In 1978 my parents purchased a new farm.

With the Rhodesian Bush War intensifying and many whites leaving the country because they saw no future for themselves, it was probably not the wisest of times to be considering such an investment – some might even have called it foolhardy – but my father was never one to doubt his own judgement and went ahead anyway.

He had recently come in to some money, as a result of finally selling our long abandoned Nyanga ranch to the new (and destined to be short- lived) Zimbabwe-Rhodesia Government who wanted it for resettlement.

With the proceeds my father bought a 1500 acre property adjoining my brother Paul’s cattle ranch in the Battlefields area (so named because many of the old gold mines and farms in the area had been named after famous battles) in the Rhodesian Midlands.

Situated in a marginal rainfall area about halfway between the towns of KweKwe and Kadoma the farm consisted mostly of mixed mopani woodland. Although there were some crops grown in the area (mainly cotton and wheat), usually where there was irrigation available to supplement the unreliable rainfall, this was mostly cattle country.

The ranches tended to be large, each one separated from its neighbour by miles and miles of rough, ribbed, ungoverned country. If I stood on top of the low range of hills that ran immediately behind the old homestead I could see no other sign of human settlement in all directions other than the cooling towers of the Umniati Power Station which protruded above the tree line and the electricity pylons that marched like an army of ungainly giants alongside the main Salisbury-Bulawayo Road.

There was already a house built on the farm, simple but comfortable in the old settler style. It consisting of whitewashed brick with a corrugated iron roof, big, bare rooms and a wide veranda which jutted forward over what remained of a lawn.

It had been built on a small shoulder of land, in front of which was a vlei that sometimes flooded in the rainy season but for the most part consisted of a series of potholes caked with cracked mud. On the other side of this stood a thin belt of thorn trees and beyond that a fenced enclosure that had once been a cultivated field but was now slowly being reclaimed by the bush.

Although my first loyalty will always be to the Nyanga farm, where I grew up, Bowmont came to exert a similar hold over me; it had the same haunting and mysterious familiarity although, on the surface, its attractions were a whole lot less obvious.

On the Inyanga farm our horizons had been ringed by mountains and no matter where you stood you were more or less guaranteed a great view. On Bowmont once you left the Big Vlei, the trees closed in around you and your vision became restricted to a few hundred metres on every side.

Whereas I had fallen for the Inyanga landscape almost on sight, Bowmont revealed its beauty in a more subtle, slower way.

Having bought the farm, my parents had to decide what to do with it. In her usual quiet, methodical way my mother immediately set about creating a garden, one that would provide a bright, colourful oasis in the middle of the dry veldt.

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For his part my father decided that Bowmont was good sheep farming country. Unfortunately he could never persuade the sheep themselves to accept this fact. For some reason they didn’t like the area at all and despite my father best efforts to convince them otherwise they persisted in growing thin and dying with a monotonous regularity.

It soon became more than obvious that we would be hard-pressed to earn a living this way.

In a letter to my English cousin, Rebecca, I noted somewhat despairingly: “August is our cruellest month: the nights are still cold but the days are hot and we are pestered by an angry dry wind that blows dust into everything and slowly frazzles out the landscape. The grass turns harsh and tough and stubbly and in between the soil is dry and cracked, the blood sucked out of it; waiting to get whipped up along with the dead leaves and other winter-time debris and carried away by the meandering dust-devils. It is also the month when the sheep driven on by visions of green begin to stray and get preyed on by the equally hungry jackal…”

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The advent of the rains – which could happen any time between October and December – always marked the turning point of the year. For weeks beforehand I would find myself anxiously panning the skies for the first tell-tale signs that they were on their way. Normally there would be a few false starts before the day would come when the dark storm clouds would start banking over head and the air became charged and tense and then suddenly you would hear the first big, shiny drops falling and hissing as they hit the sun-parched ground.

Living in a dry country, there was no nicer sound than lying in my bed at night listening to the rain drumming down on the corrugated iron roof while the old mango tree outside my bedroom window heaved and swung and the thunder rolled along the line of kopjes.

At his stage of my life I was – in between my numerous army call-ups – six weeks in, two months out – employed at the Mining Commissioner’s office in Gwelo. Built somewhat optimistically in 1896 as a Stock Exchange the building which housed our offices had that air of beguiling shabbiness one so often associates with government departments – especially those banished to the sub-regions. The work itself was of a fairly dull and routine nature – issuing prospectors’ licences, registering mining claims and trying to sort out disputes between farmers and miners over land rights. Most weekends I would jump into my battered old Datsun 1200 and together with my border collie, Bruce, head off to Bowmont.

In the meantime the war ground inexorably on towards its inevitable conclusion. The advent of majority rule finally gave me the excuse I needed to quit my government job and to move to the farm to help out my father who was becoming increasingly ill.

