The sun was shining, the air was pleasantly cool, and all was quiet except that away in the distance a strange bird was making an unusual hooting sound. It was not the mournful hooting of an owl, but something much more persistent and penetrating. "Woo-woo-woo" it went, constantly and monotonously, like ornithological alarm clock intent upon waking all the bird and animal population within hearing. A quick peep at my watch told me that the time was 6.30 a.m. and across in the other bed, just visible through the mosquito nets, J.R. was still sleeping soundly.

A knock at the door and in came Kwasi, our cook boy, bearing a tray with early morning tea and two cups. Through my half-closed eyes I saw him touch J.R. on the shoulder and hiss in his ear, "Tea, Massa". J.R. came awake in an instant and took the tray from him, with urgent instructions to keep his voice down so as not to wake Madame.

"Madame's awake", I said from my bed, "and dying for a cup of tea".

I sat up in bed, drinking my tea and watching my husband getting dressed for the tropical day - underpants, white shirt, white shorts, socks and shoes. Didn't take long. The days of wearing a solar topee for any excursions out into the sun were long gone and most of the white residents went bare-headed, unless they expected to be exposed to the sun for several hours as when working outdoors or playing in a cricket match. Then, panamas or linen hats were the order of the day. J.R. sometimes wore a hat, bought from a London shop, which the salesman informed him was called "an old gentleman's bowling hat". Well, that's as may be, but it certainly was ideal to combat the hot sun and provide shade from the glare, being white linen with a small brim all round, lined in dark green.

It was not, however, required at this time in the morning for the 100-yard walk to the Assay Office. He waved to me from the door as he went out and said he would be back for breakfast.

This early morning start to the day was essential to get important jobs done before it became too hot and sticky. He would be back at 8.30 for breakfast, then again at 1 p.m. for lunch, and had usually finished work for the day by about 3 p.m. Between 4.30 and 6 p.m. was golf time. The mine had its own golf course and most people managed to get down to the course for a quick nine holes before the rain came. Golf was considered to be the ideal form of exercise for this climate, being not so strenuous as tennis or badminton, and it filled in the time nicely between finishing work and adjourning to the Club for a before-dinner drink. October being the time of the "small rains", the game was frequently interrupted by a shower, which cooled everyone down.

I reflected that it was going to take me some time to become accustomed to this entirely new life, and one of the first things I had to become used to was having native servants. They were all called "boy" no matter how old they were, and most of them working in this area were Fantis, from the local tribe of that name. But there were others from farther afield - Yorubas and Ibos from Nigeria, Degartis (who ate snakes and dogs) from the north, Ashantis from the region round Kumasi, Hausa traders from Kano, boys from Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast and Togo. Some, mostly from the Northern Territories, had their faces slashed and seared from the distinctive tribal marks, which are cut on them when they are young. Generally speaking, I found the Gold Coast boys a happy breed and easy to get on with. They smiled a lot, showing their wonderful white teeth, and the children (called "piccans" from piccaninny) were especially appealing. The little girls wore gold earrings in their pierced ears and all of them, boys and girls, wore round their necks a fetish of some sort. This was usually an amulet, or simply a piece of bone or wood, bought from the witch doctor for a couple of chickens or something similar, and supposedly endowed by him with the magic powers of warding off the "evil eye". Christianity had penetrated to this neck of the woods, but even so the old ideas died hard and the local witch doctor still held sway over large numbers of the native population.

With the exception of the minority of boys who had received some basic education, they all spoke Pidgin English, which again takes a bit of getting used to. If a boy thinks he is unwell, he interprets this as "I be fit for die", even if he only has a headache. After cross-examination, he will then admit he is only "sick small for head". After a time one picks up these idioms. "Wait small" means "wait a minute", and food is always "chop". My most vivid memory of Kwasi after all these-years is of him standing in the doorway before dinner, wearing a white uniform starched so stiff that it could stand up by itself, saying "Chop ready, Massa". He never said it to me. I felt I was there on sufferance. I was simply Madame, who came with Massa, and was obviously going to make day-to-day life for Kwasi somewhat different from what had gone before.

