Eighty Not Out (28 page)

Happily the border crossing passed without incident, and we continued to Narok, passing the Longonot ‘satellite tracking station' – the most surreal thing we had seen: a solitary piece of sparkling Western technology sited on a plain in the middle of Masai land. The road was passable in the dry season, but one of the dustiest we had ever travelled, and very dangerous where the dust lay in deep piles. The track plunged down to a deep gorge, at the bottom of which were a few stepping stones, where the river would be a raging torrent at times, with no possibility of climbing up the other side. It would have been no great feat of engineering to build a simple wood and metal bridge, but clearly there were other priorities – like satellite tracking. We gave a lift to a solitary, odoriferous, old Masai who managed to pack himself and his spear into the car without piercing the roof. Sitting silently in the back beside the children, he fondled a sharp knife, and I was quite relieved when he prodded me to indicate that we had reached his boma, and got out emitting a gracious grunt.

Fergus had meetings at the Ministry of Health in Nairobi, and with Sven, the project statistician, as well as another checkup with his cardiologist, while I took the children for dental checks, and to buy more hideous items of school uniform. The train, one carriage of which was occupied by Kaptagat pupils and several teachers, left Nairobi on Sunday morning, but did not reach the school until nearly midnight. On parting, Katharine was not tearful, which slightly assuaged my feelings of guilt after hearing the views of two Dutch women who exclaimed: ‘We would never
dream
of sending our children away for schooling.'

For the return journey to Mwanza, we took the Nairobi– Nakuru road almost as far as Lake Naivasha, then turned west towards Narok. In the intervening week the piles of choking dust had grown higher, and we came upon a lorry straddling the road upside down with the driver's cabin shattered; miraculously nobody had been killed. We stayed a night at Keekorok: its position not so striking as Lobo just to the south, but the staff were more pleasant and better trained, so we felt we got ‘good value for money', as
Which?
magazine would say. We arrived in time for lunch, then let the children have a swim and watch the antics of the too-tame monkeys, which raided the rooms for anything edible, and a few things that were not: when shooshed away, many did not shift. Several carried tiny babies, all pink and tender; the way the mothers cared for them leaving not a shred of doubt that Darwin got it right.

In the late afternoon we hired a not very expert guide – the good ones having already been booked – who prevented us from getting lost in the maze of tracks. In films located in Africa vehicles charge around seeming to know instinctively where they are, but reality is not like that. Our guide was an amiable Masai from Narok, who seemed to think the Peugeot could crash through young acacia trees as effectively as a Land Rover, so we dampened his enthusiasm and confined ourselves to two-wheel track routes with a high grass ridge in the middle. He led us to a scene of hyaena domesticity, some adults, as is their habit, trailing their genitalia on the ground in a gesture of submission to those higher in the pack. The endearingly fluffy babies were heavily tick infested, with encrustations at the tips of their ears. Only on an underfed bitch with a prolapsed uterus, which sometimes came to lie on our veranda at home, had I seen such masses clumped together, cheek by jowl, so to speak. We should have had her put down, but suspected she belonged to Mzee, the old man who lived at the bottom of our drive, who would have been affronted by such interference. Yet another memory I would gladly expunge, as it is another example of our joint ineffectuality.

Late in the evening large numbers of zebra and waterbuck came onto the floodlit grass area in front of the lodge and spent the night grazing quietly; in the morning an askari went round with a shovel collecting the heaps of dung. The evenings and early mornings were chilly, so throughout the night a crackling fire was kept alive to keep visitors warm, and discourage visits from hyaenas and the big cats.

Not daring to risk finding Ndabaka gate under water again, next day we took the Banagi to Fort Ikoma track, only to hear later that Ndabaka would have been passable. Eighty needless miles were added to the journey. The Fort Ikoma road was a mixture of every conceivable surface; its stretch of black cotton soil was at the start, followed by miles of what looked like flint hand-axes, then fine sand and open river-bed. The old German fort had been turned into a superior hotel, and on the day we called, it was swarming with German tourists and tsetse flies. Despite being within a game-controlled area, the lunch menu was eland steak – elands were relatively rare. We decided not to stay, and ate, with faint misgivings, leftovers from the previous day, hoping the cooler climate would have discouraged proliferation of nasty organisms – we got away with it.

Mary and Michael gave vent only rarely to outbursts of awfulness when their spirits ran too high for such sustained confinement. They were excellent travellers, and their resilience over what was often a seven or eight hour period was laudable: in some respects Katharine had a better deal.

