Roses Under the Miombo Trees (21 page)

I remember little of the trip other than my anxiety at leaving Paul, despite knowing how at home he would be with his friend Jeanne and adults he now knew quite well. There was even a concrete paddling pool which had been built for a pet otter which hadn't arrived. We gave him a new car and then we were off:
650 miles of straight road with trees on either side, completely unvarying for the entire journey. I shopped as quickly as possible from my mile long list and did manage to get most of the things I wanted to pack into Mark's car, from garden lime to Christmas presents
. There followed two days of dentist, doctor, blood tests and a hair cut and perm (
the girl didn't even know I was pregnant!
) and some time to feel almost a single girl again with Barbara before flying home.

Paul with Uelo in the front garden…

…and with his friend Jeanne Bowmaker at the Yacht Club

The greatest thrill was to get back to my little boy:
Paul was struck dumb to see me arrive off the plane
, I wrote home,
but has been so good since, not at all clingy or whining as I had feared… Uelo came every day and Paul dotes on him
.

Despite being nearly seven months pregnant, and having been ordered to rest after a scare with contractions following a gastric upset, my breathless air letters continue to recount endless activity, including a major garden restructuring. This involved Mark learning to operate the Agriculture Department's small motor plough to plough up the front drive, the relocation of the garage ‘
near to the back door instead of miles from any door at all, by Uelo and a temporary helper at 3/- a day'.
Later I reported making five trips in the Mini with Uelo to fetch rocks, to create a rockery where the new lawn was terraced to cope with a change in level. It was early November and the rains had started with a vengeance, with a dramatic build-up of cumulus thunderheads, forked lightning and heavy tropical downpours, all far more dramatic than we had been used to in Southern Rhodesia. Everyone seemed to have a rain gauge, and that month 11 inches was recorded, one inch falling in a day. Abercorn could receive 50 – 60 inches in a season, even more down towards Lake Tanganyika. By January we were to realise that the rainy season, ‘summer', was cooler here than ‘winter', with those heavier rains and higher winds than we had been used to and relatively little sun to warm us up. For Paul all this rain was simply an opportunity to go out in his new red Wellingtons, whilst Mark had to cope with increasingly muddy and at times impassable roads, erratic oil tanker deliveries and irate customers waiting for their orders.

Indoors, as well as my other sewing, I was now requesting scraps of material from Mum as
I have started a patchwork quilt for our double bed
. At least, I think now, I must have been sitting down to work on that. To add to it all, I was now on my second house servant, Edward, my discomfort with Daudi having led to some final falling out. I don't remember Edward at all, save for the following incident:

I am sans domestique. Edward was suspected of lying and pinching food, and then I found him (at 11.30 a.m.) in Paul's room lying on the bed. Ugh. He pretended to be ill, but though a born actor, I was too angry to be deceived further. The only applicants so far have been quite hopeless and I'd rather go it alone and try to find someone decent tho it may be difficult. Uelo is a help and can iron nappies and do floors etc so it's not too bad.
(It is a tribute to all that ironing over the years that no putse fly ever burrowed its way into our babies' or our flesh.)

I had been told in Ndola that it would be safe for me to have the baby in Abercorn provided that regular blood tests – the samples had to catch the plane to Kitwe for analysis – did not show a build-up of antibodies that would threaten the baby. However, with impeccable timing, our Medical Officer, Chris Roberts was about to go on long leave. He came to stay for a few days while his house was got ready for his locum, Dr. Trant:
She is a dear old girl of about 80 who practises in Tanganyika and was here before Chris. She has a monkey and is deaf but everyone says she's v. good and adores delivering babies. We have ordered a lighter pram which should be here soon. Needless to say names have not been discussed yet, we always disagree anyway
.

I wish I could say that I remember being attended by a doctor with a monkey on her shoulder – but I can't, because of course she left the monkey at home. (It was in fact a bad tempered baboon called Audrey, much disliked in the community; it was diabetic and had to be injected regularly with insulin). Dr Trant was a delightful, feisty old lady, Anglo-Irish and very excited at the prospect of delivering a white baby (there were many black ones arriving in the location hospital, but only mine expected in the European community). My due date was only a couple of weeks before her locum ended, and she was reassuringly determined that I should be delivered before she left.

