The Flame Trees of Thika (15 page)

T
ILLY
was trying to educate me in such time as she could spare from the farm and garden. Luckily I liked reading and she left me alone a good deal with the book of the moment, but we were not well placed to get hold of the right kind of literature, and sometimes I had to fall back on old copies of the
Field
, manuals of instruction on everything from lace-making to the erection of simple stills (Robin was putting one up to distil essential oils), and the volumes of a pocket encyclopedia in minute type.

These I found rather beyond my capacity, and when Tilly was safely occupied I would abandon them in favour of trying to catch George or Mary in the act of eating a fly, or of looking for birds’ nests, talking to Njombo and Sammy, playing with Twinkle, or of other non-educational pursuits. We had an atlas and Tilly put me on to tracing maps. The strong, oily smell of the tracing-paper enthralled me, and I loved its crackle and its springiness, but found it hard to control. After tracing them, I transferred the countries on to drawing-paper, put in rivers, towns, railways, and mountains, and painted everything in gay if blotchy colours, which was very satisfactory.
After a while, both Tilly and I grew tired of this and I took to inventing countries. All of them were islands which contained a
lot of swamps, because I enjoyed making the neat little symbols used by map-makers to indicate marshy land. They were also mountainous, because a lot of contour lines made them look dramatic and important. When this palled, Tilly read aloud an essay on gardens by Francis Bacon, and told me to design one on the lines he recommended.

The garden’s main outline, all in squares, was clear enough, but I found it difficult to represent a hedge with arches and, over every arch, a little turret with belly enough to receive a cage of birds; and then, between each arch, a figure made of broad plates of round coloured glass for the sun to play upon. However, I had no doubt that all this would look very gay, not to mention the alleys, coverts, mounts, fountains, pools, and arbours with which his thirty acres were liberally sprinkled.

From the garden, we proceeded to the house, and the table allocated to my studies became strewn with rough designs of banqueting houses, towers, turrets, chapels, cellars, and butteries. The house, as I remember, was divided into two, one side for dwelling and the other for feasts and triumphs, which I hoped would be numerous; and I wondered who would occupy the infirmary set aside for sick princes, as we did not seem to have any of those. When completed, I counted over fifty rooms, and asked Tilly who would fill them, but she told me not to be so unimaginative.

I was sitting one day designing a cloistered court with statues when Lettice Palmer walked in, smelling faintly of heliotrope and looking, as she always did, fresh and elegant, although she had ridden over in the heat of the day. She carried in her bag a little book with sheets of thin paper in it and she would tear one off and rub it over her face when she grew hot or dusty, and this would miraculously restore her cool, unshiny appearance.

She looked at the papers strewn around and observed:

‘Your father seems to be going from one extreme to the other, in the matter of houses; is he trying to out-do the Sackvilles, and build a rather larger Knole?’

I explained about Bacon, and Lettice took up the book and glanced through it. She had taken off her heavy hat and her red-brown hair was as glossy and smooth as a newly-opened horse-chestnut. Her skin was like one of the waxy, heavy-scented
frangipani blossoms that drenched the night air, and one could see tiny little blue veins on her temples, like rivers on one of my maps, and two faint lines at the corners of her wide mouth. She wore a thin silk blouse and riding skirt, and her waist was slender as a wasp’s; you could see the motion of her bosom when she breathed, like a bird’s when you hold it palpitating in your hand.

‘“There was never a proud man”,’ she read, ‘“thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved: and therefore it was well said, that it is impossible to love and to be wise.” Pompous old prig! Now come, I’ve a surprise waiting for you outside.’

A syce stood on the lawn, or what was destined to become a lawn, holding two ponies, her own alert South African and one I had not seen before: a small, white, dumpy animal with short legs, a short neck, and a suspicious expression.

‘You’ve got your wish,’ she said. ‘Make the most of it, because when you’re older that will very seldom happen to you, and when it does, you will often find you wished wrong.’

As I did not understand her meaning, I did not reply.

‘Well, have you been struck dumb?’

This was even more embarrassing, and I was still tongue-tied.

‘This pony is a present for you,’ Lettice patiently explained. ‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Or have you changed your mind, and would prefer a party frock or a talking doll?’

