Love, Life, and Elephants

by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

  During the day, ours was a busy, often noisy household. Apart from the sound of animals, there were the endless arguments between Granny Chart and Grandpa Webb. Ellen was not happy about this, and whenever she visited our house at the same time as them she would flounce like a tornado through the rooms, banging doors, keen to show her displeasure at their very presence. She was a large, well-endowed woman, made of the stuff that created the Empire – a formidable old force. Grandpa Webb was no pushover either and his wicked sense of humour got him into frequent trouble, especially when he was caught – often! – in exaggerated but accurate mimicking of Granny Chart’s tantrums. Days would pass in frosty silence and it would take all the tact of my softly-spoken, gentle Granny Webb to try and smooth things over. As children we used to watch wide-eyed as these adults shouted and sulked at each other, and as soon as things became heated my mother would try to shoo us out of earshot of their noisy exchanges.

  My parents worked extremely hard. Like the women who had trekked from the Eastern Cape to settle here, my mother had to be proficient in just about every aspect of farm-life and homemaking. She was always on the go, responsible for all the farmyard animals including the large numbers of pigs on which we depended for some of our small income; the general running of the home and the domestic helpers we employed; making all our clothes; teaching us children for two hours a day; and tending to our much-needed vegetable garden. But she was always loving and even-tempered, managing to find time for her passions – painting and making our house beautiful. She was a brilliant artist, known for her skilful murals, so nursery rhymes danced off our bedroom walls and hand-painted sunshine birds of Kenya adorned silk lampshades. I thought of my mother as an angel, and at bedtime each evening when we knelt to say our prayers she was always there beside us. I loved the flowers, especially sitting in the jonquil patch enveloped by their heavenly scent, and I spent a lot of time staring at the ‘floating bowl’ in the sitting room, in which stood a pale-blue cut-glass mermaid with long flowing hair surrounded by cut roses from our garden, lost in my own thoughts and dreams.

  My father was more remote, in contrast to my mother. He wore his emotions on his face, an almost constant expression of worry and concern, for it was difficult in those days to make ends meet. We didn’t see much of him during the day, as he was always busy, involved somewhere on the farm. It was difficult to make a go of a farm and there was always something worrying him – a sick animal that he had to attend to, pestilence, the killing of one of his precious animals by a marauding leopard. The nearest vet was over 150 miles away and the farmworkers did not yet possess the skills needed for European-style farming. My father had a contract to send butter to Nairobi and made 300lb a week, fetching the equivalent of 6d per pound. Our pigs were hard to market, so he made ham and sausages himself on the farm, the ham fetching the princely sum of 1d per pound. Sometimes it was so difficult to generate enough money to keep us going that my father hired himself out, building dipping tanks for neighbouring farmers or transporting other people’s produce on our ox-wagons. Although much had been learned since the first settlers arrived, farming in the Rift Valley was still unpredictable – the periodic droughts impacted on grazing for the cattle. Between this and endemic diseases, about which little was known in those days, whole herds of livestock could be wiped out.

  And the locusts! Memories of the despair on my father’s face as a swarm approached remain vivid in my mind. If you have never seen locusts descend, it is a sight to behold. Like large grasshoppers, they come in a dense black cloud that blocks out the sun and they devour every blade of green for miles around, leaving vast areas bare before they take off to wreak havoc somewhere else. Mostly I remember the panic that preceded their arrival, for whoever first spotted the swarm had to warn everyone else so that they could grab tin cans and beat them as loudly as possible in an attempt to divert the swarm. For a few moments it felt as if the world would never again be quiet, the symphony of their flight making us quicken our beat on the tins – a sort of atonal premonition of the chaos to come.

  But the locusts were not all bad news. For Sega they were a culinary delicacy, and we would watch in horrified fascination as he pulled off the legs and heads, tossed the torsos in hot butter as he roasted them over coals and crunched up the browned bodies with obvious relish. My special friend – one of our gardeners from the Mkamba tribe, whom I used to beg over and over again to show me how he could pull out his filed front teeth and put them back in again – persuaded me to try some one year, which I bravely did, just to please him. I don’t really recall the taste, but I do remember Peter sneaking on me and my mother telling me not to eat insects ever again.

  In contrast, during the rains all the anxious creases on my father’s brow disappeared. He would stand on the verandah, hands outstretched, looking out over the Great Rift Valley, and watch as the first raindrops fell, soaking the earth, breathing in the scent of the air. Meanwhile my brother and sisters would be praying for hail, despite the fact that hail meant doom for our father’s crops. But for us it meant one thing: ice cream.

