‘when I was in the Punjab’. To our delight, he ran our class like his old regiment and barked out parade-ground commands in Hindi. He could throw a piece of chalk with deadly accuracy across the classroom at a daydreaming boy. And if you got an answer wrong he’d yell ‘balderdash!’.
I quickly learned about Britain by watching television when my mother took me home to the farm in Devon. We had no TV in Kenya, but so much of what the boys talked about at Ravenswood came from kids’ shows and sport on the box. I watched it to find common ground with my peers, among whom one needed to be able to speak and act like Scoobie Doo and Mutley the Dog. The programme I genuinely liked most was The Magic Roundabout. After that came the news. My mother insisted on watching this and so I would stick around because once in front of the box it was hard to unglue my eyes.
I remember one news night very clearly. The pictures were of troops on the move, refugees, rice paddies and palm trees. A young American soldier was crying. ‘I want to go home. I want to go home.’ My mother looked cross and said, ‘They’re always so emotional. The British never behaved like that.’
‘Maybe they’re scared,’ I remember saying.
‘Of course they’re scared,’ Mum said. ‘But you should never show it.’
A reporter did a piece to camera, speaking into a big handheld microphone. A roar suddenly grew audible. The camera lurched away from the correspondent and zoomed in across the paddies to get a shot of a fighter jet plunging into the earth a mile away. The shot held for a few seconds, the sound of the impact explosion distorted above the muffled shouts off camera. The reporter came back in frame and resumed his story as a column of black smoke rose from the crash site behind him. From that moment on, I think my bags were packed and I was ready for a life in news.
My father took little active interest in my schooling and he seldom read my end-of-term reports. But once he visited me at school to deliver a lecture about the Danakil Depression, which became amazingly detailed about the Afar and their livestock in the deserts along the Red Sea coast. On that occasion, I suppose my African background was so exotic to my peers that a child said to me after Dad had driven away, ‘That wasn’t your father!’
I promised the boy that he was.
‘How can that be?’ the boy jeered. ‘He’s very old. And anyway, I thought your father came from Africa.’ I replied that he did.
‘Well then, why isn’t he a black man?’
At the end of term, I longed to break up like any other boy, anxious to leave that dungeon for a spell. In summer or sometimes at Christmas, I’d fly home to Kenya on a special BOAC flight packed with schoolchildren called the Lollipop Special. Down at the beach house, I’d kick off my squeaky black shoes and socks and feel the sand between my toes again.
At thirteen I went up to Sherborne School, in Dorset. The town was Saxon, built on a scire burne, a clear stream; the school had been founded by the boy king Edward VI, and for generations it had fed the ranks of England’s soldiers and administrators. In my memory, I seem to have spent a large amount of time in church. During the sermons in the Abbey, I’d gaze up at the old flags that hung in lines above our pews, Union Jacks and regimental colours torn by cannonballs and stained by battles in the four corners of Britain’s empire. I filed out of chapel a thousand times with the organ striking up Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. As I descended the steps I’d look up at the walls of names memorializing all the school’s Old Boys who had been killed in the succession of wars, always bringing my eyes to rest on one, Cowan, whom my mother had known in Burma.
As a teenager, I spiked my hair and bleached it with peroxide, and learned to smoke, drink snakebite and take poppers and speed. I quickly found the Africans again at Sherborne and together with two Nigerian brothers I formed a rock band. Our keyboardist was from the Cayman Islands. The Nigerians played drums and lead guitar. At first we called ourselves Vic Virus and the Exploding Parasites. Our lyrics were cascades of punk nihilism fused with a Commonwealth beat. We wanted our music to have a message, so we changed our band name to The Starving Millions. At our only concert, I came on stage wrapped head to foot in red ink-soaked hospital bandages and sang about world poverty.
Out in Africa, I think my father grew lonely and perhaps felt burdened by the responsibility of a family from which he was separated for so much of the time. On the rare occasions I saw him in England or Africa, he never took me in hand. He wasn’t one to dispense fatherly advice, nor to listen to fears or dreams. He could have had authority over me, if only he had wanted to. He was a stranger to me, though I was in awe of his greatness. It was my mother who laid down the rules and did all the bringing up. Dad paid the bills and came home once in a blue moon. When he was with me he wasn’t much good at football, cards or games. I never went with him to a museum and rarely to the cinema, which in Malindi had films projected into a big white wall under the stars.
The year my puberty kicked in, I was a bomb primed to go off. I had grown to be happy in England. That summer, I spent my days playing in the fields and along the streams with boys from the neighbouring farms. My skin was as brown as an impala’s. At home I had persuaded a girl named Alice to take her breasts out and let me kiss them while we played in the hay barn. In school dormitory that summer term, we had run about the sloped rooftops naked, and cut lead from the guttering.
My confidence that all was well was shattered one day when I found my mother by herself in the kitchen weeping. At first she would not tell me what was wrong. She stopped crying, but over the coming days, she sank into a state of depression, sitting alone in her darkened room for hours at a time. She stopped taking care of the house or cooking meals. I recall foraging in the larder myself. My mother’s moods took on a frightening pattern. She was fine in the morning. By eleven o’clock she become listless. If I spoke to her, she didn’t answer. If she bothered to reply at all, she spoke slowly and her voice had a disembodied, metallic tone. Instead of disciplining me if I misbehaved, she became sarcastic. Her face sagged. On her rare shopping trips, she would buy several bottles of Martini.
For nearly a year I had not seen my father, who was in Ethiopia. By now I was used to his absence. Our Father who art in Africa. But now Mum told me Dad had taken an Ethiopian mistress.
Mother said that before they were married, she knew the wife of another man who used to look at Dad ‘like a snake’. There had been others, some situations embarrassing, most of them absurd. In most cases my mother had handled the problem with style.
‘He’s been doing it for years,’ she shrugged.
It reminded me of the story of my aunt Gertrude, wife of my father’s favourite uncle Ernest Hartley. When they lived in Calcutta, Gertie learned about Ernest’s constant philandering with other women. Being a Catholic, divorce was not an option and perhaps she loved him enough not to leave him, but she did not let his behaviour go unpunished. One evening she held a lavish dinner party and when Ernest entered the room he realized all the female guests were the married women with whom he had had his affairs.
In my father’s case, though, what was much worse on this occasion was that he had fathered a child with his Ethiopian girlfriend.
I panicked. Would this mean that my father would leave us, that we’d lose our home in Devon? Would I have to leave school? I imagined my mother having to struggle to care for us with no money. Worst of all, I worried that we would never return to Africa. We would be condemned to a life with no exits in cold, grey England. I knew I had to protect my mother, but I didn’t know how. I felt guilty that I could not do something to help her. I began hating both of my parents for ending my childhood in this way. I had expected an adolescence as carefree and irresponsible
