Chapter One
JUST before she sailed, Tilly got a telegram from Robin saying: "Please
bring shaving brush and windmill." With everyone being demobilized, even the shaving
brush was difficult, a windmill impossible; it was hard enough to get passages for the
wife and daughter of a repatriated soldier, let alone for a large metal construction.
Tilly had only managed to squeeze us both into a ship by a combination, as she said, of
sucking up to shipping clerks and bullying managers. So she left the windmill and took
instead a cigar-box full of silkworm cocoons. These were to pioneer a new industry in East
Africa; now that the First World War had ended everyone would be crying out for luxuries,
the market would expand.
In the Red Sea the sticky heat was appalling. At night we took our mattresses on deck
and tried to sleep, impeded by lascar sailors and even more by rats, which abounded. After
Aden, we noticed that, about five o'clock every morning, and with a great deal of clanking
and creaking, the ship swung her bows round to face backwards. The engine stopped for a
few minutes and then started up again, and the vessel swung back to resume her course.
Tilly was puzzled by this and so was Randall Swift, a fellow farmer also returning from
the wars. Three days out of Aden he came to Tilly with as grave a look as any countenance
so merry could assume to say that, despite the heat, we had better sleep in our cabins.
"We couldn't sleep," Tilly pointed out.
"We can spend the night there, for if we don't, we'll be spending it in kingdom
come, from what I hear. There's bubonic plague on board."
The purpose of turning the ship round, it appeared, was to allow the bodies of those
committed to the deep to avoid entanglement in the screw. Randall had found this out by
sleuth-work; the bubonic plague was a secret, for if the health authorities at Mombasa
heard of it, we should be kept in quarantine for weeks, at a heavy cost to the owners, and
no one would be allowed to land. So those of the passengers who suspected anything were
just as anxious to keep the matter quiet as the Captain and crew, and there was no ship's
doctor.
We went about drenched in Keatinge's Powder, of which Tilly had brought a liberal
supply, our eyes alert for dead rats. Luckily we were due at Kilindini in less than a
week.
"It's touch and go with the cocoons," Tilly observed, two days before our
hoped-for arrival.
"Don't tell me they're starting to hatch," Randall said.
"I think, if the ship's punctual, they may just hold out. I don't know what the
Customs would say to a lot of grubs crawling about the baggage."
Each morning Tilly examined the cigar-box with mounting anxiety. Whether she had
miscalculated, or whether the ship had taken longer than was expected, or whether the Red
Sea's heat had disarranged the hatching schedule, I do not know. The day before
we were due at Kilindini, she observed unmistakable signs of activity among the cocoons.
"They can't possibly hatch now," she exclaimed, frowning at them with
entreaty and dismay.
But they had made up their collective mind. Not only that, in their new-found freedom
no cigar-box was going to keep them confined. On our next visit to the cabin, which Tilly
said was hot enough to cook a rice pudding or a meringue, we found little black grubs
crawling about all over the drawers.
"We must catch them, that's all," Tilly said firmly. She was not going to let
a lot of silkworm grubs defeat her on the threshold of their new career. So she and I,
Randall and the bride he was taking back with him, chased grubs among handkerchiefs and
underclothes, on the floor and in the bunks, and put them into a tin in whose lid Randall
punched tiny holes.
"They'll die of starvation," Tilly said in distress. "I wonder if I can
find any mulberry leaves in Mombasa? Or if they would accept a substitute?"
On the morning we were due to dock the entire cabin appeared to be a mass of little
grubs. Assisted by Randall, Tilly hauled our luggage into the passage and stood guard to
prevent any member of the crew from penetrating into the insectory she had established Our
feelings of relief as we at last walked down the gangway, our heavy double-felt hats
(called terais) clamped firmly down on our heads, were immense. Both the bubonic
plague and the silkworms were still concealed from the authorities, and once we were
ashore we were safe.
