I am a horticulturist, writer and photographer who lives on Tamborine Mountain, one of the world's beautiful places to live with plenty of sunshine, good rainfall, moderate temperatures, lush rainforest, splendid views of both the ocean to the east and the mountains to the west. I love writing about the place in which I live, in all its moods and seasons. Besides gardening I love good literature and poetry, bushwalking, birdwatching, history, Japanese language and culture, and music of several kinds.
Palms are the graceful dancers of the rainforest, slender stemmed, green fronds swaying to the slightest breeze.
They are found in all types of rainforest except the temperate and the niche they occupy in the biosphere is important. Those great fronds act as fans to cool the temperature around them, the berries nurture birds and small creatures, the balls of hard-packed roots take up little space in the ground, the long stems are efficient conductors of water and nutrients.
This is done through vascular bundles because palms have no bark and no inner rings to mark age in the trunk. These bundles strengthen the stem against strong wind, while the round shape deflects it.
In fact palms are not trees at all but monocots, like lilies, lacking the features of dicots such as trees. When wounded, the outer “bark” does not regrow; when beheaded, new fronds do not form.
In the subtropical rainforests that surround my home, the dominant palm is Archntophoenix cunninghamiana, a very customer than can tolerate quite cold conditions providing there is no hard frost or heavy snow. Heat, it tolerates very well; particularly when coupled with high humidity.
Top: The fruit of the Piccabeen Palm.
Top right: Aerial roots above ground on the stem of the palm improve absorption of water and sunlight while also providing extra stability.
These palms, which we call Piccabeen, the name by which they were known to the indigenous people, grow in all parts of the forest and will do well as solitary specimens in the open, but are seen at their best in deep gullies along water courses and clustered in groves on the flattish bottoms of groves where the water table is high. Here they flourish to the exclusion of most other species, growing high and slender as they reach for the sky.
Lyrebirds and some other species roost in those lofty perches where the fronds cluster at the apex and some birds nest there. Rain washes the bird poo, rich in nutrients, down to the forest floor. Insects are attracted to the summer spikes of tiny, nectar-rich flowers and they, in turn, insects and flowers both, fall to the ground.
Thus enriched, the leaf litter is a rich nursery for the palm seeds that drop there, bright red in the case of the Archontophoenix palms and very ready to germinate. This is how the palm groves form and also why these plants are so readily available in nurseries. The flesh around the single seed is tempting to certain birds and animals but not palatable to humans, and thus the palm is part of the wild banquet that is an essential feature of this particular ecosystem. Other parts of the palm, including the heart for consumption and the fronds for basket-making, were a resource for the indigenous peoples who foraged and hunted among the thickets.
To me, palms make an elegant contrast to the great buttressed rainforest trees and I love to sit on a hillside and look down upon them wherePalms
Palms are the graceful dancers of the rainforest, slender stemmed, green fronds swaying to the slightest breeze.
They are found in all types of rainforest except the temperate and the niche they occupy in the biosphere is important. Those great fronds act as fans to cool the temperature around them, the berries nurture birds and small creatures, the balls of hard-packed roots take up little space in the ground, the long stems are efficient conductors of water and nutrients.
This is done through vascular bundles because palms have no bark and no inner rings to mark age in the trunk. These bundles strengthen the stem against strong wind, while the round shape deflects it.
In fact palms are not trees at all but monocots, like lilies, lacking the features of dicots such as trees. When wounded, the outer “bark” does not regrow; when beheaded, new fronds do not form.
In the subtropical rainforests that surround my home, the dominant palm is Archntophoenix cunninghamiana, a very customer than can tolerate quite cold conditions providing there is no hard frost or heavy snow. Heat, it tolerates very well; particularly when coupled with high humidity.
These palms, which we call Piccabeen, the name by which they were known to the indigenous people, grow in all parts of the forest and will do well as solitary specimens in the open, but are seen at their best in deep gullies along water courses and clustered in groves on the flattish bottoms of groves where the water table is high. Here they flourish to the exclusion of most other species, growing high and slender as they reach for the sky.
Lyrebirds and some other species roost in those lofty perches where the fronds cluster at the apex and some birds nest there. Rain washes the bird poo, rich in nutrients, down to the forest floor. Insects are attracted to the summer spikes of tiny, nectar-rich flowers and they, in turn, insects and flowers both, fall to the ground.
Thus enriched, the leaf litter is a rich nursery for the palm seeds that drop there, bright red in the case of the Archontophoenix palms and very ready to germinate. This is how the palm groves form and also why these plants are so readily available in nurseries. The flesh around the single seed is tempting to certain birds and animals but not palatable to humans, and thus the palm is part of the wild banquet that is an essential feature of this particular ecosystem. Other parts of the palm, including the heart for consumption and the fronds for basket-making, were a resource for the indigenous peoples who foraged and hunted among the thickets.
To me, palms make an elegant contrast to the great buttressed rainforest trees and I love to sit on a hillside and look down upon them where they emerge from the canopy, raising their fronds to the sun, rustling mysteriously, lush with tropical allure. they emerge from the canopy, raising their fronds to the sun, rustling mysteriously, lush with tropical allure.
I have travelled the world’s coastlines and now live in a country of many fine beaches but I have never yet seen beaches more perfect than the Kenya beaches of my childhood.
Of course, as with all my African reminiscences, my mind is harking back to a time as well as a place. A time when I, a child of privilege, had as my backyard a couple of hundred kilometres of exquisite white sand and turquoise sea and sighing coconut palms.
The varied faces of a typical Kenya beach. Photos by Thomas Ackenhausen.
And these beaches were all but deserted, except for a few local fishermen who earned their meagre living there. And, on weekends, the “white” community for whom going to the beach on Sunday – or even Saturday – and any day during the school holidays – was a type of holy ritual. It was our main form of recreation, our temple of pleasure. And we knew we had something special that could be found in few other places on earth.
Of course there are plenty of beaches around the world with sand white as snow, fringed with palms and overlooking an ocean sparkling in more shades of blue than you ever see in a painter’s palette. But what made the Kenya coastline so special was the reef, located a mile or so offshore and stretching from near Malindi in the north to about Shimoni in the south, which protected the beaches from rough seas, big waves and sharks. When the tide was full, we could swim in safety and enjoy a bit of body surfing or just jumping up and down in the modest waves. And when the tide was out….
…Aaahhhh…when the tide was OUT! Then indeed we had a playground full of fascination. For the seascape from shore to reef was a mosaic of coral outcrops and gleaming pools, some shallow, some deep enough to lie in or even swim around a bit. The white sand at the bottom of these pools was pristine apart from a small scattering of shells and little, darting, bright-hued fish. And the occasional crab scuttling from one outcrop to another. There was so much of interest in these pools and in the coral. And a few dangers, too. Moray eels lurked in crevices, sharp of tooth and aggressive to small, inquisitive hands. Sea urchins clung to the hard surface, spines dark and painful if you stepped on them. Which we did, and suffered the consequences when the punctures became infected, as they often did. But apart from these minor irritations, a child – or an adult – could spend the long hours of low tide mucking about in the pools or walking out to the reef or looking for shells which – back in the fifties and early sixties – could still be found there.
The fishermen in their frail-looking outrigger canoes would seek out the biggest and most commercially-valuable shells – the conches and cowries – and sell them to traders or to white folk on the beach, particularly those on holiday from up-country who would take them home as souvenirs. We locals were more blasé, though there were few European homes in Mombasa back then without a giant conch shell lamp! By the time I was in my teens these large shells had become over-harvested and rarely seen but we could still find leopard cowries and take them home and leave them to stink in the garage or on a veranda ledge until the sea-starved dead “dudus” inside had disintegrated or been eaten by ants.
Few of us children were lucky enough to live right by the beach and of course there were no real beaches on the island, except for Tudor Creek, and we didn’t think much of them! Murky, muddy, full of sharks and – it was rumoured – crocodiles. So we were dependent on our parents to take us there, and for most of us this was a Sunday outing. A picnic would be packed and a groundsheet or blanket to sit upon. Sandwiches and perhaps quiche, which we called egg and bacon pie, and fruit. Possibly cake. Never chocolate because it melted in the tropical heat. We kids didn’t care – all we wanted was to get there and stay there for as long as parental tolerance and comfort would allow.
Top: Whitesands Hotel in the 1950s and Bottom: Nyali Beach Hotel about the same time. These were two of the popular beach destinations on the northern beaches, both for up-country holidaymakers and locals looking for a day out.
We were never bored. If the tide was out, we had a thousand pools to play in. If it was in, we swam and played water games. We also built sandcastles. Or drew hopscotch lines. If the grown-ups could be persuaded to play with us there was cricket and rounders, with improvised wickets and bases gathered from the debris beneath the palm trees and casuarinas. The endless imagination of children meant we were never tired of the beach – in the days when reading books, the weekly radio shows and an occasional visit to the cinema were the only forms of entertainment. We were pirates, we were shell seekers, we were castaways building our own palm-thatched shelters. Skinny, sunbrowned, always on the go. And we went for walks, too, both with our parents and alone. It was so safe, back then, on those beaches. You could walk, alone, for miles and in the long distances between the handful of beach entry roads and modest hotels and see only a friendly fisherman, checking his traps.
Fish trap under construction. Photo courtesy of Robin Swift.
Those traps were another source of adventure. Made of sticks and poles and jutting from the tidal zone out into the water they cunningly trapped fish that came in on the tide, leaving them to be picked out at will when the tide went out. We would sometimes help the fishermen catch the worthwhile fish and crustaceans and that was fun too. Sometimes, however, on a particularly high tide, dolphin got trapped there and small shark. Small but still sufficiently toothed to bite off the arm of a fisherman one day, who bled to death before he could be given medical aid. Once this story got around, we kids found the traps even more fascinating!
The Sunday beach expedition was usually a multi-family affair. On longer journeys we would go in convoy. Our favoured beaches were Jadini, in the south, which we believed had the best beach (from there to Diani) and where instead of a picnic we would have lunch in the dining room banda and my parents and friends would have a drink in the bar with Dan and Madeleine who were something of a legend for hospitality. But it was a long haul to Jadini and so our most visited beach was Nyali where the big hotel offered excellent hospitality, the great terrace overlooked the sea and the lido down on the beach provided drinks, snacks and changing rooms for day visitors. As well as an outdoor dance floor. And a raft just offshore. At other times we would go north to Shanzu, owned by my friend Margaret’s parents who were also famed for their hospitality. Or Whitesands, then owned by the Durwood-Browns. These were all casual sort of places with thatched bandas for the guests and a big, open-sided thatched dining room and recreation centre with bar. So simple, so unpretentious, so created for a perfect beach experience. At various times these places offered dancing and Whitesands had a radio that played the Hit Parade on Sunday evenings. It was there I first heard Elvis sing It’s Now and Never and we teenagers were shocked and disappointed that our badboy hearthrrob, fresh from army service, was now singing music of which even our parents approved!
My mother and I on the beach at Jadini, about 1957. Jadini was a long drive from Mombasa Island but the beach strip along Jadini and Diani was one of our favourite destinations on Sundays.
How clearly I recall going home in the car, all passion spent, our skins roughened by sand and salt water, hair stiff with both. Home to hot baths and the modest Sunday night supper of salad with ham or tinned salmon, left ready by the cook before taking his day off. The slight sting of sunburn and the smell of calamine lotion as we crawled under our mosquito nets and fell instantly into the deepest and most satisfying of sleeps.
During school holidays, our greatest desire was to spend all day, every day in the water. At Nyali, or the Swimming Club just over Nyali Bridge, or, more rarely, the south coast beaches close to the Likoni ferry, Twiga or maybe Tiwi. What joy it was when we were old enough to have bikes that could carry us across bridge and ferry to be where we most longed to be. Independent, free, sunbrowned and skinny, needing only a soft drink and a cheese sandwich to get us through the day.
These simple whitewashed and thatched bandas were the typical accommodation of the day, simply furnished but comfortable enough to suit our modest holiday needs back then. And the sea was right at our door. (Photos courtesy of Beaver Shaw).
And then we put away our buckets and spades and our contented innocence and became teenagers for whom the beach had a very different interest. It was the popular place for birthday parties and teenage barbecue dances, scuffing the sand with our bear feet to Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins and, later, The Beatles, as rock and roll gave way to The Twist. We walked along the sand into our first love affairs, shyly holding hands, sneaking away from our parents and sullen when they insisted on knowing where we went. We still swam and frolicked but we were more self-conscious now, aware of our developing bodies, plagued by pimples and periods and embarrassing erections. Soon enough we had steady boyfriends and girlfriends and the boys had cars and it was down by the beach, or on the beach, that we lost our virginity, some of us.
Top: Myself on the beach at the Mombasa Swimming Club when I was fifteen. This was on the seaward side when you crossed over Nyali Bridge; a tiny, simple little building and a rather indifferent beach facing across the harbour to the Old Town. Its main attraction was that we could reach it easily on our bikes! Bottom: A year later and I’m on Nyali Beach with my BF Val Wheeler. We’d go to the beach with our boyfriends on Saturdays, change our clothes and shower at the beachfront Lido and then dance to a live band on the terrace of the Nyali Beach Hotel on the cliff above.
And then we were young adults and still the beach was our main weekend playground. We ventured further afield, north to Malindi and lovely Watamu, south to Shimoni which was all-but deserted in those days, always looking for a new and perfect and empty stretch of pristine sand. We took our picnic rugs and our simple food and often stopped in the little villages for cool madafu, watching while an obliging local cut the top off the coconut with a panga. We took along gear for spearfishing now, and hauled tanks for scuba diving, no longer satisfied just to stay within the protection of the reef but going into the blue deep beyond, where the bombies were.
There were only a dozen or so beachside hotels on the north and south coast in those days and they offered reasonable access off the main road but everywhere else you could only get to the water over rough sand tracks, the sand itself red or white depending on where you were, often so deep that we had to get out and help push each other’s cars through it. Old cars were all we young folk could afford – Morris Minors and Ford Prefects and battered Peugeots and Beetles with their engines at the back. No café SUVs for us! Our tyres were worn, our radiators prone to overheating and yet we got through. Lured by the siren song of turquoise water and the white waves breaking on the distant reef and a perfect day in the paradise that was soon to be lost to us.
For by the time we were taking our own children down to the sea on a Sunday, things were changing. The beaches, once so safe, were no longer places where we could wander alone. In the post-Independence boom more and more hotels were built, of much greater sophistication, and new people from around the world came to stay in them and new people from up-country came to work in them and today there are highways and bridges and buildings and shops and a degree of commercialisation that we could never have imagined, when we were young. There are camels on the beach, now. And vendors of tourist tat. And posh lounge chairs under the palms.
Yet the sand and the sea and the reef remain the same and children still play there, thrilled by what once thrilled the children of my generation. They have so much more than we ever had, in a material sense, and many virtual worlds at their command, so perhaps to them the beach is just one of many pleasurable experiences. Whereas for us, it was everything.
