Читать книгу Mukiwa - Peter Godwin - Страница 12

There is a picture of my first day at school. It is an ambitious photograph that attempts to include not only two children, but also the car and the whole of the house. My father’s instinct to catalogue has once again defeated the photographer’s art. Although I’m in the middle of the frame, I stand barely half an inch high. The most noticeable thing about my uniform is that everything is vastly too big. The green blazer, with its little lamp of learning on the pocket, complete with rays emanating forth, all but reaches my knees. Only a narrow rim of baggy khaki shorts peeps out at the bottom. A capacious grey felt hat sits at a jaunty angle on the back of my head – there is no sign of hair. My socks have sagged to my ankles, above a pair of Clark’s Jack and Jill sandals, which I hated and contrived to lose within a week. And when I look closely, I am standing defiantly in a puddle.

Next to me, and twice my height, is my sister Jain, also on her first day at a new school. She is clearly embarrassed, in a teenager sort of way, clutching the hem of her blazer and looking down. She has good reason to look embarrassed. On her head is the most extraordinary white bowler hat.

To the right in the foreground is the grey Austin Westminster, indented heavily into the soggy driveway, marooned there like an old frigate. And behind us, up a steep slope of lawn, is the house, its verandah dripping with a profusion of crimson bougainvillaea.

My mother ferried me to school each day in her Mini Minor. It was a fifty-mile round trip along terrible dirt roads, so we had to set off shortly after dawn.

From Silverstream we drove up into the wattle plantations, swinging around hairpin bends with streams tinkling under culverts at every turn. If the wattles were in blossom they were festooned with little yellow pollen balls. When we got to the ridge at Tandevel, we could look back down on Silverstream, just for a moment. The river, the village where the Europeans lived, the factory, with steam rising from the chimneys, and, on the other side of the factory, the African compound. Then we went on through more plantations, thick with pine now. And so dense in some places that the trees formed an arch over the road, so that even on a bright day it was gloomy and cool and damp in there.

These dark places were fairly scary because they were home to tokaloshes. A tokalosh was a sort of African goblin, a bush imp, a malevolent hobbit.

I’d never seen a tokalosh and Violet, who had, gave me a very confused description. She said it looked like a chimpanzee with blazing red eyes and pointed teeth and a little pot belly. Often it had little horns like the devil. But it could change into other forms. Tokaloshes spoke Shona and if you came across one it was always very cross because you would have woken it up. Violet used to raise the legs of her bed on to bricks to stop tokaloshes from invading her sleep. Apparently tokaloshes couldn’t reach high beds.

What was even more worrying for me was that both Jain and my mother seemed to believe in tokaloshes too. There was a particular glade on the way to school, just on the Melsetter side of Skyline Junction, which they considered a definite tokalosh habitat. It had all the requirements: a water source, lots of shade and no human residents nearby. We called it tokalosh corner and my mother would always mumble some incantation to placate them as we drove by, especially if it was at prime tokalqsh time – after dark or early in the morning.

‘Oh great tokalosh. Spirit of the night,’ she would intone in a deep voice full of stentorian formality. ‘Do not harm us, for we respect you. Let us pass freely through your territory.’

During this performance I would sit uneasily in the passenger seat, half disbelieving, half nervous.

Once we had passed it without incident, she would always say cheerily, ‘Now we’ll get home safely. The tokalosh has deemed it so.’ And I would relax.

Late one night on our way back from Melsetter, the Mini’s engine died as we reached the dreaded corner, and we rolled to a stop right at tokalosh HQ. We sat in silence. The only sound was the croaking of frogs and the creaking of the umbrella trees in the wind. I was bug-eyed with fear.

‘You forgot the tokalosh prayer,’ I said in a very small, hoarse voice.

My mother seemed rather flustered. She tried the engine again but it showed no signs of life.

‘What will the tokalosh do to us now,’ I asked, tremulously.

‘Oh, you don’t believe in all that nonsense,’ she said irritably. ‘The tokalosh isn’t real you know; it’s just a legend, a myth to make people respect the bush or something.’

She tried the ignition again. Nothing.

I was indignant.

‘But you said this is where he lived.’

‘Well, if he did exist, if he does exist, this is the sort of place he would live,’ said my mother, trying the engine again.

