‘It’ll only be for a couple of years; I’ll be back before you’ve had time to miss me’.
‘But it’s so far away dear and the political conditions are not at all ideal’.
‘I don’t care about politics, the sun shines all the time and South African men are so good looking’.
Needless to say I didn’t voice this part of my argument out loud, but probably went on about the environment and how much the experience would broaden my horizons. I was determined to go to South Africa, and all it needed was the consent of my parents, and I could pack my suitcase, collect my brand new passport and head for Heathrow.
‘I don’t know. What do you think dear?’ My mother turned hopefully to my father, but to his credit, he mentioned that his recent trip to Cape Town had been a terrific success and it was obviously the land of opportunity. Mind you, he also used to say that if I could have been put in a deep freeze at thirteen and removed when I was eighteen, life would have been a far more relaxing thing, so perhaps he could see a chance for regaining a bit of peace and quiet with both of his teenage children flying the nest, what with my older brother heading off to Canada.
I could feel them weakening, and I brought in the big guns.
‘David was only eighteen, and you let him go and join the Voluntary Service Overseas in some place you’d never even heard of’ (‘and he had a ball’ – I added mentally).
My older brother had gone out to work in what was then the ex British Protectorate of Basutoland in southern Africa and had embarked on a programme of building irrigation dams and furrows and generally improving the lot of the downtrodden. At least this was the impression that my parents got. Meantime, I knew he had been learning how to fly, flirting with the beautiful daughters of the local trader and dangling his toes in the Indian Ocean whenever he got the chance. Now it was my turn; I wanted adventure, the feeling of being completely cut off from all those people who had witnessed my slow but steady metamorphosis from a gangly teenager into an independent woman. I wanted to go where no-body knew my name and I could carve out a life for myself on my own terms.
‘I promise to write every second week and join a private medical scheme’.
They couldn’t come up with any other arguments strong enough to keep me close to home and hearth, and four months later I waved them goodbye at Heathrow. I had never set foot on an aircraft before and the furthest I had travelled had been a well-chaperoned trip to Paris when I was fifteen. A nineteen year old, struggling with a large blue suitcase, wearing a smart two-piece dress and coat and sporting a new hair do. I was ready to face whatever Africa could throw at me.
In 1968, the route to South Africa was a lot more arduous than it is nowadays. Flying from London to Frankfurt, on to Lisbon and then Las Palmas, we worked our way down to Luanda, then to Windhoek, finally landing in Johannesburg. En route, fear of the unknown became reality but I did battle with the gimlet eyed German woman who ran the ladies loo in Frankfurt. She was one of those people who, had she been employed at an abattoir, would have felt that a humane killer should be considered an optional extra. But I braved it out and refused to be parted from my hard earned Deutschmarks. Scattering a few coins in the saucer, I made a run for it, followed by some fairly voluble Germanic cursing, but for the time being, I was ahead of the game. In Frankfurt, the plane filled up with tanned super-fit Germans who were headed for South West Africa, and I started to feel increasingly out of place in my smart London clothes while all around me were desert boots, slouch hats and foreign accents.
Having sweated in the sodden night-time heat of Las Palmas, we slept and ate our way on down the coast of the great continent to land at Luanda. As the door of the plane opened, Africa rushed in to meet us. Sounds and smells, voices and black faces were suddenly all around and I could see the old Africa hands scenting the air like animals returning home. We circled Windhoek in a whirling dust storm and on the third white-knuckled attempt, we crunched down onto the tarmac. The newspaper hording in the airport building did nothing to instil me with confidence , announcing as it did the recent death toll in an air disaster at the Windhoek airport.
“Is it possible to get a taxi from here to Johannesburg?” I asked some equally shaken co-passenger, but she led me to a map of Southern Africa on the nearest wall and pointed out the distance between the two places.
‘Sorry my dear, we’ll have to grit our teeth and carry on” and after a stiff, and what seemed ridiculously cheap gin and tonic, we tottered back out to the waiting plane.
‘If the plane hasn’t lifted clear within the first thirty seconds after they start rolling, you’ve had it’ came the cheerful comment from the row behind me. I have never counted to thirty so slowly in my life.
Another couple of hours and we began to see the mine dumps of the Transvaal below us and suddenly rising out of the endless veldt, there were the gleaming sky scrapers of Johannesburg.
Here I changed planes yet again and continued on to Durban, and in those days, the South African Government was so ready to welcome settlers, that my only expense was the Johannesburg to Durban leg.