The upcountry train left about four o'clock. The smell of dust, the crowds of jostling,
sweaty Africans in tattered shirts or red blankets, the beaded women thrusting bananas,
oranges, scrawny live fowls and gourds of gruel up at the passengers from a gravel
platform, the clean bright air, the hard bright sunshine, the brilliant creepers, the
monstrous glistening baobabs - all these had not changed. Soon coconuts and cultivation
gave way to nondescript and spiky bush, harsh as old iron, reduced by extremities of
climate to a vegetable equality where no bush rose above its fellow, no proud tree threw
its shade, all was level, featureless and sterile; there was no water, and patches of red
gritty soil, leached of all enriching humus, gaped from the bush like raw wounds.
At Voi the train stopped for about an hour while its passengers were fed, or fed
themselves. It was dark by now, the soft velvet darkness of the tropics we had not felt
for four years. You walked as through a warm conservatory whose great dome was encrusted
with all the diamonds in the world, and all the scents in the world were there too,
changing like currents in the sea, from the overwrought sweetness of frangipani to the
crisp pungency of dried cattle-dung, from smoke of brushwood fires to heat-baked sand and
stones, from the rich oiliness of fat-smeared bodies to the alien twang of the oxtail soup
which awaited us in the dak bungalow with our evening meal.
On level ground serving as a platform, and behind the goods shed, a lot of little fires
sprang up, as native passengers concocted their meals of maize-flour, rice and bananas.
Firelight flickered like a snake's tongue over bronze or coppery limbs and caught the
gleam of white teeth bared in laughter. Our fires, our lamp-lit bungalow, our little knot
of sound and movement, must have seemed from above like a tiny prick of light in a great
encircling darkness, a firefly flashing out and then vanishing. Close by, we could hear
two hyenas calling to each other and, farther off, the throaty grunt of a lion. The slave
and ivory route to the Great Lakes that had crossed this waste of thorns long before
railways were invented did not seem far distant in time, you could sense a ghostly trudge
of feet bound for exile; indeed, less than thirty years earlier you might have come upon
an Arab caravan camped near the site of our station. Bleached skulls and thigh-bones,
overlooked by hyenas, might still be found to mark this long and bitter road.
"A lot of things have changed in the last four years," Randall Swift
remarked, "but not the Uganda Railway."
"No, it's just the same, only more so," Tilly agreed. And indeed the little
wood-burning locomotives, brought out to pull the first trains less than twenty years ago,
were still man-fully puffing their way up to the highlands, considerably exhausted after
four years of war. They were very thirsty engines, needing constant long drinks at tanks
fed by pipelines from distant springs, and proceeded under a great arc of wood sparks,
which always started grass fires in the dry weather They quite often broke down. On a
pre-war journey, Randall told us, the train had stopped for several hours near Tsavo while
an important official had disembarked to hunt a lion spotted out of the window. The trophy
was skinned amid the rejoicings of a posse of native passengers who had followed at a safe
distance, and in due course the official, the skin and the passengers had resumed their
journey, to arrive about half a day late in Nairobi.
"Perhaps we shall see a lion tomorrow morning," suggested Tilly, who was
always ready for some stirring event. "Then we can stop the train and go after
it."
"We're hardly important enough," Randall objected.
"We can always pretend to be. No one knows that you're not a new Colonial
Secretary, or I'm not a cousin of the Governor's."
"They might make a shrewd guess at it," Randall said, glancing at our
clothes. After nearly four weeks in the crowded little vessel, these appeared serviceable
rather than elegant. "That's what we should have to look like, to be believed,"
he added, indicating a young man at a nearby table dressed in the official uniform, a
khaki suit with shiny brass buttons and a collar and tie. His clean new suit was perfectly
pressed; a big cork helmet, with a long sweeping stern shaped like an otter's tail and
with a flashing badge in front, lay by his side next to a debe - a four-gallon
paraffin tin - of water. The conversation he was holding with one of the waiters did not
appear to be going well.
The young official was giving an instruction in flawless Swahili, the kind that
everybody knew they ought to speak, but no one did. After a while the waiter, still
looking baffled, said "ndio, bwana," went away and returned with a bottle of
Worcester sauce.
