You Have Not a Leg to Stand On (15 page)

We drove back to our lawyer's office to sum up. A small adjustment could be made to their offer. They would have to pay something for the passion fruit plantation and our wooden house. My Parents would retain the main house with its garden and surrounding acres, but most importantly and urgently, we needed night and day security to establish our ownership of the Family House.

While all this was going on, my mother, my sister-in-law and her two children, had disappeared off to the coast, to stay with my Aunt Ginger. In view of what Njonjo had warned, my father wanted my wife to go too, but she refused. The house was vacated without any damage, so when everything from our little house and the back of my lorry was put back in place, it didn't look as though anything had happened at all. Our day and night ‘Guard' consisted of twelve men in uniform with rifles, and a Sergeant. Our Sergeant was the smartest Sergeant you've ever seen. His uniform was dark air-force blue, with razor-sharp creases down the front of his trousers, his gaiters and belt shining white. The buckles and badge of gleaming brass, the toes of his boots, such a bright, deep black, they caught the sun as he marched about, barking orders to his men. This little pantomime went on for about a week. I don't know if it served any purpose, but at least we were safe. My wife and I drove down to the valley floor, from the main house to the plantation, to pay wages to all the workers, for the last time. In the same way we'd made a pitch to show our ownership of the big house, I suppose they did the same to show their ownership of the plantation and the rest of my father's land. During the payout, a swarm of screaming, yelling young men descended upon us, tearing open the neat boxes of fruit and ripping open the sacks, ready for the Nairobi deliveries. They wildly crammed whole fruit into their mouths so the juice and seeds spurted out over their faces. The workers were terrified, they didn't know whether to run away or stay for their last weekly wage. Without a word between us, we acted as though nothing was amiss. Our headman's heart was pumping so hard you could see it heaving through his chest. I gave him the money for each person, and he handed it out. He was very brave to stay. It seemed to take an age to finish. I locked the door of the store in which I was standing to do the payout, and they immediately smashed it open. We climbed back into the truck, with all the screaming shouting young men, waving their pangas (long knives) in the air, and slowly drove away.

I started this agonising tale with what was going to happen in about two months time. You can see clearly now how the sequence of events came about. To be waiting for the butcher on that beautiful day, on the 29
th
of June 1976, to drive north through the little ramshackle, wooden town of Rumeruti and the beginning of years of traumatic despair.

In the time-honoured phrase, ‘life goes on', it does go on, but it so often does so in a manner that's cruel beyond measure. About 18 months after the car crash, my little wife and I were well ensconced with our marvellous new friend Marriott, in her small mews house in Notting Hill Gate, West London. One evening, after her usual delicious, simple supper and a bottle or two of red wine, the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, there was a long echoing silence, a feeling of dread came over me. A soft, distant, fragile, small voice said, ‘Hello Darling, Daddy's had a stroke, he's in Nairobi hospital.' I weep when I remember that far away, fragile, soft little voice. Somehow, we were there, at my father's bedside, the next day. The stroke could not have been crueler to a man like my father. A man with such life and vitality, such humour, everyone remembers his laugh, such gentleness, such strength, so many ideas, so full of thought, everything taken away. He couldn't speak, not even a murmur, he couldn't think, he couldn't feed himself. He couldn't walk, he had no coordination, he couldn't even control his bowels and bladder. And yet, with his whole character taken away, he was left with his physical life, and the ability to feel terrible, agonising, contorting pain. We didn't know then, but I'm pretty certain I know now, after 18 exhausting, emotionally draining months for my poor mother, he died in such awful, dreadful agony of a massive heart attack. As it was happening, he was trying to tell the doctor, by pointing to the side of his stomach, but actually he was trying to point to his chest. My mother was with him in the Mission Hospital above the Kedong Valley, holding his hand as the last embers of his life faded away and he was finally, still.

The Vineyard

In spite of all we'd been through in our life together, right up until we found ourselves looking out from our ‘ivory tower' on to the moving picture of activity on the River Thames just east of Tower Bridge; we still had no direction of how or where our life might lead. I was still drowning in my own, my own dreadful dissatisfaction and lack of purpose and uselessness of my life, and I was beginning to pull my poor little wife down with me.

A local social worker came to see us and welcome us into the area. What were our plans and could he be involved in any way? It turned out he strongly disapproved of all the warehouses along the banks of the river being turned into expensive housing, forcing the local population back and back, from what they considered ‘their' river. They were being forced into poorer and poorer, run down accommodation that hadn't really featured in any government planning since the end of the Second World War. He hated Margaret Thatcher with a vengeance, but it was her policies that incentivised inner-city development throughout the country. One of her aims was to move wealth from the generally wealthy South of England, through the Midlands and on to the genuinely deprived north-east; Grimsby, Hull, Darlington and Newcastle. Even today the North-east is lagging behind the South-east, and it's the massively expensive construction of HS2 that's now thought to be the answer to moving wealth north.

