by William Boyd
“When are we coming back?” Glenway called out as the whimpering ayah clambered back on board.
“Soon,” Temple said with grim confidence. “Very soon indeed.”
It was about a forty-mile journey from Smithville to Voi along an old caravan track which led through particularly and and dusty scrubland. The Smith family in their buggy made slow but steady progress without seeing any further signs of the Germans. Temple briefly savoured the cruel irony of the fact that he had intended to make this journey today anyway—but with two valuable loads of sisal, instead of his placid wife and increasingly fractious children. For the first time and for a brief moment he experienced a feeling of rage and frustration which seemed to do some justice to his new refugee status, but it didn’t last long. The track was too bumpy and the waggon jolted too much for Matilda to read, he noted with selfish pleasure. But she seemed as unperturbed as always, gazing out over the thorny scrub, which shimmered and vibrated in the haze, at the distant hills and mountain ranges, fanning herself with her book. She also, in an effort to amuse the children, played interminable word games which seemed to consist of building ever-longer lists of groceries and vegetables, repeated ad nauseam, and which drove Temple wild with a kind of rampaging boredom, until he ordered them to cease forthwith. They stopped once to water the mules, for an hour and a half, at midday, and ate some sandwiches which Joseph had prepared before they left. Temple looked back up the road to Taveta, squinting into the glare, wondering if he could see the smoke from his burning fields.
It was nearly dark as they approached the small village of Bura, still some eight miles from Voi. The mules were plodding very slowly, the children and Matilda were asleep, curled up in the back, and Temple himself nodded dozily over the reins.
“Halt!” came a sudden shout. “Who goes there?” followed immediately by a ragged volley of shots. Temple saw the flash of the muzzles, but as far as he could make out no bullet came anywhere near.
“Get down!” he yelled at his screaming terrified family, and then bellowed “Friends!” up the road in the direction the shots had come from.
“Cease fire! Cease fire, you bloody fools!” came a familiar voice. A lantern came bobbing down the track towards them, casting its glow on long thin legs protruding from flapping shorts, and improbably shod in black socks and very large tennis shoes.
“Thought I recognized your accent, Smith,” said Wheech-Browning. “Sorry my men were a bit premature. ‘Trigger-happy’ is the expression in your part of the world, I believe. Gave the children a fright I expect.” He held up the lantern. “Evening Mrs Smith. Sorry about all this fuss. Wheech-Browning here, late of Taveta. Ha-ha!”
“You stupid…stupid dumb idiot!” Temple seethed. “You could have killed us.”
“Steady on, old chap. You could have been the wa-Germani for all we knew. No harm done anyway, thank goodness, that’s the main thing.” He gave a nervous smile. “Come across any Huns by any chance?”
“Yes,” Temple said, too exhausted to remonstrate further. “They threw us off the farm this morning. Set fire to the crops.”
“My God, the swine,” Wheech-Browning said, his voice hoarse with loathing. Temple wondered where the man got his antagonism from. “Can’t say I didn’t warn you,” Wheech-Browning added, a little smugly. “They didn’t take you prisoner, though, that’s a bonus. We clapped old Heuber in irons for the duration, p.d.q. You know Heuber? Chap with the rubber at Kibwezi. He was most put out. Listen, are you going on to Voi? Can I get a lift back with you?”
On the way to Voi Wheech-Browning gave him his version of the attack on Taveta. He claimed he’d received no message from the Germans to surrender and was extremely surprised one morning to see about three hundred of them marching down the road ‘bold as brass’. It would be too undignified to leave without firing a shot, he thought, so he ordered his men to open fire. Nobody, he was sure, had been hit, but he was extremely surprised at the way in which the German askaris had scattered and had proceeded to lay down a furious fire on Taveta’s flimsy defences. Wheech-Browning and his men wasted no time in setting off down the road to Voi. Luckily, Wheech-Browning said, considering the amount of bullets shot in their direction, they had suffered only one casualty.