The young man was patient and verbose. At last the waiter, grasping at least part of
the order, removed the debe in which some oysters awaited their doom.
"It must be difficult for him to understand that oysters must be eaten raw,"
Randall observed, "when we're always insisting that everything else must be cooked or
boiled, even water."
"What an odious young man," concluded Tilly, who did not like displays of
privilege. Meanwhile the waiter was in difficulties with another passenger, a red-faced
North-countryman who could speak nothing but English. He explained slowly, loudly and
repeatedly that he did not like steamed sponge, but wanted cheese instead. The waiter
brought a bottle of Worcester sauce. It was perhaps a relief to the waiter to encounter
our clumsy, basic version of the language, which at least he understood. The words were
Swahili, but by ignoring all the grammar everything was greatly simplified, provided that
no profound, complex or subtle thoughts had to be conveyed. Our gastronomic needs were not
profound, subtle or complex and we avoided the Worcester sauce.
At last the engine driver, who had a table to himself, rose to his feet, fastened a
belt loosened for the meal, nodded to the oyster eating official and remarked that we had
better be on our way. There was a general gathering together of hats and bags and
equipment, a scraping of chairs and settling of bills, and we strolled across to mount the
train, while the guard shouted at the native passengers, whistles blew and people scurried
about getting either in or out of carriages. With a great deal of chugging and huffing the
locomotive pulled itself together, digested a mawful of logs, emitted a cascade of sparks
and heaved the crowded carriages away from the friendly little station into the encircling
blackness of the Taru desert.
When we awoke next morning, we felt that we had really come home. During the night the
red dust had drifted in through open windows and settled over everything. Our faces had
become a milk-chocolate colour, with white circles round the eyes, like coons, and the
peculiar, tingling, feathery smell of the dust, as native to this high country as the
whistling thorn, the twisted olive, the flat-topped acacia or the lolloping giraffe, was
never out of our nostrils. And with it through open windows came the smell of early
morning, the essence of the fresh and young: of dew on biscuit-shaded wiry grasses, of
wind off distant grape-blue hills, of innumerable acacias, of lees of century-accumulated
sunshine, of hidden moisture in silent sand-rivers, and simply of freedom and space, the
smell of the highveld of Africa that one can never forget.
Away across a rolling and ravine-creased plain speckled by twisted thorn-trees more
numerous than the stars, there floated in the soft early-morning sky, and in a most
unlikely manner, a mighty mound or hump the colour of mother-of-pearl above a great ruff
of pale lavender cloud. This cloud masked the base of a mountain which did not seem
attached to the ground, but rather to have been created out of light and space and fancy
where it floated, like the sail of some great celestial ship. The sun's early beams now
lanced the plain in shafts that seemed a thousand miles in length, giving rise to shadows
longer than the spires of the tallest cathedrals; and as for our train, we could see a
moving replica of it, in silhouette, gliding across the golden grasses on our left-hand
side. We gazed in silence at the majesty of Kilimanjaro, pink and delicate as a flamingo's
breast-feather, and might have imagined it to be a trick of light and cloud that would
dissolve in full daylight had we not known of its reality.
I think that if one lived to be a hundred, and watched the dawn break and the sun rise
over the highveld of Africa every morning, one would never tire of it, just as a sailor
will always find delight in watching the sea. And indeed there is the same play of light,
the same endless changing, forming and reforming of cloud and shadow, the same sense of
the creation of the world before one's eyes. The rolling up of long shadows thrown by
rocks and trees never fails to enthrall; their tips race in utter silence across the
plain; behind them, trees and grass and bush and ant-hills spring into a new golden life
of their own. It is like watching the rolling up of a gigantic carpet at an incredible
speed. The fascination of beginnings - of the daisy that opens its petals to the sun, the
yellow chick drying from the egg, the spring that trickles from the rock, the clenched bud
just parting on a twig - all this wonder is packed every morning into the birth of an
African day. Heat and sweat and weariness come later, but all that is forgotten at the
start; it was four years since we had seen this miracle and we gloried in it again.
