I would sit on the bed happily for an hour or so, examining and marvelling at every piece, not moving off the bed until I heard my siblings calling for me to join in the shop-keeping game, which involved dressing up in all our grandparents’ old clothes and ‘shopping’ for the items on the pantry shelves. The morning would come to an end when we were called for lunch, when there would always be my favourite sago pudding, tinted pink or yellow, fluffy and delicious, topped by meringue in the shape of Mount Kenya, or Grandpa Webb’s famous potato scones, for which I still have the recipe written in his own hand. Wednesdays were, without doubt, very special days of my childhood.
As I turned four, Peter and Sheila went off to boarding school, initially to a school near Nakuru. Betty was just a baby, no good for exploring outdoors, so without my two older siblings I was bereft and lonely. To make matters worse, just before they left, Ricky-Ticky-Tavey had decided to explore the nooks and crannies of Never Die’s engine and my father, completely oblivious to our favourite mongoose’s whereabouts, had wanted to use the car that day with tragic results. The entire family was plunged into mourning that treasured little friend. As usual I busied myself with my special rabbits, cats, chicks and ducklings. But then, overnight, my life changed: I was given the responsibility of caring for an orphaned baby bushbuck. I named this little forest-dwelling antelope Bushy and I loved him totally, right from the very first moment he arrived.
Bushy was the first creature to provide me with an insight into the wonders of the wild animal kingdom. He was gorgeous to look at, with large soft ears and beautiful liquid eyes, his skin of a rich chestnut colour with white patches on his throat and vertical white stripes and spots on his body. I could spend ages just stroking and cuddling him. My gardener friend helped me make a retreat for him, laboriously cutting brush and stacking it in a corner of the chicken run. This was a great success, Bushy immediately hiding himself inside, emerging every four hours for his bottle-feeds of diluted cow’s milk. At first I was disappointed that he hid himself away for so long, since I wanted to play with him as much as possible, so I would try and drag him out, but my mother explained to me that as a baby, before Bushy was orphaned, his mother would have hidden him away for his own protection and being so young he only really felt safe when hidden. She told me that because I loved him and didn’t make him do things he couldn’t yet do, as he grew up he would start to spend more time out of hiding. So at first I sat beside his new home most of the day, just to keep him company, and at night carried him to the little schoolroom so that he could be with the cats and safe from the leopards. Granny Webb’s friend Mrs Hansen gave me a little bell that I tied around Bushy’s neck, and from then on I could always locate him as he later spent more time frolicking around the garden. As he grew up and became more independent, Bushy became more responsive. I would talk to him endlessly, absolutely convinced that he understood everything I said to him.
But wild animals are wild animals, more ancient and sophisticated than us. Knowledge vital to survival is instinctive – what to eat, what to fear, who they are and how to behave in their ordered communities is knowledge imprinted at birth, so that they come into the world already programmed to a certain extent. In hand-raised animals, however, natural instincts lie latent, suppressed by soft and safe living, so they must be honed by exposure to a wild situation.
This is one of the most difficult aspects of raising wild animals – knowing when it is the right time to open the stable door at night and expose your hand-raised baby to natural dangers and finding the courage to do so, knowing that its future is now at Nature’s mercy. But it is an essential part of rehabilitation. Only then does everything begin to fall into place, and what was once your garden pet becomes what it was destined to be – another member of the wild community, faced with the spectre of Nature’s most powerful tool, natural selection.
Through exposure to the wild, an animal learns a number of vital lessons: the early warnings of danger in the language of birds; the alarm calls of monkeys and other animals; the hidden messages in scents on grass stems, in dung piles, in the wind and, most importantly, the rank and status within its own hierarchy. Such things cannot be taught by a human foster-mother, for we humans are too far removed and remote from Nature and have lost the skills that once, long ago, we must have possessed in common with others of the animal kingdom. All a human foster-parent can do is provide the right circumstances and a secure base from which an orphaned animal can begin to explore and to which it can return, if threatened, until it finds its own niche in the wild community. You should not raise an orphaned animal unless you can be certain that it will be able to enjoy a good quality of life at the end of its dependent years, or unless you are sure that you can be unselfish enough to grant it freedom when the time is right.
