Close to the Sun

by Stuart Jamieson

  At Raigmore with my father and brother, 1948.

  We had other servants at home besides Emily and Simon. We had a cook and several “garden boys,” who looked after the grounds, wearing khaki shirts untucked over their khaki shorts. Barefoot, unlike the house servants, they were usually seen with a wheelbarrow or garden hose. It was a happy household, one that to my young mind comported perfectly with the world and everyone’s station in it.

  Raigmore. From left to right: My sister Margy, Simon (in his white uniform and fez), me, Emily, my brother Chris, and my mother.

  Bulawayo was still a dusty provincial town with broad streets designed by Cecil Rhodes to allow a wagon behind a full span of sixteen oxen to do a U-turn. The streets were so wide that cars could park nose-in on either side, and then in two rows nose to nose down the middle, still leaving two lanes of traffic going each way. There were only three traffic signals in town. Bulawayo had some industry—a cement factory and a slaughterhouse. The white population was about five thousand, while there were around 250,000 blacks. Most blacks who didn’t work and stay at white homes lived in small cement houses in a part of town known as “the location.” Only whites paid taxes, and so it was a struggle to find the money for the education and infrastructure that would make black advancement possible.

  Cecil Rhodes, who died three days after my father was born, was a towering figure in this isolated place. Bulawayo in most ways was still an outpost not unlike the old pioneering towns of the American West. Rhodes had made his fortune in the diamond fields of Kimberley by buying up the small diamond operations. He was financed in this by the Rothschild bank. He died at forty-eight, leaving a provision in his will for the famous Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University. Rhodesia was named after him, a legacy now gone.

  I remember a curious thing, a project my father undertook that continued for several years. We had a long, unpaved driveway that entered the property from a dirt road. There were pillars on either side of the entrance, but no gate. The drive curved up toward the house and circled back on itself. One day, my father decided to pave the driveway with bricks. These were not cobblestone pavers, but actual bricks, the sort you might build a wall with, turned on their sides and laboriously set in place in a zigzag pattern, three at time, first this way and then the other. He started at the house and worked toward the road. The driveway had to be excavated and leveled by hand to bring the bricks flush with the ground, and then meticulously prepared with sand, on top of which the bricks were carefully tapped in place.

  My father did all this work by himself. Every Sunday he’d sit on a small canvas stool, setting bricks. Progress was made by the inch, season after season, and after several years we began to wonder if the work would ever be finished. And then my father abruptly halted when the brick surface was still some twenty feet short of the road. It was strange. I don’t think he wanted to finish. It was if he thought his life might be over if he did.

  There was a social scene in Bulawayo, and my parents enjoyed it. They liked their friends and they liked their whiskies at the end of the day. A small difficulty was that my father also liked to invite black guests to the garden parties we held at our house from time to time. This was considered improper, and it also caused problems with our servants, who felt they should not be compelled to wait on other blacks, as this was beneath their dignity. My father would patiently explain that they worked for him and that meant taking care of any guests he decided to entertain. Simon and the others complied, but I don’t think they were happy about it.

  When I was about eight years old, my father was instrumental in the construction of an African hospital in Bulawayo called Mpilo, where blacks could finally receive medical attention. He usually worked there a couple of days a week. He never charged his patients at Mpilo, but I think he found it rewarding in other ways. Blacks in Africa often developed cataracts, and my father changed many lives with the surgery that corrects this problem. Mpilo is an African word for “life.” Today, Mpilo Central is the largest hospital in Bulawayo and the second largest in all of Zimbabwe, and there is a plaque in the corridor to my father’s memory.

  My father operating at Mpilo Hospital.

  Given the brutal history of apartheid in neighboring South Africa, it’s natural to think that the racial divide in Rhodesia was the same. But this was not the case. To be sure, there was a sharp demarcation between the races. Whites were the ruling class, and blacks were the servants. So the blacks were exploited, no question. And they were also denied self-governance. The government was white. But neither whites or blacks regarded one another with malice. There was not the kind of resentment between the races that existed in South Africa, or even in America, for that matter. Everyone was treated with respect. No one was forced to work, and certainly nobody was owned as they once were in this country. It’s hard to explain, but the racial environment felt nontoxic when I was growing up. And that undoubtedly helped to mask the underlying injustice of the situation, the unspoken but abiding tensions that would one day explode.

  From my earliest memories, I knew I wanted to be a doctor. I was inspired by the dedication of my father, and by the thought of making a difference in people’s lives. And I thought that surgeons made the biggest difference. I loved the idea that a surgeon could fix people. At a young age, I would “operate” on grapes, removing the pits and sewing the skin up again with a needle and thread. But medicine was far in my future, and looming ahead was boarding school, a break with childhood from which you never returned. Being sent away to a good school was considered a privilege, an expensive one. I remember how it started.

