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Any African hospital is a shock by Western standards. There is nothing here to remind us of the hushed tones and pastel hues of our institutions. The unpleasant and offensive aspects of the human body are not dealt with in side wards and behind screens; it is very much a public place. When a man is ill, his whole family insist on being there, cooking there, doing the washing, nursing the children and conducting domestic affairs in strident voices as if at home. There are blaring radios, hawkers peddling a hundred forms of trash, long queues of swaddled women and downcast men all clutching pieces of paper like charms. Male nurses cut through them, intent on their own purposes, oblivious to the clutching hands and wailing voices. The environs are an ecological disaster. Every leaf has been plucked to wipe hands, every twig to feed fires, every blade of grass has been pounded to death and the lunar landscape is dotted with neat piles of excrement on which furtive dogs feed.

In the midst of it all is a doctor, usually white, harassed and overworked, rushing from one emergency to another, combining in his own no-frills service the competences of a dozen hospital departments. Here I received treatment in the form of gamma globulin injections that made me incapable of moving my legs for two days and, once more, I was generously taken in from the rain by the Nelsons who clearly decided on a policy of feeding me up.

The great trouble with hepatitis, it seemed, was that it could easily become chronic and dog me to the end of my stay. It was therefore important to identify which of the several varieties I had contracted. This could only be done at Yaounde. Here there was also a proper dentist who could produce a more serviceable dental repair until I got back to England. I was encouraged to seek this by the obvious distress of Westerners when my teeth flew out spontaneously in the midst of eating, talking or other forms of ordinary activity.

Financial disaster loomed on all fronts. Money was still not getting through to me. The bank was incapable of following the simplest instructions and my indebtedness to the mission was becoming something of an embarrassment. Now I had to face further expenditure on vehicle and personal repairs. In desperation I sent a telegram to my college asking them to advance me £500 to get me out of difficulties. If they could cable it to me, I would pick it up at the British Embassy in Yaounde.

My physical collapse had come at a relatively convenient time. The main ritual season was over and the harvest, which I particularly wanted to witness, had not yet begun. I had about three weeks to refit and return to the field. With luck I might just make it. Gritting my dentures, I set off for Yaounde.

Being in a delicate condition, I opted for taking a couchette and damn the expense. This was surprisingly clean and comfortable and in a style that seemed to hail from the Tierra del Fuego Railroad Co. of about 1910. My chances of a good night, however, were destroyed by the efforts of the attendant to install me in a compartment together with a formidable Lebanese woman and her willowy daughter. The attendant pointed me to a bunk and I stowed my kit and settled down to sleep. Abruptly he was seized by this Levantine virago. "No man sleeps in the same room as my daughter till she is married," she hissed. "She is a virgin," she elaborated. We both regarded her with renewed interest. I attempted to disclaim all ambitions upon the physical charms of her offspring. The girl giggled. The attendant ranted. I was ignored.

"I know a director of the railway. I shall have you fired."

The attendant treated us to a long reading from the regulations despite constant heckling from the woman. This dispute went round and round with that lack of purpose that characterizes African arguments.

"Whore!"

"My brother is an Inspector of Immigration. I will have you deported."

"Savage!"

As for me, I limped off down the corridor where I found almost all the couchettes empty and chose one at random. The attendant regarded this as a vile defection and favoured me with his views on the Lebanese at great length until I bribed him to simply go away. At intervals throughout the night I would hear the door of the compartment down the corridor open as the lady sentinel spotted her enemy passing and hurled abuse after him. The next morning as we pulled into Yaounde, he was dedicating himself to preventing her getting a porter, while she attempted to pour her drinking water over him.

An undignified tussle took place in the doorway, ending in great quantities of spitting. The girl and I exchanged looks of mute sympathy. It was time to be dogmatic and I roused myself with difficulty. The woman seemed to fear an attempt to assault her daughter from the rear and leaped to interpose herself with clenched fists. Profiting from her distraction, the attendant seized her from behind and began dragging her howling into the corridor. A large crowd, consisting largely of travelling policemen, gathered to watch with serene detachment, while meaner spirits urged the combatants on.

I rendezvoused with French friends, whom I'd met when I'd first arrived, at the usual bar and we gossiped about what had happened to whom. Most of the absentees seemed to have fallen foul of the extremely virulent venereal diseases that haunt West Africa, social life being so dull that fornication is the chief distraction. The souvenir vendors, to my horror, recognized me as the one who had passed through without buying anything the first time and were determined not to let me escape again.

Whereas when I first arrived in Cameroon I had been greatly impressed by the ugliness and squalor of Yaounde, I now saw the city as a haven of beauty and good taste, brimming over with the comforts of civilization. Something drastic seemed to have happened to my standards in the few intervening months. I found myself also unmoved by rather shocking collocations of wealth and poverty. As we sat at the café, in mainly white company, a small child stood on the pavement and, driven by I know not what path to political radicalism at so tender an age, began to rail against foreigners. The clientele of the café found this hugely amusing and threw coins that the child scrabbled in the dirt to pick up.

