Читать книгу House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe - Christina Lamb - Страница 7

NIGEL THOUGHT there was no better feeling than that of arriving home for the beginning of the long school holidays, weeks of freedom stretching ahead. Like most Rhodesian farm children he had been dispatched to boarding school at the age of seven, so young that many of them still wet their beds. An early photograph shows him in his uniform looking into the camera and trying to affect a jaunty pose while struggling not to let his lower lip wobble. We were all bundled off on the train and we would cry like mad. We wouldn't come home again for three months. It was tough but you got used to it For Rhodesian farming families, child-rearing was kind of like a lottery-you sent your children away at an early age and just hoped they turned out all right and would one day be able to run your farm.

His first school was Chancellor Junior School in Umtali, which was reached by climbing Christmas Pass where the blue gums gave way to the eucalyptus and pine-scented firs of the Vumba hills. Umtali sounded like an African name but was actually the white way of saying Mutare, the easternmost city in Rhodesia, not far from the border with Mozambique. War had been raging just across the mountains since 1964 as Frelimo (Frente de Libertacáo de Mozambique) guerrillas led by Samora Machel fought to oust the Portuguese colonists. Our hostel was right on the border and sometimes mortars would go over the top of us and land inside the compound. It was a phenomenally loud noise and we would hide under the blankets.

Chancellor was an ‘A school which meant it was all-white and the day began with an assembly thanking God for all their blessings and a shrill chorus of ‘Morning has broken’. The school had extensive grounds, a swimming pool and even a roller-skating rink, but Nigel counted the days to the holidays when he could run free with his brothers and sisters. Although even at an early age I was aware of tension when there was drought and farming seemed a lot of work, I could not imagine a better lifestyle, the outdoors and the space. We were little kings.

As the car turned off the main road from Umtali to Headlands and onto the winding red track signposted ‘Riversdale Farm’, he thought excitedly about the swimming, hunting, biking and cricket ahead of him. Rustling gum trees lined the way, and after a couple of miles a twin-towered anthill marked a fork in the road. The other turn-off led to their nearest neighbour, an old Afrikaner doctor they called Oom Jannie. It was to Oom Jannie's clinic that farm workers and their families went when they were sick. Nigel was slightly scared of him. He used to say, ‘The bleks come with runny noses and leave with itchy scrotums,’ then laugh, ‘Heh heh heh! We were too young to understand what he meant but his patients never became fathers again after that. It was his way of reducing the black population.

Beyond Oom Jannie's turn-off was a big hump in the road that Nigel and his siblings called Danger Hill. Dad would go fast over it so the car would sort of lift off, you know that kind of feeling where your tummy drops, and we'd all beg, ‘Again, again, please can we do it again?’ Then it was through the gate with the Riversdale sign and into lush peach orchards, beyond which opened out a green and yellow tapestry of tobacco and maize fields spread across a series of hills. At the top of the track were the farm buildings, a cluster of white-painted stores and barns, and then an exuberant garden of palm trees, Jacaranda, honeysuckle and African tulip trees with their bulbous red blossoms. The tiled roof of the one-storey house was just visible through the trees and the dogs would run out jumping and barking whenever a car drew up.

As Nigel got out, his mother Mary would come down the steps and greet him with a brisk hug, then quickly return to her jam or pickle making. Born in 1962, Nigel was the fifth child, with two older brothers and two older sisters, and as the house filled with the sound of all the children shouting and bickering Mary Hough would shake her head in amused despair.

On the first day of holidays, the children would be allowed to stay up late as a special treat with a tray of her home-made lemonade and cookies on the terrace. As on most Rhodesian farms, this was where much of life took place and where tea turned to sundowners brought by servants. Mary and John Hough always sat there at dusk with cold beers, the dogs curled at their feet barely stirring as the couple clinked glasses and looked out over their lands. Often John would be tending a wounded bird he had found in the fields or reading Blake's poetry to Mr Ponsonby, his pet crow. ‘Mr Ponsonby never answers back’ he joked to neighbouring farmers with a nod to his talkative wife.

At 1,000 acres, Riversdale Farm was small by Rhodesian standards. But everyone agreed that the view was hard to beat. An open veranda ran all along the back of the house, looking across lawns kept brilliant green by sprinklers. Beyond lay the fields of crops leading towards a smudge of mountains that changed colour with the seasons. Yellow-green in summer when eagles circled their peaks, in winter they were purple-blue and dawned draped with strange mists known as gutis.

