The Flame Trees of Thika (6 page)

‘Are rectangular buildings a sign of civilization?’ Robin wondered. ‘I can’t think why they should be, but it seems to be so.’

‘The Colosseum was round,’ Tilly reminded him. ‘And the Pantheon.’

‘They were public buildings. Roman houses had corners like ours. I can’t think of anything round in England, except Martello towers. Even the Saxons had square dwellings. There must be a connexion, though I don’t know what it is.’

‘Perhaps it’s the furniture,’ Tilly suggested. ‘It doesn’t fit very well into round houses. Natives have scarcely any furniture at all.’

This was indeed true, at the time; all they had were three-legged stools, round also, and beds made of sticks lashed together on posts high enough for goats to sleep underneath. They kept a fire burning in the middle of the hut and had no windows; you could not call it hygienic, but it was warm. The smoke was said to kill lice, and the goats’ urine to keep down jiggas, so in a way it was all well-planned; but the smoke also gave children eye
troubles, and the fug led to chest complaints, so perhaps what the Kikuyu gained on the roundabouts they lost on the swings.

To build a rectangular house naturally took longer. Its roof was a major difficulty: the structure of rafters, purlins, and a ridge-beam was a total novelty and Robin’s explanations got nowhere, although when he clambered up – we had no ladder – and, with the aid of many willing but unpractised hands, secured the main poles in position, much interest was shown. We started off with nails, but after the first day all the long ones vanished; we had no safe or store to lock things in and these handy little lengths of iron, just right for turning into ornaments, proved irresistible to the Kikuyu. Robin cursed and swore and made up his mind to ride to Nairobi on a mule to get a fresh supply, but Njombo considered this quite unnecessary.

‘Those things,’ he said (the Swahili word for things came in for heavy use), ‘they are useful, but it is wrong to put iron in houses. Iron is for weapons and for ornament. Let us build the house according to our custom and keep the iron for bigger things.’

‘The house will fall down without nails,’ Robin said.

‘Why should it fall down? Our houses do not. And if it does, you can build another.’

So Robin agreed to let them try, and they bound the poles together with twine in their customary fashion. The house was standing when we left the farm fifteen years later and never caused us any trouble, and the roof withstood many storms and gales. Njombo’s young men did not thatch it in a day, however, so no doubt all sorts of devils got in, but these never caused us trouble either, or at least no more trouble than it was reasonable to expect.

After the grass walls had been tied in position, the house was lined with reed matting. The floor was made of earth rammed into a hard red clay which could be swept as if it had been tiled, and it was soon covered, at least partially, with skins of leopards, reedbuck, Grant’s gazelle, and brown-haired sheep. Its only-disadvantage was the shelter it offered to jiggas, and at some later stage, though not for several years, we put down a layer of cement. This was the only material that did not come from the farm, or from the bush round about.

The house was airy, comfortable, cool, and most companionable, for a great many creatures soon joined us in the roof and walls. The nicest were the lizards, who would stay for hours spread-eagled on a wall quite motionless, clinging to the surface with small scaly hands, like a very old woman’s, whose claws looked like long finger-nails. They would cock their head a little on one side and then scuttle off suddenly in a tremendous hurry, or vanish into the thatch.

This thatch was always full of sounds, little rustling, secretive noises from unseen fellow-residents meaning no harm – except for white ants, those termites who will destroy anything with their tiny but ferocious jaws, and betray themselves by little tunnels, like long blisters, marking their passage across walls and beams. A constant war was waged against termites and it must have been largely successful, as our house did not get eaten away. The whole house took about a fortnight to build and its cost, which no one ever worked out, could not have been above £10. Our light came first from safari lanterns, but later we acquired a pressure lamp that had to be pumped up at frequent intervals, emitted a faintly sinister hissing like a snake, made the room too hot, and leaked paraffin.

‘On the whole, modern improvements seem to be expensive, temperamental, and smelly,’ Robin once remarked pensively. ‘I sometimes wonder whether civilization is all that it’s made out to be.’

