My first love affair

The sea was sparkling blue beneath the summer skies

And all alone with you I was in paradise

We wandered hand-in-hand, along the golden sand

Into my first love affair

That song was a big hit back in the late fifties when I was at boarding school in Nairobi.  It was made famous, I think, by an English singer named Craig Douglas (possibly not his real name; very few English boys were called “Craig” back then); a milkman who had enjoyed a brief flare of fame before sinking back into obscurity.  I feel I have a small claim on Craig Douglas because my cousin Susan, who lived (and still lives) on the Isle of Wight knew a girl who went out with him.  Presumably while he was still a milkman.  His songs, of which I can only remember two (the other is the more famous She Was Only Sixteen), seemed to echo the clopping sound of a milkman doing his horse-drawn rounds, or so my father once commented.  Though by the late 1950s I don’t suppose there were many milkmen still driving horses, not even on the Isle of Wight.

For those of us who WERE about sixteen when the bland but boyishly pleasant-looking Douglas (he didn’t smoulder like Cliff or have the cheeky charm of Adam) enjoyed his brief hit-parade success, it was a song for our time and place.  I was slightly younger but already well awake to the possibilities of love.  It was no accident that Shakespeare made Juliet fourteen; we forget as we age that the most intense love is felt in our teens, when our hormones are most urgent and our emotions untempered by reality.  

To live in Mombasa, back then, and walk along one of those endlessly pefect beaches, beside the  Indian Ocean which ALWAYS sparkles, hand-in-hand with the boy of our choice (and who had, oh bliss! chosen us) really was paradise enow!  True, our sand was white rather than golden, and all the better for that.  Our cousins in England, poor pale things, could only enjoy that gold for a brief summer each year, and that fleetingly.  Whereas we Kenya kids had our white beaches always there for our delight.

And so, for the teenagers of Mombasa, and those older than us who, for reasons which we found incomprehensible and faintly revolting, still insisted on romance in their lives, the beach was an essential factor in our love affairs.  So it was for me, and I still remember those moonlight walks and frenzied gropings in the sand with great affection.  But my first love affair was not with a boy – it was with Mombasa itself; the town and the coastlines north and south.  Mombasa was the first great love of my life; like all great loves the memory still warms my heart and like all lost loves it haunts me still.

I still remember the day I fell in love.  My father had taken up a new post and so we packed up the house in Nairobi and headed for the coast.  We were, I remember, all ecstatic about this.  Nairobi had come to seem grim with the dark shadow of Mau Mau still upon it.  We didn’t doubt that the British Government and the stalwart nature of the settlers on their fortified farms would ultimately prevail over a handful of disaffected and witch-ridden tribesmen but there was nonetheless a strong sense of unease in the European community, sensed even by children at a time when children were seen and not heard and certainly not informed about adult affairs.  It is not of course the done thing to say this now, but we felt betrayed by those we considered in our trust and wondered whether we could ever feel safe in that beloved country again.  Too, the winds of change were beginning to blow just over the horizon, perceptible to those astute at reading political weather.  Terrorism was all but defeated but those of us who thought we had won the battle were soon to find we had lost the war;  within a decade we would no longer rule the land and our way of life would be gone forever.

None of this weighed on my small family, however, as we took the red road to the coast.  We knew what to expect because we had holidayed at Jadini where the simple thatched banda with its iron beds and primitive bathroom, sited between the jungle and the splendid beach, was all that up-country folk expected of a holiday in those simple times.  But to actually live there with the beach forever at the door and the palm trees waving and the warm, moist seawind  blowing over the island was unimaginable bliss.  Especially after Nairobi which seemed colourless and dreary by comparison.