“Unfortunately he was my bearer,” Wheech-Browning said. “Got a round in the throat. I was standing right beside him. Fountains of blood, you wouldn’t believe it. I was covered, head to tail—dripping. Of course the fellow had been carrying all my personal gear. I had to leave everything behind in the retreat, everyone was hot-footing it out of town, I can tell you. Which explains,” he pointed to his footwear, “this unorthodox regalia.”
Temple was glad enough to have Wheech-Browning beside him as an escort. He felt it was only his due anyway, considering he’d had his farm seized and his crops burned in the cause of an Anglo-German war. Wheech-Browning could see them all right, he reasoned, make sure the authorities cared for them properly.
He was surprised when, as they reached the outskirts of Voi, Wheech-Browning leapt off the buggy saying he’d better report to the KAR officer who was in command.
“But hey,” Temple called. “What about us?”
“What about you, old man?”
“What are we meant to do?”
“I should put up at the dak bungalow at the station,” Wheech-Browning advised. “Pretty reasonable rates, and jolly good breakfasts.”
The next morning, foregoing his jolly good breakfast, Temple went in search of the KAR officer to see what the British Army’s plans were for transporting the Smith family to Nairobi. He found the man in the Voi post office which was being used as a temporary command headquarters.
“My dear fellow,” said the KAR officer. “No can do.” He was smoking a pipe which he didn’t bother to remove from his mouth. As a result all his words were delivered through clenched teeth which made them sound, to Temple’s ears, even more heartless.
“But I’m a refugee,” Temple protested. “I’m a victim…of, of German war crimes. Surely there’s something in your rulebook about care of refugees?”
The man took his pipe out of his mouth, pointed its saliva-shiny stem in Temple’s direction and closed one eye as if taking aim.
“Ah. Ah-ha. But, you see, I’m not so sure you are a refugee. According to Reggie Wheech-Browning you were warned to evacuate your farm over a week ago. I’m afraid you can hardly expect us to take the consequences of your”—he stuck his pipe in his mouth again—“what shall we say? Your recalcitrance.”
Temple marched back to the dak bungalow viciously cursing the British Army in general and ‘Reggie’ Wheech-Browning in particular. He felt more irate and hard done-by now than when he’d been watching von Bishop destroying his livelihood. At the dak bungalow he discovered that the train from Mombasa to Nairobi, which had spent the night at Voi, had departed half an hour previously. The Smith family would have to wait until the next morning before their journey could continue.
Temple’s anger swiftly died down but he insisted that his family get and keep a receipt for everything they spent or consumed. He was fully determined to present the largest bill possible in his reparations claim. He sold his American buggy and two mules to a thieving Greek merchant for a fraction of their true worth, and added this deficit to his rapidly growing column of figures.
The boys and Matilda seemed far less put out than he was. The Dak bungalow was efficiently run and they enjoyed—as Wheech-Browning had promised—wholesome meals. In the afternoon Temple read his way through a pile of newspapers and illustrated magazines that had recently arrived from Eng-land. The news from Europe was two weeks old and was only of war declared and of the German invasion of Belgium. Talking to other travellers Temple pieced together some idea of what had been going on in East Africa while he had been innocently gathering and decorticating his sisal harvest. Dar-es-Salaam had been bombarded by HMS Astraea; Taveta had been captured—as he was by now well aware—and instructions had been sent to India
for the dispatch of troops to East Africa. Indian Expeditionary Force ‘C’ was believed to be on its way at this very moment and was expected at the beginning of September. “Should be over soon after that,” his informant confidently told him. “Crack Indian troops. Fine body of fighting men.”
Temple’s spirits rose considerably at this. September, he thought. Let’s not be too hasty…say, two months before it’s all over. That would give him several weeks before the rains to lay the new trolley tracks down, possibly even plant out the first of the vanilla fields…Conceivably, this enforced stay in Nairobi could turn out to be more beneficial than irksome. He could examine different strains of vanilla seedlings at his leisure; there might even be someone—the idea was appealing—who would tell him a little more about Krupps Decorticators.
Chapter 2
20 August 1914,
Nairobi, British East Africa
Temple looked out of the window as the train approached Nairobi. Compared to the stifling heat at Voi the cooler, drier air up here on the plateau felt almost chilly, even though it was mid-afternoon.
