Many Parts: The Life and Travels of a Soldier, Engineer and Arbitrator in Africa and Beyond

MANY PARTS

MA NY PARTS The Life and Travels of a Soldier, Engineer and Arbitrator in Africa and Beyond

Desmond FitzGerald

The Radcliffe Press LONDON

⋅ NEW YORK

Published in 2007 by The Radcliffe Press 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU In the United States and in Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © Desmond FitzGerald, 2007

The right of the estate of the late Desmond FitzGerald to be identified as the licensor of this work has been asserted by the licensor in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 84511 306 3 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog card: available

Typeset in Sabon by Oxford Publishing Services, Oxford Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface Introduction Lineage

vi viii ix xi

Part I: Tale of Four Families 1. My immediate family 2. England and India 3. My school years in England, 1925–35 4. Further education: the RMA, SME and Cambridge

1 3 20 29 66

Part II: Away to the War 5. Phoney War 6. Dunkirk, Leeds and Skegness 7. Round Africa convoy 8. Middle East posting 9. Tripoli, Tunis and preparing for Italy 10. Italy and training for Europe and Overlord, 1943

79 81 91 100 114 126 135

Part III: Peacetime Soldiering 11. Military service in East Africa, 1945–48 12. Back in the UK

157 159 175

Part IV: Kenya: my second career, 1955–99 13. Down to earth 14. Family life and DF&A, 1965–76 15. Nomad roaming from place to place, 1976–81 16. Life on Ol Olua Ridge and Kamundu, 1979–89 17. The last lap: 1990–2000

193 195 218 240 258 267

Index

271 v

Acknowledgements

T

he end of the Second World War and then 40 or more years of silence on the part of most participants. Who wants to provoke that glazed look that labels you the bore of the century if you dare reminisce? History books, of course, there are in plenty; but you don’t have to read them, and for that matter, who does? Then gradually one senses a thaw. Don’t ask why, but young people begin to listen, actually to invite one to open up. They don’t actually ask the dreaded question: ‘What did you do?’, but if you tell them a good story they start asking for more. One’s family, of course, are the most curious. I remember wondering about my father, who married my mother when he was 40. Did life really start for him in 1915? What was he up to during all that lost time? No good, no doubt. So it is with our daughter Katie, although she has already heard most of what follows during her 30 odd years. Our grandchildren are not old enough yet to be curious; Charlie wants eventually to own my ceremonial sword, and so he shall, one day. My story is meant mostly for their mother and for them when they are old enough to read it – and perhaps their children. What about a wider audience? This was where the idea of a memoir became exciting. I had the luck to befriend a young Irish colleague in the company for which I work, named Sue Lawless. She liked my tales (anecdotes you could call them, though I dislike the word), and kept on encouraging me to put them on tape. I might have done so at that, if I had had her beside me when I recorded; but she went and got married and left for Uganda, and I could not relate anything just into thin air. It was not that Sue was interested in the war as such; in fact the idea of war repels her. What excited her were the tales of human interest. She loved the sad story of Lucy the hen – she even wanted me to tell it at her wedding. It was her particular enthusiasm that made me think that even the story of vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS my childhood might attract a wider audience; but others, particularly my wife Barbara, have encouraged me to prune that part very thoroughly. I am leaving that to an editor. Sue Lawless, then, is responsible, if not for the memoir, for the enlarged form it has taken. Barbara, along with Sarah Cape, Bridget Evans and Joanna Hechle (who have been typing it) is reading it. They have all kept their opinions of it very much to themselves. Bridget, when in a moment of despair I threatened to bin the whole thing, said she thought that would be a pity – otherwise, silence. Barbara is my critic. She would like to have typed it, but with all her activities, including coping with my business correspondence, there would never be time. I would not be writing it at all if it were not for her. She is the one to whom I owe it all. I owe a deep debt of gratitude, of course, to the ladies who have actually taken on the onerous task of interpreting my awful writing and typing it. I am especially grateful to my two sponsors, my ex-brother-in-law W. R. (Bill) Horne who put up most of the funding and my ex-wife Buff (Elizabeth) FitzGerald who also contributed. I must also acknowledge the involuntary help I have had from other amateur authors. I’ve collected a little library of books of this kind, and have rather shamelessly plundered the best of them for ideas on style and construction. I am particularly grateful to Hugh Holmes, John Millard (who has read and commented on the war section) and Michael StJohn, whose books I treasure and hope to emulate. The late Roger StJohn’s family reminiscences have also been an enormous help. My son-in-law, Philip McLellan, told Ian Parker about my book and he expressed interest. When he had read the first draft Bridget passed to him he told me he would like to edit it. He noted that the book stopped in 1955, 45 years ago. ‘Why?’ I said I was thinking of stopping it in 1964, the year of my second marriage. ‘That is not much of a compliment to Barbara.’ ‘Well what can possibly interest anyone in an account of domestic ups-and-downs, let alone bliss?’ ‘What about your grandchildren, and your great grandchildren?’ That’s it then, the whole story as edited by Ian. So, here’s to Sue and Sarah and Bridget and Jo, and to Hugh and John and Michael and Roger and Ian; and most of all to Barbara, my wife, for being my critic and having to put up with me for so long and for enabling me to survive happily to tell the tale. vii

Preface

H

enry Ford I opined: ‘History is bunk’. Tony Blair seems to hold the same view. ‘Call me Tony’ he bleats. Why not ‘Blair’ for God’s sake? What’s wrong with a distinguished Highland Scottish clan name? I am Desmond John Otho FitzGerald. At my prep school I was ‘FitzGerald’. My friend, John Gaskell, had an elder brother there, and was therefore known as ‘Gaskell Minor’. Nobody addressed us as ‘Desmond’ and ‘John’. Similarly, at Wellington. I believe they got this right. Now I am mostly ‘Desmond’, even in the office. This marks me as a person, that’s all. FitzGerald links me to a family 1000 years old, and to 1000 years of history. It is nothing to boast about, but something surely to live up to? That is why I have written a few paragraphs about my Geraldine and Goodbody forebears.

viii

Introduction

A

pologies all round. Clinton apologizes for slavery. Australians say sorry to the Aborigines. Her Majesty of the United Kingdom, it is true, bucks the trend over Amritsar and the Emperor of Japan dissatisfies the British survivors of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps; but we lesser lights are expected to follow the fashion and don sackcloth and ashes. The FitzGeralds, including the Glin clan, have nearly a millennium of misbehaviour to account for. A FitzGerald was one of Strongbow’s lieutenants in the 1169 invasion of Ireland – outrageous aggression – followed by the illegal seizure of great tracts of land in southwest Ireland. They even had pretensions to (petty) kingship. The FitzGeralds, it is true, didn’t have to pretend not to be English – they were not; but to claim to be Irish, that was another matter. They were, are, Normans, with roots in Italy and the Mediterranean islands – ‘not one of us’ in the recent words of a truly Irish lady. Some of the FitzGeralds, the Kildares for example, sucked up to the English/Hanoverian monarchs and became earls and dukes. Thank God we Glins do not have to plead guilty to that; but what about our adoption of the Protestant religious rite, just to hang on to what was left of the lands we had pinched? Tut tut! Nearer to the present, we Glins fell into the bad habit of joining up and fighting British wars. There were FitzGerald officers in George III’s household brigade; and more recently still my own father fought in the second Anglo–Boer war. He could have been forgiven for this if he had realized he was fighting the oppressors of the South African Bantu, but he did not. He thought he was fighting for Queen and Country. How confused he was! He then compounded his errors by joining the colonialists in East Africa and became part of a mercenary African army, the King’s African ix

INTRODUCTION Rifles, formed to fight a European enemy with whom Africans had no quarrel. Oh dear! All that ended 80 years ago. Then I became the culprit. Born in the Arboretum in Nairobi, the capital of a colonialist occupied African country; born to be a British soldier myself, returning whenever I could to Kenya Colony to escape the rigours of the lands of my roots and enjoy the comforts provided by underpaid domestics and a decent climate. What a truly shocking history! How apologetic I should be for the errors of myself and my ancestors!

