Page 176 - Real English 2024 Book 8

DIGITAL RESOURCES

A Good Deed Comes 18

Round

An autobiography is an account of a person’s life and experiences written by that person. It is usually written in
the first person. The author often chooses to highlight those life-events which have had a lasting impact on him
or her, while ignoring the less important ones. An autobiography is thus a window to the author’s life.
In this lesson, you will read an extract from Peter Godwin’s autobiography.

Growing up in Africa, the son of English
settlers, I often accompanied my mother,
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a doctor, on her rounds. We went in her

car, which was like a mobile clinic. It was
fitted with a medical chest with a wonderful
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array of equipment: glinting scalpels,
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cotton swabs, dozens of pill bottles and
tubes of ointment. We covered hundreds of
kilometres around Melsetter village, in the

rural eastern highlands of what was then
Southern Rhodesia.
All of life was there, and sometimes
death. My mother’s single biggest lifesaver
was her vaccination programme, which was

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close to her heart. Grand tours to inoculate
people against smallpox, diphtheria, tuberculosis and polio became
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people who go to live in a
new country or region part of our dry-season routine.
shining Our journey took us high up towards the glittering granite
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3.
small sharp knives used by Chimanimani mountains. These bordered the most remote,
surgeons during operations unexplored part of Mozambique, where a guerrilla war against the
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4.
pieces of soft material used colonial Portuguese was under way.
for clearing wounds We had sent word ahead, and when we arrived, thousands of
inject medicine as the local Ndau people had gathered – most of them from across the
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protection
a method of fighting in border. We weren’t supposed to vaccinate the Mozambicans, but my
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small groups against the mother felt it made sense to because the Ndau crossed the border so
government freely.

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