Roses Under the Miombo Trees (28 page)

There remains one mystery from that Christmas: I wrote to thank my mother for ‘
the grey wig, which is rather a nice one'
. A
grey
wig? Not for me, surely? Could it have been for a wicked stepmother in that panto? The question hangs spectrally in the air, unanswerable now.

From Mark to my parents, early January 1965:
No doubt Amanda has told you all about our Christmas and New Year's doings… all very pleasant. Unfortunately the poor girl stubbed her toe at the yacht club on Christmas Eve. The doctor looked at it at our Pimms party on Boxing Day and declared it a mere bruise. However, a week later it was still causing considerable pain and preventing sleep so she went back to him. Now he has decided it is more serious and put it in plaster… unfortunately (typical of this country I'm afraid) the X-ray machine is broken so we don't know for certain what's wrong. Poor Amanda is rather crippled…

As you will have gathered we are getting rather fed up with this country and with the company here… I feel I may as well get out, what to do I don't know… anyway we shall be coming over soon, looking forward to seeing you and showing off the grandchildren… All a rather disturbing start to 1965 but I hope the year will end well. Please pray for us.

‘Poor Amanda' – but also poor Mark, who was now both depot clerk and chief homemaker, bathing children, getting up to Paul with his bad cold in the night, cooking suppers. To cap it all the depot safe was burgled, and Caroline had caught a mild form of chickenpox, with Paul sure to be next. At least Mark was grounded and so not expected to be covering his territory till the clerk returned. We were now spending much time talking about the future: the company's personnel department was urging Mark to wait for the General Manager's return, felt there would be a future for him. But Mark was becoming increasingly certain that the sort of job he had been doing was not for him. Somewhere we had heard of psychological aptitude testing, and I wrote to Mum asking her to find out more. And where should we settle? We didn't feel we wanted to return to Zambia –
Abercorn is the only really nice place, and its all getting more inefficient and maddening daily
I wrote. So that left Britain or South Africa. I had deep, though unarticulated misgivings about the latter, with apartheid dominating all aspects of life there, whilst Mark, who had never lived in England apart from his three years at Cambridge University, felt he belonged in Africa. I knew that my role was to support my husband who was, after all, the breadwinner. Meanwhile though,
do we sell everything here before we go, or hang on and have to come back (Mark will be in Broken Hill for the 6 weeks before he comes over), and so on. All v. difficult, but I'm sure it will work out and Mark will find what really suits him
.

I can see now, through our letters, how much more of a burden our situation must have been for Mark than for me. I, in my role as follower, as loyal wife, found that by not thinking about the future too deeply, I could stay optimistic, with a naïve confidence in his future career. Besides, I was soon to be going home, and my letters are full of practicalities about push chairs, cots and possible toys for the grandchildren. I was going home to a place where, even in a house I had never seen, everything else would be familiar. Each piece of well-worn old furniture, every picture and wall mirror, every table setting – the faded pretty china, the twirly silver candlesticks, the napkin rings we had each had since we were little – all would be just as I had always known it. The grandfather clock would tick and whir, Mum's dented saucepans would clatter in the kitchen, her clutter of letters, bills and messages on scraps of paper lie in drifts by the phone. There would be croquet on the lawn, beyond it Pa's apple trees, and surely an asparagus bed, a fruit cage and tall globe artichokes. My Gran – Mum's mother – had just moved into a little house across the road; there I would find her, her Chinese carpet in the drawing room, the chiming carriage clock on the mantelpiece, her Steinway grand piano with its double piano stool for duets, a faint smell of pot pourri and her lively voice: ‘Darling! How wonderful to see you!'. I had all this to come, to show my children and make them part of. Whilst Mark, sole breadwinner, would be stuck with working out his two months' notice in Broken Hill, certain only of what he did not want to do for a living.

By the end of January we had decided: Cape Town it would be, a choice welcomed by both our parents.
And a big thing is the better communications with you, and mail ships not so expensive as planes to Zambia.
With an unaffordable quote for moving all our furniture, I set about turning out cupboards, and suddenly we were the ones having sales of small items, flagging up larger ones for later offers. Almost nothing need be thrown away, for any battered utensil or torn sheet would fetch a few pennies. The fridge found a new home in Fort Rosebery, our double bed a new lease of life in an African's home in the township. In the end we kept little but our chintz-covered suite and small tables. Even the dining room table and chairs in some dark hardwood, that Mark had stripped and polished so lovingly, were up for sale. But my desk, an antique but solid oak bureau given to me by Gran, at which I had written so many letters home, would go with us no matter what it cost. (Today, refurbished, it stands in Caroline's home, its pigeon holes and little drawers cleared out, looking better than ever.)

