“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley.” - Robert Burns
I know, I know it has become a common cliche. Once again in this wonderful world of technology and the so-called proclaimed regard for your fellow man’s welfare, the one category of person who is shown little or no respect by those meant to serve them is the traveller. This past Monday morning we were meant to start our trip to the Isle of Lewis and Harris, Outer Hebrides. It was not to be for late Sunday evening, just before midnight, the car hire company informed us the car was no longer available due to some, as far as we could gather, hypothetical problem. They could offer us an alternative smaller car which would barely accommodate the four of us, let alone our luggage. Bearing in mind we planned a four-day trip with our son Selby and his partner Maggie, we had to have luggage. This brought about cancellation of the ferry and accommodation all with a cost.
Be it an airline, bus company, train service or now a car hire company, it would appear the customer is the least important part of their service. Now there is a rail strike this week causing havoc for working commuters and holidaymakers. In the meantime, the airlines are not just postponing flights but cancelling them. Gatwick announced that by cutting the number of current flights, those flights remaining would offer a better service. What about the poor people left with no flights and having to placate a household of disappointed children? Families with the excitement of holidays are arriving at the airport where only then, they are told the flight is cancelled, not delayed. Not because of weather or technical problems it seems, but because they cannot find staff, air or ground. Grrr! Luckily while our trip from Portugal was delayed we caught up with time in the air to arrive in Edinburgh close to midnight only to find the electronic passport scanners could not cope with the number of travellers arriving on numerous flights. Only four were working, luckily a couple of human border control personnel on duty were both efficient and courteous handling about three travellers in the time the scanners took to handle one.
Time spent in airports is fast becoming as long as the actual flights. We all seem to spend our time waiting on these ‘artificial intelligence’ devices which have more attitude and technical frailty than humans. Oh, how I would like to revert back to human operators both across the desk or at the end of the telephone line. The telephone is the worst where despite being given many options by pressing 1 to 9, depending on the service you require, the outcome will be the same. An extended and frustrating line-holding exercise in futility normally resolved by you abandoning the call. Of course, the desire of the service provider to work from home does not help. The comfort of the service provider seems to be more important than the client.
Back to the car, I wonder, did the cancellation have more to do with the pending rail strike which would cause the need for more lucrative emergency daily hires? Am I being too cynical? After all these hire companies have hundreds if not thousands of cars, mechanical problems will be well covered in their business models. Another cause of decay in the travel industry appears to be the standard airlines’ business model of overbooking which is now being applied to all modes of transport and accommodation. Full rooms or seats are much more important than disappointed travellers.
Luckily for us, our college reunion had no such problem and we had a wonderful weekend at Murrayshall near Perth organised by Mike and Vari Clark. Mike is the same Clark whose name I have been spelling incorrectly despite knowing him for over fifty years. He suggested over the weekend it was maybe because I had lived in Southern Africa that Clark had become Klerk with a C.
The group's common link is that we were all either student tenants or the landlord's children of Highfield Farm. Needless to say, we had good food, good company and told rather embarrassing stories about each other, some shocking to us, let alone our female partners. Funny with time we may still all remember specific events although the detail may be different. We all see ourselves as the hero, not the villain. All our partners were happy to remain with their birth gender making it easier for us dinosaurs to maintain what we considered normal if not formal etiquette in our dealings with them.
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most heartening experience for me was how we just picked up on our friendship as if we had not been apart for fifty years. All had maintained their characters over the years despite their many diverse experiences, occupations and business successes.
We even managed a trip to Scone Palace which individually none of us would have undertaken. There we learnt that the origins of the ‘stone’ are unlikely to be as rumoured and more importantly the present stone’s composition would indicate it is not the original stone anyway. It does not seem to deter visitors who flock to pay for expensive scones in Scone, mediocre fudge and poor coffee.
