Eighty Not Out (22 page)

One of the narrow roads along the shore led to an overgrown cemetery with weathered headstones, some recording the death of young men from England who had died within months of arriving at Mwanza; others in memory of pioneers who had reached a ripe old age before death. One of Mwanza's most colourful residents, Gertie Brown, lived on the road to the cemetery with her partner, a geologist who had spent years searching fruitlessly for the diamond pipe he was convinced existed at a specific location south of Mwanza. Gertie remained a striking woman with high cheekbones and lovely skin, although by the time we met her she must have been about eighty and had put on weight. She was vivacious, and it was easy to believe that she had been a Gaiety Girl in the twenties. We were asked to afternoon tea, served in fine porcelain cups and poured from an ornate silver pot; there was juice for the children and thin cucumber sandwiches. We were introduced to her pet pelican, with which we had already had an encounter: I had stopped the car to admire the scene when I turned to find myself eye to eye with a small red orb – clearly the brute expected a handout. I wound the window up just in time to avoid the first thrust of that incredible beak; when no fish was forthcoming, in frustration he attacked the headlights. The girls, safely out of range in the back of the car, were thrilled. We met Gertie's geologist once only before he killed himself in a particularly messy way, blowing his brains out in her chintzy living room just before dawn one morning. Thereafter she became a recluse, joining him after a few years among the headstones in the cemetery.

Fergus went to Dar to meet the
WHO
representative, but we did not accompany him, as the coastal climate is similar to that of Accra – more often than not humid and conducive to prickly heat. Indeed, we never visited the capital, though later we spent time at Tanga, a coastal town south of Mombasa, when we had to leave Mwanza during Amin's hostile attacks from the air.

The garden rapidly rewarded Fergus's attentions. In addition to judicious pruning of flowering shrubs, he scraped a sandy bank bare to encourage kingfishers, and by late July one pair was nesting. We considered making a pond in a natural hollow where water tended to collect, but were discouraged by pessimists who predicted that ants would eat any rubber or synthetic lining. Plans for the Serengeti trip continued and Fergus hoped to revisit some of the places where he had conducted school surveys in 1957 in south-west Uganda; we were deterred, however, by reports that three Belgian tourists, who had accidentally crossed the border into the Congo, had been marched off by militia and summarily shot.

Despite the demands on my time, I continued writing to my mother and a few really good friends in the
UK
: among these were Sybil and Iain, our Scottish friends from Boston, who had returned to work at the Medical Research Council at Mill Hill in north-east London. Iain had a contract to spend two years at their research centre in the Gambia, and a letter from Sybil sought information about what they might expect. From what little I had seen of the Gambia in 1960, I could think of few less desirable places to be stationed, but did not say so, rather, listing the things I had found indispensable such as Wettex cloths, muslin nappies, insect repellent, an ample number of towels and, assuming they would have a generator, a fan and a sewing machine. I complained to my mother that most people were lazy about letter-writing, not realising how welcome letters from home were.

During the last week in October, as soon after dawn as possible, we set off for the Serengeti in the Land Rover, with the children, Maria and her six-month-old baby, plus Stella, Stephano's third daughter, to look after Maria's child, and help with what would be an enormous load of washing. The road to Musoma was tarred for the first twenty miles, then the laterite began. As we crossed a bridge cobbled together of widely spaced wooden planks, which rattled as we lurched to the other side, a swarm of bees filled the interior of the Land Rover. Fortunately I was the only one to be stung; it was very painful and the lump lasted several days. Gradually the land became more fertile, with banana and sugar cane plantations, and we could see the range of hills that juts into the lake south of Musoma. Soon a scattering of dwellings appeared on the lake side of the road, an indication that we were nearing the entry gate to the western corridor of the Serengeti at Ndabaka. We knew that many of the local inhabitants, even some park rangers, were dedicated poachers, operating on quite a large scale, despite the heavy penalties they faced if caught.

On arrival, a ranger checked that we were legitimate, took the payment, and gave us permission to park under a jacaranda tree, which provided the only shade. We all wandered off to pee and stretch our legs, returning to drink lukewarm pineapple juice and eat peanut-butter sandwiches. Michael's sodden nappy went into a big plastic bag, in which dirty items stayed until washing facilities were available. Disposable nappy design was still in its infancy; in any case, their use was a guarantee of developing a sore bottom, so inside plastic pants were an outer layer of terry towelling, an inner muslin nappy lined with Kleenex to take the worst, and the skin liberally plastered with a barrier cream. I never discovered how Maria coped with her own baby, but the breast-fed infant was content and there were no unpleasant smells other than the pervasive body odour we had come to accept as part of life in Africa.

