Roses Under the Miombo Trees (19 page)

(There was, however, much speculation about the real cause of John's death, and rumours swirled in the community. John had grown up in the area, knew it and its people well and spoke chi-Bemba fluently. It was said that, in one of his bush trips, he had in some way offended the spirits of a place sacred to the tribe – was this why he was struck down with the illness that would kill him? Vengeful spirits? An angry Chief? ‘All the locals knew this was why he died,' Jiff Bowmaker now reminds me, ‘and – well, you can't just discount these things, can you?')

Abercorn had its own little monthly newspaper, quirkily named
Abercornucopia
. It was produced and largely written by John Carlin, a retired journalist who ran the Lake Press in the town, its main business coming from government printing contracts. The following week, a write-up of the play appeared, with the headline
NEW STAR IN BRILLIANT SHOW.
I had reason to be grateful to John for his piece, not just because it was flattering about my performance, describing me as:
an excellent actress – well among the very best ever seen in Abercorn
but in particular for this
: The part was that of a successful young actress – and a successful young actress she was. She was also the beloved wife of a television writer – and his beloved wife she duly was. She made the whole thing natural and credible…
Still smarting under the embarrassment of being seen as the cause of a very public marital crisis, I felt that he had understood – that I had been, after all, only acting the part that I was required to play. I do not recall having any more contact with Roy after that night, and it was not long before he was posted elsewhere. There were to be a number of other productions during our time in Abercorn, at least one of which sparked a domestic upset far more dramatic than ours. I remember particularly being asked to be in Noel Coward's
Hay Fever,
to play the part of Amanda, indeed. I wrote home that I had no time and that anyway ‘I don't care for the play'.

The minute my brothers arrived, I started cooking to try to satisfy their travel-induced hunger, and for the next few weeks was producing three cooked meals a day. Soon I had to write home and ask Mum to supplement our budget, to keep up with their appetites. However much I brought to table, down it went, until that is my economy dish ‘bacon and potato bake' resulted in a traumatic incident. Over lunch Will suddenly choked – a hard-baked slice of potato topping had got wedged in his throat. We tried everything: whacking him on the back, glasses of water, finally had to resort to calling Chris Roberts. Hours later, now in the little ‘European' hospital, with Will more and more exhausted and in pain, Chris was talking of having to fly him down to Kasama, where there was a larger, better equipped hospital. And then suddenly, the potato slice shifted, softened perhaps over time, and he was back home, shaky but recovering. I never cooked that economy dish again.

With the hard work of the play over, we could spend time showing Will and Simon Abercorn and the area, exploring it ourselves as we did so. There was the daily routine, of course, becoming familiar to us but strange and interesting for them: the local, limited shopping at Westie's Stores and the Indian run general store. Nearby on the main street was a small lending library at the Victoria Memorial Institute which, though strong on Africana, left me thankful for the parcels of Penguins my father sent. And if it was Wednesday or Thursday, then there were probably letters from home on the arriving plane, and of course our own aerogrammes home to be timed to ‘catch the post'. (This was a long-standing family catch phrase, from my mother's passion for letter writing and for making a dash down the hill to the local stores to catch the 4.30 collection.)

We organised for Will and Simon to visit the headquarters of International Red Locust Control Service (IRLCS) to meet the pilots and get an offer of a flight, flying low over the herds of game that roamed the area. Flying very low (down to 20 feet) though risky, was necessary, for the grounded locusts must first be flushed out and, once in flight, sprayed. Ian Mackinson in his memoir tells of an occasion when, flying with Robin Crosse-Upcott, the wheels of the Cessna just touched an elephant's back, and ‘with a considerable lurch and superb control by Robin' the plane was righted, later landing safely back in Abercorn. Mark went up once with Robin too, a neighbour of ours; ex-RAF, he looked like a pilot from a war film with his upright demeanour and classic features, distinguished grey hair and black moustache. He had spotted an albino giraffe and sold photographs of it to National Geographic magazine, and they went in search of it again. I still have the tiny black and white print Mark took of it from the plane's window.

We took my brothers down the rough dirt road to Lake Tanganyika, twisting through wooded slopes, always descending. We were greeted at the oil depot on the lake shore by humid heat and a pungent smell of ‘dagaa' – tiny sardine-like fish dried in the sun, packed into huge sacks and despatched inland. At night fishermen would go out, their lights shining down onto the deep waters to attract the silver shoals into their nets. Up in Abercorn you could buy their larger catch, a type of nile perch, fresh – well, fairly fresh and big enough to slice into steaks of firm white flesh, a change from endless meat, if not very fine flavoured. We watched the ‘S.S. Liemba' steam down the lake one Sunday afternoon, looking for all the world like the German boat spotted by Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in ‘The African Queen'. Which was not surprising, for the vessel had started life as the ‘Graf von Götzen', used by the Germans, based in what was then German East Africa (subsequently Tanganyika) to control the lake in World War I. When, in 1916, the German commander abandoned the port of Kigoma to head south, he scuttled his prize vessel. But it was later resurrected and renamed the ‘S.S. Liemba' (Liemba was the name of the lake when Dr Livingstone ‘discovered' it). The Germans' defeat is vividly and hilariously described by Giles Foden in ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth – the bizarre battle of Lake Tanganyika'. The film ‘The African Queen' had indeed been made in the area, the film crew based in the then Belgian Congo just up the western shore, though sadly the steam ship they used was not the Liemba, but another, on Lake Victoria. More recently Michael Palin in the television series ‘Pole to Pole' spent an uncomfortable night on the Liemba, as he made his way south towards Cape Town.

