Someone Wishes to Speak to You

by Jeremy Mallinson

  On the outskirts of the city, Mathew called in at Umtali’s recently reconstructed museum in order to thank the staff, in particular the botanists, for all the plant and invertebrate identifications they had done on his behalf. He promised to send them reprints of any of his published scientific papers that referred to their findings. After leaving the now-garrisoned city and passing through two further police checkpoints, Mathew stopped at the top of Christmas Pass to have what could possibly be his last sight for quite some time of the wide exposure of Umtali and the breathtaking view of the mountains surrounding it. The view included his much-loved Vumba, and the monkeys that the mountains held so securely within their embrace.

  Mathew stood once more by the memorial of the benefactor Kingsley Fairbridge, at the age of twelve, with his African friend Jack and his little dog, Vixen. Here, he reflected on Rhodesia’s sad evolution since the statue was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother in 1953: how such a progressive country, which had so greatly helped the advancement of both the African and European communities, had now descended (seemingly so irretrievably) into the abyss of political unrest and killings.

  After turning off the Salisbury road at Rusape, he was stopped by yet another police checkpoint manned by four African BSAP constables. Mathew’s visitor’s permit and passport were studied with an exaggerated degree of attention. When they asked him where he was heading for in Inyanga and he told them that he was to be the guest of Group Captain Miles Kinloch, their rather hostile expressions blossomed into smiles. Before a constable raised the boom across the road, they all insisted on shaking him warmly by the hand and wishing him the most enjoyable of visits. (Miles later told Mathew that whenever he was stopped at that particular police checkpoint, he always gave them some money for their families and a sizeable bag of apples to share.)

  As Mathew drove up the winding earthen drive to the Kinlochs’ homestead, he was met by Huggins and Welensky as they ran around his Land Rover, which they recognised immediately and loudly barked their greetings to him. On hearing the commotion, Miles descended the steps from his front door and before Mathew was allowed to start unloading any of his kit, he was led into the house to share an earlier than usual sundowner with his host. Miles particularly wanted to be told as much as possible about Mathew’s recent experiences in the Vumba, in the aftermath of the terrorist mortar attack on the Leopard Rock Hotel.

  During dinner later that evening, Mathew’s host had to remind him of one important point. ‘As this is to become your future base, I want your stay with me to be as pleasant and as informal as possible – so I insist you call me by my Christian name.’ Initially, due to Mathew’s very conservative upbringing in the UK and the fact that he always had an inherent respect for a gentleman from a previous generation, he had found it difficult to call Addie’s father ‘Miles’, but as his host clearly wasn’t going to have it any other way, he soon relaxed into the informality of the situation.

  Mathew spent the following day unpacking his kit and arranging some of it in a small outhouse that Miles had given him to use as an office. Here, he was able to place his small library of reference books and diaries, his tape-recorder, camera, binoculars, and other items of equipment that could well be useful if his intended observations on the local troops of chacma baboons proved to be a viable research programme.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve made the right decision,’ said Miles while Mathew took a brief pause from his labours. ‘I must say Addie was hugely relieved, it should be so much safer for you here than in the Vumba. Both Sir Roger and Simon Vaughan-Jones called after they heard about the mortar attack on the Leopard Rock Hotel to say how glad they were that you’re relocating to Inyanga. The mortar attack got a great deal of coverage in the media, you know. They both said that they will be sending letters to you via Addie – she’s due to visit next weekend.’

  Mathew spent much of the week before Addie’s visit reading as much as possible about the chacma baboons that inhabited the Inyanga area. It was interesting for him to note in the eighth volume of Osman Hill’s primate monograph that the chacma was one of the earlier elements of the South African fauna to attract the attention of travellers. In the mid-seventeenth century, van Riedbeck had frequently recorded the presence of chacma baboons in his diaries; they were also mentioned by subsequent travellers in the region during the eighteenth century. Hill described eight sub-species of chacma baboons, of which the Rhodesian sub-species of chacma, Papio ursinus griseipes, was first described by R.I. Pocock in 1911 as being distributed to the north of the Limpopo, extending northwards through Rhodesia into southern Zambia.

