When I asked her later, how she had managed to do this, she said that she had played rounders at school. Really?! I didn’t know that. Why had she never mentioned it before? I was full of praise for her skill, though. We were so proud of her. I learned from this that my mother was always ready to take on a challenge, and that we should never underestimate her.
Once every few years, Lake Mac was no longer on the cards. My mother would decree that our family needed a “proper holiday”, which meant that, with any luck, we were going on a beach/seaside holiday to Beira, Mozambique. I should imagine that my father, who hated the idea of lying on a beach in the sun and who didn’t even enjoy swimming, could think of nothing worse. However, he could probably see the benefits to the family, and didn’t complain too much. My mother made all the reservations required.
So off we would go, to Beira, a long and dirty drive through the bush via Umtali (now called Mutare), in the Eastern Highlands of Southern Rhodesia, and across the border into Mozambique, heading towards the Indian Ocean. It was a long, dusty drive, but worth it, in the end, we thought, just to see those endless beaches of pristine golden sands and to frolic in the waves of the ocean. We could hardly wait to arrive.
Sometimes we went to Beira with friends who had children approximately the same ages as my two brothers and me. One such family lived in Salisbury, but another family had recently moved from Salisbury to Umtali, a small town about 150 miles away. My mother, who enjoyed the company of other people, must have thought it was easier to go with friends, because we children then had playmates.
“Going with friends” was open to interpretation, though, since, although this meant we would be going to Beira at the same time as another family, there the similarity ended. Whilst our friends stayed in a lovely seaside hotel offering full service, we camped out in a small cabin on the sandy beach, far cheaper than any hotel. No mod cons, no bar service, no meals served up in style, just a communal water tap on the beach somewhere nearby. The sand was so hot outside that we couldn’t walk on it without first putting on our flipflops. Of course, we traipsed sand everywhere inside and outside. We must have consumed untold amounts of it, too, because sand got into everything, everywhere, all the time.
But we children didn’t care! We were thrilled at the prospect of going to the seaside, to the Indian Ocean, no less. What could be better to us, who were used to living in a flat, in a small city, in a land-locked country?
“Beira, here we come!”, we’d holler, hardly able to contain our excitement.
My father, I now realize, must have dreaded it. This was not his idea of fun at all.
