Roses Under the Miombo Trees Read online

  Roses under the Miombo Trees

  An English Girl in Rhodesia

  Amanda Parkyn

  Illustrations by Jayne Watson

  Copyright © 2012 Amanda Parkyn

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299

  Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  ISBN 9781783068210

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For my children and grandchildren

  Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature,

  among other creatures, in a large landscape

  Doris Lessing

  Contents

  Preface

  Part I Southern Rhodesia

  Chapter 1 Bulawayo, where everything was fresh and new

  Chapter 2 Of money, and learning to live with loneliness

  Chapter 3 Gwelo: ‘between one horse town and city proper’

  Chapter 4 ‘Quite the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life’

  Chapter 5 An unexpected visitor: of racism, language and locums

  Chapter 6 The sudden intrusion of politics and an election shock

  Chapter 7 A post-Christmas bombshell; of visits and farewells

  Part II Northern Rhodesia

  Chapter 8 Abercorn – a very particular place

  Chapter 9 ‘Its pride is its people’ – but shopping is a challenge

  Chapter 10 Nuns’ head-dresses ‘fluttering like great white birds’

  Chapter 11 Of high-kicking bunny girls, and a clarinet unpacked

  Chapter 12 Flags exchanged at midnight: of dreaded farewells and a longed-for arrival

  Postscript

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  PREFACE

  When my parents moved house for the last time in the 1980’s, my mother produced a worn leather document case. ‘You’d better have these’ she said. It contained the letters I had written home over several earlier decades, hundreds I should think. There were a few in a round, boarding school hand, along with my school reports, then from language college in Switzerland. Most, however, were from various parts of Southern Africa, blue aerogrammes, some decorated with outline sketches of Rhodesian tourist features – ‘Visit Lake Kariba‘, ‘Zimbabwe Ruins’. Rustling airmail paper emerged tightly folded from too-small envelopes covered in colourful stamps. I skim-read this collection with a mixture of curiosity and wariness, sorted them firmly into date order, filing them according to period: ‘School 1950’s’, ‘S. Rhodesia ’59 / ’61 – ’63’, ‘N Rhodesia ’63 – ’65’, ‘S Africa ’65 – ’72’ and finally ‘England ’72 onwards’. Then I put them back in their case in the bottom drawer of my bureau.

  Some years later I was reading The Dust Diaries, Owen Sheers’s intriguing memoir cum biography cum travelogue about his ancestor Arthur Shearly Cripps, a maverick missionary and poet in Rhodesia in the early 20th century. It vividly brought back for me the sights, sounds and scents of a country I had known for a few years, but also made me aware of how ignorant I still was about the country’s earlier colonial history. I soon recognised that the period in which I had lived there was also significant: for Southern Rhodesia, the die was cast in the 1962 elections for a change of government that would have drastic consequences for the country for years to come. In Northern Rhodesia I had seen the birth of the new Zambia in 1964. Perhaps, I now thought, it would be interesting to see what the letters could say about that period from the point of view of this young English woman.

  As I re-read my letters and listened to her voice, the memories I now hold of that period began to intrude, often contradicting or qualifying young Amanda’s version written for her parents. I was obliged to confront her racist attitudes born of ignorance and a certain sort of privileged upbringing. Reading books on the history and politics of the time filled some of the huge gaps in my knowledge of what had actually been going on when I lived there.

  I have sought to weave together the voice of young Amanda writing home, the memories I hold now of the time (such as I have been able to access) and my learning about the historical, political and racial context of the era, and thus to offer the reader a journey back to a long vanished era, seen through the prism of a 21st century perspective.

  Penkridge, Staffordshire, 2011

  The train rocks slightly as it trundles

  through the veld. She’s looking out on

  spindly thorn trees, fawn savannah grass,

  the punctuation mark of a fat baobab,

  its rootlike branches reaching

  to the sky’s cloudless, whitish blue.

