by Chris Froome
And that’s how it started. On the first few occasions Mum would drop me off at Kinjah’s place and pick me up in the evening. Then we got to the point where he said, ‘Why don’t you just sleep here and we’ll go and do the same thing tomorrow?’
Next, it got to the stage when Mum would call to collect me and I would turn to Kinjah and say, ‘But we have that thing tomorrow that we can’t miss …’
I’d throw him a look and he would say, ‘Oh yeah. That thing.’
And Mum, not fooled at all, would read it and smile and say, ‘Okay, okay.’
It went on like that. The first time we cycled together I was on school holidays home from South Africa and I went on two rides with Kinjah and the boys. After that it grew and grew until I was spending more and more time at his tin hut and with the team whenever I was home.
We had so much fun, riding out in the morning to visit one of Kinjah’s family members and stopping there for lunch. We would meet the rest of the family, have some ugali and sukuma wiki for lunch and then turn round to ride home. Some rides would be up to 200 kilometres, which meant eight hours in the saddle with only one food stop in the middle. When we got back, the other side of Kinjah’s life would take over – making bike repairs to earn a living. Local customers would bring in their bikes and he would often let us help, and teach us how to fix them.
This was an education, and a level of expertise far above anything I had known up until this point. Like at the market, where I had watched the local mechanics at work, Kinjah didn’t have the kind of money available to pay for expensive repairs, and even if he had, it was unlikely that the local bike shop would have those parts available. He couldn’t, for instance, just buy and fit a new derailleur. Instead, he would fashion pieces of metal himself and skilfully attach them to the bikes. Hey presto, it would work.
By the time I was sixteen years old, I had started training during term-time in South Africa too. I saved up for a set of rollers – a piece of indoor training equipment – for my room at school and I would spend hours on it. There were also shorter training rides that the school had come to tolerate me leaving the grounds for, and I would fit a longer ride in on a Saturday or Sunday, which normally lasted five or six hours.
When I went back to Kinjah, I could test out how much progress I had made by seeing where I ranked among the group. He had a great ability to judge exactly where you were at with your performance levels and your capacity for suffering. He knew how to take you up to your absolute limits, and how to keep you there, but he would also show you that at any point he could ‘drop’ you, or leave you in his tracks.
Kinjah said that I was a good sufferer. Perhaps our hard labour in Bloemfontein had made men out of boys, stoics out of sufferers.
Shandy had never settled in quite like Rocky had. After I moved to St Andrew’s he was still very aggressive, and a constant nuisance for my mother. The two snakes were also growing. Their latest caged enclosure had a small wooden structure built inside in the shape of an octagon, with a lid on the top and a narrow entrance at the front. This was their den within the cage if they wanted some darkness during the day; pythons like to hide away from everyone. However, they had got so big that only one could fit in the cramped den at a time. As they were snakes, there was no point in drawing up a timeshare rota.
While I was away from home, I knew that in order to clean the cage someone else would have to regularly risk their limbs to lift Rocky and Shandy out of the den. Anna, our ayah at the time, made her position clear. She wasn’t touching any snakes. Ditto the gardener. So poor Mum was elected by default.
Before my departure I had tried to teach her a good way of evacuating the snakes.
‘Mum, you just need to put a kitchen cloth over the python’s head and then pick it up by the tail and they’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.’
I always did this if I was ever going to pick one up and I could see they were in a bad mood. A cloth over the head and they were immediately placid. It was a shame it didn’t work on the prefects.
Anna’s reservations were understandable, of course. One time in a house in Karen where we were staying, Rocky went missing. It was a house with thick vegetation and forest at the end of the garden. I thought he was out there somewhere. Three weeks had gone by since anyone had seen him, until one day Anna was in the house cooking a meal and my mother was the only other person home. There was a small sort of vent in the ceiling, a power outlet which had created a hole. I don’t know how it came to be but Anna turned round and Rocky was hanging down into the kitchen, upside down, with his head precisely at eye level with her. She bumped straight into him. Anna’s blood-curdling shrieks must have been heard in parts of northern Africa. My mother thought they were being burgled or kidnapped.
