, but the saucepan radios lived on sturdily for years in stores and African homes, the only problem with them being, I imagine, the periodic high cost of the batteries and the occasional new valves.

On one of our ventures with Ken we visited Old Livingstone and nearby came across a loosely moored dinghy with oars that we immediately borrowed and spent the rest of the day paddling round the nearer islands of the Zambezi. Horribly

149 dangerous to think back on, what with crocodiles and strong currents, hippos and even elephants, who liked to cross from island to island, walking on the riverbed with just their trunks poking above the water as snorkels. Hippos were a bigger danger than crocodiles as it happened and were responsible for far more deaths on the Zambezi.

Crocs usually stayed on the islands out in the centre of the mile wide river during the day, avoiding humans, but hippos were bolder. They also seemed to enjoy surfacing beneath small boats and tipping them over just for the hell of it. But for the selfsame reasons paddling about on the river in a borrowed boat was also wonderfully exciting and rather amazingly we managed at the end of the day to return the boat to where we’d found it, rather than having to abandon it somewhere downstream nearer the

Falls.

Lesley also sometimes took Chris and me along on outings with her older friends, as she’d done at Munali. By now they were living the teenage dream largely inspired by

(up till 1963 and the Beatles anyway) American music and fashions – the Everley

Brothers, Del Shannon, Elvis, Little Richard and so on. It was an odd feature of

Rhodesian racism that black American musicians largely slipped under the radar so

Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and later on the Supremes and the Four

Tops were all somehow accepted as honorary whites because of being American.

Meanwhile Harry Belafonte was a favourite family choice of music, our parents’ choice but we were still of an age to enjoy their music as much as our own.

The two albums that particularly stand out being his debut from 1954 Mark Twain and Other Folk Favourites which (rather curiously in hindsight) was a collection of

British and American folk songs; and more expectedly (at least to a Rhodesian kid listening to a black singer) Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean from 1957. Later on in

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1962 there was Bert Kampfert’s Swinging Safari which put African rhythms in an easy listening orchestral context. This was a great hit with most white Rhodesians who normally would not be caught dead deliberately listening to the real African music pouring out of their radios in the towns and villages. A similar hit with whites was the African-nuanced The Lion Sleeps Tonight. There was also British pop music, helped by our dad taping the Top 20 off the BBC World Service using the government professional broadcasting equipment he otherwise used for recording and filing news reports and then transcribing it onto tapes we could play at home. But overall we really aspired to be young Americans and the general lifestyle and popularity of American cars reinforced this ambition.

In Rhodesia there were no European bands or orchestras that attracted any degree of international recognition, though there were plenty enough able to provide live music for social events. This was probably natural enough given that the combined white population of both Rhodesias was no more than a provincial British city. Some acts from South Africa did impinge on our consciousness though. Most memorable was Jeremy Taylor who had a number of hits gently satirizing South

African culture and whose albums apparently outsold Elvis Presley’s there for a while. His greatest hit was Ag Pleez Deddy a plea from a demanding Afrikaans child for all the material delights on offer in the Republic, sung in a broad Afrikaaner accent and ending with the infuriated parent roaring Voetsak!! at the child, a word that had probably never previously appeared on a record. Another was the Black-White

Calypso whose chorus went: ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me why I want to know the fact/Why all the black people want to go white and the white people want to go black.’ This was a comment on the skin-lightening creams used by Africans in

151 contrast to the suntan lotions used by the whites, whose aim was the complete opposite of sunscreen.

Another South African star (though he was in fact just a brief visitor) was

Mickie Most who with his band The Playboys had a string of hits with cover versions of British and American rock ‘n roll before returning to England to become one of the most successful British record producers ever.

Back to Livingstone: on one occasion Lesley planned a great picnic with a group of her friends, boys and girls. Transport was provided by government Land Rovers which ferried us down to the Falls and across the bridge into Southern Rhodesia.

There we were driven upriver past the David Livingstone statue and the Big Tree into the edge of the game reserve where we piled out with our blankets and hampers and a transistor radio tuned to pop music on Lourenço Marques (LM) Radio broadcasting in

English from neighbouring Mozambique on the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles downriver from where we were sitting. This radio station was deliberately modelled on Radio Luxembourg in Europe, playing pop tunes with adverts and on fading shortwave it was our chief means of keeping up with British and American pop music. I often used to listen to it last thing at night when drifting off to sleep; though sometimes for entertainment I also listened to the very different accounts of troubles in the Congo or Vietnam on Radio Moscow and Voice of America, comparing their stories with what we heard on the BBC World Service. The casualty figures were always wildly different and the BBC’s always somewhere in the middle, which somehow always made them seem more plausible.

Popular wisdom held that this stretch of river was too close to the Falls for crocodiles and we happily accepted this. With no more than a cursory examination for

152 crocs, we jumped into a branch of the river and claimed it as our private pool, not that there was any competition (from humans at least) because there was no-one else around at all once the Land Rovers had left.

Lesley’s friends mostly paid little attention to her kid brother but there was one, Danny Schafer, who went out of his way to be friendly with me. Probably he was hoping to ingratiate himself with Lesley, whom he clearly fancied, but if so his plan failed. I did even ask her once why she didn’t go out with him but she just said dismissively ‘Oh, he’s too soft.’ Cruel, but it was her business. Anyway, Danny was at the picnic and came along when Chris and I and a couple of others explored the small island beyond the swimming stretch, and then the even smaller island beyond that, which we reached by means of a tree which neatly bridged the running water. As we were crossing over I glanced down and saw the back of some creature below in the water. It seemed about two or three feet wide and had the distinctive, cell-like divisions of the back of a turtle or tortoise, though it was far too big for that. I knew a bit about Zambezi turtles, having helped our parents’ friend Mr Mitchell release a batch into the river not long before. He was a (or possibly even the) senior officer in the Livingstone Game and Fisheries Department.

Although it was the right sort of size, the pattern and texture were completely unlike those of a crocodile’s back, with which we were quite familiar. The only other thing it might be was a leguaan, a kind of large monitor lizard or iguana that lives in the Zambezi and likes sunning itself on branches overhanging the river, from which it can easily drop into the water if disturbed. These are not particularly dangerous to humans, being smaller than crocs and lacking their teeth, but the larger ones were said to be able to break a human leg with their tails; but again this creature looked larger than any leguaan I’d seen and the pattern didn’t look right. Sadly the ends of the

153 creature were obscured by the side branches of the tree which formed our natural bridge.

We called the others’ attention to this discovery and some of the older boys came over from where they were swimming in the next branch of the river. They decided to flush the beast out and began lobbing anything they could find into the water below our tree trunk bridge – rocks, branches, mud, anything they could lay hands on. The creature vanished with a flourish but then shortly afterwards two large nostrils broke the surface downstream, beyond the tangled branches of the fallen tree.

This led to a fresh bombardment of that area, upon which the creature vanished altogether without us seeing what it was. I felt a bit bad about having called attention to it when it had quietly been dozing and minding its own business.

That was not our only encounter with African wildlife that day. Later that afternoon when everyone had exhausted themselves and we were just lazing around in the sun or shade, chatting and listening to music, our peace was shattered by the trumpeting of elephants and soon afterwards a herd of them came crashing through the trees towards our picnic spot. We scattered, gathering what we could as we fled and soon afterwards a large herd came past, warily shadowed by some African game wardens with rifles. The elephants were not interested in us at all though, just busy about their own affairs. But it was the end of the picnic and with the wardens’ encouragement we collected our things and drifted back towards the dirt track where the Land Rovers were due to collect us.

That wasn’t quite the end of the mystery creature though. The next time Mike

O’Connell came down from Mazabuka to stay, we rode out to the Falls on our pushbikes to investigate. To my delight the creature was back exactly where I had

154 first seen it, just a few feet down under the water beneath the natural bridge. Mike was disappointingly less enthusiastic about it being some giant and unknown species of river turtle, which was my theory. Mr Mitchell’s reaction was even more disappointing when we cycled back to Victoria Falls Township to phone him. I suppose it’s not surprising that he should not have taken seriously an over-excited ten or eleven year old boy’s claim to have found a giant and previously unknown turtle in the river; but at the time I was quite astonished when he said he was too busy to come and investigate.

What might the creature have been? Well, who knows now? On and off for years afterwards I scanned wildlife reports from the Zambezi in the hope of being vindicated by the discovery of large turtles there, but there has been nothing. Perhaps after all it was simply an unusually marked croc; the nostrils we’d originally seen had been about the right size so possibly we were luckier than we knew swimming about in the river. Or more likely it was simply an unusually large leguaan, because they can grow two to three metres in length and the turtle-like markings may have been caused by the dappling effect of sunlight on the water.

When I was about twelve I acquired a new friend Tony Walsh for the holidays in

Livingstone. His dad worked for the railways and he lived well downhill beyond the tracks so we often used the storm drains to get to each other’s houses. The family wasn’t Afrikaner but because so many of the other railway workers were they had picked up a lot of their habits, including on the one hand a much brisker way of ordering Africans around, on the other a much better grasp of their languages.

Most Africans in Rhodesia seemed to speak from childhood several tongues well enough to get by – their own regional dialect, a broader tribal common language

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(of which there were at least seven in Northern Rhodesia alone) plus usually that of their neighbouring tribe(s) plus English and possibly Afrikaans. On top of which there was a pidgin language which seemed to work with all the tribes that was commonly called Kitchen Kaffir though its more respectful name was Chikabango (‘kaffir’ being generally an insulting term for black Africans) but I’d never learned it nor, rather surprisingly, did our parents ever encourage us to do so. This language was an eclectic mix of mostly Bantu words mixed with English and a little Afrikaans. I believe it evolved in the South African mines, which attracted workers from all over southern

Africa who then carried it back to their homes, where it was probably useful wherever different tribes mixed.

One day Tony and I were messing around with the guinea pigs in the yard at the back of our house between the old and new kitchens and the guest room Chris and

I shared, where we’d built a chicken wire run for them. As we did so Tony was teaching me some Kitchen Kaffir which was a lot more pithy and entertaining than the

Latin we learned at school, besides having possible practical applications beyond understanding the Catholic Mass or reading about Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars.

At one point Tony said: ‘I’ll tell you something they don’t teach you in

Kitchen Kaffir, man – masippa how! That really gets them mad.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Buggered if I know, but it gets the munts hopping.’

‘Masippa how?’ I tried experimentally.

‘No no. Hey, you spit it out like this.’

Tony gave a demonstration and I copied him till I’d got it right.

All this time Dixon was quietly going about his duties in the kitchen, saying nothing till Tony had left when he told me: ‘That boy is not a good friend for you.’

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‘What do you mean? He’s great.’ I enjoyed visiting Tony because his family did so many things differently, like frying not just fish but bananas and many other foods in batter. They also had a refreshingly frank way of talking to each other, even if it did often involve colourful swearing, which was not permitted at all in our house.

‘He is not good for you,’ Dixon persisted stubbornly. ‘He teaches you bad words.’

Ah, so he’d heard my little lesson in African swearing then. I wasn’t ready to admit Dixon was right though and just stalked off to my room. A bit of a gulf opened up between us after that and I think it was probably the last time he called on the old familiarity to upbraid me about anything. But as it happens the friendship with Tony didn’t last anyway. By the next holidays he had other friends from his own school and we just parted company.

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17

Meanwhile back at St George’s I’d moved up from Hartmann House to the main school. This was pretty scary because it meant that just about any boy in the higher forms could give you a hard time if they chose. At the very least you had to endure endless grilling, where older boys called you over and asked any questions that came to mind, mostly designed to embarrass or humble the recipient. I had, as Chris no doubt also had before me, to put up with endless humorous improvisations on my surname and endure many other insults without seeming to care. That was essential, not seeming bothered and if possible being witty in your replies. If you could keep it up the older boys started leaving you alone, but if you showed any fear, anger or hurt you were in deep trouble and soon became a regular victim. There are grim stories I could tell about the bullying at St George’s, such as that of my friend ‘Stick’ Kane who tried running away from school and then, when caught and dragged back, tried to cut his wrists because the prefects were coming for him in the sick bay that night. Or the practice in the Senior Common Room when kicking a junior senseless, of making him bend over with his head under the billiard table so the boot to his backside also made him whack the back of his head; this punishment often being inflicted for no reason beyond having given imaginary cheek or offence to a senior.

Well, maybe I will come back to some of those but I can’t complain too much personally because, as with the fighting, I got off lightly compared with others. I got picked on more than some but less than many. I did hate the school quite steadily for its culture of bullying but at the same time this fostered a kind of camaraderie among one’s peers which I imagine is rather like that in the armed forces. I made some very good friends and we had many laughs between dodging the endless rules and

158 penalties that circumscribed our lives. In fact I had more good friends at St George’s than in any previous or following school, despite or maybe even because of the hostile environment. I did leave with a big grudge against the school though, possibly because I missed out on the tail end of the conditioning at the heart of the British public school system; which is to get to the top form and then rule over all the minions below. At which point I would guess most grievances and scars get resolved one way or another and you go out into the world with such confidence in ordering people about that you resolve to send your own son there in due course for the same training.

At the time though, languishing in the lower forms, it was a mystery to me why pupils who had experienced the whole bullying system should so enthusiastically send their own sons to undergo the same, because a large proportion of the pupils were second or even third generation Georgians. But now I’m sure that many of the boys who had a much tougher time of it than me later did the same with their own sons. I’m sure there are plenty of psychological studies around to explain it. When

Chris had a son he started going to church again. He wasn’t sure why because he hadn’t recovered the faith or anything, but he had an uneasy instinct that Mark might miss out on something, even if it was only making the choice at some point to stop going to church himself. Chris also once even contemplated sending Mark to boarding school when his family moved for a while to Germany so he could work on the

Tornado fighter jet for the Royal Air Force. The difference between us was probably that although Chris also missed out on the final stage of the public school conditioning, having left before reaching the sixth form, the St George’s experience gave him a head start when he joined the RAF in Britain where a similar culture

159 prevailed; so he was more inclined to be grateful for the hard lessons he had learned.

Me, I just resolved never to inflict anything like it on my own children.

Among the taunts Chris and I had to put up with from seniors was the accusation of being ‘currymunchers’ i.e. Indians. We assumed this arose from some garbled rumour about our mother having been born in India, spread by Lusaka boys whose parents knew ours and something of their background. In fact I could even hazard a guess as

to which boy it was – a kid we’d played with back in the Lusaka convent days who went on to become one of the worst bullies at St George’s; but of course I can’t be sure. And it so happened that Chris and I had dark complexions anyway, even by

Rhodesian standards, so the accusation might have been levelled at us anyway. With all the swimming practice he did as a breaststroke champion in the school team,

Chris’s back used to turn almost black in the summer.

You’d imagine that this would have given us some empathy for Asians on the receiving end of white Rhodesian racism but I’m afraid not. We just distanced ourselves as far as possible from the notion, probably by displaying more anti-Indian

160 prejudice than would otherwise have been the case, and certainly not mentioning our occasional dinners with the Nayees back in Livingstone. In this we had a mild taste of how it must have felt being accused of being Jewish in Germany in the 1930s and experienced how back then many suspected or even actual Jews became more flamboyantly anti-Semitic than anyone else. Sadly the instinct for self-preservation can easily triumph over nobler notions and insights. It’s easy from a safe distance to assume you’d have done the right thing back there in Germany, as in Rhodesia, but you can’t possibly know without being put to the test. The Germans have a good word for it – weltanschauung – meaning world view. From the outside or with hindsight it may be obvious when one of these is deluded but it’s not so easy when you’re on the inside looking out.

It was similar with the boys in every year who were the natural targets for bullies. I sympathized and was even quite friendly with many of them, depending on the situation, but you simply didn’t dare be too chummy for fear of being lumped in with them. So I can’t claim to have been particularly brave that way and often kept my distance when some unpleasant bullying was going on, but at least I did not get a taste for joining in. Others might remember differently of course, so I’m not trying to claim any great virtue here. I’m sure some of the bullies I remember very well have quite different recollections of their behaviour at school, Robert Rademayer for example or Clive Coton, while others who were my juniors may well remember unflattering incidents concerning me that I have conveniently forgotten.

It never occurred to Chris or me at the time that there might be any truth in the accusation of Indian blood; but thinking about it now it seems much more possible, and would actually be rather fun. As with North Americans claiming descent from a half Cherokee grandmother, it would be nice to be able to claim a blood link to

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Caryl’s side of the family’s time in India. Sandra has been in touch with some distant cousins in Canada whose family photos of India include one of Caryl as a child with

Granny. Others suggest Anglo Indian relations, but there’s sadly no paperwork showing how the pictures are all related and it’s probably too late now to prove the case either way. I doubt if enough colonial records in India still survive. I was interested though to read in the travel book City of Djinns by William Dalrymple that jobs in railways and telegraphs (as per our grandfather) in colonial India were generally reserved for Anglo Indians i.e. mixed race.

The main building at St George’s had an imposing look, being largely built in what I suppose could be called Victorian Gothic style, the architect being one of the Jesuits themselves, a Fr Leboeuf. The main block dating from 1927 looked like a square-built castle with battlements and even a turret on top. This was actually the school’s water tank but according to school gossip the castle-like appearance was not pure show.

During some native rebellion it had apparently served in battle, a machine gun being mounted on top of the tower to mow down African rebels trying to storm up the hill to

162 massacre Europeans. How true this rumour was I now have no idea. What seems more likely is that a previous building on the site was used as a fort during the 1896 native rebellion when St George’s was just being founded in Bulawayo 300 miles away.

The fortress part of the school housed its offices, staff accommodation and some dormitories. The main entrance for visitors was reached by a grand flight of steps from which most pupils were usually banned. We had to go to our dormitories via an entrance round the back. High on the stone keep wall was a large circular bronze plaque depicting the traditional image of St George slaying his dragon. Below and to the left of this the first floor balcony had been converted to a dormitory by the simple expedient of fitting large canvas blinds that could be lowered almost to the floor in winter. This didn’t make a vast difference to the draughtiness of that dorm because it was completely open at one end to the wide staircase by which we reached the dormitories from ground level. This stair came in useful one night for a prank when a particularly heavy-sleeping boy (Nick Bulloch from Livingstone in fact) was carried down it, still fast asleep in his bed, and planted out front on a lawn where he awoke the next morning. It also provided entertainment another night when a hapless cane rat about the size of a Yorkshire terrier wandered up it into the dorms, leading to a furious hunt till the poor thing was despatched and probably carted off to the kitchens as a delicacy for the servants.

African wildlife also intruded on our nights during the bullfrog mating season when the priests were kept awake by the din of their courtship in the large school pond presided over by a concrete statue of Neptune. Then we would be turned out of our beds to go down to the pond and massacre the creatures by splattering them against garden walls, often while they were still engrossed in the act of copulation.

This sounds pretty callous, and it was, but bullfrogs had their own reputation for

163 ruthless self interest. There was a story in circulation of a farmer who had rounded up several bullfrogs and taken them home in a sack; but when he got there and opened the sack it contained just one enormously large frog blinking at him and too stuffed to move.

The school had about 600 pupils (including those at Hartmann House) and was presided over by Father Ennis who, to those in the lower forms anyway, was a remote figure rarely encountered in daily life. Of the priests who did handle the practicalities of running the school the most feared was Fr Carty who later succeeded as head. It was he who boasted that once boys came into the care of Jesuits they would be tied to the Catholic Church for life, either loving or hating it to the end. Well I couldn’t stand the man so later in life I set out to prove that there was a third path – that Catholicism and Christianity in general are no better or worse than any other major religion, including several pagan ones, full of the same mixture of inspiration, good intentions and glaring self-contradiction – and it seems to work. In fact religions of all kinds have remained a kind of ongoing hobby, inspired as most of them have been by glimpses of paradise but ruined to a greater or lesser extent in the end by inevitably developing into hierarchical power structures governed by people who are better at politics than spirituality.

Other notable priests included Fr Nixon who had a reputation for not being completely sane. As a substitute for swearing (which was a minor sin you were supposed to own up to in confession) he used to exclaim ‘Hades!’ which we supposed did not count because it was Greek. He also addressed boys as ‘darling’ which word was often used as a nickname for him. Personally I came to loathe him too for reasons that will come out later, but possibly that was too harsh. He did once strip the blankets

164 off a boy in our dorm in the middle of the night for no apparent reason apart from a full moon because his temper was famously volatile then. He often seemed slightly unhinged but to be fair, in a tribute years later some colleagues claimed he had exaggerated his foibles as a kind of entertainment and he was in general quite popular and a good rugby coach.

Fr Stanley was another character and our study periods were occasionally punctuated by gunshots from him hunting feral cats in the Botanic Gardens, also when there were full moons but that was probably because he could then better see what he was doing. He was quite fierce but straightforward and I preferred receiving beatings from him to several others. From these extremes the other priests could be graded in increasing levels of decentness down to those like Fr Hugh Ross who was a thoroughly good man who coached swimming and other sports, and Fr Falconer who came from a rich background and wore distinctly classier jackets than the other priests, although notionally they were all supposed to be equal and live off the same small amount of pocket money. Then there was the similarly decent Fr Wilson and others. I could run through the list with character sketches but I’m not sure it would be helpful in an account of Rhodesia in general because St George’s, like all boarding schools was, as I mentioned before, largely a world in itself.

Though it’s possibly worth mentioning one of the very few females we came into contact with – Nurse Postlewhite – who we were sure had been chosen on looks to provide the least possible feminine stimulation to a school full of hormonal teenage boys. But curiously enough, after a few weeks of term she did start to look disturbingly curvy, as even did our Maths teacher Mrs Martin, who was ancient in our eyes. When a rumour spread that the school cough medicine contained opium the trick became to visit sick bay on some pretext then while some of you distracted Nurse

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Postlewhite the rest would take hurried glugs from the large bottle of cough medicine.

It seemed to do something to one’s mood but whether it really did contain opium I now have no idea.

There were also of course the African servants but they were surprisingly invisible, beavering away behind the scenes or in the distance, tending to the playing fields, working the kitchens and suchlike. There was very little direct interaction between us and them. I suppose they must have cleaned our dormitories when we were out but we made our own beds and skivvied like slaves for the prefects and sixth formers, polishing their shoes and cadet kit, making their beds and tea and so on.

Pupils did not have any direct command over the school servants. The only real interaction was that once a year there was a soccer match between the servants and the school rugby team which we all attended and which the servants won comprehensively every time.

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18

I think it was in my second year at the big school that the scandal of Texas broke. We had still quite often seen him in passing since moving up from Hartmann House because for some reason he often parked up by the main school at the weekend on his way out for a jaunt with a car full of his ‘pets’. Perhaps he had to check them out at the office because the school was strict in its system of passes or exeats for leaving the premises. On a couple of occasions some of us saved the hardest potatoes from dinner and stuffed them up his black Ford Popular’s exhaust while it was parked there in the hope of causing a mysterious breakdown or at least a startling backfire, but never heard if this worked.

Then the rumour spread of an enormous scandal involving Texas and one boy in particular at Hartmann House. I could mention the name but I don’t suppose he or his family wish to be reminded of the event even this many years later. A wall of secrecy crashed down and we never did learn the exact details or extent of the affair, though it did not take much imagination. The only certain facts were that Texas was immediately banished from the school and Fr Farwell lost his position as Head of

Hartmann House, becoming a normal teacher in the upper school. This seemed a particularly Jesuit form of punishment. Everyone knew there had been a scandal, even if we did not know the details, and now as former Head of Hartmann House he had to face boys in the upper school who’d been in his care while Texas had been carrying on his antics in the dormitories. Fair but also slightly cruel. He could just have been transferred elsewhere but he took his penance gracefully and I don’t remember noticing any animosity towards him from pupils. As for Texas, well in the light of recent revelations about paedophile Catholic priests one only hopes that he was

167 actually booted out of the Church with a clear record of what he had done, and not just quietly transferred to some other school with a caution, which seems worryingly likely.

The boy himself rather surprisingly stayed on at St George’s and when he moved up to the main school the following year some of us tried getting the inside story out of him by grilling him in the school-honoured fashion – calling him over and asking questions – but for an otherwise vulnerable child he was surprisingly adamant about giving nothing away. ‘Father Ennis told me to say nothing’ was his reply and we could sense the full weight of the school’s disciplinary machine behind his words, which we would challenge at our peril. So we let him go. I’m sure he was put through the same scenario many times and at much tougher hands than ours but the full story never did leak. It was not just fear of reprisals that held us back from getting the truth out of him though; there was also a degree of sympathy and it was noticeable that the usual bullies who would otherwise have cheerfully made his life a misery tended to leave this boy alone.

One problem I had with St George’s was that, especially in the lower forms, it was very hard ever to be alone or even with just a small group of friends because the whole setup was designed to prevent this. This is probably true of most boarding schools and you can see the logic from the school’s point of view – if you’re responsible for children you want to keep them under supervision as much as possible, but it was quite wearing and also meant you were constantly on show to senior boys who might decide to have a bit of fun at your expense.

One solution was to join a club and the first chance that came my way was the printing club run by Fr Filby in my second year at the main school. The printing club

168 was located in a building slightly downhill and apart from the rest. It in fact predated the main school, having once been a four-room guest house for passing Jesuits. After the school moved here from Bulawayo it became a cottage classroom, then the matron’s house. Finally its four rooms were knocked into two and it became the printing club. One room housed all the printing gear while the other was used for general storage and as an informal common room for club members. It was also a ginger beer brewery because under Fr Filby’s tuition we made racks and racks of occasionally exploding bottles of ginger beer for our own consumption.

Not only did the printing club provide a welcome refuge where we could brew up toast and tea and ginger beer but I soon became hooked on the process of printing itself, which we did on lovely solid hand-cranked presses. The typesetting was also done manually, along with careful inking of the circular plates by which ink was transferred to the type by pulling a beautifully clunking handle. As well as producing the school calendar and programs for various events, the club took commissions from the town for wedding invitations and the like – short-run, high quality commissions with no complex binding or photographs. Any illustrations were line drawings and we were proud that you could feel the ink standing up from the card surface with your fingertips once it had dried. I don’t remember any money from these commissions coming our way but the treats such as ginger beer and privacy were payment enough.

Fr Filby was a big, hearty priest who seemed to take a genuine interest in pupils with none of the creepiness of Texas. He was not someone you deliberately tried to take advantage of though. He was friendly but could also be stern, as some of us printers were to learn at first hand. This showed in his interrogation methods in the confessional, by way of contrast with Fr Rea, a small priest who was universally loved and totally gullible. When it came to going to confession in the chapel there

169 were usually two or three priests on duty. Everyone queued for Fr Rea’s booth because you could confess to him about having slept with your grandmother and he’d still absolve you with just three Hail Marys for penance and not ask too many questions. Fr Filby though would grill you forensically for details of the sins you tried to gloss over or slip through without him noticing, in among the forgotten morning and evening prayers. With Fr Rea you could confess to having had impure thoughts five times in the past week and he would just murmur ‘Try harder to resist them in future, my son’. But Fr Filby would ask what impure thoughts exactly were they?

There was the option of simply lying or saying nothing of course, but in the lower forms most of us were too thoroughly indoctrinated even to think of lying in confession, even if you hated the priest you were talking to. You might believe the man to be a cold hearted thug like Fr Carty or borderline lunatic like Fr Nixon but priests had the magical power of sacrament and a direct line to God. You didn’t mess with that when you genuinely believed in an everlasting life after death, which I and probably most others did. In fact when I was about twelve and could feel the onset of real temptation to sin being imminent, which is to say the attraction of girls, I seriously thought it would be great to become a martyr. We’d been told that people who die for their faith get all sins forgiven and go straight to heaven. So I had a fantasy in which armed enemies stormed the school and demanded that we convert to another religion or be put to the sword (or machine gun or whatever). It seemed a simple enough choice at the time and since 9/11 and the bombings in London a few years later I’ve reflected on that delusion with much sympathy for the poor dupes who believe a similar thing today.

However, back to confession: everyone queued for Fr Rea’s painless confessional, or for just about any priest apart from Fr Filby, but if his booth went too

170 quiet he would emerge with a face like thunder and commandeer some of the waiting sinners to visit him, which you would line up to do with a sinking heart. However, as I said, Fr Filby was otherwise a wonderful teacher and sometimes he raided the kitchens for our printing club snacks, a special treat being bread and dripping with blood jelly and liberal doses of salt. It sounds grim now but at the time and in our diet-restricted circumstances it tasted heavenly.

Expulsion from the haven of the printing club came abruptly when some of us sneaked in through the window there one morning at an illegal time for a quick smoke and cup of tea. Probably our entry was spotted and reported because we were still just settling down when the door burst open and Fr Filby himself descended upon us like a thunderstorm. He not only expelled us from the clubhouse that morning but from the club as well, so that was the end of that haven. I did regret it because after that Fr

Filby treated us expellees as complete strangers. There was no vindictiveness or revenge in his attitude but, having taken advantage of his trust, I and the other evictees were blanked by him from then on. We also missed out on receiving one of the beautiful wooden pencil boxes he painstakingly used to make and give to long- serving members of the printing club. They had perfect little dovetail joints, metal reinforcements at the corners and compartmented trays for all your odds and ends.

On the face of it one could see similarities between Fr Filby’s treatment of boys and Texas’s – the food treats and presents to particular favourites. He was even responsible for the sound system in the study hall over which we heard classical music during our recreational study periods. But there was never a hint of impropriety with Fr Filby. He just seemed in his gruff way to enjoy bringing a little pleasure into our narrow lives. He also ran the school tuck shop.

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So I was out of the printing club and cast adrift in the communal shark pool of St

George’s again, but then I heard about the radio club. Of the various clubs on offer it seemed the least formal so one day I plucked up courage and approached Darcy

Mennell, the senior who ran it, and asked if I could join. This took a bit of nerve because on the whole you didn’t approach seniors about anything unless they first called you over.

‘What do you know about radios?’ he wanted to know.

‘Not much’ I said ‘but I’ve made a crystal set.’ I’d been shown how to do this by Brian ‘JB’ Henderson, a boy from Livingstone a couple of years older who hung out with Lesley during the holidays. I pulled the contraband device (pupils were banned from having personal radios) from my pocket and showed it to Darcy

Mennell. It was the most basic radio possible, consisting simply of an earphone with a germanium diode connected across the terminals from which two wires sprouted. One went into your mouth as an earth and the other to the metal bed frame or whatever you were using as an aerial. Metal conduit pipes for electrical wiring also made good aerials as did, curiously enough, the earth terminal of electrical sockets. While in the sick bay overnight once, my bed happened to be close enough to a socket and I got brilliant reception this way. It was just as well there was no lightning strike nearby that night.

There was no way of tuning the device so you just picked up the most powerful broadcast around, which was Radio Rhodesia whose transmitter was close by on our hill for the same reason as the water tanks – because it overlooked the city; but the crystal set was good enough for the illicit thrill of listening to the radio when you were supposed to be going to sleep. In 1964 I even heard a broadcast of the famous Cassius Clay – Sonny Liston World Championship fight that way.

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Darcy Mennell was not overly impressed by my crystal set but gave me a few days and said that if I could then prove I really knew something about radios I could join the club. So I got a book out of the library and over the next few days put in more study than I ever did for lessons, mastering the basic principles and equations of tuning and amplification and memorizing the circuit diagram of a three valve superhet radio along with an explanation of how the clever feedback system worked to boost the signal. This time Mennell did seem mildly impressed and let me join the club.

It was housed in some outbuildings behind the swimming pool, next to the carpentry club workshop. In fact one panel of the soft-board dividing wall could be removed like a door for borrowing tools or just chatting to the guys in there. The carpentry workshop was quite big while ours was only the size of a large garden shed and packed with electrical junk, in particular turntables for multi-stacking 78 rpm records. These had wonderfully intricate mechanisms but were largely obsolete and only really any good as a source of electric motors. More entertaining was the generator I found from an office telephone switchboard, one of those devices you see in old black and white movies where the operator cranks a handle to make a call. That handle drove a rotor between rows of magnets and was in fact a generator that could give a healthy electric shock if you held the terminals; which became our entertainment for a while. Boys would trade sweets for the chance of receiving a shock. Of course it was eventually confiscated on some pretext and no doubt went on to provide more entertainment in one of the senior common rooms, possibly as an instrument of torture.

Incidentally, in the same vein of self entertainment hypnotism became a popular fad for a while and I became rather good at it. Or at least I had an extremely suggestible subject in Peter Tobin who managed to learn reams of Latin poetry by

173 heart after I put him into a trance. Sadly when I tried to get him to do the same for me it simply didn’t work and I was left with having to master them the hard way. Another trick was to get up in the middle of the night and engage a sleeping boy in conversation. Once you’d got some chat going and were firmly included in his dream you’d steer it towards the aim of the game, which was to sell him a battleship. It was surprisingly innocent fun, we never steered anyone into a nightmare which would probably have been just as possible.

And come to think of it there was yet another mind-bending entertainment that was popular for a while at Hartmann House. For this you hyperventilated for a while then stuck both thumbs in your mouth, blocked your nose and then held your breath till you passed out. The fun part was waking up and not understanding for a few moments why you were lying on the ground surrounded by other boys grinning down at you.

The radio club, I soon learned from Mr Beaver, a lay teacher who notionally supervised our activities, had declined from an age of greatness. The first organized radio classes in Rhodesia had been held at St George’s in 1923, while still at its old location in Bulawayo, and in the pioneering days of radio it had been responsible for some of the first broadcasts in southern Africa. The classes were founded by Fr

Bernard Whiteside, who had been a pupil of Sir Oliver Lodge in England, one of the key figures in developing radio tuning circuits. The radio club soon had its own receivers capable of picking up broadcasts from South Africa and built its own transmitter able to send voice signals from one side of the school to the other. The

June 1966 St George’s Chronicle describes one use to which it was put:

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‘Once, dear old Fr Hartmann SJ, then very deaf, came in from Empandani

Mission near Plumtree, and we asked him to listen-in to Johannesburg. He had to put his head nearly inside the loudspeaker to hear anything, but he was dumbfounded at the marvel of it all. Whilst the old man had his head in this position, Brother Tom Tryers

(beloved by all Old Georgians) spoke, in his deep bass voice, into the school transmitter and of course his voice came also through the loudspeaker. Fr Hartmann’s astonishment was laughable when he suddenly heard in booming tones – “Hello, hello Johannesburg calling! Is that Father Hartmann? I want to give a message to Father Hartmann: how are you Father? I hope you are well and hearing me clearly. Goodbye”. The old man was thoroughly mystified and pleased. “Ah, it is wonderful,” he said, “but how did they know

I was here?”’

The St George’s Radio Club made the first public broadcast in Rhodesia by transmitting an improvised performance of harmonica music across half a mile to the

Bulawayo Academy. Emboldened by the success of this experiment and after further improvements to the transmitter, the day came when the Club felt ready to broadcast to the world:

‘Notices were sent by post and to the Press warning towns in the Union [of

South Africa] and Rhodesia to listen-in to “Bulawayo Experimental” on a certain night. At zero hour the broadcast began: “Bulawayo calling! Greetings to Johannesburg, Durban,

Cape Town and European listeners everywhere etc. etc.” Mouth-organs and records were played frantically for an hour. We then waited hopefully for a week expecting telegrams and letters of congratulations. Alas, not a single message arrived. The broadcast never travelled beyond the precincts of Bulawayo itself!’

From those brave heights of endeavour the radio club had somewhat declined and now its membership consisted basically of Darcy Mennell and his pals who had a rock

175 band and used the club chiefly for building their own amplifiers. Because of the informal setting they were remarkably friendly for seniors. This didn’t apply outside the club where the normal social barriers prevailed, but within it they were happy to chat and show me the rudiments of soldering and building a proper tuneable crystal set and then amplify it with a transistor and so on. I then moved on to cobbling together a working valve radio from the wreckage of those in our junk pile.

Mr Beaver called in occasionally to see what we were up to and lend a hand in coaching me where necessary. He was supposedly Burmese, which was interesting because it meant he was possibly Asian and he did indeed have a dark skin; but in contrast to Chris and me, the assumption among pupils was that he was Burmese only in the sense of having been born there; and besides, his name wasn’t Asian and I never heard him being referred to as a currymuncher behind his back, with that peculiarly Rhodesian disdain for other races that tried to rise above their station. Mr

Beaver talked wistfully about the glory days of the club and made quite a few appearances in my early days there, but he gradually visited less and less. So too did the other club members. Once their amps were built all their spare time was devoted to practising their band in the Beit Hall, the school’s assembly hall and theatre. So I was then basically left in possession of a clubroom of my own with tea and toast making facilities and to which I could invite anyone I chose. Which was brilliant (or

‘lacker’ in Rhodesian slang, a word borrowed from Afrikaans). On the rare occasions when Darcy and his friends showed up to repair a broken amp, they were quite unbothered if I had guests, though these were expected to push off and make room for the proper members.

The club also provided a handy haven one term when I managed to drop off the school’s radar for sports. I did this by first opting for swimming and then claiming

176 to have asthma. Normally anyone not actively engaged in sport at the designated periods was a clear target for interrogation by prefects or masters but I had the radio club to hide out in. I could even watch the swimmers through a little window in the brick wall, slaving away under the benevolent but unsparing eye of Fr Ross.

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My best friend at St George’s was Ian Walker, popularly known as Tubby. Most kids would cringe at this nickname but I never heard it used as an insult. Possibly it had begun that way when Ian first joined the school but by the time I got to know him there was no trace of insult in it, almost the opposite. He was indeed pretty large and round but he was also well-proportioned and athletic, being in our year’s A teams for both cricket and rugby; which in Rhodesia counted for a lot. In fact so little insult was attached to his being called Tubby that it came as a surprise when I went to stay with him once at Broken Hill in the school holidays and he asked me to call him Ian, to spare the feelings of his parents who really wouldn’t understand. My own nickname among friends at school was Satch, short for Satchmo (jazz singer Louis Armstrong) on account of my deep voice.

On that visit to Broken Hill Ian tried introducing me to golf which was a sporting passion he got no chance to exercise at school. But as I stood at the first tee gazing down the fairway trying to imagine hitting the tiny ball down its length with the ridiculous gangling club in my hands I decided that life was too short for some challenges and offered just to caddy instead. I can see the fascination of golf and admire those who persevere at it but have never since found reason to change that first opinion.

Despite his bulk Ian was actually far more successful at sports than I was. In cricket I was just about good enough for the B team while at rugby I was complete rubbish, spending my time trying to look useful while keeping as far away from the ball as possible. I was strong enough and a pretty good runner but could never really bring myself to tackle another player from behind as it was standard practice for them

178 to dig their boots as hard as possible into your stomach or face as they went down; so

I used to trail along behind, looking as if I was making an effort while staying just out of diving range. I usually played for our year’s C team but was once commended for my captaincy of the D team, which was about the height of my success as a rugby player at St George’s.

On the other hand I did once play for the A team at cricket in the third form.

Generally I was their twelfth man – i.e. scorer and reserve. This wasn’t because I was really A team material. I was a fairly competent B team player. I could usually score a respectable if not spectacular number of runs, didn’t drop many catches and when throwing in from far out in the field my ball usually landed where it was aimed. It was an ongoing mystery to me though why more players weren’t run out when I did this.

The ball seemed to take longer than when everyone else threw it, even though I threw just as hard and the ball usually landed perfectly in the wicket keeper’s gloves just over the stumps. Only later when I did Applied Maths did I learn that for a given distance and launch speed there are two angles that will do the job – a steep and a shallow one. For some reason I just naturally lobbed the balls high.

However, that’s by the way. I was a reasonable B team player but they didn’t really want to waste one of their best players sitting on the sidelines and keeping score for the As, so I volunteered and got the job. As someone with an aversion to team sports, being scorer for the A team was brilliant – some kudos and the illusion of probably being quite good without having to prove it. Then one day some day boy couldn’t make the match and I had to join the team, a junior being drafted in to do the scoring. I dropped no vital catches while fielding so that half of the game was OK and that would have been the end of it if our opening batsmen had put on a halfway decent show. But no, I was not to be spared. Down the wickets tumbled like – well, you can

179 supply your own cliché here and my head was full of them as I watched with growing apprehension till the dread moment arrived when I had to pad up and walk out onto the field of certain doom. To my own astonishment I hit the first ball for a four and then a few balls later a tricky bouncer scattered my stumps. ‘Bad luck’ other players commiserated as we retired to the changing rooms. I tried to look disappointed but was secretly ecstatic at having scored anything at all.

Looking back, I spent a fair amount of time trying to get out of sports, even those I enjoyed like swimming, tennis and cross country running. On one inter-house cross country run through the Botanical Gardens around the school, I slipped away with Kevin Mulligan and a couple of others and we took a short cut through the bushes that would cut off most of the run. We stopped along the way for a smoke and chat, the cigarette end as usual growing into long glowing cone longer than the rest of the cigarette itself from being passed around and puffed so quickly, then lay in wait and tagged on to the end of the runners as they came past. The trouble was that we joined the wrong group and when this became apparent we were sent round the whole course again with a couple of energetic prefects on our tails wielding switch canes.

Smoking was a great focus for rebellion at St George’s and with hindsight my time at the school must have coincided with a quite serious breakdown in discipline, of which the battles over smoking were probably just a symptom, the front line of battle. When

I moved up from Hartmann House the penalty for being caught smoking, or for most serious offences really was four or six whacks or ‘cuts’ of a cane on the backside.

Major offences or persistent misbehaviour meant being beaten on the hands with a ferruler, a kind of very fat ruler rumoured to be made of whalebone covered in rubber.

To begin with, six strokes of the cane were reckoned to be equivalent to two or three

180 with the ferruler but over the next few years the ferruler took over and the number of whacks with it escalated to the point where nine or even twelve strokes were not unusual.

There were set times of day for receiving punishment, when you would queue up with your pink ticket outside one of the designated priests’ studies. Pink tickets were kind of like lottery tickets in reverse. When you handed yours in it would in due course be checked against the issuing master’s stub to ensure you’d redeemed it within the prescribed time. Conversely, if you didn’t you’d be collared and the punishment increased.

When you entered his study, the priest would usually ask a question or two about your misdemeanour, then firmly grasp your wrist with your palm held up and administer the required number of strokes to first one hand and then the other; after which you were expected to thank him politely before leaving. There was usually an audience waiting outside to see how coolly you took your punishment and if nothing else the procedure did wonders for learning how not to show any reaction to pain. The downside of this stoicism is that it often makes you equally unable to show a reaction to sudden joy or pleasure.

In order to stamp out smoking in the lower forms, the sixth formers were allowed to smoke in their common rooms and were expected to join the prefects in eradicating smoking among the juniors. By the time I reached the third form the normal punishment for smoking had escalated to nine whacks of the ferruler, plus two weeks detention during free time on a terrace outside the classrooms, plus a visit to either (or both) the sixth form and prefects’ common rooms where whoever was there would line up to kick you pretty much senseless. Smoking, or the prevention of it, was also the reason given for the ban on closing toilet cubicle doors. Why they didn’t just

181 remove them altogether I don’t know because there were doors, you just weren’t allowed to close them and someone would kick them open if you did. So most day boys did all they could to avoid taking a dump while at school but as boarders we soon got used to it and voiding your bowels was often quite a social business with boys standing around the doorway chatting while you did your business.

The draconian measures taken against smoking were actually quite effective in at least cutting it down in the lower forms while at school. It was a curious thing that my most regular smoking pal Ian Walker plus others like Gerry Mulligan all got caught several times, but always when I was not with them. For instance, one comical occasion I happened to witness was at a First XI cricket match against a rival school, probably King Edwards. I happened to get separated from our usual smoking gang and was in the main crowd of spectators when a cloud of smoke rose from a small brick shed beyond the boundary, followed by the surreptitious scuttling of several boys evacuating that shed. Prefects homed in like angry hornets and the culprits were all caught and duly chastised.

As a result of my luck I became a superstitiously popular smoking companion but of course I couldn’t be everywhere and the others continued to get regularly caught while my own run of luck almost miraculously continued. Only once was I almost given the common room treatment when caught by some seniors smoking with my friend Pete Rundle, but as I’d not actually been holding the cigarette and it couldn’t be proved that I’d touched it, they let me go. If I’d been a bit braver I would have confessed anyway and shared Pete’s beating, but sadly I was not that much of a hero. Pete never seemed to hold it against me though.