(I wish to acknowledge the photos used here of Thomas Ackenhausen, Robin Swift, Kevin Costa and Beaver Shaw, all contributors to the Kenya Friends Reunited Facebook site – without their photos this story would not be nearly so appealing. Thank you all).
The Oceanic Hotel, built on the cliff ovedrlookiing the Mombasa seafront, with a Union Castle ship coming through the malango and into Kilindini Harbour. The hotel, long gone now, was built in the late 1950s and I used to play in the scaffolding. My home was nearby.
I was very young when I first went to live in Mombasa but I still remember my first impression of the seafront.
We had moved down from Nairobi which to my child’s mind seemed a dark place in those days, shadowed by Mau Mau and that dreariness that often seemed to imbue this city built on swamp and plain with the dark bulk of the Ngong Hills looming nearby.
Mombasa, by contrast, was all sunlight and sparkle and nowhere did it shine more brightly than on the narrow strip that stretched from the Golf Club to the Likoni Ferry; a mere shelf between cliff and ocean. Most of it covered with the smooth green of the golf course, coconut palms streaming their fronds in the sea breeze and, at the Kilindini end, the solidly reassuring bulk of baobab trees.
My home was not far away and thus the seafront was a ready playground for myself and friends. Something was always going on there. Ships came into Kilindini Harbour from all parts of the world, bringing a whiff of faraway places. Or else they went out again, the little white pilot boar bobbing behind, ready to take off the pilot once the malango had been safely passaged. The malango was the gap in the reef and through it came not only ships but also sharks, to make the harbour a dangerous place to swim, though it didn’t stop those of us who sailed small boats out from the Mombasa Yacht Club venturing upon its narrow waters. So narrow that when a large ship came down the creek it appeared to be steaming through the landscape when you glimpsed the funnels from a distance. I remember seeing the Ark Royal and, later, an even larger American aircraft carrier come into harbour and it was a fine sight – breathtaking because you wondered – hoped even! – if it would get stuck in the shallow beds of coral that lay either side of the creek entrance or, even worse, hit the high cliff bank at Likoni.
Most things of worth or interest entered Mombasa that way, in those days and if there was nothing else to do it was always worth going down to Ras Serani Drive to wave at the ships. On a couple of memorable occasions we waited excitedly down by the water, or up on the high cliffs where the Oceanic was built, to watch the Royal Yacht Britannia sail in bringing her royal cargo. We loyal little white children of Empire, Union Jacks in sticky hands, greeted the visitors with enthusiasm but then so did our parents and others of Her Majesty’s subjects whether white, brown or black. Innocent days! During Princess Margaret’s 1956 visit a splendid fireworks display was organised on the southern side of the creek. Alas, something went wrong and after a few preliminary rockets and Catherine wheels the whole lot went up in one big whizzbang, including the set-piece of Her Royal Highness’ head over which the firework makers had laboured lovingly and long. It was a big disappointment to the authorities but we kids thought it was great fun, especially as the event nearly turned into an even worse disaster when grass along the Likoni clifftop caught on fire and had to be put out by the fire brigade.
Besides the ships, there was the sea itself. While the coasts north and south of the island were protected by the long, white reef that prevented large waves from breaking on the beaches, the rough, brown coral cliffs on Mombasa’s ocean side were constantly battered by an unfettered ocean that, at times, could become very rough indeed. This was a matter of great excitement to children and we would spend hours watching the bigger waves as they surged over the ragged coral and sent their wild white spray high into the air. Or, the more daring among us would descend the flesh-tearing rocks into Glassy Cove, so named for the thousands of brightly coloured pebbles that surged in and out with the tide. These were the sea-smoothed remains of a long-lost cargo of bottles, precious to us as jewells, and I have written about this cove elsewhere, in the story “C.J..” Here we would play in the cave and wait for the incoming tide, running out to touch the edge of the water when it surged backwards, then racing the waves back to higher and still higher ground, knowing we dared not slip and either slash ourselves on the jagged coral or be sucked out into the ocean.
What freedom children had then! The seafront, when one thinks back, offered its share of hazards but no parent forbade us to play there and we would be gone for hours without supervision. And none of us came to any harm, that I can recall. Those of us who lived locally in the area bounded by Cliff Avenue, Kizingo Road and the smaller streets roundabout had a secret path down to the front which in itself was a source of pleasure for it was bounded by Lucky Bean trees and there was a house to one side, believed by us to be haunted and with a very large and romantically overgrown garden. We strung the hard little red seeds into necklaces and played in the garden, when its fierce caretaker wasn’t about. In the late ‘50s my friends and I formed a small gang and we would waylay other children found using “our” path and take them prisoner and tie them to trees until anguished ayahs or mothers came looking for them.
Glassy Cove and other clefts in the cliff face offered another opportunity at low tide – golf balls. On the seaward side of the golf links (as we called them then) and not far from the clubhouse, golfers had to go close to the water’s edge and drive across an indentation in the cliffs. Very often their balls didn’t make it safely across and dropped short instead, to roll down the decline into Glassy Cove. We kids would race the young African caddies to retrieve these balls and then sell them back to the golfers. Some of whom were our parents. My father, for one, strongly objected to this and when I brought a couple home one day, refused to pay me. He was greatly chagrined when I promptly went down to the Golf Club and found another client! It was rather mean of us, really, because the caddies probably needed the money more than we did; our meagre pocket money may not have gone far in buying toys and sweets and comics but at least we were well housed and fed!
Here and there along the font were the remains of fortifications and gun emplacements, reminders of the two world wars in which Mombasa had been vulnerable to German attack. At the time of which I am writing the second of those wars was not long behind us and the concrete platforms and bunkers made good places to play, or just sit and watch the sea. They were subject to a bit of graffiti even in those days, and the first time I ever saw the word “fuck” it was scrawled on one of those pocked grey walls. I didn’t know what it meant but knew, by some instinct, that it was not a word I could go round repeating. Little did we guess that it would one day become a common word in the vocabulary of primary school children and just about everyone else!
A strange African took possession of one of these old gun emplacements for a while and made it into a home. He was hideous, toothless and quite mad and we children were very frightened of him because when we approached what we considered, after all, was OUR territory he would chase us away, shouting incomprehensible things. Children can be cruel little beasts and it became our great delight for a while to tease this poor creature, whom we inevitably nicknamed Majinga. He used to feed himself by going down among the rock pools at low tide and picking things out of the pools – tiny shellfish and sea slugs and such. Seaweed, too. Madness made him incontinent and he turned the gun emplacement into a latrine, filthy and stinking, until at last some authority came and took him away. “To Mathari”, we children whispered in awe, knowing that this was the name of the asylum in Nairobi where lunatics were housed.
Another seafront character was the man who used to sell peanuts from his hamali cart, mostly to those waiting for the ferry to Likoni. He was an Afro-Arab – what we wazungu used to call a “Shirazi” or “Shirry” for short – dressed usually in a red-and-white check kikoi and a white embroidered cap. He always had a kind word for children as he dished out his peanuts into cones made from newspaper pages. The taste of those “nuts” – which we called njugu but are now, I believe, called kajanga, rich in salt and oil, remains in my tongue’s memory and all the more tasty for being forbidden – parents considered this cheery entrepreneur dirty and his peanuts unhygienic – but we bought them surreptitiously and ate them with relish!
By far the biggest attraction on the seafront during the 1950s, for children anyway, was the Florida Swimming Pool. For those of us who lived on the island this provided the only safe swimming and during the school holidays, when we couldn’t get out to the north and south coast beaches, we would spend long hours here. Free, mostly, from adult supervision. The long seawater pool was filled through the simple expedient of opening two sluice gates set low in the thick wall that divided the pull from the ocean. So it was rather like swimming in the sea, complete with the odd small fish or bits of seaweed. I saw my first seahorse here, floating serenely in the deep end and there were always stories about sharks being washed over the seawall on very high tides, though of course even if this had been possible any such creature would have been instantly visible from the pool surrounds! We would spend hours in that pool, as only children can. In between swims we would lie around the edge or clamber on to the seawall where we could watch the waves break. A game evolved by which we older kids – and I’m talking eleven and twelve-year-olds here – would dare each other to jump into the ocean and wait for a wave to carry us back near enough to grab the wall and pull ourselves up and over. Only the bolder among us did this, and the best swimmers. It was said that a couple of boys bolder than all the rest had actually gone out through the sluice gates when they were opened (which happened once a day) and then swum back in again but, like the shark story, the wisdom of age has taught me that this oft-repeated tale is probably not true. Most of us were pretty handy little swimmers, though, equally at home in pool or ocean.
The Florida had two spring boards at the deep end of the pool which provided us with endless fun and those of us who went on to become notable divers at our up-country boarding schools learned our skills here. They were excellent boards with good length and plenty of bounce, covered in a rough sort of coir matting. Even greater thrills were provided by the diving platform which had, from memory, four levels (though it could have been five – not sure, now). This served as a rite of passage for young pool-goers: we would start on the lowest platform and work our way up to the high board as fast as our ability – and our courage – would allow. Some never made it but those of us who did were as triumphant as Olympians, grinning down at the lesser mortals before plunging, bodies stretched and arms extended, to the green depths below. The top board seemed very high to me then though it was probably not as high as my child’s eyes perceived it; certainly not as high as the top board of the diving platform at the high school swimming pool to which I graduated at the age of twelve. High enough, though, to permit jack knifing and swallow diving and a double (but not triple) somersault. How I – and others – worked on our diving once we’d got the hang of it. For two years, every holiday, my friends and I would do little else. We brought to diving that single-minded concentration which only children can bring to any new activity until – like jacks and hopscotch and other passions the diving craze gave way to some other and equally impassioned interest.
A boy was killed one day, diving from that top board. A slight boy with sun-streaked blond hair who would have grown into a handsome man had he lived. During the times when the pool was being emptied and filled a sign would be placed on the diving platform steps, forbidding us to dive. Of course, we ignored it and it became another rite of passage that when the caretaker’s back was turned we would sneak up on to the boards and practice our skills in shallow water. The trick was to flick your body upwards immediately it touched the surface, arms extended and fingers flexed ready to bend upwards too. Surprisingly, when one looks back, we managed to do this successfully time after time though I remember the dry-mouthed fear of it and the relief when each dangerous dive was safely completed.
On that terrible day I was in the changing rooms when it happened and remember being furious that others had seen the accident and I had not. I soon learned the details, though, for children are gory little beasts. I heard about the neck that snapped with a sound audible to those already in the half-filled pool, and the blood and brains that floated to the surface. None of it true, of course. In this age of ever-ready counselling it’s hard for those raised in a different time and place and social code to understand how little this affected us emotionally, except as a subject of gossip. The only “counselling” we got was a sharp warning from parents and teachers as to what happens when you disobey rules set in place for your own good. Needless to say, the diving board steps were more closely guarded after that and as far as I know nobody ever dived into the half-filled pool again – but then this may have coincided with my being sent away to boarding school, an improved ability to get to the beaches in the school holidays and, not so long after, the closing of the pool.
The Florida pool, in the late 1950s or possibly early ’60s. You can see my parents’ house a couple of streets back from the top of the cliff top. Also part of the golf course, across from the pool. A great playground for children of that era who lived and went to school nearby.
The era of “going down to the Florida” passed, as all such childhood phases pass, to morph into a very different Florida experience when the place was turned into a nightclub. This set out to be a stylish place and for a while, when I was in my late teens, it seemed to have taken on all the glamour of those nightclubs I’d seen in films of the ‘30s and ‘40s: smoky dimness lit only by red-shaded table lamps, a small and crowded dancefloor, women in cocktail dresses, palms in pots, live jazz and torch songs, an atmosphere imbued with the musky perfume of forbidden delight. Here, in the sinful hours after midnight, when respectable people were abed, you might see men dancing with other men’s wives and women holding hands under the table with other women’s husbands. Here you could rub shoulders with shady characters whom you would not acknowledge in daylight. Here you might say things that could only be whispered anywhere else.
“I know…a dark…secluded place
A place…where no-one…knows you face
A glass…of wine…a swift embrace
It’s called…Hernando’s Hideaway. (Ole!)
So they had sung, to a tango beat, not so many years before my own time on the dance floor of youth. And, to me, it described the Florida Night Club quite perfectly. Alas, it became steadily sleazier in the years following Independence as the European patrons took flight and newer, smarter places took its place. But the dear old Florida did not fade away and, after several new beginnings, is today a fashionable restaurant as befits its splendid position on the seafront.
Ahhhh, the seafront. How its soft sea breezes sing forever in my memory. In that magic period just before and after Independence when I and my friends were in full hormonal bloom at a time when doing “it” was nominally forbidden outside marriage, the seafront became our main trysting place. We could sit and neck in the gun emplacements, or fondle each other in the steamy backseats of our Volkswagens and old Peugeots. Many a woman of my age lost her virginity beneath the baobab trees or on the grassy parking areas facing the sea. Sex then was softened and sweetened by romance –we knew all the love songs by heart and they underscored the lovely clichés of our environment – the sound of the waves, the moonlit pathway over the water, the swaying palm trees, the humid air so conducive to passion. Few young people have ever been quite so blessed.
Yet this idyll, too, did not last. As the stringencies of British rule were relaxed crime became more prevalent – and more dangerous. Petty pilfering and house breaking gave way to serious assault and even murder. A girl I knew was raped on the seafront by five men, one of them a taxi driver, and her boyfriend savagely beaten. No longer would the seafront offer a safe and romantic haven for lovers.
Yet in daylight hours the dear old seafront remained a place for promenade and pleasure as well as one of the world’s most delightfully-located golf courses. In those far off days it was a quiet place during the week with little traffic, but on weekends it drew the people of the island from their hot houses; not just the comparatively small European population but Indians, also, and on Sundays it resembled the marine parade at Bombay-sorry-Mumbai. Africans back then, unless in domestic service, lived mostly on the further and landward side of the island and couldn’t afford cars. Nor were they enthralled by the ocean. Indians, however, could drive there – and did. In fact it was a standard joke among Europeans as to how many Indians could fit into a Morris Minor!
Rather a cruel joke, really, reflective of the attitude felt by some Europeans towards those with browner skins and different customs. Never mind that they provided the community with its groceries and most other commodities, and were the major philanthropists, too. I can see, looking back, what a relief it must have been for most of those Indians – Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsees, Catholic Goans – to escape from their small, crowded, stiflingly hot flats for just a few hours each week to enjoy the cool breezes that came from “their” ocean. In any case, the bright saris and salwar kameez of the women added a touch of colour to the generally sportive and cheerful atmosphere that was the Mombasa seafront when everyone was out and about. It reminded us that we were all living in an exotic and generally happy place even though it lay on the edge of a huge, dark and often frightening continent. So much more exciting and spicy than life in Surbiton or Wolverhampton – or even Delhi – on a Sunday afternoon!
