Roses Under the Miombo Trees (9 page)

Lily's relatives came to the city to work, for there was no employment back in the rural so-called ‘homelands'. But they could only stay if they could get and keep a permit to do so, for this was South Africa under apartheid – separateness – rigorously maintained as a way of life. Mark and I perceived it as far more draconian than the separateness of Southern Rhodesia, although in truth this may have been largely because it was so visible. ‘Whites Only' signs designated everything from the best beaches to post office counters to park benches. But all this was what was often called ‘petty apartheid'; less obvious to us but far more profound in its effects was the Group Areas Act, which designated where you might live according to your racial classification (itself hedged about with a raft of laws).

Under this system Lily had a permit to work in Cape Town, returning to her family home in the Eastern Cape only on her annual leave. This arrangement was precarious for blacks: if your permit was withdrawn for any reason – and that threat was ever present – then back to the ‘homelands' you must go.

I am greatly oversimplifying this whole elaborate legislative edifice. Apartheid's tentacles spread into every crevice of your life for good or ill, and for us whites, it was a comfortable and privileged life indeed. So it was small wonder that the African National Congress had resorted to abandoning its policy of non-violence, forming a military wing, Umkhonto-we-Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). We did not know it then, but Nelson Mandela had, two months before our visit, slipped secretly out of South Africa in search of support from other African nations for the armed struggle which nationalists now saw as inevitable, all other means of negotiating with the government having been met by ever harsher legislation.

My parents-in-laws' life ran to a well organised routine, Dad with his business interests, a governor of the University of Cape Town, steward at one of the two racecourses, Mother running a tight ship with Lily and organising their social life. By Dad's Lazeeboy recliner lay Chambers Dictionary and a thesaurus for tackling crossword puzzles. Before lunch, Dad with his pipe and Mother with eyes narrowed against the smoke from her cigarette had a pink gin – ‘Gordons, with a lot of ice,' Dad would boom at waiters – and in the evening ‘Bells whisky with a little water, no ice!'. They both played a mean hand of bridge and had respectable golf handicaps.

It is often said that the Western Cape isn't truly Africa, and it's true that it has a quite different feel to it from the high expanses of savannah, the semi-deserts further north. With its long dry summers and almost all the rain falling over the temperate winter months, it has a Mediterranean climate. The bush has given way to the high, pointy mountain range over which the first settlers took their ox wagons, heading north: below, from Sir Lowry's Pass, is the gleaming curve of False Bay and the pointing finger of the Cape Peninsula. That summer, with the cool shade of the oak trees, the vivid blue of agapanthus flowers on their long stems rising above begonias and busy lizzies in Mother's garden, it did indeed feel as if we had flown to a different continent.

All this was pleasantly familiar to me from our pre-engagement visit, as we arrived exhausted with our baby, and oh! what a relief it was to share responsibility for the baby with Mark now he was on leave, and with an eager but tactful granny. Mark discovered accidentally that if put down on his front, Paul went instantly to sleep – a practice forbidden now as a possible cause of cot death, but a life-saver for us thereafter. Soon Paul – we had managed to stop calling him Bert – was into a well organised routine, sleeping in a borrowed pram under the oaks, cooed over by Lily and shown off to family friends. Delicious meals appeared only too regularly (‘we shall neither of us lose weight' I half-complained in a letter home). Mark and I socialised with his old friends (two of them to be Paul's godfathers) and their wives. We even managed a little tennis and the odd nine holes of golf, for which I had no aptitude, but which, because Mark loved it, was a good way of spending time with him.

Paul was christened in Cape Town – a proper ‘do' at St Thomas's church, where he slept soundly as streams of water were poured over his head by the vicar. Then:
‘There was tea complete with lovely cake adorned with stork carrying hammock, and lots of Veuve Cliquot '55 (or was it '53?) which went down well
. ‘ Gifts ranged from silver napkin rings (3) and a silver mug, to Winnie the Pooh and Beatrix Potter books.