And, of course, the animals were a major part of it. These great herds of moving,
unhurried, innocent creatures, at home in their element, numerous as buttercups in an
English May meadow and as beautiful, were like the heart that gives life to a body;
without them, the features of the landscape would still be there and still be shapely, but
they would be lifeless as the contours of the dead.
The wonders of this journey to Nairobi have been described many times, the tens of
thousands of animals to be seen from the train, the sense of travelling through some
tremendous park full of tame beasts, almost as if one had journeyed through the Garden of
Eden before the fall. It would be tedious, therefore, to repeat all this and to dwell upon
the great shining herds of zebra and wildebeeste, the close-packed, gracefully-horned
gazelles with tails always a-wag, the patchwork giraffe arching their necks to nibble a
tree-top, the red, lyre-horned impala, the cowlike eland with their dewlaps swaying, the
lithe hunting cheetahs and ungainly hyenas and silver-backed jackals.
I searched with hopeful eyes for a lion, or even a pride of lions sloping off into a
thick-bushed gully, or sunning themselves on a cluster of rocks. It was always an event if
one saw a lion, a small triumph scored. It was not a rare event, but on this occasion
lions eluded us; we saw, however, a procession of three rhinos, a father and mother and
half-grown child, walking in single file, their insect-like heads weighed down by their
long curved horns, like a prehistoric frieze. When the leader heard or smelt the train he
halted and swung a lowered head round to face it, pawing with one big foot on the ground,
searching for something on which to vent his irritation, like a Victorian father whose
privacy is invaded not by an individual but by an untoward event. Rhinos had been known to
charge the train itself in sheer outraged fury, and I hoped this family party would not
decide to do so, for they could only stub their noses and get themselves shot. They did
not realize that all their heavy armour, which for centuries had protected them from every
hazard Africa could offer, had become a mere encumbrance in their last and hopeless battle
against a species infinitely more ruthless, ferocious and clever than their own.
We made another stop for breakfast and stretched our legs along the red gravel
platform, and sniffed the smells of morning mingled with those of bacon and coffee and of
native bodies smeared with rancid fat. Randall had found a one-armed acquaintance to whom
he introduced us: this was Mr. Eastwood, a former general manager of the railway who was
returning to Nairobi to retire. The arm had been lost as a result of a charging rhino,
which had knocked him out; he had regained his wits just in time to drive away the
vultures about to peck out his eyes.
"I 'eard 'em buzzing like bloody great bluebottles in a meat-safe," he
sometimes remarked, when telling.the story Then he had shouted for his retinue, who had
cautiously returned, and carried him on a stretcher for four days to the nearest doctor,
while gangrene rotted away a crushed arm. Within six weeks he was back at his desk,
writing with his left hand. Mr. East wood was one of the old school. He had started as a
builder's apprentice, taken to ledgers and worked his way up to become chief accountant to
the railway. In this capacity, he had once demonstrated his system of accounts to a
visiting Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Mr. Winston Churchill. "On this
side 'ere we 'ave the money coming in and on that side there we 'ave the money going out,
and they 'as to agree," he began. "Yes, yes, I know all about that," Mr.
Churchill impatiently remarked. "Yes, but you see, they don't," Mr. Eastwood had
responded.
I grew more and more excited as we approached Nairobi and so did Tilly, since four
years is a long time to be away from home. During those four years I had scarcely seen my
father, and now I even wondered, in a panic, if I should remember what he looked like; I
had a photograph, but he was in uniform, apparently on a dark afternoon, and people did
not look the same in farm clothes, and in the bright sun of Africa.
Nairobi in those days was self-effacing; you were on it before you realized anything
was happening, and it appeared to consist of little more than a cluster of bungalows and
sheds whose tin roofs winked like heliographs, and a few dusty blue-gum trees.
Trains reached it from Mombasa three times a week, and practically everyone in the town
came to meet them. The native coaches with their wooden benches exploded with people; one
could scarcely believe that quite so many had been packed in side; for every traveller
there were perhaps a dozen greeters, and the excitement and commotion were intense.
