Owen Sheers: The Dust Diaries

Blue starlings flirted round its broken altars,

And climbed and hung, and climbed and hovered,

Thin spire of smoke not teased by any wind

Against the gentle evening dim with rose

And apricot.

The final two stanzas of the poem are addressed to Arthur himself:

Rest so, never in doubt,

Never in doubt that beauty and truth are one,

That truth will rise, resolute, unconfined,

Like water drawn unerringly from deep wells

To carry in drought to drooping loveliness

The smell of rain.

Rest so, ever in peace,

Your knuckles steady on your homely stick;

And may the sunset that so often for us

Underlines cheeks with harsh violet shadows,

Be like a benison on your patient eyes,

Soft, with no pain.

During the War of Independence Noel and his wife Eva somehow survived a vicious mortar attack on their house. The building itself, however, was demolished and they moved to Harare to be closer to their son, John. Some years later Eva died as a result of a car accident. Noel followed his wife in December 1991, aged eighty-three, the same age as Arthur when he died.

Captain Meinertzhagen served in the British Army for another ten years, rising to the rank of Colonel. After East Africa he served in Palestine on the Gaza front, where he conceived and engineered the dropping of a GHQ officer’s notebook close to enemy lines. The notebook contained detailed false information about the impending British attack along with a letter from an imaginary wife about the birth of a son for added credibility. The Turkish were suspicious of such a lucky find, but the Germans fell for Meinertzhagen’s trick, which proved successful and significant enough for T.E. Lawrence to mention it in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom . Years later, on a visit to Constantinople in 1933, some Turkish officers tracked Meinertzhagen down to celebrate with the man behind the famous ‘dropped notebook’. They took him on a tour of the city’s nightlife of cabarets and dancing girls. Meinertzhagen records the event in his Army Diary 1899–1926 , which he eventually published in 1960 at the age of eighty-two. ‘I got to bed,’ he writes, ‘at 4 AM after quite an amusing evening.’ Theresa and Stuart Hildred got married in a church in St James’s, London. Theresa’s Italian lover Mario got wind of the marriage and did actually come to London to try and win Theresa back. On the morning of the wedding day he burst into a church in St James’s hoping to interrupt the ceremony, and, had he got the right church, would have been successful.

On 5 February 2001 I received a letter from Leonard’s daughter, Florence, a nurse in Masvingo:

Dear Mr Owen,

I am writing to let you know that my father Leonard Mamvura died of cancer on 12th January 2001. He was laid to rest on his farm on 14⁄01⁄01. He was very unfortunate that his diagnosis had been missed until a day before his death. The doctors said the cancer had spread from the prostate gland to the kidneys and intestines but he had been admitted to Harare hospital as a case of acute renal failure.

I would be very pleased if you could spare a few cards of him which you took during the Cripps Festival.

Best wishes

Florence Shindi

I don’t think I have ever met anyone possessed of such an ability for joy and love as Leonard. I had seen him just six months before I received this letter. He must have already been very ill, but still everything about him spelt life, energy and laughter. As Ray Brown wrote to me later, he was the best part of Arthur’s legacy.

Ray Brown himself is still in Zimbabwe, still in the same house on The Chase, although it is currently up for sale. The disruption in the country is driving him out, as it has already done to so many of the others I met while looking for Arthur.

Pelline and Laci returned from church one day to find their house and farm occupied by ‘War Veterans’ and Zanu PF Youth. They were given five hours to pack and leave. They are row living in a flat in Budapest, Hungary, which, Pelline writes, is ‘alright, but snowy’.

Contrary to what I expected, their son, Miki, also left his farm and has taken his family to Mkushi, three hours from Lusaka in Zambia, where he is establishing a new farm from scratch. And Alice and Stassi Callinicos have left too. They are both teaching in the North of England, Stassi at Stonyhurst and Alice at a sixth-form college in Blackburn. Canon Holderness, though, is still in Zimbabwe, in a nursing home in Harare. His daughter’s farm was invaded and he lost most of his papers and books, which were stored there. I haven’t heard from Betty Finn, and no one seems to know what’s happened to Jeremy.

Since I met him I have discovered that Dr Hunzvi was the man at the root of much of this disruption that has sent so many people out of Zimbabwe, and thai threatens those who have remained with economic breakdown and famine. It was Hunzvi’s petition for pensions and large ‘gratuities’ for the 40,000 war veterans and his own embezzlement of these funds that triggered the country’s economic crisis. Then, once Mugabe had bought them off, Hunzvi and his organisation became the President’s private army, leading the violent land invasions and torturing, raping and beating any opposition to Zanu PR The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum has since singled Hunzvi out as being personally implicated in acts of torture during the 2000 General Election at Chikomba, Bikita West and in his own doctor’s surgery at Budiriro.

Hunzvi died on 4 June 2001, officially from malaria, but his long battle with AIDS was well known. Drivers in Harare celebrated his death by honking their horns in the streets while his supporters stood vigil outside his hospital ward, swearing revenge on the celebrants.

The Arthur Shearly Cripps Children’s Home has also suffered from the disruption and unrest in Zimbabwe. An increasing number of children are arriving at the home with AIDS, but the local clinic has closed down. The sisters have no transport to take sick children to the clinic in Harare and have to depend on the local headmaster’s car, when he can find petrol. The Home finished the last of its fruit jam (a crucial source of nutrition) last July. Now they are almost down to their last groundnuts and have recently had to kill all their chickens for meat, depriving the children of eggs. Meanwhile, the government-controlled grain supply is either sold off for profit or handed out to card-carrying Zanu PF members only. Donations to the Home can be sent to: The Shearly Cripps Children’s Home, P.O. Box UA378, Union Avenue, Harare, Zimbabwe.

♦

And then of course, there is Mazzy Shine, Theresa’s daughter, who I finally found in a mansion flat in Belsize Park, London. Mazzy, who has travelled much of Africa as a nurse, gave me coffee over her large wooden kitchen table and once again I heard Arthur’s story, but this time from the lips of his granddaughter. Her mother only told Mazzy about Arthur on the night of Stuart’s death; until then his existence and her lineage had been a secret. But Mazzy had indeed been to Zimbabwe before me; she had stood up in Ray Brown’s seminar, she had been to the festival and introduced herself to my great aunt and she had been to her grandfather’s grave in Maronda Mashanu.

Mazzy found some old photo albums her parents had left her, and together we flicked through their stiff black pages. I saw Theresa’s postcards and photographs of Europe, Mario, the British European Airways tickets and a black-and-white picture of the silver aircraft that flew her and Stuart to Paris for their honeymoon (Mazzy remembers her mother telling her how the plane’s roof had leaked on the way, dripping water onto her new dress).

There was just one photo of Ada, as an old woman, sitting in a deckchair at the coast. She smiles comfortably into the camera, her grey hair tucked under a hat and a shawl about her shoulders. Mazzy says she remembers the day well, the whole family at the seaside. Ada, however, was fast subsiding under the weight of senile dementia and the young Mazzy couldn’t work out why she kept offering her cake, over and over again. Ada died a few years later, in 1957, five yearsafter Arthur.