When we got back to Bwiru, we found another dog on our list of dependants. Imaginatively named, Blackie had belonged to a biologist who had returned to her native Kenya. Her bungalow, and her dog, which had been left tied to a tree, were taken over by a young playboy doctor, who had stayed on the compound for only a few months, before quitting for the superior delights of Dar. The unfortunate Blackie had again been abandoned, tied to the same tree. Noggin, our resident dog, doted on by Michael, accepted the new arrival, and Blackie expected no more than some food if anyone bothered to dish it out, and a bowl of water. Ribby, cowering, wormy, and tick-infested, he flinched at any hand extended to pat him, but in our care he turned into a responsive, affectionate animal, though so conditioned he never expected to enter the house. He was a good watchdog, and slept on a mat in a corner of the veranda outside our bedroom.

In the following months air activity escalated and troops were known to be massing on the Ugandan border. President Nyerere was against military action, but some of his henchmen and the
TANU
league were pressing him to invade the neighbouring country and dispatch the ‘traitor Amin', the ‘colonialist puppet'. They estimated the job could be completed in twenty-four hours, but we felt this was optimism of the Francis Kofi sort.

Silence from Ansari's office at headquarters was unbroken, which did not augur well.
WHO
has a Board of Appeal to which staff can bring cases of (a) personal prejudice on the part of a supervisor or other responsible person; (b) incomplete consideration of the facts; (c) failure to observe or apply correctly the provisions of the staff regulations or rules. If Fergus was not appointed to the current post, the organisation would be guilty on all three counts. Our joint nerves were not in a good state.

By mid-November the political situation had further deteriorated, so much so that Fergus wanted to evacuate me, Mary and Michael to Nairobi, for the time being. There had been several border incidents and a specific threat from Amin to bomb – ‘destroy' was the term used – both Bukoba and Mwanza, if the provocative incidents did not cease. My sympathies were to some extent with him. This was the statement of a man who felt insecure both within and outside his own country, who had had, and would continue to have, further provocation. What complicated the matter was the external aid afforded to each side, which risked a major confrontation – a sort of African Vietnam. Our intuition was that there might shortly be an outbreak in which one would not wish one's family involved. We determined not to bring Katharine home for the holidays, and drew up plans to travel to Nairobi with two cars, our own and the project one, loaded with household effects. Fergus had official permission to spend four days in Nairobi for consultations at the Epidemiological Centre, and we booked a family unit at the Fairview hotel for an indefinite period dating from Katharine's end of term. I wrote to the headmaster, asking if he could transfer her to the sister school at Banda, also in Kenya, and if he could admit Mary as well. I would try to get a part-time job and a flat or small house on a short-term lease in the Nairobi suburb of Karen – named after the Danish writer Karen Blixen.

The most worrying aspect of all these plans was that Fergus had to remain at post until any hostilities actually did break out, otherwise he could be accused of ‘desertion of post'. We still had heard nothing concrete about our transfer, except a wire from Brazzaville saying they supported his candidature, and another from the chief medical officer saying the same thing. Our apprehensions fluctuated from day to day, and although we thought that the situation might ultimately defuse, we did not feel justified in taking any risks with the children. Others, not so well off financially, would have no choice but to stick it out, and hope their High Commissions could be relied upon to do the necessary.

Within two weeks there was a sea-change, and things became a bit more settled – for the time being at any rate – and reconciliation was in the air, so we returned with Katharine after a week in Nairobi. We would not be convinced of any lasting reconciliation, however, until there was visible evidence of withdrawal, or at least a drastic thinning of the build-up of forces on our side of the border. In Mwanza we could count the number of military vehicles heading in the direction of Bukoba and the frontier. Then at the beginning of December, Amin accused Tanzanian troops of firing across the border and threatened to bomb two Tanzanian towns on Lake Victoria if the troops resumed hostilities. Dar es Salaam did not issue a response to this and Tanzania also officially ignored claims of terrorism, looting and shelling by its border troops.

The anxiety over Fergus's heart attack and recovery, combined with the uncertainty of his future in
WHO
, against the backdrop of escalating military conflict, naturally took its toll, and my dependence on alcohol deepened as a result. A bottle of Scotch, the taste of which I disliked, was by this time the first item to go into my overnight bag, and I recall once shopping for staple supplies at Mwadui and adding a ‘Special Offer' case of Southern Comfort. I also remember being driven by Pa Jenset from Kisumu to Kaptagat with a carload of children returning after a half-term break; he had a flask of brandy, from which, after first offering it to me, he took periodic swigs. I declined, thinking the gesture bizarre. Such was my innocence, or ignorance, if you prefer, it did not cross my mind that both our families were being driven by a man, over the limit, on a notoriously dangerous road. Nor did I relate his behaviour to my own, although the first thing I would do on arrival would be to pour myself a generous drink.

