Events run together in my mind, the highlight being the birth of our son, Guy, in the January of 1957, an event which took place in our own bungalow at 8 a.m. on January 31st. I had been told beforehand by the other wives at Obuasi that the doctor, unlike Dr. Donnelly, had no objections to delivering babies on the mine, and in fact it was a branch of medicine which he quite enjoyed. J.R. was present on this occasion, although not actually in the room, being at the crucial moment next door in the dining room having his breakfast. I have never allowed him to forget that when his son and heir was born he was unconcernedly eating kidneys on toast in the next room!

Six weeks later came the event which the whole of the native population of the Gold Coast had been waiting and hoping for years - they gained their independence from the white oppressors, Kwame Nkrumah became the first black Prime Minister of a Colonial country, and the Gold Coast was henceforth called Ghana. This apparently was its original name, "Gold Coast" being only its British colonial appellation. Guy must have been one of the last white babies to be born in the Gold Coast.

But when I returned by ship to the Gold Coast in April, 1955, J.R. having flown back in January, all this was in the future. Penny was a very lively two-year-old and my mind and energies were almost entirely taken up with the problems of my daughter cutting her last molars, which she did during the twelve days on the water, keeping myself and most of the people in the neigbouring cabins awake nearly all night. We were travelling on the "Auriel" and I will never forget those long, hot nights and Penny yelling her lungs out, night after night. I was sorry for her, sorry for myself, and also for anyone within hearing, but apart from walking her up and down the cabin and administering baby aspirin (which she mostly spat out), there was little I could do but put up with it.

Things were not helped by my independent daughter taking an active dislike to the nurse in the children's play area, and refusing to be left in her charge. At times in desperation I did leave her there while I snatched a brief nap in the cabin, but whenever I collected her I found her red in the face from crying, and the nurse almost at her wits' end from trying to cope. She had a lot of children to look after and could only give a certain amount of attention to one troublesome toddler.

And one day I had a real fright. When we first did boat drill on the deck, we were told to pay attention if ever we heard the ship's siren sounding off, and it was emphasised that if we heard seven quick blasts, that meant "Abandon ship! Make for the lifeboats!" On this particular afternoon, I was in the cabin with Penny, sorting out some clothes, when the siren began to sound and to my astonished ears I did hear seven blasts in quick succession. Admittedly it was a bit rough outside, but surely we couldn't be sinking?

Tucking the baby under one arm and my purse under the other, I poked my head outside the door to find heads appearing from doors all down the corridor, and at the end a steward was making fast the watertight doors. Trapped! In a panic I turned towards the porthole, wondering if I could possibly get myself and Penny and my money through there before we turned over, but then a grinning stewardess appeared, and said, "It's all right, dear, it's only a practice!"

The crew had either forgotten to forewarn the passengers, or else we'd missed the announcement. I had to have a strong cup of coffee and two aspirins before I could trust my legs to propel me up the companionway, where I could look out and reassure myself that we were in fact on an even keel and still progressing southwards towards Africa.

But one interesting thing did happen on that trip. In the dining saloon I was seated next to a man who was a minor Government official on his way back to his office in Accra, and while talking to him about conditions on the Coast I happened to mention the book which had been our "bible" in the days before either J.R. or I had set foot on the African continent - the five shilling bargain from Foyle's, "We two in West Africa". This man had not only met one of the authors, Major Guggisberg's wife (now Lady Guggisberg), but had traveled home from West Africa with her the previous year. She was now a widow in her seventies, and in this man's eyes she was a "game old bird". She told him that she intended to make an air trip out to the Far East, to "find out what was going on out there". She didn't like what she had been reading in the papers. Whether she ever went, or what she found out if she did go, I shall never know, but I remember thinking that I hoped I would be as enterprising as that when I reached my seventies.

He told me something else I didn't know. In 1919, Gordon Guggisberg had returned to the Gold Coast after the First World War as Britain's Governor of the Colony, and being an enlightened man for his time, one of his main interests in this post was to see that the native West African had the chance to become better educated, and this meant they had to have more and better teachers. Directly from this there was established at Achimota the Colony's first high-quality training college for teachers, and one of the most outstanding students admitted to the college in 1926 was the seventeen-year-old Kwame Nkrumah. Strange how the wheel of fate turns! In due time Major Guggisberg was knighted, probably for giving a lifetime of service to the Empire, and of course we know that Nkrumah rose to become Prime Minister of Ghana, for better or worse.

