Danny’s mum is one of those homely, practical, domesticated, arty-crafty types who makes her own everything. My mum cooks okay, and she bakes cakes or biscuits every now and then and they usually come out nice, but Mrs Proctor spends her days up to her elbows in pastry or cake mix or half completed garments, and she’s just finished making these – a hundred of them. A hundred. I couldn’t even find a reason to have a hundred. Who does she send them to?
“Oh wow, those are beautiful Mrs Proctor! We used to make Christmas cards.”
She looks up at me with sparks of kindred spirit in her eyes. “We? With your parents?”
“Me and my sister. We thought it would be a good idea, just for family, but I don’t reckon they were appreciated.”
She thinks that’s funny, but I just remember it being a complete pain in the you-know-what. We spent hours measuring with rulers and making faint pencil lines that could be easily rubbed out, then Dad cut the cards with his office guillotine. We then spent more hours folding knife edges precisely and copying pictures from old cards in coloured crayons. My handwriting being far superior to Rosie’s, I got the task of penning all the greeting lines (also plagiarised from the previous year’s commercial cards) and filling in the addressees’ names, and then signing With lots of love from Bob, Sheila, Tessa, Rosie, Cleo, Skellum and Induna. Eight times, each year, for four years. Then Grandad Harry died and because he’d so loved our efforts and wrote to tell us how he looked forward to them every year, I couldn’t bring myself to send any more home-made cards to Granny Libby in case it made her cry. I don’t know if it would’ve made her cry – I’ve never met her – but I visualised her alone in her little bungalow in Ringwood, opening an envelope, taking out one of our cards and bursting into tears because Grandad wasn’t there to see it. So then, because she wouldn’t get any more cards, all of them had to stop in case she felt left out. No more for Dad’s brother and his family or Mum’s sister and her family or even for Grandad David and Granny Madge. I made the decision, Rosie took no convincing and Mum failed to produce an argument that stood up to that logic, so that was the end of our Christmas card manufacturing career.
Dad’s Aunty Julia was the only one who eventually asked, in a letter, “Why don’t your girls do their own cards anymore? They were so lovely.” Bless her.
I have to say Mrs Proctor’s creations are way more impressive than our clumsy attempts, and I wonder where the hell she gets the time to do the measuring and the cutting and the colouring and the gluing and the spraying of glitter and the crafting of the perfect calligraphy, never mind searching the depleted shops in Salisbury for the materials and pens. I’m just about to butter her up with, “Yours are so professional!” when Danny’s dad appears at the back door, his square face red and a bit sweaty. His nose – which is Danny’s nose exactly – is glistening.
“Hi Tessa!” he exclaims, ditching his flip flops one by one. “Lovely to see you today. My, that’s such a pretty skirt. Did you make it?”
Did I what?
I’m saved from having to make any sort of embarrassing admission, or indeed lie, by Mrs P herself.
“Go and get showered, Roger. Sue said she’s serving lunch at one and when Sue says one, she means one. Dan, there’s corned beef and salady stuff in the fridge and fresh bread.”
When they’ve gone, Brian and Cassie muck in to help us make sandwiches. My first impression of Brian still comes back to me whenever I’m with him – that he’s just a slightly older version of Danny, with a thinner face and a more studious intensity about him. Today he’s focussing that intent on finding out how long I’ll be staying this afternoon because he’s got some friends coming over that he’d like me to meet.
“We’re not sticking around Bri,” says Danny. “We’re off for a walk in a bit.”
“Heavy cloud out there. You sure?” Brian leans across the worktop and cranes his neck to study the sky.
“No rain forecast. It’ll be fine. Cass, here’s your sandwich.”
“Well hopefully they’ll pitch up before you go. I was kind of hoping I could introduce you, Tessa.”
The walk is news to me but I’m okay with it. After a very small amount of time wondering why he’s so keen for me to meet these friends I give him the oh-well-never-mind noises. I’m sure they’re lovely people.
