Roses Under the Miombo Trees

by Amanda Parkyn

  Today (Monday) Mark has gone away till Thurs. night which is very dismal – Beit Bridge this time, last week it was 2 nights and I spent one night with Brenda H, a rather pale sad looking company wife with a husband quite the opposite, who is away most of every week and she gets lonely and is nervous at night. This I found I wasn’t, you’ll be glad to hear. The cottage is so compact one’s imagination can’t run riot! But the days seem rather aimless with no evening with M to look forward to, and not working yet (boring search continues). But I visit various bods like Olive T or Thelma, and even Daniel is company really. I showed him the wedding photos and he was delighted, saying how smart the baas looked, and me looking like Simon [my middle brother], and the big car, church etc etc – cries of ah and oh!

  I enjoyed his admiration as I relived our great day through the album. I wonder now what Daniel must have made of it all, the black and white photos of men in morning dress and carrying – mostly not wearing – top hats, of women in furs and hats with veils, the beribboned Rolls Royce, the awnings and marquee – all in the grey light of a cloudy English February day.

  African Wild Life

  She’d been prepared for ants, but not

  for these purposeful columns filing daily

  towards the garbage bin, penetrating

  her kitchen cupboards. They ring the jam pot,

  seethe in the sugar bowl.

  Nothing knows its place; caterpillars process

  nose to tail, their bristly bodies looping

  along the polished floor of her stoep.

  Cohorts of chongollolas – giant centipedes –

  march in black lines across the bathroom,

  up the front steps, along a window sill.

  And worst of all, at night the baleful frogs

  breach the front steps and hop towards the light.

  Perhaps, she thinks, as she watches

  the houseboy’s broom disperse them,

  they are outriders for some great army

  massing its forces out there, determined

  to reclaim its territory.

  CHAPTER 2

  Of money, and learning to live with loneliness

  Money – or our lack of it – dominated those early days, every penny counted. For example, we did not have a phone in the cottage, nor could we afford one, even though Mark was now away overnight quite often. My mother was so horrified to learn that I had to walk down the road to ring him in the evenings, unless I was staying with another lone wife, that she promptly sent us the £11 needed to have one installed. However, we soon discovered that his being ‘on the road’ actually helped our tight budget … as apart from having free car and petrol, he gets £60 imprest per month for travelling expenses, which cuts down home expenses while he’s away to almost nothing.

  I had started to scan the Bulawayo Chronicle for jobs soon after we arrived, but without a decent shorthand speed I did not come up to scratch for the numerous personal secretary posts available. I was becoming discouraged, longing to fill my days with something more than waiting for Mark to come home when, unexpectedly, I was called for interview at an American firm, Remington Rand, in a downtown outlet for their safes, typewriters and electric shavers: I was interviewed along with a lot of efficient looking women, so I never expected to get the job – but next day I heard that I had! It has the best salary I’d been offered in Byo – £50 p.m. with prospects of a rise. So today I was once more a working girl. The girl I’m replacing is staying a few weeks, so I’m learning from her – typing, telephone, filing, banking, reception – she is incredibly idle – v. Rhodesian-female type… My salary will be a help, for us to be able to save it.

  Although I knew nothing about fireproof safes or electric shavers, the work suited me rather well. My ‘hopelessly inefficient’ predecessor left me plenty of scope for organising things better, and of the two young bosses, one, Mr Brown, seemed to be permanently off sick, while pale Mr Courtney with his floppy blonde hair was constantly harried by Head Office. In the showroom were fireproof safes, typewriters and sharp, thin-faced Marlene in charge of the shaver counter. Out at the back the African employees – messengers, porters, drivers – congregated in their brown overalls, waiting for orders and laughing and talking over their tea mugs. I learned later, from one of the salesmen, that they had nicknames from the animal world for all the white staff. Marlene, he told me, was ‘the chicken’ and it suited her perfectly. ‘What’s mine?’ I asked innocently, but the sales rep looked embarrassed and would not tell me. Here, yet again, was a strange, foreign world just out of my reach, incomprehensible. I worked in an office upstairs, where Mr. Courtney came to rely on me. I wrote home happily: I seem to deal with everything and literally never let up all day, sometimes can’t make the cloakroom at all, but do enjoy it… and for me the bustling city centre gave an impression of living in a vibrant, buoyant economy. However, this was an illusion, for changes were afoot – in fact had been for some years, if only I had paid attention to the country’s recent history.

