Sir Laurence arrived at the church in a grey Humber with his first wife and mother of the groom, Jill Esmond. They were married for ten years. His hair was now as silver as hers. They have kept on good terms all these years and he warmly guided her into the church by the arm. Miss Vivien Leigh, his wife for a score of years and stepmother to Tarquin during his youth, came with her actor friend John Merivale. From beneath a brown velvet Garbo hat which almost made her anonymous, she said theatri-cally: ‘Any time is a good time for a wedding.’
The 270 wedding guests represented our finest acting talent but it was difficult to pick out the full cast in their penguin wedding suits.
The bride’s mother Mrs Patrick Gibson took an Oscar as the most thespian figure in sight. She wore a black velvet hat deco-rated with enormous ostrich feathers which waved wildly around her face. ‘Doesn’t Vivien Leigh look lovely,’ she whispered to a friend.
Riddelle and I led the procession out of the church, followed by the bride’s mother and my father, then my mother and Pat Gibson. Patricia later told me what then happened. After a series of flash camera bursts and the bright lighting from BBC television news, the chauffeur held open the car door for her and Larry. She stooped and sat down, joined in the back seat by Larry. The door closed and they were alone, being chauffeured slowly away, never having met before going into the vestry. Her stoic self-control was detonated by her fury at Larry’s behaviour.
‘You have the worst manners I have ever come across. If you were Prime Minister you would have accepted our invitation for drinks, not even supper, knowing how busy you are. Just drinks. And you never invited us.’
Larry patted her hand which she sharply withdrew.
‘Now dear,’ he started. … ‘Don’t you call me “dear”. That’s the most provincial approach I ever heard. How dare you.’
And she kept this going all the way to the Anglo-Belgian Club in Belgrave Square, so she told me.
As the car came to a halt he tried again. ‘I do so hope that one day we can meet again.’
She snapped back: ‘That won’t be necessary.’
It took a toll on him. Weeks later a number of friends said they had no idea how much taller I was than my father. However at the reception he did enjoy himself with so many of his dearest friends. Vivien stayed only a short while for my speech, which I loved giving; a captive audi-ence I could actually look at face to face, unlike playing the piano. Never had I done that before and I could see his and everyone else’s enjoyment. He was much taken with Yu Ling. He had never before been charmed by a lovely Chinese. In fact the following day he tele-phoned my mother and asked was it really true that she had been my girlfriend?
When we had changed and were leaving for our honeymoon every-one lined the staircase and balcony. Riddelle was in a smart purple tweed suit and round fur hat. They all looked down at us and sang ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. The car took us all of two hundred yards to the London Hilton.
We had a room service dinner and turned on the nine o’clock news. After an assortment of stories, the threat of a major strike in the steel industry, and more bad news about the Americans in Vietnam, the dulcet voice said: ‘Meanwhile in St Mary’s Church, Cadogan Street was the marriage of …’ and there we were standing in the doorway of the church, looking absurdly young and happy.
We honeymooned on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
In London we took a flat in Lancaster Gate. The drawing room was large even if the furniture was an afterthought and the bed became a sofa in the daytime. There was plenty of room for friends to sit around and the front hall worked quite well for dining six people. For my work it was a twenty minutes’ walk across Hyde Park to CDC in Hill Street. Riddelle got a temporary job in Queensway; nothing more settled than that because we expected an overseas posting.
In Head Office I was given a small portfolio of investments to moni-tor, and became representative of the Swaziland Sugar Association for the monthly discussions to do with the Commonwealth Sugar Agree-ment, which was chaired by Jock Campbell. This was in preparation for negotiations on quotas, prices and future plans. My Controller of Operations said my career would benefit if I qualified as an accountant, an Associate of the Cost and Works Accountants: ACWA. That course of action on my part was as far out of character as I have ever targeted.
At home when we were alone together, between going out and having people in, I realised that we had very little to talk about. She did not enjoy reading. She was put out whenever I picked up a book. ‘I don’t think you like me tonight, Tarquin,’ she would say. ‘In fact I don’t think you like me at all.’ Now that was a joke and we always laughed whenever she said it because she knew how much I loved her. Curiously she never minded my studying accountancy Part One – Bookkeeping, Statistics and so forth.
