Eighty Not Out (20 page)

Early in the morning of 12 January I woke up in a wet bed – it was the first time my waters had broken, so I knew the birth was imminent. Leaving the girls with my mother, I drove to the hospital at Dundonald, on the outskirts of Belfast, where I was given a room next to one that had been occupied by Mrs Ian Paisley a few days earlier: the nurse confided this in an awed tone, as if the establishment had the royal seal of approval. Alone again, I suffered solicitous comments on how hard it must be with my husband not present – always detectable an element of doubt that he actually existed. Remembering the agonies of Agogo, I asked to be given pain relief. In the theatre the clock showed three thirty, and I was assured that Mr Boyd was on his way. I fear I remarked waspishly that he was having a protracted lunch. Shortly afterwards, everything merged into a haze from which I surfaced at five to be told that I had a beautiful boy weighing 8lb 12oz.

Three hours later, on hearing that my husband was on the line, I hobbled to the phone to impart the good news. The green-eyed monster flickered once more when he said he would celebrate that night at a dinner hosted by the long-time partner of the less offensive of the two Germans who had stayed at Wa, who was currently absent from Geneva. A few days later I drove home with Michael Fergus rattling around on the rear seat in the same blue and white carry-cot that had done service in Ghana. My mother and the girls, then four and three, waited on one of those sunny winter days when the warmth of the sun is just perceptible, and the winter jasmine in flower, to meet the first male to be born into my side of the family for almost seventy years. They were ecstatic, but Mary so extravagant in her display of affection that I had to restrain her by explaining the delicate structure of a baby's skull, and how the fontanelle gradually closes to protect the brain. Looking back, I realise I never treated them as children, and expected far too much in terms of comprehension. Katharine cites books read in early childhood, saying, ‘Don't you remember
you
gave me that when I was only nine?' – Laurens van der Post's
Lost World of the Kalahari
was one; another anthropological work was about the Ik tribe in Uganda, which had some repulsive habits, and more suitably, Gerald Durrell's
My Family and Other Animals
.

Fergus first saw his son two weeks later, at the start of three weeks' home leave before flying to Tanzania to inaugurate the project in Mwanza.

13

Kenya – Uganda – Tanzania

T
he federation of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania was by this time demonstrating that Francis Kofi's firm conviction that ‘All Africans are brothers' was patently untrue in East Africa. Indeed, ten years earlier, when Fergus conducted school surveys in Ruanda, he had been present at silent ‘morning after' scenes in village compounds where Tutsi teachers had been massacred overnight by Hutu raiders. In early 1967 there was border tension and sabre-rattling in the Bukoba region, from which Dr Eyakuze came, on the western shore of Lake Victoria, and General Idi Amin was at the height of his power in Uganda. Jomo Kenyatta still reigned in Kenya and Julius Nyerere – an exceptional leader – ruled in Tanzania, where technical collaboration with both Russia and China was much in evidence.

The
BOAC
flight from London via Cairo landed at Entebbe in torrential rain; the children's raincoats had been left in Ireland, everyone was shouting in Swahili, and Fergus was not there to welcome us. Katharine and Mary, excited at the prospect of seeing their father, kept repeating plaintively, ‘Where can Daddy be?' Michael was bawling, and his bottle of milk, entrusted to a hostess with a leopard-skin hat, was now on its way to Nairobi. A corpulent but amiable Idi Amin lookalike led us to his office; despite his seniority, his English was rudimentary, and there being no equivalent of West African pidgin, I was unable to communicate our plight. I tried unsuccessfully to contact David Bradley at the university, with whom the East African Institute for Medical Research and
WHO
collaborated, and with whom Fergus had co-authored several papers on bilharziasis. The noisy downpour continued and Mary, having found a pair of bluntnosed scissors, was quietly littering the floor with fragments of white paper. Mugs of thick sugary tea were offered. Then Fergus appeared: there had been a long delay on the road, due to a lorry having crashed axle-deep into a pothole – it sounded all too familiar. We had a token breakfast of fusty cornflakes and watery milk, and I prepared a fresh bottle to placate the baby. In the three years since Mary's infancy I had forgotten the tyranny of preparing sterile feeds under testing circumstances – on the bonnets of cars, inside Land Rovers, in semi-darkness in unfamiliar rest-houses, often aware that our large container of sterile water was running low.

Our combined baggage amounted to seventeen pieces, all of which were loaded onto an old DC-3 aircraft, which took off at ten in the morning on a direct flight over Lake Victoria to Mwanza. The lake's immensity was immediately apparent, and for a while we might have been over the Pacific, until we started to lose height and saw small islands with little sandy coves, and a hilly coastline with huge sculptural rocks topping some of the summits. The pilot announced that we were nearly there and drew our attention to Saa Nane island zoo, on which, to the children's delight, several giraffes could be seen; then he indicted Bismarck Rock in the bay, and Buganda hill, on top of which a fine new hospital was under construction.

A welcome delegation, consisting of Dr Eyakuze, and several field and laboratory assistants recruited to work on the new project, met us at the rudimentary airport: the names of the latter – Hermann, Reinhardt, Klaus and Dieter – a reminder of Tanzania's years under German rule.

