After we got back to Ethiopia, we went straight out to Mulu It must have been at the end of September, the loveliest time of the year with everything still green after the rains and Maskal daisies everywhere. We must have spent sometime in the main house but then moved into what used to be the office and packing sheds. We used the old office as our sitting room until we built on the large front room. The kitchen at first was up the steps at the back of the house but we later moved it into the second room along with a calor gas stove. We built a small veranda onto the house outside the sitting room with steps that lead down into the garden. We had a tin roof on the sitting room because we wanted to have a stove there. We found one in a coffee selling company who had used it to help dry the coffee. It did us very well for years.
Mike got down to farming. He spoke no Amharic but learnt enough pretty quickly. Old Tesfai who had run the farm for years used to come for orders each evening, with me translating. He would then go down to Dad and Mum to report to them as well .One of the first jobs was to rebuild the dam on the Alaltu which used to get swept away each rains. Then it was getting to grips with the strawberry gardens and the irrigation. The machinery that Mike had organised, arrived , to great excitement. I remember the salesman from Mitchell Cotts coming out to see Dad ploughing and he remarked something to the effect that this was not ploughing, but fighting. We had to get a lot of the land cleared of acacia trees and bushes which went on for ages. At some moment, I went galloping across a cleared field and the horse tripped in one of the holes that had been dug to remove the acacia roots and I was flung off my horse and got knocked out. I can remember, in a blur, Waki one of the herdsman saying anxiously, Philippa, Philippa or more probably Kilippa Killippa (which was what they sometimes called me), as I came round. Some of the people who were surveying for the new road , were asked to come and they came bumping along and lifted me into the back of their Landover and took me to the house, where Mike appeared, having just got back from Addis Ababa and I recognised him and all was well. I remember the horse was Birru who had been given to me by David Stokes, a missionary with the BCMS, working in Fiche, who said that Birru did not stop galloping all the way from Fiche to the Entoto hills. He continued his style of galloping madly everywhere until his death, trying hard to kill me as well.
Another thing I remember well was Dad doing some ploughing near Iyanni’s house which had bee hives around it. The bees hated the sound of the tractor and came swarming out and attacked the tractor. Mike had to leap off and flee to escape them. Of course he then had to get back and take the tractor away. I seem to remember he did it in the evening when the bees had settled down for the night.
Piers started riding at some moment when I think he was two, and we had a basket saddle made, that he could be strapped into and he used to go off for his ride with Galate in loving attendance. I think they used to go to one of the strawberry gardens daily, where Piers gorged himself on strawberries and played making mud pies, with the irrigation water.
Christopher was born in January of 1960 in the Filwoha Hospital which I think at that time was run by the Seventh Day Adventists. All I can remember is that I had a very nice doctor and that being Adventists, even tea and coffee were regarded as stimulating drinks like alcohol. So whenever anyone came to see us, they brought thermoses filled tea and coffee with them. He was rather a big baby so I was quite glad when it was all over. We did not stay in hospital for long and then it was back to Mulu, where I was inundated with gifts from all and sundry, usually in the form of a few eggs. I seem to remember that I had some sort of pram or buggy in which he took his daily airing until he was old enough to sit on a horse. I seem to remember he was not a good sleeper and after a few weeks, we decided he would just be left to yell. The zabanya thought this was bad and knocked on the door to say “the baby’s crying”. As if we did not know, the whole room was shaking. Poor little boy, I must have been doing something wrong.
I remember another night when Dad and I were woken by an earthquake. I could see the roof going up and down. It was quite frightening as it was quite strong. I remember Gully asking the next day “what happens when there is an earthquake? Will the ground turn upside down and will we all be buried in a hole in the ground ? ” Addis Ababa suffered from a lot of light earthquakes. I think it must have been on a fault line. My Dad told a story of him and a friend cantering along in the polo ground and one of them saying “ I don’t remember there being a dip there.” I remember there being quite a bad earthquake somewhere on the road to Dessie when a lot of houses fell down and the road was damaged.
Janet was the next one to arrive in 1962 She was born in the Tshai hospital with Catherine as my doctor. I remember Catherine thinking I was not trying hard enough and told me to push harder and my replying, when she said “it’s a girl” “thank goodness”.
