At the age of six I was taken in
a Morris Eight Series E (1939 model, four-door, to export specification, dark
blue and black) the 1500 miles from Bulawayo to Cape Town, and have ever
afterwards wanted to recreate the feeling of excitement and freedom that opened
up with each new horizon. An emotion
snatched at again as an adult driving through Israel or New Mexico.... But can one ever recapture the awe of a
child? Of course not, for one learns to
anticipate and to worry and to doubt and to censor. Once I experienced pure excitement – what’s round the corner... and
the next... and the next.... And
thereafter life became a quest to recapture that exhilaration, the dream of a
beacon shining ahead – even now, when my neurotic dread of travelling has to be
overcome with (crumbling) teeth gritted.
I must have contracted the bug as
a two-year-old when my mother checked the car over (1938 Morris Eight Series II
Tourer) and said: “We’re going to go and stay with Aunt Rhoda.” We’d have driven out from Umtali* (my
birthplace), wheezing over Christmas Pass, bumbling along the narrow strip road
through Rusape and Marandellas for the 170 miles to Salisbury, every now and
again pulling over for an oncoming car (most definitely not playing chicken) so that the right wheels were on the left
tarmac strip, picking a place where there wasn’t a hole to crash into... and
perhaps there’d be a spurt of dust, or we’d pull over courteously for a big,
swaying American car, to overtake – a dust-brown Chevvie Fleetline or a green
Ford V8.
The first time I
wholly remember such excitement was in late 1947. Before the holiday I’d contracted measles; my
father took the car down and Mother and I went by train a week later; but we
came back by car. Then in 1949 (going both
ways) and 1951 and 1953. We’d come down
from Bulawayo through Gwanda and West Nicholson, stop perhaps (if we’d started
late) at Tod’s, with its thatched rondavels and oil-engined lighting plant –
the lights flicking to the plod of the single cylinder – and onward over Beit
Bridge (enduring the rude and resentful Afrikaans customs men), through the
Transvaal, unfamiliar foreign territory....
Messina, Wylie’s Poort (sit on the verandah of the hotel at the top,
looking over the escarpment at the dead straight dusty ribbon of a road across
the plain and over the horizon), Louis Trichardt, the Adam & Eve Motel,
Pietersburg, Potgietersrus, Nylstroom, Naboomspruit, Warmbad, Pienaarsrivier,
Hamanskraal. The sheer music of those
names! At one of these meccas the
electric fuel pump shorted; there was a circus in town and we saw to our
amazement elephants wandering down the street (fancy! elephants in Africa!),
the only thing to relieve boredom as we waited four hours for new points and
diaphragm, my father lying on the dusty gutter (why put the damn thing down
there beneath the frame?). Another year
– which? – we stopped at an old hotel at one of the dorps beginning with P and
there was a white-and-blue jug and basin for washing, the bathroom itself down
the lino-ed passage; it was better than the hotel with a bizarre shower,
surrounded by plastic curtain, in the middle of the bedroom, leaking, smelling
of mould, their first stab at an en suite.
Yes, how to
recapture that excitement! The Nile,
Petra, the bus to New Delhi, the view across the bay from Sorrento towards
Mount Vesuvius? Forget it.
Twenty and thirty
years later I moved to Australia and to England. Not quite the same dynamo of excitement – just
considered planning. Soul unwilling in the first instance, clouded with apprehension
in the second. But I am very lucky to
have lived three lives and pity (for the most part) those with but one.
Oh, and after
Hamanskraal Father would insist on grinding around east of Jo’burg, where he
dared not venture (congested concrete jungle), so another litany: Benoni,
Boksburg, Germiston, Randfontein or Springs, Brakpan, Nigel – we must have used
different routes. Oh, Potchefstroom. Don’t forget Potchefstroom.
And don’t forget
the cars. I am an expert on 1949 American models,
each one imprinted on the eyeball, Plymouth, Dodge and De Soto; Buick, Pontiac
and Oldsmobile; Mercury; Studebaker, Willys, Kaiser Fraser, Packard, Hudson....
I want a Hudson,
a wide, floating Hudson.
A reader, too, can travel,
enjoying new vistas and perspectives in print, and make sense of it. I am a reader still.
* I’ve used the old names. You
can match up Mutare, Marondera and Harare, and take my word that the other
Zimbabwean ones are unchanged. Then tell
me what the South African ones are.
