A sick ox, a rattling tile on the roof,
meant more to their lives than war in Europe. The one break in the
sameness of their daily routine was family prayers; the one weekly
event, going to church at Salisbury. Still, they had a single
enthusiasm. Like everybody else for fifty miles around, they believed
profoundly in the "future of Rhodesia." When I gazed about me at the raw
new land--the weary flat of red soil and brown grasses--I felt at least
that, with a present like that, it had need of a future.
I am not by disposition a pioneer; I belong instinctively to the old
civilisations. In the midst of rudimentary towns and incipient fields, I
yearn for grey houses, a Norman church, an English thatched cottage.
However, for Hilda's sake, I braved it out, and continued to learn the
A B C of agriculture on an unmade farm with great assiduity from Oom Jan
Willem.
We had been stopping some months at Klaas's together when business
compelled me one day to ride in to Salisbury. I had ordered some goods
for my farm from England which had at last arrived. I had now to arrange
for their conveyance from the town to my plot of land--a portentous
matter.
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