Roses Under the Miombo Trees (4 page)

On that Saturday, though, this was a place of peace, as Mark and I picnicked among the scattered balancing rocks, under the shade of scrubby musasa trees. Opening the hamper, we undid the leather straps for our plates and cutlery, unwrapped our lunch from tea cloths and cracked open our cans of cold Castle lager. We had the place to ourselves, and as we munched on our tasty treats, I felt a great sense of closeness and security with my new husband. In the warm sun, and with the falling notes of little collar doves in the trees, I was suddenly conscious of being entirely happy, certain that this feeling of companionable contentment would last for ever.

That newly-wed happiness made it all the harder to get used to the demands of Mark's job. Within weeks of our arrival in Bulawayo he was ‘on the road', often away for several nights a week, leaving me feeling lonely and bereft. Before he started his travels, we had burglar bars fitted to the bedroom window, although I do not recall ever worrying on that score – it was more the loneliness that I dreaded, and the feeling that the night was alive all around the cottage. It helped that other company wives had to cope on their own too, but still, it was hard:

Today (Monday) Mark has gone away till Thurs. night which is very dismal – Beit Bridge this time, last week it was 2 nights and I spent one night with Brenda H, a rather pale sad looking company wife with a husband quite the opposite, who is away most of every week and she gets lonely and is nervous at night. This I found I wasn't, you'll be glad to hear. The cottage is so compact one's imagination can't run riot! But the days seem rather aimless with no evening with M to look forward to, and not working yet (boring search continues). But I visit various bods like Olive T or Thelma, and even Daniel is company really. I showed him the wedding photos and he was delighted, saying how smart the baas looked, and me looking like Simon
[my middle brother],
and the big car, church etc etc – cries of ah and oh!

I enjoyed his admiration as I relived our great day through the album. I wonder now what Daniel must have made of it all, the black and white photos of men in morning dress and carrying – mostly not wearing – top hats, of women in furs and hats with veils, the beribboned Rolls Royce, the awnings and marquee – all in the grey light of a cloudy English February day.

 

African Wild Life

She'd been prepared for ants, but not

for these purposeful columns filing daily

towards the garbage bin, penetrating

her kitchen cupboards. They ring the jam pot,

seethe in the sugar bowl.

Nothing knows its place; caterpillars process

nose to tail, their bristly bodies looping

along the polished floor of her stoep.

Cohorts of chongollolas – giant centipedes –

march in black lines across the bathroom,

up the front steps, along a window sill.

And worst of all, at night the baleful frogs

breach the front steps and hop towards the light.

Perhaps, she thinks, as she watches

the houseboy's broom disperse them,

they are outriders for some great army

massing its forces out there, determined

to reclaim its territory.

CHAPTER 2

Of money, and learning to live with loneliness

Money – or our lack of it – dominated those early days, every penny counted. For example, we did not have a phone in the cottage, nor could we afford one, even though Mark was now away overnight quite often. My mother was so horrified to learn that I had to walk down the road to ring him in the evenings, unless I was staying with another lone wife, that she promptly sent us the £11 needed to have one installed. However, we soon discovered that his being ‘on the road' actually helped our tight budget …
as apart from having free car and petrol, he gets £60 imprest per month for travelling expenses, which cuts down home expenses while he's away to almost nothing.

I had started to scan the Bulawayo Chronicle for jobs soon after we arrived, but without a decent shorthand speed I did not come up to scratch for the numerous personal secretary posts available. I was becoming discouraged, longing to fill my days with something more than waiting for Mark to come home when, unexpectedly, I was called for interview at an American firm, Remington Rand, in a downtown outlet for their safes, typewriters and electric shavers:
I was interviewed along with a lot of efficient looking women, so I
never
expected to get the job – but next day I heard that I had! It has the best salary I'd been offered in Byo – £50 p.m. with prospects of a rise. So today I was once more a working girl. The girl I'm replacing is staying a few weeks, so I'm learning from her – typing, telephone, filing, banking, reception – she is
incredibly
idle – v. Rhodesian-female type… My salary will be a help, for us to be able to save it.

Although I knew nothing about fireproof safes or electric shavers, the work suited me rather well. My ‘hopelessly inefficient' predecessor left me plenty of scope for organising things better, and of the two young bosses, one, Mr Brown, seemed to be permanently off sick, while pale Mr Courtney with his floppy blonde hair was constantly harried by Head Office. In the showroom were fireproof safes, typewriters and sharp, thin-faced Marlene in charge of the shaver counter. Out at the back the African employees – messengers, porters, drivers – congregated in their brown overalls, waiting for orders and laughing and talking over their tea mugs. I learned later, from one of the salesmen, that they had nicknames from the animal world for all the white staff. Marlene, he told me, was ‘the chicken' and it suited her perfectly. ‘What's mine?' I asked innocently, but the sales rep looked embarrassed and would not tell me. Here, yet again, was a strange, foreign world just out of my reach, incomprehensible. I worked in an office upstairs, where Mr. Courtney came to rely on me. I wrote home happily:
I seem to deal with everything and literally never let up all day, sometimes can't make the cloakroom at all, but do enjoy it…
and for me the bustling city centre gave an impression of living in a vibrant, buoyant economy. However, this was an illusion, for changes were afoot – in fact had been for some years, if only I had paid attention to the country's recent history.

