Zamani E-Book

Jane Bryce

• Herausgeber: Cinnamon Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 448

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Haunted by memories of a Tanzanian childhood abruptly ended when her parents were deported, Jane Bryce returns in search of the past only to be ambushed by the present. As she retraces her own and her parents' footsteps she is surprised by unexpected connections, reaching back into the colonial past, and further, to a time of myth and legend. The key to understanding what holds these together comes to her in the form of 'zamani'—the Swahili sea of time where spirits inhabit places and landscape, memory animates the everyday and voices from the past speak to the present. Collectively these voices paint a picture of social and political change in Tanzania over the last 50 years, and invite the author to take her place in it.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Half Title

Map of East Africa, 1954

Part 1: Horizons

1. Departures and Arrivals

2. Off the shelf

Part 2: Sojourn in the South

3. On the Rondo

4. Safari in the South

5. Transitions: 1952-54

Part 3: Moshi And The Mountain, 1

6. Rombo Avenue

7. Martha’s Dream

8. The Walking Dream

9. A Contested Kingdom

10. Marangu and the Mountain Guides

11. Myself as a Puff of Dust: a Ghost Story

12. ‘They are in the forest, they are in the house.’

Part Four: Lushoto And The Usambaras

13. ‘Almost like England.’

14. Maria Morphopolous’s Slipper

15. Encounters in the Usambaras

16. Return to Lushoto School

17. Forest of a thousand memories

Part Five: Moshi And The Mountain, 2

18. Music, Coffee, Clans

19. The waHindi Clan: Himat and Pushpa

20. Putting down roots

21. Misitu ni Uhai: Forest is Alive

22. The Prayer Rug

23. Winds of Change

24. Elephant and Allure

25. The Reel Unspools

26. ‘That’s the way it goes, professor.’

27. The Dead are Not Dead

Acknowledgements

Bibliography and Source Material

Zamani

a haunted memoir of Tanzania

Jane Bryce

Published by Leaf by Leaf

an imprint of Cinnamon Press,

Office 49019, PO Box 15113, Birmingham B2 2NJ

www.cinnamonpress.com

The right of Jane Bryce to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patent Act,

1988. © 2023 Jane Bryce.

Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-986-5

Ebook Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-987-2

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Cinnamon Press is represented by Inpress.

Designed and typeset by Cinnamon Press.

Cover design by Adam Craig © Adam Craig.

All images © Jane Bryce except for the photograph of Miss Goodwyn on page 128, which is by Anne Fletcher.

Every effort has been made to contact rights holders where small quotations have been used from works still in copyright. The author is glad to be contacted through the publisher to update permissions in future editions. The author thanks all those who have granted permissions. Quotations from Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937), now owned by Penguin, Random House, appear under the US Fair Use determination and with permission from the Gyldendal Group Agency, Copenhagen for the UK edition. Two quotations: one from correspondence between Granville, British Secretary of State and Gladstone, Prime Minister, and one from Chief Mandara, are from Why Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania by Heinz Schneppen, National Museums of Tanzania Occasional Paper No.9, quoted by kind permission of his daughter Ruth Schneppen. The quotation from Robert Menzies is licensed from the Commonwealth of Australia under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. The Commonwealth of Australia does not necessarily endorse the content of this publication. Lines from ‘Ballad of the Southern Suburbs’/‘Ag Pleez Deddy’ by Jeremy Taylor on Wait a Minim, 1961 Decca, UK, 1964 used by kind permission of Jeremy Taylor.

For Anne and Jock

And all the people, alive and in the spirit world, who lent me their stories

Utarajeya kama kitofu chako kime jiwe.

‘Where your umbilical cord is buried you, too, will return.’

(Swahili proverb)

Njofu yekyephia royapfo.

‘An elephant does not die in a strange land.’

(Chagga proverb)

Zamani

PART 1: HORIZONS

1. Departures and Arrivals

We’re flying east, out of darkness into light. Twenty thousand feet below it’s still night on the savannah, but here above the clouds it’s dawn. The plane banks and levels, and there it is. The mountain, so long a buried memory, materialises in the window, impossibly near. We drift alongside as it floats above rose-tinged clouds, its snowy summit glowing in the early morning sun. Not a memory but as real as rock, as magma from the earth’s core. All the years I’ve been away it’s been here, waiting.

Between the mountain and me there’s the gulf of years, but I’m the one that’s changed. Sitting in this plane, suspended between leaving and arriving, my whole life boils down to this—a woman staring out of a window, looking for confirmation that the past exists. It’s dropping behind us now as we drift eastwards, slowly falling out of sight, the way the present endlessly recedes into the past.

The last time I saw Kilimanjaro I was not quite seventeen and flying back to school in England, sick with misery and already longing for home. I had no idea that within six months my parents would be deported and it would be a lifetime before I made my way back here. In Swahili philosophy, Sasa, the present, and Zamani, the past, are inseparable; they swim together in the great sea of time. For twenty years I’ve lived on an island in the Caribbean, swimming in another sea. Now I’m diving deep into Zamani, but Sasa is the lifeline that will keep me from drowning. As strongly as the past pulls me down, I’m always aware of the ocean’s sparkling surface, the present. In coming back to Tanzania, the land of my birth, I hope I’m going forward, open to whatever I may meet, in my luggage a parcel of memories.