I looked out at the dark shapes of the umbrella trees.

‘Oh great tokalosh. Spirit of the night,’ I began uncertainly. Then my mother joined in. ‘Do not harm us, for we respect you. Let us pass safely through your territory.’

We waited in silence at the end of the prayer. Then she blew on her fingers like a professional darts player and turned the ignition key once more. This time the engine caught. She threw the Mini into gear and we accelerated quickly away in a shower of dust.

‘Now we’ll get home safely,’ I said, imitating my mother’s voice, ‘the tokalosh has deemed it so.’

My mother rolled her eyes. But later she admitted that she had become a bit lax about the tokaloshes, and that this was their way of reminding us of their power. And after that her tokalosh incantations became more fervent.

Back then, the road from Skyline Junction down to Melsetter was famously bad. It was cut into the steep side of a valley and in the rainy season it was frequently blocked by landslides. It was not unusual to hear small rocks clattering on to the car roof as we drove by. Even when it was nominally open, the road was constantly churned up by huge logging trucks, which created treacherous mud holes that defeated a Land Rover in four-wheel drive, never mind a Mini, even one with specially raised suspension and chains on the wheels. We often got stuck.

But there was a logic to my mother’s choice of vehicle. Because the road was so bad, the Roads Department had a permanent depot there, with road gangs in constant attendance. If we got stuck, we would radio in and usually within half an hour the nearest gang would come loping around the corner in their yellow overalls and gumboots.

We would get out of the car, and take my mother’s drugs cabinet out of the boot to reduce the weight. Then about eight of the workmen would position themselves around the vehicle and the foreman would count them down. Their backs would stiffen at his shout of ‘heave!’, and they would lift up the car, carry it over the mud hole and put it down on the other side. If we were on our way back from Melsetter, after school, I was allowed to help lift the car. By then it didn’t matter if I was immersed waist deep in mud.

While the men all strained at the vehicle, the sinews in their arms bulging to hold it at knee level, I held it at my shoulder height, often hanging on rather than lifting it up, though I was always sure to huff and pant with the best of them.

Sometimes I was genuinely helpful, I think. Once I made an epic intervention as a human windscreen wiper, when an electrical fault rendered our wipers useless during a heavy downpour. I sat on the bonnet in the warm rain, swishing my arm back and forth over the windscreen like a metronome to clear away the torrent so my mother could squint through at the road ahead.

Finally we would reach the bottom of the Skyline road and the valley opened up and before us was Melsetter. Their settlement was named after a small village in the Orkney Islands, because the area reminded the first white pioneers of their homeland. It was still very much a pioneer village, at the end of the road. Ahead lay the glittering granite and quartz of the Chimanimani mountains, which rose up majestically beyond the village, dominating the view. And beyond that, the most remote, unexplored part of Mozambique.

The district had been opened up for the white man by eight pioneer columns who trekked up from South Africa in the 1890s in ox wagons. There was great rivalry between the Scottish and English treks, which were made up of Moodies and Meikles and Martins, (Moodie’s grandfather had been the last laird of the Orcadian Melsetter) and the Boers: Steyns and Nels. At school the two houses into which we were divided for the purpose of competing at sports were called Martin and Steyn, after two of the main treks. I was in Martin, as was my rightful heritage.

Melsetter village was a rambling affair, with only one concession to planning – a wide, grassy central square. In the middle of it was the pioneer memorial, which we visited as part of our history lessons. The memorial was a statue of a wagon pulled by a span of oxen. It was carved from Chimanimani granite and set on a plinth made up of river pebbles from the Sabi river crossing, one of the main barriers facing the pioneers. Underneath was a plaque which said simply:

Erected in memory of the Pioneers of Gazaland

Next to the inscription was a list of twelve names of people who had died on the treks.

At the top of the square was the Department of Native Affairs headquarters, with the distinctive red corrugated iron roof that all government buildings had. There was always a long queue of Africans outside, waiting for situpas. The old police camp was next door. On the other sides of the square were African trading stores, a maize grinding mill, the petrol station, a bakery, the Chimanimani Hotel, a bottle store and Theunessens, the general store presided over by old Ma Theu-nessen, whose motto was ‘If we haven’t got it we can order it’, as indeed she could. The dusty streets were lined with flamboyant trees that showered down their red flowers in the autumn.

