For the past three years I had led a very prosaic, dull existence as a shorthand typist in a London office, and at the time of my leaving I had a fairly responsible job, being in charge of three copy typists who were junior to me. I was not very interested in the work, and the prospect of flying out to that exotic country, Africa, and getting married there, was very enticing. Now, instead of having to oversee three giggly teenage girls, I found myself coping with two black Africans, who were totally uneducated by English standards and with only a minimal grasp of the English language. It was certainly a big change.

However, I soon discovered that Kwasi was an excellent cook, obviously having been taught by some other Madame, and Kofi, the resident small boy at my arrival, was a first class washer and ironer. He was not such a keen sweeper out of corners, and I did find it necessary to sometimes follow him around unobtrusively with a duster. Generally speaking. I was my own boss. J.R. being out of the house most of the day, and if I felt like putting my feet up and taking life easily, there was no one to tell me not to.

One of the things I noticed soon after I arrived, was the variety of butterflies that were to be seen, butterflies in all sizes and colours - yellow, red, blue, brown, green, black, the wings of some adorned with beautiful patterns like old mosaic work. And something I had not been aware of was that during J.R.'s first tour at Marlu, he had begun collecting butterflies, and he now showed me his collection up-to-date, all duly mounted in a glass case. There were some fantastic ones in brilliant colours, as well as a fair number of more somber shaded moths, varying in size from very tiny to over six inches' spread. I couldn't bring myself to handle them, much less inject them in their heads with formaldehyde, the accepted method of killing them, but it was pointed out to me, logically I suppose, they didn't live more than a day or two anyway, so that this way they were preserved for people to admire their lovely colours and shapes.

We took a few short walks into the bush, following tracks evidently made by the natives on their way to and from their villages, taking with us a butterfly net, but in the green gloom of the overhanging trees we did not see very many. They were happier in the sunshine. I was a bit nervous of meeting any animals, but was informed that the bush was too thick to permit the passage of any of the larger wild animals, and the only ones we would be likely to see would be the black colubus monkeys. We saw plenty of these, swinging in the tree branches high above our heads and chattering away. I felt they had an advantage over us, being up in the light and sunshine, whereas we were down in the stifling damp heat, finding it difficult to breathe as the super-abundant plant life all around us was taking most of the oxygen out of the air. The possibility of stepping on a snake made us very careful where we put our feet, and J.R. carried a .45 revolver in case of any emergency.

We once went into Bogoso village, where I was stared at and pointed to by the mammies and their seemingly dozens of babies and small children. The mammies all wore the brightly coloured cloths wound tightly round their ample figures, and turban-like round their heads. The babies were carried on their backs, with one fold of the cloth anchoring them securely to their mothers. These cloths were specially manufactured in England for West Africa, and some of them were attractive enough to appeal to European tastes. Being pure cotton they were easily washable, and' the clear, strong reds and blues looked well against the dark background of the bush. We used to sometimes make day dresses for ourselves out of them whenever, as frequently happened, the U.A.C. ran short of conventional dress materials.

Bogoso village itself was spread on either side of the main Tarkwa road, and consisted of compounds each containing several houses, one or two storied, with mud walls and palm thatched roofs. On one side was a road, which was lined with shade trees, the most important being known as the village palaver tree, under which the headman and elders congregated to discuss matters of state and other things. The village even boasted two taps of running water, being so close to the mine and its amenities. Around the cleared area were plots of land planted with the chief articles of the villagers' diet - plantains and yams.

Plantains look like bananas, but when handled have an uninteresting soapy feeling, and they have absolutely no taste at all. But they are undoubtedly very satisfying if baked or fried. They were largely used in the green state by the Africans, and beaten into fu-fu. Heavy wooden bowls, most likely made out of a piece of tree trunk, and broad-ended sticks were used for this purpose. From every village hut towards meal time you would hear a monotonous thud-thud-thud as the women, standing up to their work, moved the heavy fu-fu sticks up and down, reducing the chopped up bits of plantain into a nasty-looking sticky mess. The Africans were, and probably still are, very fond of fu-fu and eat it with a seasoning of beans and hot peppers, plus dried fish by the barrel load. This latter was considered by them to be a great delicacy, although known throughout the European community, for obvious reasons, as "stink fish". Fu-fu can also be made of yams, which are more nutritious than plantains and cost more. Yams are more difficult to grow, have to be planted and carefully tended, and they also exhaust the land and render it useless for another crop for several years, therefore making them a much more expensive food than plantains. The poorest of the natives appeared to exist almost entirely on plantains, and this might account for the fact that the piccans all had pot bellies - too much fu-fu and not enough protein.

