“Alfixa!” he called out.
“Pronto!” a voice replied.
“Daringua!”
“Pronto!” another voice replied.
“Fourpence …”
Roll-call. Standing in front of a tree stump, O’D ticked off the names he’d written in The Time Book. We employed about forty workers now. They started early in the day, getting equipment ready to go out to work in the forest. We were cutting timber for a Portuguese company called Socinav, who were exporting the wood in the form of logs to Lisbon.
Leaning out of my window, I peered through the leaves of the big old mango tree next to my room and watched the workers loading equipment onto a trailer that was attached to the back of an ancient little blue Ford tractor. What a bunch they all were! Barefoot and dressed in an assortment of rags, most of them were illiterate and (with the exception of the two chainsaw operators, the tractor driver and foreman) this was the first job they had ever had in their lives.
Despite its size, the little tractor made quite a racket. Pulling the trailer loaded with men and equipment, it roared past the house and disappeared down the forest track in a cloud of dust. If all went well, it would be back at half past four, the time when our working day came to an end.
After breakfast, O’D drove off to Chimoio. We needed fuel for the vehicles. Living about fifty kilometres from the nearest petrol station, we had to transport big drums to town to fill up.
Left on my own, I was going to spend the morning sorting out our room and attempting to make it more liveable, if that was possible. But first, I wanted to see what Eileen was up to …
As anyone who has ever lived in the bush will know, the small eccentricities which we all have and which we’re usually able to overlook in normal circumstances often become magnified and completely take over our minds when people are forced to live together in difficult conditions and in a confined space.
Now, on my very first morning at the sawmill, it took me only about an hour or so to blot my copybook with Eileen and to upset her.
She was cutting up vegetables in the ruined shell of what had once been the kitchen when I walked in. Mitzi was lying next to the chopping board on the wide plank Chuck had placed on top of the broken worktop and giving a snuffle or two while she watched Eileen.
“Dogs shouldn’t be anywhere near food,” I told Eileen, picking Mitzi up and depositing her down on the floor. “They’re dirty and it’s so unhygienic.”
Eileen bristled and her eyes grew beady at this slur concerning her beloved pet’s cleanliness. She gave me a glare. “Mitzi’s not dirty! She’s perfectly clean! I shampooed her only last week in the bathroom!”
Her words made me pause for thought. Was I bathing in the same small tin tub also used by a grubby, snuffling little Pekinese dog? The bath probably wasn’t even washed out afterwards.
“Gosh,” I said, lost for words. It was rapidly becoming obvious that when it came to germs, Chuck and Eileen didn’t have a clue!
I looked down at the chopping board and the mound of potatoes and carrots Eileen was busy cutting up. Where was her faithful cook, Sixpence, who had saved her and Chuck from being starved to death by Nelson at Matsinho?
“What happened to Sixpence?”
“Oh,” Eileen heaved a sigh and chopped up a carrot in a particularly vicious way, “O’D fired him because he kept getting drunk. He came home one evening and found Sixpence lying on the kitchen floor, too drunk to cook supper and so he pulled him out of the kitchen and down the back stairs by his ankles. We could hear Sixpence’s head clunking as it hit each step on the way down.”
“O’D always gets very irritable when he’s hungry,” I informed Eileen.
“Well, since then I’ve had to do all the cooking.”
“What a pity,” I said, thinking that now I would, unfortunately, have to help her with the cooking. I didn’t for one moment look forward to cooking in a stone-age style African bush kitchen but I really had no alternative. Even I couldn’t be so selfish as to leave a 74 year old woman to slave over a mud brick stove in a hut every day!
“I’ve never cooked on a mud brick stove before,” I told Eileen. “You’ll have to show me what to do.”
“Oh, it’s very easy,” Eileen said, sweeping the vegetables into some thick based cast iron pots, “as long as you can stand the heat and the smoke.”
I helped her carry the pots down the back stairs and across to the cook hut. Although the hut was very primitive, it was surprisingly pleasant inside.
