The Flame Trees of Thika (4 page)

Robin’s mind ran to precious stones and metals: he sought diamonds unsuccessfully, and moved on to some remote, lethal, and obscure region inhabited by Portuguese and cannibals, where he actually did acquire a gold mine. I do not think it was a large one, and all its previous owners had died very quickly of drink or malaria, so that it had never had a chance to show its metal (as he wrote to Tilly, being fond of puns). Robin was tougher than one might have expected, and managed to get the mine into production, as he put it, though I think that consisted only of persuading some of the cannibals to hack at a hillside with picks and wash the resulting rock in a stream. In a romantic moment he sent Tilly a ring made of gold from his own mine and a diamond from a digging in which he had owned a share; looking at it sadly some years later, he remarked that it represented the total output of his mining career.

This cannot have been quite true, for he managed to sell his portion of the interior of Mozambique at a profit, which would have been larger had the buyers paid more in cash and less in shares in a syndicate which went broke soon afterwards. But the cash payment was enough to take him on a dubious cargo-boat to British East Africa. All the good reports he had heard about the country seemed to him more than justified. Letters that might have been penned by Roger Stilbeck himself fired Tilly, also, with a longing for this land of splendour and promise that offered sunshine, sport, and adventure, with the prospect of independence and the rebuilding of lost fortunes; and here we now were, again united, and the owners of a ninety-nine-year lease of five hundred acres of land.

If it was not quite all that Tilly, at any rate, had expected, it was nevertheless there, under all that coat of grass and bush.
With hard work and patience, the vision could become real: a house could arise, coffee bushes put down their roots and bloom and fruit, shady trees grow up around a tidy lawn; there was order waiting to be created out of wilderness, a home out of bush, a future from a blank and savage history, a fortune from raw materials that were, as they then existed, of no conceivable value at all.

All this would take, perhaps, longer than Tilly and Robin had at first counted on, it would need more money than they had, it would be a harder struggle than they had anticipated; but they were young, hopeful, and healthy, and what others had done before them could be done again. Their spirits had rallied by the time they got back to the Blue Posts, and although we were sore, hot, exhausted, and bitten, although no cool grass hut awaited us, no span of oxen ready for the plough, by the time I was sent off to bed they had already harvested their first crop, bought a motor-car, built a stone house, and booked their passages for a holiday trip home, when they would stand their relations expensive meals and take a grouse-moor in Scotland for the rest of the summer.

R
OBIN’S
plan to take the Scotch cart to the new land had to be abandoned because of all the pig and ant-bear holes, and the unbridged rivers. Everything was unpacked and made into loads for porters to carry on their heads. Robin was to make a camp, enrol some labour, and start to clear land, and we would follow in a few days when tents were pitched and everything in order.

Robin rode off on a mule at the head of a peculiar cavalcade. Bedding, tents, chairs, tables, and boxes of stores made loads that were conventional if uncomfortable; as well as these, we seemed to have a lot of oddments, like a side-saddle, a grindstone, an accordion, the Speckled Sussex pullets, an amateur taxidermist’s outfit, a pile of enamel basins, a light plough with yokes and chains, rolls of barbed wire, and a dressmaker’s dummy which a
friend of Tilly’s had given her, assuring her it was indispensable for a woman in the wilder parts of Africa.

‘I wonder what the porters think about it all,’ Tilly speculated, watching one of them stagger off underneath a tin bath containing a sewing-machine and a second-hand gramophone.

‘They don’t
think
,’ said Major Breeches, dismissing the notion as absurd. They sang, however, and marched off in fine style, though they were only what Major Breeches called a scratch lot, and did not get far before various loads fell off, or got tangled in trees, and several of the carriers grew disheartened, dumped their burdens, and fled. But the distance was only five miles, so the safari did not have to be highly organized.

The gramophone had been suggested to Robin as a convenient way of breaking the ice with the natives. It enticed them, as a light attracts insects; once, as it were, captured, the advantages of signing on for work could be explained, and some would feel bold enough to try the experiment. So Robin took the gramophone and, when we were installed in tents, hopefully played ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ and ‘The Lost Chord’ over and over again. As the records were scratched and the gramophone an old one, extraordinary sounds emerged from its trumpet to be lost very quickly in the surrounding bush and long grass. Its only effect was to deflect Juma from his labours; he listened entranced; and one of the mules was found gazing pensively down the trumpet.