  We had no refrigerator and so we could never keep anything that would melt. At the first hint of hail, then, we would dash outside to frantically scoop up the hailstones as my mother rushed into the pantry to prepare the mixture for ice cream. This was placed in a sealed container, surrounded by the hailstones and salt and lowered into a bucket, which we then had to roll up and down the back verandah until the ice cream had frozen. Meanwhile those of us not rolling the bucket would be jumping around with mouth-watering anticipation. Hail only came about once every three years, so tucking into the frozen ice cream some hours later was as good as it got. No ice cream has tasted as delicious ever since.

  Although we were a self-contained family, there were of course plenty of visitors to the farm. My parents were known for their hospitality, and apart from our grandparents, friends from neighbouring farms often popped in without notice. My father came alive when we had visitors, regaling them with amusing stories, and he was deeply appreciated by his friends and neighbours, who knew they could come to him at any time for help in any one of the many areas in which he was skilled – carpentry, construction, mechanics, farming, animal husbandry . . . the list went on. Despite the fact that my father was teetotal, we children used to love to watch the change that came over him when he was relaxing with my mother or with friends. He would go from being preoccupied with farm-related problems to being chatty and funny, and we were always happy to see him sitting down in our living room, talking and enjoying my mother’s delicious non-alcoholic ginger beer.

  Among my parents’ close friends were the Higginsons, who lived on a small farm just outside Gilgil with their two sons, Michael and Philip, who were close in age to my brother, Peter. Mr and Mrs Higginson (or the Higgies as they were affectionately known) were a lively couple, full of banter and often at loggerheads with each other. This was illustrated perfectly one rainy evening soon after my parents had met them, when there was a knock at the door as my mother was bathing Peter and Sheila. Due to the appalling conditions of the roads during the rainy season, visitors after dark were few and far between, so my mother hurried out fearing that something must be very wrong. There was Mrs Higgie, dripping wet, with her two small sons in tow. She explained, in a rather harassed tone, that their old Rugby car had got well and truly bogged in the mud at the bottom of the road, so Mr Higgie had suggested that all the passengers, including the two little boys, get out and push. After a great deal of effort, they managed to dislodge the car from the mud, whereupon Mr Higgie simply roared off, leaving them all behind, caked in dirt. My mother was horrified that any husband could behave in this way and called for my father to drive them home. Reporting back afterwards, my father was equally aghast to have arrived at their farm only to find Mr Higgie with his feet up in front of a roaring fire, calmly perusing the newspaper and not a bit concerned for the rest of his family. Nor apparently did he pay the least bit of attention
to the tirade unleashed by his wife, simply glancing up over his spectacles nonchalantly before becoming absorbed in his newspaper again!

  Actually Mr Higgie was a highly decorated soldier, a good and amusing man. We all liked both him and Mrs Higgie very much. Mrs Higgie was our greatest source of local gossip, and in those days, when children were very much ‘seen and not heard’, Sheila and I would tiptoe and hide behind the door to the dining room to eavesdrop as she recounted the comings and goings of the Happy Valley set. Neither my parents nor the Higgies were part of this small community of aristocrats, who lived raunchily in the Wanjohi Valley on the eastern wall of the Rift, but everyone enjoyed hearing about their debauched sexual antics and permissive lifestyle.

  The Higginson brothers were my brother’s constant companions, cycling over most days to join in our games. Most of the time we played well together, as Sheila and I were also tomboys in our childhood and we enjoyed climbing, scrambling and exploring with the boys. However, as we got older, the boys began to pull rank and us girls found ourselves somewhat marginalized from their close-knit friendship.

  There were frequent excursions out into the surrounding areas, especially trips to Gilgil town, three miles away. At that time, my father’s single most prized possession was a T-model Ford car. He had bought it as a surprise for my mother when Peter was born, as he did not want to bring her back from the nursing home by ox-wagon. The car came to be known affectionately as Never Die. Up the road lived an old settler named Mr Worthingham, who decided that because petrol was expensive, he would use four oxen to pull his new car along. Seeing him sitting solemnly behind the wheel, steering a car that was being hauled at walking pace by oxen, made many people smile. At least Never Die was driven in the correct manner, albeit sometimes fuelled with paraffin.

  My mother instilled a great love of Nature in us, beginning with the flowers in our garden that we watched blossom and bloom year on year. The entire outside of our house was covered in Kitale creeper, its deep blue convolvulus flowers festooning the walls all the year round, and the garden was a joyous rainbow of colourful roses, Barberton daisies, dahlias and jonquils, among many other beautiful blossoms. Three entire beds were devoted to the sweet-smelling roses that were my mother’s pride and joy. On the other side of the rose terraces was the orchard where she planted the almond seeds that she had brought with her from South Africa. There were peach trees and some rather unyielding grapevines, plus a tall barricade of prickly pears, which was such an attraction for the mouse-birds that Peter used to scare off with his airgun.

