Roses Under the Miombo Trees (2 page)

How I had loved bright, colourful Salisbury! It may have been derided as ‘Surbiton in the bush' as its suburbs with names like Hillside and Borrowdale had grown in the 1950's, but it was far more attractive than that, with its wide avenues lined with jacaranda and flame trees named after British explorers; its modern buildings and parks full of dazzling cannas and hibiscus. Social life for ‘company men' like Mark centred around The Club: golf, tennis, drinks after work, impromptu curry suppers. I worked as a clerk for the C.I.D., bought a Vespa for getting around and shared a flat and a sewing machine with a workmate, Margaret Monteith. It was a sort of unintended ‘gap year' – though gap between what and what I could not have said. There was still at that time the unspoken expectation for young women that ‘career' would mean marriage and family. And so in due course, Mark and I had grown closer. We were opposites: he quiet, I ready to fill any gap in the conversation, his uncritical steadiness an anchor for my anxious temperament. Ours was not a whirlwind romance; our love grew gradually, cautiously even, at a pace I felt safe with. There were times when I had sneaking doubts, wondering ‘Is this really right for me?' But the following January we made a slow, scenic drive down to his parents' home in the Cape, Mark's old Morris Minor loaded to the roof rack with us and Cessa, my good friend from London days, over on her own ‘Africa tour'. In Cape Town, on the moonlit lawns of Kelvin Grove Club, we had got engaged. The niggling doubts briefly recurred, as I observed how different his family was from mine, wondered how my choice of husband would go down with my parents. But the excitement of being engaged, of choosing the pretty aquamarine ring that the recommended Cape Town jeweller made for me, swept such thoughts away and soon after Mark and I had returned to Salisbury, at my parents' urgings, I reluctantly flew home to wait for the wedding.

Now almost a year later here I was, a married woman, my happiness deepened by a sense that I had done things in my own way. Yes, we had had the wedding my mother thought proper – and very special it had felt too. But here, some 6,000 miles away, I felt free from all the social and family constraints I had been brought up to: the ‘right' ways of doing things, keeping company with ‘our own sort of people'. No, my parents' language was never as explicit as that, but their meaning was clear to me all the same. Here I can make my own choices, I thought, we can live our life together as we think best.

Right now we were in Rhodesia's Eastern Highlands, close to the border of Portuguese East Africa, a beautiful area later to become notorious for the ‘bush war' during the nationalist struggle for independence. It was peaceful, our hotel with its deep thatched roof and leaded windows straight off an English calendar, except for that dazzling swimming pool in a garden full of hibiscus, frangipani and canna lilies and panoramic views over African hills. We made a foray into Portuguese East, as it was known, (now Mozambique) and it instantly felt ‘foreign', Portuguese spoken everywhere by both whites and blacks, and a continental meal of which I wrote home later:
at the Café de la Gare we had huge prawns, half a piri-piri chicken and all the trimmings and a whole bottle of white vino for 10/- each – scrum!

Beside the pool and over drinks, we talked of the future. Mark was a trainee sales representative for an oil company, who must work where he was posted for a junior sales rep's salary and learn on the job. We were about to set up home in Bulawayo, to which he had just been transferred; it was Southern Rhodesia's second city, where I knew no-one. No matter – I felt liberated, launched into my new married life by our big wedding at my parents' home in Surrey, energized by the brightness of the light, the warmth of the sunshine, free of the social constraints and expectations of my English life. We were in love and everything seemed possible.

I too would be learning on the job, and although I would never have thought of it this way, I did bring with me a variety of skills and abilities, some more useful than others here in Southern Rhodesia. Brought up in a comfortable country home, sent to boarding school, then to language and secretarial colleges, I had learned a bit of my mother's rather ad hoc style of cooking – I could make soup from what was in the garden, for example – I could follow a paper pattern and wear the frock I had made, type and organise a filing system. My fluent French and German would surely not be needed, but I knew how to cope while living far from home and make the best of it; and I found it natural to write home regularly, reassuring my parents – and perhaps sometimes myself – that I was fine. Secretly, a large part of me felt pleased to be so far from home, away from my father's critical comments and my mother's unpredictable ways of trying to control me. There had been battles of will with her over the wedding – issues that assumed huge importance, like who should be invited and who should sit where in church. Now I could do things my way, I thought, and Mark, I sensed, would never undermine my fragile self-esteem with hurtful criticisms.

