The Flame Trees of Thika (33 page)

‘It won’t last long long, that’s certain,’ Robin remarked. ‘No country could afford it, for one thing.’

Robin belonged to some kind of reserve force, having been in the Yeomanry, and began to fuss about getting back to his regiment. Next day he had a cable saying: ‘European war inevitable.’ So he packed his bag and rode off the following day to the station to catch a train to Nairobi. Tilly felt restless, worried, and out of things. No one thought of lessons, she busied herself with looking after the new chickens and organizing the labour force.

‘It’s no good leaving me alone with your still,’ she had said to Robin. ‘You will have to come back and show me how to work it.’

‘It’s very easy,’ Robin had assured her. ‘There are just one or two little parts it needs. I can get them in Nairobi and bring them back when I come.’

‘What will Hereward do, I wonder?’

‘Of course, he’ll be recalled to his regiment, and I suppose go home by the next boat.’

‘I’m glad someone will be pleased about the war,’ Tilly had said.

Soon the district was almost deserted, with only Tilly, myself, Alec, and Mrs Nimmo left behind. Everyone else had gone to look for the war. Even Major Breeches had left the Blue Posts and was helping to organize rations for the volunteers who were pouring into Nairobi.

Robin returned in three or four days, full of news. People were arriving, he said, from all over the country, in trains, in carts, on mules, some of them with nothing but the clothes they stood up in and a rifle, anything from a light carbine to a double-barrelled elephant gun. On the Uasin Gishu plateau, miles and miles away, farmers who had assembled to discuss some agricultural matter had heard the news and travelled to Nairobi in a body to enlist just as they were, without even returning to their farms. As to what they were to enlist in, neither they nor the authorities had given the matter much thought. The
K.A.R.
did not want a sudden influx of quite untrained Europeans, so the more forceful of the volunteers proceeded to form their own units, appoint their own officers and
N.C.O.S
, and drill their followers.

Thus there came spontaneously into being Wilson’s Scouts, Arnoldi’s Scouts (composed of Dutchmen from the plateau),
and Bowker’s Horse. Robin had a narrow escape from this last body. A man, he said, as large and broad as a piano, with a whole leopard’s head, complete with bared fangs, snarling down from his slouch hat, practically shanghaied him on the steps of Nairobi House, which had become the headquarters of these home-made regiments. This was Russell Bowker, the South African who had lost five hundred sheep and set fire to the Masai
manyatta
.

Narrowly avoiding Bowker’s Horse, Robin got himself a job to do with Intelligence. He was delighted with it, and even more delighted to delve into a tin trunk in the store and extract his kilt and its accoutrements. Whether it was needed for Intelligence I do not know, but he took it off to Nairobi, and that was the last we saw of him for some time. It was decided that Tilly was not to stay by herself on the farm, but was to take part in Nairobi in the starting of a military hospital. Alec Wilson offered to look after the farm; later on, he also took over the Palmers’, and led a more strenuous life than many people did who had joined the Army. There remained my own future to be settled. Ian Crawfurd had an elder-brother, Humphrey, with a farm up-country, and a wife. Tilly had met them both and liked them; and when Mrs Crawfurd wrote to offer me a sanctuary she accepted gratefully, and threw in the Speckled Sussex pullets for good measure. I was not allowed to take George and Mary, the chameleons, nor Mohammed the tortoise, but Njombo promised to look after them as faithfully as if I had been there. To part with Moyale was the worst of all. It was a bitter moment when he ate his last lick of sugar from my hand, nuzzling me with his soft muzzle, and cocking one ear forward and one back. Moyale would look next day for his sugar, his carrots, his patting, his exercise, and I should not be there. Would Njombo keep his promises? Or would some
shauri
claim his interest and Moyale grow neglected and forlorn?

‘We are not going for ever,’ Tilly said, ‘I expect we shall be back before Christmas, and meanwhile I shall come out at weekends to see that things are all right.’

‘But I don’t want to go!’

‘Well, you must blame the Kaiser, he is the one…. Don’t forget to clean your teeth, and try not to scratch your head so often, and when you ride for heaven’s sake keep your toes
straight and your heels down, and your elbows in, and don’t look so much like a performing monkey.’

