The Flame Trees of Thika (37 page)

By the time Dirk had finished telling me all this, and much else besides, we had reached Londiani, or at least seen the roofs, which shone like a pool of water in a fold of the downs. The corrugated iron threw back the sunlight and we seemed to be arriving at a city of splendour and glory, like the ancient capitals of Lanka that were copper-domed.

Londiani shrank, however, on our approach, as if it had drunk from the bottle Alice found at the bottom of the rabbit-hole; it shrank, withered, and turned into a single rutted street with a few
dukas
, some sheds beside the railway, a
dak
bungalow, and a
D.C.
’s office with a flagpole.

‘Is that all there is?’ I asked.

Dirk laughed. ‘What are you expecting?’

Whatever it had been, Londiani did not possess it. I was by then tired, sore, and hungry, despite a sandwich and some roasted mcalies Dirk had shared with me as we rode along.

‘Now what shall I do with you?’ Dirk wondered. Had I been a pony, he would have turned me out to graze.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘We had better go to the
D.C.
’

‘Will he have some breakfast?’

‘Certain to.’

District Commissioners were accustomed to deal with any situation that might arise, and I do not remember that this one showed any great surprise at being handed over a stray child. He passed me on to his wife, who gave me a feast. On farms, the bread was made with yeast brewed from bananas or potatoes and imported dried hops, and was nearly always sour, and hard as old boots, so that one of the luxuries farmers most enjoyed when they visited a town, even a little one like Londiani, was baker’s bread. Mrs Pascoe’s toast was pliant and delicious, and she even had apples and sausages, the rarest of treats. Nothing in the world tastes better than a crisp and spicy sausage, steaming from the pan, after a long ride on a sunny morning.

Mrs Pascoe was a kind-hearted woman with a well-developed sense of duty; these two attributes had made her into a dumping-ground for other people’s pets, and a soft option for the locals, who caught birds and animals in the forest to bring to her for the sixpence she would generally pay to rescue them from their
misery, and so the house was full of small beasts like bush-babies and mongooses, and larger ones occupied pens outside.

Mr Pascoe soon appeared looking rather harassed, and no wonder; the war had upset everything, and this was mail-train day, so his office was full of citizens with
shauris
needing immediate attention. No one expected to be kept waiting, and everyone felt that his turn ought to come first.

‘What are we going to do with this child?’ Mr Pascoe demanded. ‘We can’t keep her here, like those infernal mongooses.’

‘I’m going back with Dirk,’ I said.

‘That young Dutchman? What makes you think he’s going back to the Crawfurds?’

‘He came to get some cartridges.’

‘Cartridges my foot. He’s probably on the way to the plateau by now, or else to Nairobi to join the party.’

‘But he’s got Mr Crawfurd’s pony.’

Mr Pascoe only laughed. ‘
That
won’t bother him.’

‘I don’t think we’ve any right to jump to conclusions,’ Mrs Pascoe said. ‘He is probably quite an honest young man.’

‘Not if he’s a Dutchman,’ Mr Pascoe said ferociously. ‘They’re in my office all day long. Permits to move cattle that turn out to be pinched from the Nandi – cases against each other that turn out to be faked – beacons moved about in the night – slippery as eels, the whole blessed lot of them. Now, what are we going to do about this brat?’

‘I can go home by myself,’ I said.

‘You certainly can’t. Perhaps there’ll be someone on the train who can take you to Molo, and then the Crawfurds can collect you there. As if I hadn’t enough to do without playing nursemaid to a stray female brat!’

He was not really a savage man, just a little gruff and disconcerted; and in the end he called for Snowball, who had also breakfasted, and allowed me to ride with him to the
dak
bungalow to find out if anyone had seen Dirk.

The bungalow, a railway rest house, was full of bearded, dust-stained Dutchmen who fell silent as Mr Pascoe approached; when he spoke they greeted him politely but with a wary, almost shifty look, behaving a little like wildebeeste that smell a lion
about; they do not panic and gallop off, but tend rather to huddle together, stop grazing and stand ready for action, although uncertain what to do. Mr Pascoe addressed a man who looked exactly like a leathery, bearded Boer, but spoke with the accents of Scotland.

‘You’re wearing your boots today, Sandy.’

‘Aye, my feet are looking after them. It’s necessary, in a thieving crowd like this.’