Melsetter school stood alone on a hill top on the other side of the village, a mile and a half away. It was a spartan place, a few low buildings, dormitories, classrooms and the headmaster’s green clapboard bungalow. My first challenge there was the classroom door handle. For most of my first year it was beyond my reach and I had to jump up for it, an experience I found deeply humiliating. Sometimes Miss Gloyne, the KG one teacher who had come all the way from Kent to teach us, would open it for me from the inside. I had never seen so many white children all in one place before – there were seventy of us altogether in the school.

To start with school was quite fun. We drew pictures and played with coloured wooden rods called Quizenaire, which were supposed to help us to add and subtract, although we just built towers with them. We life-saved tin plates in the school swimming pool, made paper chains and sang carols. We went for nature study walks and caught insects in jars and pinned them on a board on the classroom wall.

In the end-of-year play I was the small bear in ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ and had to dance around a big cardboard honey pot and all the parents clapped. On sports day I came second in the egg-and-spoon race and my mother, who was giving out the prizes that year and had a new hat on, gave me a certificate to prove it. Rawdon Ball came first. (He always came first.)

At the end of each school day I would wait on the headmaster’s verandah for my mother to come up the hill in her Mini and collect me. Often she would be late. All the other day-scholars left, and the older children went to the classrooms for prep. And I just sat on the edge of the wooden verandah swinging my legs and trying to make friends with the diffident cat. Then the bell rang and the older children came out of prep and ran to the refectory for supper. And still my mother hadn’t come to collect me.

Mrs Simpson, the headmaster’s wife, would come out and suggest that I went and had supper with the older children in the refectory. But I wouldn’t go. Eventually my mother would turn up, looking exhausted, still with a stethoscope round her neck and her white coat covered in dust. If it was really late, I would have curled up by then on the Simpsons’ sofa and gone to sleep, and they would carry me to the car and lay me down in the back seat with my blair.

After oom Piet’s murder my parents decided that this just couldn’t carry on – I would have to become a boarder. But I was still under the minimum age for boarding. Mr Simpson wrote a letter to the Ministry of Education in Salisbury, and so did the police member-in-charge and so did my father, explaining why an exception should be made. Thus it was that in KG 2, while I was still six, I became a boarder, and it was all the fault of Willie Ndangana and the Crocodile Gang.

My parents were given a printed list of the things I would need as a boarder, and we went to Meikles department store in Umtali to buy them. In Meikles’ window there was a display of the Beatles: puppets of Paul, John, George and Ringo which turned their heads from side to side, and strummed stiffly at papier-mâché guitars and seemed to sing, although I could see that the singing really came from a loudspeaker buried under some tinsel behind them. I was riveted by this spectacle and stood there, me and a crowd of Africans, all of us singing along lustily to a song which they told me was called ‘Can bonni lolo.’

Later, when I pestered Jain to play it for me on her new radiogram, she insisted it was called ‘Can’t buy me love now’. But it still sounded like ‘Can bonni lolo’ to me.

In Meikles they bought me a black metal trunk and my father stencilled on it in white paint ‘PETER GODWIN’ in capital letters. Jain gave me special lessons in tying shoelaces, because boarders wore proper shoes, not sandals like the little children.

‘You’re going to be a big boy now,’ said my mother. ‘A real grown-up. And we’re all very proud of you.’

‘Will you come and take me home if I don’t like it?’ I asked.

‘Of course you’ll like it. It’ll be great fun. You’ll have all your friends there. And we’ll come and visit you.’

Violet enfolded me into a great damp hug and then turned away to hide her crying. Knighty gave me a firm man-to-man handshake, African-style, alternating up and down. And he slipped a paper bag into my little brown suitcase.

‘It is for if you are getting hungry over there,’ he said gruffly.

Inside the bag were half a dozen of his best sugar buns, individually wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a note, on brown paper, written in pencil in the tortuous block capitals of a ransom demand. It read: ‘Good look baas Peter. Love from Knighty.’ Violet must have written it out for him.

