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A little history gives a slant on what people say. We thought we were Middle Class, we had the social graces, the accent, the interests, but not the cash. We, my mother, brother and I, had just returned from Africa under the British Raj, where we had lived and, I suppose, acted like landed gentry, with a fleet of servants. We were part of an extended family, and from time to time, through difficult circumstances, farmed out round the family for periods ranging from months to years. So, we had no airs and graces, no strong drives, living took up most of our attention, but we did not feel deprived, we, the children, accepted and mostly enjoyed life. Those circumstances alone are rare today, with two bread-winners per household and few extended families.
At Christmas we all had fixed routines and protocols which seem to have gone, mostly through affluence and expediency. Then, indeed in our case up to the 70s, the children and often everyone hung up a stocking, either over the fireplace, on the end of the bed, or were given one on Christmas morning, even grannies. We knew we would get nuts, an orange of some sort, a piece of coal, carefully wrapped, sweets and three or four items. Today, the children have entirely different tastes and expectations. We have watched great grandchildren growing up and never cease to wonder, not only at the presents they receive from friends and relatives, from the moment they hatch, but the number, size and quality. They would never fit into a stocking now.
Granted we were married in wartime, but we thought our wedding was super and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Now there are hen parties in foreign countries and the men, not to be out done get drunk in another country as well. The wedding is in a remote romantic spot, and, what with the travelling and the presents, over recent years the exponential rise in these standards, because that is what they are – standards, has left me amazed – and that is only for the relatives and close friends. The honeymoons are also unbelievably lavish at a time when the young people are only starting out. I’m not being a Scrooge, nor a party poppa, although I sometimes can be, what people do with their lives is their business. I have just watched, and wondered where it will finish. Those Joneses, everyone seems to feel they have to keep up with, have a lot to answer for! With the rising cost of housing, weddings and life generally, one cannot be surprised the younger folk are cohabiting, if they can even afford that, and unlike our generation – not many of us left – marriage itself can be tenuous.
Chauvinism exposed. I can’t remember, but I don’t suppose that the word chauvinism featured very much in the vocabulary of the man in the street, in the 30s and 40s. There used to be a silly story, which had more truth than humour, about an Italian who was asked his views on life, and he answered ‘ I digga da pit, to earnna da mon, to buya da bread, to getta da strength, to digga da pit!’ As I was brought up by women, it was only after the war that I lived in a house where the head of the house was a man. None of us at that time took exception to the fact, that he and I contributed very little to work in the house, other than maintenance and gardening. One came home, read the paper, ate the evening meal, and spent most evenings with the family. Occasionally, at times of pressure one might help with the washing up but it was rare. Similarly, we wouldn’t have dreamed of attending a birth, let alone participating.
Recently, Sophie, my wife, had been so ill she was incapable of doing more the sitting still, with the result that I found myself as a carer, with all that entails. I’m not suggesting that I found it irksome, merely time-consuming, in many cases time wasting, and very tiring. I of course, in my 80s, would be more tired than most. But what it did do was make me realise, in the past, just how much we had denigrated the work of the housewife as being ‘ woman’s work’, something simple and easy, and I suppose, beneath us. Over the years things have obviously changed not only in my own household, but even more with the younger people where it seems, the roles have no clear definition, they are certainly interchangeable. In those ancient times the head of the house, was exactly that, what he said went, and the fact that this was only superficial in many cases, and those laws were modified by those carrying them out was never discussed. Today, chauvinism seems to be found more in the workplace than in the home. You never know, it might just disappear from there too.

