Back To The Fifties!

Hi – blog time again; hope I haven’t confused everyone by posting another excerpt from An English Boy’s Wanderings in Africa. From Travel to African Adventure to Werewolves and back to Travel – hopefully, not too diverse. Another random insight to my time in the fifties, see it for what it is; a small piece of a bigger story which, as usual, is in a constant state of flux. However, despite the confusion and much shaking of heads, most of you are still here and I thank you for that...

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From;  An English Boy’s Wanderings in Africa:

... ‘Thought you were asleep?’

Shook my head and grinned at my mother. Dad was snoring.

‘Too excited. Don’t want to miss the coal mines. The man said seven o’clock so we can’t be far away from the station.’ I slid off my bunk and muscled in close to the window.

‘Hopefully, your aunt and uncle will be waiting for us. A friend of theirs is bringing his car to the station; a shooting-brake I think? Lots of room for our luggage.’

The carriages rocked against their couplings, as a child’s wooden snake our train hinged its way round bends and clattered through cuttings.

I looked down – at the ground alongside the train. Maybe I would see some animals.

‘Are there schools in Wankie?’

‘I should imagine so.’

‘What if they all speak African?’

‘What if you start making sense, Jeffrey.’

To me, it was sense. African kids, seeing as they were from Africa would surely speak and write in African?

‘Why not, English kids speak English?’ How would my mother know? She lifted up the table and secured the strap. The stainless steel wash basin with its single, cold water tap leered up at me. I was being punished for my cheek. Sounds from under the train came up through the plughole. Mother dropped my toothbrush and tube of Colgate into the basin. They rattled round like pebbles then settled at the bottom. There was still some toothpaste on my brush from last night.

‘Clean your teeth and have a wash before we reach the station. Rinse the flannel out when you’ve finished and put the soap back its container.’

There were hardly any trees now, just short bushes and dried out elephant grass. Clicks and clacks over points and joints in the rails – further apart as our speed slackened. A road had been built alongside the railway line. A black Morris Minor drove on it; sunlight flashed off its chrome bumpers, our doctor had a car just like it. On the ground all the rocks were black – the soil, if that’s what it was, was black as well. A black man on a yellow bike smiled and waved to me. I thought about my cat back in England, then the memory went all fuzzy and I forgot about it. Coal dust – everything was covered in glittering lakes of black, Wankie gold.

Mother saw them first. ‘There they are!’ she chirruped and leaned out through the window. Their friends were with them; Ron and Hilda, originally from the same town back in Blighty – scrutinising every incoming carriage window for familiar faces. Uncle Ron (not my real uncle) and my uncle Vince were both decked out in beige safari suits and floppy hats – Ron, tall with a big belly, my uncle, shorter; also with a belly, but not as big. Tweedle Dum and Dee-like they just stood there on the platform, grinning. Hilda, roofed over by a sun-battered pith helmet and dressed in khaki shirt and Rupert bear pants stood compliantly behind her man. For whatever her reasons, like some myopic owl she stared at me through thick, coke-bottle glasses. Aunt Ann was as I remembered her in England in the summer time; done up with bright red lipstick, flowery cotton frock and trademark straw hat. A little unsteady on her feet; the excitement of new arrivals, the heat and the eternal lure of the gin bottle had convinced her to seek out early solace. Her arms were brown and covered in freckles.

Mother waved the end off her cigarette. Dad, with sweat patches springing out between his shoulder blades and a curse from between his lips, set to the arduous task of dragging suitcases down from the spare bunk. The rest of our chattels were locked away in the baggage car; cabin trunks, crammed solid with our belongings, four feet long and still covered in ‘not-needed-on-the-voyage’ travel stickers. Besides bedding and towels and four sets of second-hand curtains, mother’s treasures were in them – clocks that didn’t work and her plethora of knitting gear, brass knick-knacks and family hand-me-downs her sisters had been keen to get rid of.

Father’s bête noir was the dreaded sea chest; a wood and metal abomination held together with leather straps, big catches and brass locks. Weighing in at a couple of hundredweight it would grin demonically at all who tried to lift it. As some possessed, pirate’s plunder box, gleefully it waited for him in the dark confines of the baggage car.

A hand came in through the window and dragged me over for a welcome to Wankie kiss. I suffered my Aunt Ann’s full repertoire of ‘haven’t you grown’ remarks before being released. Like my mother, aside from gin and tonics, Aunt Ann’s first love was cigarettes. Permanently haloed in smoke and juniper fumes she swore to them being her only successful defence against mosquitoes and dengue fever.

Our suitcases, cardigans and assorted paper bags were fed through the window, then we trooped off the train and for the next five minutes were set upon by huggers, kissers and hand shakers.

Dad hugged back and nodded his head, sweat trickled down from his hairline; already his white, English face was streaked with coal dust. There were blue lines under his eyes, painted there by fatigue and worry; the meagre sum of money we had left England with had almost run out, his clothes now permanently scrummaged up from living out of suitcases. Another rag-tag migrant family had come to Wankie to make a living from digging out coal – tricked from our green and pleasant land by his brother’s promise of an African paradise we had slipped to the very back of nowhere. Now, instead, we were gathered in murderous sunlight, standing inside of what my father saw as the hottest, blackest valley in all of Africa’s hell.

Uncle Vince grinned up at his brother. ‘You made it then. The heat’s not so bad, you’ll get used to it.’

I thought my dad was going to hit him, then, calmed by mother’s silent plea for temperance he sweated out a matching grin and shook his brother’s hand. A year apart had healed their last sibling rift, enough for them to share a house and smile at one another, a situation that filled my mother with trepidation, but we had no choice; sleeping outside in the veld with lions and coal would never have worked...

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