Fears and Fantasies

As children growing up on a remote boma in wartime Northern Rhodesia, ours was an extraordinarily silent world. The only noises we knew were natural, like the wind in the trees. Motor cars were so few and far between that the noise of their engines frightened us. There were no aeroplanes, and even those low-level noise pollutants like fridges and computers with which we now live were absent. We were even isolated from the low-level noise of the kitchen, laundry and light room, which were separate from the main house. Not surprisingly, in these circumstances, loud noise was an integral part of our three great terrors. The great terrors were all completely unrelated but we managed to mentally bundle them all together in a single abomination that we incorporated into many, if not all, our fantasy games.

Firstly, rabies was a very serious problem in our area. Wild animals like hyenas and jackals still roamed around the little settlement and often transmitted the disease to the native dogs. Mother, father and Namba (our Scottish nanny) spent a great deal of time, correctly it seems in hindsight, inculcating in Shirley (my sister) and me an almost hysterical fear of 'mad dogs' as we called rabid dogs. Their efforts were rewarded by our blind and unquestioning compliance with the rules governing the engagement of ‘mad dogs’. If anybody called out the dreaded words 'mad dog', we were required to drop whatever we were doing and run for the house, often with our little companions from the compound. In the house we were herded into the sitting room by Namba, doors were slammed behind us and windows closed. For young children, these were actions that nourished indescribable fear. Of course, there were many false alarms, but that didn't lessen the fear.

One day when we had been herded into the sitting room by Namba following the 'mad dog' alarm call, I was looking through the window onto the verandah when, for the first time, I saw a 'mad dog' coming up the front steps. It was not the mad dog of my imagination. That was a ferocious, slavering, wolf-like beast with bared and bloody teeth. This was a little brown village cur dog that staggered around on the verandah, crashing into furniture and drooling white froth from its mouth.

Shirley saw it too and wailed, 'Poor thing.'

Namba hurriedly drew the curtains before communicating with those in the kitchen who had a better knowledge of what was going on.

'It's alright,' she reassured us when she returned. 'Daddy's coming from the office.'

We waited in abject terror listening to urgent, murmured voices outside. The shattering roar of a shotgun on the verandah, fired no more than ten feet away from us without any warning was the final straw that indelibly marked this incident on my mind. Shirley and I were reduced to howling and sobbing wrecks on the mat at Namba's feet.

The terror evoked by all future 'mad dog' warning calls was thenceforth augmented by the prospect of a loud and terrifying bang. We huddled on the settee, one either side of Namba, with our hands clamped over our ears until the all clear was sounded. All 'mad dogs' seemed to us to come along the 'mission road’, as it was known. Where the mission road went, we never knew, but we did know it went past the well where our water came from each day borne in buckets on the heads of the labourers.

Our second fear was of the hyenas. We hated and trembled at the unearthly howls of distant hyenas and would lie in bed shivering at the thought of these evil monsters of the night. Shirley and I shared a little room at the back of the house facing the outside garage. Her bed was under the window and when we heard hyenas, she closed the window as quietly as she could, sneaked across the floor and climbed into my bed under the mosquito net. Both were serious offences in Namba's book, but our fear of the hyenas was far greater than our fear of Namba's retribution. We sat on the bed with our backs against the wall, hugging our knees up to our chins with enfolded arms and waited for the demonic noise to die away in the distance before Shirley went back to her own bed and re-opened the widow. These hyena terror trials were not unusual as far as I remember - possibly two or three times a week. But then they took an altogether more sinister and terrifying turn.

Unknown to us, father acquired a number of elephant tusks. The tusks had been smeared with hippo fat to prevent them drying out before being bound in sackcloth. They were stacked in the open shed that served as a garage outside our room. It was perfect hyena bait and the hyenas reacted to it immediately. Once again, Shirley and I sat huddled on my bed in the darkness - we had no electric lights or candles or anything like that. This time, they came closer and closer until their howls rattled the panes in the windows and we sobbed with fear as we clung to each other. Then they started their diabolical laughter when they found there was only a smell and nothing to eat. We crawled under the blanket and pulled it over our heads each trying to out-do the other by suppressing tears of fear and reassuring the other that everything would be all right. In our heart of hearts, of course, we knew that it was only time before they would burst through the flimsy window and carry us off. After all, what else had they come for?