  As far back as the 1940’s the idea of a political and economic federation between the two Rhodesias and smaller Nyasaland (Malawi today) had been explored by the British Government. It saw federation as a way of protecting all three territories from falling under the influence of South Africa’s now Nationalist government and establishing a progressive form of ‘colony’. Whites described it as ‘partnership’ – meaning economic progress and rising living standards, guided for the foreseeable future by whites. For black nationalist leaders – who had never been consulted – partnership should have meant equality and a real say in their own destiny. But the British government had pressed ahead and by 1953 there were four governments, four governors, four civil services, one for each country and with the Federal ‘layer’ based in Salisbury, the whole almost entirely staffed by whites. However, it was only seven years later that Britain’s Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was speaking to the South African parliament in Cape Town in early 1960, and his words continued to echo around the Federation:

  … the most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African National consciousness… The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

  There was much talk of this speech among us whites, the fact that Macmillan had chosen to make it in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia’s great ally, somehow giving it added resonance. But I don’t recall believing that it applied to us. Surely the government had control of unruly nationalists well in hand, with a raft of new laws, the banning of the African National Congress and detention of hundreds of ‘troublemakers’? At the same time, look how petty discrimination had been eased! Blacks could go to the cinema now, enter larger hotels, send their children to private schools, apply for jobs in the civil service. The Prime Minister, Sir Edgar Whitehead, was confident that these measures would appeal to the black middle class, and that they would register to vote in elections planned for the end of the following year, and support his United Federal Party’s plans for slow – prudently slow – progress towards full democracy. All of this felt reassuring to me and I brushed aside any niggling indicators of an economic downturn, of falling confidence amongst white people.

  As if to reassure me further, a big event during our time in Bulawayo was the Central African Trade Fair. After eight years of federation Southern Rhodesia in particular had flourished economically, benefiting from Northern Rhodesia’s mineral wealth, and the trade fair – a coup for Bulawayo over its rival Salisbury – was perhaps an indication of that. I described in my letters how busy the city had become, with all business firms in a fever, and big noises coming down and chivvying poor harassed Mr C. Of course we all made much of this event, visiting the fair’s stands after work, even tasting wine: the standard is amazingly high, especially the international stands, except the Iron Curtain ones which are dreary and cheap looking. We’ve har
dly been in in the evenings for supper, usually a hamburger there. Daniel seems to hold the fort alright.

  There was much company entertaining during the fair: Mark and I played host to friends of my parents-in-law, he a retired director of the company, taking them out to the Matopos. On the back of this we got invited to cocktails at the company’s fair stand: I wore my going away suit – a great success. A v. smart do on the lawn, full of v.i.p.’s and ending up dinner for 12 at the Fair’s Grill Room. Felt a bit decayed today!

  I feel a pang of regret now that I did not keep that going away suit, made for me in a very light, sapphire blue wool, with a stand-away collar and three quarter sleeves and lined with a patterned blue silk matching the blouse beneath. I like to believe it would have looked good even now, 45 years later.

  Life settled into a happy routine, my job keeping me mercifully occupied during Mark’s many absences. Daniel kept house far better than I could have done, with floors, furniture and our wedding silver polished to a high shine, the vegetable patch productive. If Mark was away for more than two or three nights, I would stave off loneliness by spending one with one of the other young wives also on her own. At weekends we had started to work on the garden and were slowly creating more basic storage to meet the demands of our enormous stock of wedding presents. My father’s old Consular Service tin trunk made a fine linen press at the end of our bed, standing on a wooden base run up by Mark and with my newly sewn patchwork cover. Mark demonstrated how easy it was to make bookshelves out of planks of sapele mahogany and clean bricks. And as we socialised more and more, playing tennis, golf, bridge, swimming, eating with friends, as my tan darkened and my hair bleached in the sun, I began to feel I belonged – that I fitted in, no longer seen as a despised English ‘rooinek’ [red-neck], those ignorant Brits overseas who ‘don’t understand the situation over here’. I was becoming adept at picking up the Southern African twang, the ‘ja’ for yes, the ‘ag man’ (pronounced ‘ach men’) with ‘men’ used on men, women and children alike. I enjoyed using some of the pithy phrases lifted from the Afrikaans, but I did not trouble myself with learning any words in the local language.

  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 r
easonable 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.