Free Paradise Revisited by Norman Filler Page B

much, counter person in a cleaning establishment, but I succeeded in doing a good job of it and kept at it until mother’s death made it unnecessary to work.  Since then, I’ve been clean but aimless, and eventually decided to revisit Malawi. So here I am. Now it’s your turn.”
    “Well, you were here at the beginning.  Maybe you can tell me why Mike changed the way he did. After we were married, his mother left more and more of the running of the place to him. Maybe that was too much for him. He’d always been more dependent on his mum that he wanted to admit. When things began to go wrong, he began to blame everybody else. You came under fire first and he ran you out. He didn’t realize how dependent he was on you until it was too late. For weeks afterwards, he was hardly ever sober.
    Then w hen the government insisted that we give up land for resettlement, he became vituperously anti-government and made enemies there. In their eyes, Matambala couldn’t do anything right after that.   Your mother, seeing things going wrong, tried to step in, but he became even more obsessed with never doing anything she told him to and began to be vile to her.  It broke her heart. When she had her stroke, and couldn’t live at Matambala any longer, he threw her into Newlands Home and never visited.  I visited, but she didn’t particularly want to see me. It was Mike she wanted to see. She didn’t last long after that.
    She sat silent for some m oments, then went on under her breath, “Then I was the only target left. “
    “What happened to Siobhan?”
    “She escaped from home by marrying a bastard of an aid worker who had his eyes on the wealth of Matambala. When Mike made him unwelcome here, they went to England, where he abandoned her. I hear from her at Christmas, and I know that she’s surviving, but that’s all. I think her memories of the end are so bitter that she won’t ever come back.”
    “So you were alone with him.”
    “I was.  And you know what Thyolo people are like: one of the most enclosed and ingrown communities in the world. They had never fully accepted me and naturally sided with Mike, when he complained about me.  So I was really alone with him. When he started to hit me, there was no one I could tell and expect to be believed.”
    “Why did you stick it?”
    “It was partly that until your mother died, I didn’t have any money of my own; then I kept hoping I could cure him with love. But at heart, it was because I had come love this place and couldn’t abandon it. Even with everything falling apart, I thought maybe I could salvage some of it. And in a way, I have. Most of the forest has gone. Mike alienated the local people instead of getting their support, and short of an army of guards 24 hours a day, there was no stopping the poaching and tree-cutting. But some is still there, and it isn’t getting any smaller, maybe even regenerating at the edges.  I talked hard and fast to the chief and persuaded him that preservation was in their interest.  He had already seen things happening to their water supply and watched the erosion without knowing that removing the forest was causing it. “
    “Mike was never much interested in the welfare of our workers but after the land debacle, he became actively antagonistic – with the inevitable loss of production and increase in sabotage.  The resentment was palpable. When we drove around the estate, people would scowl at us as we went by. Things went steadily downhill and at one point it looked like we’d have to close down or sell up.  You can imagine how Mike felt about that.”
    “ Things are better now.  Even while Mike was in charge, I persuaded him to take a few steps to improve relations, and now we’re doing all sorts of village development: schools, clinics, craft classes, and the sabotage and deliberate idling have all but stopped. I think we probably have the most contented staff in the area. Even the tea pickers, though