Sandy was one of the few transport-riders who was not a Boer. He was said to keep his boots in a knapsack and to walk barefoot beside his oxen in order to save the leather, and to have travelled back to Scotland on a third-class railway ticket from Londiani to Nakuru. Another story was that he once rode on muleback for three days into the Kavirondo country to retrieve a stolen pair of socks; but others said this was untrue, because he had never owned any socks.

When Mr Pascoe inquired about Dirk, Sandy said:

‘Och, he’ll have gone after his brother, up to Sixty-Four. The brother came through by the last mail, to fetch his gun before he went for a soldier.’

‘You mean he took the pony?’ Mr Pascoe said.

Sandy looked astonished. ‘You don’t think there’s a Dutchman living who’d pay for transport when he could get his legs across a nag?’

In spite of Sandy’s certainty and Mr Pascoe’s smile, I felt sure that Dirk would return the pony. Although Mr Crawfurd would no doubt regard his present action as a theft, to a Dutchman or to an African it would appear merely as a rather long borrow.

T
HE
wagon-track from Sixty-Four ended outside the
dak
bungalow, and from its veranda, where travellers waited for the mail, someone called attention to a puff of dust rolling towards us with unusual speed. A high, old-fashioned buck-board came
into view, drawn by four oxen who shambled along at a splayfooted jog-trot and drew up with obvious relief beside the bungalow. This was Whitelock’s stage-coach, propelled by oxen trained to trot (if not very swiftly), and changed every fifteen miles between Sixty-Four and Londiani.

By these means, and by keeping his teams going all through the night, Whitelock had reduced the journey from five or six days – and anything up to three weeks in the rains – to twenty-four hours.

One of the passengers who stepped stiffly down from the buck-board was a man of six feet three or four, of massive bulk, but not fat by any means – solid muscle. Everything about him was large – nose, hands, and feet, thick dark moustache, heavy shoulders. He seized Mr Pascoe’s hand and pumped it, and explained that he was on his way to join the war; from what he said, it was high time that someone put a little punch into it. In spite, no doubt, of Robin’s efforts, the Germans kept on blowing up the railway line between Nairobi and Mombasa, and the arrival of troops from India had not made the difference everyone had expected. The local volunteers, who had coalesced into the East African Mounted Rifles, had been whisked up to Kisumu to man a boat on Lake Victoria, and had won a naval victory over a similar German vessel. But there still seemed plenty of scope for Mr Pascoe’s acquaintance, whose name was Dick Montagu.

‘Oh, this is my wife,’ he added as an afterthought. Mrs Montagu had been standing quite still, looking bewildered and nervous. She was as small and light as he was large and heavy; like some hesitant bird, bright-eyed and fine-limbed, she seemed to have alighted on the veranda, rather than to have climbed the steps. Her waist was so slim that her husband could surely have encircled it with his two hands. Dick Montagu ignored her while he got his baggage assembled, and told Mr Pascoe that he would have to spend the night at Londiani in order to wait for the bulk of his kit, which was following by wagon in charge of his Abyssinian servant.

‘It should be here tomorrow, and you can put us on a goods,’ he said. ‘I was caught in the Congo when the show started, and I don’t want to miss any more of the fun.’

Mr Pascoe looked displeased, but said: ‘You’d better bring your wife over to our bungalow for the night, this place is full.’

‘Thanks, old man,’ Dick Montagu replied in a perfunctory manner.

Mrs Montagu behaved as if the Pascoes’ bungalow was a palace, entered after a long sojourn in a swineherd’s hut. And, indeed, that may have been her situation. Her father was one of those rich Americans who had come to shoot big game after Theodore Roosevelt had made the pastime fashionable; and Dick Montagu had arranged his safari. The hunter had bagged not only a lot of large animals, but the daughter as well. She was barely eighteen, and her father forbade the match. After Dick Montague carried her off to the Belgian Congo in a romantic elopement, her father had returned to Philadelphia to cut her out of his life and his will. Dick, who was twenty years older than his bride, boasted that the old man was sure to come round, but over a year had passed, debts had gathered, and the old man was still in Philadelphia refusing to answer letters and as close as a clam.

‘My, you have flowers and real nice furniture, even
books
,’ Lois exclaimed.

‘Surely you need books all the more on the plateau,’ Mrs Pascoe suggested, in a voice that sounded faintly accusing. ‘I mean, being so isolated.’

