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‘The British Government', he went on, ‘is taking rather long about getting you to Serowe. Please consult with your legal adviser about this situation.' Seretse alone, he said, could give her ‘the necessary comfort to relieve her of the mental tensions and strains that have been her lot for so long. I consider that your coming back is quite imperative, and that too as soon as possible.' He added in a postscript, ‘It is impossible for Mrs Khama to do any travelling whatsoever in her position and not for any distance either.'
²¹

Dr Moikangoa also communicated his concerns to the High Commissioner's Office and told Clark that Ruth had threatened suicide unless Seretse came quickly. This worried Clark. ‘Even discounting hysterical outburst,' he told the High Commissioner, ‘there is reason for thinking that at one time at least in her pregnancy her physical health has not been good.'
²²
In London, too, British officials were starting to feel anxious. ‘You will see from the press,' sneered a senior official at the Commonwealth Relations Office to a colleague, ‘that it is now argued that Seretse should be allowed to go to see his wife at once because the lady is pining away through his absence.' Then he added nervously, ‘How easily we may be squeezed into a general retreat from the decisions in the White Paper!'
²³

The High Commissioner's Office decided to send the Director of Medical Services, Dr Mendi Freedman – a white doctor working for the Government – from Mafikeng to Serowe, to see Ruth. But she refused to see him. She had no wish to see a doctor she didn't know, she said, and had received a telegram from Seretse that morning, telling her not to submit to any medical examination. She also refused to see Dr Gemmell, the Senior Government Medical Officer at Serowe.
²⁴
Dr Freedman was annoyed. ‘If Mrs Khama were really ill,' he argued,

she would have no hesitation in seeing me. If, however, she were medically fit, she would take steps to ensure she were not ‘found out' and would not submit to a medical examination as she might erroneously believe that this might prejudice the chances of Seretse being permitted to visit Serowe.

He asked Dr Moikangoa to persuade her to see him. But Dr Moikan-goa soon returned, saying that Mrs Khama still refused a visit from the director. ‘I left Serowe the same evening without having seen Mrs Khama,' reported Dr Freedman to Mafikeng.
²⁵
He added that in the opinion of Dr Moikangoa, Ruth was not in a fit state to undertake even a train journey to Lobatse. But, added Dr Freedman, he had had a chat with the Serowe district commissioner, who had ‘expressed the opinion that there were valid reasons for doubting the “bona fides” of Dr Moikangoa in this matter, and that his medical report was very probably biased by his political opinions'. A copy of Freedman's report was sent to Clark by Nettelton, with the comment, ‘This seems a fairly good sample of doublecrossing on the other side.'
²⁶

At the very least, reasoned Baring, Dr Moikangoa's reports had been exaggerated. After all, Ruth had recently driven from Serowe to Mahalapye.
²⁷
Nevertheless, he started to worry. ‘It is clear that [an] early visit by Seretse would help allay her anxieties,' he wired the CRO. ‘This may be bluff but Resident Commissioner thinks there may well be something in it.'
²⁸
His attitude to Ruth was calculating and ruthless: he assumed that whatever she did was political. His own wife had given birth to three children, so he must have had some idea of the risks and discomforts involved. Moreover, he himself suffered badly from problems with his liver, so he knew what it felt like to be vulnerable physically. But he had no sympathy for Ruth: he had lost sight of her as a human being.

Sir Evelyn was also afraid that Ruth was planning to bring her sister Muriel to Africa. For one thing, the prospect of having to deal with yet another young woman from the Williams family appalled him. For another, he had heard a rumour that ‘Seretse's closest supporters hoped that Ruth would be successful in her efforts [to bring Muriel] as this would give them an opportunity to emulate Seretse's successful wooing.'
²⁹
There was no foundation whatsoever for this rumour, but Baring was predisposed to believe it and it frightened him.

