by John Challis
In Mother Nature’s Son, John Sullivan, always alert to new trends, is tapping into (forgive the pun) the bottled mineral water racket. Del has found a dribbling hose in the overgrown allotment and has a sudden, misguided Del Boy inspiration. He has recently visited a successful organic food shop and recognizes what’s beginning to happen with the natural-food movement. It is a short leap for him to conclude that he has just discovered a source of natural mineral water in the allotment. He manages to wangle a certificate of purity for the water coming from the old hosepipe and has it bottled. He markets it as Peckham Spring Water, and starts coining it in.
In the money once more, Del and Rodney go off on holiday with Raquel and Cassandra to Brighton, where they are rung up in a panic to be told that there is serious problem with the Peckham Spring Water. It’s glowing in the dark and is thought to be badly contaminated. When they get back to deal with the crisis, they also learn that the local reservoir has been polluted by the chemical drums which they’d chucked into it.
It was a classic Only Fools, screened on the evening of Christmas Day, 1992, and for the first time, it was watched by over twenty million viewers. Twenty years on, bottled Peckham Spring Water is always a best seller at the Only Fools & Horses conventions that are still held around the country.
Chapter 10
That’s Entertainment
At the beginning of 1993, Bob Hankinson, a foundation stone of the Coach & Horses in Barnes High Street, entered a radio quiz based on knowledge of Zimbabwe. The quiz had been set by an organization called Tusk, a charity dedicated to conserving the African wildlife that’s being eradicated at an alarming rate by poachers seeking elephant tusks and rhino horn. In this modern scientific world there has been an extraordinary leap in demand for rhino horns which, in ground form, are seriously believed to increase a man’s libido. It’s an absurd idea with no rational basis to it and presumably only the coincidence of the shape and texture of the horn could be perceived as having any connection with male sexuality. At the same time, the international trade in ivory has rocketed and elephant tusks are fetching huge prices.
Bob, who tends to know a lot about most things, also had a great interest in Zimbabwe, and particularly the Wankie Safari Park, where I’d been with him a couple of years before with Inge. He won the quiz – answering correctly the gestation period of an elephant – and his prize was a safari for two with Tusk.
He was asked if he would like to bring a wife.
‘Whose wife? I haven’t got one. Can I bring a friend?’ He was told he could.
He asked me.
‘Can I bring my friend, too, if I pay for her?’
‘Oh, no! Not another woman!’ Bob wailed, remembering the awful time I’d had on the previous visit with Inge.
‘This’ll be different,’ I quickly promised. ‘Carol is an entirely different kettle de poisson.’
Bob knew Carol a little. He’d had dinner with us once and he was used to seeing her in the pub. He was impressed that she could sit down at the bar and knock off the Telegraph crossword, while all the men around her were talking bollocks. She would only stay as long as it took her to finish it, which wasn’t long, thus curtailing my own drinking time quite severely.
We soon agreed that the three of us would go to Zimbabwe together.
We had one of the most exciting trips ever. We’d been asked if we minded roughing it and we’d said we didn’t. Having reached Harare, we flew north and landed in the middle of the Mavuradonha Wilderness. Mercifully this was devoid of human beings, who had hunted out 90 per cent (yes, 90 per cent) of the larger wild animals that had lived there.
We explored it with the help of an ex-Rhodesian bush-fighter turned tobacco farmer called Nick O’Connor. He made it clear that he was very interested in Carol.
‘I could do with a long strong blonde like her!’ he told me, which was a little nerve-wracking, though not as alarming as riding the ex-polo ponies he’d produced to carry us out into the bush.
Carol, of course, although she hadn’t ridden for years, was the daughter of a long line of Dorset hunting folk and soon found her seat. Bob who wasn’t really constructed for this kind of thing, found it very uncomfortable and mildly terrifying. I did a little better, although I had difficulty staying on the first day we went out.
