Rambles on the Edge. Wendy Maitland

during the uncertainties that accompanied our nomadic life. When we all spilled out at Taunton it was a further relief to find the aunts waiting on the platform, ready to fold their arms around us and make us feel safe again.

      It was a brief visit followed by sad farewells when we had to leave all too soon, the aunts coming to help us onto the train as they brought along assorted carrier bags full of presents for Adam and his parents, that had not been wrapped. These objects kept falling out of the bags as I tried to keep all my pieces of luggage together. The presents included a pair of stirrups with leathers (bound to come in useful, the aunts said), knitted socks, pots of Marmite and Gentleman’s Relish, garlic grown in the garden, long rubber waders that had belonged to their father Percy, and homemade marmalade. All of these had to be jammed into suitcases a few days later when we left to go home, facing another tortuous journey.

      This time I was changing planes with six pieces of luggage and three small people whose heads I had to keep counting to make sure none had gone missing. When we reached Cairo airport it was a vast milling multitude of people camping out like refugees; whole families with bedding spread out and barely an inch of space between them. I needed to find lavatories and a nappy-changing space for Peter, hoping there would at least be running water for a wash. When I located the reeking conveniences and put Peter down on the filthy floor to change him, it felt like being in a war zone and I was thankful beyond measure that our next stop would be Johannesburg.

      The previous day, leaving this time from Heathrow instead of Gatwick, David in a final gesture of kindness had booked rooms at a hotel near the airport for us, and had come to help with all the details of departure and make sure we got off in good order. That evening, putting the children to bed, they asked, ‘Are we leaving David behind again?’ As ever, children’s remarks can be keenly perceptive, and our departure the next morning was no less emotional than a year before at Nairobi when we left for Rhodesia with every one of us in tears, including David. He was left behind again, to return to his regiment and single life in England, his own children still far away, while my future had to be in Rhodesia, making things work for us.

      CHAPTER 2

      Adam had driven down to Johannesburg to meet us and was standing at the arrival gate with a nervous smile and big bouquet of red roses.

      That was a tender moment as the children ran to him and we all stood clutching each other in a huddle among our motley assortment of bags and baggage. We had a long drive ahead, but Adam had booked comfortable places to stay along the several hundred mile route, going north through the Transvaal to the Limpopo border and home.

      None of the Transvaal shopkeepers or hotel people we met on the way seemed able or willing to speak English on the long dusty trail, until at last we reached a beautifully cool and refreshing mountain retreat called Louis Trichardt, on the South African side of the border. We spent the night there gratefully, looking forward to a hot bath, stiff drink and good dinner, after putting the children to bed. Locating the hotel bar I went in with Adam for that urgent gin and tonic, to be told that ladies were not allowed to drink with men and there was a cocktail bar where I could have a drink with other ‘ladies’. This was a surprising restriction: like an apartheid against women, in an otherwise friendly hotel. In the cocktail bar I took the opportunity to introduce myself to those women who had no objection to speaking English, and find out what they thought about the rule. ‘It’s lekker (great) getting away from the men,’ they laughed. ‘We don’t want them with their guns and rugby bullshit. Keep them out!’ Apartheid was on the other foot here it seemed.

      Gwelo was another three hundred miles north from the border driving via Bulawayo where we spent the next night and then, when we were nearly home, Adam delivered a piece of news that was deeply unsettling. ‘I didn’t want to tell you while we were enjoying ourselves, and I didn’t want to depress you when you had only just arrived,’ he began in the same ominous tone that Fa used when about to deliver a torpedo into the conversation. If any kind of disaster was about to be announced I wanted to hear it fast and straight. ‘Yes?’

      ‘The Macleans suddenly decided they want their son to take over the dairy, so I haven’t got a job any more, which means we’re on the move again. It’s a bit of bind, but luckily they have fixed me up with a friend of theirs who is a director of the Dairy Board and has a big herd at Hartley. I’ve been waiting for you to get back so we can pack up and do the move.’ He was trying to sound matter of fact and break it gently, but it was bad news coming so unexpectedly and so soon after arriving back. I took a deep breath and steadied myself, trying to see this as a new opportunity instead of a setback.

      ‘It’s a step up for you, darling, working for a big dairy chief, and the Macleans must have recommended you highly to have got you the job.’ I wanted to sound up-beat, and it worked as Adam replied enthusiastically, ‘Yes, sweetheart, you’re right, it’s a leg-up in the dairy world, and comes with more pay as well.’

      Repacking tea boxes with all the possessions we had brought from Kenya hardly more than a year before, I thought of Muz repeatedly doing the same. Perpetually moving, taking down and folding curtains to put into boxes along with her Singer as I was now doing with my own sewing machine. I didn’t want it to become a symbol of curtain-making for an everlasting series of different-sized windows, and remembered promising myself during the early days at Glanjoro that my own family would never be subjected to the same upheavals. Now, here we were on the road again, with another change of school for Louise. But Hartley, a small farming town further north on the road to Salisbury, was more our sort of place I consoled myself, more like Nakuru, and we would make a proper home there.

      ‘Remember to pack the dogs’ beds, and their bowls when we go,’ Louise reminded me. ‘If they’ve got their own things with their own smell on them, they won’t mind being in a new place. And when we get there, remember you promised we can have cats, one for each of us. I’m already thinking of names. And you said we can have chickens too, for laying eggs. Mum – are you listening?’

      The district of Hartley with its rich agricultural land lay almost in the dead centre of the country where the main arterial road from the capital, Salisbury, ran south to the border, bisecting the town. For shopkeepers and cafés the passing trade was a bonus. The town itself was very much smaller than Gwelo, having just one main street of shops serving a farming community that radiated from this rural hub into pastoral countryside, where the climate was considerably less harsh than further south. This is where we arrived with our boxes and dogs and furniture at the start of 1971. I had not seen either the farm or the house where we would live before moving and it had been a scramble to relocate ourselves, since Adam had been given only a month’s notice and this was almost at an end by the time I got back from England. He had been to see the new farm, Rogate, and the manager’s house which he described as hardly luxurious but adequate. What he failed to mention was that the house wasn’t really a house at all but a converted grain shed, standing all by itself in the middle of a bean field. It was a large field, which I noted was just as well since on one side traffic thundered past on the main Salisbury road after leaving the town speed limits. We were five miles from the town, so that shops and school were conveniently close – similar to the situation we had left behind in Nakuru – a positive feature that could be used to make us feel more at home I decided.

      Any other plus factors to be found in this latest move were hard to identify. The house itself was so dismal in every possible way that it surpassed even Fa’s worst excesses during the periods of his crazed purchases and building schemes. I consoled myself in thinking about the laughs I could have when describing it to Ros, and how outraged she would be that I was reliving the travesties of our childhood. Adam tried to be encouraging about the house. ‘At least it has three bedrooms so Louise can have her own instead of sharing with the boys, and there are neighbours quite close on the next-door farm with a daughter the same age as Louise, so they will be going to Hartley School together and you can share school runs.’

      I contemplated these assets while introducing Louise to her own private bedroom, and when she pointed out that the window had no glass, only chicken wire stretched across the open space, I reminded her that Grandpa and Grandma’s dining room window at Glanjoro was the same and she hadn’t complained about that.