Now that I live in a country that has not known war apart from a few Japanese missiles landing on two minor cities in World War Two, there is a genre of my childhood tales that are generally greeted with disbelief or horror.
It as though the only ones that really understand the peculiarities of growing up in a war-zone are your peers from the time. While “western” in appearance and education, us Zimbabweans have a defining characteristic in that we grew up in a country and era where danger apparently lurked behind every tree and had the potential to invade any backyard at any time.
Perhaps “every” and “any” is a little misguiding, but there is no doubt that there were very real dangers in our land. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, I don’t have any childhood memories of the kind of hysteria that seems to surround children these days, where the biggest risk they face appears to be to fall on the wrong side of the Occupational Health and Safety police.
Yet the stark reality of my first several years of life was that I was witness to a number of events that would send today’s parent rushing their cherub to the closest therapy unit.
Perhaps chief amongst these was the death of our next-door neighbour’s son.
My recollection is vague, but my impression is that he was on “call-up” or National Service when the vehicle he was in hit a landmine, callously planted by the “communist insurgent terrorist” (terrs) troops that were flooding across the borders to seek soft targets in the “Second Chimurenga” war.
Miraculously he survived the blast, but when he was being airlifted in a “casualty evacuation (Casevac)” his plane was either shot up or hit trees on the runway to claim his life. He’d been married a few short months.
Sometimes in the school holidays Mum would leave me with my sister when she went away to work. My sister was doing her nursing training at the Bulawayo General Hospital. Several times my sister would be called away following the “thwack thwack” of the helicopter blades bringing in the latest Casevac.
When an emergency like that happens the whereabouts of a seven year old boy, and what he witnesses, becomes a secondary concern.
Our country became a vivid map of “no-go” zones. This was basically anywhere outside the four major cities and the highways between them.
We regularly visited farming friends in West Nicholson and their majestic farm-houses became surrounded by eight-foot razor wire whilst fly-screen mesh boxes were placed over their windows to repel mortars.
Later they installed bunkers and “safe rooms” with control panels that detonated grenades sprinkled throughout their pristine gardens. These stick grenades used to make great markers for childhood games such as Rounders or “stuck-in-the-mud”.
Whenever we went north or south we did so in “convoy”. A typical convoy was a congregation of cars that gathered in Essexvale at the sleepy hour of 7.30am. Three “buckies” (utes to Australians) with heavy machine guns mounted in their trays would be waiting for us . One would take the front position, another would sit in the middle and the third would bring up the rear, waiting to repel any attack that might come our way.
My father hated the convoy as it’s speed was dictated by the lowest common denominator, generally around 80kph. We’d dawdle through the tribal trust lands (TTLs) staring at goats, wizened mealie (corn) crops and empty buildings pocked by numerous bullet holes. Every now and again we’d pass signs advising us to only travel in daylight hours, preferably with the convoys.
We’d never pass any cars coming in the opposite direction. They’d all be in Beit Bridge awaiting the armored buckies on the turnaround home.
The blasé approach to death and destruction was all around us when you think back. Every morning we’d wake to the daily score on the radio. The “score” being the names of the Rhodesian troops killed in the previous day’s action followed by the number of “terrorists” slaughtered to make it happen.
The roll-call of “our” names seemed to grow by the day.
With a father and brother on regular “call-up” there was always a pile of oblique brown boxes scattered around our house or in our shed. These were the infamous “rat-packs”, a day’s ration of food for the men in the field.
Half of the food in those rat packs was practically inedible so the older males in the house would stash them and bring them home for me. And whenever a friend visited we’d explore the darkest vestiges of our yard, rat-packs in hand, and gorge ourselves on “dog-biscuits”, cans of bully beef and myriad tin tubes of condensed milk, jam and greasy butter.
They also used to bring home bullets. These were great fun because we could get a pair of pliers and wrench them open to reveal the internal gunpowder which we’d lay in long trails all along the cement of our car-port. Put a match to the gunpowder and it would erupt in a sizzling display of fire that would sometimes last for minutes and leave great big long black trails of burnt cordite.