One of the most trying things for me, right from the beginning, was the intolerable wet heat, from which there was no respite even at night. It had the effect of sapping my energy and making me very sleepy for much of the time. I had to almost force my eyelids to stay up after about 9 p.m., and this made life difficult if we happened to be socialising. Oh! the agony of trying to look interested and suppress shattering yawns at dinner parties when all I was longing for was the comfort and oblivion of my own bed. But, after a few months, I did become acclimatised, although the Gold Coast climate cannot under any circumstances be described as invigorating.

This was going to be a lazy life, I thought, as I wandered round the small garden on that first morning, while Kwasi organised breakfast. He did all the cooking, (which was just as well because in those days I couldn't boil water), and he had the assistance of a series of "small boys" to do the menial jobs like washing and ironing, cleaning shoes, housework, or anything which he considered was beneath his dignity to attend to. To be a Cook Boy in a mine household was thought by the African community to be a good job, and Kwasi was fully aware of his own importance in his social circle.

The bungalow was tiny, consisting of one bedroom, a living room, bathroom, a small cubbyhole where the kitchen crockery and utensils were kept, and an airy verandah which went round two sides of the building. All the windows and verandah were netted in with fine wire mesh netting, which was very effective at keeping out flying insects while allowing the windows to stay open all the time. The kitchen was quite separate, across a yard at the back, and here there was a wood-burning stove and an oven. This was Kwasi's domain. Here he reigned supreme and- I only ventured in when he had departed on some errand, down to the store probably, to make sure he was keeping it clean. He entertained his friends there, and his wife and relatives sometimes came up from the village for an afternoon out. His wife, I am sure' looked upon these jaunts as a welcome break from her normal daytime job of beating the locally grown plantains into a sticky mess called fu-fu, which was the Africans' staple diet.

Behind the kitchen, out of view from the bungalow, was a cold water tap. Here Kwasi took his daily bath after he had served the evening meal, and before returning to his home in Bogoso village.

The furniture in our bungalow was supplied by the mine management and was locally made of mahogany or cedar by an African carpenter. It was quite plain but served its purpose. Before my arrival J.R. had arranged to have a dressing table made for me and also a couple of bookcases to house the books which I always seem to accumulate. When I had arranged these, with my hairbrush and other toilet articles on the dressing table, the place began to look quite homelike.

We had breakfast on the verandah, with oranges from our own tree (green skinned but deliciously sweet), fresh pineapple and slices of a melon-like fruit called paw-paw which also grew locally, and when we had finished I said to my husband, "What am I going to do with myself all day while you are working?"

"Oh", he replied, jovially, "you won't have time to sit down and twiddle your thumbs. There will be a constant procession of women down here this morning - wives, you know, inviting you all over the place to morning coffee and dinner parties at their bungalows. "But don't worry", he added, quickly, seeing the alarm in my face, "you won't be expected to return any of the invitations for at least a month. They'll give you time to settle in."

I wanted to know why the mine was called Marlu. Apparently the first manager of the mine was a Mr. Pickering and his wife's name was Marie Louise. When the mine was opened, some time in the 1930's, and a name was sought for it, someone suggested it be called by the first two syllables of Mrs. Pickering's Christian name. And so it became Marlu. Marie Louise had a Domestic Science diploma and she produced a very useful little cookery book called "Tropical Cookery", for the use of wives living in the tropics, and this contained many first class recipes, including one for West African curry. This curry, I discovered, was to West Africa what roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is to England, and it was the standard meal for Sunday lunch. I was introduced to it quite early on, and although I didn't like it at first, I rapidly became one of its most enthusiastic devotees. J.R. bought me a copy of this book, rightly deciding that it was time my cookery education began, and I still have it and use it. It was my first cookery book and taught me everything I know about cookery in the tropics. Thank you, Marie Louise!

After breakfast, we stood outside for a few minutes in the sunshine, and l made the acquaintance of one of the most prolific of small reptiles in the country, the common house lizard. It was harmless, and the smaller ones were welcomed in the house as they ate flies. The larger ones liked to bask in the sun on the roof, occasionally taking flying leaps onto the ground, so that it was wise to stand a little distance from the edge of the roof unless you wanted a lizard on your head. We moved away to a safe distance and I had a look around, noting that the land sloped down on all sides from Assay Office hill.