We were glad to eat yams ourselves now and then, when the U.A.C. ran out of potatoes. Yams look a bit like turnips, although very coarse in texture but if well grated and boiled with milk I defy anyone to distinguish them from mashed potatoes.

The biggest product of the Cold Coast was cocoa, although at this later date I do not recall ever having seen any cocoa plantations in the part of the country we lived in. I know in the early nineteen fifties the cocoa economy was being upset by a widespread plant ailment called swollen shoot disease, the only known cure for which was the ruthless cutting out of affected trees. I presume this has been overcome, as there does not now appear to be any shortage of cocoa in the shops.

While we were in the village, there was a headman somewhere around, but I didn't see him, and the local witch also kept out of sight - which was a pity, as I would have liked to have seen the man who reputedly had such influence over the inhabitants. The rather odd social structure of village life in the Gold Coast was also explained to me. The huts, farmland and possessions were handed down not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew, so that if a boy had a wealthy uncle he was much more to be envied than if his father owned land or money. It seemed to me that if this was a typical Gold Coast village, and I think it was, nobody owned very much of anything anyway, but the climate was such that, unlike vast tracts of the rest of the continent, no one actually starved. With all the rain and heat, most food stuffs grew very easily, and fruit in particular flourished in great abundance. It was no wonder that the natives were inclined to be lazy, but they were so good humoured that one couldn't help liking them.

I had not been out on the Coast more than a few weeks when I received my first tsetse fly bite.

One of the reservations in my mind about going out to the tropics was the number of insects and other creepy-crawlies which were bound to predominate in these parts. Spiders in particular I disliked intensely, especially the big ones with large, sagging bodies and long folded legs. They always seemed to have a frightening turn of speed when spotted in the bath, after having emerged from the waste pipe. My usual method or coping with them, which was to keep the plugs firmly in place in both bath and wash basin when not in use, was not very popular at home in England, after a leaky tap had succeeded in overflowing the basin and flooding the bathroom. Here, however, I was the lady of the house, so Kwasi and Kofi were firmly instructed that Madame ' did not like spiders and they were to dispatch any of these which dared to show themselves.

But, strangely, 1 saw very few spiders. The wire netting over windows and doors excluded most flying and crawling insects, and the regular use of a disinfectant spray each evening killed off all other small objects with legs or wings which might be hovering in dark corners. The most prolific insects were the small brown sugar ants and the not-so-small cockroaches. The ants were everywhere. Even the smallest amount of food left out after a meal would very quickly become the centre of a heaving mass of voracious brown bodies, with long lines of ants converging from all corners. Food, unless completely sealed in tins or kept in the refrigerator, was housed in the food safe - a wooden structure with mesh sides, the four legs of which were placed in tins of diesel oil so that they were completely surrounded by liquid, and any ants which tried to penetrate the safe fell into the oil and were drowned. I quickly learnt to deal with ants. They were clean little insects and would demolish any dead flies or moths which they discovered in their path.

Cockroaches were another matter altogether. I think they are known as black beetles in England, and steam beetles on board ship, but the African cockroach is much bigger, a reddish brown in colour and with peculiar markings on the head which gave them a resemblance to a skull or death's head. I went in fear and trembling of seeing a cockroach. In the evenings, sitting at dinner, someone would often spy one scuttling across the floor and hurl a shoe at it, never of course hitting it. They liked to get into all the warm corners, a favourite place being our wardrobes. These were known as drying cupboards, because in order to combat the all-pervading damp they would each have a couple of electric light bulbs in the bottom, permanently alight, and these dried the air sufficiently to prevent shoes from getting covered in mould and delicate silks and chiffons rotting away. Cockroaches loved to creep into the drying cupboards, and I shall never forget my horror when one day, without thinking, I put my hand inside my cupboard to get a handkerchief and felt a cockroach run over it.

Kwasi's favourite method of dealing with cockroaches was to nonchalantly step on them with his bare foot, which made a nauseating crunch, and then pick the body up and drop it out of the nearest window.

