Serious injuries should happen in appropriate settings: during a war in Central America, an election in Angola, an earthquake in Armenia or on some daring journey through trackless wastes. Merely to have tripped over the cat outside the kitchen door adds indignity to injury and I could hear my friends involuntarily giggling at the other end of the telephone. Huffily I protested that this was no giggling matter, that for the first three of my five days in hospital I had been on a morphine drip, that numerous shattered bones (originally my left elbow and forearm) were now being held together by eight pins and a strip of metal. Penitently, the friends sympathized. Too late! To punish them I pressed on, explaining that now, back home, the vibrations of a door banging in the distance – never mind any movement of the body – caused exquisite pain. That lowered my friends’ telephone bills: they couldn’t ring again because they wouldn’t want to occasion bodily movements …
It happened at 9.15 p.m. on 2 June when Sebastian – a frail elderly feline gentleman – was mugged by the neighbours’ ginger tom, a notorious hooligan. Hearing an agonized wail I raced from my study, rounded a corner of the cobbled courtyard at speed and tripped over the fleeing victim. Luckily, I fell to the left. Had I fallen to the right, my head would have struck the sharp edge of a stone step and I might well have been moved not to a casualty department but to a mortuary.
It pleases me to live in the Irish equivalent of a dorplet, remote from urban influences. But remoteness has certain disadvantages and, while lying motionless on the ground, I considered one of those. Undoubtedly I had broken something. It was too soon to diagnose precisely what but I am familiar with the body’s response to broken bones. The nearest hospital is forty-five miles away and at 9.30 p.m. one cannot expect friends to drop everything and drive ninety miles. I decided to put myself to bed and send out an sos in the morning.
By then Sebastian and Mingmar, my dog, were standing by looking anxious, as animals do when their human is in any kind of distress, mental or physical. They watched me slowly pick myself up, during which ordeal the nature of the damage became apparent. ‘Think positive!’ said I to Sebastian and Mingmar. ‘At least it’s not the right arm.’ As usual they followed me to bed, looking puzzled when the undressing routine was omitted.
The chemistry of shock/pain is interesting. No painkillers were to hand but having gently arranged my bent arm on my chest I lay all night in an odd sort of semi-coma, unaware of pain though trembling violently. It seems the shock of shattered bones stimulates within the body some temporary analgesic device.
At 8 a.m. my sensible doctor refrained from examining the injured limb; by then I had realized that the elbow was also dislocated. He gave me a horse-sized shot of painkiller, scribbled a letter to the casualty department and soon I was in a friend’s car on the road to Cork. I used to think this was a smooth road; that morning I thought otherwise.
The term ‘casualty department’ suggests a unit where efficient professionals deal swiftly with emergencies. It is a misleading term – or was I an emergency only in my own egocentric estimation? For four pain-bemused hours I sat in a bath chair, at intervals being pushed from queue to queue through hundreds of maimed men, women and children. The men were mainly young, victims of industrial or sporting accidents. The women were mainly elderly. Most of the children whimpered quietly. The queues tended to be bureaucratic rather than medical. The exact sequence of events is a blur but I vividly recall the radiologist’s expression when she looked at the X-rays, then at me. ‘You’ve done a thorough job!’ said she, almost admiringly. The plates seemed to show a pile of kindling thrown in a grate; here was a thrilling challenge for an orthopaedic surgeon.
My operation was scheduled for 6 p.m. I longed to see that pile of kindling being reassembled into an arm and pleaded for a local anaesthetic. (If born without a compulsion to write, I would have been a surgeon.) But my plea was spurned, perhaps wisely: the operation took over an hour.
After a blissfully happy night on a morphine DIY drip (how easy to become addicted!) an ambulance moved me to another hospital, maybe because one-third of the X-ray machines at Cork’s Regional Hospital were out of order, as they had been for five months.
On 8 June I was sent home with instructions to keep the plastered arm in ‘an elevated position’. At once a local carpenter made a mobile stand from which The Arm was suspended, day and night, for three weeks. (It had, by this stage, acquired capital letters.) During those weeks sleep was scarce; not since adolescence have I read so many novels. Then came a riveting phenomenon: for the next month or so, Nature dictated that out of every twenty-four hours I should spend approximately fourteen deeply asleep.
