The Flame Trees of Thika
Most of our furniture was made out of the packing-cases that had sheltered our few salvaged possessions, such as a French bureau with ornate, curly legs, used by Tilly as a writing-desk and adorned always by two tall, embossed silver flower-vases. She also had a delicate little work-table where she kept her embroidery, and a fat-bellied commode used as a medicine-chest, full of queer brews of turpentine, ether, linseed oil, camphor, and other strong-smelling liquids, together with calomel, castor-oil, iodine, and that sovereign remedy for almost everything, Epsom salts. No more unsuitable tenants could possibly have been found for the commode. Robin noticed this one day – he was not at all observant, as a rule, about his immediate surroundings, generally having his mind on distant, greater matters, always much more promising and congenial than those closer at hand – and grew rather angry, for the commode had come from his side of the family.
‘It’s a shame to treat good things in that way,’ he said.
‘How else can we treat it?’ Tilly asked. ‘This isn’t the Victoria and Albert Museum.’
‘It’s sometimes very like the Natural History, with all these insects and reptiles everywhere. I should have thought the commode could have had a little more respect shown to it, that’s all.’
Tilly looked deeply hurt, and also riled by the injustice, as she felt it to be; for Robin would have been the first to have stuffed anything that came to hand into the commode. He respected most theories, a few great men of history, and Tilly, but not possessions, governments, nor the practical necessities of everyday life.
‘I wish I’d never come to this rotten country,’ she exclaimed when he had gone, with tears in her eyes. Sometimes she spoke aloud in my presence without exactly speaking to me; I was a kind of safety-valve, helpful to her feelings even in a passive role.
‘Everything is raw and crude and savage and I hate it!’ she cried. ‘The place is full of horrible diseases and crawling with insects, no one knows how to do anything properly, and there’s nobody to talk to for hundreds of miles!’
Tilly had already been upset that morning by one of those gruesome little tragedies in which Africa abounds; tragedies that happen in a thousand places, and many times a day, that no one hears of, that do not matter, and yet for someone like Tilly, brought up to believe that life could be, and ought to be, full of joy and happiness for all creatures, capable of wounding the spirit and wringing the heart. It concerned the Speckled Sussex pullets she had brought from England, with a fine young cockerel, to start a new line of poultry. One of the pullets, now a hen, had been sitting and the chicks had just emerged: fluffy yellow balls, like animated chrysanthemum buds, that darted about, cheeping, full of life and charm. They had hatched the day before; in the night a column of siafu, those black, purposeful, implacable, and horribly sinister warrior ants, had marched through the nest. In the morning the yellow chicks were limp, bedraggled, soiled little corpses with their insides eaten out, lying in the nest. The hen was alive, and that was the worst part of it, for the ants had swarmed over her and eaten half her flesh away and her eyes, and she lay there twitching now and then, as if to demonstrate that unreasoning persistence of life that is the very core of cruelty. The hen was released from her pain and Tilly stood with a wisp of yellow fluff in her hand, herself white with misery, appalled by thoughts of the helpless chicks’ last moments of agony, and by her own failure to prevent the tragedy.
‘They were just hatched,’ she said. ‘Why did this have to happen? What good do siafu do?’
‘When they march, rain will come,’ Juma said, removing the corpses. He was quite unmoved; siafu were a natural hazard, and had done many worse things than that. They liked to swarm over living creatures and eat into their soft parts, especially the eyes.
Later that morning, a woman brought along a baby that, several days before, had fallen into the fire. The burns had suppurated, and the pus been set upon by flies; the baby, like the hen, still persisted in living in spite of every discouragement, including pain that could never have relented, and that only death could relieve. The contents of the commode were quite inadequate to deal with this situation, as was Tilly’s knowledge of first-aid. It was remarkable how soon the news had spread that white folk possessed healing medicines, and how women who had refused even to approach us a few weeks ago were already anxious to hand over their children for treatment. Tilly was doubly horrified, by the baby’s ghastly injuries and by her own inability to justify its mother’s faith.