When I think of the Mombasa seafront I’m reminded of how simple were our pleasures back then. To have a car to take us for a Sunday drive and a bit of a promenade along a lovely seashore where we might meet friends and stop for a chat; where there was space for children to run around and dogs to frolic; where we might buy a cone of peanuts or an ice cream, looking forward to an evening of music and perhaps a play on the radio, or a curry from the Elias Hotel or fish and chips from the Rocco because it was the cook’s night off. Would people today be content with such modest pleasures, I wonder? In this age of non-stop digital self-gratification? Probably not, yet the Mombasa seafront endures as a place to walk and talk and admire the view.
It’s even livelier today, and much more crowded. A multi-cultural horde gathers there on weekends – and even weekday evenings – to enjoy what we used to enjoy yet with many additions. Music blares from car speakers, today’s pleasure seekers can buy a wide assortment of things to eat and drink, tourist “attractions” abound. There is a certain tattiness replacing the pristine expanse of grass that used to be. Gone forever are the silent sunsets of my memory, but for a new generation in a new age the dear old seafront is still a wonderful place to be.
The siafu came, like all true horrors, at midnight.
They came stealthily as they always do, determined of purpose. The leaders made their choice and the long columns followed, obedient as automatons, the scouts ahead and to the side, the stalwart marshals vigilant along the side of each column, keeping the foot soldiers in line. There would have been several columns. I didn’t see this for myself but knew it to be so because I had witnessed these sudden, forced marches before and, though well aware of their deadliness, had teased and provoked and dropped obstacles in their path, gleefully and fearfully watching the seething mass that soon sorted itself into order and marched on, over the bodies of comrades. . Overcoming everything. Leaving me awed at such sacrificial resolve.
I was the giant, so immensely huge by comparison that they would barely have been aware of my existence. I could destroy them, like a god, but while I had the size, they had the numbers and should I for any reason fall they would swiftly discover me to be no deity but mere flesh, and devour me.
On that night the siafu came I was asleep in my bed, in our solid-walled house of cream palnted coral block and terra cotta tiled roof in Kizingo Road, on the seaward side of Mombasa. Across from us was a grassy vlei and beyond that a collection of small cottages separated by narrow laneways. These were known collectively as the bandas and they housed lower-ranking white employees of the City Council, many of them of South African origin. These bungalows were tiny, two-bedroomed and hot, with kitchens out the back to be fire-safe, joined to the main house by narrow covered walkways. There were no ceilings below the thatched roofs and geckos hunted along the beams while snakes and rodents made homes in the straw. Those today who think all the colonial white bwanas and memsaabs lived in luxury should be taken back in time to live for a few nights in one of the bandas.
I had playmates living there and so spent some after school hours chalking out hopscotch squares on the melting black tarmac and throwing balls against the mud-and-wattle walls. One of my favourite activities was to visit a couple known as Aunty Bertha and Oupa and in the strange way that some children attach themselves to adult oddities, so I became enamoured of this couple, so very different from my parents and their friends. Aunty Bertha was a large, fat, jolly woman and Oupa was her father, an immensely old (to me) man who rarely seemed to stir from his armchair. They spoke mostly Afrikaans, at least to each other, and his English was poor or else, as was the way then of elderly Afrikaners, spoken grudgingly.
Aunty Bertha loved children and always had sweeties for us. They kept no servant – unheard of! – and she did her own baking so that we could be sure of gingerbread and sugary biscuits. She kept bottles of Vimto for us in the old, noisy frig and had a forlorn monkey on a chain in the tiny baked-earth yard whose main amusement was to leap out at passing children, teeth bared. We could not play with him but could instead fondle and throw balls for the sweet-natured golden cocker spaniel who was Bertha’s darling. She had never been married and this dog, Meisie, was the object of all her maternal affection. She had a heart as big as her body, did Aunty Bertha and all the time in the world for the neighbourhood children whose own, more affluent parents were usually either at work or at the club.
The old man would watch us play and listen to us prattle without saying much but we always assumed his presence was benign and, as he did not engage with us, we ignored him. He, too, was very fond of the dog and would take it on his lap and feed it little treats – and as a result the dog was, like its mistress, very fat.
It was to this modest household, on one dark night in, I think, 1957, that the siafu, in the inscrutable way of marching ants, directed their attack.
It was all too well known in the Kenya of those days that once the safari ants went on the march, and your house was in their way, then all you could do was get out. Africans, in their village huts, had long known this but a traditional hut only takes minutes to clean out and you can flee to a safe distance and wait while they trail relentlessly through and go on their way. For the white folk and Indians, however, there was rarely enough time to remove everything except all foodstuff not in tins and as much clothing as possible.
Because the ants would consume everything except metal, stone and hard timber. Soft fabric on furniture, clothing, bed linen, paper, carpeting, shoe leather and every kind of foodstuff could be chewed to pieces or totally gobbled up by those savage mandibles.
Siafu invasions of urban areas were rare. We did not live in daily fear of them. But we knew they could happen, had seen them happen to others and had heard the stories – no doubt wildly exaggerated and the stuff of myth but – as I was to learn that night – sometimes true.
These ants of the Dorylus genus were indomitable. They marched in their millions and nothing except wide water or fire would stop them. Usually when they were spotted nearing houses or shops there would be a concerted community effort to deflect them – chemicals would be sprayed on them, water would be blasted at them through hoses and though millions would die, millions more marched over them towards their mysteriously-determined goal. Mysterious to humans, that is.
In the bush, one often came upon these columns which seemed to go on forever, consuming anything in their path such as vegetation, baby birds and young creatures too weak to run. All things that could run, from bush mice to elephants, got out of their way. But in this environment the siafu played their part in the natural way of things and no doubt it was a useful one. It was only in the urban environment that they became a menace.
Houses like my own were better able to stand up to ant attacks but the Bandas, only a step up from African huts, were very vulnerable. Full of nooks and crannies and entryways and the walls that ended just short of the thatched roof so that the air could move through and keep the place cool.
When the ants marched during the day they would usually be spotted well in advance and evasive action taken. Or a line of fire lit to deter them, though it had to be continuous and wide or else the siafu would just march through across the bodies of their frizzled comrades. But when they came at night the chances of detection were minimal.
As was the case that night, of which I write after nearly seventy years, when the siafu came to the Bandas and, of all the little houses there, chose to invade the home of Aunty Bertha and her father.
We heard the shrieks and shouts. Even from our house, on the other side of the vlei , we heard them and woke. Closer neighbours crowded the little laneways and some rushed in to help the stricken couple while others checked the lines of ants to see if their own houses were in danger. The fire brigade was called. And in this white residential area, the live-in servants emerged from their quarters and gathered in small groups, speculating and sending runners to find out what was going on. Soon the dread word siafu was whispered around and my father, deciding this was not his affair, ordered us all back to bed.
But I didn’t go. I was twelve and curious. So was one of my friends who lived across the road. Together we sneaked out of our homes and across the grassy open space to where the action was. There were so many people milling around that we could not get very close, but close enough that we could see Aunty Bertha and Oupa, wrapped in sheets, being ushed into a car, and that big, kindly woman dishevelled and in tears, arguing with those assisting her. She was, I learned the next day, desperately trying to tell them something, and to get back into the house. And they were just as desperately trying to urge her away.
I could see a wide pathway that had been left between the roadway and the house and along it flowed a relentless river of ants which was, in the next minute, sprayed by the fire hose. Other hoses were being sprayed on the house. Here and there firemen and a mixed crowd of Africans and Europeans were beating – rather uselessly – at other ant columns, using brooms and sticks and even hippo-hide whips. The lights of the fire engine whirled and made everything glow eerily. Torches bobbed. I heard men discussing the possibility of lighting a fire line and deciding it was too dangerous in that close environment of thatched homes. It was the kind of chaotic drama that kids love.
By this time we knew the bones of it. The siafu had come and invaded the little house of Aunty Bertha and her father. They had woken only when the ants were upon them, biting them, covering everything. A horror too terrible to think about. Overweight, aged and slow, it had taken them a while to yell for neighbours and get out of the house – but they had done so and, though shocked and badly bitten, would survive.
“The ants were all in her hair,” I heard a woman say, and I shuddered. “All over and…you know…up in every part of her”. I envisaged this and shuddered again – fascinated as well as appalled.
Nobody knew quite what to do in such a situation and it was decided that the stricken couple, beating at their bodies and in great distress and pain, should be taken to hospital. But, good neighbours that they were, nobody wanted to use their own car for fear of filling it with ants, for the bite of one siafu is very painful, as I had long since learned to my cost, along with other overly-curious children. The bit of many is true agony.
Later, my mother told me, a solution of a kind was found and the poor old couple was liberally sprayed with DDT, using the little barrelled flit guns that were found in every home, our only defence against the mosquitoes and other annoying insects which bedevilled the African night. The chief of the fire brigade sent a departmental vehicle to take Bertha and Oupa to the hospital – but still she protested and struggled back towards the house.
And then I could hear…we could all hear…what she had been hearing. The long, dreadful howl of a dog. A dog in agony. A dog in terror. A dog abandoned. Poor Meisie was in the house. People do strange things in time of panic. Aunty Bertha, from sheer force of habit, had locked the door when she left the house! And in all the beating and the fumbling of clothing and the frenzied attempts to rid herself of the biting ants, she could not find the key!
When this was conveyed to those standing by, there was talk of breaking down the door, or smashing a window. But the ants were everywhere around the house as well as inside it, thick on the ground and up the walls, wreaking havoc on the thatch, a seething and malignant dark mass. Nobody would be foolish enough to try and rescue a dog.
The firemen were urged to spray the door and try to break it down so that Meisie might be able to rush out but they would not do it – their remit was to kill ants but not damage property, even if the owner was begging for it. And really, what good could it do? Already the dreadful shrieking – so appallingly different from any dog howl that we had ever heard – was muting to faint whimpers. And then silence.
My friend and I sneaked back home and I lay in bed, deeply distressed and sleepless. I longed to tell my parents, next morning, what I’d seen and heard but didn’t dare. However they soon learned about Meisie and it was a great relief that I could now share my misery with them. We hugged our own dogs closer and wondered aloud what we would do if such an awful fate had befallen them.
My mother and other members of the East African Women’s League visited the hospital with food and other comforts.
“Bertha is very brave,” she told me. “But she blames herself terribly for leaving her dog behind.” The two women had never spoken before and my mother was gratified – and very surprised – to learn that in one household, at least, I was considered a “lovely little girl.” Dear Bertha and her kind heart, no other adult had ever described me thus!
It was a week before Aunty Bertha and Oupa were released from hospital. In that time their house had been thoroughly cleaned and replacements found for soft furnishings that had eaten by the ants. They had not owned much and most of what they had was consumed or damaged so badly it had to be thrown away. Pots and pans and china remained, as did the frig and the stove and the water filter. The old man’s pipe was intact along with the tobacco tin. Somebody had taken away the little skeleton which was all that had been left of pretty Meisie, with her soft floppy ears and lively eyes.
The ants had disappeared as silently and mysteriously as they had arrived.
Charlie, the Vervet monkey, had survived. His shrieks were one of the first things to attract attention to the unfolding threat and a neighbour had rushed into the yard and freed him. For which act of mercy he was rewarded by a severe bite, requiring several painful rabies injections!
Somebody gave Aunty Bertha another dog; another golden cocker spaniel. I don’t know how she really felt about that, but she accepted it.
I, along with the other neighbourhood kids, grew up and moved away. But for years I had nightmares about swarming ants and, as you can see, the sound of that little dog’s dying haunts me to this day.
My parents in our house in Kizingo Road, getting ready for their usual Christmas morning Pimms party. This was taken not long after the night of the siafu invasion, which took place only a short distance away. And no, that’s not the family bath in the left hand corner, it’s the ice tub!
Teenagers, as those of my generation know, were invented sometime around the mid –to-late 1950s. There weren’t any before then – just children who became adolescents who then made the sudden leap into official adulthood at twenty-one. No matter if you had been out to work since the age of fourteen and had a driver’s licence– you weren’t taken seriously as a fully-fledged member of human society until you were given the key of the parental door. Unless, of course, you were silly enough to have got married – as many of us did for the very reason that it gave us adult status.
Teenagers were invented in America, like just about anything else back then, and the idea soon crossed the Atlantic to hybridise into sub-cults like Teddy Boys and, a bit later, Mods and Rockers. Young men slicked back their hair into duck tails and grew sideburns. They dressed in drainpipe trousers and draped jackets. Girls bound their hair into pony tails or combed it up into “beehives. THEY went forth either in a frou-frou of full skirt and starched petticoat, or else pencil-tight skirts or pedal-pushers, feet shod in bobby socks and flats or stiletto heels. Rock and roll ruled the airwaves, prime time TV programs were dedicated to “pop” music, records went vinyl and society suddenly discovered that the youth market was a goldmine because – hey! – for the first time in history kids had money to spend!
All this reached Kenya rather late. When Elvis was warning people to keep off his blue suede shoes most white Kenyans between the ages of, say, 13 and 18, were still schoolchildren following the same pursuits that their parents had followed before them. Even if we’d left school our leisure time was still influenced by the activities of the previous generation and we inhabited that uncomfortable no-man’s land between childhood and adulthood, where little account was taken of our adolescent desires.
Not so bad if you lived in the country because there you had horses and could shoot things or go camping or tear around the bush tracks, unlicensed, in a Landrover. For townies, however, the school holidays and weekends could be dreadfully dull. You couldn’t be forever playing tennis or Monopoly. Those lucky enough to live at the coast had, at least, the beach for amusement. But even that offered little amusement when evening fell and you were too old to go to bed early but too young to go dancing at the Sports Club, or to the cinema without a chaperone.
However, by the time Elvis had changed his tune and was out of the army singing It’s Now or Never things in Kenya had changed too and the cult of teenagehood was well and truly established. Suddenly those of us born during or at the end of World War 11 found ourselves with a collective identity and parents with the time, money (comparatively speaking) and social awareness to indulge us. In Mombasa this new recognition manifested itself mainly in the introduction of special “teenage dances” every Wednesday evening during the school holidays.
These were run by the East African Women’s League which was very brave of that ultra-respectable organisation because supervising a bunch of youngsters with their hormones running wild and hell-bent on making whoopee is not for the faint-hearted. As we all know, the EAWL was formed of doughty gels up to anything from scaring off a rampaging lion to executing the most exquisite of embroidery stitches so those who volunteered to supervise the teenage dances were obviously made of stern stuff. They had to be youthful enough, or at least youthfully aware enough, to let us have plenty of fun while at the same time able to command sufficient respect to prevent excessive behaviour such as drinking, fighting or having sex behind the cricket screen. As far as the first two were concerned, they were generally successful.
The dances were held in the Railway Club. This was centrally located at Mbaraki and its membership was tolerant enough to allow we rock and rolling youngsters to take over the joint for one night a week, eight weeks a year. Such a thing would have been inconceivable at the Mombasa Club and even the popular Sports Club was obviously not prepared to yield up its wonderful sprung dance floor to the juvenile brigade. From memory we paid a small fee though this could hardly have covered the cost of the excellent and youthful live band that could play everything from early jive to the latest pop tunes to foxtrots and sambas. In truth we were a lucky lot – we Mombasa kids of the late fifties and sixties, to have had all this laid on for our delight.
