The Flame Trees of Thika (3 page)

A hotel had been started just below the falls. It consisted of a low-roofed, matched grass hut whose veranda posts were painted blue and gave the place its name; of three or four whitewashed rondavels to sleep in, and a row of stables. The manager was a lean, military-looking, sprucely-dressed man with a bald head and a long moustache, who had the misfortune to be very deaf. One day a safari visitor, admiring his host’s neat attire, rashly asked: ‘Who made your breeches?’ After he had bawled this
question several times, growing more and more embarrassed, the deaf man seized his hand and shook it warmly, saying: ‘Ah, yes, Major Breeches, delighted to see you, hope you will enjoy your stay.’ After that the innkeeper was always called Major Breeches, and I never knew his real name at all. The owner was a rich young man called Harry Penton whose best-known exploit (if it could be called that) was to be found stark naked astride the roof of the Norfolk hotel proclaiming himself to be a mushroom, and holding a tin bath over his head.

Robin rode down on a mule to meet us at the Blue Posts.

‘Is the house built?’ Tilly asked hopefully.

‘Not exactly,’ Robin answered. ‘I’ve picked out a splendid site, only there doesn’t seem to be any labour to build it with.’

‘But Roger Stilbeck said there was any amount.’

‘Perhaps he was thinking of ticks and white ants; there are plenty of those.’

‘Well, we’ve got tents,’ Tilly said. I think she was glad, really; already she had fallen in love with camp life and was in no hurry to become civilized again.

‘There are said to be some chiefs in the reserve,’ Robin added. ‘I shall go and see them. The bush is much heavier than Stilbeck led me to believe. I shall have to do a lot of clearing before I can plough any land.’

All the clearing had to be done by hand, by young men with pangas. They started off in blankets but soon laid these aside and glistened in the sun like red fish, jingling with charms and ornaments. They did not work hard, and rested often, and their wages were very low. Generally speaking they could earn the price of a goat in thirty days. This was about four rupees. The goat would be added to a flock being slowly assembled to pay for a bride.

‘I can only find one river,’ Robin added. ‘The other seems to be just a son of gully with no water in it. And there are several
vleis
which won’t be much use.’

‘Mr Stilbeck doesn’t seem to have been particularly truthful.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t know himself,’ suggested Robin, who always found excuses, when he could, for his fellow-men, and indeed for himself where necessary. ‘There’s a lot of red oat grass, which everyone says means high fertility. The stream that
is
there has a nice fall and we shall be able to put in a ram. Later on perhaps a little turbine might be possible…. There’s building stone by the river bank. And lots of duiker and guinea-fowl; we oughtn’t to go hungry, anyway.’

It all sounded wonderful, except the ticks. I had already found a lot crawling up my legs and had learnt to pluck them off and squash them in my fingers. They were red and active, and itched like mad when they dug into the skin. They left an itchy little bump and, if you scratched it, you soon developed a sore.

There were also jiggas. These burrowed under your toe-nails, laid their eggs, and created a swollen, red, tormenting place on your toe. To extract it, you had to wait until the jigga was ripe. Juma was an expert at this. He would seize a needle which you first held in a match-flame, grip your toe with thumb and forefinger, and plunge the needle in with such skill and dispatch that in a few moments he had cleared a pathway to the jigga and extracted on the end of his weapon the neatest little white bag, about as large as an onion seed, containing the eggs. It was the female who caused all the trouble; male jiggas either leapt about at large, or displayed the masculine habit of clustering together, in this case round the eyes or ears of dogs and chickens, evidently the clubs, lodges, and messes of the jigga world. I soon learnt never to go barefoot, or, if I had mislaid my slippers, to walk with my toes curled up off the ground, a habit that persisted for years after jiggas had passed out of my life.

We had reached, now, the end of the road: or, rather, the road continued to Fort Hall, where perhaps a quarter of a million Kikuyus were ruled by a solitary District Commissioner, and we had to make our way through roadless country to our piece of land. This lay uphill, towards the Kikuyu reserve.

‘I don’t know how the cart will get there,’ Robin mused. ‘For one thing, there are no bridges.’

‘Then we must get some built,’ Tilly replied. She never dwelt for long on difficulties.