Albert the garden boy, who never came into the house, waited at the back door to bid his farewell. He presented me with his large penknife, which I had admired on many occasions and which I knew he treasured. I held it in awe, then I shook my head sadly and handed it back.

‘I can’t take it, Albert. It’s your knife. You need it for cutting things here.’

‘No, I will get another,’ he said, closing my fingers around the knife. Take it as a borrowing. You can give it back afterwards.’

We set off in the Austin Westminster and the servants stood in a group, waving. When I looked back from the end of the drive I could see them in the distance, still waving hard. And I knew then that nothing would be the same again.

At Melsetter school they had allocated me a narrow iron bed at the end of a long row of identical beds. It had a thin lumpy mattress and a pillow filled with something called kapok. It had two stiff grey blankets in the summer terms and an extra one in winter. And on the blankets and the sheets, pillowcase and towel, and even on the counterpane, were the letters OHMS, which stood for ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’. Next to the bed I had my own small metal locker with three shelves. My mother helped me unpack my clothes into neat piles and put them in the locker. Then she sat me on the bed.

‘We won’t be far away, you know.’

I nodded glumly.

‘Now if you have any problems, you just tell the Simpsons and they’ll phone us in Silverstream.’ She kissed me on the cheek.

‘Be a good lad, son,’ said my father and boxed me lightly on the shoulder.

Then they got back into the Austin Westminster and drove away.

I wet my bed that night, for the first time since I was a baby. The next morning I told the matron, Mrs Wormald. I tried to do it surreptitiously.

‘I’m afraid I’ve wet my bad, ma’am,’ I said in a tiny voice.

But she was rather deaf.

‘Speak up, boy!’ she said. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘I’ve wet my bed,’ I said, only slightly louder.

‘You’ve wet your bed?’ she boomed down the dormitory, and the older boys sniggered.

‘Well why didn’t you tell me you were a wetter?’ she asked. ‘I would have given you a rubber sheet, saved the mattress a soaking.’ She took away my wet bedclothes and returned with a dry set and a cold red rubber sheet.

‘Now put your mattress outside to dry in the sun, and when it’s dry, make up the bed with this rubber sheet on the bottom.’

After she’d left, some older boys, led by Fatty Slabbert, danced around clutching their balls with both hands and chanting in singsong voices, ‘He’s a pisser! He’s a pisser!’

I started to cry.

‘And a blubber! And a blubber!’ chanted Fatty Slabbert, and the others joined in.

Later that day, I went to the Simpsons’ house. I waited patiently outside while they finished supper, listening for the clatter of the cutlery on plates to stop, and then I knocked on the door.

‘What is it, young Godwin?’ asked Mr Simpson in a kindly way, smiling at me over his glasses.

‘I would like you to phone my parents,’ I announced. ‘This is their number.’ I handed him a folded sheet of paper on which I had carefully written ‘Silverstream 303’.

The Simpsons gave me a cup of cocoa and while I drank it on the sofa, where I used to fall asleep, they chatted to me, trying to comfort me. Eventually Mrs Simpson looked at her watch.

‘Good gosh, is that the time? It’s a little late now to be calling anyone. You’d best go to bed. Let’s phone them tomorrow, shall we?’

This routine went on for several days before I finally realized that the Simpsons weren’t going to let me call home at all.

That Saturday most of the boarders were taken out for the day by their parents. But mine never came. I sat alone under the pine trees on a carpet of rusty dry pine needles, disconsolately carving sticks with Albert’s knife and nibbling one of Knighty’s buns and planning to run away.

Early the next day we had to go to church. We put on our Sunday whites and formed up in a crocodile file and marched down the hill to the Melsetter Anglican church, St George’s-in-the-Mountains. My plan was to excuse myself while everyone was in church, run down to the bus depot where the African buses waited, and jump on to the Chipinga Express, which I knew stopped at Silverstream. In my pocket I had all my savings, 7s. 6d, to buy the ticket, and I kept fingering the coins to make sure they were still there.

As we marched down the hill that morning, the sides of the road were bursting with banks of bright blue morning glories. The red-winged loeries called to each other as they hopped from branch to branch, and the smell of pine resin filled the air. For a moment I felt better. I decided to put off my escape until next Sunday.

In church it was Easter, so we sang an Easter hymn with a mournful tune, which made me sad all over again.