Yet to this day I still shudder at the memory of my first teenage dance. I was only thirteen at the time and still something of a tomboy. My only experience of dancing, apart from ballet, was the obligatory ballroom lessons given weekly at our Nairobi school and some clumsy attempts to practice my steps at the Saturday night hops held in our boarding house. There, of course, girls danced with girls and we younger oiks were barely tolerated on the common-room dance floor by our seniors.
Timid is hardly the word to describe my feelings at my first public dance. Terrified would be more like it. I’d only gone there at the command of my mother, who was one of the regular chaperones at the teenage dances and, indeed, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the whole idea. She was also among the most popular with the kids, being herself quite young, pretty, fashionably-dressed and easy-going of temperament. This latter quality meant that she was inclined to spend more time sipping cocktails and gossiping with the other chaperones, or any stray member of The Railway Club foolish enough to risk the bar on teenage dance nights, than keeping an eye on her charges.
In general, my mother was not a natural habituee of the Railway Club and was usually to be found at the Mombasa Club or, in younger days, at The Sports Club. But she was an affable soul who could chat as easily with engine drivers’ wives as she could with the old codgers at the “Chini” Club across town. “Oh good, your Mum’s on duty”, the other kids used to say to me, knowing that our activities would not be overlooked too scrupulously and the smoochy “lights-out” period that ended every dance could be extended.
Not all the EAWL women were so sympathetic. On one occasion a certain prominent committee member with a spurious double-barrelled name and an even more spurious posh accent (cruelly mimicked by my mamma to amuse friends and family!) opened the night’s events by pleading with us to “why not enjoy yourselves gels and boys with some naice quicksteps and waltzes instead of all that horrible rock and roll” and instructing the band to play her kind of music. Some of the older boys – men, really – objected strenuously and threatened to go home. The whole future of the teenage dances hung in the balance and Mrs Double-Barrel reluctantly yielded – but spent the whole night patrolling the dance floor like a sergeant-major and forcibly separating any couples who got too close during “lights out”. “Silly bitch”, said my mother to my father, in my hearing, voicing a sentiment which no teenager of my day would have dared say aloud. And so, thanks to my mother and the other younger and more “with-it” supervisors, the dances continued – a highlight of every school holiday.
Still, at that first dance, I was far from considering it a highlight and was furious with my mother for making me go. In truth, I was still too young. Only one or two of my friends were there, under similar duress, and similarly dressed in childish clothes. I wore, I remember with embarrassment, a white broderie-anglaise blouse buttoned to the throat and a flared yellow skirt with white ricrac round the hem. No starched petticoat to fill it out; it just hung in dull, chaste folds from the waistband without even a belt to make it look a bit more grown-up. Worse still, I wore white socks! True, this was the age of the bobby soxer, but that particular dress code had never really caught on in Kenya and all the older girls wore stiletto heels. I don’t remember the shoes I wore and only hope they weren’t those Bata sandals with little bits cut out of the toes! Or were they Clarkes?
When you walked into the Railway Club there were the lavatories on the right and then the bar area and the main club room on the left, which was where we danced. Outside was a patio overlooking the sports field. Around the room, wooden chairs were arranged. Here, on these wooden chairs, sat the novice boys and girls. The shy, the plain, the fat, the skinny, the spotty, the non-dancers. The in-crowd; those Godlike beings who were older and better dressed and more popular than the rest sat in groups at the clubhouse chairs and tables. When each dance started I, and the other little girls of my acquaintance (and there were painfully few of us) sat stiffly on our chairs, eyes cast mainly upon our shoes but straying occasionally upwards to watch, with envy, those older teenagers flinging themselves so confidently around the dance floor.
We took an occasional peep, too, at the boys of our own age or slightly older who sat with equal stiffness across the rooms. They, too, had been parentally coerced into attending the dances, usually with the well-meaning idea that this would improve all our social skills. Which, eventually, it did. Though perhaps not always in the way that was intended! The European community of Mombasa being small, and the community of the young smaller still, we knew most of those boys. Like us, they were finding their feet for the first time in the often brutal world of boarding school, or else the difficult transition from boarding prep school to high school, and were gawky and awkward with neatly parted brylcreamed hair and less adept than we were at hiding their spots. And, despite the fact that they had been playmates just a short time before, racing around with us on bikes and exploring the caves on the seafront and daring each other to dive off the higher boards at The Florida pool, in this newly slicked-out guise and in this strange venue they had become strangers to us.
Yet it was only from this disappointing pool that we younger girls could draw our dancing partners. None of the desirable older boys would be caught dead jitterbugging with an adolescent wearing white socks! Occasionally one of the EAWL chaperones would go up to one of the young, chairbound boys and cajole them into inviting one of the young, chairbound girls to dance. Across the floor he would come, shuffle-footed, tied of tongue, eyes darting everywhere but at the target. And we girls would sit there, smiling and chatting frantically to each other to show we were having a good time, pretending the boys didn’t exist and at the same time whispering inside ourselves “Pick me! Pick me!” I remember, still with some pain, seeing some spotty youth whom I remembered from Mombasa Primary heading my way and feeling both disgusted and grateful at the same time, and nervously readying myself to accept even though I couldn’t really dance and knew I would make dreadful fools of us both – and then he asked the girl next to me! Oh, the mortification! This was my first dance and nobody asked me at all and when I got home my mother – who had not been on duty that night, wanted to know if I’d had a good time!
This painful experience was repeated a few times though I was, when at home with my girlfriends and the record player, and back at the Saturday night boarding school hops, gradually learning to dance. And, too, boys sometimes asked me on to the floor, though only when prompted by the well-meaning chaperones. Mostly, though, myself and other plain little girls, and all the plain little boys who would so much rather have been at home reading Beano and Dan Dare, sat there admiring the older dancers – and learned with our eyes. Oh I can see them now as clearly as ever, those beautiful girls and boys of sixteen and seventeen. Mombasa had, I now realise, a surprising number of good-looking girls in my day who would have held their own in any beauty contest anywhere and during the fifties and sixties many of them strutted their stuff at the teenage dances. Most beautiful of them all were the Italian girls and their faces are before me as I write – vivacious Gloria who danced so splendidly, elegant Marilva, and Marialena who was as lushly gorgeous as any movie star. How I envied their flowing hair, their stylish clothes, their earrings. And the boys who partnered them were all magnificent dancers and handsome in the dark Italian way. They were the stars of the teenage dances and seemed impossibly up there beyond the reach of we ordinary mortals.
Top: Winning a rock and roll fancy dress prize, age 14, with my friends Marilyn and Lesley. (Not at the Railway Club). Bottom left: An afternoon on the beach was often the precursor to a night of rock and roll at the Railway Club; at left, myself aged 15 on the Mombasa Swimming Club beach and, bottom right, on Nyali Beach, at 16, with my best friend Valerie, another enthusiastic participant in the Wednesday night holiday teenage dances. Valerie and I still live just an hour apart.
And then, suddenly, the longed-for transformation took place and within a year or so – so swiftly do things change for teenagers and yet how long does that time of transition seem to last – I was one of the “in-crowd”. A cinderella, magicked from the ashes of pubity who no longer slunk into the dance hall wretched with shyness but instead flew in blithely with the rest of the flock, greeting friends, giggling and squealing, tossing hair, eyeing the boys with a sharp look out for the boy, rushing to the Ladies to put on forbidden make-up and earrings nicked from my mother’s jewellery box. I used to “borrow” her high heeled shoes, too.
And dance! All of a sudden I was the dancing queen – out on that floor with partners competing for my hand and winning competitions. Even some of those desirable older boys were no longer too proud to give me a whirl now and again, even if they returned to their steady partners when the lights were turned down for the last dance. This last dance was a ritual – when the band stopped playing rock and roll and turned to the slow, romantic ballads of our parents’ era and darkness descended on the dance floor then couples would move in to a clinch. For steady daters this was a chance to indulge in some officially sanctified necking. For unattached boys bold or lucky enough to have grabbed the girl of their dreams before the lights went out it was a chance to declare their interest with a bit of cheek-to-cheek and perhaps a daring kiss and, if not discouraged, a bit of frottage. For girls lucky enough to have been chosen by the boy it was the very acme of teenage romance – a kiss and a hug to boast about to your friends the next day. Many romances did, indeed, begin on that dance floor. Some were consummated down behind the cricket screen or in the car on the way home. Others led, in time, to marriage. For all of us back then it was an important right of passage; the only opportunity we had to make acquaintance with the opposite sex and embark on that best of all games, the Mating Game.
It never occurred to us that we were extraordinarily fortunate to be doing what young people all over the world were doing – but in a far, far more special place than most. Mombasa, when you think of it, was so perfectly made for romance. The palm trees, the white beaches and turquoise sea, the constant warmth that meant we could dress lightly and prettily all year round, our bodies bared to the gilding sun. We were all of us the children of privilege, free of responsibility, cossetted by servants, well-nourished on post-war abundance. Not as privileged, perhaps, as those Bright Young Things who emerged from the previous war and were glamourised by novelists. But privileged, nonetheless, compared to those living in a Europe still throwing off the last shadows of war or a United States where youth rebellion was beginning to take on a darker cast and rising crime was ever ready to prey on teenage vulnerability Whereas there in our small and lovely town on a small and lovely island in a country also poised for drastic social and political change we kids rocked innocently on, as far around the clock as we could get.
When the lights went on again my friends and I would open our blissfully-closed eyes, withdraw reluctantly from our partners and make another mad dash for the Ladies where we would strip off our make-up and flashy Woolworths jewellery before our fathers (or mothers) arrived to pick us up. Until I was sixteen and had a steady boyfriend with a car (and was allowed to wear make-up, though not to pierce my ears) I was always collected by my father. Or the parent of an approved friend. In vain I pleaded that this would blight my social life forever; my father was adamant. I considered this a form of child abuse – it never occurred to me that my father, tired from a day at the office and perhaps a difficult meeting or two, and a post-work game of tennis or golf, was making a considerable sacrifice in taking out the car and going to pick up his sullen, ungrateful daughter at 11 o’clock at night. That his strictness was, in fact, an act of love. The Railway Club carpark would be full of such parents, smoking and gossiping until their offspring emerged, hot and sweating and dazed with frustrated lust, or else still full of high spirits. It occurs to me now how very tactful most of them were, not to intrude on our teenage world by arriving early and hanging around watching us from the edge of the dance floor. Perhaps they were afraid of what they might see!
Today’s young – my grandchildren for example – would consider those long ago dances and adolescent grope-fests tame affairs indeed. They would laugh at our long drawn-out mating rituals where dancing was such an integral a part. And at our notions of “going steady” as a natural precursor to marriage, which at least, for some of us, made sex permissible. After an awful lot of heavy breathing and groping in the back seat of cars or on beach blankets. Yet I remember them with great affection and I’m sure others do also. They were, too, remarkably free of trouble considering the amount of testosterone on display. In fact in my time I remember only one unpleasant incident and when I recall it now it tells me a lot about our social attitudes back then.
The teenage dances at the Railway Club in my day were organised on behalf of those young people still at school and though teenagers who had already left school were not excluded they tended to regard the dances as rather too juvenile. They, after all, were free to join the adults on the dance floor at Nyali Beach Hotel or other such places and, being in the workforce, had money to spend.
In any case, the EAWL, with the support of the Railway Club, did vet the dances carefully to ensure that “undesirables” were excluded. I have written elsewhere in this collection about the subtleties of social discrimination in Kenya society; suffice it to say here that “undesirables” meant, for the most part, those boys and young men who did not go to one of the definitively “good” and “white” schools: The Prince of Wales, Duke of York and St Mary’s. Or perhaps an English public/grammar school and home to Kenya for the hols.
There were, in the Mombasa of that time, young men who did not quite fit this profile. They tended to wear leather jackets, ride motorbikes or hotted-up cars and be of mixed race or else identifiably working-class. One such lot had even formed themselves into a gang – the nearest thing we had in Kenya to bikies. They had a certain lure for we girls – some of us at least – who tended to identify them with Marlon Brando or James Dean. OUR boyfriends were cricketers or rugger buggers; decent, predictable and a bit unexciting. We knew we’d probably end up marrying one of them but still our adolescent dreams yearned secretly for The Leader of the Pack – deliciously dangerous, possibly doomed and definitely forbidden! It was this type of youth that the good ladies of the EAWL, acting in loco parentis, scrupulously attempted to ban from the innocently middle-class teenage dances. Of course, the ban didn’t always work. The young men sneaked in – or sometimes boldly strode – through the back way and dared each other to take to the dance floor, with one of “us” as partners. They were invariably very good dancers.
A friend of mine was being pursued by one of the “undesirables”, known to us as Mike. He was shortish, wiry, dark-hair slicked back into a DA and yes – despite the cloying heat of the coast would wear a leather jacket when riding his motor scooter. He had been to no school that we recognised, his parentage was obscure (i.e. not known to OUR parents) as was his nationality – some said he was Maltese, others Slavic but I now realise his surname was Armenian in origin. Mike had a cocky manner that would have irritated any protective father but went down well with young girls. And one night he walked nonchalantly into the Railway Club and asked my friend to dance. Worse, he kept hold of her hand when the dance was over and then led her outside where they sat with his arm possessively round her shoulders.
Going outside with a boy was generally a declaration of sorts – an indication of romantic interest and, often, a prelude to sneaking off behind the cricket screen! Mike danced – rather flamboyantly for he was lithe and very good and could throw a similarly skilful partner over his shoulder – with others of us that night, though mainly with my friend, and very closely, too. I don’t know exactly what happened – whether he was asked by one of the chaperones to leave or whether one of “our” boys took objection to him – but a fight broke out. I remember thinking it was rather thrilling – like West Side Story! A rumble! Mike wasn’t alone, he had a couple of mates with him and though they had not danced but hung around the edge of the dance floor looking ill-at-ease they weren’t the sort of boys to back off from a friend in trouble.
The EAWL ladies clucked like hens and, as far as I remember, somebody in authority from the Railway Club waded in and separated the fighters and threatened to call the police. Mike and his mates left. I got a stern lecture afterwards from my father about not encouraging the attentions of such youths and what he would do to me if I was ever seen in their company! Mike’s brief fling with my friend ended when she left school shortly afterwards and went to study in UK. I met him again, some years later, in Zambia. We were both married by then, with children, and he had some sort of dull, respectable job. The DA and the leather jacket had gone, along with the Vespa, but the cockiness was still there. I asked him what exactly had happened at that long ago dance and it was obvious the memory still irked. “Those dances were kids’ stuff,” he said, with something of the old, carefully cultivated sneer. “I only went there for a dare and because I knew it would upset those snobby old biddies”.
