Zambia World Wide

I understand the Jesuits are reputed to have said, "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man". The implication of this is that a child's personality and belief system are developed during the first seven, formative years of life, suggesting that these are pretty significant years for any individual. I don't know whether that is true - I think children can change a lot after their seventh birthday, and indeed I hope that what happens after the age of seven can still have a huge influence on what that child eventually becomes. I say "hope" because my own daughter was already seven when I adopted her, and I like to think that some of her better qualities could possibly be at least partially attributed to the way I brought her up from then on.

I was born in what was then the Commonwealth country of Northern Rhodesia on 3rd November 1956. It amazes me now to think how soon that was after the end of the Second World War, or "The War" as my parents used to call it. When you are ten, something that happened ten years ago not only sounds like it was a lifetime ago, it really was a lifetime ago! But when you are fifty, thinking of two events which were only eleven years apart, like the end of the war and my birth, you feel that one was hardly over when the other occurred.

My father was a policeman and my mother a teacher, and they both had the extreme good fortune, in my opinion, to be employed by the British government in the exciting developing African continent at a time when it was largely unspoilt and life was a great adventure. In those far gone days, there was no such thing as "gap year travels", because young people didn't have need of a year out of real life to experience other cultures. There were opportunities of real, paid employment in all corners of the British Empire for those with a pioneering spirit of adventure, and I like to think my sisters and I all inherited quite a large dose of that from having two parents with wanderlust in their genes - it could explain why we have variously lived in Singapore, South Africa and France!

Our family has treasured, flickering early cine film of us in those idyllic African days. My younger sister and I were both born in Livingstone, and there is footage of us close to the famous Victoria Falls, with wild baboons wandering free and the shimmering water rushing perilously close to where we are enjoying the sunshine. I would love to go back there, but suspect now there would be car parks and ticket offices and safety barriers and all the other paraphernalia of a world famous tourist attraction. But in those days, I suspect it was largely unchanged from the waterfall David Livingstone first laid his wondering eyes upon - how lucky my parents were to enjoy it in its natural state!

They lived and worked in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) for several years before I was born and for the first seven years of my life, although they did return "home" to Britain "on leave" several times during that period. I remember nothing at all of Livingstone, but do have some memories of life at No. 5 Police Camp in the copperbelt town of Mufulira, where I was living when I first started school; it was the first "home address" I ever memorised. I guess all memories of early childhood are idealised, and perhaps this is even more true if one is ripped from ones childhood home at the age of seven and never able to return to see the reality and put it into perspective. I think it is also true that the brain chooses to forget unpleasant childhood memories and only consciously retains the pleasant ones, so understandably, almost all my memories from that time are happy ones - with a few exceptions.