The Flame Trees of Thika
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Authors: Elspeth Huxley
PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS
THE FLAME TREES OF THIKA
Elspeth Huxley was born in 1907 and spent most of her childhood in Kenya. She was educated at the European School in Nairobi, at Reading University, where she took a diploma in agriculture, and at Cornell University. In 1929 she joined the Empire Marketing Board as a press officer. She married Gervas Huxley in 1931 and travelled widely with him in America, Africa, and elsewhere. She was on the BBC General Advisory Council from 1952 to 1959, when she joined the Monckton Advisory Commision on Central Africa. Among her diverse writings are novels, detective stories, biographies, volumes of autobiography, and travel books. Her publications include
The Mottled Lizard
(1962),
Out in the Midday Sun
(1985), an anthology entitled
Nine Faces of Kenya
(1990), and
Peter Scott: Painter and Naturalist
(1993). Her 1939 novel
Red Strangers
is available in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. Elspeth Huxley died in January 1997.
THE FLAME TREES
OF THIKA
Memories of an African Childhood
ELSPETH HUXLEY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1959
Published in Penguin Books (U.K.) 1962
Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 1981
This edition published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 2000
17 19 20 18
Copyright © Elspeth Huxley, 1959
Copyright renewed Elspeth Huxley, 1987
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-101-65139-1
(CIP data available)
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Monotype Plantin
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TO THE IMAGES OF WHOM
ROBIN AND TILLY ARE REFLECTIONS,
AND THE GHOSTS WHO
SLEEP AT THIKA
Chapter 1
W
E
set off in an open cart drawn by four whip-scarred little oxen and piled high with equipment and provisions. No medieval knight could have been more closely armoured than were Tilly and I, against the rays of the sun. A mushroom-brimmed hat, built of two thicknesses of heavy felt and lined with red flannel, protected her creamy complexion, a long-sleeved white blouse clasped her by the neck, and a heavy skirt of khaki drill fell to her booted ankles.
I sat beside my mother, only a little less fortified in a pith helmet and a starched cotton dress. The oxen looked very thin and small for such a task but moved off with resignation, if not with speed, from the Norfolk hotel. Everything was dusty; one’s feet descended with little plops into a soft, warm, red carpet, a red plume followed every wagon down the street, the dust had filmed over each brittle eucalyptus leaf and stained the seats and backs of rickshaws waiting under the trees.
We were going to Thika, a name on a map where two rivers joined. Thika in those days – the year was 1913 – was a favourite camp for big-game hunters and beyond it there was only bush and plain. If you went on long enough you would come to mountains and forests no one had mapped and tribes whose languages no one could understand. We were not going as far as that, only two days’ journey in the ox-cart to a bit of El Dorado my father had been fortunate enough to buy in the bar of the Norfolk hotel from a man wearing an Old Etonian tie.
While everyone else strode about Nairobi’s dusty cart-tracks in bush shirts and khaki shorts or riding breeches, Roger Stilbeck was always neatly dressed in a light worsted suit of perfect cut, and wore gold cuff-links and dark brogue shoes. No bishop could have appeared more respectable, and his wife, who looked very elegant, was said to be related to the Duke of Montrose. Roger Stilbeck had met us at the station when we arrived and Mrs Stilbeck came to see us off, a mark of grace by no means conferred on every buyer of her husband’s land.
Tilly, eager as always to extract from every moment its last drop of interest or pleasure, had ridden out early on the plains to see the game, and had returned peppered with tiny red ticks. These she was picking off her clothes while she supervised the loading of the cart. Wearing a look of immense concentration, as when at work on her embroidery, she popped them one by one with finger and thumb. Mrs Stilbeck watched with fascinated horror. Then she put a pale, soft-skinned hand to her eyes.
‘Roger,’ she said, ‘I don’t feel very well. You must take me home.’