This much I now know, but at four years old I loved Bushy so unconditionally that I would have given all my hailstone ice cream to him. As far as I was concerned he loved me back and we were going to be together for ever. I knew that I had to be gentle with him and I loved to be with him, chatting to him incessantly, trailing him around the garden, feeding him, settling him and fondling him. I could see that being confined made him unhappy, so I let him out to roam outside the chicken run. There was nothing I would not have done for him, and I mistakenly thought that his affection for me was such that he would never choose to run away.
He vanished on the same day that one of my grandparents’ friends, Mrs Hansen, passed away at their house. I was inconsolable and shed tears of bitter loss. Later, when I understood that a wild pet is simply on loan for its dependent years before that mysterious inherited genetic memory we call ‘instinct’ manifests itself, with hindsight I knew that Bushy did what was only natural, but aged four I felt as if my heart would break. As for Granny’s friend, Mrs Hansen, I was confused. Later that day we were bundled into Never Die and taken to Granny and Grandpa Webb’s house. I pleaded with Granny Webb to let me see her.
‘She has gone to God,’ whispered Granny, tears welling in her eyes.
‘No, she hasn’t,’ I said. ‘I can see her there in the bed.’
‘That is just her body in the bed, her spirit has flown off,’ said Granny.
I looked up at the ceiling to see if anything was flying around but there was nothing there, so I cried anyway, but more for Bushy than for Mrs Hansen. Life seemed unbearably sad.
Nevertheless, with a child’s resilience, it wasn’t long before I cheered up, for it was soon a favourite time of the year, entailing the annual and much anticipated journey to Granny and Grandpa Webb’s seaside cottage at Malindi. They had bought this as a holiday home for the family, eventually moving there from Gilgil some years later. Memories of going there as a child, of packing up at the farm, of the always adventure-filled journey, and the excitement of the first headlong run into the sea, remain so sharp in my mind that whenever I return each year, I can still see and hear myself and my family in the house, on the beach, and body-surfing in the sea.
In the summer of 1939, when I was five years old, with the clouds of war gathering and the air thick with uncertainty, my parents decided we would make the journey again by road while we could. Preparations started weeks beforehand – my father making hams, bacon and sausages and my mother baking endless biscuits and crackers, stacking them up in a huge wooden box; oiling dozens of eggs to keep them fresh and making biltong, the salted spiced meat that she doused in vinegar and hung out to dry. My father converted the back of an old Ford V8 lorry into a reasonably comfortable space for us children, though there was such a lot that had to be taken with us that we had to squash up together most of the time. We set off at 4 a.m., hardly waking from sleep as my father carried us from our warm beds, but when the dawn lit the sky in a blaze of colour as we approached Nairobi, we awoke from our dreams to the thrill of a real life adventure.
Nairobi was the very apex of civilization to us, back in those days. First, my father stopped the truck on the outskirts of the town so
that we could change into our best clothes, because my mother wanted us to all look smart, in case we saw someone we knew. Nairobi was a wonder to us children: huge crowds of people; shops and stalls piled high with goods; a cacophony of alien sounds, so different to those of the natural world. We talked about what we had seen for days afterwards as we journeyed on to the Athi plains, where we set up camp for the night. Our parents slept under a tarpaulin attached to the back of the truck, while we stayed in the back, the canvas replaced by a large mosquito net through which we could see the moon and the stars. The night chorus of the Athi plains was always marked by the incessant background symphony of thousands of wildebeest and zebra, interspersed by the eerie howl of hyenas and the barking of jackals, while the deep-throated roar of a lion triggered a brief hush.
