The Flame Trees of Thika (10 page)

‘I wonder why they came,’ Tilly speculated. ‘It doesn’t seem their sort of life, and if they have money…’

‘Sport, I suppose.’

‘Yes, but sport-lovers have a big safari and then go away until the next time; they don’t settle. There’s something queer about it, I think.’

Tilly had a great capacity to scent mysteries. She leapt to conclusions with the unpredictability of a frog and, guided by a combination of alertness and sensitivity, sometimes landed much nearer to the truth than one would have expected. Robin merely said:

‘There’s something queer about anyone who comes to this country.’

‘It might have been some kind of scandal. And now I think of it, I vaguely remember hearing something of the kind connected with the name. Perhaps she ran away with him. He’s quite attractive, but a type. She does the helpless female act, but underneath it all is probably as tough as old boots.’

‘A fellow like that will want a stone house,’ Robin meditated. ‘There’s some stone that looks just right for building near the river bank, on our land. I wonder if he’d like to go into partnership over a small quarry?’

O
NCE
kindled, the notion of a quarry quickly gathered strength; soon, in Robin’s mind, houses had sprung up all along our ridge, cut stone was being sold in large quantities and he, with Hereward Palmer as a sleeping partner, was a stone magnate of no mean degree. He returned from his first visit to the Palmers’ camp only temporarily discouraged. Captain Palmer intended to employ a building contractor in Nairobi to put up his house.

‘He must be very rich indeed,’ Robin said wistfully.

‘Not for long, if he goes on like that.’

‘I warned him he’d waste hundreds of pounds. I think the idea sank in; he may change his mind, and decide to develop the quarry….’

Tilly asked his opinion of Mrs Palmer. He was unexpectedly cautious.

‘I think she’ll get fat in a few years’ time.’

‘She isn’t fat
now
; what does it matter what she’ll be like in future?’

‘I seemed to hear the clash of castanets,’ Robin said obscurely.

He added that their head-boy was defrauding them at every turn, their labour was nothing but a collection of scallywags, and that Captain Palmer thought of little but shooting. He rode over to their camp quite often and much enjoyed, as Tilly put it,
doing the heavy settler. It was surprising what a lot of difference half a year’s experience made, and a knowledge, however rudimentary, of Swahili. This was just as much a foreign tongue to the Kikuyu as to us, but they picked it up quickly and, although it led to many acrimonious conversations conducted at cross-purposes, it did provide a means of communication a little more explicit than shouts and gestures.

‘It’s curious how many people think they can make foreigners or natives understand merely by shouting at them,’ Robin once remarked. He was quite right. On station platforms, in rickshaws, and especially in hotels one often heard baffled Englishmen bellowing angrily at mute, uncomprehending Africans such phrases as: ‘Where – is – my – bedding?’ or ‘This – bacon – is – cold’ as if hammering a nail into a stone wall.

After they had settled into their grass huts – larger and better ones than ours – the Palmers rode over on their superior ponies to lunch, and in the afternoon Robin showed Captain Palmer his development. There was not much to see, but what there was had been won hardly. The clearing of the bush was slow and difficult, especially the digging out of tree stumps. When you came to do it, there were more trees than you thought, and their roots were remarkably tough and prolific. The Kikuyu had never wielded picks before and used them rather as if they had been toothpicks, prodding gently round the stump as if afraid of touching a nerve. Eventually, when all the roots were freed, the ox-boys lashed a chain to the stump and their team, with luck, hauled it away. But the chain often snapped or slipped, and the oxen were apt to pull in several directions at once; and the more the Kikuyu shouted and flapped, the more confused and stubborn the oxen became.

However, at last the stumps had been drawn from a level piece of ground near our camp, and the land had been ploughed and worked down to a seed-bed that would have appalled any English farmer, but that was adequate for coffee, which was planted as seedlings ten or twelve inches high. In the dry weather before the long rains, a hot and dusty period, Robin had spent many sweaty and frustrating hours holding one end of a chain composed of thin steel rods, each three feet long. A Kikuyu warrior held the other end, and Sammy went down the
chain putting a stick into the ground at each joint, to mark the site of a future seedling. This was complicated by the spacing of the seedlings in triangles, and the forest of sticks which soon arose sometimes grew confused, and had to be uprooted to enable everyone to start again.