I was still at Banda at the time. Rocky was probably hungry or something. Neither Anna nor my mother asked if he was peckish. They closed all the doors and they stayed closed until I got home from school. I had to go inside, pick him up and put him back in his cage.
That should have been the end of Anna and my pythons but she actually had a moment of great heroism soon after this. Siafu ants are an African plague. You might be sleeping and they will march into a formation on your leg and in inexplicable unison they will all bite you at exactly the same time. The ants can get into your skin to the extent that many of the tribes use them for stitching wounds. They hold a siafu just above the wound and let it bite into the sundered flesh and then they break its body from the head and the pincers will still remain in the skin holding the wound together.
These ants got into Rocky and Shandy’s cage in such numbers that the ants were going to kill them. The snakes were thrashing around inside, uncontrollable and incapable of getting the ants off themselves. Anna screwed her courage to the sticking point. She threw a towel over the snakes, scooped them up and ran with them to the bathroom. Next, she dropped them into the bath, filled it up with water, and then began brushing the ants off the snakes. The snakes, unappreciative as ever, and in some pain, tried to attack Anna. It would have been far easier for her to turn a blind eye to them and pretend that she hadn’t seen what was going on, but she didn’t. She wasn’t that kind of person. She knew how upset I would have been. They never appreciated it, but Rocky and Shandy really owed their cushy existence to the loving natures of Mum and Anna.
For Mum’s sake, I let Shandy go free into the Nairobi National Park on the way to the airport at the end of a trip home for the school holidays. It was just Rocky at home now, and one python was far easier to manage, particularly as Rocky was quite a chilled guy for a snake. I think that secretly Mum kept him around because he reminded her of me. She would never admit that though.
By this time, Rocky was just over two metres long and as thick as an adult’s arm. He ate chickens and fully grown rabbits. When I was at home I sometimes accidently left the cage open or left a bolt unlatched and he would find a way out. Or I might fall asleep holding him. When I woke up he would be nowhere to be seen, slithering off around the house somewhere. Rocky escaped a number of times, but if he was loose in the house I could usually find him quite quickly, lurking somewhere that was dark or covered. Usually …
‘CHRISTOPHER!’
When she used my full name I knew it was trouble. Rocky had actually slipped into bed with Mum. He was lying right in front of her face where he could get the warmth of her bosom. She woke up eyeball to eyeball with Rocky.
‘CHRISTOPHER! Get your bloody snake back in the bloody cage!’
It wasn’t a good time to remind her of our deal about shouting. I couldn’t help but laugh.
Mum was extremely tolerant. She put up with the snake and she enjoyed my endless struggles to be a good provider. When I was home I would set traps on the way down to the Ngong Hills. If we saw rats crossing a road we would stop for a moment and follow them with our eyes because they normally ran along particular trails. If we found a trail I would leave a trap there and come back the next day and look for it.
Sometimes I would even catch elephant shrews, small rodents that jump in a similar way to kangaroos. The elephant part of their name comes from the length of their nose, which slightly resembles a miniature trunk. But there the likeness ended; they were tiny and wouldn’t make much of a meal for a python.
In the end Rocky kept on growing until he was too big for the largest possible home-made enclosure, and when I was away at school my brother Jeremy went with my mother and released Rocky into the wild in a forest in a nearby National Reserve. It was a habitat that would have suited him well. By this stage he was too large for an eagle or a kite to bother him and far too big for my mother to wake up with.
Noz brought me to the bus station in Johannesburg and loaded me on to the bus to Bloemfontein. Half-term was over and it was back to the gulag. The bus was a jalopy and this was a long journey at the best of times. When we finally chugged into Bloemfontein the clock was crowding midnight. We were five hours late. The Free State was deep into winter and although I was better prepared than I was when I first experienced Bloemfontein’s chill, here I was again, still freezing.