‘She must take it to hospital,’ Tilly said. Robin was out with the greased warriors, trying to persuade them to cut down bush.
Everyone looked blank. Juma pointed out that the nearest hospital was in Nairobi which was two days’ journey, and that in two days the baby would certainly be dead.
‘Then we must take it in at once,’ Tilly insisted.
‘How, memsabu?’
‘In the mule-cart, of course.’
‘One of the mules has a bad stomach.’
‘It must go all the same.’
‘The other one is lame. And a wheel of the cart is broken.’
‘You are telling lies,’ Tilly cried.
Juma shrugged his shoulders and relapsed into a sulk, and Tilly was left to deal with the sick baby without support, advice, or cooperation. Its mother held it silently, regarding it with an impassive face that revealed no feeling. When Juma had so resolutely resisted all attempts to help her, she had not attempted to intervene. Probably she did not understand; if she had, she would not have argued; she accepted uncomplainingly the authority of men. Tilly was sure that Juma was lying, but she failed to find the mule-boy or even the mules. It was useless to fight the battle single-handed. She did what she could, which was very little, to treat the baby, and the operation nearly made her sick, the stinking sores were so rotten and the baby so silent, as if even at that stage of its existence it accepted disaster, pain, and death as its natural lot.
So that was why she was upset by Robin’s rebuke about the commode. He did not know the reason, and went off thinking her careless and touchy. He was having his troubles too. He had bought some native oxen, and was trying to train them to the plough. They were quite unfamiliar with this implement; they were strangers even to yokes and chains.
The difficulty of teaching them was all the greater in that none of the Kikuyu had an idea how to train them either. In South Africa, Robin had often walked beside a wagon and watched the Boers control their teams by the inflexion of their voices and the cracking of their long whips. It looked easy enough for any fool to do; but it was not. The Boers had developed a remarkable affinity for oxen, an almost magical authority. They could command them as a circus trainer can command his ponies, or a shepherd his dog. But they had never taught Robin – they never would teach anyone who was not a fellow Boer – and, when he tried it, the oxen did not behave at all according to plan. Not only did they refuse point-blank to draw the plough but they broke chains and skeys and yokes, they cavorted all over the place like a herd of buffaloes, they tangled themselves up in the gear, and finally most of them escaped altogether. The Kikuyu ran about just as wildly, with no idea of the correct response.
It was fortunate that after tea, when both Tilly and Robin were exhausted and on edge, Randall Swift arrived to see how things were going. He had to push his bicycle most of the way from Thika, and he was always anxious to get back quickly to Punda Milia, but I think the inexperience and general unpreparedness of Robin and Tilly worried him, and as we had no neighbours (excepting the Dutchman, Mr Roos, who was still away somewhere hunting animals) he made it his business to see if he could help.
Robin explained his difficulties about the oxen. ‘I can’t even get them yoked,’ he said. ‘They won’t stand still long enough.’
‘I can give you a tip about that,’ said Randall, who had a large store of useful wrinkles.’ First of all you climb a thorn-tree with the yoke, then you get a boy to drive the creature underneath you, and then you drop the yoke down on its ne
ck. Provided the boy doesn’t let go of the traces you’ve got your bullock properly caught.’
‘It sounds all right,’ said Robin, who was beginning to discover that the gap between promise and performance was not, as he had so confidently hoped, any less wide in Africa than elsewhere.
‘You can often trip up a man from behind where you can’t knock him down to his face,’ Randall said cheerfully. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You need a headman here who knows a bit about these Kikuyu fellows. I think I can find a man for you, and I’ll send him along.’
Robin accepted the offer gratefully, and resolved to build a house for him next morning. Everyone got on better at building houses than at yoking oxen to the plough.