My luck finally ran out just two weeks before leaving the school for ever and all my smoking buddies showed up to see me get the ferruler, which I was able to

182 carry off with reasonable aplomb. Although not a wildly rebellious pupil and, as I said, lucky when it came to not being caught smoking, my number of whacks per term was a steady 32 during my last year at St George’s. Being finally caught smoking also meant that my last two weeks there were supposed to be spent in detention on the parapet above the cricket stock room, but in the event this was no great hardship.

With the imminent end of the school year and Christmas no prefects or seniors remembered to give me the common room treatment, or even to keep close watch on the detention area where I spent much of the time hanging out in the cricket room before ignoring the detention altogether. So my nine whacks were quite a small price to pay for my long run of good luck.

The escalation in school punishment was most marked with smoking, but as the penalties for that increased, so they did also for other offences and many boys became so immune to beatings that that they treated them as a kind of macho challenge, well worth it for winding up vulnerable teachers. In particular, and with some guilt, I remember Mr McCaffery, a young trainee priest with no idea of discipline. In his classes the penalty for quite minor cheek and disruption rapidly rose and he was soon dishing out pink tickets for four to six, then nine and even twelve ferrulers while the disorder in his classes simply escalated. It was a peculiarity of blackboard dusters then that if you whacked their wooden backs against the wall, they would stick. So regularly when he looked around for his it would be stuck like that up near the ceiling.

As he tried to give a lesson there would be rainbow lights dancing around on the wall behind his head from prisms stolen from the science lab. I was once given nine ferrulers for that. Often the poor man looked on the point of bursting into tears and

183 rushing from the room and that only redoubled our efforts to give him a nervous breakdown whatever the cost in beatings.

By way of contrast was Mr Marbaix, another scholastic who came around the same time. Scholastics were trainee priests who wore dog collars but were called ‘Mr’ as opposed to the Brothers who also wore clerical dress but on the whole weren’t intended for the priesthood, confining themselves to more practical duties. At the first hint of cheek in Mr Marbaix’s first lesson he calmly wrote out a ticket for four ferrulers. By the end of the lesson he’d written a couple more and that was about it as far as establishing discipline went. From then on his classes were conducted in perfect order and what is more he was as popular as he was feared.

Most teachers fell somewhere between these extremes and had devised various means besides simple thrashing to keep discipline. Mr Bennett was a lay teacher who for a while used to suspend offending boys by their collars from the clothes hooks at the back of the classroom till one of them, my Livingstone pal Nick Bulloch yet again, passed out and had to be rushed to sick bay. This was followed by the unprecedented occurrence of a teacher actually having to apologise to a pupil in front of witnesses and revert to more conventional disciplines. Other teachers threw board rubbers at inattentive pupils’ heads. Or, worse still, used sarcasm to humiliate them in front of the class, which was probably the most effective punishment of all.

We weren’t at war with all the staff though. There were several exceptions like ‘Pop’

Graham the music teacher who was a kindly old bachelor who tried to liven up our lessons with pop music we could relate to. Occasionally he also took some of us out at weekends in his Morris Minor for modest jaunts and then back to his flat in the suburbs for tea. Besides teaching music he played the organ in chapel where, standing

184 at the back with the choir, I used to admire the rows of glowing valves through the instrument’s ventilation panels. Chapel services, which we attended at least twice a day, were regularly punctuated by muted thumps, the crack of knuckles round the back of skulls and gasps of pain as bench monitors administered justice for inattention, slouching, whispering or any other slight offence, so being in the choir was quite a relief.

There was also Wally Dewar, a non priest who ran the bookshop. He was rumoured to be about 70 years of age and his body certainly looked wrinkly enough when he went for his lengthy daily swim, but he was as strong as an ox. When he prodded you with his hooked forefinger in the back or shoulder for some misdemeanour or other it would really hurt, but that was about as severe as he ever got and everyone liked him. The bookshop had a profitable sideline in pink paper which we were required to buy with our pocket money when writing out lines for punishment, ordinary paper would not do. The wording of these lines was chosen by the prefects each week and published on a notice board, lines such as ‘Procrastination is the thief of time: Year after year it steals, till all are fled’. We sometimes tried to speed up these lines by sellotaping several ballpoints together but you had to be careful because if this cheating was spotted your punishment escalated dramatically.

Then there was Colonel Lind a retired army officer often referred to as the

Bloody Colonel because of his penchant for swearing. Bizarrely in a school full of priests he became our Religious Studies teacher for a while and our spiritual education focussed chiefly on the battles in the Old Testament. Usually though he taught English in a brisk military manner that tolerated no cheek at all from us. My mate Rob Webster once played cricket against him in a mixed staff-student game and despite not being the most brilliant bowler, managed to bowl the Colonel out. The

185 following week, in Rob’s own words: ‘He marched into class looking like thunder and said in a rather loud voice: “Webster!” He paused and waved a pink ticket in the air for all to see: “Six cuts!” At this point I was rather ashen and went up to collect the ticket wondering what I had done. On the way back to my seat I heard this deep chuckle . . . on the ticket it said: “Daring to bowl a superior officer." What a character.’

My favourite staff member though was Brother Connors. His official job was in the school office doing admin but his real passion and vocation was managing the school choir. Physically Br Connors rather resembled our cook Dixon – short, round and cheerful but he had a really astonishing voice and grasp of music. No-one ever had a bad word to say about him and along with Fr Rae he was one of the treasures on the staff. I went along to auditions for the choir purely because it was compulsory and was rather surprised to be chosen. I was even more surprised to learn that I apparently had an exceptionally good alto voice and was soon being coached to sing a solo at the choir’s Christmas concert.

I was not altogether delighted by either of these developments because becoming a choirboy was not the most macho way of asserting your personality at St

George’s, but I soon found it had compensations. For a start there was just the novelty of doing something different, plus we were rewarded with sweets at the end of practice and got to stay up late, returning to an already sleeping dorm. It was probably for similar reasons that I used sometimes to volunteer to serve at early Mass. Every priest was required to say Mass once a day and obviously they could not all do this with a congregation so they did it privately in little chapels in the priests’ residential block. Servers would be woken at dawn by Mr Shufflebotham gently shaking a foot, a

186 good way to wake someone silently and a contrast to the usual yelling that dragged us out of sleep and into the queue for the morning cold shower. Then he would lead you through the normally forbidden corridors of the priests’ block to some chapel where you would go through the required pious motions, though occasionally there was the chance to swig some of the un-consecrated wine when the priest’s back was turned.

Being in the choir also meant you got to stand at the back of chapel during choral services and thus, as I mentioned before, less likely to get thumped by a bench monitor. Singing a solo in front of the whole school and guests at Christmas was pretty daunting however, especially as the carol Br Connors had chosen for me was

‘How Far Is’t to Bethlehem’, one verse of which runs:

Great kings have precious gifts And we have naught Little smiles and little tears Are all we brought.

Hmm, you can see why a would-be tough Rhodesian boy might shrink from a public display of such sentimentality but as with many things at boarding school you just got on with it and hoped for the best. The other soloist in my year was Nick Bulloch who had a sweet soprano voice and even sweeter carol to sing so I hoped that might provide cover. On the night I stepped out of the choir towards the conductor’s podium with much the same feelings as when going to present a pink ticket for ferrulers and it says much for Br Connors’ coaching that I carried the song off without musical embarrassment.

After the concert (whose finale was a solo from Br Connors himself which was always kept a surprise even from the choir until concert night) and the choir party

187 that followed, I made my way alone back to the dorm and on the way bumped into a prefect, one of the school’s sporting heroes. Fully expecting trouble for being out of place, I quickly blurted ‘I’m with the choir.’ ‘I know’ he said ‘I just wanted to say well done for the solo.’ I would have been less surprised if he’d punched me for singing such a soppy song.

The next morning I had two reasons to be cheerful. One was that the prefect’s reaction suggested I might not be ridiculed for my performance; the other was that I was due to receive an Imperator’s Breakfast for giving it. This was what you got for scoring 50 runs in an inter-school cricket match and other such triumphs and consisted of a full English breakfast with bacon and eggs and fried bread and mushrooms and so on, as opposed to the usual porridge and toast. I sat with quiet anticipation as one of these was brought in and set ceremonially before Nick Bulloch.

Then I waited with growing unease as a second one failed to materialize. Cautiously I caught Fr Nixon’s attention and asked where my breakfast was. He leaned close and said coldly ‘One of your socks was down,’ and that was the end of it. I hated Fr Nixon steadily after that.

It wasn’t quite the end of my singing in the spotlight though. Not long afterwards Nick Bulloch and I got to sing a duet in Salisbury Cathedral that was filmed for Rhodesian TV and made us briefly famous. A boy from another school even recognised me once when we met for rugby. Then my voice very welcomely began to break. I was spared the usual and comical loss of control of it; my voice just grew steadily deeper. So I remained in the choir but among the massed ranks and if

I’d stayed on at the school long enough I probably would have moved without break from alto to tenor to bass, singing beside Fr Nixon himself at some point.

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Because of the distance involved in going home it was usually necessary to make other arrangements for half term holidays. Once when I was twelve or thirteen I went to stay with my friend Keith McAlister on his family’s tobacco farm near Karoi, about

150 miles north from Salisbury along the road to Lusaka. Both his parents drove down to collect us and do some shopping in the city, so it was getting dark by the time we approached Karoi. ‘The question is’ said Keith’s dad, ‘do we stop for a quick graze here or just press on and get home sooner?’

This was obviously a regular dilemma whenever they drove back from

Salisbury and was probably being aired at least partly for me as their guest. While at that point it was quite tempting to stop for a snack at a Karoi café it was decided after a brief debate to carry on.

Their farmhouse was a spacious bungalow set slightly apart from the barns and other farm buildings, and as we pulled up everyone agreed it was much better to have arrived than still to be on the road. The electricity came from a petrol generator in a barn and once it was switched off for the night we had to make do with paraffin lamps and candles. Most if not all of the farm had been built up by the McAlisters themselves and I’d guess that they were part of the great influx of European settlers, mostly ex soldiers, encouraged to immigrate to Rhodesia after the War. Between 1945 and 1955 the European population of Southern Rhodesia doubled from 75,000 to

150,000, continuing to grow to about 250,000 over the next ten years until Ian

Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965. This was the flip side to the

189 immigration to Britain from the West Indies that happened at the same time – the so- called Windrush Generation.

The next day I was duly given a tour of the farm and I was indeed suitably impressed. I’ve no idea now what the acreage was but when the landmarks on its boundaries were pointed out, it seemed absolutely enormous and the tobacco fields and other crops such as maize stretched for miles, tended by dozens of African farm hands. Despite tobacco being their main crop, Keith’s parents did not approve of us boys smoking. We did try spiritedly arguing the case that the more people who smoked, the better it was for the farm. But no, we were far too young and that was the end of it. And anyway, their tobacco all went for export so Rhodesian habits made no difference at all to their profits. So we had to do our puffing in secret that holiday, which was easy enough as Keith and I were mostly left to our own devices.

We got to do a fair bit of exploring on our own because in the corner of a dusty barn we came across a motorbike Keith’s dad had used in the early days of setting up the farm – an old British Francis-Barnett with a 200cc Villiers two-stroke engine. With some oil and petrol from the farm supplies, plus much strenuous push- starting up and down the dirt road outside the barn, we coaxed the thing into stuttering life before roaring off in a cloud of smoke and dust. It took a few tumbles before we got the hang of riding the beast but no great injuries were sustained and then there was no stopping us. We were soon familiar with all the proper tracks on the farm and then explored winding paths, dried up river beds and the like. Then we conceived the notion of visiting Barry Mulder, another St George’s boy whose parents had a farm not many miles away towards Karoi on the main road.

Somewhat surprisingly Keith’s parents agreed to this, though only after exacting the direst promises not to ride on any public roads. What we were doing was

190 legal enough on private farmland, if not particularly safe, but on the public highway it was totally not. However, this was no great problem because there was no need to use any public roads to get where we wanted, we could go cross-country. I don’t think the

Mulders’ farm adjoined the McAlisters’, but whoever else’s land lay between were bound not to mind. I suspect there were also a few calls up and down the shared party telephone line warning of our passage. The only people we met on the way though were a few strolling Africans and we stopped at one of their shops for refreshment.

This was a small corrugated tin shack by the side of the dirt road, of the kind you came across here and there in rural areas. Most Africans in Rhodesia received basic food rations as part of their pay so these little shops were crammed with minor luxuries plus radio batteries, pots and pans, candles and so on. We bought warm bottles of Coke and Fanta and stocked up on Springbok cigarettes, which along with a cheap brand of Players were top of the range of smokes on offer there.

As ever, we were greeted with cheerful curiosity by the storekeeper and the other Africans loitering there, and they gathered round to admire our battered old

Francis-Barnett. Considering the grief that came later in Rhodesia it would be easy to assume that this friendliness was just a mask adopted whenever faced with Europeans, and I suppose to some extent it must have been so, as in the American South, but the amicability felt genuine enough at the time. It’s easy to see why Ian Smith could boast in perfect confidence after UDI that Rhodesia had the happiest natives in Africa because most interactions between Europeans and Africans, especially on the farms, seemed perfectly amicable. It was only on the interface where competent Africans in the towns were lorded over by clearly less competent whites that the trouble brewed.

Rhodesians blamed all political unrest on tsotsis or town gangsters who had ideas above their station.

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Leaving the store, we carried on to Barry Mulder’s place where we attempted to revive his dad’s old motorbike as well – a small, much more recent red Yamaha – but without joy. Despite looking in much better shape than our machine, the thing stubbornly refused to spark into life, so we just hung about at the farm for a while till it was time to head for home. For once we didn’t get taken on a guided tour because

Barry’s father was caught up in some crisis or other.

From recent correspondence with Keith, who now lives near Cape Town, that

Francis-Barnett inspired a lasting love of British motorbikes, besides developing serious muscles in his right leg from kick-starting the reluctant beast. He later bought and rebuilt an ex army Triumph 500 which he rode for years till it ended up hibernating in a corner awaiting the next rebuild, rather like his dad’s old bike. It also kicked off a lifelong love of motorbikes in me and apart from a hiatus of twenty years or so while our daughter was growing up and it became a largely useless indulgence,

I’ve had one since the age of sixteen.

Given the distances, it was not really possible to return such half term favours but we did once have Gerry Larkin, a classmate of Chris’s, come to stay with us in one of the longer holidays. We combined his visit with a family trip, a safari almost, to

Lochinvar, a ranch come private game reserve near Monze, two thirds of the way to

Lusaka and then off to the north-west for some thirty-odd miles along increasingly sketchy roads. There we stayed in a bungalow to which no hint of electricity had yet arrived. So there were oil lamps at night and it was not at all safe to go wandering around in the dark because here there were leopards and lions on the prowl. The chances were that they would keep well away from human habitation but none of us were going to take that risk.

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By daylight we toured the reserve but, to be honest, we kids were not that impressed. Coming from Livingstone, the wildlife on show was not that spectacular, although by any other standards it must have been impressive – vast herds of antelope and occasional buffalo and so on largely undisturbed by humanity. The most interesting things were some hot springs but we were not allowed in because of what other creatures they might contain. There was also a hill where apparently Desmond

Clark and Brian Fagan from the Museum had recently discovered an ancient settlement but there were no ruins or anything to see, so again we kids were not that impressed. It was more of an adventure for our parents I think. After independence the

Scotsman who owned the place left and it became a national game reserve run with intermittent success ever since.

For one half term holiday Chris and I both stayed on at the school, along with a dozen or two other boys whose half term plans had also fallen through. It was rather fun because all the usual disciplines were relaxed and although our days were given some structure to ensure we didn’t stray too far, we were mostly left to entertain ourselves.

At some point one morning I and some other third formers decided to explore the Beit

Hall. This was the school’s rather grand assembly hall and theatre which was on the whole strictly out of bounds, especially the backstage areas. As with many others across the country, the hall was named after the founder of the de Beers mining company and associate of Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Beit, who left much of his mining fortune to promote infrastructure, education and other cultural activities in both

Rhodesias and Nyasaland.

In our explorations we discovered that the stage hands had made themselves a cosy den up in the rafters above the stage, with old sofas and tea-making equipment.

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So we settled down there for a while, smoking and discussing our next move. Later in the day we returned for another session but, climbing up the wooden ladders, discovered to our horror that one of the sofas was darkly smouldering. Someone must have dropped a cigarette earlier. We scrambled for a bucket and water and dosed the sofa thoroughly before making our getaway, taking even more care this time not to be seen leaving. All seemed well, the danger safely averted and our implication kept secret, but that evening in the study hall where we were listening to music, reading and chatting, the fire alarm rang out. The Beit Hall, it seemed, was on fire!

Well, luckily it did not completely burn down and the fire was contained before it spread from the stage to the rest of the building, but it was a close call and the curtains and scenery were seriously damaged. Then came the anxious wait to see if anyone might point the finger at us. Funnily enough though, when I got a chance later to talk to Chris it turned out that he and his friends had shared the same anxiety because they’d been up there for a smoke too. And further discreet enquiries turned up several more possible culprits. It seemed that half the boys staying over that holiday had been for a smoke on the sofas above the stage at some point that day.

Whether any of them had also seen the sofa smouldering we did not find out, or even try to, because that would have been too much like tempting fate and giving ourselves away. Nor did I even mention the smouldering sofa to Chris till many safe years later.

Another half term we went camping with the school to Mt Darwin in the north east of the country. This was pretty much like camping with a school or Boy Scouts anywhere in the world – ancient old canvas tents, mountains of baked beans and sausages, home-made breadsticks and creepy tales round the camp fire – apart from

Father Wilson sitting on guard with a rifle on the rocks overlooking the swimming

194 hole in case of crocodiles or leopards. It was at this camp that a rumour spread that mixing codeine with coke could make you high, so we all suddenly developed headaches and experimented enthusiastically. It certainly seemed to do the trick, though it was probably just our imaginations. More usefully, Chris also remembers first learning how to scramble eggs properly on that trip.

The school also occasionally arranged weekend trips for us into the bush, or at least out of town. Generally at weekends we were limited to the city if we were not grounded for some crime. You could get a pass to visit non-boarding schoolmates for the day, or see movies at a Christian centre in town shared by several schools. The main attraction of this was the chance to chat up some girls (never very successfully as girls were more alien to us than Martians and the convent girls probably viewed us the same way) plus the walk into town and back provided some opportunity for taking detours on the off-chance of adventure, using the Pearl Assurance building as our compass. There were also the sporting fixtures with rival schools, especially our arch rugby enemies, Prince Edward’s. Often the action on the pitch would be mirrored by scuffles behind the grandstands between packs of crimson and maroon blazers.

But from time to time you could sign up for outings away from the city, all boys piling loosely into the back of the school’s open-backed truck, as we did for any school outing involving transport. No such luxury as a minibus, seats or seatbelts – you just hung onto the rails around the edge of the truck bed and tried not to be shaken loose as it bucketed over potholes. Along the way songs would be sung, mostly rude but a common favourite, especially when entering a rival school like

Prince Edward’s, was the school’s unofficial anthem When the Saints Come Marching

In – ‘Saints’ being our nickname for ourselves

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A popular destination because it was only about twenty miles south west of town, was Lake McIlwaine, now called Lake Chivero. As the guide books will tell you, this was originally named after a former High Court judge who founded the country’s soil and water conservation movement. It was an artificial lake formed by a dam built in 1952 as the main water supply for Salisbury, which it still is for Harare.

It was also one of Salisbury’s favourite water parks for boating, fishing and swimming. There were some great rock outcrops nearby, small kopjes where there were rumoured to be some bushmen paintings; but of course we made no real effort to find those, being more occupied with war games, for which the broken rocks were ideal, and spying on courting couples. This spying meant occasionally having to flee through the rocks pursued by an angry boyfriend, but that was part of the sport.

Curiously enough, a couple of hours after finishing the last paragraph in 2011

I heard on the BBC Radio 4 news that the Lake Chivero resort had been invaded by a group of Robert Mugabe’s infamous ‘war veterans’ as part of a new wave of land grabs targeting successful tourist venues. Unfortunately for them this caused acute embarrassment to the Zimbabwe Minister for Tourism who was visiting London at the time trying to encourage visitors to the country; so in the end they were evicted by riot police. One can only weep for the country really, and admire those who persisted in trying to make it work under the apparently immortal Mugabe; up until, of course, his abrupt removal towards the end of 2017.

More rarely there were visits to Mermaid Pool and a mission school further away in a different direction. Unfortunately I can’t now be sure but it was possibly the

Chishawasha Mission east of Salisbury. It was linked with St George’s in some manner; perhaps just because it was also run by Jesuits, as it still is today, but rumour

196 had it that part of our fees went towards financing this school for Africans. Apart from its remote location the school seemed just as well if not better equipped than ours, with bright, airy new classrooms and signs of ongoing building.

We were not really interested in the school or mission themselves of course and after the expected dutiful tours we headed off with relief to burn energy in the bush, supervised by a couple of junior teachers. There were two attractions to this outing. The most impressive was what we called Armchair Mountain nearby – a vast boulder of stone shaped much as its name suggests if you picture a bulbous old British armchair. It was larger and less fractured than most kopjes so climbing it was a long steep slog under a baking sun. Then near the top under whatever shade we could find we’d have a picnic lunch and sit around chatting while we admired the view. On one of these visits I fell into a long and pleasant chat with Mr Shufflebotham. He was a likeable enough teacher anyway in class but I was struck by how different and normal this conversation was outside school. It was like talking to one of our parents’ younger friends at home.

Then to cool down on the way back there was a muddy waterhole at the foot of the mountain where we’d often end up in mud fights with the local African kids.

These were perfectly amicable battles that usually began with them pelting us with mud and cow dung as we were swimming. This was one of the complicated aspects of

Rhodesian racism that again echoes the class divisions of Victorian Britain. White kids growing up on farms would play quite happily with black kids and on more or less equal terms up to a certain point at which the paths divided for masters and servants, beyond which there was no real turning back. In most respects we were beyond that point at this age but trips like this to the mission dropped us into a different context where such innocent frolics once again became permitted.

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Another curious observation that gave food for thought on one of the trips to this mission was spotting an albino African child playing with the black kids. His skin and hair were lighter even than most Europeans’ though his features were plainly

African. One of the masters told us that in the past such children were often left to die at birth. More recently of course there have been reports from across east and southern Africa of such albino children being targeted for body parts in black magic rituals.