The stove was simple, with a waist-high back and two sides made with mud bricks that were cemented and plastered together with more mud. On the top, supported by the back and sides, was a thick metal plate and underneath the plate was a space with a grate, a little furnace, large enough for a wood fire.
Eileen put her pots down on top of a rickety wooden worktop and threw some more small pieces of wood from a pile on the ground into the fire under the metal plate. “You can adjust the heat of the metal plate by how much wood you put on the fire,” she told me, placing the pots in the centre of the plate. “When the plate gets very hot, you boil things in the centre and then when you want them to simmer, you push the pots over onto the cooler sides.”
Watching her, I saw that once you got the fire going at the right temperature in the stove, there was nothing to it really. The only disadvantage was that every now and then a big puff of smoke blew out through the cracks between the mud bricks and completely enveloped our faces.
While we were in the cook hut, a small procession of four or five youths, dripping with sweat and breathing heavily, walked out of the long grass and headed towards us. They were all balancing 20 litre plastic containers on their heads and when they arrived at the cook hut, they off-loaded their burdens down onto the ground with some relief.
“It’s our water for bathing and for washing the dishes,” Eileen told me. “The river’s completely empty now, so they fill up with water from a hole we had to dig in the river bed. We heat the water up in those large black tin cans outside the cook hut.”
“What about drinking water?” I asked.
“Oh, Chuck drives over to Macate with some containers and gets it from the village borehole. There’s a hand pump and so we wait in line with the villagers until it’s our turn.”
I decided, without any opposition at all from Eileen, that she and I would take turns to do the cooking and that whoever did the cooking, would do all the washing up as well. This would give us each some completely free days when we didn’t have to go anywhere near the cook hut at all.
While Eileen got on with the lunch, I walked around outside, getting my bearings. Under the shade of some mango trees not far from the back of the house, I noticed a long line of rabbit hutches, each hutch filled with one of these cuddly, fluffy little animals. No doubt Chuck was breeding them for food.
A lot of clucking from a large room underneath the house told me that Chuck was also breeding chickens and that one of them had just laid an egg. I looked into the room. It had a dirt floor and was filled with equipment and spares and tyres. There were chickens all over the place, laying eggs inside the tyres and sitting on them to hatch the eggs and scratching in the dirt and splattering everything with nasty-smelling black and white chicken droppings.
“Oh dear,” I muttered to myself. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear!”
I walked away from the house, past the area where the large circular saw was in the process of being mounted. O’D had bought new discs and new stellite and tungsten insert teeth for the saw from England. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be long before we started producing planks and making some real money to get us out of a fix we already appeared to have fallen into.
As we had feared, Carmen’s bungling with the Deed of Loan had had some very bad consequences for us. In the short time left to us before the end of the cutting season, we hadn’t been able to fell enough timber to see us through the first three months of the new year. We had managed to send John Phillips
six thousand dollars, but this payment had meant we had later run low on funds. As a result, O’D and Caetano had taken out another loan with their Mozambican bank to tide us over.
My heart had given a flip of anxiety when I had heard this news. Two loans, one at 25% interest and now another at an incredible 44% interest!
“I knew it!” I had cried, beginning to hyperventilate. “We’re going to lose Arrojela!”
“Don’t worry,” O’D had assured me. “We’ll have the saw up and running soon and then we’ll be able to pay back those loans in no time at all. You’ll see.”
On the other side of the saw, there was a makeshift workshop near the yellow container now housing the Kohler generator. In the shade of its grass roof, Chuck was lying on the ground, repairing something underneath the Gaz lorry. Avelino and a young worker called Pocas were helping him and as I strolled past them all, Chuck sat up with an annoyed roar and hit Avelino on top of his head with a spanner.
