Roses Under the Miombo Trees (6 page)

We passed muster, to our great delight, and just in time by the end of October the removers came and packed up. Daniel and I stacked trays of seedlings in the car boot, and with a last affectionate look at our little cottage, I turned the old Morris Minor north-east to our new life in the Midlands. We were leaving behind the friends we had just made, Mark was settling into his new sales area, I was seven months pregnant and Daniel's workload – though I don't believe I considered this much at the time – was about to double.

Our homestead, as I think of it now, was the best thing for me about Gwelo, which itself held no attractions. The town fell between two stools in several ways – between Salisbury and Bulawayo, between Shona and Ndebele tribal lands, between one horse town and city proper. Founded in 1894 by Dr Leander Starr Jameson as a staging post between the two larger settlements, it had become – and remains – the centre for the agricultural midlands, with its fine cattle-ranching country, all allocated then to white farmers who, with a scattering of mines, made up Mark's new customers. Railway lines criss-crossing the country converged here, with rail links to Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) to the east, South Africa to the south and Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and South West Africa (now Namibia) to the south-west. The two big employers were the Bata shoe factory, which had its own tannery, and a chrome smelting plant. As for the town centre – more relevant to my life – no wide tree-lined avenues here. Its key landmarks were its historic Stock Exchange and the memorial clock tower which Widow Jean Boggie, a great character locally, had had erected in memory of her husband in 1928. The Meikle brothers owned a small department store and the Midland Hotel and there were a couple of other hotels and two restaurants which we subsequently decided were ‘decent'. For the rest, the general stores, shaded by corrugated iron arcades, had a frontier town feel to them. Throughout our stay there, I lived for the occasional chance to shop in Bulawayo or – an even greater treat – Salisbury.

Out at our homestead though, all was peace, quiet and long African views over the scrubby bush – though we discovered that the peace could be shattered by low flying Hunter jets from the nearby Thornhill Air Force Base. The house was called ‘Norwood', strangely redolent of some English suburb, the area Umsungwe Block, hinting at the original intention of a housing development, now shelved. Behind it ran an already overgrown dirt road still awaiting its share of new bungalows.

I felt like a proper home-maker, and whilst Mark was out on the road in his new area, for me running our new home became an absorbing challenge. We soon realised that we were going to have to get used to the demands of running a much larger establishment. The house, though spacious, had no mod. cons. and was a succession of large bare rooms, in which our small stock of furniture looked somewhat lost. Daniel's day started first, with lighting the wood fired boiler for hot water for Master's shower, then getting our breakfast, so Mark could be off to work by 7.30 or so after his early morning run. Then Daniel would get on with the housework, with acres of red skimmed cement requiring his foot polishing routine. Whilst Daniel worked indoors, I was often out in the garden, settling our seedlings into gaps in the borders, trying to get to grips with the hens, which, like my mother before me, I secretly hated:
It is amazing how busy I am all the time around the place, quite apart from Christmas and babies. The hens have been very tiresome, the other day they began to have an egg-eating orgy; fortunately I was in the veg. garden at the time and noticed what they were up to. Then the mother hen went for me because I was too near to her chicks, so altogether I am fed up with them, and if they didn' t lay such nice eggs would cheerfully eat the lot. A battle is also being waged against cutworm, which appear in the night and senselessly destroy the poor little seedlings I have planted out. I am now armed with deadly poisons which I sprinkle liberally, but they are unimpressed. Scrattling about in the garden is my main form of exercise these days – I have been feeling very energetic, mainly I think because of the cool weather. On Sunday Mark even left his work to dig furiously in the veg. garden, and to build compost! It is lovely here at the weekends. We also put up our name sign outside the gate, très eyecatching.

By now the rains had started in earnest and the garden and surrounding bush sprang into new green life. It relieved me of some of the burdens of watering, certainly, but brought other problems; weeds sprang up overnight, mud trekked relentlessly into the house and the welcome freshness turned to cooler, ‘horrible' weather. Perhaps too Daniel's heavier workload had started to take its toll, for I wrote:
Daniel has a cold and cough, but what good giving him medicine when he then paddles in the rain with bare feet? Today it is pitch dark and pouring rain, so I went to get the milk [from a neighbour] in the car, fearing he may get pneumonia. He won't go to bed, we think it makes them think they must be dying.
(I have no idea where we got that idea from or whether there was the least truth in it).

With not much more than a month to go before my expected New Year's Day date of delivery, I was eyeing the baby's bedroom with some anxiety:
Mark has been working so hard and long that he hasn' t had a chance to do anything round the house for ages. He seems to come home every night with another report to write. However, we are going to paint the inside and out of the built-in cupboard in the nursery, as it is too scruffy at the moment, and are buying a plain wood table from someone who is leaving Gwelo which I can also paint (for changing etc.) Then I feel the room will be more respectable. Still trying to track down a nice 2nd hand pram if I can
. On our budget I worried about the cost of assembling a basic layette, but fortunately was beginning to receive welcome parcels of baby garments from family and friends in England: tiny hand-knitted cardigans, embroidered nighties. In the heat of the day, when I couldn't be in the garden, out came the Singer and I set about copying what I could. All that was left to do was find dozens of nappies, ideally from a wholesaler.

On top of all that, Christmas was a constant worry and posting dates looming:
Gwelo shows itself daily more horrible for shopping, both for the baby and for Christmas presents, over which I am having a great struggle for that reason. I shall obviously miss the last date for posting, so you had better expect a late gifte anyway! In a fit of energy I managed to get off our cards in time, so that's one thing.