Chapter 5
THE prospect of a party, even if it consisted only of one guest with nothing beyond a clean pair of socks in his saddle-bag, always gave Tilly’s eye a sparkle and her laugh a new contagious gaiety. Life could stab her to the heart, but her powers of resilience were great. She could write off her failures, not because she did not mind about them but because she minded too much; the next venture was sure to succeed, life would be unbearable if it did not.
Having lost her cherished hen in such distressing circumstances, Tilly instructed Juma to wring the neck of one of its valuable companions in order to provide a meal worthy of the occasion. I was allowed to stay up for the party, the first we had enjoyed in the grass hut. I picked some wild flowers and Tilly arranged them in one of the cut-glass tumblers, but we were still eating off a packing-case, over which a damask table-cloth was spread. A hollow silver cow that held (or should have held) sweets of some kind, occupied the centre of the table, but we ate with kitchen knives and forks, the rest of the silver having been swept away in the Crash. In Tilly’s bedroom the packing-case which did duty as a dressing-table bore a number of cut-glass bottles and jars with silver tops on which her initials were elaborately engraved, and which belonged to a handsome dressing case that she had managed to retain.
By now Tilly’s attempts to preserve an appearance of leisured elegance, never perhaps very determined, had gone by the board. She was by nature a participator, and had a dozen enterprises under way. While Juma took care of the domestic chores, she was abroad in the sunshine laying out a garden, supervising the planting of coffee seedlings, marking out a citrus plantation, paying labour in a corner of the store that served as an office, rendering first-aid, and in many other ways filling her day with occupations that made her hot, dirty, and tired. Now she had a chance for once to dress up like a lady, and she took it. She wore grey, a kind and gentle background for her corn-gold hair and milky skin and wild-rose complexion, and her emerald ear-rings shone with the radiance of a sunlit beech-leaf in spring. I was allowed to squeeze the scent-spray, encased in a coat of mesh, that lived among her bottles, a simple pleasure rarely indulged. She looked at her hands with a frown.
‘I haven’t any white gloves; anyway, that would be over-doing it. My hands are like a navvy’s, dirt won’t come out of the cracks and as for my nails….’ She had been attacking them with a file, long, thin scissors, a buffer, and some polish from a tiny flat jar, but the result was discouraging. Tilly was downcast; as with all perfectionists, it was the detail others might not notice that destroyed for her the pleasure of achievement. I doubt if she was ever fully satisfied with anything she did. But she breasted each failure as a dinghy rides a choppy sea, and faced the next with confidence and gaiety. So she frowned at her nails, remarked: ‘Well, they’re clean anyway, and there’s nothing I can do about it,’ and proceeded to arrange her hair in a new fashion she had noticed in an illustrated magazine.
Randall was entranced, as indeed he might have been, for she was a handsome woman in the fullness of youth and she had besides that flame of animation without which all beauty is petrified. I think he fell in love with her a little that night and never lost his admiration afterwards. He was himself at heart also a romantic, drawn to Africa less by a dream of fortune than by a wish for freedom and the danger to be found in sport. His Sundays were spent walking about the plains and hills in search of lions and buffaloes.
‘When we make our fortune out of sisal,’ he said, ‘I shall go home every winter to hunt the fox in County Meath, and in the summer I shall come back here to hunt the elephant. Ah, what a grand life that will be! And when the coffee’s made a fortune for you, what will you do with it?’
‘I don’t know what comes first,’ Tilly answered. ‘Robin wants a castle in Scotland, and I should like a safari across the Northern Frontier into Abyssinia and home by the Nile. And then I’d like to own a balloon, and to breed New Forest ponies, and to get to China on the trans-Siberian railway, and to have a model poultry farm, and buy a Daimler, and fish in Norway – oh, and lots of other things.’
When the same question was put to Robin, he replied that he meant to buy the most expensive luxury in the world. The others tried to guess its nature: running a yacht, shooting tigers, owning a racing-stable, buying jewels for Tilly. Robin beamed genially, and said:
‘Doing absolutely nothing. A very expensive affair.’ He quoted a favourite West Highland song:
‘Oh that the peats would cut themselves
And all the little fishes would leap upon the shore,
That I might lie upon my back
And rest for ever more. Oich! Oich!’
