Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  Making my way past the borehole, I walked into the forest, deeper and deeper into the trees. When I thought I had gone far enough, I sat down. I pulled my legs up to my chest and wrapping my arms around them, rested my head on my knees. Soft rain began to fall. I closed my eyes. I was safe now. Safe in the leafy arms of the forest that O´D and I had saved. I would stay here until dawn, until daylight, and then I would go back to the house to find out what had happened to O´D … to Douglas … to Lee …

  CHAPTER ONE

  HOW IT ALL BEGAN

  There’s some speculation in the little town of Chimoio as to why someone like O’D would be living in Mozambique and in a place like the Nhamacoa.

  Bob Manser, who owns the company ProSol and provides gas cylinders for our cookers, fridges and freezers, is equally puzzled. One morning, while he was slipping an overdue bill for gas bottles across the counter towards O’D, he set out to satisfy his curiosity.

  “Where did you go to school, O’D?” he asked.

  Surprised at a question concerning a school he’d left decades ago, O’D replied, “Er … England, of course.”

  “No, no,” Bob said impatiently. “WHICH school? WHICH school did you go to?”

  When O’D admitted that he’d gone to Eton, Bob rubbed his chin thoughtfully and came up with some ideas that were far from flattering. “Hmmm … you’re too young to be that Lucan fellow … Are you a Remittance Man then, by any chance, O’D? The black sheep of a family who’re paying you to live in Mozambique, to keep you out of their hair?”

  Others think O’D is a wanderer or working for the British Government and spying on the Mozambicans, but this also isn’t true. You don’t spend seventeen long years in one spot if you’re a rambling man and what on earth would anyone want to spy on the Mozambicans for?

  I, of course, know the answer to this mystery, having been married to O’D now for far too many years than I care to reveal. The reasons why we came to Mozambique in the first place are quite complex but why we continue to live here after all we’ve been through can be put down solely to O’D’s character. A character that becomes quite clear to anyone who reads the third chapter of my story, which I’ve called “An English Jailbird” and which is a hair-raising account of O’D’s incarceration in the vile-smelling Primeira Esquadra jail in Chimoio.

  As I’ve already mentioned, O’D and I first met many years ago. O’D, by the way, is short for O’Donnel and pronounced Oh DEE. He was named after his great-uncle O’D, who was Cornish. Well, anyway, O’D and I actually met in a bar, but this was no ordinary bar. It was a thatch-roofed and white-painted little bar and it was set in the beautiful and enchanting Victoria Falls, on the banks of that great river, the Zambezi.

  It happened during the dying days of the Rhodesian bush war, when terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on which side you were on) paddled canoes across the wide river at night from Zambia to infiltrate the country or, every now and then, entertained themselves by using this safe-haven across the border to shoot mortars at the tiny town. There were notices on the mirrors in the hotel bedrooms, telling you to lie down on the carpet between the wall and your bed when you heard the explosions of these mortars. And when you got on the airport bus to travel to or from the small airport in the bush, young sunburnt soldiers dressed in faded camouflage and armed with FN machine guns, drove dusty Land Rovers in front of you and behind you to protect you from an ambush.

  It was the time when few tourists visited the country and only the intrepid made their way to Victoria Falls. It was the time when a terrorist rocket was aimed at a small plane flying some of these intrepid tourists over the spray and the rainbows and the water thundering down into the gorges of the Falls; a rocket that missed the plane and hit the original Elephant Hills Hotel instead, burning it down to the ground.

  It was the time when one of these intrepid visitors was sitting in the bar at the A’Zambezi River Lodge, when I wandered inside out of the sunshine on a hot, steamy December afternoon and asked for a Coke to quench my thirst.

  The bar had been empty that afternoon, except for the African barman and a young man with grey eyes and a thick mop of silky dark hair who had been sitting disconsolately on a bar stool in front of the bar counter. Dressed in shorts and a white T-shirt with a green cartoon crocodile printed on its front, the young man had been nursing a beer and ruminating over the loss of dozens of his cousin Strath Brown’s crocodiles. Crocodiles that had disappeared during the night while he, O’D, was supposed to have been in charge of them!

