A Raindrop in the Ocean: The Extraordinary Life of a Global Adventurer
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A Raindrop in the Ocean: The Extraordinary Life of a Global Adventurer
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781785630385 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eye Books |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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A Raindrop In The Ocean
The Life Of A Global Adventurer
By Michael Dobbs-Higginson
Eye Books Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Michael Dobbs-HigginsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78563-038-5
CHAPTER 1
Boyhood in the African Bush
It was a hot morning on the high-veld and I was in my usual garb of a pair of shorts and virtually nothing else, about to go off into the bush with one of the cattle herders, Twalika – my favourite, as he was always patient in explaining the ways of the bush and the wildlife that inhabited it. There were snakes everywhere, and I knew it was important to watch out for the puff adders that enjoyed basking in the sun while they lay in wait for small animals on the paths around my grandfather's farm. Unlike most other snakes, they were too sluggish to slither away, but they were not slow to bite, and their venom could easily kill a small boy. Nevertheless, six years old and fearless, I liked to run everywhere barefoot, and today was no exception. With a spear in my hand and my fox terrier, Toki, running on ahead, we set out on the path through my grandfather's tobacco fields. The rows of squat green plants were just coming into flower and the sweet scent of the pink blooms perfumed the air.
A couple of fields away lay the nearest of the five villages on my grandfather's land. I often liked to sneak away on Saturday nights to sit with the village children at the kraal, the centre of the mud and lathe houses, and watch the adults drink skokiaan, a vile-smelling home-brewed liquor that made them laugh loudly and dance. The men of the village were out in the fields at this time in the morning, but there were a few children roaming around, and an old woman sat in the doorway of her grass-thatched hut cutting vegetables into a stew-pot. We waved at her and called hello in Chilapalapa, the pidgin language that I had been taught to use with the Shona villagers, but we did not stop because Toki was pressing ahead and I did not want to lose sight of him. I had a vivid memory of a leopard snatching another of our dogs off the veranda of our house, and I had no intention of letting any such accident befall Toki ...
Beyond the village was an irrigation channel. It was dry at this time of year but it was a good route to follow and we now walked along its sun-baked path, humming a song I had learned from Nursey, who had sung the same songs to my father, and his brother and sister, when they were children in China. Some way along this channel was a spreading mahogany tree with just enough footholds for me to climb into the lower branches and survey the surrounding plateau. I hauled myself up, my bare toes curling nimbly around the bole, and settled into a comfortable perch, where I pulled from my pocket a slab of cake I had stolen from the kitchen. Toki looked up at me imploringly so I tore off a chunk and dropped it down to him, as well as giving a piece to Twalika. My vantage point was just high enough to see the low roof of our house, which my father had built from bricks that he and a team of village helpers had made from mud and straw and baked in the sun. Away to the north, too far to see, was my grandparents' farmhouse, which was larger than ours and full of treasures my grandfather had brought from the East. The one I liked best was a huge lacquered screen on which animals were painted: extraordinary creatures of a kind we did not have in Africa. There were tigers and griffins and dragons, and they puzzled me because I thought we had every conceivable animal on the farm. Glossing over the fact that several of them were mythological, my grandfather explained that they didn't live in our part of the world: rather, they lived in China. After hearing his explanation, I had decided that one day I would travel to Asia to see these exotic creatures for myself.
Until that day came, however, I still had plenty to explore on my doorstep. In the opposite direction from my grandfather's house, further along the irrigation channel, was one of the dams that the farm used for irrigation and fishing when it was full. Having realised he was not getting any more cake, Toki had wandered off in that direction and I decided I had better jump down and follow.
When we reached the dam, I could see my dog sniffing around a bulky object on the floor of the dry basin. It was hidden behind some stones, and from the stink and the cloud of flies, I assumed it was a dead animal.
"Come away, Toki," I called.
He looked up to acknowledge my arrival, but it was clear he had no intention of leaving his noxious-smelling discovery alone. As Twalika and I approached, I tried to make out what kind of animal it could be. The most likely possibility was one of my grandfather's cattle, in which case Twalika would have to report this discovery to our headman. But the shape looked too small for that. Perhaps it was a calf. Bones were sticking out of what dark skin remained, and whatever it was looked as if it had already become a meal for the fish before the damn dried up. Twalika tried to persuade me to leave, as he was clearly very agitated. Holding my hand over my nose to try and fend off the stench, I tiptoed closer. Now, with horror, I saw that the shape was not the remains of a dead animal. I was looking at a dead body.
For all my fearless nature, I was trembling now.
"Come here, Toki," I called, my voice shrill and hesitant in the eerie silence that seemed to have descended on this part of the bush.
Backing away, I grabbed Toki by the scruff of the neck to pull him with me, then began to run as fast as my bare feet would carry me back to our house, with Twalika following me closely.
I found my mother in the kitchen talking to our cook in Chilapalapa about lunch.
"There's a dead man in the dam!" I blurted out.