On my return to Obuasi that April, I found the mine fairly humming with activity. While we had been on leave, three new European bungalows had been built in the valley below ours, and were now occupied by three new families, all with young children. The Williams family had two small boys, the Hayes' two boys again (one three years old and the other a six week old baby), and the Moores had a daughter of about eleven and an older boy at boarding school in England. Penny now had playmates near at hand and there was always someone for me to talk to.

Kwasi was still with us, confidently expecting to become rich now that Nkrumah was the leader of the C.P.P., the governing party, and the independence of the country was apparently just around the corner. How this wealth was going to be acquired was not made clear to us. There had been a General Election the previous year when the C.P.P. won 72 Parliamentary seats out of 104, and established its claim to being the party of imminent independence. We did our best to explain to Kwasi that independence would not immediately result in a higher income and standard of living for him, but he merely rolled his eyes and grinned, unconvinced. Like Dick Whittington, he firmly believed that the streets of the distant city, in his case Takoradi, were paved with gold, just there for the picking up.

I suppose one could argue that the gold was already in the ground in the Gold Coast, and while not actually lying around waiting to be picked up, was being mined and recovered entirely by foreign investors, with most of the profits therefrom being sent out of the country and not being used solely to improve the conditions of the native inhabitants. This was true and would continue to be true until the said native inhabitants acquired the knowledge and skill to do the work themselves, unsupervised.

But what was also true was that the mines did bring prosperity to the Gold Coast by way of employment for the men, increased health facilities, clearing of the land for crops and better housing, control of the malarial mosquito, and generally making the population aware of other ways of life than their own. Another valid point was that if the demands for independence accelerated too fast and the country descended into anarchy, no foreign investors were going to want to risk the lives of their employees by sending them out to work there anyway. If that did happen, the mines would close and all employment there would cease.

But one could not get this message through to the bulk of the uneducated inhabitants, such as Kwasi. What they were told by the politically minded minority who had a smattering of education was that independence would mean more money flooding into the country, to be shared by all.

I used to have long talks with one of the other wives about this situation. Joy Bishop was a South African with two small daughters, and while we were drinking coffee on our verandah and the three children were amusing themselves as small girls will, playing with mother's jewelry and make-up, we would discuss the problem of African development and education. We would always end up talking about the seemingly impossible situation developing in her native country of South Africa, a situation which is still, over forty years on, unresolved.

"But you don't understand!" she would protest to any suggestion I made towards helping to find a solution. Although I did try to understand, it seemed to me that all ideas broke against the solid rock of her unwillingness as a white South African to see any alteration in their current way of life, and this still to my mind is the root of the problem. One can see their point. Their work has brought the country to its present degree of prosperity, and they will fight to keep the status quo - after all, they have nowhere else to go, except the sea. I daresay I am in no position to judge or make comments, as I have never been to South Africa and can only see the situation from an outsider's point of view. As I write (late 1980's) it does seem that changes are coming very gradually, and I only hope they come without too much bloodshed.

Generally speaking, my life on the mine was now much more active, looking after a toddler who never seemed to get tired. Afternoon rests were a thing of the past. I always felt terribly lethargic during the after lunch period, and sometimes I did try for half an hour's peace and quiet by putting Penny into her cot with the sides firmly pulled up and the door closed, but I needed ear plugs to deaden the subsequent protests.

Most of the other small children played with each other outside in the gardens, or in the stream running through the valley, but I was much too apprehensive to let Penny do this. The area abounded with poisonous snakes and insects, and I was continually amazed that none of the other children was bitten. I also could not understand the mothers allowing their children to play outside during the heat of the day with no hats on their heads. We were after all only four or five degrees north of the equator, and it seemed to me the height of folly to expose a child's head to the blinding heat of the sun, day after day. Whenever we went out we both wore hats, and also shoes, indoors and out, so that we did not suffer from jiggers.

Perhaps I was too fussy. The other children flourished, bare headed and bare footed, but I often wonder if any of them suffered in later years from all this exposure to the sun. I watched over Penny all the time, as she was inclined to wriggle out of her clothes during the hot afternoons, and we have one lovely snapshot of her on the lawn just about to step out of her pants, otherwise naked.

The climate was not good for children, however, and during that year of 1955 Penny did have a bad bout of gastric malaria which was a great worry to us. For a time I thought I might have to bring her home before Christmas, but with the- improvement in the weather as the rain eased off she began to improve also, and we were able to enjoy one more hot, sunny end of the year with the usual fun and games.

