Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [14]
Still, it was no wonder that when friends offered my grandmother free berth to Kenya in exchange for acting as au pair to their children, she fled the island of her ancestors and headed for the colonies. She was twenty years old. Until the day she left for Africa, she’d never been more than a hundred miles from her home. On her journey she took the native intelligence of her crofter upbringing; a suitcase of sensible clothes; a diary in which she recorded the day’s temperature and any other notable occurrence; and several dense biographies of various members of the British royal household, past and present.
Fairly soon after reaching Kenya, Donnie met and married Roger “Hodge” Huntingford. For eleven years Donnie and Hodge tried to have a child, but the massive quantities of quinine my grandmother took to prevent and treat malaria also acted as an abortive. Not until the Second World War, when my grandfather was stationed in Burma and my grandmother had gone back to live on Waternish Estate, did she manage to carry a child to term.
Once the war was over, my grandparents returned to Kenya with two-year-old Nicola in tow. “The men went out first to set things up again,” Mum says. “And then my mother and I came out on the first ship to bring women and children—a converted troop carrier, the RMS Alcantara.” Mum pauses. “In my memory, there were ten thousand women and children on that ship and one man—Mr. Branson, the haberdasher from Eldoret—but that can’t be right. Can it? Maybe there were two thousand women and children, and Mr. Branson the haberdasher.”
On the train from Mombasa to Eldoret, Mum ran up and down the dining car and ate all the butter off the tables—pounds and pounds of butter, rationed in Britain but here for the taking—and by the time she got to Eldoret, she had acidosis. “I was seriously, seriously sick and had to be whipped straight off to Doctor Reynolds for a liver remedy.” Mum blinks at me in surprise. “Where were all the grown-ups while I was busy wolfing down the butter? I nearly killed myself with greed and no one stopped me.”
ELDORET IS A TOWN SOUTH of the Cherangani Hills on the Uasin Gishu plateau, close to Kenya’s border with Uganda. Originally known as 64, it was sixty-four miles from the head of the newly built Uganda Railway, but then the settlement became more established and the settlers cast around for something that sounded more romantic—less like the location of a prison camp—and someone came up with Eldoret, taken from the Masai word eldare meaning “stony river.”
“It was a bit bleak and windy sometimes and it could be very cold up at six thousand feet,” Mum says. “We had to light a fire almost every night. But compared to gloomy old Britain after the war, it was ecstasy. For one thing, the quality of light so close to the equator! And for another thing, the space. You could look across the plateau all the way to the horizon and you would see uninterrupted land for as far as anyone could hope to walk in a single day.”
My grandfather worked as a government agricultural extension officer, going off on safari for two or three weeks at a time to remote parts of the country and leaving my grandmother and Mum “up country.” To begin with, until they could find a proper house, the Huntingfords lived in a tiny rented bungalow on the grounds of the Kaptagat Arms, the estate of Zoe Foster, whose husband had been a white hunter in Uganda.
“The husband was gone by the time we showed up. I think he had been eaten by a lion or gored by a buffalo or whatever happened to those white-hunter types,” Mum says. “Anyway, Zoe seemed perfectly happy. She had two sons, a beautiful blond daughter called Mary and lots of animals. There was always a vicious but effective mongoose resident in the house, excellent for killing snakes—just like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Oh, and her garden was the most exciting in the whole area—a stream, a maze, beds of rhododendrons and roses, lavender and peonies,