Zambia World Wide

I remember, first and foremost, sunshine, and lots of it. In those days we knew nothing of holes in ozone layers or skin cancer, so we were encouraged to spend as much time as possible out in the sun with limbs and faces exposed. My recollection is that, because of this hot sun, we started school at 8am and finished at 1pm, leaving the whole afternoon to be spent at the swimming baths. Of course, that cannot be true, we must have spent many afternoons doing other things, but I particularly remember the swimming baths, which had a fountain in the middle which only the very brave would venture beneath. I vaguely remember my father trying to teach me to swim, wearing "water wings", and also remember one time cutting my big toe on what was presumed to be glass on the bottom of the pool and having to be taken to the first aid post. It was probably the tiniest little puncture wound, but there was definitely blood, and to a child that seems serious - I also thought at the time that something underwater had bitten me, which was a frightening notion.

I remember my mother coming in to wake us every morning with freshly squeezed oranges. No, not just the juice! My memory is that there were the glasses of fresh juice, but then she also brought in the squeezed oranges, and we could eat their flesh once we had drunk the juice. I have no idea why she would have squeezed out the juice then offered us both - perhaps we sometimes refused the actual oranges? But it felt like a wonderful way to be woken!

I don't think she took us to the market with her every day - she probably didn't go every day. But I do have a memory of going to a bustling, noisy market with her one morning, as a treat, and being thrilled at all the sights, sounds and smells that surrounded us. Of course, my memory is that all the stalls were run by black people, but that would not have struck me as at all unusual at the time. My world was populated by black people and orange people (I don't ever remember being familiar with the term "white"), and that seemed perfectly normal to me. In our house, there were black men with biblical names who worked for my parents. The one who helped my mother in the house was referred to as the "houseboy", and he lived with his family in a small white house at the bottom of our garden. The one who worked in the garden was called the "garden boy", and I had and have no idea where he lived. Neither of these people looked like boys in my understanding of the word, they were fully grown men and the one I remember best, Samson, I remember as having a grey beard, and I knew he had a family because I had met his daughter, Martha, occasionally when I looked out of the back window of the garage, also at the bottom of the garden. His family had once come into our house when somebody threw a teargas cannister onto a bonfire in our vicinity and it was impossible to breathe properly outdoors; the windows of the houseboy's house had no glass in them so afforded no protection. I'm not sure how these servants were paid by my parents, but I do remember my mother boiling up great saucepans of what we called "mealy meal" for them in our kitchen - and "mealies" were our name for corn on the cob, which grew abundantly all around.