Robin borrowed a mule for each of us from Major Breeches and we set out early next morning, before the heat of the day. A steepish hill immediately confronted us. Dry, wiry-stalked brown grass – hay, as it were, on the hoof – reached up to the mules’ shoulders and wrapped itself round my legs and knees.
There were trees, but this was not forest; each tree grew on its own. Most of these were erythrinas, about the size of apple-trees, with rough bark and twisted boughs – rather tortured-looking, not calm and dignified like cedars; they bore their brilliant red flowers on bare branches, and only when these were over turned their attention to leaves. Tapering ant-hills like spires, or the ruins of castles, thrust themselves above the grass and bush; they were hard as sandstone, and the same colour. These were the craft of termites and underneath each one, if you dug, and if it was still in use, you would find a big, fat, slug-like white queen, large as a sausage, manufacturing egg after egg for years on end.

It soon grew very hot. The erythrinas were in bloom, and glowed like torches: Tilly called them sealing-wax trees. Small doves with self-important breasts cooed from the branches. The country undulated like the waves of the sea.

We followed a native path that corkscrewed about like a demented snake. There was not a straight stretch in it, and one could not see why, it did not seem to be avoiding anything, or even linking up dwellings. Its convolutions must have made the journey three times as long. Our attempts at short cuts were unsuccessful. The first time we tried it, we came to an unexpected stream with boggy edges which we failed to cross, and had to rejoin the path. Our second attempt led to the sudden disappearance of Robin. At one moment he was there, or at least the top part of him was, sheltering under a dirty, battered, broad-brimmed felt hat, with a dreamy look on his finely-cut, amiable features – the bottom part was hidden by long grass; at the next, he had completely vanished. A swaying and rustling in the grass betrayed the mule, as a disturbance in the ocean will suggest the passage of a school of fish just below the surface.

‘Robin,’ Tilly called in alarm. ‘What’s happened?’

Had we indeed reached the land of magicians? I looked round, half-expecting to see him transformed into a tree. The grass writhed, his head slowly rose, hatless, followed by his shoulders.

‘The mule has got my theodolite,’ he said. This object, folded up, was strapped to the saddle; he had gone to great trouble to borrow it, for he thought it would help him to install a ram and other mechanical devices.

The mule had fallen into a hole made by ant-bears or by wild
pigs. The ground was perforated by such cavities, and thence-forward we stuck to the path. Even that was not fool-proof, but at least you could see the holes, or the mule could. The mules were tiny, and walked with very short tripping steps, like dancers. When they decided to stop for a breather no amount of belabouring and kicking would budge them an inch. It seemed a very long five miles, and the heat stifled us like a heavy blanket. Cicadas kept up a shrill, continuous chorus that quivered like the heat in the air, and the heads of the grasses. It seemed that everything was quivering – air, heat, grass, even the mules twitching their hides to dislodge flies who paid no attention; the strident insect falsetto seemed like the voice of air itself, chattering through all eternity to earth and grass. The light was blinding and everything was on a high note, intensified, concentrated: heat, light, sound, all blended into a substance as hard and bright and indestructible as quicksilver.

I had never before seen heat, as you can see smoke or rain. But there it was, jigging and quavering above brown grasses and spiky thorn-trees and flaring erythrinas. If I could have stretched my hand out far enough I could surely have grasped it, a kind of colourless jelly. But it danced away as I rode uncomfortably towards it, my mule’s feet now and then tripping off tufts and hummocks.

Once or twice, on rounding a hairpin bend, we found ourselves face to face with a Kikuyu who stood transfixed, just like an antelope pierced by the instinct to bolt, and then stepped aside to let us pass. But the women uttered high-pitched squeals like those of piglets, and scattered into the grass as if they had been partridges, their loads and babies swaying on their backs. We could see their heads turned towards us at a safe distance in startled alarm, while the men shouted at them not to be fools. But they would not approach. They chattered in excited voices, like a flock of starlings, the wire coils on their arms winking in the sun.

‘You see,’ Robin remarked with a certain glum satisfaction, ‘it scarcely looks as if they’re longing to come out to work.’

