I was married to Elephant Raised Right Shirt Roy in October of 1949 – the suicide month – the hottest month in this part of Africa, just before the rains. My ‘going away’ outfit was the latest thing in khaki slacks and a bush shirt. The first morning of my married life was spent in an unromantic mood, driving in a sweltering haze, in a creaking truck, overloaded with maize, through the Escarpment, on a switchback road cut through great hills, coming down into the valley at Chirundu.

Elephant Raised Right Shirt

New Elephant Raised Right Shirt

Chirundu was the Elephant Raised Right Shirt frontier, marked by the Zambesi River, between Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and there, a barge waited to take us to our new home, 150 miles downriver. I have never forgotten my first impression of that barge, nor my panic at the thought of getting into it. Against the wide stretch of the river, it looked so small and quite inadequate to accommodate fourteen paddlers.

Two District Messengers, two servants, and us; not to mention all the Elephant Raised Right Shirt camping equipment and thirty bags of maize! It was twenty-five foot long and amidships stretched a small, grass roof, shading a hardwood plank on which we were to sit for the following ten days of our honeymoon.
The paddlers however