Arriving in November from the grip of an early English winter, the heat took me and squeezed me. Safari-suited Europeans, coal black Zulus, colourfully dressed Indians and endless blue-rinsed matrons filled the canyon-like streets of the city. Durban was airless, humid, burning and exhausting and I quickly learned to avoid the beach and enjoy a midday siesta in the shade. Temporary jobs here and there brought in enough to pay the rent at the little English boarding house up on the Berea, and I quickly made friends and began to spread my wings. I soon realised that Natal was painfully colonial in many respects, and invitations to the Point Yacht Club and the Royal Durban Golf Club failed to show me anything new that couldn’t be found in the Home Counties of England.
My first real adventure came in the form of a skin-diving trip to Inhaca off the coast of MoVambique. Driving through the rolling hills and endless sugar plantations of Natal and Swaziland, for the first time I began to sense some of the incredible variety and beauty of the country to which I had come. The further we drove towards Maputo which was still known as LourenVo Marques, the more marked the comparison became between the civilisation of Durban and the down-at-heel towns and villages through which we passed. Pausing only at the squalor of the border gates of Goba and Golel, we pressed on into the fading light until at last we were rewarded with the lights of “LM” glowing on the horizon. A night spent in the capital was enough for us to see the faded splendour of the grand hotels and boulevards that had once made LourenVo Marques a jewel in the colonial crown of Africa, but the next day would bring us face to face with the realities of Africa.
“Man is like a flea on the back of the dog of Africa” goes the old saying, and it only takes one good shake of the dog to send you flying.
The ferry ride across to Inhaca Island was uneventful. The rickety boat was laden with a mixture of European tourists headed for the only hotel on the island, local African workers who played endless games of cards and dice, Indian traders who bartered and argued their way across the water, and our own intrepid bunch. It seemed that the whole colourful melting pot of Africa was on that boat and my senses of smell, hearing and vision were at full stretch, and for the first time, I was aware of the easy mingling of the races now that we were out of the shadows thrown by the apartheid system.
Once we landed on the island, stage two of the journey began. We arranged the hire of a felucca - the small Arab dhow that nudged its way through the sheltered waters of the island. However, our destination was the far side of the island where the diving was the best, and this would take us out of the lee of the island and dangerously close to what is known as “The Rip”. This current of water sucks out between the mainland and the island, and those who get caught up in it can be carried far out into the Indian Ocean without any chance of reaching landfall. Already it was late and the light was fading but our guides were greedy and eager to be paid.
‘We get there quick quick’ they assured us, throwing our gear into the little boat and bundling us aboard, and not having the funds between us to spend the night at the pricey hotel, nor keen to waste any time camping on the quayside, we agreed.
Sailing eastwards with the setting sun warming our backs, we dangled our fingers in the silken water and downed a bottle of Portuguese beer, and all the while, Africa was a tame beautiful creature, slumbering gently beneath us.
It was the sound of the Rip that began to strike terror into our hearts. As the light faded, we could hear the steady roaring pulsating noise and could see the distant cream of waves breaking where there were no rocks.
‘We’ve got to keep away from it; steer more to port but watch out for the rocks at the headland’. A stiff evening breeze had picked, blowing out of thunderstorms on the mainland, and the tiny sail strained under its burden and pushed us further offshore.
Mercifully our group was made up of at least four who had some sailing experience. As night fell, the locals who owned the boat had given up the fight and were prostrate on the floor of the little craft gibbering in fear. Praying to their gods, as we prayed to ours, we fought to keep the little boat from the grip of the tidal current. The darkness became complete and the taste of fear was in everybody’s’ mouth. Baling out the water that constantly splashed in over the bow, we rowed with whatever came to hand. The sandy beach lay within our reach but we were being steadily pulled out towards that white line of breaking water.
‘It’s no good’ gasped the team leader, ‘We’ll have to swim the boat in. Not you Eddy, that cut on your hand will have the sharks here in two ticks’.
With these comforting words ringing in our ears, we slid over the side and dragged the boat through the breakwaters fighting the suck and thrust of the waves that tried to take us back out again. I can still feel the taste of that wet sand as I laid my lips on it and sobbed out my fear and relief and never had the words ‘Terra Firma’ sounded more appealing.
For five days we lived on the beach, making shelters out of the great banana leaves and turning the colour of bronze. Exotic fruit grew wild and we had brought maize meal and staples with us. Combined with daily catches of fresh fish, and with bottles of local beer, wine and cheap African cigarettes to satisfy our baser cravings, we swam, sunbathed, and explored our own desert island. I learned to dive with just a snorkel, and discovered that it was almost possible to walk on water when I came face to face with a grouper and thought it was a fat idle shark. One of our number was bitten by a scorpion and was saved by a Dutch doctor who just happened to have walked across from the hotel to visit our side of the island. Africa takes no prisoners. Either luck is with you or you leave the party early For the first time, I felt the pulse of that mighty continent beating beneath me, and drifting naked in the shallows of the reef in the velvet warmth of the night under an endless canopy of stars, I began to surrender myself to the irresistible but formidable master that is Africa.
