The Flame Trees of Thika (38 page)

They had this quite important care, however, about nourishment, which no one seemed able to provide. And then a sort of miracle occurred. Without warning, in the dead of night, the station was quietly invaded by the succulent odour of freshly-baked bread. A kind of mass hallucination? Had so great a volume of insistent thought somehow been turned into smell?

An amazed hush fell upon the men; they stood still and sniffed the air. It was as if a magic ring had been turned and their wishes granted. Through the entrance came a torch-bearer carrying a safari lamp, then a hand-cart piled high with baskets and finally a small, quick-striding figure that I recognized. The light fell upon a nob of red hair, a high voice cried: ‘Well, boys, here’s what you’ve been waiting for. Come and get it!’ And a stampede followed towards baskets full of warm, delicious rolls, whose crusts crackled as they parted to surrender a creamy, soft, and satisfying dough.

Whether Pioneer Mary had started her bakery before the war, or after it arrived with its new demands, I do not know, but a bakery she had, here in Nakuru; getting wind of the troop-train she had prepared for the hungry travellers. Soon the station took on a festive look, with groups of soldiers sitting on crates or sacks of bedding or the carriage steps munching the rolls, joking, once or twice breaking into snatches of song. Pioneer Mary was among them like a red flame flickering along the platform, leaving a trail of laughter, and boisterously greeted as the lady of the loaf.

She was not the only acquaintance there. I looked round to see Dick Montagu approaching with a slighter figure at his side on whose bare head the lamplight shone as on a new golden sovereign. Even Dick Montagu was mellowed, and introduced his companion to Lois without disparaging her. Already half moonstruck by the masculinity of these joking, feasting, migrant soldiers on their way to war, who would seem tomorrow creatures of dream and legend, she gazed as if bewitched at the thin and smiling face of Ian Crawfurd.

‘Dick has spoken of you often,’ she said.

‘I don’t know how the devil you got yourself into uniform so quickly,’ Dick grumbled. ‘I heard you were somewhere out Mount Elgon way, picking out some land.’

‘I happened to have gone down to Nairobi, and to be there when the show started. Otherwise I might have been out of it for months. I haven’t even let Humphrey know yet.’

‘I’ll never forgive you if you clear the Hun out of German East before I can join the party.’

‘I think there will still be plenty for you to do,’ Ian said.

For a while they discussed the war, which they did not think was being well conducted. Then Ian smiled at me and said:

‘I saw your father in Nairobi. He had just come back from questioning some German prisoners.’

‘Did he shoot them?’

‘Well, no; one is supposed to shoot them before they are captured, not after. He had been finding out why they had failed to blow up the bridge at Tsavo. It was really awfully bad luck. They had been given British maps because the Germans thought they’d be more accurate than their own, which showed the Tsavo river in quite a different place. When they got to where the bridge should have been, they ran out of water and had to give themselves up. If they’d stuck to the German maps they’d have got to the right place at the right time and destroyed the bridge.’

‘That was the hand of Providence,’ Lois said.

‘We’re told that God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform, and perhaps the inaccuracy of British maps is included in the mystery…. I hear you are staying with Kate and Humphrey; you must give them my love, and say that I shall write, and that I hope they are very well.’

‘All right…. Thank you very much for Mohammed,’ I said. ‘But I had to leave him at home.’

‘Yes, he would not at all enjoy Molo; you would have had to make a coat for him from a blanket, with a hole to push his head through.’

‘I didn’t want to leave him at Thika, but…’

Above all I wanted to hold Ian’s attention, not to lose him, and to find some thread to lead me on to all the questions I longed to burst out with. But it was no use, they jammed my tongue. The moment passed, Ian turned away to speak again to the Montagus. Dick was asking him about the land he had taken up, but Ian only smiled and was vague.

‘It hardly looks as though I’ll need it, after all.’

‘Don’t make any mistake, old man. That land will be worth a lot of money when we’ve thrashed the Hun. Things will go ahead, we’ll see land values really come into their own. Look after the development clauses, don’t let it slip through your hands.’