There was an extra party laid on this year - "Burns Night", on January 25th, to celebrate the birth of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. This was planned to be a real gala affair, but you could only attend it if you had Scottish ancestors, and try as we would, J.R.-and I could not unearth one single forbear who hailed from north of the border. My father's origins were in darkest Bedfordshire, with good yeoman stock going back as far as anyone could remember, my mother came from London, and J.R.'s people were red haired Vikings, with a bit of Irish creeping in from somewhere. My maternal grandfather came from North Wales, and judging by the swarthy skins he bequeathed to his children, the Spaniards from the scattered Spanish Armada had some responsibility there. But of Scottish blood there was none. So we were barred from attending, which was a pity from our point of view as I believe it was quite a colourful sight, the men in their kilts and the ladies in long white dresses with tartan sashes.

For a few days before the event there was much excitement and dusting off of kilts, and there was even a set of bagpipes produced. Where they came from nobody knows, and it was quite certain that no one knew how to play them. The reels had to be danced to recorded music.

The mine manager at Obuasi at that time was an American, Phil Brown, with a South African wife whose name was Nell. Nell Brown could not bear to think that there was some activity going on which she couldn't take part in, so she managed to dig up some long forgotten Scottish ancestor, and both she and her husband appeared, suitably garbed, at this event. When challenged by various people as to their right to do this, Nell replied, indignantly, "But I am a Scot!"

They were, of course, always referred to afterwards as the MacBroons.

As Obuasi was situated some fifty miles south of Kumasi, the nearest sizeable town and also the capital of the Ashanti region, and to get there one had to travel over the usual bumpy red laterite roads, we did not go there very often. It was no fun taking a small child over these roads, which were in turn dusty or muddy and always in bad repair. But I did manage to get there once or twice, mainly in order to visit the shops and the market.

Kumasi's central market was a large, thriving affair, filled with noisy throngs of natives hunting all the small items such as matches, bright beads, miscellaneous items of hardware, as well as the much prized mammy cloths. Cheap shirts and shorts were produced on the spot by tailors sitting on the ground, crouched over their hand sewing machines. And there was the inevitable dried fish area, the smell from which was strong enough to persuade us to keep our distance. This market was a bigger version of the one in Obuasi village, and I noticed in both of them that the Indian stallholders appeared to have different selling prices for their goods for different people, and the native Africans came off worst by being charged the most. This did not make for happy relations between the two peoples. The Indians had their hands on the money all the time, and I thought of this several years later when Idi Amin was in charge in Uganda, and celebrated his overall power by expelling most of the Indian population. I wonder why?

J.R. went quite a lot to Kumasi as he was a member of a Freemason's Lodge which met in the town, and several times he met the Ashanti King, the Asantahene, who was a Past Master of this Lodge. I had read up about the Ashanti Wars before I came out to West Africa, and very bloody they were by all accounts. My history books informed me that the Ashanti tribes came originally from the savannah country to the north, were very warlike, and practised slave trading and human sacrifices. Tradition asserts that during the reign of Osei Tutu (1697 - 1731), there descended from heaven a Golden Stool that contained the spirit of the Ashanti nation and was their equivalent of a European crown. Be that as it may, after the Ashantis were defeated in the war and the country was made a British Protectorate, the stool, which had been confiscated, was given back to them and is still there at all official functions at which the Asantahene is present. Whether it is the original stool, or if indeed it is made of gold or just plated; I wouldn't know. One could buy wooden replicas of the stool in any of the carpenters' shops, and J.R. bought me one which to this day I use as a dressing table stool. He also bought a small one for Penny, which her small daughter now uses.

Referring back to "We two in West Africa", which I frequently do - it has such a wealth of information in it I see a whole chapter is devoted to the Ashanti wars, particularly the siege of Kumasi. I suppose in 1900, after so many years of peace and prosperity in England, broken only by the distant Boer War, these West African skirmishes roused the complacent British public to heights of righteous indignation, until the superior British forces managed to gain the upper hand and force a surrender. Little did any one guess that the Great War (World War 1), which would change everyone's ideas of warfare for ever, was only fourteen years ahead.

This was how matters stood in 1955, and I think it was still several years before he at last managed to meet his now grown-up son in East Berlin. We lost touch with him when J.R. finally left Africa and came back to work in England. If he is still alive, Florian must now be 84 or 85 years old. I wonder if he made it back home to Poland after the Berlin wall came down and the East/West situation began to ease? I don't suppose we shall ever know.