I grew up in Moshi, a small town on the plains at the foot of Kilimanjaro. During the day, when it was shrouded in cloud, life went on as if it wasn’t there. But in the evening the mountain would emerge shining and afloat on its raft of white. When it was hot and dry and everyone was irritable, sometimes our parents would take me and my sisters to Marangu, a magical place on the mountain, where it was always cool and green and everywhere you went there were streams and waterfalls and the emerald green of banana trees. The turning to Marangu was marked by an ancient baobab on the main road, so vast an entire family couldn’t get their arms around it. People said the first baobab had been uprooted by God for daring to complain about something and made to grow upside down with its roots in the air. A tree that size would be at least five hundred years old, my father said. Five hundred years of growing upside down, its branches buried, unable to see. You could live off its bark and the water it contained if you were lost in the savannah. And people were buried in the trunk sometimes, so spirits lived in it. Tree of life and death.

After the tree, the road climbed. The air became clearer and caressed your face, carrying the faintest hint of moisture to revive you after the dust and drought lower down. In Marangu, the two peaks, Kibo and Mawenzi, seemed lower, almost at eye-level. The drama of distance was replaced by the intimacy of connection, so that all the elements were redolent of the mountain—earth dark and rich, air cool and thin, water cold and sparkling like liquid sunlight.

Before the white man came the coastal people had known of the mountain for centuries as a mysterious place, populated by djinn. They called it the Land of Djagga, and though they made long perilous journeys there in search of elephant tusks and people to sell in the slave markets of Bagamoyo and Zanzibar, they regarded it with dread. Trudging across the endless plain, a winding caravan of merchants and pack animals, porters and guards would catch a glimpse of something impossibly white rising high on the horizon, and shiver. The wisps of vapour that clung to the peak were the visible sign of spirits.

Though the Chagga had lived there for hundreds of years, for a long time its upper reaches remained a mystery. People believed the mountain was a sacred site, inhabited by supernatural beings that caused death to those who approached. To the Chagga, it wasn’t even a single thing, but two peaks embodying distinct personalities. The name Kilimanjaro didn’t exist until slave and ivory traders from the coast started to pass that way and the name emerged out of different languages: kyaro, a kiChagga word for god, kilima, kiSwahili for little mountain. For a long time, white men from different places quarrelled over who owned it; eventually it became an icon, a sign for Africa itself. When Independence finally came to Tanganyika—as it was then—a local man was entrusted with carrying the Uhuru torch to the summit, where its flame was a beacon of freedom to the rest of Africa.

Staring out of the plane window, the mountain already out of sight, I wonder why this homecoming has taken so long. All my adult life I’ve written and taught about Africa without coming back to Tanzania; when I got a Commonwealth scholarship to study for a PhD, I chose Nigeria and lived there for five years. I’ve since been in many other countries on the continent, including Kenya—just next door. But I didn’t cross the border. Was I afraid of losing all I had so carefully stored in memory? That somehow the past that haunts me, with its peculiar feeling of groundedness in a certain time and space, would have ceased to exist?

In the Caribbean, ‘Back to Africa’ is a longed-for return to a site of myth, a place of origin beyond the reach of history. For the twenty years I’ve worked as a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, I’ve tried through literature and film to connect African descendants with the continent as it is today. I’ve organised a film festival, brought African directors to show their work and talk to local audiences, and created a dialogue between African and Caribbean filmmakers. For my students, who have never heard African languages or music, experienced its frantic cities or witnessed its contradictions, cinema is a portal to a lived reality. Now, it’s brought me here, far from the Black Atlantic, to the Zanzibar International Film Festival, to immerse myself in an Indian Ocean cultural world. To stand in the centuries-old Arab Fort in Stonetown listening to a taarab orchestra, eat the spicy food of the Swahili coast, walk with festival goers from all over Africa through narrow winding streets past crumbling palaces. Zanzibar is, for me, the bridge between memory and whatever this country has become in all the years it’s carried on without me.

The plane’s crossing the water between the city of Dar es Salaam and the islands of Zanzibar, which united with the Tanganyika mainland in 1964 under the new name, Tanzania. Since then, Zanzibar has become a fantasy destination for foreigners in search of the exotic; but I’m not looking for paradise. Beneath the thrum and hustle of today’s Tanzania, I’m pursuing a ghostly trail only I can see. That trail leads back to my parents, to their meeting and their fateful posting to Tanganyika in 1949. Before I am even born, the story starts there.

2. Off the shelf

When he emerged from two and a half years as a prisoner of war, Jock Bryce, five foot eleven, weighed 137 pounds (62 kilos). It was May 1945, the War had just ended and he was not yet twenty-four years old. When it started, he was eighteen and marked time getting a war-time degree at Oxford, until he was old enough to join the RAF in 1941. Jock’s perfect English enunciation, his public school and Oxford education, belied the fact that he was colonial to the core. His Scottish father, George, was a senior colonial administrator who had been posted successively to Ceylon, New Guinea, Malaya and Nigeria. His mother, Kitty, was Australian. In later years, she lived in a district of Adelaide called Stirling West, while George lived in Stirling, Scotland. Jock had been weaned on separation and distance.

