The closer Christmas got, the more I missed all the traditions of our large family get-togethers in dead of winter, the piles of presents that mounted on the big table on the landing, the dog-eared but much loved decorations we strung across the hall, the appearance of spare uncles and aunts, so that by the day itself we might easily be ten or more for Mum to cater for. Perversely I even started to miss the chill of a dark English winter day. Here in the hot sun that appeared between downpours, it felt ridiculous to be sweating over the stirring of a heavy Christmas pudding, or icing a fruit cake, though I did, unsure what to replace them with. I became set on making our first married Christmas as social as we could, and in an effort to settle in to the local community, we invited to drinks not only the few couples we could now call friends, but also some we hardly knew at all. Mark made an enormous and powerful wine cup, I laid on the nibbles – and alas, most of them simply did not come, citing when I phoned them vague and unconvincing excuses. I felt mortified, my pain more acute from having learned at boarding school the importance of being popular and in the thick of things, to stave off homesickness and isolation. Now, instead, I felt more lonely than ever. Of course in my letter home I didn’t mention my feelings at all, just that the cup put the remaining few of us ‘swiftly on our ears’ and that after a huge scrambled egg at 9 we sent them reeling off into the night.
No health warnings for pregnant women in those days: I happily drank as much as everyone else – which was, by today’s standards, quite heavily. Both beer – the local Castle and Lion lagers – and wine and spirits from South Africa were cheap. My favourite sundowner was brandy and ginger ale. Similarly, cigarettes cost little, made of course from local tobacco and all tasting much the same. We favoured State Express as being classier than Gold Leaf or Pall Mall, at around 1/10d for 30. At the budget end, for the African market, came Star at 2d. for eight.
The airmail service was surprisingly speedy in those days, and my letter wishing the family a happy Christmas was written on Sunday 17 December and posted next day:
I am sure you can easily believe that we would love to be there too, in fact were only saying so in wistful tones at breakfast this morning. Everyone here gets very homesick for snow, log fires and so on – carefully leaving out the smog and drizzle. We shall either boil and wish we could have fruit salad instead of plum pudding if only it didn’t feel wrong, or be trapped by tropical downpours and wonder if we could manage at least the log fire bit after all.
In the event I need not have worried about loneliness, my post-Christmas letter giving a full account of our packed programme. We made the best we could of our limited budget, decorating the house with a small conifer felled from a vacant neighbouring plot and triumphantly conjuring homemade decorations for 10/-. We had also begun to get involved in Gwelo’s only Anglican church – we were both regular churchgoers then. It was an anchor of sorts in a new place, a way of entering the local community, and apart from the fact that the building was new, modern and light, felt little different to worship in from the parish church at home. I don’t recall ever seeing a black face in the congregation. After much discussion about the risk of my fainting during a service, we opted to avoid the heat and go to Christmas Eve midnight mass (I sitting throughout near the door) – a wise decision as it turned out, because Christmas Day dawned cloudless and exceptionally hot. We opened the mountain of bulgy brown paper parcels with their green customs labels I had studiously avoided reading. Baby clothes mainly, for me, and a fine edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion from Pa, which I have to this day. There were records – LP’s – of much missed classical music, a silk tie for Mark, and my mother, typically, had even remembered Daniel:
Daniel was thrilled with the shirt you sent, he said we must write and thank you but I am hoping to get him to write tonight, to enclose with this. We gave him a pair of brown canvas shoes and yellow socks which pleased him too. I don’t think Christmas meant an awful lot to him, but he slaved on Christmas Day and then had all Boxing Day off, so was quite happy.
He did indeed manage the letter, respectfully written on a sheet of company notepad: [see next page].
(The expression ‘smart shart’ remained an affectionately remembered expression in my parents’ household for years.)