So from a week of peace and quiet togetherness, Mark and I headed back to the real world. Loading up his ageing Morris Minor with luggage that friends had been keeping for him in Salisbury, we set off for our new base, covering the 400 miles in a little under 8 hours along the straight, narrow metalled road. There was nothing much to see on the way, the mountainous scenery of the highlands having given way to flatter bush, punctuated by scrubby trees, hills then no hills, the occasional small town or settlement. Then the cooling towers of Bulawayo came into view, and through its suburbs we came to the home of kind friends of Mark's, Olive and Phil Thompson. Despite their bungalow being crowded with two small boys and with Olive expecting Number 3, they nonetheless found room for us until we had our own place. It was an example of warm, informal Rhodesian hospitality that I found to be wonderfully in contrast with the more formal lifestyle I had grown up in. Phil worked for the railways, an important employer in Bulawayo, and liked to boast that Rhodesia Railways was the only nationalised railway in the world to make a profit. I have no idea if that was true.

Now I wrote to my parents for the first time, thanking them for the wonderful wedding, missing them all but excited about the future – the first of so many letters that Mum kept from that time. It pleased me to be able to write to them about my new life in a strange environment they knew nothing about, to be able to choose what to tell them – and what to leave out, to feel in control of communications between us. My first impressions of this new city were positive:

Byo promises well I think – its quite civilised, I mean not a dorp in the jungle or anything! It hasn' t Salisbury's good looks as far as the city centre goes, but the suburbs are quite attractive. Everyone is very friendly, in the shops etc you notice it immediately… I am beginning to feel madly domesticated and home-minded as you may have gathered! … Being so inaccessible to you is the only cloud in the sky, but I am sure we'll be able to manage to come over not too long hence; we are definitely going to save.

In those early days in Bulawayo, everything felt fresh and new, yet my memories of that time are limited, consisting mainly of a few vivid snapshots, set against some rather vague overall backdrops. The letters I wrote home have filled in some of the missing details of our every day life, such as the names of friends with whom we socialised endlessly. But there are still strange gaps I cannot fill: where did I buy food? was there a local shopping centre? why can't I recall faces, other than those we captured on a few tiny black and white photos? How unpredictable memory is, what tricks it can play!

So building on what I have, here is an early snapshot: I am seeing, for the first time, our ‘ain wee hame', (lapsing oddly into Scottish in my first letter home) and I am feeling immense satisfaction that this is
ours
. It stands foursquare, a brick-built whitewashed cottage with a black corrugated iron roof and pillars on a small front stoep ( or verandah – a lot of white Rhodesian vocabulary had its roots in Afrikaans, from neighbouring South Africa, whence the early settlers had come). To one side there is a gnarled old tree that looks like one of my father's apples, but cannot be, here in the sub-tropics.

It was tiny, the best our equally tiny budget would allow, given our determination to have a house and a garden, rather than a flat. There were three rooms just big enough for our minimal supply of furniture and a cramped back kitchen with a small electric stove. In my vague memory of it, the garden is limitless – perhaps because it was part of the much larger garden of the main house, whose owners were letting the cottage. Certainly there were shrubs and a few more trees, a large vegetable patch and somewhere at the back, servants' quarters for both the cottage and the big house, a cluster of rondavels (round thatched huts) behind a dense screen of tall bamboos.