At eighteen, Jock had one ambition—to get airborne and ‘do his part killing Germans’. He wrote to Kitty in Adelaide: ‘It is harder to receive than to give and I can’t have all these people dying for me.’ He had to wait till 1942 before his wish was granted and he was posted, still only twenty-one, to RAF Coastal Command in Malta, whose pilots had the job of patrolling the Mediterranean. They not only flew Beaufighter planes but were in control of all the offensive weaponry. This suited Jock, who had scant respect for the idea of a crew and liked to remark sardonically, ‘There’s only one thing stupider than a bomber pilot and that’s a fighter pilot.’

His first mission was flying a Beaufighter over a convoy to protect it from enemy attack. He was disgusted beyond measure when he was shot down on his first flight. Propelled by fury, he fought his way out of the cockpit as the plane sank at speed below the surface of the water. Picked up by an Italian ship, he survived a succession of prison camps, in both Italy and Germany, on Red Cross food parcels, letters from his mother and the companionship of his fellow POWs. One thing that especially sustained him was teaching people to play Bridge—and then beating them. Stakes were high: a single piece of Red Cross chocolate the highest ever. The killer instinct for cards and gambling that grew out of semi-starvation followed him into civilian life. When he was released two and a half years later, he had no idea what he wanted do for a career but knew he wanted to get married, and to whom. He wrote to Kitty that he wanted ‘a moll who thinks she has all the answers, who I can bludgeon to her knees’. There not being many women who fitted this description, he looked around meanwhile for a career that would guarantee him maximum freedom and went back to Oxford to read forestry.

Then he met his moll. In May 1949, he sent his mother a telegram: ‘Marrying a girl who is older, taller and heavier than I am.’ Anne stuck stubbornly to her claim to be five foot ten and three quarters (Jock was five eleven), but in her heels she topped him by an inch. Jock told his mother the part she herself had played in their meeting. While she and George were posted in Kuala Lumpur, Kitty had made friends with a couple called Marguerite and Malcom Macgregor. Their two boys were the first people their own age that Kitty’s children, Judy and Jock, met when they came to school in England. Though the elder son—also called Malcolm—was four years older than Jock, they became firm friends. When the War began, Malcolm joined the Navy as a doctor and was posted to a medical station in Tanga, on the Tanganyika coast. The job of looking after wounded troops was greatly eased by the presence of a number of female nursing auxiliaries (VADs), one of whom was Marigold. Marigold was upper-class and beautiful, with an irresistible charm that made you want to warm your hands at its flame. Malcolm was smitten from the moment he met her and they were married in India on his next posting. Conveniently for Jock, when the War ended, they chose to set up home in Warwickshire. He could catch a train in Oxford on a Friday evening, Malcom would meet him in Banbury and they’d be home in time for pre-dinner sherry.

Having become accustomed to viewing their guest room as his, Jock was put out on arriving one weekend by the news that another guest was expected. As he had arrived first, he moved into the spare bedroom before ownership could be contested. The other guest, when she arrived, had the sofa. Anne Millard turned out to be a friend of Marigold’s from Tanga, where she’d been posted to the WRNS with the job of decoding enemy communications. Tall she certainly was, but with a gentle grace and a smile that could illuminate a room. She also had a wicked wit to match his own. The family connection and Marigold’s friendship were enough to outweigh the fact that she was working for a Labour MP. Since the war she’d been secretary to Eddie Shackleton (son of the famous Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton), who had also served with RAF Coastal Command as an intelligence officer. Jock would have been impressed if he hadn’t been a High Tory. When he declared that feudalism was the best form of government for Britain, Anne sniffed and said, droit de seigneur was all right as long as you were the seigneur.

Given her credentials there didn’t seem any reason to delay. Jock went up to London and took Anne out to dinner a couple of times just to be sure. Three weeks after their first meeting, Anne was ironing a blouse when the phone rang and a voice like velvet came through the earpiece. When he asked her to marry him, she was so shocked she forgot about the blouse, and when she went back to it, the iron had burnt right through. Of her wartime boyfriends (among them Frank, who gave her a silver bracelet with their names inscribed in a heart; Creepie, who despite his name was very attractive; soulful George; Pete with the jaunty smile) many did not survive. Frank, whom she might have married, was killed early on. Later, many of the naval officers with whom she danced in Tanga were torpedoed at sea. A cardboard folder of typed poems written in her twenties contains as many about death as love. In one she laments:

Amidst the tragedy of fallen things

Dreams unfulfilled

And beating broken wings

This too must be a part—

This unhealed hurt

This numbing of my heart.

Despite this, a lot of her friends got married before the War ended. For people in their twenties who’d survived it, the War was a bond they shared. Besides, Jock was good-looking and made her laugh. He pretended to be cynical and liked to say outrageous things, but she could tell he’d had a hard time. Anne asked Marigold what she thought and her answer was, ‘Pure gold.’ So she cheerfully sacrificed the blouse.

Jock wrote to Kitty that he had proposed to Anne by offering to ‘take her off the shelf’. The War had been over for four years and Anne was twenty-eight. ‘I’m glad to say she had the good sense to accept,’ he went on. ‘I trust you’ll approve my choice, because I can’t marry anyone you don’t like.’ In fact, Kitty and Anne recognised each other as allies and were friends the moment they met in September 1949. Afterwards, Kitty wrote Anne a long and personal letter about her struggles with motherhood, her guilt and misgivings about the past. Her honesty cemented a close relationship with Anne: they were each other’s champions ever after.