x

Lineage

The Irish Geraldines The Norman invasion of Britain, which we all know took place in the latter part of the eleventh century (1066 and all that), bringing with it a return of European civilization lost in the previous five centuries, together with renewed opportunities for the enlightenment of the brutish Britons, was followed a century later by a similar invasion of Ireland. In 1169, Richard Gerald, Earl of Pembroke (Strongbow), landed at Wexford. Maurice FitzGerald ‘de Windsor’, known as the patriarch of the Irish Geraldines, was one of Strongbow’s lieutenants. Maurice FitzGerald, Lord of Maynooth and Baron of Naas, County Kildare, patriarch of the Irish Geraldines Maurice was the son of Gerald FitzGerald – Constable of Pembroke Castle in Wales and President of the County – and Nesta, daughter of Rhys ap Griffyd ap Tudor Mawr Prince of South Wales. Maurice died in 1176. His immediate descendants were known as FitzMaurice and his grandson – John FitzThomas, son of Thomas FitzMaurice – became the first Earl of Decies and Desmond through his marriage to Marjory, daughter of Thomas FitzAnthony, Lord of Decies and Desmond by authority of King Henry III of England. This title in due course descended to the 2nd Earl, Maurice FitzGerald, and was later styled the (FitzGerald) Earldom of Desmond. The 16th Earl died in the Tower of London in 1612 and the title with him. John FitzThomas subsequently fathered a number of bastards, among whom were Gilbert FitzJohn (the ‘White Knight’) whose line died out in 1611; Maurice FitzJohn (the ‘Green Knight’) whose descendants became the FitzGeralds of Kerry, still extant with Sir George FitzGerald Bart, 23rd Knight; and John FitzJohn (the ‘Black Knight’) who was the first Knight of Glin (1269–1307). xi

LINEAGE John FitzThomas’s father was Thomas FitzMaurice (died 1214) who had four distinguished brothers: William FitzMaurice, who inherited the Barony of Naas Gerald FitzMaurice who was the ancestor of the Earls of Kildare and the Dukes of Leinster ‰ Maurice FitzMaurice of the Barons of Kirtsany ‰ Robert FitzMaurice, the ancestor of the Earls of Kerry and the Marquesses of Lansdowne ‰ ‰

It was thus that in the thirteenth century the Irish Geraldines proliferated in what, six centuries later, still flourished as four distinguished families – the Kildares/Leinsters, the Earls of Kerry/ Marquesses of Lansdowne and the Knights of Kerry and Glin. The variation of ‘Fitz’ surnames, the reader will be glad to know, gave way at the end of the fourteenth century to the surname FitzGerald for all succeeding generations of Geraldines. The prefix ‘Fitz’ does not, as I had always understood, necessarily mean ‘illegitimate son of’; it is usually legitimate, though not in the case of the White, Green and Black Knights. The title ‘Knight’ is now unique to the Knights of Kerry and Glin. John FitzThomas was created Knight of the Garter in 1229 by Henry III. This John, by one account, conferred the knighthood on three of his sons by virtue of his royal seigniory as a Count Palatine – nothing to do with the English crown. Another account says that the titles were created by the English King Edward III in 1333, in the time of Thomas the second knight, one generation later. At any rate, whatever their origin all three knights were styled such by English Acts of Parliament – in the case of Glin, in the time of Philip the fourth knight, one generation later (circa 1351). The knight’s wife is styled ‘Madam’ (or, by the vulgar, ‘Knightdress’). The FitzGeralds of Ballydonaghue We now jump five centuries from 1307 and consider Gerald FitzGerald of Ballydonaghue, County Limerick, who was the second son of Thomas FitzGerald the 22nd Knight of Glin. My father, Thomas Otho FitzGerald, was Gerald FitzGerald’s great grandson. Gerald FitzGerald died in 1806, my father in 1959. Gerald FitzGerald’s elder brother was the 23rd knight, John xii

LINEAGE Bateman FitzGerald, who rebuilt Glin Castle between 1780 and 1789. The present (and last) knight is the 29th knight of Glin and my daughter, Catherine Lucy, is the fifth cousin once removed of the present knight. If she had been born a boy and the present knight had still had no male issue, my daughter Katie might have become the 30th knight of Glin. A little bit of politics My great great great grandfather, Gerald, the patriarch of the Ballydonaghue clan, held a commission in the British Army. False reports (which are given credence in Gaughan’s book) linked him with Lord Edward FitzGerald, the noted adherent of the United Ireland movement; so that when later the Emmet Rebellion erupted in 1803, Gerald had already lost his commission. It is on record in British army lists of the time that Gerald’s commission was restored to him when Emmet was put down, which gives the lie to this allegation. In the political atmosphere of the time (the French revolution, the American colonies secession from the Crown, George III’s madness) it seems a pity that the allegations proved to be untrue. On the other hand, it is always unwise to be on the losing side in any tussle of this kind. The Glin FitzGeralds were very conscious of this, opting for Protestantism when their religion had been papist, and they were very good (most of the time) at keeping in with the (real) Irish – Glin Castle was often threatened with being burnt to the ground, but never was. Gerald the alleged renegade was succeeded by Parson Dick (the Reverend Richard), 1801–85, who went through what there was of the Ballydonaghue FitzGerald fortune like the proverbial knife through butter. His son Doctor Dick (Richard Boyd), 1840–85, was evidently a mega-wimp – fathering six boys and, once Parson Dick had disposed of all the money, following his father to the grave three months later, ‘turning his face to the wall’ (family polite-speak for committing suicide). His widow, Caroline (née Wilson), was left with six young boys (4–16 years old) to bring up and educate; so in 1886 she carted them off to Folkestone in England, leaving Ireland for ever, to live near and be supported by Emily, Caroline’s widowed but more affluent sister, who had one daughter and three sons. Aunt ‘Em’ managed to educate my eldest xiii

LINEAGE uncle, Gerald, at a public school (Harrow?), but the other five were very inadequately catered for educationally. Very little information exists as to what happened in Folkestone between 1886 and 1898 when my father, Otho, went off to the South African war. My father wore his mother’s wedding ring on the little finger of his right hand. It was engraved inside, ‘Mother died 1896’. This seemed to amuse my mother. Anyway that is all I know about my grandmother. Uncle Jack, the fifth son, was the first to go – he died in 1905. Uncle Gerald was commissioned into a good regiment, survived throughout the South African war and got back to England. He died of typhoid fever, allegedly contracted from drinking English water out of a military water cart brought back from Cape Town and not properly sterilized, in 1906 – as the war ended in 1902 ‘them bugs’ must have been extraordinarily long lived. His widow, Mabel, lived on into the 1940s. I never set eyes on her. The most indisputably disreputable of my uncles was Aubrey (the third son). He took to the stage, apparently successfully, in a number of West End shows, including a musical called Veronique in about 1907. He made a bit of money, opened ‘Fitz’s Bar’ in Shaftesbury Avenue, bankrupted himself by drinking most of the stock, could not remember his lines, quarrelled with the theatre management and, after years of penniless obscurity, finally died in 1968 worth £98.00 My Aunt Lucy was kind to Aubrey, but reproving when he claimed to be 94 years old. ‘Your birth’s recorded in the family bible and you are 92.’ He married Peggy twice. As a child I saw her once in bed, with last night’s make-up still on. Aubrey was growing a beard for some movie part in a Ralph Lynn, Tom Walls farce, as a butler I rather think – ‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served’ his only line. Aubrey was often seen in Ennismore Street in the late 1920s and was quite a favourite of cousin Nesta and me. He was immensely, attractively ugly. Uncle Claude, the second son, I never saw. He was on the stage too, but not for long. He was known to have been a purser on a P&O steamship and died in 1939. My Aunt Lucy’s father, Sir Henry Bell Bart, a shipping magnate, held the extraordinary notion that his daughter should not marry but spend her life looking after him. So, when my Uncle Maurice, xiv

LINEAGE my father’s younger brother, who was employed as Sir Henry’s private secretary, proposed marriage to his only daughter and was accepted, Sir Henry got jealous, took against the whole idea and cut Aunt Lucy out of his life (for 12 years) and his will (for ever) and left her and my Uncle ‘penniless’, or at least with only £20,000 out of his £1.5 million (equivalent of nearly a million pounds in today’s money). My uncle and aunt lived in genteel ‘poverty’ for the remaining 45 years – a house in Ennismore Street and later a flat in Knightsbridge, a cottage in the country, Armstrong-Siddeley chauffeurdriven motorcar, Mr and Mrs Cheesely as butler/housemaid, Kate the cook and a nanny (Annie Steers) for my cousin Nesta, their only child. What of my father, Otho? We know that in the late 1880s he and his brothers sang in the choir of the Folkestone parish church. Was there a parish school and did they attend it? We do not know; nor do we know what happened to him in the six years from 1891, except that he may have joined his elder brother on the London stage. Certainly, in later life he loved hamming it up in amateur theatricals in Nairobi, and fancied himself as a baritone in musicals’ songs – ‘Oh tell me pretty maiden are there any more at home like you’ – with the reluctant piano accompaniment of my long suffering mother, who was a very accomplished pianist. All this conjecture ends with my father joining the British militia, the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Territorial Army, as an ensign in the Kings Own Royal (Lancaster) Regiment in 1897; sailing in 1898 for Cape Town to take part in the second South African War (1899–1902) and returning to England in the summer of that year.