Kids’ stuff perhaps, but how quickly kids grow up. Soon enough – though we are only talking a matter of three or so years here – the lovely Italian girls and their beaux had danced themselves into maturity, even matrimony, and their places were taken by myself and the friends of my age, and our boyfriends. Now we were the much-envied older crowd, confident in our dancing and sexual allure, and another lot of scared young girls and boys were inhabiting the chairs around the dance floor, being cajoled into getting up to dance or fearfully hoping – and dreading – to be asked.
The last time I went to one of the Railway Club Teenage Dances I went there not to rock and roll but to show off my engagement ring, and my fiancée. Absurdly young, I had nonetheless achieved a social triumph in the eyes of my peers (if not my parents!) by managing to snare a man six years older than my still-teenaged self, who had a respectable job and a car. No more teenage dances for me! Nor for anyone, because not long after that, when Independence came, the dances were discontinued. The young white bwanas and memsaabs – most of them – left for new lives in new places and graduated to nightclub dance floors around the world; to Twisting the night away and, in time, Disco.
I am an old woman now and as I write this my mind goes back to those hot, sticky nights on that tropical island with the starched skirts whirling and the high heels deftly tapping and the pretty girls and the slim young men and all that energy that would have rocked us around the clock if we’d been allowed – and I hope, oh I hope, that the young folk of Mombasa are still dancing today.
It was midnight and clouds were scudding across the moon. By its fitful light we crept nervously up the ruined staircase to the turret, avoiding the jagged-edged holes where boards had rotted or been ripped away. Everything was deathly quiet; the only sounds we could hear were our own breathing and a skitter of small, clawed feet somewhere in the darkness beyond. Silently we sat on the littered floor, backs against the walls, hands touching for reassurance. “Oh God,” I heard someone whisper, “What are we doing here? “ and I knew I was not alone in my fear. Down through the window it was just possible to make out the shapes of trees and bushes in the weed-wild garden which suddenly seemed full of threat, barring all possibility of escape. The moon came out from behind a cloud and lit full upon the black mouth of the old well…
From memory there were about eight of us. I know” Kuku” Henn was there, and Ruth Brereton (as she was then) and Bryan Beardmore, and Mary Molloy. Today, more than sixty years later, I can no longer remember who else – probably Bill Hurst and possibly Chris Selby-Lownes. We were all rather into ghosts back then, and always trying to find something to do on a Saturday night besides going to the flicks and then on to Nyali Beach Hotel to dance, or crashing somebody’s party. So when it was suggested that we sneak into the empty Phantom Inn and look for the ghost, it seemed like a fun thing to do.
The Phantom Inn had previously been called The Golden Key (for some reason nicknamed by many The Golden Bollock) and in my memory of the 1950s and early 60s in Mombasa, it had never been much of a place before falling into disuse and dereliction. My mother, however, told me that before World War II and possibly during, the small hotel on the northern side of Nyali Bridge had been quite a popular spot for drinking and dancing; a sort of night club. It stood alone on the cliff just as you came off the bridge on to the mainland, overlooking Tudor Creek. And by 1963, when this story takes place, the only interesting thing about it was The Legend – of a young Arab woman who had been thrown down the well by her husband as a punishment for some unspecified offense. She was said to rise from the well at midnight when the moon was full, and wander around the hotel. Certainly Africans avoided the place after dark and many white Mombasa-ites, too, claimed to believe the story.
Picture of the old Nyali Bridge that connected the island with the north shore, back in the time of this story. The Golden Key aka Phantom Inn aka The Golden Bollock is the two storey building at far left of the bridge. (Photo courtesy of Rajni Kant Shah).
So, late one night when the moon was suitably full, our gang of ghostbusters parked our cars on the island side of the bridge and crept across, eager to be in place by midnight. Giggling and shushing each other we clambered through a window, pulling back the rotting shutter, and picked our way gingerly through the debris on the ground floor. A dilapidated staircase led up to the next storey, where there was a sort of turret room. Here we ensconced ourselves, sitting on the floor with our backs to the wall, where most of the inner lining had rotted away. The whole place stank of rodents and bats and, I think, human piss. It was quite horrible and I remembered wishing I’d stayed home! When our watches showed midnight we all became breathless and silent. I don’t think any of us REALLY expected to see a ghost, especially the older men who were less credulous than my 18 year old self (I was the youngest in the group by about four years).
But then…oh the horror!… all of a sudden we saw a wavering light creeping towards us. We couldn’t see exactly where it was coming from, it just seemed to wander all about without purpose or direction. At least for a while. A pale, mysterious light with no sound to humanise it. “It’s the ghost…there really IS a ghost!” whispered Ruth, sounding slightly hysterical. Mary Molloy, I remember, crossed herself and asked for some heavenly protection – I’d never known her be particularly religious before. The men – Kuku, Bryan and the others – had been scoffingly sceptical about the whole adventure until then, just going along for the hell of it, but now they, too, had gone ominously quiet and that worried me most of all.
We sat there, group hysteria taking over, terrified and not quite sure what to do. I can’t say we were frozen with fright because this was, after all, Mombasa on a hot Saturday night. But we were certainly immobilised by it. What else, after all, could this mysterious light that seemed to hover a few feet off the ground be BUT an apparition of some kind? The light came closer, we could see it diffused and indistinct but certainly THERE through the cracks in the floorboards. And then – it began to ascend the stairs! It now seemed to be accompanied by a sort of shushing noise which to me sounded JUST like the noise an ambulatory ghost might make, especially if she was wearing her buibui!
“Omigawd!”, muttered Ruth. “What will we DO?” One of the men – can’t remember who it was, now, probably Bill, told us to stay calm and very quiet. No screaming. And so the light came nearer…and nearer…and the moonlight, quite ghostly in itself, shone through the window and cast shadows that made the whole thing seem more sinister. And then a voice…a trembling voice that wavered fearfully behind the wavering light…said: “Nani huko?”
It was the night watchman!
We hadn’t thought of that! Hadn’t realised there would be anyone watching over this derelict building but of course local watu might have found a use for the old timber and stuff. So a night watchman had been employed, and a wizened, ancient and very frightened and indignant mzee he was too, carrying a kerosene lantern and wearing huge unwieldy thongs made of recycled tyre rubber, hence the “shushing” sound. He was not at all amused by this bunch of young wazungu with nothing better to do with their time than disturb his peace of mind. And, of course, we WERE trespassing. So to soothe him down and shut him up (calling the policewas mentioned) we paid him a few shillingi and made our merry way back across the bridge.
This ultimately dispiriting experience didn’t in the least dim our enthusiasm for things supernatural and paranormal – far from it. Our next ghostbusting adventure after that was spending a night in the Mombasa Cemetery – but that’s another story!
THE beginning of the 1960s was a bad time for Kenya farmers. First, in 1960, came a severe drought which hit the Ukambani around Machakos harder than most other areas. As so often happens in Africa, the drought which forced farmers to sell off cattle cheaply or else move them to other and often remote grazing areas was followed by some of the worst flooding known since European settlement.
And then came the army worm (Spodoptera exempta), a voracious little caterpillar that can gobble up entire pastures in a few hours. This time the army worm plague was so thick on the ground that the Mombasa-Nairobi train couldn’t run on its tracks, greased to impassability by the crushed bodies.
After the army worm the precious new grazing that came up after the rain was suddenly invaded by herds of zebra and wildebeest. The first time in years such a thing had happened and the timing seemed almost deliberate, as if the game was getting its revenge for the invasion of the wilderness with our pampered domestic stock.
And so the farmers gathered in the Ukambani to save their grazing by driving the herds of zebra and wildebeest, impala and kongoni back into the Masaai Reserve. Half a dozen families including children over the age of twelve, assorted friends and relatives from “town” who enjoyed a bit of shooting, and plenty of watu to do most of the “driving” because it was not only white settlers who were affected by the infestation of game but also the squatters who lived on their land and those who worked the village shambas.
Imagine if you can today, in the age of endlessly clicking cameras and little zebra-striped safari buses and game lodges with infinity pools what is was like to rise in the chill of dawn on the day of the game drive. To eat a hearty breakfast of porridge or cornflakes, eggs and bacon, kedgeree and sliced venison, toast and marmalade. To hear the click of bolts as guns were checked and feel the excitement sizzle through your veins like a lighted fuse. It sounds terrible to tell such a tale today, but this is how it was, back then and one shouldn’t judge the past by the mores of the present.
All had been planned days before. A shallow valley selected along which the herds could be driven; the strategic placing of the best shots along that route, the starting point for the mass of yelling beaters waving sticks and bright pieces of cloth and clubs to finish off the wounded animals. Also in the rearguard were those Europeans who would follow the herds in vehicles, some armed, some just along for the fun of it, all making a great deal of noise as they bush-bashed their suffering vehicles over the rough and mostly trackless terrain. Here and there lookouts were stationed on rock outcrops and small kopjes along the slopes above the valley. These were mostly younger people and the less-experienced shots, positioned where their sharp eyes could be of benefit to the hunters but where they were in no danger from the stampeding mass of hooves and horns. We (for I was once one of them) were given light rifles and two pieces of cloth, one red and one white. We waved the white “flag” when we first saw the game coming towards us down the valley. The red cloth was used mostly to drive back any animals desperate enough to stray up the slope. It could also be used to signal danger to the other watchers, for where there are zebra and wildebeest in a panic there are also lion and hyena. Other creatures used to get caught up in game drives, too, made dangerous when their natural fear of humans was overcome by confusion. Rhino for example. Or stray buffalo.
Standing on one of the kopjes with hands shading eyes, we looked to where we’d been told the game would come. It was a long wait, in the hot early sun that drove the chill from the air and hyrax back to their holes after a night’s foraging. This was Africa so in that early hour there was always something to see; a Bataleur eagle soaring overhead, a cloud of vultures rising on distant thermals, a family of wart hogs trotting busily by, tails in air, a cobra slithering hood down in the grass. We were always warned to be wary of cobras which were plentiful thereabout and used to lie and sun themselves on the rocks, ever ready to take offence. Meandering across the long, shallow valley was a creek, dry in that season and a likely hazard to the vehicles that would soon cross it in pursuit of the driven herd. Its belt of shrubs and long grass was a daytime shelter for the small solitary antelope such as Dik Dik and Duiker and they, too, would be caught up in the general stampede and perish there, unless they could stay calm and low among the boulders.
It takes a long, long time to get grazing herds of wildebeest and zebra on the move. They start easily when disturbed by humans but don’t run for long. They must be steadily, mercilessly harassed until the spark of panic ignites into a headlong rush that will not easily be stopped until the stronger beasts tire. For once they are in range of the guns and begin to fall they must run on and on, or die. On the particular day that lives in my memory, it was early afternoon before those of us acting as lookouts far down in the valley saw the first puff of dust on the horizon. The puff soon became a cloud, thick and brown, rising higher and higher, sinister as smoke. Then we heard the dull, insistent thud of many thousands of hooves and, as they came closer, the wild cries of the beaters and the blare of vehicle horns. We enthusiastically waved our white flags to signal the distant marksmen and soon enough the vanguard was a hundred yards from us, heads down, back legs driving through under the hard bellies or else kicking up in occasional bursts of terror or perhaps rage.
On and on they came, the heavy grey bodies of the wildebeest, the flashing stripes of the zebra, an occasional flash of dun or chestnut. Small self-contained herds of impala stayed wisely on the edge of the stampede, leaping high and long, graceful even in panic. You could smell them from a long distance; the bovine gaminess of fleeing ungulates; the reek of squirted dung turned liquid by fear. And over it all, and through it all, the coppery smell of African dust that is made up of so many elements both ancient and new. Amazingly, despite the general pandemonium, a few creatures here and there would stand off to the side, grazing for a few minutes as if they hadn’t a care in the world, before suddenly rejoining the stampede. Some of these strayed innocently up the slope to where the lookouts were waiting to shoo them back into the mainstream and though here and there some developed a sudden sense of self-preservation and broke through to safety up the slope and beyond, most obeyed the herd instinct and continued to run with the rest.
The din was beyond description yet soon another and louder sound reached our ears as the guns began their merciless slaughter. And slaughter it was, because the point of the exercise was not fine shooting but simply to send the herds far enough away from the European-owned farms and tribal shambas so that they could not easily come back. So the hunters – and perhaps hunting is not quite the right word here for it denotes skill and there was no skill involved in this – just fired into the solid mass of animal flesh as it galloped by, not worrying whether they killed outright or merely wounded. In any case, no wounded animal would survive long in the rush for if it stumbled or fell the hooves of its fellows would make sure it never got up again. And so it went on, hour after hour, and we all felt the blood-madness that takes over at such time until the last few exhausted stragglers staggered by.
This blood madness is a fearful thing and when it passes people look at one another uneasily or cough and turn aside or light up a cigarette or shuffle themselves about a bit, embarrassed by such a loss of the self that is usually governed by everyday decencies. Some find it harder to shed than others. I remember an incident involving two young soldiers from the Cameronian regiment, invited out for the day by a kindly farmer who feeling sorry for them as being far from home and friendless in a strange land, thought they should be given a chance to know Africa better before being sent elsewhere. This pair were not officers but ordinary squaddies from the slums of Glasgow whom nobody else would have thought to invite into their homes.
They were conspicuously ill-at-ease among the settlers, shy and mumbling and sounding so much like the comic-book hero Oor Wullie that nobody could understand a word they said. Yet at the end of the day, with the blood madness still on them, they suddenly became volubly over-excited. As we drove home in the red dusk, with several of us standing close-packed in the big farm truck, they were swearing and yelling every time the wheels hit a pothole, boasting of all they had shot that day. Game drives got to some people like that; they just couldn’t come down or let go. A jackal ran in front of the truck, its eyes glinting in the dusk, presenting an easy target. One of the soldiers picked up his rifle and shot it, but the shot only caused a gut wound and the jackal spun round and round, shrieking and snapping at its side. The soldiers laughed at the spinning jackal; almost screaming with mirth that sounded every bit as frenzied and horrible as the shrieks of the wounded animal. The whole convoy of vehicles stopped and somebody – I can’t remember who – finished off the jackal with a merciful bullet. The soldiers stopped laughing and there was a dark silence. Having killed all day and seen others kill, they couldn’t understand that what they had done was an appalling breach of etiquette. That enough was enough, even for hunters. That we were sated with slaughter and could suddenly bear no more of it. Especially when it was gratuitous and unnecessary. I think one of the soldiers had been planning to jump out and seize the dead animal’s brush, as a trophy, but if so he thought better of it and they were both silent for the rest of the journey. Nor did we see them later at the post-hunt barbecue on one of the farms, for they had been packed off back to their regiment.
Behind us on the plane we had left more than a thousand corpses scattered in heaps of grey and brown and black-and-white. The watu from the farms would take some of the meat and so would the tribespeople from the reserve but most would be left to the scavengers, for Africa has a vast appetite and can soon swallow up any excess, any outrage. Blood and bone and flesh would soon enough be reduced to fragments in the dust and where in the fresh morning the herds had grazed and kicked their heels, now the carrion eaters would come through the evening murk for their turn at the table.
