Roses Under the Miombo Trees (5 page)

Most of our entertaining was relaxed and informal, though for those given to throwing lunch and dinner parties it was easy to do well, with competent servants, spacious stoeps, pleasant, well-tended gardens, perhaps a bar by the swimming pool. Some older established residents could be quite grand: I recall a rather formal lunch party in Salisbury, with servants in whites with scarlet sashes, a perfectly risen cheese soufflé passed round, and for second helpings another one, also impeccably timed. We were not in that league of course, but with our little house full of wedding gift china, glass and silver, I felt honour bound to use them, consulting my two cook books and remembering my parents' example of how to do it. But we – and I am sure our guests – far preferred the casual, out of doors way of doing things, with a reliance on the ‘braaivleis' (barbecue), with much inexpensive meat, spicy South African boerewors sausage and salads. I soon learned to whip up a quick anglicised ‘spag. bol.' for a few friends after drinks at the company club. The South African drinks industry kept Southern Rhodesia's whites well supplied with affordable wines, brandy and ‘sherry', and their brewers had established their Castle and Lion brands of lager in the colony. (Africans, however, were forbidden access to any of these, being restricted by law to ‘kaffir beer', a brew derived from maize and sold in the townships in vast beer halls).

I don't remember our discussing whether, or when we were going to start a family. This must sound particularly odd to those who have never known a world without reliable, available birth control. I knew that sex – well, sexual intercourse, not the fun of premarital heavy petting – came after marriage. (My mother had been required to apprise me of the facts of life before I went to boarding school aged 9, and had done it well enough, memorably adding: ‘I know this may seem strange to you now, but married people enjoy it'.) The message had stuck and I had been well prepared to ‘keep myself for marriage' which, from my upbringing, meant marriage followed pretty quickly by having and raising a family. I never questioned that this was what was expected of me, giggling happily, ‘Oh, we'll breed like rabbits!', envisaging myself as Mum at the centre of a large and happy family. So in those early months of our marriage, it was as if I was waiting for pregnancy to happen to me. Yet once my body's changes told me, and the doctor had confirmed that yes, I was expecting a baby, I felt delight but also astonishment – could I really be capable of this? What a pity that the letter to my parents announcing the news of their first grandchild has been lost, along with several others during the first half of my pregnancy. Our becoming parents seemed to me like a natural development in our marriage, bringing with it the job I had been brought up expecting to do. I felt pleased with myself, enjoying the inevitable fuss and congratulations. I was fit and well, suffered little morning sickness, and ‘the bump' as we referred to it took a while to show. My only worry was the risk of twins (my father's mother was a twin) and the double demands that would bring. But reflecting on it now, and re-reading my letters with their litany of worries about making ends meet, I think that this turn of events must have been quite scary for Mark who was just setting out on his career. There was, after all, no question of my working once the baby came, so we would be dependent on his small salary.

Meanwhile I happily got on with my job, sorting out the chaotic office systems, looking after harassed Mr. Courtney, saving my salary. It was at work, bent over a filing cabinet, that I first felt deep inside me a tiny unfamiliar flicker of movement. I froze, it came again: this must be the baby, I thought, and then: but it feels like the pat of a kitten's paw. How do I know it
is
a baby? Perhaps I'm carrying kittens, even puppies? This worried me terribly for a while, though I never told anyone of my fears, my imaginings of a tiny litter. These faded with ensuing check-ups, but the baby's movements remained a huge thrill.

Then Mark was promoted. This brought both good and bad news: more money of course, progress up the career ladder. But he was to cover a new area on his own, based in Gwelo, (now Gweru), a smaller town in the agricultural midlands between Bulawayo and Salisbury. It would mean moving house only two months before the baby was due, and we knew no-one there. Worse, Mark had to take over the area weeks before our move, spending Mondays to Fridays there, our precious weekends truncated. Standing on a platform of Bulawayo's railway station early one Sunday afternoon, waiting for the train that would take Mark away from me, I felt suddenly daunted by the sudden change to our life, and utterly miserable. Back in our empty cottage, Daniel off duty till next morning, I sat down at the oak bureau Granny had given me and wrote home:
He won't be back until Saturday lunch if we're lucky. He had to go so early as he couldn't get a lift, and the later train arrived at midnight. So I saw him off in boiling sun on a totally empty train after an early lunch, and already feel he has been gone months. It was very odd having Sunday by myself, I went to evensong, and then he rang to say he had arrived safely, so that was nice. He only has this week for ‘handing over' by Dick H. so I gather they will be away most of the time in the bush, and I don't expect to hear much from him. Dick and Brenda return [to Bulawayo] next weekend, so after that M. will have to find his own way round. He is no more pleased than I am that we shall hardly glimpse each other until the end of October. But it is worth our while for me to stay at work. We hope he may find a house too, so Daniel, the furniture and I can move direct from here. However, in the meantime, the weeks are going to seem very long, though in fact I have got quite a lot to do. Also, the hot weather by now is making me want to rest quite a lot. It has been pretty warmish, and I shall be rather glad to graduate to mornings only next week.

I was heavily dependent on the idea of Daniel coming to Gwelo with us, though I don't recall asking him if he would. Perhaps for him it would just be another new place far from his Nyasaland home, and he was after all in employment, in a job with reasonable pay and conditions in the context of the time. I felt reassured that, while everything else would be strange and new, I could rely on him to help me set up another home.

We had by now made firm friends with several couples, who were a great support. John and Shirley Macdonald were proudly Scottish and one evening Shirley and I researched, in my Mrs. Beeton, how to make haggis, which she longed for. However, it required one sheep's paunch and pluck (liver, heart and lights) and once we reached …
soak the paunch for several hours in salt water, then turn it inside out and wash thoroughly
our nerves failed us and we gave up on the project.