‘I feel I must write to tell you of my gratitude that you have agreed to marry my son,’ Kitty began. ‘I have never felt so instantly drawn to any young thing as when you walked towards me in the restaurant in London, tall and graceful in your elegant New Look suit. As I sat watching you so bravely enduring Jock’s dancing, I was surprised by my depth of feeling and hardly dared hope you would really marry my darling Jock, who has had too much suffering in his short life. Your combined senses of humour seem a gift from Heaven and should make light of any difficulties you encounter. I know from personal experience that marriage is not an easy thing, but the ability to laugh at each other’s jokes goes a long way to smoothing rough edges. And Jock has some rough edges, despite my efforts to civilise him.’

It wasn’t, she told Anne, entirely his fault. Like all colonial wives in the 1920s, she’d had two choices. Having gone back to Adelaide to have both her children, did she then take them to a harsh tropical environment in Papua New Guinea where there was no suitable housing and rampant malaria, or leave them in Australia and go to join her husband? Kitty’s decision, to commit Judy aged three and Jock two to a children’s home in Melbourne, was one she continued to struggle with. Until the 1980s, Australia had a large network of such institutions, where many migrant, Aboriginal and white Australian children simply disappeared.

Kitty did what she thought best for her children, regularly spending weeks at sea travelling home to see them. When, on one of these visits, she discovered how miserable Jock was—the extent of deprivation, neglect, abuse and assault in children’s homes would only emerge much later, spelled out in a 2004 report titled Forgotten Australians—she withdrew them and took them back with her to New Guinea, then to Malaya. When Judy was eight and Jock seven, Kitty reluctantly sent them to boarding schools in Adelaide. She was sick at heart, ‘because’, she wrote to her own mother, ‘I shall be so wretched without them.’ When George was posted to Nigeria in 1930, for a few years she continued to spend eight weeks at sea getting to Australia. Eventually she decided she could cut down the distance by moving the children to England, only two weeks away.

So these two young Australians went, aged fourteen and thirteen, to English boarding schools. Kitty bought a cottage in rural Bedfordshire and in the holidays, as young teenagers, Jock and Judy stayed there by themselves and a woman in the village looked after them. Jock was unhappy at school but did well enough to get into Oxford, where, at the age of eighteen, he went to read medicine. But medicine was George’s choice, and one thing she would discover about Jock, Kitty warned Anne, was his resentment and anger at his father’s preoccupation with work and ignorance of his children’s needs. Even after he switched to study English, all he could think of was getting into the forces and joining in the War. He was especially keen on the RAF, because, he told his mother, of ‘the possibilities of speed and aerial antics leading straight up into the balmy blue, with, one hopes, a little killing to do when up there.’

Kitty left it to Anne to imagine what it must have meant, after all that training and having finally got to where he most wanted to be—at the controls of a fighter plane—to be shot down and imprisoned in such frightful conditions. For herself, she wouldn’t speak of her feelings during the two weeks between the telegram telling them he was lost and the news that he was alive and a prisoner of the Italians. Kitty had frequently thought that his early experiences—emotional deprivation, physical separation and institutional neglect—might have prepared him for what he encountered as a POW and helped him survive. It did not, however, soften him or make him any more amenable, and of this she wanted Anne to be aware. His forestry supervisor at Oxford reported that while he was unquestionably a man of intelligence and ability, he was also cynical and critical, and would show up best when working independently. His judgement that, ‘He is likely to be difficult under other conditions,’ was one, said Kitty, they would all do well to bear in mind.

‘This, my dear Anne,’ she concluded, ‘is the man you have agreed to marry. I tell you these things not, as I hope, to put you off, but because I trust to your strength of character and that spirit of yours that so appealed to me when we met. If you can overlook the rough edges, I venture to promise that you’ll have a husband of sterling worth. But then I am his mother.’

Anne wasn’t put off; they were married in October 1949. In the photograph taken as they emerge from the church, they stand shoulder to shoulder, gazing into each other’s eyes, and they’re laughing. He’s dark and dapper in morning suit with a carnation button-hole, she’s in a white 1940s wedding dress holding a cascade of roses in her left hand. He’s clasping her right hand in his left, and his customary sardonic humour has given way to a teasing hilarity, mirrored in her wide smile beneath her orange-blossom crown. What is he saying to make her smile like that? At this moment they are in perfect equipoise, inhaling a single breath.

Almost immediately afterwards, Jock heard from the Colonial Office that he was to join the Forest Department in Tanganyika, first posting the Rondo Plateau in the Southern Province. They were to leave in November. Anne knew something of Tanganyika, though a southern upcountry posting was going to be different from the northern coastal town where she’d been posted during the War. Jock, from reading the Annual Reports, kept at the Colonial Office, knew that the Southern Province was a territory of some 55,000 square miles—5,000 square miles larger than England but with a population of only a million—so remote it was excluded from the Forest Department until after the War, and since then, ‘just permitted to tick over’. Before the War, forestry had been mainly about exploitation and collection of revenue. Now, under the leadership of the visionary Chief Conservator, W.J. Eggeling, it was viewed as protecting natural resources through soil conservation and water control ‘for the betterment of the natives.’ It was hoped, through Colonial Development and Welfare aid, to introduce sound forest management and Jock was to be one of three forest officers charged with this mission in the Southern Province.

