MUD BETWEEN YOUR TOES: EXTRAS
Mud Between Your Toes ‘Extras’ is a selection of stories not published in my book. Often I found that too many names and adventures tended to muddy the waters and stop the natural flow of the story. This does not mean that those tales are less important.
So I have decided to upload a few of them for you to read.
I hope you enjoy.
Story 3. The farm garden
M'sitwe Farm is a magical other-worldly place. From the cool Umvukwes plateau, relatively high at 5,000 foot above sea level, the bumpy dirt road drops 2,000 foot in just twenty six miles into the V Block, as it was affectionately known. Where Umvukwes has low, soft, grassy, undulating hills, coniferous plantations and wide arable lands that almost look like parts of Scotland, (indeed one farm was even called Galloway Estates), the road winds its way down through the Birkdale Pass in the Great Dyke - steep sided and lined with date palms, supposedly spat out by Arab slave traders back in the 1700s. Crumbling stone walled forts built for protection by Mashona people are testament to that ghastly trade and can be seen all around this area.
As you emerge from the lush valley through the Dyke you are confronted with a totally different world - hot and humid, with rugged balancing rocks and kopjes and small uneven lands squeezed between thick, impenetrable, indigenous M'sasa and Monondo woodland.
The view from the main house back towards the Dyke, is breathtaking - a valley that stretches for several miles from the rickety stables housing our two unruly horses, Pedro and Piccolo, down to a heavily wooded area called Mzindirindi. To the south is a wild, hilly area known as Matimba (place of wood), dotted with massive granite dwalas forced from the earth millions of years ago - the 'bald kopje' reigning over all. And then, far in the distance, the mauve ribbon of the Great Dyke.
Along the route from Umvukwes, if you care to peer between the trees and shrubs, you will see an abundance of flora, such as aloes (the towering excelsa and the orthalopha) and around Christmas, bursts of fireballs, (Haemanthus filiflorus and H. multiflorus), known locally as red hot pin cushion or African blood plants, with their large globes of many slender red tubular flowers. If you are lucky, there will be tangles of flame lily (Gloriosa superba) - the national flower and also the emblem of our junior school in Umvukwes. Wonderful scarlet swaths of invasive red sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia) shimmer in the fallow lands, with the giant imposing Euphorbias standing sentinel on the horizons, their finger-like branches reaching skywards. Paper bark Albizia, with their delicate skin peeling off like rice paper and white trunked mountain acacias dominate the small rocky outcrops in between the fields.
Sprouting between rows of maize are edible African horned cucumber or rather more tongue twistingly known in Shona as the mugamgangam and the inedible snake apple or poison apple, poetically known as mutemberere.
At the start of every school holiday, we would bounce around in the back of the Land Rover, leaving behind the cold fir and pine trees so common around Umvukwes school. First to go would be the shoes, then the shirts. Our uniform for the next week or so would be a simple pair of shorts and little else. The three of us children always felt a sense of belonging as we entered the V Block. It was always a thrill - the heat, the smell of wood smoke and cow dung and the sights along the road. The first farm beyond the Dyke was owned by Howland. We would always be on the alert to spot wildlife in their private game reserve - impala, warthog, ostrich, zebra, eland and giraffe. This was the gateway to the V Block and it just seemed fitting that wild animals should be the gatekeepers. A mile on was Prangmere, owned by the Girdlestones, with their fantastic, tall, thatched house and hundreds of snarling inbred cats. Trevor Girdlestone, one the first farmers in the district was a man of immense character, although perhaps not the most successful farmer. He was eventually buried on top of a steep hill overlooking his farm - I reckon Trevor was laughing in his grave when his chums all nearly had heart attacks carrying that box up the steep rock face.
Along from Prangemere were the Hendersons. John Hendy suffered from mild narcolepsy and was in the habit of dropping off half way through a conversation, leaving rather embarrassing pregnant pauses during a dinner party. Fortunately this affliction had not affected his driving. At least I didn’t think so otherwise the Henderson kids might have been pretty neurotic and highly strung. Mind you, nodding off at the steering wheel was nothing new in the V Block. Indeed, it may have been a criteria.