Beside the European coaches things were more sedate, especially if a white-uniformed
civil servant, with a large white pith topee, was there officially to welcome an official
guest. When the head of a department returned from leave one might even see belted swords
and be-medalled chests. Humbler travellers wore shabbier khaki and broad-brimmed felt
hats, and sometimes spine-pads made of quilted cloth interwoven with a red material, and
buttoned to the outside of the shirt. The sun was still regarded as a kind of dangerous
wild animal that would strike you down if you did not watch it every minute of the day
between nine and four o'clock.
I had no difficulty, after all, in recognizing Robin. He was thinner than I remembered
him, but still wide-shouldered and strongly built, his sandy hair cut very short, a small
moustache, a wide-boned, good-humoured face crinkled by a huge grin, and blue eyes
twinkling with pleasure.
"I've got a surprise for you," he said, when all our luggage had been
extricated from the train and Tilly had broken the news that she had no windmill. "I
hope you'll like it, also that it will behave itself; I haven't had it long enough to be
quite sure of its temperament."
"I hope it's not a kind of pet," Tilly said. She was devoted to pets, but we
generally had far too many of them.
Robin led us to the station yard where rickshaw boys crowded round us, battered
motorcars with high-roofed box-bodies awaited their owners, and a character called Ali
Khan, in riding breeches, beard and turban, waved a greeting with his whip as he stood
beside a mule-drawn buggy suspended on four enormous, spidery wheels. Before we could
reach Robin's surprise Njombo was upon us, seizing our hands, crying out and jumping up
and down in the sunshine in a joyous ecstasy.
My own delight, if more restrained, was no less genuine. Of all the people on the Thika
farm, he was the one I most clearly remembered: Njombo the smiling, the robust, the gay,
with his dashing air, his laughter, his lively and intelligent expression and his gift of
rhetoric. He was a sort of Irishman among Kikuyu, an actor to his fingertips with all the
world for his stage.
"Eeee-eee, but you have been away a long time!" he cried, shaking my hand
again and again. "Eight times the maize has been sown and harvested, eight times the
rain has fallen, the coffee berries have been picked! Twice the youths have been
circumcised! Now you have grown like a tree, like the trees your mother planted, and all
the Germans have been killed, destroyed like birds'-nests, or like grass burnt by hunters
on the plain! The soldiers of King George have slaughtered all their enemies and returned
to their wives, although we have not yet seen the cattle, the sheep and the goats they
have taken -and what is the profit in war if the warriors do not bring back the cattle of
the enemy?"
"And your news, Njombo? You have been well? Your wife and children---"
"All, all are well, they are healthy and strong, my wife has given birth twice
while you have been away and now once more her belly is as large as a gourd full of beer!
As for the shamba, I, Njombo, I have looked after it as if it had been my own, as a hen,
looks after her chicks, as God looked after bwana while he was among the bullets of the
Germans! It was as if bwana had left his eyes on a tree and his tongue in the office to
see and instruct us. Although I had many affairs of my own to attend to, I left them as a
young man leaves the dancing when lions smell his father's cattle, he takes his spear to
drive away the wild animals. I thought only of bwana's affairs, of his house and crops and
cattle. I left my own, and kept everything of his safe from thieves and wild beasts and
plundering askaris, and all the dangers that threatened his property when he was
away."
"That is splendid," Tilly said warmly, moved by this recital. "Indeed,
you have looked after things well. . . Though as Njombo's job was to look after the
ponies, and there weren't any, and Sammy was the headman," she added as an
afterthought to Robin, "I wonder what he actually did do?"
Although Njombo knew no English he understood the gist of her remarks, and renewed the
recital of his labours. "I, Njombo, I was everywhere; I guarded the cattle, I pruned
the coffee, I swept the house, I mended the roof when the rain came in, I saw to the
garden by the river and kept out the buck, when strangers came I watched them in case they
were robbers. I was like the right hand of bwana, and his eyes, and his tongue, and his
feet; so long as I was there, no harm could come to his property. Eeeeeee! but it has been
a long time and I have grown weary; now you are back, the dangers are over, you will see
for yourself the mighty work of Njombo; bwana will bring wealth to the farm and we shall
all grow rich."