Eventually, however, the Kikuyu dug holes for the seedlings. This task was supposed to be finished before the rains, but of course was not, and then came a crisis when the seedlings Robin had bought arrived before the ground was ready for them. In future years the plantation would be supplied from a nursery beside the river, under Tilly’s care, where coffee berries were planted in long mounds, like asparagus beds, and thatched with banana fronds to prevent the sun from drying out the moist riverine soil.

By now the first rains, which were torrential and cold and stopped the progress of all wagons and carts, had come and gone, and our seedlings had been planted in the freshly broken land. Already they had vanished beneath a carpet of weeds, which was rapidly becoming a jungle; the warriors had been set to work with pangas to demolish it, and give the precious seedlings a chance to find light and air.

After the first day of this, Sammy came to Robin to report that the warriors refused to demolish weeds any longer.

‘But it is not such hard work as the clearing,’ Robin protested, ‘and they are paid the same.’

‘It is not that,’ Sammy said.

‘Then what is the trouble?’

‘Their pride would be injured if they were seen cutting weeds.’

‘What is the difference between clearing the grass away before the land is ploughed, and clearing the weeds away afterwards?’

‘This is women’s work,’ Sammy explained.

Robin was indignant. He thought that the warriors were making an excuse and, if they were not, that work like this should not be done by women, but by otherwise idle young men.

His anger did not make any difference. The young men downed pangas and said that they were going home.

‘I know what our Dutch friend would do,’ Robin mused. ‘Put them down and give them twenty-five.’

This was a sovereign remedy in those days, but Robin did not
like it, and he dodged the necessity whenever he could. ‘If it’s women’s work,’ he added, ‘perhaps we had better get some women. We can’t reform their customs overnight.’

He consulted Sammy, and Sammy went to see chief Kupanya, and in due course a number of young women came swinging gaily down the path from the reserve chanting a song which, to judge from the laughter it aroused among the warriors, was ribald and obscene. Their heads were clean-shaven except for a patch on top, about as large round as an egg-cup, which showed them to be unmarried, although probably they were all bespoken, and awaited only the settlement of the bride-price before being claimed. They were bare to the waist and had shapely breasts, not yet spoilt by prolonged suckling, and wore a triangular leather apron in front and behind. They also wore beads and brass or copper ornaments, such as bangles and anklets, and objects dangling from their ears.

The young men were delighted to yield up their pangas, which the girls seized with strong wrists and practised holds, and went into action against the weeds with great gusto and dash. They sang all the time, and did three times as much work as the men. In the afternoon they marched up the hill again to their reserve. Their fathers were not letting them stay away at nights, and there was plenty waiting for them to do when they got home. Their wages they would pay over to their fathers, with no doubt a large cut for Kupanya on the side.

When Captain Palmer rode over he saw these young women at work with mingled disapproval and envy.

‘Hardly seems quite the thing, does it,’ he suggested, ‘with all those idle young bloods eating their heads off and not lifting a finger.’

‘You know what tribal customs are,’ Robin answered knowingly, although it was unlikely that either of them had much information on this subject. Anthropologists had not yet made it respectable.

Tilly took Lettice to see her own activities, of which there were many, including hens and turkeys, a young orchard, an embryonic garden, and rows of pegs where everyone hoped a house would one day arise in its glory. Lettice was deeply impressed.

‘How do you find the
energy
to do so much?’ she asked.’ This
country’s full of sloth, the air distils it; the essence of a thousand generations of doing no more than is necessary to exist, of leaving things as they are, has settled into the ground. And it’s become too strong for me to resist; I’m not very good at resisting things, I’m afraid. Or do you think I am just making excuses?’

