Gradually, we all noticed that my mother’s mood improved. We were so pleased to watch her regain some of her energy, her sense of humour and her liveliness. She wasn’t as sad. She was busy again and she looked better. She always dressed smartly for work, in pretty cotton dresses. Even at my young age, I always felt proud of my mother since she was young and pretty. I should imagine that she was excellent at her job because, although I didn’t appreciate this until I was much older, by which time I was just like her in so many ways, she was both conscientious and hard-working. Later she told me that she had eventually earned the respect of the locals who came into the accountant’s office. Many of these were Afrikaans-speaking farmers, not enamoured of anyone British, so this alone was a testament to her charm and efficiency. I know that my mother would have loved these social interactions, too.
Our life was still not ideal, but my mother was a central part of our family, and her mood affected us all. It was such a relief to us when she began to look and sound like her old self. However, we were still struggling with coming to terms with our new life, even though my mother was obviously happier than she had been at first. We didn’t know, of course, if this trend would continue, but we could but hope so. All we knew was that she wasn’t lying around listlessly on the sofa anymore.
We children certainly didn’t have any idea that underneath it all, my mother was still far from happy about our circumstances. She still hated living in the bush. We didn’t understand that our father couldn’t bear to see her distress, so much so that together they took a drastic decision, although they didn’t tell us children what was going to happen until the very last minute.
So it was that in March or April of 1959, we three children were almost shell-shocked to find ourselves helping to pack up our goods and chattels to head back to England. “Back to Ol’ Blighty,” a reference to smoky London, as my father would sometimes call it, or the “Thousand Dollar Cure”, as the locals called it, telling us in no uncertain terms that, like so many other immigrants, we were wasting our money, because within no time at all we would be coming back to Africa. “Africa tends to get under your skin”, they said to us. “It isn’t easy to leave all this space and sunshine behind,” we were told. “You’ll be back. Just you wait and see!”
They were so supremely confident in their predictions for us, but so were we. “Not us!”, we’d answer. Rule, Britannia! We were convinced that we were going to be different. We knew what we were doing. We were not wasting our money. We weren’t coming back. We couldn’t wait to leave. We were going home to England for good, saying farewell to Africa, for evermore……or so we all thought.