Then, quite suddenly it felt, our lovely, reviving break was over: ‘
we felt most depressed to leave Cape Town, and didn't at all relish the idea of coming back here. We fitted in a final swim and golf before we left, but became quite melancholy. After a night's stopover in Bulawayo, showing off our growing son to friends, we drove up here yesterday afternoon, arriving in pouring rain as in Nov. to find Daniel all geared up and cheerful, and everything in order. A lot of veg. are coming on now, but we have to start planting winter flowers…
Then, as the reality of life in Gwelo sank in, a little cri de coeur:
‘Mum, have I any winter clothes left with you, as I really must get geared up for the cold here which I dread, and have no vests or warm dresses etc… anything would be welcome.
'

Amongst the waiting post, including parcels of ‘tiny and not so tiny garments' from friends in England, was the big baby book my mother had kept, first for me (the eldest) at one end, and then from the back for my first brother Will. I avidly compared Paul's progress with mine and Will's. The tiny photos I stuck in his book seem little better in quality than those of me in 1938/39 and scarcely more numerous, the first ones taken by his godfather Skip at the christening and only arriving in Gwelo in May. What a contrast to the blizzard of digital images instantly available to us nowadays after every important event! It must have been particularly hard for my parents, having to imagine their grandson with the aid of my, and my mother-in-law's letters.

With Paul growing apace, feeding and sleeping well, the household now got into a new, better ordered routine. On weekdays Mark was off early, either to the depot, or into ‘the bundu' to visit farming customers, and often home late too, having stopped off at the club for ‘a beer or three' on the way back. How I hated this – the uncertainty as I waited for his car's headlights up the drive, longing to have a bit of time for us together before the next feed. But it was also a time of enormously enjoying my baby and his development, writing regular reports home of his new skills (hand to mouth, a range of vocal exercises etc) and commented:
I said to Mark the other day, it sounds to me as if Paul is getting spoilt, and he said, Well whose fault is that? So. I fear I am a bit goofy about him, I just dig that toothless grin! Daniel says he is just like the Baas (fat!) and ‘too clever and cheeky' which is v. complimentary
. Although I hated it when Mark was away, which was for at least a night most weeks, there were endless coffee mornings and tea parties with neighbouring mums, and long sessions at the sewing machine while the baby slept outside in his pram, well netted, under a tree. I made almost all of my and Paul's clothes from inexpensive cottons bought at Desai's store, along with curtains, pram sheets and table cloths. It all saved money and was one way I could contribute to our very limited budget.

Twice a week I would go into Gwelo to shop, leaving at eight so as to avoid the heat, since I had to take Paul in his carry cot. I went to Desai's with a list of everything from insect killer to zip fasteners plus all our groceries and Daniel's rations. Then on to the butcher for vast quantities of meat – enough for a daily meal for us, for Daniel and for the animals. No Rhodesian man felt he had eaten properly without a decent helping of meat, which guaranteed a thriving trade. But shopping in Gwelo was utilitarian at best and what with the baby and the hot car I was always glad to get home.

And there I learned to garden and to love it. The vegetable plot was Daniel's province, though I chose what he grew. By arrangement he got to share the proceeds and worked hard at it. Peppers, aubergines, tomatoes, root vegetables, spinach, salads, onions, Daniel's mealies (maize) – everything – in my memory at least – thrived. I wanted flowers and raised trays of seedlings, which, if they survived their first week after transplanting into the red soil, produced a riot of colour in no time. It was the same with herbaceous plants. I became friendly with a neighbour, Gill Orner, whose husband was something in the Department of Agriculture. They had two rumbustuous little boys, constantly quarrelling; perhaps they were after their mother's attention, for her real passion was her garden. Under her guidance, and with Daniel's labour for the heavy work, I created a long, deep herbaceous border, backed by a rough stone wall. Unpromising looking offcuts from Gill's stock soon grew to fill it with blazing canna lilies, six foot rudbeckias, spires of lupins at the back, then dahlias and annuals – larkspurs, a haze of white mignonette, campanulas, snapdragons … the thrill of it has stayed with me, leaving me with a lifelong eagerness to make a garden wherever I have lived.