The empty bullet (“dorpie”) would still have a live firing mechanism so we’d put that in a clamp, get a nail and hammer and detonate it with a loud crack.
I suppose the definition of blasé is your father bringing home a faulty but still “live” mortar with it’s cone head removed but otherwise intact. The mortar stood at our back door and smoked into the heavens for several days before it was deemed sufficiently “safe” to throw it in the school bag for the day’s “show and tell” session in Grade Two.
Which happened to be the class of Mrs Eyre. This was a fun class where it seemed the sun always shined and the pleasures of learning broke upon us in ever increasing waves.
My abiding memory of this classroom is of a chipper Mrs Eyre up the front cajoling us and inspiring us to excellence, particularly in English. It became a badge of honour to be the seven-year old to spell “approximately” correctly and Rodney Minter-Brown was the first to achieve the feat.
While my mortar may have been amongst the more unusual of “show and tell” events it was by no means a lone stand-out. I distinctly remember one of the boys, possibly Rae Da Silva, bringing a baby banded cobra in a jar so we could look at the stripes that resembled a zebra crossing.
Of course I wasn’t too enamored of snakes at the time because it was in that year that Fiona Dewar and I returned to my house after a school day and stepped out onto our verandah only to have a seven-foot spitting cobra shoot under our leading feet. We bolted away as fast as we could leaving the front door wide open to the snake to enter the house should it choose to.
Thankfully it didn’t but it did attract a coterie of knob-Kerrie wielding “garden-boys” from surrounding homes who battled with it for the best part of an hour while it flung itself at them, hissing and spitting and promising instant death to the unwary. When it was finally killed they took it away for burning to make sure that its spirit didn’t return
Rae’s cobra inspired something of a race to bring in any embryo that could be found and we had a shelf in the classroom that was lined with jars of embryos preserved in methylated spirits.
I remember one reading session out on the lawns in front of the classroom where Mrs Eyre was impressing the importance of phonics on us and the need to sound out words. And I just happened to be reading a book about an earthworm that could only hear through the vibrations in the soil.
Except that I was sounding words and pronounced it “Vib Rations”. But there was no derisory snort from Mrs Eyre or quick correction. Rather it was “that’s excellent that you’re sounding out the words Andrew, and you’re actually correct to sound it out that way, but sometimes English breaks the rules and the correct way to say it is “Vy Brations”.
Such was the nature of the woman.
And looking at the work we generated in those days, it was certainly of the highest order. My scrapbook is filled with relatively long tomes on measurements and mothers and fathers. Neat writing, perfect punctuation and the first stirrings of expressive writing.
Excellence didn’t stop at English however. There was one girl in the class (whose name now escapes me) that was a budding artist and produced works that were a cut above the rest of us. My impression was of the fringes she gave her portraits - a zig zag effect that we were all trying to emulate by the end of the year.
I’m certainly no artist but two paintings I generated that year, of a ship and an airplane, hung on my walls for years afterwards as the best works I’d ever produced.
I recall that one of our class (who shall remain nameless) swallowed her mother’s wedding ring and for the best part of a week had to be escorted to the toilets by Mrs Eyre who would then have to sift through the “droppings” until the ring was found.
And I used to despise line-ups at the front of the classroom because Michael Collins would maneuver himself to stand behind me and pull my ears - that was until Mr Phillips came out of his office and caught him in the act. I’m pretty sure we heard a bit of thwack thwack through the office door shortly afterwards.
The year flicked past and our time in the “top block” of the school was nearly over. Most mornings a crowd of students from the older classes seemed to flood our classroom to “visit” Mrs Eyre. They seemed to come from another world, the realms of the big school and the “Standard” classes.
I determined that I too would be one of those visitors to Mrs Eyre in future years. She’d left her mark.
