• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Settled at Lavender’s Corner—newly wed and cheerfully unemployed—Mum decided to focus on her art. She set up her easel on the veranda and began to paint. “What I saw in front of me,” Mum says, “the Rift Valley in every mood. You could do a different painting every single day of exactly the same view. The light, of course, changed all the time. And the savannah, you know, it’s not just a big blond blob.” And when she ran out of muse, she saddled up Violet and took Suzy for long, meandering rides. “The land wasn’t so chopped up by roads and fences in those days and you could go for miles.”

Meanwhile, Dad landed a lucrative position with a German veterinary-supply company. “Four hundred people applied for that job,” Mum says, “but Tim got it because he swotted up in Black’s Veterinary Dictionary—‘Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming’—that sort of thing. But what really impressed the Germans was Tim’s extreme Britishness. The Germans were thrilled. Until they hired him, they hadn’t been able to operate competitively in a former British colony for zee obvious reasons. Isn’t that right, Tim?”

“What?” Dad says.

“ZEE GERMANS!” Mum shouts. “UNABLE TO OPERATE IN EAST AFRICA BECAUSE OF ZEE WAR.”

ON MONDAY MORNINGS, Dad left Mum on the veranda. “She was always surrounded by her animals, reeking of paints and turpentine,” he says, and drove for days, all over Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, selling supplies to remote large-animal veterinarians. “You could go for miles without seeing much sign of human life. Maybe the odd Masai herdsman or a couple of Samburu warriors waiting in the shadow of an acacia. If you saw another car, you got so excited you stopped and introduced yourself.” But Dad found comfort in the emptiness: the lonely ribs of a long, gravel road; a makeshift bed under wild stars in an insect-sung night. “Once you’ve had a taste of that,” Dad says, “you can’t go back to the madding crowd.”

On Friday evenings, Dad returned to Lavender’s Corner. For the occasion, Mum got out of her artist’s smock and put on something respectable. “Pedal pushers and a nice linen shirt,” Mum says. Then Dad smoked his pipe at the kitchen table and listened to Mum chatter on about her week, while she made a casserole or a curry in the Le Creuset pots. They ate dinner late, with a couple of bottles of cold beer, and watched the moon make its slow traverse across the Rift Valley.

On the weekends, Mum and Dad turned to more patrician pursuits. Dad played polo. Mum show-jumped. They both hunted. “If you could call it hunting,” Mum says. “It was more like cross-country of the worst nature.” The hunts took place in Molo. At more than eight thousand feet, Molo was one of the coldest communities in the country. Some distance off the main Nairobi road, pressed up against the Mau Forest, the settlers were isolated, uninhibited and uncensored.

“Happy Valley wastrels,” I say.

Mum shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No, no, no. The Happy Valley wastrels were gone by then. Well, maybe there was the odd survivor limping about. But no, the Molo people just got up to a little bit of common-or-garden hanky-panky. That’s all.”

The hunts were organized by an English horse vet named Charlie Thompson, who thoroughly approved of all sorts of blood sports: dog fighting, cock fighting, wife swapping. He had an eagle nose, tiny dark eyes, smoked a pipe and walked as if his hips had been locked into their joints. He had lost his riding muscles in some bizarre accident years earlier, about which no one would speak. “The mind boggles,” Mum says, but that didn’t stop him from riding his stallion, Amos, every chance he got. “Oh, that horse was a magnificent animal, wasn’t he, Tim?”

“Oh yes,” Dad says. “Yes, that was a very nice horse, a black Thoroughbred with a bit of warm blood in him.”

While I am sitting there in astonishment that my parents can remember the name, breeding and color of this long-ago stallion, Mum resumes, “Charlie just strapped himself into the saddle, a classic English seat, and off