Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (34 page)

     Meanwhile, the bar opened for
drinks on the house, and a party started that went on till two in the morning.
A pretty Australian girl, who was holiday-working at the hotel, found herself
the excited and exciting centre of attention from bearded men with smoking
rifles. She would have a tale to tell when she got home. She did not wait to
tell it. She quit her job and left the country next day.

     Otherwise, the only cloud rested on
Gareth, who was fuming. ‘I’ve never felt so frustrated,’ he spluttered, ‘since
I was looking the wrong way when that German night-fighter flew past us over
Berlin.’ Gareth was a forward gunner at the time.

When we got back to Marandellas, we told
our tale at the bar of the Three Monkeys Hotel, expecting to be kings of the
pub and bought a round, at least. But such tales were two a penny by now, and
most of the drinkers, being younger than ourselves, were spending half their
time in the security forces, one way or another. We did our stuff, like dual
announcers on the television. When we finished, there was a pause. One man put
down his glass, and remarked reflectively: ‘Troutbeck! I lost three golf balls
in the lake there once.’

The following Christmas we went up to
Troutbeck again. As we entered the foyer, Gareth brandished his rifle and said
to the manager behind the counter: ‘Here we are again, David! All ready to
shoot a few terrorists, what?’

     David received this greeting with a
certain coolness. ‘Things have changed, Gareth. We have our own guard force
now.’

     Both coolness and information
failed to register with Gareth, who carried his rifle to our room and propped
it lovingly beside his bed, like a favourite teddy bear. He carefully laid a
bag of ammunition beside it on the floor, in case it got hungry in the night.
He was not going to be cheated of any sport going this time. I had my cowboy
outfit with me, which I put away in a drawer. After that, we went for
sundowners and supper.

     At supper, a white youth of about
nineteen in a T-shirt approached our table. This was the captain of the guard
force. He had no difficulty making out whom he wished to speak to. David had
probably described Gareth in terms of the Galloping Major, which would
certainly have picked out Gareth in a crowd.

     ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he began. ‘I
believe you have a rifle in your room.’

     Gareth put down his soup spoon.
‘Yes, my boy,’ he replied, rubbing his hands together. ‘Expecting a spot of
trouble, are we?’

     ‘If we do have any trouble, sir,’
replied the youth, ‘we would prefer you to remain in your room.’

     ‘But you see,’ replied Gareth,
anxiously, ‘we are in the Garden wing. You don’t have a very good field of fire
from there.’ The Garden wing lay behind the main building. ‘Shouldn’t I report
to an assembly point or something?’

     The youth looked at the ceiling. He
looked down again.

     ‘Look, sir,’ he concluded. ‘If we
want you, we will send for you.’ With which he walked away.

     ‘Don’t ring us, we’ll ring you!’
mocked Gareth, bitterly. He looked at me earnestly. ‘Why, Warren! I was seeing
action when that child’s nappies were on the line!’ He looked away, engaged in
some mental arithmetic. He looked back at me. ‘Dammit! When his
father’s
nappies were on the line!’

     Something aged in Gareth, almost
visibly. Between spoonfuls of soup, he went on bitterly: ‘Not wanted! That’s
it! Not wanted! Too old!’

Now that the shooting has started in
these pages, ‘liberal’ readers (lock up the spoons!) may be asking what I was
doing toting a gun on the ‘wrong side’, with which I might have killed someone
old Mr Gladstone used to describe as ‘struggling, rightly struggling, to be
free’. Quite apart from the chances of hitting anyone with my ancient Webley,
carried for self-defence, or simply deterrence ( as previously explained),
while pinned down in a ditch, under a hail of bullets, I suppose it still
implicated me in the situation; and even if I had been as defenceless as Jock
Scott, I was still committing the ‘sin’ of risking my precious hide in a ‘wrong
cause’, even if I did have a romantic idea of death in Africa, under almost any
circumstances, as carrying its own crown of glory: all of which may call for
some explanation.

     I had hoped to avoid politics in
this book, as I had in my position as a doctor in Rhodesia; but perhaps they
will not avoid me.