We had to cross a raging torrent that was carrying monsoon rains from the high ground. My pony, a wiry beast who knew exactly who was in control, had a change of heart about leaping over it and galloped off towards a stand of trees with long low branches.
‘I’ve seen this in the movies,’ I thought, as we approached them. ‘You just sway to the side.’
I swayed, but I kept on going, straight out of the side door. The pony stopped, turned and looked at me pityingly.
A little further on, my handsome bush hat got picked up by the wind and flew off behind me. I made an instinctive grab for it and went straight out the back door. The pony stopped, looked, and looked away in embarrassment.
When we got back and I was congratulating myself for only falling on soft ground, I went to dismount, left one foot in the stirrup, flipped over and fell flat on my face. The pony didn’t even bother to look.
The next day I was given a deep-seated Western saddle with a nice big pommel to hang on to, and remained on board for the rest of our safari.
Bob was too uncomfortable, and anxious not to miss out on useful drinking time, so he excused himself from further sorties by horse. But Nick, who was a master of bush craft, took Carol and me out on a different route every day to special secret African places. He showed us some wonderful things – bat caves, ancient rock art, tumbling waterfalls and some rare sable antelopes.
Nights at the camp were fairly hairy too. The latrine – a unisex ten-foot hole in the ground, surrounded by flimsy canvas walls – was 50 yards by torchlight through the bush from our sleeping quarters. The thought of that journey was made more daunting by tales of the ‘kasi snake’, waiting for the chance to strike.
And one night, sleeping in our open A-frame huts, we were woken at 2am by the horses fidgeting and playing up. This was accompanied by a very strong odour of cat – big cat! We got some comfort – not much – from having remembered to sleep with our back packs behind our necks, because we were told, lions have a tendency to drag you out by the head.
While we were at the camp, we experienced a very violent storm that took out the whole of Nick’s tobacco crop. Although in many ways, he was an old-fashioned colonial and had no time for President Robert Mugabe, he was very well thought of by the locals in his district, where he was responsible for employing a lot of people and was known for putting in schools and churches and encouraging the people to preserve their wildlife and treat it as the valuable tourist resource it represented.
This aspect of the Zimbabwe bush had been picked up and developed by Tusk in their endeavours to save the rare species from extinction.
Our next destination was a conservancy near Kwe Kwe, a place where twenty years before, in the former Rhodesia, I had toured with a production of a British farce, Move over Mrs Markham.
From there we went to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city. It had changed almost beyond recognition since I’d last been there. The bush seemed to have crept into the town and was taking it over and it looked more like one of those dry, dusty one-horse towns that my old hero Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda used to ride into.
Weeds grew through the paving, once-thriving hotels were closed and there was an air of despair about the place.
In the Midlands, where we went next, we saw a lot of game, this time from the back of a Land Rover. Stately giraffe galloped across the veldt, mingled with antelope, wildebeest and warthog.
With the help of an African tracker called Clever we found a rare and magical black rhino wallowing magnificently in a mud hole just yards away from us. We were downwind of the beast, which was good, but our host, Ken told us to stay absolutely still, as the black rhino, blind as a bat, will happily
charge at any sound it doesn’t like. Clever, who had quite a record for being charged by rhino, was less sanguine and skirted round to the other side of the mud hole to be well out of the way.
Ken shrugged. ‘Clever’s just superstitious. He thinks the rhino’s got his number but he’s right, if that rhino does charge, he’s much more likely to come this way. If he does, just climb a tree.’
I looked around wildly. ‘There are no trees.’
‘Then just lie still. He can’t see a bloody thing.’
This was not reassuring. The thought of just lying still with a two-ton rhino thundering towards us at 30 mph did not fill me with glee.
We nearly fainted when the animal suddenly heaved itself out of the wallow and cocked an ear at us.
The next moment, he wheeled around and charged off in the opposite direction, just missing Clever by a few feet.