They and many other couples were kind to me during those weeks, and another way of dealing with the loneliness was by keeping busy, always my instinctive strategy in difficult times. I can see myself now, bent over the old electric Singer, its needle clunking along the seams of a cotton skirt with a large elasticated waist. Edges were pinked – no zigzags on my sewing machine. Finally it had to be ‘full regalia' as I described it: full cotton smock tops over skirts with a large U scooped out to accommodate my growing belly, for the great thing was modesty – hide your changing shape, which was somehow indecent. This burst of sewing was one way of meeting the endless challenge of making do on very little: I would buy fabrics from an Indian wholesaler, choose a paper pattern that could be adapted five different ways, and spread it all out on the dining table. Later on baby nighties, cot sheets, curtains, all came off that old machine; nothing was bought if I could make it.

At downtown Remington's offices, I was relieved now to be working mornings only, my future replacement and I
‘working like mad things. The office is not in very good spirits just now – like many other firms we are having to economise in a big way, in fact the existence of the branch depends on the profit or loss of the next few months I gather. Consequently Mr. C is harassed, the salesmen are depressed because other firms are undercutting them, the Africans cross because their free tea has been stopped and a new Government tax imposed, and I sad because nothing seems much fun without Mark.

This was my first mention of an economic downturn which even I could not fail to acknowledge had well and truly set in, triggered by the growing political uncertainty. We all talked about it, endlessly, speculating about outcomes, telling tales of falling house prices in the best suburbs, of people who had flitted away, leaving their building society to do the best they could with an empty property. Looking back at the situation now, one might think Mark and I would have been worried for our future there, but we were not, or at least I wasn't. We had the incurable optimism of youth still on our side, and anyway as far as I was concerned, these attacks were initiated by troublemakers, and we could rely on our government to sort them out, as it had done in the past.

Immersed in my new life as I was, it was strange when, occasionally, an unexpected memory of my faraway ‘home' brought it disconcertingly close. One afternoon we were visiting Reg and Jeanette, proud owners of a television, which of course was on. We sank onto the settee for this rare treat, watching a documentary following a pair of champion British ice skaters. Here they were, practising on the Queens ice rink in Bayswater;
Oh look!
I exclaimed,
I skated there in the evenings last winter!
At that moment, among the throng of skaters I appeared, earnestly balancing my way along, coming quite close to the camera. It is the only time I have seen myself on television and it was very strange to do so sitting in that brightly sunlit sitting room thousands of miles away.

The second coincidence was more unsettling: Mark and I were walking under a shopping arcade in downtown Bulawayo, rounded a corner and came face to face with three uniformed British Army officers. I recognised one of them instantly as an old boyfriend of mine, John. Before I had left England back in 1959 for my ill-fated au pair jaunt, we had been mad for each other. But we had fallen out at a dance, with jealous accusations on his part, inarticulate embarrassment on mine, and we had never made it up. All this flashed through my mind in an instant on that hot sunny street, making my stomach lurch. I made a split-second decision to cut him dead and we walked on.

 

The Illustrated Mrs Beeton, Updated

They decide to give a dinner party – a thank-you

to kind friends. She knows how it should be done:

three courses, the table laid with silver from the canteen,

crystal glasses, candles, the monogrammed napkins.

She leafs through Mrs Beeton (the new edition, 1960).

‘
Hors d'oeuvres'
it says, ‘
present an opportunity

for the cook to show her skill and originality'
.

She remembers her mother's liver paté, served with toast.

‘
Plain roast chicken should be accompanied

by thin brown gravy, bread sauce, bacon rolls,

with watercress to garnish, and veal forcemeat stuffing
.'

She'll skip the stuffing, and veg. from the garden will do.

Black and white photos show hands making pastry, sifting,

rubbing, rolling, cutting decorative trims. Colour Plate 39

displays a lemon meringue pie, its peaks lightly gilded.

She settles for swiss roll trifle with canned apricots.

The table settings sparkle. In the steaming kitchen

Daniel in his clean whites clatters pots, as she calls

their cheery guests from the stoep. The paté cuts

neatly. Now she can sip the red her husband's poured.

He sharpens his knife with long strokes, slices of chicken

fall whitely, and now his fork probes for stuffing, pulls forth

a plastic bag of giblets. She joins in the laughter, passes

bread sauce and gravy, flees to the kitchen,

where she snaps at Daniel to hurry with the carrots.

The back door opens on black night full of the shrilling

of cicadas, a chorus of frogs, the smell of warm rain.

Suddenly she's remembering the long pale dusks of home.

CHAPTER 3

Gwelo: ‘between one horse town and city proper'

In Gwelo, weary of viewing soulless square bungalows set on small suburban plots, Mark had been networking among his new customers. Now he phoned me with news of something different, sounding excited: ‘Come up and see it, he said, it's big, and out of town, you'll love it – but we're going to have to convince the owners we can look after it properly!' On a ridge well out of the town, above a road that led to the airfield and not much else, the car crunched up a long stony drive. Here was another brick built, rectangular, iron roofed house with a long front stoep, this one much larger than our cottage, with spacious rooms on a substantial plot of land, from which no neighbouring homesteads were visible. Its owners, Mr and Mrs Cummings, were an older couple who were off to start a small farm from scratch. They gave us lunch – I remember bountiful salads from their vegetable garden – and it was clear that the place meant a lot to them. We love gardening, we said, admiring the flower borders below the stoep, the big lawn, a vegetable garden and hen run in a clearing in the bush to one side. These last were overlooked by the servants' quarters, the ‘kaya' – another, smaller, brick and iron construction. Yes please, we said, trying to look capable, we would like to rent it on a monthly basis – and where can we buy some hens?