When we appeared, the mother darted away, the python uncoiled itself and slid into the trees, all twelve feet of it, to return later to its meal. For by then, the little body was dead.
Then came some unpleasant business with the sisters. I have already explained how they were the ‘officers’ of the nursing service. The older ones had worked harmoniously with both doctors and nurses along the traditional lines of African district practice, but after independence, a new breed began to appear, who seemed to have derived ideas from the West End of London. They started to object to assuming certain duties, notably declaring persons dead on the wards and especially ‘dead on arrival’, something the older staff had done on the principle already described - the senior person on duty. These bright new things started calling doctors to do it, night and day, as if they were working in Guy’s Hospital, or somewhere.
(The famous case of a lady ‘resurrecting’ in Gweru mortuary, the first of its kind in the country’s history, did not help matters, needless to say.)
Of course, there was nothing more exasperating to a doctor who had been slogging in the hospital or banging round the landscape in a Land Rover all day, and got up to do a caesar at two in the morning, than to be dragged out of bed at 4am to declare someone dead before removal to the mortuary.
I put my foot down and issued a memorandum to the effect that this nonsense had to stop; that all should remember they were working in a district hospital and to observe the principle of delegation, without which our work would be impossible. And I sent a copy to the PMO.
The sisters retaliated by sending a copy of this directive up their ladder to their leaders, with a covering letter of protest. Some battle took place amongst the gods, which was never resolved, as far as I know, though occasional rumbles and flashes came down to us, notably a remark from some high lady about ‘standards in Western countries’, which I had already suspected had inspired the new attitudes.
I could have retorted to the Olympians that doctors could play at that game. What general practitioners in ‘Western countries’ did caesarean sections, and a lot of other things besides; and what would happen to the mothers and babies and most other people, to say nothing of the system, if we went by ‘Western’ rules? But the Olympians never asked for my opinion, so I never expressed it. On the ground, we were left in our bitter quarrel.
It reached its worst point when a dead body was brought in one night by the police, and the sister called Charles to ‘certify’ it. Charles refused, and the next thing, the police were banging on Charles’s door, threatening and frightening the life out of the poor little chap, which they did with the more gusto as he belonged to the wrong tribe. Charles was dragged out of his bed to do his ‘duty’, and even taken to the police station afterwards to ‘explain himself’, and knocked about into the bargain.
This brought a sharp protest from the PMO, and the police chief was moved, but the hospital battle smouldered on, and was still burning when I finally left.
I wondered why I got so worked up about this matter. The fact itself was annoying enough, as I have explained, but there was something more. Some new spirit: the spirit of formalism of the modern world, displacing the generous spirit of the old world, especially the old Africa.
Then the PMO came up with a scheme for training expatriate doctors at the provincial hospital (something which was the rule when I first came to the country), and wanted me to move to Gweru to take charge of it, in a lateral transfer to a specially created new post of medical training officer. I may say now that the system of training them at the main teaching hospital, which was even then in existence, was far superior: they could learn more there in their three-month crash course, properly organised, than they could in twelve months in the rather haphazard circumstances of the provincial hospital. I rather think the PMO thought I had done long enough in the districts and might appreciate a move.
It brought, at least, benefits, for many incidental reasons, which were rather sad reasons. In the old days, men (and women - though the women were more usually unmarried and in missions) spent their whole careers in the districts, with all the advantages that experience and local knowledge give. Now things had changed.
In the first place was the matter of schools. District doctors could never afford private schools, but in the old days, every small town had good primary schools for white and black; and at the age of thirteen, the children could be sent to a state boarding school in the provincial town. The fatal flaw was a hopeless disparity on the black side. The black schools which existed were good enough to produce the country’s new leaders, but there was not one tenth enough of them, to say the least.
So, with independence, came a vast break-neck expansion of non-racial education, and the quality of the system was inevitably swamped. Many of the teachers did not have ‘O’ levels. It was not quite the twelve-graduate situation of the Congo, but it was something like.
Which meant that government doctors, black and white, wanted to send their children to private schools.
When we moved to Gweru, we could send our children to a private non-boarding primary school and just afford it: the prospect of secondary education, as it loomed ahead, was something else, boarding or not boarding; and eventually, like everyone else, I had to review my position in the service altogether. As an African consultant, who was himself quitting the service, said: ‘Unless you want your kids to go to Shumba Secondary School, Dr Durrant, you’d better get out and go into private practice;’ as he was doing. The sad thing was, he went to Shumba Secondary School himself in its better days.
There was no private primary school in Zvishavane, and all middle-class people had lost faith in the government establishment. A desperate attempt was made to re-classify the schools into ‘A’ and ‘B’; ‘A’ being the old European schools, ‘B’ the old black ones. As the ‘A’ schools were in the posher areas, now multiracial, it was hoped, though never confessed, that class distinction might save the situation left by the abandoned racial distinction of the past; but few (white or black) acquired much faith in this expedient.
Moreover, the government salary was not keeping pace with inflation and the rising cost of living. Sadly, when we left Zvishavane, we had to pay off our servants, knowing they had little chance of finding other employment.
