Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Mrs Cole was disappointed. When Bishop Gaul announced after the service last Sunday that the young priest relieving Archdeacon Upcher at Enkeldoorn would pass through Salisbury on his way to the mission, she had immediately offered to lay on a dinner of welcome. Since then, she had been looking forward to the visit of Father Cripps. For the first time in months she woke with a sense that there was something on the horizon, an event to prepare for and anticipate, rather than the familiar dull ache of lethargy she usually associated with her cramped bedroom. Her husband had been away at the Boer War for over six months now, and the pioneer spirit he once so valued in his wife had dwindled even further in his absence until she found each day merely something to be endured, rather than embraced as a challenge. The basics of living, shopping, preparing meals and washing had become daily trials that drained her of energy and enthusiasm. It was not a change in her character that Mr Cole would have liked to see. He was, as he would remind anyone who would listen, ‘one of the originals’, one of ‘Rhodes’ Apostles’ who had trekked up into Charter territory back in the i88os. A bullish man, who placed high value on ‘backbone’, ‘spirit’ and ‘mettle’. As a member of Dr Jameson’s staff who had risen to the post of Civil Commissioner for Salisbury he believed completely in Rhodes’ dictum on the life and duty of the pioneer: ‘ Those who fall in thecreation, fall sooner than they would have done in ordinary life, but theirlives are the better and the grander .’ Mrs Cole’s life did not feel better or grander. It just felt harder, and empty. And she did not really cherish the idea of falling sooner than anyone else either, or indeed, falling at all.

The sound of the maid clanging pots in the lean-to kitchen roused her and she looked about from where she sal in the corner of her brick dining room, lit by the one flickering candle on the dining table. She dreaded to think what her husband would say if he could see her now — his proud pioneer wife, drenched and despondent, the debris of her welcome dinner party spread before her, wincing at the sound of hyenas howling on the outskirts of town.

♦

Mrs Cole had been the first European wife to enter Mashonaland. Mr Cole had sent for her from England as soon as Rhodes lifted the embargo on women in 1891. He met her and his two-year-old daughter at Fort Tuli with two mules and a battered old ox wagon, in which he took them a further 400 miles into the country to Salisbury. The wet season had not longed passed, and the journey was laborious and stilted as a result, with whole sections of the track simply washed away or turned into impassable mud. But Mrs Cole loved her husband, and she was pleased to see him again, and was even more pleased for him to be with their daughter, Anne. It was the first time he had seen her since her birth. Mrs Cole remembered with some irritation how her husband had departed for Africa again only days after she was born, just staying long enough to impose a name upon the child and to display a hint of dissatisfaction that she wasn’t a boy. On that journey, however, she’d watched him grow familiar with Anne. At first he handled her as he might a lion cub, with interest and slight trepidation, but over the nights that followed Mrs Cole observed her husband’s manner change towards their daughter. After the first week of their journey she often found him cradling her on his lap by the camp fire at night, telling her about the wonderful life of farms, crops, lakes and animals he would build for her in their new country. Perhaps Mrs Cole was seduced by these night-time tales her husband told, or perhaps she had lent too much credence to the picture painted of Rhodes’ blossoming young country at home in London. Whatever the reason, she could not help but feel the emptying of disappointment when they finally rounded a small kopje three weeks later and Mr Cole proclaimed, ‘There she is! Fort Salisbury, our capital!’

She had followed the line of her husband’s finger, and at first thought she must be looking at the wrong part of the landscape. But there was nothing else to see. Just what her husband proudly pointed at: a line of tin shacks, their roofs glaring in the sun and a scattering of pole-and-dagga huts, cut through by a swamp that divided them from another, smaller scattering of huts. There were no other permanent buildings, just groupings of canvas tents, more huts under construction and collections of wagons covered with buck-sails. She had been travelling for over two months to get to this place, this town which promised so much on the map, its letters not only bigger and bolder than any other town’s, but underlined too. She had endured the concern of her mother when she told her she was leaving for Africa and the scorn of her mother-in-law when she expressed her doubts. She had travelled through storms at sea and through hundreds of miles of inhospitable country, all with her young daughter in her arms. She had lain awake at night, in ships’ berths and in the rocking wagon, dreaming of when the travelling would stop, of when they would reach their new life. And this was it. A frontier outpost of shacks and huts, the centre of their new world.

As Mr Cole chivvied the mules before them and proudly rode his family into town, men appeared to greet them, their moustaches and beards trimmed, pulling on their best jackets in honour of their arrival. A woman had come to live among them, and with her, like Eve to Adam, she brought the hopes of new lives, companionship and a civilising influence. The small crowd threw their slouch hats in the air and cheered as the wagon drew up beside a long rectangular hut, larger than the others. It looked like a cattle shed but a newly varnished wooden sign told her it was the town’s police station. Mrs Cole smiled down at the crowd, holding Anne tighter than ever to her bosom and feeling a sharp stab of regret as she thought of her home in London, small and neat with furnishings, a world of culture outside its door.

That night, for the first time since their reunion in Africa, Mr Cole made brief and awkward love to his wife on a bed of sacking cloth, then slept a deep sleep while she lay awake once more, listening to the crack and swallow of the frogs in the swamp and wondering what she had done. But she did not cry, not once. Instead she woke the next morning and rose to the challenges of her new home. She set about making curtains out of old wagon canvases, instructed the cook and the maid on the times for lunch and dinner, and rearranged the basic out-house kitchen. The next day she got the boy Marufu to help her start digging a vegetable garden at the back of the two-room pole-and-dagga house that was now hers to call her own.

Many of the plans and projects she embarked on in that first week were to frustrate her in the months to come. The heavy curtains lessened the already slight breeze that the house badly needed and gave the rats another surface to climb. Both the cook and the maid left the same night after they had again been told that what they did was wrong. Until she adapted her gardening to the local method the vegetable seeds she had brought from England were either washed away with each heavy rain or perished and died under the heat of the African sun. But she continued to support her husband in every way possible, feeling that as the first woman in the community something was expected of her. If she showed weakness, it would be a sign of failure, and no one in Salisbury would let that word be spoken let alone admitted to. So when the total population of women in Salisbury numbered just seven, it was she who gathered them together to organise the town’s inaugural dance. Despite the lack of material or clothes shops she led them in making evening dresses out of limbo, the local calico, and made do with yellow leather working boots as dancing shoes which flashed into view every time Mr Cole spun her in the Lancers.