After a few miles the track changed to black cotton soil, which after rain would turn into a treacly morass, dreaded by all travellers. We were fortunate, unlike Dutch friends, who two weeks earlier had been forced to return to Mwanza. Soon we began to see small groups of Thomson's gazelle, several giraffes, a pack of hyaenas, bunches of four or five warthogs scarpering off, tails erect, waterbuck, a few ostriches, many baboon troops and hundreds of gnu. Katharine spotted a group of vultures bouncing up and down on a heap of something that attracted myriad flies, insisting on closer inspection despite Fergus's protest that at this rate we would not reach Seronera by nightfall. The heap was a gnu – its ribs already exposed.

We stopped at the camp beside the Grumeti River, and were lucky to find the young zoologist ‘at home'. We had brought contributions for Richard's larder, tinned sausages from Czechoslovakia, a can of rubbery orange cheese, a dozen cans of beer and some fresh fruit. One round hut was his bedroom, another the office/laboratory, and a row of outbuildings contained the kitchen, cook's room and a modern bath, which had to be filled by hand with grey-green water from the river. This same water was what one drank after boiling and – I hoped – filtering, though I did not see a filter. The loo, perched over a deep hole in the ground, prompted the girls to ask if it led to Australia. They sat on a low branch above the silky river, and pronounced it heaven. In many ways it was.

Maria and Stella had remained impassive throughout, and Katharine and Mary had become blasé about the more commonly seen animals, complaining that they had yet to see a rhino or elephant. Richard patiently explained that they were rare in the area, but we might see some hippos in a nearby pool. Leaving Michael with Maria and Stella, we set off in Richard's vehicle, lurching over a mile of deeply fissured track, before he stopped, announcing that now we had to walk – in total silence. Fergus had sensible desert boots, but the girls and I wore only flipflops. For a while the quiet was broken only by the distant call of a bulbul shrike, and faint rustlings from the surrounding bush. A large flock of wood ibis clattered into the air, giving away our presence just before we reached a round soupy pool no more than fifty feet in diameter, where several crocodiles immersed themselves immediately. After a short interval, about fifteen hippos of assorted sizes surfaced, little ears twitching, to inspect the intruders. A fully grown elephant silently crossed the stream on the opposite side of the pool; only then did I feel a tremor of fear, realising that Richard did not carry a gun, and my faith in Fergus, though considerable, did not extend to imagining he would be of the slightest use should we be forced to take evasive action.

On leaving, we thanked Richard sincerely for having allowed us a glimpse of his Mara paradise. (From what I have read recently this area is now at the centre of luxury lodge accommodation, which makes me even more grateful to have been there before mass tourism, and continued poaching, made their mark on yet another site of special scientific interest.) Travelling on to Seronera, we made a stop for drinks and leg-stretching. Then, while Fergus and the others stayed in the Land Rover, I climbed a slope overlooking a bend in the river, hoping to get a picture of a somnolent crocodile. A child's voice floated over the stultifying air: ‘Watch out, Mum, there's a lion.' ‘Shut up, Mary,' I replied; ‘bad-taste joke.' Then Fergus, in measured tones, said: ‘There
is
a lion, just walk back slowly, don't run.' I glimpsed a dead gazelle on the riverbank and quickly realised I had disturbed a meal.