As a chorus of crickets heralded nightfall with growing insistence, the five freshly scrubbed Hough children in pyjamas would be paraded out by Faith, the nanny, to say good night. Another maid brought out the Tilly lamps, and, if there were visitors, Mary might suggest a hand of canasta or bridge. Light switched suddenly to dark with just the tiniest swivel of the earth, and someone could usually be relied upon to mutter that it was the best climate in the world and perhaps the best landscape too, and they nodded and felt blessed to have been born in such a place.

Such reassurances had taken on a more urgent note since Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain (UDI) on 11 November 1965. Finding themselves the first white settlers to rebel since the Boston Tea Party in 1776 had come as a shock for the Houghs, like most Rhodesians. Although the colony had been self-governing since control was transferred from Rhodes' British South African Company to Whitehall in 1923, its formal occasions were always opened with the national anthem; its army and air force had been integrated with the British in the war; and Smith once boasted it had more Union Jacks than Britain. Even the names of farms and settlements reflected nostalgia for what was seen as the motherland. Typical examples were Surrey, Arun-del and Dorset farms, the small towns of Plumtree and Bromley, the lake of Loch Moodie, Essex Valley and Brighton Beach, while the capital Salisbury had suburbs of Kensington and Belgravia.

But the region was undergoing enormous change. Apart from Portuguese Mozambique to the east and South Africa-controlled Namibia to the west beyond Botswana, all the other surrounding colonies had been given independence under constitutions granting majority rule. The independence of Ghana in 1957 had been followed by Nigeria and Belgian Congo in 1960, then Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia in quick succession.

Smith had no doubt that black-run government was a bad thing. ‘The story was always the same,’ he later wrote in his autobiography. ‘Tribal violence and massacres, political opponents imprisoned, coups, streams of white refugees who had been dispossessed of their property, rampant corruption and the establishment of external bank accounts by their leaders.’ In particular, he commented, the white refugees fleeing from the newly independent Belgian Congo ‘left an indelible impression on our people’.

When he was elected Prime Minister in 1964, Smith had no intention of being the next victim of what Harold Macmillan called the ‘winds of change’ sweeping through the continent. Rhodesia was more complicated because although the whites numbered only 220,000 compared to almost 5 million blacks and went back at most three generations, they considered themselves just as indigenous. The Rhodesian leader also pointed out that, unlike other African colonies, his country had a sophisticated economy based on mining and agriculture with its own merchant banks and stock exchange. If it was to be independent, he wanted it under continued white minority rule to safeguard all this.

But Wilson's Labour government insisted that independence must come with a constitution entrenching universal suffrage, and negotiations ended in stalemate. After taking the precaution of moving the country's gold and other assets out of the Bank of England, Smith took a vote of his cabinet, placed a crack SAS unit on standby and drove to the studios of the Rhodesian Broadcasting Company. There he recorded a message to the nation in which he accused the British of shattering years of loyalty ‘on the rocks of expediency’ and proclaimed independence. Smith was no orator, but even in his flat nasal monotone it was dramatic.

After the initial Shockwaves, the white community rallied round, generally agreeing with their Prime Minister's assessment of Rhodesia as ‘an oasis of peace in an otherwise turbulent continent’. Some African states called for a British invasion, but this was ignored, and although an international trade embargo was imposed, Rhodesians soon developed ways to circumvent it, helped by Portugal and South Africa on whom they depended for ports. Alone among the European colonial powers, Portugal's fascist regime refused to grant independence to its African possessions and fought a bitter war in Mozambique, which borders Rhodesia. South Africa's apartheid regime was a natural ally of Smith, and extended considerable military and economic assistance as well as allowing Rhodesian gold and other minerals to be passed off as of South African origin. Farmers like the Houghs were urged to increase production to feed the nation.

Nigel's mother was a staunch supporter of Smith and would come back from shopping with locally produced cornflakes and teabags in plastic bags stamped with the words ‘Rhodesia is SUPER’‘. Nigel wore T-shirts bearing similar patriotic slogans. Smith was quite a dour man but he did have a presence and, especially for a country that was basically farming-based, he was kind of one of the boys.

