Chapter 15: Crocodiles and Dysentery
We arrived in Lagos on the 13th of December 1936 and learned that we were going to Minna, in Northern Nigeria. Some friends came and took us off the boat, and we spent the day with them and then at eleven at night we got on the boat train to Minna. After twenty-four dusty and sticky hours on the train, we reached Minna. The engineer whom my husband was relieving was on the station to meet us. He motored us up the hill to the house. His wife was in bed with fever. We had met them both before and liked them, so the handing over was easy.
As soon as she was able to get up, they left for England and we moved from the rest house into the engineer's house. The house was on a hill; a concrete platform had been built on the edge of the cliff, and it was very pleasant to sit out there and watch the sunset over the distant hills. Every evening flocks of white tick birds used to fly overhead heading for the water, passing at regular intervals for at least an hour. I suppose they spent the night in trees in the valley, but we could not see the end of their journey.
Beyond the station on a flat stretch of land there was a native town, from which we could hear drumming at night. At night we used to see little lights darting about outside the native town. We were very curious about these lights. They were in two groups, and one light from one group would move to the other every so often. Then there would be a flare, then another pair of lights would move forward and then flare again. We asked our boys if they knew what it was all about. They told us that it was a game of setting light to each other's robes. Two teams would meet and one man from each team would run towards each other, and the winner was the one who ignited the other's robes, and the winning team was the one which had burnt most robes. They said that the teams came from all over Northern Nigeria and the game went on for a few months. I was sorry when the mystery was revealed, because we had had a lot of fun watching those lights, speculating on the cause and trying to work out some system.
The penalty for living on the hill was severe. Whenever I went for a walk, I had to climb back along a rocky path, and it was hot at Minna. There was a tennis court near us, but nobody played much at that time. The golf course was down below and I played, but had to walk up the steep path afterwards. My husband was very busy and most of the time he had to be on the coach. I went with him once or twice, but it was very hot and I was not very well, so I mostly stayed in Minna at the house. After a month or two I made the garden very pretty with quick-flowering plants. The gold mines were flourishing, and there were a lot of miners, some with wives. Whenever they came to Minna to bring the gold to the bank and buy some stores, they would climb the hill and visit us.
The miners were very interesting people; some of them had wandered across all the continents before they came to Nigeria. We used to visit some of those who lived near Minna. Gold dust was not at all what I expected; it looked like yellow sand. When I first came to Minna, I was always hoping to find a nugget in our rocky garden, but after I had seen the mines and what a lot of work it was to wash the earth before one got a tiny pinch of gold dust, I gave up that hope. But when they were breaking up the old concrete staircase of a railway house, they found quite a large nugget of gold. After that when I went for a walk, I always brought home anything that looked like gold. I had quite a collection of pebbles and mica in the end.
There was a resident at Minna, a district officer, two assistant district officers, the bank manager, a forestry officer, the commissioner of police, some railway men down by the railway station, and two or three missionaries. There was a club and it was well patronized by the miners whenever they came to Minna. They could get food there and cold drinks. After being in the bush miles away from anywhere, they enjoyed visiting, exchanging news and sometimes having business transactions. Occasionally there was a dance at the club.
Next door to us, there was a young political officer with his bride. They were touring nearly all the time, so we did not see much of them. One day they were on a trek in a lorry and they stopped by a river to bathe. When they were climbing out of the river, the wife was suddenly pulled down under water. Her husband heard a splash and turned around to see his wife disappearing under the water. He shouted her name, but she thought he said "Kick!", and so she gave a terrific kick and came up to the surface and fainted. Her husband picked her up and rushed her to their lorry. She was badly torn on the thigh and bleeding. He knew then that it was a crocodile that had pulled her under. He emptied a bottle of iodine onto her wounds, bandaged her up, and the boys made her a bed in the lorry as quickly as they could and she was driven to Minna. It took them five hours as they were miles distant when this happened. At Minna she was put on the ambulance coach and rushed by train sixty miles to Kaduna hospital. She entered Kaduna hospital twelve hours after the accident. As a crocodile's teeth are very dirty, her wounds went septic, her temperature was high for days, and it was only because she was a very young athletic girl, with healthy blood, that she pulled through. She was three months in hospital before she recovered. She went home to recuperate but is now back in Nigeria. She has a charming freckled face and is full of personality.
In May I went down with dysentery. All these years I had dreaded this disease and was always so careful about filtering and boiling our drinking water and had sacked many boys because I thought they were careless on this point. After a week in bed at home, I was sent to Kaduna hospital in the ambulance coach. I was in a very exhausted condition and could not move. My husband went with me, and after I was taken to hospital he returned to Minna. I was very well looked after in hospital, and after twelve days I had recovered enough to leave. I was not very strong though, and I stayed with friends at Kaduna for three days. They returned me to Minna in their coach as they were going there on an inspection tour. On the way there was a very bad storm, and we women both had an electric shock when the lightning struck somewhere nearby, and the discharge came through the rails, the wheels of the coach and the floor. We arrived at Minna five hours later than we were expected, and my husband was very worried because he thought I was coming by myself on the train and there was no restaurant car. He was relieved to find that I had been looked after by our kind friends.
I stayed for a month at Minna after that, mostly by myself. My husband had to be on line nearly all the time as there was a great deal of work being done on that section. As I was not getting any stronger, we decided that I should go home.