I don’t think that Andrew has ever forgiven me for his being born in England. He used to say “O well, I was conceived in Ethiopia”. I can’t remember why we decided to come to England that year. It might have been that it was Maud and Bertams golden wedding or it may just have been that Mike had not seen his parents for a long time or that we had got someone to look after Mulu while we were away. Anyway that was what happened. We decided by then that we were too many to stay in the Woodlands with Mike’s parents so we looked for somewhere to rent. For the first bit we rented Polhawn Fort, dungeon level. It was very damp and I remember that you could feel an electric shock when you got into the bath. Dungeon level meant that you had to climb up several flights of steps to get to the top. I wanted to get the family breakfast before I left so left it a bit late for the ambulance to get me there. As we approached Torpoint Ferry the nurse obviously felt we must get on first, so we queue barged all the waiting traffic and the other side tore off to Devonport Hospital where I had booked myself in. Once there the person who admitted me was being very slow collecting all the information she needed that I was forced to say,” leave all that till later, this baby is arriving now.” Everyone sprang into action and Andrew was born a few minutes later. I was told later that he came so quickly that the medical students did not get there in time –thank goodness. I think it was a teaching hospital.
Obviously the Fort was not a suitable place to take a baby to so luckily we found a house in Cawsand. Cawsand House, it was called rather grandly but the villagers knew it as Brick House as it was built of red brick. The two things I remember most about that place was looking out of the window and seeing Janet aged 18 months sitting in the middle of the road to where she had crawled. I flew downstairs and brought her in before any traffic arrived. The other was being given an eel to cook by a fisherman friend of Mike’s and not knowing what on earth to do with it. Nasty slimy thing. Andrew was christened in Maker Church and we had a party somewhere afterwards. We still managed to go on the beach and I think this might have been the occasion when we put the baby and carry cot in a boat and chugged round the corner to Mike’s favourite place. A rocky inlet to which it was very difficult to land on. But Andrew survived.
Vicci was born in 1970 in the Tshai hospital with Catherine again being the doctor.
. I went in ,with what I hoped was a few days before, to be told the baby would not be born for at least a week. I had to go somewhere so I got into a taxi and he proceeded to drive very fast up a bumpy road. I thought “Shall I tell him to slow down and then I thought “no I wont and the result was that the baby was born that night. Pippa was expecting Judith and went to hospital first. I followed her in to discover there was no spare bed. So I lay on the window seat while Pippa had the bed and then after the deliveries, I had the bed and Pippa the window seat. Chris and Dan came in, in state to see their two new granddaughters which caused quite a stir in the hospital.
In between all these exciting arrivals work on the farm went on as usual. Some years we had bumper crops of strawberries. At one moment we exported them to Djibuti and even tried to the Netherlands with an export company who also worked in Kenya but they were not successful. We were not knowledgeable enough about the right moment to pick them so that they travelled well. So we gave up trying that. We used to make a lot of jam and we also managed to sell some for jam making to missionary groups. The rest were sold to shops in AA and also to street boys who sold them going from car to car. They were very successful and they managed to sell a lot. I have an idea we lowered the price to them as well. The big grocery shops complained because they sold them far cheaper than they did. We used to give them a fixed price to sell at but they always charged more. And would then complain to me about the rates the street sellers were selling at. We used to count all the fruit before it left for Addis and if the totals that the salesboy gave me did not match my total they would delve into their pockets and fish out the missing money. I am sure they cheated us along the way but I was happy so long as at the end of the accounting, the money matched what I thought it should be. Sometimes the phone would go and the caller would say “ Is that women in from Mulu?” I would reply “ Yes, I am that women” Greatly embarrassed they would apologise. Over the years we tried various types of punnet and in the end we had oblong ones with a cellophane window on the top, which were made locally. This stopped customers in the groceries browsing from the non-covered fruit before they bought it and dumping the one they had been browsing for a full one.
Plumbs were much easier to sell as they did not deteriorate so quickly but sometimes we would have a glut of them and then it would be panic stations with missionaries helping us out by buying damaged ones for jam at a very cheap price. The plums also were easier to export down to Djibouti by plane if one could bear the time spent, getting export permits. I remember once, M Barrozzi in Djibuti whom we sold through, telegrammed us telling us to stop the next export as all Djibouti was suffering from mal de stomach = runny tums through eating too many.
The Emperor loved our plums and at the beginning of the season, we would send a gift of strawberries and plums to him and then every time the car came in from Mulu, the palace would send down for some. The Emperor told Dan and Chris once that he had tasted plums all over the world but that there were none that tasted as good as the Mulu ones. I think they were Methley plums and to my joy, I found a Methley in a catalogue two years ago and planted it and hope very much to get fruit this year if the frost does not get them first. We had frost at Mulu and employed special zabanyas to light smoky fires just before dawn when the frost started, to raise the temperature with smoke. On the whole it managed pretty well.
