what I thought then

I never dreamt I'd stay a whole decade in a troubled southern African country, much less raise a child here. I grew up in rural England, the oldest of three girls. We wore Laura Ashley dresses on Sundays. I kept rabbits -- pedigree Himalayan dwarfs -- in the backyard. The nearest I ever got to any kind of a snake was a sign saying 'Beware of Adders' in the Chambers Woods in Lincolnshire. After university, I moved to Paris. If I ever thought there of having kids (and I don't think I did much), I imagined a bigger flat avec vue sur la Tour Eiffel. A jeune fille au pair. Saturday afternoons sailing those wonderful boats with big white sails on the pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Chic ensembles from Petit Bateau. Arriving for Sunday afternoon tea at Tante Marie-Jeanne's bearing one of those beribboned white boxes full of dainty little multi-coloured patisseries. This was not the life I got.

They Will Use Machetes

Oh, and they play with machetes.

Scene: Child delivered home from playdate. Dusk in an African garden.

Me (absentmindedly, crouching over hole my son is digging): "Did you have a lovely time with X?"

Him: "Oh yes. We cut down a tree."

I look at my husband. He seems...shifty.

"It was a giant strelitsia. Hanging down over the drive. Had to be cut down, the mother said."

"What with?" enquires the Wary British Mother.

"We used a machete," my son, 7, says proudly.

mind the cobra on the verandah

- A tale of mothering in Africa.

This is what being an (accidental) mother in Africa has taught me:

- There will be snakes and they will be of the deadly poisonous variety.
- You can't rely on a (pirated) DVD to keep your child away from your snake-infested jungle of a garden because there's probably a power cut.
- Your child will learn to munch stalks of the local brand of clover, yanked out of said snake-infested garden by the handful. You will vaguely wonder about toxiplasmosis. Because you didn't properly listen to your mother when she spelt out the perils of creature-peed-on weeds back in your sedate childhood but the bits you can remember sounded scary, you will decide not to Google it. You will tell yourself that clover -- known in my part of Africa as donkey weed -- must have some vitamins in it. Also, it's one way of getting greens down him. For free.
- You will not weigh up the merits of brown/white/wholemeal/sesame-seed-speckled bread as your glamourous friends in functioning Western countries do. After several years of food shortages, you will just be glad there is some bread to buy. The amazing thing is that your child will never notice the cardboard taste (while you will reminisce ruefully about your days on the rue Brancion, just down from the Boulangerie Poulain).
- Boys will make do with mud if they haven't got Nintendos (much cheaper). And sticks and stones and lizards' legs and wasp stings. Just about everything Health and Safety would ban anywhere else.
- You can bath your child in a baby bath 'til he is...well, probably geriatric. Actually, you yourself are still bathing in a plastic baby tub (the one your mother-in-law gave you when you were first pregnant) at the ripe old age of 38. One baby bath = 3 saucepans of hot water. You won't have the patience (or the gas) to heat any more.

birthday

On the bumpy mud track leading to the homestead, blue plastic bags hide each bunch of bananas so that each tree is dotted with huge gaudy baubles.

"I took my grandchildren up the hill the other weekend for a birthday party," says a farmer. "Seven kids, all under the age of 10."

We're sitting in a shade-dappled garden, sprinkler going and that chill in the air you get - despite the sun -- when the Zimbabwean winter's about to set in. I look at the wine and the curry and the perfect rice and dhal and poppadums and Greek cakes and good books and a huge floppy dog. Not for the first time, I get that trapped-in-time feeling I often get on still-white-owned farms.

"When we came back down again, the army trucks were waiting." He takes a sip of wine. "Wanted to know what political meeting we'd been holding up there."

The authorities -- or rather those loyal to the president -- have been clamping down on all gatherings, revving up, no doubt, for elections Mr Mugabe is determined to hold before the end of the year, despite widespread fears of violence. A History Society meeting was recently broken up in Harare: too many whites in one place made the gathering "suspect" (read: likely pro-opposition MDC).

