Eighty Not Out (23 page)

We deposited the pregnant woman safely at the hospital, then, mission accomplished, on reaching Bwiru, collapsed with stiff drinks. Stephano had the house in good order, beds made, table laid and a curry prepared. He announced that the cat, recently consigned to our care by a departing European family, now had six kittens: the girls were thrilled, Fergus and I less so, as we faced having to tell them that we could not keep them all. Eventually two handsomely marked males were kept, and the mother spayed. It was thought a wild cat was responsible, and indeed the one we retained matured into a fiercely independent character with a large bushy tail, which spent days away from home. The other we managed to foist on a missionary family living in the project zone.

As the end of the year approached, a succession of minor incidents occurred. An unidentified insect bit my ‘bad' leg, which swelled to elephantine proportions and broke out in small blisters – the agony subsiding only after a couple of days. Mary spent time with Stephano's wife collecting termites from a previous night's swarm, hopefully bringing a cup of them for us to try. Fergus bravely did so, pronouncing them rather like shrimps, but I declined, feeling much as my mother did about lobsters. The girls, together with John and Rosemary's children, Peter, Sheena and Andrew, had collected a number of large land snails (
Achatina spp
.), which were housed in boxes all over both houses, even on the dining table at breakfast, to Stephano's disgust. They marked them with nail varnish and held races in the garden. I drew the line at a vacated tortoise shell in the house until the ants had removed all traces of its dead occupant. Mary started to attend a nursery school that had opened on three mornings each week; unfortunately it was short-lived through lack of demand, and she had to wait until March 1969 to join Katharine at Isamilo Primary School. Our insensitive German neighbour annoyed a black mamba by injuring it with a stone; Fergus then saw it near our car park, chucked a large stone at it, and missed completely; we were astonished how quickly nine feet of snake could disappear into the rockery. Much ineffectual hue and cry ensued, all neighbouring cooks and shamba boys joining in the fray. I hoped it would get the message that it was unwelcome, but it didn't, and was seen from time to time on the track crossing the gully up which cattle were driven daily by a little boy no more than ten years old.

By mid-November I had recovered from the Serengeti trip enough to contemplate taking our entourage to Uganda by lake steamer. Fergus had been asked to attend a schistosomiasis expert committee meeting early in January, followed by the annual medical conference the following week. John and Rosemary, with their three children and their ayah, planned a similar excursion. I had in mind to visit the Queen Elizabeth and Murchison Falls game reserves in western Uganda at the conclusion of the conference; Fergus was less enthusiastic, having been there in 1957 unencumbered by family. It must be hard for readers to imagine how difficult communications then were between countries in the East African Community. Any attempt to make steamer reservations by telephoning the central booking office in Nairobi was guaranteed to provoke a rise in blood pressure. The alternative was to send a letter, which in theory should arrive the next day, but never did. So unable to visit the office in person, chances of booking return tickets for our family and vehicle from Mwanza to Jinja, near Kisumu, and back were slim.

The situation became farcical: Fergus had a personal invitation to go to Kampala, but the regional office in Brazzaville refused permission, saying they intended to send the regional representative (who had not been invited, and had nothing to contribute) as an observer. The secretary of the East African Medical Association then intervened, asking Brazzaville to reconsider its position in view of the valuable contribution which Fergus would make to the special committee on schistosomiasis. He was determined to go, even without official travel authorisation, but this was dangerous territory and might have resulted in days being deducted from his leave, and refusal to pay travel costs. More seriously, he risked arousing the wrath of Dr Quenum in Brazzaville, and seriously jeopardising his future career. As the time approached for our departure, John and Rosemary, their children, the youngest of whom was Andrew, a year older than Michael, and ayah, had their return journey, including their car, confirmed by Nairobi, but not the outward trip; in our case, it was the reverse – between us we had a full booking. Our reservation covered the Peugeot 504 brake.