A small cavalcade of vehicles, headed by us in the director's Mercedes, took the main road to Mwanza town. The vegetation was lush and most of the flowering shrubs were familiar from Ghana. We turned right onto a branch road leading to the residential compound at Bwiru, and met, for the first time, herds of cattle with humps and wide spreading horns driven by turbaned men or small boys. The tarmac degenerated to deeply rutted laterite before a sharp left turn up a slight incline led to a circular parking space beside the bungalow that was to be our home for the next six years.

The garden, though neglected, had been landscaped many years earlier, and Fergus had already recruited a shamba boy to help him restore some of its former glory. The lake could just be glimpsed, and the kopje, directly above the house, was topped by a giant cone-shaped boulder on which the leader of a pack of baboons often sat contemplating his territory; a colony of rock hyrax lived at its base. During fierce electric storms, the children would ask: ‘What if the lightning strikes the rock? It will tumble down and hit our house.' We dismissed their fears with explanations of the geological time-scale – ‘It has stood up there for millions of years …' – but there were times when I too felt a bit uneasy. Some dangers would be real enough, however – a hyaena crunching bones under the guava tree just outside the children's room, a leopard coughing as it passed under the window beside Katharine's bed, a giant python coiled in the ancient fig tree.

But this was all in the future. For the moment, the contents of our cases were strewn around, the children were demanding the whereabouts of favourite toys last seen in Ireland, and I was getting to know Stephano, a cook/steward who had worked for ‘Webbo' – Gerry Webbe, a Medical Research Council scientific officer who spoke fluent Swahili and had specialised in schistosomiasis transmission. Stephano came with glowing references but spoke almost no English, so I would have to acquire a rudimentary vocabulary in Swahili. Under the colonial regime, all government officers had to pass an examination in written and verbal Swahili if they were to advance in their career; it had not been obligatory for wives, but most acquired what was termed ‘kitchen Swahili' if only in order to survive. By this time only a few such wives remained; one or two had come from Kenya or Nigeria, and regarded Mwanza as the sticks. They insisted their servants wore a white uniform, cummerbund and fez, and were notoriously demanding – one, for whom Stephano had worked for a few months, had asked him to wash the kitchen ceiling. His flat refusal had led to dismissal not long before our arrival. The lady in question called on me, emphasising that I should not take any nonsense from the ‘natives', who were without exception lazy, unreliable and dishonest. Her manner was condescending and I was frosty, intimating that five years of living in Ghana had led me to form my own opinions: thus effectively ensuring that we were not invited to dine.

The house bore the signature of German rule, similar in many ways to the one that had reduced me to tears in Wa, but this one had not been neglected to the same extent. However, after a few days only, many imperfections revealed themselves. Malodorous man-holes half hidden in the vegetation, and old cans and discarded tyres harboured stagnant water in which mosquito larvae thrived. The concrete floors of the bedrooms were the familiar red Cardinal, and the living room was battleship grey with areas of red showing through – I later compounded this mess by using dark blue paint which failed to key with the underlying layers. The kitchen was enormous, but the windows so high that one might as well have been in a prison. Two Belfast sinks with sodden and stained draining boards, an ancient gas cooker and yet another kerosene-fuelled fridge completed the equipment. There was a capacious store cupboard with ample shelving next to the back door, from which a track led to Stephano's quarters, and over a ravine to our neighbour's bungalow. There was a separate lavatory and the bathroom had the usual temperamental gas-fired water heater. The
WC
was far from pristine, and blocked within hours of our arrival; a suspect trap, topped with disgusting brownish froth, lay below its window, and that of the kitchen. Fergus arranged a meeting with the clerk of works, who came with his team in several vehicles, noted the many holes in the mosquito netting, counted the mosquito breeding sites, then left without actually doing anything, or giving any promise of intent. Memories of the painters at Kintampo were revived.

The cot we had asked for duly arrived, with a fitted net, but after a night of restless sleep for Michael, I found little specks of blood on the net, and something that looked very like a bed bug, which I sent to Fergus for identification. It was positive, so an intensive scrubbing session with Dettol, kettles of boiling water and a toothbrush ensued, annihilating the bug population that had thrived in the wooden slats under the mattress. An Italian electrician came and pronounced the wiring in the house potentially lethal.

