a second time

It happens a second time.
This time we have been stopped at a police roadblock, one of many on the main highway between the capital Harare and Mutare.
A policeman, rotund in his winter fluorescents, peers in through the driver's window. "Where is the Daddy?" he asks my husband.
"The Daddy?" This time it's my husband who is stumped. "My father is back at home."
The officer considers us. The thought of a fine keeps my lips clamped together like wheel locks.
"Well, look after the Mother," he says, before waving us on.
"He thought you were my son!" I explode, as soon as the driver's window is safely sealed. I round on my husband. "Can't you stop looking 16?"
"I don't look 16," says he. A trifle too innocently for my liking.
I study his side profile. Not the hint of a wrinkle. I suspect he may have been secretly smoothing on my imported-at-great-expense sun cream. Which clearly works better on him than it ever has on me.
"You do," I say crossly. "17, max."
"Oh." Is that all he can say? When his longsuffering wife -- who he dragged across continents from a carefree existence in Paris to Africa 10 years ago -- gets mistaken for his mother?
My husband ponders for a minute or two.
"Maybe you should dye your hair red," he says finally as pyramids of tomatoes piled high in Kango dishes flash past us near the town of Rusape. "You know you’ve always wanted to."
I choose to remain silent.

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.

bully by name

"What a coincidence," my mother-in-law laughs. But I think I detect unease in her voice.

We've just pointed out to her that the bullying protagonist in the Costa Children's Award-winning Out of Shadows is called Ivan Hascott. His name is one syllable different to my brother-in-law's, my mother-in-law's second child.

Reports say author Jason Wallace attended the same boarding school at the same time as my brother-in-law: Peterhouse, in Marondera, Zimbabwe. Wallace -- who set his story in a post-independence Zimbabwean boarding school -- looks to have been a couple of years younger than my brother-in-law.

Who was a well-known bully.

Often, when I reveal my married name in a social gathering, someone will come up to me and ask hesitantly: "You're not related to --" and I steel myself. Some former schoolmates laugh when they recount his exploits. But we've met at least two men aged around 40 who I'd say were still psychologically scarred.

His parents knew little about his bullying: how would you, when you saw your child only in the holidays and at the most twice a term? Boarding school is a big thing here, something I find -- with my English day Grammar School background -- totally foreign. As I write, a friend's just dropped off her seven-year old for the first time. ("Not a tear shed by any of us," she texts me).

Bullying was and is a problem. An 80-something friend of ours remembers when she had to take her son out of a school because a classmate died in a bullying incident (he was locked into a tin trunk). In one of the worst cases a couple of months ago, a 19-year-old prefect was arrested for sodomising 10 younger boys in their dormitory (actually, he wasn't arrested straight away: they let him sit his exams).

My brother-in-law was, I think, pretty scarred himself at the time, as many white and black kids were in the early 1980s. He'd had an absent father for much of the previous decade (my father-in-law had to perform six-week blocks of military service, so he'd spend six weeks at home and six weeks away in the bush, and the family never knew whether he'd come back). The three brothers returned to school after independence to find other whites overnight had either fled the country or yanked their kids out of now racially-integrated local government schools. Rightly or wrongly, my parents-in-law followed suit, scrabbling around to mop up the remaining places in exclusive boarding schools. Each child ended up in a different school.

That's not to excuse what happened, but it may go someway towards explaining it.

"Who'd have thought our sweet little darling was getting up to all that?" my mother-in-law tinkles. She is, as always, nothing but brave.

not the marrying kind

"Talking about not being married --" he says. "I've got a story to tell you."

We're sitting on our oil-lamp lit verandah, crickets chirping in the blackness. He is a Zimbabwean academic, now living in the diaspora. He's come back for the Christmas holidays to visit his frail mother, 83, who -- all credit to her -- is just finishing her third book.

"I've got this colleague" -- he says. The colleague's interested in things military. When our friend sees a pair of rusted small cannon sitting in the long grass outside an apparently deserted storeroom he pulls out his camera.

A few minutes later a soldier taps him on the shoulder. "My boss would like to see you."

A six-hour ordeal begins. He's taken to the police station, then to the back offices. Why did he take a picture? How did he know that building he photographed was a disused barracks? (He didn't. My husband did. He can remember being taken there in the back of the family station wagon during the war days when his parents dined in the officers' mess. There was a waiter -- Goodson, was it? or Warrior? -- who brought cold drinks out to the boys in the night) How do the CIO (because it's CIO interviewing him now) know he wasn't trying to make a map? A map to be used for espionage purposes?

They confiscate the camera, want a print-out of the photos. Just one problem: the police (of course) have no printer. So officers accompany our friend to the market square where the outdoor photographers roam, cameras in hand. Yes, one of them can print out what the police need. The photographer disappears with the precious memory card. He returns later with the photos. It's only when the police examine the prints that they realise these are not the right ones . A Shona couple beam, resplendent in wedding attire, at the officers from Kodak paper.

We sip our coffee.