Lake Tanganyika regatta: M.V. Triton and dinghies

At about the same time there was a cheering treat: the Yacht Club executed a long discussed plan for a regatta on Lake Tanganyika. Somehow all the dinghies were transported down in advance, trailers bouncing down the 28 miles of dirt road. We left home early for what turned into an unforgettable day. There were spectators both on the overlooking cliff-top and on the shore, with such interest in the event that Ann Parton and her helpers prepared lunch for 60 Abercornians. At that lower altitude the heat was tremendous, and a paddling area was set up in the shade for the children. How different from little Lake Chila! We were to sail off Niamukolo Point, with Peter Parton's M.V. Triton as committee boat some 200 yards off shore. Those vast expanses of water (I still had a niggle of anxiety at the immense depths below us) and a fine wind at the start made for superb sailing, then the wind dropped and races, now much slower, had to be rationed, each sailor having a turn at two long races. Lighter winds gave me a bit of an advantage, and I proudly wrote home that I had
tied equal first in one with Colin and another chap!
which made an excellent excuse to leave the boats down there for a tie-breaker the following weekend. To end the day, William Winterton, about to return to England after his year's voluntary service, hosted a barbecue at his caravan, the centre piece a whole roast lamb on a spit. The follow-on day was just as good, with a rice salad lunch and ‘plenty of time to improve our suntans', though Mark was busy supervising the Liemba's unloading into the fuel depot, and I finished only third overall.

February, then, was our last month in Abercorn. We had been married for four years now, celebrated by inviting the Bowmakers and Colin to dinner, suddenly nostalgic:

- Remember how cold it was, and how my veil was whipped up by the wind for the photos? I said

- A year later we were in Cape Town with Paul, and Dad cracked open a bottle of Krug, said Mark, adding: …and two years ago we were still in Gwelo, waiting for your Ma to visit …

- And last year I was enormous and fed up, and Caroline arrived two days later!

Her first birthday was a low key affair, overshadowed as it was by packing and promises of buying her better toys in England. She was now able to walk, and quite apart from having to keep even more vigilant track of her, we had to deal with Paul's frustration as his newly assertive sister attempted to join his games or seize his toys. There were frequent incidents that ended in tears on both sides. Then, what with the children and I getting tonsillitis, measles spreading in the township and a worsening rabies outbreak, it began to feel as though things were conspiring to make our last weeks difficult.
This place is a hotbed of disease,
I wrote dramatically, with
Mark overworked as mother's help
. Then the company joined the conspiracy, perversely ordering Mark to spend his last full working week at a sales conference in Broken Hill, thus cutting short our last weekend among our Abercorn friends before our departure on the following Friday.

Last trip on Lake Tanganyika: still ‘the blonder the better'

Still, we had one last good day down at Lake Tanganyika: Mark's manager Peter Hare, brassed off with his own impending demotion to Salisbury, drove up for a last trip on the company. We borrowed Alan's fisheries launch for the morning, and despite storms circling around, managed to get to the Kalambo Falls for a last look at the storks floating above the spray.

Mark's replacement, Dick Hurlbatt, had already been up for two days to look around:
He is probably going to have our house, they are keen gardeners, he seems quite nice. He's full of enthusiasm for the job – poor soul,
I added darkly. He would have two weeks overlap with Mark, so the first would be spent largely away from Abercorn. I began to plan introducing him and his wife Jane around – until they arrived, one of their children with full-blown measles. Feeling guiltily inhospitable, we had no alternative but to avoid them.

Abercorn had one last social event in store for us: I had been involved in organising, in the new post-independence spirit, a multi-racial fund-raising dance in aid of a university for Zambia. We decided on the TVMI as venue, being neutral territory, not exclusively associated, as the club was, with the white population. Tickets were sold as widely as possible and many of us whites went in support of this good cause, together with numerous smartly dressed local Africans. There was however one problem, for none of them had brought their wives, and the resulting shortage of female dance partners meant an exhausting but also laughter filled evening for us women who were there. No sooner had one sat down to mop one's face and rest aching feet after gamely twisting to Chubby Checker, than another smiling black face would appear, and one was swept off to rock 'n roll to ‘Love Me Do'.

My memories of our last days in Abercorn, apart from that evening and our breathless laughter, are at best hazy, blurred I think now by the mix of emotions I was having to deal with. I know, only because my letters tell me, that my last club AGM went off well, and I expect I was warmly thanked for all my hard work. We invited 12 to meet the Hurlbatts, who presumably had found a baby sitter for their children (the second one now having caught the measles), and it apparently went off fine. There was, I wrote, one last sailing regatta on little Lake Chila, at which I tied first with Alan, my long-held ambition to beat him finally thwarted. And I am touched now to read, in an issue of
Abercornucopia
that must have come out just before our departure, a warm send-off piece John Carlin had written about Mark's and my contribution to Abercorn life, even referring to me as ‘Abercornucopia's dear Amanda'. Dear John – I realise now how very fond I was of him too.

The Barrs, bless them, kindly invited us to stay for the last three nights in their official residence's guest house in the grounds, as all but our suitcases had gone on the removers' van or to local buyers, from whom we had made the fine sum of £150 ‘to put aside for our next home'. We were, I wrote home, invited out every night of our final week, and each evening must have been a reminder of how many good friends we had made and the unspoken fear that we might never meet again, for who knew where we might all end up living?

As I wrote my last letter home, my thoughts were clearly darting ahead, back to present practicalities, then ahead once more:
I think I just about have a warm outfit for each to arrive in
.
I must say I dread leaving here by plane, everyone coming to the airport to wave, and feeling one won't see little Abercorn ever again. See you SOON! I can't wait – but am depressed at leaving poor Mark for 6 weeks… so many goodbyes to be said ……