Of course, we children didn’t have any say in the matter, but our parents did their best to explain that this time our lives would be different. We would be going to the city of Salisbury and wouldn’t be living in the bush. They promised John and me that we would be allowed to have bicycles. This was a huge lure. We could have a bike each?! Wow! That would be a first! I had wanted a bike ever since we’d arrived in Southern Rhodesia over two years previously but had never been allowed one. Looking back now, I can see that living in the bush with dirt roads, and tall grass everywhere, was hardly the best place for us children to have bicycles. Not only would we have disappeared immediately from parental sight, but there was simply nowhere to go, either. Our laneway was a long, rutted dirt track. We didn’t have local school friends to visit so what were we going to do with our bicycles? Just cycle round our unmade up back yard? I was jealous of the friend whose family we had met on board the ship going out to Southern Rhodesia, and who lived in a suburb of Salisbury. She’d had her own bicycle within no time at all. There were plenty of proper suburban roads around her neighbourhood, though. She could ride to visit her school friends nearby. I couldn’t do that.
Our family started packing suitcases, preparing to emigrate once more. This time, we didn’t have tea-chests to pack and send, though. We had been living in rented, furnished accommodation, so all we had was our clothing and personal items.
I will never forget that cold wet November day in 1959 when our family of five boarded a Viscount aircraft, and left England. It was the first time that we children and our mother had been on an airplane. The plane made stops in Rome in Italy, Wadi-Halfa in Sudan, then Entebbe in Uganda, and finally in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. I remember hating the cigarette smoke-filled cabin, the bumpy, weather-related jolts and swings, the tiny airports of Sudan and Uganda, with, once more, their red African soil and tin shacks.
So, we arrived in Salisbury, where my parents rented a small bungalow in Southerton, not far from the African township of Highfields. My parents had chosen to live in Southerton because it was so cheap, and because their long-time friends, Herbert and Bertha, lived next door. Herbert, who had emigrated from England at the same time as my father, also worked in the clerical department of Rhodesia Railways. Bertha was a stay-at-home mum looking after her two young children, so my parents probably thought that she could keep an eye on us three children next door when our parents were at work.
My mother began working as a telephone operator in the city, and my father was working, not only for Rhodesia Railways from 8am till 4pm, but also for two years from 5pm till midnight as a proofreader for the Rhodesia Herald newspaper. We hardly saw him.