‘I’ll remember,’ Ian said. ‘And now I must go. I’m a corporal,
and have a dozen men to look after who’ve never heard of discipline. But two or three are good bridge players, one plays the clarinet, and another is an excellent conjurer, so we’re never dull. I expect we shall meet somewhere on the border, Dick, and perhaps we shall ride together in triumph through Tabora, dragging von Lettow at our heels.’

He took my hand for a moment to say good-bye.

‘Did Ahmed come back?’ I managed to eject one of the questions, even if it was a minor one, out on the perimeter.

‘Funny you should mention that. He did, and he’s joined a troop of Somali scouts and has a pony and a rifle, and glorious dreams of war and loot. So he’s all right. Give my love to Tilly when you see her, and to everyone else….’

He stood for a moment as still as a fish-eagle above a swirling muddy stream, looking down at me, his hat in one hand and the other resting lightly on his belt. I thought he looked thinner even than before, older perhaps. The name in both our minds lay unspoken between us like a barrier, and yet uniting us, for this fleeting instant, like fish caught in the same net. So strong was this impression that I thought I heard through the chatter a clear musical voice and sensed among the stale platform odours, and the lingering reminder of bread, the sunny scent of heliotrope.

Ian hesitated; perhaps he, too, did not want to put to flight the ghosts of happiness whose presence there beside us turned all the khaki men of flesh and blood into puffs of vapour. Then he slipped from one wrist a little bracelet he wore – such things were then in fashion – of plaited hair pulled from a lion’s tail.

‘He had courage: some people eat the heart, but I doubt if that’s necessary.’

I took it without finding anything to say, but I knew in my own heart that it was not for me. He smiled at us, waved a hand, and vanished into the throng and bustle of the train, which was now preparing for departure. The men began to sing the jingle that was then so popular – ‘Marching to Tabora’; and the shouts and cheers, the whistles, the hissing and chugging of the engine, filled the station as a kettle fills with steam. Everything seemed to bubble over; men waved from windows; Dick gave a hunting cry; the red hair of Pioneer Mary flared under a lamp;
the guard jumped into his moving van; and we watched the rear light of the last coach vanish, and heard the chugging die away. A plume of sparks, a long coil of dancing fireflies, spread across the black ancient shoulder of the crater Menengai; and gradually the vast digesting dark of Africa swallowed up all traces of that audacious grub, the hurrying train.

A
COUPLE
of days later I, too, found myself in the train and bound in the same direction, although not for the war. The Crawfurds, who came down from Molo together, had decided not to keep me any longer. Humphrey said he was tired of my disappearing act, and that Kate had other things to think about; and they had heard from Tilly, who had done all she could for the time being at the hospital, and was returning to Thika, that she would like me back again.

Lois Montagu offered with enthusiasm to deliver me to Tilly, but Dick did not seem pleased. I suppose I was a kind of protection for Lois, without realizing it; also, through me she would meet Tilly, who might help to get her into the hospital. Dick was resolved to hustle her through Nairobi, which he seemed to regard as a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, and deposit her with friends who would keep her out of mischief. She did not seem mischievous, but of course I did not know her very well.

In the train Dick did not speak much to Lois, and ordered her about in the same sort of tone, only sharper, that he used to a cocker spaniel who lay at his feet in a position where everyone tripped over him. Lois insisted on pointing out to me from the window things I had spotted long before she had – herds of waterbuck and impala, a great many black-banded Thomson’s gazelle and their larger cousins, the Grantii, and plenty of giraffe. Dick grumbled a great deal at the slowness of the train, and appeared to hold the Indian stationmasters at every stopping-place personally responsible for the delays.

Tilly was at Nairobi station. She already knew Dick, but not Lois, who made the mistake of being effusive, and of praising me. Tilly knew that the favourable things she was saying about me could not possibly be true, and I could see that Lois was heading straight for the category of gushing fool, which was as bad as silly woman or stuck-up ass, and would not get her into the hospital. However, we all had tea together and Lois managed to manoeuvre Tilly to one side and explain her wish.

‘He is really very medieval,’ Tilly remarked, when Dick had taken her off. ‘If he had his way, he’d lock her in a chastity belt for the rest of the war.’

Robin was still away somewhere on the railway, or perhaps on the German border, no one knew; the next day we took the train to Thika and once more rode out to the farm.

