5. Africa

Twelve days after leaving Southampton we disembarked in Cape Town. We took a taxi to the railway station only to discover all our luggage had been left on the quayside. After a frantic drive back to the docks, to everyone's relief the cases were still there, where we had left them...dock workers must have been a pretty honest in those days. 

We arrived back at the station with only minutes to spare. No sooner had we clambered aboard the train than the whistle sounded and the slow journey north to Salisbury began.

Three days and fourteen hundred miles later the train made an unscheduled stop at a small town called Norton which was about forty miles from Salisbury. Desperate to see us, Dad had borrowed a car, drove out to Norton and flagged the train down. After much hugging and kissing...and barking - our dog Tina was with us - we all squeezed into the car and set off back along the ‘strip’ road to Salisbury. 

                                                     The dreaded strips

Prior to the Second World War the government of the day, in an effort to open up the country and to save on the cost of construction, had come up with a cunning plan. Instead of tarmacking the entire surface of a road they laid two long parallel strips. Which meant that when two a car approached each other both vehicles would pull over so the wheels on the driver’s side were on the left strip leaving the passenger’s wheels on the dirt. Rhodesia's heavy 'rainy season' eroded the earth either side of the tarmac strips leaving a dropped of anything up to a foot, so the 'passing' manoeuvre played carnage with the tyres and sumps.

My first impression of Rhodesia was one of acute disappointment. My expectations had been raised unrealistically by the film “Tarzan of the Apes” which we had seen shortly before setting sail for the Dark Continent. Measured against the Africa of “Tarzan of the Apes” Rhodesia fell well short…there was no vines and creepers on which I had imagined my brothers and I, dressed in fur loin cloths and accompanied by a friendly chimpanzee, would swing our way round the jungle. In fact there was no jungle at all, just a never ending expanse of ‘elephant grass’ broken by the odd flat topped tree and small kopjes (hills). There was one consolation on our arrival in Rhodesia which made up for it, well two actually. Before squeezing into the Ford Prefect Dad presented each of us with a trilby hat and a pop-gun designed like the Winchester Rifle.

                      Wearing brand new trilby hats - minus the pop-guns

For the first year or so we lived at Crambourne Hostel, a refurbished W.W.2 RAF barracks where most new immigrant families ended up. 

From there we moved across town to a sprawling pioneer bungalow in Mount Pleasant, where brother Charlie was born.  After Mount Pleasant we moved to 146 Victory Avenue, Greendale - which brings us neatly back to Christmas morning 1959.