"Thank you very much," Tilly said, conscious of the remark's inadequacy.
"I am very happy to be home, and to hear your good news." To Robin she' added:
"And now, how are we going to get to Thika?"
"That's where the surprise comes in," Robin said. He led us proudly to a
small, open two-seater with a short round snout, a good deal of shining brasswork, an
elevated dickey and a generally rakish air. "I was lucky to get her, you can't get
cars for love or money in Nairobi now."
"Then how did you get her?"
"Her owner went down to South Africa, he's going to bring back a couple more....
Isn't she a beauty? Goes like the wind, plenty of clearance, good strong springs - there's
a big future for these cars, and with lots of soldier-settlers coming out and the country
developing..."
"You mean it was love rather than money," Tilly suggested, after she had
admired the car.
"I had to offer him something, of course. I haven't had a chance to tell you yet,
but I put in for a farm under the soldier-settlement scheme and drew one that seems to be
almost on top of Mount Kenya - that was what the windmill was for, but I think we can
manage without it. Anyway, I got him to accept a half share in the land to pay for the
car. Not a bad bargain, I thought."
"Yes, I see," Tilly said, determined not to let her doubts about another
partnership - Robin's ventures had been unlucky - gain the upper hand. A stream of porters
now arrived, each bearing one piece of baggage - no porter ever carried two - some of it
ours, some of it other people's. Njombo took them in hand like an excitable shepherd with
a flock of unusually stupid sheep. Tilly's habit was to travel light, which meant a great
many small packages instead of a few large ones.
"Perhaps it's just as well I wasn't able to bring the wind-mill," she
remarked.
"But you have got the shaving brush?"
"Yes; aren't there any here?"
"I'm told that all the shaving brushes in the country have got anthrax,"
Robin said.
Our heavy luggage was to go by rail to Thika, but even our light equipment filled to
overflowing every nook and cranny of the two-seater; Njombo, in the dickey, was wedged in
so tightly among the parcels, suitcases, hold-alls, baskets and things sewn up in sacking
that it seemed impossible he would ever be able to emerge.
"I hope we don't have a puncture," Tilly said.
"Not much danger of that, all the tyres are in good condition, except perhaps for
one of the front ones which is a little worn; but the road's not too bad at
present..."
"It's down to the canvas," Tilly remarked after a brief inspection. "And
this back one doesn't look too healthy."
"Well, we'll see if she'll start."
Motor-cars were spoilt in this respect; if they showed reluctance they were not coaxed
or tinkered with, but simply pushed, since willing muscles were always available. Pushing
was popular: it called for rhythm, stamping and song. We left the station in a crescendo
or triumphant cries, a chuttering of cylinders and a shower of largesse, and bowled off
down the hot and dusty main street, flanked by open-fronted Indian shops and by tin-roofed
wooden bungalows, through the packed and noisy Indian bazaar, smelling of open drains and
nameless spices, and out into the country, where dust lay even thicker, ruts went deeper
and potholes of alarming aspect pit-marked the road.
It was all just as I remembered it: a film of dust over pale grass and twisted trees
and yellow sodom-apples by the road-side, four-wheeled wagons with their eight pairs of
humped oxen creaking along, little naked boys with balloon-like tummies herding
shiny-coated scurrying goats, women plodding under heavy loads suspended by leather straps
that bit into their foreheads, and a baby's head, black and shiny as a croquet-ball,
peering out from its sling; high, piled, whipped-cream clouds in an immense blue heaven,
blinding sunshine, shrilling crickets, a tinkle of bells, a smell of earth and heat-baked
cow dung, wide-sweeping views towards distant plains. In twenty minutes we were as thick
with dust as a working bee with pollen.
"It's nice to be back," Tilly said.
"I forgot to ask, did you have a good voyage?"