There were also the ever-present mosquitoes, both malarial and non-malarial. It was easy to distinguish between the two kinds. When they settled on a wall the body of the non-malarial variety was parallel to the wall, but the other kind, the anopholes, crouched at an angle. It was difficult to keep them out of the house altogether, as with Kwasi coming in and out from the kitchen the side door was constantly being opened and closed. House flies, wasps and hornets there were also in abundance, and the dreaded tsetse fly.

At first sight the tsetse fly is very similar to a housefly - being black and only slightly larger. One afternoon I felt something biting my leg and looking down saw what I thought was an outside house fly. I knocked it off with the fly swatter, but almost immediately my leg began to swell up and I spent the next week sitting down with my afflicted leg stretched out before me on a chair, looking as though I had contracted elephantiasis. My first tsetse fly bite. They must have liked the taste of me because without exaggeration I can truthfully say that I had one nearly every day for weeks. I was assured I would not get sleeping sickness, this being an illness that only the natives were prone to, not being so well nourished as Europeans. This did not stop J.R. from teasing me constantly over the next few years quoting my propensity for falling into bed at 9 p.m. and sleeping the clock round, and saying I had probably had sleeping sickness ever since my first bite.

After a while I became quite good at spotting tsetse flies in the bungalow. There was something about the way they flew which was different from houseflies. They zoomed about in graceful sweeps, unlike the ordinary flies with their uncoordinated zigzags. And when at rest on our white-washed walls they were also easy to pick out, with their wings folded back against their bodies. My first bite must have given me some immunity against their poison, as I only had a little local irritation from subsequent bites, and no swelling.

Once I was about again it was the end of November. The small rains had ended and the brief dry season was about to start. December became sunnier and dryer as each day went past and any time from Christmas onwards the Harmattan, the dry north wind from the Sahara, would start to blow, causing books to curl up and sand to get into everything. Some people hated the Harmattan because of a moth, which appeared at that time, and this affected those with sensitive skins, bringing them up in an itchy dry rash. The boys in particular didn't like this wind. Although the days were bright and sunny, the dry atmosphere made it appear much cooler, especially after the sun went down, and the boys were inclined to go down with chest colds and pneumonia. I loved the Harmattan. I had loads more energy for a couple of months and would have preferred the weather to be like that all the time.

One bright morning I was on my way to the U.A.C. to go grocery shopping, followed at a suitable distance by Kwasi and Kofi to carry everything back, when as I passed the Assay Office J.R. appeared at the door with the news that my holiday was over.

A Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, who were on their way back from leave in England, were at this instant disembarking from one of the Elder Dempster mail boats at Takoradi harbour and would be arriving at Marlu in two days' time. Glyn Lewis was Shaftmaster at Marlu, which meant he was in charge of the underground workings and the African staff who worked there, and it was the custom for returning European staff to be entertained for dinner on their first evening back by one or other of the heads of departments already on the mine.

"They will be coming to our bungalow for dinner", J.R. announced, and seeing my apprehensive face, he added, "Don't worry, Kwasi will take care of everything. All, you have to do is shop".

Now, I had never had to do any housekeeping until I came to Africa. In England I had lived at home with my parents, gone to the office every day, and all the cooking and shopping was taken care of by my mother. Food rationing was still in force, which simplified things in that there was only a limited amount of food that one could buy, only a certain amount in the shops. But here, food supplies were pretty well unlimited. There had been no rationing during the War and supplies kept on coming in from all over the world, unlike in England where we suffered severely from the effects of the German blockade. It was no better when the War ended, either. Everything went for export to pay for the war we had just won. The meat ration was pitifully small, most tinned goods were on "points" in the ration books, and fresh fruits like oranges and bananas were simply never seen.

