The Flame Trees of Thika (13 page)

Mrs Nimmo, on the other hand, was a conscientious woman who liked to keep a grip on things. A state of war therefore existed between her and the cook; sacks were always being torn down,
totos
evicted, and cooking-pots scoured. But after she had blown through the kitchen like a tornado things returned to normal in a few days and the recipes she had laboriously taught the cook vanished from the bill of fare. Her cook went about, on these occasions, with the air of a most long-suffering man, as indeed he was, and Tilly sometimes wondered why he did not leave. The reason came to light some time later. He had engaged a Kikuyu smith to copy her store-room key, and used her house as a sort of cornucopia flowing with sugar, fat, and paraffin.

When white people discovered such goings-on they naturally regarded them as thefts and inveighed against the morals of the natives. But I do not think the natives regarded them as thefts at all. The Kikuyu were perfectly honest with each other; crops grew unplundered, homesteads were fortified only against evil spirits, if a woman left a load of millet by the path-side, or a man a snuff-horn or spear, it would be found intact on its owner’s return. But Europeans were outside the ordinary stream of living and their property, therefore, exempt from ordinary laws; it sprang up like grass after rain, and for a Kikuyu to help himself was no more robbery than to take the honey from wild bees.

‘You must eat up your milk pudding,’ Mrs Nimmo was always saying to me – I can hear her now, her flat yet singsong lowland voice, and see her kind yet curiously impersonal smile, her round snub-nosed face whose separate features, in themselves pleasing enough, did not seem quite to coalesce into a personality. I can hear her saying: ‘You must eat up your milk pudding, it’s good for the complexion’: or, ‘You must eat up your porridge, it’s good for the brain.’

‘I thought that was fish,’ I protested.

‘Well, it’s fish too, dear; porridge is good for everything, it will make you grow into a big, fine girl.’

‘But I don’t want to be a big, fine girl. I want to be a jockey.’

Mrs Nimmo clucked like a hen and looked disapproving. My home life shocked her deeply, and I heard her remarking to Alec Wilson, who rode over a day or two after I came:

‘It’s no business of mine, I’m sure, but whenever are they going to send that child to school? It’s not right, letting a child grow up like a native.’

‘They mean to send her to a boarding-school at home when the coffee bears,’ Alec explained.

‘When the coffee bears! I mean to have a castle in Spain when my ship comes home.’

Alec tried not to smile; it was generally believed that Mr Nimmo was making enormous sums from his ivory poaching, and Robin thought that he was burying rupees under the floor of his hut, like the Kikuyu, or investing them in herds of cattle in Uganda. Meanwhile, Mrs Nimmo was kept so short of cash that she could scarcely afford to buy fifty eggs for one rupee or a hen for sixpence, the current prices, and owed her labour force several months’ wages.

‘Mr Nimmo is most disappointed that he cannot get here for the New Year,’ she added in her most formal tones. ‘He writes that he is detained by business in the Belgian Congo. But I expect him home next month.’

This was a formula she used constantly; so far as anyone knew, Mr Nimmo never wrote, but simply turned up between safaris at infrequent intervals, drank a great deal of whisky, sacked half the labour force, complained of Mrs Nimmo’s extravagance, and went away again.

Alec was not going to the races, he did not want to spend the money. Nor was our neighbour Victor Patterson, who was expecting visitors. So Alec had come to ask Mrs Nimmo to a party to see the New Year in. She had to refuse because of me, but Alec took pity on her disappointment and accepted her eager offer to give the party herself.

‘But what will I do for the dinner,’ she cried in deep distress, ‘when there’s no prime beef to be had in the country, and no decent turkeys either, and the fowls the size of starlings, and the mutton tough as old boots?’

‘The food will be secondary, at least with Victor,’ Alec said. ‘And he’ll bring his own whisky, I expect.’

Mrs Nimmo clucked, and hoped that everything would be kept respectable: Mr Nimmo would not countenance any doubtful goings-on under his roof.

‘You mightn’t believe it, my husband is very particular when he’s at home. But then, he’s used to the best. His father was one of the most respected men in Dundee, and twice made Provost of the city. And I haven’t always lived like a tinker as I do here. My grandfather was a Writer to the Signet, and my great-uncle Andrew became the Lyon Knight at Arms.’