Several of the flame trees, now taller than I was, flanking the future drive, had burst into flower. The young coffee trees were looking healthy and had a few green berries on them, their first. I was thankful to discover Moyale in excellent health, too plump if anything. On the farm, Sammy reported, all was in order, save for a fight after a beer-drink in which two men had been injured, but not fatally, and the death of one of the oxen. When Tilly inquired into this she found that the Masai herd, wishing to hasten the ox, had prodded it up the backside with a sharp stake, puncturing its rectum, so that it had died in agony. She lost her temper with the herd and fined him, but it was obvious that everyone, including Sammy, thought it was the loss of wealth that had provoked her anger, and concern about the poor beast’s feelings was something they simply failed to understand.

Here on the farm the war, except for Robin’s absence, might not have existed at all. Some of the young Kikuyu were full of ardour and would shake their spears or sticks and cry:

‘Show me these Germani! Where are they? Have they run away? I will kill them as we used to kill the Masai! Ho, ho! There will not be one left between here and Kilimanjaro!’

This bellicose atmosphere so infected me that one day Njombo came upon me chopping off the tops of old maize stalks with a hunting-knife.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Cutting off the heads of the Germans!’

The attitude of the Kikuyu was put down to a gratifying, if not surprising, loyalty to the British, who had done so much to bring civilization, law, and order to the savages. No other explanation occurred to anyone but Alec Wilson, who came over soon after we were back.

‘It’s the prospect of law and order being removed, not their introduction, that is so much exciting them,’ he said. ‘All the men in their thirties are pulling their spears out of the thatch where they’ve been hidden, and telling frightful whoppers to the newly-circumcised about the Masai, who in fact always beat them, while the young lads are saying: “Those old has-beens had no more fight in them than a chicken. But
now
you’ll see something!” I’m afraid they’re going to be dreadfully disappointed.’

‘I daresay they like a scrap,’ Tilly conceded. ‘But theirs wasn’t civilized warfare. The women and children were carried off or killed.’

‘From what I hear, the Kikuyu will be made into porters, and sent down to German East. I hope that when they’re humping the troopers’ bully and the Generals’ champagne through the bush, which is stiff with tsetse, rhinos, and malaria, they’ll appreciate the advantages of civilized warfare. But I’m afraid it’s not exactly what they’re hoping for when they demonstrate their loyalty.’

‘You’re a cynic, Alec, that’s your trouble.’ Like most cynics, he was very kind, and frequently came over to offer Tilly help in running the farm. There was a lot to do: coffee to be weeded, citrus pruned, a stone store built, land ploughed, maize planted, seedlings nursed. I rode errands on Moyale, added to my collection of birds’ eggs and started a scrapbook about the war, although there was not yet much to put into it.

A chit came one day from Lettice: she had returned, and invited Tilly over for the night. I went too, because there was no one to be left with, and for the same reason a syce carried over a woven-reed basket containing a pair of carrier pigeons Tilly had bought from a man who kept a
duka
in the farthest depths of the Masai reserve, and used a pigeon post to Nairobi. Tilly anticipated a need for carrier pigeons when our troops were pursuing
Germans beyond Tabora and hoped, by breeding them, to make a small contribution to the war.

Lettice we found pale and tired; her eyes looked huge and dark, a peaty brown. She kept patting her hair and making other nervous gestures, and she had taken up smoking. The smell of heliotrope was still there, but almost overlaid by Turkish tobacco.

‘Now I am being caught out, as I knew I would be eventually,’ she said, after she had greeted Tilly with affection. ‘None of the things I am good at are the least use in a war, and I cannot even help Hereward by running the farm efficiently, as you help Robin. Hereward gave me a manual of instructions made out in duplicate, telling me what to do with each labour squad and ox-team and shamba, and I put it in a hat-box which I left behind in Nairobi.’

‘How is Hereward?’ Tilly inquired.

‘Getting impatient. This is just a side-show, he says, and he wants to get back to the real thing. But he isn’t quite so worried now that it will all be over before he arrives.’

‘I would expect Hereward to be bellicose, but I must say I’m surprised at Robin. He is just the same, and all this sword-sharpening is out of character.’