In due course I found an inspired physiotherapist in Dublin; Mary Pender’s name should be written up somewhere in letters of gold. Within three days of the plaster’s coming off on 30 June she had me swimming, a week later she had me cycling. Broken elbows are notoriously intractable, not to be pandered to or you may be crippled for life. Hence Mary’s relentlessly sadistic approach: ‘Never mind the pain, just get on with it.’ At each session her treatment was fourfold: acupuncture, laser ray, electrical massage and (ouch!) manipulation. Yet even she failed to get me typing. However hard I tried, The Arm could not function at the typing angle until 27 July.
On Sunday 28 August my daughter Rachel, then working in Mozambique, met me at Harare airport. She had a week’s leave; on 4 September her partner, Andrew, would drive up to Mutare to collect us. I planned to fly onto Jo’burg ten days later, by which time The Arm would be fit for a full day’s cycling. However, I had calculated without Mozambican bureaucracy. At the Harare Consulate tourism was not at the top of anyone’s agenda. My visa would of course be granted, within two or three weeks …
‘Never mind,’ said Rachel briskly. ‘There’s a smugglers’ path over the mountains on the border. If you sneak in that way, before dawn, we’ll pick you up on the far side. But remember the landmines, don’t ever leave the path. If you need to pee, pee on the path.’
We took the Wednesday night train to Mutare and next day spent several strenuous hours in rough terrain sussing out exactly where this path began. Viewing its continuation through binoculars, I felt some misgivings. This route involved more than walking: it ascended an escarpment that might require two sound arms. But by then it was much too late to ‘think sensible’, I was completely hooked on the smugglers’ path.
Late on the Saturday afternoon Andrew arrived from Beira, to be informed by Rachel that at four o’clock next morning he must deposit Mamma a mile from the start of the path. For security (noise) reasons a vehicle could go no closer. Quickly Andrew adjusted to the situation, at which point I recognized a kindred spirit.
In pitch darkness I was deposited on a ridge-top; we had driven up a rough track from the main road and the invisible Zimbabwean border-post lay some three miles away. As the vehicle disappeared I stood still, allowing my eyes to become accustomed to starlight – a magical moment, the silence broken only by tiny mysterious noises in the bush. During our recce I had imprinted on my mind exactly where the path branched off from this track; a convenient solitary tree served as landmark. Soon after finding it the dawn came: a quiet pastel dawn, light slowly seeping through the surrounding dense tangles of dwarf acacia and euphorbia. From afar, through binoculars, this had looked like a fairly direct path across a wide valley. But it was no such thing. For a variety of topographical reasons it wandered to and fro, up and down, this way and that, often meeting other paths. Twice I near-panicked: I have no sense of direction and a wrong turning might expose me to the full fury of the Zimbabwean and/or Mozambican immigration officers, who presumably also use binoculars. Rachel had of course foreseen such a disaster; a lifetime of gruelling experiences has left her with no illusions about the maternal sense of direction. So I was carrying only a walking-stick – no camera, no binoculars, no passport, no notebook, no food or water. If apprehended by officialdom, I would seem an eccentric geriatric who enjoyed walking in the cool of the morning and had innocently strayed into the border area.
Tension built up as I hesitated at these numerous junctions – then, at the base of the mountain, my spirits soared. Confronting me was an eight-foot-high wire fence marking the Zimbabwean border. The smugglers had long since cut the two bottom strands and wriggling through was easy. Some fifty yards further on came the Mozambican wire fence and another easy wriggle. For the next half-hour the path climbed steeply through comfortingly dense forest – and then came the escarpment, some 400 feet high. With two arms it would have been difficult enough, with one and a half arms it was quite terrifying. The technique of ascending this near-precipice involved hanging onto strong, ancient tree roots, polished by the hands and feet of countless smugglers. My problem here was not pain, which under pressure can be dealt with – mind-over-matter. My problem was The Arm being physically incapable of supporting my weight. But desperation is the mother of innovation and I discovered that hanging onto tree roots can also be done – though less securely – with a knee, improbable though that may sound. Halfway up I almost lost my nerve as the soil became looser and the roots seemed less dependable. However, any attempt to descend would have been even more risky. Having paused for a few moments to recover my nerve, I continued very slowly – and felt weak with relief when I got to the top.