  But it was during our weekly walk through the nearby forest, to visit Granny and Grandpa Webb in Gilgil, that my mother became truly animated, zealous in her love of what she termed ‘the matrix of life’. Something within the forest stirred my soul, and the background music of the river enhanced an almost spiritual experience for me. In a sort of reverential hush, we would take our time through the glades, spotting as many animals as we could. You could always tell when a pack of monkeys was around, as there was a musty smell in the air, but you had to be quiet in order to spot them. Once you saw one move, suddenly the air would fill with their movements and sound and we would crouch down low, still as statues, as they leapt into life. We loved watching the Colobus most, those beautiful black and white forest monkeys that soared through the trees with effortless jumps, fur flared out to assist their passage aerodynamically. Their tiny black hands were not unlike our own, except that they didn’t have thumbs. My mother told us that this was because they had been removed by evolution, thumbs an encumbrance that used to snag against the branches and twigs and slow down their progress. It was their voices that intrigued us the most, for when they called to each other it sounded like motor-bikes revving up. I was entranced by the variety of animals we saw in the forest. Most of the bushbuck, duikers and suni had hunched backs to make it easier to move through the undergrowth, and spotted or streaked coats to enhance camouflage in a world where sunlight streaks rather fleetingly through the herbage. The birds of the forest were both wonderful and plentiful – hornbills, touracos, starlings, parrots, bar-bets and bulbils, thrushes, babblers and flycatchers all abounded and everywhere their song interrupted the silence.

  We learned to distinguish different species of birds by their calls, and I loved the maiden-ferns that waved their feathery arms at me. I was convinced that the little moss-covered boulders surrounded by toadstools and tiny wild flowers were the very entrance to fairyland itself. I firmly believed in fairies, and would approach them very, very slowly and very, very quietly, blaming the fact that I never saw one on Peter and Sheila, who would make as much noise as possible the moment they saw me on my tiptoes.

  My mother likened the forest to a giant’s sponge, retaining water and releasing it gently to the lower regions consistently and faithfully throughout the year, year in and year out. She said: ‘If you remove the forest, then the slopes will stand bare and rocks will stick out like the bones of a skeleton with all its flesh gone.’ She felt acutely the therapeutic value of the natural forest and taught us to unwind, to release our minds so that we could appreciate the soothing tranquillity of the dim green twilight. Through my mother’s patient and passionate love of the forest, I came to believe that plants have all the attributes of other living creatures, though in a different form, for they react so certainly, so variously and so promptly to the outer world. While we cannot decipher all plant responses, not understanding what they ‘say’ to one another or what they ‘shout’ at us, by observing them closely we can see the most amazing things. Carnivorous plants will grasp at a fly with infallible accuracy, moving in just the right direction at just the right time; some parasitical plants recognize and even react to even the slightest odoriferous whiff of their victim, overcoming all obstacles to crawl stealthily in the right direction. There are those plants that seem to know which insects come only to plunder their nectar and so shut themselves up when a thief is about, opening only when the dew on the stem is sufficient to foil the marauder. Other more sophisticated types actually enlist the help of certain ants in a protective role, rewarding them with nectar in return for their warding off harmful insects and herbivorous mammals. My mother showed us some orchids that grow petals to mimic the species of a fly so perfectly that the male attempts to mate with it and in so doing pollinates it. The night-blossoming flowers around us were pure white in order to attract night moths and night-flying butterflies more easily, exuding a stronger fragrance at dusk to lure them, and rather than the delicate perfume of its type, the carrion lily made itself smell awful, like rotting meat, so that it would attract flies in areas where only flies abounded. There was so much to observe and learn, and later I believed that I could have devoted my life to the close investigation of the structural ingenuity of plants.

  As we wandered through the forest, I loved searching for and picking my favourite flowers, the beautifully scented wild Carissa edulis blossoms that I would, on arrival, give to my Granny Webb. It wasn’t long before those flowers became known by the family as ‘Daphne flowers’, and even now they conjure the memories of our weekly forest walks and all that my mother taught me.

  Wednesdays at Granny and Grandpa Webb’s house were special to us, for we could do almost anything we wanted. First, though, we had to line up against the wall for Grandpa Webb to ‘measure’ us to see how much we had grown. We were then ‘straightened’ and lectured about how to carry ourselves properly. Once released, my first port of call was the linen cupboard in the bathroom, where Granny kept her soaps that smelled of cedar, lavender and roses all rolled into one. Then I would ask if I could wear her jewels. Bouncing into her room, I would sit on the bed. There was one stipulation for trying on all her jewellery, and that was that I had to remain seated on the bed during the process, Buddha-like, with rings, bangles, necklaces and brooches festooned around my neck, arms, legs and fingers, her precious gold watch ticking quietly on my wrist. To this day each item is still imprinted in my mind, and
some I now own. It was the gold watch that fascinated me the most, because I knew that I would have to wait until my fifteenth birthday in order to possess a watch of my own.