Standing in the Storm: Living with Faith and Cancer

Colouring Within the Lines

Leather shoes could be heard slapping the polished concrete of the hospital floor as the doctor came sprinting down the corridor. He had been out for dinner that evening when the call came that he should come quickly. Still in suit and tie, he rushed through the hospital to the maternity unit. Finding my mother in the last throes of labour, he managed to swing his tie over his shoulder just in time to catch me as I made my entrance into the world. At least, that’s how the story goes, according to my mother.

It’s one of those stories that gets brought up at family barbecues or at weddings. The sort that make me smile politely yet leaves me feeling I can’t quite contribute, as I can’t remember any part of it. So I smile and nod, yet quietly ponder, ‘Did it really happen like that?’ But who am I to question the fond stories my mother tells? It is the story of my birth. My first breath. The beginning of an amazing adventure.

The world I was born into was an uncertain and changing one. The year was 1979 and there was a civil war raging in the country of my birth, Zimbabwe.
Southern Rhodesia was established as a British colony in the south of Africa in the 1920s after previously being purchased by the British South African Company who were prospecting for gold. In 1965, the white minority government declared independence from the British. After this, the country was known as Rhodesia. The African majority strongly objected to this arrangement and so a brutal fifteen-year civil war ensued.

The year of my birth saw an end to white minority rule as a new government was created and the country renamed Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. However, this did not last long as it failed to receive international recognition.

It wasn’t until 1980, when the war ended and new elections were held under British and Commonwealth supervision, that the new nation of Zimbabwe was born.
My early years saw me growing up and taking my first steps in the capital city, Harare. This is also where, three years after I arrived, my sister, Leigh, was born.
Shortly after the war, my dad took the deputy head teacher’s post at a primary school situated in the north-east of the city.

I grew up in peace time. Rationing was still biting hard and things were in short supply, but I didn’t know any different. People were friendly and life was good. Times were changing, and the country’s prosperity was increasing.

I attended an infants’ school that was just a walk over the playing field away from home, as we lived on the school grounds. I remember my teacher used to knock on the chalkboard with the wooden handle of the board rubber and ‘magically’ there would be a knock in return. She told us it was the fairies who were knocking, and my six-year-old mind believed her.

Because we lived on site, I would run around the school grounds freely out of hours, happily occupying myself with building dams in the puddles, climbing trees and having conversations with the man who drove the school tractor. I would help our gardener harvest avocado pears the size of pineapples from the massive tree in our garden. He used a long bamboo pole with a bent coat hanger at one end that resembled a hook and another coat hanger attached underneath the hook that was in a hoop shape. The hoop had an old fertiliser bag attached to it so that as an avocado’s stem was tugged by the hook it would fall into the bag and be saved from smashing into a million pieces on the ground below.

It was from one of these tall trees in the garden that a vital piece of African playground equipment was hung. A couple of ropes secured to a branch held an old car tyre that had been turned inside out and fashioned into a seat with two arching handles where the rope attached. A swing.

Occasionally I had the opportunity to indulge in a treat. Counting up my coins, I would walk to the school gate with my mother, as a particular ice-cream man knew this was a good spot to sell his wares. Wearing their dark-blue uniforms, which consisted of a floppy hat, a long-sleeved button-up shirt and grey trousers with a blue stripe down the side, the army of ice-cream men and women would cycle around the city on their specially adapted three-wheeled bicycles. Attached above the two smaller front wheels was an insulated box filled with ice creams and dry ice. This meant that when the box was opened it was always accompanied by a puff of dry ice smoke, which added to the drama and pleasure of the event. This particular ice-cream man was on to a good thing as he sold quite a few ice creams at the school gates over the years.

