Child of the Sixties We moved from an African summer to a Southern English winter in the early nineteen sixties, and what a culture shock it was! I remember my youngest sister bawling her head off as we disembarked onto the cold, wet Southampton dockside, crying that she wanted to go to England. We had been told, of course, throughout the voyage, that we were going to England, and I think all of us children assumed it must be a better place, otherwise why would we have upped sticks from sunny, idyllic Mufulira to go there? But the freezing, grey morning that greeted us was completely unexpected by the four little girls, as was the chilly wooden bungalow in the New Forest to which we headed from the boat. We were lucky, of course, that of all the places in Britain to which we could have been taken, our parents had picked on the much sought-after garden of England, the New Forest, to be our initial rented home. However, I suspect the cottage was intended primarily as a holiday home, and my memory of it is that it was made from wood (though perhaps this was just a rustic facing?) and very, very cold. I believe it had a huge garden, which was largely overgrown, with stinging nettles amonst other things, and the bus stop from where we could travel to school was just a short walk up the road. We must have experienced British winter weather before, I suppose, when we had been across "on leave", but I think frostbite and ice on the inside of the windows came as a shock to all four sisters. I remember standing at that bus stop, right beside a forest heath, with a terrible, throbbing pain in my feet, thinking I was going to die. I am sure we would have been well kitted out for the winter weather, in fact I have vague memories of experiencing escalators in the Southampton chainstores with great fascination and excitement as we went shopping for this purpose. But we were simply not accustomed to such cold, and it was bitter. I do not remember the small village school as welcoming, although perhaps they did their best. We enrolled in the middle of a school year, so of course a lot of friendships had already been established, and I always felt somewhat "on the edge" of things. I remember getting really excited one playtime by the sight of "needles in the sky" - the vapour trails made by aeroplanes. I didn't recall ever having seen these before, whether because they don't occur in hot climates or because we didn't live over a flightpath I have no idea. My younger sister and I found them fascinating, but the other children whose attention to them we attracted simply stared at us as though we had two heads and stated that they were aeroplanes - so what? We had to stay at school all day, of course, and the idea of having lunch there was quite alien to us. There was also the long lunchtime "playtime", which I found difficult as I lacked confidence in these new surroundings. I remember a group of boys who would set up each playtime in the middle of the playground and sing whilst pretending to play guitars. They would always attract quite a crowd, and my sisters and I would look on, wondering where they had got the idea for this new game, and why only four boys at a time were allowed to play - and always boys, never girls. The other children would tell us, "It's the Beatles!", but we had not had a television in Rhodesia, and had never heard of The Beatles, so we were stil mystified. Our parents did, however, quite quickly acquire a television (black and white, of course!), and the whole family took an avid interest in "Top of the Pops". We soon learned who The Beatles were, and various other singers, and looked forward to hearing them each week. I was always a bit of a "goody-two-shoes" at school, mainly through fear of punishment. The cane was certainly still used at our school in Africa, and my mother taught for a while at that school, which meant if I were scolded at school, she would get to know, and I would be reprimanded again when I get home. But I do remember being told off once at that first English primary school, and I felt it was unfair then, and still do now. We were "colouring in", and I was colouring the humans in my picture in orange, as I always had. Europeans in Africa tended to be fairly tanned, so orange was the closest to their skin colour we could get. However, the British teacher seized upon this and criticised immediately. Why was I colouring the people orange? Look around me, did I see any orange people? Actually no, I didn't, but the'n neither did I see any pink people, truth be told. But apparently, humans were to be coloured pink, everyone knew that! I was made to feel the laughing stock of the class, yet I had only been doing as I had been taught. It sounds a small thing, but it just seemed to drive home to me how alien our new environment was, and it made it quite difficult to settle. I never really gelled with the children at that school. I remember one day the girl who sat beside me deliberately dug the point of her pencil right into my arm, making it bleed. No doubt I had made some provocative remark to trigger this act of aggression, but it shocked me considerably, and I didn't feel the teacher dealt with it as firmly as I had expected. I probably didn't even tell my parents, as I would have known they would have accused me of asking for it; I was already getting a bit of a reputation as a nuisance! At one point, in order to climb higher in the esteem of my peers, I pretended I knew how to speak in an African language. They would indicate an object or action and ask me the African word for it, and I would make up some nonsense word. It wasn't long after I started doing so, however, that I realised my sins would soon find me out, for of course there was no way I could remember these invented words from one day to the next. I felt acute embarrassment as I realised my foolish deception would quickly be discovered, and sure enough, I became the target of much ridicule, although I never openly admitted what I had done. Strangely, when I'd lived on the African continent, renown for its wildlife, I'd seen nothing larger than a lizard roaming free, but in the New Forest, I saw from the bus to school many ponies and cattle, which I assumed to be wild, and even the occasional shy deer. I determined to catch myself one of these ponies, and used an old skipping rope to fashion some kind of lassoo such as I'd seen in cowboy movies (those self same movies that featured the terrifying Red Indians). My family humoured me, and one weekend walked with me up past the bus stop onto the heathland, where a small herd of unsuspecting ponies grazed peacefully. As I had seen in the movies, I stealthily approached one pony after another, skipping rope at the ready, but of course, as soon as I got within six skipping ropes length from them, they would wander nonchalantly further away with barely a backward glance. A full afternoon was spent thus, with my disappointment and frustration mounting at every failed approach, and I suspect my family's amusement increasing proportionately, until eventually I had to give up and accept that I was not going to capture my own pony. Of course, as I much later found out, every pony in the New Forest is already owned by a commoner, and had I succeeded in capturing one I could have been arrested as a horse rustler; not that I would ever even have succeeded in getting it home, much less confining it in our garden - and anyway, pets were not allowed at this rented abode. From then on, I had to content myself with spending my weekly pocket money on a bag of carrots at the nearest market town and feeding them to the two ponies who lived in a field beside our garden; they soon learned to come galloping across whenever they saw me, and it was almost as good as owning them myself - at least I escaped all the mucking out!