Rambles on the Edge. Wendy Maitland

among the guests, we emerged from the palms with a piece of exotic folly that drew such gratifying applause, we found ourselves being congratulated instead of shunned as freaks.

      To compensate the children missing out on parties when they either slept in the car or stayed at home with a babysitter, we took them to the drive-in cinema: a treat for all of us. It was an ideal family outing as we slumped in our seats with paper boxes of chicken and chips served from a café on site. The mess of greasy fingers and crumbs spilt everywhere was ignored as part of the evening’s release from daytime cares, and if anyone fell asleep that was normal too. Our car had a bench seat in front so all of us could squash together, and in the interval the children ran around meeting friends from school. ‘It’s lekker having a drive-in,’ they would say breathlessly, running back before the film started again. ‘Not even England has one. I’m glad we’re here.’

      ‘They can’t have them in England because of the rain,’ Louise pointed out.

      ‘Can I have a Lucky Packet?’ Peter asked. His speech had improved noticeably since starting at Treetops where I could drop him off on my way to work each morning. Lucky Packets were another Rhodesian speciality much cherished by children. For fifty cents a small sealed packet could be bought and when opened there was a surprise object inside. This might be a miniature plastic animal or other cheap toy, or just a sweet, but it was the surprise element that appealed. As well as Lucky Packets there were Monster Packets of the same size and just as popular. Inside would be a small plastic monster of hideous deformity, thrilling the recipient, and many children had collections of these. Most shops sold the packets but I have never seen them anywhere else except in Rhodesia.

      Adam’s elevation to city slicker status (as he saw it) with a job in finance had not in reality enhanced our financial situation very much at all. We had a subsidised house and my own wage from the surgery, but we still struggled and there was nothing left for holidays or luxuries. Medical insurance was a big cost as there was no free health service, but it had been the same in Kenya. We had never needed any expensive treatment or thought about serious health problems until Louise unexpectedly became ill. For more than a year she’d had recurrent abdominal pain, but on numerous visits to our GP he said he could find nothing wrong and it was probably just a grumbling appendix.

      As time went on, with more visits to the GP, I asked for a referral to the paediatric practice where I worked. I had already spoken to Dr Zilberg about Louise’s problem and asked him, or one of the others, to see her, but these doctors had a strict ethic and would not see any child without a referral. In desperation, on a day when Louise was ill again, I took her to the surgery with me, and Dr Zilberg relented. After examining her, he admitted her to hospital straight from the surgery, and when tests were done these showed a serious kidney condition (hydronephrosis with bilateral reflux). Dr Zilberg explained this was due to congenital abnormalities which needed complex surgery. He recommended taking her to London for this to be done by an eminent surgeon, Sir David Innes Williams. ‘The best in the world for this type of surgery,’ he told us.

      Instead of being alarmed by this news, Louise was excited to be going to England. ‘We can see Gran, can’t we? And go to stay at her new house, and Ros, where she lives in London. We can go to the fun fair and the zoo. The boys won’t come with us. It will be just me and you, and then I can have the operation and get better.’

      Ros and Gary had bought a flat in a terraced house in Battersea where houses still had pre-war features such as zinc tubs hanging on the back wall, and outside privies. By the time Louise and I arrived to stay, they had installed an indoor bathroom and modern kitchen/living room combined with two comfortable bedrooms; all very bijou and arty as would be expected. During this time traditional Battersea life continued as before with the rag and bone man calling ‘Rag-Bones’ as he drove his horse and cart along the street, to collect broken furniture, pots and scraps of anything that could be sold on. The paraffin man was another regular, filling cans from a tank on wheels to supply all household heating as well as some cooking stoves and even the occasional lamp. The fumes given off by burning paraffin permeated the interiors of these houses with an oily smell, always there, as familiar to household aromas as tobacco smoke.

      One morning I noticed that all the windows in the street had their curtains drawn and Ros said there must have been a death, as, when this happened, curtains would stay closed all day as a mark of respect. We were still in the seventies and many of the old ways carried on, slowly.

      Too slowly it seemed for Muz who, having moved into her dream cottage in Suffolk, found herself exasperated by its many age-related drawbacks after leaving behind the modern comforts of Forest Lodge. The cottage, in a small village, was several hundred years old, thatched and quaint to a degree that looked more suited to occupation by the Seven Dwarfs than real-life people. It had been built by Flemish weavers escaping persecution in their own country, and in honour of this connection Muz named the cottage ‘Flemings’. Ros seized on this and insisted on calling it ‘Phlegms’, which she remarked was appropriate since Andy had become even more of a slob since marrying Muz, no longer needing to keep up appearances now that she was his.

      ‘After they were married,’ Ros reported, ‘Muz discovered he hardly ever changes his underwear. He only has a bath when Muz insists, and due to a phobia about getting his head wet he can’t bear to have his bald head washed, so it pongs.’

      My own observations when Louise and I arrived at the cottage, were more concerned with its impracticalities as it had no modern heating and was very cramped inside. A staircase of steep twisting steps was poked into one corner of the sitting room with a ceiling so low that we were forced to ascend in a crouching position like hunchbacks. ‘How did you ever get any furniture upstairs?’ I asked Muz, and she explained that all the beds and cupboards had to be taken apart to enable this feat. ‘After a great struggle dismantling them and getting them upstairs,’ she said, ‘nothing would stay in its place and kept sliding down the sloping floors. But Andy very cleverly solved this by suggesting bricks could be used as blocks, and it worked perfectly.’

      ‘I bet he didn’t carry the bricks up the stairs himself,’ I ventured.

      ‘Poor Andy. He developed a bad back just as we were due to move, and it’s still troubling him. But he finds a good massage helps, so I do my best as a masseuse and he likes that.’ I didn’t want to think about Muz giving Andy massages, and turned my attention to other irksome features such as the damp chill which seeped through each room of the cottage, adding to its discomforts. ‘I admit there are some problems,’ Muz conceded after noticing how unimpressed I was. ‘But we have got used to them, and Andy feels at home now he has his armchair and books to hand. We do a trip to the library in Sudbury once a week for him to change his books, while I do the shopping.’

      ‘Does he help with the shopping?’ I enquired, knowing what the answer would be. ‘He seems to do nothing all day except read,’ I pressed on, now we had got onto the subject of Andy’s indolence.

      ‘Yes, of course he’s a great reader, very well informed on any topic. He was never one for taking exercise. He does rather take his ease and expect to be waited on, but I don’t mind that because I like to be busy.’

      Just as his sister Mary predicted, I thought, Muz has become his housekeeper and is blind to any deficiencies in him or the cottage. Except that she did allow herself a complaint when it related to her precious piano. She had to leave her beautiful Bechstein grand piano behind when they moved, but managed to fit an upright Bechstein into one end of the sitting room. Practising and playing the pieces that flowed from her fingers so readily was a joy but also an important therapy for her. Throughout the turbulent years of moving from country to country and place to place, wherever we went, a piano always came with us. After she and Fa were married and went to China as missionaries, all their wedding presents and other possessions followed, including her piano. When subsequently all was lost in a Japanese bombing raid and we later found refuge in India, Muz located another piano and this was carried by porters up the steep Himalayan mountainside to our house perched on a ledge, where earthquakes regularly rattled the ivory keys.

      The piano installed at Flemings was, in this way, one in a long line, but no less treasured than all the others. Each day of her life Muz looked forward