The journey was like no other, each step revealing something new. My favourite stop was in the heart of the nyika, near Mtito Andei, ‘the place of the vultures’, where the soil was red and sandy and the sultry air was filled with the fragrance of earth mingled with wild sage. The scenery here was rugged and spectacular in its vastness, reflecting in its expanse a sense of eternity. The skies were a crystal-clear blue, and the towering dome of Kilimanjaro lent majesty and power. The sun beat down, baking the blood-red earth with intensity, and the air was filled with the excited and urgent chatter of bright yellow weaverbirds as they hung upside down along the branches of the acacia trees, building their intricately woven nests. We camped beneath the twisted branches of a massive baobab, the tree that many Africans regard as the home of their ancestral spirits and whose flowers last for such a short time. There was life in the folds, indentations and wrinkles of its pith bark, the nest of a pair of hornbills deep inside, having walled themselves up, closing the fold with mud, leaving just a small slit for the male bird to pass grasshoppers and insects to his wife inside. There were chameleons, lizards and back-fanged arboreal boomslang snakes searching for hatchlings and eggs. In the evening we saw enchanting little bush-babies with large, round, liquid eyes – nocturnal monkeys with eyes like orbs, and yellowish limbs and tails, that were constantly on the go. Small black-and-white-spotted genet cats, which were actually more like mongooses than cats, ran across the boughs with amazing agility, thanks to little suction pads on their feet. We took some of the white pulp of pure cream of tartar from the baobab’s big hanging fruits and saw how the emptied capsules could be used as water dippers. My mother explained how the fibrous wood was used to make paper and bags and the roots a red dye. Many of the trees, she told us, were deliberately hollowed out to serve as water storage tanks, trapping rainwater in their giant bowls, where it kept pure and fresh for months afterwards. This giant tree with a life expectancy of thousands of years was a world in itself. Lying under it at night I felt secure, as if the tree was exuding safety as well as shelter.
As we journeyed on and came nearer and nearer to the sea, we argued happily in the back of the lorry as to which of us could spot the first coconut palm and then the sea itself. At Mariakani, on the outskirts of Mombasa, we cracked our first coconut and ate the first mango of our holiday. We children could not stop staring at the women from the Giriama tribe, who strode around expertly balancing receptacles on their heads, bare above the waist, with their breasts swinging above short, heavily pleated calico skirts, some with a baby slung across their backs. At Mombasa we stopped to get Betty and our grandparents, who had travelled down by train and had had a much smoother ride, albeit less exciting, than ours. My father then had to negotiate a taxi to take them on the last stage of the journey to Malindi, his dialogue in Swahili constantly interrupted by Granny Chart, who was a more formidable haggler. We spent a night in Mombasa, which had an atmosphere all of its own, the smell of spices and frying fish mingling with the heady scent of the ocean.
The final leg to Malindi was just a rough sandy track with two creeks that had to be crossed by ferry, and this took all day. The highlight was the ferries, each of which consisted of a huge wooden platform supported by floating drums that could carry about three cars as well as our lorry, all elaborately coaxed aboard by an old foreman who waggled a ping-pong bat furiously to position the vehicles just right, even though it was puzzling trying to understand what the signals meant! When everything was to his satisfaction, the leader of the ferrymen made a series of loud honking blasts on a conch shell, a seemingly crystal-clear signal, because almost at once a wonderful rhythmic stamping dance and elaborate song about the passengers started up. At first I was mesmerized by the rocking of the ferry, for the ferrymen seemed to want to outdo each other in how much they could stomp. Soon, however, I was listening to the words of the song, for by this age I understood and could speak Swahili. The men started singing about my father and his family, pointing at us children, and this made us feel really important, being singled out for special mention.
Eventually we reached Malindi, and as our beach cottage came into view we were already stripped down to our costumes so that we could leap over the dozens of large pink ghost crabs and jump straight into the sea. Grandpa and Granny Webb’s cottage overlooked the best section of the bay, where the beach sloped gently into the surf and the currents were benign, so the bathing was safe. However, when the tide was low, the waves turned into what we called ‘dumpers’, and these needed to be treated with great caution. Huge swells that coasted silently in long lines towards the shore suddenly reared up in a curling arc of translucent green to thunder down in shallow water, throwing spray high into the air and stirring up the sand of the seabed. It was one of these savage ‘dumpers’ that broke my father’s nose, picking his surfboard up and hurling him with incredible force into the sand face-first, so that he stumbled to the shore barely conscious, with blood pouring down his face. ‘It must have been a shark,’ whispered Sheila to me, Peter and Betty, as my mother ran down the path from the house to reach him. In fact, no person to my knowledge has ever been taken by a shark in Malindi Bay, but our parents used the threat of them, saying that they fed at night as a way of making sure we did not go into the sea after dark.
