My dress is black. Modest. Plain. With long sleeves and a mid-length skirt. He’s wearing a tie and a grey suit. I notice the faintest of pin stripes running from head to toeโa minute but extravagant detail. Itโs only the corsage at our breasts that suggest this is a special day. Our special day. He reaches for my hand and we smile as the camera clicks, sealing our togetherness. I smile long after the moment passes.
That was 1947. In 1950 we got on the boat train at Waterloo Station en route to Zambia in service of the South African General Mission (SAGM). It was a Thursday and the time was 9:20am. Life never looked the same again.
Grey skies opened up to a wide blue expanse that swallowed heart and soul the moment of exposure.
From boat to plane to lorryโฆ to home. Brick and thatch, without ceilings. At night, bats flew above our heads. There were spiders on the walls and ants on the floors. Sometimes snakes would crawl through the open door and hide under the tin ant guard around the wainscoting.
Gas lamps lit the night, casting other-worldly shadows that remained even after sleep.
The kitchen had an old-fashioned wood burning stove that baked bread and boiled water. We bathed in an oval-shaped tin tub filled with water from a 4-gallon paraffin tin on the stove, topped up with cold water. Chesiwe would walk to the river a quarter of a mile away to fetch us water each day.
Mosquitos were relentless. Neither wire nor toppers, high legged boots nor quinine pills staved off the Malaria. We got it. It got us.
Hearts in hands we offered ourselves to the land.
He arrived two days after his baby girl fought her way into the thick African climateโat a doctorโs home 185 miles from the Mission Station. It was far. His feet were tired. Swollen with heat and pressure.ย He clambered onto the old bicycle with rickety alignment and no breaks, pushing his right foot down, then his left, he struggled forward on this tortured piece of apparatus. Minute after minute. Lost in the vastness of the landscape; tree after tree, stone after stone.
Grains of sand filtering time through the agony of desperation.
It was not enough.
Another time, another daughter. He was there. And then a son, 25 December 1955. Born at a hospital in the East End of London and whisked home before the grey got in.
We sent them away so we could work.
Back and forth. There more than here. I cried for them when no one looked.
We tried to make our children wear shoes but they liked to run with their feet on the ground. Sometimes the jiggers got into their skin. If the grubs werenโt removed, their feet would become crippled. We removed them.
Time after time.
I am old now. The moments come to me frequently and infrequently, sometimes in a haze and other times as clear as day. Eons in the past or mere minutes ago. I canโt always tell who is who or when is when. But I know the smell, the sound, the sun, the soil. It lives in me.
And I in it.
Author & Storyteller: Andrea Zanin
This post is dedicated to my granny.
Andrea is a writer, wife, mother and dreamer; also the author of this website. She moved to London in 2006 to earn ยฃs, travel, see bands and buy 24-up Dr Martensโwhich she did, and then ended up staying. Andrea lives in North London with her husband (also a Saffa) and five children. She loves this grand old city but misses her home and wishes her children could say โlekkerโ (like a South African) and knew what a โkhokiโ is.
