My parents must have known that living so near to an enormous African township was not the safest place to be. As it was, Southern Rhodesia had 250,000 Whites and four million Blacks, so we Europeans were hugely outnumbered. When our friends and neighbours, Herbert and Bertha, upped and left for Vancouver, Canada, that must have been a hard blow for my parents, too. We had all come to Southern Rhodesia to better our lives and now they were leaving to move onto pastures new. They were unable to sell their house, so, like many other Europeans of that time, they simply walked out leaving the house and its contents standing there, uninhabited. Forfeiting the money involved was a small price to pay for security, a new job, a better life in a safer setting, I suppose.
What did my parents do in the face of so many challenges? They knew that John, who was brilliantly gifted in the sciences and mathematics, would be better suited to attending Alan Wilson Technical High School in Salisbury, instead of coming to Lord Malvern with me. So, they did what they had done before, always having our best interests at heart, though. They decided we had to move!
What? Again?! Where to, now? This time, our family would be moving into the centre of town, to Salisbury, where we would rent a flat, and where we three children would be starting yet again at different schools. How many schools had I been to by now? I felt as if were beginning to lose count.
So, it came to pass.
We moved over the Christmas school holidays, so that we three children could start the new academic year in January 1961. At least, I thought to myself, we hadn’t moved to another country. We were somewhat familiar with Salisbury which was comforting. Although it would be a huge change for five of us to be in a small flat, as against in a house with a garden, I didn’t think I would mind the lack of garden because I was so pleased with the idea of living in a city.
By then we had been back in Southern Rhodesia for just over a year, but John and I still didn’t have our promised bikes. I knew that we didn’t really need bikes because we were so centrally located and could walk everywhere. But a promise is a promise, and John and I felt as if our parents hadn’t kept their word to us. In the end, John was to get his bike a year or so later, when we moved from this first flat to a larger one in a different part of town further away from his school. However, I could still walk to my school albeit from a different direction, so still no bike for me. I felt as if I would never get a bike from my parents. So, I started saving my pocket money, which wasn’t very much. At that time, we were given by our parents every week as many pennies as we were old. I received 13 pennies, John 11, and Peter, 7.
It took me several years of saving up to buy my first ever bicycle. I was 18 by then, and about to head to university. It was probably a crazy purchase, really, since I couldn’t take my bike with me, but I loved my bicycle on principle, if nothing else. The irony is that I didn’t really have much opportunity to use it, before it met an untimely end when Peter borrowed my bike one day, writing it off in a terrible accident which almost killed him, too.
