The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
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called them in for a chat and gave them a book entitled Man, Woman and God. A riding partner of Dad’s named Quill, who had been a POW in Changi, threw a stag party. On 27 January 1951 they married in the garrison church at Steamer Point with a reception to follow. Dad was forty-three, my mother twenty-five. The flowers came from Asmara by plane. The wedding cake was ordered from the Crescent Hotel. The governor laid on his Rolls-Royce to transport the bride. The telegrams were read out:
CAN NOT GET OVER NEWS STOP EMPIRE BUILDER
LOST STOP MY CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU AND COMMISERATIONS FOR THE UNFORTUNATE WOMAN
After the English ceremony my mother changed into an Aertex shirt and slacks. They climbed into a hired car and the Arab driver got angry when he learned the guests had tied tin cans to the rear bumper. Later they drove down the beach to Abyan.
Their first night together they slept in the fort on Khanfar Rock, a promontory overlooking the whole of Abyan. After breakfast next morning, Dad told my mother to change into her riding clothes. They got on their horses; Dad on his stallion al-Qatal, my mother on al-Azraq. They rode their horses to the bottom of the rock, where the mounted Sultan Hussein al-Fadhli and his slave boy on a donkey beside him were waiting. They saw a mass of camel and horseback riders advancing towards them from the village of Zingibar, followed by a great plume of dust. Dad’s horse could sense the great crowd and stamped and snorted. The hum of many people became audible. The party rode out in a line and as they approached through clouds of dust a crowd of people on foot and on horses and camels came into view. Turbaned riders, their skin glistening with oil and blue woad, galloped towards them as they fired off salutes with rifles and muskets. ‘The bullets missed us literally by inches. I felt my hair blow up once from the blast’, Mum wrote to her parents. A circle formed and the bride and groom cantered around it as the riders shot in the air, then a cavalcade formed behind them and the whole mass of horses and camels wheeled about in the dust, horses springing and leaping. A bullock was led out into the circle and a swordsman hacked off the beast’s head. First my father, then my mother, jumped their horses over the bullock’s carcass. They dismounted and were ushered into an enormous tent lit by gas lamps. Inside, they were shown two ornate chairs where they sat, drinking glasses of tea, as a bard sang his blessings for their future together.
‘That was a good party,’ Dad said later, when they had returned to sleep on Khanfar Rock. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he said, almost surprised.
My father stopped tying himself to the bed when he grew used to living with my mother. Nor did he make his bedroll headfirst with the revolution of the earth. My eldest brother Richard was born twenty months after they married and Dad retired from service in Arabia so that they could settle and raise a family back in his beloved Africa. On the eve of sailing, my mother wrote to Granny and Grandpa: ‘If ONLY we could be certain of peace, I can see the most perfect and exciting life ahead…’
My mother’s first glimpse of Africa was a stevedore pushing a wheelbarrow of ivory tusks down the dockside in Mombasa. As he went, he chanted, ‘Produce of the Congo! Produce of the Congo!’ From the coast they drove inland to Mweiga, on the slopes of Mount Kenya, where Dad had bought the farm En’nekeraka during the Great Depression. The farmhouse was a cedar log cabin and the newlyweds would sit in their dressing gowns, in front of a roaring fire eating fresh trout from the stream. From the windows in the morning, they saw the legs of a herd of buffalo below the raising blanket of mist as they moved back into the thick surrounding forest.
Soon after my parents settled on En’nekeraka, the Mau Mau emergency broke out. First my father’s cattle were hamstrung by the guerrillas. Then a gang chopped their neighbour into little pieces while he was taking his bath. My parents saw the way things were going and so decided to up sticks and move to Tanganyika. Soon after they left, police burned down the house on En’nekeraka, claiming that it was a late-night meeting house for terrorists.
I clearly remember, at about the age of three, trying to recollect what had happened up to that moment in my life. I looked back to oblivion, all apart from a single conscious moment. In this tiny phrase of time that is with me still, I am sitting up in my cot, crying, in a cool, bluish white room with windows opening out onto a vast, dry landscape. A sublime figure enters the room and, speaking softly, soothes me back to sleep, I suppose, because my memory stops there. My recollection is from my parents’ new Tanganyika farm, which they called Langaseni. My mother saved a handful of photographs and scratchy, heat-damaged film from the years at the farm. Otherwise, I have no sense of what Langaseni was like in those days, though I have heard about it all my life from everybody else in the family. From the stories, and they were almost lectures, I formed such a strong mental picture of this African paradise that I feel I could find my way around every single hill and tree of the place. I’d know the horses in the stable, the dogs sunning themselves on the veranda, my elder siblings with their hair flaxen blond, and my father on his horse, riding down the dusty track under thorn trees. As a man I’ve visited the farm and nothing of my idyll survives.
The 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