Nairobi in 1914 presented a curious sight. Built on a flat plain, with gently rising hills to the north and south, ten years before it had been no more than a cluster of tents and tin shacks around a rudimentary railway depot. Now there were many imposing stone buildings among the galvanized iron and wooden shops; motor cars bumped up the dirt streets, two of which—Government Road and Sixth Avenue—were illuminated at night by electric streetlamps. On many occasions Temple was forcibly reminded of small American townships.
The same single-storied wooden shop façades with hand-painted signs, the same wooden awnings over the sidewalks, but with bicycle racks outside instead of hitching posts. There was a half-mile of macadamized road leading to the centre of town from the station, otherwise all the thoroughfares were dirt, or slightly better, gravel and dirt.
As the train pulled into the station—new, stone and quite impressive, Temple had to admit—he saw the distinctive bald-headed, slope-shouldered figure of his father-in-law, the Reverend Norman Espie, of the Friends of Africa Evangelical Mission. Temple had telegraphed ahead the day before—the mission was some ten miles outside Nairobi—and arranged for them to be met. He was going to send Matilda and the children to stay with her parents while he remained in Nairobi to see what the government were prepared to do about the loss of his farm.
So it was with less reluctance than usual that Temple allowed his father-in-law to grasp his hand and shake it vigorously for a full minute. The Reverend Norman Espie was of average size and was a wiry, fit-looking man considering he was in his fifties. But his lack—almost his complete absence—of shoulders gave him an unalterably puny appearance. From the back, his silhouette resembled a pawn in a game of chess, his arms tapering smoothly up into his neck with no interruption and his round bald head tee-ed up on top of it. Indeed he was the sort of man, Temple often thought, whose weakness was a kind of challenge: it made you want to punch him in the chest, just to prove you weren’t affected by it.
“My son, my son,” Espie was saying, “we have been praying for you.” He released Temple’s hand and fell to his knees—to Temple’s extreme embarrassment. Temple assumed his father-in-law was about to offer up an impromptu prayer for their deliverance, but in fact he was only positioning himself the better to sweep his grandchildren into his arms and smother them with kisses. From this humble posture he looked up at Matilda, who at this point had just stepped off the train. Espie clambered to his feet crying, “My child, my child,” and wrapped his arms about her.
“Now, now, Father,” Matilda said. Her father was the only person who could provoke a show of irritation in her. “Don’t fuss so, we were in no danger.”
“The barbarians!” Espie exclaimed. “If you knew the stories that have been coming out of Belgium. To think that in Christian Europe we can harbour such—”
“Shall we get along?” Matilda said in a business-like way. “The baby is very tired.”
“The baby, the baby,” Espie intoned. Temple went off in search of the baggage.
He saw his family loaded into Espie’s—or rather the mission’s—motor car (the ayah was sobbing plaintively for some reason) and waved them goodbye. Then he climbed into a rickshaw and gave orders to be taken to the Norfolk Hotel.
The rickshaw moved steadily away from the station up the long stretch of Government Road. Temple saw the new stone post office standing alone in a great field of grass looking quite incongruous. A red flag was flying from the roof to signify the arrival of the Mombasa train and to alert any letter writer who wanted mail sorted and carried on up to Entebbe in Uganda.
He looked curiously about him as they reached the built-up areas and jogged past the astonishing number of shops and stores Nairobi possessed. For such an out of the way place it was truly incredible what goods were on sale. There were large general stores, taxidermists, jewellers, tobacconists, chemists, photographic studios, wine merchants, milliners and tailors selling all the well-known brand names from Britain. He passed Cearn’s Outfitters, boasting proudly in their window that they possessed ‘all the luxuries and necessities of the colonial gentleman’. He saw advertisements for Burberry and Aertex, ‘K’—shoes and Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. He passed the wooden and corrugated iron two-storey building of the Stanley Hotel, one of eight hotels in Nairobi. The Norfolk was half a mile further on.