  As troops of chacma baboons were quite a common sight among the rocky kopjes of Inyanga, Mathew knew that he would have few problems in locating their favourite daily foraging sights, or the places that they chose to sleep at night. However, what concerned him more than anything else was whether he would be able to habituate a family group to his presence as easily as he had done with his Stairs’ and vervet monkeys. The chacmas in this region were frequently shot on sight whenever they entered people’s properties or were seen feeding in fruit orchards, so were, on the whole, apprehensive of humans and frequently beat a hasty retreat whenever they came into contact with them. Mathew saw a series of dramatic magazine photographs showing a large, powerful, male baboon defending itself from an attack by two Norfolk terriers, both of which were bleeding quite profusely from the encounter. The pictures well illustrated the length of the baboons’ long canines and the ferocity of their characters. This was a species that Mathew could see would require a great deal of time and patience to acclimatise to his presence.

  Since the Kinlochs and Mathew had first met Angus Whitton on New Year’s Eve, just over a year ago, Angus (who had by now received his majority and was gazetted as a major), had become a good friend of Miles and was quite a regular visitor to the Kinlochs’ homestead. Angus was able to keep him up-to-date with security matters, in particular news about any insurgency attacks from across the border. One evening when he joined Mathew and Miles for dinner, he described an incident that at first had appeared to be the consequence of a terrorist attack on the Chavhanga Missionary School. By coincidence, Angus was with a unit of his Rhodesian Signals accompanying a large scale counter-insurgency operation in the area in the early hours of the morning, when they saw flames and clouds of smoke coming from the direction of the school. As the military feared that it had been subjected to another terrorist attack and massacre similar to that which had taken place at the Elim Mission in June 1978, a detachment of RLI and Angus’s unit had immediately gone to investigate.

  Angus told Mathew and Miles that as they approached the burning school with the utmost caution, with their weapons at the ready, they were all stunned by what they saw. ‘Honestly, it was like something out of The Sound of Music. Instead of coming across a bunch of terrified, sobbing youngsters, and perhaps some dead bodies, there was a line of girls clad in their dressing gowns and slippers walking in an orderly crocodile fashion around the school’s blazing kitchen outhouse, under the supervision of a few determined-looking nuns. They were all enthusiastically singing “Onward Christian Soldiers marching into war; With the cross of Jesus going on before . . .” It was like something straight out of the pages of the Old Testament – it did great credit to the missionaries who founded the school in the first place!’

  ‘So if it wasn’t a terrorist attack,’ Miles asked, ‘what caused the fire?’

  ‘Well, they later established that a cauldron of cooking fat had caught alight after having been left on the kitchen’s log-burning stove. Unfortunately, it wasn’t seen until it was too late for the cauldron to be removed and the fire to be extinguished. When some burning fat overflowed on the stove, it set the entire kitchen block ablaze, but fortunately none of the girls or the missionary staff was harmed. It makes a pleasant change when things turn out to be nowhere near as bad as you’re expecting . . . they’re usually far worse.’

  Another
evening when Miles and Mathew were dining alone, Miles was explaining to Mathew how much the annual income of most Rhodesians had plummeted since the tightening-up of the UN trade sanctions and how the Rhodesian pound continued to be devalued by international currency markets. ‘Before the sanctions, over two thirds of the apples grown on this estate were exported to Europe, with the majority ending up on the English market. Not any more. Although I still get a small pension from my days in the RAF service and I have shares in a property in Salisbury, I no longer benefit from some of the luxuries that I used to enjoy – the annual holiday in the Cape, a trip back to see the few relations left in the UK – although I still have a very comfortable life.’