Alec made a respectful departure, leaving Mrs Nimmo to bustle about in a frenzy of food-gathering and preparation, of tidying-up and of chivvying her cook, who looked aloof and indifferent; to him there seemed no reason for this sudden galvanizing activity, the day was a day like any other and no wedding feast, circumcision, or betrothal had occurred.

‘Oh for a good, juicy undercut of prime Scots beef, or a fine Midlothian turkey!’ Mrs Nimmo lamented. ‘Or even black-face lamb or a salmon straight from the burn! This is a heathen country and there’s nothing worth the eating in it. The flour’s so coarse and crusty I cannot even make a scone my mother wouldn’t have thrown out of the window. I like young Mr Wilson, he’s a nicely-spoken young fellow, but that Mr Patterson…. Well, I suppose he can’t help being an Australian, and one must take the rough with the smooth out here; but I hope his friends are not more of the same sort or I don’t know what Mr Nimmo would say. He is very particular whom he entertains.’

I did not see much of Victor Patterson’s friends, for I was sent to bed soon after they arrived, but I often heard Mrs Walsh spoken of, and saw her once or twice afterwards, and she was the kind of person who burns a little mark into the memory, like a flame. Indeed she was a flame-like person, small, thin, red-haired, and vibrating with energy. Her eyes were blue and very bright, her colour high and she spoke with a strong Irish brogue. She was not an Australian at all, but had lived there for many years with a husband now dead, with whom she had gone at seventeen to make a fortune on the goldfields of Western Australia. She made no fortune but lost all she had – that is to say, her husband, and her two small children, of whom one was drowned, the other bitten by a poisonous snake; and so she left
Australia alone and friendless, at less than thirty years of age, to find a living in South Africa.

She moved up to the east coast, just after the railway had been built, with a second husband, a quiet Englishman called John Walsh, and they remained together until the end of their days. Everyone called her Pioneer Mary. By the time she came to Thika for the New Year of which I am speaking, the start of 1914, she was a well-known character, for she travelled all over the Protectorate, and in German territory, to trade with the natives, sometimes in an ox-cart and sometimes on a mule, sometimes with her husband and sometimes alone. She had no fear, and went among tribes as yet untouched by European influence, and more or less outside European law, with a rifle slung over her shoulder, but she never had to use it except to provide herself with meat. She cared little where she went, or what she did, or whom she talked to. Sometimes she would drive her ox-cart on to the platform of a railway station – which was not really a platform, just a fiat place hardened by murram – and offer goods for sale to the native passengers: oranges, bananas, eggs, cooked chickens, or things they loved to buy like coloured cotton handkerchiefs and combs and ornaments and mirrors, or anything else she had been able to pick up cheap in the bazaar.

The natives she employed feared and respected her, and perhaps thought her a little more than human, for, although womanly enough in looks, she displayed, in their opinion, nothing of a woman’s character; she was forthright, hard, and sometimes fierce, and none of them ever molested her. Whenever I saw her she was cheerful and friendly, although it was easy to believe in the temper for which she was famed. There was something about her that put you a little on your guard, as if in the presence of a lioness that was tame and purring, but had claws tucked under her pads.

At Mrs Nimmo’s she was all purr and no claws. She looked admiringly round the grass-walled living-room, which Mrs Nimmo had decorated with green branches, coloured candles, and paper streamers.

‘Well, now, look at that!’ she cried. ‘Isn’t this the homeliest sight in all the world? Mightn’t we be back now in the old
country with the snow outside and the church bells pealing and the waits ready for their glass of port wine? Well, now, for the mercy of heaven isn’t everything as neat and tidy as a fusilier’s coat on his wedding day!’

She went on in this strain for some time, with Mrs Nimmo drinking it in. The grass hut’s basic furnishings were meagre, but Mrs Nimmo had brightened them with bits and pieces (as she called them) of her own, such as brass warming-pans and charcoal-holders hanging on the reed-screened walls, brasses worn by cart-horses over the big open fireplace, and a spinning-wheel that gathered cobwebs in a corner. There was a big log fire. On a packing-case covered with a red chenille table-cloth stood a potted spruce, conveyed with considerable difficulty from Nairobi. Tinsel streamers, glittering balls, and other baubles hung from its branches. She had made the tree bloom with candles, red and blue and yellow; if you half-shut your eyes it looked like a dark, crouching animal with golden fur and silver harness, and was something very wonderful to me.

