that made her sad of Indians doubled up under the weight of the huge blocks of ice they carried to the European clubs, and of large, cool rooms with fans and cool drinks, regimental displays and wide, green lawns. Even after half a century in Africa, my mother still said, ‘Africa is nothing compared to India.’
As a boy I asked my mother why our great-grandpas and our great-grannies from families of Yorkshire farmers and Scottish doctors felt the need to leave home and travel all over the world.
‘Oh, to get out of the rain, dear,’ Mother replied.
After several centuries, our British Empire came to an end. Most of my tribe returned to where they had once come from. As a child I used to meet my British relatives on visits in England. We all loved ancient Aunt Connie, who had been married once but recalled little about her husband because it had been so long since he was killed in the First World War. Connie lived with Aunt Vi, a spinster and self-sufficiency enthusiast who kept sheep, a pack of Chihuahuas and fermented raspberry wine in bottles that exploded in her corridors. But most of the rosy-cheeked cousins I met at weddings and funerals were as strange to me as the country of Britain itself.
My parents were almost the only family members I knew who refused to go back to England. We who had been in India, the Far East, the Antipodes, the Americas and the South Sea islands stayed on where we had made our last landfall, in East Africa. Once the colonial rulers, our status was now simply that of an appendix to history: powerless, few in number, and, most of all, extremely happy to remain in exile.
Britain was known as ‘home’, yet for us it was a distant island, where after all these years it was still raining. It was almost entirely through BBC radio that we kept in touch with an idea of England, which was cleansed by the frequencies of short wave and my parents’ vaguely remembered sense of patriotism. England greeted us each dawn with the BBC World Service signature tune, ‘Lero Lero, Lilli-Burlero’. Wherever we were, Big Ben tolled the hour and Dad, doing his yoga while drinking his early morning tea, gazed out at our adopted landscape, at a rising desert sun, or at the fishermen punting their outrigger canoes into the surf.
At the centre of this world was my father. In my eyes, Dad was like an Old Testament patriarch. He was mightily handsome and strong. He had been in the sun so long that his legs, heads and arms were blackish brown, but underneath where he had worn his short-sleeved shirts and shorts his skin was still pale white. He was huge, leather-backed, barrel-chested, larger than mortal, with a large nose, big earlobes, hair of jet and on the cusp of sixty when my mother gave birth to me. I have a strong mental image of my father as I write this, as a man walking. He walked with big swinging strides. He had walked across entire lands in his day. As an old man he walked too, daily, stopping ever more frequently to survey the view. When he walked a natural euphoria came over him. That is all one can say. It made him happy. It made him remember all the other walks of his life, before cars and aircraft made us rush about and pollute the world. He looked around him and saw the beauty of the land, and saw that he was moving through it at the pace that he wanted, filling his lungs with air, greeting loudly the people he passed on his way.
He was a great storyteller, who came home in his dusty veldskoens with presents that spoke of his travels. He’d produce from his duffel bag a curved Afar dagger in a goatskin sheath, a wooden Somali camel bell, or a gold star brooch for my mother. I remember once he also came home with his Land Rover punctured by three bullet holes. When he slammed the car door and strode off for a cup of tea, I hung back and stuck my fingers into the gashed aluminium. The rare times I ever found Dad sitting down, I’d climb up on his lap and he’d enfold me with one brawny arm, Tusker beer cradled in his other hand. We could be out in the bush but even if we were in a city, the way Dad told a tale in his voice as deep as a drum made it seem as if we were around a campfire out under the stars, in a pool of light cast by flames and encircled by the darkness of a million square miles of imagination.
My paternal grandfather, John Joseph, grew up on the island of Islay, where the Scottish children called him a ‘Sassenach’. He married Daisy, from Queenstown in South Africa’s Cape. He worked as a government official and they settled in the Leicestershire village of Kegworth, in a rambling house called Claremont. My father was born at home on 31 July 1907. His earliest memories revolved around ordinary English village family life. Opposite Claremont was the church, where he used to steal pigeons’ eggs from the belfry. On Sundays the bells rang out ‘Nine Tailors Make a Man’. In the garden was an ancient mulberry tree, planted during the reign of Charles I, and an old pavement from the ruins of a Roman villa. At the bottom of the garden was the River Soar, where my father and his siblings learned to swim, sail and fish. England’s countryside was still quiet and motor cars were unknown. In summer, one could hear the corncrake and lapwings. Noise arrived only with the outbreak of the Great War, when my father heard the sound of marching boots and horse-drawn equipment echoing through the streets for days on end. He remembered cold winters at his grammar school in Loughborough, and frost-bitten potatoes for lunch. Each week a fresh list of names was added to a scroll of honour in the assembly room to commemorate the Old Boys killed on the Western Front. He saw zeppelins bombing Nottingham and once the horizon was illuminated by the explosions at Chilwell, a munitions factory where hundreds of women worked. He remembered an elderly spinster aunt’s only comment when she heard the detonation: ‘Oh, what is Cook doing in the kitchen?’ He was haunted by his memory of the faces of soldiers coming home from the war, still in their trench coats and shouldering their rifles.
Dad recalled later in life that he had not enjoyed school and focused his mind elsewhere, ‘in the woods and along the river’s reedy banks’. His one desire was to roam the countryside. In time he went to agricultural college, where horses were still used for haymaking, ploughing and haulage. He learned to stook sheaves of corn, and he built turnip clamps, cut and laid hedges, topped and tailed mangles, hoed root crops and went turd knocking. A new era in agriculture was beginning, however, and my father studied soil analysis, artificial fertilizers, hybrid improvements of crops and livestock, pesticides, chemicals and tractors and combine harvesters. In 1927 he was offered a Colonial Service scholarship to Oxford University.
At Oxford, my father said he learned there was more to the world than the ‘bullocks, sheep and crops’ of his childhood and he ‘talked of politics and everything under the sun’. He began to read about Africa and in Blackwell’s he bought a signed first edition of Sir Richard Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa. After Oxford he went to study at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in St Augustine, on the island of Trinidad. When not studying cotton or coffee, he went out with his Creole friends shark fishing or iguana hunting. Until now, the only time he had gone abroad in his life was to France on a cycling tour. In Trinidad, he was fascinated by the mix of foreign races he encountered.
My father could have made his life in almost any part of the empire. Many of his generation went overseas, including his brother Ronald. I remember Uncle Ronald, a ukulele-playing, agricultural college principal in Fiji who had his singing Bulgarian wife shave him before he turned out of bed each morning. At college in Trinidad, notices went up offering jobs in everything from rubber in Malaya and tea planting in Ceylon to ranching in Australia. My father chose Africa because of his mother, Daisy, who told him stories of life in the Cape in the nineteenth century and remembered trekking across the veld in an ox wagon when she was still a little girl. My father was also inspired to live overseas by his paternal uncle Ernest, whom he loved. Ernest was a businessman in India, a keen sportsman and a raffish character with a great sense of humour, whose daughter grew up to become the actress Vivien Leigh. During the summer of 1928, Ernest and his wife Gertrude leased the house of the Earl of Mayo in Galway and Dad went to join them for a summer’s fishing. He fell a little in love with the precocious, adolescent Vivien. ‘Everybody knew it,’ a gossipy aunt told me. She gave him a book of poems by Banjo Paterson, signed ‘To my favourite cousin, with love from Viv’. My father adored ‘The Man from Snowy River’ for the rest of his life.
On 10 October 1928 he received a letter from the secretary of state for the colonies. It gave news