xv

The Sum of Things These, in the hour when heaven was falling, The day when earth’s foundation failed, Followed their military calling And did their duty, and prevailed. Their shoulders held the heavens suspended, They fought and stood and fought again; What God abandoned they defended And saved the sum of things – in vain. (With acknowledgments and apologies to the poet, Housman)

‘Imagination and Memory are but one thing.’ (Thomas Hobbes)

‘You then have to go away to find out where you are from.’ (James Joyce, of Dublin)

xvi

Part I A Tale of Four Families

1 My Immediate Family

M

y father landed in British East Africa in the English autumn of 1904 – a 28 year-old veteran of the South African war but, by reason only of his secondment to the King’s African Rifles (KAR), newly gazetted as captain. My father in East Africa Father was not alone as the Uganda Railway train chugged slowly and dustily up the hill to Nairobi’s shanty town, 5000 feet up and 320 miles off, into the new world of the Kenya Highlands. His friend, Jack Bois, a wartime companion and a South African, had had the same idea, which was to live again the three years of African life as a soldier in the wide, empty veld: life under canvas, of thorn scrub, hot days and cold, clear, star-studded nights, of military discipline and companionship. Otho FitzGerald and Jack Bois, who had been militia subalterns in South Africa, returned to England to gain their King’s commissions as regular officers in a minor county regiment, the King’s Own Royal (Lancaster) Regiment, the only type of unit that would accept penniless soldiers of fortune. Not for them the plushy comforts and social whirl of smart guards, rifle regiments or the cavalry, to which the two friends who had learnt the hard way to ride, shoot and hunt wild game on the African plains, had anyway never aspired. They longed to escape the boring grind of English military life. The companionship of the regiment was there, but they wanted to get away to what they really missed, and the KAR was their escape route to what they regarded as the real world. The KAR was an East African rather than strictly Kenyan regiment, consisting of British officers and non-commissioned officers 3

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES commanding African rank and file. The first battalion was raised in Nyasaland (Malawi), the second in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and the third in Kenya. The Uganda unit was the fourth battalion. So, FitzGerald and Bois joined the third KAR in Nairobi and it was not long, only time in fact to kit themselves out, before they were entrained at Nairobi, bound for Lodwar, a remote military fort, by way of Londiani and ‘64’, later to become known as Eldoret. Their journey to Lodwar, first by ox-wagon then camel train, took nine weeks. Upstream of the confluence of two normally dry, but at times torrentially flooded, luggars bringing water from the mountains of northeastern Uganda they found a tented camp with a flagstaff. The presence of sweet water wells caused the later township of Lodwar to be sited in this ill-chosen spot. Nowadays a bridge spans one luggar and an Irish bridge the other, while a few miles to the east one crossing would have sufficed. The military post at Lodwar was there to guard the approaches into Kenya from marauding bands of nomadic tribesmen from the southern highlands of Abyssinia, as well as raiders from northeastern Uganda. Patrols were dispatched from Lodwar and my father accompanied these missions northwest of Lokichokio, and the southern end of Lake Rudolf, east to North Horr, Marsabit and Moyale. During protracted treks Bois, a considerable watercolourist, illustrated his diary with studies of men and women of the many northern tribes, which rivalled those Joy Adamson later executed, but are now alas lost. FitzGerald and Bois completed their secondment in 1906 and Bois never returned to Kenya. Father rejoined his regiment and, in 1909, went to Ireland to join a military garrison in Limerick. Two important events coloured his life there: a return to the land of his forefathers and meeting my mother. Garrison life in Southern Ireland was different from the Kenya Northern Frontier District, but its attractions were nonetheless enjoyable to a man as outgoing as my father. There were infantry, gunners and even some sappers in the garrison and, except for the cavalry, no smart regiments. The provincial society of Limerick, Tipperary and Clare happily integrated with the garrison officers and the social scene was dominated by hunting, racing, parties and balls. Female talent abounded and, closely following the beautiful Kennedy girls, were the three Goodbody sisters. This family was part of a large clan of 4

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY Quakers who had come to Ireland in the wake of Cromwell in the early seventeenth century, and had prospered as merchants in that rabidly hostile Catholic country. They were respected as honest traders and for practising their non-violent philosophy. Posing no threat they attracted no hostility. The Irish Goodbodys Everybody is descended from somebody and, in my father’s view, from Adam and Eve. The problem is only with records and for the Irish Goodbodys these start with John Goodbody, a Quaker, and his wife Ellen Grattan of Ballynaville and Mullaghanard, John dying in 1705. Six generations later came my grandfather, Ellis Goodbody, who was born on 30 May 1864 and died on 20 December 1914, two years before I was born. He married Alice Pritchard of Retford, Nottinghamshire, in 1888, and my muchloved grandmother survived him, dressed always in black until she died aged 80 in 1943. Thus my father, 15 years older than my mother, was only 11 years younger than my grandfather and 12 years younger than my grandmother. The Quakers are members of the Society of Friends, a religious sect deriving from Christian Protestantism and founded by George Fox, an Englishman, in the mid-seventeenth century. There are no churches, no bishops or priests or parsons – only sober elders who came together on Sundays in plain white meeting houses. My grandfather was a Quaker but my grandmother was not. She was a very devout high church Anglo-Catholic – all ‘bells and smells’ and hats and genuflection (a lot more ceremonial than today’s Catholicism, but owing no allegiance to Rome). There was no suitable church in Limerick, where they lived and outside which the Lewis Goodbodys and their sons had their milling business. Catholic ‘chapels’ were off-limits and the Church of Ireland is very ‘low’. My mother, Catherine Audrey and her sisters Madge (older) and Peggy (younger) behaved badly at Quaker meetings, so in the end were sent to the ordinary Protestant church in Limerick with my grandmother. My mother and her sisters were strictly brought up as Anglicans, and my mother was as devout as her mother, though never ‘spiky’. She went to church on Sundays, read her bible and prayed at home. 5

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES

J. Ellis Goodbody, Esq. (1864–1914)

It is recorded that John Goodbody, his sons and grandsons, were farmers not far from Dublin and that Mark (1749–1800), the third generation ancestor, set up business in Mount Mellick, the principal Quaker settlement outside Dublin. Mark allied himself to another noted Irish Quaker family, marrying Elizabeth Pim in 6

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY

Alice Madeleine Goodbody, née Pritchard (c.1914 newly widowed)

1777. His son, Robert, in turn married Margaret Pim in 1807. She was my grandfather Ellis’s grandmother. In 1826 Robert Goodbody (1781–1860) set up near Limerick at Clara and, with members of the Pim family, started the family milling business. He later bought out the Pims and, with three of his sons, founded ‘Robert Goodbody and Sons, Millers’. The Goodbodys owned eight substantial houses in Clara. My great grandfather Lewis Frederick’s family home was Drayton Villa, Clara, built for him in 1849. With his brother Jonathan, Lewis Frederick started ‘J & L F Goodbody Ltd’ in the mid-1860s and manufactured jute bags. In their heyday in the 1860s and 1870s, the Goodbodys owned all the mills in Clara, and all the principal houses, as well as 4000 acres of agricultural land. 7

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES Then began the Goodbody ‘diaspora’: a few prosperous Goodbodys remain in Ireland and England, but the successful ones are in the United States, with some scattered about in Australia and New Zealand. When my grandfather Ellis died in 1914, his brothers in the milling business, by then called ‘James Ballantyne’, did not prosper, did not look after my grandmother financially at all well and finally, in 1929, sold out to ‘Rank’, the UK milling monopoly. My father: 1875–1959 My father served in German East Africa throughout the First World War. I have enough material in a tin trunk to fill a book about his experiences in what later became Tanganyika. Suffice it to say that he had a ‘good war’ – he served under Jan Smuts, for whom, as a former enemy, he had huge respect, and for four years he charged around not only Tanganyika and Mozambique, but even Rhodesia and Angola, chasing that other master of the art of war in Africa – the German General von Lettow Vorbeck. Between his thirty-ninth and forty-third years as a youngish commander, my father commanded a brigade column, ‘FitzCol’, and was decorated with the Military Cross and the tsarist Russian order of St Stanislaus. This latter entitled him yearly, so he said, to take his choice of nun from some Russian Orthodox convent, and he bemoaned the fact that the October revolution in 1917 denied him any opportunity to exercise his rights. He also earned the OBE, which he said ‘came up with the rations’. The Tanganyika campaign claimed many more casualties from disease than battle. The ‘little feller’ as he was known in Limerick, was as physically tough as they come, and came out unscathed. He boasted of never having succumbed to malaria (‘mosquitoes as big as elephants my boy’). In the whole of his long life his only illness, liver cancer, killed him in his 84th year, after only six months of incapacity. The young Thomas Otho FitzGerald was known as Tommy until he was ten years old. He then announced that in future he would answer only to Otho, showing, not for the first time, the strong will that was to give him the power to overcome a physical disadvantage. He was barely 5 feet 6 inches tall and needed to boost his personality in order to lead men as a military commander. As a result he was bombastic, certainly – he knew how to assert himself (‘If you follow in my footsteps, my boy, you won’t 8