When we first heard the King’s speech on the wireless, it was really a celebration of the Empire and its reinforcement, tightening the ties. My first recollection of Empire Day, although I know it was celebrated in most schools in England, was when it was celebrated in Livingstone. Unsurprisingly it was a ‘great day’, which started with some form of military ceremony presided over by the Governor of Northern Rhodesia, followed by presents, games, and finishing with a bun fight for the children.
There was no doubt the early indoctrination of patriotic ideals and the strength of the bond between most of the population and the Crown was a feature of English life before the war, and never more so than in 1935 when we had The Jubilee, the Royal Funeral and then the Coronation of George VI. On the actual days of celebration there were sporadic street parties, and all the towns and villages were decked out. The papers had a field day with special editions and school children were involved up to the hilt. All the Crowned Heads of Europe and the potentates of the Empire were assembled and London was agog. Souvenirs were on sale everywhere and the LCC gave every child a commemorative EPNS spoon and an embossed or painted mug for both occasions and, in the case of the Jubilee, there was a separate parade by the King and Queen and all the panoply down The Mall at about midday. Public transport and special coaches brought the children there. Stalls, toilets and first aid stations had been erected in the Park and the youngsters had to be in place quite early. I was there, in the front row halfway down the Mall and constantly there was something to watch. For the first hour the excitement was enough but then we would see troops of soldiers on horseback, police on horseback and other people passing and re-passing, and each time a cheer would go up. The trees, lamp standards and the streets were decorated with flags and bunting from the real celebration and the atmosphere was electric. For whatever reason, patriotism was tangible.
On a purely personal level I regret the advice given to the Royals to come off their dais and try to meet the commoners on the same level. Their own history should have warned of the pitfalls awaiting them and if they had only followed the progress of the Continental Press, after all they are fluent in the languages, they would have seen where it would all lead. Changing course, no matter how or when, will never retrieve what, in effect, we have all lost. The Dutch achieved the change, but I suspect their press is either more controlled or less aggressive.

The day came to leave and we, my mother and I, caught the train which would ultimately take us to Capetown, a train where one booked a compartment in which one read, ate, slept and washed for tedious days on end. The hand-basin was hinged on the door and one tipped it up to empty it out, through the structure of the door onto the track. I have only a vague impression of that part of the journey, of dust, heat, the regular stops and the confinement, but I remember vividly some of the passes we went up to reach the plateaux, where the views were breath-taking and where the train, being so long and the hair-pin bends so tight, the engine actually passed beside the guard’s van

The journey home appears like a series of excerpts from an 8mm colour film rather than one long episode – like a series of snapshots. I say ‘home’ because I never really felt that Africa was my home, it was a way-station. I can almost smell the air as I did then. When the train from Livingstone to the Cape halted for water or fuel, we would find groups of Africans who wanted to sell fruit, food, and their beautiful knick-knacks, standing below us on the track, in the scorching sunlight backed by the harsh browns of the sand and the burnt grasses Their wares ranged from little models of animals the size of the blunt end of a pencil to huge elephants and crocodiles, all made from ivory. There were wooden artefacts and small carved stools with areas coloured in patches by poker-work, trays in natural and black cane, beaded bangles and little purses on a string either beaded or woven where the bottom was attached to the string and the top slid up and down it as it was opened and closed. At one such stop I persuaded my mother to buy me a long bladed wooden knife with a carved handle in a polished wood not unlike mahogany – ebony. It was one of my early ventures into persuasive barter as compensation; she was placating an aggrieved son.
For almost all the time I had lived in Africa I was required to wear an awful pith-helmet that my mother had purchased in the UK before we went out there. It was the usual putty colour and was about half an inch thick, as if made of pizza dough, although we had never heard of pizzas then. I suppose this type of hat was all the rage when she had left Africa some years before, but she was not up with the times. When we arrived I found that my peers were kitted out with very smart and very lightweight helmets made of compressed cork. All the other children made fun of mine. At that age, 6, I hadn’t the wit to sit on the thing, bust it and then get a new one and be like my contemporaries, instead I tended to run about without it, risking severe sunstroke which I suffered on more than one occasion. In the end, of course, it wore out, part of the brim went limp and when it was too far gone and was replaced by the cork type, but this only happened a few weeks before we left to come home. I was like a cat that had eaten the canary, at last I was like everyone else, now I conformed, I had a cork topee.
The day came to leave and we caught the train. By this time I was eight years old. On the train was a family friend who was on his way to Bulawayo and he accompanied us for some time; that was the problem. He was a sort of ‘hail fellow – well met’ person, given to the broad gesture and when we had been travelling for some time he came to our compartment and committed a heinous crime. I can’t recall all the details, even how it came about, but I do remember the nub of the incident vividly. You must understand that ever since I had been told I was going ‘home’ I had been casting myself as the returning traveller, having visions of myself telling all my erstwhile friends about lions and crocs, baboons and witch doctors, while standing about in my smart, new, compressed cork toupee – David Livingstone the second. This blighter, this interloper into our compartment, this vandal, stood up, opened the window and then, with words like “Well, you’ll soon be home, no need for this thing then!” he snatched the helmet off my head. I had been wearing it ever since I had received it and probably would have done so in bed if the brim had not been so hard. He then skimmed it through the window, beyond reach, beyond recovery. I was dumbfounded as I watched it disappear down the track. Heartbroken I steadily became more and more hideously vindictive after that. If even a couple of my prayers had been answered he would have died a gruesome death at my feet – hence the blackmail and the purchase of the knife