I wished we had lived together before marrying. But that was not yet done. It should be essential, a requisite. I found myself in a deep quandary and one which I could not discuss. We had only just married. I worried about our future together. Had I made a fatal mistake? How can anyone not enjoy reading? I had never come across that. We had decided to wait before having babies so as to get to know each other better. That was sensible. But even with the attentions of the best gynae-cologist, with our bodily cells pounding for procreation, it was only to be expected that Nature would laugh at us. I remember walking home along the pavement of Lancaster Gate when my eye was attracted to a fallen green leaf from a plane tree. I stood and focused on it. For some reason it assumed a very odd significance. I knew instinctively what had happened. Despite the precautions a baby was assured the following January.
When the news was confirmed we became effusive, ecstatic. So was everyone else. ‘I love you too much,’ she kept saying. It was quite an awakening.
We stayed a weekend with Larry and Joan at 4, Royal Crescent, Brighton, to which they had now added number 5. Parked outside was the most beautiful royal blue open Rolls-Bentley. The gleaming chrome grille, bumpers and over-riders were aggressively masculine. The skins of the seating were soft, stretched and tanned. It was a hermaphrodite car, created to please all save the envious.
‘Yes,’ Larry said, ‘I was so fed up with that fucking National I felt that if I didn’t buy it I’d shoot myself.’
He was very proud of it. With their two children there and heaps of congratulations to us for our own expectations it was an idyllic day beside the sea, windswept under bracing sunshine. Larry looked so happy.
Eleven
Our overseas posting with CDC was to Tanzania, a five-year-old sugar estate and factory: Kilombero Sugar Company, two hundred miles inland from Dar es Salaam. We landed in Nairobi on our way and took a week’s leave. We stayed with Malcolm MacDonald, now British High Commissioner after being Governor and handing Kenyan Indepen-dence to Jomo Kenyatta. He had moved from Government House into a pleasant Shell Company house for senior executives in the northern Nairobi suburb of Karen. This obvious step downwards gained him everyone’s increasing respect for his generosity of spirit. There was a swimming pool and a large garden which he was remodelling with flower beds in curves rather than its martial straight lines.
The first evening Riddelle and I sat opposite each other at one end of the large table with him at the head. He ate nothing. His last meal of the day was tea. Lunch was his only real meal. He would go to bed at a normal time, around eleven, and be at his desk, spruce and clothed by five in the morning, with breakfast at nine. Riddelle was radiant in her early pregnancy, looking her best in a summer dress.
After our breakfast we rented a car and drove out of Nairobi, past the big game park and into the Rift Valley. There were small herds of Thomson gazelles leaping around and on the far horizon there rose Mount Kenya. We had seen it the day before, far below us from the cockpit of the VC10 airliner. We came to the high escarpment above Lake Naivasha, the water shimmering pink at one end with flamingos.
We stayed near the lakeshore with the Hopcrafts. They had a brick and
wooden bungalow and a large farm, with nice houses for their workers. They said everything had settled down after the terror of the Kikuyu rebellion a few years before. They had been spared because of their employment policies. Their great hope was President Kenyatta. They had cattle and, thanks to Kenya’s height above sea level, temper-ate crops such as wheat. Enlightened people, in love with the country and admirers of the Kenyans.
We drove off to Nyeri to stay in Treetops Hotel, where Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip had been when King George VI had died. There she heard for the first time the words: ‘God save our gracious Queen’: the start of her lifetime’s pilgrimage. A dozen years later the original building had been replaced with a solid two-storey building, above a large pond, which was visited every evening by elephant, wild boar and the occasional lion.
Back in Nairobi, Malcolm explained that he had a formal dinner that night: a British delegation. He sighed conspiratorially: ‘Led by the British Officer Commanding the Middle East. Can you imagine the fatuity of such a title? Even before Suez. And next to me will be his lady wife. I do hope she reads a bit. I shall have no food myself because I never do for dinner. I shall have to pretend enjoyment. I’ll spare you that.’
