Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [22]
My grandmother nursed the donkey back to health with liquid paraffin and May & Baker antibiotic powders, but Suk sensibly refused to go anywhere near the school again. Anyway, he remained completely bald over much of his body, “and you can’t ride a bald donkey.” So for some months Mum was forced to walk to school every morning alone, and when she was sent to sit under the scorched eucalyptus trees, she could no longer lounge on the back of her donkey, staring up at the sky. Belatedly, and to her heartbroken surprise, she found she missed Suk’s obstinate, scheming companionship.
THE SHORT NOVEMBER RAINS CAME, followed by the startled, green days of Christmas. Then the longer rains arrived in March and stayed all through May. Walking to school, Mum collected clogs of mud on the bottom of her shoes. The roads turned fluid and my grandfather had to put chains on his tires to drive anywhere. Then May dried into June and the long dry season started again.
“What you saw first,” Mum says of the occasional, almost mystical arrival of the Somali horsemen, “was a pillar of dust coming from the edge of the plateau.” And by nightfall they were in Eldoret and you could hear the bells around the necks of the lead mares and the men shouting to one another in their exotic desert tongue. Their little campfires lit orange out of the grasslands, and the shapes of horses milling and men in silhouette ghosted the vlei.
Hundreds of Somali ponies had arrived, worn muscular and sinewy having trekked almost the entire breadth of Kenya from the drylands of Somalia. “Only the fittest, sturdiest animals survived that long, difficult journey,” Mum says. The herdsmen—every bit as tough as the animals they had come to sell—were lean and secretive behind their white wrappings of desert garb, dry and folded as moths.
Within the week, the horses were all taken over to Betty Webster’s place, one of Eldoret’s riding teachers. “She set up benches and a thatched shelter at her riding arena and there was an auction of all these fabulous ponies which, of course, I had to miss because of school. But my mother and father went. They were very keen on Somali ponies and they decided that a pony of my own was exactly what I needed to take my mind off what had happened to poor Suk.”
Back in the early 1930s, before Thoroughbreds made it to East Africa, my grandfather had won the Kenya Gold Cup on his Somali pony, Billy. “Not much to look at,” Mum says. “They tended to be ewe necked, goose rumped, straight in the shoulder, and they were tiny—average height, about thirteen point two hands—but the main thing is they had endurance and they could run like the wind if they felt like it.”
At the auction, my grandmother was taken with a sturdy gray gelding. She thought he had a nice direct way of looking at a person. A herdsman with sun-baked eyes and a lip full of khat agreed to let her ride the pony before she bought it. For the first and only time in his life, the creature behaved like an angel. He allowed his feet and teeth to be checked, he didn’t kick or bite, he willingly jumped every obstacle put in his path, he turned and halted nicely. My grandmother paid the herdsman a handsome sum and she named the pony Nane, Kiswahili for the large eight branded on his rump.
“He never went forward again,” Mum says. “His only interest in life was food, which I suppose was understandable given he’d been on desert rations all his life until then.” Every morning before school, my grandfather galloped his Thoroughbred mare, Vanity, out on the racetrack and Mum trailed behind on Nane. “The racetrack had been where the Italian prisoners of war camps were, so there were lots of overgrown and collapsed latrines that you had to be careful not to fall down. Otherwise, it was a perfect