The local inhabitants, however, remained aloof. No one seemed to live anywhere near. But the reserve was said to hold a great supply of able-bodied young men who did nothing all day but grease their limbs and plait their pigtails while their mothers and sisters toiled in shambas, and who would be a great deal better employed (according to their prospective employers) in useful work like clearing bush, ploughing land, and building houses. These young men were not to be lured, it seemed, even by the magic of sound coming out of a trumpet, which was generally held, by those unfamiliar with the invention, to issue from a familiar spirit held captive in the box.

Before we left the Blue Posts, a young Irishman arrived one day on a bicycle, with a broken fly-wheel strapped to his back. He paused for a drink, which he must indeed have needed; the
sun was vicious, the fly-wheel must have weighed at least fifty pounds, and pedalling along a wagon track deep in dust and ruts, and full of holes and tree-roots, cannot have been easy.

He came, he said, from Punda Milia, a stretch of country about fifteen miles farther on and called after the zebra that infested it, and he was taking the fly-wheel to Nairobi to be repaired. He was not much larger than a well-grown jockey, but as tough as hippo hide, and he had the quick, gay smile and bright eyes of many Irishmen, with a trace of the brogue, but not enough to make him sound as if he was putting it on, which is often the effect created by the genuine article.

The bicycle, he said, was shared between himself and his partner. If both young men wanted to visit the town together, they took it in turns to walk and ride. One went ahead on the bicycle, left it ten miles along the road and proceeded on foot. The second walked the first ten miles, found the bicycle, and caught up his friend. In this way they reached Nairobi, a distance of fifty miles, in one day. No one ever molested the bicycle, which they had bought second-hand for ten rupees.

His name was Randall Swift, and he found life so entertaining that he was very seldom without a laugh and a smile, so that he endeared himself to everyone, and became one of my parents’ closest friends. Moreover he was now an old hand, having arrived in the country in 1904, so they looked upon him as a kind of oracle.

‘All the same, he’s been here eight years and his only form of transport is a ten-rupee bicycle,’ Tilly mused when he had gone. ‘He hasn’t made
his
fortune very quickly.’

‘He’s a splendid fellow, but he hasn’t stuck to one thing,’ Robin explained. ‘All his trial trips were no good. But now he’s settled on sisal, he’s sure to do well. There’s big money in sisal.’

Randall Swift had told us how he and his partner had secured the last consignment of bulbils (the young sisal plants) to leave German East Africa the day before the Germans put an embargo on their export. Now they would be able to supply other aspiring sisal planters with bulbils at a profit, and they had built a factory to extract fibre from the long, tough, prickly-tipped leaves.

‘It needs a lot of capital,’ Robin said wistfully. ‘How do you manage about that?’

‘The bank, of course,’ Randall replied, roaring with laughter. ‘At first we shot game and dried the meat and sent it to the coast. Then we got hold of a tractor weighing eight tons. When it came it broke all the
P.W.D.
bridges and we got a contract hauling sand to build new ones.’

The tractor’s fastest speed was four miles an hour and he and his partner, Ernest Rutherfoord, had taken turns to haul sand, day and day about, from Punda Milia to the bridge by the Blue Posts. It consumed prodigious quantities of wood, and at intervals the driver would dismount with a hatchet and hack more fuel from the bush. Once the tractor ran out on a treeless stretch; at the opportune moment, there came into sight a column of porters, each of whom carried a pole. Waving his axe, Randall halted the safari, commandeered the poles, chopped them up, and proceeded on his tractor. A few days later, an angry official arrived at Punda Milia demanding restitution for the telegraph poles that had been on their way to establish a new line. Both partners had brewed beer at Mortlake before they came to Africa. Randall was like a robin, with a bright eye and friendly manner and a habit of cocking his head on one side.

He gave us some good advice about labour.

‘Get hold of the local chief,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll give you a tip. Put a safari lamp up on a pole outside your tent at night. These people have never seen lamps before. Once they get over thinking it’s a spirit, they can’t resist a closer look at such a remarkable thing.’