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY go far wrong’). Of course, he was right. He had all the Victorian qualities that were commonplace then (unlike today): first and foremost honesty and loyalty to his country (Britain), his family and his principles. In this respect, he was a primitive Christian. He believed in and abided by the Mosaic Law, the Ten Commandments, and believed in God’s creation of the world (if the bible said so in Genesis Chapter 1, that’s how it was); if Jesus said ‘Love thy God and love thy neighbour’ – that is what he tried to do. My father’s loyalty to his country and the crown sometimes found embarrassing expression. Once, walking on the Leas at Folkestone, the military band in the bandstand nearby ended its concert and struck up ‘God Save the King’. My father halted in his tracks and came stiffly to attention as he removed his hat, a green ‘pork pie’. I was ten years old, dressed in a grey shirt, shorts and wearing a grey felt school hat. I was slow to stop strolling and slower still to remove my hat. My father, with a sweep of his walking stick, did it for me and it sailed away over the cliffside (I had to nip down the cliffside walk and retrieve it from far below). My father suffered from an inadequate education and this haunted him all his life. He tried over and over again, during his 30 years of retirement, to write an account of his exploits in the Tanganyika campaign and a history of the third KAR; but my mother’s ostensibly good-natured but actually cruel gibes told him that his efforts were useless. He was a slow reader. My mother said he took three years to read Gone with the Wind. My father loved women and they loved him – though not perhaps as much as he claimed: ‘I only have to lift up my little finger and they all come running.’ However, my cousin Michael who attended my father’s cremation at Highgate cemetery in London (the rest of us, including my mother, were scattered worldwide and could not attend), was intrigued by the presence of some quietly dressed elderly women – some of them veiled, who seemed to know nobody, not even each other – silently mourning my father’s loss, then disappearing directly the ceremony ended. I was intrigued by my parents’ marital relations. My mother’s notable statement that when it came to sex she would ‘rather eat an apple’ seemed to set the scene. She would never ever share a bed with him and when they stayed with people and the only bed was double, my mother slept on the floor. 9

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES Perhaps because from the age of eight I was at boarding school or living with relations while my parents and sister were abroad in India or Kenya, and we only met once every three years or so, my relations with my father were, let’s face it, formal to the point of farce. Thus it was that my father, on my last night before entering Wellington for the first time and his last night before embarking for Kenya, in a brown bedroom in the Strand Palace Hotel felt it necessary to address me on the facts of life, thus: Father:

‘Have you ever heard of a feller called Oscar Wilde, my boy?’ Son (surprised): ‘Yes, dad, was not he a playwright? The Importance of Being Ernest, Lady Windermere?’ Father: ‘Yes, well … do not do what he did.’ Son: ‘No, Dad.’ I had no idea what my father was on about and no time to ask around before I was in the boarding house at Wellington. I had to wait to be enlightened by my StJohn cousins that 1930 Christmas. My father was unusually strong. I remember him at 52 years old showing off one summer afternoon when he had taken me out from school at Ashdown. In the garden of the Dorset Arms Hotel, he balanced himself horizontally on one hand on the sundial – body one way, legs together the other, in a straight line. He was supposed to have been fair when he was young, but when I knew him (he was 42 when I was born), his hair was jet black, later grizzling, but always luxuriant and kept in place with his favourite ‘hair wash’, as he called it – bay rum and brilliantine; always trimmed of course – short back and sides. When I was soldiering in Kenya in the late 1940s and I knew we would meet, I always had a haircut. My welcome was always the same: ‘Hello, my boy, when are you going to have your hair cut?’ I was in Addis Ababa in the 1960s during my days as a consulting engineer on a work hunt in the company of Richard Hughes, the architect. In the bank, changing money, we stood in a queue next to an elderly, tall, very fair-skinned and obviously ex-military Indian gentleman. In conversation it turned out that, on retiring from the Indian Army, he had taken a job with Haile Selassie, looking after the emperor’s polo ponies. I told him that my father 10

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY had been the commandant of the small arms school, first at Satara and then at Pachmarhi between 1923 and 1929. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Not that little dapper man who was always asking me when I was going to have my hair cut?’ One early morning, my mother found my father sitting on her stool at her dressing table, with her hand mirror, looking in the big mirror at the back of his head. ‘Audrey, look, I’m going bald!’ ‘You silly old fool,’ she replied, ‘What do you expect? You are over 80 years old!’ Until his mid-seventies, my dapper father was always carefully and smartly dressed and never went out without wearing a hat. In Nairobi, even at night, he would put on his ‘Bombay Bowler’ (a type of solar topee). One year, returning as usual by boat through the Suez Canal to England, there should have been the ceremonial throwing overboard, after leaving Port Said, of the old topee; which would be replaced on return by the purchase of a new one at the famous emporium, Simon Arzt. This time he forgot, so that in July at Folkestone, in a heat wave, he was seen to be wearing it striding down the Leas – pointing out, to my mother’s protests, that ‘it’s much hotter here today than it ever is in Nairobi.’ Father, to the end of his life, always had an evening bath and dressed for dinner – stiff-fronted starched shirt, black tie, black waistcoat (never a cummerbund) and dinner jacket: but in his last ten years these garments gradually wore out and some were discarded and not replaced, so that at the end his evening garb consisted of a pair of grey flannel slacks, any old shirt, a black bow tie (still), a coloured pullover (if it were cold) and his old DJ. Fathers these days think it is a good idea to find someone to teach their children how to, say, play tennis or golf or drive a car. My father, because he was in the army, was taught how to ride and shoot rifle bullets at targets. As a result he was quite a good polo player and an expert rifle shot. We have silver spoons he won to prove it. But he never was taught how to shoot game or birds and soon gave it up. At golf, which he loved to play, he persisted for 50 years having never had a lesson in his life. On the Royal Nairobi Golf Course, where once or twice a week he nearly always had an evening nine-hole round on his own (unless I played with him), a trail of giggling totos often followed him because when he struck the ball, whatever the club other than a putter, he did a kind of lunging forward cricket shot and, at impact, neither foot 11

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES

Colonel Thomas Otho FitzGerald, OBE, MC, Father

touched the ground; he also had a very individual style of putting – with his feet in line with the direction of travel of the ball. I would hate anyone to go away with the impression that my father was not a serious man, or that he was not only loved but 12

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY respected. Once, on one of our journeys from Kenya, we found upon disembarking at Marseilles (which my father always pronounced ‘Marseye’) that Thomas Cook had failed to book us a sleeper on the train to Calais via Paris. As the train was already standing at the platform and it was two hours before departure, my father managed to persuade the SNCF to add another coach. To his all too often demanded ‘Do you know who I am?’ and the invariable reply, ‘No’, the reaction on this occasion was, as it was quite frequently, favourable and he got his way. When my father died and his ashes had been returned to Kenya the KAR mounted a military guard of honour at his funeral service, and rested on their arms reversed and gave him a send off with a volley of musketry. And, at his memorial service at All Saints’ Cathedral, about 200 of his old First World War soldiers along with Sudanese from Kibera, all Muslim, came to bid him farewell. It was 1959 and 41 years after the end of the war, so the youngest must have been 60 years old. My mother: 1890–1966 Catherine Audrey Goodbody married my father in October 1915 from the chief secretary Sir Charles Bowring’s official residence in Nairobi. Apart from a year at a finishing school in Paris, she had lived the first 25 years of her life with her father and mother and two sisters at Thornville, Limerick, a large, comfortable house set in a formal garden. Her only brother, Geoffrey, was an afterthought, born when she was 13 in 1903, and sadly drowned while serving in India in the Royal Tank Corps at the age of 23. Britain then ruled the whole of Ireland and Limerick was in effect a provincial town in a backward and fairly remote part of the British Isles, populated by an alien race with an alien religion. My mother’s family was part of what the Irish called ‘the Ascendancy’, and they moved in a society that could be called ‘county’ but was enlivened for the young by the presence of a British army garrison. These were the halcyon Edwardian days, very pleasant for the comfortably-off bourgeoisie enjoying a carefree social life. My mother’s father, Ellis, was a good-looking, tall, reddish to fair haired man who, while enjoying a reputation as a workaholic in his family milling business of which latterly he was chairman, found time to indulge his daughters and his main hobbies, motor13

