I was now busy with staff training, having sacked Bourdillon in exasperation after some last misdemeanour. Jiff matter-of-factly explained to me that by now I would have a poor reputation with any available local workforce as an impatient “cheeky madam”. Why not, she suggested, train up Uelo, whom I got on with and who was bright enough to learn all I needed? And she and Alan could recommend a piccanin – a young lad I could train up in the garden, who had done some work for them and was keen to learn. It worked a treat; soon Uelo could do ‘ far more than Bourdillon ever could’ and young Friday was ‘a great success in the garden, chasing Paul with the hose while watering, pushing him on his trike and learning to do the endless nappy ironing’. I remember them both as bright, cheerful lads, always good-tempered and, like Daniel, able to deflect my impatience with reassuring smiles.
We had now been in Abercorn a year, felt settled in the little community, where we had made good friends. How fortunate we were, I think now, to have lived in that small but vivid world at that particular time! We wives and mothers especially, unencumbered by much in the way of domestic chores, could pursue whatever projects we fancied, our children playing together as we socialised. The club, still largely unaffected by the forthcoming prospect of multi-racial membership, flourished. Mark was now chairman of the golf section, playing well and busy organising matches with visiting teams. I was now secretary of the main club and active in the yacht section: with two children I had had to give up any pretence of being a golfer, but with the yacht club’s safe play area for children, and friends to keep an eye on Caroline in her carrycot, I now felt I could give free rein to my recently developed passion for sailing. I loved everything about it: the excitement of hanging out by your toes in the teeth of a high wind, pushing the boat to its limits, the rush of activity at ‘Ready about! – lee-o!’, the boom swinging over and the scramble to trim the sails. On quieter days, inching the boat along in the lightest of breezes, you had time to chat with your sailing partner, to notice your shoulders burning and wish you had put on a shirt over your bikini, to hear other voices across the water, a snatch of a Bob Dylan song blowing in the wind perhaps, or a burst of laughter. I surprised myself with my competitive streak, the low cunning I could employ to steal another boat’s wind when the breeze died. Competitive sailing took place on Sundays, so that Mark missed every alternate one, but at the club we minded each others’ children, took turns to skipper and crew, the wives to produce lunch. As well as couples with young families there were also agreeable bachelors about, including smiling Colin Carlin who always seemed to be around, ready as a sailing partner or to lend the little boat he had built. To have the little lake, spring-fed and free from the liver fluke that caused the debilitating disease bilharzia, to have the use of the dinghies, Enterprises and Graduates mostly, free with club membership – what extraordinary good fortune! (Much later I watched sailing on an English midlands reservoir, saw how cold it was, learned how expensive, and sensed that my sailing days were over). There was the on-going fun of a social life with a wide variety of friends, mostly our age with young families. (I say ‘variety’, but of course all of them were white – European, as we called ourselves, although many had never lived in Europe, or not for decades.) Life, at least on the surface, was busy and enjoyable.
Fun, busy, enjoyable – yes, life was all of those things, but as in any marriage other factors were also in play. There were the pressures of Mark’s job, which not only took him away so much, but was also far from head office and which became increasingly burdensome to him. I felt sympathetic but helpless as he complained about the lack of support, and how this meant he had to be always sending telegrams, phoning (not easy, lines were often down) and even writing – never his strong suit. At the same time we were frequently inundated with visitors and the need to entertain them. I can see now the resulting stress affected our respective health in different ways.
Hon. Sec. Abercorn Club, photo courtesy Horizon magazine, where it was captioned:
Amanda L –, secretary of Abercorn Club, and leading member of its yacht section, believes
that Abercorn has it all. ‘You just cannot be bored here’ she says.
