Story 5 from ‘Absurd Tales from Africa’ by Robert Gurney
Bob Tell and his wife loved playing bowls. The type of bowls they specifically adored was English lawn bowling.
Bob had grown up in a house that overlooked a beautifully manicured bowling green in Luton, England. He had spent many an evening as a child leaning over the fence looking at the bowlers.
He loved the polished wood of their bowls and the sound of bowl striking bowl. For him it was a sort secret language: click-click-click, click, the language of permanence. To him the essential English evening scene was a windless, sunlit green where men and women in whites stood stock-still. It represented stability and respectability, civilisation, Man’s mastery of Nature.
Later, when he grew up, he was allowed to join in, despite the fact that he was years younger than the other bowlers.
Then, one day, he was told he had to go to Africa. He was a civil servant and the newly independent country of Uganda needed his area of expertise: agriculture. He was to advise on the best seeds to use in Uganda.
He and his wife, Mary Tell, moved into a bungalow in Entebbe, a short walk from the President’s office. Bob liked Entebbe. It was a green and pleasant place. Rain fell regularly on its lawns every afternoon at three. Life was good. The restaurant of the Lake Vic hotel could scarcely be bettered anywhere in East and Central Africa. He understood how Churchill could have called Uganda “the pearl of Africa.” But Bob missed his bowling green.
It was then that he decided to do something about it. He decided that what Entebbe needed was a bowls club. There were enough Englishmen and women working in the government offices to make it viable.
He rented from a chief some land near the lake’s edge, using money he had inherited from an uncle. He set about flattening his field. He employed a small army of men with wheelbarrows to spread good topsoil garnered from swampy areas that had been drained in Kampala. His mouth watered as the rich black earth went down.
He then had to decide on the grass seed. The grass in Uganda seemed to him to very hard in comparison with the softness of grass in England. He knew through his training that there were grasses that thrived in the cool season and others that were better suited to the warm season, not that these were very distinguishable in the micro-climate at the side of the lake.
Once the field had been flattened and levelled he divided it up into squares. The most successful square would become the green. In one he planted warm season grass seed that was tolerant to drought, i.e. it needed less watering. Water was not his main concern in Entebbe, though, because of the powerful rain storms that built up each day over the lake.
He planted Bermuda grass that, he knew, was quite disease-resistant. He had heard from old Africa hands in the Kampala Club that they tended to use this seed for their lawns. He tried St Augustine grass but realised that it was rather thick-bladed and needed a great deal of water. He experimented with Buffalo grass, very drought-tolerant and needing lots of sunshine.
He did not have much shade at Entebbe and thought that, perhaps, this might prove to be the one. He seeded square after square, one with Zoysia grass, another with Bahia grass, the latter being able to resist most insect attacks. Entebbe was plagued with insects at that time. He tried Kentucky blue grass, fescue grass, tall fescue, which is hard-wearing, red fescue and perennial rye-grass. He was coming to the conclusion that it was this last one that would make the best sward for bowling.
Having set the experiments in motion, he knew he had to just sit back and wait for the results. In one or two cases these could take a year or more. No matter, he installed himself in a wicker chair at the side of his patches and just sat there under a tree smoking his pipe and watching the grass grow.
He became restless. The old urge to play bowls began to reassert itself in earnest. His discussed this with his wife Mary. She understood and approved his plan that they should travel, in their holidays, to established bowling greens in other parts of Africa.
First of all they ventured out to Nanyuki but Bob was not entirely satisfied with the smoothness, or lack of, of the turf. They decided to venture further abroad. They found one that came to love especially, the bowling green in the grounds of Cathedral Peak Hotel in the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa.
They found another they liked, the Lawn Bowls Club in the Clifton area of Cape Town. Bob was in his element on the South African greens. He didn’t really want to go back to Entebbe but, needs must, he and Mary always returned before the end of their holidays.
During one holiday a small clubhouse had gone up, on Bob’s instruction, next to one of the squares of land back in Entebbe. This large shed — it wasn’t much more than that — became like a second home to Bob. He would sometimes, with Mary’s permission, spend the night in it so that he could be up at dawn to put the sprinklers on his rye-grass green. It wasn’t ideal but it was the best grass he could come up with. His green was passable.
The years went by and Bob slowly developed an archive in the “club house”. In it he kept the records of games: who in Entebbe had got nearest to the jack in 1967, that sort of thing. He and Mary also kept the correspondence they had had with clubs in other parts of Africa. Bob was proud of his archive. It contained newspaper reports of the victories and defeats of the sides he had played for, particularly in Cathedral Peak.
One day the club burned down. No one knows what caused it. Some say that a dispute about the land lay behind it but Bob would never speak about it. He was heart-broken. The fire brigade had cut across his pride and joy, his rye-grass green, carving deep ruts in its surface. It was as if all he had worked for had been defaced, desecrated. And the fact that the paperwork was destroyed in the conflagration means that posterity will never know now for whom exactly the Tells bowled.
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Story 6 in this series is ‘The Death’s Head Hawk Moth Man of Makerere’.
….to be continued.