Dave and Wendy Dolphin lived on a farm that used to be owned by Punch and Cynthia Norton. Cynthia was a fabulous blue rinse, Barbara Cartland type of woman, who not surprisingly became the Victory Block beautician. Mum would drive up there and put herself at the mercy of Cynthia’s fluorescent drag-queen eye shadows. She would return to the farm looking like (a mad) Van Gogh had gone crazy on her eyelids.
As we drove down towards the farm, over the Nyarowe river bridge, more like a concrete drift that flooded each season, the raggedy kids from the compound would pour out, waving and screaming next to the car. It was always a wonderful home-coming signaling the beginning of the hols - and the freedom from school rules, shoes, the constant smell of coal from the school boiler, not to mention the bland school food. It also, thankfully, signaled the end to that incessant sinister sound of crows constantly arguing with one another like a witches seminar. I read that the collective noun for crows is a murder of crows. Their mocking, lonely cawing always reminded me of school. M’sitwe thankfully had no crows.
Half a mile of massive blue gums led the way to the barns and sheds, then up the hill to the house where we invariably would be greeted by our staff, Fred and Konda, and a posse of over-excited dogs.
The house was designed by my father on the back of a cigarette packet. Not too surprisingly, it was never perfection, but it was entirely ours. Firing the bricks in a home-made kiln using the clay from a termite mound, and using local granite for the foundations. The L-shaped house dominated the top of a rocky, arid hill with moderately commanding views of the V Block. Whitewashed walls, yellow windows frames, sea green asbestos roof and a verandah tiled in local Sinoia slate - polished to perfection by Konda and smelling magnificent of Cobra wax.
The walls of the verandah, like so many homes in Southern Africa, were adorned with all my dads hunting trophies. Buffalo, Kudu, Eland, Impala and Sable. A wobbly elephant foot side-table stood on a tatty well-worn zebra skin, leopard skins hung from the walls interspersed with my mother's Sanderson chintz and floral soft furnishings. This rather eclectic farm house, practical on the outside and elegant on the inside, was a cool oasis from the intensely hot bush.
Many farm gardens in Rhodesia were rather beautiful and took enormous efforts to maintain. The first garden boy I can ever remember was ancient. His name was Sakara and he was one of the most fascinating people I had ever set eyes upon - as old as Methuselah, bent double, his khakis patched and torn and hanging loose on his thin aged limbs, a large suspicious smelling homemade cigarette attached to his chapped lips, his yellow mottled eyes staring fixedly and angrily after us. He never wore shoes - quite possibly did not own a pair, and he delighted in showing us kids the soles of his feet which had such deep cracks that you could wedge a penny in them. He stalked across the garden like Death, bony and cloaked (well not cloaked but bony anyway) wielding a bemba, a home-made scythe, to sweep away the weeds, rather than the skulls of the departed. Irascible and grumpy, Sakara not only terrified us kids, but obviously scared the bejesus out of the farm workers. He chose to live away from the main compound in a mud hut half way up the hill, guarded by a pack of yelping, worm riddled curs. Whenever we would venture anywhere near his hut we would be set upon by these mangy menacing dogs, which would chase us back up the hill snapping at our heels. The idea of getting rabies was not far from our minds. I cannot remember what happened in the end to Sakara, although I do remember that his dogs had to be ‘got rid of’. They became too familiar and started encroaching on our own dogs’ territory. I guess Sakara moved on after that - even an old loner needs his company. Or perhaps like Methuselah, he simply faded into the ethers of time.
Despite having little water and only ever allowed one gardener, my Mum managed to design a garden that would be admired by our visitors. Many people, quite wrongly I might add, think that these farm women were like those from other parts of the empire and did very little work, relying entirely on their staff. In fact these farm gardens were stunning because of big dreams and hard work and only became a reality because of grand visions. It takes a very special kind of person to look at a bleak dry piece of bush, peppered with rocks and thorny scrub, and imagine how the mowed grass will eventually undulate down the hill to the ornamental ponds beyond. Rolling Australian Evergreen lawns stretching down to lush borders of bizzie lizzie, petunias and nasturtiums and a series of fish ponds tangled with bullrushes and waterlilies.