We also grew peaches but they were not very successful. Jackals loved the fruit and would climb up into the trees to get at the ripe ones, usually damaging the branches as well. We had to pack the peaches very carefully as they bruised easily and I discovered that my skin was allergic to them and I would get a rash on my arms. A good excuse to give the job to someone else.
Over the years we had many sales boys, the first being Zarafu who had a trade bicycle with a space for a box in front. Zarafu used to wheel the bike round Addis very slowly and ponderously but in the end we gave that up as it was too slow and the harvest much bigger. He lived to a ripe old age and I am pretty sure he was 100 years old when he died. I used to go and see him when I went out to Ethiopia. He had a nice house up a stony road behind the palace and his family who had emigrated to America sent him money with which he furnished the house and a grand daughter looked after him.
Originally the fruit was carried into Addis by carriers from Mulu. We had special wooden boxes which could fit in 40 punnets of fruit which equalled a weight of 40 lbs. They would leave Mulu at dawn and get to our house in Addis about 6pm. Then Zarafu and the sales boys took over and filled the baskets that we sold the fruit in from the much stronger ones in which they were carried in. I seem to remember we paid them about 6 birr for the return journey but they knew they had got us under their thumb and used to say they would go on strike if we did not pay them more, so of course we did .I seem to remember to rose the nine birr a round trip. In the rains they also took the post in and ou.t Then finally the road was built from Chancho to Dereba and went past the farm, so the fruit was brought in, in special trays that were supposed not to slip into the ones below them and then they were taken by car all round Addis. We had various drivers all of whom colluded with the sales boys to cheat us. But as I said before, so long as I was handed the money, I thought was correct, I was happy I or Mike used to count the fruit ourselves and it went into Addis three times a week. We instituted Sunday picking so that Monday to Friday were selling days. The staff did not seem to mind as we paid them a bit more for working on Sunday.
So you see that the selling of the produce was quite a major task which fell to my lot to organise. Monday was the day I did the accounts in Addis so that I could combine that with taking you all to school where you weekly boarded with the Casbons.
Originally we used to sell butter. We made some from our own milk but we also had milk stations in outlying parts where we put a milk separator and the cream, having been carried to the farm dairy was made into butter. The skimmed milk was left at the milk stations, for the chaps there to drink. The dairy was the building at the end of the croquet ground and we had a churn in there that turned to cream into butter. When Dick and Anne came to work at the farm, Anne did a course in cheese making and we used to make a soft white cheese which was very popular but also a hard cheddar type cheese. We did not have a press so one was constructed of two long poles attached to a strong cross pole. The cheese curd was placed into the moulds and then the two logs had a heavy weight on the end of them which pushed the cheese followers onto the curd and it squashed it down. We would have to press it for 5-6 weeks I think and then wrap it round with cheese cloth (abajadid) from the market in AA) and leave it to mature for several months. A long drawn out process but if it worked, we produced some good cheddar cheese. If it did not work, we could not sell it but used it ourselves for cooking cheese. The humidity had to be just right, which was difficult to achieve.
We also innovated the idea of growing oats. I think we got the seed from the plant breeding station in Debre Zeit. It was very successful and we grew it in preference to other cereals. We used it in the mix we fed the dairy cows, to the horses and it also made very good silage which was another thing we innovated. I discovered recently that it is grown by local farmers all over the woreda. Sadly it was the wrong type of oats for making oatmeal so we were stuck with porridge made from wheat, which I did not like much.
Early on some of the staff had their own plots of arable where they grew wheat, barley and teff. We took the usual share of the crop as rent and it was stored in gwoteras, man made grain stores standing off the ground and thatched, We used this grain to pay the wages sometimes,during the rains, which the staff loved as they got it at a cheaper price, which was decided by Tesfai and the senior staff. I remember them queuing up to get their share in baskets which were the right size for a kuna of grain. I seem to remember that was about 15 Kgs. And how much they got depended on how much grain there was. Tesfai used to be in charge and we used to go down and watch. The gwoteras were in his compound, near the stable.