Now that I live in a country that has not known war apart from a few Japanese missiles landing on two minor cities in World War Two, there is a genre of my childhood tales that are generally greeted with disbelief or horror.
It as though the only ones that really understand the peculiarities of growing up in a war-zone are your peers from the time. While “western” in appearance and education, us Zimbabweans have a defining characteristic in that we grew up in a country and era where danger apparently lurked behind every tree and had the potential to invade any backyard at any time.
Perhaps “every” and “any” is a little misguiding, but there is no doubt that there were very real dangers in our land. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, I don’t have any childhood memories of the kind of hysteria that seems to surround children these days, where the biggest risk they face appears to be to fall on the wrong side of the Occupational Health and Safety police.
Yet the stark reality of my first several years of life was that I was witness to a number of events that would send today’s parent rushing their cherub to the closest therapy unit.
Perhaps chief amongst these was the death of our next-door neighbour’s son.
My recollection is vague, but my impression is that he was on “call-up” or National Service when the vehicle he was in hit a landmine, callously planted by the “communist insurgent terrorist” (terrs) troops that were flooding across the borders to seek soft targets in the “Second Chimurenga” war.
Miraculously he survived the blast, but when he was being airlifted in a “casualty evacuation (Casevac)” his plane was either shot up or hit trees on the runway to claim his life. He’d been married a few short months.
Sometimes in the school holidays Mum would leave me with my sister when she went away to work. My sister was doing her nursing training at the Bulawayo General Hospital. Several times my sister would be called away following the “thwack thwack” of the helicopter blades bringing in the latest Casevac.
When an emergency like that happens the whereabouts of a seven year old boy, and what he witnesses, becomes a secondary concern.
Our country became a vivid map of “no-go” zones. This was basically anywhere outside the four major cities and the highways between them.
We regularly visited farming friends in West Nicholson and their majestic farm-houses became surrounded by eight-foot razor wire whilst fly-screen mesh boxes were placed over their windows to repel mortars.
Later they installed bunkers and “safe rooms” with control panels that detonated grenades sprinkled throughout their pristine gardens. These stick grenades used to make great markers for childhood games such as Rounders or “stuck-in-the-mud”.
Whenever we went north or south we did so in “convoy”. A typical convoy was a congregation of cars that gathered in Essexvale at the sleepy hour of 7.30am. Three “buckies” (utes to Australians) with heavy machine guns mounted in their trays would be waiting for us . One would take the front position, another would sit in the middle and the third would bring up the rear, waiting to repel any attack that might come our way.
My father hated the convoy as it’s speed was dictated by the lowest common denominator, generally around 80kph. We’d dawdle through the tribal trust lands (TTLs) staring at goats, wizened mealie (corn) crops and empty buildings pocked by numerous bullet holes. Every now and again we’d pass signs advising us to only travel in daylight hours, preferably with the convoys.
We’d never pass any cars coming in the opposite direction. They’d all be in Beit Bridge awaiting the armored buckies on the turnaround home.
The blasé approach to death and destruction was all around us when you think back. Every morning we’d wake to the daily score on the radio. The “score” being the names of the Rhodesian troops killed in the previous day’s action followed by the number of “terrorists” slaughtered to make it happen.
The roll-call of “our” names seemed to grow by the day.
With a father and brother on regular “call-up” there was always a pile of oblique brown boxes scattered around our house or in our shed. These were the infamous “rat-packs”, a day’s ration of food for the men in the field.
Half of the food in those rat packs was practically inedible so the older males in the house would stash them and bring them home for me. And whenever a friend visited we’d explore the darkest vestiges of our yard, rat-packs in hand, and gorge ourselves on “dog-biscuits”, cans of bully beef and myriad tin tubes of condensed milk, jam and greasy butter.
They also used to bring home bullets. These were great fun because we could get a pair of pliers and wrench them open to reveal the internal gunpowder which we’d lay in long trails all along the cement of our car-port. Put a match to the gunpowder and it would erupt in a sizzling display of fire that would sometimes last for minutes and leave great big long black trails of burnt cordite.