My mother was normally calm in a crisis, but she looked alarmed and promptly dispatched one of the kitchen boys to look for my father. Then she hugged me close and asked me to tell her precisely what I had seen, which I did.
"What do you think killed him?" I asked.
I knew there were lions and hyenas out there, because we could hear them at night, and I was under no illusions about the dangers of such wild creatures.
"Let's wait until your father goes to find out," she said.
I did not know this at the time, but my mother knew at once that no animal had killed this man. It was impossible to recognise him but it was probable that he was a stranger to our farm. He had no doubt been murdered in order to harvest his organs so a witch-doctor could used them for his muti, or potions, in black magic rituals. The police were called, but nobody was ever charged because this kind of thing was a fact of life, albeit infrequent, in the bush of Southern Rhodesia. For me, as the discoverer of the body, it was a rough early awakening to the fact that life could be pretty brutal.
I also learned not entirely to dismiss black magic as primitive superstition. There was a time when one of the men on our farm became very ill. The local mini-clinic could do nothing for him so my father sent him off by bus to the general hospital in Salisbury, the capital, and monitored his health by public telephone. In those days of very limited long-distance communication, we had a system where one ring was for a neighbour twenty miles away, two were for a slightly closer neighbour, and three meant the call was for us. When the call came through, the hospital told us the man was definitely dying.
My father shook his head and looked at my mother. "I'm sure it's black magic," he said.
He called in his headman and told him: "I know perfectly well your wife is a witch-doctor. Bring her here at once."
The man looked at his feet.
"If you don't, there will be very severe consequences," my father said.
His wife was duly brought to my father. I was standing watching when she arrived, fascinated to see what an actual witch would look like. But to my disappointment she looked no different from any of the other village women.
"Have you put a spell on this man?" my father wanted to know.
"No, sir!" she insisted. "Honestly, I have not!" My father picked up his sjambok, a whip made of rolled hippopotamus hide, and raised it to make it clear he meant business. The threat had the desired effect and the woman changed her tune immediately.
"All right, all right," she pleaded. "I did put a spell on him, because he liked a girl and she liked him, but somebody else wanted her. That man paid me to put a spell on him. I will take the spell off now, I swear to you, sir. Please do not whip me."
She disappeared back to the village, and about three hours later we received a call from the general hospital some one hundred kilometres away. The man had got out of bed, they told us, and was coming home.
I have no idea how one explains that in a rational way. But incidents like it informed my world view as I grew up in this remote, unsophisticated outpost of the British Empire.
My grandfather had arrived in Southern Rhodesia in the 1920s. He was a brigadier-general who had lost a leg in the First World War. Like many men of his class and generation he had a nursery nickname that stuck with him for the rest of his life; his was Piglet. That may make him sound frivolous to modern ears, but in truth he was gruff and rather distant, as befitted a man who had spent the first half of his life in the Victorian era. Clean-shaven with a shiny bald head baked as a brown as the bricks of our house, he clumped around on his wooden leg, issuing orders in a military manner, and according his grandchildren a half-hour audience every day before his dinner. We referred to him as Grandpa, but to his face we called him 'Sir' – as indeed did our father.
His real name was Cecil Pickford Higginson, and he had been born in Liverpool, where my great-grandfather was a coal merchant. The family had previously owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and our most exciting direct ancestor was a renegade called Stede Bonnet, nicknamed the Gentleman Pirate. He decided that being a pirate was more profitable than owning a sugar plantation, and he fell in with the notorious Blackbeard. Eventually, he was hanged in South Carolina in 1718. By respectable contrast, my grandfather went to public school in the UK and then the Army Staff College at Camberley in Surrey. He served as a captain in the Shropshire Light Infantry in the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing before going off to the Boer War in South Africa, where he was mentioned in dispatches twice and decorated with the DSO. Later, he went back to China, where my father was born in the northern port city of Tianjin in 1910. He then commanded a battalion in the First World War, but lost his leg in the first year and was invalided out. He was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and George.
He could have settled into a comfortable retirement in the Home Counties, but he had fallen in love with Africa during his time there and he decided he would go back. The British government was offering land grants to help settle Southern Rhodesia, the crown colony between the Limpopo river in the south and the Zambezi river in the north, occupying a part of Africa named after the British empire-builder Cecil Rhodes. My grandfather acquired a parcel of land in central Mashonaland, some fifty miles north of the capital, Salisbury. His two sons and a daughter were at public school in England, and he let them stay on. But he made it clear to them that there was no question of their going on to university. Instead they were required, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, to help him build his own little empire in Rhodesia. To sweeten this pill, he secured land grants for them, too, and they all ended up building their own houses on what was effectively a sprawling family estate.
The settlers of their era were creating farms out of raw bush. Traditional African agriculture was based on a slash-and-burn model, and there was no notion of crop rotation before the colonials arrived. Whatever the rights and wrongs of their unilaterally taking ownership of the land, they undoubtedly made it more productive. This fertile region, and Rhodesia generally, acquired a reputation as the breadbasket of Africa.