I loved the joy an ice-cream man brought to people. So much, in fact, that all through my primary school years it was my life’s ambition to become one myself one day.
In 1987, my dad was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a headmaster and to open a brand-new school about an hour’s drive to the north of Harare.
On our first visit to the location of where the new school would be built, my mother packed a feast for the epic journey: sandwiches, cola in glass bottles, boiled sweets and a wet flannel tucked away in a plastic bag. We all climbed into the family car, a dark blue Renault 4, which had a gear stick in the shape of an upturned L coming out of the dashboard, and not much suspension. So we jiggled about as we drove along.

It was exciting, going to visit the place that would become our new home, not knowing what to expect. After driving for what seemed like forever, we finally stopped opposite a small, rundown building on the side of the road. It was a simple structure made of brick, with a tin roof. It stocked some household essentials as well as alcohol. Out in the countryside of Zimbabwe, these stores were the corner shop and the local bar rolled into one. It was also not uncommon to see chickens scratching in the dust outside these establishments, as well as some people waiting for the bus who had been there for a day or two.

We got out of the car and stepped over a thin length of a barbed wire fence that was about knee-high. The elephant grass towered above my head, and my sister’s, as we carved our way through the virgin African bush. There was also an abundance of msasa trees in this area, whose leaves turn a variety of rusty reds and yellows in autumn.

After walking for a while, not really being able to see much as the grass was so tall, we stopped and Dad said, ‘Here is where the office is going to be,’ and, ‘Here is where the dormitories will go.’ After venturing deeper into the grass, he stopped and proudly announced, ‘This is where our new house will be built.’
It was hard to imagine that a school would rise out of the ground on this spot; the tall grass giving way to manicured lawns, office blocks, classrooms, playgrounds, a swimming pool, tennis courts, playing fields and dormitories. But it did.

In 1988, the school opened its doors and my sister and I were two of the original eighty-six founding members of Barwick School.
As well as receiving a great education, I had many adventures there.

One of these was an early flurry into the world of the entrepreneur. In my upper primary school years, I set up a small business raising and selling chickens. It operated out of our utility room and the chicken coop was erected next to the carport. I would buy fifty chicks that were a day old, and then raise them into fully fledged adult birds. The gardener helped and was paid in kind; he would get a couple of chickens at the end of that brood. It was good fun and I learned quite a few things about running a business along the way.

Being located out in the ‘bush’, as Zimbabweans would call it, the wilds of Africa were quite literally on our doorstep. I’m not talking about lions sleeping on the patio or elephants roaming through the garden. You would need to go to a safari park to encounter animals like that. But you did get some amazing wildlife.

Around Christmas-time in particular, a type of beetle would emerge in its thousands – hence the name ‘Christmas beetles’. Most were about the same size and shape of a peanut but you would occasionally find some giant-sized ones about the size of a domino piece. They would all swarm around the lights at night and quite a few would die, so you would need to sweep them up in the morning.

There were also several close encounters with deadly snakes, like the time when a black mamba had hidden itself underneath the piano in our hallway and my dad had to dispatch it with a golf club. Or the time when the security guards came running to our house to fetch help because they had encountered a six-metre-long green mamba in one of the trees of the school. Eventually it was scared off and it slithered away into the bush without harming anyone. Then there was the time when a farmer and some of his workforce arrived in a lorry. It pulled up on the school field and dumped a massive python onto the grass. It had just eaten a large antelope – you could see its hooves and legs pressing through from inside the enormous snake’s body – so the farmer thought the children might want to have a look. We did!

My interest in music and singing was also taking hold. I have loved listening to music and singing for as long as I can remember. At primary school I was part of the school choir. One highlight was when the choir all climbed into the school bus and went to Harare, in 1991, to a recording studio for a day. Our choir mistress was recording a song and wanted the school choir to sing on the recording. It was an amazing experience. I still recall her telling us that the day was going to be very special, and that we should do our best to enjoy the experience because not many of us would get the opportunity to sing in a recording studio again. The studio housed a couple of soundproofed rooms, a mixing desk and a reel-to-reel recorder. I thoroughly enjoyed the process and hoped that it would not be the last time I set foot in a recording studio.

