Born Wild (3 page)

I really threw myself into the school. I worked hard at my studies and outside the classroom I was like someone trying to join the Marines. I did cross-country running, pull-ups in the gym, rope climbing, anything – as long as it hurt. Boys fill out
naturally at that age but I was also very athletic – something that's stayed with me, which is lucky or I would never have been able to do half the things I've done. Tracking lions and chasing after leopards all day is exhausting work and I really needed to be strong.

The academic work was a struggle. I've always had problems remembering things, and although I was good enough to pass my A levels, universities weren't exactly clamouring for me to attend and there was no way I was getting into medical school. I did chemistry, zoology and physics with all the future medical students. My chemistry teacher put me in touch with the personnel director of Express Dairies, who took me on as a management trainee before I'd even left school. Most of my contemporaries walked straight into jobs too, but I didn't have the contacts they had so this was a lucky break, even if it wasn't Africa.

As in Cockfosters, I devoted plenty of time to the Scouts. We had the option of Scouting or the CCF at Mill Hill – an easy choice. Play around outdoors, doing what I'd always loved, or wear reject Second World War uniform and march around in circles while being shouted at by a retired sergeant major. I must have got every single badge they ever made but I never became a Queen's Scout. I have always had a problem with authority and becoming a Queen's Scout required following rules.

By the time I reached my last two terms I'd achieved what I needed to get out of school and, with the Express job in the bag, I was able to play a little. Bob, who had left a year earlier, used to come and pick me up on Saturday night in his father's old Hillman Minx and we'd go cruising for girls. Unsuccessfully. But it was freedom.

I had loved Mill Hill but casting off the shackles of authority was still a great feeling. I went on a motorbike trip round Britain with a school-friend. We got into all sorts of trouble but it was a short holiday rather than a gap year so very soon I started work at
Express. I travelled all over the country doing a variety of jobs as part of my training, from hotel management to a milk round in Muswell Hill, like Matt Monro who sang the Oscar-winning theme song for
Born Free.
1963 was a great time to be young and in London and I had the best of both worlds. I was a management trainee in a huge and respected company at the forefront of Harold Wilson's ‘burning white heat of technology' and I was also knocking on doors in a little blue cap in the early mornings. I soon learnt that all the clichés you hear about milkmen and housewives are true. I was having the time of my life.

As I stumbled from party to good time, Express were beginning to see the error of my ways. They battled away for two long years as I turned up late for work, took too much time off at the weekends to play rugby, grew my hair too long and showed a marked lack of interest in the dairy industry. Eventually they sent me on an Outward Bound course in a last attempt to get me to show some leadership qualities. It was to be an eye-opener both for Express and myself.

On the course, we were divided into patrols named after polar explorers – ours for Lawrence ‘Titus' Oates, known for his honourable death when, aware that his ill health was jeopardizing his companions' lives, he told them, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time,' before walking out into a blizzard. Being in the Oates patrol was another lucky chance akin to getting into Mill Hill. I've been such an ass all my life, chewing at the hand that feeds me and always getting bored, but every now and then I meet some incredibly good person who sees past the pain in their hand and totally changes my life. The man in charge of Oates patrol was one such. Campbell Whalley was just the man I needed to meet at the time. A former game warden in the Serengeti, he had lived the life I had always wanted to lead since reading
Tarzan
– an ambition I had let slide through laziness and a willingness to go with the flow. He was just the kick up the
backside I needed. He told me fabulous stories about his life in the bush, the animals he had known, the battles with poachers, the solitary but hugely rewarding life. Blithely unaware of Macmillan's ‘wind of change' then sweeping across Africa, I wondered what he was doing running an Outward Bound course on Ullswater for a bunch of misfits like me instead of running around the African plains. Early on in the course, he told me I should go to Africa if I felt I had to but added that I was thirty years too late.