At breakfast the next morning, we told Namba that we were very frightened of the hyenas and that last night they had tried to get us. Namba was dismissive and told us not to be such babies. She explained the tusks and said that was what the hyenas came for. We were totally unconvinced, but after breakfast, with our little friends from the compound, we confirmed the pile of tusks and tracked the hyena's huge paw prints in the sand along the mission road as far as the well. Beyond that we were too frightened to go.

During the next night I was woken by Shirley's light tap on the shoulder.

'They're coming again,' she sobbed, as she crept under the net.

I sat up and listened, but could hear nothing.

'There,' she said. 'The mission road. Can't you hear them?'

Very faintly I heard the distant, moaning, whoop and trembled at the thought of another visit.

'They're a long way away,' I whispered, encouragingly.

'But they're coming closer,' wailed Shirley. 'There they are again,' she sobbed, 'they're much nearer.'

Chins resting on our knees we waited in helpless terror as the periodic calls became louder and louder until, once again, the panes in the windows rattled in their frames. We heard stirring from a distant part of the house and secretly hoped it was Namba coming to our rescue. There were murmured voices and then our lives abruptly ended. Instead of a hyena hurling himself through the window, which we thought was imminent, there was a flash and a quick double bang outside our window, so loud that we hurt our heads on the wall behind us as we recoiled from the deafening noise. We lay in the middle of my bed in a hysterical, sobbing heap where Namba found us a few seconds later when she came in carrying a candle. She pulled up the mosquito net and sat next to us on the bed where she tried, in vain, to comfort us.

'Don't be alarmed,' she cooed. 'Daddy was frightening off the hyenas. They won't come back again.'

We were too young to explain coherently that the greater terror was the unexpected noise of the gun, not the hyenas.

The third evil to emanate from the mission road was the Father himself. The mission, at the far end of what we called the 'mission road', was a White Father’s establishment, an order well known for their good works in Africa. What concerned me and Shirley, and indeed our little friends from the compound too, were his frightening looks and the terrifying noise of his Harley Davidson motorcycle.

Like the hyenas, we could hear the Harley Davidson coming from miles away. The first person to hear it shouted a warning to the others, which was a signal to drop everything and run for our secret hide-away in a grove of trees overlooking the house but furthest from the mission road. In our hide-away we comforted each other as the din of the motor-bike became louder and louder. We watched it draw up at the front steps leading to the verandah of the house and watched the frightening apparition climb off it.

He wore a long white cassock down to his sandaled feet. Around his middle was a tasselled rope belt with the tied off ends hanging to his knees. On his head he wore a broad-brimmed straw hat that hid a mass of white hair culminating in a long grey-flecked, beard hanging to his waist. He wore necklaces of large black and white beads around his neck. To us he was the devil personified and when Namba's voice rang out, calling us to come, we hid deeper in the bush until the apparition re-emerged to start his motor-bike when we clasped our hands over our ears to reduce the frightful noise.

In our fertile young minds, forced by necessity to live in a fantasy world, we conceived of a dark cave on a hill-side somewhere down the mission road wherein lived the White Father surrounded by hyenas and ‘mad dogs’. At night he sallied forth riding on a hyena attended by a slavering pack of mad dogs. In the daytime he converted his biggest hyena into a diabolical machine that belched smoke and roared like thunder until the whole earth shook. In this evil and horrifying cave, we stashed all our other minor ghoulies and ghosties of a type that people the minds of all little children. Thus we managed to contain all the satanic elements in one fantastic place and that gave us considerable comfort, although we continued to fear the individual inmates as much as before.