A world of servants
As I look back on these early days, I’m struck by how peaceful, secure and prosperous our lives were, in sharp contrast to the extreme poverty, disease and fighting that currently afflict so much of the African continent.Of course we were part of the privileged white elite and I’m sure a black child’s perspective would have been completely different. Every white household had black servants, most often several. We always had a minimum of three. Our cook “boy” who was older than my father and the senior of the servants, followed in order by a houseboy and garden boy. More often than not, these numbers were augmented by several nannies who often times were the senior wives of the resident cook.
Servants came and went but “Cookie”, our cook boy stayed with us until we finally left 
Zambia, as Northern Rhodesia came to be called after independence. In many respects he ran our household, not only cooking all our meals, but also deciding what our daily fare would be, only conceding to my mother if he deemed her request for some special fare appropriate. Primary school was both easy and fun. In good weather – and with only a long dry season and short rainy season (the terms winter, spring and fall were all foreign to me), this was most of the time; I would bicycle to school, mainly along bush paths created by Africans commuting back and forth to their jobs from their outlying villages. I knew all of the sixty odd children at school and, in those days, we probably knew every person in town whose total population was only a few hundred.
Boarding school
In spite of these idyllic times, I couldn’t wait to be sent off to boarding school as this involved a three day trip by steam train through the bush, across Victoria Falls bridge and all the way to Bulawayo in what is now Zimbabwe. There we were loaded into buses for a further twenty miles to Falcon College, which was, and remains, one of Africa’s finest schools. I was fortunate to be accepted, and was so probably in large part thanks to my brothers sterling record of achievement. He’d completed his schooling there two years prior to my arrival, but had left behind a legacy of athletic achievement that had made him one of the schools early heros.
Discipline at the school was strict, by American standards militaristic, and from my first days, caning became almost a weekly ritual for me. Prefects, senior students selected by teachers to supervise our every move, awarded black marks. These demerits were routinely handed out for the most mundane offenses. Having a shoelace untied, a sock down, or talking after lights out, all qualified for a black mark or two. Get three in the space of one week and the recipient had to make the long walk across the quadrangle to the Housemasters study for a severe caning on the buttocks. With my penchant for talking, I am sure I continue to hold the records for most strokes of the cane in one school career. Additionally each black mark required an hour of work in the garden, and I personally planted almost all of the lawns surrounding Tredgold House, of which I was a proud, albeit much disciplined member!