My early letters mentioned nothing of this issue of having a servant, but of course we had already decided we would do so, for labour was readily available, and even on our budget, eminently affordable. Africans – black Africans – played a vital part in the lives of white people, but they were so much a part of its fabric that they were for me, so to speak, nothing to write home about. I already knew that they were essential to the running of almost all white households, whose owners did not, therefore, need to worry too much about the absence of mod cons: skimmed and painted cement floors needed polishing, laundry washing by hand, and everything must be ironed on both sides, to kill the putse flies that laid their eggs and which otherwise, I was told, would burrow into your skin. African women were normally only employed as nannies who minded children; ‘garden boys' tended flower beds and watered lawns. In town I saw African men employed as delivery boys, drivers, messengers, waiters. Africans were always ‘boys' and ‘girls', never ‘men' or ‘women'.

I was not yet quite used to this way of life, writing to my parents early on:
I must stop soon, to walk down to the shops (half mile) to post this, as M has the car … Most Rhodesian women, note, would send their boy on a bicycle, rather than walk even 400 yards anywhere.

All my contact with black Africans had, until now, been fleeting: a thank you to someone else's servant or a waiter, encounters with messengers or a garage hand, a brief unsuccessful spell as ‘madam' in my cousin's Lusaka home. Now I was to have a servant of my own, cleaning our tiny cottage, working in our kitchen and garden, doing anything we required of him, from bringing us early morning tea to washing up after supper, with a rest period in the afternoons. This was ‘normal' to everyone else – but to me felt rather daunting.

Now here was Daniel, small and dark skinned, smiling eagerly and deferentially as we interviewed him on the stoep. He was named, he told me proudly in a soft voice, at his mission school back in Nyasaland, had come south because there was more work here. I am wondering now, how did we find him? Did he come with the cottage, as if left by previous tenants, along with a Baby Belling stove and a frayed wicker chair on the stoep? More likely Mark had put out the word before coming to England for our wedding, and recommendations had been made. The right papers – permits, references – were essential. Mark checked that his were in order, former employers testifying that he was honest and hard working, could cook and clean and work in the garden.

I hoped Daniel would wash regularly, for to me many Africans smelled unwashed, and in my world ‘b.o.' was a cardinal sin. There must have been a shower of some sort at the back, in the cluster of servants' ‘kayas', but his life there was a mystery to me and I do not recall ever going there, regarding it as somehow foreign territory to me. I was fortunate, for not only did he use the Lifebuoy soap I provided with his rations, but he was skilled at working quietly, somehow managing to keep out of my way well enough in the small space. I watched warily as he padded through the cottage, his broad horny bare feet making no sound on the polished wood floors, his face sweat-shiny as he worked. No need for a polisher, for just like every other servant, Daniel would make them gleam – though not by hand, rather by foot. At first I watched fascinated as he took a large polishing cloth, wiped it into the floor polish tin and folded it into a pad, which he then proceeded to rub over the floor underfoot using a sort of dancing movement. (I secretly tried it myself once, when he was out, but found I could not sustain it for more than a minute and collapsed breathless on the sofa.) In the kitchen I discovered that he was competent at plain cooking – stews, roasts and vegetables – which allowed me to pore over my two cookery books for new and fancier recipes for our supper. Almost all of these involved red meat, without which no self-respecting Rhodesian could get through the day.

Shopping therefore involved not only ingredients for our meals but also Daniel's rations. I can remember being given a leaflet drawn up for new British immigrants, which included advice on employing servants. Doris Lessing quotes from it in her 1957 memoir
Going Home
(she was born and brought up in Southern Rhodesia and returned as a journalist and communist, to report on the situation at the formation of Federation). You were recommended to provide basic foodstuffs weekly:

1½lb of mealie meal a day

½lb of meat a day. This used to be the usual ration, but although the native still looks upon it as his right, the meat position no longer allows it. Other protein foods will then have to be substituted.

Vegetables at least twice a week. This will be found difficult as the African does not understand the meaning of vitamins. He usually likes the more pungent vegetables. Onions, potatoes, cabbage and spinach in limited quantities are recommended.

1lb of sugar per head per week.

1lb of dried peas or beans. These the African does not like. He will always prefer ground nuts, which are usually obtainable. For some months green mealies are available and could be provided.