a life it could be when heavy floods washed away all his crops. The couple lost everything and for some years had to lease a farm called Ripplemead. Finally they saved enough to buy Riversdale where they could provide their growing number of children the idyllic childhood of running free that they had both enjoyed.
The Houghs made an unlikely couple, but the relationship worked. Like most Rhodesian farmers' wives, Mary was a strong, practical woman who taught all her children to read in between bottling preserves, while John was a dreamer. They were a perfect two-part harmony, John taking care of the important issues in life like crowned eagles, building bird-hides and producing a dazzling display of useless gadgets, while Mum made sure we all were fed and went to school and had a house to live in.
Even as a young boy, Nigel was well aware that it was his mother who held the family together. Father was a wonderful person but not a great businessman. I always felt that dealing with the rigours of a drought never held the same mental anguish for him as the disappearance of some egg from an African hawk eagle's nest. Even with Rhodesia's cheap labour, they would not have been able to maintain their lifestyle were it not for the fact that John Hough had inherited a large sum of money from his father.
Although neither parent was at all demonstrative, the Hough brothers and sisters grew up so close that outsiders would refer to them as the Mutual Admiration Society. Whenever a member of the family needed help we would call on the siblings-we referred to it as calling out the artillery. If more than one came out we called it heavy artillery. If my mother arrived that would he the nuclear warhead. Childhood pranks usually involved the boys against girls. Every evening we would all go for baths in the bathroom at the end of the corridor along which we all had our rooms. Once my elder brother told my sisters that the coast was clear for them to go back to their bedrooms then called the cook boy Maxwell so he saw them all running past naked.
All the surrounding farms in Headlands were white-owned. Farming was a close-knit society and there were about thirty other white farming families in the district. Apart from his brothers and sisters, Nigel had a group of young friends with whom to go hunting, shooting and fishing in the dam as well as riding on motorbikes. We were all about five or six when we started with a pellet gun, and I went on my first bird shoot with my father when I was ten. He was given his first serious weapon-a 20-bore shotgun-at the age of 14 and mostly they shot guinea fowl and doves. For young guys that kind of life is like a dream.
In those days the bush seemed full of game. Leopards stalked the hills, their cries often to be heard in the night and their spoors left outside the living room windows in the mornings. It was common for the children to come across duikers with their liquid eyes or see wild pigs shooting out from under a msasa tree. Speckled francolín partridges would skit across dusty red tracks, usually in threes, and there were often snakes to dodge away from, cobras and mambas. An enormous python lived in a pile of rocks on the way to the dam and they always hurried past, though sometimes one of the boys would poke in a stick then run. Once we saw the python just after it had swallowed a big duiker and it couldn't move it was so full.
After checking their boots for scorpions or baboon spiders, the children would set off hunting with a retinue of black boys to carry their things, track animal spoors and collect any kills. The black were good trackers and would carry whatever we shot and were always keen to come because afterwards we'd give them whatever we'd bagged so they might get a guinea fowl or something for their suppers. We knew so little about blacks that once, when we were about eight years old, my cousin saw one of the black guys doing a wee and she rushed back saying, ‘Jeez, you can't believe how big this guy's willy is!’ So we asked to see it and he was quite indignant. He charged us all a penny. I don't remember how big it was but we felt it was worth paying.
Nigel and his brothers and sisters were almost entirely ignorant of the black majority all around them, even though the most recent official census showed blacks outnumbered whites by 21 to i.* To Nigel the blacks were just a kind of supporting cast that did his family's washing and cooking or laboured in the fields then melted away back into the bush or their kraals. He and his siblings sometimes played pranks on them, like placing a dead cobra on the watchman's chest when he fell asleep on duty.
When Nigel was not hunting or fishing, he spent his time playing sport. The farm had a swimming pool and a tennis court and at weekends the Houghs often held tennis parties with local farming families coming over for some of Mary's lemon meringue pie and their cook Robert's famous piripiri chicken. Robert was very small and round and most of his cooking was stodgy and forgettable but so good was his piripiri chicken that Nigel's father always said he would ‘put up with any amount of nonsense from Robert’ because of it. The children knew better than to interrupt their father while eating it for his level of concentration exceeded a lioness honing in on her prey.
Nigel was extremely competitive, as was his eldest sister Shirley, and his other sister Tess often had to act as peacemaker between the two after a showdown over tennis. If none of Nigel's siblings or white friends were around, he would play football or cricket with the workers' children. It was kind of one-sided because when we played cricket I would do all the batting and with soccer they would never tackle me hard and they would always let me win as I was the baas's son.
He also developed a passion for squash. Father had got a loan from the Land Bank to build a tobacco-grading barn, which he had built to the exact dimensions of a squash court so it was a grading shed during grading season and a squash court for the rest of the year. Nigel played with their maid Maria. I used to make her play me for hours and hours each day A large, fat woman, who would puff and sweat as Nigel made her run around, Maria was the only one of the workers who dared venture into the sweet tobacco-smelling barn. There were two owls in the rafters and most Shona are scared of owls, believing if one lands on a building and hoots, someone inside will die.
From a young age, Nigel would often trot round after his father to inspect the progress of the tobacco or maize. I was soon aware that farming was extremely hard work and that without endless supervision the munts would do nothing. Every morning at 5 a.m., John Hough set off for the fields in his long khaki shorts, safari shirts with folded-up sleeves, and long stockings with boots, all topped off with a grubby white floppy hat that his wife would long have liked to dispose of. A man of strict routine and firm principle, he came back to the house at 8 a.m. sharp for a cooked breakfast, often lambasting Robert for his ‘miserable’ eggs, and at 8.30 a.m. would disappear into the bathroom for half an hour to ‘contact his stockbroker’, chiding his children that ‘good plumbing is the secret to good health’. He came home again at half past midday for lunch, after which he would sleep for exactly thirty minutes before returning to the fields until late afternoon.
Sometimes he would let Nigel sit with him as he distributed the fortnightly wages to the workers, entering the amounts in black ink in his big ledger. All had stories of woe, leading them to beg for an advance for the funeral of a relative or to buy medicine for a sick child. Mother said they would just fritter it on beer and that he should pay the wages to the women to make sure the children got fed, but the munts would never accept that But his father often gave in to their requests, admonishing Nigel not to let his mother in on the secret.
The only time John Hough ever took off was for their twice-yearly holidays. In August the family always decamped to Nyanga dam near Rhodes's old stone cottage in its English gardens, and would sleep in tents under the fir trees, while every April they spent a month in Beira on the Mozambique coast. This was usually in a group with other families, renting chalets on the beachfront, and it was Nigel's favourite time of year. Mozambique seemed very exotic. We children would play all day in the Indian Ocean, diving through the huge rolling waves and trying to catch jellyfish on sticks. There was a zoo where they laughed to see animals in cages instead of running free in the bush or in game reserves like back home, and a funfair.
