of milk of magnesia. Aspirins were rare, while antibiotics were banned. Home cures and local remedies were warmly approved of: hot cooking oil for earache, hot brine for a stomach ache and a poultice of pawpaw and honey for jigger worm boils, cuts, thorns or sea urchin spines in our feet. If we had fever Mum plucked leaves from the neem trees in our garden for hot infusions. When Charo suffered a stroke that paralysed one side of his body, Dad took him to a witch doctor who buried him alive for half an hour, with very positive effects. For me, only malaria had led to a visit to the dreaded Dr Zoltan Rossinger, a Viennese Jew who had escaped Hitler. The doctor charged Africans nothing and all others the normal price – except for Germans, from whom he demanded double.
My brother Kim and I spent a lot of my time with an old man named Mohamed. Polio had stunted one of Mohamed’s legs, which dangled useless and childlike, and he eked out a pittance hawking shells to the growing number of white tourists. He sat all day long on his coconut mat in town, resplendent among the mother-of-pearl of nautiluses, triton conches and the pink, pouting lips of spider shells. We sat cross-legged listening to him, as he told us stories about storms on the ocean, dugongs and the Glory of the Seas, rarest among all shells. As he spoke he paused to expertly spit quids of red betel nut juice for dramatic emphasis, or roll a fresh nut into a pan leaf and tuck it into his cheek to chew.
Some days, he would take us down to the beach where fishermen caulked their careened boats while buyers haggled over beached shark carcasses. The sand glittered with mica. It was the same beach from which Mohamed’s slave ancestors had been herded aboard dhows bound for Arabia. On land, he lurched about on crutches but out on the ocean from his outrigger canoe he flipped into the sea and swam like a merman. We used to hand-line in the waters beyond Vasco da Gama’s pillar, staring into the water, yanking the line, hoping for brilliant reef fish to bite. Mohamed tied his line to a horny big toe and dozed off, springing alert at the slightest nibble.
Once my brother pulled out a fish with a domed forehead and a sailfin. Mohamed gave it his Swahili name, filusi, fine to eat and very special. In English it is the coryphene. In Spanish it is more beautifully known as the dorado, meaning ‘gilded’, because of its iridescent gold flanks. Mohamed seized hold of the fish and told us to watch closely. As the dorado suffocated its pigment, sheathed with a patina of stippled green, was transfigured for a brief instant like a beam of sunshine on a church mosaic. Mohamed held the fish as its strength drained away. With it, the light in the dorado’s brilliance faded. When the process was complete, Mohamed picked up his knife and sliced open her belly, removed the guts and tossed the body to the bottom of the canoe, where it turned the colour of tarnished lead.
My mother decided it was time for us to be educated outside Africa with its revolutions and wars. My siblings were taken out of their Kenya schools. I remember the time they first left by plane to go to boarding school in England. They had to swap their African uniforms of gingham shirts and khaki shorts for thick socks and grey felt blazers that made them look cold even before they were out of the equatorial sunshine. They went on ahead to Europe and my mother followed with me. We settled on a small hill farm in Devon. It was a rugged, pagan spot: a thatched longhouse of whitewashed cob, a great barn with timbers like a ship, views over Dartmoor, oak and elm woods, blackthorn hedges, clover pastures, a millpond and a stream, granite troughs and rookeries. This was modern England, but our neighbour on one side still ploughed with horses, stooked his hay with a pitchfork and was unable to write apart from sign his name on a bank cheque. On the other side of us was the poet Ted Hughes. After we met him one day in the fields, Mum said he ‘looked like a man who has been struck by lightning’.
We had sheep, cattle, horses and a black dog called Bruce. My eldest brother Richard attempted rearing pigs but he grew to know each porker by name so he couldn’t face sending them to the butcher. I kept ducks and chickens, goats, rabbits and guinea pigs. Lambing started when it was still cold and muddy in spring as the first crocuses poked through the snow. May carpeted the wood floor with bluebells. In summer wildflowers dusted the meadows and we fished for trout in the little streams and the pond. Richard helped Mum run the farm. He ploughed and harvested and made hay, helped by a labourer who had a hook where his hand should have been. Richard was so strong he could pitchfork a bale of straw high onto a trailer. In autumn we had fights throwing apples and harvested bags of them for delivery to Mr Inch, the cider maker who said he threw in a rat to improve the flavour of his brew. In winter, it rained a great deal but some mornings you’d wake up and it was sparkling sunshine, with the entire landscape covered with hoarfrost or snow.
Richard was dispatched to a school in Scotland, where it was felt that he might grow up tough doing outward-bound courses, mountain rescue and skiing. My sister Bryony went to where Mum and Granny had both been educated. Kim attended a school in Berkshire where boys wore First World War navy uniforms, complete with brass buttons, whitened belts and spit-and-polished boots. So began our long separation from both Dad and Africa, the years of being knocked into shape on a rainy little island. It is impossible to exaggerate the effect that British schools had on my siblings. They had been raised in wild liberty and happiness. They were now rootless and appeared exotic to the local children. They were confronted by petty, brutal school discipline and the unfamiliar British class system. Already from an unorthodox background, the counterculture of the sixties and seventies swept them off their feet and they were always climbing over walls to abscond for parties in London.
I remember Richard with shoulder-length hair and sideburns, a sheepskin coat and flares. He came home with languid, older girlfriends and freaks in clapped-out cars. I recall fighting over the gramophone when I wanted to play my record of ‘Elephants on Parade’ from The Jungle Book instead of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’. Bryony had big eyelashes and puppy fat and she wore lime-green and bright yellow miniskirts and knee-length boots. For a time she lived in a bedsit above a coin-operated laundrette off Elgin Crescent in London. Later, Kim got into disco and grew an Afro.
I remember my first day at school, aged six, when I held my mother’s hand and walked up the gravel driveway, past the big stone pillars topped by griffons at the school gates. In front of us was the Victorian Gothic edifice of Ravenswood, on the edge of Exmoor. I looked up at Mum and said, ‘I’m not going to cry…’
The headmaster invited us into his study and asked us to sit down. ‘You are most welcome to Ravenswood. Do you have any questions?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am told that the planet Pluto has vanished. Could you please explain why?’
Mum went back to Africa to see my father and sent me postcards of elephants and landscapes with colourful stamps. I used to stare into those pictures for hours at a time and long for home in Kenya. School was a hard place to which I became completely adapted. The terms unfolded into years and I recall friends and times that were happy. Still, the memories of Ravenswood and its cold dormitories, with names like Drake and Ivanhoe, still get me like the chilblains.
When Mum was overseas, I’d visit my grandparents and Grandpa sympathized with me about school because he’d hated it too. He joked that if I survived Ravenswood I’d be able to easily deal with being a POW, if there was ever another war, or as a convict if I ever did anything wrong. It’s true I never felt I had to put on such a tough act as I did there. In the playground we played chicken, seeing how close a knife could be thrown at our feet without flinching. The masters beat us regularly but we didn’t much care. We’d stuff sheets of blotting paper down our Y-fronts – to absorb the impact – and after a thrashing show off our welt-reddened bare bums to our classmates. The food was inedible but one couldn’t ‘get down’ until one had finished one’s plate. When I went home for the first time, Mum asked me what we were given to eat. ‘Munched-up meat and hardened potatoes,’ I told her. We had greyish fish that floated in scum; mashed orange swede; pickled purplish beetroot; toad-in-the-hole and semolina and tapioca pudding.
We were the first generation after the end of the British Empire, but in geography class our ageing school atlases still showed large parts of the world coloured red. The masters
