Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (10 page)

One part of the hotel terrace was owned by Dan, and he sold lots of African things. Watching Dan selling all his things, always surrounded by people was fascinating. People just arriving in Africa were keen to buy something African and he was the first point of sale after arriving. This terrace was always full of gossip about who was doing what, to or with whom. The busiest nights there were the two nights a week when Pan American Airways landed, as everyone wanted to see who was arriving. Special receptions were sometimes given; Eddie and I had one as everyone knew that we had been asked to come to do some important work. The days were full but the nights more so: there were gatherings galore.

Betty describes what followed as a cultural shock, especially coming from a very wealthy part of London relatively untouched by the war. Seldom were white women found living in Ghana in the long term: it is not for nothing that Ghana was known as the white man’s grave. Aside from the perils of disease, Betty soon discovered that it was a must to carry a cutlass in your car if you travelled, as she did, into isolated areas. Nevertheless, she found the country fascinating, even though at times frightening and even life-threatening:

After the initial shock, I committed myself to Ghana for two years and in doing so I had some incredible experiences indeed. Almost from the day we arrived we were up to our necks in Ghanaian politics. After getting to Ghana, we got together with Kwame Nkrumah almost immediately. Aside from our personal friendship with him, he was our contact for our building projects there. Yet over time in Africa, we lost everything we had, apart from a good friend in Kwame. I never ceased to be ashamed of the way that this country treated him. He was such a compassionate man that did so much for Ghana.

My most outstanding memories of Africa were the terrible poverty, mostly in the outlying villages; the hardships the women endured, while the men enjoyed lazing about. And the poorest of animal specimens; you could see them lying around everywhere, and you could see all their bones. There were bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere, open sewers, terrible smells – all embraced by red laterite dust.

All the way along the highways in Africa would be very tall proud cotton trees. If you stopped for anything on the roadside, people would come to sell you fish, you can imagine the smell in that heat! And these boxes of fish were covered in flies! They would also sell fruit, lots of plantain. But I’ll never forget the smell of that foul fish. They were also selling pigs feet, sweet potatoes and homemade bread, but all covered in masses of flies! Water, though, was like gold dust; you had to sometimes get people to carry it for miles. Every village you passed as you travelled had guest houses that you could rent. I remember once going into a rest house and finding a snake under my pillow, so my rest period was over before it started! It was vital to carry a cutlass in your car as you travelled through isolated areas as we did, Africa was dangerous. Sacrifices were quite common in Ghana. Heads were at a premium. When a chief died, in theory they would be servants in the afterlife. Congestion on the roads was horrendous. Driving was a hazard, especially in the centre of cities where the congestion was appalling. The standard of driving was appalling as well. For a few pounds’ bribe you could be passed fit to drive anything. If you passed an African on the road, he would spit at you and call you a pig, and being forced into the ditch was a game if you crossed an African driver. When this happened I just put my foot down and put my two fingers up.

Leprosy was widespread. Lepers were everywhere; people in the streets without arms and legs. There were even open sewers. Malaria was also a constant worry. In those days they didn’t have the preventatives of today so it could have been life-threatening; here today and gone tomorrow. Because of the heat, if you died in the morning, you’d be buried by lunchtime. There was so much to remember to do to protect yourself, taking some pills, keeping out of the sunshine etc. It was hard to take all of this in after coming from London’s Belgravia.
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Ghana was completely uncivilised, no beauty parlours, nothing there at all. It was for me a great shock, from affluent Belgravia to Ghana was a massive leap, but I was forced to acclimatise and pretty rapidly too. Aside from the ever-present bugs, there was the heat; you could literally fry an egg on your car bonnet in the early morning! No shops, no dressmakers; there was just one big store. Everyone was wearing the same thing.

Eventually we got our house. It had a dining room and a sitting room on the ground floor, and on the next floor it had three bedrooms. The kitchen was outside, on a stove a bit like a barbecue. Eventually we qualified for an electric stove, meaning we had to be somebody of note, on a point system, so that was quite something. We had quite a nice garden. We lived there for about two years. We had house boys, like servants, and a garden boy, a cook and a night watchman to make sure no one tried to kill or rob us! It was common to sell stolen goods in Nima nearby; even the night watchman would do so. We trusted ours but still had to be careful. One night after meeting our managing director, who had come from Holland, we had to leave our car on the other side of our stream, swollen by heavy rains. Eddie had to drag me through the stream (between the road and our house) and I in evening clothes! When, the next morning, we went to get our car, all the wheels had been pinched! We had made some promotional films of the houses we were building, which had been left in storage cans in our car, but the films had been strewn all over the road.

Cooking facilities for most were primitive wood-burning stoves. We were fortunate to have an electric cooker, which was not always an advantage over the wood variety. Our Sudanese cook, Johnson, used to complain. In his words, ‘the stove him kick so he not fit to use him’. Any electric items were unreliable because of installation. On one party evening with 250 guests our whole system blew up. We discovered a neighbour, a well-known government official, had had his supply connected to ours, overloading it.

Johnson was always at the palm wine. It was very potent. Cooks did not like ‘the missus’ going with them to the market place because they couldn’t fiddle the money and buy palm wine. Johnson came home this day with the meat which I had already arranged for. He brought it inside in a tin while I was in the dining room. He banged it down on the table and looked murder at me and said ‘I fit to kill you missus.’ I said, ‘Get out of here’, and pushed him out and closed the door. He was in such a rage and crazy with the palm wine that no one in the house would do anything against him. I tried to get the houseboys to go out and phone Eddie, because I didn’t know what he would do. No one could find Eddie, but eventually they did get out to get the government chief who lived next door. About two or three hours had passed and Johnson arrived with several of his buddies with long knives. Miraculously, at the same time Eddie returned home, and that was that. I couldn’t charge Johnson because a white person, especially one in our particular position – for the African – couldn’t really go against them. But we found another cook very quickly.