“Fact can never supersede myth. In fact, with time myths cement their place in folklore.” - Peter McSporran
On Sunday my sister Fiona and her partner Gordon, picked us up to spend the night with them. No problem with that service. They organised the husband of my late sister Morag, that is Lindsay Ross, to be there with his daughter Nicky Ross and family for dinner that night. Lindsay was visiting his daughter having moved to South Africa from Malawi. Power and water outages, poor security and bad roads is now driving him from that country. How familiar to us Zimbabweans!
But surprise, on a night of surprises my Dutch cousin, Shiela de Bloeme and her husband Hein, were also present.
All very emotional. Sheila went on to sing beautifully some old Scottish ballads that she had learned from my late aunt Bunty, my mother’s sister, who had married a Free Dutch army officer during WWII. Unfortunately, Sheila’s parents and her three siblings have all succumbed to cancer. The gene’s on my mother’s side of the family obviously pass on cancer with Sheila being the only surviving cousin on that side of the family while I am on mine. I to date have luckily survived two bouts as you know.
Getting back to our trip, a quick call to my cousin in Loch Awe offered us an alternative to the Outer Isles although once again our livers were to suffer. For those that may not know, entertainment in Scotland revolves around a dram, it seems, even in old age. Oh, that was another thing, from our behaviour I would say to a man we are all in denial about our age.
Go or Stay?
Now married and with continuous call-ups, especially as a newly married couple, Diane and I started to think about our future. We both agreed not to start a family while the war continued. Three years later we were to dump this idea.
She being a farmer’s daughter understood my wish and ambition to farm in my own right and she supported my idea of doing so. At the same time, we felt if we could not do this quickly we should look to alternate countries. The rationale behind this was why risk your life in hope if you were unable to attain your life ambition. I even did a job interview for a manager's position in Brazil. As it turned out they were, they said, looking for someone less qualified. This being the only job I have been turned down on and it was because of over-qualification! Were they just being nice in my rejection?
In November I got back to the farm following yet another call-up in time to plant seed maize, soya and sorghum. I had never grown sorghum before and by some fluke, at harvest the following year achieved record yields. This attracted much excitement from the seed house who wanted to know what I had done to achieve this. I had no clue about the achievement, putting it down to pure luck rather than my management. Of course, I preened in the misplaced compliments.
Once planting was complete, back to the bush with 1977 to 1979 being exceedingly tough years on army call-ups. In one instance, we returned to the farm to find our house had been ransacked. Was it just local thieves or CTs?
My efforts to raise a loan from the Landbank increased. They being, under Government guidance, happy to fund people to replace those leaving the border areas. In saying that, most farming areas in the country now had a CT presence and no farmstead was safe except those just West of Salisbury. In 1977 my in-laws seeing our efforts in trying to obtain land offered us the lease of a farm in Darwendale which they had purchased from the Government. The farm was in the basin of the proposed Darwendale Dam on the Hunyani River. The farm originally had produced fire-cured tobacco but in recent years the previous aged owners had just kept cattle. The dam would take away about half the farm area but in exchange obviously, there would be a huge opportunity for access to water for irrigation.
In about April of that year, I was involved in one of the largest internal contacts of the war. We were operating in the Northeast, in Op Hurricane once more when one of our sticks in the Mudzi area surprisingly, as it was early morning not early night, opened up on what was to be presumed an expected small group terrorist incursion. Most crossings through the cordon sanitaire happened early evening to allow the CTs to put distance in before the security forces discovered their tracks the next morning. Anyway, what was thought to have been an ambush of a few, turned out to become a serious, although limited battle. I was in base and all our sticks in the field were called to get ready for pick up. Fireforce, on arriving from Motoko also came under heavy fire immediately, including from some heavy weapons, most unusual. We were picked up, even cooks and drivers, and deployed as stop groups and sweep lines, most of us coming under fire even before we touched down as we landed. Sticks were immediately engaged on the ground and before long calling for an ammo resupply finding themselves in serious close-quarter firefights. Meanwhile, a second Fireforce team arrived. The airforce and mortar platoons were also involved. The fighting became fragmented within a couple of hours with most of the CTs escaping back across the border or further into the country. Fireforce left that evening with many of our troops returning to base. My stick was ordered to remain and mop up any possible survivors having the final exchange of fire the next morning on a group escaping across the border. They hid in a ditch which required us to belly crawl up to their position and throw in grenades. The noise was heard back at headquarters and we had to assure them it was a limited action and not a renewed incursion. That following day we picked up a further eleven bodies from action the day before. Mostly killed by the 20 mm cannon from the K-car. Along with bodies during both days, we picked up a huge amount of weaponry including an anti-aircraft gun dumped in a vlei. Where that was headed? God knows. We suffered no casualties, unbelievable.