But here it was like being in Aladdin's cave, except that instead of gold and jewels the place was stuffed with food. The first time I went down to the store with Doris, I could hardly believe my eyes. There were shelves and shelves from floor to ceiling of canned goods of all kinds - peaches, pears, plums, strawberries, ham, chicken, sausages, kidneys, salmon, corned beef, some from South Africa and some from Australia, tea from India and China, rice from other parts of tropical Africa. And there was a cold store with beef from Argentina and lamb from New Zealand, as well as local beef and chicken (vetted by the doctor as being fit for human consumption). You could also buy kitchen utensils, towels, sheets, etc., and there were occasional deliveries of nylons and dress materials. White drill and other cotton materials were available for men's shorts and shirts, and African tailors would quickly run up any required clothes on their hand or treadle sewing machines. Fresh fruit could be had in abundance, and not necessarily from the store. Oranges, lemons, bananas, paw-paws and mangoes grew everywhere you looked, and our orange tree in the garden produced two crops a year of the delicious green skinned oranges. If you wanted bananas, Kwasi would bring up a bunch of about thirty small green ones from the village for threepence, and put in the kitchen they slowly ripened, a few at a time. In West Africa we ate so many bananas that we had a surfeit of them, and for years afterwards couldn't face the large, bland, almost tasteless fruit which was all that the English greengrocers could offer. And for a long time, after our final return to England in 1959, we used to scour the shops for the tins of Walls pork sausages which we used to get in Africa and which we liked so much. Without success - no one could produce the exact same product and nothing else in that dine tasted so good. It was another case of an item being for "export only".

"Tell me about these Lewises", I said to J.R. that evening, as we were sitting outside on the verandah, having a pre-dinner drink (sherry for me, orange juice for my husband who didn't drink alcohol in those days), and through the door watching Kwasi in freshly starched white uniform laying the dinner table. "What are they like?"

Well, it appeared they were Cornish. No, that wasn't strictly true. Jane was from Cornwall, but Glyn was a Welshman who had lived in Cornwall for many years and had met his wife there; There were a lot of Cornish miners in the Gold Coast, driven out there because the Cornish mines were almost defunct and couldn't provide them with a living. Here in West Africa they lived almost a life of luxury; were paid more than they had ever been paid before, had servants and a bungalow provided, plentiful food and the beer was strong and cheap.

"But", added J.R., "the Lewises are not your average ignorant miner, flinging money about because they've never had so much before. In fact, Jane is known as the meanest woman on the Coast."

He enlarged on this a bit. There was a story going the rounds about one of the European shift bosses who was invited to the Lewises for lunch, to sample one of Jane's home made Cornish pasties. When the pasties were taken out of the oven, three of them, Jane carefully cut each one into three pieces - a centre section and two ends. Jane, Glyn and their guest had a centre portion of pasty carefully placed upon their plates, and this, with one potato and a few tinned peas, was lunch. The six end portions, which consisted almost entirely of pastry, were removed and put into the refrigerator. After a few moments of silent eating, Glyn, who always seemed to be hungry, asked his wife if he could have one of the ends.

"Oh no, my love", she replied, severely, "those are for lunch tomorrow."

And that was that. The six unappetising hunks of pastry were no doubt warmed up and dished up for lunch the next day, together probably with one potato and a few more pale green peas.

"Anyway", said J.R. to me, "anything you give them to eat will be welcome. They have known hard times, when there was not sufficient money coming in to buy food, so don't worry - they're not fussy".

And my simple little dinner (tomato soup, roast leg of lamb with roast potatoes and canned beans, followed by fresh fruit salad and ice cream) did go down well. Kwasi cooked and served it impeccably. He borrowed a cut glass decanter from Doug and Doris for the wine and a pair of silver-plated candelabra from another neighbour, so that the table looked really handsome. We never found out whether the owners of these articles ever missed them, but this sort of thing happened all the time. You would go out to dinner at one or the other of the neighbouring bungalows and see something vaguely familiar, like a flower painted coffee set or some etched wine glasses, and after giving the object a hard look, would remark, "Funny! We have some just like that in our bungalow)" After a time the penny would drop - it was yours, and the boys had been having the usual scramble in the background to add a bit of class to Master's dining table. The articles finally found their way back to the rightful owners, and so long as nothing was chipped or badly soiled, it was regarded as a bit of a joke.

Glyn Lewis turned out to be a cheerful little man with a nutcracker grin and his wife an exceedingly plain woman who, at the drop of a hat, would regale you with details of her last operation. She "enjoyed" bad health and suffered with her kidneys, the mystery being how she had managed to persuade her doctor to allow her to come out to the Coast. As she herself was fond of remarking - if you have anything wrong with you, the Coast will bring it out! General opinion was that she insisted on being with Glyn, to see what he was getting up to. Whenever there was an event on at the Club, such as a party or the weekly cinema show, you could rely upon Jane being there seated in a comfortable chair with her feet propped up on a stool (because of her swollen ankles), beaming at the company from behind her thick glasses, waiting for someone to bore with the latest bulletin on her health, and keeping her beady eyes on Glyn to see how much he was drinking. Once when I was sitting next to her, and perhaps not showing enough sympathy, she insisted on dragging my hand round to her back so that I could feel the thickness of the padded corset her doctor said she had to wear' presumably to keep her kidneys from floating away.

