ranch was in the dry, rocky plains, between the snowy sugarloaf of Kilimanjaro and the sharp, black mass of Meru. The farm’s western boundary was the Red River, coloured by fluorine that blackened teeth and bones. Along the east was the Cold River, glacial and blue, flowing among glades of fever trees. To the south was a moonscape of volcanic hillocks like bubbles, covered with sparse, wiry grass, or sands and stunted thorn. On hard red soils to the northwest grew thickets of wait-a-bit thorn and aloes. In the north, on the edge of a plain teeming with game, was Firesticks Hill, Ol Lekema Jipiparuk. My parents built their first huts here with horse stables made of split euphorbia trees. Later, they built a house with a flat roof like an Arab fort. The walls were of volcanic stone. The roof beams were giant cedar trees Dad had dragged down from Kilimanjaro’s forest by ox wagon. The doors and windows were made of camphor and they looked up at the mountains on either side.
At night, lions grunted and roared and the hollow volcanic hill rumbled as rhino cantered by. Coral-coloured snakes migrated across the plains en masse in season and in the glade below the home were dark-spotted giraffe, zebra and impala. In the dry open country were Grant’s and Thomson’s gazelles, oryx, wildebeest, cheetah, hunting dog, hyena and jackals. In the wait-a-bit thorn were long-necked gerenuk and lesser kudu. Flocks of sandgrouse drank at the salty rainwater pans at dawn and at dusk you could hear the rasping chatter of guinea fowl and partridges preparing to roost.
‘We were in a paradise,’ said my father, ‘that we can never forget, nor equal.’
By the time they arrived, my brother Richard was a baby and my sister Bryony was on the way. ‘It was good to start a new life on the ranch, with the thought of more children to come, and the great open air,’ my mother recalled. ‘I said we were going to be there a hundred years.’
They poured what little money they had saved into the farm and borrowed the rest. They started with a small herd of Boran cattle, including a cow that had been slashed on the face by Mau Mau, a truculent heifer that took exception to anybody wearing a hat, four hundred goats, two dogs, Silver the pony and Jamila, an Arab filly (my mother’s wedding present) with three centuries of pedigree, plus a Dodge nicknamed the Red, Red Car. Dad set about building up his herds and bought his stock from the Maasai and European farms in Kenya.
In the bone-dry country, the key to the farm’s survival was water. The fluorine in the Red River was slow poison, the Cold River was seasonal according to the rains and the drums of water they trucked down from pools at Ol Tulali on Mount Meru were thick with baboon shit. When Dad looked across the plains he reasoned there could be water in the ground at the foot of Firesticks Hill, which stood in the way of the line of the Cold River. Flor Visser, an old Boer who had arrived on the banks of Red River in 1904, said: ‘I tell you, Mr Hartley. You will never find water here.’
A plump Swede came to drill at thirty shillings a foot. At first the bit went down through red soil, then clay, then decomposed rock, then volcanic lava to 130 feet. No water. The Swede brought his wife and son down to move in with him in his caravan. The lava got harder and harder. Some days the drilling slowed to as little as eight feet a day. The bit reached 260 feet. No water. The Swede said he was surprised because he had never known a hole that was so completely dry. At 320 feet, no water. The bit went through layer after layer of the glacial mountain Kilimanjaro’s roots, the strata of millions of years. At one point, the drill brought up a chunk of timber from a prehistoric forest. Christmas came and went. At 400 feet, Dad announced that the hole was dry. They had failed. ‘Just one more week,’ Mum urged. ‘Please go to 500 feet.’
