Digby takes to the open road (1)

by AnneS · Published 13/03/2026 · Updated 10/11/2025

The Thrill of the Open Road 1947-53: In Which Potchefstroom Outclasses Sorrento
At the age of six I was taken in a Morris Eight Series E (1939 model, four-door, to export specification, dark blue and black) the 1500 miles from Cape Town to our home in Bulawayo, and have ever afterwards wanted to recreate the feeling of excitement and freedom that opened up with each new horizon. An emotion snatched at again as an adult driving through Israel or New Mexico. But can one ever recapture the awe of a child? I experienced pure excitement – what’s round the corner… and the next… and the next…? And thereafter life became a quest to recapture that exhilaration, the dream of a beacon shining ahead – even now, when a neurotic dread of travelling has to be overcome with (crumbling) teeth gritted.
I contracted the bug as a two-year-old when my mother loaded up a previous steed, a 1938 Morris Eight Roadster, and said: “We’re going to go and stay with Aunt Rhoda.” We’d have driven out from Umtali (Mutare), wheezing over Christmas Pass, bumbling along the narrow strip road through Rusape and Marandellas (Marondera) for the 170 miles to Salisbury (Harare), every now and again pulling over for an oncoming car (most definitely not playing chicken) so that the right wheels were on the left tarmac strip, and a spurt of dust on the left. Take care in picking a place where there wasn’t a hole to crash into…. Or we’d pull over courteously to permit a big, swaying American car to overtake – a dirt-brown Chevvie Fleetline, perhaps, or a green Ford V8.
My first continuous memory of the thrill of travel comes from late 1947, the journey extolled in the opening paragraph. Then in 1949 (going both ways) and 1951 and 1953. We would come down from Bulawayo through Gwanda and West Nicholson, stop (if we’d started late) at Tod’s, with its thatched rondavels and oil-engined lighting plant – the lights flicking to the plod of the long horizontal single cylinder – and onward over Beit Bridge (enduring the rude and resentful customs men), through the Transvaal, unfamiliar foreign territory, Messina, Wylie’s Poort (sit on the verandah of the hotel at the top, looking over the escarpment at the dead straight dusty ribbon of a road across the plain and over the horizon), Louis Trichardt, the Adam & Eve Motel, Pietersburg, Potgietersrus, Nylstroom, Naboomspruit, Warmbad, Pienaarsrivier, Hamanskraal. The sheer music of those names!
At one of these meccas the electric fuel pump shorted; there was a circus in town and we saw to our amazement elephants wandering down the street (fancy! elephants in Africa!), the only thing to relieve boredom as we waited four hours for the delivery of new points and diaphragm. My father lying on the dusty gutter (why put the damn thing down there beneath the frame?). Another year we stopped at an old hotel in one of the dorps beginning with P and there was a white-and-blue jug and basin for washing, the bathroom itself down a lino-ed passage: it was better than the hotel with a bizarre shower, surrounded by plastic curtain, in the middle of the bedroom, leaking, smelling of mould, but a bold stab at an en suite.
Yes, how to recapture that excitement! The Nile, Petra, the bus to New Delhi, the view across the bay from Sorrento towards Mount Vesuvius, Chartres? Forget them.
Twenty and thirty years later I moved to Australia and to England. Not quite the same dynamo of excitement – more exercises in planning. Soul unwilling in the first instance, clouded with apprehension in the second. But I’m very lucky to have lived three lives and pity (for the most part) those with but one.
Oh, and after Hamanskraal Father would insist on grinding around east of Jo’burg, where he dared not venture (congested concrete jungle), so another litany: Benoni, Boksburg, Germiston, Randfontein or Springs, Brakpan, Nigel – we must have used different routes. Oh, Potchefstroom. Don’t forget Potchefstroom. We scrutinised little books that told us where each car came from: TJ registration Jo’burg, OB Bloemfontein, S Salisbury, and so on. Rhodesians would wave at each other.
And don’t forget the cars. I’m an expert on 1949 American models, each one imprinted on the eyeball, Plymouth, Dodge and De Soto; Buick, Pontiac and Oldsmobile; Mercury; Studebaker, Willys, Kaiser Fraser, Packard, Hudson…. I want a Hudson, a wide, wafting Hudson. We played guess the next car, and: “I bags Ford.”
Ah well, a reader, too, can travel, enjoying new vistas and perspectives in print, and make sense of it.

Digby is the author of the biography of Sir John Christopher Willoughby.