With these parting instructions we left for Nairobi in the mule-buggy, with the crate of Speckled Sussex pullets, a basketful of vegetables for the hospital, and many other miscellaneous things. In theory, Tilly travelled light, but in practice the imminence of her departure acted like a summer thunderstorm on a mushroom field, and parcels, baskets, and mysterious objects in odd-shaped packages sprang up on all sides.

Nairobi was full of khaki men with rifles. They had no settled uniform, but most of them wore breeches and puttees, bush shirts, and felt hats, with gay bandana handkerchiefs round their necks. While we were shopping in the town a platoon rode by carrying native spears adorned with red and yellow pennants; Tilly said they had turned themselves into Lancers, and were called Monica’s Own, after the Governor’s daughter.

In the evening Tilly put me on the train in charge of the guard, with a good deal of luggage, and some last-minute presents for Mrs Crawfurd such as a box of little trees, a sack of seed potatoes, a preserving pan, an egg timer, and two new blouses and some material that had arrived in the last boat before the war began. ‘They will bring nothing now but beer and bullets, I expect,’ Tilly remarked gloomily, ‘so we had better get what we can.’ The guard said he would put the Speckled Sussex in the van.

When I got off the train next morning everything smelt quite different, fresh and cold. An ox-cart met me at the station with a young Dutchman who said his name was Dirk, and that he would take me to the Crawfurd’s farm.

At Molo everything was much bigger than at Thika – hills, trees, distances, even sky and clouds. The trees were black and clumped, the grass naked and tufty, and bent over on one side, and you felt as if you had reached the very top of the world. The air was sharp and clean as iced lemon juice, and a wind blew, and spikes of pink and bronze wild gladioli grew among the buff sedgy grass. We passed no round huts, no goats, no shambas, no valleys with banana-trees; everything was empty and cold.

I was silent on the journey, and so was Dirk, and we jolted
along with very few words. Dirk walked with a limp, and told me he had broken his leg.

At the end of the track, I told myself, would be Mr Crawfurd, and he would be just like Ian only rather larger, because he was the elder of the two. But Humphrey Crawfurd was another surprise. He was not like Ian at all, in fact I did not believe that they were brothers. Humphrey was certainly much larger, but dark instead of fair, with a heavy moustache and big thick hands; indeed he was heavy all over, bulky, silent, he did not sparkle at all. It was only in the eyes that I could see a resemblance, both pairs were proud and smoky blue; and a little in the smile, perhaps, which made Humphrey look younger and less preoccupied.

What I remember most about him was his ability to embalm himself so deeply in thought that flies could crawl about his face, even into his ears, without his making any sign. This gave him a monumental quality which impressed itself deeply on my mind. He did not flap and twitch like ordinary people, or like cows. He must, one felt, be sunk in some tremendous wisdom or philosophy. In fact, he was a man who held to one passion at a time, and at the moment his thoughts were concentrated upon water, and on ways of getting it about. He had a large farm, a ranch really, and it needed a great many pipes, channels, and flumes.

Mrs Crawfurd was as lavish with words as he was sparing. They bubbled out like water from one of his sluice-gates, and like the water they were fresh, bright, gay, and occasionally a little monotonous. She had the knack of uncovering drama in every event, significance in every situation, and importance in every human being. In fact monotonous is the wrong word, just as it would not be the right expression to use of a dappled, busy, flashing mountain stream. Such streams can lull you into a half-drowsy, half-dreaming state where every now and then you catch the intonation of a little waterfall, the whisper of a rock pool. That may have been how Humphrey Crawfurd felt. She did not expect him to listen to every word of hers, for she enjoyed talking, nor did he expect an over-lively interest in his water schemes. They gave and took. They had two children, a girl called Althea who was in Scotland, and a boy of about two years
old who was with them, called Bay; and a baby was expected quite soon.

After my retinue of packages had been unloaded and sorted out, and Mrs Crawfurd had exclaimed on Tilly’s generosity, she added:

‘And it was angelic of your darling mother to send such a splendid
kikapu
of vegetables, they are quite magnificent, but they are perhaps the one thing we could have done without. Now we are going to have so much water everywhere I shall be able to irrigate a garden, and meanwhile we grow splendid vegetables from English seed, that is one of the things we
can
do on our mountain-tops.’

This gave a jolt to my memory. The Speckled Sussex! They had not been in the ox-cart. Had they been left behind?

