Rambles on the Edge. Wendy Maitland

city, Salisbury, to the Limpopo river marking the border with South Africa. It was a big step up for us from Nakuru’s one street of hugger-mugger shops with very little choice or variety. Gwelo had department stores and restaurants along pavements lined with flowering trees that spread their bright petals like confetti underfoot. I could even buy a newspaper, a rare treat, at one of the stationery shops selling Christmas cards. Some of the cards showed the usual nativity scenes and among them were others that stood out with bold lettering. ‘Those are the most popular ones,’ the shop assistant said when she saw me looking at them. Printed across a snow scene there was a caption in large letters: ‘KEEP CHRISTMAS WHITE.’ I stared at the words, dismayed. That kind of message would not be tolerated by anyone in Kenya and I had not been expecting anything like that here.

      The Christmas cards symbolised an attitude that we became increasingly aware of, particularly on outings with the children and our new nanny, Alice, when we stopped at roadside cafés as we used to in Kenya, all sitting at a table together having something to eat and drink on a hot day. The first time we did this in Rhodesia we were told: ‘Blacks are allowed in here, but they are not allowed to sit at the same table with whites.’ This made me feel very uncomfortable and out of place after the more congenial manners of Kenya.

      Despite the Maclean’s kindness and the many advantages of the farm, I was terribly homesick for Kenya and a way of life that I fitted into, while in Gwelo I felt displaced. I missed Fa, and Muz too, disappointed that neither of them seemed inclined to visit. There was nothing connecting us to the rest of the family and all my friends, except letters.

      A surprise visitor did come during those early months, introducing himself as Sidney Franklin from East Grinstead in Sussex, explaining that he was a friend of Fay Craddock (Muz) and wanted to meet us. She had not mentioned anything about this friend and we were intrigued. He was our first visitor and was a charming cultured man, a widower, who it turned out had known Muz for some time so her silence was puzzling, especially as it became clear during his stay that his feelings for her were more than casual. We sensed that he was looking for approval and that this had been the purpose of his visit. It was an approach that seemed very sensible, but how could he not know about the lurking presence of hopeful Andy, standing first in line of prospective suitors?

      ‘I’ll have to go and check on Muz,’ I told Adam, ‘and see what’s going on with Andy, and why she hasn’t told us about Sidney who is precisely the kind of man she should go for – genuinely caring, with his feet on the ground; also very well off so he could give her security.’

      ‘Ros says your mother is still stuck in a bog of depression, taking all sorts of pills to help her sleep and stay sane. She might not be in a frame of mind to be receiving suitors, whoever they are.’

      ‘All the more reason for me to go and see what’s going on. But I’ll have to get a job to pay for fares, I know that. Anyway I need a job; I need to use my nursing, and keep my brain in gear.’

      Getting registered with the Rhodesian Nursing Council was straightforward and in less than a month I was working as nurse/receptionist for a surgeon, Mr Comline, at his consulting rooms in the town. This fitted in with school runs for Louise, and the boys were safe on the farm with Alice and Adam.

      Mr Comline was very exact in the way he worked, slightly austere but devoted to his patients and highly regarded. As well as all routine clinical nurse procedures, I did his book-keeping, sent out bills, typed his letters and enjoyed every day at the surgery. The work was satisfying as I understood how Mr Comline liked things to be done after years observing Fa who was similarly meticulous. Mr Comline appreciated what I did for him so it was a mutually agreeable situation, besides which my wages were mounting up week by week.

      There was a small hotel in the same street where I went for lunch each day and the same table was always reserved for me, with two places. A demure woman called Marguerite occupied the second place since the head waiter had put her there on my first day, which I thought was a friendly gesture and that Marguerite was an unusually friendly girl. All through lunch, every day, men would stop at our table to chat and make dates with her. She noted down days and times in a diary that she kept beside her on the table, making me curious.

      ‘You seem to have an awful lot of boyfriends,’ I remarked after a few days.

      ‘They’re not boyfriends, they’re clients,’ she laughed.

      ‘What sort of clients?’

      ‘What do you think?’

      I looked at her, confused by the contrast between her modest appearance and what she was suggesting.

      ‘I would never have guessed.’

      ‘It’s why the waiter put us together, to make things look respectable. You sitting there in your uniform sharing a table with me. You don’t mind, do you?’

      ‘Of course not. I like you. And your clients are always very polite to me.

      ’ ‘You’ve given them ideas. Some of them want me to put on a uniform like yours now, when they come round. But it’s kids’ stuff compared with some of the weird nonsense they ask for.’

      ‘Such as?’

      ‘Not nice. But the worst are the police. They think they’re entitled to freebies. It’s mostly when they’re on night shift, getting bored. They come round any hour when I’ve closed up and gone to sleep, waking me up for what they think is their perks. Then they want to hang around smoking and drinking while I’m trying to get rid of them, telling them I don’t do night work.’

      Gwelo was a surprising place, full of Dutch Reformed Church repression alongside more relaxed elements like Marguerite’s services openly on offer, and others that Adam discovered when he went to have a haircut. Finding what looked like a barber shop with a sign saying ‘Gentlemen’s Hair Parlour,’ he went inside and was directed to a booth in a line of similar booths occupied by men. This looked ordinary enough until he noticed that all the hairdressers were topless girls, wearing nothing but the briefest of mini-skirts.

      ‘I didn’t want to look as if I’d been caught off guard, so I had to pretend this was normal, sitting there with breasts bouncing around my face as scissors were applied to my hair,’ Adam told me when he came home. ‘You know how I detest mammary hyperplasia. It’s bad enough in cows, but in humans, it’s obscene.’

      ‘You seem to have survived the ordeal, and you’ve had some proper styling for a change, instead of army scalping. What did it cost?’

      ‘I can’t even remember how many dollars I shelled out in the end. All I could think of was how to escape before getting suffocated.’

      At weekends our swimming pool was popular with neighbours and friends. We enjoyed having braais (BBQs) and everyone contributed, bringing baskets and boxes of food and beer. The Afrikaner families brought boerewors sausage and enormous steaks as well as, for dessert, a type of doughnut that was a completely new discovery for us in the area of gastronomic thrills. These exquisite pastries were called koeksisters: made in the shape of plaits and deep-fried before being submerged in chilled syrup to come out golden and oozing. I had never encountered these before coming to Rhodesia, and there was another superb national favourite – piri-piri chicken, which appeared on all restaurant menus and was a staple of household menus too. Braais were an art form in Rhodesia and purists dug a pit or trench which was filled with burning logs under a metal grille, where the men of the party gathered with long forks to supervise the sizzling and turning of the meat. We had one of these braai pits in our garden and used it for parties despite my fear that a child might fall onto the burning embers. Our neighbours couldn’t understand such squeamishness and said even the dogs knew better.

      The pool was another wide-open menace, again laughed at by others, most of whom had their own unfenced pools and believed all objects, including children, were equipped with natural buoyancy. At one of our Saturday parties, watching children jump in and out of the pool with a great deal of noise and bobbing about in the water, it looked safe enough from where I was sitting with other mothers, drinking and chatting. Louise ran up at one point saying something that I couldn’t