Excerpts from book :

“Anyone who thinks that life has handled them badly should try farming in Africa, particularly if they know nothing about it. They can crowd so many minor victories and crushing defeats into a short span that everything afterwards will be a breeze by comparison. I speak with feeling, since I quit journalism to go farming, as have other jaded newspapermen, who later wished they hadn’t. None wished they hadn’t as much as I, at least at first. At the end of a few short months, my wife Ria and I, with three infant dependents, could compile a list of challenges that –
for variety alone – might have set a record.

Set in 200 acres of shallow valley, flanked by the boulder-strewn ridges that break up the plateau lands of what was then Rhodesia, the farm in the Marandellas area had been largely undeveloped, There were marshland hummocks, where the local folk had raised yams in the dim past before the white man came, and a household vegetable garden. The rest had been tentatively cleared years earlier and then had lain fallow once more, to be reclaimed by low scrub and thorn trees.
This starkness stopped abruptly at the old farmhouse, where the grounds were brilliant with blood-red poinsettias, floods of bougainvillea and fountains of purple jacaranda. The building was massive and stolid, brownish brick under a mantle of sun-blackened thatch, and was surrounded by lesser structures: a guest cottage, pump-house, storerooms, and workshops. Towering pines near the entrance muffled all sounds and perfumed the air along the sandy driveway. It was a deceptively peaceful scene. ”.