"I said to them: Why would I take kids to a political meeting? If I wanted to hold a meeting, why wouldn't I just hold it in my house?" He sighs.

"And I'm going to have the same problem next month, when the Tree Society of Zimbabwe come."

pillow talk

It's the very last pillow in the shop. At US 4, I think it is a real bargain. I stand in line at this shabby zhing-zhong shop, near the fuchsia-pink dustpans and the plastic towel hooks, waiting to pay. I've been looking for pillows for ages. These days my son uses a cushion sheathed in a cotton case, his head dangerously wobbling off the corner when I check him late at night. "You're only taking one?" the cashier wants to know. This isn't a shop many (any?) whites patronise, cue all sorts of attention since I walked in. "There aren't any others," I say innocently. "It doesn't matter: I'll bring my own," he says. He looks at me slyly to see how I'll take it. After 10 years in Zimbabwe and four in libertine Paris, I'm still pathetic when it comes to being provoked. "I don't think my husband will be too happy," I squeak -- and remember all the times I vowed never to hide behind a man.

bottom enhancers

"They're called apetitos but they enlarge one's butt," texts Tadiwa. I've just read about Zimbabwe's latest craze -- bottom-building pills -- and sms'ed her worriedly.
The pills are called Super Apetito, Power Apetito and General Apetito. They're smuggled in from Angola and Mozambique and -- according to Kwayedza, the Shona-language daily -- they're selling like hot cakes. Zimbabwe is, after all, a country where a recent survey concluded "men are looking for women with huge behinds." (You can count me out then, and probably Tadiwa, since she fits into my cast-off Paris trousers)
At around 60 pence a packet, the pills are eminently affordable, even for working girls struggling to get by on Zimbabwe's standard monthly salary of less than £120.
But there are side-effects: sleeplessness, strange gait (one woman said her client was now "walking like a crab") and goodness-knows-what-else in the future. Local doctors are urging women to stop buying them but it's an uphill struggle: the standard wolfwhistle here translates to (and I've got this on state media authority): "This woman is very attractive, she wiggles."
"Don't use those pills, girl," I text Tadiwa. "You've got a beautiful figure."
She doesn't reply.

wedding fever

-- The (white) Zimbabwean version: 120 guests (OK, so not 2,000). Booked into Mana Pools, a rapidly-regaining-in-popularity tourist resort in western Zimbabwe for the only free weekend in weeks. Camping for three nights. The bride's parents must provide food -- and loo-roll -- for all of them during that time. Wedding at sunrise (so coffee and rusks first) on the river (Zambezi) banks. ( Slight possible problem: last time crocodiles were feasting on a just-dead hippo. Do you really want that as background for your vows?). Ablution blocks seriously not up to scratch: no plugs, no toilet seats, no shower roses (Bride's father has had to redo the lot at his own expense, but National Parks and Wildlife Authority who run the place won't give him a discount). Another problem: the monkeys. They've been fed by ignorant tourists so now they're unafraid and vicious. The bride's mother is currently working on a huge gauze creation, not -- as you might imagine -- for her daughter's veil, but to slip over the thatched gazebo that's housing the food to keep the monkeys out (a kind of giant black see-through four-poster thing). Caterers -- for caterers there are a plenty -- want 1,000 US just to get themselves from Harare to Mana Pools. Another possible problem: water levels. Lake Kariba is spilling. If they open the floodgates (as they did in Jan/Feb), the bit of Mana the wedding's being held at will be.. wait for it... underwater. "I'd have put my foot down," sniffs my mother-in-law.

-- A prospective groom legged it from the wedding ceremony late last month when he spied his current wife in the congregation. Wife Mercy Ncube had come to watch Inspector Resistant Ncube wed his lover Sergeant Faith Kaseke in Kuwadzana township in April. When Resistant spotted Mercy he pushed aside his best man, "panicked and bolted out of the venue." She'd been tipped off by -- amazingly -- his relatives. Resistant Ncube is the editor of the police magazine The Outpost.