The Rondo Forest had been proclaimed a reserve under German rule in 1912, but no one knew the extent of it. Jock’s first job would be to map it on foot. After that, the idea was to allow judicious commercial logging alongside nurseries for reafforestation. According to Eggeling, author of the Annual Reports, ‘A forest officer’s time should be spent in the forests, not at an official desk.’ Jock’s sentiments precisely—what could be better? 32,000 acres of forest (an area the size of Manchester) to himself and under orders to get out there where no one could tell him what to do. The Chief Conservator’s summation: ‘Tanganyika may not be a place fit for kings, but it appears perfectly adequate for foresters to live in,’ gave Jock all the encouragement he needed.

Anne, meanwhile, less than a month after her wedding, was preparing to leave behind her friends and family and, once again, live in Tanganyika. On top of an annual salary of £620, they had been given a grant of £30 for equipment. Looking at the camp bed, chair, table and folding canvas bath, the mosquito net, mosquito boots and hurricane lamp, Anne tried to imagine herself in a tent in the bush. For the next three years, they would live with the hiss of the kerosene lantern as their only light source. They had to anticipate what else they would need miles from the nearest grocer or dress shop. Luckily, one of Anne’s wedding presents was a Singer sewing machine, and one of Jock’s a Phillips wireless they hoped would receive the BBC Overseas Service. Picking out books to take, Jock’s tended towards the history of Napoleon’s military campaigns, Anne’s in the direction of Romantic poetry. It would make for interesting conversation in the long evenings.

There were more personal, feminine, concerns. Needing a companion and advice, Anne thought of her sister Pam, but she was tied down in her Essex village with a toddler and a new-born. So she invited Marigold, who anyway was her closest friend and confidante (and no one had her dress sense) to spend a day in London and help her choose the right clothes for her new life. It was easier for Marigold, who had a nanny, to leave her new-born baby at home. In fact, it was an intense pleasure for them to have the day together in London. It was lovely to sit in a restaurant, just the two of them, and have a really good natter—something that marriage seemed to make so much harder.

‘Men,’ said Marigold, ‘never want to talk about the interesting things, it’s all the state of the world and the price of whisky.’ Anne agreed.

‘What about the price of nail polish and how many bottles to take for three years? And I won’t be able to pop into Boots the Chemist for sanitary towels and aspirin either.’

‘At least in the War we were all in it together and could borrow each other’s.’

‘I know. I feel as though I’m going to the ends of the earth with a man I hardly know and no girlfriends to advise me.’

‘At least you’ll get leave every three years,’ Marigold reminded Anne, ‘and next time you come you can share the spare room and won’t have to sleep on the sofa.’

Cheered by food and talk, they cruised the Oxford Street department stores, but, even though clothes rationing had been lifted in March, it was now late October, the shops were full of winter clothes and lightweight dresses were nowhere to be found. Then Marigold had a brainwave. ‘Let’s go to Liberty’s!’ she said, steering Anne towards Regent Street and the half-timbered black and white facade. In the fabric department, they found what they were looking for—exquisite floral-patterned lawn cottons that Anne loved on sight. She selected half a dozen and they spent time in the drapery section, looking at dress patterns. She bought a yard of white linen for contrasting collar and cuffs, bone buttons, a belt—Marigold knew a marvellous dressmaker who could make anything. By the time Anne waved her goodbye at Marylebone Station, it had, they agreed, been a thoroughly satisfactory day.

Anne would wear those cottons every day for three years, until their patterned flowers faded almost away from the onslaught of sunlight and washing.

PART 2: SOJOURN IN THE SOUTH

3. On the Rondo

Anne and Jock sailed from London on November 9th 1949 on the P&O cargo ship SS Matiana, bound for the capital, Dar es Salaam. Arriving in December after a month at sea, they took the 21-seater wartime DC-3 plane to Lindi, then still capital of the Southern Province. Though to Anne’s eyes Lindi was nothing like Dar, or even Tanga, it had until very recently been a thriving port, with schools, hospitals, cinema, sports club and a telephone system. Two years before they arrived, the colonial government had decided to promote Mtwara, seventy miles south, as the centre of a major post-war agricultural project, the Groundnut Scheme. As it was now to be the chief trading centre of the region, Lindi’s long-established Asian commercial community was induced to move there. By the time they got there, as far as Anne could tell, Lindi had nothing but an old Arab fort and some ramshackle administrative buildings built by the Germans.

They were met by Jock’s immediate boss, John Blower, also an Assistant Conservator of Forests, but unlike Jock a bachelor. They took to him immediately. Despite its amenities he hated Lindi. ‘I spend most of my time walking in the bush,’ he told them. ‘In the last year I’ve spent 198 days on tour and walked 1,300 miles.’ When threatened with an office job a few years later, he transferred to the Game Department and became a celebrated game warden in Tanganyika and Uganda, before going to work for Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. He and Jock hit it off, especially as Jock’s job was to deal with the Rondo Plateau, which would free John up to explore the rest of the territory.

They spent the first night in Lindi in an official bungalow, and the next day they went to the office to be briefed. The forestry office was in an underground dungeon with walls four feet thick, beneath the old German headquarters, or boma. It had a horrible acrid smell, and Anne was glad Jock didn’t have to work there. There were bats roosting in the ceiling, droppings everywhere, and not much else beyond a huge desk next to a barred window. On the wall a tattered map showed the coastline in detail, but the area behind—where they were to live—was labelled vaguely ‘Bush’ or ‘Hills’. John waved at the map. ‘Don’t take it too literally,’ he said. ‘It’s at least fifty years old and no one’s even tried to update it. Last year, it was hailed as a triumph when a jeep made it to the top of the Rondo, because it meant it was actually possible for vehicles to manage the climb. So then they made the road.’ Anne managed a smile.

