By Bev Hermanson
Nine Juliet Romeo Bravo Popa, what are your intentions?
I remember it so clearly, like it was yesterday. My Dad always told the story with a chuckle and a glint in his eye. I have no recollection what the story was about, but 9J-RBP sticks in my mind because that was the registration detail of the Piper Cherokee 4-seater plane that took me away from my childhood home and deposited me in Cape Town when I was eleven years old.
9J-RBP was also the plane that my Dad flew across Africa, from the Copperbelt in Zambia, up the eastern side of the content, across Italy and France, to the United Kingdom. The plane is now in retirement at Rayne Hall Farm in Essex, where it’s undergoing a slow restoration.
Like his father before him, my Dad, Gordon Evelyn Arnott, was passionate about flying. He would be down in the pit in his garage, fixing the undercarriage of a car, next thing, he’d be outside peering up at the sky to see if he knew who was flying overhead. The transition from darkness to sunlight always made him sneeze.
Gordon arrived in Northern Rhodesia in 1935, aged nineteen. He’d responded to a call from the British government for able-bodied men and women to help colonize their territories. In the early days, he was sort-of a jack-of-all trades, driving the ambulance and fire engine, fixing machinery, cars and pretty much anything that needed to be fixed on the mines.
Five years later, an eighteen-year-old young lady travelled from Cape Town to the Copperbelt to join her cousin who was a nurse at the local hospital. Gwen Truter secured a position at the Post Office censoring letters mailed by the prisoners of war to their families in Europe, mainly in Italy, Germany and Poland. World War II had a devastating effect on the countries in the northern hemisphere, but luckily, the Central African countries were only vaguely affected. Life was full of camaraderie and optimism and Gwen and Gordon were married on the 4th of August 1945 – perhaps in anticipation of the end of the war?
Before my sisters and I were born, my Mom owned a dance studio and after we came along (sadly Suzanne died at the age of three months, but my middle sister and I are still going strong!), she worked as a part-time secretary, while my Dad was eventually appointed Manager of Transport for the Kitwe Municipality. We had all the trappings of a modern household – stove, refrigerator, pop-up toaster, pressure cooker, ironing machine, floor polishing machine, sewing machine, knitting machine, TV, telephone, my Mom even built herself a hi-fi unit with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, record player and amplifier all fitting into a large cabinet, with speakers on either side.
Our milk was delivered daily in glass bottles and the bakery sent a bread cart around our neighborhood every day so the housewives could buy fresh bread.
There was no shortage of fresh fruit as we had an orchard filled with trees – mangoes, guavas, oranges, lemons, avocados as well as a coffee tree. We also had banana trees round the side of the house, a strawberry patch and a granadilla hedge. At the bottom of the orchard, there was the carcass of a crashed airplane and an enormous termite heap the size of a small shack.
The termite heap was my domain and I spent endless hours excavating and making mud pies.
Those were the days when the working adults came home at lunchtime and there was always a cooked meal waiting for my Dad. He would then have a 30-minute nap before going back to work.
On weekends, my Dad took us with him to the Flying Club and we would wander through the tall elephant grass alongside the runway while he was up amongst the clouds doing aerobatics, or flying the plane that towed the gliders, swooping low over the runway to drop the rope once they had taken off.
On the way home, as the sun was setting, we would pass the slag heaps and, if we were lucky, we’d catch sight of the bright orange rivers of molten slag running down them, glowing in the fading light. Brick houses, tarred roads, street lights, telephones, electricity, cars, trains, planes, hospitals, schools, churches, shops, hotels, community halls were all a part of our reality, but they weren’t ours to keep.
It turned out we were living on borrowed time.
And after it deposited my mother, my sister and me at the Youngsfield Airport in Cape Town, we never saw 9J-RBP again.