  Out from England on a working holiday, O’D had spent about six months on his cousin John Brown’s farm in Mangura when, suddenly, he’d found himself being bundled onto a plane one morning and whisked out to his other cousin Strath’s crocodile ranch at Victoria Falls. No sooner had he arrived at the Falls, than Rob Gee (Strath’s partner who managed the croc ranch) had decided to go off for a holiday, leaving O’D in control.

  With the casual wave of a hand and a nonchalant “See you in a week’s time, O’D!” Rob had jumped into his old Land Rover and had disappeared in a cloud of dust in the direction of Salisbury (Harare).

  The day after Rob’s departure, David Blake, the National Parks’ Vet, had arrived at the croc ranch to check on the gender of some of the larger crocodiles. There had been fighting among the reptiles and he’d been asked to sort out male from female so they could be separated and put into different pens. As the scaly creatures all look horribly alike and there’s no external indication to show what gender they might be, the only way to find out was through an internal investigation, by putting a finger up their cloacae. This, as you can imagine, is a rather strenuous procedure, especially when it involves crocodiles measuring between six to ten feet in length!

  Together with O’D and five other men, David Blake had entered the first of the crocs’ pens.

  “Right,” the Vet had said to them, pointing a finger at random in the direction of an inert crocodile, lying with its mouth open to the sunshine. “Let’s get on with it.”

  One of the men had approached the unsuspecting crocodile and, taking it by surprise, had thrown a hessian bag over its head. This, O’D had told me, made crocodiles docile. Then, making sure they all worked in unison, because crocodiles are powerful and dangerous creatures and could inflict a great deal of damage if a tail or a leg was unsecured, the other men had each grabbed hold of the croc’s legs and tail and bagged head at the same time. At a signal, they had heaved the reptile over onto its back and then had quickly thrown their weight down on the bits they were holding, pinning the croc firmly onto the ground while David Blake had made his examination.

  “Male” the Vet had muttered. “Okay, let it go and bring on the next one.”

  Everything had gone well and to plan but the following morning, to O’D’s consternation, he had woken up to discover that the crocs had had plans of their own!

  The invasion of their personal privacy by David Blake had upset the crocodiles and had made them irritable and they had decided to run away. During the night they had somehow managed to lift up the gates of their pens with the use of their snouts and when the gates had come out of their hinges and fallen over, the crocs had escaped, fleeing en masse into the bush. Some of them had splashed their way back home into the Zambezi River, others had wandered around village huts and given the Africans terrible frights and there had even been reports from two elderly intrepid American tourists that they had hit a crocodile on the head with one of their golf balls while playing on the golf course of the burnt down Elephant Hills Hotel.

  The crocodiles’ disappearance had worried O’D for three reasons. The first was that they were valuable. The second was that they were difficult to catch. And the third reason was the reaction of their owner when he found out that they had gone.

  I had understood why O’D was worried. His cousins, the Browns, were originally from Scotland and, as everyone knows, people from Scotland are very tight with their money and Strath was no ex
ception. After all, there’s that old riddle that says it all. “Do you know how to make copper wire? Just give two Scotsmen a penny!”

  Settling in Rhodesia in 1928, Jim Brown had worked hard to turn virgin bush into future cotton, coffee and tobacco farms. Later, the Browns had also started up an engineering works and after President Mugabe took over the country, they grew roses for export to Europe as well and built the Ilala Lodge at the Falls.

  I had met O’D’s cousin Strath. A member of a family that was not only large in number but large in physique as well, Strath was the largest of the lot at that time, although his nephew Philip would later supplant him as the biggest Brown. A man with arms like hams and legs like tree trunks, cousin Strath had a voice to match his size. It was loud and booming and could crack your eardrums.

  “What are you going to do?” I had asked O’D.

  “I’m going to have another beer,” he had replied, “and then I’m going to go gambling at the Casino.”