After the briefing, they drove through the town, where the dhow harbour still bustled with life. Then they were allowed to go back to the bungalow and rest, and in the evening, John took them for a drive along the coast, all coconut trees and mangroves. Over a welcome gin and tonic and dinner at his house, John and Jock swapped stories. John had studied forestry in Edinburgh after the War, and delighted Jock with an account of how he released a cageful of rats at a Communist Party meeting. He’d been in Burma during the War and horrified Anne with the story of coming face-to-face with a tiger as he and his men made their way through the jungle in search of Japanese soldiers.

A Bedford truck, assigned by the Forest Department, arrived early the following morning to take them and their luggage to the Rondo. Designed for moving troops and equipment during the War, it was well qualified for the terrain if not passenger comfort. The cab was over the engine with an open metal-floored tray behind, it had a four-wheel drive and weighed three tons. Anne and Jock got into the cab with the driver, who was to show them the way. John had thoughtfully found them a ‘houseboy’ with rudimentary cooking skills, a man in his forties called Rashidi, who rode in the open back of the truck with their boxes.

It might have been called a road, but to Anne it was sixty-four miles of hell. It was so pitted and bumpy they could only go about fifteen miles an hour, and the journey took over four hours. They arrived at last at a small clearing right on the edge of a ravine that plunged away thousands of feet below. It was spectacular, but Anne was so stiff when she got out, and her eyes so full of red dust, she couldn’t appreciate the view. She was longing for a hot bath and a change and a drink, but what she got was cold water, and not a lot of it. They soon found out there was no water up there except what came in a truck every month or so, it had to be boiled because of bilharzia and you had to use as little as possible.

Anne had picked up tummy trouble along the way, and, to her horror, discovered the pit latrine was thirty yards down a forest path. John had warned them that leopard, the most frightening of the big predators, abounded in the forest. It could steal up on its prey in silence and its jaws were deadly. Surrounded as they were on three sides by forest, Anne was queasily aware a leopard could be watching her from the branches of a tree. Women and children were more likely to be victims because they were smaller and easier to dispatch. That first night they made several journeys down that forest path, Anne in front carrying a hurricane lantern in her sweaty hands, trying to still her breath so as to catch the merest rustle in the grass. Jock, walking behind carrying the rifle, tried to focus his eyes outside the small circle of light into which he stepped, trusting it to keep the path clear of snakes. Neither of them fancied diarrhoea as a cause of death.

The house was made of mud blocks, one room deep to allow currents of air to flow through it, with a grass roof populated by creepie-crawlies of every shape and size that swarmed around the flame of the kerosene lanterns. Before dusk, they sat on the verandah sipping minute quantities of whisky from their limited store, but after dark they retreated inside and Rashidi served them dinner cooked on an iron wood-burning stove. His quarters and the kitchen were separate smaller structures at a distance from the house. Though there was a kerosene refrigerator it was hard to keep food fresh, and their diet would be mainly out of tins. In the wet season they got vegetables from the Benedictine mission fifteen miles away on the plain on the road to Lindi, but when it was dry, nothing grew. A forest messenger brought eggs on foot from thirty miles away and Rashidi laid them tenderly in a basin of water to see if any floated—if they did, they were bad. He guarded them jealously and boiled them for breakfast. It was three weeks before Jock woke up to the fact that the only way they would taste fresh meat was if he shot something. So he went out with the rifle and shot an antelope. Rashidi skinned it expertly and they made themselves popular by giving a lot of it away to the forest guards living nearby. There was no point keeping it to go bad, so for a few days they simply gorged on steak and then went back to tinned sausages and beans.

The few large rooms were cool enough in the dry season at that altitude to warrant a fire at night but there was hardly enough light to read by. Instead, Jock taught Anne how to play Bridge. They hadn’t been there long when it became apparent the pitch of the roof was wrong and it had to be rebuilt by local men who lived on the Plateau. The poles and grass, laid in clumps and lashed on, were torn down, releasing a shower of snakes, rats, scorpions, lizards and spiders into the living area. Though they moved from one half of the house to the other until the work was finished, for the nine days it took they had to guard their plates and cups when eating. At night they stripped the bed and remade it before getting in. ‘It’s a long way from Tipperary,’ quipped Jock.

They wasted no time getting on with the job. In a letter to his mother in February 1950, Jock’s customary understatement and phlegm barely disguised the dangers they faced: ‘Back in good order from the first safari. Anne did a good job of keeping up. We were out for six days and walked about eighty miles, accompanied by a team of porters led by Bernard, one of the better Forest Guards. It’s reassuring to have an experienced Forest Guard because there’s a lot of lion and elephant about and we had some exciting moments. It’s an interesting thing to walk in the forest knowing you’re observed by large hungry cats which are quite invisible. But the worst thing is hearing elephant and not knowing in which direction they’re moving as if they find you in their path they make no detour.’

In these conditions, Jock and his fellow conservators were expected to maintain professional discipline and contribute to scientific knowledge. For Jock, this was a satisfying byproduct of indulging his need for unfettered exploration. The Government had granted a logging concession to Steel Bros of Burma, and he was charged with supervising British interests in the reserve. One of the things he was to look at was how to balance what was taken out with new growth, and which species were most effective. He ran trials with local hardwoods, mahogany and mvule (a mighty tree known as iroko in West Africa, Latin name Chlorophora excelsa). The new forest policy was to enlist local cultivators, who lived in the forest and knew it intimately, to help with reafforestation by planting trees.

