There was great excitement in the house. Dad came home to say he was transferred, they we would be leaving Broken Hill and going to live in Southern Rhodesia in a town called Gwelo. Joan was especially excited as it meant she would be able to go to day school and not have to leave the family and go to boarding school.
Dad and Mom had a conference and decided that Mom would take the three smaller children, Jeanette, Patricia and Buck, and travel by train with all the household furniture. Michael, Joan and Donald would drive the 477 miles with Dad in the Ford.
It was a big job packing up the whole household on to a huge lorry and taking it down to the railway siding and loading it all onto a flatbed for transportation. Next came the final loading of the Ford. The children each had a blanket and pillow, and food was packed in Dad's scoff box to eat along the way. Cold roast chicken, huge red oxheart tomatoes and a large loaf of Mom's homemade bread. The canvas water bottles were filled and hung on the outside of the car where the movement of the air would keep the water cold. Donald had two bantam chickens which he had raised almost from the egg. Dad wasn't too sure how we would take these with us, as really we should not have taken them at all, but Don, who was about nine at the time, promised his Dad faithfully that he would care for them the whole journey.
They set off in the early hours of the morning in the old Ford Tourer, the children wrapped tightly in their blankets. They weren't too sad at leaving Broken Hill because they were excited about the trip down Africa by car. At about 5:30 Dad stopped at the side of the road and built a fire to make a warm drink and for the children to have sandwiches for breakfast.
As they huddled around the fire to keep warm, Dad told them to stop chatting a minute and to listen to the heartbeat of Africa. They sat quiet for a few minutes and could hear rustlings and crackling in the grass and trees around them. They drew closer to one another and the fire. In the distance a lion roared and a laughing hyena cackled. Dad reassured them that the animals were some distance away.
It began to get light as the sun started to rise and where there had been nothing but blurred outlines before, they saw rocks and crags, huge trees, and elephant grass six feet high. In the early morning light everything showed up in great clarity and the sky seemed wide and high. The children were over-awed.
Soon they were on their way again, coming to the Kafue bridge, stopping only for a quick lunch, to refuel the car, and fill the water bags. As they came closer to the Zambezi they saw many wild animals in the bush and on the side of the road. Dainty little duiker, only about three feet tall, looking like Bambi. Black and white guinea fowl by the dozen, with their red necks, would fly up at the approach of the car. Mike's mouth watered at the thought of guinea fowl baked in the old black kaffir pot. A herd of Eland was seen with their proud horns held high. An elephant trumpeted in the distance and a rhino was seen chewing at the leave of a low growing bush.
Soon the road was winding downwards to the mighty Zambezi River. As they approached they could see the massive pontoon made of wooden logs roped together with hawsers that the car would be driven on to and hauled across the river by a crew of African men. The children were excited and scared at the same time at the thought of only those logs holding the car up in the middle of the deep river.
Dad greeted the men in their own language and paid them to haul the car across. The children stood on the bank whilst Dad carefully drove the car up the ramps onto the pontoon, then he came back and carefully helped each child back to the car telling them earnestly to hold on to the doors and not go near the edge as the crocodiles in the Zambezi were the biggest in Africa. The leader of the group of men helping, called to one of the other men who picked up a drum, a hollowed out tree trunk with dried animal skin spread tightly over the opening. The man began to beat out a message on the drum. The children saw a group of figures appear on the opposite bank of the river and heard in the distance a man chanting. It almost sounded like he was saying "ho-ho heave ho" and the men would answer with a shoo-ing sound, as though they were expelling all their breath. All of a sudden the children felt the pontoon begin to sway. They held on tightly as slowly the huge pontoon was hauled to the opposite side of the river. When they finally arrived and the pontoon was tied up, all the men lay about laughing and chatting at a job well done. Dad gave them some more money, pulled into a pretty place so the children could go to the loo and have some lunch, then off we set climbing up into the mountains called the Zambezi escarpment.
Night in Africa comes quickly. There was a beautiful red sunset where everything was bathed in a warm, orange glow, then the next minute it was dark - black dark, with only the headlights breaking through it. Dad couldn't drive too fast for fear of animals crossing the road. They would be mesmerized by the car's lights. It was eerie driving up the mountainside with only the car lights piercing the almost impenetrable darkness. Finally the moon came up like a huge, golden ball.
We had been travelling for some time when Dad stopped for a loo break. He then told us to look back the way we had come. In the distance we could see flames as a bush fire raged across one of the mountain tops.
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