Whatever happened to the small town hotel? When I was growing up they were all over the place. Now, they seem to have become an endangered species.

This is, of course, a rhetorical question and one which has an obvious answer. Their demise became inevitable once they started having to compete with all the cheaper bed and breakfasts and self-catering establishments that suddenly began springing up across the sub-continent like a contagious rash.

Others found themselves replaced by up-market, chain hotels or, because of a decline in bookings, were converted into slightly run-down-looking shops and boutiques. Or else they were simply knocked down to make way for something else.

Such is the nature of progress. I find it all rather sad because so many of those old hotels were architectural gems which gave the small towns both character and definition. Often they were the most distinctive buildings in them.

The ones, I remember, from my Rhodesian and Zimbabwe days, were invariably situated alongside the main road. Tall palms or blue-gums with peeling bark and rustling leaves cast pools of shadow over them.

Most had large wrap-around verandahs with arches and pillars and a few pot plants strategically scattered about to create the right ambience. Also an assortment of old wicker chairs and a few tables to put your drinks on. The roofs were steeply pitched and made of corrugated iron, often painted red or green. The outside walls were white.

Inside, the lounge would be equipped with a tired-looking, over-stuffed couch and a few mismatched, broken-backed chairs. Often there was a slightly strange smell – a weird combination of stale beer, frying odours from the kitchen and dust. Even the ancient looking fans that whirled from the ceiling above you couldn’t disperse it…

I was always scared of those fans. Too often, they looked like they could, at any moment, come spinning off their bearings, decapitating some unfortunate soul in the process.

The rooms, themselves, were not exactly posh. The furnishings were minimal, the curtains gauzy, the carpets threadbare. A few pictures, often reprints depicting snow-capped Alpine mountains, would hang on the wall while the beds, with their lumpy mattresses, would sag in the middle. If there was a wash basin in the room, the tap often leaked. More often than not there was no en-suite bath; you were obliged to use the communal one at the end of the passage.

The walls were like matchwood. Through them you could hear the radio or TV (if they were lucky enough to have such modern contrivances back then) being played next door or people murmuring in low but hard-edged voices. Upstairs it sometimes sounded like there were platoons of soldiers practising their drills in hob-nail boots on the wooden floor boards.

Their departure from the room would often be followed by a wall-shivering door slam..

Lying in bed, trying to get to sleep, you could hear engines throbbing, brakes screeching or cars thundering along outside. If you were near the railway line – again, many of these hotels were – your sleep would invariably be disturbed by the blast of a train horn as it came puffing grandly in to the station, before stopping with a loud squealing of brakes.

In the dining room, the food, served by turbaned waiters, although edible would hardly qualify as haute cuisine especially by today’s high culinary standards. Mostly, it was meat and two vegetables, over-cooked, a bit like the mush they dished up at boarding school

Invariably, the most well-frequented part of the hotel would be the bar. There were usually two kinds of these – the swanky cocktail bar which women (this was before the MeToo Movement) were allowed to frequent and men were expected to wear a tie; and the saloon bar which was Men Only.

The latter were spit n’ sawdust affairs and there was no real ‘dress code’ here except you had to wear long trousers after 6pm. If you wanted an insight into White Rhodesian “culture” this was the place to go. Easily identifiable were the regulars: a sad-eyed collection of red-nosed, old misfits staring gloomily in to their drinks. Most of them turned up as soon as the pub opened and stayed until it closed.

There wasn’t much talking, just a lot of guzzling. Having frequented the place for years most of them had exhausted their personal lives as conversational topics. Occasionally they would try some other subject.

Something like “Nice weather we’re having,” might be tried as an opening gambit.

“Yeah – very nice,” the grunted reply.

In stark contrast you would get the groups of young bucks, throwing darts and playing pool and yelling at each other about what a good time they were having.

In my early twenties I rather liked frequenting these bars although I was never one of the dancing on the tables sort. When I was based in Sinoia (now Chinoyi), working for the District Commissioners Office (my penance for letting the Government pay part of my varsity fees), I practically lived in the local bar.