When the gramophone failed him, Robin remembered this. For the first two or three nights nothing happened, except that droves of insects beat and scorched themselves to death against the glass. It was always dark by half past six or seven and, after I was sent to bed, I lay awake and watched people moving about by lantern-light and the flickering of the camp fire, a small speck of warmth and comfort amid a great encircling continent where cities, friends, and civilized ways were not to be found, not for thousands and thousands of miles across plain and bush and forest.

At such times, when all the furtive noises of the night beyond that speck of firelight crept unasked like maggots into your ears, you could feel very isolated and lonely. At such times, I think,
Robin and Tilly, although they did not say so, wondered why they had come, and what they were doing, and whether they had set their hands to a hopeless task. For until you actually saw it and travelled across it on foot or on horseback or in a wagon, you could not possibly grasp the enormous vastness of Africa. It seemed to go on for ever and ever; beyond each range of hills lay another far horizon; always it was the same, pale-brown grass and bush and thorn-trees, rocky mountains, dark valleys, sunlit plain; there was no break and no order, no road and no town, no places even: just marks on a map which, when you got there, turned out to be merely an expanse of bush or plain exactly like the rest of the landscape.

And here they were, on all sides only blankness, committed to the task of somehow shaving off a patch of bush in the middle of nowhere and ploughing it up and getting little plants put in, and a house built in the wilderness: surely a daunting task for two people not at all well equipped to tackle it. Like rusty hinges, frogs croaked from surrounding
vleis,
the air was pierced by the ceaseless cry of cicadas: how many between here and the Indian Ocean? More, perhaps, even in the few miles around us, than stars that prickled in such millions overhead, clear, transcerulean, and indifferent, each the centre of an unbelievably remote universe of its own.

On the third night, a new sound came from beyond the golden circle, something to mingle with the queer whispers and stirrings and insect calls that came out of the darkness and seemed to hesitate upon the edge of light. I lay in bed and listened with a thumping heart. Often I used to imagine our camp to be be-leaguered by creeping unseen beasts with red fiery eyes and ripping jaws and fangs who crouched just outside the fragile bubble of light, or by savage spearmen with naked limbs gliding towards us like eels. The first sound was a cough which did not sound at all savage but human; then something moved and it was as if the darkness parted for an instant to reveal an inner core – as if the night were a great lake of black water and in it fishes and monsters moved about, and troubled the water, breaking the surface with a coil or fin.

‘They’ve come after all!’ Robin exclaimed; he had not really believed in the lamp trick, as he called it.

‘We mustn’t frighten them.’ Tilly spoke as if they had been shy antelopes or birds.

‘I wonder what we do next?’

They waited, and Robin smoked a small cheroot. Tilly was struggling with some tapestry work under the indifferent light. She was talented at this, and at embroidery, and never liked to sit still with nothing to do.

‘Juma will deal with them,’ she said.

Juma had faithfully maintained his contempt and indifference towards the local inhabitants. It appeared that he, whose forbears had no doubt been slaves of the Arabs, felt that the sooner these people were enslaved the better; it might even make them into Muslims, and therefore into human beings.

‘Tell them we are friends, and if they come back in the morning they can have some meat,’ Robin suggested. Juma had dressed up not only in his white
kanzu
, which he always wore on duty, with a red fez, but also in his scarlet sash kept normally for best occasions. Robin wore pyjamas and a dressing-gown and high mosquito-boots; he remarked that the tradition of dressing for dinner in the jungle was safe in Juma’s hands.

‘They do not eat meat,’ Juma pointed out.

‘Oh, well. What do you suppose they’d like? Of course there are beads, and calico and copper wire…. Unfortunately we haven’t any of those. Or have you any beads you can spare, Tilly?’

‘The only beads I had went long ago to Uncle’s,’ she replied, referring to her pearls which had not survived Robin’s unhappy partnerships. Almost the only relic of her jewel-case was a pair of ear-rings to which, for some reason, she was devoted, and often wore on the most unsuitable occasions because she was afraid they would be stolen if she left them behind. She had them on now.