Having said all this, I must add that they were both very kind to me during my first few months at the mine, when I suffered considerably from the heat and various insect bites. Jane had one big sorrow in her life - she was passionately fond of children but unable to have any of her own. Later on when my children arrived, she was always on hand to give help and advice when needed and was a willing and reliable baby-sitter.

When we were seated in front of our soup and Kwasi had retired discreetly to the doorway, ready within call should Master need anything, J.R. asked them, "Well, did you have a good leave?"

The usual form when people returned from leave was to ask them if they had had a good time, and then settle down to hear about the shows they had seen, the places they had visited, the trouble cousin Fanny had when she had her baby, etc. But the Lewises were different.

"Good?" exclaimed Glyn, with his soupspoon halfway to his mouth. "We've had a terrible leave! You've no idea! First, that damned mail boat did everything except turn upside down, all the way to Liverpool, and Jane was seasick the whole time. Then, no sooner had we got off the boat than she was ill again - for three weeks. Fast to the bed was Janey - yes, fast to the bed!"

Jane nodded, solemnly spreading butter onto her dinner roll.

I was somewhat startled, never having heard this particular expression before. I had a clear vision before my eyes of Jane, for some obscure medical reason being tied down to her own bed with rope from the washing line. I thought I must have missed something somewhere, or else it was only a Cornish expression for being ill in bed.

J.R. to the rescue.

"But what was it?" he asked. "Flu or something?"

"Oh no!" exclaimed Glyn, triumphantly, his tone indicating that Jane would never suffer from any illness as mundane and commonplace as influenza. "No. We looked at the doctor's certificate. It was the Shivering Agger!"

This floored me completely. I looked at J.R. for help on this one, but he was obviously as mystified as I was.

"The what?" he cried.

"The Shivering Agger", Glyn replied, applying himself to the soup once more. "The doctor said he had never seen such a bad case. Poor Jane was on boiled fish and aspirin for the rest of our leave and she lost ten pounds in weight".

When out guests had returned to their own bungalow, J.R. and I sat and pondered on this mysterious illness, consulting our doctor's book which was no help at all, and finally decided that Jane must have had malaria. Their doctor was evidently not well up on tropical diseases, and must have decided that this was a severe form of ague, and they, being somewhat ignorant on health matters, pronounced this in the way it was written - "agger".

"I expect", decided J.R., "they stopped taking their quinine the minute they stepped on the ship at Takoradi, and didn't start again until they arrived back here".

And this we subsequently round out was exactly what had happened. They didn't understand why it was necessary to continue taking the drug for two weeks after leaving a malarial area, to kill off the poison which was there in their blood, and then to start again two weeks before returning, to build up immunity. Sometimes I know Michael Donnelly used to despair when confronted with the ignorance of some of the employees on the mine. Malaria to him was the big enemy which accounted for more than half of the sickness he met with, in spite of us all taking regular quinine, or its equivalent. I believe at that time we were taking a variant of quinine called mepacrine, a little yellow pill which turned us a delicate shade of buttercup, and when we went on leave our friends and relatives thought we had jaundice. But it was better than getting malaria.

Friday night was always cinema night. In the Club there was a sixteen-millimetre film projector and we used to have movies sent up from the Department of Mines at Takoradi once a week - some of them quite recent ones, too. We looked forward all the week to Friday nights and great was the disappointment if, as sometimes happened, the film failed to arrive. This situation occurred now and again in the monsoon season, when sometimes the roads were badly flooded or washed away and we were marooned for a few days. We never knew until we arrived down at the Club for the eight o'clock start, whether the film had arrived or not. It was not unusual for it to get to us only just in time, and once, when it didn't arrive at all, we had to make do with an amateur show, a hand-held recording of Don and Margot Venus's big white wedding in England, which they conveniently happened to have in their bungalow.

One film I remember very clearly, because we thought it was so bad. This was "London Town", in brilliant technicolour, a post-war British musical made before we got the hang of making musicals, at the time when stage and screen were dominated by "South Pacific", "Oklahoma", and other excellent American offerings. It was all bright reds and blues and yellows, the chorus girls kicking up their legs in unison and smiling ear to ear with identical pillar-box red lips and blinding white teeth. The men in the audience watching were laughing and calling them "Old Coasters". Pat Kirkwood was the star - I think it must have been her last appearance on the cinema screen. It was not a good picture in which to say her good-byes.

On fine evenings the show was given outside on the lawn and we sat out there to watch, defying the attentions of mosquitoes.

Two of the Europeans on the mine were real old coasters, Sam and Bill, who were employed as maintenance engineers. They had been stationed at Marlu since before the War and right through it, and were now approaching retiring age. Years of taking daily doses of quinine had made them both very deaf, and on Friday nights they had privileged seats right at the front, almost under the screen, and as near to the sound equipment as it was possible to get. During the intervals they would hold shouted conversations with each other, which were inevitably shared with the rest of us. I remember once listening to them both registering their disgust at the tops of their voices, because whilst waiting for a visit from the barber that day, they discovered that the man had gone up to Top Hill to cut the hair of the Chief Engineer, and they therefore had no alternative but to sit as patiently as possible and wait for his return.

They were very adjectival about this apparent preferential treatment, oblivious or uncaring of the fact that they were sitting immediately in front of several of the occupants of other Top Hill bungalows, including Theo Climas and two or three VIPs from neighbouring mines, all of whom were riveted in their seats by this scintillating discourse. The final conclusion drawn by Bill (or maybe Sam) was that they must 'ave different 'air on Top 'ill.

J.R. and I never missed a cinema night. It was the brightest spot of the week, never mind what the film was or if we had seen it before. We used to settle down in our seats with long, cool drinks by our sides, prepared for a couple of hours of quiet enjoyment, only moving for refills during the two intervals while the reels were being changed. For years afterwards, when we were once again living in England and an old film would come on the television set, we would say to each other, "Remember? We saw that first at Marlu".

Only once was a cinema evening spoilt for me. One of the men, known as Ben Lyons, was a real practical joker, and on this occasion he sat down beside me as the film was about to start and said, "Hold out your hand, Joan. I've got a present for you." I should have known better, but I did hold out my hand, and into it he dropped a live stag beetle - one of those big flying insects with three horns which used to circle round the street light outside the Club, eventually hitting it and falling to the ground, dead or stunned. I leapt about six feet straight up in the air and my resulting shriek must have been clearly heard in Takoradi.

There were quite a few odd, or at least unusual, people on the mine at the time. Several come to mind immediately. There was Les Pepper, an ex. 8th Army man, who was an amateur spiritualist. He used to hold seances in his bungalow and make contact with the spirit world through his 'control.', who was called Jorty. These seances only took place while his wife was away in England. (I suppose it was something to do in his spare time). One who was a regular visitor to these sessions, Hank Crofts, a Canadian, had a peculiarity of his own. 'He would lie for hours on his back in bed, arms stretched above his head, holding a fifteen pound weight in each hand - thinking of his wife.

But the most colourful of the odd balls was Baron de Cartier. He was a real Baron and hailed originally from France, but had spent many years before and during the War at Marlu. At some stage in his career he had lived in Iran, or Persia as it was then, had become a Captain in the Persian cavalry, and after converting to the Moslem faith, had married the daughter of the Grand Vizier of the Shah of Persia (real Arabian Nights stuff, this!). His wife never came out to the Coast but settled down in England with the family, and I believe Baron did make a few fleeting visits now and again to see how they were making out. But for the most part he stayed on the Coast in his bungalow on the outskirts of the mine, the bungalow which was distinguished by having a crescent moon painted over the doorway, and he is the only European I have ever heard of who was actually allowed to buy land in the Gold Coast. He was an engineer by profession, and used to look after the engines and trucks which ran on the light railways out to the more distant parts of the opencast mine workings. He didn't go out very much and no one was ever invited to his house; so rumours abounded as to who, and how many, lived there. His one outing of the week was to the cinema, which he looked forward to.

One week, some of the younger men on the mine, thinking it a bit of a lark, decided to investigate Baron's house. They waited until. he was safely settled in his seat in front of the screen, with his glass of beer in his hand and the first reel well under way, then they shot out in one of the cars to see if the stories about Baron having a harem tucked away in his house were true.

