The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley
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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 of his appointment as agricultural officer in the Tanganyika Territory and was signed, ‘I have the honour to be, Sir, your most obedient servant’. My father’s generation was from a new type of empire builders who were quite different from their predecessors. Before, the British in Africa had pursued an economy of simple extraction and it was as if they believed progress could not involve the mass of black people who lived in their colonies. Thin on the ground, we governed by the system of ‘indirect rule’, via traditional or appointed local chiefs. The surface of East Africa was barely disturbed at first. But in the years after the Great War, the British determined to ‘develop’ the colonies by ensnaring Africa’s native peoples in the modern world economy, at the less advantageous end to be sure, as growers of cash crops and payers of tax. This was the mission my father was asked to play a role in and, no doubt, at first he believed that it was a noble one, in which the destiny of Africa’s remote people would for their own benefit at last be joined with that of the outside world.
I have an early memory from home. In the dead of night I am blasted awake by an otherworldly sound. The ocean tide is a distant roar beyond the reef. The house is silent. I call out, and my mother comes into my bedroom. At breakfast next morning, we laugh about the nocturnal disturbance. Dad tells me it was the shout of a honey badger startled by the lights on the veranda. For days and years, I wondered, ‘Do honey badgers make that noise?’ But I have always known that it was my father.
When my mother first met him, my father made his bed point east each night so that he rolled with the world headfirst as he slumbered. He had his ankles tied securely to his bed with strips of bandage, to prevent him from walking in his sleep. Once, in a desert village prone to earth tremors, he slept on the flat roof of a house to get the cool evening breeze. At the dead of night he leapt off the top, landing in the alley below and only woke up when he hit the ground. The villagers, believing Armageddon was upon them, cried out and prayed to Allah. He used to tuck his revolver under the pillow at bedtime during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and when visiting Nairobi he would stay at my godfather Judge Birkett Rudd’s home. One night in the early hours the