Tilly went on squashing ticks while a great many Africans in red blankets, with a good deal of shouting and noise, stowed our household goods in the cart. There was a mountain of boxes, bundles, and packages. On top was perched a sewing-machine, a crate of five Speckled Sussex pullets, and a lavatory seat. The pullets had come with us in the ship from Tilbury and Tilly had fed them every day and let them out on the deck for exercise.
Robin, my father, did not come with us in the cart. He was there already, locating the land and, Tilly hoped, building a house to receive us. A simple grass hut could be built in a couple of days, but this needed organization, and Tilly was not counting on its being there.
‘I only hope that if he builds one, he will do so on the right farm,’ she said.
Farm was of course the wrong word. My father had picked out on a map five hundred acres of blank space with a wriggling line, presumed to be a river, on each side.
‘Best coffee land in the country,’ Stilbeck had remarked.
‘Has anyone planted any yet?’
‘My dear fellow, there’s no need to
plant
coffee to make sure of that. Experts have analysed the soil. Altitude and rainfall are exactly right. Fortunes are being made already out at Kiambu. You’ve only got to
look
at the place to see how well everything grows. The trouble is to keep the vegetation down.’
‘It’s untried land?’ Robin ventured.
Roger Stilbeck rolled up the map. ‘You’re right, of course, about that. If you’re in any doubt, my dear fellow, I shouldn’t look at it. Between ourselves, I’m rather glad. Buck Ponsonby has bought a thousand acres a bit farther out and he was keen as
mustard to get the whole block. I told him I couldn’t let him have it as I’d given my word to another fellow. This leaves the way clear. What about a ranching proposition down near Voi? Or there’s a syndicate starting to buy up cheap land in Uganda….’
Robin bought the five hundred acres between the wriggling lines at Thika. He paid four pounds an acre, a fabulous price in those days. As this was much more than he could afford, he also bought a share in the syndicate in Uganda, which Roger Stilbeck said was certain to make a great deal of money in a very short while and which would therefore enable him to finance the coffee enterprise at Thika. On paper, the logic was inescapable. The Uganda syndicate made nothing at all for fifteen years; Robin received the annual accounts, which nearly always started with the item: ‘To manager’s funeral expenses, six rupees.’ After that it went into liquidation.
Robin got a map from the Land Office with a lot of lines ruled on it, from which the position of our holding could be deduced. Nothing had been properly surveyed. The boundary between the land earmarked for settlement and land reserved for the Kikuyu was about a mile away.
‘Any amount of labour,’ Roger Stilbeck had said. ‘You’ve only got to lift your finger and in they come. Friendly enough, if a bit raw. Wonderfully healthy climate, splendid neighbours, magnificent sport, thousands of years of untapped fertility locked up in the soil. I congratulate you, my dear fellow, I really do. You’ve been lucky to get this opportunity. Buck Ponsonby was bitterly disappointed. Best of luck, and look us up when you come in for the races. Keep in touch, old man.’
When our oxen had plodded over Ainsworth bridge, just beyond the Norfolk, we were out of the town. The dusty road ran through a mixture of bush and native shambas, where shaven-headed women in beads and leather aprons weeded, dug, and drew water from the swampy stream that gave the town its name in gourds or in
debes,
those four-gallon paraffin tins that had become a universal water-vessel, measure, and roofing material. The road was not a thing that had been made, it had simply arisen from the passage of wagons. For the most part it ran across a plain whose soil was largely murram, a coarse red
gravel that baked hard and supported only thin, wiry grass, sad-looking thorn trees, and tortured-branched erythrinas, with flowers the colour of red sealing-wax.
It became very hot in our ox-cart, or on it rather, as we had no covering. Tilly hoisted a parasol with black and white stripes which helped a little, but it had not been made for tropic suns. I was fortunate; being only six or seven, I wore no stays or stockings, but Tilly was tightly laced in, her waist was wasp-like, her skirt voluminous, and the whole ensemble might have been designed to prevent the circulation of air. In a very short while the dust and sweat combined to make us both look like Red Indians, with strange white rings around our eyes.