  Although O’D came from a race of people who had put my Dutch great grandmother, Heiletje Borstlap, into one of their concentration camps during the Boer War, I hadn’t held this against him. After all, the past was past and from all accounts, even though she’d been their prisoner, my great grandmother had still managed to show the British a thing or two!

  Heiletje and her family (on my mother’s side of the family tree) had come from Rotterdam and had settled down to farm in South Africa. When gold was discovered in the Transvaal, the British had annexed the territory. Naturally, the Boers who lived there had objected to this high-handed behaviour and war had broken out. At first, things had gone badly for the British Army and to prevent any further humiliation by a bunch of bearded farmers on horseback, General Kitchener had come up with a rather fiendish plan. Knowing that their families on the farms kept the elusive Boer fighters going with food and supplies, Kitchener had ordered his soldiers to burn all the Boer farms and to imprison all the women and their children in camps on the veld.

  To avoid being captured and taken to one of these camps, Heiletje and her sister had spent the days lying in hiding among the reeds of a river flowing through their farm. Then, one evening, just as the sun was going down, disaster had struck.

  Preparing to go back to the farmhouse as usual for the night, Heiletje had cautiously parted the reeds in front of her for a careful look to see if it was safe to emerge from their hiding place. To her absolute horror, the first thing she had seen were two British army boots, planted in the mud only inches from her nose. The game was up!

  At the camp, my great grandmother’s fiery temper had soon landed her in trouble. When the women had been handed large lumps of green and stinking rotten meat to cook for their meals, my great grandmother had lost it, completely. Grabbing hold of one of these putrid lumps of meat, she had stormed over to the Camp Commander and had hit him over the head with it!

  Outraged by this attack and the loss of his dignity, the Camp Commander had put my great grandmother into solitary confinement.

  Now you wouldn’t think that romance would blossom in a prison camp in the African bush during a war, would you, but that’s just what happened.

  One of the soldiers guarding the camp had been a young South African born Scotsman called Peter John Christie and - unlike the Camp Commander - he’d been greatly impressed by this slip of a girl with her flashing dark eyes and the way she had taken on the might of the British Empire by battering it over the head with bad meat! What spirit! What courage! Suppressing his laughter and keeping a straight face at the remarkable sight, he had thought that this was just the sort of girl for him. By the time the Boer war had ended, Heiletje and Peter Christie had come to know each other rather well and some time after she had been freed, they had married. Leaving South Africa and the British behind, they had travelled to South West Africa (a German colony at that time and now called Namibia) where they had bought a farm, learned to speak German and settled down to raise a family.

  One year after our meeting, also during a war in Africa, O’D and I got married in Guildford, in Surrey, England.

  At first, we lived in cold and drizzly London. We rented a bed-sit in Rosary Gardens, Kensington and I can’t say that our new life was full of fun. While I worked for some architects in Victoria, O’D went to work for old Mr. Copping, the owner of one of the last independent silversmiths in London and the most irascible man in England.

  Although he was English, O’D didn’t take too well to a nine-to-five lifestyle or to wearing a suit every day and a long grey Tweedy coat to ward off the wet, icy winds.

  Things looked up when we bought a flat in Kingston and he left Mr. Copping and went to work for George Bush Senior instead, on one of his Zapata exploration oil rigs in the sea off Abu Dhabi. Instead of nine to five every day, it was one month on the rig and one month at home. Here, he exchanged his suits for red overalls and worked twelve hour shifts with tough old Texans, like the rig tool pusher who was called Double L and Norman, a laconic Australian who was tall and fair and an excellent mechanic.

  He liked being in the company of men like these and listening to the stories they had to tell. As Norman’s assistant, he helped to maintain the Caterpillar engines down in the motor room, as well as the desalination plant, and soon he also had stories of his own to tell.

  Once, during a changeover in shifts, a young and fairly inexperienced driller made a mistake and before they knew it, the smell of rotten eggs began to fill the atmosphere and swirl around the rig. H2S … deadly hydrogen sulphide!