News of the outside world seldom intrudes into my letters, the last time having been a mention of the Cuba crisis from Gwelo. Now, in early December, between thanks for the Christmas cake in its Tupperware, a list of Paul's new vocabulary and a diagram of the new lawn and rockery, came:
We were horrified about Kennedy, and only heard when I went to the shops on Sat. a.m. & someone said wasn't it awful and I said what was? I even bought all the newspapers the next week. The way it struck me was poor Jacqueline, I kept thinking how she must feel
.

We had no radio, and newspapers were inevitably out of date by the time they were available which was somewhat of a turn-off, together with their expense against our very limited budget. Perhaps too the outside world felt even more remote than it had in Gwelo, immersed as we now were in Abercorn life. Decades later I still come across a political event, a pop song, a book that made a stir, in a documentary looking back at the sixties, and realise how much of it passed me by.

The run-up to Christmas was as hectic as it always is everywhere, the succession of cool damp days, often with a fine mist, reminding me of long ago summer holidays in the Lake District with our Watson grandparents. There were endless company visitors to be entertained; farewell parties at the Club for government people leaving for good; Will to be fetched by Mark from Mpika, after his spell working in Lusaka and on a tourist ‘walkabout' including Southern Rhodesia. I checked through my Christmas card list, placed orders with the Army & Navy Stores in London of gifts for family (what did I choose for them? I wonder now, for my letters of course concealed my choices). As I addressed cards to Bulawayo and Gwelo, enclosing a few lines of our news to our friends there, they already seemed far away, so immersed had I become in our new life.

We were all delighted to have Will back for Christmas. Whilst working in Lusaka he had taught himself to cook with a Philip Harben paperback; that and his British upbringing had left him well equipped to help in the house in my servant-less state. I was simultaneously relieved not to have someone in the house whom I did not get on with, and aware that I must have someone installed by the time the babe arrived. Christmas itself brought more drinks parties, a Christmas dinner cooked by Will and me and a visit from the Bowmakers, who having decided that our household had too few animals, arrived triumphantly with Paul's Christmas gift – one of their kittens, called Minnie. Paul adored it and promptly called it Micky – a prescient move as it turned out to be male and required neutering!

New Year proved even more of a whirl than our family Christmas:
We went to the N Y Eve dance at the club and to drinks first with the Malujlos & there was a half hour panto ‘Abercornella' quite amusing and topical. Come midnight I've
never
seen so many people embracing each other, all quite mad. It was a Scottish nicht, with reels, a bagpipe & a super dinner of soup, oatmeal herrings and haggis & we got to bed at 2. Yesterday (a holiday here) we went for a long row on the lake, then to the club at midday for the ‘longest drive' competition (golf) which Mark
won
with a terrific shot!
Even little Paul took his turn, hands well down the shaft of an adult-sized driver.

The smallest competitor in the longest drive competition

As the January rains continued, a new houseboy, Bourdillon, started; I was initially
‘not optimistic'
, but later reported that he was ‘
quite good'
. Will returned to England and his Foreign Office exams, and I began to hope that this time the baby wouldn't be late – well, later than the date I had been given. Blood tests being clear of antibodies, I could plan for an Abercorn delivery. Dear Dr. Trant had pronounced herself an authority on determining the sex of the unborn infant – by its heart beat – and after earnestly listening to my tum, had confidently pronounced it another boy. Of course we tried not to mind, but I wrote home ‘
oh dear, goodbye Caroline then, I must hope I can avoid it being dull ‘John'
…' Mark, in a Christmas thank you letter, tried valiantly to be even-handed:
I am sure you would like a grand-daughter, but most of the money seems to be on its being a boy, but I hope the punters are dumbfounded. Still we shall be pleased with whatever we get
.

My letters, so preoccupied with my late pregnancy, make no mention of the January elections that would lead to self-government later in the year. Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party (UNIP) won 55 of the 65 seats, and he was sworn in as prime minister with an entirely African cabinet. Northern Rhodesia was on the last leg of its journey to independence.

 

Calling Barbara Yates

Now and then I have another look

for my old address book, try to visualise

your entry – though I know it wouldn't do,

even the country's changed its name

and you and I moved on. So I am left

with your crazy laugh over yet more beer,

that night spent on your knobbly couch, and how

you got me, hangover and all, to the old airport

just in time for check-in. Sometimes I wonder

if your name's out there in cyberspace

waiting for me to find you.

CHAPTER 10

Nuns' head-dresses ‘fluttering like great white
birds'