  I was left standing at the end of a long driveway in the hot afternoon sun, with a tin trunk by my side. A black beetle stirred in the sand at my feet as my parents drove away in the dust. I stared up at my new home, Whitestone School. It was only on the outskirts of Bulawayo, but it might as well have been in another country. I had left home for good. I was eight years old.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHITESTONE

  Whitestone was a school for 120 sons of gentlemen. The school’s name was a translation of a Matabele word Matcheumslope, meaning “white stone,” which was the name of the river that ran down through the kopjes into reservoirs behind the dams below the school boundaries. Kopje is an Afrikaner term for an isolated hill or rocky outcropping.

  Students at Whitestone were between six and thirteen years old and were divided into six grades, or “standards,” as they were called in Rhodesia. Though I went home for the holidays, from then on being at home was only temporary. I had become a visitor at Raigmore. Whenever it was time to go back to Whitestone after a break, I got a simple wave from my parents before they turned away.

  I held it together for a few days. I missed my mother terribly. It had not occurred to me that she would no longer be a part of my daily life. And I missed a sense of ownership over my own space, with my own things safely in it. At eight years old I was not ready for this, not ready to be on my own. Our dormitory was on the second floor at the top of a stone stairway. It was a long, high-ceilinged room with wooden floors and rows of beds on either side—like a hospital ward—with mosquito nets that were drawn up to the wall at the head of the bed each morning. I lay awake on my straw mattress that first night, and for many nights after, with my face pressed to the pillowcase because my mother had touched it when she packed my trunk. I had been allowed one blanket from home, and I held on to it, trembling, listening to the sounds of boys I didn’t know breathing close by in the echoey void.

  The matron in charge of our dormitory was Miss Byerly. She was called, but not to her face, “Ma” Byerly. A large Afrikans woman, she wore starched white clothes with heavy, white lace-up shoes, and a nurse’s cap perched on her straight black hair. She was a burly person, and intimidating. I am not sure what qualified Miss Byerly to be a keeper of boys. Perhaps none was required. Nobody challenged her authority.

  Miss Byerly strode through the dorm with a sjambok, a five-foot-
long whip made of stiff rhino hide that she rarely put down. One night I was awakened by a noise that sounded like a pistol shot. Miss Byerly was standing at the doorway with her sjambok in her hand, which she had whacked across the doorway. The lights went on. All the boys sat up in bed, wide-eyed with terror. Miss Byerly walked down the line of beds, lashing the wooden floor with the sjambok. She said that she had heard somebody talking, which was forbidden after lights out. She demanded to know who it was.

  Silence.

  Miss Byerly squared her shoulders and said calmly that she was prepared to thrash every boy within an inch of his life if the culprit did not “own up” to his crime. Finally, a small, angelic blond boy, with pale blue eyes and curly hair, fell out of his bed sobbing. He knelt on the floor in front of Miss Byerly and admitted he had been talking, just a word or two.

  “Mercy, Miss Byerly,” he pleaded, “mercy.”

  Miss Byerly studied the boy for a moment. Then she tore off his pajama shirt, stepped back, and struck him sharply with the sjambok. A welt rose on his back. Again the whip fell with a loud crack. And again. When the welts began to bleed, Miss Byerly stepped back and let the whip down at her side. Then she turned on her heel and walked out, snapping off the lights as she went. No one made a sound. I’d never seen anyone beaten like that. It would not be the last time I did.

  In the daytime we all wore khaki shorts with a short-sleeved khaki shirt. In the evenings the dress was khaki shorts with a khaki shirt and school tie. On winter evenings we wore a gray jersey with the neck in the school colors, red and green. Nobody ever needed a coat. White shirt, tie, and blazer were required for Sunday evenings, the only time we put on long trousers, even in the middle of winter.

  We were sent home for our holidays just three times a year. These were momentous occasions for most of other students, who came from places like Salisbury, or who lived on farms in the outlying country, or were from the copper mining or farming areas of Northern Rhodesia or Nyasaland. For me the holidays were a bittersweet reminder of the distance between the life I had always known and the one into which I’d been thrust. Our house was probably only ten miles from the school, but in every way that mattered I was no closer to home than anyone else.

  The separation from my family and the grim, prison-like atmosphere of Whitestone had a profound and permanent effect on me. I felt betrayed, abandoned. It didn’t help that my brother, Chris, who was one year ahead of me, was also at Whitestone. We’d grown up close, but now Chris was remote, and when he did speak to me it was usually to say something dismissive. I was the inconvenient and hopeless little brother. I didn’t see how things could get worse. And then they did.

  We rose at six each morning and went to our classrooms for homework before breakfast at seven. The school was chilly before the sun was fully up, and we shivered in our tropical khakis. We had to line up outside the classrooms for roll call in alphabetical order. When the J’s were reached the call was “Jamieson major?” That was my brother. He responded “Ad sum,” I am here. Then it was “Jamieson minor?” “Ad sum,” I said, though I wished I wasn’t. Waiting there for my name to be called in the cold dawn and knowing I would then have to respond in front of the whole school filled me with apprehension. It was as if a chasm had opened up between my brain and my mouth. Two words just five letters long—ad sum—threatened to choke me. Over the course of only a few days, each morning harder and more terrifying to me than the last, my heart racing and palms sweating even in the cold, I developed a stammer. Soon I had stopped speaking altogether except when absolutely required to do so. My humiliation only made the impediment worse. It would take me decades to get over that stutter. I have since given hundreds of speeches in my career and can speak comfortably before a thousand people. But even now there are words that I avoid because they remain difficult for me to say. Another lingering phobia is a meeting that begins with everyone going round and introducing themselves. I could spend an hour explaining a complex heart surgery, but the idea of speaking my own name fills me with dread. I usually say something about the weather instead, and if it goes well I risk “Dr. Jamieson” and hope to spit it out.