It was true that Muriel had hoped to join her sister and support her in her pregnancy. But she was unable to raise enough money for the long and expensive journey to Serowe.
³⁰

Ruth was missing Seretse badly. Their only means of contact was by letter: ‘Easter came and went. Still there was no news of Seretse
being allowed to visit me.'
³¹
She ‘paced the veranda of her home overlooking the Bechuanaland bush,' reported the
Sunday Express
, ‘and said with anger in her voice: “When is this waiting for my husband going to end? It is torture.”'
³²
She
could
have gone to Lobatse, to join Seretse – and the Administration were keen for her to do this.
³³
But as Dr Moikangoa insisted, it would have been risky for her to make the journey. In any case, it would have been very unpleasant for Ruth to give birth in Lobatse Hospital, as she would be surrounded by hostility. She had been told that the hundred or so Europeans living in Lobatse had objected to the idea of Seretse living near them. They had made so many threats against him that Nettelton had even found a private farm several miles outside the town – so that if things got too bad, Seretse could be moved there.
³⁴

As she waited to hear whether Seretse would be allowed to visit her, Ruth prepared their home for the new baby. The women of the village watched anxiously as she drew closer to term, doing everything they could to help. ‘Ruth is our Queen,' said one older woman to a reporter. ‘We and our children will stay with her and die with her. Her child will be our child.'
³⁵

Finally – and grudgingly – Baring decided to let Seretse visit Serowe. ‘I felt that given the anxiety of pressmen to be present at Seretse's first meeting with his wife,' he reported to London, ‘we would lose more than we would gain by withholding permission.'
³⁶
The visit was granted for five days: from Sunday 16 April to Thursday 20 April. The climax to Seretse's long wait took place on 15 April in the High Court at Lobatse: Nettelton tip-toed into the tense atmosphere of a murder trial and handed Fraenkel, who was the defending counsel, a copy of the permit allowing Seretse to visit his wife. As soon as Seretse was given the news, he packed hurriedly and ran out to Peto's lorry, planning to reach Serowe by midnight – so that he wouldn't waste a single moment of the precious time he was allowed with Ruth.
³⁷

Seretse was followed by the inevitable pressmen and also by Monsarrat, who never forgot the journey:

The heat, the dust, the bumpy ride, and the sheer hard work of that drive have stayed in my memory until this day. The [car] left behind it a towering yellow cloud of dust, but the stuff was everywhere – eyes, ears, nostrils, hair,
and neck-band… Towards dusk on the first day, I ran over an enormous boa-constrictor which was slithering across the road.

Then the car hit a bump and was thrown into the ditch: ‘There was no traffic; just the dust, the heat, a few vultures weaving overhead… I was stranded on the edge of the Kalahari. All I could think of was that boa-constrictor.' He was eventually rescued by an old man driving an ox-cart, who ‘raised his bee-hive hat with great courtesy' and then, without a word, pulled him out of the ditch and towed him the last nine miles to Serowe. ‘If anyone is making out an itinerary,' added Monsarrat, ‘a span of eight oxen towing a 2½-litre Riley with no brakes and a broken transmission does 1½ miles an hour.'
³⁸

A few minutes after midnight, Seretse arrived in Serowe. ‘My wife was waiting up for me,' he recalled later:

She must have spotted me first, for when I brought the truck I was driving to within 500 yards of where she stood, she began running toward me, stumbling, half-crying, half-laughing like an overjoyed child.

It was all he could do ‘to hold back the tears of knowing what she must have had to live through'.
³⁹
As the truck stopped, reported
The Times
, ‘she opened the door and flung herself into her husband's arms'. She clutched at his sleeve in the darkness, sobbing, as he drove the last short distance to their home. As they arrived, there were joyful shouts of ‘
Pula!
' from the men and women who had been waiting outside their house since early evening. Family and friends surged towards the door of the house to greet Seretse and he, with one arm closely embracing Ruth, joyfully shook their hands.
⁴⁰

He had accepted the conditions put on his visit: that he would not obstruct the Administration and that he would not hold or attend any public gatherings. Even so, he and Ruth had to endure constant observation by plain-clothes policemen from the moment of his arrival.
⁴¹
Seretse had been instructed to report to the District Commissioner as soon as he arrived. But Ruth was his priority and he stayed with her. Next morning, he and Ruth arrived at MacKenzie's office at 11.20 a.m. The DC was frosty. He had been very annoyed, he told Seretse, to hear that he had been seen talking to a group of men at Mahalapye.
⁴²
But as Seretse reasonably pointed out, he could
hardly help people gathering round and greeting him.
⁴³
Then MacKenzie announced that the Kgotla in Serowe was strictly off limits. Seretse was now thoroughly exasperated. It was customary for men to go and sit there, he pointed out, as part of the daily routine of the village. But he was flatly forbidden to go anywhere near the kgotla.

