A Spanish Girl and Her English Soldier – A Love Beyond Boundaries

I start this chapter for Francis, a friend from school who asked that I speak a bit more of Africa.  I think in his question lies a broader question about who I am. I have been the subject of many reports during my soldiering days and I have written many CVs and Biographies that I have been asked to submit in relation to my work, but none of them really touch on that question. I have guarded my privacy and endeavoured to separate work from the rest of my life – although ironically as Charles Hurst pointed out after reading the preceding chapters, many of my personal beliefs and values have shaped my work.

My writing so far has been focused on Ana, our relationship and our love, and my aim was to help people understand her a little and then love her a little. It was and is my way of trying to say thank you to an astonishing girl who in her own special and courageous way gave me an extraordinary 45 years.  But I can see how to understand Ana, it might help to know me a little better and so I will interrupt the flow to try and explain a bit about me.

Africa comes first.  I was born in Tarkwa in the Gold Coast. It is inland from the Atlantic Ocean coast, a hilly region surrounded by jungle.  My father was there as a Doctor working for the Gold mining company which pretty much ran the country. Our house was a bungalow on stilts.  On the path to the front door were two avocado pear trees, out of which Green Mambas would occasionally fall dangerously close to human beings, me included – they had a deadly bite. To one side was a field with corn.  There was a garden to grow vegetables and to let a solitary child play. It had some trees, one with a small tree house. The hospital was close by and down below in the valleys and the jungle were villages whose drumbeats I can still hear to this day and the light of whose bonfires I can still picture twinkling through the undergrowth.

My room looked out over the corn field and I remember once that an escaped mental patient somehow managed to climb onto my window ledge and sit there as the staff tried to get him down. I can still see him, with his arms around his knees. I felt no danger and I am sure there was none. I think he was frightened and that made me sorrowful.

I remember two cars. One was a big American thing and one was a Morris Oxford. I had a steering wheel that you could attach to the back of the front seat and pretend to steer the car.  The roads were not made up; they were dirt tracks.  There was a club for Europeans, perhaps at Takoradi but I am not sure. It was a long drive, but for me it was worth it. It had a swimming pool and at some point there was some sort of competition/show where the children were dressed up and had to dance.  Given my love of the sea and my subsequent love of sailing, it seems that my mother somehow got it right: I was dressed as a sailor and danced the sailor’s hornpipe – a dance that I have never forgotten albeit of precious little use on any dance floor I have trodden since.  I think that occasionally a few couples would come for dinner or my parents would go to dinner elsewhere. But in terms of children contact, that club was the only place and it was perhaps once or twice a year that we would go.

So in reality I was an only child and one who lived in solitude.  My only two ‘friends’ were the gardeners who were very fond of and kind to me and I was fond of them. They came from different tribes and I remember being desperately upset when they broke into a fight.  Other than those two,  my only friend was my imagination and a few toys. I am sure psychologists could have a field day with this, but what I think it meant was quite simple. I think it made me an individual and I have never gone with the crowd, never joined cliques, in fact I have gone out of my way to avoid them.  I think it taught me to cope on my own and to be on my own – and perhaps meant that I would always need a bit of space at least occasionally.  I believe that it helped my imagination develop, it helped me to be a dreamer.  Being surrounded by such a raw nature perhaps made me aware of the life and beauty of this earth without understanding it scientifically and perhaps gave me my aversion to killing any living creature. I still pick up spiders and put them outside rather than squashing them. I am aware that some may pick up on this in relation to my joining the army. I find this very easy to answer and it convinces me. In the army (and I chose to be a foot soldier) you are only going to try and kill, if you have to, someone who is intent on killing you, your fellow soldiers or innocent civilians.  And the reason that you are in that conflict is more often than not a last ditch attempt to save the lives of the innocent. In any case, returning to me I learned to love the rawness of nature, much preferring it to carefully manicured gardens and I learned to love living creatures with the very specific exception of green mambas who seemed particularly nasty.