‘We have two books, Mrs Pascoe: I have a Bible, and Dick has Rowland Ward’s
Records of Big Game
.’

‘Well, I expect you would like a nice wash.’ A little soap and water, Mrs Pascoe seemed to indicate, would soon put matters right.

When Lois Montagu reappeared she tried to talk to me, an uphill task for most people. Close cross-questioning revealed Tilly’s interest in a hospital, and this made Lois taut with hope; her fervent wish was to nurse wounded soldiers, but Dick had refused his permission because she was too young and inexperienced.

‘Maybe if I get to know your mother, she’ll kind of sponsor me,’ Lois said. ‘Then Dick will think it’s quite respectable, and let me train to be a nurse. I’m pretty strong really, although I’m
little, and I guess I can look after myself, as well as the poor wounded men.’

‘He’s afraid the wounded men will look after Lois,’ I heard Mr Pascoe say to his wife later. ‘He still thinks her old man will cave in.’

Mr Pascoe had decided that I was to stay the night and accompany the Montagus to Nakuru next day, where the Crawfurds would meet me. He had sent a syce to Molo on Snowball with a note to this effect. I knew that Mrs Crawfurd would be worried and Mr Crawfurd angry, and wanted to ride back on Snowball myself, but Mr Pascoe would not allow it, and there was nothing to be done. However, when we boarded the train it appeared that we were to travel in the guard’s van, and this redeemed the disappointment.

Even the Uganda Mail, which ran three times a week, was not a very fast train, and our goods made no pretences. Several steepish gradients so much exhausted our little locomotive that it paused a long time to regain strength, while its boilers cooled and the logs that it devoured were re-stacked. Once or twice it failed altogether at the first attempt, retreated, and took a longer run, while some of the passengers got out and walked, as if to help it. At every station it drank prodigious quantities of water while the crew, and various attendants who had attached themselves to it, got off to bargain with vendors of bananas, cooked maize, chickens, eggs, gruel, oranges, and the many other comestibles on offer at every halt. In fact our train made something of a triumphal progress, with long pauses to allow the people to admire at close quarters a creature so strange and inexplicable, that brought to remote places a flavour of adventure, a whiff of the mystery of unknown lands.

We arrived in Nakuru latish in the evening, and made our way to the hotel. I was sent to bed in a cubby-hole too noisy to permit easy sleep. The kitchen quarters were nearby, in the public rooms people stumped about on bare boards and in the bar a sing-song developed, interrupted by shouts and laughter, and once by the smashing of glass. The hotel belonged to Lord Delamere and sometimes, when he felt the need of a rough-house, he would drive into Nakuru in a buggy and start to break up his own property.

Now he was away at the war, but the hotel was filled beyond its capacity. Somehow a war seems always to create more people than it destroys. Although armies of young men march away to battle-fronts, all the towns and centres become fuller, busier, more bustling than before. Where all these people, drawn forth as rain brings
siafu
, had been before, was a mystery.

Sometimes in the night, a commotion arose. The station was very close, and I awoke to hear an engine panting and grinding, bells clanging, whistles blowing, shouts and cries. Had the Germans captured Nakuru, were we all to be lined up and shot? As I did not wish to be shot in my pyjamas, I dressed and went out to investigate.

A train was in, the platform was alive with khaki men, like giant ants whose nest has been disturbed. But Germans would be grim, orderly, and helmeted; these men wore slouch hats or no hats at all, and even in the hard, shadowy light looked young and gay. I saw Lois Montagu standing by herself, and went up to her.

‘It’s the Mounted Rifles on their way back from Kisumu, they’ve won a great victory,’ she said, after the expected exclamations of distress at my truancy. ‘Why, they’re heroes! Look at them, honey – next time you see them maybe they’ll be marching through Nairobi in a victory parade!’

At the moment, food was what they wanted, and the Indian stationmaster, hemmed in by large foraging men, made helpless gestures and looked like bursting into tears. Hot food at one o’clock in the morning was hardly a thing he could be expected to summon with a blast of his whistle, and he must have felt as if an enormous pride of hungry lions had got loose in his station.

Lois stood with her lips parted and her eyes bright, clasping my hand. ‘If I was only a painter, what a picture this would be! All these fine young fellows going off to fight for king and country without a care in the world!’