Wherever he went, Seretse was greeted by crowds of people, many of them weeping.
⁴⁴
As soon as his green Chevrolet was seen, people gathered around, some of them climbing to the tops of huts to get a better view. There were happy calls of greetings and many women danced around the car. Others touched Seretse's arm and kissed his wife's skirt.
⁴⁵
‘The reception he got from his people,' said Ruth,

was tremendous. Each day hundreds and hundreds of Africans trekked to our house. I saw them coming for miles in the distance. The women, especially, were wildly excited, dancing around weeping and making their traditional greeting of ululation.

After these demonstrations, she pointed out, ‘no one could possibly doubt Seretse's popularity'.
⁴⁶
But Seretse was aware of the risks involved. On Monday, when a crowd of about 400 people collected at his house, he warned gently that if this were to happen again, his visit to Serowe would be immediately cut short.

On Wednesday afternoon, the head teachers of the five schools in Serowe brought their pupils to the Khamas' house, ‘to greet the chief and to sing'. Irritably, Monsarrat watched the start of the event from a police truck; he then went to the top of a hill, to get a better view. Contingents from the various schools started to collect and to move along the route together; groups of adults also arrived, by car or lorry, by foot, or on horseback. By 3 p.m. everyone was assembled and Monsarrat estimated that, altogether, there were 1,200 children and 300 adults. At 3.05, he reported,

Ruth and then Seretse appeared from the side door of the house, and sat down in the centre of a row of chairs. The audience closed in round them, calling to them. At 3.15, after a number of short speeches, an entertainment began, the various groups of children taking it in turns to sing. Subsequent police reports, after I had left, indicate that at the close of the proceedings
Seretse made a short speech, thanking the children for their efforts and for coming along.
⁴⁷

‘This seems to me,' complained Monsarrat sourly to Clark, ‘like a press-promotion: it will have good photographs, a heart-rending story, and tears in Ruth's eyes as she pats a tiny head. But it seemed to us that it could hardly be forbidden, except at the risk of making us look ridiculous.'
⁴⁸

Seretse went back to Lobatse on 21 April. The visit had been for only a few days, said Ruth, ‘but how precious those days seemed to us! We had been apart for two and a half months.'
⁴⁹
And now, once again, they were apart. This time, it was even more painful: they would have to wait separately for the birth of their baby at the beginning of June, just over one month away. The Administration heaved a sigh of relief when Seretse left Serowe and congratulated themselves on their success at controlling the situation.
⁵⁰
As far as Monsarrat was concerned, the visit had been ‘a series of pin-pricks, small in themselves, adding up to an annoying total'; for the full five days, he added, Seretse had been ‘an uncooperative nuisance'.
⁵¹
In fact, Seretse had been remarkably cooperative – and it was this that had kept Serowe peaceful. If he had called for any kind of demonstration against the British, it would have happened at once.

In the early weeks of May, Seretse started to collect evidence for his lawsuit against Tshekedi. He went on a tour of his cattle-posts with Michael Fairlie, who had also accompanied Tshekedi. ‘I had not met him before,' recorded Fairlie, ‘and, to my surprise, in view of the provocation he had suffered, I found him friendly and genial.' They drove in a convoy, in two lorries: Seretse was in the lead, with a dozen or so helpers. A compassionate man, Fairlie felt ‘slightly embarrassed at having to supervise another person in the conduct of his private business'. It was ideal weather for touring: the start of the winter season, when the days were bone-dry and warm under a clear blue sky. In the evenings, Seretse chose a campsite for himself and his followers and Fairlie parked his lorry about fifty yards off. Some years later Fairlie wrote: