We spent part of the time with our parents in London and Yorkshire, and although we were all happy to see each other again, after a short while it became obvious that there was a gulf opening up between our parents and us. And also between us and other relations and friends, who were still plodding along the same old paths, coping with the same rationing and shortages which made England such a depressing place in the late 1940's and early 1950's. We felt we were different. We had seen things and been to places which they had not, but the impression which came over from them was that they were not very interested in anything outside the narrow confines of their own placid and well-ordered lives.

I learnt an important fact that first leave. No matter how close one's friends and relatives are, emotionally speaking, their own day-to-day small happenings are usually much more important to them than anything which occurs in the wide world outside, unless it is a disaster which is likely to affect them personally, such as an epidemic, a train crash, or a war. I watched one of my cousins riffling through a pile of our photos taken in Africa and on the ship, and she was showing about as much interest and enthusiasm as if she had been shuffling a pack of cards. At that point I made up my mind not to bother in future. We did our best. We had come home with presents for everyone, such as nylons, make-up, etc., but perhaps this was a mistake. In retrospect, perhaps they were all simply envious because we had managed to get away from the dreary post-war grind.

It also puzzled me to note that my mother seemed to be regarded with pity by my aunts because her only daughter was living so many miles away in a hot country, surrounded by savages, instead of them being pleased that I was at last realising one of my ambitions, to travel and see something of the world outside suburbia. Most of my school friends had married and were living in the neighbourhood in small semi-detached houses and with growing families, and here was I, still childless and without a home of my own - at least in England. I felt, once again, that I was letting the side down, being a disappointment to everyone, and it was this feeling which prompted me to stay on a little longer in England when J.R.'s leave was up. I felt that perhaps I owed it to my parents to give them a little more of my time, to make up for having to leave them again shortly for another long stretch of several months.

J.R. flew off on his own in the middle of January 1951, and it didn't take me long to realise that this was another mistake on my part. I was horribly miserable as soon as he had gone, and when his letters started to come through it was evident that he felt the same. But the die was cast now - I had said I would stay on for two months and stay I did, while making up my mind not to do this again.

My parents were well-intentioned people but rather narrow in their views, and one of my father's singularities was that he hated to see women with what he called "straggly" hair, meaning hair which had grown below ear lobe level and was thus starting to look a bit untidy. The ideal female hair fashion in his eyes was the late 1920's bob, with a parting on the side and the hair pulled back from the face with a hair slide. Looking back at old photos recently, I came to the conclusion that there can hardly have been a hair fashion more unflattering to women than that one, but there we all are, grinning at the camera with our short hair draped across our foreheads, some straight, some curly, but all with that omnipresent hair slide keeping it out of our eyes. At this time I was trying to "grow" my wavy hair, having for years had the desire to see my hair reaching waist level, and at this point it came to about two inches below my ears. As is the way with my sort of hair, some of the ends were turning up and some curling under, and I suppose the sight of me offended my Dad's tidy mind.

He looked at me critically one evening and said, mildly, "Your hair is getting a bit straggly, isn't it?"

Well, it was my hair, wasn't it? But in my efforts to be accommodating we had a long discussion, my mother joining in, and it was finally suggested that if I didn't want it to be cut, why didn't I have the ends permanently waved? The idea was that the ends could then be persuaded to all turn in the same direction. Having your "ends permed" was quite a popular thing in those days, especially amongst girls whose hair was dead straight and who couldn't afford to have the whole head done. The twenty years or so between the two world wars, the era in which my parents were still mentally living, was a time when curly hair was de rigeur, and if you happened to have straight hair and couldn't afford a perm well, hard luck, you had to sleep in curlers to give some semblance of curl to your hair before you could appear in public.

So, off I went to the hairdresser's to have my ends permed, and when I came home from that not very pleasant experience - wired up to the ceiling for hours, not like these days when its all done with chemicals - I realised I had made yet another mistake. I now had tight little curls all round my head at ear level, and the first time I washed my hair it frizzed out and turned into about six inches of smooth waves with four inches of frizz underneath. I couldn't imagine what J.R. was going to say when he saw this. But at least it wasn't straggly and my Dad beamed when I presented myself to him that evening. The first thing I did when I arrived back in Africa was to get our local hairdresser to cut all the perm off.

The last two weeks I remained in England I spent at Fred and Peggy's flat in Balham, looking after their cat. They went back to Marlu at the same time as J.R. and for some reason which I now cannot remember, for these two weeks the cat could not be accommodated in either a cattery or someone else's house. I didn't mind, I liked cats, and I'd had enough of parental overseeing by then, so I happily removed myself and luggage to Balham until it was time for me to once more climb aboard an aeroplane.

It was a first floor flat in a terraced house in an uninspiring street near Streatham High Road, and the two weeks I spent there were remarkable only for one incident, which could easily have turned into a tragedy.

I was sitting in the small kitchen/dining room, on the floor as it happened, reading a book in front of the gas fire, when suddenly there was an enormous explosion directly underneath me which lifted me about six inches in the air followed by a deafening silence. I knew the middle aged couple who lived in the ground floor flat had visitors that afternoon, and with my heart in my mouth I raced down the stairs and burst into their kitchen, not knowing what dreadful sight would meet my eyes.

The room was full of smoke. A boy of about ten was standing by the window, a small black gun in his hand, and three adults were gazing, aghast, at the old fashioned black fireplace which had a great hole blown out of it.

What had happened was that the boy had been brought visiting with his parents, and growing bored with grown-ups' conversation had decided to explore. He ventured through a doorway and down some stairs into the cellar, and there, rooting about amongst the coal and rubbish, found this black gun. It reminded me strongly of the kind of gun Dick Turpin would have brandished - short, black, with a curving handle.

The boy brought it upstairs to show to his father, who was a bit irritable at being interrupted in his favourite topic of conversation - what was wrong with the Government and what he would do if he were in power - and told him to put it back.

"But look, Dad", the child persisted, "there's some white powder coming out of the muzzle!"

His father looked, and said once again, "Well, put it back. It doesn't belong to us. And don't point it at your mother! If you must point it somewhere, point it at the fireplace".

His son obligingly did so, pulled the trigger and blew the fireplace to pieces.

I never did find out how the matter was sorted out, who paid for the damage and whether the landlord was the owner of the gun, or if in fact he knew it was there. I only know that weeks afterwards when I was telling J.R. about it, thinking he would express some sort of concern at my narrow escape - I mean, the child could just as easily have pointed the gun at the ceiling and blown me to pieces - his only reaction was to exclaim in excitement, "It must have been an old flintlock pistol, perhaps two or three hundred years old! Why didn't you offer to buy it?" That struck me completely dumb, as of course the idea had never entered my head. I'd completely forgotten my husband's fascination with guns of all kinds, fed by his years in armaments in the R.A.F., and in any case, how could I have explained the presence of a highwayman's pistol in my luggage when going through Customs at the airport?

Time passed, and at last I was waving goodbye to my parents once more and boarding the aircraft to go back to the Gold Coast. It was the usual two day trip, but this time I was able to catch a small plane of West African Airways at Accra and fly all the way to the newly opened Takoradi Airport, where J.R. was waiting with a surprise for me - a car! One of our own, that is. He was so proud of his new purchase that it was some time before he noticed my hair.

It was also useful on this occasion when I arrived in Takoradi, for ferrying us back to Marlu. The month being March, the rains were about to start, the skies looked heavy with clouds and the air felt at its most humid. Driving along the familiar dusty red road, weathering the bumps and dips with the usual grim resignation, waving to the mammies and the children as we passed them, I had the feeling that I was coming home, and when at length we passed through Bogoso village and turned onto the mine property, the unsatisfactory English leave was relegated to the back of my mind.

The new car was pressed into service a mere two days after my return when there was a cricket match at Bondaye, a few miles north of Tarkwa. Before we set out, my husband said to me, quite severely, "Now, remember, you have just come out from a winter in England, so your skin is not acclimatized to the African sun. No sunbathing!"

This is because I was always anxious to acquire a smooth, brown tan but my skin was inclined to burn. Even after days of carefully graduated exposure to the rays of the sun, I never managed to go more than slightly salmon-coloured, always supposing I didn't peel.

"All right", I said, dutifully, "I won't sit in the sun".

I sat in a deck chair under a large shady tree, wearing a hat, and watching J.R. performing on the cricket field as Marlu's wicket keeper, feeling virtuous but also slightly envious of one or two of the other wives who were already nicely tanned. I swear I didn't let a single ray of sunshine touch my exposed skin all day, but the irony of it was that, in spite of my care, the next day I was bright red all over my face and arms where the sun had burnt me through the leaves, and I couldn't go outside again for a week. There must have been something really vicious about the sun that day. This experience finally convinced me that sunbathing was not for me, and for the rest of my time in Africa I always wore a hat when outside and smothered my exposed skin in sun screening cream. Somebody once remarked to me that I looked as if I had been washed in Persil.

This, my second tour on the mines in West Africa was going to turn out to be rather different from the first. Not being a newcomer this time I knew what to expect, and felt a great deal more confident generally. Kwasi appeared to have accepted me - possibly, now having a wife of his own made a difference there - and, to celebrate my return, he cooked a special dinner on one of my first evenings back.

This was a local delicacy called Ashanti Chicken. When he proudly brought the dish into the dining room and placed it on the table, it looked like a nicely browned roast chicken. He had cooked this many times before, and I couldn't understand what he was looking so pleased about, until J.R. cut into it and revealed the astonishing fact that it was completely boneless and was entirely stuffed with minced chicken. In fact it took two chickens to make one Ashanti Chicken. I was speechless when I thought of how many hours he must have laboured away to produce this culinary masterpiece - completely skinning two chickens, removing all the bones, mincing up and cooking all the flesh and then stuffing it back into one of the skins into the shape of a real roast chicken. Or perhaps both chickens were cooked first and then taken apart. I was so stunned at the result that I never did find out how it was done, but managed to convey to Kwasi my unbounded admiration for his efforts, and the result was that for weeks he walked around looking smug. I have eaten other Ashanti Chickens at other bungalows, one of which I remember was stuffed with sausage meat (not the same thing at all), but never have I tasted one to equal the one cooked by our Kwasi.

I had only been back a few weeks when I carelessly walked around the bungalow in my bare feet, and had my first (and only) "jigger". This is a tiny insect which bores into the skin, usually under the finger or toe nails, and lays a little sac of eggs. The first sign of something wrong is a slight itching, and then someone has to get busy with a knife before the eggs hatch and cause an abscess. J.R. attacked mine, quite competently and painlessly - he always wanted to be a surgeon! - cleaning out the affected area, and the small incision healed up in twenty four hours with no dire results. But it cured me of walking around barefooted and also made me understand fully why my husband never put a foot out of bed without first putting on his slippers. He even kept his bedroom slippers tucked under the mosquito net at the end of the bed, nowhere near the floor. I used to think it was to guard against scorpions or other stinging insects, but realised now that it was to prevent jigger attacks.

When I arrived back at the mine for my second tour, I found we had some new neighbours, living temporarily in Doug and Doris Rogers' bungalow while they were on leave. These were two bachelors, Chris and Terry, and as they lived so near to us we saw quite a lot of them. Chris worked in the Mill and Terry was an assistant to J.R. in the Assay Office, and the footpath to and from their bungalow led right past our side door. Afternoon tea was regularly partaken on our patio at the end of the working day, and if sometimes the two boys turned up a little ahead of J.R., I used to wonder what Jane Lewis up there on the hill with her binoculars would make of that.

I had only been out a week or two this time when J.R. went down with malaria. We never failed to take our daily anti-malaria pills, so it was not a very bad attack, but affecting the digestive system as this form of malaria usually did, it was very debilitating and it took him a fair time to pull round from it. He had three days in hospital and came out looking and feeling pretty shaky. He didn't really feel himself for several months to come. Some people were more susceptible than others. Some people had more mosquito bites than others, but this did not mean they were more likely to get malaria. Elsa went to Takoradi once on a short leave and was bitten from head to foot but still did not get the virus, whereas Kay, with only one or two bites, came down with a very heavy dose.

However, the work had to go on and Terry was proving to be a keen and able assistant. I came to like Terry. He was a Londoner like me, which gave us some common ground, and he used to make me laugh. He was very proud of his mane of blond hair, which he wore rather longer than most men did in those days. He assured me that when he was at home he used to wash it in Drene, usually borrowed without her knowledge from his sister. He pitched me a sad tale one day that he once picked up the wrong bottle of clear yellow liquid and found out, too late, that he had washed his hair in Dettol. So what could I do but let him borrow my Drene when his own supply ran out, as it frequently did?

We spent long evenings chatting. They were rather homesick, so we entertained them as best we could with funny stories about the odd happenings, and the odder people, on the mines. There was the true story of one of the older wives who was out there during the War, living in one of the original bungalows, which were a bit primitive to say the least, with no running water, electricity or, worst of all, flush toilets. They were, however, equipped with a wooden W.C. or "thunderbox". The story which this lady was quite happy to tell against herself was that one day very early in the morning, when she was seated on this contraption, meditating, the boy whose delightful job it was to clean it out (with a stiff wire broom), opened the trapdoor at the back prior to excavating the interior, and observed from his rear view that the seat was occupied.

With great presence of mind he muttered, "Sorry, Madame", hastily slammed the small wooden door and took himself off. Whether he knew which of the mining ladies he had encountered was never revealed, but at least he saw enough to know that it was a Madame and not a Massa. She was a good sport and made a joke of it, knowing that the story was bound to get out, and the only thing to do was to laugh and pass it off as an unfortunate incident which could have happened to anyone. But when walking about the mine area, she must have wondered which boy it was who had obtained such an unexpected and unauthorised view of her, and whether it was discussed and chuckled about over the palm wine of an evening in the village.

There was another story going the rounds, concerning Don Venus.

Don was a tall, athletic, pleasant-looking young man, whom some would call handsome, and I did actually hear one of the wives saying he reminded her of Errol Flynn. His type of looks never did anything for me, but I could see what she meant. He, in common with most of the other employees at Marlu at that time took advantage of the chance to buy "export only" goods, either in Takoradi or on the ship, and new Zeiss Ikon and Rolliecord cameras were very popular. Nearly everyone had one, and splendid black and white prints of the mine environs and the employees and their wives were frequently proudly handed round by their owners. Once, after a golf match with another mine, the Club bar was full of over-heated players and their guests when someone produced a large print and started showing it around. It was a picture of that same bar, with a line of men standing in front holding up their beer tankards, and in the foreground one could see part of a semi-circle of chairs, all empty except for one right in the centre where sat Don, all alone, enthroned in his glory and obviously posing for his photo.

One of the visitors grabbed the picture, placed a large grimy thumb right on top of Don, and indignantly asked, "Who the hell's that?"

The owner of the photo answered, mildly, "That's Venus!"

"Well I can see that!" came the contemptuous reply, "But what's his name?"

Instant collapse of all within hearing. I can imagine what Errol Flynn would have said if anyone had cast such a slur on his masculinity, and to my knowledge no one ever had the temerity to acquaint Don of this incident.

One evening, after a mention by Chris of how he missed his mum's cooking, I volunteered to make a rice pudding. This was the one dish I felt I really couldn't go wrong with, although whether it would come up to his mother's efforts was debatable. In fact it was quite good, if you like rice pudding, and reminded J.R. of his first tour in West Africa when it was customary to send food parcels home to the poor, starving English. He sent one containing rice, tea, and various tinned luxuries like ham and fruit to his parents and it duly arrived in one piece, but unfortunately when his father opened it he found the paper packages holding the rice and tea had split open, and the contents were hopelessly mixed together. But - tea was on points still and I expect rice was also hard to get, so, rather than waste good food, James Beech Senior spent I don't know how many evenings painstakingly separating the tea from the rice, grain by minute grain, and he and J.R.'s mother did eventually manage to drink the tea and eat the rice. Things were in a pretty poor state in England in 1948.

During the long, dark evenings (sunset at 6 p.m. throughout the year in the tropics), we taught the two boys to play Mah-Jong. As we ourselves were not very expert, many hours were spent in studying the rule book and arguing about the finer points of play, with every now and then one of us hurling a shoe at a cockroach making a quick dash across the floor.

One wet evening something rather strange happened. Our little kitten, Fluff, now grown into a sleek, full-sized cat, had been stretched out asleep on the floor when quite suddenly he rolled onto his feet and, with a snarl exposing his front teeth, he crept slowly across the floor until he could see out into the dark garden through the wire mesh on our side door. Here he settled himself down, not taking his eyes off the darkness outside, and with an occasional growl deep down in his throat he sat there for half an hour, not moving.

"What on earth is the matter with your cat?" asked Chris, who was fond of cats and had three of his own in his mother's home in England.

We all looked and admitted that the cat was behaving oddly. A saucer of milk and some tidbits of cooked fish failed to move him, and a strong beam of torchlight directed through the door did not reveal any monsters lurking outside. It was a puzzle. We went outside and tramped up and down a bit, although if we'd known what was hidden on the other side of the hedge we would have stayed indoors with all the doors and windows locked. Next morning, the grass cutter boys came round to attack the long grass on one of their routine twice-monthly patrols, and before long I could hear unaccustomed shouts and yells. And then once more Kwasi came running, dire news on his lips.

"Madame!" he called.

"Snake dere!".

And he was not joking. Lying on the path there in front of me was a sight to make my blood run cold, an enormous Gaboon viper - luckily for all of us, with its head sliced off. It was six feet long, beautifully patterned in blacks and browns all down its thick, powerful body - and deadly. The chances of surviving a bite from this sort of viper were small. I did once meet a nurse in the Gold Coast who had lived after a bite from a Gaboon viper, but it took her a long time to recover from the poison injected into her bloodstream, and for many months she didn't really care if she lived or died. Our faithful little tomcat had evidently sensed its nearness the previous evening and was petrified almost out of his wits, but he stood his ground and didn't run away, perhaps being unable to move from fright. Whatever the reason, he was able to give us warning that all was not well.

The grass cutter boys were of course delighted, as there surely was enough meat in that ample body to provide a good supper for all of them.

Another snake story comes to mind, an episode which took place around the same time. Some of the Assay Office lab boys discovered a pile of eggs in a corner near the office, shortly after one of them had killed a particularly dangerous snake, a spitting cobra. This kind of cobra had the habit of spitting poison into the eyes of its adversary, thus blinding them and making them an easy prey. It was usually a small animal that was attacked, but even so, they were not the sort of reptile that anyone would want to keep as a pet. The boys brought the eggs into the office and kept them in a glass container until they hatched out - and they were indeed baby spitting cobras, about a dozen of them. J.R. kept them for a while, feeding them on flies and grubs, but eventually he released them back into the bush. I kept well away from the office until the coast was clear.

The rains in April and May of that year of 1951 were not too heavy and we were able to get out a bit.

In the early part of the year, Kwame Nkrumah had been released from prison. As a result of a General Election in January, the Convention People's Party became the majority party and Nkrumah was elected Leader of Government Business, and later, by a constitutional amendment, Prime Minister.

It so happened that J.R., Tommy Rowe and I went into Tarkwa by car one Saturday in May for me to do some essential shopping and Tommy to search for a birthday present for his mother, in which I was required to offer advice and assistance. My own requirements were for mundane things such as needles, sewing cotton and buttons, items which were taken for granted even in austerity England, but out here were scarcer than - well, I was going to say gold dust, but perhaps it would be more apt to say scarcer than an eskimo's igloo. African mammies do not sew. Their mammy cloths are wound round their ample figures rather sarong fashion and stay up by intricate knots, and the men wear hand woven kente cloths draped over the left shoulder, with a ready-made short sleeved shirt underneath.

At least, that's what it used to be like. It's probably all changed now. It is after all nearly forty years since I was last in West Africa. For all I know there may be a branch of Marks & Spencer in Tarkwa, mammy cloths may be a thing of the past, perhaps everyone wears khaki shorts and bush shirts now, men and women alike. But I do hope not. The African women were so colourful in their brightly coloured prints, and their carriage was superb as they glided along, carrying half the household on their heads,

On this occasion, as we approached the town it became evident that something was going on. Hordes of Africans were pouring into the town centre, waving flags of red, green and yellow and dressed in the same colours, a happy, cheering throng who crowded round when they saw the car coming, banging on the windows and slowing us down to a crawl. It would have been frightening if they hadn't been so good humoured, but they were all laughing and showing their wonderful white teeth, holding up their piccans to look at us. The significance of the colours was suddenly borne upon us - they were the colours of what would be the new flag of the Gold Coast, soon to become Ghana. The Union Jack was being booted out, and the new flag would have three wide horizontal stripes - green for the bush, yellow for the sun and red for the red soil.

"Or red for blood", as Tommy grimly remarked. For there was no doubt, this was the beginning of a revolution. They were all making for a hall in the middle of the town where, we suddenly remembered, Nkrumah was due to appear that day to make a speech. It was the beginning of the end of the white faces in this part of Africa, at least in governmental and administrative positions.

We extricated ourselves and the car, with some difficulty, and headed for the shops, such as they were. These were in the main run by Indians from the sub-continent of India, who had come over as immigrants in order to make a better life for themselves, and who took to shop-keeping as a duck to water. They were not shops as we knew them in England, but consisted of several rows of wooden, tin and brick buildings with various merchants' stores on the ground floor and the living quarters of the occupants above them, surrounded by wide verandahs and covered with the usual whitewashed galvanised-iron roofs. We completed our shopping without wasting too much time, and then made for the European Club, always our sanctuary when visiting the town. There we fortified ourselves with a brandy or two and a curry lunch, ready for whatever might be going to happen next. I don't recall that we were particularly nervous, but perhaps a bit wary as the situation seemed to be rather volatile.

What did happen next was that after lunch, when we were sitting outside on the Club verandah, the noisy, cheering mob came careering past, and in their midst was an open topped car with Nkrumah himself seated in the back, waving to his subjects. He saw us all peering out from the Club and waved gaily to us, like royalty. We waved back, a trifle more thoughtfully.

"But I don't understand", I said, afterwards. "How can they get rid of us all? Are any of them qualified to run the mines?"

The answer was of course - no, they're not. There was an upper crust, if you like, of educated Africans who had been to college or university and did know, in theory, how to run a business or a country, to do the paper work, and the first ten or twenty years after independence would show how successful or otherwise they were going to be. But as for the technical expertise of operating a gold mine, with all its detailed and complex machinery and the different processes by which the gold was refined after it was mined, requiring the attention of many trained men, there were very few natives, if any, who could undertake these tasks. The black African could be, and was, trained to be an efficient workman if shown what to do, but could not at this date take on the task of organising the work force and running the show. So they were going to need us for some time to come, but there did seem to us for the first time to be a large question mark hovering over the future of the white man in Africa.

We went back to the mine rather subdued. Time appeared to be running out for us in this part of the dark continent, and that may have been one of the things which began to turn J.R.'s thoughts towards moving on. The rest of the world was waiting out there to be explored and we had nothing to tie us down - yet. Maybe in the future, if we had a family, the problems of schooling would crop up and have to be faced, but at present we were free to go where we liked. We wondered about places like China, South America, Australia. They all had mines, and with the experience these three or four years in Africa had given him, J.R. reckoned he would be able to obtain another assay post without too much difficulty. It was something to think about, to chew over, in the remaining months before we could get away. Under the existing rules, men had to work half their allotted tour of twelve or fifteen months before they could resign without having to pay their outward sea passages, and that gave us until about November.

Meantime, there were other new faces at Marlu. An electrical engineer named Alfred Mannering arrived out with his wife and two small children and took up residence in a bungalow not far from ours. Soon after they arrived, I called round one morning to see how they were settling in. Mrs. Mannering, a rather faded blonde in her mid-thirties, was there on her own, wandering around in a transparent negligee, with half-unpacked suitcases all over the place, smoking and complaining bitterly because Alfred had had to go to work and was therefore not on hand to help her. It was not very long before she informed me that he was her second husband, and that he definitely did not measure up to her first, who was called "Boy" something-or-other and who had had the misfortune to step off a cliff and fracture his skull, thus leaving her all alone with two kids and a prey to the first fortune hunter who came into view. She didn't actually say that, but the inference was there. I didn't take to her very much and made my escape as soon as possible.

A week or so after this, J.R. and I and the Mannerings were invited round to the Climas's bungalow for dinner. This was the kind of invitation you didn't refuse, and you took some pains to dress up a bit and wear all your jewelry. We were not of the crowd who sat in the circle outside the Club of an evening, swapping golf stories, so invitations like this were not a weekly occurrence. We were therefore prepared to enjoy this one.

I got out my sewing machine and made myself a new evening dress, which was not the easiest thing to do at that time as there was a great shortage of suitable dress materials in the U.A.C. I remember I bought about twenty identical square scarves in some silky material, which were printed with a faint black and red design on a white ground, then trimmed off all the hemmed edges and machined the pieces together to form a large area approximately six yards by one yard. This I then ironed flat and cut out my dress pattern, carefully matching the red and black parts together. My goodness, what patience! I couldn't do it now. Machining the pattern together proved to be the easiest part, and the resulting dress was a great success. What's more, it was strapless, and very worried I was as the evening drew near and I still hadn't solved the problem of making sure it would stay up. In the end I had to sew it onto my strapless bra and J.R. had to cut me out of it at the end of the evening.