The empty bullet (“dorpie”) would still have a live firing mechanism so we’d put that in a clamp, get a nail and hammer and detonate it with a loud crack.
I suppose the definition of blasé is your father bringing home a faulty but still “live” mortar with it’s cone head removed but otherwise intact. The mortar stood at our back door and smoked into the heavens for several days before it was deemed sufficiently “safe” to throw it in the school bag for the day’s “show and tell” session in Grade Two.
Which happened to be the class of Mrs Eyre. This was a fun class where it seemed the sun always shined and the pleasures of learning broke upon us in ever increasing waves.
My abiding memory of this classroom is of a chipper Mrs Eyre up the front cajoling us and inspiring us to excellence, particularly in English. It became a badge of honour to be the seven-year old to spell “approximately” correctly and Rodney Minter-Brown was the first to achieve the feat.
While my mortar may have been amongst the more unusual of “show and tell” events it was by no means a lone stand-out. I distinctly remember one of the boys, possibly Rae Da Silva, bringing a baby banded cobra in a jar so we could look at the stripes that resembled a zebra crossing.
Of course I wasn’t too enamored of snakes at the time because it was in that year that Fiona Dewar and I returned to my house after a school day and stepped out onto our verandah only to have a seven-foot spitting cobra shoot under our leading feet. We bolted away as fast as we could leaving the front door wide open to the snake to enter the house should it choose to.
Thankfully it didn’t but it did attract a coterie of knob-Kerrie wielding “garden-boys” from surrounding homes who battled with it for the best part of an hour while it flung itself at them, hissing and spitting and promising instant death to the unwary. When it was finally killed they took it away for burning to make sure that its spirit didn’t return
Rae’s cobra inspired something of a race to bring in any embryo that could be found and we had a shelf in the classroom that was lined with jars of embryos preserved in methylated spirits.
I remember one reading session out on the lawns in front of the classroom where Mrs Eyre was impressing the importance of phonics on us and the need to sound out words. And I just happened to be reading a book about an earthworm that could only hear through the vibrations in the soil.
Except that I was sounding words and pronounced it “Vib Rations”. But there was no derisory snort from Mrs Eyre or quick correction. Rather it was “that’s excellent that you’re sounding out the words Andrew, and you’re actually correct to sound it out that way, but sometimes English breaks the rules and the correct way to say it is “Vy Brations”.
Such was the nature of the woman.
And looking at the work we generated in those days, it was certainly of the highest order. My scrapbook is filled with relatively long tomes on measurements and mothers and fathers. Neat writing, perfect punctuation and the first stirrings of expressive writing.
Excellence didn’t stop at English however. There was one girl in the class (whose name now escapes me) that was a budding artist and produced works that were a cut above the rest of us. My impression was of the fringes she gave her portraits - a zig zag effect that we were all trying to emulate by the end of the year.
I’m certainly no artist but two paintings I generated that year, of a ship and an airplane, hung on my walls for years afterwards as the best works I’d ever produced.
I recall that one of our class (who shall remain nameless) swallowed her mother’s wedding ring and for the best part of a week had to be escorted to the toilets by Mrs Eyre who would then have to sift through the “droppings” until the ring was found.
And I used to despise line-ups at the front of the classroom because Michael Collins would maneuver himself to stand behind me and pull my ears - that was until Mr Phillips came out of his office and caught him in the act. I’m pretty sure we heard a bit of thwack thwack through the office door shortly afterwards.
The year flicked past and our time in the “top block” of the school was nearly over. Most mornings a crowd of students from the older classes seemed to flood our classroom to “visit” Mrs Eyre. They seemed to come from another world, the realms of the big school and the “Standard” classes.
I determined that I too would be one of those visitors to Mrs Eyre in future years. She’d left her mark.
1 comment:
This was a beautiful read. i too am from Zimbabwe, attended Henry Low and this brought me so many memories.
Thanks.
Noma
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