The Flame Trees of Thika (17 page)

The living-room was flanked on one side by Tilly’s and Robin’s bedroom, which they shared with several dogs, and on the other side by mine, which was divided into two, half for me and half for the tin bath. My half held little beyond a chest-of-drawers made by a local
fundi
and a camp-bed, with a colobus monkeyskin on the floor beside it. The camp-bed was always on the point of being replaced by something better, but I was glad that it never was, for I could snuggle into it, as into a burrow, in a manner impossible on proper mattresses, and knew its creaks as one knows the voice of an old friend. A collection of wooden or china animals stood on the chest-of-drawers, but no looking-glass; indeed for some time no such thing existed in the house, except for a little pocket glass from Tilly’s handbag which was propped up on a packing-case in the bathroom for Robin’s use when he shaved.

Now and again, the bathroom was transformed into an emergency ward. There was an old man called Rohio who lived in the reserve and used to come and see us sometimes; his son Karioki drove the ox-cart that fetched our water from the river, and in between whiles prodded at the garden weeds with a hoe.
(This he had held, to start with, by the business end, and used the handle for dislodging weeds, possibly because a digging-stick was the traditional Kikuyu tool, but possibly also as a protest against Robin’s insistence that a journey to the river completed by eight o’clock in the morning did not constitute a full day’s work.) Rohio was a friendly soul who liked nothing better than a long, leisurely chat about the weather, the crops, people, and affairs. Once or twice he brought me small presents, such as a stick of delicious, cool sugar-cane to suck, or a bagful of groundnuts.

He appeared one day looking hunched and ill, and with a nasty cough. Tilly gave him a dose of strong medicine and advised him to go home at once and stay in bed. He gave the long Kikuyu ‘ee-ee-ee-eee’, which meant almost anything, rubbed his woolly head with a skinny hand, and walked off unsteadily, as if drunk, although this was not the case. That was in the afternoon. Just before sundown, Karioki appeared on the veranda and said: ‘Rohio has been taken ill.’

‘What kind of illness?’

‘Of the chest. He cannot breathe, he needs medicine….’

‘Oh, dear,’ Tilly said in English, ‘we’ve promised to dine tonight with Alec, he is making an event of it, we can’t let him down…. Take me to your father,’ she added in Swahili, and they went off to the huts.

The upshot was that Rohio, who was by then unconscious, was carried in and submerged under a heap of blankets in the bathroom. Tilly dared not dose him for fear that he would choke; he had a high temperature, and she diagnosed pneumonia.

‘All we can do now is to hope he’ll sweat it out,’ she said. ‘We had better go to Alec’s, as there’s nothing more I can do for him, and in any case there’s no food in the house.’

Robin and Tilly seldom left me alone, but they had such faith in Sammy that occasionally, if they went no farther than our nearest neighbours, they would place me in his charge. On such occasions Sammy came and sat on the veranda, and as I dropped off to sleep I could hear him through the open door talking in low tones to various companions. On this occasion I could hear also a sound like a kettle with a loose lid boiling hard, and coming from old Rohio next door. Robin had said that to be unconscious
was like sleeping deeply, so I knew that he was not in pain, and the sound did not keep me awake.

When I awoke, the morning sun had laid a bar of gold across the red earth-floor of my room. I dressed quickly, and looked in through the bathroom’s open door. (We never shut our doors at night.) A form lay huddled on a pile of blankets, ominously still, and there were no sounds of a boiling kettle. I felt chilled all over; Rohio must be dead.

I found Tilly out with Sammy, setting tasks for the day. It had been, she said, an eventful evening. At Alec’s the mules had been unharnessed and put in the stable, and the buggy had been left under a tree. When Robin came out with a lantern after dinner he had seen a number of shapes vanish into the night, and heard weird and blood-chilling noises.

‘I thought I’d got ’em again,’ he reported, ‘especially when I saw the grass had turned white, and seemed to be frothing like beer.’ This was stuffing from the cushions of the buggy strewn all over the ground; the upholstery was torn and hung in shreds over the wheels. About the scene there lingered a faint, foetid smell of decay.

‘Hyenas,’ Alec said immediately. ‘They’ve been very uppish lately; the other night I woke to see one at the foot of my bed, trying to gaze into my eyes.’