I was soon installed in my friends' flat and noted once again how different are the priorities of French and English young people. The unattached English or Americans one meets in such circumstances live either off the land or out of tins, but the French insist on their cuisine. Their lives, when not teaching, consisted of motor rallies in the jungle, parties in the Embassy area and touristic enterprises. One was an enthusiastic taxidermist and specialized in the stuffing of pangolins (scaly ant-eaters). These, it seems, are extraordinarily difficult beasts to kill and he was always experimenting in new ways of doing them to death. It was not unusual to find the bath full of remarkably lively pangolins that he had purportedly just drowned, or the lid being forced off the freezer by pangolins he had "frozen to death".

By a strange coincidence, the new doctor at the Polyclinique turned out to be known to me, being the boyfriend of the sister of an old friend, and we had once met in a bar in La Rochelle. It was extremely comforting to find the world such a small place and working on such very African principles of extended kinship. He arranged for me to have blood tests, a process that I regarded with somewhat mixed feelings. It seemed counterproductive to have needles stuck in me as the cure for having needles stuck in me.

I was forced to spend two weeks in Yaounde while my teeth were being repaired and took full advantage of it to eat meat, bread and, on one exquisite day, a cream cake. (When I returned to England I adopted a policy of eating two a day until I regained normal weight.) There is no more cheering experience than being able to walk about again after an illness. Life was full of hedonistic pleasures. I went to dinner with a man who ran the local tobacco company and could not explain my sudden, all-enveloping sense of well-being until I realized that I was sitting in an upholstered armchair for the first time in four months. In Dowayoland, I sat on rocks or on the Chief's rickety deckchairs, at the mission on stiff-backed chairs. There were cinemas too, with various luxurious features, such as systems whereby you could hear the soundtrack at the back without having to rely on word of mouth passed from the front of the house. Best of all, they had roofs not made of corrugated iron so that a heavy shower did not obliterate everything.

The next day I called in at the Embassy to see if there was any trace of my money. To my surprise, I discovered that I was the subject of much diplomatic activity. Hugely exaggerated reports of my maiming and disfigurement had reached them via the Foreign Office in London, and a member of the Embassy was even toying with the idea of going beyond the confines of the capital to look for me. Characteristically they went into elaborate explanations of the many ways in which they couldn't help me. They did arrange for me to jump the queue to see the dentist, but denied firmly all knowledge of money.

But this euphoria was short-lived. Life for the Whites centred on the various bars where they forgathered in the evening to share each others' boredom and complain about Yaounde. Since I was absolutely forbidden alcohol on pain of a relapse, these places were infinitely boring for me, and in the end I was not sorry to return up-country; other considerations apart, I was convinced that the Dowayos would have begun the harvest the moment my back was turned.

I dropped in at the hospital to pick up the results of my blood tests. The first report informed me I was suffering from "sample lost". The second diagnosed "no reagent for this test". Predictably, it had been a waste of time. However, I felt much improved physically and could pronounce most of the basic sounds of the English language with my new teeth. Only my finances had suffered. It was not for several more months that the Embassy discovered that money had in fact been sent to me and was lying in a drawer somewhere. I was impressed by their tact in sending me an invitation to the Queen's birthday party so that it arrived the week after the event; on the back someone had written, The ambassador will not be surprised if you are unable to come."

I regained N'gaoundere without incident, rendezvousing with Jon and Jeannie for a lift back to Poli. Reinforcements had just arrived from the States in the form of the Blue family whose patriarch, Walter, was to teach at the mission school. He, Jon and I rapidly became soul-mates. Walter, soon established as Vulch thanks to the locals' rendering of his name as "vulture", was a Times crossword addict and spent tortured hours wrestling with them on the veranda, groaning and whooping in alternating despair and exultation. He was also highly musical and soon acquired exclusive rights to a wizened and wheezy piano that had suffered much from damp and termites; it was only much later when he gained access to a more finely tuned instrument that I realized that he could play. His wife Jacqui was the perfect foil, firmly in charge of practical matters: making clothes, keeping hens, hitting pieces of wood with hammers, producing children that Vulch would dandle absently while solving a crossword. Through the house passed a constant stream of visitors; they always seemed glad of more. Arriving from the bush, one never knew quite who would be in residence, luggage laid out among the seething children, cats, dogs and chameleons that variously constituted the ménage.

I was beginning to feel rather less alone in Cameroon. It seemed that the worst had happened and been somehow overcome. I had found friends not too distant from my field location. I had a bolt-hole for when disease, depression and isolation struck me down. I could now get ahead with the work I had come here for.