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES ing and photography. He died very young, of appendicitis, in 1914 when he was hardly out of his forties. My mother, like her two sisters, never went to school; they were privately educated by governesses at home. These women came and went – my grandfather was partial to a pretty face and my grandmother was not complacent. My mother used to say that the attractive governesses were the best teachers and vice-versa. Whatever the virtues or otherwise of private education, my mother, the brightest of the three, was undoubtedly a very well-educated woman of her time – not perhaps in mathematics and the sciences but certainly in the arts and in the French language. She was an accomplished classical pianist and performed duets with her elder sister, Madge, a violinist. Poor Aunt Peggy, the youngest daughter, was pretty but not very bright, and was not at all kindly treated by her elder sisters. She married Noel Sim, a stolid, self-opinionated infantry soldier, bore this truly awful man three sons – John, Peter and David – and, though earlier diagnosed with heart disease, died riding a bicycle at the age of 45. The three Goodbody girls cut quite a dash in Limerick society during the Edwardian era from 1907 onwards. Madge was by far the most attractive, but my mother Audrey was more beautiful. Madge tended, even from an early age, to be buxom. One of mother’s good stories was of Aunt Madge, in her teens, praying for a bust. ‘The good Lord certainly answered her prayers.’ All the girls’ figures were more greatly admired above the waist than below, being too generously proportioned in their lower limbs to rank as beauties. My mother’s reputation as the more flighty of the sisters did not survive her marriage to my father, but she was notorious during her youth in Limerick. In the days of duennas, or chaperones, my mother came to enjoy the affectionate friendship of cousin Jenny Goodbody, an older married woman who was as keen on the lively life as she was and who chaperoned her to balls. Cousin Jenny turned a blind eye to temporary disappearances from the colourful scenes. One summer season my grandparents went away for six weeks on a tour of the continent, whereupon my mother organized a large party at home at Thornville, which my grandfather knew nothing about until the bills began to roll in. Another time, on the morning after a big party, my mother (who called her father Pater) 14

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY found him at breakfast: ‘Pater, I promised to marry Lieutenant Richardson last night. Please get me out of it! I would rather die!’ How he managed to do so is not recorded. My early days I was born on 1 February 1917. My mother and I lived in a wood and iron cottage in the Nairobi Arboretum. My father was away at the war in Tanganyika. There must have been a European nanny (there were no ayahs in those days). Directly the war ended in November 1918 we were off, just after Christmas, on leave in the Prinz Essen – a spoils-of-war steamship that toiled slowly to England, breaking down with monotonous regularity. By mid-1919 we were back in Nairobi with my father in command of the third battalion, KAR. The CO’s quarter was a wooden bungalow on stilts, now gone but until the 1980s still lived in on what is still called Upper Hill Road. I used to play a lot under the floor of the house among the stilts and was, I remember, soundly told off by one of the African servants for running around there in the buff. My first memory, which must have been when I was about two and a half years old, was of being laid up in a wooden cot under a mosquito net with dysentery. My mother was trying to dose me with a tablespoon of castor oil and I was whanging it for a six all over the bed. It was a good response to bad medical treatment. My memories of childhood in Nairobi between 1920 and 1922 are of unpaved roads and rickshaw rides with my mother. At some period my father must have acquired a T-Model Ford because we made a safari in it to spend a weekend with the old Findlays on their coffee shamba the other side of Kiambu. These were the parents of Ronald, Kenny and Hugh, who spent their lives farming coffee on a ridge overlooking Ruiru and out towards the Mua Hills. Connie, Hugh’s widow, was my mother’s best friend until my mother died in 1966. I had an English nanny; my mother thought I should not copy her table manners. We used to go for walks out to the edge of the Athi Plains where daisies grew among the rocks. We also walked along the Lower Hill Road, which looks down on the cemetery, which is still there, and once there was a funeral going on and my father was attending. I used to swing on the iron chains that 15

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES bordered the road – the remains of them are still there. Phyllis Goodship, younger than me, could tie her shoelaces in a bow; mine came undone on one of those walks and I could not. Nanny said it just showed. It was a great treat to go with mother to tea with the MacGregorRosses. Mrs MacGregor-Ross produced a good tea, but the real thrill was Mr MacGregor-Ross’s telescope at the end of his veranda, which was always trained on some interesting group of animals on the plains (now the Nairobi National Park) and often a pride of lions. One then turned round and went through to the back of his house to a back veranda where Mr MacGregor-Ross, an employee of the Uganda Railway, had a magnificent working model railway on a vast, raised trestle table and one could ‘play trains’. Throughout my childhood my favourite occupation was to play trains, as it was for my cousins Roger and Michael StJohn. We never went looking for wild animals but sometimes came upon them by mistake. We went for a picnic once in a clearing in the forest at Langata. Suddenly my father said that we had better pack up the things quickly and jump in the car. There were three lions at the other end of the clearing. There were children’s parties; we all wore party clothes and topees (sun helmets), even when we were little, and went with our nannies. I remember coming last in a donkey race. I always seemed to be at odds with such creatures. At another time it was a pony – I was sitting on it watching my father playing polo (on what is now the Nairobi Club’s cricket ground). The pony was bored and would not face the game, so I let the brute have its way and turned around in the saddle. This was commended as showing resource and initiative. We went to the Theatre Royal (still there, but now a cinema the other side of the road from the New Stanley) to see a pantomime: Dick Whittington. I fell in love with the principal boy. I claim I knew she was really a girl. My parents were always pretty remote. In the first few years of my life I cannot remember my father being in my life at all (except on that picnic). My life was my nanny, her colleagues and their charges (like Phyllis Goodship). My abiding memory of my mother is her coming to my cot, lifting the mosquito net and kissing me goodnight; a vision of beauty in a sparkling sequinned evening 16

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY dress and smoking an Egyptian cigarette in a holder – the aroma lingering after she had left. My sister, Cynthia, was born on 16 April 1922. The accouchement was at home so I was parked with friends and I sat on a really grown-up loo (long-drop of course) for the first time. My nanny said ‘Now, Master Desmond, your nose is going to be out of joint.’ I was puzzled by this observation and went and asked my mother what it meant. I was never told. She had one of those flushes that starts at the base of the neck and finishes at the hair line. By the next day the nanny had disappeared. We left Kenya that October, apparently for good, in the SS Mar Glen, and got to Granny’s house in Greenhayes, Benson, in time for Christmas. Travel in the 1920s How privileged I was to travel to and fro across the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, the romance of travel only really ended when everyone started to travel by air, and for most people this was in the early 1960s. The funny thing is that no one realized what they were losing at the time. Everyone thought air travel would be exciting. What piffle! The first sea voyage I partly remember was the one back to Mombasa in 1919. I do not remember the name of the ship or the name of the nanny we had with us. This was the voyage during which I contracted, suffered from, recovered from and was out of quarantine for whooping cough (the childish infectious diseases only came to Kenya with Imperial Airways. One had always recovered before one got back to Kenya). We travelled round the Cape and it took about seven weeks. It was usually rough in the Bay of Biscay: often we had to wear life jackets for the whole 20 hours or so it took to pass. This was a penance, especially for a child; the things consisted of four cubical chunks of cork – two in the front and two behind, sewn into canvas cloth and secured by tapes tied around the waist. This was a wise precaution on one morning when my nanny and I were sitting in deck chairs on the open deck, but in the lee of the ‘house’. Suddenly the boat gave a lurch to about 30 degrees and Nanny and I slid (in our deck chairs) right across the deck and right into the scuppers. If it had not been for the bulky life jacket I might have been catapulted between the deck railings and into the boiling sea. 17

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES We called in and went ashore at all the South African and other south and east coast ports (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Lourenço Marques and Beira). The one I remember was Durban, where there was a fascinating aquarium and we went on a drive; from the top of the hill behind the port we looked down on the harbour and saw our Union-Castle ship berthed with its blue-grey hull and red and black funnel. The ‘final’ departure from Kenya was memorable to a five-yearold. First, there was the train journey on the old Uganda Railway: the leisurely pace; the dinner at Makindu and breakfast at Voi (no restaurant car); the strolls on wayside platforms to watch the locomotive taking on water; the dust (the track was not ballasted). In those days the train left in the early afternoon and passed through the Athi Plains, teeming with game, at dusk. All the plains’ game was in view, nearly always a pride of lion and rhino – I do not remember elephant. In the early dark we saw snowcapped Kilimanjaro, then baobab trees, coconut palms and African women and girls naked to the waist. The stops at night were weakly lamp-lit and mysterious, but there was always a noisy flurry of people selling roasted maize cobs, tea and coffee. Mombasa was a noisy, shabby, dusty scramble of a town with a tramway from Kilindini across to Fort Jesus. We stayed in a hotel near Treasury Square, which has long disappeared. We had a room with a balcony overlooking the busy street. There were no berths at Kilindini, only lighter wharves, and you went by rowing boat to embark via a companionway. The handsome Mar Glen at anchor on the sparkling water; the palm trees and pretty houses on the Likoni shore; the bustling tug boats; the smart whiteuniformed harbour officials; the gaily clad throng of laughing black people with their gleaming white teeth – all made for an unforgettable memory for a five-year-old. We travelled with mountains of luggage. Apart from hand luggage for convenience in the train and hotel, there were three categories, all labelled: ‘Cabin’, ‘Wanted on Voyage’ and ‘Not Wanted on Voyage’. There were wicker baskets and mysterious canvas bags, but mostly trunks – tin trunks, long and low and slinky, wooden crates and huge, humped back leather trunks. All this was loaded in rope slings, by crane, into and out of lighters by ship’s derricks, into cargo holds – vast caverns from main deck to 18