It was not surprising that the limited education Daniel had received, and of which he was very proud, had been at a mission school. Successive white administrations had not considered educating the native to be a priority and had left it where it had started – with the missionaries. It took nearly 50 years for Rhodesia’s administration to open the first state primary school for black children in 1944, followed four years later by the first secondary school. By 1950, according to Lord Blake’s A History of Rhodesia, there were 12 government schools, compared to 2,232 mission and independent schools. Gradually this number grew; however, it was not until after independence that vocational colleges, polytechnics and other higher education establishments were developed in any number, to meet the great hunger for education, and the demands of industry for commercial and industrial qualifications.
By mid-morning on our first Christmas Day, I wrote home later, we were at one couple’s for morning tea, another’s for a cold lunch, and in the evening after a siesta, Mark and I began preparing the dinner, which was quite a labour. We had turkey, ham and all the trimmings, with iced Vichyssoise first, and plum pudding with Mark’s knockout brandy butter after – a goodly evening with Fran and Doug, complete with cigars and liqueurs. On Boxing Day we felt ‘slightly decayed’ but four other guests came for morning tea, the men ending up playing cricket on the hard-baked lawn. By evening we were celebrating the first rain for weeks, as we went out to another couple’s buffet supper.
It is a wonder all this did not bring me into labour, but it didn’t. The post-Christmas anti-climax came and I felt huge and clumsy, especially in the heat. Naively I believed that my baby, officially due on 1 January, would arrive on time, but ‘Bert’, as s/he was nicknamed, stayed comfortably put. I became increasingly impatient, not convinced that this pregnancy would ever end. In search of a change of scene, we took to going for drives: a lovely drive to Selukwe in the afternoon, where there is a sudden change to quite spectacular scenery. It isn’t really a great treat for Mark to go driving at weekends, but I hadn’t seen anything round here except Gwelo itself – most of the roads are so bad he won’t take me anyway at the moment.
It is time I explained about the roads. Around town, and on the main road between Bulawayo and Salisbury, you could rely on a fair width of tarmac. Elsewhere it was very different, as my cousin John Watson, working for Dunlop in the Central African Federation at the time, remembers:
‘The roads were of several types. The most basic was simply a clearing through the bush and, as the weather was mainly dry, the surface was dust which got everywhere, up your nose, into your hair and clothes. Most frustrating was to get behind a slow lorry which simply condemned you to driving in a dust storm. To take a chance and overtake was to drive into the unknown and for many an impatient soul this was the very last thing they did. The next type of road was the ‘strips’. These were narrow strips of tar, set apart approximately the width of a vehicle’s wheels. If nothing was coming, you were fairly comfortable, but when another car came in sight you had to get the nearside wheels off into the dust on the left. This was often quite a hazardous procedure, but the Dunlop service engineer boasted that he had experimented with differential tyre pressures and could go on and off the strips at 80 mph (the speed limit was 50 mph). Next, there were the nine foot tar roads and now and then you could find the luxury of a road where two cars could actually pass one another without driving into the dust.’ He goes on to mention his ‘brand new beige Wolseley 6/90, no mean barouche, well able to do the ton on the excellent stretch of new road south of Northern Rhodesia’s Copperbelt’. Later on, as he settled in, he could polish off the 200 miles in under three hours, to the astonishment of his friends at the Ndola Club.
A strip road (with hitch hiker)
Eleven Spoons
On the sideboard, the canteen sits foursquare.
Silver forks and spoons nestle, each in its green baize bed, knives in the lid. Daniel polishes them
once a week with the special cloth, along with
the silver teapot and the candlesticks.
The empty space gapes like a missing tooth
in a smile – eleven soup spoons. She checks
the kitchen drawers, the sink, the garbage bin,
runs to the compost heap and rummages through rotting vegetables. It must be somewhere.
Daniel – she shows him the empty slot. Their landlady
had said Keep everything locked, you can’t trust them.
Neighbours talk of marking levels on the Gordon’s,
the sugar jar, of keeping tallies of tins. He’s looking
startled, shakes his head, No Madam, I don’t know.