  Breakfast was from seven to seven thirty. We made our beds after breakfast, before chapel and prayers. Shortly after I arrived at Whitestone, I found myself one day standing at the bottom of the stairway leading up to my brother’s dormitory. Chris was nine, a year older than I. In the hierarchy of an English boarding school, a year’s difference was like a generation. As a “new boy,” I was not permitted to ascend the stairs to my brother’s dormitory. So I had to wait for him so that we could walk together to chapel. I wanted to tell him how unhappy I was and how much I missed home. I needed to see my brother. As I waited for him, I started to cry. One by one, the older boys came down, ignoring me as they brushed past. Finally, one stopped and asked what was wrong. I said I wanted to see my brother. He went back up, and after a few minutes Chris appeared and rushed down the stairway. He didn’t stop, but started off for the chapel. “Stop standing there blubbering like a baby,” he said.

  I felt even more alone.

  Discipline at Whitestone was harsh and frequent. Beatings were common and were regarded as a natural hazard of daily life. One day, in the great hall where we had meals, an announcement was made that some students had been throwing soap at each other during the evening baths. This was to stop. I didn’t pay much attention at the time.

  Bathing was regimented at Whitestone. You were allowed exactly ten minutes. The water was to be four child’s fingers deep, no more. Two boys bathed together, facing each other in the tub. To economize, the water was not changed between shifts. If your turn came toward the end, the bathwater was cold and had taken on a muddy appearance.

  As it turned out, the rule breaker was me. The two baths in the junior dormitories were three feet apart. A boy called Jeffries in the other bath asked for the soap, which was always in short supply. Since it was a little too far to reach over, I lobbed it to him. An informant later told Miss Byerly that I had been throwing soap. This was an offense so serious that even a whipping on the spot with the sjambok would have been insufficient. I was reported to the headmaster. After being made to wait for several days in abject fear, I was summoned to the headmaster’s office one morning after breakfast.

  To get to the office, I had to walk down a long corridor and then descend a stair into the building occupied only by the teachers. No boy visited these halls unless they were to be subjected to severe discipline or informed of a family tragedy. The air of doom was oppressive. I was made to wait outside the master’s study. The door finally opened, and I was ordered in. The headmaster was an Afrikaner named Van Heijst. His nickname was Frikkie, which was Rhodesian schoolboy slang for a condom. He was thickset and plodding and looked disgusted with me. A glass cabinet full of bamboo canes stood against one wall. One had been taken out and laid across the desk. The headmaster asked if I had anything to say for myself. I explained what had happened and that I had not really been throwing soap. “You boys,” he said. “Always full of excuses. Bend over.”

  I reached for my toes while he lined up alongside me. For the worst offenses, you received six blows. “Six of the best,” the saying went. No one ever got more, because after six lashes the flesh was raw and you didn’t feel much anymore. My crime merited four. After a caning it was proper form to straighten up, shake the headmaster’s hand, and say thank you. One could never cry.

  On my return to the dormitory, all the others wanted to see the huge welts. The stripes would be visible as blisters and bruises two or three months later. A severe thrashing would leave your khakis bloody.

  I learned two important things from my time at Whitestone. One was that life is not fair. The other was that physical pain is not a permanent injury.

  Central Africa in the 1950s was mostly bush. The fringes of Bulawayo, where Whitestone was, were not particularly wild. There were hazards, including many varieties of venomous snakes, but dangerous large an
imals such as lions and leopards had been chased away and were now found twenty miles or more from town. The boys at Whitestone were all comfortable in the bush, and we knew how to look after ourselves. It was part of growing up in Africa. Whitestone only had one school rule. It was that you were to use common sense. My brother once fell out of a tree and broke his arm. As soon as his arm had been set and put in a cast, the headmaster beat him. The beating was not for climbing a tree, but for falling out of it.

  The headmaster’s numbers two and three were brothers, Douglas and Gerald Pennington. We called them DP and GP. DP had two canes he called Swassa major and Swassa minor. GP had a paddle that he called a butter pat that he used to keep order. It hurt just as much as a thrashing with the canes and kept everybody on his best behavior, but the brothers were decent people and fair with their beatings.

  GP was a bachelor and never married. He taught Latin and mathematics. Gray haired, middle aged, thin, he walked with a slight stoop but was nevertheless an accomplished athlete and taught cricket and field hockey. DP was stockier, married, and had children. Among them was a son called Christopher, nicknamed Kiffy. Kiffy was probably two years younger than me. Since he lived at Whitestone year-round and had the place to himself during the holidays, he was regarded as a kind of superior being. No one envied him his continuous presence at school, but it did give him the upper hand since this was his home as well as his school.