Reading Campbell's assessment of me at the time is a chastening experience. He was extraordinarily prescient, recognizing all the faults I have carried with me through life. He immediately spotted the way my nervousness makes me bluster and show off and, of course, that I had that knee-jerk horror of rules:

Tony can, however, be very nervous as he showed when giving a lecturette that nevertheless was clear in its presentation and easily understood by the audience . . . He only spoilt a good course for himself by being very critical of the staff in his first few days and not keeping his opinions to himself. He was also inclined to pull the rules of the school to shreds . . . [he] gave an unfortunate first impression which we feel he must not give again no matter where he goes.

However, he also saw a good side somewhere, commending me for leading by example and being kind to the weaker boys. Not good enough for Express, though, who fired me as soon as they read the report: ‘Well, thank God for that,' said Campbell, in 2009, when I met up with him forty-six years later.

I was enthralled by Campbell's tales of his time as a game warden and, although it took a while to happen, this was a significant watershed. My life in milk was over! I would run a game park in Africa. I would work with animals and, in honour of Titus Oates: I would work outside and I would ‘be some time'.

Deciding to go to Africa and actually going took a bit longer
than I had hoped. I worked my way through a bizarre collection of jobs over the next couple of years that brought me into contact with everyone from former colonial governors to the Beatles. I loved the rock and roll, the rugby at the weekends and, most of all, the dolly birds, but it was the old game wardens and colonial administrators who appealed to me most. To me, they embodied real freedom and adventure, not the manufactured Carnaby Street variety. But what a time to be in London . . . I had the best of it but my ultimate goal lay ahead of me.

In 1968 my opportunity came. Forget the Summer of Love, I was off to Africa with my maiden aunt Alice.

I first came to Africa by boat – the
Transvaal Castle
from Southampton to Cape Town. It was a proper old liner with all sorts of different forms of entertainment, and although it had just become a ‘one-class' ship, the social dividing lines were still there until I met some of the wonderful ‘White Africans' – the last hurrah of the Raj now working in independent Africa. Many would look after me and give me beds and a warm welcome in the years to come. I slept in a four-berth cabin – in steerage, right next to the propeller shafts – with a smelly and largely unintelligible group of Zambian tobacco farmers and miners, alcoholics to a man. It was a glorious trip. Of course I spent all my money before I even got to Grahamstown whence my aunt had relocated from England.

Bizarrely, I met the prime minister, John Vorster, on my first day there. He had just inherited the bloodstained helm of apartheid South Africa following the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd and he was opening the museum in which my aunt, an artist, had been commissioned to paint murals. It was quite brave of him, considering it was the hated British 1820 Settlers Museum and he was a hard-line Boer. Vorster was just one of many apartheid-era South African leaders that I met in the next year or two. I'm afraid to say they were all disconcertingly nice. Reading about their exploits today, it is hard to equate the private
people with their political actions. Vorster, for example, was a corrupt Nazi sympathizer responsible for the brutal suppression of those who opposed his rule, but he was a charming host and made a lovely cup of tea.

Alice had never recovered from the death of her brother, who was executed by the IRA in 1921 – a great shame as she was full of fun and truly kind. Whenever I'm feeling particularly sorry for myself I read the letter he wrote on the night of his death.

Dear Mother, Alice and Dad,

When out walking to-day, Toogood, Glossop and myself were captured by the I.R.A. and have been condemned to be shot to-night.

The O.C. I.R.A. and his men have been very civil to us throughout and have treated us well. It is terrible to have to leave you all so early in life but it is fate and a soldier's life.

Always remember I died smiling, and believing in a life to come.

A thousand kisses and a last farewell. Au-revoir, Rob

Don't let this worry you too much.

It always humbles me.

Back in 1968, I was not feeling sorry for myself at all but I was in pressing need of a job. I took my HGV licence and eventually found work as a bus driver in Cape Town, sometimes serving black areas and at others white. It was while I was there that I was shot at for the first time.