Mary had been born in Rhodesia on the farm her father Jerry had pegged out in 1919 when he arrived from England. Jerry Timms was from a cricketing family in Syresham in Northamptonshire and his wife was from Yorkshire. Nobody talked much about it but, from what Nigel understood, his grandfather had been the black sheep of the family who had been sent as far away as possible after the First World War for some unspecified misdeed. Sending wayward sons off to far corners of the empire was common in those days. Timms had travelled by ship to Cape Town, and there picked up a horse, which he rode across the country to Rhodesia where he had heard there were plenty of opportunities. He had pegged out some land and become a farmer, eventually prospering enough to be able to send his daughters back to finishing school in England.

John Hough had also been born on a farm, but in England, in the affluent stockbroker belt of Surrey. His father was not a farmer but a director of Lloyds of London who had purchased Jordans Farm because he happened to like the country life, and John grew up a dreamer, always up trees bird-watching or tending fledglings that had fallen from their nests. After such freedom, it was a shock for John and his twin brother to be sent to Repton public school in Derbyshire. Repton was a strict establishment which instilled in him both a love of Beethoven and Blake and a lifelong hatred of pomposity. One of his classmates was Roald Dahl, and the school had an unusual saving grace, which John believed must have inspired his schoolfellow's famous literary confectioner Willie Wonka. Every so often boxes would arrive from the Cadbury's chocolate company of prototype bars for the boys to test out and award ratings.

Apart from ornithology, John Hough's great passion was flying. After leaving Repton, he had been a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, along with Roald Dahl and also Ian Smith. The future Rhodesian leader was seriously injured when he crashed in North Africa, but recovered to be based in Corsica where he was shot down and helped by Partisani resistance fighters to escape through enemy lines. While Smith liked to be seen as a wartime hero, Nigel's father rarely talked about his own experiences. He would be the first to confess that his motives for joining the RAF were less the destruction of Hitler and more to imitate the flight of a peregrine falcon. The Spitfire gave him the dual pleasure of breathless flight and the thrill of being powered by a Griffin engine. He loved flight and he loved engines.

When the war was over, John's father hoped his sons would follow him into the family insurance business. Instead both loved the outdoors and went to Africa, only their sister remaining behind. Tragically John's twin brother died shortly after, drowning while saving the life of a friend who had fallen in the Zambezi.

The twins had been inseparable, and John was distraught. Rather than return home, he found himself a job in Rhodesia, training pilots for the Rhodesian Air Force which had combined operations with the RAF. He was one of many British war veterans who turned up with handlebar moustaches and RAF badges. Like most of them, John fell in love with the country, which must have seemed like a land of plenty after the deprivations of post-war London with its grey skies, food rationing and empty shelves. In Southern Rhodesia there were fresh eggs, ham, sausages and bacon as well as endless sunshine, golf courses and wide-open spaces, wonderful for a keen sportsman and bird-lover. There was also the luxury of maids to do the washing and cleaning.

When John finally went back to London to work at Lloyds as his father wished, he found office life suffocatingly dull and was soon hankering for the wide skies of Africa. A friend found him another position in Rhodesia, managing the Timms’ farm at Inyazura near Rusape. The Timms' daughter Mary had recently returned from finishing her studies in England and was working as a matron at a local school, but John saw enough of her over the dinner table to be smitten. However, the romance seemed doomed when he lost his job on the farm because Mary's sister married a farmer who took his place, and he returned to the Rhodesian Air Force as a trainer.

John was a slightly built man in a land of hale, sporty types and had little other than his eccentric sense of humour to win the charms of a local beauty, so had to resort to other means. At times when he thought Mary would be at the farm, he would sign out his Spitfire for an hour, then make the twenty-minute flight from Harare, perform a twenty-minute aerobatic display overhead in the manner of a peacock fanning its feathers, then fly back. With him in the cockpit was his crow Mr Ponsonby. Once he flew so fast to get back within the hour after dallying over the farm that the bird lost all his feathers and John had to stick some back in.

His airborne wooing succeeded and the couple were married on 11 September 1952, Mary's 26th birthday, at Rusape. Their honeymoon was spent at Leopard Rock hotel, along with Mr Ponsonby and John's pet owl and a hawk. Leopard Rock had been built entirely of stone by Italian prisoners of war during the Second World War and looked like a castle with its lavish gardens and incredible views over the lush green Bvumba valley. It was the most fashionable resort in Rhodesia and the Queen stayed there during her visit the following year. Nine months after their honeymoon, the Houghs' first son Edwin was born and they bought their own farm.

In his first year as a farmer John Hough learnt just how tough a life it could be when heavy floods washed away all his crops. The couple lost everything and for some years had to lease a farm called Ripplemead. Finally they saved enough to buy Riversdale where they could provide their growing number of children the idyllic childhood of running free that they had both enjoyed.

