The Flame Trees of Thika (8 page)

A straight line was perhaps unlucky; at any rate it was never risked. The ploughing looked very odd by English standards; there seemed to be no furrows, just a sea of lumps and clods, and a tangle of roots.

‘I don’t see how anything can be expected to grow,’ Robin said gloomily.

Tilly pointed out that things grew without much encouragement. ‘The veranda posts are beginning to sprout,’ she added.

Robin liked to think that we were the first to settle in this particular district, but in fact our Boer neighbour, Mr Roos, had arrived before us. Several weeks after we started our struggle with the oxen he returned from his shooting expedition and rode over to see us on his mule. Robin thought he would resent our presence, because Boers notoriously disliked having close neighbours, and also because we were British
rooineks
, and as such to be despised. However, he seemed quite friendly, and when Robin addressed to him a few simple words of Afrikaans he immediately offered to demonstrate how oxen ought to be trained. He was a middle-aged, brown, leathery man with many wrinkles, a short but tangled beard, very blue eyes, and a slow, flat, halting way of speaking our unfamiliar tongue.

Like most Dutchmen, when it came to handling oxen there
was a touch of genius about him. It was as if he spoke their language. He was not rough or violent with them as the Kikuyu were, he did not shout, and although the long whip he cracked continually above their backs stung them like a hornet when he so intended, he did not use it with cruelty.

‘You’ve got those oxen eating out of your hand,’ Robin commented with admiration.

‘Your boys know nothing, man,’ our neighbour replied with contempt.

‘We are all amateurs,’ Robin admitted. ‘But Sammy is a good boy.’

‘He is a stuck-up nigger and he will not speak to me again like that.’

‘He doesn’t mean to be rude.’

Robin spoke apologetically; as a matter of fact, he was not at all sure that he was right. Mr Roos made no distinction between Sammy and the Kikuyu; to him, they were all niggers; and Sammy’s pride had been touched. Mr Roos was not going to stand for insubordination and decided to put the matter to the test. They were on the shamba, ploughing the last furrow before outspanning for the rest of the day. The Dutchman rasped out an order; Sammy ignored it, and walked away. Whereupon Mr Rood threw down his whip, took a run at Sammy, and kicked him on the backside. There was a Kikuyu youth standing by with a light spear in his hand. Sammy stumbled, wrested the spear from the startled youth, and turned to face the Dutchman with murder in his eye.

Robin acted quickly. He brought Sammy down with a sort of rugger tackle and the spear was knocked away harmlessly. The Kikuyu came and picked it up and Sammy stood there quaking with rage. He was not just trembling, he was shaking all over like molten lava in a live volcano; his head was thrown back and there was foam on his lips. Mr Roos shouted at him, demanding that he should be flogged then and there. Robin refused, if only because the Dutchman’s arrogance annoyed him; Mr Roos had bullied and blustered and behaved, Robin said afterwards, as if Sammy had been intent on starting a new Zulu war.

‘You let a nigger strike a white man,’ the Dutchman cried, himself quivering with rage, ‘and next they will kill you in your bed.’

‘That would be much more comfortable than in the open,’ Robin replied. The more Mr Roos stormed, the more stubborn Robin became. It was this attitude among the British that all the Boers loathed and feared. Theirs was simple. White men were few in a savage black land and only by standing together and stamping on the least sign of resistance could they hope to survive. The British feudal spirit that prompted them to protect their own men against, as it were, rival barons, appeared to the Dutch as a base betrayal. The British were concerned with personal status, the Dutch with racial survival. Each of the two peoples feared, distrusted, and even detested the other’s point of view.

Our neighbour went angrily away and did not let the matter rest there. In his view it should all have been settled, as these matters generally were, with twenty strokes of the hippo-hide whip, but as
rooinek
obstinacy prevented this, he still had the right of appeal to the law. He rode off to see the District Commissioner at Fort Hall, between thirty and forty miles away. A few days later a pink-faced young man sheltering beneath a very large topee arrived on a pony to say that a summons for assault had been taken out against Sammy. Robin was angry, Tilly alarmed, Sammy, when summoned, coldly contemptuous, and the young official confused.

‘I understood that he was violent and you wanted him arrested,’ he said. He had brought two large uniformed askaris, who arrived later on foot.

‘I can’t have him taken away or I shan’t get the land ready before the rains,’ Robin said. ‘It was all Roos’s fault anyway.’

‘I’m afraid he means to press the charge. We’d heard rumours that your boy was a bad hat who’d been stirring up trouble among the Kikuyu. In fact I had orders to bring your wife and daughter to Fort Hall if there was any sign of unrest.’

The young man sounded disappointed. He had evidently hoped to bring a dangerous situation under control with two askaris and his own cool judgement and presence of mind. He stayed for lunch and then rode off on his pony.

The case against Sammy cost everyone a great deal of time, trouble, and expense. When finally it came before the District Commissioner, Sammy went to Fort Hall and did not return for
nearly a month. Fearing he had gone to jail, Robin sent a chit to the District Commissioner and learnt that the case had fizzled out owing to contradictory evidence, and Sammy had left a free, unfined man.

When at last he returned, sleek and smiling, Robin asked angrily what had detained him.

‘I had to go to my father’s
manyatta
to fetch some cattle,’ he replied.

‘You did not have to pay a fine. Why did you need more cattle?’

‘To pay the witnesses.’

So it ended happily. All Europeans, in those days, received a native name derived from some peculiar characteristic, quality, or habit. Soon we learnt that Mr Roos’s name was Meat of the Wild Pig.

Robin’s name was bwana Kofia Mbaya, or Bad Hat. When Tilly heard this she exclaimed: ‘But how extraordinary! That was the name the natives gave you in Rhodesia before we were married.’

‘It’s not really so strange,’ Robin explained.’ You see, it’s the same hat.’

W
ITHIN
a few months of our arrival, several neighbours had settled nearby.

The first was a shy but determined young man called Alec Wilson who had started life as an office-boy in some drab Midland city and quickly risen, by means of excessive work and resolution, to become a solicitor’s clerk. His was the sort of life and character that Arnold Bennett might have described. Then his health broke down and he was told to seek a dry and sunny climate if he was to survive. He came out with, I think, two hundred pounds of scraped-together capital, and was lucky enough to meet in the ship a man with somewhat larger resources, who became a sleeping partner, and the two between them bought a block of bush next to ours.

Alec Wilson knew even less than Robin did about the business in hand. But people who knew nothing at all were more likely to learn than those who knew a little, and mistook this for a great deal. Alec Wilson thought that he could learn from books. In this he was mistaken, for at that time little, if anything, that was useful had been recorded, and most of what had been recorded was wrong. But the grass hut he built for himself, one like ours, was soon filled with Government reports and pamphlets, manuals of engineering, text-books on plantation industries, and works of that kind. When he came over to see us he would generally start the conversation with some such remark as: ‘According to my calculations, the volume of water in the river has fallen by point o five of a cusec, which would suggest that a furrow…’ Or: ‘I have been giving some thought to the question of wind-breaks; in Brazil the species
gravilea robusta
…’

This was a bore, yet his enthusiasm was touching. He was like a bird that has become the embodiment of a single intention, to migrate over thousands of miles of ocean and desert, so that nothing on earth will deflect it – no lure of food, no need for rest, no weariness, and no temptation. It will get there or perish. No doubt he had a family in Wolverhampton or wherever it was, but he seldom mentioned them, although he corresponded with a married sister in Wales. Naturally enough, he counted every cent of his money. The only reason we knew about his married sister was that he would sometimes give us an unstamped letter to post next time we sent to Thika, and he never repaid us for the stamp. Robin helped him in a great many ways: lent him oxen to start his ploughing, chains to pull out tree-stumps, tools, all sorts of things, and even lent him Sammy for a week to organize his labour. When Alec Wilson paid Robin for some things bought on his behalf in Nairobi, he deducted one rupee for Sammy’s keep.

When Sammy got back, he remarked: ‘That bwana should get a wife to make him comfortable. Now he is like a man who is always being bitten by
siafu.
’ Soon he was called bwana Bado Kwisha, which means: not yet finished – a phrase that he was fond of using when the Kikuyu showed signs of knocking off for the day.