From the Midlands we were flown by a young man called Clint Sparrow (oh yes) south east to the Lone Star Conservancy, close to the Mozambique border. Carol and Bob piled in the back of Clint’s Piper Cherokee while I had the wonderful experience of sitting up front, watching the extraordinary African landscape unfold, several thousand feet below, with animals, like flies on the sand, running from our approach across the bush.
The patches of rain in the distance, apparently tendrils of cloud reaching down to the earth, began slowly to build until suddenly we were confronted with a massive bank of cloud.
Clint didn’t like the look of it. He leaned forward and flipped the switch on his radio. ‘Harare, Harare, this is CJ188, heading south east for Lone Star. Permission to descend to five thousand feet. Come in!’ There was no reply.
His voice grew more urgent as he tried again. There was still no reply.
The cloud was still building but Clint spotted a gap between two banks of cumulo-nimbus and headed straight for it, like a surfer riding the barrel.
I thought we’d made it but as we got there the cloud closed right in and we were tossed about like a shuttle-cock in a gale, with sheets of rain hitting the windscreen, as if a Romanian car-washer were hurling buckets of water at it.
Clint’s jaw was set, his knuckles were as white as bone as he gripped the controls. I was transfixed. I knew I was going to die but I felt strangely calm. What concerned me most was which kind of animal would eat my mortal remains.
‘I hope it’s not hyenas,’ I said to myself. ‘I don’t like them. Cheetah, leopard, lion, maybe even wild dogs, but please, not hyenas.’
Suddenly, the sky lightened, the sun burst through again and we were on the other side of the clouds.
Harare were answering our call at last.
‘CJ188. Harare here. What was your request?’
Clint turned to me and grinned as we shared our intense relief.
Carol sat up in the back. ‘Are we nearly there?’ she asked sleepily. She’d been out for the count for the last hour and had missed all the excitement.
The Lone Star was much more of a reservation than anywhere else we had been and a lot of work had been done to arrange safaris to finance the costs of conservation.
We saw a leopard for the first time – a young female sitting on a rock at night, blinking at us. We found a lioness with her cubs. She glared balefully at us while her offspring gambolled around our Land Rover. We followed a small herd of elephant with a tracker to help us, although we did pretty well just following a trail of large mounds of dung, which, bizarrely, were covered in butterflies.
Our tracker was certain the animals were close but there were no sounds or visual clues to help – a little like trying to find the wife in a supermarket. We never did find the herd.
Later we were paddled in a canoe down a primeval- looking lake, through a drowned forest to the site of an ancient settlement. It was in a perfect defensive spot, hidden from all sides by boulders forming a natural crater.
You could imagine the people sheltering in the small caves that had formed, or clustering around a circle of boulders that might have been their fireplace. Although it can’t have been inhabited for centuries, it gave out a sense of still being occupied. It must have provided an incredibly secure home, surrounded by fruit trees, with an endless supply of game roaming around. I had strong feeling that this was a place that might have been occupied by the very earliest homo sapiens, long before the human diaspora from Africa.
After Lone Star, Bob Hankinson went off to see his brother in Johannesburg, where Inge and I had stayed a couple of years before.
Carol and I had more places on our wish list and I wanted to show her the Victoria Falls – the most impressive natural wonder I’d ever seen– which I’d visited during the Stoppard tour in 1977.
The falls were as grand as ever. I guess it would take a lot to change them. We saw them from beneath, on foot at the top and from the air and Carol was as excited by the ‘smoke that thunders’ as I had been. So aroused were we by it, that, quite madly, we decided to go white- water rafting on the river below.
Before we got on a raft, we had to sign an indemnity which stated, more or less, ‘If you die, it’s not our fault.’
We looked at each other. ‘Great,’ we said, already high on adrenalin at just the thought of it as we watched the mighty Zambezi roaring through the gorge, fierce, unpredictable and full of crocodiles.
We were a little alarmed to find that we were the oldest on the raft by about twenty years – the others were all bubbling with the exuberance of youth, bronzed, fit full of confidence – pains in the arse.
