Free Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa by Warren Durrant Page B

river when a lad would take us fishing
in a canoe. Never did I guess which wind of the brown water through the green
walls would bring us back to the Bailey bridge, where we were to alight. Such
was the monotony of all that featureless beauty.
    Sometimes a tree would fall across the
road, necessitating a return journey either to town or outstation. Out would
come a team with chain saws, and a section would be cut out of the giant trunk
(whose thickness was the height of a man) and rolled aside to let us through. I
had a photograph of a friend of average height standing against the
cross-section of such a log, which must have been near the base for, so far
from his equalling its diameter, he came no more than half way up it, like the
minute hand of a clock at half past the hour.
    At the clinic I would see cases that the
medical assistants there had screened for me over the previous week: a hernia,
a baby with malnutrition, an old person with heart failure - patients often
needing admission to hospital. The ambulance would be sent for them on my
return to the hospital. Urgent cases arriving at the clinic in office hours
would be transferred to the hospital, after calling for the ambulance on the
station telephone. But most of the urgent cases got themselves to the hospital
direct. And they came either to clinic or hospital by many means: in the local
headmaster's car or contractor's van, if they were lucky; by canoe down the
river, or slung on a bamboo hammock, carried by a couple of strong and devoted
friends; and when available the more regular service known as the 'mammy
lorry', the main bus service - fleets of such vehicles run by those pillars of
West African trade, the 'mammies' or market women.
    And I never failed to educate the MAs at
the clinic through the cases presented, which I early recognised as the most
important purpose of such a visit.
    After the clinic I would drop in on
friends, usually for a cup of coffee; but at Wadjo I had a standing invitation
to lunch. John, the mechanic, lived with his African mistress, and while she
prepared the fufu (which I was learning to relish, especially with a delicious
palm oil stew), he would play his only record: Beethoven's Violin Concerto.
Sitting in the cane armchairs with our beers, listening to that utterly
incongruous music, with the gloomy forest pressing in on all sides, we felt we
were keeping some sort of flag flying.
     
    Walter was the mechanic at the northern
outstation, which was called Brudjo. He lived with his wife Maria and their two
little girls. They were an Italian family. He was an exuberant little man as
well as a clever mechanic. He had fitted up his car to play 'We were all in
the garden playing leapfrog' (or whatever the Italians call it), with which
he announced his arrival on his visits to town.
    Walter's Mediterranean logic sometimes
clashed with the local culture.
    'Massa, dee tractor never fit.'
    'So!' retorted Walter. 'Why don't you
take him to the witch doctor?'
    'Ah, massa, he never savvy him proper.'
    'But he savvy your mammies, your
pickins, no?' Which was a kind advertisement for me.
    No reply.
    I had served in Trieste with the British
Army, and had a fair knowledge of Italian. Walter and Maria came from the same
city, so we had something to talk about and in. One day he invited me and an
English couple to lunch.
    Most West African lunch parties went on
all afternoon: people usually served curry or palm oil stew. There was much
liquor provided, in the West African fashion: they asked you what you wanted
and simply placed bottle and glass (even a full bottle of whisky) beside you
and left you to help yourself. Needless to say there were no problems with
drunken driving, or at any rate with the police, though cars and their owners
sometimes spent the night in ditches. For when I say afternoon, it was often
midnight before they wound up, the main course being usually served about four
o' clock.
    Walter's repast started at a more
civilised hour.