Open Writing

Even now, more than fifty years on, I still wonder what came over me.

Ahead of me a tired old man shuffled along the pavement, his arms weighed down by a dozen or more packages.

Suddenly one fell to the ground. Without a moment’s thought I stopped and retrieved it and handed it to him.

It was a simple act of kindness, the kind of thing many of us take for granted in our every day lives, like holding a door open for someone in a shop or giving up our seat to an elderly person on a bus.

But I can still see the bewildered, almost frightened look on the old man’s face as he murmured his thanks. As he did so I looked round and the whole street seemed to be locked in some kind of time-warp, faces frozen in icy stares, eyes wide open in astonishment, mouths gaping in disbelief.

I stood motionless for a few moments. Then I realised I had committed the unforgivable sin - helping a black man.

For this was Southern Rhodesia (later to become Zimbabwe) which like its neighbour South Africa, had a rigidly enforced policy of apartheid.

The year was 1951 and as a National Service entrant in the Royal Air Force I had only arrived the previous day at RAF Thornhill, an air training school at Gwelo, the country’s third-largest town. I was 18, going on 19, naïve, impressionable, idealistic, imbued with a natural sense of justice.

We had been lectured on our arrival that we must observe the apartheid laws, which meant no social contact of any kind with the black population. That early lesson in apartheid on the streets of Gwelo brought home to me the evils of a system that frowned on the simple act of helping another human being.

Social contact with the white population was no better for most of the men on the station - a legacy from the war years when, we were told, airmen had abused the hospitality shown by the local white population by taking too many liberties with wives and daughters.

I was fortunate because a family we knew from London had emigrated to Gwelo and opened a general store there and I was made welcome by them. They, like all the other whites, could see nothing wrong with the system. When I told them of my experience with the old man they just laughed.” You mustn’t be kind to blacks. If you are they will only take advantage”, they said.

Strangely enough I found that the whites who had emigrated to Southern Rhodesia from England treated the black population even worse than the White Rhodesians. They had exchanged the dull domesticity of suburbia where they had done their own washing, cooking and cleaning, for what they considered to be Utopia - a standard of living far higher than they had experienced in England, endless rounds of “sundowners” (parties which they held most nights at each other’s homes) and black servants who worked for a pittance.

Those in business exploited the blacks with cheap labour, paying them barely enough to support themselves and their families, so it was no wonder that our more humane treatment stirred up deep resentment among the white population.

Each RAF billet employed a wash boy to wash and iron the men’s underwear and shirts and starch their uniforms. Our “boy” was about 45 with a wife and six children and we paid him £2 a week - twice the average wage in Gwelo.

We treated him kindly, often giving him articles of clothing and food for his family and he responded by working well and cheerfully. Never was there even a hint of dishonesty. We could trust him implicitly. So much for the idea that “you mustn’t be kind to blacks….”

I had gone into the RAF straight from my local newspaper in Surrey and while I was stationed in Gwelo I wrote to a number of newspapers and magazines in Southern Rhodesia offering to do some part-time writing. A couple of them said they would consider taking me on full-time if I got demobbed out there.

But it didn’t take me long to say “No”. I could never have lived in a country where it was virtually a crime to pick up a package for an old man in the street.