To our left and behind the bungalow was the continuation of the valley which ran right through the mine, and looking down I could see residential bungalows for the white mining personnel scattered amongst the trees. Rising above the valley on that side was a line of hills, and on the summit were still more bungalows.

"Who lives up there?" I asked.

"That's Top hill", came the reply. "You saw the road leading up there as we drove in yesterday. That's where the heads of departments live".

"So why aren't we up there?" I asked, "seeing that you are head of the Assay Department."

"Wouldn't you rather live here?" he replied, indignantly, "on our own little hill?"

Yes, having thought about it, I decided I would. Here we were apart from the mob, away from the main stream of traffic, such as it was, but not isolated. Any vehicle coming up the Assay Hill we knew must be coming to us as the road was a dead end, and I could stand at the edge of the garden, looking down over the valley, and wave to people going along the road.

To the right of the bungalow was a steep drop to a large area of cleared land, and upon my asking what that was for, J.R. gave me a quick run-down on how the gold was mined at Marlu and why this area was called the "slimes dam''. He evidently thought it was time I knew something about gold mining, and this mine in particular.

Marlu was predominantly an open cast mine, which meant that the gold-containing ore was recovered from surface deposits. These were "mined" by large bucket excavators which removed the deposits as they were blasted by explosives from the hillside, and mechanical shovels then loaded the ore into small rail trucks for transportation to the crusher house, back on the main mine complex. There the chunks of rock were crushed down to pebble sized pieces which were fed into huge boiler-shaped horizontal ball mills, where the pebbles were further reduced to a fine powder. The now fine material was fed further into large water tanks containing a solution of cyanide. This substance has the property of dissolving gold, and the fine ore was agitated in these tanks for up to twenty-four hours to enable all the gold to be digested. At the end of this period, the mixture was pumped out of the tanks and passed through the filtration section of the plant, which removed all the waste sediment, allowing the gold-containing solution to pass on to the next section for further treatment. The waste product was now mixed with ordinary water, forming a solution which was pumped out to the waste dam (the slimes dam). The gold-containing solution was further treated by adding zinc dust, which "collected" the gold out of the solution. This product was again filtered and the zinc containing the gold collected, the wastewater being returned to the mill circuit. The gold-containing zinc was then dried, smelting agents were added and the whole mixture put into a furnace, where, once the appropriate heat had been reached, the gold changed from chemical to metallic form and collected at the bottom of the furnace. It was finally poured into moulds, the resulting gold bars being of a quality 920 fine, or 92% pure gold. Then the bars were shipped to gold refiners in Europe, who further processed it to achieve a quality of 999 fine, or 99.9% pure gold. Here at Marlu some 30,000 tons of ore was processed monthly. All the gold mines in the Gold Coast operated under license from the Government, entitling them to work the properties. Their operations were strictly controlled by the Department of Mines and the Government received appropriate royalties.

I digested all this in silence - and it took some digesting - while peering over the edge at the dam far below. And- how in all this lengthy and complicated process, I asked, did the Assay Office fit in? It was quite simple, really, and I could have worked it out for myself. Samples of the ground had to be taken wherever blasting and digging was going on. These samples were taken to the Assay Office to be analysed chemically as the work went on, and the measurements noted. The laboratory's further task was to monitor the gold as it passed through the treatment plant, so that the efficiency of the various operations could be measured. An analysis had also to be carried out on samples of the waste ore as it was pumped away and finally the gold bars had to be analysed so that the total quantity of gold extracted could be cross-checked with the ore fed into the plant.

It all sounded very clever and complex. I must admit I was impressed and stored the information at the back of my mind to mull over at leisure, meantime only commenting that I hoped he kept his distance from all that cyanide.

Before J.R. went back to the office, we walked round to the back of our bungalow, behind the kitchen, and could then see another building a short way down the hill. This housed our nearest neighbour and from this bungalow, he informed me, I would be receiving my first invitation of the day.

