I was born in what was Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. My great-grandparents had come to the new colony in the 1890s with their three children. The eldest of these children was my grandmother. Both my mother and father were born in Africa. Mum was born in Gatooma, Rhodesia on 11th August 1911, and Dad at a place called Heilbron, Orange Free State, South Africa on 18th December 1907. I was born at 5pm Sunday 2nd November 1947. My arrival into the world was pretty dramatic and I had to be baptised in the hospital as I was not expected to survive even though I weighed a whopping ten and a half pounds. I did survive and joined a family that included, apart from Mum and Dad, a sister,Valerie, ten; brother, David, nine; sister, Margaret, two and a half. I don’t remember a great deal about this time of my life, but I have been told that, when I was born, we lived at Beatrice Road cottages and then, because Dad worked for the railways, we moved to a house in Lochinvar, a suburb of Salisbury. I do remember sitting at the end of this long driveway waiting for my Daddy to come home. I also remember the garden had a lot of flowers and I used to pick up millipedes (known locally as ‘chungalaulaus’) and put them in my upturned hat. I must have been a lot braver then as I loathe anything with six legs or more. When I was thirteen months old, the family went to a place called Saldanha Bay in the Cape Province, South Africa. There are a great many photos of me besporting a very fetching swimsuit plus an enormous hat. I amused the family with my reluctance to actually go into the sea. I preferred to find a rock pool. This photo is one of very few to show me braving the shallows with Margaret and a girl, Francine, who was looking after us. I tried very hard to do what my older sisters and brother did – my nickname was, apparently, ‘me, too’! This photo shows me attempting to ride Margaret’s tricycle, which was far too big for me. I wasn’t the youngest for very long. In March 1949, when I was seventeen months, another boy, brother Blair, joined the family We were known as ‘the twinnies’ because we were so close in age and we spent our days playing quite happily while our older siblings went off to a place called ‘school’ every day. From the hazy memories I have of the time I know my mother didn’t go to work and that there always seemed to be cousins and other relatives visiting. I was a real Daddy’s girl and used to wait at the end of the driveway for him to come home at night. I also remember going to Lake Macilwaine on picnics with cousins. This happy time was rudely interrupted one day. Without warning, I was dressed in the same sort of clothes as my sisters, a ‘uniform’. I had to leave my brother and mother and go to the ‘school’ place. No gentle introduction to school in the fifties! I was absolutely terrified and it was days before I was persuaded not to run after my older sister every time she left me. For the first week I had to be locked into the classroom. I never ever learned to like school, but was persuaded by my father not to keep running away. I would still have preferred to be at home. I was terribly shy and found it difficult to make friends, but do remember being friends with a little girl called Anthea. By the time I was seven, I had more or less settled at school. We had moved to a new house. My great-grandmother had come to live with us, and, being Catholics, I had made my First Communion. All was well again in my world. Then another bombshell! My Dad was going to Northern Rhodesia to look for work. Then, when this had happened, we were all going to move to a town called Kitwe to live with him. My safe little world folded up. Dad left and my older sister packed us all up. Gran went to live with my great aunt. We went to live in a boarding house. It was horrible! Mum went to work with my sister, we had to have packed lunches and stay at school in the afternoons. Fortunately it was only for a month though it seemed much longer. It seemed that Kitwe was a long, long way away. Mum and my older sister found someone who was prepared to give us a lift to this far away place (a normal occurrence at this time, people apparently would advertise in the paper that were prepared to offer lifts to Northern Rhodesia though he most probably didn’t visualize taking two adults and three children!) Just before Christmas 1955, Mum, brothers, Margaret and me were packed into this great, big, dark green car and off we went. It was a very long drive but I don’t remember too much as I was able to stretch over my older brother and the driver and sleep most of the way. This ability to sleep in a car has never left me, except of course, when I am driving. It was very exciting seeing my Dad again. Unfortunately, he had been no more successful work wise in the North. He only managed a