The day came to say good-bye to Zvishavane. A tea party was given to us by the staff one morning, at which we attended as a family. We received the customary big clock - in the shape of Zimbabwe, which still hangs on the wall of our guest room. I solved the now doubly wretched business of making a speech by reviewing the progress we had made together in the ten years I had been with them: the immunisation programme, the sanitary programme, the Tb programme, etc, etc; how all our clinics had telephones, how 85 per cent of all deliveries took place in medical facilities, how our perinatal mortality rate was already below the government’s target figure for the year 2000; and so on and so on. The atmosphere became strangely charged around me; tears began to gather in dark eyes; Terry too was looking dewy. My voice faltered, and I rapidly made an end.
O, my brave brown (and white) companions! as Sassoon says. These too were my fellow soldiers, and their names form a roll of honour. The matrons: Brewster, Johnson, Ashwin (later Durrant!), Jones, Mhlanga; the sisters: Masina, Mushaya, Sibanda, Banda, Mandebvu, Moyo, Mataka, Mutema, Munyoro, Kimpton, Grobelaar, Ziemkendorf, Wild, Drayton, Fourie; the medical assistants: Muguti, Chaumba, Mutamba, Marashe, Mutema, Dzauma, Mutonhodza; the ladies: Mrs Rioga, Muguti, Chikara; Chigumbo (health inspector); the clerks: Reynolds, Mantiziva, Jackie, the Sitholes, John and Peter, Rioga; Sam and Chikara (ambulance); the general hands: Molly, Rebecca, Eveline, Phineas (mortuary); Roda (cook); all those out in the clinics, and those on other stations, too numerous to mention: I shall always remember them, even those whose names I have forgot - may they forgive an old man’s memory!
4 - Full Circle
At Gweru, I bought a house, nothing being obtainable to rent from the governme
nt: at 58, the first house I had owned in my life. And a very beautiful house it was, in a half-acre plot. I just about managed to keep the lawn under control myself with an electric mower, while Terry managed the rest, including a kitchen garden. We had trouble with bees in the house, which Terry managed to keep out by sealing one of the ventilators and smoking them out of the chimney - they fell into the sitting room in a huge dead ball. I was grateful for marrying a practical country girl - Harold Skimpole Durrant being a mere child in such matters.
I walked daily to the hospital, which was just down the road, but took the car for more rapid progress to emergencies which arose in the night. For I was a kind of all-round registrar, especially on the surgical side, and gave such training as was needed to expatriates and young local interns. My teaching methods in surgery were simple. First, I did the operation (say a hernia) with the pupil assisting. Then the pupil did the same operation on another case, with me assisting. After that, for that particular operation, he was on his own, unless he specially requested my help. A course which will no doubt make European surgeons shudder, but, as I do not need to say again, this was Africa.
They kept me at it to the day I retired, and my last night saw me piloting a young African doctor through a burst appendix with peritonitis - a successful and happy termination to the operation and my government career. But this is leaping ahead.
Came news that we were to receive two doctors from Poland: husband and wife, a surgeon and a gynaecologist, to boot. Poland was still (1986) a communist colony of the Russian Empire, and I feared the arrival of some sort of communist missionaries, and said so in my letters to England.
Within days of the arrival of the Stiritupskis, I was writing in a very different strain. ‘If Jaruzelski thought he was sending us communist missionaries, all I can say is he boobed resoundingly.’
So far from preaching communism, so far from preserving a discreet or cautious silence on the subject, the Stiritupskis practically denounced it from the roof-tops. I lived in daily fear of their arrest.
Zimbabwean comrades, who incautiously approached them in a comradely spirit, got a big shock.
‘Vot you are tinking is Rassia?’ snarled Adam, a small, dark, fiery man, who looked like a scale model of Lech Walesa, even to the big moustache, which I learned was an anti-communist badge in Poland. ‘Vorkers’ paradise? Vot a joke! I tell you vot is Rassia, my friend. Rassia is Tird Vorld cantry viz atom bombs!’
‘As for Rassians!’ spat Elizabeth, a small fiery blonde. ‘I tell you, Polish people vud razer hev zee Nazis!’
‘Communism!’ sneered Adam. ‘Communism is dead in Polan’. Dead? It voz never born. I tell you, Polish people are 99 per cent Catolic. On’y communists are traitor shits!’
All this was very upsetting to the faithful of Zimbabwe, who looked for bread to what they thought was the source of the true bread, and got stones thrown at them.
Adam soon cottoned on to the local ‘comrade’ fashion, then still in full bloom. He sat in outpatients.
‘Come in, comrade. Good morning, comrade. Sit down, comrade. Vot can I do for you, comrade? Get zis medicine, comrade. Call zee next comrade, pleess, Comrade Moyo!’
All this was rather lost on his unsophisticated victims, and even the nurses; but it was clear Adam was enjoying himself.
