When I was Five

When I was five I sat in a plane waiting on the runway. Leaving behind everything I knew, and you standing waving at me. I tried to stay, to open the window so the plane couldn’t take off. My dad’s job was over and it was time to return to England. Everyone was going as it wasn’t safe there anymore for the VSOs or vets or scientists like my dad but I didn’t know that then. So there we sat on the tarmac and I didn’t want to go because Africa and Juba was every experience I could remember, every precious memory I had ever made.

When I was five I played under the tree on the swing with Ed and Ben and waited for the warm African rain. We dug for treasure, built the sea and went exploring our world. We could go as far as the fence but not outside. It was a big perimeter, guarded by a watchman. We went to see him once, but that was outside and we were in trouble when they found us. But we were Ok and I can still see him now in my head, skinning a snake with his wife sat just outside the hut, smiling.

When the rains came Ed and Ben dared me to climb over the fence to play in the puddle, they took their boots off and I told them there might be snakes. They teased me for not being brave but I didn’t want to be in trouble again so I stood and watched them, until my mum came to fetch me home. She gave me chocolate for being good; she had seen us from the house. Ed and Ben’s mum had seen us too but all they got was sent to bed with no tea. We used to play together a lot except in the morning when they had school and my mum taught me at home. We wrote stories together and I learnt to read and count. Then in the afternoons we would play. I would grab my bear and jump on Nellie, my trusty tricycle, and race to their house and we’d pretend the rest of the day away.

We used to travel to town in the Landrover, a proper one not like the posh big cars they have become, but a rough, tough rugged machine used to bumping along dusty tracks. I sat in the middle at the front. In the town people thought I was funny, I was probably one of the only white children they had seen and I had a teddy bear, which they thought was strange. My mum told me that once there had been a witch doctor dancing along behind us and a crowd pointing and staring, she said she’d explained to me that it was because they’d never seen a teddy bear before. To this I replied ‘well Teddy Robinson doesn’t like it’. I guess it wasn’t a town as you’d know it now but a market place where people would take things to sell or trade with a few permanent buildings around the square, including the slaughter house. Everything came in a newspaper cone including medicines from the pharmacy. Opposite the market there were round huts with straw roofs. It was a bustling place, noisy, dusty, alive. Once my dad came home excited with a special treat, I was pleased and asked ‘what is it daddy?’ He’d given me an apple.

I used to help my mum with the cooking. We would put the flour into the freezer to make the weevils go to sleep before we could sift them out and bake. We would have to boil and filter all the water and we lived with the big tower filtration system sat in the corner of the kitchen. The first drink of the morning was hot and I have been drinking coffee for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes we went camping at a place called Gumbri where mum was always worried I would fall right down into the toilet and be lost. Once we stayed in a tent by a water hole and saw all the animals trouping down at dusk, in the orange glow of the sun, and it was exciting until I was lying under the canvas between my mum and dad and I heard the laugh of the hyena so loud, so close.

I remember the man who used to give his Landrover a drink from a shiny silver teapot, just like the one my granny later taught me to brew tea in, and how it was years before my dad chuckled as he explained it was only water. Once we were looking after his house and we found a spider and dad caught it in a toothpaste box and I was worried when it bit him but he was ok.

I remember coming home one night and finding the garage door open and my duck Gertrude missing, presumed eaten, and how there it seemed normal but here you would be horrified. She was the last in a long line of strays that we had somehow adopted but that later disappeared. Ed told me how the African’s would catch hedgehogs and cook them in clay and once it was baked hard the spines would come off easily and I wondered if that is what had happened to Philip. Not that it bothered me, in fact when we were visiting on leave I shouted to my dad ‘quick daddy there’s a chicken! Catch it and we can have it for tea’. The other passengers of the Bluebell railway were needless to say stunned by this outburst.

It wasn’t all good of course, when dad was sick with malaria, the red ants came marching in single file climbing up the bedposts to pay their respects and I was frightened. It was scary when people were sick as there wasn’t really a hospital and we relied on the vet and the scientists to diagnose illness and then go to the pharmacy for a cone of medicine. But in three years we were lucky, both my parents survived malaria and I was never properly ill. My dad once had to drive someone to the nearest medical facility for a snake bite and everyone was in a panic.

But it was where I felt safe. I knew about life there. I had grown up watching the nomads herd their cattle and the watchmen skin snakes. Dust tracks, warm African rain, and the sound of hyena laughing into the night were normal to me. In England everything was strange, the noise, the traffic, blocks of flats, big red busses and school. Suddenly we were back and my cat was there waiting but for a long time I just wanted to go home.