This latest action embedded in my mind that either I should leave the country unless I could find a farm which would help, in my eyes, mitigate the risks I was taking. I think the offer from Diane’s parents was also because they did not wish their daughter to leave the relative safety of the environment around Salisbury.
The farm in question was in the Darwendale area on the confluence of the Hunyani, Gwebi and Umzururu Rivers. It was about 1,600 ha but the area the Belinsky’s purchased by tender was the remaining area which would not be inundated by the dam. The house and the few buildings that remained were in disrepair and as I planned to grow tobacco, we would therefore have to build tobacco-curing barns, storage sheds and all the other infrastructure to transform what was a derelict cattle grazing unit into a commercial crop and cattle farm.
The Belinsky’s had put in new fencing, and cattle handling facilities including water to some paddocks along with some annual maize. This was being carried out by a manager, but as the soils were sandy, mainly class 3 and 4, yields were poor and Derek was already frustrated as the farm was some 40 km from his home farm. It had become a nuisance rather than an asset especially due to security commitments. Bear in mind he had lost his manager, he was killed in the war the previous year. He had bought it for the grazing and managed to buy it very cheaply from the State as many farms were now being abandoned. Most of those farmers that remained in the country during the war became multiple farm owners. Fine if the area you were in was peaceful. A burden and dangerous if close to an operational area which now applied to most of the country. After much soul searching, along with research into the farm’s suitability to grow tobacco and groundnuts, Diane and I decided to take up the offer and lease the farm. As I was still spending more time in the army, we also foolishly thought that farming in one's own right may offer some respite from call-ups. Of course, that was to prove wishful thinking, more likely just stupidity. When I informed Mr Les Edwards, my boss I was planning to do this the following season, he informed me I was crazy and despite my poor efforts over the past two seasons, it was obvious he did not want to lose me. Finally in September 1977, when I was still 28 years old, I was to achieve my dream of having my own farm, be it as a tenant.
As the farm was some 65 km from town, Diane would have to give up work. Further, she would be leaving a relatively modern house to live in a ramshackle house with an outside kitchen. At least we had water and power. The plan was to grow tobacco and groundnuts, both under irrigation. By using irrigation the unit capital cost of curing equipment and machinery per hectare would be halved by double cropping. Irrigated tobacco was in its infancy in those days, little did I know it was our pathway to successful farming. I should mention the move was not that easy and there was the occasional tear all made more complicated with the demands of the army. That year we arrived, the dam wall was completed and in expectation of this, we purchased a portable diesel irrigation pump, and a 20 ha moveable irrigation scheme. Our tobacco quota was to be 24,000 kgs which from the onset I decided to exceed thinking as the country was so short of FOREX, the Government would turn a blind eye and allow it to be sold without any penalties. Even before we left Edwards’ we had instigated the building of a new Chongololo curing system on the farm now to be known as Diandra Estate previously known as Gwebi Junction.
Next week I will relay some tales of Han and my travels in Tanzania as we were asked by their Government to look at what they wanted to call SAGCOT, a replica of the Beira Corridor which we had helped put in place and were now actually managing the funds allocated for that. Tanzanian political interference in trying to establish this corridor was much greater than what we found in Mozambique. Support, yes, that was there, directed more by self-interest than national benefit.
I am going to stop now and try and recover from last night's hangover, so I can repeat the same exercise tonight.
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
댓글