This is the story of two young men, a mob of cattle and a year spent under canvas battling lion, rhino, drought, deluge and the many diseases of the African bush. All they had were a few basic supplies, a nervous labour force and their guns. It’s an adventure that Ernest Hemingway, that great lover of African adventure, could never even have dreamed of. And it recalls a time and a way of life that is long gone.
Kenya, like much of Africa, is a climate of extremes and it’s always, as Bob Lake used to say, one or bloody other! Bob is one of the two young men in this story, and the one who endured this adventure the longest. It is from his memoirs that the account is drawn.
In the three years up to 1961 the annual rainfall in Kenya fell from just over 304.8 millimetres (12 inches) a year to 76 millimetres (3 inches). . This severe drought caused problems for the cattle farmers in the Machakos district, south of Nairobi, and stock condition began to deteriorate. Then, as grazing turned to dust, huge herds of game – mainly zebra, wildebeest, gazelle and antelope, hartebeest and eland – moved out of the neighbouring Maasai reserve and on to the farms.
This led to a concerted effort to drive the wild game back into the Maasai country. Farmers and friends from the city gathered to shoot the vast herds and drive them back towards the railway line that ran between Nairobi and Mombasa. Bob Lake and his friend and neighbour Mark Millbank, the heroes of this tale, between them shot several hundred head in less than a month and drove many more than this on to other farms, where the shooting continued. Thousands of carcases were left for the vultures. It was brutal, bloody work and, in current terms, unacceptable but for them at that time, it was survival.
And, as Bob recalled, seventy years later: “It was all in vain. When I was out shooting with Major Joyce’s William Evans shotgun, on his property on the evening of April 11, 1961, I was surrounded by huge clouds of moths – as heavy as a snow storm. On top of the drought, the dreaded army worm moth had arrived. Within days our land was covered by millions of caterpillars, eating the last bits of vegetation down to the roots of grass.”
The caterpillars devastated acres of crops and pastureland as well as the greenery that kept the herbivores alive in the wild areas. They made the roads treacherous and stopped the trains from running. It was a plague of biblical proportions, consuming what little pasture had survived the drought. Something drastic had to be done.
Another local cattle farmer, Dennis Wilson, located 250,000 acres of ungrazed land at Athi Tiva, known then as the B2 Yatta Controlled Hunting Block and mostly uninhabited. It wasn’t good land, which is why nobody lived there; it was a dry, thorny part of the nyika that lies between the high plains country of the Athi, just south of Nairobi and the green hills that run behind the coastal strip. The nyika is not desert and it has rivers but it’s inhospitable country and home only to lion, rhino, elephant, cheetah, hyena, various tough-mouthed antelope and a lot of ground squirrels. Today it’s all been subdivided into small holdings and shanty villages and you have to wonder how they make a living there. Back then, nobody wanted it, except to shoot things for sport.
To save the herds around the Konza and Ulu areas, Bob and Mark set out to move 5,200 head of cattle belonging to nine farmers to the Yatta plateau, on to land given by the Kenya government as temporary grazing until the drought broke.
Each farmer provided herdsmen for his/her own livestock and contributed to the expenses of the venture on a per head of cattle basis. Bob was appointed manager and Mark as his assistant. Their only transport was Bob’s old, stripped down Land Rover.
For the two men, both 21, it was a great adventure – and a big responsibility. Athi-Tiva was home to the dreaded tetse-fly as well as ticks carrying cattle diseases such as anaplasmosis, east coast fever and redwater. The area had no roads, only rough tracks through the hunting block; nor were there any buildings or development of any kind.
The journey involved moving, at very quick notice, the 5,200 head of cattle south by rail for 150 km, then unloading them and walking them another 80 km north-east along the bush tracks and game trails. The herdsmen had to be constantly vigilant because the local Big Cat population soon got word that there was beef takeaway to be got for very little effort – it’s a lot easier to bring down a cow than a wildebeest or buffalo! Bomas – rough enclosures of thorny brush – had to be erected at night and the Wakamba youth taking it turns to be on guard were armed only with spears, clubs and pangas (machetes). Bob and Mark had rifles, shotguns and sidearms and the former were in constant use, to scare away predators or shoot for the pot.
When Bob, Mark and the labour force reached their destination a camp was set up near the Athi River – which was only a series of shallow pools in that dry season – and eventually Bob had the labour build him a long-drop loo up on a hillside where he could look out over the countryside – king of the world! Because he loved it there! Loved the whole, wild, hard life of it. A solitary man by nature, he was content to spend his days supervising the men and tending to the cattle, hunting and yarning with Mark, eating simple meals cooked over a campfire, going to sleep with the sounds of the bush in his ears. Lion prowled around the camp at night, attracted by the beef carcasses hung in one of the tents, covered only in a mesh to keep away flies. These steers, as well as various buck and antelope, had been killed to keep the camp in meat. A vigil had to be kept to prevent rhino from barging through the camp and knocking it down, there were a couple of near misses with elephant herds wandering past. Hyenas came to scavenge for any scraps or rubbish left lying around, their weird, wittering calls making it difficult to sleep.
*
They were not completely isolated. A few weeks after the camp had been established, a small village appeared further down the river. A few huts roughly put together from mud-daubed branches and corrugated iron, a dozen families, some goats and chickens. In the Kenya of those days, such habitations could appear almost overnight. Bob questioned the menfolk who blandly replied that they had squatters rights as the land was uninhabited. Bob pointed out that it was government land, set aside for hunting and not habitable anyway. Before long, a cow disappeared and then another. Bob’s men reported finding horns and hooves half-buried in the sand along the riverbank. Then food and small items were stolen from the camp. The Kamba herders went and searched the new “village” and found incriminating evidence. They threatened to drive the newcomers away and burn down their shanties. Things looked ugly and the two young white men had to try and calm things down; concerned also by the fact that the squatters were obviously starving in that savage country.
They shot some Grants gazelles as an emergency food supply, much to the disgust of the herders who clearly regarded these non-Kamba invaders from further south and east, lacking in all the bush skills needed to survive, as opportunistic parasites attracted by what they obviously saw as some sort of new farm settlement. More would come, they warned darkly, and Bob knew this was probably true. So he contacted the authorities in Kitui who eventually sent down an African police officer and his askari to deal with the problem. By now the number of squatters was steadily increasing, though they had neither food nor water nor protection from wild animals. A child had died, and it was reported that an old man, too, had died and been put outside the loose boundary of the squatter village, among the trees, where he was consumed by hyenas. Bob was skeptical about this story but the Kamba labour force firmly believed it and shook their heads at the young bwana’s tender British innocence.
In any case, the brief and lacklustre appearance of uniformed authority seemed to work and the squatters disappeared as quietly as they had come – one morning they were there and by nightfall the bush had swallowed them, leaving scarcely a trace.
Visitors, too, came from time to time to relieve the loneliness – friends, family, the other cattle owners, government inspectors and a vet bashed their way through the thorny terrain to reach the camp. All had to bring their own camping gear and at times the little canvas boma became quite festive – there would be rough shooting by day and singalongs by night; the Wakamba labour force would put on a bit of a dance. Better than that, the visitors would bring whisky, gin, beer, tinned delicacies, newspapers, books and magazines. But nobody stayed for long. Which was just the way Bob liked it. He was happy with Mark’s company and with learning more about the ways of the Wakamba and the wildlife all around. In the evenings they would read by the light of torches and spirit lamps. They turned in early because the work began at dawn, the days were long and in any case sleep was often interrupted by troublesome wildlife including, once, an invasion of Safari Ants which consumed everything in their path that wasn’t wood or stone or iron and could only be halted – though not completely stopped – by splashing around kerosene and petrol and setting it on fire, then battling to prevent the fire from spreading to the surrounding bush.
“Of all the dangerous things that happened in that year,” said Bob later, “That was by far the worst and it was lucky one of the watu gave the alarm before the ants got into the sleeping tents.” Trapped animals – and humans – have been devoured alive by the dreaded siafu – the remorseless, relentless Dorylus ants of Africa.
As it was, any food that wasn’t in a tin was consumed and a perilous trip in bad weather had to be made to Kitui the next day to re-supply; not just food but petrol and kerosene. “We kept a good supply after that,” Bob remembered.
Another constant threat was the scarcity of water and seeking it involved risk as the cattle were moved to the nearby river, and waterholes, and back. Water storage tanks were trucked in, small dams were built, pumps were put in place with great difficulty in and over the hard ground.
Bob and Mark were both keen hunters and good shots but had some narrow escapes – especially when an enraged rhino chased them, and Bob’s gun bearer, up a small and very prickly thorn tree. On another occasion, Bob and one of the senior herders were walking back to camp in the dusk when they got a strange feeling. They turned round to see two lionesses walking a few metres behind them. The men stopped. The lionesses stopped. Then, seemingly uninterested, moved into the bush. The men started walking again, turning their heads to see, after a few minutes, the lionesses back on the track behind them. Athi Tiva is not so far from Tsavo, where the famous pair of man-eaters once roamed and the area had always had a bad reputation for producing lion with a taste for human flesh. So the men were worried. After this continued for a few more minutes, and the camp still some distance away, Bob turned and shouted at the animals, who hesitated, lashing their tails, then, as Bob told it later, looking at each other as if to say “What’s that puny human think he’s doing?”
“I think, Bwana,” said the senior herdsman, a little agitated,, “That you should shoot them, not shout at them. These simba do not like to be shouted at.”
The lionesses were now only a few bounds away. Lion are curious creatures and Bob felt that if they meant serious trouble they would have just attacked without warning; perhaps they just wanted to know what these two strange two-legged creatures were, wandering through the bush.
“It was for all the world like they were two girls just out for a stroll and not particularly interested in us at all,” he always said in later years, when recalling the incident. “They knew where they were going and they obviously had no intention of getting off the track just because we were there. I got the feeling that if we’d just stopped and stepped back to one side they’d have passed us by with hardly a glance. But of course I couldn’t take the risk.”
So he raised his gun and fired over their heads. Even in those days, you couldn’t just kill a lion without a permit, except to save your life, though of course nobody would have known, in so remote a place. Nor blamed you, for there was no shortage of lions. Bob knew he might have to shoot them both and hoped they’d have the sense to bound away – which they did. Snarling.
“They stopped once and looked back at us,” he recorded in his game diary, “And I’d swear they were looking annoyed and reproachful. And then they melted into the bush and we didn’t see them again.”
Lions weren’t the only danger. When the rains came, which they did with shocking force, the almost-dry riverbed suddenly became a torrent, washing away bridges and tracks. This meant that the cattle could not be moved and Bob had to stay for longer than planned. Mark had gone by then, called to other duties, and two other young men came down, at separate times, to lend a hand. Two other young adventurers. But it all proved overly rough for them; too dangerous and lonely, and, like the occasional visitors, they didn’t stay long.
One of them, though, stayed long enough to give himself some grief. When the rain eased off the Athi ran more gently and pools formed among the rocks. Almost overnight, hippo appeared, just a few of them, lounging in the water with their watchful eyes above the surface by day, coming on to the riverbank at night to feed on the fresh new grass. Grass which was needed for the cattle.
The men tried scaring the hippo away and Bob’s new offsider, James, even went to Kitui – a long journey in the Land Rover – and brought back some cheap firecrackers which they set off gleefully – but after an initial panic and a lot of bellowing and splashing the hippos ignored them. Bob then shot one, and made biltong from the flesh and whips from the hide but while the hippos moved further down the river they didn’t go away.
James, who was in Kenya for a year after finishing Agricultural College, to gain experience before finding a job in South Africa, was a hot-headed 19 year old who came to look upon the small mob of hippo as a personal challenge. Though he had never done any shooting before, he took to it with enthusiasm and spent hours driving Bob and the African camp servants mad by practicing on a variety of targets – mostly old Heinz soup cans. Bob taught him rough shooting with a shotgun, for birds, and they bagged francolin and guinea fowl which made a pleasant change from the main diet of beef with maize meal and tinned vegetables.
But James’s mind was set on something bigger and as this was still a hunting block he was able to obtain a license to go for it. And the shooting of almost anything could be justified as necessary to conserve cattle feed. Bob had a good relationship with the Game Department, which trusted him to do the right thing, so he warned James several times to be prudent with his new-found skill.
Rain had made everyone’s work harder. No visitors could get through to relieve the tedium, this included the vet so Bob had to do a lot of the veterinary work himself; inoculating and dipping the cattle in the rough timber yards which had been hurriedly erected upon arrival, helping cows give birth, castrating young bulls. These were tough beasts with a strong dose of Sariwal in their bloodlines but they were still subject to the pests and diseases that makes raising cattle in Kenya such a challenge. Some of them were mauled in attacks by lion and leopard, which also took calves, others were bitten by snakes or harassed by hyena. Bob was out for long hours each day, fixing problems and encouraging the labour, many of whom had got fed up with the whole venture and wanted to leave, or had already gone.
James, young and heedless, went down to the river one evening and shot a hippo. He thought he’d missed because it disappeared under the water; when its head popped up he shot again. And again it disappeared, only to reappear a minute later. James decided to take a closer position and moved from behind his rocky vantage point closer to the water. And then he noticed three hippo carcasses floating along in the current, towards the camp. He’d shot three different animals! Half thrilled, half scared, he raced down the bank to have a closer look. Whereupon a couple of huge males came out of the water, straight at him. Instead of standing his ground and trying for another shot, James turned and ran towards the camp, screaming. Bob and some of the labour came from their tents to see what was up, in time to see the boy stumble and roll down the bank, on to some rocks. As Bob told it, the two hippos stomped about a bit but the sight of so many humans proved discouraging and they waddled back into the water to join the herd.
James had broken his right arm. It was put in a sling and he was given some aspirin, the only painkiller they had in camp, apart from whiskey. He had to endure the agony for several days before Bob was able to get him to Kitui in the Land Rover – an excruciating journey for someone with a bad fracture and a
Down on the Athi River in 1961 From top left, Bob by the river near where his offsider James shot three hippo and then had to run for it; taking cattle across was always a risky business; James in the camp, just before his hippo hunting trip. Botom from left: When the drought broke and the rains came the river flooded and carried away the bridge; watering the cattle; an askari and his officer from Kitui questioning one of the squatters who mysteriously came to take up residence near the Athi Tiva camp.
Bob stayed for a year, living under canvas, happy in his comparative solitude and well-aware that he was undergoing a rare Boy’s Own adventure. Eventually, after the rains had come and gone and the grass grew quickly again on the plains, under the hot African sun, he and others took the cattle back to their home farms, with remarkably few losses considering the long period of privation and danger. Another long and difficult trek, another rail journey. And the acclaim of those whose livelihoods had been saved.
Bob Lake, my husband, lived to be 85. He had many adventures, both in Africa and in Australia where we eventually migrated and where we lived in some of the country’s toughest cattle country. Yet he always considered the Athi Tiva expedition the greatest adventure of his life and it’s a good job he wrote it all down because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to share it with you now.