I was having piano lessons. I did not enjoy them very much and I hardly ever did any practising. As a result, progress was tough and extremely limited, which in turn did not really inspire me to enjoy the process more. However, at that age I was in no position to complain. Or perhaps I did complain but I didn’t manage to get out of it.
It was near the end of my primary education that my mother had a chat with the piano teacher and arranged for me to have a go at learning to play the guitar instead. I had been given a nylon-stringed guitar as a present, so I had something to play on. Having no previous experience of playing a guitar, I had my first lesson. It was hard. I just couldn’t get the idea of how to strum, and my fingers were no good at making the chord shapes and most certainly weren’t able to press the strings down hard enough. It was a disaster. I remember hating it and I knew that the teacher felt just as frustrated. She told my mother that I would never be able to play the guitar – which is ironic as now I play the guitar as part of my career. In a rage, the guitar got thrown to the back of my wardrobe, never to see the light of day for many years.

One of my annual highlights growing up was going on one of my father’s Adventure Tours. Children who were just about to enter their final year of primary school spent a weekend at Adventure Tour, based at the school. However, it was a weekend unlike any other. Everyone was split into teams that were called ‘patrols’ and competed by doing various challenges.

My dad had spent the previous months preparing, and there was an impressive ropes course constructed within the trees – suspended car tyres that moved as you clambered through, rope bridges and other obstacles that concluded with a rapid descent down a zip line. Each patrol had a T-shirt that showed off their team’s colour. They also had fun screen-printing the Adventure Tour logo and their patrol name onto it in an art lesson in the weeks leading up to the event.

Each patrol was given a set ration of food. It was up to them how they distributed, cooked and used the food over the weekend. We cooked in our patrols over open fires that we had to collect wood for, build and light. We also had to do our own washing up. We slept in sleeping bags under the stars, or in the school hall if it was raining.

Other activities included things like how fast the patrol could change the tyre of a car, or the whole team had to climb a tree and then proceed to build and light a fire in the tree in order to boil some water and make the supervising teacher a cup of tea. Another activity was using various tyre tubes, ropes and planks of wood to construct a raft in order to transport one member of the team who had been designated the ‘injured’ person. The objective was to get them safely across the length of the pool without getting them wet.

All this was great fun and taught us a lot about teamwork, communication, risk and adventure.

Attending the same school where your father is the headmaster and your mother is a teacher has its challenges. I really wanted to get things right and to be ‘good’. I understood that I had to set an example, as other children would be looking at me as the son of the headmaster to see how I did things. It was for this reason that I tried my best to always do the right thing, to always ‘colour within the lines’.

Despite this pressure, life was good. The school hall was impressive and had a steeply sloping roof to one side. It overlooked the Great Dyke mountain range on the other side of the valley, and I would often catch myself looking at this view and thinking how lucky I was to be growing up in a place like that.

By this time, the country had entered a golden age. Crops were flourishing and were being exported all over the world. There was plenty of food on the shelves of the supermarkets too; people would get excited about discovering new and exotic things that were imported

from foreign countries, which were starting to appear in the more affluent areas of the cities. Tourists were visiting in droves and the country’s infrastructure was working well. There was running water in the taps, rubbish was collected weekly, hospitals had medicines and there was electricity.

Now, this is not to say that the problem of poverty was solved. It most certainly was not. There were still people who were poor, people who begged on the streets and would offer to look after your car in the supermarket car park in exchange for a ‘tip’ of a few coins when you returned.

In parts of the countryside, massive farms employed workforces of hundreds, who were given healthcare, housing and education for their children. But there were other areas where the land was not as productive and the rains not as plentiful. Here you would find mud and pole huts with their characteristic cylindrical exteriors and straw roofs that looked like traditional conical Chinese hats perched on top of them.

Life was hard here, yet you would be greeted with massive smiles. Hope was not lost.