I should admit here that I never did really care for Nairobi.  Most Mombasa people didn’t.  Perhaps I associate the Kenya capital with boarding school (which I loathed and where I always felt I’d been exiled from my coastal heartland) and also the earlier period of Mau Mau with its curfews and alarms.  Beyond that, however, I always sensed  (and still do in memory) a darkness at the heart of the city which Ewart Grogan once described as “that miserable scrap heap of tin”.  Of course it had changed a lot since pioneering days and had its revered icons – the Norfolk Hotel, the New Stanley bar,  the markets, the game park at its boundary – as well as some fine social and civic developments such as theatres, shops, cinemas and Ledgco.  For me, though, there was always a faint sense of depression to be found in the neat suburbs where so many of the houses were built of a grim grey stone, imprisoned by dense hedges of cypress or kai apple.  I felt this most keenly on those Sunday afternoons when I was taken out of school on one of the precious exeats by well-meaning aunts who took me to their homes and tried hard to feed and amuse me.   The homes all seemed to be filled with a kind of sad Sunday silence .  Even the gardens were darkened by overhanging trees which seemed vaguely threatening to me;  occasionally  leopards were seen in those trees, hunting the suburbs for dogs.  Such leopards, the servant of one of my aunts once told me, were really were-creatures and therefore dangerous because they had no fear of people and were particularly fond of the flesh of children.  He was a Kikuyu and thus believed strongly in such things and I believed too, because it seemed quite natural that Nairobi would harbor black horrors behind its sombre hedges.

The coast, by contrast, was all lightness and sun and happy glitter.  We arrived there as eager new residents after the long drive which at that time was still an adventure.  Traffic was low enough that when you passed another car, in a cloud of red dust, everyone waved and sometimes we would stop and exchange news of conditions ahead of us.  Animals large and small crossed the road with insouciant frequency; everything from tiny ground squirrels by the dozens to buck and gazelle of various types, zebra and wildebeest on the Athi Plains as far as the scarp above Hunter’s Lodge, then rhino and elephant in the hot lowlands of the nyika.  The mandatory stops were Kibwezi and Mtito Andei where there was a passable roadhouse; Voi if you needed fuel or felt you couldn’t go any further.

On this occasion we drove across the Causeway and on to Mombasa Island late in the afternoon, our car covered in red dust that also lay thick and gritty in our eyes and throats.  Our first stop was the office of “Uncle” Peter.  This was a courtesy title only; he and “Aunt” Kay were friends of my parents and no relation at all but it was common then for children to address close family friends by familial titles.  The Japanese do it too, and the Australian aborigines.  It’s one of those little social niceties that we have now lost in an age where even very small children call all adults by their given names.

Uncle Peter worked for the government and though I don’t know exactly what he did it must have been reasonably high-ranking because he and Aunt Kay had rather a splendid house on the seafront, next-door-but-one to the Golf Club. 

And it was there, sitting outside his office, in the back of our brand-new albeit dusty Morris Oxford, that I fell in love.  I remember the moment perfectly, though I can’t remember for the life of me exactly where we were.  Somewhere around Treasury Square I should imagine.  My father had gone inside to announce our arrival and while he was there I looked up and saw a coconut palm, heavy with fruit, leaning over the pavement.  This tree, in all its slender elegance, repeated itself in shadow upon a white wall.  And that was it!  That’s all it took!  Something about the tree and the quality of light and the feel of the air pierced my young heart as surely as Cupid’s arrow and skewered it firmly into the sandy soil of the Kenya coast.  Seven decades or so later I remember the moment quite clearly.

We then drove round the seafront where the usual afternoon breeze freshened the humidity.  The grass on the golf course was bright green patched by the sandy bunkers.  Palms framed the large houses up on the cliff, huge baobabs spread their sparse branches below.  The sea was as blue as only the Indian Ocean can be on a fine day.  A large ship in the dove grey and red colours of the Union Castle Line lay just off-shore awaiting the services of the small white pilot boat that bobbed over the waves towards it.  Apart from one or two cars and a couple of golfers the whole expanse before our delighted eyes was devoid of human activity.

Just think, said Uncle Peter. I can walk out on to that course and play golf whenever I like – it hardly costs a thing.

Could you swim, I wondered?  Swimming was new to me and associated with waterholes in the Athi River where you had to watch out for crocodiles.