"Her name is Doris". he said, "wife of Doug Rogers, mine electrician. They are from Cornwall, great friends of mine. You'll like them".

Sure enough, about ten thirty Doris appeared at my doorway' a dark-haired smiling girl carrying a hibiscus plant in a pot - our first house warming present. Any qualms I may have had about meeting lots of other wives disappeared under the warmth of her welcome. Everyone was very friendly at Marlu, she said, and if I needed any help in my early days, I only had to call on her.

We went down the footpath to her house between a small army of native boys who were cutting the coarse grass with scythes, known in West Africa as pangas. These grass-cutter boys worked constantly around the mine, keeping the areas round the buildings cleared so that snakes in particular could not lurk unseen, and there were other boys whose sole job was to spray oil on any puddles left by the rain, to prevent the malarial mosquitoes from breeding. This was by order of the mine doctor, Dr. Michael Donnelly, and certainly while he was in charge of our health at Marlu the malarial rate, amongst both whites and blacks, was kept down to a minimum.

The doctor's wife, Dilys (always known as Dill), was one of Doris's coffee morning guests, and she arrived in her own car from the Hospital bungalow, everyone else living near enough to walk. Dill was tall and dark and alarmingly sophisticated, although pleasant enough to me. There was also Paddy, who lived next door to Doris, and several others whose names remained rather a blur, with the exception of a very sweet girl named Margot. She told me within a few moments of meeting her that she was going home in January, as she was going to have a baby. This it appeared was a disaster of some immensity, as she and her husband Donald had only been married three months and starting a family so quickly was not part of their plans at all. Apparently, Dr. Donnelly was very strict about pregnant wives, especially first time pregnancies, and he didn't want them giving birth on the mine.

"Have babies by all means", he used to say to any wife hesitating on the brink, "but have them in England. Don't believe in women having babies in the Bush".

He was right, of course. The European Hospital was not equipped to deal with obstetrical emergencies, although being a perfectly adequate hospital in other directions, one of the best in fact of all the mining hospitals. The natives were catered for at the adjoining African Hospital, also under the direction of Dr. Donnelly. Malaria was the biggest problem for both whites and blacks, and in spite of quinine and all the doctor's precautions, was still one of the most lethal of tropical diseases amongst the natives. All the white population took a form of quinine every day to keep the disease at bay, but most people contracted a mild form of malaria some time during their twelve or fifteen month tour of duty. In the Gold Coast the disease took the form of gastric malaria, rather like a particularly nasty form of gastric 'flu. The daily anti-malarial pill ensured that if one did get malaria, at least it was controllable and did not usually develop into either cerebral malaria or blackwater fever, both of which had a high mortality rate.

The talk at Doris's coffee party centered mostly on the forthcoming Saturday night party at the Club to welcome Bunty and me and another new wife, Eve Hammonds, to Marlu. There were a lot of newly arrived couples on the mine, and competition amongst the wives was fierce to see who would be the best dressed female at the Club on Saturday nights. That is, who would wear the most revealing evening dress without actually being indecent. This was the era of the strapless dress, which in order to stay up at all had to be anchored extremely tightly to an even tighter strapless bra underneath - not the most comfortable apparel to wear on a sweltering tropical evening.

However, the problem of what to wear was not likely to bother me for some time. My evening wear was adequate without being adventurous, consisting of a pale peach dress with decorous short sleeves and round neckline,- which I had worn as a bridesmaid at my cousin's wedding the previous year, and a long black' skirt and white blouse (evening dress uniform). I was not going to turn any heads in this unobtrusive gear, but that was fine by me. I was quite happy to remain in the background, observing other people, until I had found my feet.

As I was preparing to leave, Dill Donnelly turned round and invited J.R. and me to dinner at her house the following week, together with the other new bride, Eve.