When the time came for our next long leave in 1962 or 3 our parents decided for once not to go to England. Perhaps this was because Norman’s mother had died but it’s more likely that with independence on the way for Northern Rhodesia they guessed our days in Africa were numbered and wanted to see more of it while we could. So the plan was to go to Durban in South Africa – Caryl, Chris and the younger kids going by train while Norman, Lesley and I drove down in the Peugeot. All went well until a cloud of steam erupted from under the bonnet just as we were approaching Beit

Bridge on the South African border and we ground to a halt. After refilling the radiator with our emergency water supply we limped into town where the mechanic told Norman he’d been lucky not to crack the engine block, which can happen when you pour cold water into a boiled-dry engine.

Luckily our only damage was a burnt out head gasket but with no local

Peugeot dealer we’d have to wait a day for the part to come down by train from

Salisbury. So we booked into a hotel and from its veranda watched the sun go down over Rudyard Kipling’s ‘great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees’. Norman must have been seething with frustration but he hid it well.

When the car was finally fixed the next day he armed himself with a big flask of

198 coffee and then drove right through the night chasing the train carrying the rest of the family. Lesley stayed awake with him, chatting and lighting his cigarettes to keep him awake while I rather churlishly just slept on the folded down back seat. On the way we skirted round Johannesburg, avoiding the city itself but we could see it clearly off to our right and it was quite an awesome sight. Where Salisbury was impressive to visitors from Lusaka, Jo’burg was even more so to those from Salisbury, even seen from a distance. This was a real world-class city, an industrial giant planted in Africa.

Without much further drama the family was reunited at the apartment we’d booked a few miles south of Durban. It was in a small modern block of four or six similar apartments close to the beach. Lesley soon made friends with a South African girl her age across the hall and before long they had a gang of teenage buddies to hang out with at the beach, and with whom Chris and I could tag along quite a lot, not finding any similar handy group our own age. Being teenagers now, this was far more attractive than joining the parents and younger kids on excursions into the hinterland and so there’s not really much more to say about this holiday as an experience of

South Africa than could be said about a beach holiday on the Costa Brava or, more to the point, in California at the time because the Beach Boys were our main musical backdrop and inspiration. The only problem was that we could not just dive into the waves on our doorstep because of sharks and had to hike a couple of miles up the coast with our primitive surfboards to the nearest shark net. Some of the older and bolder boys did just dive in anyway without coming to harm but I was very happy not to do so, seeing the size of some sharks the fishermen on the beach were hauling in.

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In 1964, my last year at St George’s, the school took the bold and rather startling step of going multiracial. There was one actual African in the upper forms, Titus

Munyaradzi who came after winning a scholarship from Kutama, a mission school run by the Jesuits that was one of the very few in Southern Rhodesia offering secondary education to Africans, including the future president Robert Mugabe.

Given the general level of casual bullying at St George’s, not to mention ingrained racism, I hate to think what Munyaradzi’s life was like as the sole black pupil. I didn’t see or hear of any outright violence being inflicted on him and imagine that the seniors and prefects were under strict orders to prevent this happening; but he was a noticeably isolated individual and it’s hard to imagine he met much friendliness from his peers. I saw him once in the showers after a rugby match. The showers either side of him were unusually vacant and there was a ring of sixth formers coldly watching him from a slight distance as he self consciously scrubbed himself. Being a senior though, he was largely screened from the view of the lower forms so I can’t really say more about how he was treated. However, he was quoted briefly on his status as the school’s first black pupil in an article by Old Georgian Mark Holden in the Times Educational Supplement on 1 March 2002: “The atmosphere was tense.

Most students, like their parents, believed integration was not possible. But the school authorities are to be commended in that they believed in justice for all and never reversed their policy.”

I would say that is a very diplomatic navigation through all kinds of emotional reefs but interestingly, like many other pupils who had an uncomfortable time at the school, he later sent his own sons there; though admittedly by then the school was

200 fully multiracial. Robert Mugabe also became a school parent and built himself a mansion next door, which must have made the Jesuits very nervous when his son required discipline.

There were also two Asian brothers, the elder of whom was in my year –

Kevin DaSilva. His reception was really quite interesting. To begin with everyone just kept their distance, probably not quite as much as with Munyaradzi in the sixth form but still, it must have felt pretty lonely. It was hard enough anyway for new boys to fit at this late stage into the well established hierarchy. Another who came about the same time was Michael Land who had the novelty in breaking the ice of having had half his leg bitten off by a shark in South Africa. Well, it had only taken his foot but after complications more of his leg had been amputated, leaving him with just a stump below the knee. To entertain the dormitory he used to draw a horse’s face on this and twitch it in a weirdly realistic fashion. He also used to employ his tin leg ruthlessly in rugby matches and took shameless advantage of opponents’ reluctance to tackle him.

He hopped around the dormitory quite happily on his remaining leg which had developed extraordinary muscles to cope with having to operate on its own. So with his entertainment value he fitted in instantly and a few years later was proudly paraded before Douglas Bader – the famously tin-legged WWII RAF fighter ace – when he visited the school.

A bit less happily was another boy who gloried in the surname Larthe de

Langladure. Given the Rhodesian propensity for taking the piss out of surnames

(much greater than in Britain; my own daughter for instance was never once teased about her surname despite going to a broad Comprehensive secondary school in

Sussex) he had quite a hard time and in fact soon abbreviated his surname to ‘Larthe’ to try and shift the problem, which meant him laboriously going through all his

201 exercise books changing the name on the covers. If he’d been a comedian or quick with his fists he could have made his mark, but as it was he just had to make the best of not quite fitting in with cliques that had been painstakingly carved out over years.

However, that was probably nothing compared to being the first Asian boy in a school full of white Rhodesians. Personally I guessed at first that if Kevin da Silva made any friends at all it would be among the other outcasts – the geeks (although we didn’t have that term then) that everyone picked on, but I was quite wrong. Brian

Moore and Chris Pincott occupied much the same level in the hierarchy as myself – not quite in the inner core of our form’s elite but able to hang out with them much of the time and not be pushed around by them. It was a delicate position that could easily be jeopardized by being too friendly with the oddballs; but Brian and Chris were the first to befriend Kevin. I admired their courage, particularly in the light of the occasional racist insults my brother Chris and I had received. When I tentatively probed Brian about his new friend, he said ‘But he’s not Indian, he’s from Goa.’

You’d have to be a white Rhodesian back in the 60s to grasp that this hair-splitting made any difference, but strangely enough it did. Word spread that the da Silvas were

Goan and not Indian and somehow this excuse made it possible to sidestep the usual prejudices because until then we’d never heard of Goa. That Goa was simply an

Indian state that happened to have been colonized by the Portuguese rather than the

British was beside the point. Thanks largely to Moore and Pincott and others like Rob

Webster, Kevin da Silva was quite soon accepted just for himself and I believe much the same happened with his younger brother, of whom he was quite protective.

While following the progress of the liberation war in Rhodesia during the 70s

I often wondered how staff at the school reconciled the contradiction between on the one hand continuing to defy the Smith government over multiracial education,

202 threatening simply to close down if the government forcibly prevented it; and on the other staging funeral processions down the school drive for Old Georgians killed in fighting to preserve that government and all it stood for, which was no majority rule for at least fifty years and as little racial integration as possible. There were close ties between the armed forces and our cadets when I was there. Generals would preside over our passing out parades and cadets were given tours of army and air force bases to tempt them to join up . . .

Meanwhile back in Livingstone around the beginning of that year of 1964 during school holidays, when the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had been dissolved and talk of independence was in the air, I bumped into an African one day dangling a tortoise on a string tied through a hole in its shell. We met walking up the hill towards the museum and town along the main road from the convent and railway station. It’s quite possible that I’d been to church because I still occasionally served at Mass during the school holidays. Seeing the interest in my eyes, the African held up the tortoise and dangled it for me.

‘Hey, you want, young bwana?’ he asked.

I felt in the pockets of my khaki shorts.

‘No dollars, man,’ I said.

He shrugged and we walked on together. We happened to be passing a car dealership on the left. Pointing to a shiny new Austin Cambridge in the showroom window he said: ‘After independence I think I will have that car.’

I suspected it wasn’t going to be that simple but kept my thoughts to myself.

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Overall we whites in Northern Rhodesia met remarkably little hostility in the run-up to independence and certainly none that I personally experienced or witnessed in

Livingstone. There was trouble here and there, mostly in the north of the country, as there had been throughout the 50s as African politicians agitated for more power and the removal of the widespread colour bars in shops, hotels and suchlike. This had led to the imprisonment of Kenneth Kaunda and other leading activists of what was to become his United National Independence Party (UNIP). There had also been occasional strikes and riots on the Copperbelt which on at least one occasion had led to police opening fire and killing some protesters, but as a kid who barely read newspapers these were faint rumbles in the background and the Copperbelt anyway was almost a separate country where different rules prevailed.

There were rumours of training camps in the bush where young UNIP supporters were drilled and trained in – well, we weren’t quite sure really and the suspicion was that their intentions were less benign and more political than the Boy

Scouts, but I can’t remember ever feeling under any personal threat, certainly not in

Livingstone. Later on, back in Lusaka on the eve of independence in 1964 we did meet some hostility when truckloads of these young UNIP supporters drove past yelling insults at Europeans and chanting ‘Kwacha!’ with raised fists. ‘Kwacha’ meant ‘dawn’, meaning the dawn of freedom, the battle cry of UNIP and later the name of the Zambian currency. There were also rumours of some white youths being beaten up by such gangs but I never felt at all nervous for my own safety.

I would guess our parents followed the progress towards independence more anxiously, even though they were totally in favour of it and all Norman’s work in various branches of the education service had been towards that end. There had been trouble in other newly independent African countries to the north, particularly Kenya

204 whose Mau Mau rebellion in the 50s was constantly pointed to by white Rhodesians as an example of why the Africans needed firm government, as was the chaos and bloodshed ongoing in the former Belgian Congo right next door to us. But the reality was that even though the African nationalists had on the ground faced deep-rooted prejudice and resistance from Northern Rhodesian settlers, they were pushing against a barely fastened door as far as the Colonial Office in London was concerned. In the end there was no real doubt after the break-up of the Federation with Southern

Rhodesia that the north and Nyasaland would have majority rule sooner rather than later, as had been acknowledged by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s famous ‘wind of change’ speech in South Africa in 1960. The pressure towards majority rule and independence came as much from the British government outside as from the African nationalists within Northern Rhodesia.

Zambia also escaped civil war between the two main political parties after independence and so was luckier than many other post-colonial African nations. The closest it came to civil war was an uprising by Jehovah’s Witnesses. That was how they were usually described in the news anyway and they had indeed borrowed many of their ideas from the Seventh Day Adventists, but were far removed from the usual

Jehovah’s Witnesses that come peddling the War Cry on your doorstep and had long been disowned by the American parent group. There was actually a history dating back decades in Northern Rhodesia of Jehovah’s Witness splinter groups preaching rebellion against the European takeover and also declaring the imminent arrival of

Jesus to throw us out of the country.

So Alice Lenshina, who led this particular group, was just the latest in a line of self proclaimed prophets. Her followers called themselves the Lumpa Church, meaning ‘better than the rest’ in the Bemba tongue. Curiously enough she came from

205 the same far northern Chinsali area as Kenneth Kaunda and was baptized at the mission where he grew up, his father David being the minister there. After a near death experience with cerebral malaria in which she claimed to have visited heaven like the prophet Enoch and learned the secrets of the universe, Alice Lenshina started her own charismatic Christian sect in the early 50s and over the next few years gathered hundreds of thousands of followers who built her a brick temple the size of a

Gothic cathedral in her home district. It had a strategically placed pillar for Jesus to alight on at the imminent Second Coming. People have often wondered at the enthusiasm with which Christianity was adopted by colonial Africans but even at that time I did not find it that surprising. When hearing the gospel stories about the downtrodden Jews and the oppressive Romans it must have seemed obvious who were the modern Romans . . .

Also Christianity happened to fit quite well with Bantu religious beliefs. As we saw with the Tonga, Africans believed very much in what is often called ‘ancestor worship’. I’m not sure ‘worship’ is the right word but they very much believed in the continued presence of dead ancestors and their power to influence the gods and other spiritual forces to the benefit (or otherwise) of their living descendants. They also believed in a Supreme Being but reckoned it was too remote to be concerned directly with human affairs. Christianity offered a direct line to this being through Jesus and had the same appeal as early Christianity to pagan converts – it greatly simplified the spiritual world by slashing the number of gods you had to propitiate.

However, back to Alice Lenshina – the trouble for the government was that the Lumpa church rejected all secular authority, both colonial and nationalist, and its followers refused to pay taxes. In the run up to independence this became a real problem because the Lumpas were draining support from Kaunda’s United National

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Independence Party in the north of the country. The trouble finally came to a head in

July 1964 when armed clashes between UNIP and Lumpa followers near Chinsali led to two policemen being killed and state troops being called in.

In a symbol of the new non racial order the policemen (one black and one white) were buried with honour side by side but despite the troops many hundreds of people died in the following savage unrest, whole villages of both Lumpa and their enemies being wiped out. Far more people in fact were killed or injured in this dispute than in the struggle for majority rule. Most were Lenshina’s followers but hundreds if not thousands were killed by them before military action took effect. Newspaper reports soon told how the Lumpa seemed fearless in the face of gunfire. At first it was assumed that they simply imagined themselves immune to bullets thanks to certain magical charms, as still happens in other African wars today; but the truth was more sinister. It was not that they imagined themselves immune to gunfire but they positively wanted to die in order to reach heaven that much sooner. Alice Lenshina had been giving out ‘passports’ to her followers – scribbled notes granting them instant access to paradise should they die in defence of their faith. As they lay dying they would show these slips triumphantly to the troops that had shot them.

Some 15,000 survivors fled to tribal cousins over the border in the Congo, mostly never to return. Lenshina was arrested and spent most of the rest of her life in detention; and it was under this slight cloud that Kaunda ceremonially took charge of the newly independent Zambia a few months later. The temple was left to crumble away, abandoned in the bush.

That area of north eastern Zambia has a tradition of grand architectural follies built of mud brick, in particular the grand English style mansion built at Shiwa Ngandu by Sir

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Stewart Gore-Browne whose grand project is the subject of The Africa House by

Christina Lamb.

Begun in 1920 this house and its estate became Gore-Browne’s life’s project, using largely local labour and resources. His treatment of the natives is questionable in many ways due to his fierce temper and quick hand with the sjambok but the benefits he brought the region and his energetic support for African participation in government led to him being the only white man to be given a state funeral in Zambia after his death in 1967. The estate was then run by his daughter and her husband until their murder in 1991, after which it fell into decay for several years until being restored as a guest house.

There’s also a Norman style castle in Lundazi on the Malawi border that is now a popular hotel. It was started in 1948 by a District Commissioner called Errol

Button using convict labour.

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Did we come to take the Victoria Falls for granted while living nearby? To some extent, inevitably we must have become a bit blasé, but we never grew bored with them or the Zambezi. Being away so much at boarding school helped keep our appreciation of Livingstone fresh when home for the holidays and there were still adventures waiting which Chris and I had not quite felt quite brave enough for by the time we moved back to Lusaka. The Knife Edge, for instance.

Our end of the Falls, the Eastern Cataract, had a much briefer stretch of rain forest than on the Southern Rhodesian side before stopping abruptly at the fissure through which all the waters of the mile wide Zambezi squeezed through into the

Boiling Pot before zig-zagging away to the south. You could not easily walk all the way to the end though because at one point the promontory suddenly narrows like a wasp-waist to a rocky path just a few feet wide, with a sheer drop of four hundred feet either side, this notional path being washed slippery by the constant spray of the Falls, even to some extent in the dry season when the section of the Falls opposite was a bare rock face. The boys Lesley hung around with mostly claimed to have made the crossing. It was almost a rite of passage in Livingstone if you aspired to be in the cool set of older teenagers. It would have been nice to be able to hold up our heads in that company and quite often I, with Chris or other friends, cycled out there to contemplate the crossing. It was tantalizing. It could be over so quickly – a short fifty foot scramble over the narrow bit and then the path widened again into a comfortable headland, almost an island perched atop vast, sheer cliffs. A similar scramble back and we’d be able to boast about it forever. But even in the dry season we never quite summoned the courage, it just looked too scary, the chasms either side too hungry and the narrow path too unpleasantly crumbly.

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So that was one untried adventure at Livingstone that no doubt we would have tackled if we’d stayed a couple more years, though to be honest I don’t regret it too much. It would have been tremendously exciting and nice to boast about afterwards but the main enjoyment would have been getting back alive, and there was a horribly real possibility of that not happening. These days there’s a neat and sturdy bridge making the crossing, and quite rightly too.

An unfulfilled adventure I do seriously regret is never having swum in the

Armchair Pool on the very lip of the Falls. Also sometimes known as the Angel’s

Armchair or, these days, Devil’s Pool it is a natural swimming pool in the middle of the Falls and perched right on its lip. So while floating in relatively calm water you can peer over the edge 400 feet straight down to a jumble of boulders and boiling water at the foot of the roaring cataract. Or so I’ve heard, because as I say Chris and I never got to do it. Lesley may well have and certainly the boys in her group had done it, but they did not invite us along for that particular adventure and it was not then something parents took their kids to, as they cheerfully do now. The secret of this wonder is that in the dry season often half the Falls are bare, dry rock so you can walk right out to the centre. The Armchair Pool, which the rest of the time is covered by a torrent, thus gets exposed when the water level drops, only receiving enough water to keep it topped up. I suppose it still takes an act of faith trusting to its thin outer shell not to collapse while you’re in there but that’s a fair bet really, since it’s lasted this long.

So no, even allowing for nostalgia, hindsight and all the rest we never did get bored with Livingstone. It was a brilliant place to grow up in and there would have been much more to enjoy if we’d stayed longer. A personal ambition was to visit

Katima Mulilo some 80 miles up the Zambezi on the Caprivi Strip where Namibia

210 reaches across to touch Zambia, thanks to a quirk of colonial politics aimed at keeping

Angola separated from Botswana. I mentioned this a few times to Norman and Caryl and the transport would probably have been no problem but we knew no-one there that I could stay with so it remained an unfulfilled dream. But having said that, neither did leaving Livingstone break our hearts. So much change was in the air both personally and in the world around us that there was also a sense of anticipation for what was going to happen next.

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- 4 -

LUSAKA

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Shortly before Zambian Independence (24 October 1964) the family moved back to

Lusaka, but closer into town along the Great East Road this time, near the old racecourse where the great annual agricultural shows were held, with the attached

Luna Park funfair and circus. Our road opened into Cecil Rhodes Drive and, with wonderful colonial appropriation, was called Sussex Close. It was laid out like a typical English cul-de-sac, with a roundabout at the end and hedges, drives and green(ish) lawns in front of the bungalows bordered by flowerbeds. The difference was that the hedges produced mangos and avocados and we had a thriving banana tree growing at the back outside the kitchen door, plus servants’ kias at the top of the garden. The avocado bushes were so fruitful that for variety we used to eat them as a pudding, mashed up with sugar and evaporated milk and called Avocado Fool.

Most of the other roads nearby were also named after English counties while on the other side of Cecil Rhodes Drive they were named after areas of Scotland.

Since then they have all quite rightly been given African names – Sussex Close has become Lunzua Road, named after a river and waterfall in far northern Zambia and no longer a close but linked up via another former cul de sac with the Great East Road.

Cecil Rhodes Drive has become Addis Ababa Drive, named after the capital of

Ethiopia. That country was a beacon for all the African countries gaining independence in the 1960s because it was the one African state which had successfully resisted colonization by Italy in the nineteenth century and (with British and French help) threw the Italians out when they again invaded and briefly occupied

212 the country in the 1930s. Emperor Haile Selasse of Ethiopia was a founder of the

Organisation of African Unity and therefore a highly honoured guest in many newly independent African countries. The avenue to the then Lusaka airport (it’s since moved further out of town) was also renamed in his honour, having formerly been

King George and Queen Mary Avenue.

Our new house was of the same basic government design as our original one in Munali, with a few slight variations, such as having an additional bedroom built onto the front veranda. As we still couldn’t fit our expanded family into it, we had a small caravan in the back garden to accommodate the overflow. Chris and I shared this for a while during the school holidays and it proved even handier than our room in Livingstone for sneaking out at nights. Lesley’s bedroom close by had a narrow

French window which gave us a shortcut into the house and meant we were easily on call to dispose of any spiders or other creepy crawlies that invaded her bedroom.

Norman by this time was directing newsreels and documentaries for the

Information Service and we were always rather proud to see his name flash up on the screen at the drive-in or cinema at the end of the news. He also had charge of directing the movie being made about Zambia’s forthcoming independence; for which, ironically enough, he had to make frequent trips to Salisbury where they had more advanced film editing and processing facilities; this despite the hostility in

Southern Rhodesia towards the north’s independence and the bringing of black majority rule right to their doorstep.

To begin with, back in Lusaka, we were still going to boarding school so the move added 300 miles to our train journey. Send-offs at the station were rather strained because all the boys from the Copperbelt and other regions north of Lusaka would

213 hang out of the windows watching for any sign of soppiness. So it would be a formal handshake from Norman and a stiff peck on the cheek from Caryl along with stilted farewells and promises to write and wishes for a good term and so on. On one of these departures I hadn’t quite boarded the train as it pulled out of the station but was nonchalantly standing on a step and hanging onto a rail beside the door. When we’d left the station behind I confidently twisted the door handle only to find it locked or jammed. This was hilarious to the other St George’s boys watching, but after they’d had a good laugh some did come along to try and open the door from the inside and then called a conductor when this failed. But even he couldn’t budge it, so I had to hang onto my hand rail on the outside till the next stop, which I think was Chilanga about ten miles down the line.

During the holidays we had a new set of friends to hang out with, mostly St

George’s boys though Chris, as a member of the Northern Rhodesia national team, also knew the swimming crowd there. For me there was Rob Webster, who I knew both from school and from originally living in Lusaka when his father had taken some professional portrait photos of our family. It was Rob’s sister we’d used as monkey bait in Livingstone. There was also especially Peter Rundle. At school Pete and I had been reasonable though not particular friends but thanks to shared holidays we soon became firm buddies. Our rendezvous of choice was the Green Parrot Café which stood in a row of shops on the roundabout to the airport. There we hung out with other kids our age and I even acquired a girlfriend of sorts – Gail Warner. We didn’t quite know what to do with each other though. She took me home to meet her grandmother, who for some reason the family all called Toad, and as far as the others in our crowd were concerned we were dating, but we barely got as far as the first fumbled kiss and

214 after a few awkward letters from boarding school the next term we kind of cancelled the whole thing.

