Eighty Not Out (24 page)

In mid-July we all went on home leave to Northern Ireland; Fergus for a month only, while the children and I did not return to Mwanza until November, in good time for the festive season. On New Year's Eve I gave a party for more than twenty with turkey, roast pork, all the traditional trimmings, and lots of booze. I do not remember whether it was before this party, or a subsequent one, that Fergus found me late at night crying into the stuffing for the cavernous bird. His reaction was: ‘Throw the bloody thing in the bin if that's the way you feel about it.'

14

Debilitating Afflictions

T
he early months of 1969 saw a succession of ‘Mwanza Special' respiratory ailments and fluctuating fevers, the cause of which was never established, usually followed by a fruity cough lasting several weeks. Conventional medical advice was that no current drug was of any benefit, so ‘just sweat it out'. In the end I took a drug recommended by the Asian pharmacist; it may have just been a coincidence, but by April I felt well enough to return to the tennis court. Malarial attacks, or the suspicion thereof, in our family as well as in Stephano's brood, were a regular occurrence. Lucy was brought to me one afternoon, limp and with eyes rolling heavenwards, so I rushed her to the institute, where she was treated for malaria without a preliminary blood slide being taken. Katharine got the same treatment, although her symptoms were not so alarming. Regular de-worming of Stephano's children was done partly as insurance against our children getting an infestation. Fergus, being a parasitologist, took the view that ‘it all depends on the load', but I was appalled when Margaret, then about six years old, sicked up on the ‘lawn' what looked like an entire stomachful of parasitic roundworm (
Ascaris lumbricoides
). Incredibly, of our children over the years, only Mary got a light infestation of threadworms.

In mid-February a Russian clinician/parasitologist recruited by
WHO
joined the project, by then officially in its second phase. Jarockij often returned with Fergus from the laboratory for afternoon tea, which he drank, peasant style, hand around cup, forefinger holding the spoon in place, making no secret of how much he enjoyed joining in the family scene. He had been allocated living quarters nearby, in a small stone building with a corrugated iron roof, which had once been a prison. Periodically he would invite us to his version of afternoon tea; vodka, white bread and a tin of Beluga caviar, with biscuits, Fanta and Coke for the children. I am grateful to him for educating me in what caviar should be like; the vodka, too, was good, probably sixty per cent.

My return to the tennis court coincided with a match against a team from Mwadui diamond mine about halfway between Mwanza and Tabora, the administrative centre in German colonial days. Fergus and a West Indian judge, recently come to Mwanza, had taken on the task of upgrading tennis facilities at the club and shocked the Asian members by undertaking some of what were regarded as menial tasks themselves. This was a subtle move to encourage the club employees whose job it was to maintain the two clay courts: weeding, sprinkling and rolling had long been neglected, and unused to direction or discipline, they passed much of the day chattering in the shade of a mango tree outside the kitchen. News quickly spread that the visitors would expect entertainment on a lavish scale, accustomed as they were to standards at the largest diamond mine outside South Africa. There was a general improvement in attitude, and Mwanza Club was not shamed on the day, providing a buffet luncheon and not, for once, running out of ice cubes. It was quite an event and I remember Maude Lyonnet, enviably elegant as always, joining the spectators with her two sons, one in a silk-canopied pushchair. Her husband, Roger, was a
WHO
doctor specialising in smallpox – his previous posting had been in Afghanistan. Roger became a faithful friend, utterly loyal and dependable over the next twenty years, although his ineptitude as a tennis player was a severe test of Fergus's patience.

As a result of our having provided a bed for one of the visiting team, who knew Fergus from the mid-fifties in Accra, before the Gold Coast became Ghana, we were invited to visit the mine at the end of May. The pipe had been discovered by a lone Canadian geologist, John Thoburn Williamson, in 1940, after nearly five years of fruitless prospecting. The site was a vast concentration camp for the mine employees, with maximum security regulations in force, despite which some gemstones did get out. In contrast, senior staff enjoyed just about every material advantage within the boundaries: yacht and tennis clubs, cinema, school, swimming pool, shopping centre, hospital and an air service to fly staff or their dependants to Nairobi for the equivalent of £5. Notwithstanding these delights, some of them were happy to escape to Mwanza from time to time. We were taken on the official visitors' tour and proudly shown a replica of the Williamson pink 23.6-carat round diamond which Williamson had presented to Princess Elizabeth as a wedding gift, and which had been set at the centre of a hideous flower brooch. The design was a single daisy on a two-leafed stalk of white diamonds set in platinum – so undistinguished, not to say trite, it might have been drawn by a child. My comment that I wouldn't wear it if paid was tactless, and did not go down well with some of the women. Poor Fergus winced, saying, not for the first time, ‘Will you never learn?' But we had spent an enjoyable weekend in an unreal world, to which we were to return two years later in quite different circumstances.