There was nothing we could say to appease our social worker, as then, he was right. I wonder what he'd say now. I know it's taken thirty years, but the East End of London, all around the derelict docks and warehouses, is now sought after and thriving.

The whole of the warehouse building plan could not have turned out better. We'd completed the entire project, selling the two lower floors to pay back bank loans. We still owned the freehold and a double storied penthouse with an outside rooftop garden. We had a lift from our basement garage right up to the top floor, and didn't owe a penny to anyone, not even a mortgage. That's not strictly true. My generous mother had written-off her loan, saying it would come out of my inheritance. I didn't deserve such kindness. What we didn't know was its success was to be pivotal in pointing us in the direction our lives would take for the next forty years.

Living on the bank of this mighty river, flowing through the centre of one of the greatest cities in the world, was a thrilling experience. Floating past our balcony was all manner of craft, from warships to pleasure boats, from tall-ships to ocean-going sailing ships. There were tough little tugs, pulling teams of barges laden to the gunnels with all types of goods. Some were destined for the massive cargo ships docked at Tilbury, others filled with London's rubbish, to be dumped in the Estuary for the high tides to take to the North Sea and beyond.

We had all this, but we still had no income or direction in our lives. The reality was stark. For the previous five years we'd been living with our miraculous Marriott, who'd looked after us with her enveloping warmth and gentle care. Now suddenly, here we were, completely alone. My poor little wife felt desperately lonely. She was only thirty-five, in the prime of her life, staring into a dreadful trap of nothing but me to look after, with me drinking too much, for the foreseeable future. I understood her despair, but I couldn't see what I could do about it, other than stop drinking.

I've told you about our beautiful, small, strong-willed four-legged wonder. It's their devotion to each other that was such a comfort to my little wife. I don't really know if dogs do know if there's anything wrong with the people who love them, but it is possible to read that devotion into a ‘knowing', when there is unhappiness.

My Uncle and Aunt had also become incredibly fond and in love, they would say, of our little wonder. We were beginning to think we should the use the escalating value of the warehouse, to buy a little house in the country to broaden our horizon. They used any excuse to be as close to us as possible, so they started looking around them in East Sussex, for something suitable. My Uncle had been a major in the Cameron Highlanders. One of his wartime jobs was to set up an extremely secretive system of Operational Bases (OBs) from east to west along the Scottish border in 1942, when the possibility of invasion of Britain seemed imminent. Peter had a talent for finding opportunities in any given situation. In no time at all we had a summons. A derelict barn, not a mile away from them, set in its own parcel of south-facing twenty acres of land to be sold by sealed tender on the 15
th
of September 1984. Sealed tender is a Scottish method of selling property. All interested parties must place their bids by post, to be opened at the specified time and date. The highest bid wins. It's very difficult to decide upon a price, if you don't know what price to bid against. To try the system out, we placed our own bids in a hat to test if any of us knew what the value might be. Only between the four of us, the bids varied from £48,000 to £145,000! How on earth were we to decide? After a great deal of discussion, lasting days on end, we came to an agreement at £ 51,500! To this day, we have no idea by how much we won, or if indeed, we were the only bid! However, its acquisition sealed our future.

One of the best days of our lives was the day we planted our vineyard but after fifteen exhausting, anxious years, came the second-best day of our lives. We pulled it out! But before that final day, by a set of peculiar circumstances, a woman who I'll call Cathy, came into our lives. She would undertake all the manual work I would have undertaken had I not been paraplegic. She worked like a Trojan. She did everything. She drove the tractor. She changed all the various pieces of equipment necessary to keep the vines free of weeds and grasses. She trained all the 6000 vines to their wires. She kept them all pruned and sprayed, against all manner of fungi and diseases. She started early and she worked late. And she loved her work. She was ‘Wonder Woman'. I'd fallen on my feet!

I can't remember why or how I started to become allergic to her character. I'm embarrassed at my behaviour towards somebody whose sole purpose was to work for me with all of her ability. She'd found a job for which she was prepared to give everything, her whole self. I don't think of myself as a cruel person but, I'm ashamed to say, I was cruel to poor Cathy.

I don't know if it was because of me she started drinking or because of her dreadful family life. We weren't aware of when it started, but in retrospect we should have put two and two together. On one occasion we'd been away for a few days, so Cathy looked after the house. On our return, under all the cushions on the sofas in the kitchen, not well hidden, we discovered empty bottle after empty bottle of cider. It still didn't occur to us she had a problem.

Around the back of the house, we'd given her a two-bed caravan as she wanted to be quiet and alone. It had a cooker, so she could make herself a cup of tea or coffee and be nice and warm for her lunch in the winter. I'd noted she wasn't around the vineyard as much as perhaps she should have been, and I'd find her sound asleep on one of the beds in the caravan. And even though a rather unpleasant, pungent odour seemed to follow her about, it still didn't register on either of us that she'd become an alcoholic.