In the then Northern Rhodesia. On film today it is certainly majestic, but to see the immensity, the rush of water, hear the noise and feel the constant rain of the spray in those simple, uncluttered days, is an unforgettable lifetime’s experience. The descriptions of The Victoria Falls runs to 11 pages on the Internet; so I will be brief and describe what it was like 76 years ago. There were few visitors then, merely the locals. Both sides of the Zambezi were Northern Rhodesia, now, when crossing the bridge, built in 1908, one leaves Zambia for Zimbabwe, and the Falls Hotel is in Zimbabwe. I have already described the mode of transport to these picnics, the reason why we took the house boys along with us, and he ravages of the baboons. Only as a special treat did we eat there, mostly we picnicked in an area where the ‘rain’ – spray thrown up by the force of the fall – was absent. Also in Zimbabwe is the Rain Forest, a treed area growing on the edge of the Falls and mostly, soaking wet from the spray The Boiling Pot was where the water from the river fell via the Cateract into the Gorge and with the turbulence and the spray was all the world like a bubbling pot. >From the pages of the Internet the area now seems to be highly populated.

Signatures And Antiques Currently there is a plethora of programmes on television spawned by The Antiques Road Show, pandering to our greed and our interest in the past. That short period of the trip to Africa put me in touch with articles and signatures, which in theory would be worth a fortune today. The aspect which I find amusing is that at the same time David Attenborough is telling us that saving up things for the future is a waste of time because there ain’t no future. A signature I missed out on was that of Jim Mollison. We had the privilege of being in Livingstone when Jim Mollison and his maintenance crew stopped over, on their record breaking run from London to Australia. Needless to say Mollison was entertained at Government House, but the crew stayed with us, with the delightful result I was taken out to the plane next day and even allowed to be seated in the cockpit for one glorious minute. Strangely I remember vividly the fuss, the gathering, small though it was, and the plane, but I think I only remember the cockpit from films I have seen since rather than a true recollection, I have no strong visual image of it, unlike I have of the scene itself.
It sometimes amazes me how we make statements without question, and take information for granted without looking deeper into the bowels, so to speak. I wrote the above years ago and yet it is only recently that I have realised there must have been a number of advance maintenance crews for Mollison to have his plane serviced, as air travel was in its infancy. I have found the information inconclusive as he did fly from London to Australia and set a record but I left Africa in 1930. I am forced, therefore, to believe his visit was exploratory and not the record attempt, but I could be wrong, and frankly it no longer matters.
Elsewhere I have written about the journey home when we were besieged at every stop by Africans selling the most exquisite articles made of all the natural materials including elephant tusks, some of which I still have today, and must be worth quite a lot of money. On another occasion I discovered a trunk left by an army officer which contained a tremendous variety of buttons, shoulder badges, regimental names in brass, cap badges and other insignia in mint condition and by the handful – imagine the specialists salivating over that lot. And then of course I received a cricket ball on board ship from Jardine and didn’t have the wit to have it endorsed. But then it is only recently we have discovered how valuable silly little bits of paper have become.

I repeatedly find that the departments of the government, and local authorities issue edicts that conflict with another, or with every day practices. We were goaded at one time to switch off the idle lights on TVs and other equipment in order to save the world. What I find absurd, is that there seems to be no attempt to improve the rate of increase in public transport, and some of the routes taken by buses are equally impossible to justify. I can go from a local supermarket to my home by bus, but I can’t take the bus from my home to the supermarket, which is only a mile and a half away, without having to take two buses. You only have to have a minor construction job on a trunk road to see how many cars are actually using that road, and the majority of the cars will be one person per car. I would have thought that if they were so worried about the carbon emissions, increasing public transport would have been on the high priority list. I am aware that the cost of wars we are currently fighting are to some extent responsible, but it was the government of the time that placed us in this situation, impetuously, without thought for the outcome once the major project had been achieved, as had been recommended by senior ranks in the army.