Drink-driving was not a criminal offence at that time, and the perils of dependence had yet to become a routine subject for press and media coverage. I look back in horror at the mileage I covered first in Africa, later in France, Switzerland, and the
UK
, with a high level of alcohol in my system: often the car contained not only our children, but some of their friends. Like most alcoholics, I thought my reactions were, if anything, sharpened. The cunning element in addiction is that the first fix delivers a kick-start to the nervous system – ideas for poems, short stories, or the skeletal plot for novel of the year must be jotted down without delay lest they be lost; paint is applied with frenetic energy; relationships feel more profound; inhibitions lessen. The great literary and artistic surge throughout Europe in the nineteenth century owed a debt to individuals steeped in opium, absinthe and a multitude of other mind-altering drugs. Thankfully, because of my asthma, I could not smoke, though I did give it a try. Cannabis was first offered to me in Tanzania by a Danish woman; it was the threat of choking, more than common sense, that led me to refuse, but intuitively I knew it might lead to hard drugs, although a decade was to pass before I saw, at close quarters, the ravages of terminal stage addiction in a rehabilitation clinic where I was the only ‘pure' alcoholic. The Danish woman sank into alcoholic depression, and died prematurely from liver failure, leaving a widower and two adolescent children.

As the year drew to a close, among the festive greetings we received was an ostentatious Christmas card from the Gnome, our secret nickname for Ansari, which we felt like returning with a note saying: ‘You forgot to tell your secretary to remove us from your list.' Fergus, infuriated by a request to provide an account of the project ‘outstanding in Africa' for presentation in New Orleans by a biologist from the Communicable Diseases Center, employed delaying tactics and shelved the request indefinitely. Plagiarism was rife in the field of biological research.

16

On the Run from Amin – Goodbye to East Africa

F
ergus was in Dar for the annual conference of the East African Medical Association in January 1972. By then he had been invited to go to New Orleans, but the Brazzaville office had not given authorisation, so we assumed it would be refused. He had left me with a mountain of project-related work to prepare for his return. The children had begun to press us about their next visit to Ireland, and it was impossible to explain why the country was no longer the happy place of their memories. Fergus would not qualify for home leave before July, but I could go earlier if I could get Michael and Mary into the local primary school, within walking distance of our house at Craigavad, during May and June. Again everything hung on our next posting. Geneva was still hanging fire, but it was clearer than ever that Dr Ansari was dissembling; one of his peccadilloes was to sound out several people for the same job. So the level of tension continued. I was angry and resentful, and in perpetual dread of a recurrence of last year's episode with Fergus's health. Another worry was Stephano's wish to return to his native coastal town of Tanga. He was not unhappy with his work, but restless because his wife refused to join him for more than short periods. He had been at Mwanza far too long – eight years with Webbo and now almost five with us.

In March Fergus went by road to visit Shirati Mission Hospital, which he used as a base for snail surveys, and to assess the level of lake pollution. In Mwanza, even since 1967, the level of pollution had escalated, with high quantities of oil, raw sewage, chemical waste, and fertilisers – then subject to no control – finding their way through a multitude of streams and drains to the lake. Later in the month he collected Katharine, and found her healthy, tanned, and elated to have come third in class.

We went to Mwadui for Easter: the children spent most of their time in or around the pristine pool; Fergus was invited for a round of golf and we both played some tennis. Back at Bwiru, Katharine forced the issue of ear-piercing, Mary being one up on that count, so I took her to the Asian practitioner who was known to be on the point of leaving. (I insisted on it being done properly, rather than the method favoured by Stephano's brood who, after piercing with a red-hot needle, inserted a length of thread with knots, one of which was pulled through on alternate days. It got grimy, but nobody ever got an infected ear.) I was regarded askance by other parents for giving in to such ‘vulgarity' – particularly when we returned to the
UK
.

Michael lost, in quick succession, five of his special friends, four for ever, and one for three months on home leave. That left only two boys whose missionary parents belonged to a weird sect of The-Lord-Will-Provide sort. Having had more than my fill in Ghana of weedy brats coming to play, with me always ending up playing the role of the Lord, I dreaded the next few weeks.

