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There was a confused moment in the car park of the nursing home while Kevin and Dad debated the merits of my father’s showing up in the maternity ward in the dress. “It’s a bit worse for the wear. Perhaps you’d better get back into your suit,” Kevin suggested. But the dress’s buttons and zips defeated both men, and in the end, it was decided to leave well enough alone.

Mum shakes her head. “You can just imagine,” she says. “Your dad comes bursting into the ward in a pink minidress, arms full of flowers and champagne, puffing away on a cigar with a very drunk Kevin weaving behind him.”

“Let’s have a party!” Dad shouted.

“For heaven’s sake, this is a nursing home,” Mum hissed. “Keep it down.”

“Sorry,” Dad said, momentarily chastened. And then sotto voce, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! Hallelujah!”

Mum held her hands to her ears. “No, Tim, no. No singing. And for God’s sake, not ‘The Hallelujah Chorus.’”

The door slapped open and the matron stormed in to see what all the fuss was about. “How do you do?” Dad said, bowing. The matron froze in her tracks. Dad put a rose behind his ear and began to do the samba. “Work all night on a drink of rum,” he sang, waving a cigar in the air. “Daylight come and me wan’ go home.”

“I thought I was going to get hell,” Mum says. “But Matron got one whiff of Dad’s cigar and she cried, ‘Oh, that’s so romantic, just like Barbara Cartland.’” Then the woman in the bed next to Mum’s burst into tears because her husband wasn’t romantic. “He was a cotton-mill worker and he had piles,” Mum says. “When he came to visit, he had to sit on one of those special cushions with a hole in the middle of it.” Dad poured champagne for everyone.

“No one thought to fetch me from the nursery?” I ask.

“Oh no,” Mum says. “No, no, no, you’d been safely bundled off by then.”

FOR TWO MORE WINTERS, Mum and Dad stuck it out in Derbyshire. Mum’s rabbits got out of their cages and bred as rabbits will. So Dad told a nearby farmer that he could have the farms’ rabbit-shooting privileges in exchange for a springer spaniel puppy, Che. (“Shoot as many as you can,” Dad begged.) Then a fox terrier showed up on the doorstep, shivering and emaciated, so that was Jacko. And finally, Mum was given a goat whose owner had multiple sclerosis. “So how could I say no? Anyway, the bloody thing was supposed to be housebroken and tame. He was nothing of the sort. He ran all over the house spraying pellets everywhere. He ate whatever he could get his teeth into. We tried giving him a basket to sleep in, but he was used to beds. And he howled if you left him outside.”

But however much my parents tried to ensure a colorfully chaotic life for themselves, there was an underlying sense that as long as they stayed in England, they would always have to be the source of their own drama. Moreover, beyond a weekly session at the local pub with Kevin and a few other friends, there was no one with whom to do anything. “Margot Fonteyn came to Manchester,” Mum says, “and I had to go to the ballet with the milkman’s wife. It was very kind of her to come along, but I don’t think she ever recovered from the shock of seeing Rudolph Nureyev in tights.” Mum blinks at me rapidly. “Well, it was a little eye-popping.”

It rained all spring. Then the summer was dreary too. Gradually, the droughty desperation of Rhodesia receded in my parents’ minds. Instead of the snakes at Berry’s Post, they now remembered Tabatha chasing Vanessa around a wide lawn; instead of waiting a whole season for rain that never came, they now remembered the hot plash of the Rhodesian sun against their skin; instead of the isolation precipitated by Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (the international sanctions, the rationed petrol, the bolts of sludgy cotton made into identical shapeless dresses, the state censorship), they now remembered the self-reliant camaraderie of Rhodesians and the astonishing kindness of strangers.

So before another