When Robin and Tilly reached home in the sadly-ravaged buggy, Sammy met them with the words: ‘Rohio is almost dead. He cannot recover. The time has come to carry him outside….’

‘That is not our custom,’ Tilly snapped, thinking of the ravenous hyenas, and their long, sharp fangs. The crisis had come upon the sick man; he was fighting desperately for every painful breath and it seemed impossible that the struggle could continue.

‘His heart can’t stand it,’ she said sadly. ‘All I can think of is a drop of brandy; it couldn’t hurt him, and anyway I’m afraid….’

Robin fetched a bottle kept for emergencies and opened it, and Tilly managed to get a little down his throat.

‘It can’t do harm, and it may do good,’ Robin advised. ‘Try a little more.’

While Sammy held the lamp above them, they went on pouring
brandy in spoonfuls down his throat, until the whole bottle was finished.

‘Well, that’s kill or cure,’ Tilly remarked. They piled the blankets over him and went to bed, telling Karioki to wake them if there was any change. They had the hungry hyenas very much in mind. Tilly had a theory that the dogs would howl if Rohio died.

The dogs did not howl, and next morning Rohio had turned the corner and was sleeping naturally. He stayed for several days in the bathroom, fed on beef tea and gruel, and in a surprisingly short time was able to walk without help. Karioki shaved his head as bare as an egg, which was a sign of recovery. Rohio’s delight at seeing again the sunshine and trees, and life going on all round him, was touching.

‘God has helped me, and you have helped me,’ he said to Tilly, ‘and now I shall become as strong as a buffalo, and walk over the hills, and beget children – even I, an old man whose sons have been circumcised. Your medicine is powerful, and my heart is strong.’

No words for thanking people existed in the Kikuyu’s language, and Europeans often accused them of ingratitude. It was true that they took help for granted, and very seldom, if ever, felt that it imposed upon them any obligation to help their benefactor in return. Europeans had many true stories of retainers who had turned and bitten hands that had fed them generously, and this trait had caused much disillusionment. Perhaps gratitude was simply a habit Africans had never acquired towards each other, and therefore could not display towards Europeans; or perhaps Europeans were looked upon as beings of another order to whom the ordinary rules did not apply; if they wished to help you, they would do so for reasons of their own, and were no more to be thanked than rivers for providing water, or trees for shade.

Old Rohio proved an exception to all these rules. Although he never thanked us in words, he did so by his actions, and after his recovery, whenever he came to visit Karioki, he always brought Tilly a present: perhaps some eggs in a little woven basket, or a load of sweet potatoes on the back of one of his wives. He would squat down in the shade of the veranda, take
snuff, and doze or simply sit until she appeared, and then he would rise and proffer his present with a little nod that set bis long ear-ornaments (strips of leather encrusted with beads) swinging like a pendulum; and he would clasp her hand between his own and shake it gently, as one does a branch with fruit on it, and tell her the news of his family.

Although Njombo had returned from the reserve, Hereward still did not know that he had killed the headman, and kept on pressing chief Kupanya to produce the guilty man. Kupanya kept on putting him off with long, vague messages, so Hereward resolved to go and see the chief, and to combine his visit with a guinea-fowl shoot. The guinea-fowl were regarded as a pest by the Kikuyu because they came into the shambas and scratched up seed, and boys hunted them with sticks and hit them down from trees at night when they had gone to roost. The Kikuyu therefore welcomed the idea of a shoot, and so did we, because we grew tired of eating tough native sheep or oxen with very little flavour, or small skinny fowls, and looked forward to a meal of plump, succulent birds. So off we set one morning on mules and ponies with a picnic luncheon packed in saddle-bags: the Palmers with Ian Crawfurd, Alec Wilson and our three selves.

At first we rode through the khaki grass, the scattered erythrinas and fig-trees, the clumps of dark-green aromatic bush that we were used to, seeing very little sign of life beyond a flock of glossy-coated goats with their attendant, a small naked boy. But quite soon we entered the reserve and, although no boundary was marked, the nature of the country quickly changed. Circles of round huts appeared, each fenced with split poles, and the hillsides were patchworked with small, irregular plots of cultivation. Each young maize plant showed up against the rich red of the turned earth like a halma peg on a chocolate-coloured board.