The Houghs made an unlikely couple, but the relationship worked. Like most Rhodesian farmers' wives, Mary was a strong, practical woman who taught all her children to read in between bottling preserves, while John was a dreamer. They were a perfect two-part harmony, John taking care of the important issues in life like crowned eagles, building bird-hides and producing a dazzling display of useless gadgets, while Mum made sure we all were fed and went to school and had a house to live in.

Even as a young boy, Nigel was well aware that it was his mother who held the family together. Father was a wonderful person but not a great businessman. I always felt that dealing with the rigours of a drought never held the same mental anguish for him as the disappearance of some egg from an African hawk eagle's nest. Even with Rhodesia's cheap labour, they would not have been able to maintain their lifestyle were it not for the fact that John Hough had inherited a large sum of money from his father.

Although neither parent was at all demonstrative, the Hough brothers and sisters grew up so close that outsiders would refer to them as the Mutual Admiration Society. Whenever a member of the family needed help we would call on the siblings-we referred to it as calling out the artillery. If more than one came out we called it heavy artillery. If my mother arrived that would he the nuclear warhead. Childhood pranks usually involved the boys against girls. Every evening we would all go for baths in the bathroom at the end of the corridor along which we all had our rooms. Once my elder brother told my sisters that the coast was clear for them to go back to their bedrooms then called the cook boy Maxwell so he saw them all running past naked.

All the surrounding farms in Headlands were white-owned. Farming was a close-knit society and there were about thirty other white farming families in the district. Apart from his brothers and sisters, Nigel had a group of young friends with whom to go hunting, shooting and fishing in the dam as well as riding on motorbikes. We were all about five or six when we started with a pellet gun, and I went on my first bird shoot with my father when I was ten. He was given his first serious weapon-a 20-bore shotgun-at the age of 14 and mostly they shot guinea fowl and doves. For young guys that kind of life is like a dream.

In those days the bush seemed full of game. Leopards stalked the hills, their cries often to be heard in the night and their spoors left outside the living room windows in the mornings. It was common for the children to come across duikers with their liquid eyes or see wild pigs shooting out from under a msasa tree. Speckled francolín partridges would skit across dusty red tracks, usually in threes, and there were often snakes to dodge away from, cobras and mambas. An enormous python lived in a pile of rocks on the way to the dam and they always hurried past, though sometimes one of the boys would poke in a stick then run. Once we saw the python just after it had swallowed a big duiker and it couldn't move it was so full.

After checking their boots for scorpions or baboon spiders, the children would set off hunting with a retinue of black boys to carry their things, track animal spoors and collect any kills. The black were good trackers and would carry whatever we shot and were always keen to come because afterwards we'd give them whatever we'd bagged so they might get a guinea fowl or something for their suppers. We knew so little about blacks that once, when we were about eight years old, my cousin saw one of the black guys doing a wee and she rushed back saying, ‘Jeez, you can't believe how big this guy's willy is!’ So we asked to see it and he was quite indignant. He charged us all a penny. I don't remember how big it was but we felt it was worth paying.

Nigel and his brothers and sisters were almost entirely ignorant of the black majority all around them, even though the most recent official census showed blacks outnumbered whites by 21 to i.* To Nigel the blacks were just a kind of supporting cast that did his family's washing and cooking or laboured in the fields then melted away back into the bush or their kraals. He and his siblings sometimes played pranks on them, like placing a dead cobra on the watchman's chest when he fell asleep on duty.

When Nigel was not hunting or fishing, he spent his time playing sport. The farm had a swimming pool and a tennis court and at weekends the Houghs often held tennis parties with local farming families coming over for some of Mary's lemon meringue pie and their cook Robert's famous piripiri chicken. Robert was very small and round and most of his cooking was stodgy and forgettable but so good was his piripiri chicken that Nigel's father always said he would ‘put up with any amount of nonsense from Robert’ because of it. The children knew better than to interrupt their father while eating it for his level of concentration exceeded a lioness honing in on her prey.

Nigel was extremely competitive, as was his eldest sister Shirley, and his other sister Tess often had to act as peacemaker between the two after a showdown over tennis. If none of Nigel's siblings or white friends were around, he would play football or cricket with the workers' children. It was kind of one-sided because when we played cricket I would do all the batting and with soccer they would never tackle me hard and they would always let me win as I was the baas's son.

