'She knows East Africa and she loves it - the people, black
and white, and the wild beauty of its countryside - with a
critical and understanding sympathy' - The Times
Chapter I
WE set off in an open cart drawn by four whip-scarred
little oxen and piled high with equipment and provisions. No
medieval knight could have been more closely armoured than
were Tilly and I, against the rays of the sun. A
mushroom-brimmed hat, built of two thicknesses of heavy felt
and lined with red flannel, protected her creamy complexion,
a long-sleeved white blouse clasped her by the neck, and a
heavy skirt of khaki drill fell to her booted ankles.
I sat beside my mother, only a little less fortified in a
pith helmet and a starched cotton dress. The oxen looked very
thin and small for such a task but moved off with
resignation, if not with speed, from the Norfolk hotel.
Everything was dusty; one's feet descended with little plops
into a soft, warm, red carpet, a red plume followed every
wagon down the street, the dust had filmed over each brittle
eucalyptus leaf and stained the seats and backs of rickshaws
waiting under the trees.
We were going to Thika, a name on a map where two rivers
joined. Thika in those days - the year was 1913 - was a
favourite camp for big-game hunters and beyond it there was
only bush and plain. If you went on long enough you would
come to mountains and forests no one had mapped and tribes
whose languages no one could understand. We were not going as
far as that, only two days' journey in the ox-cart to a bit
of El Dorado my father had been fortunate enough to buy in
the bar of the Norfolk hotel from a man wearing an Old
Etonian tie.
While everyone else strode about Nairobi's dusty
cart-tracks in bush shirts and khaki shorts or riding
breeches, Roger Stilbeck was always neatly dressed in a light
worsted Suit of perfect cut, and wore gold cuff-links and
dark brogue shoes. No bishop could have appeared more
respectable, and his wife, who looked very elegant, was said
to be related to the Duke of Montrose. Roger Stilbeck had met
us at the station when we arrived and Mrs Stilbeck came to
see us off, a mark of grace by no means conferred on every
buyer of her husband's land.
Tilly, eager as always to extract from every moment its
last drop of interest or pleasure, bad ridden out early on
the plains to see the game, and had returned peppered with
tiny red ticks. These she was picking off her clothes while
she supervised the loading of the cart. Wearing a look of
immense concentration, as when at work on her embroidery, she
popped them one by one with finger and thumb. Mrs Stilbeck
watched with fascinated horror. Then she put a pale,
soft-skinned hand to her eyes.
'Roger,' she said, 'I don't feel very well. You must take
me home.'
Tilly went on squashing ticks while a great many Africans
in red blankets, with a good deal of shouting and noise,
stowed our household goods in the cart. There was a mountain
of boxes, bundles, and packages. On top was perched a
sewing-machine, a crate of five Speckled Sussex pullets, and
a lavatory seat. The pullets had come with us in the ship
from Tilbury and Tilly had fed them every day and let them
Out on the deck for exercise.
Robin, my father, did not come with us in the cart. He was
there already, locating the land and, Tilly hoped, building a
house to receive us. A simple grass hut could be built in a
couple of days, but this needed organization, and Tilly was
not counting on its being there.
'I only hope that if he builds one, he will do so on the
right farm,' she said.
Farm was of course the wrong word. My father had picked
Out on a map five hundred acres of blank space with a
wriggling line, presumed to be a river, on each side.
'Best coffee land in the country,' Stilbeck had remarked.
'Has anyone planted any yet?'
'My dear fellow, there's no need to plant coffee to
make sure of that. Experts have analysed the soil. Altitude
and rainfall are exactly right. Fortunes are being made
already Out at Kiambu. You've only got to look at the
place to see how well everything grows. The trouble is to
keep the vegetation down.'
'It's untried land?' Robin ventured.
Roger Stilbeck rolled up the map. 'You're right, of
course, about that. If you're in any doubt, my dear fellow, I
shouldn't look at it. Between ourselves, I'm rather glad.
Buck Ponsonby has bought a thousand acres a bit farther out
and he was keen as mustard to get the whole block. I told him
I couldn't let him have it as I'd given my word to another
fellow. This leaves the way clear. What about a ranching
proposition down near Voi? Or there's a syndicate starting to
buy up cheap land in Uganda....'