Not here,  said Uncle Peter.  It was all coral cliffs and no beach. But you could walk round to the ferry and back one way, or to Fort Jesus and back the other way and hardly see a soul.  And there were plenty of good beaches north and south of the island. 

I was to do those walks many times, as child and adult.  The seafront was to become focal to my life; a place to play in the baobab trees and the ruins of the wartime gun emplacements; to drive around for coolness of a Sunday afternoon and watch the bright-coloured Indian families debouch from their small cars; to buy peanuts in cones of newsprint from vendors pushing small carts; to ramble  from end to end while pondering everything from failing relationships to major life-changing decisions;  to swim away the school holidays in the Florida pool and, when it became a night club, to dance away the small hours.  It was here that my beloved island met the sea head-on; beyond lay a world which, back then, I had absolutely no desire ever to see.

We spent our first night in the Manor Hotel.  It was old and a bit fusty, with large and heavy wooden furnishings.  My brother and I went to the first sitting for dinner, the only people in the dining room and the only children in the hotel at all.  The waiters wore the standard uniform of white kanzu and red fez and served us with the kind, slightly irreverent deference with which African servants treated white children in those days.  I remember there were four courses and that we ended with floating puddings which we thought a great novelty.   Perhaps, like bread-and-butter pudding, they’ll make a come-back one day and be all the go in fashionable restaurants. 

That night we slept for the first time under mosquito nets; these had not been necessary in our Nairobi house and we found them strange and a bit claustrophobic when the hotel ayah tucked us in.  Funny to think that for many years after I left Mombasa I was unable to fall asleep easily because I missed the security of a net over me.  Large ceiling fans stirred the air, another novelty.  My parents, all dressed up to dine, came in to bid us goodnight.  Isn’t it exciting?, said my mother looking happier than she had for ages because she  was recovering from a serious illness that had left her thin and gaunt and very nervy.  I thought it was exciting and knew myself already besotted by this new home, though I couldn’t have put my feeling into words.

Next morning I awoke and saw the sunlight glinting through the heavy shutters and, once again, that already-familiar silhouette of the coconut palm with its fronds gently shivering.  The day would be full of new things; a house, a school, a different life.  I don’t remember feeling even the tiniest regret for whatever I had left behind.  I knew I was home.

In the years after that I came to know my island intimately, even to its furthest and least likely corners.  I walked everywhere, to school, to town, to visit friends on the other side of the island.  And where I didn’t walk, I cycled.  It was nothing to us then to cycle all around the island and across the ferry to the south coast or over the bridge to Nyali. I’ve sailed down Kilindini Harbour and up the further reaches of the creekways beyond Port Reitz where even African fishermen didn’t go.  I’ve explored the upper reaches of Tudor Creek, too, in the small and unstable canoe made by my father.  There was a world of adventure for children in those places and nobody told us we shouldn’t seek it out, though the waters were full of sharks, especially around the Kenya Meat Commission and the port.  I’ve swum across from the old Swimming Club to the Mombasa Club and back and cycled through the African townships and the commercial go-down area at Chamgamwe.  I’ve  trapped fish in the mangroves along the edge of Mbaraki and explored the forgotten caves near Fort Jesus.  I’ve walked to town down Cliff Avenue when the Poinciana trees were in full bloom and wandered the streets of the Arab old town where street vendors were generous to children and old women swathed from head to toe in black bui-buis would scold us and tell us to go home.

 Here, the old harbour could be glimpsed through narrow gaps between the pastel houses, busy with dhows in season, a glimpse of an earlier and more romantic epoch.  We learned about this time in school; of conflicts up and down the Zinj coast, of Portuguese adventurers and Arab sultans, of slavers and missionaries and the explorers who ventured into the interior for ivory and the renown of discovering the sources of great rivers.  The names of Speke and Burton, Grant and Thompson, Krapf and Rebmann were as familiar to us as were the names of Columbus and Magellan and Drake to children elsewhere.  There were missionary graves just north of the island and the remains of the old Freretown slave market.  Fort Jesus was a stalwart reminder of past battles; the small mosques dotted around the island a reminder that such battles had ended in compromise. We were taught that Mombasa meant “island of war” and Dar es Salaam meant “haven of peace” and that both had been havens for the pirates who sailed the waters from the Horn of Africa to Zanzibar, long before the slavers came.