I thought him very old, as he was over thirty. He was not bad-looking,
although at first he seemed to us under-nourished and pasty-faced, with a stupid toothbrush moustache. But he had good, dog-like brown eyes and thick, wavy, chestnut hair, and when the sun had cooked him he lost the under-done appearance he had started with, his shoulders grew wider, and even his moustache became more impressive.

On our other side was the Dutchman, Mr Roos. The land immediately across the river was taken up by a Scot called Jock Nimmo who was always away shooting elephants. After a while he dumped a wife there to make a show of development. The regulations required every settler to spend a certain sum on his land within, I think, the first five years, and to do a certain amount in the way of clearing bush, fencing, cultivating, and putting up buildings. Anyone who failed to do this lost his land. As Mr Nimmo was a hunter, not a farmer, he left all this to his wife. Tilly thought that was why he married her. Why had she married him? It can hardly have been for security or for companionship, and must have been a disappointment if it was for love. She was a nursing sister from Edinburgh who had come out to the Nairobi hospital, and that was where Jock Nimmo had met her. Soon after their marriage he had left her in the bush with a drunken headman, a few unreliable Kikuyu, and some implements and untrained oxen, and had gone off to poach ivory in the Belgian Congo, with a promise that he would take her to the races on his return.

Mrs Nimmo was not much interested in coffee-planting, and was shocked by what she called the ‘heathen immorality’ of the natives. When Tilly inquired what she meant, she could hardly bring herself to speak of the sights she had seen. Tilly, hoping for some spicy revelations, sent me away. Afterwards she said to Robin:

‘The woman’s of! her head. All she’s worried about is that the boys don’t wear trousers. And she a nurse! Besides, what about kilts?’

‘Not in Edinburgh,’ Robin said with a flash of Highland snobbery.

Mrs Nimmo had hoped to put nursing behind her, and disliked references to her former profession. She asked Tilly and myself to tea and produced a silver-plated teapot, fluted tea-cups
decorated with rosebud-chains, thin bread-and-butter and many sweet and puffy little cakes which I greatly enjoyed. Each plate sat on a lace doily. Conversation was difficult. Mrs Nimmo wanted to talk about Edinburgh society, the new Governor’s pretty daughters, and a controversy then splitting the world of fashion in regard to sleeves, as to whether they should be open, or gathered in at the wrist; whereas Tilly’s mind was running on such topics as pleuro-pneumonia among oxen, twisted taproots in coffee seedlings, and rumours of an outbreak of bubonic plague.

‘I’m afraid I was a great disappointment,’ Tilly admitted regretfully afterwards. ‘The other only white woman for twenty miles and absolutely ignorant about the latest fashion in sleeves.’

Early one morning a panting messenger arrived with a chit which said: ‘Please come at once. I have a loose murderer.’ Robin collected a mule and crossed the river by a new foot-bridge he had made. When he came back several hours later he remarked:

‘She’s an extraordinary woman. She goes on as if anything below a man’s neck gives her the vapours, and there she was gaily strapping up a sliced buttock and a gashed tummy as if she thoroughly enjoyed it, as I think she did. Really it was a ghastly sight – the fellow had his skull laid open and one eye half chopped out as well – and when I remarked about it she said: “Ah, weel, I’ve seen worse at the Infirmary on a Saturday night.”’

The drunken headman, it seemed, had got rather too drunk and attacked one of the Kikuyu, whose friends and relatives had promptly rounded on him and left very little of him intact. This was during the night. By dawn everyone had vanished, leaving the headman alone in the hut to bleed to death, as by all the rules he should have done. But when Mrs Nimmo had discovered him in the morning he was still alive.

‘He has no chance, poor fellow,’ she said, drawing on a good deal of experience; but she had not reckoned with African toughness. The headman was angry and wished very much to live, and so he did. On the other hand men who appeared to be quite healthy would sometimes die because they wanted to. This did not happen so much in Edinburgh, and Mrs Nimmo never quite
recovered from her amazement at the headman’s survival. She wanted to call the police, but Robin dissuaded her. Even if the police did come, after a long delay, they could only ask a lot of questions, and as nobody would have admitted even to seeing the headman before, and as the relatives of anyone suspected of complicity would provide a complete alibi, we should not be any further forward at the end.

‘I’ll go and see Kupanya about it when your headman’s fit to tell his story,’ Robin promised.