Mary had been born in Rhodesia on the farm her father Jerry had pegged out in 1919 when he arrived from England. Jerry Timms was from a cricketing family in Syresham in Northamptonshire and his wife was from Yorkshire. Nobody talked much about it but, from what Nigel understood, his grandfather had been the black sheep of the family who had been sent as far away as possible after the First World War for some unspecified misdeed. Sending wayward sons off to far corners of the empire was common in those days. Timms had travelled by ship to Cape Town, and there picked up a horse, which he rode across the country to Rhodesia where he had heard there were plenty of opportunities. He had pegged out some land and become a farmer, eventually prospering enough to be able to send his daughters back to finishing school in England.
John Hough had also been born on a farm, but in England, in the affluent stockbroker belt of Surrey. His father was not a farmer but a director of Lloyds of London who had purchased Jordans Farm because he happened to like the country life, and John grew up a dreamer, always up trees bird-watching or tending fledglings that had fallen from their nests. After such freedom, it was a shock for John and his twin brother to be sent to Repton public school in Derbyshire. Repton was a strict establishment which instilled in him both a love of Beethoven and Blake and a lifelong hatred of pomposity. One of his classmates was Roald Dahl, and the school had an unusual saving grace, which John believed must have inspired his schoolfellow's famous literary confectioner Willie Wonka. Every so often boxes would arrive from the Cadbury's chocolate company of prototype bars for the boys to test out and award ratings.
Apart from ornithology, John Hough's great passion was flying. After leaving Repton, he had been a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, along with Roald Dahl and also Ian Smith. The future Rhodesian leader was seriously injured when he crashed in North Africa, but recovered to be based in Corsica where he was shot down and helped by Partisani resistance fighters to escape through enemy lines. While Smith liked to be seen as a wartime hero, Nigel's father rarely talked about his own experiences. He would be the first to confess that his motives for joining the RAF were less the destruction of Hitler and more to imitate the flight of a peregrine falcon. The Spitfire gave him the dual pleasure of breathless flight and the thrill of being powered by a Griffin engine. He loved flight and he loved engines.
When the war was over, John's father hoped his sons would follow him into the family insurance business. Instead both loved the outdoors and went to Africa, only their sister remaining behind. Tragically John's twin brother died shortly after, drowning while saving the life of a friend who had fallen in the Zambezi.
The twins had been inseparable, and John was distraught. Rather than return home, he found himself a job in Rhodesia, training pilots for the Rhodesian Air Force which had combined operations with the RAF. He was one of many British war veterans who turned up with handlebar moustaches and RAF badges. Like most of them, John fell in love with the country, which must have seemed like a land of plenty after the deprivations of post-war London with its grey skies, food rationing and empty shelves. In Southern Rhodesia there were fresh eggs, ham, sausages and bacon as well as endless sunshine, golf courses and wide-open spaces, wonderful for a keen sportsman and bird-lover. There was also the luxury of maids to do the washing and cleaning.
When John finally went back to London to work at Lloyds as his father wished, he found office life suffocatingly dull and was soon hankering for the wide skies of Africa. A friend found him another position in Rhodesia, managing the Timms’ farm at Inyazura near Rusape. The Timms' daughter Mary had recently returned from finishing her studies in England and was working as a matron at a local school, but John saw enough of her over the dinner table to be smitten. However, the romance seemed doomed when he lost his job on the farm because Mary's sister married a farmer who took his place, and he returned to the Rhodesian Air Force as a trainer.
John was a slightly built man in a land of hale, sporty types and had little other than his eccentric sense of humour to win the charms of a local beauty, so had to resort to other means. At times when he thought Mary would be at the farm, he would sign out his Spitfire for an hour, then make the twenty-minute flight from Harare, perform a twenty-minute aerobatic display overhead in the manner of a peacock fanning its feathers, then fly back. With him in the cockpit was his crow Mr Ponsonby. Once he flew so fast to get back within the hour after dallying over the farm that the bird lost all his feathers and John had to stick some back in.
His airborne wooing succeeded and the couple were married on 11 September 1952, Mary's 26th birthday, at Rusape. Their honeymoon was spent at Leopard Rock hotel, along with Mr Ponsonby and John's pet owl and a hawk. Leopard Rock had been built entirely of stone by Italian prisoners of war during the Second World War and looked like a castle with its lavish gardens and incredible views over the lush green Bvumba valley. It was the most fashionable resort in Rhodesia and the Queen stayed there during her visit the following year. Nine months after their honeymoon, the Houghs' first son Edwin was born and they bought their own farm.
In his first year as a farmer John Hough learnt just how tough a life it could be when heavy floods washed away all his crops. The couple lost everything and for some years had to lease a farm called Ripplemead. Finally they saved enough to buy Riversdale where they could provide their growing number of children the idyllic childhood of running free that they had both enjoyed.
The Houghs made an unlikely couple, but the relationship worked. Like most Rhodesian farmers' wives, Mary was a strong, practical woman who taught all her children to read in between bottling preserves, while John was a dreamer. They were a perfect two-part harmony, John taking care of the important issues in life like crowned eagles, building bird-hides and producing a dazzling display of useless gadgets, while Mum made sure we all were fed and went to school and had a house to live in.
Even as a young boy, Nigel was well aware that it was his mother who held the family together. Father was a wonderful person but not a great businessman. I always felt that dealing with the rigours of a drought never held the same mental anguish for him as the disappearance of some egg from an African hawk eagle's nest. Even with Rhodesia's cheap labour, they would not have been able to maintain their lifestyle were it not for the fact that John Hough had inherited a large sum of money from his father.
Although neither parent was at all demonstrative, the Hough brothers and sisters grew up so close that outsiders would refer to them as the Mutual Admiration Society. Whenever a member of the family needed help we would call on the siblings-we referred to it as calling out the artillery. If more than one came out we called it heavy artillery. If my mother arrived that would he the nuclear warhead. Childhood pranks usually involved the boys against girls. Every evening we would all go for baths in the bathroom at the end of the corridor along which we all had our rooms. Once my elder brother told my sisters that the coast was clear for them to go back to their bedrooms then called the cook boy Maxwell so he saw them all running past naked.
All the surrounding farms in Headlands were white-owned. Farming was a close-knit society and there were about thirty other white farming families in the district. Apart from his brothers and sisters, Nigel had a group of young friends with whom to go hunting, shooting and fishing in the dam as well as riding on motorbikes. We were all about five or six when we started with a pellet gun, and I went on my first bird shoot with my father when I was ten. He was given his first serious weapon-a 20-bore shotgun-at the age of 14 and mostly they shot guinea fowl and doves. For young guys that kind of life is like a dream.
In those days the bush seemed full of game. Leopards stalked the hills, their cries often to be heard in the night and their spoors left outside the living room windows in the mornings. It was common for the children to come across duikers with their liquid eyes or see wild pigs shooting out from under a msasa tree. Speckled francolín partridges would skit across dusty red tracks, usually in threes, and there were often snakes to dodge away from, cobras and mambas. An enormous python lived in a pile of rocks on the way to the dam and they always