This Allard was six years old and was a very odd looking vehicle. It had its original sleek, silver-painted bonnet in the front and a hand-made wooden box body, which made it look as though the front and the back belonged to two separate vehicles. It also had the most inefficient set of headlights I have ever seen on any car. A man walking in front with a flashlight would have provided better illumination. Many times when J.R. and Tommy had gone to Prasu and been out till after dark, I would sit-on our veranda-h after the baby had been put to bed, watching the one small patch of the main Kumasi road which was visible from the bungalow, and waiting for the unmistakable sight of a pair of very dim headlights crawling along at about five miles an hour. When these disappeared behind some trees I knew it was the Allard creeping home, and that in about 45 minutes, with any luck, it would grind up our drive, bringing an exhausted, filthy, and probably soaking wet husband home to me. They were always late home from Prasu, sometimes due to breakdowns, sometimes because of trees across the road, but most often because it-was pouring with rain and this had flooded the carburetor or some other vital piece of equipment, without which the car could not move. I never said very much when he returned. I was always too relieved to see him back.

After we had landed on the bank again, Tommy found a baby croc which had just hatched out, and this was interesting. We took a photo of him peering into the baby croc's mouth, forcing it open with a couple of sticks, but the sight of that mouthful of white teeth, already honed to razor sharpness, was- enough to make him pull his hands back and tip the reptile swiftly into the river. A most unpleasant-looking creature.

Although Obuasi was situated considerably further north than Marlu, I don't think that made any difference to the weather, which was still hot, humid, and endlessly trying. If one went further north and kept going, one eventually came to the Sahara Desert, but when you look at it on a map, there are hundreds of miles of Northern Territories, getting progressively dryer and more sparsely populated as the desert approaches. Very little went on in the Northern Territories and the boys who came south to look for work were very ignorant of western ways, similar to those in the rural areas of Tanganyika. In fact, anyone whose house boy or office boy turned out to be unusually obtuse was generally reckoned to have "just come from the N.T.'s" But they were quite good as ball boys on the tennis courts.

There were several good tennis courts at Obuasi mine, adjacent to the club and swimming pool, and in spite of the heat, matches were played in the dry weather. I went down there one afternoon with Margaret Williams and her two children, John aged four and Tony who was two, and Penny in her push chair, and as we approached and saw a match was in progress, the two boys were delighted.

"Football!", cried John, joyfully. And not to be outdone, Tony responded, "Clicket!"

On being informed that it was not football or cricket and that they were not allowed to join in, the boys quickly lost interest and we all retreated in the direction of the swimming pool, where they could make as much noise as they liked without being hushed up. Football was very popular amongst the Africans - played with bare feet - and many football matches were played on the pitch behind the club.

When I look back over the years, there are so many small incidents I remember, some funny, a few tragic, but all combining to make up the mosaic of our life in Africa.

Another memory surfaces, of a christening ceremony at the Obuasi Catholic Church for two European mine babies recently born at the Kumasi hospital - Pat's second,-a boy, and Anna's first born, a girl. If there was any doubt in my mind as to the very tentative hold which the local missionaries had on the minds of the African population, it was quickly dispelled as I watched the black faces and shining brown eyes of the congregation during the short afternoon service before the christening took place. They sang the hymns with great gusto, to their own tunes and their own words, and obviously it was a most enjoyable afternoon out, taking part in this mysterious ceremony in the English church. But just as obviously the meaning of the occasion completely escaped them, and we noticed that the piccans were not allowed inside the church at all. There was a large negro at the door wielding a big stick, which he was using to beat the small ones back if they became too curious at the peculiar goings on of the white people. It was mainly the Catholics and the Methodists in West Africa who attempted to convert the local inhabitants to Christianity, and while I do not know what their success rate was, I would make a guess that amongst the totally uneducated masses it was not too high.

An then there was the never-to-be-forgotten morning when I had coffee with Evelyn Mahoney in her very elegant home, with the antique furniture and the fine china. Several of the other wives were there, all of us wearing dresses instead of our customary shorts, but Penny and I had to retire in some confusion halfway through, after my daughter had left a large damp patch on one of the Mahoneys' pale green satin cushions. They had no children of their own, and although Evelyn forced a smile and said it really didn't matter in the least, ha, ha, ha! I felt very awkward, and we took ourselves off as soon as possible.

The last chapter of our life in Africa began with the realisation in July 1956, that I was once again expecting a baby.