Cassie’s an interesting one. She’s connected to Brian by a piece of elastic. He takes up ninety percent of her attention, she struggles to move more than about a metre away from him and she agrees with everything he says. She’s quite sweet – a bit mousey – but she’s so annoyingly In Love and she says “Praise the Lord” and “Hallelujah” after every other sentence. To be fair, I do get that she’s going to want to be around him as much as she can while he’s back home on RNR, so maybe I’m doing her a disservice. I’ll be like that too, I guess, when Danny starts getting called up. We just have no idea what this life is going to serve up to us from one day to the next, do we? Make the most of the time you spend with those you love, Gill told me, and she vowed that if she never did so before, she would do so from now on.
After we’ve eaten, they leave us alone in the kitchen for a bit and the uncomfortable tension she created in me starts to fade. I wash and Danny dries and puts away and we debate about where to go for our walk. He’s in the middle of a story about two small children who’ve been orphaned because their parents were ambushed on their way back to their farm in Mangula when he’s interrupted by the sound of car wheels crunching over the gravel in the driveway and Brian calling from the lounge, “Ah! Dan! Tess! Terry and Nina are here, guys.”
“Terry Archer and his wife, who run Brian and Cassie’s Christian youth group,” Danny whispers. “I think they’ve come to drop off some newsletters for Brian to deliver. I didn’t know until this morning that they were coming today. They’re a bit painful. We need to make our escape as soon as possible.”
Terry is pale and earnest; tall, with pale brown hair and a pale brown wispy moustache that’s struggling to make itself known. Nina is probably two thirds of his height, a bit shorter than me, but very roundly pregnant. He’s quiet and calm and gently smiley; she’s loud and effervescent.
She spots me within seconds of entering the hallway and fizzes at me, clapping her hands. “Ah! So who are you? We haven’t seen you before! Danny, you haven’t introduced us. We haven’t seen you in a while anyway! So nice to have you here!”
I’m a bit bemused. It’s his house, after all.
“This is Tessa, my girlfriend,” Danny tells her and I come over fluttery and coy and sidle up close to him. Now I’m behaving like Cass.
He winks down at me and says, “She came for lunch today,” and Nina is absolutely delighted.
“And we decided to call in! Terry said only this morning at breakfast, he said, ‘D’you know what Neens? I think we should drop those papers round to Brian Proctor today and not Monday evening.’ Now, my girlie, I have a feeling our Lord has been at work here. He’s sent you here today to meet us. Isn’t it wonderful? He knew you would be here and He sent us to help you find Him. It’s amazing! Amazing Grace – ha ha! Brian, you have to get your brother to come to Chapel and bring his girl. Do you have any brothers or sisters, Tessa?”
“A sister,” I hear myself say.
“Oh super! Great! Bring her along too. We’d love to see her, meet her. We’re all family here. In fact…” she pats her belly, “we’re expanding ours. This is our fourth. We’ll bring more people to worship the King any way we can!”
She chortles merrily and then rattles off again, which is fortunate because I can’t come up with anything sensible to say.
“So why don’t you come along then? You and Danny could also come to our Bible Study sessions so you can better understand the miracle of being Born Again and how you can be baptised when you are ready to welcome Jesus into your heart. Terry and I give classes at the weekends. It will give you something to do on Saturdays or Sundays, won’t it? Great! You can combine that with the Chapel service. I’ll bet you like lying in on Sundays? Don’t worry, we’ll keep you busy!”
Give ME something to do on Saturdays or Sundays? Lying in? I wish. I could tell her what I’m thinking, but I don’t.
Danny’s not doing a lot to try and rescue me after all his talk about escaping. Brian, Cassie and Terry are regarding me just as fervently as Nina. I’m cornered, even though the French doors are open and the world outside stretches before me.
“Right, sorry, but we’re off now. Danny and I were going to go for a walk and it looks like rain later.”
We fumble to get our tackies on and are out the door in two minutes.