He eventually died in Harare on the 3^rd February, 1983. After his death and with my mother now working during the weekdays at a boarding school just outside Chegutu I lived alone in the farm. During the holidays I would be joined by my young sister, Nicola, who was a boarder at Queen Elizabeth in Harare.

The solitude suited me. During the preceding years, my double life as as part-time civilian, part-time soldier had taken its toll. After seven years of fighting for a cause I had never really believed in I had found myself consumed by an increasing sense of futility.

When the war finally ended, I had left the army with a feeling of moral blankness but now I had plenty of time on my hands to think about my experiences and get back in touch my feelings.

Just being there and going for long tramps with the dogs through the bush was a therapy of sorts, a way of clearing the cobwebs out of my mind. I enjoyed fixing up the farm which when we had taken it over had been in a fairly dilapidated state. I planted lots of fruit trees and grape vines; I fenced off paddocks and built drinking troughs for the sheep. I even started making my own wines which, although they were unlikely to win any awards, were at least drinkable.

I particularly liked the early mornings before the heat tired and numbed one and sapped out all your energy. I also loved sitting on the veranda in the evenings drinking gin-and tonics and listening to the comforting “kuk-cooo-kuks” (“Work harder, work harder”) of the Cape Turtle Doves while the francolin called from Kwali Corner and the guinea fowl clinked softly in the old lands. Sometimes, especially in summer, I would sit out there with my feet propped up on the veranda wall until way after dark, gazing at the large yellow moon as it rose above the tree line and listening to the jackal calling and the insects shrilling in the encircling gloom.

Two large tributaries of the Zambezi – the Umniati (corrupted from sanyati meaning “many buffalo in the area”) and the Umsweswe (derived from the onomatopoeic word sweswe – meaning “the sound of dragging feet”) – flowed through the area.

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The former provided the southern boundary of my brother Paul’s next door property, Thetis. It provided a favourite walk. When I was not working the land, it was to here I often headed, a shotgun slung over my shoulder just in case of I was not sure what. I just felt comfortable with it. A hangover from the war, I suppose.

I would pick my way along the river’s bank, my senses alert to any sounds, my eyes peeled for a flicker of movement. Although there were no longer any menacing buffalo to worry about, the countryside still had a wild and uncultivated look.

There was other game about. I often saw kudu, and every now and again a male warthog would come trotting out in to the open with an impudent air, followed, shortly, afterwards by the rest of the family. Despite the shotgun, I was never interested in shooting at anything. The war had cured me of that.

On some days I took a rod with me but although there were plenty of promising looking pools to fish in I never caught much. That was not really the purpose. I was content just to sit on the hot rocks, listening to the birds and watching the shreds of cloud drifting overhead

As happy as I thought I was it became increasingly apparent to me that I could not carry on indefinitely like this, that this was only a temporary stopping- off point.

I began to wonder what on earth I was going to do with the rest of my life. As much as I enjoyed the outdoors I didn’t really feel I was cut out to be a farmer; even if I had the farm was too small to be economical and I had no capital of my own to invest in it.

I had no idea what other form of employment lay open to me. Neither my qualifications nor my inclination fitted me for the few jobs on offer.

Indeed, I was no longer even sure if an independent Zimbabwe was the place for me. I was beginning to feel that I had come to the end of this particular road. My innate restlessness also played a part, a taste for change and new adventures, a fresh start in a place where I was not bogged down by memories.

The time had come for me to move on. But to where?

It was my sister, Sally, who suggested a way out of my predicament. After the war had ended she and her husband had emigrated to South Africa, settling first in Phalaborwa and then, later, Durban.

I had always been an inveterate scribbler, filling the margins of my exercise books at both school and university with drawings when I should have been listening to what the person in front of the blackboard was saying. It probably explains why so many of my exam results were not as good as they could have been.

Remembering this and believing in my talent – at that stage she had far more faith in it than I did – Sally set me up with a couple of interviews in Durban. So, at the end of 1983, I drove down to South Africa, feeling very sceptical about whether anybody would actually want to employ me.

Much to my surprise they did. In fact, I was offered a job by the first person who interviewed me – the MD of Scope Magazine.

That settled the matter. There could be no more dragging of feet. A new chapter of my life had begun.

The day before I left Bowmont for good, I set out for my last walk along the farm boundary fence, trying to memorise all the sights and scenes and take in all the scents and feelings in the hope I could carry them away with me. After that I went back to the old house, packed up my few possessions in to the boot of my car and early next morning set off down the familiar dusty road that crosses the railway track by the old Battlefields General Dealer store.

Then I branched off down the tar towards the border, desperately trying to keep the lid down on all my choked-up emotions as I did.