We liaised with the McMahons when it came to festive catering: our servants, being nominally Christian, wanted Christmas Day and Boxing Day off, while the McMahons' cook, shamba boy and ayah were all Muslim and did not mind working on those days, provided they got two days later in the year or could add them to the celebrations at the end of Ramadan. I had bought a tree, bearing little resemblance to any northern hemisphere conifer, from the forestry department's nursery, insisting that the roots should be preserved. Decorated with old baubles, including those bought in Boston the previous year, it looked authentic when surrounded by small presents for the children, including Stephano's brood, and the ten-year-old son of one of the administrative staff, to whom Michael had taken a liking – John Leugobola. There were soft drinks for the children and hard ones for the parents. Father Christmas provided two dolls in wicker cradles for the girls, proudly displayed to all visitors, but played with minimally thereafter, as predicted; I suspect they were of status value, as all their friends had frilly dolls and cradles. The Barbie craze had yet to reach Mwanza. I was determined to prepare a better Christmas dinner than those we had suffered during the Ghana days, and ordered a free-range turkey from the island farm; ingredients for stuffing posed no problem, in fact the only traditional items missing were Brussels sprouts and potatoes; cranberry sauce and a good variety of dried fruits and nuts were on the shelves of Alibhai stores.

In late January 1968 we travelled to Kampala for the conference and arrived at Makerere University guesthouse exhausted by the trip. We had found the
MV
Victoria
unsafe for children and constant vigilance had to be kept lest any of them were tempted to sit on the rails or crawl below the lifeboats, beside which there were no rails at all. The lifeboats were, of course, on the upper deck, and the stairs up and down to this area provided an irresistible round circuit. By now Michael had a fair turn of speed and tried to keep up with the older children. The cabins were comfortable but exceptionally small; the girls and Fergus slept well but I had to share a bunk with Michael, who was wide awake at intervals, humping and thrashing around all night. David Bradley, seconded from the London School of Tropical Medicine, of which he later became director, and joint author with Fergus of a paper to be presented at the conference, found us an excellent temporary ayah who used to work for his family.

The food at the guesthouse was excellent, and the accommodation almost luxurious: we had two enormous bedrooms, two bathrooms and two loos all to ourselves for £6 per day – food included. While Fergus was at the conference centre, I was able to find many things that had been unobtainable in Mwanza, where austerity was beginning to bite with a vengeance. Even rice, which we bought by the sack, was in short supply and riddled with tiny fragments of quartz, so many washings were needed before cooking; even then, tiny bits were liable to surprise the unwary diner. David took us to the botanical reserve, where the variety of exotic butterflies surpassed even those in Sierra Leone. In the end, our five-day safari to the game reserves proved quite legitimate, because the steamer service was unable to honour our return booking until a week after the conference ended; even then we had to accept second-class cabins – sexes segregated even within families, but happily we were allowed to use the first-class dining and bathroom facilities.

We reached Mbarara, where we checked into an Agip motel, in mid-afternoon. We would have preferred a small privately run hotel overlooking the Queen Elizabeth game reserve, but did not dare risk it, as the road was bad, they had no telephone, and might not, in any case, have had any vacancies. An early start the next day was more prudent, even though nine in the morning was the earliest we ever managed. The sky was slightly hazy and it was not too hot on our journey north to Kichwamba, on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the plain, where we stopped for coffee and soft drinks at a small hotel/restaurant owned by a Swede and his Finnish wife. Forty years on I wonder how their enterprise fared under Amin's reign of terror, and whether our Tutsi ayah, some of whose children were still in their teens, survived the atrocities perpetrated by his troops.

On the second day we checked in at the main lodge in the middle of the reserve. Any view of the Ruwenzori range was obscured by dry season haze and smoke from bush fires. One early explorer spent six months at Kasese, without realising the Mountains of the Moon existed, and we saw only a faint shadow of them on the day we left. The park was totally different in character from Serengeti; but we saw any number of elephants and hippos, the birds were more varied, and we saw a pride of seventeen lions – in fact, we parked right in the middle of them. Hordes of warthog, vast herds of buffalo and a serval cat – the last mostly nocturnal – crossed our path. A bull elephant wandered around the staff quarters at the park, searching for fermenting pombe, to which he was addicted – nobody seemed in the least perturbed. There were many chimpanzees in the area, but we were told that we would have to stay at a campsite to have any hope of seeing them.