I had been having an affair with a lovely girl called Jane who, in a fit of madness, had confessed all to her husband. I was persuaded by a doctor friend, Richard Arnot – a ‘chap' who was always getting people to do the decent thing – to go round and apologize. Never listen to a ‘chap'. I arrived to find Jane lying on the floor in a silver lame jumpsuit, her husband John pointing a revolver at me. Obviously I apologized. But having been forgiven, I couldn't resist shouting at John as I left. He fired out of the
window, then ran down the street after me. Escape came in the form of a bus driven by one of my colleagues, who pulled over and yelled, ‘Hey,
soutpiel.
In trouble again?' I sat on the back seat, panting like a dog and smiling broadly like Dustin Hoffman, but there was no Katharine Ross with whom to share the joke.

This was one of many events that encouraged me to get on with my life. I was in Africa and – rare in apartheid South Africa – I'd even made friends with a few Africans, but I was still very much in 1960s English mode and I might just as well have been back in the UK most of the time. I needed to make a move and decided to hitchhike up to Kenya where some friends were touring with a rugby team. This took longer than I'd expected but Kenya entranced me from the very moment I arrived. At last I had reached the Africa of my imagination. Even Nairobi National Park took my breath away.

The first place in Nairobi that I really felt at home was, inevitably, a bar. A long, narrow room, the Long Bar at the Stanley Hotel had a huge mural of the turn-of-the-century Nairobi railhead behind Abdi's forty-foot bar. Everyone went there at lunchtime – hunters, tour guides, businessmen, actors from the Donovan Maule Theatre, off-duty pilots, minor European royalty, people up from the coast, upcountry ranchers, politicians, polo players, police informers, con men, drug pushers and even a few bemused tourists.

There was no racism and no privilege there. Prince Alfie Auschberg rubbed shoulders and shared stories with Jimmy Kariuki, an engineer with East African Airways, and Bunny Allen, a genuine Romany with an earring who would talk to anyone – as long as she was a she. If you wanted a lift to the coast, someone was flying down. Never been on a hunt? Someone would take you. Short of a few bob? ‘Never mind – it's on us.' Need a tie for the Stanley Grill tonight? ‘Take mine.' Problem with Immigration? ‘Talk to Macharia over there.'

The
Long Bar was one of those defining places – like Carnaby Street or Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. It perfectly encapsulated a time and place. It was a hard-drinking outfit, the Long Bar – in the daytime as, for some reason, it was always a bit seedy at night when we would follow the BOAC hostesses back to the Grosvenor. And it was in the Long Bar that I first met Ian Hughes. A tough, broken-nosed Welshman with a brain to match his courage, he invited me on my first safari. Unbelievably, after all this talk of
Tarzan
and wanting to run a game park, I'd been in Africa for almost a year and never been out in the real bush. Ian was in charge of a specialist anti-poaching unit based in Maralal that had responsibilities across northern Kenya. I jumped at joining him. Just getting to Maralal, a one-camel town on the edge of the Northern Frontier District (NFD), was an adventure but from there it got better and better.

No one was allowed into the NFD in those days unless they had a permit and an armed escort. But for us it was different: we were the armed escort. We set off from Maralal with a Land Rover and an old two-wheel-drive truck full of game rangers, a great rooster of dust billowing up behind us. We headed north up the eastern shore of Lake Turkana to Ileret on the border with Ethiopia. I had hitchhiked across Africa but had stuck to main roads and aircraft. This was my first time out in the wild and I already knew I was home – the sight of faraway herds of oryx shimmering in the desert air, the taste of the dust and the noise of the howling wind. The hot desert air smelt of battles and sex and a time long gone. I loved everything about it.

Ian taught me a huge amount about the bush and its inhabitants: how to interpret tracks, which animals made what noise and when to climb up the nearest tree (which, in the NFD, could be miles away). It would be years before I knew what I was talking about but it was Ian who set me on my way. I vividly remember hearing my first lion – that deep, deep sound with
which I would become so familiar but that is not at all as you would expect. Lions do not often roar
a la
MGM (that lion is yawning) but their resonant grunting makes the hair rise on your neck and completely fills the African night. ‘WHO is the lord of this land? I AM, I AM, I AM . . .' He roars, then grunts. Then listens.