Life was not all witch-doctors and mud bricks. My grandparents made money from their tobacco crop when the Second World War broke out, and my grandmother – whom we called Granny Maud – wintered every year in the smartest hotel in Cape Town. She came from a military family in Hampshire and she loved wearing extravagant hats. She also enjoyed the constant support of Nursey. A Devonshire girl, whose real name was Miss Bristow, she had gone with the family to China as an 18-year-old and stayed on with our family for the rest of her life. She had ruled my father's nursery with a rod of iron, and she did the same for us children, her ferocity only slightly undermined by the rich West Country burr she had never lost.
The real adventurer in the family was my mother. She was born in Ireland to an old and distinguished family. One of her ancestors was Lord Mayor of London in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Another became High Sheriff of County Antrim and built Castle Dobbs, an elegant mansion which still stands near Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland. Yet another Dobbs forebear was appointed Surveyor of Ireland in the 1720s and then immigrated to the US where he became the seventh governor of North Carolina, acquiring a vast estate of four hundred thousand acres. Under the British system, where the eldest son of a wealthy family inherited everything and the rest had to go off and find something else to do, a succession of younger sons and their descendants built railways in South America, and helped run the East India Company and the British Raj. My mother's great-grandfather, Major-General Richard Dobbs, spent more than thirty years in the colonial administration in southern India, where he befriended the fabulously rich and cultured Maharaja of Mysore (now the State of Karnataka). He even had a village, Dobbspet (just north of Bangalore), named after him.
I therefore grew up with tales of derring-do by my mother's side of the family. She and my father were coincidentally at the same English public school, Sherborne in Dorset, but they did not know each other there because he was four years older, and in any case the boys' and the girls' schools were completely separate. So far, so conventional. But at the age of nineteen, my mother set out for the United States on her own, which was an extraordinary undertaking for a young woman in the early 1930s. Her plan was to attend the first-ever school of osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri, which had opened the year before her arrival.
On her way, she had her first great adventure, which, remarkably, only emerged by accident. I was her first-born, and the most like her in character, so she spent a lot of time talking to me. One day I discovered the word 'divorce' in a book and asked my mother what it meant. She duly told me, and then I asked, as small children are inclined to do, if she had ever been divorced herself.
"Actually, I have," she said. And it all came out.
In order to get to Missouri from the East Coast, she had hitch-hiked. She accepted one lift from a handsome young man with a big smile and the pair of them ended up getting caught in a snowstorm. By her account, they were trapped in the car for three whole days. Obviously, it was very cold, and to keep each other warm they huddled close. The driver cannot be blamed for noticing the attractions of his clear-skinned young Irish passenger with the twinkling brown eyes, and one thing led to another. But he was apparently a man of honour, as ten days later he married her. After such a limited courtship, the relationship did not last, and my mother divorced him after three months, whereupon she proceeded calmly to Kirksville and qualified as an osteopath. She confided all this to me without inhibition in our car outside a shopping centre in Salisbury when I was seven years old. If she had not, we might none of us have ever known the story.
After she had finished her training she went back to her parents in Ireland, but she was in no mood to settle down. She decided she wanted to see Africa. War had already broken out but she managed to book passage for Cape Town on a liner which set out from the Port of London in November 1939.
On the voyage south she met my father's mother, who was trying to get back to the farm in Mashonaland after a trip home to the UK, now that the war had started. Since my mother was a good-looking gal with an engaging manner, and my grandmother was probably bored by the long sea voyage, it was natural that they should strike up a friendship, and at some stage Granny Maud told my mother: "You must come to stay with us in Rhodesia."
"I'd love to," said my mother, who knew an invitation to adventure when she heard one.
They duly exchanged addresses and for a while nothing came of it. My mother disembarked in Cape Town as planned and travelled overland to Johannesburg, where she started practising osteopathy. But the policies of the largely Boer government in South Africa were restrictive and dehumanising. The system was not yet officially known as apartheid, but she hated the rigid separation between blacks and whites. While neighbouring Southern Rhodesia also had racial laws, and she would come to disapprove of them profoundly, the colony seemed at the time to represent a softer version of the situation in South Africa. So she sent a letter to the elegantly dressed Mrs Higginson from the ship and asked if she could come to visit. She received a reply by return of post in the affirmative, at which she packed her bags and set off for Salisbury, some six hundred miles to the north.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Raindrop In The Ocean by Michael Dobbs-Higginson. Copyright © 2017 Michael Dobbs-Higginson. Excerpted by permission of Eye Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,1: Boyhood in the African Bush,
2: My Odyssey Begins,
3: Stripped Bare on the Mountain,
4: Other Forms of Enlightenment,
5: The Debs' Delight,
6: Running for My Life,
7: Banker in a Kimono,
8: The Start-up Years,
9: A Raindrop in the Ocean,
Pictures,
Acknowledgements,