They were true.

Unfortunately, the film projector was having a bad night. Halfway through the second reed it broke down completely and the show was abandoned. Baron, all unsuspecting, made tracks for home and caught all the intruders before they had a chance to make good their escape. The story goes that he chased them out into the bush, firing his shotgun indiscriminately and some of them were not seen again for several days, until they had had some necessary first aid. Theo Climas had to have a few words with Baron, to emphasise that this sort of carry-on simply would not do, but the camp rocked with laughter and no doubt the tale was spread far and wide throughout the mining community.

By the time Christmas came, I had settled down and was beginning to enjoy life in the tropics. We were invited for the Christmas festivities to the bungalow of Fred and Peggy Stokes, who lived in one of the Top Hill bungalows. He was Chief Storekeeper at Marlu, and he and his wife were Londoners from Streatham. Fred, with his forthright Cockney humour, always reminded me forcibly of the music hall comedian, Max Miller - the Cheeky Chappie. Its true he never appeared dressed with quite the outrageous audacity of Max, whom I once saw at the Finsbury Park Empire wearing a suit of plus fours made in white taffeta with large purple flowers all over it. But all the same, on this occasion Fred was quite an arresting sight in a brilliant mammy cloth shirt (made by his wife), the inevitable long, baggy British khaki shorts and long white socks, just exposing his bright pink knees, and all topped by a dazzling white ten-gallon hat. He greeted me with a rib-cracking hug and then handed us each a tall glass of foaming liquid, which he said was one of Peggy's "specials".

Peggy was a small redhead with limitless energy and an infectious laugh - Peggy laughing was the first thing we heard on our arrival. She never would say what she put in her specials, but whatever the ingredients, they had the desired effect of getting the party off to a swinging start. There were about a dozen of us there, and we ate our Christmas dinner sitting out on the lawn beneath the shade of a tall hibiscus hedge, looking down at the mine spread out beneath us. It was the traditional English fare of turkey, pork, ham, stuffing, followed by Christmas pudding and mince pies, washed down with more specials and followed by ice cream and coffee for those who had any room left. I must say we did it all justice, although this was one of the hottest days of the year, and the perspiration was pouring off us by the time we had finished.

Eve's husband, Len, said to me afterwards, "How about this weather, then? Better than England, eh?"

It certainly was. My mind went back to Christmases past, when I was a child. Year after year all the family would come to our house in North London for Christmas dinner, all the aunties, uncles and cousins, and we would sit around the dinner table with the rain splashing down outside, everyone wearing paper hats and pulling crackers. Then afterwards the uncles would retire to the drawing room for their Christmas cigar and a snooze round the fire, while the aunties, pl.'s my cousin Dorothy and myself, would attack the washing up. Later on, after tea, which no one had any appetite for, being still too full of food, was the time for us all to do our party pieces. Uncle Bob sang "Comrades", and then "Pale Hands I Loved" in a duet with Auntie Louie, accompanied on the iron-framed piano by my mother, (who did her best but really only excelled at hymns). I had to be brow-beaten into attempting "Rustle of Spring" on the piano, with much crossing over of hands, and Dorothy, with a soulful look and a quite passable soprano voice, would warble "Oh, Lady Moon".

Yes, a different world. Here the sun blazed down from a cloudless sky and all around us was the scent of orange blossom, the buzzing of many insects, and tiny many-coloured humming birds darted around the feeder hanging from the eaves. Peggy's cook, Abraham, and small boy, Kwame, dealt with the table clearing and the washing up, and, judging by the broad grins on their shining black faces, they were expecting to have a high odd time round the back of the kitchen with the remains of the turkey and the other leftovers. Its true, Len was wearing a paper hat which made him look like Napoleon, had his hand thrust inside his shirt to augment the resemblance, and he did have a tendency, discouraged by his wife, to burst into song at intervals. But there ended the similarity to previous Christmases.

Later on that day, when J.R. and I were standing outside our own bungalow in the gathering dusk, watching the stars come out and having an argument between ourselves as to whether or not one could see the Southern Cross from the Gold Coast, I felt a sudden cool breeze against my face.

"My goodness!" I cried, "a cold wind! What a relief!"

"That, my dear", said J.R., with satisfaction, "is the Harmattan"