Tilly did think so, but she smiled, and exchanged a sitting of turkey’s eggs for a pair of tumbler pigeons, which were very soon eaten by hawks. In theory, Tilly disapproved, at least in Africa, of everything that Lettice was or represented, but in practice she could not help being entertained by Lettice and enjoying her company. Tilly was on her guard against anything laid on, as she expressed it, with a trowel, but Lettice did not lay on her charm at all, she simply exuded it as a rose its scent, and just as unwittingly. That afternoon she sat on our narrow lean-to veranda playing with the siiky ears of her Pekinese and smiling a little forlornly at this glimpse into her own future. When to remedy a cold you take a lump of sugar soaked in eucalyptus oil, you taste the sharp, astringent flavour of the essence and the sweetness of the sugar at the same time. That is the kind of impression Lettice gave. The Pekinese looked out upon the world with an expression of lofty disdain probably due to their myopia, but which accorded well with their imperial origins and their bold, baroque design.

‘This country frightens me,’ Lettice continued. ‘I don’t mean the insects and the
idea
of snakes (I haven’t actually seen one), or even the lions and rhinos – why people should be so much more nervous about wild animals, who nearly always run away except when provoked, than about other human beings, who are so much more dangerous and vindictive, I’ve never been able to understand. No, it isn’t that which alarms me. It’s a sort of quiet, smiling, destructive ferocity. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that nothing people have created here has survived? Not even a few traces? No ruins of cities or temples – no ancient over-grown roads – no legends of past empires – no statues hidden in the ground – no tombs or burial mounds? No sign that generations of people have lived here, lived and died. Do you realize that quite soon
we
shall be the past? And what will there be to show that we have ever existed? We shall be swallowed up like everything else into a dreadful, sunny limbo.’

‘You’re being morbid,’ Tilly said. ‘It’s true the natives have done nothing yet with the country, but we shall.’

‘How confident you are! How do you keep your energy on the boil? When I start some simple task, a hundred distractions spring up to prevent me from completing it.’

‘I know just what you mean,’ Tilly agreed. ‘The other day I started to write to my sister and I counted twelve interruptions before I gave up. It wasn’t so much the interruptions I minded but every one of them was trivial and unnecessary, like a hornets’ nest in the larder, or a quarrel between Juma and the garden-boy, or a hawk taking a chicken. I never did finish the letter, and as for reading a book…’

‘Ah! That’s it. Since I’ve been here I find I cannot concentrate on French novels, and the other day I couldn’t for the life of me remember the words of one of my songs. We’ve got a small grand piano on the way out. Do you think we shall ever get it here? First of all the railway and then an ox-wagon, I suppose. I tremble for its safety….’

‘It will be touch and go. And you will have to build a house for it before it arrives.’

‘And then I shall practise, practise, practise every day! I love the sun, I revel in the warmth, everything is bright and gay, there are wonderful birds and butterflies, and boys to do the donkey-work, everything combines to lull and please: and yet I’m not quite lulled. I can’t understand why.’

Lettice removed her hat, which involved the extraction of several long pins with heads of mother-of-pearl; her silky hair, wound over a frame called a sausage (I knew because Tilly used one) sat on her shapely head like a kind of plate, and threw a faint shadow over the top part of her face. The rolls of hair shone like polished mahogany, and the scent she used reminded me of heliotrope. It was rather like having seats at a play, she carried round a sense of drama as her own particular element.

‘Last night,’ she said, ‘I dreamt I was back in Norway, the country that I like best in all the world. We spent one summer fishing in the fjords, and Hereward hunted elk in forests which smelt of moss and resin. The fjords, how wonderful they were! The black forest was like a bear’s furry pelt coming right down to the edge of the dark, still water, and from the house we stayed
in we could watch the fishing boats come in with their catch, and see the men wave to wives and friends in little white toy-like houses, so clean, so neat and somehow brave, pressed in by all those mountains and forests…. Once we saw the aurora borealis, it lit the sky like some tremendous ghostly signal for the end of the world, and everything was silent, even the dogs…. Well, there’s plenty of beauty here, and splendour, but it doesn’t make your heart swell and almost burst, it seems to compress it into a little button and make it hard and tight. Now I think I’m talking gibberish; you must try to forgive me, it’s such a treat to have someone to talk to about something besides dead animals and crops and how dreadfully inefficient the natives are at everything, which I’m sure is true.’