But most particularly I believe that Africa allowed me to be me, to be an individual, to be free in my thinking, which ultimately led Ana to say so often that I was different and to rejoice in that difference.

The Gold Coast, now Ghana, was hot and humid. It had its monsoon season. And so for five years I became acclimatised, tuned into heat which had little effect on me and still does much to the amazement of Spaniards and Italians.  But somehow, and I am not sure quite how this works, I think Africa made me or at least started to make me less of an Englishman, less of a Northern European. In its own special way, I think Africa seized my heart, made it more open, freed my mind and crucially said just be you. Africa also gave me a love of and appreciation of happiness, showed that it lay not in wealth but in how you took life, in your imagination and dreams for it is a continent of dreams.

My memory of my time there is like a series of small vignettes. I remember my father having a seizure on the path outside the house, of blood coming from his mouth as he rolled around on the floor. I remember a Green Mamba dropping close to me and one of the gardeners grabbing it with a forked stick before cutting off its head.  I remember the stilts on which the house sat and the gloomy darkness beneath it.  I remember as a very small toddler falling into the pool backwards and looking up through the water as I sank to see the light coloured a light turquoise by the water. I remember no fear, no sense of drowning just the sensation of falling further from the light. I remember one night waking up and finding my father in the kitchen eating some baked beans and I was so happy when he shared them with me (that was to be one of very few memories of ever having any real relationship with him). I remember both my parents lying desperately ill in bed with food poisoning and that no one really took any notice of me during the panic that filled the staff trying to save their lives. Another Doctor had to come a very long way to see them. They survived. I remember driving down the dirt tracks with the jungle closing right in around the car. And I suppose that those little experiences each added up to a childhood that was perhaps a little different from one that I would have had in Europe.

Every Christmas we would take the steamer (I think it was the White Star line) to England via Las Palmas.  I loved being on the ship. Its unique smell of paint and apples blending with the salty sea air; its long companionways, the vast decks, the hissing as the hull cut through the ocean. I was lucky. I never suffered from seasickness, but my mother did and during one storm, with the ship rolling excitingly from side to side, she lay ‘dying’ in bed (seasickness is easily described: when it first hits you, you feel that you are dying; as it continues you want to die). This allowed me total freedom to roam and it was so exciting. Not only did I wander around inside the ship loving the motion, but I found a door that I could open onto the deck which allowed me outside into the noise and spray and as the ship rolled so the sea climbed up towards the deck I was on. Today everything would be secured, rules would prohibit anyone doing any such a thing let alone a child of four or five.  But how I loved the sea and how that love stayed with me until, along with Ana it slipped away on 12th December.

I think something else that I might be able to lay at the door of Africa is my lack of interest in rules, my belief that they are not really intended for me. I think there is perhaps a sense of freedom that somehow grew within me unfettered in the vastness that is Africa or the skies that cover it.  And perhaps I should thank Africa for giving me so much confidence. Perhaps it comes from other sources too, but I feel that growing up there somehow taught me a little self reliance which gave me the self belief that has been integral to my life so far.  What it did not do at all was to teach me how to be with other people. I suppose I was Mogli.  But there is one thing for which I am hugely grateful. It taught me to respect people for who they were, not what they were. I loved the two gardeners. I trusted them and I respected them.  And crucially, although I was completely oblivious at the time, two of my best friends were black workers.  Many years later, my father said something nice to me: “you could never be racist”. Put simply I learned to love people regardless of tribe or colour and I learned to respect them and I am happy that to this day I will always try and see the good side of someone. Equally I am not tolerant of those who behave badly.

And I think Africa had one other impact, or at least the initial part.  I am usually more comfortable with non British nationalities. Some of that flows from school and then university, but I think perhaps a bit of me was unknowingly African.

So the English soldier that Ana met and then married was never going to be easily stereotyped, was unlikely to ever be a conformist or a yes man and would always be a free thinker. That was written in the soil of Tarkwa. It was whispered in the jungle trees and it sounded out loudly from those drumbeats of celebration and ritual in the surrounding tribal villages.