Dennis Hubbard - The Tragic Romance of Africa: A True Adventure

Copyright 2013 Dennis Hubbard and Jonathan Nicholas

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To Africa

This is a true story

I will tell myself the truth

Even if those around me

Deny it.

I will tell myself the truth

Even if a friendships

Lost by it

I will seek the truth

Even if it tells me

Something horrible

With it

I will speak the truth

Even if Im no longer

Invited in

At the end, the all I have

Is the truth

Charlotte Ballard

It seems incredible to me now, looking back as I have after so many years, that I once lived and worked in a remote part of Africa, surrounded by true wilderness. I had a bungalow, a job, a manservant, a kayak, a rifle, and an insatiable thirst for adventure. I had friendships the like of which, and the intensity of which, I have never experienced before or since. I lived an adventurers dream under a huge African sky and the most sublime, clear moonlit nights. I saw wild animals of all types wandering freely and even shot at some of them occasionally with my rifle. I willingly and naively took part in some exciting events which exposed me to moments of extreme danger in a wonderful, once in a lifetime adventure in the vast emptiness and relentless heat of Africa.

My two year adventure was indeed the greatest and happiest of my life, but great tragedy also accompanied it, and some horrific, painful memories have remained to haunt me through the decades since. In fact, it was all so long ago now that my recollections of it for this book were at first cloudy and obscure, to the extent that those terrific years often seemed indistinct fragments of memory, delicate and beautiful, but entirely out of reach, like large and exquisite butterflies sealed in some dusty glass case. Many of these memories have had to be coaxed and forced, kicking and screaming from the darkest corners of my mind, from where, in order to preserve my sanity, they have lain deliberately hidden for over sixty years. But I have dragged them out into the daylight for all to see, and Ive drawn them across these pages, often very painfully, in the last few years for you to read. Maybe you could eventually understand what happened to me and why I had to do what I did.

Now that I am in my eighties, in the process of writing this book I am reminded that the callow, grinning youth in the tiny black and white faded photographs really is Dennis Hubbard; a young man who seems to be an entirely different person standing there in a bygone age of colonialism and ignorance, brutality and beauty, a time of nave simplicity, in which I was playing my own small part in the slow, painful demise of an era that is now as far distant as my own memory.

But it all really did happen, as the photographs serve to remind me, along with all the surviving scribbled notes, postcards, and letters home, all of which Ive used as source material for this book. I have forced my memory to recall the events of those fateful, wonderful years and commit them to these pages. Suddenly while writing, they became as clear as if theyd only just happened, even the awful experiences which Id deliberately pushed to the back of my mind for so many years and wished to forget. But these were all part of my time there, and are just as important as the good times. It has been a cathartic exercise for me, exhausting, traumatic, but incredibly rewarding. To finally exorcise the dark side of my time in Africa, to write of the horrors that punctuated the latter days so dramatically, and which ultimately forced my departure.

I am sure there will be occasions while reading this book when you will find yourself pausing for breath, to remind yourself that this is indeed a true story, and that these incidents really did take place. I can assure you they did. Never have I known such a wild adventure with such wonderful memories, but never, thankfully, have I experienced such tragedy and heartache as was my time spent in, what is simply, the greatest continent on earth.

Dennis Hubbard, April 2013

Southern Africa, circa 1956

How on earth did I find myself living in the tropics, in Africa? The railways led me there, both metaphorically and physically, and how I became connected to the railways is a relatively straightforward story, which started when I was growing up. I was something of a disparate youth, restless and ebullient, to the extent that today I would no doubt have been diagnosed with ADHD or some similar condition. I was born reluctantly, or so it seems, in January 1929, some weeks late, in a rather sloppy mess on my mothers bed in a new post-slum clearance council house on The Manor Estate, Sheffield, England. Im told my mother, Alice, was heard to say: Its got a spout! so there was immediate and crushing disappointment all round, right from the start, when it was clear that I was not the lovely little girl theyd all been hoping for. My only other sibling and first born son to my parents, Ronald, would therefore not have the little sister he had been promised.

My dad, Alf, was a deeply uncharitable and seriously parsimonious character, who dragged both meanness and selfishness in the human spirit to fantastical new lows. I dont think he ever gave me anything at all right up until the day he died, apart from the genes which have given me relative good health all my life. In mitigation I suppose we were very poor, certainly by todays standards, but I had no idea that Id been born into a near permanent state of penury. You dont notice these things when youre a kid. Dont get me wrong, we never starved. We just didnt seem to have any money; at least it was the case that none ever came my way. It didnt bother me, as what you dont have you clearly dont miss, as the saying goes.

We kept our own chickens which lived very much with us in a large and quite malodorous wooden cupboard in the front room near the fireplace, so at least we almost always had fresh eggs. This was assuming no-one let the clucking birds out by mistake, an error which would then lead to front room chaos of pantomime proportions. My dad had to chase them around the ground floor of the house in his desperately inauspicious chicken-pursuit mode shouting: Come ere ye little bastards! or words to that effect, occasionally taking poorly aimed and obviously futile swipes at the mutinous escapees with a stair rod while clambering randomly all over the furniture. It made a welcome change from him whacking me with it I suppose, and it was quite good entertainment too, as there was no television in those days. I couldnt blame the poor chickens for sometimes wanting to hatch escape plans rather than eggs. They certainly caused major problems when they did escape, as there was insufficient space in the tiny room to dive full length at the errant, scheming birds. A decision had to be made very quickly when pouncing on them, whether to hit the wall or aim for the open fire. I remember on one occasion, while resolutely pursuing our cock bird around the house, my dad tripped over our bone-headed and snappy little Jack Russell dog and fell headlong into the fireplace. Luckily the fire wasnt lit at the time, as his head and shoulders plunged straight into the grate with such a thump that many years of soot came crashing down the chimney in one great, thunderous black cloud. After then managing to extricate himself from the chimney bottom and stand up, he turned around only to reveal to my absolute delight, and that of my brother, that he suddenly looked just like Al Jolson in full make-up, complete with black hands and face. He paused only briefly before continuing to chase the cock bird around the room, until it ran shrieking out the back door. On his return to the front room the terrified dog had relieved itself on the flock rug, probably in shock at being caught up in all the unexpected theatricals. My dad then ran into the kitchen and took hold of a towel that hed cleverly fixed to the wooden draining board with a nail, and after folding it over several times placed it on the dogs steaming piss, then promptly started dancing around on it like he was practicing the quick step. Maybe he was. Outside the cock was sprinting around in the back yard and still had to be caught. Meanwhile the wind had got up and we suddenly heard two very loud bangs from the back door. My dad had fitted a home-made plywood storm door to the back door two days before, and the inner door had suddenly slammed shut in the wind. The new outer door then slammed hard and because it was constructed with my dads usual expertise it immediately broke away from its hinges and fell into the back yard with a loud bang like a gun shot. Luckily it missed the cock, but crushed the neighbours cat, which had seen the cock and had clearly decided to join in the pursuit. The poor moggy shrieked and squealed as only a cat can, before managing to drag itself away, bruised and bewildered. The next thing I knew I saw the same cat, apparently fit and well, pissing on my dads carrots in the garden. It had clearly calculated the distance from its back end to the carrot tops in the ground, as the spray precisely covered each carrot perfectly. It had obviously done this before and was practiced at it. I later heard my dad tell my mum that it was good for the crop, as it helped prevent carrot fly.