Pete happened to live on the edge of the Green Parrot roundabout and his was a great place to hang out, with his older brothers’ Mad magazines and car pistons cut in half for ashtrays. Our parents were also great friends and used to go together to dance evenings at the Lusaka Club which was also nearby. The city’s main airport was less than half a mile away but far from this being considered a nuisance, having the airport so close to town brought a touch of glamour and it was viewed with affectionate pride as our link to the wider world. Also I suppose there were simply not so many flights that their noise was ever considered a nuisance.

When the first BOAC VC10 jet airliner came to Lusaka in 1964 half the town turned out to see it arrive, picnicking along the runway as if it were the Grand

National or Ascot back in England, or a rocket launch in the States. Our family was stationed about halfway down the runway on the south side and the noise was deafening as the plane came in to land but not many people covered their ears, they just revelled in the roar and cheered at the top of their voices, saluting it with bottles of Castle or Lion lager. I remember assuming that the adults must know if the noise levels were safe, but I doubt anyone had even considered that – as with the harsh railway lights at Livingstone and the Kariba Dam, we just rejoiced in conquering the wildness of Africa with European technology.

Norman used to fly quite a lot for his work. Mostly this was around the two

Rhodesias and Nyasaland but he also went further afield to the newly independent countries to the north, no doubt collecting useful tips for Zambia’s own forthcoming event. On these flights he collected miniatures of famous whiskies for Lesley. Well, that was his excuse anyway and she built up quite a collection, topping them up with

215 cold black tea. He also once brought a souvenir rug from Nairobi made from the black and white pelts of five Colobus monkeys. This hung proudly on the wall above the stairs in our English home into the 1980s when it began to seem rather distasteful. In

Africa in the 60s though such animal pelts and mounted heads were proudly displayed everywhere as mementos of what were called the ‘pioneer days’ when it was a normal part of a government official’s duties when touring his district to shoot an antelope for his and his servants’ dinners. In remote areas and on ranches this still happened but most Europeans by this time simply went to their local butcher.

Because of boarding school Lesley, Chris and I missed the independence celebrations themselves and were not greatly disappointed to do so. Although we met only marginal hostility before the event there was a good deal of uncertainty in the air about how carried away young African UNIP supporters might get in the euphoria of achieving self-rule. Our parents were probably safe enough because Norman was intricately involved in staging the event and probably knew all the likely danger spots to avoid during the celebrations, but they were probably also quite relieved that we teenagers were safely out of the country for the duration rather than getting involved.

As it happened, the celebrations went off pretty peacefully. There were incidents of course but no more than in the immediate run-up to independence and probably no more than in any similar national event elsewhere, including football matches. When we came home at Christmas we heard no horror tales and in fact life was remarkably unchanged in Lusaka. The newspapers were fuller of African politicians and there were noticeably more smartly suited Africans being chauffeured around Lusaka in black Government Rover 90s and American limos, but to a teenager’s eyes there was no real difference at all in everyday relations between

Africans, Europeans and Asians. During that holiday we attended the premier of

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Norman’s documentary of the independence ceremonies and got to see Kenneth

Kaunda close up and in the flesh for the first time. His charm and charisma were terribly impressive. He had an aura of friendly strength and grace in victory.

For our final year in Zambia Lesley, Chris and I all left boarding school. Lesley had finished sixth form anyway and, thanks to our school year ending at Christmas, had eight months or so to wait before starting university in London. Chris had also left school and had a shorter time to kill before joining the RAF in Britain. I was merely switched from boarding in Salisbury to becoming a day-boy at the local high school in

Lusaka. I was delighted by this and briefly imagined that my muted grumbles about St

George’s had been heeded at last, but actually it was just a cost saving exercise in readiness for our ‘return’ to Britain. Caryl had mentioned once that most if not all the money she earned went towards paying for Chris and me at St George’s, while

Norman paid for Lesley and Jacky. I’d often wished Caryl had been a bit less unselfish. It was a curious thing about St George’s though that while most of the other boys also grumbled about the place, my cheerful departure from it was seen as a kind of betrayal. I did regret losing the friends I’d made there it’s true, but felt nothing but relief at leaving the school itself.

My final departure from St George’s was not, as might be expected from my first arrival there, by way of the school truck ferrying a load of us down to the train station. Instead (for some reason I’ve now forgotten) I was first going to stay a few days with a day-boy pal Kevin Dix. At Hartmann House he’d been a boarder and we’d become pretty good friends along with his close pal Dave Mc Caughan. On moving up to the big school Kevin had become a day-boy, which was a shame in one way as it meant we saw much less of each other but did mean that I and others could

217 visit him at the weekends. Kevin’s mum drove up to the school to collect us on the last day of the Christmas term and so it was in some style that I left – Kevin and I in the back seat as we swept down the main drive past the First Team’s Cricket ground.

‘Aren’t you going to take one last look?’ Kevin’s mum asked, pausing the car.

‘No chance’ I said, ‘I’m just so glad to see the back of the place.’

‘You might regret it,’ she persisted but I held firm and refused to look back as we drove away. The one thing I did regret years later was speaking in such a callow way to a parent who, like my own, was only doing what she thought best for her son’s education; and who also had done much to brighten my own life there by taking me in at weekends and treating me like one of her own.

My new school in Lusaka was the Gilbert Rennie, named after the Northern Rhodesia

Governor from 1948 to 54, the point at which the country had been absorbed into the short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The girls’ school next door was named the Jean Rennie after his wife. Both became simply Kabulonga Boys and Girls

Schools around the time I joined, being named after the large neighbouring African township. The novelty of having girls on the doorstep like this was almost as exciting as the freedom of being a day boy at school again. I occasionally saw Gail Warner around the place but had blown any chance of taking up with her again.

By this time Norman had become chief of the government Information

Department though after independence and the policy of Zambianization he had handed over to a successor, Titus Mukupo, whom he supported as a deputy while he settled into the job. Mukupo had formerly been editor of Zambia News and was a veteran of the civil rights movement having, like Kaunda, been imprisoned briefly in the 1950s for his political activities, in particular their vigorous protests against the

218 colour bar. He was in his mid-thirties I would guess and was a graduate of Munali, so

Norman had almost certainly been his teacher there for a while. They had also possibly worked together in Livingstone. They got along famously both in and out of work. We even shared the school run until I got a pushbike and took to riding the four miles there.

Norman once took me along to a party at the Mukupos’ house. Caryl didn’t come for some reason and without her restraining influence Norman got steaming drunk and ended up literally dancing on tables with the man who had taken his job. I don’t think Norman resented this at all because I never heard him express any reservations about independence or at leaving Zambia, apart from the occasional grumble about having to go back to English weather. Chris thinks he probably hoped to be asked to stay on longer after independence, what with having three young children and the relative ease, thanks to servants, of rearing them in Zambia, but if so he never mentioned it. He did once tell Sandra though that one reason for returning to

Britain when we did was for the sake of deaf Jacky’s education. It probably helped also that he and other colonial civil servants were given generous golden handshakes as part of the independence settlement to encourage them to leave as soon as Zambian replacements could be found – full pension, six months’ pay (in lieu of long leave) and enough cash to buy a comfortable home in Britain.

During that final year I didn’t get nearly as involved in the school as I’d unavoidably had to at St George’s and was very happy being able to get away from the place as often as possible, although I liked it well enough. Luckily Pete Rundle had made the same move from St George’s so we had a head start on fitting in. His family had also moved from the Green Parrot roundabout to a new house on Twin Palms Road just

219 behind the school and theirs was the greatest place to bunk off to, with free access both to a larder and his brothers’ stashes of magazines, which had moved on from

Mad to Men Only, Mayfair and Playboy. Their house was unusual for Rhodesia in having an upstairs, which came in handy once for watching the fire brigade put out a blaze we’d started in the bush across the road and behind the school. More importantly his house had its own swimming pool, which was shielded from the road by an earth bank which doubled as a cycle ramp.

Once when we were showing off stunts to Pete’s brothers and their girlfriends,

I got so carried away without realizing it that instead of coming down on the other side of the ramp, I flew off into mid-air and landed with such a thump on my boneshaker of a bike that the wheel rims were dented. After that it was like riding with a limp, though amazingly the tyres themselves were fine. I don’t think my parents ever noticed my home made repairs with a panel-beating hammer, but I caught Dixon eying the wheels of his future transport critically a couple of times and giving me a reproachful look. The bike had been promised to him as a retirement present when we left, hence its sturdy functionality and steel brake rods instead of flexible cables and dropped racing handlebars. It was the kind of bike that lasted indefinitely in Africa and although it was a bit uncool for a white teenager to be riding one, I didn’t mind too much for Dixon’s sake and even got to rather enjoy its quirkiness; though with its modest three Sturmy Archer gears I was often stretched to keep up with friends on their fourteen gear racers. Its sturdiness also proved useful for exploring the margins of Lusaka, taking Bowker for his daily run. We quite often cycled a few miles through bush and villages to see progress on the new Parliament buildings, which were still under construction.

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Pete’s family having a swimming pool didn’t stop us from going prowling at night and swimming in other people’s pools, occasionally having to scramble naked over fences when owners set their dogs on us.

On independence Kabulonga School had become fully multiracial, which was a novelty. At boarding school I had picked up much harsher racial attitudes than I’d been brought up with in the north, but even so it was surprisingly easy adapting to the new arrangements in Zambia. I couldn’t help thinking that Southern Rhodesians would also have found it unexpectedly easy if they’d given integration a real chance.

There was no obvious day to day tension between the black, brown and white kids, though they did mostly socialize separately. The only African pupil I really got to know at all was Biggie Nkumbula, son of the opposition African National Congress party’s leader, Harry. Biggie seemed perfectly at ease in any company and could be very entertaining. I believe he followed his father into politics and was Minister for

Agriculture in the early 90s, but he died in suspicious circumstances around 2001, as did several other politicians. Road crashes were a popular and plausible means of disposing of awkward rivals, as in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, although given the high crash rate on African roads some probably really were quite genuine accidents.

At school I got the chance to study art for the first time and loved it, helped by having a crush on our pretty young female teacher. In the mocks for our Cambridge

School Certificate exams I got an A but my actual exam work got lost in the post and went ungraded, thanks to me having been given the wrong candidate number and the art exam being held three weeks before the rest. The mistake was not noticed until too late to put right. Not that this really mattered except to my pride because my next school in England didn’t do art in the sixth form.

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One of the teachers, Michael Etherton, was already familiar to Pete and me as he’d done his teaching probation at St George’s. This brought home the contrast between the schools because in the climate of barely controlled war at St George’s he’d been given a pretty rough ride, as were all new teachers until they established a degree of fear. At Kabulonga however it was quite possible to be friendly with teachers even within class. The general level of behaviour at Kabulonga was much better too – so much for the efficacy of corporal punishment. In theory one could get caned at Kabulonga but I never heard of it happening. Etherton was an inspirational

English teacher who really brought to life A Man for All Seasons and Macbeth in ways I had really not imagined possible before. He went on to become a major force in youth theatre in Lusaka, though this got him into trouble when the plays he put on became too political and the first flush of post-independence euphoria and tolerance had passed. He was deported in fact in 1972 and in 2011 published a memoir of this time with his colleague John Reed in Chikwakwa Remembered – Theatre and Politics in Zambia 1968-1972.

Caryl meanwhile had a new secretarial job and so had taken on a nanny to look after the three younger children who were now 6, 4 and 2 years old. The nanny was Mrs

Dugan, a mixed-race woman who had children of her own so quite often Jacky,

Alistair and Sandra would be dropped off at her house in a township near the railway tracks in northern Lusaka where they would play with the African kids there. This wasn’t just our parents’ liberalism at work because, as mentioned earlier, it was quite common in both Northern and Southern Rhodesia for young white kids to be looked after like this and what is remarkable is that it rarely stopped them turning into

222 conventional racists when they grew up. More commonly, Mrs Dugan came to our house but did not bring her own children.

She came to visit us in England in the 1980s when her children had prospered enough not only to pay for her flight but to send a daughter to university in Britain.

Her agitation was quite comical when we sat her down and waited on her as we would any other guest. The old servant instincts kept prompting her to jump up and offer to do things, but of course she didn’t know where anything was, so it would not really have been helpful anyway. The daughter or granddaughter was much more cosmopolitan and was perfectly happy to accept our hospitality on equal terms.

Despite her family’s apparent prosperity Mrs Dugan had many grumbles about the state of things in Lusaka in the years after we had left – the shortages, long queues and crime. Much of this hardship could be blamed on the hostilities with Ian Smith’s

Rhodesian government to the south during the 70s that had cut off Zambia’s most convenient rail supply route for both imports and exports. To solve this problem the

Chinese funded a rail line to Tanzania in the north but both during and after its construction the main route for imports and exports was the notoriously dangerous

Great North Road to Tanzania which claimed many lives and was far more expensive than the old rail route south. Also during the recession-hit 1970s the price of copper plummeted, so on top of the difficulties of transport Zambia lost its main source of foreign currency. They were difficult times and even after the liberation of Zimbabwe the country took decades to recover, though it finally seems to be prospering.

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23

During that final year our parents got a second car so Lesley could learn to drive. It was a curious little German beast called a Fuldamobil with two widely spaced wheels at the front and two very closely spaced ones at the rear driven by a small two stroke motorbike engine. Effectively it was a three-wheeler and like other German mini cars from the 50s (such the Messerschmitt and Heinkel) it looked rather like a light aircraft cockpit shorn of wings and fuselage. One of its novelties was that to reverse you switched off the engine, flipped a switch and restarted the engine backwards, giving four reverse gears. Not that you’d actually want to try driving backwards at any speed because it didn’t feel that stable at the best of times when going forward, but the option was there. Another quirk was that the gear lever only moved forward and back and, as on a motorbike, you had to fish around for neutral between first and second gears. On top of which, if you changed gear too vigorously, the lever came away in your hand. I almost drove off the road the first time this happened and was only saved by Pete Rundle grabbing the steering wheel. The hand brake was not too reliable either. I once happened to look out the house front window just in time to see the car slowly trundling down the drive seemingly intent on escaping without a driver and managed to catch it just before it reached the street and rolled across into our opposite neighbour’s drive.

Being interested in mechanics I landed the job of keeping the Fuldamobil running and then as Lesley wasn’t really very fond of it, I started driving it around town quite a lot. This was completely illegal as I was only fifteen and much the same laws applied as in England, but somehow my parents raised no objections. Caryl even came out with me once to see that I was driving safely. In retrospect their attitude is a

224 bit of a puzzle since as far as I know our parents were completely law abiding in other respects, but I was naturally delighted to have my own motorized transport, even if it did barely go faster than my pushbike. Then without warning the three-wheeler was suddenly sold in favour of an Austin A30 with which I was still allowed to tinker but was forbidden to drive, on the grounds that it was a proper car as opposed to a jumped-up motorbike. I didn’t learn the real reason for this till Lesley told me some years later; and when she did, I remembered a curious little incident that had puzzled me at the time.

One afternoon I’d come home from school and strolled through the living room on the way to my bedroom (which was now the one built onto the front veranda next to the dining room) to find Caryl deep in conversation with a priest on the sofa.

This was slightly odd, the way they were sitting so close together and the rather startled look they gave me, but Catholic priests were common enough in our lives so I just gave them a casual hello and carried on. Nothing was said about the visit later so it just drifted into that realm of faint mysteries that you never expect to be explained.

What had really been going on, according to Lesley some years later, was something like this: priest arrives knocking on our door, possibly after having first arranged the visit by phone. He’s a bit puzzled by Caryl’s carefree welcome and when the formalities fail to move in the expected direction he ends up blurting something clumsy along the lines of ‘I’m so sorry for what’s happened.’

Caryl: ‘I’m sorry Father; I’m not sure what you mean. What’s happened?’

Priest: ‘I mean your son’s death. The car crash. Please don’t tell me this is the first you’ve heard of it?’

It was while Caryl was absorbing the news of my sudden violent demise and the priest was trying to comfort her that I had breezed in with typical teenage

225 insouciance and gone to my room to read an Argosy magazine or a Lesley Charteris novel. What had happened was a natural enough mistake, given our unusual surname.

In my year at school was another boy named Suckling, Patrick Ian George (PIG)

Suckling to be precise (which, given the endless delight schoolmates took in making pig-related jokes at our expense, seemed a bit cruel or careless of his parents). We were casual though not close friends and not, as far as we could tell, in any way directly related, though sharing such a weird surname did give us a certain bond. It was Patrick who had died in a car crash while joyriding with some friends and the priest had just leaped to conclusions.

That Caryl never mentioned the incident herself is a measure of how partial our communications often were. Victorian reticence lingered much longer out in the

Empire than back at Home, along with other habits and fashions which were usually at least ten years behind the times. The younger generation of kids in our family –

Jacky, Alistair and Sandra – were treated to much more modern and open parenting after we moved to Britain.

Caryl had her own car crash not long afterwards at the Green Parrot roundabout while on her way to collect our dad from the airport. She was driving the grey Ford Taunus estate that had replaced the Peugeot when someone cut in front of her at the roundabout and as she piled into it her head had smashed into the steering wheel. As she was pulled from the wreckage she just managed to whisper something like

‘husband, Norman, airport’ before passing out. So it was not his usual warm homecoming from a trip, arriving as a roving hero bearing gifts and tales of distant lands.

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The car was a write-off but Caryl escaped without serious injury, though she took a couple of weeks to recuperate in hospital and acquired a T shaped scar on her forehead from the sharp chrome horn-ring on the steering wheel that took several years to fade. After that we acquired a small light blue Ford Anglia for the remainder of our time in Zambia. This limited family outings somewhat but with the three younger kids these had got complicated anyway so in a way having a smaller car simplified life.

1965 was quite a year for car crashes in the family but when I had an almost lethal one of my own my parents never got to hear about it. At St George’s I’d had a day-boy friend Neil Strachan who lived on a road bordering the Botanical Gardens that surrounded the school. Several of us used to bunk off to his house whenever possible to smoke and just hang out like normal teenagers, even watching a little fuzzy black and white TV, which had only recently arrived in Southern Rhodesia and had not yet reached the north. There was not much to watch but still, the novelty of it was entertainment enough, even though I could boast a little sophistication in this area, having seen British TV on our holidays in England. Neil’s parents were wonderfully hospitable and unquestioning and often agreed to us applying for official weekend passes from St George’s to visit them. On top of it all, the family had their own swimming pool where we swam in our underwear. This was the scene of Neil’s first glimpse of an actual adult European female nipple, when one of his parents’ friends had bent over carelessly in her bikini. Hushed awe descended over the rest of us boys when he told us of this and our minds boggled in the silence, never having seen more than a photo of a naked European female, and even that rarely.

African breasts we had seen in plenty because their women were not coy and had no hesitation at all about breastfeeding their babies on the pavement, but they did

227 not count. White Rhodesians were pickier than the Afrikaners and Portuguese in this respect and as a consequence there were many fewer mixed race people there than in neighbouring countries, where it had been quite common for European pioneers to take African wives or mistresses. This had happened in Rhodesia but to a much lesser extent, just enough to have left a quirk in Rhodesian law that while a black man could be imprisoned for sleeping with a white woman (if he was not first lynched), the reverse did not hold. Possibly this pickiness showed that our racism was more ingrained than with the Portuguese and Afrikaners because to most white Rhodesians the self-evident and unanswerable riposte to liberal anti-racists fresh from Europe was: ‘But would you let your sister marry one?’ – delivered with a knowing wink, a leering certainty that this notion would cut through all woolly thinking to the real nub of race relations.

The other common reaction by Rhodesians when challenged about racial attitudes by liberals newly arrived from Britain was to say: ‘You just wait and see, in a year’s time your views will be even stronger than ours.’ And sadly, all too often this would be true. The Rhodesian attitudes and accent were quite contagious when you lived there.

In return for Neil’s parents’ hospitality, we rather ungratefully used to hotwire their beige Vauxhall Cresta and take it for spins around town when they were safely out of the way, as indeed we did again when I paid him a visit from Lusaka that year after

I’d left St George’s. Caryl had to go to Salisbury for some reason so I made arrangements with Neil and got a lift with her in the Anglia. I suspect, looking back on it, that Caryl’s reasons for the trip were gynaecological. She’d had problems after

Sandra’s birth and was eventually to have a hysterectomy, and the medical expertise

228 in Salisbury was far in advance of Lusaka’s. But of course nothing along those lines was mentioned or even hinted at and as a fifteen year old I don’t suppose it was hard to leave me in the dark.

In the blue Ford Anglia we took the by now familiar route to Kariba, south through Chilanga to Kafue about 30 miles away where the road bent south east, heading towards Salisbury. Then soon after crossing the Kafue River by bridge we passed the turning to Livingstone, which prompted reminiscences, though no real regrets. I was so happy with my new life as a day-boy in Lusaka that there was little room for nostalgia for our old playground, even one as spectacular as the Victoria

Falls. Then as we neared the border at Chirundu we passed the dusty turn-off to

Kariba on the right and were into less familiar territory. We had travelled this road before but not often. Crossing the wide Zambezi valley was spectacular because it cut a wide gash between the Northern and Southern Rhodesian escarpments, but beyond that the six hour journey soon became quite monotonous in the way that even glorious scenery can become quite boring if there is no end or variation to it. The border crossing at Chirundu, a bridge over the Zambezi, was less of a formality than before

Zambian independence but we had no great delay there. There was also the slight thrill of traversing Tstetse Fly country where cattle and humans alike were prone to sleeping sickness, and on leaving which your car had to be sprayed thoroughly all over and under to kill any stowaway flies, but beyond that the road just stretched monotonously ahead with the only occasional drama being a vehicle coming the other way along the single track tarmac.

Caryl was much more cautious than Norman in this manoeuvre. His, and the usual Rhodesian approach, was to charge towards the oncoming vehicle at full pace as if in an American teen chicken-run movie, then pull over to the left at the last possible

229 moment and wrestle with the suddenly bucking left wheels so the vehicles brushed past each other in a sudden explosion of dust from the dirt verges. Caryl on the other hand slowed to a crawl, pulled over early and just crept along till the other vehicle had roared past and the dust had settled. However, we met little traffic so her technique did not slow us down significantly.

