IN THE MONTHS WE’D SPENT preparing the ground for our stay in Harare, and also in the months following our arrival, Victor and I got acquainted with what it meant to live as a European expat in a country such as Zimbabwe. While we enjoyed the extraordinary privileges such a lifestyle offered, the unease of being a white person in a country that was mostly black and the social differences attached to this never left us.

After another house-sit, we spent two weeks in the Brontë Hotel situated in The Avenues, an area north of the commercial centre. This was where the early settlers had built their first living quarters and indeed the place was – and is up to this day – a charming if quaint reminder and remainder of early settler times. Time seemed to have stopped in the Brontë Hotel. You imagine Cecil Rhodes himself appearing any minute in the wood-panelled lobby; or the Brontë sisters, after whom the place was named, in bonnets, drinking tea from floral-patterned china in one of the lounges.

In this august and venerable setting, every morning, when Victor had already left for work and I was trying to hurry the boys on to get Max to school by eight, I went through an ordeal.

The boys and I would sit at our table in the dining room, with its dark wood panels on the walls and red carpet covering the floor, while at least ten waiters scurried constantly around, asking in monotonous tones if we wanted our eggs boiled, fried, scrambled or poached, and with bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms or sausage … Franz, our two-year-old toddler, would be in his high-chair, refusing to be fed, refusing to be rushed, sputtering porridge all over the place. When I tried to pull him out of the chair he screamed at full volume. With bashful side glances to the few other guests and the waiters who, in white uniform and red fez, all looked like they came straight out of a colonial picture book, I would try to swipe with a napkin at the unsightly splashes on the table cloth and floor.

‘Don't worry, madam,’ one of the waiters would inevitably murmur, ‘we’ll take care of it.’