The M’sitwe garden was a riot of both domestic and foreign flowers and trees. Mums green fingers extended beyond the pretty English flowers so popular in Umvukwes, but also to the more exotic. Arguably the gardens in the higher, more temperate elevation in Umvukwes were more classically English - Anne Francis on Galloway Estate with her acres of roses festooned with blooms the size of cabbages, or Gina Hyde on Pembe with her perfectly manicured borders and swaths of flame lilies. Mum did have a dahlia named after her called The Libby Wood - a stunning blossom in a wonderful raspberry ripple colour, grafted lovingly by Len Healey a champion dahlia grower (and caretaker of the Umvukwes Club as it were).
To a youngster growing up in Libs wild garden, it was a wonderland, providing what seemed like the entire spectrum of garden genre, from the very English up near the house with roses and geraniums and baskets full of petunias, to a thick impenetrable (yet planned) jungle further down the hill. Around the pool she managed to blend the classic with the tropical, then changing tack with a series of fish ponds, trickling down the hill, rich with bull rushes and water lilies, ending with a fabulous rockery shaded by Cassia and Pride of India.
So many of the flowers we see in the gardens around the world are native to South Africa, from the glorious sky blue of the agapanthus, to the fun bubbly gladiolus, the banks of insane, jewel-like Namaqualand daisy, the Barberton daisy or gerbera so commonly used on dining tables in London restaurants, gardenias, geraniums, felicia, African daisy not to mention the proud lush reds, whites and striped amaryllis and the yellow and white arums. Her garden was a veritable rain forest not to mention the what’s-what of South African flora.
Jurassic Cycads - both male and female, quite prehistoric and once the food of dinosaurs, grew to massive sizes and sprouted bright red fabulous fruits full of deadly neurotoxins. Delicious monsters (Monstera deliciosa) with their huge scaled, penile fruits that look like elongated jack fruit, overtook the verandah, climbing several metres high, their aerial roots no doubt holding up the wall and ceiling, thank god - I don't think the pillars were ever really built particularly strong. Ferns of all varieties imaginable, gathered from the rivers and hills around the farm and further afield, spread their verdurous fronds down the slope to the fish ponds. One of my favourites, the weird pale green jade vine (oddly only found in the Philippines or Natal), offered much needed shade on the patio. Jade vines have an ethereal claw-like, pale green blossom which hangs in bunches like grapes, and are fertilized by bats, the flowers emitting a fluorescent aura in the dark in order to lure them in.
There were cacti, aloes and euphorbias transplanted from the tops of granite hills, elephant ears with vitriolic sap so caustic that when licked the oxalic acid would be like eating burning coals (unlike their tamer taro cousins of south East Asia), heady smelling ginger and of course the staple of all rain forests, the palms - king palms and queen palms, their fronds laden down with the nests from rowdy African weaver birds. Fan palms from Mauritius and Pampas grasses from Argentina and old gnarled Hawaiian plumeria (frangipani) in the most outlandish colours imaginable, dropping their intoxicating blossom all over the lawns. Like their cousins the oleander, their thick white sap was poisonous, as was the brick-red and yellow veined fleshy leafed South East Asian croton, used in Chinese medicine to prevent constipation, but banned by pharmaceutical companies in the west. Catching the morning light, grew bright yellow hibiscus with sangria coloured hearts, always covered in tiny midgies, vermillion heliconia, coral red organic looking lobster claw and crane-like strelitzia, generally thought to be from California but in fact once again, native to South Africa. Golden trumpet from Thailand tumbled between huge banks of cannas in luscious and lurid oranges, pinks and fuscia, and the spiked Guzmania sanguinea from the pineapple family, guzzling up drowned insects in their water traps.
These plants were always at the mercy of my mother's dreaded secateurs. Edward Scissor Hands had nothing on Lib. The instant a blossom or flower would show the teeniest tiny sign of fatigue or dehydration or disease it was ‘off with it’s head’, much to the fascination of us kids. Snip, snip, snip. Huge gorgeous blooms would tumble down to the flower bed, scattering their petals across the lawn.
‘Oops’ she might say, ‘didn’t mean to cut that one’ and then onto the next victim.
It is a total surprise that we had any colour at all in our garden. Fortunately nature had other ideas and managed to grow faster than her fingers could work.
