As so often happens, we have little photographic record of the good people with whom we worked on a day-by-day basis, the Armstrongs, Katedzas, Davises, Chapandamas, Mutambanengwe, Garnets, Coutts, Ferrars, and Hunts. Instead, the photographic record is mainly of those we saw on holiday. The Witts, David with his wife Bibi and their three children (above), had left Bernard Mizeki and moved to a school miles out in the bush, St Mary's at Wedza. We visited them often, and they came in to see us. Conditions at Wedza were a little primitive. The only power came from a generator which David ran, and which switched itself off at ten each evening. So we would be plunged into darkness and 'Sergeant Pepper' would as suddenly die.
David introduced me to fly fishing. Cecil Rhodes had stocked his country estate at Inyanga, in the eastern highlands, with American rainbow trout, and they had thrived in the fast-flowing rivers, so we would drive up to what was now a National Park for a week or so, either camping or renting....
....one of the Park's cottages by the ford over the Pungwe river.
The countryside was like highland Scotland, open hills with rushing burns, and empty of people. As well as the Pungwe, we....
....fished one of its tributaries, the remote and beautiful Matenderere, and because the rivers were grossly overstocked the Park required that we keep all the trout we caught. Eating small trout lightly fried in butter is no hardship.
Later we introduced my cousin Charlotte's husband Keith to the sport. David and Keith had been at opposite ends of the political spectrum while at university together in South Africa but they forgot their past differences in their enjoyment of the sport. In this picture, Keith is cooking fresh trout and washing them down with a dumpy of beer.
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