“Avelino,” Chuck yelled, “how many times do I have to tell you …”
Making my way through dry, yellow ankle-high grass, I decided to go and find out how the borehole drilling was getting on. The rig drilling the hole belonged to Vic Vorster, a wild-haired Zimbabwean with a somewhat maniacal look in his eye and because it was an old rig, it was working away very slowly.
“Good morning,” I said to Vic’s Zimbabwean workers. “Any luck with the water? How far down have you gone now?”
“We’re down to 72 metres,” they told me. “Mr. Pixley said that if we don’t find water in the next metre or so, we may as well stop drilling.”
My heart seemed to drop as deeply as the hole they had drilled. Vic was charging us U.S.$100 a metre whether we found water or not. If we stopped now, we would have to pay him U.S. $7,200 for nothing but a deep, dry hole!
Old Joaquim, who had originally shown the Magalhaes sawmill to Caetano, had told O’D there was water near a small incline not far from Chuck’s rabbit hutches. Unfortunately, lack of telephonic communications had meant that the Water Engineer had come on a day when O’D had been away and he had chosen a spot that was proving waterless.
I was just about to turn around and go back to the house when the word ‘EIGHTY’ came into my mind, as if someone had whispered it to me. “No, don’t stop yet,” I said. “Drill down to eighty metres. I’m sure - really sure - we’ll find water at eighty.”
On the way back to the house again through the ankle-high grass, I got the first of the many frights I was to experience in the Nhamacoa. There was a loud hiss … and I froze in mid stride. A snake! I turned my head in the direction of the sound and there it was, only a metre or so away from me. It had reared its green body up in the air in one of those stiff ‘threatening to strike’ poses and was eyeing me in a way I really, really didn’t like.
I gave it the traditional greeting humans always give snakes. “Yeeow!” I cried and fled back to the house, too scared to look over my shoulder in case I saw the creature chasing after me.
At around about four o’clock in the afternoon, Fourpence, or Fo’pence as the Mozambicans called him, returned with the tractor and the workers. They’d had a good day’s work in the forest and while they were busy offloading the equipment, Madeira, our Foreman, handed an exercise book over to Chuck. This was a record of the trees they had felled, with each individual tree’s diameter and length worked out to give a total volume. Later on in the evening, all these measurements had to be checked and then transferred into a hardbound book called the Forestry Register.
During my absence, O’D had been the one to keep the Forestry Register up to date but now that I was back, this turned out to be my job as well, in between the cooking and the washing up.
It wasn’t long before my passion for trees began to develop and although I didn’t start growing them until I met someone called Alan Schwarz some years later, I began to read up on them and to wonder if I would be able to grow the more precious hardwoods from the seeds I found on the ground in the Nhamacoa. It had always been our intention, anyway, to replace the trees we felled by growing new ones from seed and reforesting.
At this time, the timber we were supplying to Socinav came from a lovely tree whose biological name is Pterocarpus Angolensis.
Apart from this name, the tree also has three other names in Southern Africa. In Mozambique it’s called Umbila, in Zimbabwe they call it Mukwa and in South Africa, to complicate things even more, it’s known as Kiaat.
The colour of this wood when it’s turned into furniture and polished is a gorgeous deep golden brown and it has a lovely silky-smooth feel to it when you run your hand over it. It’s a very popular wood with the local Mozambican carpenters because it’s so easy to work with and even when it’s still ‘green’ (full of moisture) and the planks have just come off the saw, there’s very little shrinkage.
The sap of this tree is the colour of blood and in Zimbabwe they use it to make furniture oil. The sap also makes a very good dye, as we all found out when we inadvertently got it on our clothes and our clothes were ruined. No matter how often you wash your clothes, absolutely nothing removes an Umbila sap stain!
One fascinating fact I came across in our much-thumbed copy of Palgrave’s famous book ‘Trees of Southern Africa’ was that before colonisation, the Africans used the root of this tree as a cure for malaria. Some old Southern African books I found later corroborated that this remedy worked.