‘I told you, British,’ said Visser. ‘No water here.’ There were no wells for miles due to the porous volcanic rock. Everybody knew. And in the remote event of the drill striking water – what then? It would be salty or full of fluorine, you could be sure of that. At 460 feet, no water, and Dad said they were broke. What they would do with no money and no water, they didn’t know. It might have come to an end, but that day a car drove up and out got a man my father had known from Arabia. The visitor announced that the Arab farmers my father had worked with had raised the sum of two thousand pounds for him as a present after he had retired. To my mother’s horror, Dad said he could not accept the gift, saying the farmers should use it for their own irrigation works back in Arabia. The man said, ‘That is what they want you to do with it. They say that wherever you have gone, water has followed. And it’s time for you to find water with this money yourself.’
The next day drilling resumed. The work went on, day after day, until one morning there was an enormous spurt of water. A geyser exploded from the well hole. Clear water spouted in a fountain 160 feet into the air. The water spilled down onto the dry land. It flooded the plain in front of the hill like a flash flood. It gushed at fifteen hundred gallons an hour. There was neither telephone nor radio for miles, but that afternoon Flor Visser drove up in his old Ford truck and parked in front of the fountain of water. He switched off the engine and sat there for hours, staring at the water flooding down and no doubt thinking about the fifty years he had stayed on the arid plains where it had been so hard to make a life. Dad installed a wellhead that nodded like a huge bird. When the borehole was not pumping, strange humming noises came from the subterranean pipe. It was the thrumming of great Kilimanjaro’s volcanic innards. The geyser settled down to a flow of eleven hundred gallons an hour. The water was both fresh and pure.
Our neighbours were the Maasai tribal people and their beloved herds of cattle. Dad knew them well, traded stock at their bomas, but also played a cat and mouse game with them when they raided his cattle or poached his scarce grazing. From the top of the hill behind the house, he could see where the Maasai were on the plain, since plumes of dust followed their herds. He would then saddle up his horse and gallop after them like John Wayne with loud ‘Yehahs!’ The Maasai scattered in all directions, their red shuka togas flapping. If it was after dusk, Dad stalked them by moonlight and fired his rifle in the air to stampede the cattle off the property. Once a lion killed forty Maasai cattle. It also took Dad’s best big grey bull, so he hunted it down, shot it dead and kept the skin for evermore. A crowd of warriors appeared at the house and danced in front of the skin as it hung stretched out and caked with salt. They were in their full regalia of shields, assegai spears and ochre body paint. In a straight line they danced, stamping their feet, kicking up the dust, toasting ‘Bwana Harti’ and his deed.
Nearby there was a colony of Afrikaner smallholders, who had trekked up from South Africa after the second Boer war to escape the British and settle in German East Africa. They had been led by one of the Malan generals and the families were Pretorius, Van Venter, Lemmer, Visser, Van Rooyen and Bekker. In the Great War, they switched sides to help the British when Jan Smuts came up to attack the German East Africa commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in 1916. Pretorius, a scout and hunter, caused havoc for the Germans at Longido when he used lion fat to spook their penned horses. They were picture-book peasants, with blond, barefoot sons, old men with bright red noses and matrons with huge, fat arms. They sat on the stoeps of their whitewashed houses, stirring sheep fat with ladles to make soap, as geese and Muscovy ducks waddled about the gardens. Their church doubled as a school and grace was recited over meals at long tables under blue-blossomed jacaranda trees. They ate giraffe-meat sausages and stew made from sheep feet and pig trotters with the hair still on. ‘You must beat the kaffirs. Else how will you get them to work property, eh?’ one of the mamas told Mother. ‘Beat them, Mrs Hartley. You British don’t know anything about Africans!’ Yet the Boers were themselves Africans, and grew up side-by-side with black children from whom they were inseparable. And everybody knew that old man Pretorius, father of the blue-eyed policeman Jerry, and another boy who drove his truck over the escarpment and was killed in Manyara, lived with his black mistress in a separate house from where his wife stayed in the next-door building, which looked like a railway station. And one of the teenage girls, Katrina, had fallen in love with an African boy and become pregnant by him.
My parents prospered and in time they bought Sarel du Toit’s place, Kisimiri, also known as the Top Farm, 7,000
