Roses Under the Miombo Trees

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 20
^th
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 21
^st
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 recovering 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.