Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [24]
Newspapers around the world picked up the story, reporting that Leakey’s claim to have found ‘the Oldest Fragment of Man’ had been debunked.
Leakey returned to England in September 1935, his reputation severely damaged. He incurred further opprobrium after forsaking his wife, Frida, and their two children to live ‘in sin’ with a talented young illustrator, Mary Nicol. Divorce proceedings added to his notoriety. His Cambridge college terminated his research fellowship and the university authorities made clear they were not willing to consider him for an academic post. In dire financial straits, Leakey accepted an offer from the Rhodes Trust to undertake a detailed study of the Kikuyu people.
In January 1937, he set sail for Kenya, accompanied by his newly married wife, Mary, with little prospect of being able to pursue his search for the earliest man.
CHAPTER 5
DEAR BOY
WHEN MARY NICOL first arrived in East Africa in 1935 to join an expedition to Olduvai that Leakey had organised, she was given a swift introduction to the hazards of life with Louis in Africa. The ‘long rains’ had begun, turning roads into quagmires. Leakey was a day late in collecting Mary at Moshi, a small town at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, to which she had flown to meet him; on one stretch of the road from Nairobi, it had taken him five hours to cover 200 yards. They started out from Moshi well enough, hoping to reach the rim of Ngorongoro Crater in little more than a day, but it took them two days just to reach the bottom of the escarpment. With food supplies running low, they spent the night in a damp hut abandoned by road-makers. It rained all night long. The next day, slithering through the mud up the escarpment, they covered only three miles. ‘On some occasions, [we] practically carried the car and the equipment’, wrote Leakey. ‘Sometimes we unloaded the car and carried the luggage ahead for half a mile or so, and then returned to push and carry the car. Sometimes we took the car ahead and went back to get the luggage’. Six days after they set out from Moshi, they reached the rim of the crater, black with mud from head to foot, tired and very hungry.
The daughter of an itinerant English landscape painter, Mary Nicol, born in 1913, had been educated at a succession of schools in France and England, gaining a reputation for being a troublemaker. She was expelled from her final school, accused of simulating a fit and causing an explosion during a chemistry lesson. She left without ever having passed a single school examination, but discovered a liking for archaeology, attended lectures at London’s University College and developed an exceptional talent for drawing. A distinguished archaeologist, Dr Gertrude Caton-Thompson, was so impressed by Mary’s work that she commissioned her to illustrate stone tools for her forthcoming book on the Fayoum depression in Egypt, The Desert Fayoum. She also introduced her to Louis Leakey, thinking he too might be in need of an artist to illustrate his book on early man, Adam’s Ancestors. When Leakey saw Mary’s drawings for The Desert Fayoum, he was struck with admiration. ‘Mary Nicol’s drawings’, he recalled years later, ‘were the best representations of stone tools I had ever seen then or, indeed, have seen since’. He immediately invited her to undertake the drawings for his book. By the summer of 1933, they were ‘inseparable companions’. Mary was just twenty years old; Leakey was nearly thirty.
Mary took to the spartan life at Olduvai with relish. The surrounding plains were alive with great herds of wildebeest and zebra migrating after the rains; at night lions prowled around the edges of the camp. The gorge itself offered endless possibilities for exploration. ‘In 1935 it was just a place that was incredibly beautiful