The world boasts many great train journeys. The Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian, the Rocky Mountaineer, South Africa’s Blue Train, Australia’s Ghan or Indian Pacific. I contend, however, that there have been few train journeys to rival the overnight trip between Mombasa and Nairobi in the years before 1963.
I’m going to try now and recreate that journey in my memory and because I was a Mombasa girl, and because the beginning of a journey is usually more exciting than the way home, it is always the “up” journey I remember, from the coast to Nairobi. Up-country types will, of course, remember it the other way around.
Travelling by train back then was more than just a journey, it was an Occasion. People dressed for it, casual but smart. No jeans or shorts for women and men planning to eat in the dining car had to wear long trousers and a tie. There was only one passenger train a day and it left at 6pm. It’s possible some travellers arrived at the last minute and flung themselves into their carriage just in time, enjoying none of the gracious ceremony of departure. But these would have been few and far between because most of us liked to arrive at the small but immaculate station in good time and, having checked out our compartment and found a porter to load our luggage, repair to the bar-cafeteria for a tea, a beer or a cocktail. You could buy a very good small plate of potato chips for next-to-nothing, I remember, or sandwiches and other snacks.
Leaving on the train was a social affair and the more people who came to see you off the more fun it was. Sitting there on the raised dais of the cafeteria you could survey your fellow passengers. There would be bashful honeymoon couples shedding confetti, businessmen in formal garb with briefcases, sun-reddened holidaymakers heading back home to Nairobi or Nakuru or even Kampala, smart young women on shopping trips to the superior retail outlets of the capital, men in safari suits, Indians in turbans or dhotis or vivid saris, perhaps a priest or two in dog collar and cassock, or a family of soberly-dressed missionaries. It was all very noisy and chaotic as people yelled greetings to acquaintances or farewells to those who came to see them off, and porters dodged in and out trying to get all the luggage safely stowed before departure, and station staff made occasional announcements over the tannoy which could barely be heard above the general din.
And, behind it all, the slow, steady, deep chuffing of a great engine getting up a head of steam. You were hardly aware of it at first, until it began to build to its crescendo of imminent departure and your pulse began to throb with it, excitement building along with the steam. You began to withdraw, a little, from those who had come to see you off and make common cause instead with your fellow passengers who, like you, were now moving purposefully towards the train that huffed and puffed like a great animal anxious to be on its way. You felt a sense of importance – The One Who Was Travelling, who was going places – and a sense of pity for those poor domestic creatures being left behind. A flurry of kisses, a hug or two, many more handshakes (for most of us were, after all, British!) and the usual banal injunctions “not to miss the train”. As if you would! Though inevitably there were one or two folk 1`frantically running and gesticulating and grabbing at door handles when the rest of the passengers were already safely aboard and taking up their positions at the windows, waving and grinning. Unless, of course, they had nobody to see them off, in which case they quietly took possession of their seats and took out their books, immune to the emotions of parting.
Then – the guard would blow his whistle and the last door would slam and there would be some flag waving from the boiler plate up front and the guard’s puny toot would be obliterated in memory by the thrilling shriek of the engine’s great steam whistle and all the romance of train journeys everywhere – from Dodge City to Bhowani Junction to the Coronation Scot – came together in one glorious moment as the pistons began their steadily-increasing rhythm and the mighty engine left the station, its many dull red carriages with their eager travellers following obediently behind. Oh, those mighty steam engines of my childhood! No wonder people still love them today; enough to collect them or buy books about them or gaze at them in museums. To us, they were neither quaint nor remarkable; merely the way we travelled. Yet we were not immune to their charm and power – even as a young woman I enjoyed going to look at the engine before departure and others did, too, with awe. When I was about ten, and not travelling myself but seeing somebody off, my dearest wish was realised when the engine driver invited me (and a couple of other kids) into his cab and showed us the controls and let us pretend we were driving the train. Everything in that cabin gleamed and shone with brass and rich wood. If only my father had been an engine driver and not a government official who went, dressed in tropical whites, to his dull old office every day. I would have much preferred him with dirty hands and a smut on his nose and a huge, powerful steam engine under his command!
In my memories those engines were either green and black or entirely black. I’ve been told there were also red ones but I never saw them. They always gleamed, their paintwork and brasswork immaculate, the letters “EAR & H” born proudly. Sometimes it took two of them – one at the back as well – to get the carriages up the two main scarps between the coastal strip and the plains of the Athi; I don’t know why this was; perhaps it was when the number of carriages exceeded the norm. Mostly, though, when there was still light in the sky, you could lean out the window and see, on a curving line, the fine sight of the engine up ahead, smoke pouring from its funnel (and putting smuts into your eyes if you weren’t careful!), pulling its line of carriages with apparent ease.
In those days (and maybe today also) there were three classes of train travel. First class compartments had two berths and a spare, modern blue-grey décor with pull-down tables. Second class compartments had changed little in design since Victoria’s day and had four berths with green leather seating and lots of dark timber panelling. Whichever class you travelled, you did so in a propinquity quite alien to English people of the time, who under other circumstances would rarely speak to a stranger unless properly introduced, let alone dress and undress in a confined space and share the intimacies of sleep. In fact my husband once travelled in a second class compartment with three other men and none of them spoke a word until, next morning, one broke the ice by introducing himself.
My generation was much less formal and we would soon be chatting happily with whoever our co-travellers might be – some lasting friendships were formed on the overnight journey between Mombasa and Nairobi. In my day, only the distinctly better-off whites travelled first class. Most people – those of European origin and the wealthier middle-class Indians – travelled second. Only black Africans and the poorer sorts of Indians travelled third class and this was a very different affair. No compartments but open carriages with wooden seats where passengers stowed their baggage, goats, chickens and children and took along their own food. Third class was noisy and lively and probably great fun but few Europeans ever risked it. One who did was my grandmother, always a bit eccentric and very curious. Just why she did so I never knew, being very young at the time. But she often talked about it. She got on the train at Ulu station at about seven at night and sat there with all the tribespeople and livestock, sleepless on the hard and upright seats, until the train arrived in Mombasa at six the next morning. Apparently she was made very welcome; women shared their mealies and cold posho with her; she shared her sandwiches and fruit and biscuits with them. She’d thought to take several packets of polo mints with her and these, no doubt, proved very popular. She never drank coffee and didn’t care all that much for tea so I don’t know what she drank – probably water infused with Andrew’s Liver Salts, which she took daily. Most of those in her carriage were Wakamba and as this was the tribe among which she lived, and was most fond, I expect they all got on very well together. Those who travelled third class tended, as much as possible, to congregate in tribal groups though all seemed to get on well together, whatever their tribe, and the close carriages would be filled with the sound of Swahili as well as a dozen tribal languages. Men sat with men and women with other women, and children. This applied to both Africans and Indians, and the latter, in any case, sat usually in their own carriages – there was no official segregation but unofficially the two races did not mix. I can just imagine the smells – Africans rarely bathed in those days, as we would understand bathing, and had no deodorants. And there were, in any case, no bathing facilities on the train. The lavatories were pretty foul, too. Goodness knows how my ultra-fastidious grandmother managed – but she always spoke of the whole journey as a great adventure (though her doing so odd a thing infuriated my staid parents!).
Back in first and second class, life was both more ordered and less lively. At first, you could look out the window as the train climbed the steep grade from the coastal plain, as it was described in my book A Garden in Africa: “through hills of red earth planted with coconut palms and banana trees, African children waving, chickens running among the mud-walled houses, women of the coastal tribes in their bright cotton kangas or short skirts of fibre strips, naked from the waist up”. By the time the first station was reached, at Mazeras, it was already dusk – that brief equatorial blink between blazing daylight and the cool of night. I cannot be sure after all these years but the first sitting for dinner was called about this time. Those travelling with children would answer this call, and others wishing to get fed and to bed as early as possible. Some took along their own meal of sandwiches and fruit and cake.
Most, however, opted for the later sitting at about 8.30 and I remember regarding this as a significant right of passage the first time I travelled on the train as an adult. When the second dinner gong was sounded by African train staff immaculate in their starched EAR & H uniforms we would hurry down the swaying, rocking corridors from carriage to carriage until we reached the dining car. People dressed for the second sitting – men in ties and light jackets, women in frocks with high heels and well-coiffed hair. And making your way down those narrow passageways in three inch heels involved quite a balancing act, let me tell you! The dining car harked back to earlier and even more gracious times – all white linen and gleaming silver and each four-seater table with its cosy little red lamp. Attentive staff brought the beautifully-presented menus and though the food was plain and very English it was well-cooked and with all the advantages of a country generous in fish and seafood and fresh tropical fruits. How the chefs managed to produce such meals in the tiny galley was a matter of wonder. Outside, the night was speeding by and wild things were seeking their own sustenance. But there, inside that softly-lit carriage, with its cheerful chatter and chinking glasses, you could have been in any civilised restaurant in any civilised city in the world.
That, to me, is one of the enduring fascinations of train travel. Ships take us over the ocean, an element of which we can never truly be a part. Planes take us up so high that we no longer feel connected with the earth. A train, however, remains earthbound and the everyday world of earth and trees and houses is still visible and only inches away as we move through that stationary landscape in our own time and space, untouchable and unreachable by what’s outside and snug within our own frame of reference. No wonder Einstein used a train to illustrate his Theory of Relativity. And that is what it was like, in my memory, back on the Mombasa-Nairobi train in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. After dinner we tended to turn in early for by this time the train staff had been round to make up the bunks and there was nothing to do except chat to your fellow passengers or do a crossword puzzle. Some people passed the time with cards and I know one regular train traveller from those days who always carried a couple of packs with him and says he made some good friends over those late night card games. The fact remains, though, that in a second class compartment with four people of, usually, different ages and habits and inclinations, it was better to climb into your bunk and read yourself quietly to sleep. Some people find it hard to sleep on a train that judders and rattles but I always find it soothing. Today, it’s true, I’d find it impossible to sleep in a confined space with four other people, probably strangers if you were travelling alone, with all the snoring and snuffling and coughing and clambering up and down the ladder from the top bunk to get to the loo at the end of the corridor. Back then, though, a veteran of the school trains, I found all that rocking, rolling and riding very conducive to deep slumber. And as you snuggled down in your narrow bunk, in your crisp white EAR & H linen, outside was all the vast red thorny wilderness of the nyika that lies between the coastal scarp and the high plains country around Nairobi – a wilderness in those days little inhabited by humans but rich in species such as elephant, rhino, lion and cheetah.
Oh, to go to sleep with all of Africa around you. And then to wake to chill air and the vast plains of the Athi, alive with herds of zebra, wildebeest, kongoni, and antelope of all kinds. Ostriches would seem to race the train, their great legs mimicking the pistons. Tommies would skitter away, tails wagging. Warthog families would trot busily over the dusty ground, sometimes with several little piglets in a well-behaved line. How many of the world’s great train journeys could offer a Movietone panorama such as that? In the small compartments we would modestly try to dress ourselves without inconveniencing our fellow-travellers- or baring too much flesh. Early-risers would lay claim to the loos while others queued up outside. Overnight baggage and handbags would be gathered, goodbyes would be said, people would start to hang out of the windows as the train steamed through the dull outlying area around Embakasi before making its final huffing run into Nairobi station. Greatest of all the beasts in Africa, the mighty locomotive of the EAR & H had brought its consignment of passengers and mail safely through almost 330 (530 km)or so miles of night and trackless bush, scaling almost 6000 feet (1700m).
The railway was pivotal in the development of colonial Kenya, linking the coast with the inland and carrying early settlers from Europe to take up their farmsteads (though the doughtier Boers came up from South Africa by wagon!). In the centre, the opening of the Mombasa railway station, at left, the carriage from which Inspector Ryall was dragged to his death by a man-eating lion and right, tribal society gets a first taste of technological change to come.
To school and back
Travelling on the school train offered a slightly different experience. We high school girls would arrive at the station in full uniform (grey flannel skirt, white blouse, red and black tie, grey felt hat – blazer over the arm) despite the Mombasa heat with our hockey sticks and tennis rackets and big tin trunks, rushing about excitedly to greet friends while our parents retreated thankfully to the bar. I have some faint memory of boys and girls travelling back to boarding school on the same train, at some earlier time, but by my time at boarding school (1958 – 1961) we travelled on different days. Not hard to guess why! It’s interesting to reflect on how self-focussed are the young because for the life of me I can’t remember anyone else travelling on those trains except our lot. Presumably there were other passengers on those school trains but I have no recollection of them, nor of girls travelling to any of the other up-country boarding schools – Limuru, for example, or Loreto Msongari. All I can see in my mind’s eye are the grey-clad KGHS lot milling about in a crowd large enough to eclipse all over travellers – shrill little thirteen year-olds going up for the first time; dignified sixth formers in their distinctive blue ties; a couple of harassed-looking teachers trying to herd us all together.
The journeys “up” were tinged with sorrow and trepidation – at least for those of us who didn’t like boarding school. Another term looming: of compulsory games and sarcastic prefects; of stodgy food and conduct marks; of Sunday church and a life ruled by electric bells. Coming home on the “down” train, though, was a different matter. How happy we would be as the train puffed its way out of Nairobi station, past the carriage where the man-eating lion had snatched the unfortunate police inspector Ryall years before, and southward across the Athi plains as night began to fall. Schoolchildren travelled second class and didn’t eat in the dining car – instead we were supplied with sandwiches and fruit by the school, and a large bottle of cordial each to drink. Of course, we’d already had a cooked lunch and were, I think, quite happy to sit in our compartments munching our sandwiches and knowing that our next meal would be in Mombasa…at home!
Those long nights on the school train were filled with happy chatter as we gossiped about our friends and enemies, shared secrets about boys we admired, or whom we fervently hoped admired us, made plans for the holidays that seemed to stretch endlessly ahead even though we only got four weeks at Christmas, two at Easter and two in August (or was it July?). To us coast girls the holidays were all about the beach – those long, white, empty, palm-lined beaches divided only by the dark lines of native fish traps and the occasional headland, beyond them and the aqua sea with its protective line of offshore reef. How we longed to be back on our dear little island with its baobabs and scarlet poincianas and glorious architectural fusion of the Arabic and the Portuguese. Sailing at the Yacht Club, dancing at the Sports Club or Railway Club, lounging happily over a Coke at the Nyali lido, waterskiing on Tudor Creek, eating samosa and playing the jukebox at the Cosy Café, listening to the latest hit singles at Shankardass where the patient owner put up with us crowding into his listening booth even though we rarely had the money to buy anything.
And, once we were old enough, there would be boyfriends waiting to meet us in town, or at the pictures, or cycling with us over the bridge to Nyali, or across the ferry to the south coast beaches. It was a wonderful time, and a wonderful place, to be a teenager on holiday. Though of course, nothing is quite THAT wonderful and I have to think hard, now, and honestly, to remind myself that being young had its share of anguish. Spots that erupted overnight. Parents who wouldn’t let you stay out late. The boys whom you desperately wanted to date and who wouldn’t look at you. Boys with whom you wouldn’t be seen dead who kept asking you out. Quarrels with your best friend. Jealousy of girls prettier than you. Frustration that your mother wouldn’t let you have a new dress for the teenage dance, or let you wear lipstick, or pierce your ears. Worry about what your father would say when he saw the latest term’s school report. No, being a teenager wasn’t always perfect bliss but on the school train, going home, with all those glorious days of comparative freedom ahead, it certainly seemed that way.