There is a green hill far away, Outside the city wall, Where our dear Lord was crucified. He died to save us all.

I was suddenly sure that the hill in the hymn was actually the hill opposite our school, Green Mount, across the valley where old Mrs Randolf lived alone in a scary house with turrets.

It was a grey-green hill, except once a year when it was burnt. Then it was black. After the fire, for a few weeks it was brilliant green with fresh blades of lush new grass. Then it went back to being grey-green again. From school it always looked a desolate, foreboding hill. A heavy, swollen hill with no trees. It was just the sort of hill that Jesus would have been crucified on. Jesus had been crucified right here in Melsetter. It all made sense. It was a place where they made people suffer. They’d crucified Jesus, and now they were keeping me prisoner.

On my knees I said a little prayer to the Lord asking him to free me. After all, He had arranged for Jesus to rise from the dead, so getting me home should present Him no problem. But when I opened my eyes, nothing had changed. I trudged back up to school with a heavy heart, not seeing the morning glories nor the loeries and not smelling the pine resin.

My parents came to visit me the following weekend. They took me to the Chimanimani Hotel for tea. I sat sulking in silence in a large armchair by the fire, munching scones.

‘The Simpsons wouldn’t let me phone you to take me home,’ I finally declared.

‘Well they did phone us, actually,’ said my father. ‘But we all decided it was better to give you a couple of weeks to settle in.’

I was astonished at the news that my parents had known I was unhappy yet hadn’t come to fetch me.

‘Why don’t you give it a chance, hmm?’ said my mother. ‘You’ll get used to it in time.’

They chatted for a while to various friends who passed through the hotel lounge, and then it was time to go back.

‘I’ve already given it a chance and I’ve decided that I don’t want to be a boarder at all,’ I announced.

But my parents took me back anyway. When we got to school, I refused to get out of the car.

‘Come on son. Belt up!’ said my father in exasperation.

‘We really have no option, Peter,’ my mother said as they left. She was blinking back tears. ‘You’ll soon put all this behind you.’

The next day we had a surprise locker check. I was found to be the principal outlaw. First, Knighty’s individually wrapped sugar buns were discovered. There were four left, stale now and covered with ants. I had been rationing myself to one a week to make them last until half term. Then Albert’s knife was found hidden rather half-heartedly under my rolled-up balls of socks. Both were confiscated by Mr Simpson in a scene of great opprobrium, and I was sentenced to write 500 lines.

The only bright side of the incident was that it seemed to improve my standing marginally with the older boys. Especially the discovery of the knife, which Mr Simpson mistakenly called a flick knife.

Eventually my life settled into a dreary routine. The days were not too bad because my classmates, who were all day-scholars, were there, and I could pretend that I was a dayboy too, that someone would come and collect me at the end of the day. I was good at class and I usually had my hand up with the correct answer, even when no one else did. At least Miss Gloyne liked me. Then she asked me to stay behind one day after class.

‘You’re a clever little boy, Peter,’ she said. ‘But I have to teach all the boys and girls, even the ones who are not so clever. That’s what a teacher has to do. Do you understand?’

I didn’t understand at all.

Miss Gloyne sighed.

‘Well, I can’t always come to you for the answers. I have to give the other children a turn, even if I know that you know the right answer.’ She handed me some more advanced reading books and said, ‘Now run along. See you tomorrow.’

After that Miss Gloyne would often ignore my hand, even if it was the only hand up. Eventually I stopped putting my hand up at all. I just daydreamed out of the window instead.

After classes we had sport and then the day-scholars went home and the boarders had a free period when we went to the Pines, a small pine forest that was part of the school grounds. There we played various games, like hounds and deer. Although we could all name dozens of kinds of antelope, none of us knew what a deer was, really. Fatty Slabbert said it was the animal that pulled Father Christmas’s sleigh. The deer got a minute start and had to hide, then the hounds went bounding after them through the bracken, baying at the tops of their voices.

The other game was Pine Cone War. We divided into two teams and blasted each other with cones. The best cones to get were the hard green ones, which went faster and could really hurt your opponents, especially if you could hit them on the head. We used to spend hours collecting and hoarding good cones for coming battles.

