House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe. Christina Lamb

were wooden as opposed to the iron used by the white man, they were concentrated on the light sandy soils which they found easier to work.’

      History had been rewritten to fit a white notion of Rhodesia and it did not stop with politics. Revisionism also turned to cultural artefacts. Great Zimbabwe appeared on Rhodesian maps as the Zimbabwe Ruins, the remains of a white empire in Africa built by Phoenicians, Greeks or Egyptians, because the Rhodesian government did not want to believe that black Africans could have built such a place. In the 1960s the Smith regime even commissioned a history promoting that view despite the complete lack of supporting evidence. Postcards were sold showing it as the possible palace of the Queen of Sheba, the view propounded by the first Europeans to come across it.

      Nigel's dislike of authority made it hard for him to settle at school and he always felt in the shadow of his bright elder brother Edwin. Although his sporting prowess made him popular, he had also inherited his father's eccentric sense of humour, which led him into all sorts of trouble. One of his masters, George Armstrong, who was partial to a drink, owned a lime green Vauxhall. Nigel managed to acquire a Corgi model of the exact car and one night, when they had seen the master coming back more than a little unsteady on his feet, they moved his car from the car park and replaced it with the tiny replica. As the master stood there, blinking in confusion, they fell about laughing.

      Rhodesia was an extremely rigid society and its boarding schools, based on the English model, highly disciplinarian. Nigel was soon notching up large numbers of cuts. Although he quickly learnt to wear extra underpants as protection, he never got used to the pain and would stand nervously, waiting for the crack of the Irish housemaster's stick on his backside that would leave him with such a set of red welts that he was barely able to sit down.

      His bad behaviour was always a source of tension when his parents drove up for sports days and afterwards took him for tea and scones in Meikles Hotel. There they sat in the cane chairs among the potted palms of the colonnaded coffee lounge, sipping their drinks and trying to talk over the sound of the band.

      Nigel's parents were not sure what to make of their sports-mad son. He was in almost every school team yet at the same time was steadily building up a school record for the highest number of cuts or canings, usually for being cheeky to teachers.

      But they had other things to worry about. In December 1972 the Houghs had been spending the Christmas holiday in Centenary with their cousins the Wallers, when the farm radio suddenly crackled into action. An urgent voice called for all men to get their guns and help. A nearby white farmhouse had been attacked, that of farmer Marc de Borchgrave, and his two young daughters asleep in their parents' main bedroom had narrowly escaped death. The shaken family moved to a neighbouring homestead where two nights later they were woken by rocket and grenade fire. Again they had a lucky escape, de Borchgrave and his eight-year-old daughter suffering shrapnel wounds. The next morning when an army patrol went to investigate, their vehicle hit a landmine and a white officer was killed.

      For Rhodesia's white population, the audacious raid on Altena Farm would be seen as the start of the civil war. The black resistance fighters dated it from six years earlier, to 28 April 1966, when they clashed with Rhodesian Security Forces in the town of Chinhoyi, north of Salisbury. A group of seven guerrillas had tried to destroy power pylons with no success and had then killed a farmer, Hendrik Viljoen, and his wife, just 50 miles outside the capital. Within days the fighters had all been killed by Rhodesian security forces; they would be remembered as the Chinhoyi Seven.

      For the next six years the guerrillas made so little headway that few Rhodesians took much notice. Their camps were far away in Tanzania and Zambia, from where their attacks were launched, and a lack of arms and training made them little threat. Like most of the country, the area around the Houghs' farm in Headlands had not been affected at all.

      However, in late 1972 the Mozambican province of Tete, which bordered Rhodesia's long north-eastern frontier, had come under the control of Samora Machel's Frelimo forces fighting against the Portuguese colonial government. This enabled Rhodesia's freedom fighters to set up camps in Tete from where they could cross the Zambezi and infiltrate the north-east of the country around Centenary and Mount Darwin, starting with the attack on Altena Farm. The raid was led by a commander called Solomon Mujuru, though like most of the guerrillas he used a nom de guerre- his was Rex Nhongo. Mujuru's men started making bases in villages and the bush from which they attacked white farmers, laid mines and set ambushes on the roads.

      The war, which until then had seemed no more than a low-level annoyance, suddenly intensified. By 1974, Smith had introduced blanket conscription and Nigel's elder brother Edwin was one of those called up. Recruits were told they were like Peter in the Dutch fable holding a finger in the dyke, stopping the guerrillas pouring over the borders to bring down all they stood for. Brought up on the myth of the Shangani patrol, whether it was right to be fighting for white supremacy and against universal suffrage was not something they questioned.