We dined in our room. There was a knock on the door. It was a foot-man in a fez with a tiny envelope on a silver salver. The back of the visiting card inside said in Malcolm’s hand: ‘You lucky things.’ I took out one of mine and Riddelle wrote on the back: ‘Bottoms up’, and sealed it in an envelope. We imagined Malcolm’s discreet apology to his lady of honour as he turned to the footman, sat back and opened the message and said: ‘No reply, thank you.’
Riddelle and I went to meet CDC’s Regional Controller, Peter Wise, responsible for many tens of millions of pounds worth of investments in East Africa. With the bureaucratic love of initials he was known as RC. Unofficially as RC-tarcey. He had a neat head, shaven hair and a lump-ish body, not all of a piece, but his mind and deliberately low-pitched voice personified authority. He had served CDC in the East. His wife Norinne was part Afghan. It was she who drove us frighteningly fast to their house on the outskirts of Nairobi, far from the more sought after areas. This was typical of CDC, always with an eye to economy. Its employees were more driven by passion for development than by considerations of pay. The one redeeming feature from my point of view was that when the occasion eventually arose they would pay two-thirds of my children’s boarding-school fees. The provision of school fees was for twenty years to be the foremost constraint on anything I did.
Kilombero Sugar Company was in dire straits. It was overlooked by majestic mountains, and between them poured the Kilombero River, source of all irrigation. Floods burst its banks for the first time in history as the big factory was being built and all work was stopped. That river behaved with the same wilfulness as the Zambezi had during the construction of Kariba Dam. After six and a half thousand hectares of cane were planted half of them were smitten with a fell disease which dried them up. World famous cane scientists failed to identify it so they made up the name ‘Yellow Wilt’. The diseased canes had to be burnt, ploughed in and the planting process repeated with different cultivars. The shareholders were CDC, the Netherlands Overseas Finance Corpo-ration and the International Finance Corporation, an affiliate of the World Bank. The original Dutch Managing Agency was removed and a general manager appointed instead, a brilliant Dutchman, Mr Wevers. The thirty senior staff were Dutch, except for the chief accountant, a Yorkshireman, and me. The company had no senior representation in the faraway capital, Dar es Salaam, with no telephone link, and only a fluky radio system. At IFC’s insistence a new managing agent was appointed, over Mr Wevers’s head: Holland Vereinigings Amsterdam – HVA. Its chief executive resided in Dar. This put Wevers in an impossi-ble position.
My job was to be assistant to practically everyone, company secre-tary, chief accountant, staff personnel manager, all under the heading of administrative assistant to the General Manager. My direct responsi-bility was the financial administration of the hospital, staff housing, all insurances, the company’s enormous stores, the guest house and a myriad odds and ends inevitable in the day-to-day management of a large project. Wevers was a technical genius and under his leadership the company morale was excellent. Once a month he and I attended meetings in Dar. As soon as he was back on the estate everyone sensed his presence. His strong Americanised personality attracted instant and undivided attention. He really did care about the staff. Being so demanding it was lucky for them that he had charm. The Africans nick-named him Bwana Bonn, after President Nyerere had had a difference with Germany over its aid programme and had said he would not be dictated to by Bonn. This determined man could not bear being over-ruled by HVA and he left, suddenly. The senior HVA man on the estate took over, decent but uninspiring.
Senior Staff housing was excellent. We had a large garden, a delight-ful gardener who did all the heavy work, and a cook housekeeper which was a more difficult job to fill. After a couple of failures we found Germanus, an intelligent man, just married. He lived beyond the back of the garden in a little concrete house with a couple of rooms for him and his wife, and one for the gardener. It was only his lack of education that held him back. He taught himself English. There was a school for the Dutch senior staff and an African school which was in my portfolio. I started a monthly newspaper and invited contributions. These came in thick and fast. I had to have them translated for the sake of ensuring propriety. Some of them were interesting and some bizarre, especially the verse. One poet described a pretty girl’s breasts as being like coconuts. He said it sounded beautiful in Swahili. The Kilombero Times became a sounding board and an education for everyone.
