10. Not Out Of Africa

Of course I had the outfit. What fool would go to Africa without a long swishing skirt and cowboy boots? I believed I was all set. During the week I stood before thirty children and tried to teach them things I thought I knew; the alphabet, how to spell “definitely”. In my hut I learnt to make dinner with one pot, a relentless vegetable stew that Willy eschewed for beer at the pub with the friends he’d made and I hadn’t. I marked workbooks with the pen that never had to write upside down. I listened to Simon & Garfunkel sing, ‘Homeward Bound’ and the tap dance of lizards on the roof. At weekends I ran off to Harare at the expense of a friend of my father’s, who owned a large hotel in the city. Photographs show us, the friends I had made, with white towels like turbans on our heads in plush rooms and beside a rooftop swimming pool drinking wine, aware but not ashamed of our privilege. Letters written home to my parents are gushingly dramatic; an awful lot of, Missing you terribly and, There’s something in the air here making all emotion doubly powerful. Over the Easter holidays I toured Botswana with another friend and her family. Throughout the first and second term the White priest with his picnic chairs and champagne came and went. My boots leaked and I caught bilharzia. The pills didn’t work and I caught malaria. Milk warmed on the paraffin stove gave me brucellosis. The long skirt which swished so pleasingly through the grass picked up tick-bite fever. And one morning while readying to walk from my hut to the low school buildings across the way a pain in my abdomen knocked me to the concrete floor. I remember someone running for the man who owned a car and being driven to the town where the white priest lived. The priest knew a surgeon, a mass of wild Scottish hair who was drunk from midday to collapse but catch him between hangover and beginning again and he could do all right under bright lights. In a hospital he removed my burst appendix. I woke in the priest’s house hours later, my left arm black with ants that had found me sleeping, a scar above my right hip, a bottle of whisky on the table beside me.The Literary Obsessive is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe