Adventures in the Congo

My husband was working for a multinational company in Leopoldville (Kinshasa). I’d never been anywhere before that where there was no law and order and such dire food shortages. There wasn’t even enough proper food to feed my baby. But then we got caught up in a war, which was terrifying. We both wanted to get away from Leopoldville so my husband took a job on plantation in the interior. It was, literally, in Conrad’s Heart of darkness, and we had to travel in a small boat 150 miles down the vast Congo River to get there. It was an amazing journey past tiny fishing villages and virgin jungle. I was determined to love this place, and in many ways I did because it was so peaceful and beautiful. But there was endemic malaria and if any of us got seriously ill we were a thousand miles from Leopoldville, so there was always a lurking danger. When we started hearing rumours of war, both my husband put our heads in the sands. The village people were friendly and we didn’t believe anything could possibly happen to us. But the war did break out and all the white people were taken hostage in Stanleyville. That evening four men came to our house and said: ‘Mauvaises nouvelles. Tu doit partir tout de suite’ – you must leave now’ ‘I can’t’ I said ‘I’ve been to the doctor and he says I’m about to give birth any moment.’

It was a shock but I was never frightened because I think you go into survival mode. You’ve got a child and a baby on the way and everything else is unimportant. I knew I had to survive. I didn’t waste any time, the doctor came round and said ‘I’m going to give you an injection to calm you’ and I said ‘Thanks a lot but no.’ – that’s the colonial in me – ‘Just tell me what I should do’ and he said ‘Cry’, which is a very good bit of advice. We left just before dawn and I howled when I had to say goodbye to my husband who had to stay behend. There was a tiny little plane, an eight-seater, waiting for us on the other side of the river, and I was piled in with my little son, sitting on my knee. The plane, which was overburdened, didn’t fly us all the way to Leopoldville. We stayed overnight in a small mosquito-ridden plantation in the middle of the jungle and I said to the doctor there ‘Look I’m about to give birth’ and he said’ ‘I will put a man outside your window. Just call me if you go into labour during the of the night.’ He was very dubious about letting me go on. He got the nurse had a very serious consultation but, in the end I was piled me onto another plane. It was a real endurance test. We flew to somewhere that was unbearably hot on the equator, and had to have another break because they were shuttling people out of the danger zone as fast as possible. Eventually they put us a plane for Leopoldville. We were among a huge amount of refugees who were fleeing from the conflict, it was very dramatic. I said to the doctor who’d come to meet me at the airport ‘I’ve made it so far I’ll just go on to London.’ and he said ‘Oh no I need to examine you first.’ So he put me on a table and said ‘You’re already well dilated.’ In other words I’d actually gone into labour. By now the enemy were the other side of the river and I gave birth there, in a war zone.

I didn’t write about it for years and years because my feelings were so conflicted. I had to find the right voice. I was writing about very serious injustice not only in the past, but in the present. The democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba had just been assassinated by agents in the west. And there was still inherent racism in the multinational corporations. But, of course we were only tiny cogs in a huge wheel; the fact that my husband thought his job was significant and took it so seriously, while I was ridiculously idealistic and romantic, struck me as inherently comic. And the minute you send yourself up a bit, it helps no end. After that it was easy because it was a memoir. We were at a crucial turning point in history and I was right in the middle of it.

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ABOUT ME

I have lived a life on the edge of the great chasms of the twentieth century. A child of partition – growing up on North West Frontier, bordering on Afghanistan, as the Great Game played out in my girlhood home and the Nazi threat loomed; a white child in South Africa as it descended down the monstrous road of Apartheid; a young woman caught up in a deadly civil war in the Congo, a cat’s paw of the superpower Cold War conflict.

I write memoir with a difference – the backdrop is the conflict and upheaval you read about in the history books. I give you the mood, the intrigue and the lies adults told each other about a world changing in front of them. I show what it was really like and paint the past in vivid colours.

I am widowed with four children and nine grandchildren.

I have performed, taught drama, broadcast on the radio, and written for most of my adult life. I am widely travelled and give talks on my adventures.

I started my career as an actress – in repertory companies including Newcastle and Richmond in the UK.

When my children were small I got regular commissions to write half hour satirical television plays for children. I scripted a film and wrote two stage plays and published a short story in New Stories 3, an anthology published for the UK Arts Council in 1978 by Hutchinson.

I also wrote plays for BBC Radio 4

After taking a degree in English and Drama, I taught drama to young adults.

This was followed by a career as a freelance reporter making features and packages for BBC Radio 4 – mainly for Woman’s Hour – as well as Radio 3 and the BBC World Service. I also wrote and broadcast documentaries and wrote and read short stories for Radio 4.

In 1990 I went out to South Africa and did a number of pieces mainly about the women in South Africa.

Having been born in British India I got a commission to go back to where I grew up and wrote and broadcast a series of six ‘Letters from Abroad’ about what the country was like during the days of the Raj and the current situation in what is now Pakistan.

I have also written articles among others for the Guardian and the Oldie – about playing a cameo role in the Profumo scandal when British Intelligence listened in on the MP’s sexual exploits through our nursery wall.

In 2011 I wrote a book entitled ‘Drums on the Night Air’ published by Constable and Robinson, a memoir about going out to the Congo with my husband, getting caught up in a war and having to give birth to a baby while fleeing with my one year old son.

I have written a book entitled ‘Blood for our Blood’ about the murder of my mother’s cousin, a brilliant young surgeon, in Peshawar, British India 1932. The case appeared to have been abandoned for political reasons. In 1995 I went out to Pakistan and discovered the true reason for the murder.

After leaving India in 1947, my family went to Southern Africa.

I am currently writing a book about racism and colonialism entitled ‘Confessions of an Imperial Childhood’