succession of temporary jobs for nearly two years. This had a knock on effect on where we lived as well. At that time, very few people owned their own homes. Most people lived in what would be known as ‘tied housing’. If you lived on the mine, you had a mine house; in government, a government house and so on. Most people went on holiday to either South Africa or overseas which were both a long, long way from Northern Rhodesia and took days to reach. So they normally saved all their holiday entitlement for a couple of years and went away for six weeks to two months. They would then let out their houses as ‘leave houses’ for two reasons. One – the rent would be paid while they were away and two – the house was less likely to be burgled if it was occupied. For two years we lived in a succession of these ‘leave houses’. This did not affect our schooling. Wherever we lived, we went to the local primary school. It meant that sometimes we walked further to and from home than at others. Sometimes we didn’t even know we were about to move until we saw our garden boy at the school gate. Mum would send him to show us the new route home. My greatest memory of this time is the amount of walking we did. Mind you, life wasn’t all walking, though it felt like it at times and it wasn’t only walking to school. We walked to town, to the cinema, to the swimming baths – Dad very rarely had a car and his usual mode of transport was a bicycle. When he did have a car we went on picnics to local beauty spots or to visit friends that lived in other Copperbelt towns. On one of the occasions we had a car we even made another long journey, this time to a place called Kleimond in the Cape Province, South Africa. It was a very old car and did very well getting us to our destination. Imagine six people crammed into a Vauxhall Velox traveling over two thousand miles. It took us four days, I think, and we stayed in a cottage on a farm. For us younger children, it was totally magical. This was the first holiday we had had since Saldanha Bay. We didn’t care that it was winter and the sea was very cold. We went swimming every day much to the amusement of the local residents. We also climbed the huge pine trees, read books from the small collection at the farm, went on trips with the farmer and climbed the small mountain we could see from the cottage. Our seaside was a great deal different to an English one. It was wild and the mountains were covered in glorious wild flowers. The memories of that holiday have lived with all of us ever since. The holiday took place in August 1957 and when we finally got home, my father managed to obtain a permanent job with the local Municipality (local Council). This meant a house of our own at long last, 902 Yorkminster Way, an address that holds great memories for the whole family, as it was the one we lived in the longest. We still had a long way to walk to school every day, but we always knew we would go home to the same house. My grandparents lived down the road with my uncle and aunt two doors along. . This photo is taken on our front lawn not long before we moved. Before going on holiday I had joined the Brownies. In 1959 after gaining my Golden Hand, I got my ‘wings’ and flew up to Guides to join my sister. I was just in time to join the troop at a national guide camp to celebrate fifty years of Guiding in 1960. It was a wonderful experience. In 1960 I also moved up to secondary school, a new route to walk even though the return destination stayed the same. These years were very happy ones – in fact – my whole childhood was happy. I had wonderful, loving parents and siblings. We never had a lot of money, but it didn’t seem to effect us very much. My Dad made birthdays and Christmases enormous fun. My mother made our clothes and recited poetry, her own as well as poetry remembered from her childhood. We went to Church with my grandmother, babysat for my uncle’s children which included going with them to the circus and on picnics. We were a very extended family and either visited relatives or they visited us. I don’t know how we all squashed into our fairly small three-bed roomed bungalow, but we did and all had great fun. My older brother went to England in 1959 to join the British Army. Valerie trained as a teacher and came to Kitwe to teach though she never taught me.She married in 1964. Margaret left school in 1963 and went to work for one of the banks. She also married in 1964, had a son and she and her husband emigrated to Canada with their little boy in 1966. I married in January 1966 aged eighteen, (very foolish!) and Blair went to Johannesburg in 1966 to complete an apprenticeship with Iscor. My parents left what had become Zambia in 1964 in the late 60s to live back in Salisbury. Despite all being so scattered we still all remember the Kitwe years with great fondness.