The good news was that the meat trade was to be handed back to the Somalis, and the same month we had a public holiday to mark the demise of Sheikh Karume, vice-president of Tanzania and president of Zanzibar. More errant dogs than usual hung around in the vicinity of our house, and Noggin lost his innocence. He did not enter the first-round contest, being a bit slow in the uptake, but poor Blackie, low in the peck order, did, returning badly mauled, with a number of festering wounds and a bad limp. Noggin took off the next day, returning with an air of contentment before going to sleep for the best part of twenty-four hours. Both dogs were infested with fleas and ticks, despite wearing Vapona collars: the desirable damsel came from a lower socio-economic group, and lived at a mud hut complex near the shore.

I often wrote to my mother with news about our day-to-day lives, but also with growing concern about the ever-increasing violence in the North: the Abercorn bar bomb, for example, was a particularly heinous attack, killing two and injuring over a hundred; the first attack on the Europa hotel, for which the
IRA
claimed responsibility; and my astonishment that none of the parties seemed to take into account Communist infiltration. One Dublin journalist had written of aspirations towards a ‘People's United Republic of Ireland'. We had joined the Alliance Party shortly after it was formed under Oliver Napier in 1970, and deplored the Ulster Unionist Party, which did not help in any way to lessen the tensions, seeming on the whole to be an unproductive bunch, apart from such progressives as Terence O'Neill and Brian Faulkner. It was not until I heard David Trimble for the first time that I thought: here at last is a Unionist politician worth listening to.

Late April saw the arrival of an Irish
WHO
consultant, whom Fergus had been asked to assist on his trip from Dar to Bukoba, where he was to join an ‘expert' meeting on the Kagera River irrigation scheme. The assistance covered facilitating him on to a small plane, feeding him, showing him the delights of Mwanza, visiting the project at Misungwi and, not least, asking one of the ship's officers to reserve a berth for the return journey. Hot and clammy again, after months of relatively pleasant weather, trips to the town had become more exhausting because an increase in petty theft meant car windows had to be wound up, and doors locked on even the shortest errand.

During the Easter holidays, we had taken the children to the Tivoli cinema in Mwanza. Unusually there was in excess of eight hundred
EA
shillings in my zebra skin wallet to pay the Isamilo Primary School fees. A large holdall was on the floor at my feet, but, when Katharine wanted something out of it, I had a moment of panic when I reached down and could not feel the bag, which was found to have ‘slipped' down the slope towards the seats in front. I thought Michael must have accidentally kicked it. The bag had been stuffed with sunglasses, mosquito repellent and, most precious of all, an envelope of black and white negatives, but not until the following morning, when I was on the point of putting the fees in an envelope for Fergus to deliver at the school, did I realise that the wallet and negatives were missing. By late afternoon the police had three small boys in custody, and returned the negatives, which had been thrown on the ground just outside the cinema. The main perpetrator appeared to be deaf, speaking poorly or through interpreters; none looked more than eleven or twelve years old, and all were poorly dressed. He admitted taking the money and claimed to have taken it to his village. Neither we nor the police believed this, as there would not have been enough time for him to get back to Mwanza, where they had been apprehended. We thought he was probably under threat by someone older, possibly even an employee of the cinema, and was afraid to split.

After their initial display of efficiency, the police were slow to do anything more. I was summoned to attend court at eight thirty in the morning, but not until two hours had passed was I asked to confirm that I was Mrs McCullough. On hearing that this was so, the leisurely fellow indicated the dirty cement step on which I had been sitting, saying brightly: ‘You will sit there.' The ironic tone of my reply that I had been doing so for two hours was greeted impassively, and no seat was offered. The ‘prisoners' were present among many others, and I was interested to see the most innocent and appealing of them sporting a natty pair of bell bottoms and new suede safari boots. I had advised the police to warn both shoe shops to look out for small boys brandishing 100 shilling notes, but clearly not soon enough. At the end of the morning I was informed the prosecution case was not prepared, nor was any police representative present. We never expected to recover the money, and I bear the urchins no malice; they probably got off with a warning, and will have operated more cautiously thereafter.

In May we were already making plans for the long school holidays, which for Katharine ran from mid-July to mid-September. Our friends John and Rosemary, after a punitive two years in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, were now based at Tanga on the coast, opposite Pembe Island, north of Zanzibar, so we planned another safari to visit them, going by Nairobi to Mombasa and Tanga, and returning via Arusha and the Serengeti. Fergus had legitimate reasons to visit Nairobi, Arusha and now Tanga, where the
WHO
/Medical Research Council Bilharziasis Chemotherapy Centre was based, so would again be able to combine duty travel, for which he received a per diem allowance, with days off, which would be counted as local leave.