     Frankly, I did not see right or
wrong on either side; at any rate, in simple terms. I knew that Comrades Mugabe
and Nkomo were ‘on the side of history’ (if not each other’s), and that Smithy
on his blasted heath was as mad and wrong-headed as any old Greek defying the
wrath of the gods. But this situation, I saw, not in moral terms, but as
tragic. Both sides were right and both sides were wrong, and there was nothing
anybody could do about that: which I take it is the essence of tragedy.

     I must confess that if I had had
sons of military age, I would have done my best to get them out of Smithy’s
clutches: not for them to bear the sins of the fathers. But, for myself, I saw
these as the last days of the Empire, which, with all its faults, I regarded as
one of the great creative enterprises of mankind; in which I found my own
fulfilment, for I was not in Africa for any empty philanthropic ego trip.

     I hope there is some moral interest
in the above. The sensible reader may wonder why I bothered to justify myself.

For a year or two, some spirits had been
advocating combining districts in certain cases, so that the doctors would have
the benefits of two heads and time off duty. Meaning they should choose the
superior hospital and run both their districts from there. At Umvuma, David
Taylor had already suggested that I should join with Enkeldoorn, but being too
independent, or cussed, I had resisted the idea.

      Now I found myself approaching
Jock with a similar proposal, based on my hospital, which was larger and better
equipped than his. I had broached the idea soon after my arrival at Shabani,
but he was as reluctant as I had been at Umvuma: I discovered that other
doctors at Shabani had made the same proposal without success. However, in
time, I did succeed where others had failed, due partly to our growing
friendship and mutual confidence, and, perhaps more forcefully, to other
events: the most important being the Wall.

     As the security situation worsened,
the authorities erected a wire fence around the small town of Belingwe, with a
gate, to be closed and guarded at night, like some medieval town. And Jock’s
house and beloved hospital were left outside the wall.

     There was some talk about expense,
which did nothing to appease Jock. He was not afraid, at any rate, for himself.
But he was certainly not happy about Joyce. Besides which, there was the insult
of the position.

     The final indignity represented by
the wall and the gate emerged when Joyce had to knock on the latter for
permission to enter after dark to attend her bridge parties, to have the muzzle
of a rifle thrust in her teeth.

     That clinched it for both of them.
But there remained one problem: Jock’s nine-foot Bechstein. The available house
at Shabani was a two-storey one, near the main gate, called the ‘bottom house’,
as the internal hospital road sloped down to the main road. The doors and rooms
of this house would never have admitted or accommodated the concert grand. I
lived in the ‘top house’, a single-storey house above the hospital, among
trees, altogether more spacious. I had a Steinway upright, but this would fit
comfortably in the bottom house. So, it was agreed that I would give up the top
house to Jock and Joyce, and move into the other one.

     This was done, and the Bechstein
and the Scotts comfortably installed, to begin a happy association between us
for the next six years, until Jock retired.

Every Wednesday the Scotts gave me
supper - taking pity on the lonely bachelor. Radio Rhodesia broadcast a concert
that night - on discs, though there were, in fact, two amateur orchestras in
the country: Salisbury and Bulawayo. Jock had played violin in the Bulawayo
Symphony Orchestra. The man who ran the radio concerts was a Mahler enthusiast,
so we got a Mahler symphony about once a month, which was a trial to Jock, but
fortunately sufficient Beethoven, Brahms, etc, most other weeks. Then I would
bash the piano before departing.

     Once, when I was called to the
hospital from my own place, not on a Wednesday night, I heard Jock playing. The
Chopin studies came cascading down the hill with a technique almost at
professional level. ‘You didn’t hear the wrong notes,’ said Jock, when I told
him next day. Once only did he play to me: his technique was of a high level,
but his performance lacked finesse.

     Jock had perfect pitch. Not only
would he name any note I played at random on the piano. One evening, a tree
frog was trilling its single note after the rain. I asked Jock if he could name
it. ‘E flat,’ he answered, without hesitation. When I checked him on the piano,
he was correct.

     He could recognise the make of the
more famous violins or pianos by their tone, he told me. I never asked him
about orchestras, but I expect he could recognise the more famous ones too.

