The Flame Trees of Thika (7 page)

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.

T
HE
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:

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.

Sammy took more note of things. He showed me nests of the small golden weavers that built in swamps; neatly-woven purses, lined with seed-heads, depending from bent-topped reeds and giving them a look of pipes with long, thin, curved stems; he followed the yellow-throated francolin whose clutch of speckled eggs, laid under a grass-tuft, was as hidden as the weavers’ nests were plain.

Also he introduced about half a dozen of his little native cattle to graze on our land.

‘This is a bad place for cows,’ he said, ‘so I shall bring only a few, enough to keep me from hunger.’

‘Where are the rest?’

‘My father herds them for me with his own.’

It was his father who was the Masai. ‘My father’s cattle are as many as the gazelle on the plain. When he moves them, it is like droves of zebra who seek water in the dry season. My father’s cattle are fat as lice. These Kikuyu cattle, they are thin as grasshoppers.’

Unlike the Kikuyu, he always made the most of his wealth and importance. If you asked a Kikuyu how many goats he had, he would shake his head and answer: ‘How should I own any goats? I am a poor man.’ The Kikuyu looked in others for the cunning they possessed themselves. If you believed a man to be well-off in goats and cattle, it was ten to one you were thinking of taxes, or levies of some kind. The poor, thought the Kikuyu, were like lizards who could take refuge under stones and exist even if they lost their tails. To the Masai, this attitude was contemptible. A man’s glory resided in his herds and flocks, and if
he had no glory, what sort of man was he? As for risking the loss of them, any Masai felt himself able to defend his own against all comers, even against the Government. They would do as no man told them, only as their own sense of fitness prescribed.

Sammy did not at first bring a wife with him, but a boy, some kind of relation: a red, greased boy who had exactly the look of a buck that pauses for an instant to await some infinitesimal movement or sound that will send him flying like a spear from the hand. This boy prepared his master’s food and acted the part of page to a medieval knight, and Sammy stalked about like a squire, creating around himself an aura of feudal authority.

One day he showed me how he bled his cattle. A Kikuyu seized the head of a brindled bull and twisted it over his thigh, gripping its neck with one hand so as to swell the jugular vein. Sammy took a bow from the boy’s hand and, from a few yards’ range, fired an arrow straight into the jugular. The arrowhead was ringed with a little block of wood so that its point could not penetrate more than about half an inch. Still with a casual air, Sammy plucked out the arrow and the blood spurted into a calabash held by the boy. Then Sammy closed the arrow-prick with finger and thumb and, to my surprise, it stayed closed and the bleeding stopped. The bull, released, strolled off and started to graze. I suppose this was no more harmful to it than bleeding human patients used to be – less so, in fact, as the bull was in good health. Sammy did not drink the blood in the calabash. The boy mixed it with milk and other ingredients, of which cows’ urine was one, and let the brew ferment for a day or two. When it was ready to eat, its consistency was like that of soft cheese.

Work on the farm proceeded much more smoothly after Sammy came. He and Robin between them organized a system of piece-work and gave each man a daily task. Most people finished by noon and had the afternoon free for rest and talk, and the evening for eating and, if occasion offered, for dancing and making merry. But none of the young men drank beer. That was for the elders, who made up for what they had missed in their youth, when warriors had to keep themselves fit and ready to spring to arms when the horn of war sounded.

Sammy was a proud man, but this pride was so instinctive,
and so unselfconscious, that it imposed upon others the obligation to respect it, and no European used to him the bullying tones often adopted towards the Kikuyu. Robin and Tilly spoke to Sammy as they would speak to a fellow European. In return, Sammy gave them his complete loyalty. African society was feudal then, and Europeans who were used to the system fitted in without any trouble. This feudal relationship, however, was a subtle thing and not the same as the relation of an employer to a hired man.

Our ploughing got on better under Sammy’s care, but the oxen were still wild. They broke away quite often and had to be chased through long grass until they were rounded up and yoked again. The furrows wove a tortuous way across charred, black stubble, avoiding craters from which had been slowly and painfully extracted the roots of trees.

‘I believe these fellows would give anything on earth
not
to walk or plough in a straight line,’ Robin complained.