Open Writing

At the age of about 17 or 18 I was a member of the local amateur dramatic society, and took the role of Willy in the old play "Bonaventure". There was a good write-up in the newspaper, too. At the end of the year, we all enjoyed a dinner at a pleasant resort in the hills, near Masvingo.

Everything went well until bowls of fruit were placed on our table. I chose an apple and started eating it in the way I'd always eaten an apple, holding it in my hand and biting it. It wasn't long before I realised that other people were doing something much more decorous. One placed one's apple discreetly onto the plate, sliced it nicely, and consumed it daintily, one slice at a time. Oops! was deficient in the social grace department. Hoping that nobody had noticed, I rapidly changed to the more socially acceptable method of apple-eating at a dining table.

There have been several other Significant Dinners along the way. A few years after the apple incident, I was boarding with a family in Harare. The head of the house was a bank manager and a nice enough chap, but somewhat frugal in his ways. He bought foodstuff at auction sales. I've written elsewhere about the jam of dubious origin and content which he put into sandwiches.

One evening, we had dinner by candle light. It must have been someone's birthday. The soup was therefore served in semi-darkness. I took a couple of spoonfuls, felt something crunchy in my mouth, and declared without social grace, "This soup is gritty!" The lights went on. The soup was inspected. Dozens, or hundreds, of ants were floating gently in each plate. They were dead, of course, after being well cooked by the African servant who obviously wasn't worried about such things. My good hosts tried hard to pretend that they were not embarrassed.

Boarding with another family in a less affluent suburb, there was always something extraordinary going on. This was largely due to Mrs Selby, an enterprising, somewhat elderly, eccentric lady. When she called us all in for a cup of tea, and couldn't find the canister of tea-leaves, it was because she had hidden it so that the servant wouldn't steal from it. She bought a few cartons of tatty old secondhand paperbacks and tried unsuccessfully to run a little library for the "old dears", her friends of the same age. One evening, we noticed a farmyard smell in the dining room, only to discover that she had left a box of day-old chicks on the piano. And so it went on.

I arrived home late from work on evening. My dinner had been kept warm in the oven. When I sat down, the first thing I did was to turn the fish over. Just a matter of cautionary habit. You never knew what you might find. Well, this time I found a very large and well cooked cockroach. I didn't eat my dinner that night.

Living in Kitwe, nearer to the Equator, some white people in the 1960s seemed to have a longing for the old colonial days. After one dinner, for instance, I had to stifle my laughter when the host announced that the gentlemen would now retire to the sitting room for port, while the ladies would adjourn to powder their noses, or whatever it was that ladies did. As the house was just a normal sized house, the bathroom must have been very crowded or there was a long queue.

Feeling that there must be more creative ways of entertaining one's guests, I invited some friends round for different kind of dinner — not the port and powder friends, I hasten to add. We placed the chairs on the table and laid the table-cloth on the floor beneath the table. And we enjoyed our three-course dinner, including curried pilchards and wine, while sitting on the floor under the table. I think it was a symptom of "going troppo" but it was great fun.

© Copyright Brian Barratt