  ‘I must admit I was very fortunate in that my grandfather, Sir Reginald Duncan, set up a trust fund for my brother and I so that once we reached our twenty-second birthdays, we would get an annual grant.’ Mathew was reluctant to say too much about his own financial situation, but wanted to be open with his host. ‘Having the guaranteed income has given me the financial security and the freedom to carry out my post-doctorate primate field studies wherever I wished to do so. As for my brother Sebastian, it’s enabled him to be an officer in the Household Brigade and to serve in the Life Guards.’

  ‘You’re a fortunate man, Mathew,’ said Miles. ‘Being free from financial pressures has allowed you to follow your own path. Not many of us can hope for that, although I can’t complain, I loved every minute of my time in the RAF, and have never regretted the decision to set up home here in Rhodesia. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.’

  Mathew’s first encounter with a family group of chacma baboons took place only three days after his arrival in Inyanga. He first spotted a troop of about thirty individuals made up of adults, juveniles and infants, the latter either riding like jockeys on their mothers’ backs, or hanging like hammocks under their bellies, as the troop ambled across one of the national park’s minor earthen tracks. This was in an area particularly renowned for the clusters of impressive dome-like kopjes in which large boulders balanced precariously on top of one another, and small trees, shrubs and long grasses gave shade and security to passing animal life. When two of the large, powerful-looking alpha male baboons saw Mathew’s Land Rover slowly making its way towards them, they remained behind the rest of the troop as if to act as security guards for their family.

  Once Mathew had stopped his vehicle and wound down the window to study the two sentinels through his powerful binoculars, they both uttered a series of short warning barks, which caused the rest of their troop to scatter quickly to the security of the kopjes. Mathew had read that baboons have quite a varied vocabulary spanning from short warning coughs, grunting sounds, frenzied screams and squeals when alarmed, to soft, chattering noises of pleasure. They were recognised to be extremely powerful members of the monkey kingdom, and with their long, somewhat square-jawed, dog-like muzzle, were known to be frequently quick-tempered, chastising very freely any younger member of their troop that had the misfortune of getting in their way.

  While Mathew continued to make notes on the grizzly, olive-yellowish colour of the body of the male he was viewing through his binoculars, without a hint of any warning it rushed at his drivers’ side door, screaming as it did so. Mathew was fortunate to have reacted as quickly as he did, managing to wind up his window in time to avoid being bitten. When the irate baboon failed in its surprise attack, it jumped onto the Land Rover’s bonnet bark-coughing loudly, and after being joined by an accomplice, managed to tear off one of the vehicle’s windscreen wipers.

  Mathew’s reaction to this hostile reception was to immediately ‘rev up’ the Land Rover’s engine and, with his hand on the horn, to accelerate as quickly as possible away from the scene. This resulted in the baboons sliding off the bonnet onto the ground, although when Mathew looked into his rear-view mirror to see what had happened to them, he couldn’t help being amused to see the two large males squabbling over the windscreen wiper trophy that had been so unceremoniously wrenched from his vehicle. His plan to habituate the group and make a study of them wasn’t going to happen overnight.

  Mathew was very much looking forward to the following afternoon, when Addie was due to arrive for the weekend. Not only would it be good to see his close friend and confidante again, for they hadn’t had the chance to meet for some time, but she had said on the phone that she would be bringing with her a number of letters, including those from the Willocks and the Vaughan-Joneses. She also mentioned that Anna had given her a sizeable package of correspondence that she had just collected from his personal Causeway post office box number in Salisbury. Early on in his friendship with the Vaughan-Joneses, Mathew had given Anna the authority to collect this post office box mail on his behalf. During the last two years, whenever Mathew was unable to get up to Salisbury at regular intervals, Anna kindly collected any correspondence that she found in his post office box and sent it to him in a registered package, care of the Osborne-Smiths at the Leopard Rock Hotel.

  As soon as Huggins and Welensky saw Addie’s car pulling up in front of the homestead, there was the usual frenzy of excitable barks. After she had patted and hugged them both, she greeted her father with a similar degree of affection. Seeing Mathew walking towards her from the shade of a large mop-head acacia, she warmly kissed him on both cheeks. After the houseboy, Moses, had carried her suitcase to her room and she had taken a shower to freshen up, Addie returned to the fly-screened veranda in time for a sundowner. She gave Mathew the letters and the package.