The school was several kilometres away. My stuff was in a large, heavy, old-fashioned trunk. I would need porters or Sherpas to tote it. The housemaster was supposed to have met me at the bus hours ago but there was no sign of him now. I looked for a payphone. Then I decided to arrange a hanging.
‘Noz, it’s me. I don’t know what to do.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m at the bus station in Bloemfontein. It’s cold and I’ve been waiting more than an hour for the housemaster. I don’t know what to do.’
‘You just wait there, Chris.’
Noz got on the phone and gave a good piece of his mind to my Afrikaner housemaster, riot-act stuff. No quotes emerged but I could tell there had been a bollocking when the housemaster screeched into the station in his pyjamas. He was warmed only by his seething rage. He practically threw me and my trunk into the car. At the dormitory he physically dragged me in as if he were tossing a troublesome inmate into the prison cooler cell. He was rough in that muscular Afrikaner-meets-teacher way.
‘If you ever go to your father again and tell him that I’m not doing this or that …’
Not long after that Noz came up to Bloemfontein and I told him what had happened.
‘I’m not going to keep you here,’ said Noz.
He went to see the headmaster and told him the story. The headmaster’s heart didn’t bleed too profusely when he heard about my woe. He didn’t offer Noz the response that he wanted.
Noz said, ‘Right, I’m taking him back to Johannesburg.’
And away we went. It was as simple as that.
The timing was good. The business was starting to grow and Noz could afford a better school for me now, called St John’s.
This new place was more expensive, but even though I entered a boarding house, which wasn’t cheap, the school still cost less than Hillcrest. I loved that Noz was just forty-five minutes’ drive away and that I could go home most weekends.
St John’s had the feel of five-star luxury. In the boarding house there were no doors on the rooms but each little cubicle had its own bed. It was one cubicle per person, which blew me away.
A matron showed us round the boarding house. There were duvets on all the beds and it looked so messy that I fell in love with the place straight away. There was a boy in there who had overslept and missed his breakfast. He was still in bed!
The matron said, ‘Come on, Bradley, get out of your bed, you’ve got to go to school now. Put on some clothes and hurry up.’
My mouth was open. She made classes seem like an option. A lifestyle choice for Bradley. I knew then that I could live there and be happy and it made me feel better about Bloemfontein. Apart from having met a lot of good guys at St Andrew’s, without going to that school I wouldn’t have appreciated my new place so much.
First in St Andrew’s and now in St John’s, I wrote often to Mum. Maybe she noticed the changes in me. Butterflies, bunny rabbits, snakes and rodents no longer had anything to fear from me – they were too distant to remain as obsessions. I had even been a devoted collector of scorpions for a while but the gentle ambience of St John’s didn’t seem compatible with that.
The big news headline for me was that St John’s had a cycling club. My stunt bike and my wheelies suddenly seemed like childish things to be put away. St John’s viewed cycling as a cultural activity and every Friday afternoon there was a team ride for a couple of hours. Matt Beckett was in charge; he had these hugely chiselled legs that the rest of us would have killed for. Matt would become a lifetime friend.
On Fridays I rode along with the club on my old supermarket mountain bike. Most of the guys had proper road-racing bikes and I barely managed to keep up with the group but … I loved it.
Madly.
Deeply.
Completely.
Matt said that the Friday jaunts were in preparation for a race that we were all going to be in. I was part of that ‘we’. My head was full of it. When I wasn’t on the bike the muscles in my legs ached for the company of the pedals, for the pain of the hills and the sweet adrenaline of riding catch-up.
Officially, I was now in training for a race.
5
Growing up as virtually an only child, I found Kinjah’s world to be a revelation.