In April 1962, with Paul three months old, my letters start to look forward keenly to a visit by my mother to see her first grandchild in a month's time. Then suddenly she wasn't coming after all. The official reason was the house move: my father was within a year of retiring from his civil service job in intelligence, and they had decided to sell our big Surrey house for an old vicarage in Cambridgeshire, which would need serious restoration work. But, sadly, there was more to her change of mind than that, as my letters reveal:
I see your point about the £240 [air fare] all spent on you, but on the other hand it does seem as if you will get a good price for the house now … I keep thinking it would be such a pity for you to miss Paul as a baby, as he certainly won't be by the time we get home. Besides we wouldn't be able to make it at all if the family should accidentally increase before then – that is a subject one just touches wood about and hopes! It would be much less if you sailed via Cape Town, plus 3 days rail to here (at least you would see some of Africa that way, if not in luxury).
Then after lots of baby news, I end plaintively ‘
DO come!'
But she wouldn't relent and allow herself the trip. (The phrase ‘touching wood' referred to the notorious unreliability of the old dutch cap for birth control. Although Mark and I had learned with interest about the new birth control pill from friends Skip and Ann in Cape Town, we were still suspicious of it, feeling that it interfered too much with the body's natural rhythm.)

My disappointment at Mum's change of mind was intense, but I coped with it by keeping busy, and making life as sociable as possible. I reported ‘
a lovely Easter not doing an awful lot'
– but going on to describe a whirl of church services (Paul left in the car under a shady tree), two tea parties, a couple for supper and bridge, and nine holes of golf on an already iron-hard course, leaving Paul with Anne, who lived nearby – oh, and
‘lots of gardening and carpentering'
! Daniel was given a day off which he spent at a Jehovah's Witnesses meeting – dismissed by me as ‘a new amusement, I fancy'. Weekends were always our best times as a couple, all the more appreciated after the loneliness of Mark's inevitable nights away from home, and now we had a new-found activity to add to gardening and my sewing, and another way of saving money. We took to renovating old furniture which I bought cheaply in town, stripping down and painting a nest of tables and a standard lamp. There are glimpses of these in small black and white photos, along with Mark's patent bookcases – planks of wood stacked on small piles of bricks, cemented for safety, length and height tailored to our library's needs. (These however were not great: I came to rely on parcels of Penguin classics chosen by my father, and thus he introduced me to many of his favourite novelists – Henry James, William Faulkner, Patrick White and others.) What we couldn't make or restore, we commissioned someone else to; a skilled carpenter at the depot made a fine cot.

Our social circle continued to grow, mainly couples with young children, always ready with support and advice, the mums with time for tea parties. Jack and Joy Crouch also lived down the road with two terribly well behaved little girls dressed in frocks smocked by Joy. Jack was a teacher in town but had also designed and built their house; they subscribed to ‘Parents' magazine, which supplemented my well-worn Dr Spock, and Joy taught me the Stork margarine fool-proof recipe for Victoria sponge. Jack it was who put Mark's name forward to be a church warden at the Anglican church, where I teamed up with Joy on the tea-and-cake roster after morning service. The Crouches also had a tennis court, made out of dead anthills. Recipe: take the finely worked red earth from several abandoned anthills, spread it, roll it and stamp it down, water and leave to bake in the Rhodesian sun, them mark out your measurements. Despite the unpredictable ball bounces, it was a great resource. We saw a lot of the Smiths, Pete a tiny, vivid almost Toulouse-Lautrec-like figure, talented and artistic, Ann taller than he, statuesque, calm and beautiful. I much admired their bungalow, the interior of which they had magically transformed into something elegant and original, against which ours seemed very ordinary. I remember too a Polish bachelor colleague of Pete's, nameless now, always good for making up numbers at poker and pontoon. It turned out to be helpful too that I had met Kay McLoughlin in the nursing home where she had twins just before Paul's arrival (watching her juggle their demands made me feel positively calm and in control!). Kay's husband Alec was the local vet, and we had just acquired an Alsatian puppy, eventually – and boringly – called Boy. He was a gentle, biddable creature, but nervous, which made him difficult to train; he needed more patience than I had got for the task, and Mark was seldom free to give him the time it needed. Boy played endlessly with Twist the half Siamese kitten, who later when Paul was old enough to play on a rug, became a great favourite.