Karoi, where I had stayed with Keith McAlister, was about our halfway mark and beyond that the country grew steadily more populated and settled until finally we arrived at the metropolis of Salisbury. This as ever was a slightly humbling experience. Much as we Northern Rhodesians proudly defended our country and its differences, we did feel a bit provincial when coming to Salisbury because it was simply so much grander and more developed than Lusaka. We blamed the Southern

Rhodesians for having siphoned off much of the north’s copper revenues during the

Federation for their own development, and this was probably true enough, but you still had to admire their gall for having gotten away with it.

On this visit there was no need to hot-wire the Strachans’ Cresta because we got to go joyriding in it openly. I lied to them about having a full driving licence – convincing them that the driving age was lower up north – and this meant that Neil could drive on his learner’s licence with me to supervise. So we rode around like kings living the teenage dream. One memorable afternoon we cruised around the suburbs at up to 100 mph then called in at a café to play pinball. We were on a roll and a single sixpence was all it took to set the machine going. From then on it was bonus games all the way and when we left an hour or two later there were a dozen free games racked up for the next player (assuming the café owner did not notice and reset the machine, which happened when players were too successful). Then, high on adrenaline and feeling

230 invincible, we went cruising in the car again. Luckily for me Neil was driving when reality caught up with us.

We were racing along a tarred road towards an S-bend. It was not that tight a bend but we were going much too fast and as Neil turned into the first bend the car just kept going straight ahead, sliding sideways towards a large tree. By instinct Neil did what you’re supposed to do in that kind of skid, he steered into it and our back end flipped around, whipping us aside from the tree and back onto the tarmac, only now we were skidding sideways in the opposite direction. Another over-compensation and we flipped back the other way. By some miracle we scraped around the second half of the S-bend into a parking lot with a row of cars along each side, and with our tail flipping from side to side we managed to hit almost every one of them before grinding to a halt. After a moment’s shocked silence Neil cried ‘Let’s get out of here!’ and went into first gear; but just as he pulled away our front suspension collapsed, stranding us in the midst of the evidence of our folly.

Neil’s parents hardly spoke another word to me after that for the rest of my stay, especially after it emerged that I didn’t have a licence after all; but neither, curiously, did they say anything to my parents. Neil was grounded for the foreseeable future until he’d paid for all the damages but I got away with just feeling a bit guilty for having deceived the Strachans after all their generosity. Given this catalogue of crashes it would be interesting to know what the accident statistics were for Rhodesia while we lived there, especially given the relative emptiness of the roads. Even our quirky old Fuldamobil was not immune. We’d sold it to the older brother of a friend across Cecil Rhodes Drive who used it mainly for larking about with his mates on bush roads where he found that it really was rather prone to turn turtle as they rolled it many times, though without serious injury.

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Joyriding must have been at least partly responsible for the high crash rate, plus the lack of many police to ensure good behaviour. Pete’s brother Martin used to take us out sometimes in his old green Ford Consul whose top speed he increased by pumping the clutch, making the engine scream and squeezing a few extra mph out of the old banger. His driving calmed down a bit when he bought a decent car, a new

Austin 1100. The statistics were probably also not helped by the normality of driving home from drinks parties.

Officially I had lost driving privileges at home with the disposal of the Fuldamobil, and as it happened I did obey the ban against driving Lesley’s Austin but Chris was still allowed so I had some jaunts with him. On one occasion we decided to see what the car’s top speed was on the way to visit an old St George’s friend, John Rogers.

We found a nice long stretch of quiet road south of Lusaka and managed to coax it to

80 mph before the engine seized. A mystery, we explained to Norman later. We were just driving along normally, we told him, when suddenly the engine died in a cloud of steam. It cost him a hundred pounds for a reconditioned engine and when, years later,

I confessed the truth to him after a couple of pints in an English pub, he was still furious about it and very reluctant to let me practice driving in their car. Caryl used to take me out in it for practise when he was at work.

To compensate for losing driving rights I started hanging round with friends who had mopeds and Honda 50s with which we tinkered and played around. The

Hondas were just part of a wave of Japanese goods flooding into the country, as all around the world in the 60s – cameras, cars, motorbikes and all the rest of the manufactured goods they were suddenly making better than anyone else. It was obvious even in the Honda 50s when compared to the Italian mopeds and British

232 small bikes they were replacing. They were a bit girly of course, being semi-scooters, but they were so obviously more smooth and sophisticated – light, nimble, with automatic clutch and neat gear changes – they were just terribly good machines with the final insult of also being more reliable than the competition. And you only had to read the motoring pages (which I did avidly at the time) to know that much the same applied to all the other bikes and cars they were producing.

This Japanese influx had begun a couple of years before independence and had raised an interesting conundrum then because although most discriminatory laws had been abandoned, people were effectively still classified and treated socially as white, black or Asian; but the Japanese refused to negotiate any trade deals unless they were treated as whites. The contortions this caused the Europeans must have been hilarious to watch but probably did not last long and the Japanese got their way. However, in the glow of post-independence optimism about a multiracial future for Zambia, this was long-forgotten by 1965. Thanks to some contact, Norman could get many of these goods at wholesale prices so that year we kitted ourselves out with Minolta and

Olympus cameras and I got for my birthday a chunky Citizen self-winding watch that kept going reliably for years. Caryl, always keen on dressmaking, acquired an electric sewing machine that also kept going for decades and in fact is still sometimes used by

Sandra.

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24

A new friend I made at Kabulonga School was Larry Erasmus, an Afrikaner whose father worked for the railways. As with our Uncle Frans, Larry was disappointingly normal and there was not much to distinguish him from any other European apart from occasional Afrikaans phrases, references to extended family in South Africa and a suggestion that his father beat him up when he misbehaved; although, being fresh from St George’s, I didn’t take that to be a particularly Afrikaans trait. It was unusual though. Norman hadn’t laid a slipper or hand on me or Chris since we’d gone to boarding school and the same was true for most of our friends.

It was possibly the violence at home that got Larry into trouble at school and once put me in a very awkward position. Larry had fallen in love with a girl who was a year or two below us in Kabulonga Girls. It’s hard to say now if she had ever, however briefly, encouraged him. Possibly she had at first been flattered because of his seniority. Possibly she had just been intimidated into playing along for a while.

Either way, what happened was that at some point she asked him to leave her alone and started going out with a boy in the year below us. Larry was furious and soon afterwards while we were out and about we happened to bump into this girl with her new boyfriend and some others. Larry marched over and accused the boy of stealing his girlfriend. Then he started punching him. I was caught in a dilemma. According to the rules of bullying by which we’d lived at St George’s it was strictly speaking none of my business so when the girl and her friends came over and begged me to stop

Larry, I was slow to react. Then finally when blood had started to flow, I went over and said ‘Come on Larry, that’s enough’ and pulled him away.

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Possibly that’s why I wasn’t hauled up before the school with him for bullying, though I wasn’t afterwards proud of that hesitation before stepping in. Larry was given a grilling though and put on some kind of probation. I only learned later that my name had even come up when a friend, Pierre, who happened to be the son of our French teacher, mentioned it and I realized I’d only just escaped being charged with bullying alongside him. For someone who had fumed against the bullying culture at St George’s it was a bit humbling.

More trouble lay ahead for Larry, who with hindsight was clearly a quite troubled lad.

I first got drunk at his house. His parents went away for a weekend and so, as teenagers will, we planned a party in their absence. It turned out pretty much an all boy party. A couple of girls came along to begin with but soon lost interest and left us to get hammered on the supplies of alcohol we had managed to buy, borrow or steal.

Naturally it did not occur to us that our inebriated antics in the garden might attract the neighbours’ attention and later be reported to Larry’s parents. Nor that it might be an idea not to turn the latest Beatles for Sale album up full volume when we did retire indoors. However, the advantage of colonial houses is that they were comfortably spaced with large gardens and perhaps that is why the police weren’t called. When our own booze ran out we found the key to Larry’s parents’ well- stocked drinks cabinet. Some sense of caution remained. As there was a bottle and a half of brandy in there we decided Larry’s dad wouldn’t notice if we drank some of it and watered down the remains so there looked like no change. Well, the half bottle didn’t last long so the next plan was that if we drank half the remaining bottle and threw away the evidence he wouldn’t notice that a whole bottle was missing, especially after having been away for the weekend. He’d just think he’d miscounted.

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My last clear memory was of feeling hungry and starting to cook up some scrambled eggs. The next thing I knew was it was daylight and I was crawling on all fours along the passage looking for a toilet to be sick into. The house was a disaster and to my horror there was scrambled egg splattered across a painting in the living room which I now guiltily remembered having taken a dislike to late the previous night. Through the thick and throbbing fog of hangovers we set about removing the traces of our debauchery, then set off on our bikes to dispose of the evidence and try to clear our heads. Then who should we meet on the Great East Road but my mother who stopped the car for a chat and to ask if I’d been to Mass yet, it being a Sunday? I don’t actually remember my reply now but I suspect I lied and said that’s where we were heading, while wondering if she could tell how ill I was feeling. I was unable even to smell brandy for ten years after that without feeling sick again, and it was several more years after that before I could actually try sipping the stuff with any enjoyment. If she did notice anything amiss, Caryl made no comment and in due course carried on her way.

Our attempts to hide the evidence were totally futile of course and Larry got such a thrashing when his parents returned that he decided to run away to live with his grandmother in South Africa. Lesley came home from work one day at the agricultural station south of Lusaka to say she’d met Larry hitching a ride that morning. She’d stopped to offer him a lift as far as she was going but he’d been strangely embarrassed and waved her away. He got as far as the South African border before he was caught, either because he had no passport or they’d been warned to look out for him.

Larry was much quieter after these adventures but I don’t think he’d been cowed into submission by his brutal dad. I think they’d reached some sort of

236 accommodation because Larry also seemed calmer. Perhaps there was less need for rebellion after that.

Chris was the first of us to ‘return’ to England that year as he was joining the Royal

Air Force. First he had an extended holiday, hanging out with his swimming friends in

Lusaka. He had quite a few of these because not only had he been a breaststroke champion at St George’s but he’d also swum for the Northern Rhodesia national team.

On his first international tour he’d returned home wearing a Mexican sombrero which he was curiously reluctant to remove. At first we just thought it was some odd emotional attachment but the real reason, we eventually discovered after forcing it off him, was that his team mates had shaved his head completely bald as an initiation and also, they’d said, to make him go a bit faster in the water.

Chris and I looked and dressed very much alike then (once his hair had grown back), but hung out with different crowds. So after his departure I got some amusing double-takes from his swimming friends, who thought they were seeing a ghost, not least his ex girlfriend Susan. I also kind of inherited the role of Lesley’s chaperone, which meant that when she and her boyfriend Gerald Pope wanted to go on weekend trips together they had to take me along. Not that I was much of a moral guardian.

When I woke in the night to find them missing from camp I didn’t say or do anything about it. In return for this compliance I got to see places and have some fun that I could not have had under my own steam or with the parents. Her boyfriend was a naturalist at the research station where Lesley worked, out by the Munda Wanga botanical gardens south of Lusaka; which I imagine is how they met. He drove a Mini

Clubman Estate with wood external panelling into the back of which we crammed all our camping gear. Looking back, that was a bit incongruous because he was a big

237 man and must have been able to afford something larger if older, but perhaps it was a style choice because Minis were so incredibly chic then.

One of our trips was back to Livingstone where we stayed in the rondavel camp close to the Falls. The chalets were idealized African huts and despite having lived around there before, it was quite magical visiting the Falls again by moonlight and then returning to camp within sound of the river (no crocodiles that close to the

Falls). By the campfire we drank beer and smoked Peter Stuyvesant or Lucky Strike cigarettes while listening to Peter, Paul and Mary on Lourenço Marques Radio, watching the stars and talking late into the night.

Better still though were the trips to Kariba I took with Lesley and Gerald. Sometimes it was just the three of us but more often it was with a family Gerald had some connection with. I don’t think they were actually related, but that’s how they behaved.

The mother was a formidable woman with skin like leather who drove a battered early

50s Chevrolet with fury. I had a ride down to Kariba in the back of it once and was mildly terrified at times though we never actually crashed into anything or came off the road.

This family had a farm just south of Lusaka where I first rode a horse. Their mode of instruction was to hoist me up onto its back, then whip the beast across its flank so it broke into an immediate wild gallop around the field. It was ten years before I dared ride a horse again. They also had a boat and mooring down at Kariba so we went water skiing and diving out among the islands and the almost-islands which were marked by dead trees rising out of the water. These made the lake a bit eerie and it was astonishing to think that the vast expanse of water we played in had been conjured by humans a few years earlier just by damming one narrow gorge. The

238 strange thing about Kariba Lake at that time was that there were no crocodiles or hippos in it anywhere near the dam. Or so we were told and confidently believed. To some extent this was credible because none were likely to have survived a trip over the Victoria Falls; but with hindsight it was very trusting of us to believe there were none in all the other tributaries to the lake, and so it later proved because now Kariba apparently teems with crocs and it’s not at all safe to swim in it.

However, back in 1965 we had no such worries, though personally I was quite alarmed by my first snorkelling encounter with a group of tiger fish, each about the length of a forearm and, with their red fins and sharp fangs, looking remarkably like very big piranhas through the magnification of underwater goggles. However, I was reassured that they never attacked people and made good eating, to prove which a couple of older boys harpooned a few and later cooked them for dinner. In fact tiger fish really do behave much like piranhas, but it’s also true that there are few accounts of them attacking humans larger than small children. In theory they could if they were in large enough groups and hungry, but in practice they only attack in self defence.

Apparently. They also tasted terrible.

Not least of the attractions of this wonderful family that Gerald introduced us to was their beautiful daughter who had black hair and olive skin. She was a year or so older than me so I never held any serious romantic hopes about her but could bask all the same in the erotic glow of her presence. She had a Joan Baez look and the family trait of addressing you from the outset as if you were old friends. She was probably the most gorgeous girl in my cloistered teenage life that I had ever actually spoken to, which made it hard to say anything witty, or even sensible; but she didn’t seem to mind. Looking back, she probably enjoyed my all too obvious infatuation.

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The highlight of our non-affair was one night when we went snorkelling. In the evenings with this family at Kariba there would be a braaivleis (barbecue) then sitting around chatting under the moon and stars with plenty of beer. One bright night everyone decided to go swimming and somehow I got paired up with this gorgeous daughter in a tiny golden bikini. I got to hold the torch while she tried to catch fish in her hands. It was the most erotic adventure of my life so far. We failed to catch any fish that night but I did learn that quite ordinary black rubber Eveready torches functioned perfectly well underwater.

Come September Lesley also left for London to study Botany at Bedford

College in London, so for a few months I became the eldest sibling in the family.

Having been to boarding school where Chris and I lived pretty much separate lives, this was less of a novelty than it might otherwise have been; but nevertheless it was quite fun. There were no more weekend trips away with Lesley and Gerald, though occasionally he did still call round and I went out driving with him. For one of these drives he borrowed a friend’s Lotus Cortina, then one of the hottest (or coolest, depending on how you look at it) sporty saloons on the market. Having listened to my enthusiasm for cars and boasts of driving, he’d decided to treat me to a taste of the real thing and gave me the wheel at the edge of town so I could try it for myself – very satisfying to feel in reality the acceleration figures I had previously only known as statistics in magazine reviews.

The big political drama of 1965 was Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of

Independence on 11th November. The event was well signalled and everyone gathered round their radios to listen to the announcement; very much, I imagine, as they did in

Britain in 1939 to hear the declaration of war with Germany. There was a similar

240 sense of drama and of entering into the unknown, though few white Rhodesians really imagined it would end in the carnage that was to come. The date (Armistice Day) was also carefully chosen to chime with white Rhodesians’ sense of patriotism because among their convictions was a very real sense that they were similarly fighting for civilized values against the tyranny and chaos they believed majority rule would inevitably bring, inspired as the nationalist cause was supposed to be by communism.

In their own minds they were playing as much a part in the Cold War as the

Americans in Vietnam and found it hard to understand why other nations, especially the Americans themselves, could not appreciate this. Ian Smith used to make much of his service in WWII with the RAF, during which he had lost an eye, and he rallied white Rhodesians to his support with Churchillian rhetoric of heroism in the face of evil, genuinely believing (as far as one could tell) that his cause was the defence of

Western civilized values against barbarism and not simply the defence of white privilege against native demand for a fairer share of the country’s natural bounty.

As a teenager I obviously did not follow politics in any great detail but at that time and place it was impossible to ignore them completely. As with many white

Zambians my feelings over Ian Smith’s UDI were divided. I’d seen for myself how relatively painless the transition to majority rule could be and how life was carrying on much the same as ever for those Europeans who had chosen to stay on in Zambia; but all the same part of me couldn’t help rooting for ‘good old Smithy’ as everyone called him in the south. I even read a book arguing the Rhodesian case, with particular emphasis on the fact that voting in the south was not in fact decided purely on the grounds of race but on a property qualification. This effectively did rule out most

African participation in elections and limited that of the Asians, but the argument was that in due course as Africans acquired European levels of skill, competence and

241 political awareness they would progressively be integrated into government. I suspect this argument would look a lot more specious now than it did at the time, much more obviously a fig leaf to excuse the indefinite postponement of majority rule; but at the time, embarrassing though it now is to admit it, I was quite persuaded. I wish I could remember the title of that book and read it again now. To get the opposite view I also read a book by Judith Todd, daughter of former Prime Minister Garfield Todd who had tried to broaden the franchise in Southern Rhodesia and ended up under house arrest for his troubles. Both father and daughter were passionate advocates of majority rule. Her book on Rhodesia did open my eyes a bit to the grim reality behind Ian

Smith’s platitudes but failed to win me over completely. One evening at dinner I shocked Norman by trotting out some of the more reasonable sounding arguments in favour of Ian Smith’s position and he was genuinely shocked at having nurtured such a traitor to liberal values. He reminded me of this a few years later when I mentioned

I’d been to an anti apartheid rally in London by saying ‘So which side were you on?’

Very embarrassing.

Dixon meanwhile was still doing our cooking, having moved back with us to Lusaka.

I wish I’d said a proper farewell to him when we left the country on the eve of my sixteenth birthday, but of course didn’t really think of it at the time. Giving him my pushbike was some compensation I suppose but not really an adequate farewell present, given that he’d been a part of our family for all my life.

He got drunk a lot more often as the day of our departure approached and

Norman had to bail him out of jail several times for being out of control. Looking back, it must have been a terribly insecure time for him. Zambia’s independence meant we had to leave but didn’t offer him anything like the security he’d personally

242 enjoyed as a colonial cook. No golden handshake and pension for him from the government, though I’m sure Caryl and Norman were more generous in their farewell arrangements than was strictly required. Dixon’s plan had always been to open a beer hall in retirement back at his home village and I hope that worked out for him.

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- 5 -

GOING HOME

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Finally as Christmas of 1965 approached so too did our time to leave because we would be celebrating it on board ship to England. My feelings were very mixed. It was exciting of course, as with our long leaves in Britain before, but there were also misgivings. Listening to Norman’s grumbles about leaving our climate, I’d found in a

Geography book at school that average summer temperatures in England were lower than ours in the coldest winter. I consoled myself that maybe it would be easier to study in a cold climate but it was still hard after a lifetime of taking sunshine and heat for granted to contemplate an annual succession of freezing winters without even a certain hot summer to look forward to. Losing friends was hard too although there was some consolation in that we knew other families who were moving back to

Britain. The Rundles for a start who were planning to live in Sussex near us so I’d see

Pete again before long; plus the Rogers from Lusaka and the Bullochs from

Livingstone, and others. But I was unlikely to see Ian Walker again or most other St

George’s boys that I’d lived with for years.

For our last few nights in Lusaka I was sent to lodge with Uncle Alan, an old friend of my parents. I think he may even have been best man at their wedding so perhaps he was an old army pal of Norman’s from India. This was presumably to get me out of the way during the final packing up of all our worldly goods and I was very glad to be spared the chaos. Our parents booked themselves into the Highland House

Hotel on Ridgeway with the youngsters for the final stage.

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Alan was a bachelor and as with our dentist in Livingstone I took him as a bit of a role model for cool adulthood, possibly because his life was uncluttered by family concerns. He had a stylish apartment and a fantastic Hallicrafters radio, an enormous, solid, professional looking instrument with myriad meters, squelch buttons, band selectors, vernier controls and so on that looked like you should be able to broadcast to the world as well as listen to it. Unlike the dentist he did not drive a sports car but a rather battered VW beetle but this was also quite cool in a different sort of way because, he explained, driving a cheap old car freed up money for more interesting things like travel. He had a friend at a local factory make tyres for it with the rubber usually used for truck tyres, which meant they lasted twice as long as normal and were twice as resistant to being shredded on our rough dirt roads. On top of that he lent me a copy of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange to read, which certainly provided food for thought for a fifteen year old. Probably the most racy book

I’d read until then had been a James Bond novel passed onto me by Lesley.

Then the morning of departure came at Lusaka train station. Among the many friends who came to see us off was Gerald, Lesley’s now ex-boyfriend. I’d had the uncomfortable task of having to break the news to him a few weeks earlier that she’d met someone else at university in London and would not be coming back. He took it very well, considering, as shown by his having stayed friends with the family and coming to see us off. Perhaps he was still hoping for some future reconciliation with

Lesley but more likely he was just a decent bloke who had genuinely enjoyed being part of our family. He’d also taken over Lesley’s cat Smoky.

As we stood there with the steam engine patiently chuffing away waiting for everyone to board, I looked around and thought how strange it was that I might never see this sunny familiar place, my home, again. I didn’t really believe it because my

245 plan was to finish education and get back as soon as possible, but it was a possibility that in fact turned out to be the case, because I never have been back. Chris did in the

1990s and his pleasure in the rediscovery of our old stomping grounds was tempered by a backdrop of gloom, poverty and decay because Zambia was then grappling with massive economic problems and a booming population. Our old house in Livingstone looked as if it was occupied by squatters and showed thirty years of seemingly complete structural neglect.