"You forget there are eyes everywhere," I murmur. I wonder again about that white car that I've seen parked outside our drive the last few nights, lights off. Roadside lovers? Probably. But in Zimbabwe, the fear is never far. The car is there tonight.

"But what I wanted to say -- " He's remarkably calm about this. That's even though the military police called at his mother's cottage earlier in the day "for fellowship purposes. To check you are alright" (ie where you said you'd be and not reporting to your colonial masters) -- "The reason why it took so long with those eight people questioning me, is that they couldn't believe I wasn't married."

He's in his 50s, our friend, a steady girlfriend (plus cat) waiting for him back home.
.
"What, not married? But why?" they kept saying. "No children?" It's unthinkable, a disgrace, for a Shona male to die childless. In the past, you could be buried with a rat on your back if you had no kids.

"What about children outside?" the CIO persisted. "Ok, so not inside marriage, but outside then?"

tension

I last heard from Tension when we moved house three years ago. He arrived early one morning, complete with truck. We had to get rid of some of our bigger pieces of furniture. Tension offered to auction them for us. He and I moved round the rondavel (thatched round hut), setting a reserve price for the railway teak teak sideboard, the writing bureau I kept my books in and The Desk.

The Desk had a bloody history. Leopold Smith was one of Rhodesia's most infamous murderers. On June 17 1963 he shot 11 people, killing four of them. The attacks took place at the Premier Citrus Estate, near what was then Umtali. Smith was employed as accountant and paymaster at the farm. He and his wife Joan had a turbulent marriage -- he beat her with a sjambok - and on June 14, she got a court order for the removal of her children from Premier Estate. She arrived at the farm on June 17, accompanied by a policeman and a welfare officer. When Joan started to take her clothes from the house, Smith opened fire, first killing the welfare officer. He made for the Premier Estate office where he killed a Mr Hein, also an employee. Joan and Mrs Hein barricaded themselves into the office, so Smith shot through the window, killing Mrs Hein. A gardener was also killed. Smith gave himself up after two days spent hiding in the bush. At his trial the defense argued (unsuccessfully) that Smith had his first ever epileptic attack and was unable to control his actions. Smith was hanged in 1964.

Smith wrote to his wife after the attack: "Recalling the event, I hope you did not get hurt as it was a small room and lots of objects to make the bullets glance off." He was right there -- The Desk had a bullet hole.

Tension took it to be auctioned. It was a huge heavy thing, and we didn't have the means to move it ourselves. He took full advantage of Zimbabwe's accelerating inflation, only paying us back for the furniture he sold a couple of months later, by which time the amount was worthless.

A few days ago, I got a text message: HIE. STILL IN BUSINESS OF SELLING ALL HOUSEHOLD GOODS AND ALL TYPES OF MOTOR VEHICLES TENSION GOD BLESS. I thought of The Desk, and wondered where it is now.

chivhu

The public swimming bath is on the edge of Chivhu, encircled by a crumbling white wall. It looks like a cemetery, especially with the pavement gravestone sellers who've set up shop outside the ornate gate. But if you crane your neck, you can just catch the flash of the blue walls inside. My mother-in-law remembers this place as Enkeldoorn, once an Afrikaaner farming stronghold. If you look in the 'phone book now -- the 2002 phone book, that is, no-one seems to have a newer one -- there are still lots of Afrikaans names in Chivhu. Few, if any, will be left. Max, a black mechanic, stops to chat through the passenger window. "Where are you from?" he wants to know. "What do you do?" "I used to be a farmer," my 70-something father-in-law says. "But then the government took my farm." "Look," says Max. He has, no doubt, looked at my mother-in-law's Pajero, the boxes of sandwiches and the bulging bags in the back. "Count your blessings. I was in UK with some of those white farmers. They were working in factories, working in Tescos." My father-in-law is silent. His own future looks uncertain: the rented house they were staying in has been sold from under their feet but he cannot leave his office job for another town or country: who else would employ a pensioner? "You will get all those things back," says Max. "If not your farm, then a business, something even more profitable." "You're right," says my father-in-law firmly. As we drive off and the border-bound trucks swish past us, there's a fresh breath of hope in the car. "Well, he was positive, wasn't he?" says my mother-in-law.

sour taste

"But you said you were foreigners," the woman at the toll gate protests.

A breeze whips across the tufts of grey grass like hair. It is not a difficult climb up to the grave: an elderly Mrs Prescott laboured up here the day Rhodes was buried, he reminds me.

The moss has turned yellow and papery on the slabs of stone. High up now in the afternoon light, the balancing rocks look other-worldly. It's not hard to imagine throngs of people toiling their way up to bury the man. Not far from him lies Jameson, then, on an outcrop, Coghlan. "It's a kind of Heroes Acre* for colonials," he says grimly.

The children chase a giant blue-headed lizard. "What's that box?" asks Bella. At the edge of the ledge is a memorial to the Allan Wilson Patrol of 1893. There's a carved frieze of the men round the edges. "To Brave Men," it reads. "That's where they've put the two brave men," says tow-haired Hunty, whose ancestor Huntsman W was an early settler.