“See what I mean?” he mumbles out the side of his mouth as we make our exit down the drive. “I don’t mean to be nasty – they do no harm – but they’re so bloody persistent about recruiting. Drives me nuts.”
Over the road, we take one of the paths through the open vlei, hand in hand.
He tells me what my parents have already been worrying about for the last week – that from next year the government schools will take in all races. Private schools have done so for years now, but parents of government school kids like us have gone into melt-down over what they perceive as a disastrous and unprecedented decision.
“It had to happen, Danny. And about time. Everyone should be entitled to the same education from the start, don’t you think? Why does being white skinned entitle us to a better education? I’ve talked this through with Charles, Moira and Gill quite a bit. We’ve debated their views versus those of my folks, who, needless to say, tend to be old school.”
Charles says an equivalent education process for blacks should’ve started ages ago and I agree.
“I can’t understand how the settlers in, say, the 1920s, couldn’t see that the indigenous population would eventually want a good part in governing Africa. And with the right education there’s no reason whatsoever why that shouldn’t have been the plan. The settlers never contemplated sharing education and, eventually, power. Why couldn’t we all have developed this country together? It’s so wrong to assume that Africans – the black Africans that is, because I’m African too – would always be content to have the role of servants and labourers. What job you do should depend on your abilities and skills, not on your colour, don’t you think?”
He’s focussed on the sandy track stretching ahead. He makes no reply, although his face would indicate he’s busy making up one. Just before the main road ahead, the path takes a dip through the shallow-sided drainage swale and up to the verge, but also splits here to run both ways along this side of the ditch. Right is the short route back to his place. Left leads us on a circuit perhaps three times as long.
I tug at his hand. “Left? Or right?”
In that moment of indecision he turns to face me and I’m not sure what I see in his face. It could be fascination, but why? Or maybe amazement – again why? Disconcerting.
“Left then? We can go around the copse and then up across the hill at the back of Bertrand Road.”
“Okay.” Automatic. His mind is somewhere else.
Then he says, “Weren’t we talking about black pupils flooding our schools?”
That’s how it started. But then I steered it on to wondering how folks came to be worrying about that in the first place.
“Well… So anyway, don’t you think that’s true? What if all children in this country had had the same education from age five to sixteen, seventeen? Blacks would surely have naturally sifted into those jobs that have become exclusively white years ago and all this violence might never have come about. It shouldn’t matter what colour you are, as long as you have the education and qualifications to do a particular job. The only reason we so blithely say the blacks are not capable, not ready for government, is because most of them have been held back educationally for so long. It’s our own doing.”
We keep walking, one foot in front of the other. Why doesn’t he answer me? Come up with some comment? I pluck the head off a stalk of brown grass, kick a stone that’s so smooth it looks like it’s come from a river, decide maybe I should grope around in my head for a safe subject instead of trying this grown up stuff.
And he starts to laugh. Creased-up-face, delighted laughter. He says, “Do you know you’re even prettier when you’re all fired up? Don’t start getting a guilt complex about problems our forefathers created, Babe. If you’re going to look back that far, remember that the colonial, Victorian mentality saw things very clearly in the light of the glorious British Empire that would save the savage peoples of the world from themselves.”
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.
“All fired up?”
“You are,” he agrees, grinning.
A sharp retort would be good here, but I’m too astounded. The only direction my brain can scrabble along in is towards self justification.
“I’m just putting the case for what I think. I’m fully aware that mentalities have changed, thanks. There must have been individuals among them with the foresight though, surely?”