At that age we pretty much took for granted the great wonder of Africa that lay beyond the train windows. Elvis or Cliff or Buddy were of much greater interest to us than wild animals and those of us with transistor radios were very popular in the small four-berth compartments, where we might be lucky enough to pick up Forces Overseas Broadcasting, which played the best pop music. Sometimes, though, Africa forced itself upon us. There was the time, for example, when the line was so slippery with the bodies of millions of army worms that the train had to halt while workers cleaned the tracks. Elephant sometimes crossed the line, necessitating another slowdown. And once we hit a rhino, somewhere around Tsavo, in the middle of the night. There was a thud that travelled down the length of the carriages and the great engine juddered to a halt. You can imagine the pandemonium with a great mob of teenage girls in their nightdresses and pyjamas, having been suddenly awoken, hanging out of the windows to see what was going on and, despite the furious exhortations of the two teachers, actually getting down on to the ground by the side of the track. Hysteria prevailed – we’d hit another train, the tracks had buckled, a Maasai herdsman had been crossing the line with his cattle (at that hour!). Then word was passed back that it was a rhino. Of course we all longed to see, and crowded to the front of the train, but could see nothing in the darkness beyond the steaming bulk of the engine. We waited for what seemed like hours though it was probably only an hour before a truck arrived, with men and ropes, and after a lot of that typical African argy-barging and fitina the poor beast – quite dead – was dragged off to one side. The engine (one supposes) was inspected and found fit to travel and we got up steam again and continued the journey, we girls hanging out of the window to stare at the remains of the poor, foolish rhinoceros. Some said it had probably charged the engine, rhinos being notoriously cantankerous and always ready to take on creatures bigger than themselves. Though this was obviously nonsense, we liked to believe it.
In my memory we rarely slept on the school train, though of course we must have done. Mostly, I remember lying awake and chatting in the darkness, then getting up and peering out every time we stopped at one of those little lonely stations along the line where mysterious goods were noisily loaded and unloaded and young tribal boys would run alongside trying to sell ostrich eggs and bananas to the newly-awakened passengers. One night I remember in particular for I was sitting curled up on my lower bunk, by the window, and noticed a falling star, and then another, and another. A meteorite shower of some extent, because it went on intermittently through the night. It was 1960 and a time of turmoil – some religious group had forecast the end of the world, there had been a great earthquake in Chile and not long after that the newly-independent Belgian Congo had erupted into civil bloodshed that sent thousands of white refugees across the border. Which was, in fact, the reasons we Boma girls were on that train because the school had been opened to house the refugees and we were all being sent home early – and in a heightened state of excitement. So, being fifteen and credulous at the time, I saw those scattering “stars” as a sinister omen and was both frightened and awed. Perhaps the end of the world really WAS at hand! I have seen meteorite showers since, and Halley’s Comet, but nothing so spectacular as what I saw out of my train window that long ago night, in the clear skies over Africa.
When we awoke in the morning –IF we slept – it was to the languorous warmth of the coast and a series of fiercely competed-for “firsts” – the first palm tree, the first glimpse of the sea. Down we went through the green and terraced hillsides of Mazeras and Mariakani, waving enthusiastically at the Watoto carrying bananas and the women cutting maize. Down, down, down to the flatness of the coastal strip and the water everywhere. Across the causeway, where in the distance the dockside cranes of Kilindini Harbour stood like giant giraffes. It was our custom to throw our emptied drink bottles from the window and over the causeway into the creek below. That muddy creek bed must be lined with glass fragments to this day, to mystify future archaeologists. This practice was forbidden but we did it anyway! Term after term, year after year. It was part of the ritual of coming home.
Once we had crossed the causeway the train slowed right down and seemed to take an interminable…an unreasonable…an unbearable time to meander through the sheds and godowns around Changamwe. Until…at last…oh longed-for at last!…we would round the bend among all the shunting yards and myriad tracks and huff our way into the station. There, waiting for us, would be parents, smiling and waving. Even my bothersome little bro was a welcome sight. EVERYTHING was a welcome sight…the palm trees, the distinctive clothing of the coastal tribes, the splendid tusks on Kilindini Road under which we passed, the servants welcoming us home with a bountiful breakfast, the beloved baobab tree in the garden, the gleaming blue ocean, the feeling of holiday and above all the heartfelt happiness that is HOME!
That’s where I’d like to end my story but it does have a slight, sad sequel. Some years after I’d left Kenya I returned there with my husband and, for old time’s sake and ignoring the warning of friends still living there, we decided to travel down to the coast by train. We so looked forward to this experience and were as excited about it as children when we left Nairobi Station. Alas, even in a short time, things had changed for the worse. Our First Class compartment was not very clean and nor was the bedding – the crisp, white sheets and coarse but sweet-smelling EAR & H blankets of yesteryear were no more. The dining car looked much the same, albeit shabbier and the silverware tarnished, but of course the clientele had changed. Instead of smiling at each other intimately across a red lamp-shaded table as the African night rushed past we found ourselves facing two very large, very fat, very cheerful Luo police inspectors with rather awful table manners. They couldn’t have been more friendly and we chatted away quite happily – about our new home, about our recent travels, about the changes that had come to Kenya – but it wasn’t what we’d imagined our journey would be. And the food – some grey and indeterminate stew – was even worse than boarding school grub.
It was a lesson that has stayed with me ever since – for it can be a mistake to go back. Kenya, more than most places, exerts a magic so powerful that our nostalgia haunts us even half a century or more after we’ve left. Ex-Kenyans gather wherever they can, even when very old, to remind each other of how it was, back then. What we are inclined to forget is that our longing is for another time, as well as another place. It’s possible to go back to the place, and even try to put a positive spin on changes that, in our hearts (and eyes) offend us. But we can never recapture that special time not only of youth – everyone has that – but of rare privilege. The privilege of being such as we were, in such a place, at such a time – and all the rarer because it can never be quite that way again.
And so, in my memory and that of many others now approaching the twilight of their lives, the dear old train puffs forever on through the African night.
Though Kenya is famous for its wild game the island of Mombasa has always been rather poorly equipped with wildlife, if you exclude marine creatures. Mongooses were plentiful, and birds and reptiles but no antelope or elephant or zebra and certainly no large feline predators.
Until, that is, the Day of the Leopard. Or, to be more correct, a couple of weeks of The Leopard because once, a long time ago, a rumour went racing round the island that a leopard had crossed from the mainland and was on the prowl. I can’t exactly remember the year but it was possibly 1959 or 1960, and I missed all the excitement because I was at boarding school in Nairobi.
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Africans on their way home at night reported a large, spotted cat – a chui for sure, glimpsed slinking through gardens or following them at a discreet but still nerve-wracking distance. An Indian shopkeeper thought he saw the same creature skulking about when he was emptying some food bins one night. Soon sightings were coming from all parts of the island and these gained credence among the scoffers – such as my father – when pug marks were found in the grounds of the Church of England cathedral. The protestants of Mombasa considered this a definite triumph over the Papists down the other end of Fort Jesus Road and some wag suggested that the Provost of the Cathedral (not sure if it was still Rex Jupp at that time) buy himself a rifle! The pug marks were identified, by those who knew how, as being definitely those of a leopard.
After that the search was on, but the leopard proved elusive which, consider how crowded was our little island, without a lot of natural bush left upon it, is a tribute to the ability of big cats to conceal themselves from human view. We were not, in fact, particularly frightened of this particular big cat because leopards were not known to attack humans unless seriously provoked. However, a leopard is still a formidably strong and well-armed animal and who knew what it might do if it became hungry enough. Children were warned not to wander too far and dogs were kept indoors at night. As it was, any dogs that disappeared at that time were considered to have become leopard food and a couple of gung ho types actually sat up at night with native pi-dogs bought especially for the purpose and tied up as bait nearby, until the RSPCA put a stop to it. Men – European men at least – seemed to consider the whole thing a good joke but women and Africans – who were of course less-securely housed and more likely to be out on foot at night – were frightened. Indians were frightened too or at least the man behind the counter of our grocer, Beliram Parimal was, because, as he told us, “leopard is terrible man-eater”. In India, said my father, that’s quite true, for there leopard are larger than ours and also seem to be fiercer. He was a great fan of the books of the Indian hunter Jim Corbett, whose brother lived at Bamburi, and had not long since read The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. Unfortunately others in Mombasa had read this book too, borrowed from the British Council Library at Tudor, which probably helped fuel the general hysteria.
Leopard were, of course, quite common on the mainland wherever there was heavy forest. I myself saw them a few times – one on the roof of a cottage at Jadini Hotel, one crossing the road not far south of Malindi. When calves were taken at Kilifi Plantations a leopard was the suspected culprit and when I lived at Port Reitz my servants were afraid to walk home after dark because leopard were often seen in the vicinity. But a leopard on Mombasa Island would have to have either crossed the causeway, or Nyali Bridge, or swum across Tudor Creek or possibly the lower mangrove reaches of Kilindini Harbour. Suggestions that it might have crossed on the ferry from Likoni were generally disregarded! It all seemed so unlikely and even the reported pug prints in the church ground were regarded with suspicion by some – Mombasa was never short in those days of young practical jokers and some still remember the night a few of us drove all over Nyali pulling out name posts (remember those?) and swapping them around to confuse home owners and visitors. And then, suddenly, the leopard did something quite unexpected.
We lived in Kizingo Road and not far from us was a collection of small, cheap, thatched houses known collectively as “the bandas” and inhabited by the lower-ranking white local government employees. Among them was a woman I shall call simply “Mrs R”. She was married to a mechanic employed in the council workshops and her Lancashire origins were very obvious in an accent so broad that those of us who spoke “home counties” English could barely understand her – and thus she was much imitated behind her back. For Mrs R was not popular. She nagged her husband, gossiped spitefully about her neighbours, had few friends and was feared not only for her uncompromising opinions, loudly expressed in that harsh accent, but for her constant trouble-making. She was particularly unpopular with the neighbourhood children because, childless herself, she was always shouting at us to stay well clear of her house and garden and “keep roody noise daown”. I may be libelling the poor woman who has been dead many years now and thus unable to defend herself – but this is the way I (and others) remember her.
Mrs R was of that type and class – fortunately a tiny minority in Kenya – who went out to Africa purely for the job – and perhaps the sun – and appeared to get very little out of it. They never learned Swahili, never went into the bush or even a game park, never in fact stirred very far from their government-supplied house. They lived frugally in order to save to go “home” one day and buy a small bungalow at somewhere like Hove. They employed only one servant to do everything and as their houses usually contained little besides the basic PWD furniture this little was not much. In fact they feared and despised Africans and were, in turn, despised by those who did work for them and who preferred their bwanas and memsaabs to not interfere in the kitchen or lock up the pantry or dole out groceries with parsimony.
Mrs R was a case in point – she had a succession of servants from tribes who did not take well to domestic service and she treated them with rudeness and suspicion. Worse, she raised her voice to them in a way that other memsaabs would consider ill-bred as well as likely to be counter-productive. Possibly she did this because she had never bothered to learn any Swahili and believed, in true British fashion, that the only way to get a foreigner to understand you was to shout at them. Again, I am being rather harsh, and more than a teeny bit snobbish! But that’s the way it was. People like Mrs R never felt any kind of affinity with Africa, never felt the deep love felt by the rest of us, never tried to understand it, longed always for the day when she could finally return “home”. Where, no doubt, she would bore her friends and relatives with tales of her glory days as a memsaab. And people like Mrs R never took any interest in wildlife nor learned to tell one animal from another.
Ironic, therefore, that it was to Mrs R that the Mombasa leopard made its most famous appearance. According to two close neighbours, they were awakened late one night by a scream and a terrified voice calling out “Wilf, Wilf, it be taiger! It be taiger!”. When they rushed outside they realised the voice they were hearing was that of Mrs R, emanating from the conjugal bedroom. “Wilf, wake up!” she called. “It be taiger!”.
The way it was reported to me (and to many around the neighbourhood) Mrs R had been lying awake in bed when she saw a large, spotted, bewhiskered face peering right in her bedroom window. “When I realised what t’thing was,” she confided to my mother, “I were raight terrified”. Mrs R might not have known her animals but she did know a big cat when she saw one in her window, and had then woken up her sleeping husband. Loudly enough so that every one else in the neighbourhood (the bandas were very close together) could hear. The Story of Mrs R and the “taiger” winged its way round the island next day and she may well not have been believed except…that one of the neighbours who rushed to her aid reported later that his dog, an Alsatian known for its savage nature, had cowered whimpering at his side. And…the clincher…several pug marks of an unmistakable leopard nature were found in the soft sand of the garden bed outside Mr and Mrs R’s window.
The search was intensified but though expert trackers were brought in they found it difficult to find a trail through the little roads and gardens large and small that comprised the area between Kizingo Road, Prince Charles Street (as it was then) and Ras Serani Drive. However a couple of days later an African wandering under a baobab tree not far from the Likoni Ferry looked up and got the fright of his life, for there, draped nonchalantly over a branch, was the leopard. I got a fright too, when I heard about it, as did some of my friends, because this tree was a favourite play spot of ours and we’d even built a small cubby house in its thick, protective branches. The big cat was then captured, caged and (I think) released on the mainland. Nobody ever knew, conclusively, how it had got on the island, let alone why. The rumour mill ground out theories by the day – it had been brought on to the island deliberately as a joke; it was an escaped pet; it had escaped from one of Carr-Hartley’s zoo shipments at the port. The first might just possibly be true, albeit unlikely, the other two were obviously ridiculous because any escape would have been reported. And you don’t keep a large creature like a leopard in your home without friends and neighbours knowing about it…I’m just repeating this now to show how so many people don’t bother to think before they theorise!
We kids, of course, happily believed all the rumours in turn and even came up with a few of our own. One, I remember, was that the leopard (we always thought of it as “he”) would for sure have had a mate somewhere who would look for him everywhere and, through starvation and revenge, would prey on those who had taken him. Which shows that, back then, we knew little more about the habits of leopards than did poor Mrs R!
A Baobab tree, found all over eastern Kenya in the dry nyika country between the Nairobi uplands and the coast. Mombasa island was covered in them and legend had it that under each one was an Arab soldier, slain during the wars with the Portuguese who occupied Mombasa for a while. Baobabs are useful trees; the fruit is edible (though not particularly palatable) and a good substitute for cream-of-tartar, birds and other wildlife find refuge in the branches, some people even made temporary homes in them and we kids made cubby houses in them. We had a big specimen in our garden and I (with help from our gardener) made a snug little refuge there, impregnable to my ayah and most adults but not, alas, to my agile father!
Lyrebird Mountain 