We thanked her, and as she was going out of the door, she said, over her shoulder, "Oh, wear a long skirt, please." This was a sensible precaution to take, even if one was only visiting the house next door, as a skirt covering the ankles tended to discourage the advances of the ever-hungry mosquitoes. But Eve did bristle a bit at the imperious tone in which this remark was delivered, and replied with some asperity, "I'm sorry, I don't have one". Before she married she had been Chief Buyer for the Ladies Sports Wear Department in one of London's most prestigious department stores and did not now take kindly to anyone telling her what and what not to wear.

The remainder of that first day passed in a pattern which was to become the norm for my day-to-day life on the Coast an hour's snooze on the bed during the worst of the day's heat, followed by a quick bath, and then a walk round the golf course with J.R., being initiated into the basics of the game of golf, and ending up at the Club to join the circle of pre-dinner drinkers on the grass outside. This circle consisted largely of those men who were unmarried or whose wives were temporarily back in England, and the conversation was mostly of the 'hole-in-one' variety. I sipped my coca-cola and looked about me.

The mine Manager, Mr. Theodore Climas ("Theo"), another Cornishman, was there, and he seemed at first sight to be a mild-mannered inoffensive little man. His blue eyes twinkled at me as he welcomed me to Marlu and hoped I would be happy. He had his special cronies seated on either side of him, as well as several others - aspiring cronies - who were hanging on his every word, laughing when he laughed, taking it in turns to buy the drinks, and it was not long before I decided that he was well named. He was indeed God on the mine. The whole set-up reminded me forcibly of life on an R.A.F. station, where I had spent three and a half of the best years of my life during the War, with the various layers of the hierarchy radiating out and down from the Group Captain, through the Heads of Departments, down to the erks doing the menial jobs. Substitute Mine Manager for Group Captain and here we had much the same thing, except of course we didn't have to book in and out, or get late passes for an evening on the town.

But, looking at Mr. Climas and watching those intelligent little eyes which didn't seem to miss a thing, I doubted whether he was taken in by the more blatant of the suckers-up, and most likely found it all highly amusing.

During the next few days, I was not exactly looking forward to the welcome party for Eve and me at the Club on Saturday night, realising that we should both be very much on show. But there was no ducking out of it. All I could do was put on my best party dress (the peach silk one), comb my hair, make up my face and prepare to at least look as if I was enjoying myself.

When the evening came, I realised it was also party night in Bogoso village, and as darkness grew the sounds of music came wafting up the hill to the mine from where the villagers were having their Saturday night rave-up, drinking palm wine and dancing to the one-string fiddles and the drums. They certainly had rhythm, even the piccans. We would see them down at the store some afternoons, singing and dancing with their little loads on their heads (sometimes just a bottle of ink - well corked, one hoped), smiling their wide-toothed grins and swinging their small hips. A few years later on, when we were all dancing "The Twist", I could fully understand where that came from. We heard the drums from our bungalow as we were getting dressed for the party. "Fu-fu music" said J.R. cheerfully, as he tied his tie.

Kwasi and our small boy had already gone, presumably to join the revels and no doubt collecting other houseboys on their way down. To get to the village from the mine they had to go past a certain hill, and now as we started on our way down to the Club, my husband told me the story of the little men with their feet turned backwards. I thought he was pulling my leg, in order to make me laugh and take my mind off the ordeal ahead. But not at all. I heard this story time after time, from many other people. This hill was where the little men lived, the little men with their feet turned backwards, the Motya Men - and bullets bounced off them. All the Africans firmly believed in them and none would walk past that hill after dark unless he was in a group with others, or with a European. My mind, with its awkward habit of picking on items irrelevant and unimportant, insisted on trying to find the answer to one question - if their feet are turned backwards, which way do they walk, forwards or backwards? No one, of course, could provide the answer. No one, of course, would admit to ever having seen these little men. Tongue in cheek, I questioned Kwasi, who responded in the usual way of the African native when embarrassed, a bashful laugh showing all his teeth and with his eyes fixed on the ground. But; nevertheless, he would never walk the village road after dark on his own in case he should see the little men with their feet turned backwards. (And bullets bounce off them).

The party turned out to be fun, after all my nail biting. It was quite a sight, after the War and four years of dreary austerity in England, to see girls whirling round the dance floor in pretty full-length evening dresses in gay colours.