The Schistosomiasis Control Project was progressing satisfactorily. As it was scheduled to end in 1972, Fergus explored job possibilities within overseas development agencies, schools of tropical medicine, and universities both in the
UK
and America. A vacancy at headquarters, for which he was ideally suited, was filled by a candidate from Atlanta; Fergus heard that he had been second choice. John and Rosemary were to leave Mwanza in August for home leave in Australia, followed by an eighteen-month contract in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Katharine was devastated at the prospect of losing her best friend Sheena, but things were soon to change for her in any case. Many parents had become uneasy about standards at Isamilo Primary School, where the state had begun to interfere in what had hitherto been an independent school, answerable only to the Anglican Church. New teachers had been recruited whose spoken English was suspect, and all pupils were expected to line the official route to cheer and wave flags on Young Pioneers Day, Independence Day, or the visit of any minister from Dar. As no event ever began on time, this involved standing for hours in the heat. I mostly excused the children on grounds of sickness.

Fergus had accumulated a number of local leave days, which if not used before a certain date would be sacrificed – accordingly plans for another safari began to take shape. He would, of course, intersperse pleasure with official visits to other specialists working in the field on schistosomiasis or related rural health issues such as irrigation, wells and water supplies. This would ensure it was not just a holiday, and he would earn per diem expenses to help towards the considerable costs of overnight accommodation for the whole family. The
Victoria
had been in dry dock for three weeks for its annual service. Rumours were rife of delays in obtaining spare parts: cracks, literal and metaphorical, were widening in the hitherto notably efficient East African Railways and Harbours service. Liaison with the booking office in Nairobi had worsened to the extent that now they flatly refused to confirm reservations. In the end, the
Victoria
came on a trial run to Mwanza in June and we sailed back with it to Kisumu a few days later, hoping that it would not sink on the way. (Horribly prescient in the light of the disaster in 1996, when a more modern vessel sank between Bukoba and Mwanza, with the loss of over five hundred lives.)

My recall of the journey from Kisumu to Lake Naivasha is dim, but whichever route we took would have involved at least eight hours' driving: the ‘scenic route', for which I always pleaded, via Narok, was probably overruled in favour of the longer, but better-surfaced road via Kisii and Kericho. To recover from the battering, we stayed two nights in a timber lodge at the southern shore of Lake Naivasha, from which we walked into Hell's Gate, notching up the great bustard and secretary bird en route – the Lammergeyer bearded vulture did not oblige. We spent three nights in Nairobi at the Fairview hotel, which was a good base for families with young children, although the city was crowded, noisy, dusty, full of tourists and the traffic frightening. Next we took the Mombasa road, heading for the Amboseli reserve, stopping to eat a memorably uncomfortable picnic in rhino scrub country. The ground was scattered with small sharp rocks, there were thorns underfoot, which pierced our flipflops, and the temperature was so high the horizon was a quivering mirage. Little stirred, apart from thousands of ants scurrying around the crumbs, but we spotted a solitary rhino in the distance, and at close range, the rear end of another one browsing in the scrub. Bibiana, an ayah recruited locally, accompanied us on this trip. She was a little older than Stella and more appreciative of the wildlife, and she was invaluable in coping with our load of washing and ironing, as well as helping to tidy up the children's mess and keeping an eye on Michael, by now two and a half. Fortuitously his major ‘toilet' breakthrough coincided with this trip.

We stayed at Marangu on the slopes of Kilimanjaro at a lodge from which many climbers began their assault on the peak, which, from my photographs, was heavily snow capped. Here we met a couple from Tucson, Arizona, who became lifelong friends. Lillian was a Superior Court judge, inveterate adventurer and reliable correspondent; her husband, Bernie, was an asthmatic with high blood pressure, which precluded mountain-climbing, but Lillian had completed her ascent of Kilimanjaro a few days earlier. She added this triumph to several descents of the Grand Canyon, and white-water rafting through the rapids long before it became a popular pursuit. We visited them in Tuscon in 1993 and travelled to the Grand Canyon in the luxury Lexus saloon they lent us, getting to the rim just after dawn. It was bitterly cold, with snow on the ground, and there were scarcely any people around other than lodge staff. I am grateful to have seen the canyon before the scene was violated by the building of a viewing platform, which extends, like a diving board, from the crater rim.