However, according to my brother Alistair who visited his birthplace in 2015, much seems to have improved since then. The tourist industry is booming. The

Barlow’s house to the left of ours (and almost identical) has expanded backwards to become the 3 star Golden Chopstick hotel. The two vacant plots to the right of our old house have long been filled with houses and Mainway (now called Mosi-oa-Tunya, the African name for the Victoria Falls, meaning Smoke That Thunders) while still looking remarkably similar at first sight to how it was fifty years ago, has been rejuvenated with new businesses.

The train journey down to Cape Town was uneventful and largely occupied with keeping the kids fed, watered and entertained while the countryside trundled by outside. Along the way we stopped briefly at Kimberley with its famous Big Hole, which then claimed to be the largest man-made hole in the world. We had visited it before on a previous rail trip from Cape Town to Rhodesia but I took more interest this time thanks to the recent movie Kimberley Jim starring Jim Reeves that recreated the town’s early days in scenes reminiscent of the gold rush in the American West.

The Big Hole had started life as a hill on a remote farm run by the De Beers family till diamonds were discovered there around 1870. Soon hundreds and then

246 thousands of prospectors descended on the place with picks and shovels and by 1914 the hill had been transformed into a big hole in the ground 800 ft (240m) deep and

1500 ft (460m) in diameter. When after yielding almost 3,000 kg of diamonds this open cast mine became too dangerous and unproductive, it was partially filled in with rubble over which formed a lake of emerald green water, while the diamond mining continued through more conventional deep bore tunnels.

In Cape Town we took our leave of Granny, Auntie Joan, Uncle Frans and

Africa itself, climbing Table Mountain one last time before embarking on board the

Ellerman Lines City of Exeter ship for the two or three week voyage to England. Once aboard I was left pretty much to my own devices, only meeting up with the rest of the family at mealtimes. My single cabin was well away from their family suite too, so there was no question of them being able to keep tabs on me. Among the hundred or so passengers there was luckily another Rhodesian boy called John who was the same age so we palled up for the voyage. His family was also moving back to England; at least, he, his mother and red-haired older sister Jenny were doing that. The father had been somehow shed back in Rhodesia, presumably in messy circumstances because he was never mentioned.

As on previous trips, the voyage was one long, leisurely party with deck sports and other social events spaced throughout the day and night, though being on the cusp of turning sixteen I was able to enjoy it in a completely different manner to the last time when I’d only been nine. John and I were treated pretty much as honorary adults by both passengers and crew, which meant being allowed to drink cider at the bars where we soon got chummy with an old boozer called Mr May from Kenya who happily plied us with drinks for the sake of having an audience. Mr May had only half a right arm and was happy to tell us how this had come about. John and I had been

247 speculating about lions or crocs or maybe a shark but the reality was far more mundane.

Back in Kenya Mr May had driven a Mercedes, not least for its useful property that if you were feeling a bit tired or drunk you could drive along quite happily just by aiming the three pointed star on its bonnet at the edge of the road. This practice had served him well enough for years in getting home from drinks parties but one night he had been so tired that he had failed to notice the approach of a crossroads; and even more importantly, he had failed to notice the approach of a truck from the right towards that very same crossroads, slumped in the driving seat as he was with his elbow stuck out of the window and his eyes fixed on the three pointed star and the edge of the road. The rest can easily be imagined. He was lucky to get out of the wreckage alive and his stump was a relatively small price to have paid.

In the evenings there were usually dances and again we hung out at the bar, often with John’s mum who was also a bit of a bar fly and taught me how to slow dance. I had previously assumed that as with the waltz or tango there were particular steps to learn, but she quickly demonstrated that there was no need for all that unless you particularly wanted to do ballroom dancing. Equipped now with smooch-dancing skills I was eager to test them on the only eligible teenage girl on the boat – the delectable Anne Farquharson but it was impossible to get anywhere near without her parents suddenly appearing and closing in a protective ring around her (I know it’s hard to picture two parents forming a protective ring, but somehow they did). John was equally keen and equally unsuccessful at getting to chat her up and I imagine that to Anne’s parents we looked just like their worst nightmare – which we probably were as it happens because our teenage intentions were far from honourable.

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John’s mum was having the time of her life. As I was rapidly learning, those colonial sea voyages were famous for the holiday romances between unaccompanied passengers. Whether or not they were married at home, normal rules were suspended at sea and the atmosphere was thick with flirtation and illicit romance. Under the influence of alcohol John’s mum was surprisingly frank about the intrigues she had going on and the men in her sights, although in retrospect this was probably mostly when her son was out of earshot. One evening she confided in me: ‘You know what my fortune is? I’m sitting on it.’ If I’d understood what she meant at the time I would have blushed.

John’s sister Jenny meanwhile had begun a fling with one of the ship’s stewards which led to us being invited down to the crew’s quarters in the evenings to play cards and drink Tuborg lager. Jenny and her beau were increasingly absent from these gatherings but the crew seemed happy still to have John and me hanging around to relieve the boredom of each other’s company. A particular friend was an enormous radio officer, pasty faced through an aversion to sunshine so he always welcomed company in his cabin when off duty. He solemnly informed us one night that Jenny’s boyfriend was nicknamed the ‘Ellerman Donkey’ for his success in nailing pretty young female passengers. The implication of this, we guessed, was that John should warn his sister not to make any long-term plans with him. Which John probably did, but the steward’s crew mates were being far too cynical. Six months or so later when I visited the family in Bournemouth I heard that he and Jenny were still going strong and there was even talk of wedding bells and him settling down ashore to run a pub or small hotel.

Besides drinking with the crew John and I amused ourselves with the various deck sports (while carefully avoiding being conscripted into a team or tournament that

249 required any degree of regular commitment). But mostly we hung around the pool on the afterdeck with other refugees from organized jollity. There we befriended a young

Dutch couple who seemed a bit lost amidst the ritualized British colonial bonding taking place all around them, led by the more seasoned passengers. The girl had been nicknamed Brunhilde by the crew as she was a strapping wench and spoke with a strong Germanic accent. John had a wrestling match with her in a blue bikini once by the pool and even allowing for the fact that he was not quite sure where he was allowed to put his hands, an embarrassment of which she took ruthless advantage, he was hard pressed wrestling her to the deck. One day near the equator she fell asleep in the sun, slathered with tanning lotion and she roasted like a joint of lamb, enormous blisters rising like jellyfish all over her front and face. This seemed to break her spirit entirely and for the rest of the trip she slunk around swathed in loose dresses, wide hats and sunglasses and talking to no-one except her husband.

Mostly there was little to see beyond the ship but endless expanses of empty sky and ocean. Occasionally this was enlivened by pods of dolphins or schools of flying fish that kept pace with us for a while. There were also occasional ships passing the other way at which we waved frantically while the ships’ horns boomed in greeting, but for the most part we could almost have been alone on the surface of the world. Crossing the Equator involved the usual ceremony in which some of the crew dressed up as Neptune and his cronies and clambered up the side of the ship to hold court on the main deck. I remembered the first time I’d seen this spectacle as a child, when I had been genuinely alarmed and more than half convinced that Neptune really had risen from the clammy depths of the ocean. Now of course I was aware they had only climbed up the ship’s hull on rope ladders from the deck below and anyway recognized most of the characters beneath their pantomime costumes. But it was still

250 entertaining. John’s sister Jenny was one of the mermaids and very fetching she looked too in a skimpy bikini top and fishtail. Once established on deck Neptune then proceeded to judge the cases brought before him – those crew who had not crossed the line before but mostly passengers accused of fanciful charges laced with insider gossip – after which lurid and not too gentle punishment was meted out to the guilty, generally ending with being covered in foam and then ducked in the pool. I assume the passengers involved were willing participants, or at least had been warned of what might happen.

The next big event was landfall on Madeira Island off the coast of Spain where we got to stretch our legs and enjoy some scenery. There we took on a few extra passengers for the last leg to England. Among them was a wonderfully genteel family of faded aristocrats whose only son was about our age so John and I gained a fresh companion to pass time with, though he didn’t get to be invited below decks with us and he seemed a bit delicate and cautious to our Rhodesian sensibilities. I visited him in

England a few months later and found our shipboard impressions wonderfully confirmed. His parents collected me from Ashford station in Kent in an ancient grey

Bentley and we drove a few miles into the countryside to their house which, while not quite a stately home, was a mansion by any other standards although sedately falling into ruin. The barn where we parked the old Bentley was full of even more ancient tractors and ploughs and in the house itself you could almost feel the ghostly presence of generations of butlers and chambermaids. There were none now and my friend’s parents served up tea and dinner themselves in a cosy lounge. What struck me was their extreme gentleness and courtesy. I must have seemed quite a rough diamond with my Rhodesian accent and mannerisms but I felt no trace of condescension and

251 their curiosity about life in Rhodesia seemed quite genuine. I suppose in some ways our situation as deposed gentry echoed their own.

A few days after leaving Madeira we ran into trouble. An enormous storm was raging in the Bay of Biscay which pretty soon was tossing our ship around like a bath toy. Forward progress was abandoned for the sake of simply keeping the ship afloat.

The City of Exeter began wallowing like a stuck hippo and most passengers took to their cabins with seasickness, as even did many of the crew. John and I were largely unaffected and had a free run of what had become almost a ghost ship. We spent hours alone chatting in an upper lounge watching as the view through the opposite windows tilted between pure sky and pure waves. According to the crew we were wallowing at close to the limits of the ship – the point at which it might turn right over and sink – and one night a Greek ship did just that a few miles from us with nothing we could do to help. So the crew told us over a Tuborg or two anyway, and it’s quite possible that they were exaggerating the danger for our benefit; but even if so it was not by much, because we could feel the ship rocking and bucketing for ourselves. We could see the pendulum by the steps leading up to the bridge and how close it nudged towards the 30 degree mark (or whatever it was) we had been told was the point of no return. We watched the ship’s bows plunging completely under water, the whole front third of the liner being submerged for alarming seconds till it burst through the wave on the other side and the seawater swirled back again over the sides. However, having the usual teenage assurance of our own immortality, neither John nor I were particularly alarmed for our lives at any point and simply enjoyed the sense of drama.

We were supposed to dock at Tilbury near London on my birthday, the second of January but this hope had been abandoned along with the most of the New Year celebrations. It was a sorry gathering of passengers that assembled to toast the arrival

252 of 1966, half of them looking decidedly queasy even before they started on the drinks.

Dancing was largely impossible due to the heaving deck and there were regular crashes from the bar as plates, glasses and bottles went flying. Mr May balanced doggedly on his stool at the bar, one of the few other passengers completely unaffected by seasickness. Jenny did a public dance with her steward, skating along the edges of acceptable behaviour between crew and passengers as their romance was quite public knowledge by now and crew were not really supposed to fraternize too closely or openly with passengers. My own parents remained below decks taking care of the kids. The weather calmed a bit for my actual birthday though, enough for the family to meet up at dinner where I had my first official glass of wine with them in celebration of my turning sixteen. The wine was a Liebfraumilch from Germany and I was not too impressed, to be honest. As with previous experiments with wine I was baffled by the contrast between the flavour and what I had always imagined from pop lyrics like ‘kisses sweeter than wine’. Flavour-wise I would in perfect honesty have preferred a Coke but of course I persevered manfully and pretended to enjoy the subtle, slightly acid flavour.

Later on down in the crew’s cabins they laid on an impromptu party for me, or quite possibly just used my birthday as an excuse for a party. Later as I wove my way back to my cabin I made the happy discovery that my drunken swaying from side to side was exactly counterbalanced by the ship rolling in the opposite direction; so despite being really quite sloshed I walked down the passages in a dead straight line.

Sadly there was no-one around in the middle of the night to witness this minor miracle, John having headed off to his own cabin in a quite different part of the ship.

The following hungover morning the lady in the neighbouring cabin complained loudly to me about how my wardrobe door had been banging all night, apparently,

253 during the storm. She’d tried to wake me but got no response. I mumbled something apologetic about being a heavy sleeper . . .

The City of Exeter did not of course sink and in due course, several days late, we arrived at Tilbury Docks in London to be welcomed by Chris and Gramp. They escorted Caryl and the kids to catch a train to the house we’d rented in Kent while

Norman and I headed into London to collect the new white Vauxhall Victor estate that was waiting for us and drive it down to join them. When we got to the dealer’s we found that our car had the wrong front seats, a bench seat instead of the two bucket seats that had been ordered. One salesman said to the other: ‘So when was the last time you changed some seats?’ Then they found some spanners and swapped the seats with another car in the showroom, which shows how much more complicated cars have become since then.

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Our first, temporary home in England was an old farm house on the edge of the small country town of Edenbridge in Kent, some thirty miles south of London. The house was now let out as a holiday home, the farm itself having been sold off and developed into the new housing estate that now surrounded it. On our first free evening there

Norman took me for a pub crawl, starting with the first tavern we came to in the High

Street and having a beer in each of the following as we made our way down it. Along the way we played bar billiards, darts, bar skittles and original pinball with scoring areas defined by circles of panel pins. Along the way Norman told me how the British pub was one of the things he’d most missed while living abroad. Not an original observation maybe because you often hear this from Brits living abroad, but it was new to me then and in that initiation I could see the charms of the institution – the rubbing shoulders and chatting with strangers from all walks of life; the easy, familiar banter between regulars. With hindsight I could see that Norman had created echoes of pub life out in Africa. In Livingstone he’d had the tame carpenters in the local gaol make us a bar skittles set – six inch skittles stood on a platform which you aimed at with a rubber ball on a string dangling from a pole – and we’d had a quarter scale billiards table, plus of course darts.

Finally we fell out of the Piggy Bar in The Old Eden pub at the bottom end of town, just across the bridge over the river after which it and the town were named. By then it seemed entirely appropriate that the River Eden should flow through this glowing paradise of a small town. There was actually one more pub, the Star, in view further on but we were both a bit unsteady on our feet by then and decided a bracing walk home in the chill January night probably made more sense. To add to the

255 romance, a light snow began to fall as we crookedly meandered our way back up the

High Street past the half dozen or so pubs we had visited. A few days later Norman apologized for the outing because he’d forgotten that the legal drinking age in Britain was in fact 18 and not 16; so he’d led me straying beyond the bounds of the law when he imagined he was just following the old English tradition of a father treating his son to his first legal pint, as with that glass of Liebfraumilch on my birthday. Then we learned that landlords tended to turn a blind eye if I only drank halves of bitter or shandy while playing darts or bar billiards with Norman, and this became a regular habit on Sunday lunchtimes while Caryl prepared the family Sunday roast.

I also soon found that generally pub landlords hardly cared about the age limit

(or perhaps were just not very good at guessing the age of teenagers) as long as you caused no trouble. So without my dad I had no problem supping unadulterated pints

256 of ale. I had a taste of this just a couple of weeks after our arrival when J.B.

Henderson paid a visit hoping to see Lesley, having made the trip by rail down from

Glasgow where he was a student. This was Brian Henderson, the fellow St George’s boy from Livingstone who had been a couple of forms ahead of me at school and who had shown me how to make a simple crystal set.

Unfortunately Lesley did indeed have a new and serious boyfriend John at

Bedford College in London and was reluctant to see Brian, so it was left to me to entertain him. He was staying at the Old Crown in Edenbridge. This was and still is a quintessential English pub, an oak-framed Elizabethan coaching inn on the High

Street festooned with horse brasses, copper bed-warming pans and open fires. There we sank pints of beer while talking about Rhodesia and Britain and plans for the future. Enjoyable as this was, it was also slightly awkward because Brian had not come all the way from Glasgow to see me and I was reminded of having had to tell

Gerald Pope at home in Zambia that Lesley had moved on. After a few pints I did something similar with Brian, feeling a bit treacherous towards Lesley when I told

Brian that I wouldn’t recommend going out with her anyway as she seemed pretty ruthless with her boyfriends. I didn’t actually believe this but it seemed the kindest way to quash any romantic ambitions on his part. The next day he took himself back to Scotland. Decades later though, he and Lesley did hook up again and they became as good friends as ever they had been in Livingstone, she visiting him for holidays in

Switzerland where he had ended up, and cruising his modest yacht in the

Mediterranean on which the toilet facilities were, basically, to go for a swim. Lesley’s son Jon accompanied her for one of these trips to Switzerland, flying over from

Texas, and was tickled to find a famous country which you can drive completely

257 across in a few hours (compared with the States where you can drive all day without even leaving Texas).

In Edenbridge we were also reunited with poor old Bowker who had been sent ahead by air three months earlier and was halfway through the six month anti-rabies quarantine required for dogs coming into Britain. The kennels were a few miles out into the countryside at Haxted along lanes barely wide enough for a single car, let alone two passing each other. We were astonished at the confidence with which

Norman and other drivers barrelled along these lanes and the rarity of actually ever having to reverse a significant distance when meeting a vehicle coming the other way.

It still is an odd feature of these lanes that more often than not a handy gateway or kink in the hedge will present itself just as you happen to meet a car coming the other way. Lesley and John had come down from London to visit Bowker as often as they could manage and he was overjoyed to see the rest of the family again, though clearly bewildered as to why we could not immediately rescue him from the dank, freezing prison where he found himself. So visits to the kennel were always a mixed pleasure, ending for him in pathetic disappointment until the happy day came when we could finally take him home with us, when he almost burst with joy.

I was almost as cheerful at being in England despite the cold, which had the charm of novelty even when the weather settled into unbroken days of damp, sunless grey and it was dark by tea time. By the time Bowker was released the evenings were lengthening for his daily walk and we explored the damp Kentish countryside together, him happily and completely unsuccessfully chasing squirrels and pigeons through the woods as he once had monkeys in Livingstone. Then on another level it was wonderful to feel so close to the cultural heart of the 60s music scene. Bands we

258 had only glimpsed on newsreels and listened to on erratic short wave radio now performed weekly on Top of the Pops – Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks, Who,

Animals, Them, Walker Brothers and all the rest of the legendary British 60s bands; plus their American counterparts, Sonny and Cher, Righteous Brothers, Four Tops,

Supremes, Miracles, Temptations – there seemed no end to the musical marvels on offer to a pop-culture starved Rhodesian teenager. Then there was the novelty of

British TV itself that flickeringly drove back the winter darkness with a constant stream of sophisticated delights. The musical theme for that first winter in Edenbridge was the recent Beatles album Rubber Soul which was a birthday gift from Lesley, along with the indefinite loan of her period Dansette gramophone to play it on.

The last minute misgivings on leaving Zambia were largely forgotten in the excitement of new impressions and the sense of being on the edge of the great cultural upheaval and adventure epitomised by the Beatles. This feeling grew even stronger over the next year or two as we heard rumours at school of them filming in the neighbourhood, at Knole Park in Sevenoaks for the video for Strawberry Fields

Forever; and around the whole area for Magical Mystery Tour which was possibly inspired by the notices for ‘Mystery Tours’ outside the local Maidstone & District bus offices. On Sergeant Pepper the song For the Benefit of Mr Kite was prompted by an old circus poster John Lennon came across in an antiques shop in Sevenoaks while filming.

I had a new grammar school to get used to, the Judd School in Tonbridge, which was as easy to settle into as Kabulonga had been in Lusaka and with a curious bonus that I suddenly found myself having become rather good at rugby. I learned this by accident after being drafted into an inter-house rugby match after which I was invited to try for the first team, an astonishing compliment given my record at St

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George’s. I still can’t tell what it was, whether it was coming from the relatively more aggressive culture of Rhodesia that gave me an edge over the English boys or maybe it was that being used to living at 4,000 feet or so above sea level gave me an edge of strength and stamina; also I suppose I had the benefit of being an unknown quantity to the other Judd players so I could bluff them by pretending to be more aggressive than

I actually was. I resisted the invitation though on discovering to my delight that rock climbing was one of the sport options, thanks to the sandstone outcrops nearby that were used by many of the most famous climbers of the day; because although not particularly high they present interesting technical challenges and are the closest climbing rocks to London. The great mountaineer and explorer Chris Bonington was supposed to have cut his teeth (so to speak) at Harrison’s Rocks just over the border in

Sussex where one of the climbs was named after him.

All of which was wonderfully heady stuff for a teenager used to living in a country that was, to most of the world, a cultural backwater. On top of which there was the excitement of watching our new house being built in the gardens of an old

Victorian mansion, us moving to a couple of other temporary homes nearby while this was going on.

Much as I enjoyed the novelty of England with its varied seasons and cultural vibrancy, my plan remained to get educated as speedily as possible and then return to

Zambia, treating the sojourn as just a particularly prolonged long leave. When I couldn’t sleep at night I used to retrace in memory all the familiar roads and landmarks in Lusaka and Livingstone, keeping the place fresh in memory. In pursuit of this plan I briefly flirted with the idea of becoming an airline pilot. Not in order to fly passenger jets for any longer than necessary. My ambition, probably influenced by

260 some old black and white movie, was to get my commercial pilot’s licence with

BOAC and then as soon as possible switch to flying cargo planes around Africa, or possibly ferrying flying doctors around Australia.

The idea of flying was first suggested to me by a despairing Careers teacher at

Judd School. He had no more idea than I did about what to do with my life, given my eclectic range of interests. I immediately liked his suggestion, which had the added benefit of requiring a shorter course than university. I could have a job flying planes in just a couple of years and then after serving the required period to justify all the training, could choose to work where I liked. My mate Dave Harding’s parents were sceptical, pointing out that once you’d mastered flying you just became a glorified bus driver. I could see their point, belittling though it was of airline pilots’ skills, but they didn’t know the Humphrey Bogart film I had running in my imagination, flying old

WWII Dakotas from Cairo to Mombasa and Cape Town and all places in between.

The selection process for new pilots was quite intensive, beginning with a medical at Heathrow in London where I learned that I had perfectly spherical eyeballs, which is apparently quite rare and good news regarding optician’s bills later in life. Then followed a couple of visits to the College of Air Training at Hamble in

Hampshire where batteries of physical and mental tests weeded out the candidates. On the last visit you got to fly a de Havilland Chipmunk trainer in a complete takeoff and landing circuit.

