SIX decades down the line, the abiding memory of Christmas at our home in Stirling was of half a dozen middle-aged uncles asleep and snoring in front of the dining room’s coal fire. The thick curtains were drawn. In this post-prandial phase, which lasted about two hours, the air was thick with cigarette and pipe smoke plus methane gas. There had been only brief conversation prior to their collective coma while the table was cleared, the women retreating upstairs to the sitting room and kids left to amuse themselves.

After my last dinner there as a high school student, I escaped into the fresh freezing sunlight and glanced longingly up Albert Place to the house where the attractive daughter of a town solicitor lived.

A scrawny young man, his pinch-faced wife and a grubby child in a rickety pram appeared, scurrying townwards on the iced-over pavement. I hurried after the threesome and, with an embarrassed mumble, gave them a 10 shilling note, an aunt’s Christmas present. There was still no sign of my amour but I felt her approval reward enough.

The first Christmas at our new home at Nimule in South Sudan was a lengthy, crowded, cheerful celebration for several reasons – the newest country in Africa offered the chance of a fresh genesis from six dark decades of brutal attrition with the Muslim north; and the extended family from many parts of East Africa were arriving to check out the two returnees from the diaspora – many had never seen Anne Marie since her childhood and her consort’s existence was doubted.

It would be an opportunity for the family to meet for the first time in years and make plans to use their land around Nimule for permanent homes, ensuring youngsters started schooling and learned skills at various training programmes in the small town.

A stream of relatives and neighbours wanted to talk to us, Anne Marie giving me biographies and laughing at their observations. “He has hair everywhere except his head” and “Why do many mzungu have no buttocks?”

Late into the night, the family’s thatched huts and cooking fires around us, we would sit talking below the tall mango trees, dense black in the moonlight. Buckets of their juicy fruit aided conversation and refreshed us after sessions joining the dancers, traditional and “Madi modern”. Lisa, a cousin and mother of six strong sons, demonstrated what Europeans used to call the bump jive but is in fact an ancient Buganda rhythm demanding impressively strong and flexible pelvic joints.

The continuous cooking – in cast-iron pots, over fires – was masterminded by my sister, Elizabeth as she is the senior procurement manager of a large government department in Juba, the capital, so overseeing 50 independent-minded female relatives preparing 30 different dishes was a dawdle.

We did present a goat, the traditional gift of friendship, to the family. It bleated all night, tied to a tree outside our bedroom, until cousin Gabriel gave invaluable advice which I now pass on to Gordon Ramsay and his fellow chefs – if you are about to slaughter a one-eyed goat for your gourmet clients, ensure it is generously fed and watered for at least a day before its demise; if it is starved and stressed, its posthumous revenge will be a truly awful taste.

The Christmas which for me and many others was an affirmation of the human spirit occurred during one of the nastiest civil wars in modern times in Idi Amin’s Uganda. Torture, murder and “disappearances” were daily events.

We sat down for dinner that night in the Franciscan Sisters’ convent at Nsambya Hospital, then proceeded upstairs with difficulty after Haig-flavoured refreshment on top of brandy-saturated plum pudding. Somebody put on Irish and Scottish country dance music and – whoosh – away we went, sweating and birling amid the mosquitoes, Ugandans, Dutch, Kenyans, Rwandans and Celts.

Who could forget the sight of Sister Ambrose, out in East Africa for 30 years, sitting – or rather, perching – on the edge of a sofa, glass of sherry in hand and a very merry smile on her dear old face.

Dr David Vost studied medicine at Glasgow University and is currently working at a hospital in Swaziland. He and his family live on a small farm in Northern Uganda near the Albert Nile.

davidvostsz@gmail.com