In order to return to the ferry, we unanimously voted against the felucca, and chose to walk back across the island. Bypassing swamps filled with stately pink flamingos that lifted above our heads in a silky whirr of plumage, we slapped at the eternal insects and fought with the long grasses that cut our legs. The heat was intense and the water bottles emptied far too quickly, and we dared not refill them from the swampy mosquito filled pools that we waded through. By the time we reached the other side of the island, we were exhausted, sunburnt, filthy and desperately dehydrated. The ferry wasn’t due for another couple of hours, and to his eternal credit, the owner of the hotel took pity on us. In return for our promise to remain under a large tree on the edge of the grounds and stay away from his smart guests and his pristine swimming pool, he sent out a waiter with a tray of cold beers. I’m not a beer drinker, but that was truly nectar of the Gods.
So this was to be just the beginning of what I had vaguely planned as a two year stay that eventually turned into thirty. I had enjoyed a brief taste of the real Africa and I was hungry for more. Returning to Durban, I found it impossibly English and staid. Too many of the old school had filtered down through Africa, and with the country in the grip of Apartheid, I found the chasm that existed between black and white distasteful, especially when it was being enforced by fierce policemen who shouted in guttural Afrikaans and who used sharp toothed dogs to assist them. Leaving Durban, I took up an unexpected offer of a three month secretarial contract in Basutoland which now gloried in its new name Lesotho and fascinated at the prospect of walking in my brothers’ footsteps and perhaps discovering a few of his old haunts, I packed my blue suitcase and headed for the hills.
I loved the place from the moment I arrived. Steep mountain sides cradled the village of Mohales Hoek on three sides and the valleys and hidden places stretched away endlessly, inviting me to explore. There were only twenty Europeans living in town, eight of them bachelors, a few seconded from Banks in the Republic, some representing old trading families who had been there for the past eighty years, and the usual mix of missionaries and teachers. The country had only recently been granted its’ independence by Great Britain and the road towards a politically stable future was proving to be a bit rocky. That wasn’t the only road that was a bit rocky, and I was soon to discover that all the little towns – or camps as they were called, were linked by atrocious potholed corrugated dirt roads that shook the hardiest vehicle to pieces. Light aircraft ruled here and what had hitherto seemed like a very elite form of travel became an everyday occurrence. Whoever said that pigs can’t fly never sat patiently in the back seat of a Piper Tripacer with a snuffling little pink pig in a box next to him. Pigs, chickens, dogs were all regular passengers, and the villagers in the high mountains of the interior relied totally on visits from the flying doctor and deliveries of desperately needed goods when the winter snows closed the passes.
A little social club formed the nucleus of the town, and here the European population gathered each evening, and from the single storey building incorporating a pub, a hall and a snooker room, operated the golf, tennis, bowls, shooting and fishing clubs, along with any other form of peculiar entertainment that we thought up.
Within the year, surrounded by incredible scenery and enjoying a great social life, I became engaged to one of the European traders, and shortly after I settled happily into married life with my handsome husband, security, a large comfortable home complete with household staff, an aircraft, swimming pool, cars, horses and dogs. A year later, I become pregnant with my daughter, and barely a year after that, she was joined by her brother. Faced with the prospect of a happily married daughter and two grandchildren, my parents gave up all hope of me returning to life in the Home Counties, and began saving for air tickets to come and visit.
It is at this point in the narrative where I must be forgiven for taking a huge leap forward to 1990. The intervening years are filled with a wild and wide variety of episodes, some hilarious, some agonisingly sad and some downright dangerous, but they will make an appearance in another book. Somewhere along the line, we coined the phrase “Never look back over your shoulder unless you enjoy the view”. An Irish friend was planning to go back to the old country and have this printed on thousands of tea-towels in the hope that she could retire on the profits, but for the time being, I am letting the view settle into some sort of order before I judge which bits I enjoy looking back at. *
Sadly, my extraordinary way of life was to take its toll and the handsome husband along with all the trimmings didn’t last and twenty five year later, it was time to move on. Although it wasn’t a long journey in terms of miles, it was light years away from the lifestyle that I had enjoyed. Turning my back on the little mountain kingdom, I moved across the border with my old blue suitcase, three dogs, one horse, and a new partner in life. We had found a hiding place from the world, and its’ name was Bulklip Farm.
* Kate has completed the biographical account of her years in Lesotho entitled "From Cannibals to Croissants" and it will appear in Blog form - eventually!
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