At this stage the flow of traffic was considerable: some motor cars, lots of rickshaws and bicycles, bullock carts and horse-drawn buggies. Temple hadn’t been in Nairobi for months and the throng and bustle always made him feel a little excited: the country boy come to the big city. All this traffic raised clouds of dust from the dry mud road which hung in the branches of the small tattered casuarina pine trees which lined the street and gave it a ludicrous air of pretending to be an avenue.
The Norfolk was Nairobi’s best hotel. It was an unassuming single-storey stone building with a tin roof and a large verandah running the length of the Government Road frontage. It was not nearly as grand as the palatial Kaiserhof in Dar, but it did have electric light throughout and hot and cold running water, and was the central meeting point and social centre of the town.
Although Temple became excited by his visits to Nairobi, he very quickly grew irritated by the place. Just as the tattered spindly trees in Government Road seemed to indicate ideas above its station, so too did Nairobi’s newly-won international renown as a big-game shooting resort allow the town to affect a similar inappropriate grandeur and sophistication which it could never possess in reality. And the presence of the British made that affectation almost insupportable. There was the Turf Club with its race meetings. The gymkhanas and polo matches, the Maseru Hunt, the golf club, the Masonic Lodge…all the trappings of an English provincial town. Many times Temple had listened to discussions about who would win the Governor’s cup, about the cross breeding of wanderobo hunting dogs with fox hounds for the hunt’s pack; whether Somali ponies were better than Abyssinian ones; if it wasn’t really about time that ‘shirt sleeve order’ was banned at race meetings. He would shake his head in rueful wonder at the shouting incongruities that presented themselves daily. The immense mock-Tudor Government House, with its leaded lights and half-timbered upper floor; lady golfers in boaters and long white dresses driving off into a wilderness on a first tee where the air was dark with thousands of buzzing flies; the piping shouts of tally-ho as the Maseru Hunt took off after some hapless hyena, and above all the snobbish hierarchies that existed, symbolized by the Nairobi Club on the Hill for senior officials and the Parklands Club on the plain in Parklands for junior officials. Being an American, and one who, lately, at any rate, had some money in his pocket, meant that he was always something of an outsider and that he was naturally excluded from the phenomenally exact social rankings which obtained in polite Nairobi society. He had no complaints on either count.
Temple occupied his room at the Norfolk, had
a bath and went to sleep for a couple of hours. Later in the evening, feeling much refreshed, he walked through the hotel to the bar. To his surprise the place was crowded with men, spilling out of the room onto the verandah and even down the front steps onto Government Road. They were all dressed, moreover, for the bush, as if they were going on safari. Many wore crossed bandoliers of cartridges, and rifles and shotguns were propped in corners or leaning against the backs of chairs. Temple recognized a group of fellow Americans: Ward from the Afro-American farm enterprise at Voi, Paul Psainey, a millionaire big-game enthusiast and others he knew from the American Industrial Mission. Although the bar was crowded and nearly everyone was drinking heavily, the mood was one of boredom and irritation. Temple joined the group and ordered a whisky and soda. The sight of a new face acted as a catalyst to their flagging spirits and great commiseration was soon being lavished on him over the loss of his farm.
There was no real interest. All these men had streamed into Nairobi at the outbreak of war to volunteer their services in the defence of the country and as reinforcements to the hard pressed battalions of the KAR. Temple found himself something of a celebrity for actually having been a victim of Furor Teutonicus and he was prevailed upon several times to repeat his account of the seizure of his farm and of Wheech-Browning’s heroic stand at Taveta. By unanimous assent it was agreed that Wheech-Browning’s luckless bearer was the first casualty of the war, a war which everyone fervently expressed the hope would last long enough for them to have a squareheads. Temple was encouraged to join two of the volunteer units that had been swiftly formed to defend British East Africa. He could choose between the more prosaic Nairobi Defence Force or the East African Mounted Rifles—an aristocratic and cavalier crowd, requiring the ownership of a horse or polo pony. This particular outfit had claimed most of the Americans as it was a polyglot assembly of nationalities containing also Boers, Swedes and three Italians. Members around the bar that night included a musician, several publicans, an ex-circus clown and a Scottish light-house keeper.