Hello, darling

Home. Strange but familiar. Scary but welcoming. Three months away from Zimbabwe is a lifetime. People in normal countries return to their homes after a time away to find nothing changed. Not here. The drive home is spent dodging the same old potholes, ducking and diving with the cars and lorries belting across crossroads where traffic lights still don’t work, staring out at the rusted and buckled street lamps that have had unsuccessful altercations with Zimbabwe’s death-defying drivers.

And home – with its magnificently flowering petrea entwined with yellow and white banksia roses, the heavily scented Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (brunsfelsia) bush of purple, mauve and white blossoms, the bougainvillea spilling great masses of scarlet and cerise blossoms over the driveway, the delicate pink and white bauhinia spreading its tangled branches, all under a flawless, balmy, blue sky, so warmly embracing. I loved coming home . . . to the hysterically barking dogs and Moses, standing at the front door with his broad, delighted grin displaying the loss of another front tooth.

Until, that is, I decided to tackle the shops. The Mazda, left in June safely parked and locked in the garage, provided me with my first shock. The upper side of the boot had a rumpled look to it and it was a different white from the rest of the car. I sought out Moses, dear trusty concerned Moses, majordomo, carer, friend.

“Have you anything to tell me, anything that happened while I was away that I should know about?” I asked.

“Well I told you I broke a plate and that I used your cooking oil; but nothing else,” he replied in a puzzled tone.

“Nothing on the property,” I probed gently. “Nothing to the car?”

And so the story emerged. Apparently Moses (whose driving lessons I had sponsored earlier this year – coincidentally?) had decided to wash the car and, for an inexplicable reason, had pushed it out of the garage and it had “rolled” into a pillar. This, he claimed, had buckled the boot. So he found a hammer, used it to try and iron out the creases in the metal (unsuccessfully), bought/borrowed/begged (a shifting account here) an aerosol can of white paint – and sprayed. Why hadn’t he told me on my regular phone calls from England, or my friends keeping an eye on the house? “I forgot,” he said, eyes blank and depthless. “It was a mistake.”

Perhaps I overreacted. But I was consumed by the sense of betrayal – betrayal unhappily too common here in these troubled days – which upset me far more than the damage to the car.

Shock No 2 was TM Supermarket. Somehow I thought the stories and pictures of empty supermarkets were an exaggeration. But they weren’t. Outside the shop was a motley gathering of mainly women and children. The effect was one of darkness and drabness (worn, torn, grubby clothes), weariness and defeat (unsmiling, silent hopelessness). I asked a woman what she was waiting for. Perhaps bread, she shrugged, or sugar or maybe mealie meal [the staple]. But more likely nothing.

I went into the shop. And the empty shelves and freezers took my breath away as fresh memories of yesterday’s Sainsbury’s and Waitrose obscenely filled my mind. Many of the metal shelves were entirely bare; others contained a single row of one commodity. For instance the tinned vegetables shelf was taken up with can upon can of tomato purée – and nothing else. Another “full” shelf held a line of loo rolls, while packets of loose tealeaves decorated another. The only meat was packets of one brand of pork sausages and another of frankfurters. There were no dairy products – milk, butter, cheese – no eggs or bread or biscuits or cereal or flour or sugar . . . but there was a small selection of fresh vegetables and one brand of washing powder.

I left the shop with a packet of washing powder and two tins of grapefruit segments – the only tinned fruit. My three items came to Z$533,000 – about 90p. Living here, I thought, is going to be cheap; not to mention provide a fast-track diet.