Mark could not sleep and was ‘ drinking more than is good for him’ as I put it in a letter home. Fortunately our doctor, Chris, managed to convince him to cut down his drinking, and to get exercise, but Mark would not allow him to request the company to let him have sick leave, which would certainly have led to a black mark on his file. I meanwhile was coping with the unwelcome re-emergence of my ‘bad back’ problem – a traumatic development for me, given the surgery I had had aged 19, and my memories of the way it had put my life on hold. It first ‘went’ while Mark was on a 10 day stint at Head Office on a course (‘too much lifting while he was away – no more lifting ever again’, I wrote, unrealistically.) At first I tried a borrowed infrared lamp for strained sacro-iliac muscles. As the pain became more acute Chris offered me bed rest, which I felt was impossible, or a plaster cast to keep me from bending. This last proved both uncomfortable and entirely ineffective. There were of course no local services like physiotherapy, no Pilates exercise classes or chiropractic, which have helped me so much in recent years. Eventually, and distinctly unwillingly, the company agreed to arrange for me to see the only orthopaedic surgeon of any repute, who was down in Salisbury – a lengthy trip which would have meant leaving the children for some days. I postponed this, hobbled along trying unsuccessfully to do less, finally managing to order by mail from the Copper Belt a support corset, which helped enough for me to decide not to press for the Salisbury trip. I learned, many years later, the extent to which my back could ‘go’ as an expression of my need for greater support somewhere in my life. Then of course I was just a young wife and mum worrying about my husband, determined to keep things going at home and, being me, wanting to be part of whatever was going on in the community.
Woman’s Own, 1964
The oven’s on as low as it will go,
children asleep. She glances at her watch.
Soon surely? She flips a magazine.
In between The Perfect Pedicure
and Casseroles for Chilly Days, she’s drifted
to Kensington, the basement flat she shared
with friends. They’d window shop the Brompton Road,
full skirts swishing over net petticoats,
in short white gloves. They’d pass around the latest
hags’ mags, Woman’s Own or Woman, read
them on the tube. Last thing she’d settle in
with the short stories, four per issue, lost
in fragile love first glimpsed as pulses raced,
in heart stopping quarrels and misunderstandings,
chewing a nail until at last a head
could rest on a tweedy shoulder. Better yet,
he’d cup a tearful face between strong hands
and breathe, ‘I love you – you are all I need’.
Crunch of tyres on gravel, headlights rake
the curtains. Thank God. She spoons stew onto plates,
pictures a Saturday picnic by the lake
till he calls: The golf match starts at eight.
CHAPTER 11
Of high-kicking bunny girls, and a clarinet
unpacked
By now the pace of change was accelerating, with independence only a few months off. Soon after Africa Freedom Day came the company’s demand that Mark organise a multi-racial cocktail party during a visit from the Chairman: About 20 people, we are instructed. Trouble is there are v. few Africans here important or civilised enough to ask, but it is to keep the 2 clerks company, and one of the chaps from Tanganyika is I think Indian or something … the company’s Tanganyika G.M. is also coming – they are obviously going to consult at Mpulungu on petrol supplies – M. is going to have to hire a bus to get them down there. We racked our brains for local Africans to invite, and John Carlin at the Lake Press printed little invitations, offering to atten
d himself ‘as an ancient monument of local interest’. As I welcomed them – mostly men who had chosen to come without their wives – I felt awkward and inhibited, for I had never socialised with Africans. I could chat up the company chairman with ease, but these men, for me, came from some unknown world and I had no idea where to start. I watched friends whose daily lives in government service or in business involved mixing with Africans at all levels, saw them comfortably chatting and joking with them. I envied but did not know how to emulate them. Still, the party and the trip to Mpulungu seemed to go off well enough for Mark to feel he had earned some brownie points with the big boss.