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY ballast level. At Port Said (if you were going that way) you would change your wardrobe from tropical to temperate and vice versa by being admitted to the hold where the ‘Wanted on Voyage’ baggage was stored. We would then repack the trunk with the unwanted and usually dirty clothes. In the 1920s and 1930s even first-class accommodation was awful; only the super-rich got beds and private bath/toilet; for other travellers, of course, it was bunks in tiers. Ablution accommodation was communal; bathing was in salt water and there was salt water soap that did not really work. The baths were huge and the water came out of the valves in an enormous and frightening gush. Cabins had wash basins with fresh hot and cold water. There was no air-conditioning, so the cabins were sweltering hot as far as the Mediterranean and then got colder and colder. In the Red Sea most people dragged their bedding up on deck and slept hard but cool; in the early morning the crew would come round with hoses and squeegees, so you had to rise and shine pretty early with your bedding to avoid being washed down. The food was nearly always excellent – even in the third class or steerage. Drink was duty-free and cheap, as were cigarettes. The social life was rather too organized for our tastes, but normal people had a lot of fun. Some of the oldies played cards – usually bridge – from 9.00 a.m. to midnight with intervals for meals. Otherwise, there was swimming – usually in a makeshift canvas pool – deck games like deck quoits or shuffle board and sometimes cricket, clay pigeon shooting or just reading and dozing under a shady double awning. The big occasions of the voyage were the ‘Crossing of the Line’ ceremony and the ‘End of Voyage’ fancy dress party, but housey housey or dancing took place nearly every night, to a live band. There was always a church service on Sunday morning, taken by the captain, and we sang ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’.

19

2 England and India

M

ost of my ocean voyages as a child included hideous suffering from seasickness in rough weather. This one to Marseilles, in 1922, was trouble free until the last night when the ship started to roll fairly viciously. My mother had half finished packing a large trunk and had left it open in the alleyway between the two tiers of bunks while she and my father went to the saloon for dinner. My sister was in a lower bunk, I in an upper. The cabin stewardess came to my parents’ table in a fluster and addressed my mother: ‘Excuse me ma’am, but your little boy has fallen out of his bunk on top of the clothes in the open trunk.’ My parents were travelling without a nanny at the time and the unwelcome responsibility of looking after two children – one an infant in arms and the other a five-year-old – was taxing my mother’s patience to the limit. We were in England from December 1922 until October 1923 – ten months packed with incident. Christmas was at Benson – with Aunt Madge and Uncle Tudor (and Roger and Michael, our first cousins) – at the Old Mill House, and with Granny Goodbody, close by at Greenhayes. Cynthia began to exhibit her early childhood bloody-mindedness (it lasted only until she was three). She would not eat eggs and hated Letty, the StJohn nanny. I did too: I was convinced she was a witch. Father was posted to regimental duties at Shorncliffe, near Folkestone (back to his teenage haunts). Before we went there we spent a fortnight with Uncle Maurice and Aunt Lucy in a rented holiday house near Haslemere. This is my first recollection of Nesta, my dearly beloved first cousin. While waiting to get into our rented house at Shorncliffe, we spent a month at the Clifton Gardens Private Hotel in Folkestone 20

ENGLAND AND INDIA and it was there that there occurred the episode of the flying plate. There was no nanny (she must have been on leave) and my mother was in a bad mood, doing what she least liked – looking after my nine-month-old sister. Cynthia was at her bottle – Nestlé’s condensed milk, watered and warm. I was scooping out the remaining gooey milk from the tin and eating it. It was lovely! Mother told me to ‘stop that disgusting slurping’. I did not. She threw a china plate at me. It missed. I held this shameful episode against her at intervals – whenever it seemed necessary to score an unfair point in an argument. She always denied it. My family seemed to be rotten at hitting targets with flying plates. My sister Cynthia relates that when her husband Arthur complained about the food at some meal, she flung a full plate of it at him. It missed and hit the wall. That was the difference between my family and my first wife’s – the Braynes. Old Ma Brayne was always throwing things – usually at her servants – and never missed. At Shorncliffe I got myself run over by the local GP at the garden gate. My father had told me to go across the road, open the gate and stay there. I ran back straight under the doctor’s wheels. I had several severe abrasions to my knees and both ankles were sprained. It took a long time to persuade me that my legs were better and that I could limp across the veranda to collect my plate of chocolate cake. In summer 1923 my father was told that he was to be posted to Burma for three years. What to do about little Desmond? We went again to stay with my aunt and uncle at the Old Mill House. My father and mother had a powwow with them and my grandmother. My future was hanging in the balance. They were at it in the ‘smoking room’ while Michael and I were shut away in the drawing room, which was hardly ever used except for playing the upright piano. Michael eased the tension by playing a tune. What joy! I could go to Burma (I suspect that little Desmond being dumped on them from the age of six was too daunting to face). We sailed in the troopship Dorsetshire from Southampton in October 1923. After a blissful interval, since the famous sacking incident when Cynthia was born, we had a nanny again. The ship was due to sail at 5.00 p.m. My father had (madly) given the nanny permission to visit her parents on the other side of Southampton, across the ferry, and she took Cynthia with her. They were not long gone when the ship’s departure was rescheduled to 21

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES 3.00 p.m. Panic! My father knew the nanny’s parents’ address and we all, Dad, Mum and I, bundled into a taxi and tore across the town dodging trams (the roads in Southampton were shared with rail tracks then), did the ferry trip, grabbed Nanny and Cynthia and made it back across town and to the ship just in time. I suppose it was sensible really – better if we all missed the boat together than sail away to Burma without Cynthia. The ship was under military discipline: ships’ bells were out, bugle calls were in; at officers’ meal times they played ‘Officers’ Wives Eat Puddings and Pies, for the Troops it’s only Skilly’; and we had reveille and last post. Somewhere near Aden my father had a cable saying that his Burma posting was off – we were to disembark at Bombay. So India it was, not Burma, and father became Commandant, Small Arms School, Satara. Satara was a big, bustling, smelly, colourful, native town with a raja and elephants about 100 miles east of Poona. It was not high enough above sea level to have a decent climate; it was sticky hot all the time and pretty horrible during the monsoon rains when the heavens opened for hours and days on end for two months. There was no cooling down, like in most hot places when it rains, it remained just as hot and sticky as ever. There was ‘plague’ all the time I was there, but that was in the town so we were all right because the military camp was several miles outside and had its own buildings and special bungalows, club and golf course for the British officers. The students were Indian Army and segregated. Little Desmond was not allowed to make friends with the British NCO’s children, so my friend was the son of my father’s syce (groom) and he and I went riding all over the cantonment on ponies. Then his mother set his bedclothes on fire by putting a night light under the bed and he got third degree burns. I saw my mother treating them with gentian violet; then he was hospitalized and I saw him no more. I spoke fluent what was then called Hindustani (Hindi) with him, of which later I remembered only a few scattered words. Later, when I continued to ride alone, it was a pity he was not there because I once fell off with my foot caught in a stirrup and was dragged, bumping along in the dust, for quite a long way while the pony very sensibly walked home. Satara was great for snakes. I was always on the alert for Kipling’s deadly karaite, the tiny dust snake, but never saw one. 22

ENGLAND AND INDIA The spitting cobra was common. The first and only time I saw my mother nude was because of one. One evening she rushed screaming out of the bathroom, which opened straight into the sitting room where I was having my supper. There was no piped plumbing: the bhisti brought the hot and cold water in four-gallon petrol cans and you mixed your water in a galvanized tin bath that sat in a depression in the floor, with an outlet pipe to discharge the used bath water when you tipped up the bath. It was up this outlet that the cobra had come to settle comfortably in the folds of my mother’s bath towel. She spotted it just in time before picking up the towel. The second time I encountered a cobra was when my father was teaching me to swim in the covered swimming pool in the botanical gardens: there was one in the rafters of the roof in the men’s changing room. When I lost my Indian friend I took up with the six year-old daughter of one of my father’s officers. Her name was Angela Stott. We did things the Indian children did, like making kites and then flying them, and sailing little paper boats on pools. She was a pretty little girl, so it was fun when her parents allowed us to share a cooling cold bath on hot afternoons. My mother solved little Desmond’s schooling problem by teaching me herself with the aid of Mrs Andrews, the childless wife of a fellow officer who lived in an adjacent bungalow. Mrs Andrews taught me arithmetic and writing (in copybooks) and mother taught me geography, French, spelling and the Bible. Mother thought I ought to learn that Galileo was right about the earth going around the sun and not vice versa. I remember well how thick I was about this and how, as the orange in hand went round the oil lamp the juice started to squirt out of it as her exasperation mounted. When I joined my first proper school, Ashdown House, Forest Row, Sussex, in the summer of 1925, I was glad of Mrs Andrews’s grounding in arithmetic. I was equally grateful for mother’s inculcation of the Bible when I was bidden by Miss Hipkin to learn and recite an eight verse psalm, and the King James-type English was already familiar. Geography was a bit wobbly – my mother had not boned up on the post-1914–18 changes and had taught me that Christiania was the capital of Norway and some erroneous things about Petrograd and Archangel. But at spelling she was a 23

