Mondays with Chip

CHIP CATHCART KAY

Chip and Shar on the lawn in front of house number one...PC Danika Thomas 

Our family moved to Malawi a decade ago. We arrived at Malamulo Mission, just twenty kilometers off the beaten track from Thyolo, in the southern tea growing district of the land locked country. Malawi – known as “Africa’s Warm Heart” certainly didn’t seem warm to me in those early days, when our house, our food and our work/life was challenging!

It took three months to acquire a vehicle from Japan and when it arrived, we rushed off the mission, escaping the fishbowl life of the past three months in search of new friends. We drove onto Satemwa Tea and Coffee Estate, and checked in at the barrier as strangers, “looking to meet the owners, please.” I heard a lady’s friendly voice on the radio telling her guard to “send them up for a cup of tea.”

So began a relationship with Chip and Dawn Cathcart Kay of Satemwa. A friendship that has enhanced our family’s life and helped us navigate Africa with more grace and understanding than we could have otherwise.  It didn’t take long before we were regulars at the Kay’s indoor/outdoor dining table on a Sunday luncheon. Dawn would seat her company on the patio table where a large bougainvillea tree reached heavenward from the middle of the room. She organized us all - male, female, male, female to mix up the group and to keep conversations lively. Children behaved with their napkins tucked into their shirts or placed on their laps. Tall, golden candles graced the tables and children happily drank their water from crystal goblets.  Lunch always began with an iced tea and always finished with a hot cup of coffee grown on the estate. I often sat next to Chip at these lunches and began to learn that Chip was unlike most people I had known, and that his was a life of adventure, a life of great love and a life of great loss.

As Chip aged and the stories kept flowing, people began to speculate about ‘recording history’ while Chip still had the energy and will to share it.  Dawn and I talked about it one day while strolling through the garden and I told her I would be delighted to sit with Chip and listen to his stories.

Chip wasn’t so sure anyone could follow his “butterfly” thinking and tried to talk us both out of it. But when I produced a list of stories I had remembered from listening to him at Sunday luncheons over the years, his face lit up and he said, “you remember my twenty first birthday!? Shar, you have a deal, let’s write a book.”

I thought of our Monday afternoons a little like “Tuesdays with Morrie,” as I would escape from the mission on the bumpiest road I’d ever known, arriving to Satemwa in the midafternoon glow of sun across the green fields.  Chip would be waiting for me on the lawn in front of his house - a house he built when he was 18 and wanted to put distance between himself and his parents just five kilometers away. When I arrived, Chip’s gardeners would have four chairs set up in a square, and Chip would choose to face Thyolo mountain, and motion for me to join him on the other chair which also faced the mountain. Moments later, a tea trolley would appear, prompting Chip to comment, “Let’s see what fare Lyton has prepared for us today,” as he lifted the skirt on the tea trolley and peeked under the silver lid of the sandwich tray. Dawn would join us on the lawn and offer us both tea, which Chip always took black with some “leaves” in it. (Lemon verbena)

The Hydrangea at Chip's 'room with a view' on Thyolo mountain, Chip said it was "Satemwa's national flower..."

History was important to Chip, and as he recounted his stories to me, I felt incredibly young and ignorant. One day he told me, “we were sanctions-busting in those days in Rhodesia…(he paused and looked at me quizzically…) you do know what sanctions-busting is, don’t you?” I shrugged and made a note to “check google” during the following week.

Soon, whether I was on the mission, or away with my family for the weekend, I began to hear Chip’s voice in my head at random moments, at historic places, at bends in the road or meeting people whom he had talked about in one of our Monday sessions. It’s no wonder, looking back, not only did I have the few hours with him every Monday, but then during the week I would replay the voice memo and type it out verbatim, often consulting google as I did. (Aha! Sanctions-busting! Naughty Chip!!)

Chip had many passions during his life, the earliest began on Satemwa, where he marveled as spores grew into plants, “just ninety days from seed.” And when he said, “Just ninety days from seed,” as an eighty-year-old man - his eyes sparkled and his thoughts went back to his childhood plantings of vegetables at his boarding school in Cape Town. He laughed when he spoke about the trouble he got into when he illegally planted vegetables behind the cafeteria and gave the produce to Nooki, the lady who worked in the kitchen. And he beamed when talking about modern-day Malawi and the vegetable club he founded where Satewma female staff learned how to grow vegetables and Chip hoped they would also delight to watch things growing “just ninety days from seed!” As an older man he was often found with his camera in his pocket, showing photographs of the cabbages the vegetable club ladies had grown, “food to feed the family and money when they can sell the surplus!” Chip would boast.