The time we spent at Malindi was magical. My parents were relaxed, away from the sweat and toil of the farm; Grandpa Webb and Granny Chart settled into their annual ceasefire and my brother and sisters and I spent our entire time either in the sea or on the beach. The cottage was also almost outdoors, its roof Makuti matting fashioned from palm leaves, so that the ocean breeze could blow free under the wide eaves. The toilet facilities were the same as at our farm – ‘a Long Drop’ behind the house, with a wooden box over a very deep hole, hollowed out to form the seat, under which were huge cobwebs, massive spiders, unblinking geckos and perhaps even a skulking snake – so I chose to use the chamberpot as much as I could, even though I had to withstand the constant jibes of my siblings.
After the initial days spent swimming in the sea and playing in the sand, I would beg my mother to take me to the local coral reef so that I could catch some of the brilliantly coloured baby coral fish to start up my own little aquarium. Armed with nets and buckets we would follow the tide out, treading carefully over the flat surface of the reef, covered in sea grasses and bright green sea lettuce, to avoid the hermit crabs that were busy carrying their shell homes on their backs, while mudhoppers used their pectoral fins as tiny legs to shoot across the shallows. We also had to look out for the black waving arms of many different kinds of brittle stars, which protruded from every nook and cranny, as well as the sharp spines of the sea urchins, which could penetrate our tennis shoes. On the shore side of the far reef there was a deep channel where the corals grew undisturbed, breathtakingly beautiful in a variety of shapes, sizes and subtle colours. This was a whole new world, with multitudes of fish of every hue and shape. The far reef was the most fascinating of all, for here, embedded in the coral and covered in barnacles, was the wreck of an old ship.
It was the Blue Lagoon at Watamu, the ocean to the south of Malindi, that gave me the greatest pleasure. Unlike today, the lagoon was re
mote and untouched, frequented only by fishermen from a small Giriama settlement inland from the sea. There were twin lagoons, separated by an ancient coral headland, whose rugged walls had been hollowed out by the sea to create cool shaded caves that became exposed at low tide and provided ideal shelter in the heat of the day. In some of the caves the retreating tide left little pools, and the sunlight filtering through the orifices in the headland above would create prisms that reflected all the colours of the rainbow. The effect was magical. Depending on which monsoon was blowing at the time, one or other of the lagoons would be choked with an enormous pile of seaweed, but always one would be clean, its sands pure white, comprised of minute particles of pounded shell. Here, the coral heads, viewed through our goggles, were even more beautiful than those at Malindi’s coral reef, and the fish more brilliant because the water was so clear and not sullied by the silt-laden waters of the Sabaki River. Shining blue and red parrot fish pecked at their coral castles, black and white scorpion fish skulked in their hideaways, butterfly and surgeon fish floated and darted, while bright red starfish and shells of all sizes, colours and shapes littered the ocean floor.
The lagoon and its magical spectacle of marine life was the nearest I ever got to the fairyland fantasies of my childhood. I remember it with deep nostalgia, and it always makes me think of Karen Blixen’s words: ‘Yes, this is how it was meant to be.’
It was my last summer of innocence.
3. Growing Up
‘I stand enriched, endowed with a priceless heritage that is my very own. While on this earth no man can take away from me the sun, the sea, the warm south wind that softly whispers by.’
– My mother, 1950
After my near-perfect early years, life changed and I had to grow up rather swiftly. As the Second World War got under way, the Government needed to find a way of feeding the British and Kenyan troops fighting in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and deployed in Burma, as well as the Italian prisoners-of-war captured in Abyssinia and the German prisoners captured in the Middle East. In order to provide food, thousands of animals had to be massacred, and for this task my father was chosen to shoot wildebeest and zebra in the Southern Game Reserve, at a place called Selengai. This area covered over 10,000 square miles of prime game country that encompassed the eastern edge of the Loita plains near Narok, swept over the Athi plains beyond Nairobi, to Amboseli at the foothills of Kilimanjaro, stopping at the fringes of what is now Tsavo West National Park. The terrain consisted of forest, high and low bushland, savannah and an unforgiving thorn scrubland. It was an area teeming with wildlife.
Love, Life, and Elephants Page 5