Then Randall turned to me and asked me the same question. Not only was I acutely embarrassed by this sudden attention, but the question baffled me. I had no money and it did not seem to be a thing one needed for any purpose at all.
‘He means, what would you like best in all the world if you could choose?’ Tilly explained.
I knew that a quick, decisive answer was expected and my thoughts fled like a herd of kongoni when a shot is fired. Of course I wanted a lot of things, but no one great need over-topped the others. A sharper knife, a mule of my own, one of the lustre coffee-cups to keep, a guinea-pig, mice made of pink and white sugar? What I wanted most of all was perhaps a companion, but I knew this did not fall within Randall’s meaning, so I answered at random, ‘a chameleon’. Indeed these creatures with their air of patient, knowing, and obstinate complacency fascinated me. I admired the way they swivelled their deep and watchful eyes in big, baggy purple sockets that enabled them to see in any direction they pleased, and loved to feel the dry, cold, burr-like pluck of their agile little fingers on my flesh, and to observe them sway backwards and forwards, like a man about to take a tremendous leap, when they contemplated a sudden, darting, forward waddle.
My reply caused the sort of laughter any child dislikes, because it has a ring of patronage; but Juma had made a meringue-crusted pudding with which I was able to console myself, while my elders returned to a topic that never bored them, that of sport. Although Tilly and Robin then believed as firmly as their friends did that to shoot animals was one of life’s richest pleasures, I do not believe their hearts were ever wholly in it. Safaris they loved, and Robin would enjoy a walk with his gun in the cool of the evening to bang away at a red-legged francolin or a fat guinea-fowl, but as a rule he left the antelope alone, and he was not always hoping, as most others were, for a trip to the game-abounding plains along the Athi river. He preferred to plan irrigation works, dams and furrows, forestry projects, and sites for little factories to treat the coffee, citrus, and other crops that were not even planted; and of an evening, to sit by the hissing lamp with any reading matter he could lay his hands on, even out-of-date copies of motoring journals or the Field, and to cover scraps of paper with detailed, complicated calculations which invariably proved, beyond all question, the brilliant success of whatever plan he was hatching.
Once, when clearing up some of these abandoned bits of paper, Tilly noticed, at the bottom of a long column of very high figures, the terse conclusion: ‘Therefore, small sums do not matter.’ It was on this robust principle that Robin conducted his affairs.
Randall kept his word about a headman
, and in due course Sammy arrived. He was a tall, beak-nosed individual with fine, almost Asiatic features and thin bones; instead of the usual blanket he wore a shirt and shorts and a pair of leather sandals. He brought a chit from Randall which said: ‘You will find this boy reliable and clever, so long as you keep him off the drink. He is half a Masai, so despises the Kikuyu, but the other half is Kikuyu so he understands them. If you give him grazing for his cattle, he will think you a king.’
I became friends with Sammy. To the Kikuyu he was stern and often arrogant, but to us he was always polite and dignified. The Kikuyu, as a rule, were not much interested in their surroundings. Although they had a name for all the shrubs and trees and birds, they walked about their country without appearing to possess it – or perhaps I mean, without leaving any mark. To us, that was remarkable: they had not aspired to re-create or change or tame the country and to bring it under their control. A terraced Italian landscape or an English farming county is a very different matter from the stretch of boggy forest first provided as the raw material; it is the joint creation of nature and man. The natives of Africa had accepted what God, or nature, had given them without apparently wishing to improve upon it in any significant way. If water flowed down a valley they fetched what they wanted in a large hollow gourd; they did not push it into pipes or flumes, or harass it with pumps. Consequently when they left a piece of land and abandoned their huts (as eventually they always did, since they practised shifting cultivation), the bush and vegetation grew up again and obliterated every trace of them, just as the sea at each high tide wipes out footprints and children’s sandcastles, and leaves the beach once more smooth and glistening.