"Don't run," we call after them.

I break off a piece of Resurrection Plant. If you sink one of these dark dried twigs in water, it turns green. My father-in-law turns to his cousin on the way down. "How much did they make you pay for this?"

"55 US," she says. "10 each for adults." We confront the woman at the gate. You pay one fee to get into the Matopos National Park, extra to visit Rhodes Grave. Foreigners pay 5 times the price of locals. We produce our Zimbabwean identity cards. "But you said you were foreigners," the woman protests. Why on earth would we do that, we ask. A riot policeman in a faded uniform appears. "Look in the receipt book," he says. We do -- and see we've been carefully entered in blue biro as Zimbabweans. So where's our change? "You can't have the money," the pair say in unison.

"It'll look like there's been fraud."

* Heroes Acre: burial ground in Harare where black fighters from the war for independence are buried (almost all ZANU-PF)

Jamaica Inn

Not far from Marondera, there's a collection of shabby thatched buildings to your left. A sign reads: "Jamaica Inn. National Training Centre For Total Skills Training."

My in-laws spent their wedding night here in the early 1960s, when the place really was an inn. It was a disappointment. "It didn't have the palm trees you'd expect," my father-in-law says.

Up till then the day had been picture-perfect. My mother-in-law descended the stairs in a tiara made of daisies (there are pictures to prove it). The best man treated them to a supper at his father's house. His father was then the governor of the Reserve Bank. The governor's official residence was opposite State House. My in-laws left -- this bit I'm imagining -- in the dark in a flurry of good wishes.

After a half-hour drive they were met at Jamaica Inn by "a lecherous old so-and-so" with an smirk. My father-in-law soon found out why. When they opened their room door (after a suitable interval in the bar, pretending to be a long-married couple), they found a whole boiled chicken and a flask of milk sitting on the bedside table. A friend had ordered a "sustaining" snack.

These days it's Mr Mugabe's Green Bombers and Co. who hang around the sign, hoping for some food.

cats and dogs

Edith Mabel didn't like small boys much but she did like cats and dogs.

Edith Mabel took my father-in-law and his brother in when they were aged 3 and 5. Elsie, my father-in-law's real mother died of TB when she was just 23. Her husband skedaddled, terrified by the weight of two toddlers. Nothing more was heard of him for years till Edith Mabel got the news he'd died a lonely alcoholic, somewhere in South Africa. All that's left of my husband's real grandparents now is a black-and-white picture of Elsie in my father-in-law's study, perched on the curtain rail -- a wistful girl with dark wavy hair that comes to just above her jawline. Her face is turned away from the camera.

My father-in-law doesn't have happy memories of his childhood. He remembers a big house in what was then Salisbury, somewhere near today's Mount Pleasant suburb. Edith Mabel believed boys should be occupied to keep out them of trouble. They weren't allowed out of the house in the mornings for school until they'd "performed" with the help of a spoonful of cod liver oil. The boys were often late for school.

In school holidays Edith Mabel sent the brothers to ballet lessons and had them water the enormous lawn using a square grille she'd invented. The boys were each given a watering can and square grille about the size of two shoeboxes stuck together. Their job was to lay the grille on the grass and water through the holes. Then the grille had to be moved a square along, and the process repeated. Little wonder my father-in-law says he didn't start living until he met my husband's mother, a dark 17-year-old with a waist you could fit your hands round.

There were just a few light moments. One day Edith Mabel's husband (he's always nameless) brought a cat home. Edith Mabel had a big dog, a mastiff of some kind. The husband sat in a winged armed chair with a roll of newspaper and the cat on his knee. The dog was brought in, straining at the leash. He made for the cat -- and was slapped sharply on the muzzle before he could close his jaws. The process was repeated, until dog and cat eventually managed to co-exist in -- strained -- harmony (apart from when supper was served, but that's another story).

I think of Edith Mabel when we bring home two stray kittens from the SPCA. (There is still an SPCA here, with branches across the country). We have two rottweilers (not pure, and the smaller one definitely has a bit of goat in her). The rottweilers have been encouraged to chase small furry things with tantalisingly long tails that hang around in tree branches and raid my loquat/mango/granadilla crops. It occurs to me when I settle the new acquisitions in my study with a rusty old oven pan filled with leaves for a litter tray, that kittens are remarkably similar to monkeys (but they don't have blue testicles. Will the rotters ask to see their testicles before they decide whether or not to chase them? I doubt it). So we go the Edith Mabel route. My husband arms himself with a sisal branch, truncheon-size. The kittens are let onto the verandah. The dogs watch. The big one licks her lips. When either dog advances, my husband brandishes the truncheon.

Amazingly, it works. Six weeks down the line, the dogs wag their bottoms when they see the kittens. The kittens rub themselves against the dogs' paws. As long as the kittens don't climb in the loquat tree at the same time as the monkeys, they're safe. It's not quite the Garden of Eden but hey, this is Zimbabwe.