In our local paper, ‘Cornelius’ – the name always reminded me of the wise old elephant in the Babar children’s books – now ruminated on issues such as the wisdom of a stand-alone currency for the country based only on copper and its unpredictable market fluctuations. My letters continued to grumble about deteriorating postal services (though not our local Post Office, run most efficiently by its new African manager), and of how shops no longer catered for Europeans. The Gamwell sisters had put their estate, Chilongolwelo, on the market – a great blow as they were such significant figures in our little community – and one by one, couples who were our good friends were selling off unwanted possessions and heading back to Europe or elsewhere. For many others there was the likelihood, or at least the possibility, of their jobs being ‘Zambianised’. We busied ourselves with sailing, bridge evenings, supper with friends, the respective sections of the club setting up competitions and tournaments. But change and uncertainty permeated all our conversations.
No matter: as if in a communal act of insouciance against all these winds of change, the yacht section of the club now planned its biggest fundraising event ever – the Commodore’s Ball, for it needed funds for the upkeep of the boats. Someone had had the bright idea of writing an appeal to Lord Abercorn in Scotland, after whose forebear, the Chairman of the British South Africa Company who took over its administration in 1895, the town had been named. Not surprisingly this had been unsuccessful. Now we wanted to rival the tennis section’s ‘grand weekend event’ held the previous year, when record sums had been raised at a ball and cabaret.
The star attraction on that occasion had been ‘Miss Pamela the Tassel Tosser’. It was rare for a female entertainer to be prepared to come as far as Abercorn, let alone unaccompanied, and word had spread to the furthest outlying homestead, attracting large numbers of single men in the area. Male members not seen for years appeared. To the strains of her taped music (on ‘a tape-recording apparatus kindly provided by Mr Marbus of the Electricity Corporation’, as our paper reported) Miss Pamela had swayed and twirled, tossing the four long silky tassels attached to her breasts and buttocks. A finale in which tassels fore and aft, right and left, spun in opposite directions had brought a standing ovation from the men, and left us women wondering how on earth she did it (or as our reporter had put it, had ‘greatly impressed … especially, it seems, the ladies who particularly appreciated the difficulties she so skilfully overcame’). On our way home Mark and I and Chris Roberts had dropped in at the Bowmakers for a nightcap. While Chris tried to remember his anatomical training and sketched diagrams trying to work out which muscle tweaked where, Jiff and I had shrugged our shoulders and clenched our buttocks and collapsed defeated in fits of laughter.
For the Commodore’s Ball we were hoping to sell up to 80 tickets, with the hall and stage decorated in the style of South Pacific, and supper of a paella – sort of – with salads made by me I wrote home. The entertainment was to be provided in-house. It was to be a black tie and long frock affair and I got sewing immediately on a strappy number with a swirling long skirt.
Over a four-day bank holiday weekend I had plenty of time, for not only was Mark leading the Abercorn golf team in Kasama, but there was no sailing – at least not in Abercorn. The Bowmakers, Colin C and three other couples had taken four of the dinghies to Broken Hill on the Copper Belt for the national sailing championships. I felt very frustrated that we were not free to go, though much less so when they returned, with accounts of terrific gales, capsizings and two broken masts, not to mention the hardships of chilly, wet camping with young children. But meanwhile a lonely bank holiday weekend loomed for me, till William Winterton suggested I and the children join a party to Lake Tanganyika for the Sunday. William, known as Willum in our household, where Paul was devoted to him, was one of the agreeable young bachelors about the place, on a gap year with V.S.O. and based at Mpulungu, where he spent much of his time building a catamaran out of two canoes. He and others – Colin Tait in Fisheries, Colin Carlin – were all very pleasant though quite proper company for us young wives whose husbands’ jobs took them away, and I suppose we were ‘eye candy’ for them in the absence of any young single women. When on a couple of occasions Mark and I were hosts to visiting eligible females, we were immediately besieged by eager callers.