It must be somewhere, Daniel. If you know, you must
tell me. She waits. He’s sweating now, but still
he shakes his head, no. She makes him help her
search each room, the flower beds by the stoep,
the compost heap again, desperate for a glint.
Daniel follows her, hangdog, past rows of mealies,
cabbages, carrots that need thinning, a sprawling
pumpkin patch. She looks at the closed door
of his kaya, back at his sweaty face. His No, Madam
is urgent now, his eyes reproachful.
She stops. Above them, a turtle dove is purring
in a musasa tree. Absently she tugs at a straggling weed.
We have to keep looking, Daniel, it must turn up.
Back in the cool of the house she closes the drawer
on the empty slot, clicks the lid down.
CHAPTER 4
‘Quite the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in
my life’
It is January 12th. I’m sitting on our shady stoep in my now well-worn sleeveless blue smock, my new friend Anne Smith beside me – beautiful, calm, reassuring Anne. She is holding her watch, saying ‘Well done – you’re down to 6 minutes between contractions now.’ Yesterday, on edge from the long wait and the heat, I convinced myself I could feel labour pains, was admitted, but it came to nothing and I was sent ignominiously home. This time feels different and I know it is for real …
Now I am in a small delivery room half-lying back on a high bed, my legs hoisted up in sort of stirrups, feeling tired from pushing, and the doctor – there are a lot of staff around – is saying something about my being too small, about forceps and anaesthetics. And even though I don’t want this, I am going …
And that’s how, at the last, I missed our son Paul’s arrival at 8.20 that evening. I woke to hear my baby’s cries but to my intense disappointment ‘he was whisked away to rest – and after the forceps they thought it would be better for me to see him all tidy.’ So Mark, who had called in to see how things were going (husbands being expected to stay well away from the birth) was first to see him, and then to reassure me of what a fine son we had. Then ‘I was meant to sleep, but didn’t manage very well, in spite of drugs etc. It was just that I was so excited to see my son and so thrilled altogether, I kept on waking up and smiling all by myself in the dark, till 5 a.m. when at last they brought him. Of course he was quite the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. I believe that in fact this wasn’ t just the maternal eye of love, but that he was fine looking as babies of that age go, since he had had only a short struggle into the world, so wasn’t a bit wrinkled or red. Mr. D – made a fine job of the forceps and there is hardly a mark to show … I just spend my time thinking how lovely he is!!
Then began ten days in the mothers’ ward, where our every moment was controlled by nurses and we lived in a strict four hourly routine. The high points were when the babies were brought to us, when I was allowed to hold my son, to nurse him, wind him, unwrap his swaddling shawl and admire his perfect fingernails and chubby clenching toes. I lived for those times, but all too soon, in a rustle of starched uniform, nurses would bear our babies away to a separate nursery. ‘ Of course whenever one of the babes in the nursery yells, everyone worries that it’s theirs being hungry, but the nurses will never tell!’ We were given lessons in bathing and nappy changing, but great swathes of time had to be passed reading magazines, thankful for visiting times – an hour in the afternoons (for friends) and evenings (mainly fathers). Mark was allowed to go down the corridor and peer at his fine son through a window, then we would gloat at how clever we had been, and he would bring me news of the outside world – of how Daniel was managing at home and of his work trips.
Why did not we mothers rise up, rebel, march down the corridor and claim our babies for ourselves? Well, because of course it was the way things were done then, best for mother and baby, we were assured. We were good girls and did as we were told.
At last the longed-for moment when Paul (still called by his pre-birth nickname of Bert) and I could go home, although unsurprisingly the regime left us, as new parents, ill-prepared for it: Daniel was on the step to greet us, and terribly thrilled to see the ‘piccanin baas’ [little master] – I’m not sure he’s so thrilled now with all the nappy-washing! At this minute I even have a fire going with nappies airing on a horse, as it’s drizzled all day, the drought broke while I was in the home, and now the garden is green and lush and full of weeds, and there’s no sun to dry the washing. – well, can’ t have it all ways! Our little Bert is very sweet and it’s lovely to have him at home, I wish you could see him, he has such a dear face.