The new cook and the houseboys would come with me to the market. It had vegetables but they were expensive. You could get paw paws cheaper as they grew there, and also plantain. You had to buy your ice from an ice company every day to keep your fruit fresh, until eventually we got a fridge. When the chiefs in the north heard about this fantastic new innovation called a fridge, they went wild! So they all bought them and waited for the drinks to get cold. When this didn’t happen, they said they didn’t work, and they took them back. When they complained, they were told, ‘Oh, you have no plugs.’ Plugs were then purchased, and they returned to their village. They tried plugging them into the mud huts, just plugging the cable straight into the mud. Same routine: waited and waited. Until someone pointed out they had no electricity. The elders needed some pacifying.

Even our close friend Krobo Edusie wasn’t immune.
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He had a lovely modern house – smart toilet, facilities, bathrooms etc. Our first visit was after a long, hot, dirty journey, and oh, there was a lovely bath. I must say I was impressed by our bathroom until I discovered on turning on the tap that there was no water, and no plumbing.

Because the native Ghanaians had been kept as a servile people, they never had an opportunity to move beyond. Now that they were, at last, their own people, many of them were anxious to learn Western ways, especially among the emerging community leaders that Eddie and Betty were constantly mixing with. Eddie remembered the time that Betty had invited the wives of influential Ghanaians around to a traditional tea party. She had bought a new tea set. The wives all sat there, not knowing what to do. Betty put the cups and saucers out, and little cakes. She poured the tea and passed the teapot around, and they all copied her. Betty says of the time: ‘They were very anxious to learn our ways, and after that we had tea parties all over the place.’ To the pleasure and amusement of all, Betty also adopted some of their ways: ‘They got me dressed up in Kente cloth, and made me the traditional African dress. When I went to tea, I had to wear this. It was long, and you could hardly move in it. It was like a long wrapover skirt.’

She continues:

When we were in the capital of Ghana, Accra, there was a store called Kingsway where you could buy everything except fruit and vegetables, which was sold by a different company called The Ice Company. Kingsway bought their merchandise in bulk. All the Africans that waited outside the store would then go in and buy stuff only to sell it again on the streets. Their main sale was cotton for clothing; the long, tunic-style clothes that were wrapped around. The market place was open and sold everything from goats and chickens to fresh salads. The trader’s biggest problem was to protect their produce from insects: they wrapped everything in cabbage leaves.

From the market we would sometimes buy chickens and keep them in the garden, feeding them up until they were ready to eat. We also had turkeys ready to be killed and prepared for special occasions. I gave the houseboys whisky to give to the turkeys before they killed them so that it would relax them! One day when I looked out at the boys doing it, I saw them chopping off the turkey heads and drinking the whisky themselves! One day, the cook came in with a big fat chicken, trying to tell me it was from the market, but actually he had stolen it from next door!

The houseboys were both a source of amusement and annoyance at times. Once, Betty’s houseboy, Peter, and the night watchman started fighting every two minutes when the Chapman’s backs were turned. It went on for about three or four days for no apparent reason, although it emerged that Peter had, unnoticed, stolen some money. Eddie mentioned it to Nkrumah, who said, ‘Never mind, I will get the witch doctor down and he will find out what it’s about.’ When they told Peter and the watchman that they were going to get the juju man, the pair went absolutely mad. They were petrified. But the Chapmans told them: ‘It’s too late, we want to find out what’s going on.’ Betty says:

So the juju man came up and he had some bones and God knows what with him and they were shaking like tapioca puddings. He gave them stones which they put in their hands and he then did his party piece with the bones and apparently he said to them ‘The hand that took the money will be burnt’ and my boy who was my personal servant suddenly let out a squawk and dropped it.

Betty has other stories about Peter:

He used to come up every night with a drink. There were two doors to our room so if one door was locked on one side he would go round the other side. So this day I was standing in my room absolutely starkers and he walked in with a tray. I said ‘Peter you knock before you come in.’ So he held the tray in his hand, knocked on the inside of the door, looked me straight in the eye, and handed me the drink. On another evening we had people in for drinks. I asked Peter where Awini (another houseboy) was. He said: ‘He gone piss ma’am.’ I said: ‘You must not say that Peter. You must say he has gone to the urinal.’ So the next time I asked where Awini was he said: ‘He go to the urinal to shit ma’am.’

She continues:

The chiefs controlled much of the flow of money in the economy. But because they didn’t trust anyone, the chiefs would get the money and then bury it. Then, they often couldn’t find it again. There was about £20 million out of circulation, worth about twenty times that amount today. When we first paid our rent I paid them in cash, but one month I paid by cheque, which had to go through a bank. A few weeks later I got a note from our landlords, saying ‘Have you paid your rent?’

I said, ‘Of course I have paid it.’

He said, ‘Well, we haven’t received any receipts for it.’

So we got hold of the chief and asked him if he had paid the money in. He said ‘Yes, yes, hidden underground.’ I said, ‘You have got to pay them into the bank.’

He replied, ‘[I] don’t trust the banks, missus.’

I loved the countryside and I never missed an opportunity to go to the government farm overseen by a charming (and good-looking young man), Tommy. It was about 40–50km from Accra, and approached by a very bumpy 3 or 4km track off the main highway. I found the only way to stay on it and to avoid toppling off the edge into the fields was to maintain a speed of 40mph. It did concentrate the mind because there were all sorts of assorted animals around. The farm was extensive and flat and reminded me of parts of Wiltshire. I just loved sitting with Tommy on the stool in the cool of the evening, swapping stories – gossiping I guess is more like it – as there was plenty to gossip about: who was cheating on whose husband or wife and who was sleeping around.