The Ruanda-Burundi affair rumbled on, with an estimated ten thousand refugees fleeing across the border to the Kigoma region. We still had hopes that Fergus's next visit to Geneva would clarify the future, despite the fact that our suspicions had been confirmed that Dr Ansari had indeed appointed an American in the post, despite the fact that he was currently doing another job – a conveniently confused situation. He may well have had all this fixed when he was last in Mwanza partaking of our lavish hospitality, talking sentimentally about his new marriage, and weeping over the plight of the poor lepers in the town, while knocking back a third green chartreuse.

While Fergus was in Geneva, I flew from Mwanza with the two younger children to spend Katharine's half-term holiday in Nairobi. We stayed at the Fairview and had the use of a car belonging to friends who were going on leave. It was a Renault 4L model with a uniquely horrible gear-change which stuck out of the steering column: I got used to it, but always feared accidentally getting into reverse. After half a day Mary and Michael started to cheer me on from the back seat: ‘You're getting a lot better, now go faster' – unwise in Nairobi traffic. We did the usual dreary things, like dental checks and buying new sandals for all three, but also visited the Snake Park and the now famous Animal Orphanage.

At the end of June Fergus had an almost cordial letter from Dr Ansari, acknowledging receipt of sundry working documents and reports. The change in tone was marked, and may well have been the result of his activities having come to the notice of both the head of Communicable Diseases, and one of the assistant directors general: time alone would tell. We did consider taking the case to an ombudsman or the International Labour Organization, but that would have been drastic while some men of principle still walked the corridors of power at headquarters. We felt that Dr Ansari underestimated our joint ability to fight if sufficiently provoked.

In July a man was murdered more or less at the bottom of our garden: cut to pieces with pangas by three assailants in the middle of the night, and we did not hear a sound. Other nights were loud with the noise of drunken scuffles, and dogs giving tongue at the constantly howling hyaenas; but the night of the crime was remarkable for its silence. Compared with what was going on in Ruanda, it was a trivial incident. One European had perished in the massacres and further outbreaks were anticipated. Never known for my political correctness, I said it was one method of population control in that small, very backward country. As I write today the population has burgeoned, the demographics have changed because the
AIDS
virus has destroyed much that was good in tribal systems, and the mindless slaughter continues unabated in that region, not only of humanoids, but of the great apes and most other living things.

Around this time I began making enquiries about property in Scotland, where the Church was selling off old manses on the grounds that they were outdated and the upkeep too costly; new bungalows were thought more appropriate for contemporary clerical families. We were thinking eight years ahead to the time when Fergus could take early retirement at fifty-five, and had decided that Scotland, rather than Northern Ireland, would be a good choice. We did not want to commit the children to a future in a society constrained by underlying hatred and narrow prejudice. We had shortlisted the Borders, or the area around Kirkcudbright and Wigtown, but one house at Carsphairn in the Rhinns of Kells, near Castle Douglas, sounded so beautiful I was sorely tempted to take a trip to investigate further. To settle in Scotland would merely reverse the journey made in the mideighteenth century by my paternal great-great-great-grandfather Stevenson, who, with many other Scots, left Ayrshire in search of a better life at Ramelton in County Donegal.

Late in July we collected Katharine from school on a morning when blue-black rain clouds were massing in every direction and even a short shower would have reduced the fifteen-mile track from the school to the main road to a morass. The nightmare, however, was reserved for the ‘short cut' we took down to Sondu on the Kisii–Kisumu road – the main Kericho–Sotik–Kisii road being murderous and subject to numerous diversions. It began all right, but when we went down a very steep gradient and found a mud-slide at the bottom, we knew there must have been a downpour the night before. Turning back impossible, there was no option but to bore on like the worst scenes in the East African Safari rally. Sliding and jolting, a deep narrow ditch on either side, Fergus drove out of skid after skid, keeping the engine revving because to stop or brake would be fatal. I could not have driven under such circumstances because it demanded a mixture of physical strength, experience, determination and courage. Despite all we had endured in Ghana, nothing had been so terrifying as this, and I had not realised he could drive so well; later he admitted that neither had he. In all, it probably took no more than forty-five minutes, but near the end we narrowly missed a tractor, before rounding a hairpin bend where women were washing clothes in a roadside pond – I remember a fleeting vision of our vehicle in the water, but it didn't happen. Thereafter, all went smoothly, apart from a bit of unpleasantness at the border post, where two officious policemen were unaware of the diplomatic privileges usually accorded to
UN
personnel. Fergus found a letter from the regional commissioner in Mwanza, which did the trick in the end, or maybe it was his threat to take their names and numbers for reporting to a superior officer that did it. We reached Bwiru just before darkness fell.