Africa 1959

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Tonbridge to the Americas in 1946

Africa in 1951-2

Africa 1959

Liverpool and Germany in the 60's

KENYA 1959

We were visiting my wife's brother on the Kinangop in the White Highlands of Kenya, where they had a delightful estate at 8,000 feet. My sister-in-law, mother of three grown-up children had herself been born in Kenya and was the daughter of a doctor. She was practical, very capable in all emergencies, medical or otherwise and she would not be annoyed at my so describing the traits she had inherited from her scotch ancestry.

Trousers, sweater and cedar-wood fire were de riguer for breakfast at that height and I had just changed into shorts and a bush shirt and joined her on the terrace, when I noticed she was frowning - not angry but worried - and, when I asked her what was the matter, she indicated that I should look over her shoulder and added "My cook's brother." The visitor approaching up the drive had almost reached us. He was a Kikuyu clad in an old army greatcoat and a pair of sandles made out of an old tyre. He greeted her politely and a long conversation took place in Swahili, of which I understood nothing. After he had gone, she explained that she had been told off for sending his brother by car 90 miles down to Nairobi to the native hospital where they could do nothing for him, as he had had a spell cast over him by the local witch doctor. She treated anybody who wanted help in the neighbouring 200 square miles and she knew that she could do nothing for him. This seemed to me to be the right moment to relieve her tension by having a good laugh. She turned to me and said, "Tom, I wish I was as certain as you are." He died of cancer a couple of months later in Nairobi hospital.

LONDON 1959

My wife decided that we were going to Kenya again to inspect the recently arrived grand-daughter for a full three weeks. I had always wanted to visit the fabulous Ngoro-Ngoro crater in Tanganyika, so I visited Safari Ltd. in Regent Street to spy out the possibilities. I was looking for a couple of days trip in a native bus, but came out with an organised safari with white hunters lasting a. month and costing ?2,000 for four people. On leaving I turned left and did ten yards up Regent Street, when I cannoned into somebody at the corner of Maddox Street. Before I could apologise he had shouted my name and I had recognised the son of one of my father's greatest friends - Cyril Cox. A typical conversation for the occasion took place, "Forty years it must be ... what are you doing now? etc." Cyril was employed as a veteninary officer by the Tanganyika government and he commuted between Arusha and the Serengeti Plains. I told him that he had got himself a visitor and I even gave him the date of my arrival at Arusha.

After duly admiring the grand-daughter I set off by native bus and he met me at Arusha, driving me to his bungalow, where we spent a couple of days getting ready for the trip. The tourist rest houses etc. were unknown in those days and when we set off in our big International truck we had on board a black servant, a paraffin-run Australian manufactured refrigerator, a spare back axle, two twenty gallon drums of petrol, water cans, food and four dozen bottles of lager amongst other necessities. I could write a book on our adventures, how my cine-camera worked overtime shooting all the animals that live in the bowl of that fifteen mile diameter dead crater, with herds of 10,000 wildebeest, the Masai villages to which Cyril had the entree because he tended their cattle when sick, how a bull rhino charged my side of the truck when Bill stalled the truck's engine and my cine kept on whirring to the end. I will confine myself to two incidents which would naturally happen to me and nobody else.

We pitched our tent the first night on the rim of the crater in a clump of thorn trees, with a big one at the back for protection and a fire at the flap end that our boy kept alight all night to keep away prowling beasts. Before we turned out the paraffin lamp, Cyril brought in his gun and leaned it against his camp bed, handing me a panga to put handy by mine. Then with the parting injunction that when I got up in the morning, I was to have a little search around before leaping out bare-footed, he blew out the light. Apart from some frightful yells at one point during the night, I slept well and duly got up, washed and shaved - in hot water. After breakfast with plenty of fresh butter - our servant could not steal that because he was a Mohammedan and Cyril had taken the precaution to wrap it up in bacon rashers before he put it in the fridge - I followed Cyril's example of making my own bed. As I put my hands on the mattress, I screamed and grabbed the panga and Cyril came running in, nearly treading on the baby field mouse that I had disturbed.

After four days we were back on the main Cape to Cairo road. Do not imagine that this is four lane carriageway - it is not - simply a red track in the earth, where no vegetation grows, but there is a hotel kept by an Englishman, who has elected to retire from society and civilisation. Cyril got second bath and I having put on my last pair of clean shorts, strolled over to the main building from our hut and enquired from the owner what was for dinner. Apparently wild duck to which he was able to add from a dusty shelf one bottle of claret which had not gone to vinegar out of the eight we had to open before we found it. The owner was a very lugubrious kind of person and as he never did see anybody, he found no pleasure in chatting with this cheery person. What should I do with myself until Cyril had finished soaking? I knew - I would phone my wife and tell her that we were safe and sound and that I had never enjoyed myself so much since I had read of such things in the Boys' Own Paper. I turned to the owner and asked, "Can I speak to my wife in Nairobi?"

Complete silence for fifteen seconds, then he reached behind him and tugged at a blanket, disturbing two enormous South African ridgeback dogs and passed it to me with the words, "In the yard at the back you will find some damp straw. Does your wife read smoke signals?"

The tenderfoot returned. to Nairobi next day - about 150 miles with Cyril whom I introduced to my wife and the cause of all the excitement the grand-daughter. I paid Cyril for the petrol and food etc. and saved ?1970 on my projected deal with Safari Ltd. of Regent Street.

EAST AFRICA 1959

My wife and I hired a car in Mombassa to visit Malindi, which is about 100 miles to the north, which is now a beautiful seaside resort but which was then quite primitive. Friends told us that we must visit the blue lagoon and the ruined town of Gedi, which lies about a mile inland but was probably on the coast and a trading port, when it was deserted, quite suddenly at a date no one is certain of and for equally obscure reasons. The date is suggested as 1650 and the reason either plague or arab pirates. It has some lovely buildings and a dried-up well twelve feet in diameter. The whole city is overgrown with huge silver-grey trees and the whole atmosphere is quite ghostly and no native will enter it after sunset. In fact friends told us of odd experiences they had had there, for instance a professional photographer whose three films were all fogged and the girl who told her companion following her along a narrow path through the ruins not to keep treading on her heels to find that her companion was at least five paces behind her.

After walking round we got back to the exit, when I found that I had taken all my cine-camera shots on a used film and I was anything but a beginner. I changed the film, while we remembered our friends' odd experiences, going round again to retake my shots. It was closing time when we got back to the exit and the native gatekeeper wanted to get off. We walked to the carpark about 100 yards away and I could not find the car keys. I had two pockets in my bushshirt and three in my shorts and the keys were not in them. Then my wife remembered that when we were going in, she had borrowed my handkerchief to put on her head against the sun, as she had not brought a scarf. We remembered the spot exactly where I had handed over my handkerchief and searched for twenty minutes in vain. Back at the car, I went to the driver's door to see if there was any means of breaking in and my wife to the passenger's door. What with the ghostly atmosphere, dusk about to fall, the locked car, the African bush and Malindi ten miles away, we were both very miserable.

Now, my wife does not drive a car and I am prepared to swear on oath that she has never in all the years we have been married ever been in physical possession of my car keys. I looked across the bonnet of the car to her standing very miserably with her handbag (which we had naturally already searched) hung on her arm when something prompted me to ask her what she was holding in her left hand. The car keys! I know Africa well enough not to try to offer any explanation of how they got there.