They were not at Molo station, and Mrs Crawfurd wrote to break the news of their disappearance to Tilly. A week or two later, we heard their fate. Tilly had received a note from the matron of the hospital, thanking her warmly for her handsome gift of a dozen young hens. ‘The patients have enjoyed them, such a welcome change….’ Poor Speckled Sussex, it was sad for them to travel five thousand miles, so much cosseted and cherished, and destined to found a new colony of hens, only to be confused with a basket of vegetables and end up in the roasting-pan.

A few days after I arrived, Mr Crawfurd opened a furrow that was to carry water from a spring in the forest to his house and farm. The trench was nearly two miles long and had taken over a year to dig and to line with a kind of clay that had been hauled by ox-carts, with frequent adventures in the mud.

We rode up to the forest with a picnic, men with spades having gone on before. Nothing could have made Mr Crawfurd talkative, but you could feel that excitement was coiled up inside him like a spring. The labour on the farm had decided to make this into a holiday, and all the people living round about, attracted by the party as ants by sugar, had come to join in.

Molo was not like Thika; there was no native reserve; only about fifteen years before, no humans of any sort had been living there. Too bleak for cultivators, too high even for Masai cattle, these Molo downs had lain there as God made them, empty and
unchanged, with wild animals in sole possession and able to do as they pleased.

After the Government had built a railway from the coast to Lake Victoria, they had offered blocks of this land for nothing beyond a very small annual rent, but they had not found any takers, not one. The land was beautiful, but people were not after beauty, they were after profit, or at any rate the chance to make a livelihood, and at Molo this could not be done. The land lay unwanted for a while, and then a few South Africans arrived, and scratched a living not by farming but by shooting the game and running transport from Londiani, the next station but one up the line, to the Uasin Gishu plateau, where Dutch settlers were growing maize, but had no railway to take it away.

It was from a South African that the Crawfurds had bought their ranch, of five thousand acres. There was nothing on it, just a few huts made of split logs and some
bomas
for sheep and cattle. There was not even a road or track to link the ranch with the station. Mr Crawfurd’s trouble, like most people’s, was lack of capital, so he could only do a little bit at a time. Like the Dutchmen, he was slowly building up his flocks and herds, animal by animal, calf by calf. About the only crop for which there was a ready sale was maize, and Molo was too high for that. The Crawfurds did sell a little butter, which went down once a week in an ox-cart to the station, and then in small consignments to people they knew in Nairobi.

As no Africans were living on this great western wall of the Rift Valley, of which Molo was a part, the earliest farmers sent to fetch some either from the Kavirondo country, or from Kikuyuland, and small native settlements arose near the European homesteads, and in folds of the hills. And as everyone within ten miles or so had decided to attend the opening of the Crawfurds’ furrow, we arrived to find quite a lot of people squatting round on their heels, or leaning on their spears.

The head of the furrow lay a little distance inside the forest, in one of the glades. This forest, like the rest of Molo, was quite different from anything I had seen in the Kikuyu reserve. Most of the trees were either olives, or cedars with black, bitter berries, which grew to great heights. Their trunks, fluted and twisted like enormous sticks of Edinburgh rock, had a special talent for
catching the sunlight and giving out a red glow. Their foliage was hung with long, drooping beards of lichen, dry and brittle, of a peculiar, soft greenish-grey. This gave them a look of ancient giants, full of wisdom and mystery, turned into trees.

Their branches were often twisted and half-bare, so that one might have imagined an ecstatic dance of venerable but frenzied priests, frozen by divine command and so obliged to spend eternity in those odd, tortured, and yet dignified positions. Inside the forest’s darkness the sharp cedar-smell was always in your nostrils, dry twigs cracked and whispered under your feet, the rotting fallen trunks lay as deep in moss as Plantagenet monarchs in furs and velvets. The slow decay of leaves, and the spotted fungi, added a pungent tang to the cool sunless air. The undergrowth was thick and spiky and you could not traverse it without getting torn to bits, and perhaps not even then. But game paths went everywhere, and some of these had been widened into human paths by the Dorobo, those little hunters who dwelt, like bongos, only in the very deepest forest. One seldom saw a Dorobo, but they had game pits in the forest, down which one might tumble on to a nest of sharp stakes.