The climate was pleasant and the girls played outside in their paddling pool with a hose, while Michael lay on a rug on the veranda watching. Katharine made friends with the five-year-old flaxen-haired daughter of the German vet; she was a stolid unresponsive child, but Katharine did not seem to mind. Mary preferred the company of Salome, one of Stephano's six daughters, whom I overheard her informing, ‘Rolf Harris has got three legs, you know.' The girls soon picked up a basic vocabulary of Swahili nouns and could count up to ten, but like me, had little concept of sentence construction. The children of our Australian friends – John and Rosemary McMahon, both doctors – by contrast spoke fluently, having spent much of their time in the care of a massive, light-skinned ayah who came from the coast. Their daughter Sheena already attended the Anglican Diocesan Primary School, which was the only option other than the state primary, at which all lessons were in Swahili. So by the end of July, Katharine joined a large class of mixed Asian, African and European children. Bishop Wiggins and his wife, both from New Zealand, were the founders, and their son taught the higher grades. I never heard of any application being refused, but Mrs Wiggins was quoted as having said of us: ‘Such a pity, we hear they are heathens.' Katharine really enjoyed singing hymns at morning assembly, and once, when I enquired what they had sung that day, the reply was ‘Oh, we sang about vicious cement' – it took me a while to work out that it must have been ‘fishers of men'. For a while, until firmly discouraged, she would return from school chanting: ‘Did y'ever say Yes to Jesus, did y'ever say No to the Devil?' The uniform was a cotton dress of harsh blue with small white polka dots; boys wore a shirt in the same material, which could be obtained from one of many stores owned by a member of the Alibhai family, who also owned the largest general store, which stood on a prime corner site in the centre of the town.

A young entrepreneur – Nur Mohammed – owned a specialist shop offering many surprising things not otherwise obtainable without making a visit to Dar es Salaam (former capital of Tanzania), Kampala or Nairobi. I found melamine ‘unbreakable' tableware, odd bits of Hornby train-sets, including rails, and he sold me a Rolleicord twin lens reflex camera, to which I later added attachments enabling me to photograph maps and diagrams for the project. He talked about his hope of settling in Canada, and I often wonder, as I arrange my breakfast on a pale blue plastic tray bought from him, if his dream was realised.

The Elna sewing machine bought in Boston came into heavy use during these years when the children were growing rapidly, and the lifetime of garments, due to sunlight and frequent washing, was short. I made shirts for Fergus and almost all my own dresses, not to mention one or two for Stephano's six girls. His wife spent much of the time on the coast at Tanga with their only male child, Joseph, while his eldest daughter Joyce, ‘married' to the librarian at the institute and living in another of the houses nearby, kept an eye on her father.

Stephano knocked on our bedroom door each morning at six: he would call ‘Hodi' and if the answer was ‘Karibu', entered bearing mugs of tea; then while we all got washed and dressed he laid the breakfast table with packets of cereal, a jug of milk, freshly squeezed orange juice and a slice of pawpaw for each of us. This did not vary over the years, and I still miss the fresh pawpaw with a little slice of lime. Shopping was more complicated and time-consuming than it had been in Ghana: in addition to the Land Rover, we had the Peugeot 504, which, after dropping Fergus at the institute and Katharine at school, I drove to Alibhai Stores and the main market, sometimes, if I could face it, stopping at the Somali butcher's shop on the outskirts of the town.

Good meat could be obtained from this butcher. He had an immense gap between his front teeth and dealt with customers while giving sharp orders to his assistant, who wielded a variety of choppers and knives. An entire fillet of steak, costing three
EA
shillings and sixpence, had to be ordered in advance, but one still had to join a queue stretching from the shop, down a flight of steps, which ended near the malodorous wayside drain, to claim and pay for your moist blood-stained brown paper parcel. The chopping block was an ancient tree stump stained with the blood of many years. One particularly repulsive incident lingers clearly in my brain: a cow's head, black and white skin, ears
in situ
, was targeted by the axe-man while teeth ricocheted off walls and customers. On another visit I stood wedged in a line of overweight, pungent-smelling women, while a cascade of greenish liquid flowed down the steps from a stomach, laid on the floor of the shop, which was being hosed before being cut into portions for sale; tripe was a great delicacy. The overpowering pong of blood, body odour, charcoal-burning stoves, dried fish, roasting plantain and roadside drain varies little throughout Africa, and is fixed on my ‘memory stick'.

Mwanza was a thriving cosmopolitan centre at the railhead of the track that led from the coast, the construction of which had cost many lives, African, Indian and not a few Chinese, during the latter years of the nineteenth century. It was also one of the ports at which the
MV
Victoria
stopped – the others were Bukoba, Entebbe, Kisumu and Musoma. Mwanza had spread rapidly, and was a magnet for hopeful illiterates who had little to offer in the way of skills, and often spoke only the language of the Sukumu tribe, which inhabited the hinterland between Mwanza and Tabora, the capital during the days of German rule. Lepers were more numerous than in Ghana, and many cripples with wasted limbs begged on the streets. The Somali men were strikingly tall, thin, very black, and wore heavy turbans; their regal women sometimes wore heavy gold jewellery. Ismali women wore clothes and ornaments exotic in comparison to the simple batik prints favoured by the indigenous women, and the older men tended to be overweight, sometimes illiterate, but oozing prosperity. One patriarch in particular took a regular Sunday afternoon drive, in a cream-coloured Rolls Royce stuffed to capacity with family members of all ages, along the lakeside, passing Bismarck Rock, the dusty golf course, the Mwanza Club, with its swimming pool and tennis courts – once an all-white bastion, it now had a few Asian members – before returning at a speed that must never have exceeded 15 m.p.h. to the town centre.