‘The bits that reach us here are rather part-worn,’ Tilly said. But she liked to have reminders of it round her, so far as she could. Although we ate, for the most part, what the country offered, apart from flour, tea, sugar, and a few things out of tins, the evening meal always ended with black coffee drunk from tiny lustre cups of very thin china – Coalport, I think they were. They dwindled rapidly in number, but I remember loving their lightness and thinness and graceful shape, and the fascinating blend of tones like shot silk or mother-of-pearl. Also we had the cut glass I have mentioned, the few bits of jewellery Tilly had salvaged from the Crash, and, later on, one or two pieces of furniture which came out from England and must have looked incongruous in our earthen-floored grass hut.

Most of our furniture was made out of the packing-cases that
had sheltered our few salvaged possessions, such as a French bureau with ornate, curly legs, used by Tilly as a writing-desk and adorned always by two tall, embossed silver flower-vases. She also had a delicate little work-table where she kept her embroidery, and a fat-bellied commode used as a medicine-chest, full of queer brews of turpentine, ether, linseed oil, camphor, and other strong-smelling liquids, together with calomel, castor-oil, iodine, and that sovereign remedy for almost everything, Epsom salts. No more unsuitable tenants could possibly have been found for the commode. Robin noticed this one day – he was not at all observant, as a rule, about his immediate surroundings, generally having his mind on distant, greater matters, always much more promising and congenial than those closer at hand – and grew rather angry, for the commode had come from his side of the family.

‘It’s a shame to treat good things in that way,’ he said.

‘How else can we treat it?’ Tilly asked. ‘This isn’t the Victoria and Albert Museum.’

‘It’s sometimes very like the Natural History, with all these insects and reptiles everywhere. I should have thought the commode could have had a little more respect shown to it, that’s all.’

Tilly looked deeply hurt, and also riled by the injustice, as she felt it to be; for Robin would have been the first to have stuffed anything that came to hand into the commode. He respected most theories, a few great men of history, and Tilly, but not possessions, governments, nor the practical necessities of everyday life.

‘I wish I’d never come to this rotten country,’ she exclaimed when he had gone, with tears in her eyes. Sometimes she spoke aloud in my presence without exactly speaking to me; I was a kind of safety-valve, helpful to her feelings even in a passive role.

‘Everything is raw and crude and savage and I hate it!’ she cried. ‘The place is full of horrible diseases and crawling with insects, no one knows how to do anything properly, and there’s nobody to talk to for hundreds of miles!’

Tilly had already been upset that morning by one of those gruesome little tragedies in which Africa abounds; tragedies that happen in a thousand places, and many times a day, that no one hears of, that do not matter, and yet for someone like Tilly,
brought up to believe that life could be, and ought to be, full of joy and happiness for all creatures, capable of wounding the spirit and wringing the heart. It concerned the Speckled Sussex pullets she had brought from England, with a fine young cockerel, to start a new line of poultry. One of the pullets, now a hen, had been sitting and the chicks had just emerged: fluffy yellow balls, like animated chrysanthemum buds, that darted about, cheeping, full of life and charm. They had hatched the day before; in the night a column of
siafu
, those black, purposeful, implacable, and horribly sinister warrior ants, had marched through the nest. In the morning the yellow chicks were limp, bedraggled, soiled little corpses with their insides eaten out, lying in the nest. The hen was alive, and that was the worst part of it, for the ants had swarmed over her and eaten half her flesh away and her eyes, and she lay there twitching now and then, as if to demonstrate that unreasoning persistence of life that is the very core of cruelty. The hen was released from her pain and Tilly stood with a wisp of yellow fluff in her hand, herself white with misery, appalled by thoughts of the helpless chicks’ last moments of agony, and by her own failure to prevent the tragedy.

‘They were just hatched,’ she said. ‘Why did this have to happen? What
good
do
siafu
do?’

‘When they march, rain will come,’ Juma said, removing the corpses. He was quite unmoved;
siafu
were a natural hazard, and had done many worse things than that. They liked to swarm over living creatures and eat into their soft parts, especially the eyes.