From Kilimanjaro we travelled to the Lake Manyara hotel, perched on the edge of the Rift Valley escarpment, overlooking the national park directly below. From the beautifully planted garden, one could see elephant families, herds of buffalo, and a scattering of giraffe in almost constant movement on the stage below – it was like having a front row seat in the upper circle of a theatre. The swimming pool was pristine, the accommodation superior, but the atmosphere was dour, and the staff uninterested in visitors because of the average twenty-four-hour turnover, coming in coaches chartered in the
US
or Germany. The baboons at the entrance to the park were importunate to the point of being dangerous, sitting on the bonnet and reaching in through any open window, making negotiations for tickets hazardous. Mary in particular was nervous, her sunhat having been snatched by a colobus monkey at von Nagy's small zoo near Moshi, a refuge for orphaned semi-tame animals that had been hand-reared.

Leaving Manyara, we began the long ascent to the summit, which overlooked Ngorongoro crater. The air grew perceptibly cooler, and the vegetation changed to tall trees, from which curtains of Spanish moss dangled in the mist. Several elephants crossed our path, one bull stopping in the middle of the road to inspect us, before, to general relief, disappearing silently into the forest. We stopped to gaze over the vastness of the crater towards Jaeger Summit – l05 feet higher – and two other ancient volcanic peaks, knowing that lakes Natron and Magadi lay in the vastness beyond, promising ourselves that one day we would visit them too. We never did, having to content ourselves with seeing the flamingos at the better known, more easily accessible, Lake Nakuru. Descending to the plain, we were soon choking in clouds of dust as we neared Olduvai Gorge on a track that bore notices advising how best to cope with shifting sands. I revised my view, expressed once to an Australian water engineer recruited to Fergus's project, that air-conditioning was for wimps. He had boasted about his duty-free Mercedes, which had this benefit. Our admiration of the Leakey team of archaeologists, who depended on water coming in by road from Arusha, was, and remains, profound. We saw them patiently scraping, softly brushing, and sifting under the relentless sun, scarcely a bush in sight, but they stopped work to describe what they were doing to interested, largely uninformed, visitors. Our visit was five years before the four-million-year-old fossil remains of Lucy, our earliest ancestor, were discovered. The children were too young to appreciate the significance of it all, but intrigued by the lavatory, which in this instance was a three-sided wooden structure perched on a little hill overlooking the main site: the fourth side was a sack flapping in the faint breeze, the wooden seat over another bottomless shaft to Australia.

As a result of my letter of complaint two years earlier, we spent two nights and a full day as guests of the management at Seronera, receiving
VIP
treatment, including palatable meals. We inspected the self-service section and found it much improved, though still without a refrigerator. Highlights on the last lap to Ndabaka were seeing a ‘congregation' of crocodiles and, for the first time at close range, three cheetahs resting on a small hummock. Now that Serengeti can be viewed on television screens worldwide, I appreciate more fully the chance I had to take pictures with a hand-held Exakta camera, changing telephoto lenses under adverse conditions, mostly using Kodachrome II film, which has borne the time-test surprisingly well. This film went out of production early in 2012, to the worldwide regret of many professional photographers.

October brought the long school holidays, the object of which was to release children back to their family farms to help with planting the before the rains began, but on 16 October they started with a vengeance. I was in the main market when the first downpour fell and water rapidly rose to ankle depth. I got back to the institute, on a hill about half a mile from the town centre, in time to collect Fergus and the children, who now looked healthy, having regularly been out in the morning sun. Michael adopted Stefano's daughter Salome after Lucy was returned to her father, the librarian, and they all had great fun on the big orange bouncy ball with ears, bought in Nairobi. We had inherited a primitive barbecue from John and Rosemary – a metal drum sawn in half with holes in the bottom, which rested on stones in the garden. Charcoal was cheap and plentiful, and we never lacked advice on how best to achieve and maintain a constant glow; Jarockij proved invaluable, always joking about his horror at having seen me trying to cheat with a sprinkling of paraffin. As the year drew to a close staple foodstuffs rocketed in price after the State Trading Corporation took over distribution. Effectively this resulted in spasmodic deliveries only, thus creating ideal conditions for both black and brown profiteers. Shades of Ghana yet again.