House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe. Christina Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ holding the lighter flame to the pennies until they were burning hot, then placed them ready on the window ledge.

      Outside the window the countryside from Umtali to Salisbury flashed by, hills and valleys, grass and streams, and strange balancing rocks that defied all notion of gravity. Unique to that part of southern Africa, the granite boulders strewn about the landscape looked like Easter Island figures tumbled on their heads by a mischievous giant. White Rhodesians often referred to their homeland as God's Own Country, and this part was the most beautiful of all.

      On the racks above the seats were stacked the boys' straw boaters and black tin trunks with their surnames stencilled in white above the words ‘Prince Edward School, Salisbury’.

      There was a shrieking whistle and the train shuddered to a halt at Marandellas station. As usual the platform was packed with natives hoping to sell sodas and biscuits. To Nigel, the crowd of women in colourful prints resembled a cloud of butterflies that parted as the train approached. Most rushed to the whites-only carriages in the front, urgently pressing their wares and black faces against glass panes etched with the words Rhodesian Railways. The schoolboys, smart in their maroon blazers, white shirts and maroon ties, hair cut into fresh pudding bowls by heartless mothers, stared out at the dusty children and strangely humped women with babies strapped to their backs. Then one of them wound down the windows a little to toss out the scalding pennies. They laughed uproariously as the black children jostled each other, hands outstretched, only to drop the coins in wide-eyed agony.

      ‘Works every time!’ shouted Nigel. ‘The piccanins are so stupid.’

      ‘Have you heard?’ asked Charlie Tibbets. ‘They are talking about having munts at our school.’

      ‘No!’

      ‘Ja, Freddie Wilderkamp's dad is a governor and he told me.’

      ‘Ach, those munts have a hang of a smell. They don't wash, man. Imagine having them in the same dormitory.’

      ‘They don't even know how to use a bog. I heard the ones at St Georges stand on the seats!’

      ‘Imagine getting one of them as your fag!’

      They all fell silent contemplating this prospect as the train chugged on its way. Occasionally it stopped at farms to leave mail or collect churns of milk and boys in similar school blazers who would clamber aboard with a cheery ‘Howzit?’

      Nigel watched as a small black boy in torn red shorts held up with a pin jumped on clutching a plastic container to fill with water from one of the train's taps, then scampered off with a delighted smile. Outside a handful of dove-white clouds chased each other across the wide blue sky and one of his friends mimicked taking aim and pulling a trigger with his fingers.

      I guess we were thinking about the munts we had on our farms, recalled Nigel, how they smelled and stole things and how our parents always said the black man couldn't be trusted. We knew that blacks were way behind in civilization.

      Just before the previous election in 1970 in which the Rhodesian Front had won every single seat for the second time since declaring UDI, Smith told a rally: ‘Sixty years ago Africans here were uncivilized savages, walking around in skins. They have made tremendous progress but they have an awful long way to go.’

      White boys like Nigel talked of the black population as ‘they’ and thought it not at all unreasonable that they should be barred from white hospitals, schools, bars, swimming pools, restaurants and shops or from voting.* After all, Smith described them as ‘the happiest blacks in the world’. Besides, these were people who did things like leaving a tractor and trailer on a main road with no lights at night, which had led to his brother's tragic death.

       Growing up in Rhodesia it was so easy to be drawn into generalizations. When you have all these incidents at the farm, endless theft and betrayals by servants, you have one or two ways of going. You can either rationalize and say, ‘Well, that would happen with any race,’ or say, ‘No, they're just an inferior breed and what do you expect?’

      None of us could imagine them in our school Prince Edward was one of the oldest and most prestigious schools in Rhodesia. Founded as Salisbury Public School in the early days of the Pioneers back in 1898, it was renamed after the Prince of Wales who visited Rhodesia in 1925, and even today the school prospectus states that it ‘seeks to build balanced gentlemen’. The flag fluttering over the red-brick tower of the main building bore the school crest of a lion and a sable holding up a shield on which was the three-feathered coronet of the Prince of Wales. The lion carried a flag emblazoned with the English Tudor rose and both animals rested on a grassy knoll decorated with a Tudor rose, the African flame lily and the Welsh leek. Underneath was the Latin motto Tot facienda parum factum—So much to do, so little done, a translation of Rhodes's weary words on his deathbed in 1902.

      The school was divided into eight houses named after Pioneers and heroes of the colonial era including Jameson, after Leander Starr Jameson, first administrator of the British South African Company; Baines, after Thomas Baines, the explorer; Selous, for Frederick Selous, the adventurer; and Moffat, for John Moffat, the British government emissary who first persuaded Lobengula to keep out the Boers. Nigel was in Rhodes House, where the initiation process included stealing fruit from the neighbouring convent and being woken in the middle of winter at 2 a.m. to swim in the pool and do a cross-country run. I thought it built up camaraderie but then one year a boy died doing it because he had a weak heart that no one knew about.

      Apart from extensive rugby and cricket fields, the school had its own observatory and memorial chapel funded by the donations of old pupils. Nigel had managed to find a hiding place at the back upstairs and would sleep all the way through Sunday service. Latin and Greek were key parts of the Prince Edward curriculum and there was a set of rules such as always wearing a tie inside-maroon with the three feathers or green-striped for prefects-but never a cap. Any violations were punished with a set of cuts, beatings with a cane, sometimes six at a time, which left the victim bruised black and scarlet although of course no self-respecting boy would allow himself to cry.

      The school day began somewhat brutally with a junior blowing a bugle at 6 a.m. Nigel was fagging for one of the prefects, Philip Nicholas, so had to get up even earlier to polish his shoes, run his bath and carry his books. Inspection and roll call were at 6.30 a.m. Everyone then filed over to the main school building for morning assembly which started with a rousing chorus of the school song. This opened with the lines:

       When the lion roared of old And the sable tossed his crest

      It went on to become increasingly martial with verses such as:

       When we lay aside the pen And abandon bat and ball We will acquit ourselves like men Answering our country's call

      Under Rhodesian law, no government school was permitted to have more than 6 per cent blacks, and Prince Edward had never admitted black students. But it was not the effect on traditions that concerned Nigel-Prince Edward was the country's top sporting school and he was worried about the impact a black presence might have on the performance of their teams. I lived for sport-squashy cricket, rugby. Although he was small for his age, within days of arriving the eleven-year-old Nigel had beaten the school tennis and squash champions and by the following year he was playing first-team cricket.

      Their main rival school, St Georges, had black boys and because of that their teams were not allowed to play away games. Some СКАЧАТЬ