He also developed a passion for squash. Father had got a loan from the Land Bank to build a tobacco-grading barn, which he had built to the exact dimensions of a squash court so it was a grading shed during grading season and a squash court for the rest of the year. Nigel played with their maid Maria. I used to make her play me for hours and hours each day A large, fat woman, who would puff and sweat as Nigel made her run around, Maria was the only one of the workers who dared venture into the sweet tobacco-smelling barn. There were two owls in the rafters and most Shona are scared of owls, believing if one lands on a building and hoots, someone inside will die.

From a young age, Nigel would often trot round after his father to inspect the progress of the tobacco or maize. I was soon aware that farming was extremely hard work and that without endless supervision the munts would do nothing. Every morning at 5 a.m., John Hough set off for the fields in his long khaki shorts, safari shirts with folded-up sleeves, and long stockings with boots, all topped off with a grubby white floppy hat that his wife would long have liked to dispose of. A man of strict routine and firm principle, he came back to the house at 8 a.m. sharp for a cooked breakfast, often lambasting Robert for his ‘miserable’ eggs, and at 8.30 a.m. would disappear into the bathroom for half an hour to ‘contact his stockbroker’, chiding his children that ‘good plumbing is the secret to good health’. He came home again at half past midday for lunch, after which he would sleep for exactly thirty minutes before returning to the fields until late afternoon.

Sometimes he would let Nigel sit with him as he distributed the fortnightly wages to the workers, entering the amounts in black ink in his big ledger. All had stories of woe, leading them to beg for an advance for the funeral of a relative or to buy medicine for a sick child. Mother said they would just fritter it on beer and that he should pay the wages to the women to make sure the children got fed, but the munts would never accept that But his father often gave in to their requests, admonishing Nigel not to let his mother in on the secret.

The only time John Hough ever took off was for their twice-yearly holidays. In August the family always decamped to Nyanga dam near Rhodes's old stone cottage in its English gardens, and would sleep in tents under the fir trees, while every April they spent a month in Beira on the Mozambique coast. This was usually in a group with other families, renting chalets on the beachfront, and it was Nigel's favourite time of year. Mozambique seemed very exotic. We children would play all day in the Indian Ocean, diving through the huge rolling waves and trying to catch jellyfish on sticks. There was a zoo where they laughed to see animals in cages instead of running free in the bush or in game reserves like back home, and a funfair. In the evening, they might go to their favourite Johnnie's Seafood Restaurant or the dads would grill fresh prawns on the barbecue and dip them in peri peri, a sauce so hot it burnt the tongue.

Nigel was aware that his father was different from other dads. It was not so much his British accent-only 40.71 per cent of whites at that time were Rhodesian-born. Around half had entered the country like John Hough since the Second World War, largely from Britain but also from former colonies in East Africa and India, as well as Greeks, Afrikaners and a considerable Jewish community. Between 1946 and 1960, the number of whites rose from 82,000 to more than 220,000 attracted by the high standard of living, sustained as it was by the inequalities between blacks and whites. Even Ian Smith was only second generation-his father had been a Scottish butcher who moved to Rhodesia in search of a better life.

But John Hough had always seemed more interested in birds than children, particularly crows, which he said had ‘amazing characters’. Paradise for Dad was listening to Beethoven's Emperor Piano Concerto while watching eagles in flight and eating a smidgen of Mum's lemon meringue pie. As he grew older he even began to resemble a bird. Nigel's school friend Larry Norton found him alarming. ‘He looked exactly like a falcon. He was balding with long grey hair round the edges, a big nose and a big moustache.’

Nigel and his elder brother Edwin would take advantage of their father's eccentricity to tease him mercilessly. Once on holiday in Ballito Bay on South Africa's northern Natal coast, John could not understand why every time he went into the local shop he was treated extremely rudely by the shopkeeper who would follow him around snatching things from him as he picked them up. The boys had whispered to the shopkeeper, ‘That's our dad. He's an alcoholic and a shoplifter and often takes naughty magazines from the shelf.’

Shortly after one of their holidays, Nigel's parents purchased their first LP player, prompting great excitement when it was unloaded at the farm. The sanctions imposed by the West after UDI meant most things were locally assembled, and the ‘Supersonic’ radiogram was no exception. Apart from John's beloved Beethoven, the family record collection soon featured Cat Stevens, Sandy Shaw, Gary Glitter and Mick Jagger. Later they bought a television, a Philips set built in socialist Yugoslavia. The Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation (RBC) had a monopoly and evening viewing largely consisted of old American comedy series like The Ed Sullivan Show and I Love Lucy. The Smith government was obsessed with protecting the country against encroachment of the so-called permissive society corrupting the outside world, so there was strict censorship. Penthouse and Playboy magazines were not allowed into the country, while the RBC even banned Olivia Newton-John and Gene Pitney.