Chip Cathcart Kay in his early eighties

The kondi at house number one, (Chip and Dawn’s home on Satemwa) was always brimming with visitors. Farmers from nearby estates, family that lived near and far, old friends who had become part of the kondi furniture and part of the old tales, and the ‘new blood’, people who were passing through or recently arrived.  “It’s the new blood that keeps things interesting,” Dawn once told me as she inquired who had recently arrived at Malamulo and if they might like to come for a meal with us sometime. Chip would refer to people like us (at least in the early days) as “Strays.” I often heard him saying, “I rounded up a bunch of strays at Huntingdon and had them join us for lunch on Sunday.” And then he would recall with intrigue snippets of the ‘stray’s’ lives and retell their stories to me on a Monday.

Chip and Dawn's front door, always open and usually full of friends

Even as an aging man, Chip wanted to stay on his two feet, no matter how wobbly they became. Convinced somewhere in his mid 80’s to occasionally use a cane for support, he wondered about the estate every morning and every evening, always in the factory, up at Chawani, or representing Satemwa at the tea Auctions in Blantyre every Tuesday.  Sometimes I wanted to change up our Mondays for a Tuesday or Wednesday but it just wouldn’t do, as Chip would tell me, “no, no, see Tuesday is the auction, and our prices….oh our prices. The price of tea in Malawi! Did you know Kenya just had a bumper crop?” I would tell him “Yes, I can see Tuesday is out, but Wednesday?” “Well, Shar, Wednesday, I get 10% off at Game in Blantyre, and the pool needs chlorine, and Pi needs some groceries…”

He was a man of habit, in his old age, but it reflected the man I began to know from his youth. Chip was used to flying all over Central Africa in a little Cessna. Out on Wednesday, back on Saturday and repeat the following week. “I always knew where I was, you see, by mango trees below…” Chip would tell me, simulating his younger self in the cockpit and looking down from his lawn chair, as if he were still 8,000ft in the sky.

I always had a feeling there were stories of grand mischief that he hid behind his mustache and occasionally I would feel brave enough to pry them out.  And occasionally he would feel nostalgic enough to tell me, and then say as he looked at my phone flashing on voice memo record, “that one’s not for the book, ok Shar?”

His green hazel eyes would twinkle in the fading day as he retold the young days of his love with Dawn, and often as one particular story after the other came fresh to his recollection he would call to her from the lawn chairs where we both sat, “Pi, Pi!” He would shout, “Pi, come here! Do you remember when….”

Rarely did Dawn ever join our sessions. Perhaps she had heard all the stories too many times and just preferred the company of a good book which sat half read by the warm fire in the entry room? But after some time, I really thought she wanted to give Chip this time to relive his life, unblinkingly, unaccompanied, except for his storyteller, - me – the young Doctors wife from the age-old mission just down the road. He talked, I listened.

Somewhere along the way, it seemed he had told me all the stories he knew to tell. And when he began to repeat them, I knew it was time to begin my independent research – a step or two above google. I began to fact check Chip, was the bridge really built 1951 or was it 1952? The newspapers at the impeccably kept library above La Caverna in Blantyre would help. And thanks to Chip, I had all the important dates already highlighted and now all I needed to do was find them and corroborate his story.

Learning about the early days of flying in Nyasaland

Chip and Dawn Cathcart Kay ready to leave for their honeymoon

What a mind and memory he had! To the day, and the exact year, story after story checked out to be true, exactly as he has retold it. Finally, I thought I had found a fact that was incorrect, it certainly could not have been September 25, 1945, when he arrived as a boy of 14 into Liverpool, just after the war, because I found the ship’s logging and it stated its’ arrival to be the 23^rd of September 1945. But something made me dig a little deeper, and after some searches, I found an article detailing the “late arrival of the Mauretania” into port, two days late, in fact, due to inclement weather in the harbor. Oh! I should have known Chip was right again! I told the Nancy Drew in me to take a step back…

As the book began to be compiled, and our time together became interrupted by distance and Chip’s declining health, I began to miss Mondays with Chip. I began to miss how the “one hour” on the lawn turned into dinner, and coffee and a late drive back to the mission where the light from my Prado’s headlights bounced into the trees, searching for bush babies – I told myself – as a consolation for having to drive the bumpiest road back home.