Lake Tanganyika is remarkable: the third largest freshwater lake in the world, the second deepest after Lake Baikal, nearly 5,000 feet at its deepest. At over 400 miles long and averaging 31miles wide, it is the largest rift lake in Africa, and the great depth of its tropical waters means that much of its lower depths are ‘dead' or ‘fossil water' and its extensive fish life is found only in the topmost 600 feet of water. It is fed by three rivers including the Kalambo not far from Mpulungu, and its waters flow out into the Congo River system and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. I did not have all those figures in my head at the time: all I knew was that it was immensely deep, that its size meant that being on open water could feel like being at sea and that, situated as it was between two towering mountain ranges, storms and high winds could whip up unexpectedly.

After the lake, we visited the other local attraction, the Kalambo Falls, second highest waterfall in Africa. I remember how tightly I clung to Paul, for there was no sightseeing platform here – just a stony track and the sudden falling away of the earth before us, the distant thunder of the water below. Even in the dry season it was an impressive sight, the waters creaming away in one uninterrupted drop of over 700 feet, from the high east African plateau over the shelf of the Great Rift Valley. There were long views over distant Lake Tanganyika, with beyond it the huge blue-misty bulk of Northern Rhodesia's western mountain ranges; rare maribou storks, strangely angular birds, floated on the thermals in front of the spray.

Having made my brothers temporary members of the Abercorn Club, they could join us in tennis, learning to sail and socialising in the club house. It was a happy time for all of us, for me a precious connection with home and my parents, hearing of their new home and its on-going restoration. Paul was developing fast, and at his Granny's prodding I reported, along with accounts of our doings, his progress on the pot, with feeding himself and lists of his first words. He adored his two young uncles who were always ready to play, or to allow him to ‘help' them in the garden. The three of us had been brought up knowing that gardening was something you did, once you had a home of your own, so it was not hard to harness their labour, though I seem to have made no concessions to the fact that we were now into the hottest, driest time of the year:
The garden is slowly being transformed
, I wrote
, Will has built a rich compost heap, I have had 2 flower beds right out and put back again enriched and replanted, and now Uelo is hacking at new beds round where lawn will be started when the rains come. V. hard work as it's so dry (Simon can testify!). Lots of seeds coming up incl. dahlias and carnations. We have some crazy paving to do but shrink from the labour
. No wonder our visitors needed all that food! Paul would follow the workers around with his pull-along truck, or a small watering can. In the evenings Mark and I taught Will and Simon bridge to make an in-house foursome, which apparently we all much enjoyed – a very odd thought to me now, having not played it since.

Despite my expanding waistline I felt very fit ‘
and obviously the tiny does too, as it is fantastically active for five months, leaping around'
I wrote. So I could continue, for the time being, to learn to sail, crewing for experienced skippers like Alan and Colin Carlin. Playing golf under Mark's coaching was still a source of togetherness for the two of us, with Paul pushed in his pushchair by Uelo and just about tolerating nine holes if rewarded with chips of spicy dried game biltong. In the club house afterwards, sitting in state on the bar, he would be given sips of beer from our glasses. Down at the Yacht Club, dinghy racing was for Sundays, so during the week we would take a couple of the smaller boats and sail them to a little beach on some other part of the shore for a picnic. The Yacht Club, I wrote, was now Paul's second home.

Abruptly, after our weeks of fun together, Will and Simon were gone: Simon flying home to the new year at Oxford, Will, who still had a few months free, for some sightseeing and temporary work in Lusaka. Once more the end of a happy family visit left us all feeling bereft.

 

Slide Show

Colour transparencies slide from the envelope.

Soon they'll be reborn as jpeg files

that spring to life on my computer screen.

For now, I hold each one up to the light

like looking wrong way down a telescope.

I squint at tiny distant images:

a squatting toddler in a stripy T shirt

points at a line of hairy caterpillars;

a youth and a young woman, all tanned legs

and bright bleached hair, raise a dinghy's sail;

late sun on silhouetted laughing faces,

an open picnic case, calm distant water.

And here's a couple, back to camera, each

following the tyre track of a red-dirt road,

she with a push chair, a high ridge of grass

running between them. On the slide's frame

someone's scribble in long faded ink:

The happy pair stride into Africa
.

CHAPTER 9

‘Its pride is its people' – but shopping is a
challenge

By now it had become clear to me how much could not be bought locally, and an abiding theme of my letters from Abercorn was how to obtain the unobtainable. Some things could be sent for from the Copper Belt, or fetched by anyone driving down who had the space available. On Mark's occasional trips to Ndola he would be charged with bringing back assorted household and garden items from plastic pants to garden fertiliser. With October upon us, Christmas was already an endless preoccupation, with cards to be ordered through Mum, airmailed to us, written and, in the case of those destined for UK addresses, returned to her for posting. I worried at what gifts to send family, when there was so little available, and sent for catalogues from the Army and Navy Stores in London. I wonder now why my parents didn't just say ‘Look, don't worry to send anything, we realise it is all too difficult.' Perhaps they did, and I was insisting on keeping our end up.

As for clothes, I was now even more thankful for my sewing machine and the dressmaking evening course I had done in London, for fabrics were one thing we could buy locally from an Indian run store:
All alone Paul and I are now, as Mark is away for 3 days,
I wrote after my brothers' departure,
it seems very odd, but fortunately I have so much to do that I don't have time to sit and be sad… Paul misses his uncles very much, but is being pretty good considering all. I am in the middle of making him 2 shirts, 2 prs shorts and some pyjamas, not to mention a dress for Shirley Macd's new daughter and a smock for me.
After my pregnancy, and as the pace of our social life hotted up, my letters would refer to yet another party dress I was running up a couple of days before the event. I remember with particular affection an off-one-shoulder number I made in a white silky knit that draped in an elegant Grecian way. Making your own clothes, you can at least be sure that they fit well, we wives said to each other.