After playtime the boarders went back to the classrooms for prep. During prep the last of the sunlight would fade away and Sixpence the lantern boy – he was actually a very old man with a bushy grey moustache – would come around with the Tilly lamps. He filled them up with paraffin and pumped the little brass plunger in the base, lit the gauze mantle and adjusted it with another brass knob. Then, using a long pole with a hook on the end, he would skilfully hoist the lanterns up on to their hooks. The lanterns made a comforting hissing sound and they were soon surrounded by squadrons of moths and flying ants.

When prep was over, we trooped back to the dorm, washed our hands and lined up outside the refectory. Mrs Wormald would come down the line very slowly, holding up a lantern in one hand and a ruler in the other. Each of us had to show her our hands, both sides, and if she found any dirt she would hit the hand with a ruler and send the boy to wash. Girls didn’t get hit with a ruler, which wasn’t fair.

In the refectory we said grace and then sat on benches at long wooden tables. Tickie was the school cook boy. He was Sixpence’s younger brother and had a jolly wheezing laugh and a huge round stomach that tugged at his shirt buttons. For some reason he was called a chef, not a cook boy, and he wore a tall white hat. Tickie cooked meals like toad in the hole and braised liver, steak and kidney pie and Welsh rarebit; and for pudding, tapioca, semolina and baked quinces from the school orchard, all done under the close supervision of Mrs Wormald.

When we had finished our supper we would usually line up at the sickbay for our daily spoonful of malt and cod liver oil, and then read on our beds to the hissing lamps for half an hour until lights out. Mr Simpson would patrol up and down the creaking floors for a bit to make sure there was no talking. When he had gone, I would pull the counterpane over my head and cry myself to sleep. The end of another day. I had perfected the art of silent crying now so no one could catch me.

Paul Withers, the boy in the bed next to me, knew that I cried, but he kindly kept it a secret. Withers became my first boarder friend. But he wasn’t much help – he had a crew cut and spoke with a funny accent because he was the son of American missionaries at Biriwiri. Fatty Slabbert and his gang would hop around him chanting, ‘kaffir-lover! kaffir-lover!’ And they would try to imitate his accent.

On Sundays, after church, we went on ‘rambles’. These would take us either to Bridal Veil Falls or up Pork Pie mountain. The waterfall was very tall and thin and ended in a deep plunge pool in which we were allowed to swim, but only in groups of four at a time. The water was icy and there were trout and barbel in there and eels. Odd spider-like animals called daddy-longlegs skimmed across the top of the water. The foliage around the pool was bathed in a constant spray from the falls. It was verdant and cool and covered with moss. Orchids grew on the overhanging trees and vividly coloured kingfishers would sit on the branches peering into the pool and then streak down to snap up shimmering silver tiddlers.

Pork Pie was harder but more fun. It was the mountain that overlooked school hill, and it was supposed to look like a pork pie, though I had examined it from all angles and still couldn’t see the likeness. On Pork Pie we would usually see eland, the biggest antelope in Africa. If we all kept quiet and still, they wouldn’t run away. They’d just stare at us and chew their cud, like cows.

Pork Pie was also good for scorpions, which lived under rocks. While someone distracted the teacher, the rest of us would go around lifting rocks. When we found a scorpion we would taunt it with a stick, provoking it to flick up its arrowed tail and sting the stick. The fact that scorpions were capable of sudden bursts of speed and would sometimes ignore the stick, making instead straight for the hand, made it more fun. Even better was to get two scorpions and make them fight each other. There are over fifty kinds of scorpions. Most could give you a very painful sting. Only two would kill you. But we didn’t know which two.

The only other time we ever left school was to go on trips with the YFC, the Young Farmers’ Club. As most of the pupils at Melsetter school were the children of farmers, we usually went to their parents’ farms. They would explain how coffee or tea or fruit farming worked, or how to run dairy cattle or timber plantations. Most of us knew this anyway, so it was just a good excuse for an outing. Usually the farmer’s wife would lay on a lavish cream tea at the end of the day.

In the truck on the way back we would sing camping songs in our piping voices. My eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have not brought my specs with me, or She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes. And we were all given little YFC badges to wear on the lapels of our blazers.