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES star; I never had much trouble with that from the word go. She had to expostulate on spelling when I was quite old, and comment on my letters home: ‘My dear mum and dad, I hope you are quite well and having a nice time. I have just had the ticket for my birth on the Llandaff Castle going out to Mombasa in July.’ ‘Dear Desmond, Your birth took place 16 years ago, as I only too well remember. Your ticket was for a berth.’ English history was not on the curriculum, but I was fascinated by the visual evidence of an ancient civilization in India (the East Africa I saw was tops on wildlife but bare of history). There was an ancient deserted Mogul fort and one could see where the defenders had poured boiling oil on the attackers. The raja was histrionically inclined: when he celebrated we were all garlanded. The plague resulted in many deaths and the pageantry of the processions, sometimes with elephants and music, to the burning ghats was very exciting. My parents paid visits to Delhi and Agra and brought back photos of the Red Fort and Taj Mahal, and told me about the Indian Mutiny. My father shot a tiger from a machan. It was terrorizing the villagers (the usual story). He also shot wild peacocks and we ate them. Although my father knew everything about small arms, he was unsure of his ability as a lecturer, so he wrote his lectures out and then learnt them by heart. I used to hear him practising his recitations: ‘And now I come to the fifteenth of the seventeen types of stoppage of the Lewis Gun, and …’. Can you imaging the appalling tedium of it? My sister and I shared an Indian ayah. I suppose she had a name but she was just called ‘Ayah’. She was a middle-aged, comfortably built, betel-nut chewing, sari-clad woman who was unobtrusive all the time, not showing any apparent affection or interest in her charges. But on the day she came back from a holiday visit to her family she showed me, with great pride, a group family photograph, in the centre of which was seated a very distinguished elderly gentleman. ‘That’s my late father,’ she said, ‘he was sent to the burning ghats the next day.’ ‘Do you mean he is sitting there dead?’ I cried. She nodded. I whipped the photo from her grasp and ran to my mother. ‘Look, mummy’ I cried, ‘the old man is dead.’ My mother was cross but did no more than berate the ayah, who must have been devoted to our family because afterwards, for 24

ENGLAND AND INDIA some years, letters would come to my mother from Poona, dictated to a scribe, giving her news and keeping in touch. Looking back at what wonderful nannies African women make, I envy those who had them a lot, but in my childhood no African woman was ever seen in a European household. I hated my first two English nannies and I do not remember the nannies in India before Ayah. Nesta’s nanny was affectionate, if hyper-sentimental: all that ‘little lamb, little ram’ stuff cannot have been good for us. Cynthia’s Nanny Barnes was the only one who was sensible and good-hearted; I must have been nine or ten when she was around. My time in India was drawing to a close. If I have not mentioned my sister Cynthia very much it is because, when I left, she was still less than three years old. She did, however, come in very handy on one occasion when I was faced with the problem of what to do with the tomato soup, cold and congealing, behind which I had been sitting for a good half hour. It was the now blessedly forgotten era when you ate up or else: ‘You are not to leave the table until you have eaten that soup!’ Brilliant wheeze! Cynthia was in her cot, having her afternoon rest and no one was about. Ever so carefully, spoon by spoon, not a drop on the bib, I fed the whole revolting mess to my sister who absorbed it with no obvious show of disgust. ‘Oh, you are a good little boy! You can go off and play now.’ I was a deceitful little sod, but not without a commendable demonstration of resource and initiative. My father had entered the second phase of his 60-year battle to succeed at golf (the first was when he helped to start the Royal Nairobi Golf Club before the First World War) and it was time to initiate his son into its intricacies at Satara. He cut down a set of hickory shafted clubs for me and we had nine-hole encounters – more, of course, with our surroundings than with each other. It was a case of the blind being led by the overconfident blind. The best bit was being allowed into the club with my father after golf, for ginger pop and chips with tomato sauce, or ice cream. As a child I could not set foot in the place on my own or with other children, say Angela. Major Beckwith seemed to be always on the prowl to defend the sacred precincts from juvenile contamination. Major Beckwith, a bachelor, had retired from the Indian army and stayed behind to live in Satara; he was a fierce man, red faced with shaggy eyebrows like an admiral and a formidable moustache. He 25

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES was by no means as bad as he looked, for when he heard I was being packed off to school in England he bid me a gruff goodbye and tipped me 100 rupees (the equivalent then to £8 sterling or 14 bottles of Johnny Walker – my father used to grumble like anything at having to pay 11/6 a bottle, which is more than £240 at present-day values). The time came at last in February 1925 (my eighth birthday) for my father to take me by train from Poona to Bombay to join my uncle, Noel Sim, my Aunt Peggy (mother’s sister) and their sons, John (5) and Peter (3) in the SS City of Paris back to Liverpool. The night train journey was exciting. Bombay, like all Indian cities, was stiflingly hot and smelly, but we stayed a day and a night at the Taj Mahal Hotel, a marvellously palatial marble palace with a grand staircase, lofty ceilings and slowly revolving fans. My father dumped me on board with my aunt (I knew the family already – they had been to stay with us in Satara for some months and Peter had cried incessantly because of the sticky heat) and went off to buy me some films for my much prized Brownie 2 box camera. As usual (unbelievably) the departure time was again changed and my last sight of my dad was of him throwing the films onto the deck over the widening gap between ship and quay and waving goodbye as we moved slowly away. The Indian Ocean, Aden, hot old Red Sea, Suez, the canal, Port Said – a bit of seaside swimming in the Mediterranean – Simon Arzt’s emporium, the fortune tellers, the bumboats, gully gully men, de Lessep’s statue, young boys diving off the ship’s rails for pennies thrown into the sea. This was all familiar stuff from my journey with my parents and Cynthia in 1922. The plus was that although John was a bit young, he was a friendly boy who was very athletic. He excelled at swimming, battling it out over the pool on the greasy pole, deck quoits and shuffle board (and went on later to become a physical training king in the army). Uncle Noel was at his best on a sea journey. He was great at organizing deck entertainments and was a bustling ‘keep-fit 50 times round the deck before breakfast’ bloke – until it got rough between Marseilles and Gibraltar and then he showed his brutal side. I was a martyr to seasickness and wished to stay in my bunk, drink a little beef tea (Bovril), eat a water biscuit and die in peace. It was not allowed! Uncle Noel would storm into the 26

ENGLAND AND INDIA cabin: ‘Bad for you to loll about in this stuffy cabin – up on deck with you at once and get some fresh air into your lungs; a bit of strong exercise – do you the world of good; seasickness is all in the mind.’ So up I had to go, my head swimming with vertigo, bouncing from one side of the passageway to the other, tripping up the companionway onto deck, only to dash to the lee rail to throw up the Bovril and water biscuits. Rescued by kind Aunt Peggy with a deck-chair and warm travelling rug I would watch the rough sea toss and slide as the ship pitched and rolled. The steward had more beef tea and water biscuits – repeat routine. In 1922 we had disembarked at Marseilles, father had done his ‘do you not know who I am’ bit with the French railway and we took the train to Paris. We stayed in our compartment as the ‘Ceinture’ transported us to the Gare du Nord and then Calais – followed by a mercifully calm channel crossing that ended up at Victoria station and the comfort of the Grosvenor Hotel. This time we stayed aboard the City of Paris bound for Gibraltar, the Bay of Biscay and Liverpool. By pure chance I just managed to avoid being left behind on the quayside at Marseilles. We had been ashore, gone up the funicular railway, ‘done’ Nôtre Dame de la Garde and returned to the ship. Idly watching the goings-on on the quayside, I spotted a French woman selling balloons at the end of the ship’s bow. I had a few French francs so, in a jiffy, was down the gangway and off to the balloon lady to buy a couple. Sauntering back to the gangway, I suddenly noticed Aunt Peggy shouting at me hysterically from the deck. Then, a bit perturbed, I noticed that the gangway had disappeared and the ship was starting to inch away from the quay. Luckily, the ship’s crew, unlike my aunt, were not having hysterics. They moved the gangway back into place and I scrambled aboard with my balloons. I also got a bit of a bollocking from my uncle, who was much more embarrassed by my aunt’s hysterical performance than by my bad and inexcusable behaviour. We docked at Liverpool in March 1925. It was bitterly cold on deck and I had this new sensation of seeing my breath for the first time: but the sun was shining. On the quayside there was a solitary, well-dressed, black-suited, elderly gentleman, wearing one of those slightly unusual high-crowned bowler hats, like the ones the commissionaires wear at the Berkeley Hotel. The gentleman’s was 27