It is a wonder to me now that with all that we could find the energy for socialising. But of course it was vital to make the most of any promising contacts in order to build some sort of a social life. For us this started with other company couples, though there were far fewer of these than in Bulawayo. Still, on only our second weekend there, a Saturday night braaivleis (barbecue) with Doug and Fran ended at midnight, and next morning Noel and Bridget were calling with a huge basket of apricots. We felt pleased to be able to reciprocate with eggs.

Then we had a windfall: the opportunity for an otherwise unaffordable trip to Bulawayo, with a night at the company's expense, as the General Manager was coming down. There was a social evening followed by a profitable day for us both:
Mark saw Mr. T in the office, and was told that he was doing very well… I had a somewhat energetic a.m. shopping. We found our wholesaler, and with a company order got nappies, plastic bath, oddments and the offer of a very nice pram when we want it (had no room in the car). I also found other odd things like a cot mattress for when Mark makes it and suchlike, all of which far cheaper than here, and your Christmas present… We finally got back here for supper, feeling we had achieved quite a lot. I had left Daniel a list of things to do in our absence, he seemed quite worn out! I am glad to say he is working well now touch wood, having recovered at great expense to me for medicine from his cough and flu.

By now I was much more aware of my pregnancy, even allowing myself a rest after lunch with a library book. One was of baby names, for Mark and I had no favourites in common, which was a great worry. ‘Not Nicholas,' he said firmly, pronouncing it Nicholarse, whilst I barred John as ‘boring – anyway he's your brother'. Eventually I suggested we each make a list of our top ten names to see where they overlapped, which resolved the problem – just. My doctor in Bulawayo had handed me over to a friend in Gwelo:
He has pronounced me fit as a flea … I have got to the stage of making long lists of things to do, and hoping for the best! I have supposedly only got 5 weeks to go as from yesterday, so am beginning to feel that I am getting somewhere. No doubt this will soon turn to impatience and ‘a feeling of frustration' as the book warns me!!

The book was Doctor Benjamin Spock's
Baby and Child Care
which was to be my constant adviser. Looking again at the yellowed pages (‘the most widely recommended handbook for parents ever published – over 20 million copies sold') I am reminded of how comforting he was: it was ok to have mixed feelings about the baby, to regret losing your sylph-like figure and saying goodbye to your carefree youth … love for the baby might come only gradually … you were bound to get tired, even blue, and would need some help in the first months … fathers might well feel left out, but a man could be a warm father and a real man at the same time … grandparents might, or might not be a source of support and help in the early weeks. It was all very reassuring in its way. But for live support I had to rely on a few very recently made woman friends, almost all of whom, helpfully, had babies and/or toddlers. There were no ante-natal classes available, but someone lent me a booklet on natural childbirth, with instructions for breathing and relaxation, which I practised dutifully (but which turned out to be of precious little help when it came to it). The Birchenough Nursing Home (‘very small, only holds 14 at most, nice and quiet') had given me a list of needs to pack for what would normally be a ten day stay, prompting me to run up, ‘out of my head', a quantity of nighties on my hard working Singer.

My poor parents must have been worried silly when I wrote in some detail about my car accident:

I escaped with no harm to me but quite a lot to the car. I was shopping in town, and a landrover backed out of a parking place at the side of the road into me. Fortunately I was travelling at about 2 mph, but the whole of the left front wing is ruined (landrovers being so solid). A policeman was on the spot and said it was my fault, which I couldn't believe, and sure enough a superior finally came and said of course not, and the other chap was fined for negligent driving, so he is going to pay the £23 damages. Mark had just left for the day to go into the bush and isn't back yet, so I rang Doug C from the office of the Gwelo Times who had sat me down and given me water etc., and he managed everything very nobly. All well now.

The policeman on the spot would have been an African constable, his superior a white officer, their force the British South Africa Police, formed in the 1890's as protection for the settlers' Pioneer Column. Its name only changed much later, after Robert Mugabe became president, to the Zimbabwe Republic Police. I recently found in a trinket box a brass ceremonial cap badge, a memento of working in administration in its CID branch in Salisbury: a generously maned lion half stands, half crouches over a Zulu shield and several spears, while another spear seems to have pierced his shoulder. He is holding his head and tail improbably erect, his canine teeth clearly visible.

With Christmas approaching, whilst I was in what I hoped was the final stage of my pregnancy, Mark had been left with a double workload, covering for his boss's absence on long leave. Then came a fresh development:

You may have heard of the ‘emergency' with troops being called out last weekend, with the NDP being banned (cheers) and all. This meant that all company staff had to do duty at the oil depot – they are all special policemen, only specifically to guard the depots which are ‘key points'. Doug C [Fran's husband] had the midnight to 8 am shift, and Fran had gone into hospital for 10 days, which left the children alone, so of course Mark offered for us to have them. They were very good and seemed to amuse themselves and are terribly polite, (‘Can I help you, Mrs. L-?' made me feel very OLD!)

The Nationalists' efforts at discouraging Africans from registering to vote, their looting, burning and violence in the townships, had driven the Prime Minister to call out the troops. Within a week of the NDP's banning, and despite the arrest of many of its leaders, a new organisation had been formed, the Zimbabwe African Peoples' Union (ZAPU), its aims and tactics the same as those of its predecessor. Joshua Nkomo, meanwhile, stayed abroad, seeking unsuccessfully to drum up international support for their cause, to pressure Britain to intervene and set in train majority rule. But there was much sympathy in Britain for the white cause, which no doubt contributed to the continuing sense among many of us whites that all would be well.