When their pay cheques failed to arrive after two months, Adam was on the line to Head Office in no uncertain tone. Finally, he shouted : ‘From now on, I am on strike!’, banged down the receiver, and walked straight home. By next day, his sense of duty to his colleagues (to say nothing of his patients) brought him back to work: the half-day strike was over. It caused a lot of fluttering in the dove-cotes of Head Office, who had never had this kind of thing before. (They were to get it later from their own people, as the service deteriorated.)
Then he asked me if he could use my private telephone for a certain purpose, which he more or less let us in on. While Terry was in the house, he would slip out of the hospital to our place to ring the Canadian High Commission in a neighbouring country. It became plain that they had come to Zimbabwe as the first step in a plan of escape from their own country. Usually after these calls, he would leave with a sad face. Then one morning, he put down the receiver, ran into the kitchen and gave a startled but sympathetic Terry a big hug and a kiss. They had been accepted for Canada. Before long, they invited us alone to a small party, left their jobs without a word, and boarded the next flight to London.
Even before we left Zvishavane, Gareth decided to go back to Wales. He came out for an annual holiday for some years afterwards, when we would meet him and go away with him for a holiday ourselves, usually to the Eastern Highlands.
One day, in the British High Commission, the children saw Uncle Gareth’s picture on the wall: not exactly a police notice, but looking remarkably like a wanted South American bandit, with his strong, swarthy features and heavy moustache. It was, of course, his new passport photo, awaiting attention, and our first intimation that the eagle had landed.
Once I took him to see the Mutarazi Falls: at 2500 feet, the highest in Africa. Even Terry had not seen them. On our previous visit, she had stayed with the children, as the thought of them scampering up and down that terrible drop was too much for our parental nerves. The scene is reached, walking down a valley in the Highlands, where one sees the strange tree ferns, like giant hairy phalluses. Then one comes to the V-shaped cliff. The narrow stream falls over the right arm of the V, in two thousand odd-foot steps, and can be viewed clearly from the left arm. Before one and far below is spread the vast panorama of the Honde Valley, fair as the Elysian fields.
On the viewing side there is a promontory, not at all unnerving, even to me who have no head for heights; but there is no doubt that only a little push is required to send someone over it, and they wouldn’t touch anything for a long time. Gareth said he would like to shove his second wife off it, and we named the spot, ‘Mrs Baker’s Leap’.
Alas, in the government service, we got poorer and poorer. I had already cut Anderson’s pension from fifty dollars a month to twenty. Now I decided I would have to stop it altogether. I did not want to give the old chap the shock of finding this out from the bank, when he went to collect it, so I went round to his house in one of the Gweru townships. I need not have worried about Anderson’s welfare.
Malawians are no slackers. They were brought up by Dr Livingstone and his friends, under their policy of ‘Christianity and Commerce’, which is why so many of them have Scottish names, and although their mountain country is as poor as the Scottish Highlands, they have an equal reputation for industry and frugality. I discovered that Anderson (Thatcher style) had long since bought his house in the township; he and his wife were feeding themselves amply from the garden (like me, he had taken the wise course of marrying a strong and much younger woman); and, moreover, the couple were living in one room of the house and letting out the others to some lady lodgers, whose source of income had better not be further elucidated, except to say that it was secure.
In fact, I suspect that my pension simply covered Anderson’s supply of liquor and tobacco: a double vice to which that admirable nation is over-addicted, and which has given them one of the highest rates of cancer of the gullet in the world; so perhaps I was doing him a service by cutting it off, though I rather doubt it.
All in all, Anderson was by no means discomposed by my news; even, if anything, extended sympathy to me and my family in our poverty.
And at Gweru, Michael showed organising abilities in creating the Gweru East Sports Club, comprising, like most such bodies in the country at that time, European and Indian members, for historical reasons, too complex to go into here. They shared their venue with Chaplin Secondary School (where Terry had boarded), until the governors of that institution, in rather cavalier fashion, enclosed it with a wall, and Michael’s club came to an end.
They played cricket and soccer in season: on Saturday or Sunday afternoons; and I was dragged out of my
armchair to supervise and instruct. Talk about the leadership activities of the blind! One bowler had an incurable problem: young Kalpesh, whom I rather unkindly described as bowling ‘like an Indian student throwing a brick at a policeman’. And when it came to soccer, Africa burst in with the children of the school caretakers, who had never had more than a bundle of rags to play with before, and (temporarily) took the ball off the more privileged children, like a pack of wild dogs, sending them home in tears.
At least, Michael gained some local fame by his activities, and I was hailed by black children, on my way home, as ‘Macklesfather’.
Finally, at the age of sixty, I decided to take early retirement from government service, and took a three-quarter share in a small private practice with an Indian, who went to live in South Africa as a sleeping partner.
The surgery was a simple lock-up, open eight to five, no night or week-end duty, and no house visits, except to a handful of my partner’s friends. So, under the sign of Balti and Durrant, I set up in my own business for the first time in my life, in a street of other Indian stores, below Main Street.
What frightened me most was keeping the accounts. The other staff consisted of a clerk, Robert, and a nurse, Annie, with a stand-in nurse, Nyasha. But Indians are not in the habit of delegating finances, so I faithfully took on the books in my partner’s tradition.
Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Page 41