'Ave an Avo!

When we stepped off the mail ship 'Edinburgh Castle' in Cape Town in 1959, we were a young, green, immigrant family! Well, mum was green as she suffered the whole trip with sea sickness, and would literally shudder at the mention of food! Dad had retired from the Metropolitan Police and had been recruited by the NRP (Northern Rhodesia Police) for a three year tour. So, we arrived in Cape Town after a two week voyage and then faced a three day steam train journey to Lusaka. (As we pulled into the station late on the Sunday evening, my sister slammed her thumb in the toilet door and we came face to face with a knife fight and two bleeding men! I think that mum was ready to kill dad by then!)

But, I digress........you must be used to those words by now!!

When we were shown to our compartment on the train, we saw a lovely basket of fruit, sent, we all thought, to welcome us to Africa by the NRP. (Actually, we discovered later, much later, it was sent to the wrong compartment and wasn't ours at all!) Anyway, it contained fruit that we had never seen before, mangos and..................an avocado pear. Now, bearing in mind that the only pears we had ever seen and eaten before were the usual 'apples and pears' type pears, green skinned and fairly hard to bite into, dad assured us that the hard, thick skinned 'pear' was ripe and ready to eat! What did we know? We tried to eat it, dad cut it up and removed the stone and we manfully bit into the hard, bitter skin and flesh. It went out of the window very quickly and I resolved never to eat another one......ever!! Many years passed before mum gathered the courage to try again!

Ripe and ready to eat! (Thanks to Google)