  On the footplate between two carriages

  she can smell the dust, hear the engine’s

  sudden wailing hoot. It slows to walking pace,

  stops nowhere - but it’s somewhere, people

  have gathered, squat on hard beaten dirt,

  watch. Swollen-bellied children jostle and point.

  The engine hisses steam, pulls slowly away.

  In the first class compartment a man in khaki,

  knees tanned between drill shorts and thick

  long socks, moves to the window, unhitches

  its leather strap. He lowers it on warm air,

  smell of dust, more veld and thorn trees, more

  fawn waving grasses. ‘Better get used to that’

  he grins, ‘M M B A we call it -

  miles and miles of bloody Africa.’

  PART I

  Southern Rhodesia

  CHAPTER 1

  Bulawayo, where everything was fresh and new

  I gazed out over the distant Chimanimani mountains, a glass of Rhodesia’s best cold Castle lager in hand, the sun already burning my English winter-white skin. I was 22, just married, the year 1961. My fingers felt for the engraved pattern on my gold wedding ring, the one Mark and I had chosen in Bond Street when he had come over on leave for our February wedding. I wanted to be a good wife, to have a happy marriage, but there was no need to think about how to bring this about, for it would happen, I knew it would.

  The barman inside the Mountain Lodge hotel seemed to know what that meant. He would wink at Mark as he opened our bottles of lager, saying encouragingly ‘There – a baby in every bottle.’ I would giggle and blush and we would take our drinks onto the stoep and plan the next day: a walk in the Vumba hills maybe, or a drive to the border, maybe just more time around the pool. There I would be sure to wet my hair, dry it spread out on a towel on the lawn. I wanted to arrive in Bulawayo as blonde and as tanned as possible. I didn’t want people to think that Mark had married some pale little English girl who didn’t know the ropes. This was Africa after all, and I badly wanted to fit in.

  I knew – or thought I knew – how to do this, for I was not quite a stranger to Southern Africa: in 1959 I had been recov
ering from a back operation and my mother had thought I needed to ‘get away’. (This was to become her default strategy when any of her four children seemed to be at a loose end – send them somewhere). What a splendid idea, she thought, for me to go out to Africa to act as home help to cousin John in Lusaka, whose wife Toni was expecting their second baby. I would have been quite happy to stay in England and persuade the Foreign Office to take me back on to my clerical work in intelligence. The work itself was routine, but London life for a single girl sharing a little flat in SW3 had been enormous fun. But now Mum pressed on, letters were exchanged, and by the time my passage was booked east coast on the M.V. Warwick Castle, I had become quite seduced by the glamour of it: ‘I am off to Africa’, I would say grandly, with no idea what this would involve, beyond the fun of putting together a hot-weather wardrobe in mid-winter England. After four and a half weeks cruising south, the ship delivered me to Beira, whence I took the train via Salisbury up to Lusaka. In the event, my stay with my cousins had not lasted long, for I did not have the temperament or skills to make a very good nanny/housekeeper to a perfectionist new mother. I loved 15 month old Yvonne, but my pastry would not hold together, and I did not ensure that all the linen was washed every day. After a few weeks embarrassed cousin John said he felt obliged to ask me to leave. He offered to help me find a flat and a job, but Lusaka, though the administrative capital of Northern Rhodesia, consisted of a dusty main street ambitiously called Cairo Road, a few shops, bars and a run down hotel. Visiting politicians and business men stayed at the luxury Ridgeway Hotel well out of town. Whilst I thought about this, would I like a trip to the Victoria Falls, he asked? I would indeed, and had an unforgettable trip on a very slow train across the bush, and marvelled at a multiplicity of rainbows over the thunderous falls. But I returned feeling at a loss, unable to face going home with a sense that I had in some way failed. I had only one other contact in Southern Africa, Mark, cousin of friends at home, who lived in Salisbury. I had met him in England on his university vacations, and on my way from Beira port to Lusaka. Now, hearing my anxious tones on the phone, he leapt to my aid and drove up to fetch me in his old Morris Minor.

  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 w
as 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.