Every four weeks we would have an exeat weekend, when boarders could go home from Friday after lunch until late Sunday afternoon. The problem with this arrangement was that Friday was fish day. Every Friday lunch Sixpence produced Kariba bream, boiled to a mush in a thin milky sauce.

Kariba bream tastes like mud under the best of circumstances. When Sixpence cooked it to Mrs Wormald’s gruesome recipe it was disgusting, and I refused to eat it. As we were not allowed to leave until our plates were empty, I had to sit there over a plate of cold boiled fish, long after everyone else had gone home. My mother would go and have tea with the Simpsons while I sat stubbornly in the refectory, with Mrs Wormald guarding me because she knew Sixpence would gladly have tossed the fish in the bin if we were left unsupervised.

It became a battle of wills.

Sometimes as a concession she would get Sixpence to reheat the bream and put it back in front of me. But I still wouldn’t eat it. She would sit there unmoved, her knitting needles clicking. I would sit there staring at my plate and thinking how much I hated her – old Mrs Wormald, everything about her was ugly, even her name, worm-old, old-worm. Her orthopaedic shoes, her fat ankles, the gnarled blue varicose veins that coiled their way up the backs of her legs, her vast boat of a bum and its counterbalancing massive bosom, the wart on her chin with black hairs growing out of it, and her little rheumy, light blue, piggy eyes that stared out from behind thick glasses.

Sixpence would stand, leaning his bulk against the kitchen hatch, wondering at this bizarre contest and at the madness of the mukiwa.

Eventually Mrs Wormald would try to do a deal, scooping most of the fish to one side of my plate.

‘OK, you eat this little bit here, then you can go. And I’m doing you a big favour, hey?’

When the pile to be eaten got small enough I would fork it into my mouth, pack it into my cheeks with my tongue, mumble my farewell and dash to the lavatory to spit it out.

I found exeat weekends very unsettling. Hardly had I begun to savour the feel of freedom before I was being hustled back to school. It was the one time now that I still cried in public. It was worse in winter, when the school seemed dark and forbidding and isolated, sitting on its lonely hill.

One Sunday, after a particularly lengthy battle with Mrs Wormald the previous Friday, I felt especially sorry for myself. My parents had brought me back early, before any of the other children, and I sat on my bed, knees drawn up to my chest, crying quietly, alone. Suddenly Mrs Wormald walked briskly into the dormitory, catching me before I could dry up. She looked at me strangely and then walked out again without a word.

A minute later she returned and sat down on the bed next to me.

‘Ach, you mustn’t cry now seuntjie. Growing up is difficult to do. I can remember. I was a child once too, you know. You’re a good little boy really, even if you do cause me so much hassle.’

Then from somewhere about her large person she produced a ballpoint pen. It was no ordinary pen, it had four different colours. Depending on which button you depressed it could write in red, black, blue or green. No one else had anything like it. No one had even seen anything like it.

‘Don’t tell the others I gave it to you, hey?’ said Mrs Worm-aid. ‘Otherwise they’ll all be pestering me for one.’ The bed groaned as she leant over and pecked me shyly on the cheek, brushing me lightly with her wart hair. Then, the colour rising in her face, she fled from the dormitory.

My Friday confrontations lost their sting after that. And Kariba bream, though still disgusting, seemed bland enough to swallow without tasting. Besides which, Tickie perfected a way to serve me with a mock fish, made up of fish skin wrapped around mashed potato. As we were allowed to leave the skin, I just had to peel it off and put it to one side of my plate when no one was watching, then eat up the potato and I was free.

‘See,’ Mrs Wormald would say, regarding my empty plate benignly, ‘it’s not that bad after all now, is it, hey?’

One morning at school assembly, Mr Simpson told us there was going to be an important announcement on the radio. It was 11 November 1965. All normal lessons were cancelled and there was an air of great excitement. The whole school gathered together, all seventy of us, in the main block after lunch. The concertina partition between our kindergarten classroom and the classroom next door, which was shared by standard one and two, was opened up, just like it was for school plays. Two standard-five boys carried Mr Simpson’s big brown Bakelite wireless over from his house and put it on a desk in the middle of the room. We, the smaller kids, sat cross-legged on the floor beside it. Older kids sat behind us on chairs.