Finally, finally late one night, perhaps after an incident at home, she decided to drive to work and poor Cathy smashed her car into the rear of a stationary vehicle in the village. The police arrived upon the scene. Fortunately, she wasn't hurt, but she was found wandering around the village dragging a piece of the car into which she'd just collided. Poor woman, she was five times over the limit.

She asked me to be a character witness at her trial. I owed her that at least. But she lost her licence for a couple of years. To add to her misery, I had to tell her, ‘Surely, Cathy you can't go on coming to work without a car.' She said, ‘I know you want to get rid of me, but I'm not going, this is my job.'

She did stay, walking the seven miles from her house every morning. She was never late, but soon, it became untenable and she became quite ill. She died in the cottage hospital from drink-related complications.

Over the first ten years we were here and before the tragic drama of Cathy's downfall and eventual demise, we'd had to sell the warehouse, convert the derelict barn, and establish a whole new way of life.

The first blow was the refusal of planning permission by the Wealden District Council. We had been warned by our solicitor that this would happen, but by law we could take the decision to appeal. On the town council were twelve members of the public, and apparently it was quite legitimate to lobby each member separately. They all responded in the affirmative to our argument, except one who said she would listen to the pros and cons put forward by the council officers on the day.

Our argument was we were saving a beautiful old Sussex barn, first erected in the seventeenth century, from dereliction. Now that a vineyard had been established, it was necessary for the manager or owner to live on-site. On the other hand the Council officers argued, it wasn't worth saving as it was so remote, no members of the public would ever see it. Also, there were many other, far better preserved examples, all over the county. Also all services necessary for a modern dwelling, water, electricity, waste collection, sewage and bins would be difficult and expensive for the council to implement. A reasonable argument, but our lobbying, fortunately, paid off. Every single member, even the woman who said she'd decide on the day, voted for us.

Gavin, the builder we used, is still a very good friend to this day. He told us that anything he built he'd give it a lifetime guarantee! He's always kept an eye on us and regularly drops in for a chat. Every year we get a bottle of champagne on each of our birthdays and one for Christmas. He told us he'd take a year to build the house as it was a difficult and complicated conversion. He moved his team on-site on November 21
st
. 1985. On November the 21
st
1986, all was completed. The underfloor heating made the house as warm as toast; a welcome bottle of champagne awaited us in the fridge. We moved in!

In October 1987 it was now evident poor Cathy had worked superbly in the vineyard, so our first crop was ready for picking. It would be small, but nevertheless a very exciting and rewarding achievement.

I've told you earlier my father never wanted me to have anything to do with farming. ‘The risks are too high for a viable long-term future. I've seen too many farmers completely ruined overnight.' What did he mean exactly?

On the morning of October the 18
th
1987, I found myself on the telephone, speaking to my wife, who was staying with her brother in Herefordshire, saying, ‘We are ruined.' I now knew what my father meant. Everyone in the South-east of England had woken up to the results of the most devastating storm, with hurricane winds, usually associated with the tropics. All the vines were stripped off the wires, lying flat on the ground. All Cathy's long, hard, tedious work over the previous three years, gone to nothing in only a few hours. My mother was staying with me, and she came padding through to my room at about three in the morning and said, ‘Is this normal for Sussex?' For the last 55 years she'd lived in Kenya, in very remote places, even when my father was away in North Africa in 1943 fighting the war. She'd been confronted with an enormous variety of life-threatening dangers, but she'd never been in a storm like this.

The only option open was to start again. It was ten years since that car spun out of control, rolling over and over and my back snapped, cutting the spinal cord, leaving me paralysed from the waist down. Only now had I come to terms with my disability and realised my only option was to ‘start again'.

Poor Cathy took it in her stride, beginning at one end of the vineyard and not stopping until the job was done. All the family were procured whenever they could see a spare moment. My mother, my little sister, Peter and Carmen, C's Brothers and their wives, women from the village, other passers-by, anyone, and everyone was collared. They were given a ball of string and scissors and sent out into the vineyard to twist and tie the fallen vines back on the wire.

We'd lost our first crop but the second benefited, and with renewed vigour, which soon started to show. From then on the tonnage produced grew and grew. One particularly good year, the setting in May wasn't hit by frost or rain. It was a lovely hot long summer and the rainfall was perfect; not too hard, not too much and not too little. The autumn was soft and warm, perfect for happy pickers; the best were young mums from the village who had to leave at three to collect their little darlings from school. On that year, we produced thirty tons of utterly delectable, sweet, full-bodied, disease free, bunches of grapes. That perfect combination of weather conditions only comes about, on average, once every ten or twelve years. In the intervening years the romanticism of producing your own wine, turns to pulling your hair out with worry and frustration.

Luckily for us, the large vineyard nearby, Lamberhurst Vineyard, owned then by the McAlpine Family, awarded us a very generous contract to take all our grapes for the next few years. Thank you, Mr. McAlpine.