Post-war planning was about better administration, beginning with measuring the reserves and increasing the size of the forest estate. They used the Compass and Chain method Jock had been taught at the Forestry School in Oxford: the compass gave you your direction and the chain your distance. The chain was the length of a cricket pitch (twenty-two yards) and consisted of a hundred strong metal links, heavy enough to stay straight when laid on leaves or soft vegetation on the forest floor. He wrote the measurements in a notebook and later, used them to create a map on graph paper.

Alongside that was the identification of botanical species and Jock and his African assistants spent a lot of time on safari collecting specimens. While he was trying out his book-learnt Swahili on the forest guards, he was especially grateful to Bernard, who had grown up with a knowledge of local plants and spoke a little English. As well as leaves, they collected flowers and fruits, for which Bernard knew the local names. They put the specimens—two of each—in rudimentary botanical presses made of crossed strips of plywood nailed into frames, and used layers of newspaper to dry them. With thorny specimens or large fruits it was often difficult to get the newspaper covering—sheets of the East African Standard—to stay flat, and it had to be changed frequently to stop things rotting. The frames were stacked and carried back to base on the heads of porters. Through these improvised methods they contributed to science by sending the specimens to the official centres: the Herbarium at headquarters in Morogoro, several hundred miles to the north, and duplicates to the East African Herbarium in Nairobi for naming, as well as Kew Gardens in London and the Imperial Forestry Institute at Oxford.

Anne had other preoccupations. At the end of June 1950, she wrote to Kitty: ‘Three letters from you were waiting at the Lindi post office when we were there last week, and were tremendously welcome. It’s wonderful to have news from the outside world to remind us it exists. My main reason for braving the road to Lindi was to see a doctor at the hospital, and I have good news. It seems I am to have a baby! I had been feeling a bit off-colour and Jock thought I might have picked up something so I went to be checked. Of course it had crossed my mind, but I hadn’t dared to hope I might be pregnant. So here I am, at twenty-nine, expecting for the first time! It should arrive in February, God willing.’

As she quickly outgrew the Liberty print dresses, another trip to Lindi was called for to buy cottons at the Indian duka so Anne could make some larger garments. Because of the arduous journey each trip was an occasion, so they took the opportunity to buy as much fruit as they thought they could eat before it went bad. The doctor had told Anne to eat healthily so she saved the bathwater and used it to nurture tomato seedlings she’d bought in Lindi. She waited to see if they would survive.

When Anne told Jock she was pregnant he responded, ‘Good, I’ll have someone to play cricket with!’ It didn’t seem to occur to him it might be a girl. He suggested to Anne that she should stay home when he went on safari, but she was having none of it. The dense shade of the forest made it a gloomy place at the best of times and she didn’t fancy being left alone. In the morning, she lay in bed and watched the sun rising over the ravine through the expanded metal burglar bars, gradually penetrating the heavy mist in a sinister, silent dawn. The occasional croak from a hornbill, a melancholy plangent sound, only accentuated the silence. During the day the forest was mostly quiet apart from the occasional chattering of monkeys, but towards dusk it whispered and seethed like a great animal coming alive. At night they heard lions roaring terribly close at hand; they had to keep Horatio the terrier (Horry for short) locked up or it would have been like leaving out bait. In fact they had lost two pets almost right away. It was all very well when Jock was there and they could laugh about it, but Anne was adamant she wasn’t facing it on her own. She told Jock that until she actually couldn’t walk she would continue to go with him on safari, but she did eventually have to brave the loneliness. In November 1950, Jock wrote to his mother: ‘I have just returned from safari, for the first time alone. Anne was finally persuaded to stay at home by the fact that she can no longer run out of the path of a charging elephant.’

While Jock was on safari, Anne, eight months pregnant and with only Horry and her tomato seedlings for company, kept herself occupied with the BBC Overseas Service, the Singer she’d brought from home and books. She sewed clothes for the baby and dresses for herself, cut from outdated patterns bought in Lindi. The Swahili she had picked up in Tanga during the War was limited to agreeing with Rashidi what he should cook; though the forest guards also lived on the rim of the Plateau, their wives only spoke the local language, Mwera. When she felt lonely, she listened to the wheeze and crackle from Bush House and pictured the Strand on a rainy day, and meeting a friend for lunch at Lyons. She read a lot of poetry—Tennyson, the Romantics and A.E Housman—and (having published her first poem at nineteen) wrote a few poems herself, a habit she never lost. In one she wrote:

I wish I were in Fleet Street now.

There is always a thrill seeing people rushing

With folders under their arms—

Especially if it is raining,

And inside, the bright lights

And the hammer of typewriters

And the noise of the press turning.

It seemed a long ten days Jock was away, especially when she went out one morning to find Horry’s mangled remains right there in the garden. A leopard had come right up to the verandah to snatch him.