It was a flattish top, some 150 yards by 100, with huge boulders lying between tall trees. And obviously it was mine-free: beer and Coca-Cola cans and cigarette packets and condoms littered the short brown grass. (Are smugglers an unusually sophisticated, AIDS-aware segment of local society?) As I rested, leaning against a boulder, I heard voices which drew me back to the edge of the precipice. At the bottom, five men were unloading. Then one swiftly ascended, let down a rope and drew up the enormous head-loads: square and oblong boxes, wrapped in blankets. When his friends had followed they all greeted me politely, tactfully registering no surprise at finding an elderly white female on their path. ‘You have lost your passport?’ suggested one, in sympathetic tones. ‘Yes,’ said I.
What were they smuggling? I longed to ask but tact must be two-way so instead we talked about the weather. In Europe weather-talk is trivial chit-chat, in Africa it’s often a life-or-death issue. They told me all about their losses during the cruel drought of 1992 and shared with me their Coca-Cola – a swig from each tin. Then they moved on, having earnestly warned me not to put a foot off the path.
Cautiously I followed, down and down and down, very steeply, through thin forest or scrubby bush, the two border-posts now visible in the distance on my left. But where the path eventually joined the motor road (the notorious Beira Corridor) those hazards were far behind me.
No one took any notice of the illegal immigrant as I walked the ten miles to Manika, the first little town in Mozambique. That was an exhilarating walk through superb mountains, quite densely populated; here, round straw huts replaced the more Westernized dwellings favoured by the Zimbabweans. On the verandah of Manika’s ramshackle hotel I drank many beers while waiting to be collected. When the young arrived at noon Rachel looked unsurprised to find me where I was supposed to be. Andrew, I gathered, had been preparing to bail me out of Mutare’s police station.
Re-entering South Africa proved equally stressful in a much less enjoyable way. But that was all my own fault, as several Jo’burg friends scornfully pointed out. During the hour-long flight from Maputo we were required to fill in immigration forms and, this being the new South Africa, I uninhibitedly ticked ‘work’ as purpose of visit. But at Jan Smuts airport, in September 1994, honesty was the worst policy. A small pot-bellied Afrikaner immigration officer, with thin sandy hair and angry pale blue eyes, demanded my work permit. Then I made mistake no. 2 by firmly asserting that in the new South Africa I didn’t need a work permit. Resentment of the new South Africa is strongest among exactly this category of Afrikaner: minor civil servant, immediately threatened by affirmative action. Moreover, I was, technically, wrong. GNU hasn’t yet had time to deal with all the laws scheduled to be changed.
The immigration Commander-in-Chief now came on the scene – a tall, thin, megalomaniacal bureaucrat who seized on me as a glorious opportunity for the full exercise of his powers. Yes, I could get a work permit but it would take time – all day, in fact, because my application must be processed in Pretoria. (It was then 9.30 a.m.) Meanwhile I was forbidden to make any attempt to contact the outside world, where the long-suffering Margaret was standing by to collect me.
Off, then, to an office where a conspicuously armed policeman supervised my form-filling. Bizarre forms these were, demanding the name of the corporation for which I worked, its global headquarters (Tokyo? London? New York? Hong Kong?), the South African addresses of all its agents, the period of my employment with it, the precise nature of that employment, the address of my South African bank and my account number, my health-insurance details, my destination(s) in South Africa with addresses, telephone and fax numbers – and more besides, which I left unanswered because I couldn’t understand the questions.
Karel Schoeman, an Afrikaner author, has commented: ‘Afrikaners hardly read books, never mind showing admiration for people who write them.’ You could widen that comment: South Africans in general lack any understanding of the literary way of life. Yet now, when presented with a fourth form, I attempted in desperation to explain that freelance authors are just that – free spirits, not even remotely associated with any corporation. The C-in-C’s eyes glazed over when I outlined my ‘work’ in South Africa: cycling from Jo’burg to Bloemfontein, via Bop, kwaZulu/Natal and the Transkei. In South Africa even blacks don’t cycle; they use communal taxis.
At that crucial moment the telephone rang; Margaret had detected the crisis and was forcefully rallying round. I’ll never know what she said but her intervention unnerved my captor, already badly shaken by all this talk about cycling and writing; for me, he had no bureaucratic pigeon-hole. Somehow Margaret’s spiel completed his demoralization. Grabbing my passport, he stuck in a form ordering me to report to the Home Office in Central Jo’burg seven days hence to collect my work permit. And then I was released into the not-so-new South Africa.
A week later I obediently queued at the Home Office for one hour and forty minutes. But alas! nobody knew anything about Dervla Murphy’s work permit. End of story. Dervla Murphy spent the next four months happily working in South Africa, then departed with no questions asked.