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Hunts would traditionally begin with one of Charlie’s famous dinners: piles of mashed potatoes, a leg of some recently slain game animal, beans boiled to death, gallons of bad wine. He lived in a dark cedarwood house furnished with worn leather chairs and moth-eaten animal-skin rugs. On the walls, there were the usual collection of mangy mounted heads and tarnished Indian sabers. “About a thousand bad-tempered dogs were draped everywhere, glaring at you as you ate,” Dad says. And there was a parrot. “You would ask for the gravy and the parrot would shout, ‘And you can fuck off too!’” Dinner usually ended with port in front of the fire. The generator was switched off at about midnight, and the guests faltered to bed with candles. “And then the corridor creeping started,” Dad says. “Mum and I kept our door locked.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” Mum says. “Those people had to leave their children in a pram at the bottom of the garden until it was time to send them to boarding school because they all looked like the neighbor.”

IN THE MORNING, everyone gathered out in the yard for the hunt, the hounds thrashing and whining and twining themselves around the horses’ legs. “You had to be careful if you had a mare like Violet because Amos was terribly excitable,” Mum says. “If you weren’t paying attention, the next thing you knew you had Charlie and Amos sidling up, everything sticking out. . . .” A stirrup cup was brought out to the riders. “Usually dry sherry,” Mum says, “of which you needed a big strong dollop because it could be awfully cold and the hunt was always bloody dangerous.”

Then the horses lined up to leap out of the wooden enclosure. “It was before anyone had taught their horses to jump barbed wire, so there was no other way around,” Mum says. “We’d all scramble over these impossibly high livestock pens and then off we’d go through the mist, along the edge of the forest, the hounds baying and the reedbuck springing out ahead of us, usually getting away, thank God.” Mum sighs. “Violet just loved it. She would gallop like the wind—such a big heart, such lungs, the altitude didn’t bother her at all. We were always streaks ahead of everyone else.”

“Even Amos and Charlie?” I ask.

“Especially Amos and Charlie,” Mum says.

THEN, IN EARLY AUGUST 1965, at a Charlie Thompson hunt, for the first time in her life, something happened to Mum’s nerve. “We were supposed to leap out of this hideous kraal as usual, and I’d done it heaps of times before. But on this day suddenly my heart just wasn’t in it. I suppose Violet felt me hesitate because she faltered and I tumbled off.” In the end, Dad had to ride Violet over the kraal and Mum walked around. She finished the rest of the ride, but she was uncharacteristically shaken by her fall.

Back at Lavender’s Corner, Mum just felt like lying in bed all day. “Of course Suzy would get fed up and make me take her for walks, but exercise made me feel queasy,” she says. “The smell of paint made me dizzy. Food turned my stomach. So off I went to the doctor and I explained that I had taken this spill at one of Charlie Thompson’s hunts and that I still wasn’t feeling right. And he did a couple of tests and told me I was pregnant. I was very indignant. I said, ‘No, of course I’m not. You don’t get pregnant from falling off a horse. Everyone knows that.’”

However, by early September, the evidence of an impending baby was undeniable. Mum surrendered to her condition and began reading Shakespeare to her womb. “All the studies in those weird, gawd-help-you parenting books said reading aloud to your fetus produced serene, intelligent babies,” Mum says.

“But Shakespeare?” I ask.

Mum blinks defensively. “Well, a person might as well start with Shakespeare and work her way through the rest of literature from there.” So by the time of her birth, on the evening of March 9, 1966, at Nakuru’s War Memorial Hospital, Vanessa Margaret Fuller had been exposed to King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, most of Coriolanus,