We were cheek by jowl, together all day, every day, at his tin hut or out on the road. Kinjah saw me, I think, as this eager young skinny kid who was incredibly keen to learn. There were a few of us – me and some other local teenagers – and we would all end up sleeping head to toe in the one bed that was there. We would lie awake for ages some evenings, talking about Kinjah’s time racing in Europe.
After seven or eight hours on the bikes earlier that day, the guys would be tired and dropping off to sleep, but I would lie awake even after Kinjah had gone quiet and imagine the world we had been talking about. Kinjah! He’d been racing in Italy. From this tin hut in Mai-a-Ihii, he had made it that far. There was no reason why I couldn’t do the same.
While a lot of the kids I had grown up with had moved from the Banda School to Hillcrest, and were now getting into drinking and the nightlife of Nairobi, I was lying in a world they could never imagine and was perfectly content in this small tin hut. The sheets, which were more like heavy blankets, always had a strong musty smell. It wasn’t an issue, just an observation, a scent that still comes back to me when I am thinking of those days.
I was a strange sight in the village. The only mzungu. People would ask Kinjah where he got me from, and did I even have parents. But they came to accept me. It took a while to be absorbed into the group within Kinjah’s hut, for me to be able to really joke and talk with them, and for them to come out of their shells with me. We had to share some time and some history together first. We’d find a point where we had a little gag to share or something to recount. If you fell off your bike in front of one of the others, for example, and he had to brake not to run you over, you felt like you almost owed him something for not flattening you. Things like that helped to dismantle the barriers.
There was banter between us all day long. They had nicknames for each other and I had a few which I never fully understood, as they were generally in Kikuyu. They were mainly along the lines of ‘White Boy’ or ‘White Kid’. I was the murungaru, which means a sort of gangly kid. There was constant teasing. If anyone did something clumsy or silly, we would rag him all day about it. We spent long rides teasing each other and laughing the whole way.
I imagine that initially the guys probably thought there was something in it for Kinjah, that my mum was paying him to coach me, or something like that. That was never even discussed. Once we had shared a few stories together, suffered on a few rides together, they began to open up to me a bit more.
There was Njorge. That is a very Kenyan name. Njorge was one of the younger adults, always up for anything. He was very happy and smiley and was a decent ri
der, much better than me. All of them were pretty much better than me. Njorge was one of the most open members of the group and easy to get to know. Then we had Njana, which was a nickname. He was a bit mischievous and you could see that he had the inclinations of an opportunist. Njana was very quick to find people’s faults and then to prey on them. I think if we had all gone out drinking, he definitely would have been the ringleader, pushing us to do silly things. I say that but I don’t remember anyone in the group ever drinking any alcohol; I never even saw a beer around the house, it was just not part of the lifestyle. Njana quit riding at a fairly early age and the guys who are still around give him grief nowadays for being chubby.
Samson Gichuru was another one of the youngsters who started out back then. He progressed well and would go a long way in cycling, becoming a good professional in Kenya and even spending a bit of time with the UCI development team in South Africa.
George Ochieng was around at that time too. He was Kinjah’s training and racing partner for a number of years, but eventually times got tough for him financially and he sold one of Kinjah’s bikes without Kinjah’s permission. That was the end of their relationship.
Kamau was one of the more prominent riders who was always on the training rides and would lead the charge with Kinjah at the races. He was a quiet guy with a hard, chiselled face, but he was very likeable once you got to know him. He started off in life with close to nothing, but he would eventually have a proper house of his own not far from Kinjah’s, with brick walls, electricity and water. He would also set up a matatu business in Nairobi.
I always enjoyed being in their company. I looked forward to those times immensely and thought that the longer I could stay there, the better it would be for me; all I wanted to do was ride my bike. If I was at home on my own, riding would be more difficult and far less fun.
Up to the age of seventeen I was definitely one of the weakest in the gang until some younger guys came along and I discovered that I was more capable than they were. That was good for me, and I realized that as time passed, and I came back a bit older and with a bit more experience, I could start pushing them all harder on the rides, particularly the climbs in the hills.