Christmas with the Farrers in Mtwara was a welcome relief. It was seventy miles of bumpy, winding coastal road south from Lindi, and the journey on the hard, plastic seat of the Bedford cab was an ordeal to Anne in her unwieldy state. It was worth it for the company and change of scene. Ralph Farrer and Jock had trained together at Oxford, and Ralph had been Jock’s best man. He was a gentle, attractive man with a shy smile under his trademark broad-brimmed hat. His wife Ann, who was plump and pretty and laughed a lot, was the first woman Anne had talked to properly since their arrival a whole year earlier. While Jock and Ralph did a lot of comparing of notes on the forestry situation, so did the two women—on their respective pregnancies. They visited the hospital where Anne had her blood pressure checked for the first time. It was a comfort to know everything she was feeling was normal. They played a lot of Bridge and Jock and Ralph played tennis while the two women lolled on the beach and took the occasional dip, though there was too much weed for the swimming to be any good. There were also unlimited supplies of beer and conversation to boost their spirits before taking up their solitary and abstemious existence on the Rondo again.

Mtwara, where the Farrers lived, until recently a fishing village, had been developed in 1947 into an administrative centre and port for the Groundnut Scheme, which was to provide oil for cooking and margarine to a post-war Britain beset by rationing. Along with the new port, a railway had had to be built connecting Mtwara and Nachingwea, a hundred miles inland, so as to import the latest farming equipment to cultivate 150,000 acres of bush. It was one of the most notorious failed colonial experiments. Over Christmas everyone they met was talking about it. As far as Jock was concerned, the Scheme’s officials were suffering from collective dementia while the whole miserable affair was the result of the Labour Party’s misguided post-war policies, which had poured forty-nine million pounds of tax-payers’ money into it.

Almost gleefully, Jock wrote to his mother describing the obstacles in the way of the project. First, they had to bring the tractors by dirt road from Dar, chased by elephant and rhino. Even tractors adapted from Sherman tanks couldn’t cope. Baobabs, mighty trees which abounded in that part of the country, impeded progress, but couldn’t be cut down because they were used as tombs of important men, for imprisoning miscreants and so on. Their hollow trunks were beloved of bees that savaged the workers. So inhospitable was it to the demobbed recruits of the so-called Groundnut Army that they eventually trained local men to take over the work of ground-clearing. Jock noted that they took to the tractors with enthusiasm, wrecking them in the process. Then the Colonial Office, informed, he supposed, by socialist notions of equality, conceived the idea that the workers should be unionised. No sooner was the union formed than it went on strike in solidarity with dockworkers in Dar. Once they got the first crop planted, the rains washed away all the buildings and brought on a plague of scorpions besides. When the ground dried, it baked so hard they could hardly harvest the nuts.

The government’s answer was to send a military man out who marched up and down barking orders no one obeyed, until he got sick and was invalided out. Finally, that January they conceded defeat and cancelled the project, having got precisely two thousand tons of groundnuts for their pains. Now the cleared land was unusable even for subsistence farming. Jock concluded his account by hoping some good might yet come of it—’if the great British public comes to its senses and elects a Conservative government at the first opportunity.’ Compared to this, the Forest Department was a model of well-run efficiency.

The next letter, in February, bore news of a different kind: ‘Dear Mama, from my telegram you’ll know the baby arrived and also that it’s a girl: Mary Jane. We couldn’t agree which name to give her so ended up giving her both, and so far Jane has won out. Perhaps if she won’t play cricket we can teach her to make a third at Bridge.’

I’ve always loved the drama of my arrival. It was touch and go whether I would arrive on the road or in the hospital at Lindi. When Anne started having pains, Jock put her in the front of the Bedford and they set off down four thousand feet of escarpment to the dirt road that would take them to the coast. Anne was gasping and gripping the truck door whenever they bounced or jolted, which given the state of the road was most of the time. They had sixty-four miles to navigate and on a good day it took four hours. Jock knew if they didn’t make it he would be acting as midwife; being at the controls of a Beaufighter when its engines had just been shot out was the only comparable experience he had to draw on. He put his foot down and kept going till they reached a point normally crossed by a small bridge. In the dry season there was nothing there but a furrow that never had anything more than a trickle of water. Now it was the middle of the rainy season, and a torrent of muddy reddish-brown water rushed and gurgled across the road, with no sign of the bridge. He looked at Anne, who was rigid and sweating profusely, eyes squeezed shut and teeth clenched. ‘Hold on old girl,’ he said, ‘we’ll get you there in time.’ He swung the steering wheel around and turned the truck back up the road the way they had come on a detour taking them an extra two hours. At last, the simple, one-storey façade of the Lindi hospital, its curved front door beneath a pitched roof held up by verandah posts. Jock brought the truck to a screeching halt and ran to open the door for Anne. She barely made it to the ward before I was born.

Feeling he’d reached his limit and needing back-up, Jock left Anne to navigate the final stage with the help of the nurses. He went in search of John Blower, who luckily was not on safari but in his fusty basement office. John stood up as soon as he entered. It was obvious to both that a drink was in order, so they went back to John’s verandah and downed several beers before they felt strong enough to return to the hospital. When they did, they found Anne propped on a narrow iron bed with me in a crib beside her, tearful but none the worse for wear.

‘They made me walk up some stairs to the delivery room and I nearly didn’t make it,’ she told them. ‘At one point I collapsed onto a step. I could feel I was sitting on the head.’

‘I hope without brain damage being incurred,’ said Jock.

Anne, caught between tears and almost hysterical laughter, found herself gasping for breath. When she could speak, she said, ‘It was the only one of life’s experiences so far that’s lived up to expectations.’