The mine had a surgeon when I arrived in
Shabani - a chunky little Pole in his fifties, called Marek. He gave me a lot
of help and instruction. He could be brilliant, and sometimes less so: which
can be said for most surgeons. I have seen no surgeon more dextrous. Henry, at
Umtali, was a virtuoso; and Ian was a sound craftsman. But Marek could open the
abdomen with a single slash, without touching anything within, which I never
saw anyone else do. He did this when I called him in to a man with a ruptured
spleen - a case I had seen only once before - in Ghana, and failed with in my
early days. Marek was into the abdomen and had the pedicle ligated in seconds:
the organ was completely avulsed and it is a wonder the man ever reached the
operating table.

     I had a gunshot wound - a man shot
in the throat with an enormous haematoma (bleed) that so distorted the anatomy
I could not find the windpipe to insert a tube; for the man was choking.
Luckily, Marek was in the hospital at the time, and I called him. He took the
knife from my hand without scrubbing up, found the windpipe in seconds, and got
the tube in.

     But alas, in other matters, his
reach exceeded his grasp. A guerrilla was brought in with his jaw smashed by a
bullet. The police wanted to question him. ‘Maybe vee can do somesing viz
vires,’ said Marek. I thought: ‘we have ways of making you talk’. Alas! there
was nothing to be done with wires - not then, or by us, at any rate; and I sent
the man to Bulawayo.

     Unlike Henry, he also fancied
himself as a gynaecologist. Certainly, he could do a good caesar and
hysterectomy, but he thought he could do the highly specialised business of
repairing vesico-vaginal fistulas - the hole, so many African women develop
between the bladder and the vagina after obstructed labour. After a failed
attempt of Marek’s, which I had to transfer to Bulawayo, a gynaecologist sent
me a cautionary letter referring to him. When I passed the message on to Marek,
he retorted: ‘Who eez zees boy? I voz doing VVFs before he knew vot a vagina
voz!’

Later, came another surgeon to the mine.
Their establishment was simply for three medical officers: if they had
specialist degrees, so much the better. They all did general practice, anyway.
Percy was a retired British Army surgeon, an old-fashioned debonair type,
rather like Noel Coward. From the first, he and Marek clashed like rival prima
donnas or the editors in Eatanswill. It was an elemental antipathy, unequalled
by nature since her last experiment with the cat and the dog.

     Percy’s opinion of Marek was
unutterable - or should have been in the eyes or ears of the Medical Council -
but that did not stop Percy uttering it; nor did he care whom he uttered it to.
At an open air luncheon of a fishing party, which must have included half the
local angling society (needless to say, lay people all, except Percy and me),
Percy aired his views of Marek. ‘Did you hear what he did to poor, dear, old
Mrs Blenkinsop? Bless my soul! I felt positively ashamed for my profession!’

     Marek could hardly have sued him
for slander, even if litigation was popular in Rhodesia (which it was not), as
he would have been hampered by the usual handicaps existing between the pot and
the kettle. He had no hesitation in criticising Percy’s work, even when it was
wide awake and listening to him. ‘An outdated operation! Nobody does it now.’ I
have seen him more than once spread Percy’s notes and X-rays round the duty
room to demonstrate Percy’s supposed shortcomings to all who ran and read, or
merely listened, including the cleaners.

     I had a feeling that Percy was
Jewish, although he never said so. Jock agreed when I put it to him. ‘He has
all the Jewish touches,’ he said. Jock and Joyce played bridge with Percy and
his wife, Marguerita. ‘He’d lend you a thousand dollars as soon as you asked
him, but he’d fight you for five cents at the card table.’

     One night, the police brought Percy
to me for suspected drunken driving. The case was completely irregular: they
had got him out of his bed three hours after the incident in question. But he
was so emotional, like a ham actor overplaying an outraged Shylock, that I
feared for a horrible few minutes that he
was
drunk. ‘Don’t talk to me,
you scoundrel!’ he shouted at a black police constable. ‘I’ll report you to
your superiors tomorrow. I’ll report the lot of you. Just see if I don’t! The
magistrate is a friend of mine. I play golf with him. Just wait till he hears
about this, damn you!’ I went through the prescribed routine: even without the
blood test it was obvious that he was cold sober. They let him drive his car
home: they had let him drive it to the hospital, just to botch their case
completely.