We debated often, the name for Chip’s book. He and I both liked “Malawi’s Last Colonial” – because as Chip had said, “I was born a Colonial and I will die a Colonial.” And as we both began to realize, there weren’t many, if any, of his contemporaries left. However, in the early 1950’s the world began to view the very word “Colonial” as sinister and people began to associate it with dominance and dominion over others. But to Chip, being a colonial was more about the pioneering spirit that had brought his father from Scotland to Nyasaland in 1922, knowing no one and owning nothing. Being a colonial, to Chip, meant you were a leader in developing the land and people around you, for the better. Yes, he was born a colonial and he would die a colonial.

But just as those people in the world which emerged after the second world wars had to cultivate a sensitivity towards those around them, Chip and I knew we also needed to be delicate with his book Title.  We debated more names, “From Jungle to Tea Pot,” “The Intrepid Tea Planter,” “I Did It My Way,” until we settled on “Kangaroo Kay.” It was a name on an original piece of art that hung in the hallway just outside Chip and Dawn’s bedroom, and it hailed from his flying days when he was learning to land a Tiger Moth on a short runway, bouncing down it like a kangaroo in the outback. His flying friends had made it an ‘inside’ joke and it came complete with art to hang on his wall.

Chip and I in Cape Town, editing his book together which all the hospital staff loved because they listened in and began to get to know their patient in a completely different light. "You flew all over Africa!" the night nurse commented, saying the afternoon shift had told the night shift all about this pilot patient from Malawi...

In the last decade, people who knew Chip might wonder how he really felt about the Africans. He was, after all, often upset with them. He would shake his head and recall a story from the weekend where one of their female laborers had been whisked to hospital, having been slashed up by her husband. One day I asked him what his pet peeve was, and he answered after a pause, “violence against women.” He’d seen too much of it in his day, and the older he got, the more out of control he felt to defend anyone against it.

Nyasaland, the place of his birth, where he found happiness in great measure, footing about the estate with his African friends, John Humbiani and Nelson Nagoli, ran deep in his veins. He traveled wide and far, but his heart was always in Central Africa. Even after the shambles of independence ushered in Malawi’s’ first dictator, he still loved the country and the people. This was home. He had nowhere else he would rather be.

Maybe you’ve met this old man, the same old man that I met? Frustrated by the obstacles facing white and black Malawians alike. The old man, who spent his afternoons helping women grow vegetables, and his weekends picking up strays at Huntingdon. Full of vim and vigor and stories from his youth, Chip was unlike anybody I’ve met before. He was an old gentleman, who loved his life with every breath, who loved his family with every new day, and who always sought to learn something new.

And that’s who life should be extended for…people like Chip who seek to understand, who press into the tough moments rather than running from them – people who have lived stories worth retelling again and again on their lush green lawn facing Thyolo mountain.

Chip – I will forever be grateful that you entrusted me with your life story. That you thought I was just colonial enough myself to understand you. That you thought I was just smart enough to piece together your butterfly thinking, even if I had to use google as my aid.

Sometimes people come into this world and really are “larger than life.” When you died, Chip, our boys wanted to know what Dawn would do now in your very large home, because you, apparently, took up so much space. I think what they were trying to say was that you were “larger than life,” that your absence can be felt around the world, but especially in your home where you welcomed our family to your kondi ten years ago.  Where we sipped our first cup of Satemwa red and looked at you strangely as you threw some leaves into your black cup and launched into stories about missionaries that lived at Malamulo years before we were even born.

Rest now, Bwana Chippy, the best flight of your life is ahead of you, on that great day when Jesus comes back to take us all home.

 

Our last goodbye, July 22, 2019

  

my friend, I'll be missing you

 CHIP CATHCART KAY

September 25, 1931 - January 24, 2020