I absorbed all this as if it was my birthright but strange to tell, when I learned all these things, it did not occur to me that there was anything extraordinary about the place in which I lived.  I used to sit in the hot classroom at Mombasa Primary School, head on one hand, and dream of places that I considered truly exotic;  Pago Pago,  Rangoon,  Rio di Janeiro, and great, slow-travelling rivers such as the Irrawaddy, the Brahmaputra and the Amazon.  When I pictured pirates they were always walking planks in the Caribbean. Those were the faraway places with strange-sounding names of which I dreamed; it never occurred to me that the Kenya coast was in any way exciting or exotic.  Like children everywhere we played at pirates and at one time our games were centred on an old wrecked boat that we found in the mangroves far up Tudor Creek.  We shouted “ooo aarrhhh” at each other in the accents (or so we thought) of Devon and wore eyepatches and made swords out of timber and made each other walk the plank.  We were always Blackbeard (a film that came out of Hollywood about that time) and never Sinbad.  It was a triumph of culturism over geographical reality; who we were – little colonial Bwanas and Memsaabs – was more powerful with us than where we were.

Looking back like this it can be seen that I had soon learned to take my great love for granted.  And yet I do think that one of the genii of the place had writhen its way into my spirit so that I “belonged” to the island in a way that my parents and other adults could not.  Adults of my own kind, I mean, who had come to Mombasa too old to fall wholly under its influence. They liked it for its easy working hours, its obvious beauties, its pleasant life of clubs and sport and parties and beaches.  I – and I know others who grew up there feel the same – knew something much older and deeper.  It came to me in strange moments but the feeling is impossible to describe though it has something to do with Kundera’s  unbearable lightness of being; a sublimity of soul envoked by a full moon over the sea, the sun shining in a certain way on a white wall, a dusty track between mbati-roofed shacks, the shocking contrast of white sand and green dune-plants and blue water, rain washing the squalid streets down the far end of Salim Road, the elegant stone fretwork of Islamic architecture,  the rattle of the planks on the old Nyali Bridge, the song of the men pulling a ferry across a sun-splashed creek.

And there is a feeling more powerful than all the rest that today, long-exiled, I associate with Mombasa.  It’s a purely personal feeling rather than one which others might share and though it manifests itself in the guise of memory it is not of any one particular memory but rather a synthesis of recollection that stands for a time and a place precious to my soul.  I call it my “red lamp feeling” for want of any more telling description.  There is a room, at that point of darkness which comes just after sundown on the equator, and in it are a mother, a father and two children.  I think they are reading or listening to one of those old fashioned radios with a cloth piece at the front – I can’t quite be sure because, as I say, this is not quite a memory and not quite a feeling but something in-between.  In  that room there is a red-shaded standard lamp whose light shines kindly on them all and is also reflected in a nearby window.  The room has window bars and the general appearance of my childhood home in Kizingo Road; beyond that I recognize and remember nothing.  I have no idea what triggers this feeling/memory today but when it comes it washes over me with indescribable intensity – a sort of hot flush from the past which is at once painfully nostalgic yet deeply comforting.  “This is absolutely the right time and the right place” it seems to say.  I’m an atheist and a rationalist but if I believed in Heaven I would want it to be back there and back then for eternity!

