THE VINTAGE WEDDING
IN the 1940s, after serving in Burma during WWII, my father, Miles Forster, took a job as a cotton farmer in a small town called Wad Madani, which lies on the west bank of the Blue Nile, 135km southeast of Khartoum in the Sudan. He used to joke and say life out there alone on the cotton farm in a harsh environment was tough, so his mission was to find himself a good wife.
He took six weeks’ leave, met my mother, Mavis Heard, through friends and fell for her straight away. With little time before his leave was up, he attempted to hurry the relationship along but my mother told him: “You don’t get to own the gold mine before you buy the gold ring,” which he duly did.
They were married on December 3 1949 and returned immediately to the Sudan, leaving behind them the green, wet landscapes of England and a comfortable life to live in the burning dry temperatures of the Sudan at an average of 41 degrees daily. “One could fry and egg on the verandah roof,” my mother would say.
Paraffin fridge, paraffin fans, scorpions and having to learn to speak Arabic were all part of her new life. A special welcome feast was held on their arrival and my mother was presented with the local Sudanese “special tribal delicacy” — a raw ox eye on a plate, along with a bag of camel dung “cake” baked for days in a hole in the ground to be used as fuel for the fire. With her quick thinking, and without wishing to insult her Sudanese hosts, she explained that in Britain the culture is that any food delicacies are always sacrificed by the wife to the husband — and shoved her plate across to my dad!
They enjoyed some raucous socialising at the famous “88 Club” (88 miles along the Blue Nile from Khartoum), where all the British and other foreign workers would meet for weekend socials, and where my mother (a talented musician) would entertain everyone with her piano accordion.
A year after they were married, she set sail for England on a Union Castle mailship, returning to give birth to her first baby — me. At three months old, I was shipped back with my mother to life in the Sudan for the next several years. On weekends as a young child, I remember being left to sleep with a mosquito net draped over the entire car, and a fan blowing on me inside the car — an ever-faithful servant on “guard duty” while my parents danced the night away at the 88 Club.
In the mid ’50s, the Sudan became independent from Britain and my parents returned to life in the UK. Forever after they declared that their years in the Sudan were the best times of their lives.