Our day out was to be on the government launch the Dame des Iles, which slept five and was comfortable and fast. For once it was not too hot down at the lake level, and eight of us and our children set out for a day of fishing round the islands and a picnic. We even went out to meet the S.S. Liemba as she steamed in, towing her barge of oil products – it was the one and only time that Mark had delegated the task of unloading the barge to his Mpulungu clerk. The word ‘lake’ is not, for me, adequate to describe that expanse of water so vast as to feel more like a sea. Swimming from the boat in open water was something I never got used to, always aware of the immense depths beneath me, the thousands of feet of ‘dead water’ far below, filling the bottom of the Great Rift Valley. We did believe, however, that its waters, which tasted sulphurous, were good for bleaching our hair, so I conscientiously wetted and sun-dried mine whenever we were there; never mind the straw texture, the blonder the better. It could be nerve-racking with small children on board, as there often were, for you had to be vigilant every second. So when Colin invited us to go out on the Nancol, an open boat he had bought from the Gamwell sisters, and rigged with a mast and two sails, ‘we took advantage of a new Abercorn arrival Jo Bailes, who does babysitting for money: we dropped the kids off, went down to Mpulungu and sailed with a picnic lunch on Lake Tanganyika, swam from the boat, then put on the outboard and followed the Liemba into port … it all made a fine change from Lake Chila.
The lake could be dangerous too, with sudden storms and gales whipping up huge waves. For the holiday Tuesday I had planned a curry lunch for twelve and ten children, spending Monday cooking ahead. Half of our guests, though, had gone on another government launch up the lake to a tourist camp, Kasaba Bay, where ‘by early Tuesday a terrific gale was blowing – the ‘Kapata’, a 3-day affair peculiar to July, and due to immense waves they couldn’t come back. We didn’t realise this till 1 p.m., by which time we had slaved all morning … what a waste! … They only finally returned two days later.’
On Lake Tanganyika: Colin Carlin on the Nancol, seeing in the Liemba
On Lake Tanganyika: William Winterton (‘Willum’) and local fishing boat
Once the Bowmakers had returned from leave in Salisbury, during which time I was kept busy checking on rabbits and hens, walking dogs and deepfreezing their beans, the committee started preparations for the ball in earnest. It was decided that the cabaret would consist of selected numbers from South Pacific mimed by a male chorus to the soundtrack of the musical, followed by a high-kick routine by a chorus of six bunny girls (‘and if you don’t know what they are, ask Will!’ I wrote). I have said in an earlier chapter that Playboy would get another mention: it seems strange to me now, after all the changes in awareness wrought by feminism in the intervening decades, that Playboy magazine was passed around as regular household reading. While I felt vaguely uncomfortable at the pneumatic centrefolds, our husbands enjoyed it for what it was, and I for one, as a good wife, was not going to object and be accused of being a spoilsport. I rationalised madly about its good fiction a
nd other features (witness the meat fondue recipe). And, well, the event and in particular the cabaret turned out to be enormous fun.
A team of six of us wives set to work on our costumes. We were, as you had to be, solution-focussed:
- We’ve all got Merry Widows, for a start, haven’t we? (Of course we did.)
- Hardly decent though, are they?
- But we could add a bit of lacy skirt where the suspenders go…
- Mine’s white though, too underwear-ish for a floorshow!
- So’s mine – but we can trim the seams with black velvet ribbon …
- What about collars and cuffs?
- That stiff stuff you use for lining collars and things will do… I’ve got some.
- … and very thin foam sheeting to cut ears from, pinched onto alice bands!
- Tails…? I know, big pom-poms made with wool on two circles of cardboard, you know, like we used to make when we were kids!
I should explain for younger readers that a ‘Merry Widow’ was a ‘corselet’ produced by Warner lingerie and named after the Strauss operetta – so, think wasp waist and pushed-up bosom, but also metal zip, hooks and eyes, wires and unyielding nylon voile. Lana Turner is quoted as saying: ‘I’m telling you, the Merry Widow was designed by a man. A woman would never do that to another woman’.
The all-important white bunny tails were finally sewn on behind – though not too firmly, for we had decided that each bunny would award her tail to a male member who had made a particular contribution to the yacht club, and he would have to snip it off in a prize-giving ceremony to conclude our performance.
Roses Under the Miombo Trees Page 15