I had known as soon as we got home that I wanted the baby in our bedroom, in his carrycot beside my bed. But here was the problem: my job was home and baby, but Mark’s was to go out and sell, to drive across his sales area making contacts, to nurture business relationships and write reports – this last being something he hated and made slow work of. He pointed out that he needed his sleep. So the baby went in his cot in the nursery, which suddenly felt a long way from our room – actually across a wide corridor and a landing that was large enough to serve as our dining room. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to hear him cry (which of course I could, perfectly well). When he was asleep I would gaze at him in wonder at his beauty. But when, during the day, he went on crying even when he had been fed and changed, when I had checked his nappy for a pin that might have come open ( Dr. Spock said I could, but that it wouldn’t have) – then I felt scared and inadequate. The first time it happened, I can remember suddenly realising, with a sense of near panic, that it was all down to me now – no nurses, no having him whisked away so I could rest. And yet here too was the loveliest thing I had ever set eyes on, our precious baby. It was an emotional roller coaster I had not expected and my anxiety leaps off the pages of those early letters home:
At night he has been very good so far, only shouting at the right time, for food. I regret to say that most of the day he yells. This I think must be wind, but I’ve tried everything, even a hot water bottle to not much avail. Apparently it will do him no harm to scream, but it harms me considerably, gets on my nerves and I can’t rest.
My new women friends rallied round of course, admiring him and assuring me over endless cups of tea that this was normal, but this only temporarily eased my distress at the baby’s crying. Did I ever
wish my mother was there to help me, not 6000 miles away? No, I am afraid I didn’t, fearful that she would have taken over, like the nurses in the home. They had never revealed whether they did any supplementary feeding between the official ones, and so whether my milk supply was adequate. A Child Welfare Sister arrived, said perhaps he is hungry, lent me baby scales for one day to check what he was getting. Of course, despite the fact that on weekly weighings he was gaining an ounce a day, I immediately decided that his crying was indeed hunger. It was all too easy to lose confidence in my own milk production and to start to supplement with a bottle.
Yet in spite of my anxieties, it is the joy I remember most vividly. There were quiet moments, just him and me together in the small hours of the night, as I carefully changed his nappy, wondering at the perfection of him. I would sit feeding him close to the open window, with the smell of warm night air heavy with rain, wind him looking out on the bush-dark night. His head would drop heavy against my shoulder, and I would stroke the soft folds of his nape, breathing in his baby scent to the pulsing shrill of cicadas.
Our attempts to keep my parents briefed on their grandson’s first few weeks were dogged with mishaps, reminding me how difficult it was in those days to keep in touch with far-off loved ones. The fastest option was a telegram, which would be phoned through to the recipient, then followed up with the tickertape strips pasted onto a form. So on 13 January they received ‘Baby born last night Amanda and son both well’ – any more would have been too expensive. A couple of days later I wrote a long letter which seems, untypically, to have taken over a week to reach them. Meanwhile my parents had sent a congratulatory telegram, but alas, no-one told us that they had also prepaid for our reply, so I responded with another (slow) letter. At last a phone call was organised: you had to book international calls to reserve your ‘slot’ on the wires so to speak, then sit and wait for the phone to ring and the operator to announce, ‘You’re through caller’. If you were cut off (which happened frequently) you must jiggle the phone hook to attract the operator’s attention and get reconnected. It was still a huge thrill though, as I wrote on our first wedding anniversary, 4 February 1962: Thank you so very much for telephoning, and I’m only sorry they kept cutting us off. Still it was lovely to hear your voices – amazing how they really sound like you at that distance … Oh dear, hearing you makes me wish we could see you all, and especially for you to see Bert, what fun it would be.
Roses Under the Miombo Trees Page 5