Later that morning, a woman brought along a baby that, several days before, had fallen into the fire. The burns had suppurated, and the pus been set upon by flies; the baby, like the hen, still persisted in living in spite of every discouragement, including pain that could never have relented, and that only death could relieve. The contents of the commode were quite inadequate to deal with this situation, as was Tilly’s knowledge of first-aid. It was remarkable how soon the news had spread that white folk possessed healing medicines, and how women who had refused even to approach us a few weeks ago were already anxious to hand over their children for treatment. Tilly was doubly horrified, by the baby’s ghastly injuries and by her own inability to justify its mother’s faith.

‘She must take it to hospital,’ Tilly said. Robin was out with the greased warriors, trying to persuade them to cut down bush.

Everyone looked blank. Juma pointed out that the nearest hospital was in Nairobi which was two days’ journey, and that in two days the baby would certainly be dead.

‘Then we must take it in at once,’ Tilly insisted.

‘How, memsabu?’

‘In the mule-cart, of course.’

‘One of the mules has a bad stomach.’

‘It must go all the same.’

‘The other one is lame. And a wheel of the cart is broken.’

‘You are telling lies,’ Tilly cried.

Juma shrugged his shoulders and relapsed into a sulk, and Tilly was left to deal with the sick baby without support, advice, or cooperation. Its mother held it silently, regarding it with an impassive face that revealed no feeling. When Juma had so resolutely resisted all attempts to help her, she had not attempted to intervene. Probably she did not understand; if she had, she would not have argued; she accepted uncomplainingly the authority of men. Tilly was sure that Juma was lying, but she failed to find the mule-boy or even the mules. It was useless to fight the battle single-handed. She did what she could, which was very little, to treat the baby, and the operation nearly made her sick, the stinking sores were so rotten and the baby so silent, as if even at that stage of its existence it accepted disaster, pain, and death as its natural lot.

So that was why she was upset by Robin’s rebuke about the commode. He did not know the reason, and went off thinking her careless and touchy. He was having his troubles too. He had bought some native oxen, and was trying to train them to the plough. They were quite unfamiliar with this implement; they were strangers even to yokes and chains.

The difficulty of teaching them was all the greater in that none of the Kikuyu had an idea how to train them either. In South Africa, Robin had often walked beside a wagon and watched the Boers control their teams by the inflexion of their voices and the cracking of their long whips. It looked easy enough for any fool to do; but it was not. The Boers had developed a remarkable affinity for oxen, an almost magical authority.
They could command them as a circus trainer can command his ponies, or a shepherd his dog. But they had never taught Robin – they never would teach anyone who was not a fellow Boer – and, when he tried it, the oxen did not behave at all according to plan. Not only did they refuse point-blank to draw the plough but they broke chains and skeys and yokes, they cavorted all over the place like a herd of buffaloes, they tangled themselves up in the gear, and finally most of them escaped altogether. The Kikuyu ran about just as wildly, with no idea of the correct response.

It was fortunate that after tea, when both Tilly and Robin were exhausted and on edge, Randall Swift arrived to see how things were going. He had to push his bicycle most of the way from Thika, and he was always anxious to get back quickly to Punda Milia, but I think the inexperience and general unpreparedness of Robin and Tilly worried him, and as we had no neighbours (excepting the Dutchman, Mr Roos, who was still away somewhere hunting animals) he made it his business to see if he could help.

Robin explained his difficulties about the oxen. ‘I can’t even get them yoked,’ he said. ‘They won’t stand still long enough.’

‘I can give you a tip about that,’ said Randall, who had a large store of useful wrinkles.’ First of all you climb a thorn-tree with the yoke, then you get a boy to drive the creature underneath you, and then you drop the yoke down on its neck. Provided the boy doesn’t let go of the traces you’ve got your bullock properly caught.’

‘It
sounds
all right,’ said Robin, who was beginning to discover that the gap between promise and performance was not, as he had so confidently hoped, any less wide in Africa than elsewhere.

‘You can often trip up a man from behind where you can’t knock him down to his face,’ Randall said cheerfully. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You need a headman here who knows a bit about these Kikuyu fellows. I think I can find a man for you, and I’ll send him along.’