It almost didn’t go like that. On my first takeoff I had some trouble with the plane’s rudder. I think it was because I was used to riding motorbikes. Push the left handlebar forward on a bike and the vehicle goes to the right. Push your left foot forward on a plane’s rudder and the plane swings to the left. Very confusing and tricky to adjust to while you’re attempting your first takeoff. Thanks to my rudder

261 problem, instead of roaring straight down the runway our Chipmunk swung to the right and began trundling across the bumpy grass straight towards the control tower. I yelled ‘Have you taken over?’ to the instructor sitting behind me but his only reply was a strangled gasp of terror. So I had to continue, opening the throttle full while still heading straight for the control tower and then heaving back on the joystick when we reached the necessary speed, 70 mph I think it was. Somehow we did rather shakily manage to wobble into the air and scrape clear of the tower, and my instructor then recovered enough to continue the lesson/assessment, which rather amazingly I passed comfortably in the end. My instructor confessed his own surprise at this, given my unpromising start, and complimented the speed with which I’d got the hang of flying.

Then, possibly by way of explanation for having frozen, he told me that an instructor and pupil had been killed in a crash at Hamble not long before. His life had clearly been flashing past his eyes at the point when he should have taken over the controls from me.

I was accepted onto the course at Hamble but didn’t in the end go because at the last moment they slashed their intake to just the top ten percent of those who’d been offered a place. I suspect the airline doubted my commitment and that I probably had been a bit too honest at times in the interviews. When asked how long I’d wanted to be a pilot I said, as was the true case, three months; which was roughly how long it had been since the Careers master had first made the suggestion. Most of the other applicants I spoke to had aspired to becoming pilots for half their lives. Also when I impressed a panel with my grasp of aerodynamics they asked where I’d learned it and

I just replied ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica.’ Again true, but also a bit shallow as far as commitment went.

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I wasn’t too disappointed by this setback however, and was even rather pleased because the timing meant it was too late to apply for university, so I had a free year in which to try various casual jobs and just mess around – a gap year in fact though the term hadn’t been coined then. Nor was such a thing encouraged or expected, least of all by my dad who was getting rather keen to see me fly the nest, which with hindsight I perfectly appreciate. Having teenagers in Africa was relatively painless because the outdoor lifestyle meant that most of their energy was burned off out of sight and mind (apart of course from incidents such as those I’ve mentioned). But

British weather throws families much closer together – loud music in the teenage bedroom, noisy friends brought home for drinks after the pub has shut and that sort of thing. Plus of course the pressures of raising a set of younger kids without the benefit of servants; on top, for Norman, of a gruelling daily commute to London for work instead of driving a few sunny miles across town with a fresh packet of Peter

Stuyvesant cigarettes in his shirt pocket for sharing around.

With hindsight our parents did adapt astonishingly well to their suddenly changed circumstances. Caryl, after attending cookery classes, took to feeding a large family as if she’d been doing it all her life instead of almost the opposite. She’d always been interested the theory of cooking and experimenting with new recipes but hardly ever in her life had she had to handle the mundane practicalities of preparing daily large meals; only ever, probably, during our long leaves in Britain. But a visitor in our early years in England would never have guessed this. Norman also took to cooking often at the weekend to give her a break. Curries were his speciality, with curry puffs following as snacks the next day. He tried his hand at other dishes too.

One day I opened the oven to see what was for lunch and later kept very quiet when he complained in bafflement at his Yorkshire puddings having collapsed. Sandra once

263 happened to be passing the kitchen when he cut his finger while making fish pie. She watched him stare in dismay at the blood in the mix, then reach happily for a bottle of ketchup. She lost her appetite that evening.

Socially, the parents soon built up a new circle of friends as well as reconnecting with old ones who had similarly returned to Britain. The south east of

England was a popular choice with returnees except for those who had strong ties to other parts of the country; such as some Northern Irish friends who startled us by popping up on TV in a documentary about their successful dog breeding kennels in

Ulster. For a while my old Mazabuka friend Mike O’ Connell lived just around the corner in Tunbridge Wells till his family moved to Southampton for the sake of work.

There were also the Rundells and the Rogers and the Dibdens within a short drive plus others who would call in to visit when passing. Caryl and Norman were a good deal less socially active though, relatively speaking, due to the greater demands of family life and commuting. Much more time was spent watching TV than would have happened in Africa even if we’d had it, though of course TV in itself was quite a novel delight. It also brought out a new talent in Caryl.

Possibly she had always enjoyed a flutter on the horses because we’d often gone to the races in Lusaka, but I’d not suspected it until I noticed how eagerly she watched the English Grand National and Epsom Derby on TV. Not just that, but she often dreamt the winner the night before. As soon as I was old enough she despatched me to the bookies with the names of three horses which took the first three places in the race. If I’d known more about betting I could perhaps have turned the bets into serious money but we were happy enough with the profit my each way bets returned.

Later when she became a village post mistress in Sussex she used to get the postmen to place her bets and probably did quite nicely out of it. Her dreams weren’t always

264 that clear though, more like cryptic crossword clues. In 1983 she dreamt that a woman won the Grand National so placed a bet on the only female jockey in the race. She failed but the race was won by Corbiere, the first winner to have been trained by a woman, Jenny Pitman.

However, back to the story, it would be interesting to visit the parallel universe in which BOAC had waited a couple more years before slashing its intake of new pilots.

My life might well have taken a completely different course. I had even been contemplating swapping my British passport for a Zambian one when I returned, which was an option on offer for those who had been born there. Nor was my plan as far fetched as it might seem because I later learned that a St George’s friend had set up a freight company in Zambia around that time and a pilot’s licence could have made a very useful calling card; though how life would have panned out afterwards, what with the war in Rhodesia and the natural urge of Africans in Zambia to run their own affairs – well, who can tell now?

However, during that gap year my sentiments began to change. There was no

‘Eureka!’ moment as such, it just happened gradually. The last traces of my

Rhodesian accent melted away along with associated Rhodesian attitudes. The transition was speeded along by more reading into the political background of the country. I revisited Judith Todd’s Rhodesia and this time with the benefit of having lived in relatively liberal Britain for a couple of years I could see absolutely the points she made, helped along by viewing Rhodesia through the prism of British news media. For a while there was talk of sending British armed forces to take over the country and set it back on track for majority rule, but this was complicated by the

‘kith and kin’ factor of which much was made at the time. According to Chris in the

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RAF they were told that they would be given a free choice whether to sign up or not for such action but nothing came of it in the end.

I read other books like Richard Hall’s The High Price of Principles plus analysis in the newspapers which gave a very different picture of the politics that had been going on invisibly around me in Africa and made it quite comfortable to distance myself from white Rhodesian culture, which looked increasingly misguided, delusional even. Pretty soon everyone I met just assumed I’d been born in England and for the most part I didn’t trouble to put them right. The dream of returning to

Africa was eclipsed by the much juicier prospect of becoming a student with a no- strings grant in Swinging London and having the chance to experience at first hand the liberating cultural ferment that had the older generation so worried at the time.

Free love, long hair, wild art and music. Anything seemed possible.

The more I lived in Britain the more I appreciated the tolerance, open- mindedness and sheer cultural effervescence of the country compared with white

Rhodesia. Of course Britain had its own share of racism and bigotry back in the 60s as any cultural history of the time will tell you. I saw for myself on TV the launch of the term ‘Paki-bashing’ into popular parlance when an earnest interviewer asked some skinheads about their leisure activities during an investigation into youth culture that sought to uncover what all the turmoil was about. Not long afterwards Enoch Powell delivered his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, the response to which revealed a vast gulf of latent racism in Britain. Then at university, a year or so after that, I had an

Indian friend Raja who, like me, had shed his accent and sounded perfectly English if you closed your eyes. He found that when ringing up for flats they might be vacant over the phone but were mysteriously let when he knocked on the door five minutes later. A few years later he moved to the States where he equally quickly adopted an

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American accent, which led to an interesting confusion when he next rang and I had no idea who this Yank on the line called Roger might be.

However, tolerance and prejudice are relative, and it was the contrast between the general levels in Rhodesia and Britain that was so refreshing. Everyday casual racism was still common – there were those infamous notes in windows of rooms to let saying ‘No pets, coloured or Irish’ – but there was still infinitely more tolerance, social mingling and open-mindedness than anything we had grown up with. As far as

I know Raja met no prejudice among our group of peers at Imperial College in

London. A big reason for my own being able to settle in so quickly and easily was, I knew quite well, that I was white. When renewing my temporary passport at a post office once I was conscious of the swiftly appraising glance that followed the cashier reading my place of birth, and the equally rapid dismissal of the possibility of there being a problem because of the colour of my skin. But even so, as I say, the general level of tolerance and broad mindedness in Britain was wonderfully refreshing compared to southern Africa. There was the novelty of talking to black people with

English accents and their common assumption of equality – little of the deference or defiance white Rhodesians were accustomed to.

There was also the strange sensation of no longer being the odd one out, of natural liberal inclinations no longer having to be masked to fit in with your peers. It was a relief being able to shrug off the right wing attitudes ingrained in Rhodesian culture. So in an odd sort of way, although it took a couple of years to sink in, moving to Britain even at the age of sixteen and after only three previous visits to the place, truly felt like coming Home after all.

END

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APPENDIX

Northern Rhodesia Journal Vol 5 No 6, 1964

"THE LIVINGSTONE PIONEER"

As told by WILLIAM TRAYNER and written by PATRICK BARNES

INTRODUCTION

William Trayner is a Clydeside Irishman who left his home in Wishaw in 1902 and arrived in Livingstone about a year later, having worked his way via Glasgow, New York,

Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pochefstroom, Mafeking, Bulawayo and Wankie.

He immediately got a job, under the late A.J.Clarke, in charge of the canoe ferries which at that time were the means of crossing the Zambezi at “The Old Drift”, as the original town of Livingstone was called. He kept the job, with some interruptions, until the town moved to its present site, and the canoes were made redundant by the railway bridge, whose inauguration he attended.

He seems to have been a man of all trades in the new town, doing his newspaper in between other jobs. Later he went in for cattle trading and wandered further and further afield until, about 1909, he found that his headquarters was in Lubango, Angola, rather than Livingstone. He quarrelled with the Portuguese authorities in 1914 and found his way back to London, after various adventures in Lisbon and other places.

He was quite well known in England in the ’twenties as an authority on African big game, on which he lectured quite a lot and broadcast. During those years he went on several hunting expeditions in French West Africa.

About 1929 he went with his family to Rio de Janeiro, where he lived for the next quarter century, returning to Kensington in 1956.

William Trayner is now 85 and partly blind, but he still walks miles and miles through darkest London, and is only too glad to talk for hours about old times.

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Patrick Barnes, son of one of Trayner's old friends, has been, for several months, writing up a book, to be called “Tales of Trayner”, taken mainly from tape recordings of

Trayner's stories and, to a certain extent, from letters which Trayner wrote from South

America about his earlier life. The story of the "Pioneer" is one chapter of the book.

Copyright reserved by Patrick Barnes and William Trayner

“THE LIVINGSTONE PIONEER”

It so happened that I was the founder and editor of the first newspaper in

Central Africa north of the Zambezi. I did not seek the honour, but the newspaper grew and the Government actually made it official. The editor’s chair will not be in the local museum. It was an empty beer box standing on end, and the editor took his cushion about with him.

It had started this way at the Old Drift: I had been in charge of the ferry and had been constantly on the river meeting tourists. At that time there was no railway or telephone, and letters came in only once a month or so; so I was the news-bringer and I had to tell the goings-on to the crowd in the bar at night.

Sometimes I would have to write them all out for some of them who were not very good at writing, because they wanted to send the news home, and sometimes there were several of them wanting it, so then I wrote it through carbon paper to make several copies.

That was really the beginning, and gradually it all developed. Sometimes a piece of paper would be pinned up in the bar and one would read it and then another would read it and we would discuss the proceedings. These varied a lot, and every day it was different, but eventually it became a kind of news-sheet.

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I was the only person in Northern Rhodesia at that time who could take down shorthand, so I often practised it by reporting events and conversations.

After the move of Livingstone to the New Town, the paper began to take on a more definite form. I now had a typewriter and later on I was able to get the news-sheet

Roneoed in several copies. We got printed covers and advertisements up from Bulawayo, and all that helped to make it more like a regular journal.

Needless to say the editor developed with the paper. Before long he was given to voicing his opinions, and he often called the paper Gazette and Advertiser, though most people referred to it as “Trayner’s Rag”.

As reporter and correspondent of the Ladies’ Page I attended the first wedding to be celebrated in Livingstone - a doctor and a nurse. The reception was held at a corner of

Clarke’s Hotel Bar. Clarke’s was nearer to the registrar’s than Mills’ and it was a semi-

Government affair, of course.

It was “standing room only” inside, and the bride had to stand with a glass of beer in one hand and a chunk of cake in the other, but as she was a tall hefty kind of girl she did not seem to mind much.

In Livingstone the liquor actually “flowed” but that day the Severn Bore seemed to have taken a part. The bride was toasted and the groom well “roasted” for getting away with almost the only eligible female in the country. Even the editor was toasted in the general melee, but he was by then getting well out of his depth.

The end of the bust-up was the arrival of numerous cronies in the editorial office singing: “The Jolly Dead March”, which was a local favourite at the time, and which was the nearest thing to the wedding march that they knew. To say that they did not go home until morning was an understatement - some of them were there for the best part of a week. This was not at all unusual, as the bar and the newspaper office were the two

270 principal clubs of the tavern. The difference was that the bar made money whereas the editor dished out free entertainment, literary and liquid.

In due time of course, the editor got the typewriter sorted out from the bottles and glasses, and the Wedding Report appeared:

“Our good friends Dr. so-and-so and Nurse such-and-such, two local thoroughbreds, have decided to run in double harness” and much more to that effect.

The drunken orgy in the bar was glossed over as a “brilliant reception”. Then came the difficulty of describing the bride’s dress, and here the Ladies' Page correspondent was in very deep water indeed. One trouble was that the bride had been married in her ordinary dress, so the correspondent got over that difficulty by saying that “owing to local transport difficulties the bride’s dress failed to arrive in time; so she was married without it.”

Of course the bar crowd read that in their own way! For weeks afterwards I heard reference to the fact that I must have been damned drunk to think that the bride was married undressed. That was one of the most complicated entanglements I ever got into.

There was a blacksmith’s shop under a tin shanty in the town, and I called him the “villain blacksmith” in a parody of the song which I made up. It was a very wild song and the crowd sang it, and it nearly lifted the bar roof off. I had not anticipated that rubbish to take the town by storm, but it did, including the blacksmith. The “villain” chased the “damned editor” with a loaded shotgun shortly after that verse appeared.

Fortunately he was too drunk to get within range, and the chase ended by him falling over a log and letting off both barrels, and me going back to help him to his feet!

Another man who figured in reports was Old Lawley, who dealt with the railway contracts. He was of stoutish build and had come to Livingstone to superintend the laying of the rails northwards. My status as an editor caused me to visit the bungalow of

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Lawley and his good lady on several occasions, to collect news and “face the worst” when I was on the mat and had to appease the wrath of a man who had been more than good to me on many occasions. Trying to be good is the devil’s own job when you are not built that way, and I was often in the soup for things I said or left unsaid.

“Answers to Correspondents” was an occasional feature of the paper. Questions and answers were both written by the editor, but Old Lawley did not know that and he swallowed my ribald nonsense as gospel. The Lawleys had just brought up the first refrigerator in these parts, and one week there appeared the comment: “Livingstoney:

You are wrong. The oldest fridge on this side of the Zambezi is the local cemetery.”

The camp went wild with joy, but not Mr Lawley; and I was on the mat again. He told me that he did not blame me - I was only a boy – “But just who asked you that question?” I had some difficulty in convincing him that none of his enemies were involved and that the whole column was written by the editor to make the camp laugh.

He sat back then and laughed heartily and told me I would go far. I have - all the way to

West Kensington.

The Government fell on me eventually about this paper and the District

Commissioner Mr. Sykes - we called him Bill Sykes in the bar - got concerned about it.

He met me one day going up through Livingstone and said: “I was just looking for you.

Come to my office! I want to have a talk with you.”

So we went up to Bill’s office and sat down.

“About this paper,” he said.

“What paper?” said I.

“You know what paper, your paper! What's the idea?”

“No idea at all.”

“Who's behind it all?”

“There’s nobody behind it.”

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“I think the gang’s running this; the gang that crowd into the bar.”

“Well yes, that’s true in a sense. The gang talk a lot, and one has to get the pages filled up somehow. I couldn't make it all up, but I make a good deal of it up.”

“Well,” he explained, “I've got a letter from Kalomo [then the country’s capital].

They want the paper put on a proper footing and registered. I suppose you knew that all newspapers have got to be registered and to state where they are published.”

Then Sykes and I got down to it.

“Before we can register it,” he said, "we will have to have a few particulars as to who is running it, who it belongs to, who the editor is, and who this and who that, and the name of the paper. Who’s running it?”

“I am.”

“All right, I will put you down as editor and proprietor. Your occupation?”

“I can’t say that I have an occupation. Put me down as an engineer.”

“You can't put that down for the editor and proprietor of a newspaper.”

So I went down as “William Trayner, printer and publisher.”

“Now,” he went on, “you must give me the name of your paper. It can’t go on being ‘Trayner’s Rag’ you know. We must have a decent name for it. This is an historic event, which people will look back on, the first registration of a newspaper in this country. Why not call it ‘The Pioneer’ or something like that?”

“All right Mr. Sykes, ‘The Livingstone Pioneer’ it is.”

It was registered that day. It had started as a schoolboy’s prank and it was now a respectable newspaper.

I now had the official monopoly for publishing Government Notices in

Livingstone. I was paid for putting in these notices, but I was required to send copies to the Government and to the Colonial Office in London.

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Every now and then London would complain that such and such an issue had not been received and they would write about it to Lanigan O’Keefe, the Chief Secretary at Kalomo. Then Lanigan would send me a letter, typed in Government green ink, ending, in the official Civil Service way: “I am, sir, your obedient servant, Lanigan

O’Keefe.”

The gang at Livingstone always wanted to see these letters, and so Lanigan became known to all the bar crowd as “my obedient servant.”

Sometimes a man would come into my office and say: “You had better look out.

Your obedient servant is in town, and I think he is after you.”

Soon afterwards Lanigan would call on me and ask why the issue of so-and-so had not appeared in London. I would reply: “I must have sent it.”

“You know damned well you didn’t send it. I realise it is difficult for you in these conditions, but you are a Government Publisher and you must keep to the rules.”

Then “my obedient servant” stamped out.

Quite recently - here in Kensington - I had a queer experience. I heard a voice on the radio announcing that some girl would sing: “Smile, damn you, smile.” I nearly jumped out of my seat when I heard the announcement. The song was sung by a weak feminine voice, and had no resemblance to the bush version that I wrote for The Pioneer way back before I was reformed – that is if I have really been reformed, not just “mended worse”, as someone used to say of me.

That song was made to fit the surroundings. It was hailed as a masterpiece and could lift the roof of an up-country bar when bellowed out by a dozen or more beery voices at a time. It would never have been allowed by such an “unco’guid” concern as the B.B.C. The new version was sung in a mild Sunday school tone and would have been

274 enough to make some of those wild singers turn in their graves – and they were quite good graves; I saw the funerals.

Another chance hit that long held sway there was the supposed up-country host saying to the newly-arrived guest as he pushed the “square-faced” across the table: “Are you teetotal?”

“No, I'm from Livingstone,” replied the thirsty one.

That was pinched by the Johannesburg papers and applied to that city without one word of recognition, and it went round the world.

I used to pinch other people’s jokes too, but I was an honest thief. I used to put them in a column entitled: “Purloined . . .”

I used to have a go at more serious verse too, and wrote this about the Victoria

Falls:

“Wild sweeps along the mighty sea As from some Titan leash set free. It leaps The Falls with giant bound While awesome thunders peal around.”

There was some more of it, but most of it was plain bathos, as The Pioneer doggerel had to be. Then we came to the gossip column, which started:

“Now let us spray . . .”

The end of The Pioneer came, like the end of so many of my other undertakings, from Blackwater fever.

One day I had been having a long argument with some fellows about Blackwater.

They said it was wiping out so many people that there must be an epidemic. Of course it was not an epidemic disease at all and I wrote a raging article all about this epidemic business in my paper – and then fell off the chair I was sitting in with this very

Blackwater that I had been writing about.

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I was carried off to hospital of course – they had one by then – and the head doctor, Dr. Coomber, who came up from the railway depot to see me, sat down on the edge of my bed with the paper in his hand and said: “I had just been reading your article when they phoned me and said you were down with it yourself.”

That was the doctor who later told me so much about the research on the disease up to that date.

I was attended by a very clever hospital nurse called Ginger (she was red-haired) and I must have been in a bad way. She told me later that I was the most intractable patient she had ever had, because when I was lying at death’s door and she was ministering what she thought were practically the last rites, I suddenly sat up in bed and told her that I had just about had enough of her, that she was to get the hell out of it and to let me die in peace. She said that there was so little that she could do for me that she was compelled to leave me, as far as her duty would allow, lest I should pass out in a rage over some kindness meant for my alleviation.

I apologised in due course – long afterwards, when she told me of it - and Ginger and I remained good friends. I was far from alone in her friendship, as she had at one time or another nursed nearly every man for miles around. She was the heroine of the region and we vied with each other in our worship of her.

If Ginger had time off and wanted exercise, all our horses were at her disposal.

She was quite a good horsewoman, but alas, the horses had been badly trained and, sooner or later, they always took her to the pub. The place turned out en masse to welcome her, each man with a drink in his hand, and asked her to come in. The horse generally had a beer but Ginger refused all our blandishments and smilingly berated us on our bad habits.

Anyway, I had this Blackwater fever, and that stopped The Pioneer for some time.

I was willing to go back to it when I recovered, but I got no help from others who had

276 intended to join me. The boom had passed, the rails had gone northwards, the construction gangs had left, and Livingstone was in the dumps.

By this time the bush had more attractions for me, anyway. There were hunting parties to escort, cattle to be traded, exploring to be done, and the wandering instinct in me took control.

------oooOooo ------

Nigel Suckling was born in 1950 in Lusaka,

the capital of what was then the British colony

of Northern Rhodesia. He grew up at Munali

School, where his father Norman was a

teacher, then in Livingstone with its Victoria

Falls and back again in Lusaka. The family

moved home to the UK a year or so after

Zambian Independence in 1964. This book is a memoir of those closing years of

British rule.

He is the author of many books on Mythology and folklore including Faeries of the

Celtic Lands, The Book of the Vampire, The Book of the Unicorn and Year of the

Dragon.

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