I shook my head, now much too overcome for speech, and gazed at the pony, which gradually changed before my eyes. From a stumpy, rough-coated Somali it became a splendid milk-white charger, fleet of foot and proud of eye, and yet not too proud to acknowledge me as its friend and master. It looked at me, I perceived at once, with a meaning withheld from other people, a look of recognition and mutual conspiracy.

An ability to match my thanks to the gift was quite beyond me; I muttered a few disjointed words and patted the pony. His nostrils were soft and springy, like woodland moss, and his breath sweet. He cocked an ear as if to say that he accepted my advances, and understood that he had come to stay.

‘You’ll have to find a name for him,’ Lettice said. ‘Something very fine and grand like Charlemagne or Galahad. He came from a place called Moyale.’

That was the name that stuck to him, Moyale. I thought of several others but Njombo paid them no attention. Moyale did not mean anything, but he could pronounce it.

Tilly and Robin were nearly as surprised and overcome as I was. Tilly grew pink with embarrassment and was almost grumpy, she did not like receiving presents on a scale much too lavish to reciprocate, yet of course Moyale could not be returned.

‘Ian Crawfurd got him for me,’ Lettice said. This was a name I had not heard before, but one that was to crop up often in my elders’ conversation.

‘It came down with a batch from the Abyssinian frontier,’ she added. ‘They drove the ponies through the desert where only camels live as a rule, but there had been rain. One night they were attacked by raiders and had a pitched battle, and another time lions broke in and stampeded the ponies, and they lost three or four.’

More than ever did Moyale become an object of romance and enchantment. Caparisoned in gold and crimson, with a silver bridle and a flowing mane, he had carried princes on the tented battlefield, and galloped through the night to bring news of victory to maidens with hibiscus flowers in their dark hair, imprisoned in a moated fortress.

‘I hope that he is salted,’ Tilly said.

‘You aren’t going to eat him, surely?’ Lettice inquired. But this was a term, Tilly explained, to indicate that a pony had recovered from horse-sickness and was thenceforth immune.

Njombo, who was used to mules, professed himself delighted with Moyale. ‘What a pony!’ he cried. ‘He will gallop like a zebra, he is strong and healthy and yet not fierce; now you have a pony fit for King George.’

We found a brush, and groomed him every day. His hide had many scars and gashes, and a brand on the flank. To me these scars were relics of spear-thrusts and sabre-strokes delivered in battle. Certainly Moyale had not led a sheltered life, and he was at first suspicious of Njombo and myself, but he soon grew tame and learnt to enjoy sugar and carrots. We had no lump sugar, and fed him on dark brown
jagoree
made by Indians from local cane, that had a heavy, burnt, rather sickly flavour.

For a prince’s charger full of battle-scars, he was surprisingly
placid. I think he had a lazy nature which he was at long last able to indulge. He would amble peacefully along with one ear cocked forward and the other off-duty, as it were, in a resting position, but life had imposed a wary sense upon him, and sometimes I could feel a current of alertness running through his body. Once he shied violently and threw me off sideways into a prickly bush, but waited politely for me to remount. His main fault was a hard mouth, an inevitable result of the long, brutal bits used by Somali and Boran horsemen. Our mild little English bit must have seemed feather-light to him and, had he wanted to, he could have ignored it; but he was not ambitious, and perhaps knew when he was well off, freed from the spurs and whips and curbs and thirst and hunger of the Abyssinian deserts.

Soon after this Ian Crawfurd arrived, to stay with the Palmers, who asked Tilly and Robin over for the evening. I had to go too, as I could not be left, and they arranged for me to sleep there, rather than ride back late at night. I was given a tent, much to my satisfaction, for there was nothing I liked better than tents. By day their hot, jungly smell, as thick as treacle, was delightful, and the dark-green gloom inside reminded me of Turkish delight. At night they had the atavistic charm of caves: a warm, protecting, secret cave, a refuge, and a private kingdom. Lying on the camp-bed, you could make shadows on the canvas by holding your hand near the lantern; on the ground, each sentry-stiff blade of grass threw its pencil of shade. You could imagine yourself looking down upon a great forest in which an ant, staggering along with a tiny crumb in its mandibles, was like a monstrous pachyderm carrying off a rock to drop upon the heads of its enemies.