On our last two days we drove down through the south end of the park, which bordered on the Congo. Elephants were everywhere, while the roadworkers worked on, apparently oblivious of their proximity. Outside the park we came on vast herds of topi, before starting to climb steadily into the famous Kisengi province of Uganda, where the mountains reach eight-thousand feet. The road was rough and the precipices almost alpine in character. Everywhere the steep hillsides were neatly cultivated, or in some places forested with coniferous trees interspersed with eucalyptus: a formidable feat of planting if one considered the distances, gradients, and stultifying heat during the day. There were small compounds on even the steepest slopes with plantations of bananas, beans, maize and even strawberries. We stayed at Kabale, which is famous for its pleasant climate, but unfortunately did not have time to visit Lake Bunyoni or Kisoro some fifty miles away on the border of Ruanda-Burundi and Congo, where the ascent to mountain gorilla territory begins. The final day was just a straight batter back to Kampala, which we reached early in the evening in time to take the girls for a swim in the university pool. On this trip Fergus had, technically speaking, ‘abandoned post'.

When we eventually boarded the
MV
Victoria
again, the children and I were conducted to a nine foot by six foot secondclass cabin, to be shared with two Indian women, one African woman – all immense – and six assorted children. The Asian ladies got on board at Bukoba, and amid much thumping and loud discussion, filled the available floor space with huge tied bundles. All the lights were ablaze, and at one time the cabin door was filled with voluble male relatives of assorted ages, giving advice, while I lay in my ‘negligée' on the top bunk, my head about eighteen inches from the ceiling. Michael, beside me, slept through it all, but Katharine and Mary in the lower bunk added their views on where things could best be stowed. Outside the cabin, the floor was packed with recumbent bodies shrouded in blankets and cloths; between them a narrow route led to other cabins and several bicycles chained to the rails were a hazard to our shins. In the other cabin Fergus and John McMahon were trying to discourage a nervous elderly Asian, who thought his bunk was dangerously high, from laying his mattress on the floor; also in their cabin was a doctor from Dodoma mental hospital, who helped us by taking the older children up to the first-class deck and reading them stories. Michael celebrated the journey by doing five ‘smellies' en route, so I spent a lot of time in the foetid bathroom trying to clean up, before adding the rinsed nappies to the huge load we had accumulated over the previous few days. Rosemary, whose younger son was still in nappies, was fortunate indeed to have her ayah on board.

During the latter part of February Michael was very ill for three weeks. It began with loss of appetite and persistent thrush which did not respond to treatment with gentian violet, followed by teething problems and a chest infection resistant to all the drugs prescribed. He was miserable and, because even sucking was painful, would not drink enough fluid to prevent dehydration. It was emotionally and physically draining all of us, but he rapidly regained lost weight, and soon was back to normal, dishing out orders to his peer group. I fear Stephano's brood had been told not to thwart the boss's son. Lucy had inherited Joyce's inscrutable countenance, and unlikely to rebel, little Joseph clung limpet-like to his mother, while Margaret, Salome, Elizabeth and Hilda, who saw themselves as trainee ayahs, were happy to carry Michael around. Stephano, unknown to us, had negotiated the sale – for that is what it was – of Stella, by this time fifteen, to a policeman in Dar for 400
EA
shillings. A previous attempt to ‘marry' her to a middle-aged local man had provoked her to seek shelter with the family of a school friend. ‘That girl is always troubling me' was what Stephano thought about the matter.

Maria of the scowling countenance continued to look after Michael in the mornings, but I had unspecific reservations about her. One day I returned to find Michael at the front of the house, one foot wedged between the blades of the lawnmower, while Maria gossiped with the shamba boy at the back door. Michael was not distressed, and probably would have extricated himself, but I blew a fuse in Swahili, which no doubt sounded ridiculous. The message got through, however, that this was the final straw, and her services were no longer required. She did well out of it, getting three months' severance pay, but no glowing reference. Katharine and Mary were pleased, Stephano enigmatic, and the shamba boy more industrious after the incident. Stella took over in the interim period, before, to our regret, moving out of our life, to live with the policeman after Stephano got his final payment later in the year. I hope the man was kind, as Stella had a nice nature and would have preferred to stay at school for another year.