Idly musing as Archie and I wended our way down the Commonwood path the other day, I had a minor epiphany. That’s a way of saying I realised something I hadn’t realised before and felt a bit silly that it hadn’t occurred to me earlier as it should have been obvious.
This can happen when your mind is in neutral and the cogs are ticking over unburdened by useful thoughts. The musing went along the lines of, “running water, a semi-urban bit of bush, relatively unthreatening wildlife, a faithful pet, and me . . . what is so compelling about this picture?” And the answer came from nowhere: “the Hillside Dams.”
For those of us fortunate enough to have grown up in the southern Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo, this will be instantly recognisable and need no further explanation. But for the rest of you, here follows a bit of an essay about this place.
In 1895 when the town was young, two dams were built to supply the colonial populace with fresh water. Thirty years later, the city fathers built better infrastructure and the dams sat idle as suburbs spread all around. By the ’70s some amenities for visitors existed: a lawn next to the Lower Dam, gravel walking paths, a tuck shop. The waters were stocked with waterfowl of various stripes.
And best of all, my family’s home backed onto the Lower Dam — just a stone’s throw from the wall itself. We had easy access to a huge expanse of bush, peppered with volcanic rock formations and teeming with native flora and fauna, including wonderful bird species I would give my right arm to photograph now.
My route to school began with a kilometre of dirt road and a concrete bridge below the spillway which, excitingly, would sometimes flood. During the school holidays my sister and I would go ‘exploring’ with sandwiches and a Swiss Army knife in a canvas rucksack. Avid readers of the Famous Five and Swallows and Amazons, we had high hopes of participating in extraordinary events. And in a way, we did.
Once, we found a coot’s chick trapped in a crack in the rocks and ran breathlessly to the park warden to report this emergency. Another time we found an illegal fish trap tethered to the roots of a waterside tree . . . and ran breathlessly to the park warden to report this emergency. It didn’t occur to us that it may have been his — a spot of poaching to supplement his measly salary. Once, sister and I went out to explore and my marmalade cat Toby followed us for miles through the bush, acting very much more like a dog than was quite right.
Fishing featured strongly at various times: my friend John and I pulled tiny bream out of the spillway using bamboo rods and garden worms; later, we tried spinning for bass in the Upper Dam, catching nothing and setting a strong precedent for my future fishing trips. On boring weekday afternoons, John and I would set forth with two cents in our pockets to buy aniseed balls — five for a cent! — at the tuck shop.
And when the Dams spilled during a good rainy season (front-page news in the local paper), the children of the surrounding neighbourhoods would congregate with inner tubes to float down the rapids. Once, someone’s small white dog leapt into a steep stretch of foaming water and was instantly in trouble; my chum Eddie, without a moment’s hesitation, sprang into the torrent and saved it. I was very impressed — I’d never seen authentic bravery before.
In the evenings, local runners would congregate to do traffic-free laps around the Dams on those manicured paths and our beagle would escape our garden and join them. He became quite well-known for this — and for begging for scraps when people picnicked on the weekends.
On Sunday afternoons, someone in authority would hire a band to play under the shady trees on the lawns by the tuck shop. We could hear it from our house: a Scottish pipe band one week; an army brass band the next. And one memorable weekend, the Founders High School jazz band, with best mate John flushing deeply as he drove a swinging Little Brown Jug from the drumkit.
With political change and re-jigged social structures, the Dams fell on hard times in the ’80s, not helped by a series of serious droughts that left them empty and overgrown with weeds. The waterfowl vanished; the Lower Dam lawns went to seed. It stopped being an interesting place to go.
One of the last times I was in Zimbabwe — probably mid-’90s — I strolled through the quiet bush to the Upper Dam at sunset. It was a lonely time — John, Eddie and all my boyhood buddies had left the country; my family was scattered. What remained of the waters was a tiny muddy puddle in the shadow of its wall. I took a photo of the shimmering sky and the winter-yellow bush. It came out quite well — the dry winter atmosphere and the bleached-out pink sky were strongly evocative of the place. I had a small print tacked above my desk in various chilly London garrets for years.
These days the Dams have undergone something of a renaissance. It’s now known as the Hillside Dams Conservancy and an army of volunteers pitch in regularly to keep things well maintained and attractive. I think you have to pay to enter. And at the moment there appears to be water in both dams. Far far away in Braidwood we have a version in miniature that provides a stroll into a golden childhood — just around the corner.