This ride through sun and heat, jolted by the sluggish mules, prickling with sweat, seemed to go on forever. We crossed a treeless
vlei
whose grass was short and wiry and where a duiker
leapt away from under the mules’ feet. Robin pulled up and said. ‘Here we are.’ We did not seem to be anywhere. Everything was, just the same, biscuit-brown, quivering with heat and grasshoppers. There was not even an erythrina tree.

‘You mean this is the farm?’ Tilly asked. Her voice suggested that her feelings were much the same as mine. Even Robin did not sound very confident when he replied that it was.

None of us quite knew what to say, so Robin began to praise our surroundings in a rather hearty voice he always used when bolstering-up was needed.

‘This grass and stuff will burn off easily, we ought to be able to start our ploughing before the rains. There’s not a lot of clearing to be done in places, for instance round here.’

‘This is a swamp,’ Tilly objected. It did not look like one, in fact it was hard as rock; but we have been told that rain would flood these bits of open
vlei,
and we could see that nothing seemed anxious to grow there.

‘Not at all,’ Robin replied, rather hurt. ‘Roger said
all
the land was ploughable. Except of course the river bank, which is just over there.’

‘I can’t see a river,’ Tilly said.

‘Of course you can’t, if you don’t look.’ Robin’s testiness was a sign of disappointment; he had hoped for Tilly’s enthusiasm. He himself had already furnished the site with a large mansion equipped with running water and electric light, with a garden, an avenue of flame trees, and several hundred acres of fruiting coffee trees.

‘This is where I thought we’d put the house,’ he added, leading the way up a slight rise to command a prospect of more brown grass, dark-green spiky bush, and scattered trees. ‘There’s a good view towards Mount Kenya, and we can ram the water to a reservoir on top of the hill and feed it down by gravity to the house and factory. The pulping place will be down there, and the first plantation over to the left; we might irrigate a vegetable garden, too, and start a small dairy. Lots of people will be settling here soon, we can sell them milk and butter and make a bit that way. Then we can plant an avenue, and an orchard, and make a feeder road of course down to Thika. I’ve heard that the Italian Mission has some coffee seedlings; if I can buy them there, we’ll
save at least a year, and make a nursery by the river for the next plantation, over towards the other boundary….’

Robin talked on; the whole place was thriving and making several thousand pounds a year before Tilly had managed to dismount and sit down on an old eroded ant-heap to wipe her face, coated with sweat and red dust as all our faces were, and start to pull ticks off her ankles.

‘And in the meantime,’ she said, ‘it would be nice to have a grass hut to sleep in, or even a few square yards cleared to pitch the tent.’

‘Oh, that won’t take long. But just for the next night or two, perhaps we’d better put up at the Blue Posts.’

So we all rode back again, rather silently, though Robin rallied once or twice to tell us of the neighbours who would soon hem us in on every side. Tilly said he made it sound like Wimbledon, to which Robin complacently replied:

‘One of them
is
a stockbroker, as a matter of fact.’ All the land had been sold, he added, though the only settler actually to arrive was a South African who was living in a tent somewhere by the river and spent all his time shooting animals; Robin had tried to find him, but he was never there. He had some oxen, however, and Robin hoped for help over the ploughing.

Robin had never ploughed anything in his life before. He had been in other parts of Africa, but had spent his time prospecting, and going into partnership with men who knew infallible ways to make money quickly without having any capital. By a series of extraordinary mischances, something invariably went wrong, and it was always Robin’s little bit of cash that vanished, together with the partner. Unfortunately his father, dying young, had left him some money, so instead of learning how to make it in the ordinary humdrum manner, after an unproductive period in the Army he had indulged a passion for inventing things that never quite worked (though perhaps they might have done, had he been able to persevere) and starting companies to exploit them.

These companies involved partners, who seemed to have the same traits wherever Robin went; there came a gloomy day when everyone went about as if there had been a death in the family – as I suppose, in a sense, there had – and preparations
were made to evacuate the house and sell most of our possessions. On the first occasion my nanny – to start with we had enjoyed such luxuries – replied sepulchrally to my inquiries: ‘Daddy has a hole in his pocket.’ I demanded why it could not be mended, and received no answer; I could only suppose, correctly in a sense, that all the golden sovereigns had fallen out before Robin had noticed the hole. So he had vanished to seek a new fortune in the colonies, as they then were, and I had attached myself to Tilly, instead of to a nanny, at the home of relatives.