Tilly wanted to tie the flap back to admit plenty of air, but I implored her to shut it.

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ she said.

‘There are the cannibals.’

‘Cannibals! You must control your imagination.’

I reminded her about the Kavirondo who had perhaps – though no one seemed to know – eaten the man Njombo had killed.

‘Nonsense,’ Tilly said. ‘That was just an invention of Sammy’s. In any case, they only eat people who are dead.’

All the same, she did close the flap and leave the lantern burning. The tent was close enough to the living-room for me to hear bursts of laughter now and then – in fact, most of the time. Ian Crawfurd was a young man who left a wake of laughter as he skimmed along. Hereward Palmer was the best-looking man I knew, but Ian Crawfurd was much more attractive. He was even fairer – his hair looked almost silver in the lamplight – and his face drew your eyes because its expression was always changing, like cloud-shadows on mountains, and because the bones were so beautifully formed. They seemed to have been very carefully moulded out of some malleable material like plasticine, whereas Hereward’s were rigid, as if cast in iron. The hollows of his cheeks and temples were soft and delicate, like curves in Chinese porcelain. I do not mean that there was anything effeminate about his looks; on the contrary, he was strong and lean, but he did not walk heavily, like Hereward, he walked with precision and spring, like a tracker. When he spoke he often tipped his head to one side a little, and his eyes, blue-grey in colour, were candid and clear.

Ian Crawfurd was a friendly person who found life entertaining and agreeable, as indeed it could be for the young, healthy, and adventurous. He had arrived on horseback attended by a tall, thin, proud Somali who wore a shawl of bright tomato-red wound loosely round his head, and who appeared to disdain all that he saw. To him, no doubt, we were fat, effete, root-bound heathen southerners who consorted with dogs and ate pork; only loyalty, the virtue next to courage, obliged him to come amongst us, like an eagle in a parrot cage.

When I awoke, a blade of sunlight had thrust under the flap of my tent, and outside the doves gurgled like cool water tumbling from a narrow-necked jar. Also came the three notes in a falling cadence, half a whistle, half a call, of a nondescript but vociferous bird the Kikuyu called the ‘thrower of firewood’ – why, goodness knows. I got up to pay my morning visit to Moyale and found Ian Crawfurd at the stable preparing for an early ride. His hair shone like kingcups in the morning light. He wore a leather strap, for some reason, on his right wrist, and looked as slender-waisted as a whippet in his shirt and breeches.

‘I’m glad you liked the pony,’ he said. ‘I picked him out from
a batch of twenty or so; I thought he was the nicest, if not perhaps the most beautiful.’

‘Did he belong to a prince?’

Ian Crawfurd looked thoughtful, and replied that, in a sense, he had. ‘He belonged to a Ras, and a Ras is a kind of prince, if frequently a villain also: I daresay the two go together more often than not. The Ras didn’t want him to leave Abyssinia, even though he accepted a red cloak and a Winchester rifle and gave me his word; so he had to be smuggled out, with his nineteen companions.’

I had heard of watches being smuggled, and scent; but ponies…?

‘That’s a long story,’ Ian Crawfurd said. ‘Too long to tell before breakfast; let’s ride up the ridge and you shall tell me who lives where, and what sort of animals you’d turn them into if you had been apprenticed to a witch who knew how.’

Everyone (he went on to explain) had some affinity with a bird or beast or reptile – and not always the one that you would think. Doves, for instance, were unpleasant characters who squabbled, scolded, and were greedy and cross, whereas eagles were very shy, and cobras liked nothing better than to curl up in someone’s bed and go peacefully to sleep in the warmth, and only spat when they were terrified.

I thought Mrs Nimmo might become an ostrich because she had a large behind which waggled when she hurried, and he assigned to Captain Palmer the giraffe because he was long and thin and had large feet and a thick hide. A bat-eared fox for Alec Wilson for his large ears and big brown eyes; for Victor Patterson a greater bustard with whom he shared a long stride, long neck, and toughness – ‘and both need to be hung,’ Ian Crawfurd said.

When I mentioned Lettice Palmer, he laughed and shook his head.