“Probably very few and their views wouldn’t have been popular. Don’t forget also that many whites who came to this country from England, Scotland and other countries in the early part of this century, and even as late as the forties and fifties, were not happy with their lot in their own home territory. They were perhaps lacking in education themselves and they lived a hard life after World War Two in overcrowded homes they couldn’t afford to own. Think of the opportunities a place like this, or South Africa, or East Africa, had to offer. Those less educated settler whites were the ones who would’ve had their jobs threatened by up-and-coming, well-educated blacks who might have worked with the higher class whites. The higher class, business-owning whites were more likely to be liberals anyway, and open to this idea. The working class white folks particularly were afraid of educated blacks. Lots still are today. You’re in danger of becoming too idealistic, Tess. You’ve got to take human nature into account. Anyway, it’s too late. It’s all happened, we can’t change it, and it’s no fault of yours or mine. Don’t be guilty. Besides, I’d have thought you’d be concerned about standards in schools, my sweetheart?”
I’m aware of all that too. And I’m not guilty.
“I’m aware of that too. And I’m not guilty. Why should I be? And why should I be concerned? I support the idea.”
He stops and shakes a puzzled head. “I just thought… Don’t you want…? Well never mind. Come down off your soapbox, Babe! These people – your friend and her parents – you’ve let them influence you in ways you probably don’t realise. It will never work, Tessa. The place will collapse, just like the rest of Africa, you wait and see.”
His voice in this final sentence is flat and terminal. Conversation over. Like he’s disappointed, although I’m his sweetheart. He’s saying he thinks I should be concerned about standards in schools. I don’t know why he would say that.
Well, I do, of course. Now how about that for a little wormy thought I’d rather ignore for now?
“Well, let’s hope the place doesn’t collapse, but that’s not my point. The point I’m trying to make is that we have to have racial equality. It’s inevitable and it really always has been. I’ve grown up in this war, Danny, as have you. I can barely remember what it was like before. All the death, all the restrictions – it’s become a way of life. Do you know what occurred to me just the other day? I haven’t seen or heard a firework since… when? I have this dim recollection of being about four or five, or maybe younger, in our garden on Guy Fawkes Night – rockets throwing up colours and patterns, Catherine wheels, lots of noise. I’d forgotten all about it. It’s hardly important in itself, but it’s something we used to have before. Before war.”
And another thing…
“And another thing. The Owens are all my friends and we have many healthy debates about all sorts of subjects. I happen to think their political views make more sense than those of my parents. What’s wrong with that? It means I’m thinking for myself.”
He lets go of my hand, slides his arm around my shoulders, soft now, smiling, soothing.
“All right, all right. Don’t get worried. Family is important and I think you do really support them although I can see what you’re trying to say. I’ve upset you though, Babe and I’m sorry. It’s okay if you’re angry. I’m just surprised you… well… you don’t see the problems Smith’s been trying to prevent all these years.”
He’s making out that I don’t know my own mind. Smith. I’ve been brought up to be fiercely patriotic for Rhodesia and good old Smithy. Would I still be as patriotic and believing if I’d never met the Owens? Never been party to any opinions other than those of Mum and Dad? Possibly. A government at war uses propaganda to its maximum advantage and my parents have faithfully taken on board that we’ll really be able to hang on to a Promised Land. A paradise of easy living in the sun and a privileged position in a society with plenty of cheap labour to create an affordable cost of living and to provide an abundance of domestic help. They see it that this is right. That we, the whites, are upholding civilisation in Africa, benevolent guides to a more simple people, just like the Victorians did. That Ian Smith is leading us in a stand against the rest of the world because we are doing the right thing by holding government. That it’s the rest of the world that’s wrong. That the racial status quo is a perfectly acceptable situation.
I do not support my parents’ views just because we’re all members of the same family. Why should I do that?
“I haven’t yet figured out how I would argue this with Mum and Dad. To be honest, I probably won’t.”
“Sure, sure, sure. Probably best not.”
We do a hug and he says shall we go back now and I nod against his shoulder but I’m thinking I won’t get back on my soapbox in front of him again. I’m not having my soapbox kicked to pieces under me.
We don’t go back straight away. We wander up in the hills for nearly two hours talking comfortable subjects. Finally, he says he thinks the coast is probably clear now, but when we arrive back at his house Terry and Nina are still there.