A bunch of White, English, public school kids off to teach in Zimbabwe. What could possibly go wrong. We gathered at Heathrow, I said goodbye to my mother, we flew to Harare via a skidding touch down in snowy Sofia. At a farmstead we put up our brand-new tents and drank beer and tried out our thin camping mattresses on each other as if we were still in Chelsea. We met the priest in whose care we were placed. Also White, but large and old, he’d been a master at Sherbourne. He read out the list of our pairings, strangers to each other, the person we’d spend the next year with in a place we’d never been, mine was tall and angular, we’ll call him Willy which was nothing like his real name but was the nickname he preferred. Separated into our pairs we were sent off to our schools, Willy and I among the last to go, our village was in the south. A flatbed truck delivered us to Dhirihori late at night when the stars were out and the pub open. Willy jumped off the back and settled on the stone steps with a beer, making friends. I shouldered my rucksack to the low block of rooms across the way, tin roof, concrete veranda, a door that didn’t lock, one window. I’d packed according to the list: a paraffin stove, malaria pills, a water filter, sleeping bag, I’d added a pen that wrote upside down. I don’t know what scenario I imagined where that would come in handy, but here’s the important bit: my family are landowners, we have always owned the view. I slept on the floor and when I woke and opened the door I remember thinking it was the first time in my life that the land outside my bedroom wasn’t mine. That was the extent of my experience of the world outside a tall, cold house in London. I had not the faintest idea what I was walking into. Our headmaster took one look and knew what we were made of. He was small and didn’t want us there, these ignorant White children come to fill in a year-off checklist at his school. He gave us what we deserved, the most glancing attention. As opposed to the White priest who liked to turn up in our village when the day was done and the magnificent African sun sent slanting rays across the grass. He would park at our hut, arrange picnic chairs on the concrete veranda and pour two glasses of champagne, one for him and one for me.
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Oh THAT guy 🤬
🤬