As far back as the 1940's the idea of a political and economic federation between the two Rhodesias and smaller Nyasaland (Malawi today) had been explored by the British Government. It saw federation as a way of protecting all three territories from falling under the influence of South Africa's now Nationalist government and establishing a progressive form of ‘colony'. Whites described it as ‘partnership' – meaning economic progress and rising living standards, guided for the foreseeable future by whites. For black nationalist leaders – who had never been consulted – partnership should have meant equality and a real say in their own destiny. But the British government had pressed ahead and by 1953 there were four governments, four governors, four civil services, one for each country and with the Federal ‘layer' based in Salisbury, the whole almost entirely staffed by whites. However, it was only seven years later that Britain's Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was speaking to the South African parliament in Cape Town in early 1960, and his words continued to echo around the Federation:

… the most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African National consciousness… The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

There was much talk of this speech among us whites, the fact that Macmillan had chosen to make it in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia's great ally, somehow giving it added resonance. But I don't recall believing that it applied to us. Surely the government had control of unruly nationalists well in hand, with a raft of new laws, the banning of the African National Congress and detention of hundreds of ‘troublemakers'? At the same time, look how petty discrimination had been eased! Blacks could go to the cinema now, enter larger hotels, send their children to private schools, apply for jobs in the civil service. The Prime Minister, Sir Edgar Whitehead, was confident that these measures would appeal to the black middle class, and that they would register to vote in elections planned for the end of the following year, and support his United Federal Party's plans for slow – prudently slow – progress towards full democracy. All of this felt reassuring to me and I brushed aside any niggling indicators of an economic downturn, of falling confidence amongst white people.

As if to reassure me further, a big event during our time in Bulawayo was the Central African Trade Fair. After eight years of federation Southern Rhodesia in particular had flourished economically, benefiting from Northern Rhodesia's mineral wealth, and the trade fair – a coup for Bulawayo over its rival Salisbury – was perhaps an indication of that. I described in my letters how busy the city had become, with
all business firms in a fever, and big noises coming down and chivvying poor harassed Mr C
. Of course we all made much of this event, visiting the fair's stands after work, even tasting wine:
the standard is amazingly high, especially the international stands, except the Iron Curtain ones which are dreary and cheap looking. We've hardly been in in the evenings for supper, usually a hamburger there. Daniel seems to hold the fort alright.

There was much company entertaining during the fair: Mark and I played host to friends of my parents-in-law, he a retired director of the company, taking them out to the Matopos. On the back of this we got invited to cocktails at the company's fair stand:
I wore my going away suit – a great success. A v. smart do on the lawn, full of v.i.p.'s and ending up dinner for 12 at the Fair's Grill Room. Felt a bit decayed today!

I feel a pang of regret now that I did not keep that going away suit, made for me in a very light, sapphire blue wool, with a stand-away collar and three quarter sleeves and lined with a patterned blue silk matching the blouse beneath. I like to believe it would have looked good even now, 45 years later.

Life settled into a happy routine, my job keeping me mercifully occupied during Mark's many absences. Daniel kept house far better than I could have done, with floors, furniture and our wedding silver polished to a high shine, the vegetable patch productive. If Mark was away for more than two or three nights, I would stave off loneliness by spending one with one of the other young wives also on her own. At weekends we had started to work on the garden and were slowly creating more basic storage to meet the demands of our enormous stock of wedding presents. My father's old Consular Service tin trunk made a fine linen press at the end of our bed, standing on a wooden base run up by Mark and with my newly sewn patchwork cover. Mark demonstrated how easy it was to make bookshelves out of planks of sapele mahogany and clean bricks. And as we socialised more and more, playing tennis, golf, bridge, swimming, eating with friends, as my tan darkened and my hair bleached in the sun, I began to feel I belonged – that I fitted in, no longer seen as a despised English ‘rooinek' [red-neck], those ignorant Brits overseas who ‘don't understand the situation over here'. I was becoming adept at picking up the Southern African twang, the ‘ja' for yes, the ‘ag man' (pronounced ‘ach men') with ‘men' used on men, women and children alike. I enjoyed using some of the pithy phrases lifted from the Afrikaans, but I did not trouble myself with learning any words in the local language.