Late in the afternoon, hot, exhausted and engrained with red dust, when the sun was turning to a red ball, we reached Seronera Lodge. It was a relief to find that we were expected, and that two self-catering rooms were ready for occupation, but accommodation for Maria and her baby had to be arranged at the servants' quarters, near the laundry. Stella was to stay in our second room with the children. Formerly these rooms used a communal kitchen with a steward to lay tables and do the washing-up, even cooking if requested, but rumours had been rife over the previous eighteen months of a marked decline in standards and they turned out to be all too true. The cot requested for Michael was nowhere to be seen, and when one was produced, it was encrusted with bat dung. There was no fridge for the food I had brought in our now warm ice-box, no cook and no means of cooking until six in the evening, when a fire was lit to warm bath water. Luckily we had brought a Primus along, so it was back to the old Ghana regime of making up baby feeds on the dressing table among hair brushes, melting butter, hardening lumps of bread and our precious tin-opener. The kitchen was filthy, such pans as there were blackened and misshapen – fortunately I had brought one along just in case. There were no aids for dish-washing other than a slimy rag, which I incinerated as soon as the fire got going. We found an assortment of cutlery and china in a cockroach-infested meat safe; most of the cups had a layer of hardened sugar at the bottom. The dining room was some distance from the kitchen; grimy cloths covered the tables, which bore crumbs from the last meal, and there were several Kapok mattresses on the floor, indicating it was a multi-purpose room. (I wrote a letter of complaint to the National Parks manager at Arusha, who was English and probably well aware of the situation: Seronera, the main lodge in the largest reserve, was one of the worst.)

We had hoped that after the children had been fed and had gone to sleep under Stella's care, we would dine at the main lodge, mostly patronised by rich Americans, but we were refused, owing to a new rule that no meals would be served to tourists staying in the self-catering rooms. They graciously agreed to serve us with drinks and nibbles in the amphitheatre in front of a stone-fronted bar. A large fire was blazing and beyond lay the vastness of Serengeti under a clear star-sprinkled sky.

After a good night's sleep, we woke to see two giraffes delicately nibbling the tops of some nearby acacia trees, and tame glossy starlings, their iridescent oil-slick-coloured plumage brilliant in the soft early light, hopping around outside: all the effort suddenly seemed worthwhile. The children discovered a colony of tame rock hyrax, and wanted to visit the museum. A sad and dusty place it was: stuffed, moth-eaten specimens of smaller animals were displayed under flyblown glass, the labels curled and brown at the edges. There was a collection of pallid snakes and frogs in formalin and a few hand-axes and arrowheads said to have come from the Olduvai gorge. Faded sepia photographs of nineteenth-century pioneer hunters, standing proudly with attendant askaris beside a kill, hung crookedly behind cracked glass. The children were unimpressed, but strangely often referred to it afterwards. Leaving Michael with Stella and Maria, we hired a guide for the afternoon. Driving his own vehicle, he took us first to see a family of lions at their ease in the shade of an acacia tree. The male lay prone, legs in the air, while two females watched several cubs at play nearby. Then, alerted by seeing another of the park vehicles stopped near a large solitary tree, he drove to see what the attraction was: wedged high in a fork in the branches, a fine leopard stretched out, long tail dangling, guarding his kill –a Thomson's gazelle, its head also dangling from a long neck. Nowadays, thanks to the mixed benefits of digital technology, all the rangers have mobile phones, so such a kill would be surrounded by four-wheel-drive vehicles, each sprouting video cameras and telephoto lenses. Buffaloes we found about as entertaining as domestic cows, but we knew they were among the most dangerous animals, liable to close in on and trample any interloper. Visitors were warned on no account to leave their vehicles, but in practice many did.

Gradually we learned to indentify the less common antelopes – kudu, topi, gerenuk and hartebeest – but by the time we set off on the journey back to Mwanza, we were all sated by sightings of baboons, zebras, warthogs and troops of green vervet monkeys. We stopped briefly at Richard's camp, where his cook contrived a meal using some of our remaining canned contributions. Fortuitously one of the Land Rover's tyres chose to develop a slow puncture just as we approached the camp, for a search revealed that the institute's mechanic had not replaced the tool-set in its usual place under the driver's seat.

As we were on the point of leaving, one of the rangers implored us to take his heavily pregnant wife to the hospital in Mwanza, as she was thought to be miscarrying, so she managed to squeeze herself into the back of the already overloaded vehicle. Steely blue clouds had formed behind us, flashes of lightning shot over the horizon, and distant peals of thunder could be heard. When we got to the black cotton soil area, it was much softer than it had been on our way in, so we decided that I should take over the driving while Fergus walked ahead to test the surface, to a chorus of anxious voices: ‘Look Mummy, there are big drops of rain, and why does Daddy have to get out so often, and what will happen if a lion, or rhino comes?' What indeed. We made the gate with about fifteen minutes to spare before the downpour started in earnest. (Two weeks later a young couple were stuck for forty-eight hours before deciding they had no option but to abandon the car and walk the remaining eight miles to the exit. The girl told me she had been terrified – they had seen three rhinos and a large herd of buffalo.)