Robin bought the five hundred acres between the wriggling
lines at Thika. He paid four pounds an acre) a fabulous price
in those days. As this was much more than he could afford) he
also bought a share in the syndicate in Uganda) which Roger
Stilbeck said was certain to make a great deal of money in a
very short while and which would therefore enable him to
finance the coffee enterprise at Thika. on paper, the logic
was inescapable. The Uganda syndicate made nothing at all for
fifteen years; Robin received the annual accounts, which
nearly always started with the item: 'To manager's funeral
expenses, six rupees.' After that it went into liquidation.
Robin got a map from the Land Office with a lot of lines
ruled on it) from which the position of our holding could be
deduced. Nothing had been properly surveyed. The boundary
between the land earmarked for settlement and land reserved
for the Kikuyu was about a mile away.
'Any amount of labour,' Roger Stilbeck had said. 'You've
only got to lift your. finger and in they come. Friendly
enough, if a bit raw. Wonderfully healthy climate, splendid
neighbours, magnificent sport, thousands of years of untapped
fertility locked up in the soil. I congratulate you, my dear
fellow, I really do. You've been lucky to get this
opportunity. Buck Ponsonby was bitterly disappointed. Best of
luck; and look us up when you come in for the races. Keep in
touch, old man.'
When our oxen had plodded over Ainsworth bridge, just
beyond the Norfolk, we were out of the town. The dusty road
ran through a mixture of bush and native shambas; where
shaven-headed women in beads and leather aprons weeded, dug,
and drew water from the swampy stream that gave the town its
name in gourds or in debes, those four-gallon paraffin
tins that had become a universal water-vessel, measure, and
roofing material. The road was not a thing that had been
made, it had - simply arisen from the passage of Wagons. For
the most part it ran across a plain whose soil was largely
murram, a coarse red gravel that baked hard and supported
only thin, wiry grass, sad-looking thorn trees, and
tortured-branched erythrinas, with flowers the colour of red
sealing-wax.
It became very hot in our ox-cart, or on it rather, as we
had no covering. Tilly hoisted a parasol with black and white
stripes which helped a little, but it had not been made for
tropic suns. I was fortunate; being only six or seven I wore
no stays or stockings, but Tilly was tightly laced in, her
waist was wasp-like, her skirt voluminous, and the whole
ensemble might have been designed to prevent the circulation
of air. In a very short while the dust and sweat combined to
make us both look like Red Indians, with strange white rings
around our eyes.
Once out of the town the oxen flagged, and no wonder, and
the driver shouted less. He fell into a kind of shuffle
beside the beasts, who were coated now with flies. We had to
keep flapping flies off our own faces. When we encountered a
span of sixteen oxen drawing a long, low wagon we were
immersed in a thick red fog which made us choke and smart and
settled over everything. The stunted thorn-trees and shrubs
beside the road were coated with it and we travelled always
with its sharp, dry, peculiar smell tickling our nostrils.
One cannot describe a smell because there are no words to
do so in the English language, apart from those that place it
in a very general category, like sweet or pungent. So I
cannot characterize this, nor compare it with any other, but
it was the smell of travel in those days, in fact the smell
of Africa - dry, peppery, yet rich and deep, with an
undertone of native body smeared with fat and red ochre and
giving out a ripe, partly rancid odour which nauseated some
Europeans when they first encountered it but which I, for
one, grew to enjoy. This was the smell of the Kikuyu, who
were mainly vegetarian. The smell of tribes from the Victoria
Nyanza basin, who were meat-eaters and sometimes cannibals,
was quite different much stronger and more musky, almost
acrid, and, to me, much less pleasant. No doubt we smelt just
as strong and odd to Africans, but of course we were fewer in
numbers, and more spread out.
All day long we passed through flat country with distant
ranges of hills and one abrupt round bump, Donyo Sabuk,
standing out from the plain. This was where a rich, benign,
and enormously fat American sportsman lived on a large
buffalo infested ranch called Juja, dispensing hospitality
that, even in those hospitable days, was legendary, when he
was not riding about on a mule that could barely be seen
beneath him - he weighed over eighteen stone - shooting
animals. All day long we saw game of many different kinds.
The animals were still there in unsuspecting millions, they
did not know that they were doomed. Tommies with their broad
black insignia wagged their tails as if the world belonged to
them, giraffe bent their patch work necks towards the small
spreading acacias. No one has ever seen a thin zebra,
although they are stuffed with parasites; these were no
exception. They looked like highly varnished animated toys.