The women in the shambas straightened up to watch us and some ran for shelter like bolting hares, their babies bobbing on their backs, for they had never seen mules or ponies before and thought that they were evil spirits or monstrous objects like centaurs; the whole concept of a man sitting on a beast was wild and strange. The shrill call of women ahead and still invisible came to us from beyond the bush and forest patches; sound carried easily from ridge to ridge.

After a steep climb up a slippery hillside we paused to rest our mounts and gaze about us at the chequered ridges, the forest darkening the scene ahead, the thatch of huts poking like mushrooms through bush and floppy-leaved banana-trees which partially concealed them. The Kikuyu liked privacy; each homestead was bush- or forest-sheltered, each had its own twisting path that could be guarded by spells. The country was greener here than on our farms, and more fertile; the rainfall, you could see, was higher, the air more crisp, and the bush full of wild flowers, bright flowering creepers, and big flowering shrubs, especially one, a kind of cassia, that bore spikes of golden florets as vivid and as bold as gorse.

‘We have seen nothing but women and children,’ Lettice remarked. ‘Surely there must be men about somewhere.’

‘Lying under trees asleep, or swilling beer,’ Hereward announced, ‘while their wifes do all the work. Lazy scoundrels.’

‘Lucky dogs,’ Robin said wistfully.

Hereward’s moustache bristled. ‘Young dogs should be made to work, if they won’t do it voluntarily. No discipline, that’s what’s the trouble. This Government – ‘

‘I suppose we were all like that once,’ Lettice interrupted hastily, ‘going about in woad and making human sacrifices, until the Romans came. It seems odd to think that we were civilized by Italians.’

‘You can hardly call the Romans Italians,’ Hereward objected.

‘I don’t know what else you can call them.’

‘This Italian Mission farther up the ridge,’ Alec remarked. ‘I suppose it’s civilizing the Kikuyu, though so far the results are pretty ghastly.’

‘If you find anything missing, that’s the place to look for it,’ Hereward added. ‘They say all these mission-boys are thieves.’

‘Perhaps we ought to look there for my scent-spray and that copy of
Eugènie Grandet
,’ Lettice suggested.

Hereward mounted his pony in a huff, wearing an expression like a camel’s, and Lettice went rather pink. Before she could think of some emollient observation, Ian had come to the rescue with a remark about Muslims which gave Hereward an opportunity to praise their virtues. Although himself a stout Christian, Hereward had no wish to attract members of the subject races
into the fold, but rather resigned them to the Prophet, whose views on discipline, strong drink, and women he considered very sound.

Kupanya was waiting for us under a large fig-tree outside his fenced enclosure, which had almost the dimensions of a village, because he had so many wives and children.

‘Do people become chiefs because they are rich, or rich because they are chiefs?’ Lettice inquired.

‘The two advance side by side,’ Ian answered.

Kupanya had dressed up in a cloak of grey monkeyskin and wore a kind of shako made of some other fur, together with a great many ornaments and charms. This was a compliment to us; normally he wore a blanket like everyone else, and merely carried a staff with a brass knob on it to indicate his chiefly status. Round him sat a circle of old men with wizened faces and scrawny limbs, apart from one or two who had run to fat. They displayed wise, lined, authoritative faces, and the dignity of those whose word is always obeyed.

‘Those are the real rulers of the tribe,’ Ian said. ‘Kupanya is more or less a figure-head.’

Njombo had told me that Kupanya had been a noted warrior in his time and had killed several Masai, and even wounded a European. His prowess with the spear had won him a generous share of booty, and so, by the time his age-grade had taken over the control of local affairs, he had become a man of substance; and his character had made him a man of authority. When the District Commissioner had looked about for a suitable chief, Kupanya had seemed an obvious choice.

‘His wealth has grown like a gourd,’ Njombo commented; and now indeed he looked a little like one himself, large and full and ripe.

He gave us native beer, which Hereward spat out with a grimace, and Ian sipped with interest, remarking that it tasted of sour yeast. Alec said that it would give you a bad headache if you drank more than a mouthful. Remarks about crops and weather would have continued for the rest of the day if Hereward had not grown impatient.

‘I have been waiting for you to send in the man who killed my headman,’ he said. ‘Now I am tired of waiting. If you do not
send him immediately to Fort Hall I shall summon the police askaris and they will come and find him.’