  Mathew was reluctant to open any of his mail while enjoying his whisky and soda, being brought up-to-date about how everything was going in Salisbury and whether the escalation of the Bush War was causing any additional problems in the capital. His reluctance had to be put aside after Addie mentioned that when Simon had come round to her office to give her his letter, he told her that it contained, as far as he was concerned, a most important and exciting offer which required a response at the earliest opportunity. Mathew had no alternative but to open the envelope in front of his hosts; after scanning through its three pages quickly, and then returning to read one part of it more carefully, he stood up to make an announcement. ‘Well, it seems that the University of Rhodesia have offered me a position as a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the university’s Department of Zoology. I think I may have to accept!’ The sundowner glasses were quickly refilled and clinked together, and father and daughter proposed their individual toasts of congratulations to their guest.

  After the most convivial of evenings, Mathew recognised that through the excitement of the university offer, he had drunk too much. But when he returned to his room carrying the rest of his as yet unopened mail, he was determined to have a cursory look through before turning in for the night. The letter from Sir Roger and Devra Willock said how very pleased they were to have learnt from Addie that he had now transferred his base from the Vumba to her father’s orchard estate in Inyanga. Also, as Sir Roger had heard that the terrorist attack on the Leopard Rock Hotel had been covered in the UK press, he had already cabled Mathew’s parents to let them know that their son was safe and sound and had now moved to another much safer location. The Willocks had ended their joint letter by saying how very much they looked forward to Mathew’s next visit to Salisbury, when they hoped that he would take the opportunity to stay with them once again. They were both very keen to hear about his recent experiences in the Vumba Mountains.

  The package of letters that Anna had collected from his post office box, some of which had been there for some time, comprised of a good cross-section of correspondence from his parents and brother, from Antonia Clinton-Kemp, from some of his old school friends in England, a few from his university friends in Atlanta, and a long letter from Osman and Yvonne Hill. But it was an envelope with a postal cancellation stamp from Washington DC, written in Lucienne’s elaborate hand, which gave him the greatest surprise. Although he knew that her letter was in response to the one he had posted to her j
ust over a year ago, mailed as she had requested to her old Atlanta address, he had not expected to receive any response from her.

  Dearest Mathew,

  I hope this letter finds you well. I’m writing to give you the exciting news that Daniel has just been promoted, and later on in the year is to take up the appointment as Cultural Secretary to the US Embassy in Lusaka. I’m hoping to join him as soon as the US State Department’s administrative authorities consider Zambia to be safe enough for me, our baby daughter Polly and adopted son, Marcus.

  I very much hope that once we are settled there, we can arrange to meet. That is, of course, if Ian Smith’s illegal regime will allow you to travel to Lusaka across Rhodesia’s war-torn border with Zambia. Daniel recently told me that what he calls the freedom fighters’ Bush War has effectively come to the border of Zambia and Rhodesia, so the conflict now extends some 600 miles from the Zambezi River in the north to the Limpopo River in the south. I hope you’re being careful to keep out of danger.

  I’ll contact you once we arrive in Zambia so that we can make arrangements. It goes without saying that I can’t wait to see you again, and I so look forward to introducing you to Daniel and the children.

  Until then, dear Mathew, take care.

  Lucienne xxx

  Lucienne and Daniel had often thought about what the most appropriate age would be to inform Marcus that she was indeed his real mother, but Daniel was not his father, although he had adopted him as his son prior to Polly’s birth.

  Lucienne also often weighed up the pros and cons of letting Mathew know that back in 1973, the abortion had not after all been carried out and that Marcus, whom she considered would undoubtedly develop into a fine, handsome young man, was the product of their own very first intense love affair. As such, he was a love-child whose life would always have to be both celebrated and cherished.