It would be tedious to list all the kinds of animal we
passed.
'We might see a lion', Tilly said, 'if we keep a sharp
look- out.' Lions were often observed to stroll about in
broad daylight among their potential dinners, who displayed
no alarm. But we did not see any lions; Tilly said they were
asleep in the patches of reed and papyrus we passed from time
to time. She longed to stop the cart and get Out to look for
them, as people sometimes stopped the train from Mombasa if
they saw a fine specimen. We jolted on, getting hotter and
hotter, and more and more irritable and sore. At last we
reached Ruiru, about half-way. We were to stop there for the
night. About fifteen miles a day was all that oxen could be
expected to manage, or porters either, when they carried
sixty-pound loads. It was quite enough, too.
Ruiru was just a few dukas kept by Indians and a river
crossing, not even a bridge: a causeway made by shovelling
murram into the swampy stream and putting up some white
posts. In the rains it was awash or under water and wagons
often stuck, some times for days. Tufted papyrus grew all
around, like a forest of feather dusters standing on end. A
small dam had been built at Ruiru, and a flume to carry water
to a turbine which made Nairobi's electricity. Once an
inquisitive hippo, unable either to advance or reverse, had
got wedged in the flume, and all Nairobi's lights had failed.
Our host for the night was a large-framed, flat-faced,
beefy South African called Oram, a hard-bitten man in his
late fifties who seemed to me immensely old, I suppose
because most of the white people one met then were young,
like my parents.
Henry Oram was the kind of man who never settled down. He
had left a prosperous farm in the Transvaal) and before that
in the Free State) and before that in the Cape) to come to
B.E.A. (as everyone then called it)) and bully into
productiveness another patch of bush and veld. He had a
little bougainvillea-covered house of corrugated iron, full
of sons. A number of green, shiny coffee bushes grew in rows
all round it and were expected soon to make him rich, but now
he could see signs of a neighbour's cultivation on the
opposite ridge.
'It's getting overcrowded,' he said in a South African
voice, flat and strong like himself. 'It's time I moved on.'
'Where to?' Tilly inquired.
'They're opening up new land beyond the Plateau. Splendid
country, they say. No settlers yet, no natives, lots of game,
and centuries of untapped fertility. I'm off to have a look
at it soon.'
'But your coffee's only just coming into bearing.'
'This place will be a suburb of Nairobi in a few years.
There's talk of a railway to Thika, soon there'll be a horde
of Indians, someone will start a club....'
'I don't see anything wrong about a club. And now your
wife has made a home....'
'With a wagon, a fire, and a pound of coffee any true
woman can make a home,' Henry Oram replied. Tilly thought him
pompous, but he may have been pulling her leg. They had quite
a comfortable house at Ruiru and, as Robin pointed out, would
probably sell the place for a nice profit and get a lot of
good land farther out for next to nothing.
Tilly, who had the home-making instinct, remarked to Mrs
Oram: 'You will be sorry to leave, now that you have made a
garden.'
·'Oh, but the whole country is a garden; a garden God has
planted. Look what He has provided - streams to drink from,
trees for shade, wild fruits and honey, birds and beasts for
company. How can any of His creatures improve on that? Isn't
it a waste of time to plant a border when the rain coaxes up
a dozen different kinds of wild flower? There's nothing I
love better than to walk in the wilds and return with my
hands full of the bright jewels of veld and forest - the shy
creepers, pink storm lilies, humble forget-me-nots.'
'They die quickly in water,' Tilly said coldly. She
reacted like a clam to this sort of thing, and when she
summed up Mrs Oram as a gushing woman, Mrs Oram was
condemned. Yet the Orams were hard workers, their hospitality
was always unstinted, and their craving for the wilder places
of the earth was genuine. But everything had to be twice as
big as life size.
'They are romantics,' Robin suggested later.
'They are fools,' Tilly replied. She disapproved of
romantics, but of course was one herself, though she
concealed it like a guilty secret. It is always our own
qualities that most appal us when we find them in others, and
for this reason Mrs Orarm entered into her bad books.
Nevertheless she was grateful, and later on sent Mrs Oram a
turkey and several packets of English seeds.