Our pilot, Cephas, a young Zimbabwean, gave us a quick course in raft management, to get us scuttling around the craft. ‘To the left, to the right, to the front, to the back. Oh dear, what am I going to do with you?’
Carol and I, being taller and relatively heavier were assigned to the two front corners of the raft, with the task of leaning right forward as far as we could when the raft came down the rapids and hit the return curl of water at the trough. It was this curl that could force the front to lift and, in extreme cases, flip it up and over in a somersault.
Cephas sat himself up at the stern to steer with a single long oar and we set off calmly enough, passing under the bridge which was the border with Zambia, festooned with baboons and bungee jumpers, until we became aware of a growing roar, like a massive locomotive thundering towards us, as a faint line of spume came into sight, marking the start of the falling water.
Before you have time to get used to the idea, you’re staring into the abyss. Then you know for sure – ‘This ain’t no fairground ride or health-and-safety-fied Disneyland thrill. This is where you are going to die!’
It was the second time on this safari trip I knew I was going to die but this time I knew what was going to eat me – I could see them, lining the banks, licking their chops at the prospect of all this easy food. For them it must have been like sitting at one of those sushi bars where the nosh drifts by on a conveyor belt, while you make your mind up what you’re going to eat.
I took a final glance at Carol as we started our plunge. I felt so bad that I’d dragged her into this. We’d had such a short time together. That short time had been fun; it had been more than fun – there had been some sublime moments, but now it was time to say ‘Goodbye’.
The raft hurtled down. I could see no way in which we could come out of this. The nose of the rubber dirigible hammered into the curl at the bottom of the trough and my side went straight under the water; it was as if the craft had been stood up on its edge. I felt the water boiling and seething around me.
‘So, this is what it’s like,’ I thought, quite calmly. A battering by an angry river and then oblivion.
Nevertheless, I tightened my grip on the rope at the side of the raft. Abruptly, it righted itself and we were on our way again. The near-death experience had lasted no more than three seconds. I looked across at Carol, who looked like the figurehead on the front of a clipper ship – a strong, proud and determined Wagnerian heroine. This effect was only sligh
tly marred by her ill-chosen white jersey shorts, which were soaked and had become completely see-through, giving the boys further back in the craft a great view of her womanly curves. I, on the other hand, looked like a hairy dog that had been through a car-wash. It was massively exhilarating to have been through and come out the other side but this rapid had been only the first of sixteen.
Clearly, Cephas had lined us up wrong for the first one, which wasn’t encouraging, with runs with names like The Mother, or Highway to Hell or even The Washing Machine still to come.
It was only as we passed two capsized rafts and another stuck in a side stream that we realized Cephas must have been pretty good at his job. We ran seven more rapids in quick succession, sometimes sideways, sometimes backwards, but always with a flourish. We grew more confident as we survived short violent drops, long turbulent flows and threshing cross-currents; our own addictive adrenalin juices were flowing and we had begun to look forward to the next buzz, when we found ourselves in a placid pool, just floating dreamily. We had stopped for lunch.
We pulled the raft right up on to the bank, which turned out to be a good move when out of nowhere a violent rainstorm hit us and as we scrambled for cover, a tiny stream dropping gently down the side of the gorge became a raging torrent, creating a flash flood, which carried most of our lunch out into the very murky Zambezi. In the way of tropical storms, it was all over in a few minutes.
While we were waiting to set off again – enthusiastic now – the capsized rafters turned up, full of tales of survival against incredible odds. We never saw the ones from the marooned raft, who’d had to be rescued. After the deluge, the river had reached its maximum safety height and we had to forego rapid number ten, The Mother, as it was deemed commercially unrunnable, but we survived the rest of them and came through to the end of our run soaked, battered and triumphant. After climbing almost vertically out of the gorge, we clambered aboard an ancient bench-seated truck to bump and rattle our way back to the Falls.