There is generally an amicable solution to most problems, and I believe this applies particularly to what is termed ‘ the mummy ran’. I am told, that in Canada, schoolchildren are transported to school in what is termed ‘ the slow yellow bus’. In parts of Britain parents on a rota basis, collect the children en-route, all cycling, with one parent in the lead, one in the middle, and one bringing up the rear. Clearly, the numbers of people cycling in any one single group would have to have a limit. I recently received a postal catalogue that informed me that a government survey, carried out by a University had discovered that shopping by telephone, or online, generates 24 times less in carbon emissions compared with shopping by car. I quote this, not because I see it laudable, but because it shows the government is aware that using cars for shopping is creating carbon emission. The rider to that is that carrying children to school on a daily basis must be 250 times the carbon emission they won’t generate if they cycled, and something fairly low if they used the bus.

The research I did was very simple, and unscientific, and one of the questions I was asking parents was why children over say nine years old, had to be accompanied. There seemed to be two main worries, one was bullying by children from another quarter, and one was the possibility of children being offered drugs free of charge, experimentally. I don’t know if there are any statistics to justify these fears, but to take the number of children individually to school by car, as seems to be the practice everywhere, seems to be using a hammer to crack a nut. I accept the fact that the children are required to understand these problems and take precautions, one of which is a series of collection points, where parents can take their children, and either rely on the children as a group to resist these problems, or again have a rota of parents willing to walk with the children. To someone who walked every day to elementary school, a distance of a mile and a half, morning and afternoon, with no molestation in any form, makes me feel that the problem is not as serious as it would seem, and if it is then steps should be taken by the government and local authorities to eradicate this.

I may be telling you something that you are well aware of, but I think it well worth voicing it again for the benefit of those who have been too busy to take time to contemplate. I for ever seem to be amazed at the way in which the world and we within it, have come about; that from a ball of highly heated gas, we could arrive at where we are today. The way in which nature has accommodated and used the differing aspects of terrain and weather, to provide habitats and nourishment for all the species that have arrived in the various areas, over decades and millennia, is nothing short of a miracle The Hummingbird, with its long curved beak, arrived at by the mutation of the genes, and the basis of the survival of the fittest, is just one feature of millions of cases. The arrival of creatures with heavily armoured exteriors, for no apparent reason that I have heard of, in itself is remarkable. And so, with a combination of the survival of the fittest, mutation of the genes, plus the continuous changes in weather, and habit, the world has been the home of a vast number of different species, many long extinct, and worse still, many in the process of becoming extinct.

I think it is reasonable to assume that when man first appeared as a reasoning animal, he would have had little effect on his environment, and like the rest, he would have to hunt to live. But the problem has been that man is a reasoning being, understanding cause-and-effect, able to make tools and use them for his own benefit. The result of this was that he had an advantage over all the other creatures to such an extent, that in certain cases he was responsible for making some of them extinct, and that process which might have been by necessity initially, is now one based upon greed, avarice and so-called leisure. Greed and avarice was stretched to the extent that sophisticated man used other races as a commodity, without forethought of the long-term disadvantages. This general aspect of man has appeared in every walk of life, such as the mindless waste of oil reserves in United States, purely in the enhancement of the wealth of individuals. I don’t need to progress along these lines, we are all aware of the way in which big business often operates to the detriment or the majority. Wars, generally started by a few ,with high ambition, lays waste disproportionately to any possible valuable outcome. The use of Napalm is a glaring example.

Having lived nearly 90 years, passing through periods of calm, pleasurable enjoyment, to absolutely crazy mayhem, which were no more use than mindless destruction and set us back 30 years, I find that man is still wrecking not only our environment, but the atmosphere above us, through short-term, untried, policies, rather than careful thought along the lines of cause and effect.

I had always thought that fairytales were for the entertainment of the young. My definition of a fairytale is that it is an imaginative story not based on fact, generally gentle in concept, amusing, and with an element of danger as the spice. Now I find that we are being presented with a double diet of fairytales on a daily basis on television. One form is the adventure-crime film that is totally unbelievable from the very outset, because none of the action could be duplicated without special effects, and illustration techniques. I don’t need to tell you all the details, about guns with endless ammunition, and every single member of cast proficient in martial arts. I don’t know anybody who knows anything about Martial arts. This sort of mockup, might be all right for children, but putting it on a programme entitled ‘ movies4men’ leaves one to wonder who these men really are. They must be watching these films because they are offered to such a great extent, they are obviously unbelievable, so perhaps these men need some sort of fairytale.