So deep was my attachment to Mombasa that throughout my youth I could not bear to be anywhere else.  I didn’t care much for going on long leave with my parents; the sea trip either way was fun but Europe – and England especially – seemed grey and cold and dreary to me in those years after the war.  Who could find pleasure in bathing in a grey sea where the beach is full of stones, when they had known the soft white sand and coral pools of the Kenya coast?  Who could enjoy the dull and rainy streets smelling of wet wool and the dank garden laurels of London suburbia when they were accustomed to dusty red-brown roads and flame-red poincianas and the beloved silhouette of palm trees? How could anyone LIVE in England, I wondered?  France was a giant gallery of art and architecture intimidating to children, Italy a place of ruins both ancient and modern inhabited by voluble fat women in flowery penziones who fed and minded my brother and me while our parents went out to dine in little cliff top restaurants overlooking the sea.  Well if that’s what they wanted they could do it just as well at Nyali Beach was the way I looked at it then.  All I wanted was to get back home where I belonged.

Even worse was being sent up-country to boarding school.  Again, it was as if all the colour had been taken from my life and I hated it!  I pined and wilted and begged my parents to let me stay and finish my schooling at the coast where the old Loreto Convent seemed to embody the spirit of every such school in every tropical colonial outpost, its deep verandahs shaded by frangipani and Poinciana trees, the  sound of chanting softening the wet and heavy air.  Eventually I got my way; on the day when I was sent home by train, in disgrace, though fearing (justifiably!) the retribution that awaited me all I could think of was that I would soon be back in Mombasa Island’s safe and sunny embrace.

And so the years passed and in my memory we danced them away with no concern for the future.  Dancing was very much part of our lives; we started when young at the Railway Club’s school holiday Wednesday night rock ‘n roll sessions for teenagers , graduating to the Sports Club at New Year and the Sunday night live band out at Port Reitz.  While my parents and their friends danced sedately at the Chini Club we younger folk did the twist on the floor under the stars at Nyali, or at the Sunday tea dances further up the coast, or at private parties on Saturday nights.  Nightclubs opened, seedy and mildly wicked, and we danced there, too.  We danced on New Year’s Eve and at Government House on the Queen’s birthday, and on board ships in the harbor.  We drove to the dances in open cars with the soft wind of the ocean blowing our hair, and back from them late at night on the long, empty roads, spoiled children of Empire who would dance forever as long as they never left the Enchanted Isle.

Yet leave we did, most of us.  The problem with all great loves, whether they be for people or for places, is that they change.  And so do we.  When this happens we either try and accept the changes and grow old together, wrinkles and all.  Or we part and go our separate ways.  When Independence came to Kenya and  Mombasa began to change, not dramatically at first but in small, insidious increments, I knew I couldn’t stay.   The reasons for leaving were all commonsensical but in my heart I felt that a serpent had entered Eden and I and my kind were being cast out and that Eden itself was about to be despoiled. Fanciful, I know, but then love is not a reasonable emotion. 

Sad to say, so disenchanted had I become with my Enchanted Isle that when I finally left I did so without a twinge of sorrow.  All I can remember is driving one last time through to Tudor to say goodbye to a friend and thinking how dull and flat everything seemed on a Sunday afternoon.  The very palm trees that I’d always so loved seemed to droop with lethargy.  I, by contrast, was filled with the vigour of seeking new and larger horizons and I felt quite sorry for those whom I was leaving behind!  It was only later, quite a bit later, that the soft and sweet memories stole over me and I wept for all I had given up, even though I knew that what it was I missed was gone from me forever, stolen by time as well as politics.

In time I learned to love a new land where the beaches, like those of my childhood, go on forever.  True the sand is not quite so white nor the sea quite so brilliantly aquamarine; the coconut palms have been planted and there is no protective line of reef.  Yet still it’s a fine place where I can wander the tideline safely and alone,  and where I can still recapture something of my magical childhood.

Because the essence of your first great love is that you never forget it.  Never, ever, quite manage to tear it from your heart.  In memory, Mombasa is never very far from me and because I have not been back that memory is pristine and preserved in time as perfectly as an insect in amber.I began this story with a song and I’ll end it with another; one that, when it came out, I felt had been especially written about Mombasa.  When I sing it today, it still makes me cry!

Oh island in the sun

Willed to me by my father’s hand

All my days I will sing in praise

Of your forest, waters your shining sand