This is where we grew up and often took for granted I suppose, although we were always aware of the beauty surrounding us, the smells and sounds and naturally the wildlife that was attracted to this oasis. The good and the bad - the pythons and adders, the field mice, the hawks and the starlings and squirrels, the toads and frogs and geckos and an abundance of butterflies, from the common African Monarch to the tiny swarms of painted ladies or pea blues. The delicate fluttering swallowtails and cabbage whites and the swift Charaxes that would glide across the lawn like streamlined, mosaic torpedoes, diving down to the nearest patch of manure. Charaxes were my favourite to collect and certainly the most challenging. They are the spitfires of the butterfly world. They don't flit and kiss like normal butterflies. They don't alight on blossoms and sup of the nectar. They dive bomb to the nearest steaming dog turd for a good tasty gobble of shit, then dash off to safety to clean and stroke their proboscis with delicious abandonment.
One month was never the same as another and despite the lack of water (and only one garden boy as we were constantly reminded), it always managed to remain green and lush and irresistibly glorious. Mum never let us forget that it took hard work and clever design to make it look so wild, so abandoned and tumbled and rich.
The African bush outside the fence waited patiently for the day when it could reclaim this patch of land and rid itself of the imposters that so arrogantly and proudly grew up the hill. As indeed that day would come.
Although not native to Mashonaland, we also had a huge fat Sabi star or Impala Lily. Like the oleander, they have such toxic sap that the San bushmen used it to poison their arrows. Nothing is innocent in the garden of good and evil. When I was young, my brother and I travelled down by train to the beautiful Jacaranda lined city of Umtali in the Eastern Highlands, where we were picked up by our cousin George Hulme and driven hundreds of miles to his million acre ranch called Divuli near Chipinga. As you near the Sabi river, out of nowhere the massive steel structure of the Birchenough Bridge towers above the flat mopane bush veld. Designed by Ralph Freeman in 1935, the designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it in fact bears a very close resemblance, although only 1/3rd the size. This incredible piece of engineering was the third longest suspension bridge in the world and stood on my cousins land! And there it was - in the middle of no-where.
Divuli was a cattle ranch, but also had an abundance of wildlife. George took me on my very first real hunt. Never the hunting, shooting, fishing type, I went along with it, unfortunately wounding a young impala ram. The trackers and their dogs took three days to find the poor beast and put it down - retrieving the tiny stunted horns for me to place next to my bother and fathers massive trophies. Having decided that hunting was not my thing, my teary eyes then settled on slightly gentler pursuits - one of which was the retrieval and transplanting of a Sabi Star - hundreds of which dotted the dry veld around the ranch, their incredible vivid pink and white blooms casting a welcome hue across the otherwise grey bush. The plants look somewhat benign from the top - gorgeous flowers, and fat, grey stumpy trunks like a miniature baobab tree. But beneath the surface they hid a rhizome or bulbous root that grew to absolutely massive proportions - a small six-inch plant might have a bulb the size of two or three rugby balls. Having started my mission, George and Duncan looked on smirking as I spent the best part of a stifling hot afternoon digging out the root. Victorious, I now had to take it all the way back to M'sitwe.
‘Well, you’re on your own there,’ grinned Dunc. Determined, I heaved and lugged the huge heavy plant on the train and all the way back home across the country much to Duncan’s amusement. ‘The Great White Hunter’, he sarcastically remarked with absolute glee holding up his huge buck trophy. Now, back at home the plant had thrived, growing to huge proportions and gave enjoyment and happy memories to everyone when it literally burst into bloom every season with it’s shocking pink flowers.
I loved that garden. Never too manicured, it just had a life of it’s own, with nooks and crannies where you could hide out, or run around and build forts or Jacarandas and flamboyants to climb.
A poem I read describes the Rhodesian garden perfectly and could have been written for my Mum:
A Rhodesian Garden
In our garden there always grew
Shrubs and trees Rhodesians knew
Pride of India, a bamboo so high
It's tasselled fronds seemed to touch the sky.
Bougainvillea of colours rare
Mixed with Yesterday and Tomorrows scented air
Jacarandas, a Flamboyant or two
Dressed in their spring or summer hue.
Pointsettias and Petria side by side
The loveliest background for a bride
A feast of colour in the springtime breeze
Crowned above by the Msasa trees
For of all the trees nature in colour has dressed
The giant Msasas are the most blessed.
From the collection - Rhodesian Reverie