Mr Simpson switched on the radio. It took a few minutes to warm up and then it crackled into life. There was music for a bit and then the announcer came on.

‘This is the Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation,’ he said. ‘Please stand by for an important message from the prime minister, the honourable Mr Ian Douglas Smith.’

After a pause, Ian Smith began. His voice was easy to recognize because he seemed to speak through his nose and he had a very thick Rhodesian accent. He started by recalling how we Rhodesians had been so loyal to the Queen.

‘The people of Rhodesia have demonstrated their loyalty to the Crown and to their kith and kin in the United Kingdom through two world wars, and have been prepared to shed their blood and give of their substance in what they believe to be the mutual interests of freedom-loving people.’

But now, Smith said, all that we had cherished was about to be shattered on some rocks called expediency. He sounded quite cross about it.

At that point I stopped listening because I got into a scrape with Fatty Slabbert, who had flicked an elastic band at the back of my neck. Apparently, while Fatty Slabbert and I were bickering, Ian Smith declared Unilateral Independence, UDI, which meant we were no longer part of the British Empire. He had done it because the Queen wanted us to be ruled by the blacks. Smith said that UDI might be quite hard for us. But that was OK because we were pretty tough:

‘The mantle of the pioneers has fallen on our shoulders and we will, I’m sure, be able to face any difficulties which may occur, fortified by the same strength and courage which distinguished our forefathers in days gone by.’

He made it sound as though we were going to be quite important.

‘I believe that we are a courageous people and history has cast us in an heroic role.’

I thought that was great, we could all be heroes now. I quite fancied the idea of being a hero.

‘We may be a small country, but we are a determined people who have been called upon to play a role of worldwide significance. We Rhodesians have rejected the doctrinaire philosophy of appeasement and surrender.

We have struck a blow for the preservation of justice, civilization and Christianity, and in the spirit of this belief we have this day assumed our sovereign independence.

God bless you all.’

I didn’t really know what it all meant, but Mr Simpson and Miss Gloyne seemed very grave and solemn about it.

I’m not sure if anyone tried to explain to us what UDI really meant. Certainly no one said that Rhodesia would be isolated, that there would be economic sanctions against us and a war. That we would have to go into the army, that some of us would be killed, that we would be ambushed and attacked, that our farms would be burnt down and abandoned. No one said that.

But soon after the broadcast things began to change.

At first it was just little things. The men from the Public Works Department, the PWD, arrived in their yellow lorry and fixed anti-grenade screens on to the outside of our dormitory windows.

Then a firebomb was actually thrown into Chipinga school. After that we started practising emergency escape drills. We each had a partner so we could help one another up and out of the windows, which were too high for most of the boys to negotiate on their own.

They started locking the dormitory at night, and if you wanted to go to the lavatory after lights out you had to wake the dorm captain, whose bed was next to the door. He was supposed to unlock it to let you out and lock it again after you returned. But in practice he banned us from nocturnal pissing expeditions and we had to climb on to a locker and piss out of the window instead. You had to aim through the mesh of the grenade screen and if you wobbled it splashed back on you. You could tell where the favourite pissing holes were because the piss slowly dissolved the paint down the wall in those spots, and the flowers in the beds below them shrivelled and died.

There was another drill too, called ‘school attack procedure’. It was great fun. We had to pretend that tsotsis, who were now called terrorists, or ‘terrs’ for short, were firing rockets or throwing hand grenades at us. At the teachers’ instruction we had to shut down the Tilly lamps and lie under our beds with our hands over our ears. This immediately spawned a new game called ‘incoming’. The cry of ‘in-come-ing!’ by any boy meant that we all had to dive under beds as quickly as possible, and the last one under would be given a ‘lamey’ – a sharp thump on the arm with the point of a knuckle.

In the Pines, the games began to change too. Hounds and deer and Pine Cone War, instead of being Jerries versus Tommies, or cowboys versus Indians, or even Boers versus Brits, as it had been in the past, were now SAS and the Crocodile Gang, or sometimes, if Fatty Slabbert was organizing it, Rhodies and kaffirs.

Of course, everyone wanted to be on the Rhodie SAS side, but because I was little I usually ended up as a kaffir and a member of the Crocodile Gang, whether I liked it or not.