Every Thursday, the family would drive to Rusape Club. It was only 30 miles away, but on unmetalled strip roads in their light green Ford Cortina station wagon that felt like a real trek. John Hough was not a gifted driver and it was a squash to fit all six children in, two always having to sit in the boot. Their parents were always telling them to keep quiet. Once my sister Tess fell out on the way to the club. When we tried to tell Mum and Dad they told us to mind our manners and wait till they finished talking. Afterwards when they realized what had happened they were more favourably disposed to us butting in.

Everything in the community revolved round the Club. There was cricket, tennis and golf and on weekend afternoons it would be crowded with farmers dressed in their uniform of khaki shirts with tight shorts and long socks with combs tucked in the top. They would gather for braais, grilling thick boerewors sausage and slabs of meat, and downing Lion or Castle beers from the bar as they conversed loudly in the flat vowels similar to the Boers'.

The topics were usually the same-commodity prices, the prospects of rain, hunting and guns, and complaints about workers – ‘the Affs’ or munts as they called them. It was rarely long before discussion turned to Ian Smith and the ramifications of his decision to secede from Britain. There were close relations between Smith's Rhodesian Front and the Commercial Farmers' Union and most farmers supported UDI, fearing that the British government had been about to ‘sell them down the river and hand the country over to the blacks’. Before entering politics Smith had been a farmer like them, and they referred to him as ‘good ol' Smithy’. Despite his long-winded speeches delivered in that nasal burr with a finger jabbing the air, he had come to be seen as the true Rhodesian, born and bred in a land he would never leave and guarding his country from an outside world full of evil. His lack of facial expression, the result of plastic surgery on his war injuries, gave him a heroic status.

The farmers liked to see themselves in the front line, feeding the nation, and finding innovative ways to keep selling their tobacco, the country's biggest foreign exchange earner. Undeterred by attempts by MI6 agents to tail the perpetrators, the Rhodesians had become adept at sanction busting and a nightly meat run flew around Africa delivering cargoes of Rhodesian beef.

The children liked the club because they could drink Coca-Colas with ice-cream floats and eat chips in greasy paper and sometimes there would be movies on the bioscope like Jungle Book or Alice in Wonderland. Every so often there were dances or gymkhanas, and at Christmas one of the farmers would dress up as Santa Claus to distribute presents. Occasionally a farmer with a plane would fly in, like their uncle Noel Waller, and might even be prevailed on to take some children up for a spin.

The whole family was in the car returning from the club one evening when they rounded a bend and found themselves heading straight into a tractor and trailer parked on the road without lights. A car was coming the other way, and as the bulk of it filled the windscreen it was too late to swerve. One minute the children were all chattering and arguing, their mother telling them to keep quiet, then there was a tremendous searing crash. The doors burst open with showers of glass as the car hit the oncoming vehicle and rolled over and over, then it was ground underneath the tractor. Nigel, who was only two at the time, was thrown straight out of the windscreen and initially presumed dead. His father was also thrown out and his mother's head smashed straight through the glass. The other driver was killed. Everyone had cuts, bruises and broken limbs, and as they started coming round groaning, his mother saw her nine-year-old son Terry lying inert on the roadside, literally cut in half. Those who heard her scream never forgot it. ‘It was horrible, devastating,’ she recalls, ‘but it also brought us closer together as a family.’

For a long time after Terry's death, once they were all back from hospital, the farmhouse was a hushed place. Terry's bed remained made and ready from the night he had never come home. Mary stayed in her room, and the children sometimes crept up to the door and could hear muffled crying, though never in front of them. Their father spent even longer periods out in the bush or up trees with his binoculars, leaving the children to be looked after by the nanny. The nightly drinking on the terrace took on a more relentless nature. Neighbours came with homemade pies and hushed condolences and averted their eyes as they spoke. For once it was a relief for the children to go back to school.

*According to the 1969 official census the population of Rhodesia was 228,296 Europeans, 15,153 coloureds, 8,965 Asians and 4,846,930 blacks (Rhodesia Central Statistical Office).