So farming at Mulu was a mixture of the old and the new, Before we got the machinery we used to plough using oxen and I tried my hand it, One gave the oxen verbal commands, oli and geddi which meant right or left, but I was not much good at it. You could tell when it was midday when a particular rock below the bump threw no shadow. ( I think they had two hours off for lunch) and the end of the day’s work was when the sun went down. Work started around 7am which was when the sun had been up for an hour or so.
We had holidays. The favourite was at Lake Langano. Our first camping place was near the edge of the tree line but it became very dusty. I remember Lemma being the local lad we employed and he is still there at the new site which was near the British Embassy plot. He has a house there and has been able to establish that his family owned that land for several generations. But he has to pay rent for it. Batterie his wife is there. I discovered that Batterie means beautiful and not the things you put into torches. They have two sons. One works in the village near the turn off and the other helps his father run the site. The same tree is there that we used to camp under but is much larger and I swear the same fish eagle is there too. At any rate it still uses the same tree as it always had, The same camp fire place is there and the moonlight still streams across the lake and into the mouth of my tent. The Turacos are still there and the superb starlings and the long drop loo is in more or less the same place. I remember once seeing what I though was a hyena scavenging by the camp fire so I shouted at it but it was only a dog. On another earlier visit we were camping in a different place and I was in a tent the other side of the campfire to the tent the family was sleeping in. I did see a hyena round the fireplace so I fled across the site and got into the same tent as the children – guarding them you understand, but I definitely needed their company.
We had other holidays as well. Once we went to Lalibella .We drove up beyond Dessie to a place called Waldia.. I had sent Walde Hanna up by bus to find and hire riding horses and mules for us and pack animals. Piers and Chris came too and we had Eldryd Parry and t6he daughter of the british Ambassador also. We had our camping gear and travelled roughly between 9am and 4pm when we looked for a camp sight.. It was very difficult to get food along the way loke eggs. IU have a feeling it was the beginning of that dreadful drought when food was very short. I think it took us 4 days to get there. Mike was not with us on the outward journey but we met him in Lalibella a day later than we had meant to. Eldryd was with us and Helen was to fly up with Mike and meet us there. There was one room ready but it was a double room and Helen and Mike were trying to decide whether to share the one room which was clearly expected of them as the staff thought they were man and wife. Luckily Eldryd arrived. He had left us about to camp near a river and decided to walk on to Lalibella as he knew Helen was expecting him there and did not want her to be worried. So all was well and we arrived the next day and found somewhere to camp. I think in the local governor’s garden. We spent a few days there going all round the churches. I had wanted to go to the early morning services as true pilgrims would but they would not let us in as we were fernegis. This reduced me to tears and later on when we did go in, the priest said that we should go first as I had wept at not being allowed in earlier. It is an amazing place; such atmosphere. My favourite church has always been St Georges where you can see the prints of his horse on the outside edge of the church.
I have been to Lalibella three times. Once in the early 1940s we went with Dan and Chris, staying with Wilfred Thesiger in Dessie where he was advisor to the Crown Prince. I remember him being horrified by the amount of bread we ate. He had to keep buying more supplies. As Dan was an official in the Ethiopian government, we got special treatment with people turning out to greet us when we set up camp, bringing presents of Irgo the equivalent of yoghurt today, also sometimes a sheep for supper and much singing and dancing. Looking back now I feel sorry for the local people who were so poor but of course at that age, Stephen and I lapped it up. This was my first visit and on the way back south of Dessie, at Kombolcha I think, we stayed with an old patriot friend of Dan’s and he gave Stephen a machine gun and told him to use it, firing at the opposite hillside. To our horror an elderly peasant emerged a few minutes later, driving some sheep along. The same man gave me two lovely silver bracelets. The trip with Parry’s was the second visit and a third one was when Mike’s nephew David Galloway was staying with us. We drove there, as a road had been made right into Lalibella. On arrival we went into the local hotel to get a cold drink but their fridge was out of order. We went off to find somewhere to camp which I think was in the local governor’s garden. A message came down from the hotel asking Mike to come and fix the fridge. He replied “only if you give us a free supper. Stalemate but in the end they agreed so David and Mike went up and discovered all that was wrong, was that the plug had become unwired. Mike said” we can’t do this
too quickly otherwise the free supper might disappear so they lay on the floor saying, ”pass me the spanner, pass the screw driver” and making it last a long time and we got our free supper.
Despite the huge number of tourists, Lalibella still retains its special feeling, that this is a holy place, and that for the Ethiopia visitors it is a real pilgrimage and one feels privileged and blessed to have been a pilgrim as well. ec