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This is an amusingly written, but serious and non-fictional, account of the life
of a District Officer's wife in Northern Nigeria in the 1950s. If it is, in an implicit
sense, a memorial to Rosemary Hollis's husband, who was killed by a train one
foggy morning in early 1979, it is also an explicit reminiscence (the term autobiography
is far too formal for this light style of presentation) of what it was like
to be the wife of a colonial official in upcountry Nigeria.
But this is not merely a 'view from my verandah' book, for all its useful
insights into the work and leisure of colonial officialdom. It offers at the same time
the far less common perceptions of just what that job meant for the official's wife.
And it is here that A Scorpion for Tea will have a special appeal, not only for those
of us who want to relive our own experience in the printed word, but above all the
younger ones who have no idea of the discomforts as well as the delights of colonial
service in Africa and who, in this day and age, feel that the missing element in the
literature is the woman's view of what was very much a man's life. To the mind
of this reviewer, a regretted lapse is the inadequacy of names and the frequent
omission of any clue to the identity of the friends and colleagues whose lives intersected
with that of the Hollises: Tom and Marjory are simply not enough! Potential
buyers as well as historians of the Nigerian Service may be disappointed by such
silence.
Mercifully, not all wives experienced the series of disasters which seem to have
been Mrs. Hollis's lot. Like the necessary fool in King Lear, her sense of humour
comes as a relief to the readers as calamity follows catastrophe: being bitten by mad
dogs and bruised by even madder dentists, sewing up the abdomen of an attempted
suicide with violin string, stink-bugs by Mehitabel's "billion times a billion billion",
a snake which "dropped out of the roof and bounced off my head into my lap",
and the inevitable thunder-box tales. But undeterred by this apparently commonplace
accumulation of mishap and miscarriage, all endured without a word of
self-pity or a whisper of complaint, Mrs. Hollis typically made the most of whatever
she found on the credit side of being a DO's wife in Bauchi and Bomu, In Wamba
and Kontagora. Much of the quiet conviction in her reminiscences lies in the fact
that for many Colonial Service wives this is just how it was. The one thing that
could be guaranteed about the colonial life, m. or f., was that even the routine
would be remarkable. Whether today's spousely reaction would echo that of Mrs.
Hollis's London office boss, "a very self-sufficient, tough young woman", who, on
learning of her fiance's posting exclaimed "Good heavens, I couldn't cope with
that life!", is a speculation not likely ever to be put to the test again in the history
of British womanhood overseas.
Over and above its merits as a memoir of life in latter day colonial Northern
Nigeria, A Scorpion for Tea carries a special bonus for its readers. Some of us may
remember Rosemary Hollis's evocative sketches of the Northern Niprian Landscape
and its peoples. Others will have seen her attractive paintings in the Voluntary
Service Overseas headquarters in London, where her late husband, Michael,
worked after his retirement. A Scorpion for Tea is now illustrated with nearly fifty
of these delightful sketches. The result is a striking blend of author's black and
artist's brown ink, recapturing the nostalgia of colonial life in Africa - nightmarish
warts and all!
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