"Well, yes and no; it was very hot in the Red Sea, we both got prickly heat, the
ship ran out of soda water and plague broke out on board. Still, there was quite a
cheerful crowd."
"The farm may give you one or two surprises," Robin said. "It's rather
like that bit in Henry V about docks, thistles, keckies and burrs in the fields of
Burgundy, although in this case mainly blackjacks and thorns and just the bush coming
back. I'm afraid the garden has more or less disappeared. However, we shall soon get
things put straight again.
"I've brought some lovely roses, the latest varieties. I only hope they haven't
sprouted in the Red Sea."
Now and again we came to a causeway laid across a papyrus swamp, into which streams
that started in the mountain forests degenerated when they neared the plains. We stopped
at one to fill the radiator, for by now the car was wheezing and panting.
"The engine sounds a bit rough," Tilly suggested.
"Yes, there's something knocking; I'll have a look when we get to Thika."
The car proceeded like a man gasping for breath, quivering with the effort, but Tilly's
mind was on other things.
"Surely badgers don't get anthrax?" she inquired. "I'm thinking of the
shaving brush."
"It was only a rumour. They're hideously expensive in Nairobi anyway."
"Badgers are indigenous," Tilly reflected. "I'm sure I've seen them
about."
"I'm afraid it may be the piston rings..."
"If they have the right kind of hair for shaving brushes we might start a local
industry. You could get an awful lot of brushes out of one badger, I should think."
"The fellow swore the engine was all right," Robin grumbled, "and
up to now it's gone like a bird. Something must have worked its way loose."
With Robin's mind on pistons, and Tilly's on badgers, we proceeded erratically for
several miles, Until we reached a fairly steep hill. This was too much for the car and,
about half-way up, the engine stalled.
"Quick, a stone," Robin Called. "I'm not absolutely certain of
the brakes." An upheaval in the dickey expelled Njombo from the parcels, and Tilly
and I jumped out too as the car started to roll backwards. Luckily, plenty of boulders
were at hand to stem the retreat.
Robin unearthed some tools and went to work on the engine, while Njombo kept up a flow
of advice and a dramatic commentary on the mysteries laid bare by the spanners. In no time
at all a large audience had gathered, men in red blankets and boys in nothing at all. They
fixed bright, unwinking, fascinated eyes upon Robin, murmuring softly to each other as he
made some move, and poised for flight at the first sign of danger. Tilly and I sat on a
boulder with a thermos and sandwiches. The sun shone, crickets chirruped, weaver-birds in
a nearby thorn-tree squabbled and flapped, little red-eyed doves with lustred plumage
cooed contentedly, a hawk plunged down faster than my eye could follow into dry, rustling
grass beside a shamba where women weeded among the waist-high maize. It was all peaceful,
familiar and serene.
As a mechanic, Robin was dashing rather than thorough. Sometimes his methods worked and
sometimes they failed completely, and when they worked he was never quite sure why. The
various helpers who had pressed themselves into service under Njombo's directions handed
him back bits of engine like theatre sisters supplying the surgeon with instruments. On
this occasion the bits must have been put back in the right places, for when Robin got in
and the stones were removed, the car burst into life as it ran backwards in reverse gear.
While this started the engine, it did not get the car up the hill; the helpers practically
carried it up, singing lustily, stamping and chanting, and proclaiming their triumph as
they reached the summit. Tilly distributed cents and added the rest of the sandwiches,
which they regarded with the suspicion people always accord to foreign food; they took
them politely, but afterwards threw them into the bush.
"Now we should be all right,". Robin said proudly.
"That was very clever," Tilly agreed.
They spoke too soon. Not even a hill was needed to bring the car to a halt a few miles
farther on. Robin failed to repeat his performance, diagnosed the fracture of an essential
part and made his way sadly to a coffee plantation we had passed a mile or two back. He
returned with the owner and a team of oxen to which the vehicle was ignominiously lashed.
It was not the home-coming Robin had hoped for. Several hours later, dust immersed,
sweaty, dry-throated, dispirited and cross, we arrived at the Blue Posts Hotel.