Pioneer Mary pulled from the enormous pocket of her bush-shirt an untidy parcel, saying that she would have bought me something fine and entertaining, a toy or a book, if she had known there was to be a child, but this was all she could find. It turned out to be a very small crocodile, about eight inches long, stuffed with grass and clumsily skinned, but engaging because it was a complete reptile in miniature, down to its tiny claws and little bumps along the backbone and prickly teeth jutting from ferocious jaws. It was extraordinary to learn that crocodiles were born like this, complete: little, snapping, predatory creatures from their moment of introduction on to this earth. I cherished my baby crocodile, and kept it for several years until it was eaten by a puppy.

‘I’m glad you like it,’ Pioneer Mary said,’ though it’s not much of a present to be bringing to a child, and I wouldn’t say a crocodile was overflowing with the Christmas spirit, even when it’s newly born. But you’d not be caring for the trinkets I have with me for the niggers, and where would I be finding a shop for toys and pretty things? Now we must rest the bones of the old year as well as wishing strength for the new. Let’s have the bottle, Jack, and wish Mrs Nimmo the best of health and happiness, and
her good man also, and God bless all our friends and damnation to our enemies.’

Mrs Nimmo looked displeased; she did not drink herself, and regarded with misgiving the three lean, inelegant colonials who had invaded her home.

‘I’m sorry, I have no soda water,’ she said in rather chilly tones.

‘No need to gas my booze,’ Victor Patterson answered. ‘I leave the gassing to the politicians.’ When he laughed his teeth behaved as if they led a separate life and were saying something on their own. His long, thin jaws had been champing quietly like a horse; now he walked to the door and spat loudly and suddenly. ‘Dry as a ship’s biscuit,’ he added, looking at the night. ‘It’s a fair cow.’

Robin had once remarked that he thought Victor too Australian to be true; he suspected him to be a bishop incognito who had learnt the language at the Berlitz School, or a disguised absconding financier. In fact he had been at different times a prospector, a sheep-station hand, a dock worker, and various other manly, open-air things. His leathery, sallow face reminded me of an old pigskin wallet of Robin’s, but his eyes were blue and childlike, only bloodshot round the rims.

I rather liked Mr Patterson, if only for his wayward teeth; but these had failed to conquer Mrs Nimmo.

‘I hope those two gentlemen won’t get rowdy,’ she remarked to Alec, who came with her to the door when she led me off to bed.

‘I hope so too, but I shouldn’t like to guarantee it.’

‘A woman needs her husband at a time like this. Mr Nimmo won’t put up with any horseplay in his home. If there should be trouble, Mr Wilson, I shall look to you.’

Alec glanced at his fellow-guests. Both Victor and John Walsh were powerful, slow-moving, determined men, as hard as rocks, and just as immovable.

‘In that case you had better lock up the breakables and have the mules saddled for a quick getaway,’ Alec advised.

‘Well, really! What a thing to say! You’re not very gallant, Mr Wilson.’

‘I know my limitations. If there should be trouble, you’ll find me hiding under your bed.’

Surprisingly, Mrs Nimmo giggled, and quite a different look came into her face. She no longer appeared to disapprove of the party, but rather to expect something of it.

‘The things you say!’ she exclaimed. ‘Please look after the guests while I settle the bairn for the night.’

I resented very much being settled and wanted to join the party, but there was no getting round Mrs Nimmo. If only I had been left to Pioneer Mary, I felt, how different it would have been! Cleaning teeth, folding clothes, saying prayers would scarcely have bothered her. The drums were thrumming somewhere in the distance for an African counterpart to Mrs Nimmo’s party where there would be dancing in the firelight, singing and stamping, with beer for the elders and love for the young. A hyena howled from the next ridge, going with relish about its grisly but hygienic business. The darkness was pricked by the squeak of a bat, pierced by an owl’s call, and shattered by a sudden outburst of barking. I could not get to sleep, and some time later slipped out of bed and crept from my rondavel into a grey starlit night that smelt of jasmine and coffee. There was bustle in the kitchen and laughter in the lighted living-room. It was easy to see in through a window; they had finished eating and were sitting near the fireside round a pool of flickering blue flames that darted to and fro like butterflies. Then one of them would seize a blue leaping flame in his fingers and put it into his mouth.