  Leaving a driller and thirteen of the crew behind to try to cap the killer gas, the rig was hurriedly evacuated. Rig workers jumped into the basket, which a crane lowered into one of the boats that continually circled the rig in the interest of safety.

  It was a short sea that day, O’D told me, and as the boat rode the choppy waves around the rig, a noxious vapour of another type began to fill the atmosphere as a tightly-packed crowd of about eighty men consisting of Pakistanis, Indians, Arabs, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Scotsmen and Dutchmen all began to throw up. The American Medic had begun to vomit as soon as his feet had touched the deck and as a result hadn’t been of help to anyone.

  Crushed in the midst of this great mass of groaning, heaving, spewing men, even O’D who never suffered from seasickness began to feel a touch of nausea, a certain lurching queasiness, as the boat relentlessly circled around the rig … on and on and on … for the next twenty four torture-filled hours …

  And then there’d been the time when O’D had been helping Norman to clean out the rig’s drains.

  They’d closed off all the taps (or so they’d thought) and Norman had been leaning over the side of the rig platform, watching for the spout of filthy water to begin gushing into the sea when O’D turned on the high pressure in the noisy motor room ...

  There’d just been a changeover in shifts and the kitchen and galley (which resembled a fast food restaurant) had been busy with chefs cooking behind a counter and tired, hungry men eating at tables, when without any warning at all, all hell had broken loose.

  Fountains of water, filled with the greasy filth and garbage of years, had suddenly erupted all over the kitchen and with high velocity had hurled stinking, slimy sludge all over the ceiling and walls of the kitchen and had splattered onto the hot plates and fridges and food and cooks. Taken by surprise and overcome with the horror of it all, tough roustabouts and tool pushers and drillers had reacted with screams and shouts and by overturning their chairs in panic.

  It had been these loud screams and shouts that had alerted Norman to the fact that something had gone wrong. Tracking the noise down to the kitchen and galley, he had walked into a scene of chaos.

  Unflappable whatever happened, he had thoughtfully surveyed the shambles in the room and had drawled laconically in his dry Aussie twang, “Been thinking for some time that the kitchen needed a good clean out.”

  As Zapata paid for its employees’ airfares to and from the
rig no matter where they lived, O’D and I took this as an opportunity and began to look for a home in a warmer part of Europe. Leaving England behind, we went off to the lovely pine-scented Greek island of Samos for a year.

  Here, we stayed in a tiny house in a fishing village with the tongue-twisting name of Ormos Marathakambos and learnt even more tongue-twisting phrases like ‘logharyasmo, parakalo!’ (the bill, please!) Life was fairly pleasant amongst the Greeks until summer arrived and something very disturbing occurred. When the last grey wintry cloud blew away and the sun burned down on the island’s long sandy beaches, all traces of Greece suddenly vanished … and we discovered we were living in a GERMAN colony … which, even more alarming, appeared to be populated by large crowds of enormous, pink and NAKED Germans!

  Black-garbed Greek women grew grim and slitty-eyed at the sight of naked Germans sitting and reading books, standing and windsurfing, striding around eating ice cream cones and lying down on their towels on the beaches. Greek men, of course, weren’t the least little bit concerned about this blatant disregard Germans showed towards Greek culture. They left their fishing nets and sat perched goggle-eyed on top of the cliffs overlooking the beaches, sharing a couple of binoculars and laughing.

  When we’d had enough of island life, O’D and I packed our suitcases and drove off to France.

  As I’d been a Francophile since the age of four, the prospect of living permanently in France was a delightful one. While African Americans go on about finding their roots in Africa, my earliest roots as a White African lay in the France of my Huguenot ancestors (on my father’s side of the family) who centuries ago had fled to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa to escape religious persecution.

  While O’D worked away on the rig, I lived in the comfortable little apartment Madame Faure had rented to us in the village of Mazan, in wine-drenched and lavender-scented Provence. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I caught a bus and travelled to the town of Cavaillon where Patrice, a young schoolteacher, would be waiting for me.