Most of the dresses were sleeveless and backless and no doubt were held up by good faith and many safety pins, but the effect was a dazzling kaleidoscope of moving colours, backed by the men in their tropical whites. Eve and I, being guests of honour so to speak, were never off the floor, me in my demure bridesmaid's dress, well covered up, and she in an equally circumspect patterned afternoon dress, the hem of which came just below her knees. She was the only woman in the room in a short skirt but she didn't let it bother her, and certainly the ratio of about three men to one woman ensured that we were never without a partner.

One or two people made an impression on me. Margot was well to the fore, looking stunning in a strapless gown of wine red velvet and her hair swept up to the top of her head, and Doris was a complete contrast in pure white, which showed off her suntanned skin and big dark eyes. Of the men, I remember Alec Gray who danced like a spinning top and was so cross-eyed I didn't know which eye to look at, and Davy Dow, shaped like Humpty Dumpty so that dancing with him was difficult in a different way. And Dill was there in gold lame, looking remarkably cool and sleek, with her husband, the doctor.

I have only met a few people in my lifetime whom I really could not get on with, right from the start. I think I am fairly easy-going and prepared to like nearly everyone, but in a minority of cases the gears simply wouldn't mesh, and this looked like being one of those cases. Michael Donnelly was an older man, a silver haired charmer, who had the females of the camp swooning in droves. All except me. I always felt uneasy in his presence and could never put my finger on the reason. From all accounts he was a very good doctor and surgeon and had spent the War in the Army Medical Corps, ending up as a Colonel. This posed another question. What was an excellent doctor doing out here in the wilds, when with his qualifications and expertise he could no doubt have been usefully employed, not to mention better paid, in any number of important hospitals world-wide? It was a mystery. The Gold Coast until quite recently had had the reputation of being a haven for men getting away from their wives (or other people's wives) and from financial embarrassments, or a variety of other reasons - so one wondered. Not that anyone complained about it. It was, after all, our good luck at Marlu to have a more than competent doctor to look after us.

The dinner party the next week was a lot less fun. Eve was indisposed so therefore she and her husband Len did not come. The other guests were Theo Climas and two or more of Michael Donnelly's fellow doctors from neighbouring mines, and it was all very formal. I wore my black and white evening dress uniform and my diamond engagement ring, with a string of pearls J.R. had bought me as a wedding present. Dill was in black, terribly smart, and with no jewelry at all except a ring with a ruby almost as big as a golf ball.

The house was beautiful, as was to be expected, furnished with what looked like antiques, no doubt shipped out from England. No mine carpenter had been applying his trade here. The bathroom fittings were impeccable, and as Paddy remarked in wonder after she had been there for a coffee morning - "even the seat was polished!" And the meal itself was a dream, starting with asparagus and ending with crepes-suzette cooked at our elbows by Dill's very superior cook and his two underlings, on a portable electric hotplate. The glassware and silver twinkled from the light in the overhead chandelier, and the porcelain coffee cups were so eggshell thin that one expected them to shatter into pieces when the hot coffee was poured into them.

Unfortunately, the conversation round the dinner table on this occasion consisted almost entirely of anecdotes regarding the game of golf, about which I knew nothing so could not join in. It seemed to me that Theo Climas was the instigator of this, which I thought was rather rude and off-putting to a newcomer. Then a further awkwardness arose when it became evident that one of the visiting doctors had been pretty well oiled before he arrived, and by the time dinner was over, with different wines at the meal and liqueurs after, he was, to put it bluntly, drunk. While we were having our coffee in the sitting room, he was discreetly led away, to be driven back the twenty or so miles to his bungalow near Tarkwa.

Dill, trying to retrieve the ruins of her dinner party, murmured to J.R., who was already on his feet anticipating departure, "Don't leave yet." But he could see the dismay on my face, so although we did stay a little while longer, blight had been cast over the evening and we left shortly afterwards.

By the time we were back in our own bungalow, I was feeling rather cast down, although J.R. assured me that the evening's events had been unusual and not typical of social gatherings on the Coast.

I did so hope he was right.