Riddelle settled well into estate life, liked the Dutch and the Africans, the Staff Club, swimming pool and tennis courts. Our best friend was a nearby cane farmer, Major George Pletts, an Englishman with a heavily accented South African wife called Jean, and their teenage son David. She was, as they say in the colonies, a real character. She once said: ‘If ma husbind doesn’t like ma brists, he can lump them.’ They lived ten miles away beside a beautiful mountain stream with hundreds of butterflies.
I started work at 7 in the morning, the same time as all the field staff, had an hour and a half’s lunch break at home, then went on until 6. Saturdays, mornings only. It was stressful, especially when the chief store keeper was killed in a car crash and I had to take over the nitty-gritty of that as well. He had left everything in a fearful mess. The rela-tionships between people were interesting but hardly memorable. Getting to know the wives added insights into the employees them-selves, how often the women’s views of their husbands’ responsibilities were wildly different from their men’s. It added more dimensions to the way I saw my colleagues.
Our son Tristan was born on 23 January 1966 in the Estate Hospital, just after I had had air-conditioning installed in the senior staff ward. Riddelle opted not to have any painkiller and perform au naturel. It was agony even to watch but she said my being there was comforting. She did very well and he was a splendid baby. This fulfilment of nature cloaked our relationship.
For local leave we set off for Nairobi for me to sit the ACWA Part One exam, which I passed, with Part Two six months later. Our Peugeot 404 had big spiral springs for the front wheels and bounded over the roughest roads at sixty m.p.h. As we went north the gentle slopes carried us up to the Masai Steppe: flat lands with tall grasses waving in the cooler air. We drove by several groups of statuesque Masai warriors, scornful of any other way of life, with their spears, ear-rings, dyed reddish flesh, long loping strides and their herds of cattle. We stopped the car and went for a stroll to stretch our legs. Tristan was five months old, asleep in his basket on the back seat, all his gear piled round him. There was a muff beside him with some bells inside. Whenever we drove over big bumps the bells tinkled comfortingly. So we left him and wandered, hand in hand and outward bound, the sky streaked with alto-cirrus clouds. The clouds straight ahead of
us were different. They were not moving, not even fractionally. Then we understood: we were gazing high up at the snow-clad summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. We both felt we should be kneeling in the pres-ence of greatness, rising 19,000 feet straight up with no foothills, to two-thirds the height of Everest.
From Nairobi we headed west to Keekorok Game Reserve. It was soon after the rains and no other car had yet got through. We were the first. At the camp our cabin had three little birds perched in a line along the roof, singing in a kind of harmony. We hired a Land Rover and guide and saw the usual game. We stopped by a large pride of lions and their cubs. They paid us no attention, bored by harmless Land Rovers. Riddelle breast-fed Tristan, put him over her shoulder and he burped. The lions leapt to their feet, ears spiked, eyes suddenly alert. Had a young buck strayed into their midst?
One evening before sundown the guide stopped and we watched a couple of black rhinos, a young one nearby. He said something was about to happen. It did. The bull mounted the cow. As his erection developed she squirted him with vaginal juices. His penis straightened like an elbow, and eventually the tip like a wrist, growing to the length and thickness of a man’s arm. He pushed heftily nearly all the way, with the whole weight of his huge body. A minute or two later it was over and he hopped his front feet back to the ground. Riddelle exclaimed: ‘That was wonderful!’ and our guide laughed. He said that in thirty years he had only once before seen rhinos mating.
We drove to Ngorongoro Crater Lodge, an old-fashioned wooden hotel overlooking the huge crater of an extinct volcano, miles across and filled with game. Our room was cold but it had a fire blazing away in the grate. Next day we drove down to the eastern Serengeti Plains to see Olduvai Gorge. It was very difficult driving over irregular surfaces of granite. Tristan’s bells tinkled all the time. We came to a halt and walked down into the ravine, about 300 feet deep, carrying him into the dried up gorge. There Dr and Mrs Leaky had worked from sunrise to sunset with their brushes, separating tiny chips of bone from frag-ments of dirt. These were all accumulated and composed into a humanoid skull. They also pieced together the earliest hand capable of holding tools – two million years before – and much else from the 400 pieces they assembled. This was confirmation of mankind’s African Genesis.
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