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BOOK REVIEWS The Scent of Eucalyptus; This book describes not one vanished world, but three. The first and least of them is the yet-to-be-Thatcherised Diplomatic Service of the post-war Golden Age, when senior mandarins caught the 8.40 from Godalming (“the City men having mostly left on earlier trains”) and picked agreeable jobs (“I was offered the post of Consul-General in Cape Town”) as they coasted towards an index-linked retirement. After four years at the United Nations in New York (“comfortable, luxurious even, protected, insulated”), author Richard Posnett gets to be Governor of both Belize and Bermuda, leaving the last amid unfortunate allegations that he had fiddled his expenses. Despatched at short notice to deal with a crisis in East Africa in 1979, Posnett has to make do without any help from local British diplomats. He has to hire his own car, and later his own aeroplane, to get to Entebbe – and arrives with no diplomatic accreditation. The High Commissioner to Kenya refused to see him on a Sunday, despite the fact that he was sent by the Foreign Secretary, and a war was raging in two former British colonies. “It was strange to me, brought up perhaps in a different school,” writes Posnett, “never to have been invited to the High Commissioner’s residence for a meal or a drink.” The mental world of men such as Dick Posnett is a different school indeed. It is the second of the vanished worlds disclosed in The Scent of Eucalyptus, and the one the current generation will find it most hard to enter. In its one-damn-thing-after-anotherness, this book is a monument to a peculiarly British culture of unreflective stoicism. Posnett recalls with obvious admiration Dr Noel Humphreys, who broke his arm climbing Mount Gessi: after setting the fracture himself, he continued his ascent. Posnett describes his own first law as “Don’t be deterred from your purpose by negative advice.” But if there is no self-pity in this book, there is no self-awareness either. Perhaps a generation whose lives were made or blighted by Hitler’s war were bound to be more comfortable doing than thinking. The athletic, mountain-climbing, cricket and golf-playing author has a muscular approach to life and work that must have helped to win friends and influence people at the time - Sir Frederick Crawford, one of the last Governors of Uganda, told Posnett on the course that he would much rather have been a professional golfer, while the restless natives of Anguilla were soothed by an impromptu game of cricket – but denies the reader any real understanding of the author, his life or even his career. If his accounts of his first marriage (“Elisabeth and I became fond of each other and this led to our marriage six months later”) and divorce (“Elisabeth was increasingly unhappy with our life together in Africa, and she decided to go back to live in Switzerland, taking the children with her”) are understandably matter-of-fact, Posnett ought to have done more to prove his own assertion that his command of African languages gave him special insight into the African mind. The book is certainly not short of prompts for further reflection on the subject. When he asks for advice from his old friend Yusuf Lule, leader of the Ugandan government in exile in Dar-Es-Salaam for advice on how the British government should respond to the Tanzanian invasion, he is told to listen to the news. When he calls Kampala instead, the operator asks him to send “a pair of trousers, medium size.” The new foreign minister of Uganda, who Posnett recalls from a previous life has a prodigious thirst, is brought on side with a bottle of whisky. Unfortunately, none of these incidents is used to broader effect. In this book, Africans remain, by turns, remote, comic and vicious. Yet this is surely not the intended result. Posnett is a man of
liberal temperament, who refuses a cushy post in apartheid South
Africa, attributes his troubles in Bermuda to whites opposed to
his closeness to the black population, and ascribes the retrogressive
effects of decolonisation in Africa to historical and anthropological
factors that the British failed to take into account. The book nevertheless
concludes with a cautious but positive assessment of the British
Empire – the third and last of the vanished worlds described
by Posnett - as a force for good. It is astonishing to think that
only fifty years ago Whitehall was still giving twenty-somethings
absolute power over what amounted to small countries. As a district
officer in north-west Uganda from 1941, Posnett not only governed
an area the size of Wales, but doubled as road engineer, big game
hunter, tax collector, minister of food, disease prevention officer,
and hanging judge (he sentenced men to death at least twice). It
is a measure of the remoteness of that era that we denizens of a
more prurient age cannot help wondering what these youthful imperial
consuls did for sex. Posnett is not saying, but it seems at least
one DC in his part of Uganda kept catamites. The reason for his
consequent removal was, of course, hushed up. And who is to say
that a secretive, homophobic age is not preferable to our own? M’COBEN, PLACE OF GHOSTS, When Lady Margaret Barry, daughter of the 6th Earl of Radnor, died in 2002 aged 99 the Daily Telegraph published a lengthy obituary of an extraordinary woman who, with her ex-army husband Gerald, carved a farm out of the Southern Rhodesian bush in the 1920s and 30s and endured privation and loss – including that of twin babies, a boy and a girl – that would be unendurable to pampered Western women of the 21st century. Having visited Rhodesia during school holidays in the late 1940s, I had some idea of how demanding its bush life would have been before the war and after reading the Telegraph obituary I wanted to know more about this remarkable aristocrat. Now her granddaughter Alice Peterson has written a comprehensive account of Margaret Barry’s life in M’Coben: Place of Ghosts. It is an interesting read for many reasons, not least because it describes the metamorphosis of a young woman who grew up at Longford Castle, Wiltshire with its 47 rooms, and the privileged lifestyle – with the ‘stifling upper-class regime’ of the Pleydell-Bouverie family - to become a rather different kind of person who in her early twenties was happily keeping house and raising children from a single tent with an adjacent shack for cooking, in the middle of nowhere 40 miles south of Bulawayo. Peterson’s account swings between her grandmother’s
experiences in Rhodesia and the counterpoint of her own visit to
Zimbabwe in 2000 with her aunt Diana and her mother, Pam, who both
knew M’Coben as children. (In 1926 the journey from Bulawayo
to the farm site in an Armstrong Siddley had taken the Barrys six
hours; it took Pam, Diana and Alice 40 minutes.) The 2, 500-acre
property on which Gerald took out an option for £1 an acre
has river frontage for 2 ½ miles along the Umgaza river and
the author’s description of flora, fauna and birdlife can
be lyrical. Meanwhile the narrative, based largely on letters home
from Margaret to her mother, conjures a world that lovers of Africa
will recognise, as Gerald struggles to create his farm, besieged
by the vicissitudes of nature - a veldt fire destroys 2, 000 acres
of crop growth; a vicious hailstorm destroys a bumper tobacco crop
– and the unreliability of man: a drunken builder makes bricks
that crumble when used. It embraces the good times, too: Margaret
and Gerald return to M’Coben after a war in which Gerald went
back to soldiering, and Southern Rhodesia enters the boom years,
as the Barrys’ crops thrive and they prosper. That picture
of post-war life in Central Africa contrasts sharply with Peterson’s
contemporary description of Zimbabwe in 2000 and her account of
later events, when Robert Mugabe’s wanton destruction of a
beautiful, once-prosperous country was well underway. If pioneers
in pre-war Rhodesia or the wonders of human persistence interest
you, read this book, and enjoy some excellent photographs of the
period as a bonus. MC |