Our customer, Socinav, wasn’t at all interested in cures for malaria. They wanted the largest and most perfect of the Umbila logs we could cut down for them and they wanted them down at the port of Beira, in a hurry, to catch the ship to Portugal.
As there was little transport in the form of 20 ton trucks for hire at the time, this meant we had to transfer the logs to the railway station in Chimoio ourselves and load them into the wagons for their journey to Beira.
Without the help of a crane, the method we used consisted of muscle power in the form of our workers, or muscle power together with the aid of our tractor – the usual method we all used in Mozambique at that time to load timber.
First, O’D or Chuck supervised the loading of the Gaz and the trailer. Two long and sturdy poles were placed against one side of the lorry and then two ropes were tied to the top of these leggings. While the men pushed the log up the poles, other men (or the tractor) on the other side of the lorry, helped to pull the log up onto the vehicle with the ropes. It all looked pretty dangerous to me but thankfully we never had an accident.
To help the men work in unison with their pushing and pulling, a strong young man called Massoura sang and chanted out directions in his truly beautiful dark rich voice and they all sang and chanted back to him in wonderful harmony.
O’D and Chuck took turns to drive the loaded Gaz and trailer slowly out of the Nhamacoa and along the dusty corrugated road to the railway station and while one drove, the other supervised the loading at the station. When the logs were offloaded from the lorry, the whole performance was repeated all over again in order to load the logs into the wagons. It was heavy, heavy work.
One day while O’D was taking his turn at the railway station, a man approached him and asked him for a job. He was a tall man of about forty and his clothes hung in tatters on his strong frame. His name was Steven and although he admitted he was Zimbabwean and we weren’t allowed to employ Zimbabweans, this didn’t deter O’D.
“If you really want to work,” O’D told Steven, “you can start right now.”
Steven took a place among our team of workers and when the wagon was loaded with logs, he came back to the sawmill with them on the Gaz. He was grateful for a job. He hadn’t eaten for a long time.
About ten days after my arrival at the sawmill, one of the young men who had been carrying containers of water up to the house from the hole in the riverbed told Eileen that he knew how to do housework. He was called Sabonette, which means Little Soap, and she decided to try him out.
The day Sabonette starte
d working in the house was my cooking day, a day that consisted of a lot of walking up and down the back stairs.
He was busy sweeping the corridor when I left the cook hut and came upstairs to set the table for lunch. I put out plates and water glasses, knives and forks and once this was done, I went downstairs again for a final check on my simmering pots and pans.
There was no sign of him when I trudged back up the stairs again some minutes later and I thought he had finished cleaning and had left the house. How wrong I was! When I walked through into the main room, I saw a sight that rooted me to the floor with amazement. There was Sabonette, happily and carefully sweeping our plates and cutlery and everything else on the table with the dirty old broom he’d been using to sweep the corridor!
I let out a scream “AAAARGH!” and Sabonette’s broom came to a stop on top of Chuck’s plate.
“What do you think you’re DOING?” I grabbed the broom out of his hands. “Out! Get back to the river!”
Alerted by my scream, Eileen came hurrying down the corridor. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I caught him in the act of sweeping the table - with THIS!” I cried, waving the dirty broom at her.
“Oh, my good grief!” Eileen exclaimed. “What a good thing you saw him doing it.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” I said. “And now I’m going to have to wash everything all over again!”
“I’ll reset the table for you, while you’re doing that,” Eileen offered kindly. “I hope Avelino ironed the spare tablecloth!”
Down in the cook hut, I poured boiling water over the plates Sabonette had covered with germs. It was just as well I had caught him in the very act, I thought grimly to myself, because if I hadn’t seen him, we would all have been eating off filthy, germ-ridden plates, totally unaware of their unhygienic state!
A few days later, another youth who had been carrying water up to the house told us that he, too, had once been a house worker and had been employed by no less a person than the Governor of Beira himself.
“Well, shall we try HIM out?” Eileen asked.
Monkeys in My Garden Page 16