Theo Climas came and picked us up in his car and we drove over to the Mannerings' bungalow, all smiles, everyone on their best behaviour. The boss tooted on his horn and the door was opened by a very embarrassed-looking Alf, who explained that unfortunately they would have to decline the invitation as his wife was feeling unwell. Theo was very solicitous, hoped it was nothing serious, and said please let him know if there was anything he could do to help. Alf thanked him, said he was sure she would soon be feeling better and was very sorry that it had to happen on this particular day.

There was silence in the car as we reversed and drove off again in the direction of Top Hill, a silence so thick you could have sliced chunks off it. While we had been sitting gazing through Alf's wide open front door, we had all had an unimpeded view down their hallway to another open door, obviously leading to their bedroom, from behind which there protruded a pair of horizontal female legs ending in high heeled shoes, accompanied by an empty gin bottle dying on its side and strident snores which were shaking the foundations. All of which told its own story. No one said a word but the old man's profile was grim as we went on our way, and we needed a few quick drinks to restore our nerves. It goes without saying that the Mannerings never received another invitation to the Climas residence.

Later on during that summer, feelings between us and Dickie and Paddy Beadon became slightly strained, as our little brown hen once again went missing. Kwasi, when questioned said, no she hadn't gone for bush this time, he thought someone steal her. When asked for a few more details as to who and why, he went all coy and giggly, showing his teeth in an embarrassed grin and rolling his eyes, but we couldn't get any more information out of him.

However, we remembered that Dickie had more than once asked us if we would sell Brown Hen to him, as he considered she would make good eating, and each time we refused. I don't know what made him think she would be good eating as she was quite small and not very plump. But here she was, mysteriously missing, and we heard the Beadons were having a dinner party, so we put two and two together. Whether we were right or wrong we would never know, but one thing was certain - Brown Hen was never seen again.

Our time at Marlu seemed to be gradually rounding off. The hen was gone, all the chickens were eaten, and now we lost the cat. He sickened one day and died and we never did know why, but assumed he had eaten something which had poisoned him, or else perhaps he had been bitten by a snake or some lethal insect, although we couldn't discover any wound. It was sad, but this was the tropics and dangers lurked round every corner. I was always pretty wary about putting on my shoes without shaking them first, for fear of scorpions, and I never walked through long grass because of what it might be hiding. There was even one place on the footpath which went down to Doug and Doris's bungalow from ours where red ants crossed on the long blades of grass, and if you brushed carelessly past you were liable to collect a few stinging bites.

It was hostile country, and outside the perimeter of the mining area was what I called "raw Africa", with all its insects, reptiles and small mammals kept at bay only by diligent clearing and spraying. I felt they were all waiting patiently for the day, which was bound to come some time, when the mine would close down and the white faces go home, leaving the bush to close in again and cover our tracks.

In November, J.R. decided he had had enough of West Africa for the present and we sailed for home again, this time on the M.V. "Accra", and before we left we had dinner at the bungalow of the manager of the U.A.C., Tony Luscombe. This was a nerve-wracking ordeal for me as Tony's bungalow was one of the few on the mine where the windows were not netted in. We sat there eating, with all the lights on, and with me ducking every few minutes when one insect after another zoomed in. The mosquitoes and flies were bad enough, but there was also a pale green monster called a praying mantis, which to my horror was over six inches long. There were too the regular flying beetles, horned and otherwise, and they could inflict a nasty bruise if encountered head on. I didn't have much to eat, being mostly under the table.

The boys who worked in the Assay Laboratory were much perturbed when they heard that my husband was leaving the mine, and together the senior boys, Peter, Lewis and Cobbena, composed a farewell letter which they presented to J.R. as the time approached for us to go. This was addressed to "Dear Couple" and, written on lined exercise book paper, conveyed in flowery English how sad they were to see us go. While bemoaning the fact that they "had nothing at this time to give us" (they never had), this letter ended with some lines cribbed from a popular song of the forties:

"Now is the hour, when we should say goodbye,
Soon you will be sailing, far across the sea.
When you are away, Oh please remember us.
When you happen to return, you will find us waiting here".

It was really rather touching. I kept that letter for years, and while searching through old papers the other day, I found I still had it - rather yellowed and creased with the passing of time, but legible enough to testify to J.R.'s popularity with his African staff on that now far-distant date of October 17th, 1951.

We drove off to Insu station one sunny morning, with all our bags and baggage, containing our clothes and the bits and pieces we had accumulated during our stay at Marlu, with the good-tempered jeers of Tommy and other friends ringing in our ears - "You'll be back!"

But we never went back to Marlu.