There was not much else to do…

The Specks Hotel in Gatooma (now Kadoma) was another one I got to know during my Mines Department days and which perfectly fulfilled all my expectations of it.

Not that all of these small town hotels were tatty and down-at-heel and fallen- on- hard- times.

The Cecil Hotel in Umtali (now Mutare) was a rather grand old lady until it got taken over by the army, during the Rhodesian Bush War, and converted in to an HQ. So was the Midlands Hotel in Gwelo (now Gweru), another period hotel which stood directly opposite the Boggie Clock Tower, a rather strange edifice erected in the middle of Main Street for no other reason, it often seemed, than to confuse out-of-town motorists ( it was actually built in 1928 to commemorate Major William James Boggie, an early big-wig in the town).

After independence there were suggestions the Boggie Clock be pulled down. I am not sure whether that was because of its unfortunate colonial associations or because it was a traffic hazard. As far I am aware, it is still there, still bamboozling out of town motorists.

For me the most stylish and grandiose of all these hotels was the Old Meikles Hotel in Salisbury. Some might quibble, here, as to whether it actually qualifies as a small town hotel but since Salisbury was still in its adolescent stage when the hotel was built, back in 1915, I am including it.

Overlooking the gardens of Cecil Square where the first British settlers raised the Union Jack, it was a study in Victorian elegance and old world charm. Again there was a wonderful old verandah in the front where you could collapse in to a comfy seat and sip your gin and tonics and watch the folk passing by. Inside it was pleasantly dim, high-ceilinged and paved with cool tiles.

On Saturday mornings it would be packed solid with wealthy tobacco farmers come to town. Often there would be a man tinkling away on the piano in the background of the lounge where the farmers had congregated, with another man playing the double bass next to him, partly concealed by a potted palm tree.

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In what can only be counted as a resounding victory for the cultural philistines – and an unmitigated disaster for the rest of us – the Old Meikles was demolished in the mid-1970s and replaced by a functional, modern but utterly character-less structure.

Having grown up with it always being there, like a comforting blanket, I felt bereft. I was never able to look at Salisbury through the same eyes after that.

When I moved to South Africa in 1984 – the demolition of the Old Meikles was but one of my reasons for taking this step – I found the situation very much the same down here although here and there a few of the old hotels still survived.

There is still one in Howick, the town nearest to where I now live, whose doors continue to remain open although how well it is doing I have no idea. It is just around the corner from the Howick Falls so is, not too surprisingly, called the Falls Hotel.

Somerset East, where my sister Nicky and her husband, John, moved to, around 2009, has one on its main street named – you guessed it – the Somerset Hotel.

My pub-crawling days were long over when I came drifting in to town so I never actually went inside but I am sure it would meet all the criteria for a small town hotel. The outside certainly does except it is painted a garish yellow instead of my preferred white, a black mark in my eyes.

The one morning, when I was staying with my sister, an almighty hullabaloo suddenly erupted from outside it which had me thinking the end of the world was upon us. When we went out to investigate we found ourselves confronted by a scene that looked like something from the set of a Mad Max movie. The bikers had come to town.

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There seemed to be hundreds of them hurtling up and down the main drag, revving their engines, spinning their wheels and kicking up huge clouds of blue smoke, hydrocarbons and testosterene in to the air. Others were leaning from the balcony upstairs, clutching their brandy and cokes and shouting boozy instructions.

Folk thronged the street, some still in their Sunday finery, others in filthy T shirts and shorts. Kids dodged in and out of the traffic. There was so much haze and noxious gas and so many people you could barely make out the Dutch Reformed Church down the road.

It all kind of made sense. If the first thing you need in a small town is a kerk for your prayers, a mart for selling food and a pub where you can commit the sort of sins that would warrant praying about, than Somerset East filled the bill.

It was a classic Southern African dorp with a marvellous old hotel…