The other side of fairytales are as a result of the credit crunch. Advertisers are competing with one another to provide advertisements which are increasingly cheaper to make, while giving the information required by the product manufacturer. If you look closely you realise that most of the adverts are as a result of illustration techniques, rather than photographed material as in the old days. They now have every type of puppet making grandiose recommendations for the product, in instances which have no logic whatsoever, and in some cases using fear as a goad. I was always led to believe, and I have found this to be true in my own case, that exposure to germs is an essential part of living, so as to build up the immune system. Hence it seems irrational, that in the home, where there is unlikely to be the level of germs that are not already catered for in the immune systems of the family, yet the viewer is being urged to wipe everything in sight with the product to avoid these millions of germs, sources unspecified, types unspecified. I’ve found it ludicrous that the amount of cleaning shown and urged to be necessary around the WC, is in areas that would only be treated in normal circumstances by a loo brush. I know I’m a critical old idiot, but I object to being treated as if I had no brain with which to think for myself. Those ugly little puppets seem to be inveterate liars.

With no homework, I had a long afternoon to put in. Ocassionally a few friends and I would go outside the limits placed by our parents, through the tall grasses of the Veldt, along wide deep drainage ditches waiting in their dusty state for the next onslaught of the monsoon rains. It was exciting creeping down these excavations, knowing full well there were snakes there, because our parents had told us that was the reason we were not to trespass outside the town boundary. Across this arid pasture we went until we neared the abattoir, another no-go area. It was here we spied on the Africans slaughtering the pigs. The act certainly didn’t conform to Government regulations; it was more a tribal game. They would release a pig. give it a stab to urge it on its way, then some of the men would run with it until they managed to kill it with a knife. We seem to have been unaffected by this brutal barbarism. I was horrified for the sake of the pigs. While I was left with a mental snapshot, it did not affect me otherwise, no nightmares and no aversion to blood, This was not the only killing I was to observe. In retrospect I realise that the Africans’ values were unsurprisingly different from those of the whites. On one occasion, shortly after I arrived, one of the servants asked me if I would like to see the chicken being killed, the one destined for the table that day. The family reared chickens for eggs and meat in the compound at the back of the house. I assume I acquiesced because I became party to a demonstration of decapitation and the sight of a headless chicken running round the compound until it fell, already dead. This I still see in graphic 3D.
Until I started thinking more deeply concerning those days, I had not realised how much death was taken for granted in that environment. On one occasion I saw from a distance the witch doctor who was brought in for the ritual killing of several people and would ultimately be hanged, himself. I saw a snake killed on the step of the bungalow merely because it was poisonous. I went to the Zambezi to see my father bring in the bodies of several crocodiles, which had been killed because they were thought to be lying in wait for Africans watering their cattle. Both oxen and herders had become the reptile’s prey, swept off their feet by a swipe of a tail and then drowned. These huge creatures lived on an island in the river and took their kills there to bury them for eating later. The white men were rowed out on the river in small boats to shoot the crocs in the water and then, when they were sure the reptiles were dead they would be tied on to the boat and towed ashore. My father and his friends would then stand around while their servants skinned the beasts. I remembered that the smell of raw crocodile was one of the foulest smells I had ever encountered.
All this took place at what was referred to as ‘the bathing place’. An area of cleared River Zambezi riverbank with two rectangular huts in the style of native dwellings, used as changing rooms for the whites – by the men and ladies. In Africa, at that time, white women were all ladies, irrespective of their antecedents or proclivities. As far as I could see, the whole aspect of life as a member of the Raj was like being a member of a select, upper class British club. There were rules, which one only broke on penalty of being black-balled, so one conformed – how one conformed. The actual bathing was done in the Zambezi itself. I assume that an inlet in the bank reduced the velocity of the river to nearly nothing at that point. I have no recollection of currents being a problem. The main river was only about two miles from the Victoria Falls at that point so the velocity in the main stream must have been quite high.
To protect the bathers from the ever present threat of crocodiles, wire netting on poles formed the perimeter of the pool, held to the bottom by stones, a crude system which later proved fatal for a friend of mine. At Madeira, on our way home we read of the death by drowning of a school friend who had been lost in the swimming pool. Apparently he had not been seen for a while and when the men went to look for him fearing him drowned, his body was not within the enclosure, but they did find the wire netting had been breached very badly. The assumption was that a crocodile had entered, drowned the boy and left with him. From an age when I could reason cause and effect, I had been astounded that the whites would have permitted the Africans to water their oxen and cattle beside the bathing place, it was tantamount to training the crocodiles, and the death of the school boy had not been a unique case. We later heard that that was the end of bathing in the Zambezi. Incidentally, no one ever called crocodiles anything but crocs.