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES black, not brown, but to my consternation and then my growing fascination and delight, I watched this hat as it took on a life of its own and moved backwards and forwards on its wearer’s head. It became clear that this old man had a marvellous and, to me, new and unreal facility: he could move his scalp, and thus his hat, backwards and forwards without seeming to move his head at all. My cousin John was equally mesmerized by this performance and was even more delighted when Uncle Noel told him that the old gentleman, Brigadier Sim, was his grandfather. He had come to meet us and accompany us in the train to London, where we would assemble at his house in Montpelier Square (this was also the posh address of Roger’s and Michael’s Uncle Dick and Aunt Peggy StJohn, as I learnt a bit later). Here I parted from the Sim family (not forever by any means) and was shunted over to the StJohns: first in a taxi to Cadogan Place, where my Uncle Tudor had a room in Aunt Carrie Rickman’s porticoed, stucco, Belgravia-type house (with a lift). When one went to Aunt Carrie’s house, as my cousins Michael and Roger often (and I sometimes) did, we seldom saw Aunt Carrie. Kind female staff would welcome us, sometimes urge us to have a bath and a change, but always gave us a sumptuous meal (usually breakfast as we would have come off some night train). Then, at the door would be Shepherd the chauffeur, who drove an absurdly old-fashioned maroon Rolls Royce, and he would take us, normally, to Paddington for Wallingford, or sometimes to Victoria for the school train. This time I waited for Uncle Tudor, who would be on his way home to Benson from his job as clerk of the vote office in the House of Commons. He would collect me, with my trunk and suitcases, and accompany me to Paddington where we would join the train for Reading and Cholsey. There we would change again onto the branch shuttle to Wallingford, where Mr Walters would meet us in his ramshackle taxi and convey us to the Old Mill House and into the comforting arms of dear Aunt Madge.

28

3 My school years in England, 1925–35

O

ver the years I have read with fascination accounts of the tribulations suffered by small boys torn from their families in places like India, and sent off at the age of eight to a strange country and brutal schools where other boys bullied them and sadistic schoolmasters beat them endlessly. They, of course, then blamed this for their subsequent aberrant behaviour. One must, of course, believe the stories of the bullying and the beatings, but I confess to some irritation at the current fashion to blame everyone and everything but yourself for your faults. ‘Victim’ of empire My own experience was typical. I was eight when I was ‘torn from my family’. Ashdown House was a brutal school. There was bullying by the boys (but not of me). Arthur Evill, Jack Clayton and Miss Hipkin, and one or two others whose names I forget, were possibly sadists. John Adlercron, a boy, was a horrible bully. Why then, I ask myself, can I not only not remember having any worries about what might happen to me when I got to England or when I was on the City of Paris, or any apprehensions about being made part of a new family at the Old Mill House, but not even any fear of the future on the eve of joining the first school of my life, and a boarding school at that? Perhaps I was an unusually insensitive, cold fish – taking it for granted that someone would always see that I was fed, watered, cosseted and loved. Whatever the reason, I do not fit in at all with these hard doneby ‘victims of empire’. I have no complaints. Fate did not deal me 29

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES a rotten hand. My life was anything but boring and my various families – my own mother and father, Aunt Madge and Uncle Tudor StJohn, Uncle Maurice and Aunt Lucy FitzGerald – were so welcoming and loving that it never even occurred to me that I might be in some way abandoned. Perhaps, best of all, my grandmother on my mother’s side, Alice Goodbody, née Pritchard, was the one I relied on most. School in England I settled in with Aunt Madge and Uncle Tudor in March 1925. Roger was in his second year at Wellington and Michael was at the end of his second year at Ashdown. My first term there was due to start in early May; unfortunately, Michael went off without me because I was struck down with measles. Dr Nelson visited me as I lay comatose in a darkened room, but I made a good recovery and was able to join Ashdown in early June, a month late. It took a bit of getting used to. The lowest class, the seventh form (the top form was first not sixth) was taken by Miss Hipkin, who took us in all subjects (except maths, which was Mr Fraser’s, and French, which belonged to Jack Clayton) and whose chosen form of torture was hitting one on the knuckles with a ruler and whose weapon was sarcasm. Miss Hipkin’s weapon was to make you look silly. She was the one who accused me of slouching and got hold of a thin beech branch about three feet long and made me sit at meals with it behind my back and in front of my elbows. I was to do that for a week, but Mrs Evill stopped it after a day. It was not only the lessons. I was not used to the extraordinary variations of time between sunrise and sunset. This was June and it stayed light until 10.00 p.m. at night, yet we were sent to bed at 6.30 p.m. Mrs Evill used to try and catch us talking. We called her ‘Pussy-foot’. If we were heard it was six strokes of the cane from Mr Evill, who did the beating. It was difficult to go to sleep in full daylight. On the other hand, for a new boy with as yet no friends, bed was a sort of refuge from a hostile and unfriendly world. I think it was the Old Ashdown cricket match that turned the corner for me. Aunt Madge and Uncle Tudor came down to take Michael and me out and there was a smashing tea with strawberries and cream. Soon afterwards Michael’s cousin, Audley Chapman, took us out one Sunday and drove us to Eastbourne in 30

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 her open Bentley. She and her deaf husband were very rich and had a grand house up on the hill overlooking the Royal Ashdown Golf Course. They had a Rolls and several other cars as well as the Bentley, and a butler and numerous footmen and maids staffed the house. There was a son (Stewart), who had TB and died young, and two daughters, all a lot older than me. After a bit I made some friends, began to enjoy games and found that I was good at lessons. I was either first or second in every form right to the top. Arthur Evill, despite his propensity to wig you by the short hair in front of your ears, was a marvellous maths teacher. Eric Formby, the deputy head, was an excellent classics man. I suppose there were good English and history teachers; the rest were mediocre. Despite excessive caning we were happy. Other punishments were dire, especially ‘cubes’ where you had to cube an ‘eight digit number’, and a punishment of five ‘cubes’, which was quite common, took an age to do and to get right. On the positive side there were rewards for good behaviour – ‘credits’. If you got credits it could qualify you for treats like going to Tunbridge Wells for the Kent versus Sussex county cricket match, which meant more strawberries and cream. It was a very small school, between 50 and 55 pupils. Most other schools were bigger, but we held our own pretty well at cricket and football (association). The food was excellent. The teaching staff took charge of different tables. Mrs Evill supervised the young ones. Mr Evill occupied the top table and, instead of conversation, we had games. In the geography game one went round the table in turn and if the boy next to you said ‘Edinburgh’ you had to say, very quickly, the name of a town in Britain beginning with the last letter, H – ‘Harrow’, say. It was quite fun. Miss Darke was the music mistress and, according to my cousin Michael who was a success at the piano, a good one. But she was ugly and greedy. When she carved roast pork for the eight boys at her table she hogged all the crackling for herself. Physical exertion of various sorts was the order of almost every day. In summer it was cricket and swimming, in winter soccer and, in the Lent term, rugby and golf – played on the school course: nine holes, very ad hoc among the cow pats. We were all boy scouts. There was a grand parade where new boys were initiated and had to swear: ‘I promise on my honour to do my duty to God 31

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES and the King, to help other people at all times and to obey the Scouts Law.’ This is the only oath I have ever sworn, even when I joined the army. Twice a week all year round on Tuesdays and Fridays Sergeant Dance came by train from Croydon to take us in ‘physical jerks’: ‘latest Swedish drill exercises’ as he called it. He wore PE shoes, dark trousers and a sweatshirt – a small, lithe man with cropped grey hair and moustache. We did ordinary exercises, exercises with Indian clubs, and he piled boys in tiers above one another to form pyramidal tableaux. He gave us little moral lectures and one of his sayings sticks with me: ‘duty is duty and duty must be done.’ I dreaded fire drill if one’s dormitory was the front or back room on the third floor of this beautiful Georgian mansion. Each room had a fire-escape consisting of a canvas tube chute stowed rolled up under the window. When you lifted the frame up, the chute unfolded and fell to the ground. How it worked was that the boys already down held it out with the end horizontal, so you just slid down one by one. But if you were head of dorm you had to go first, with no one at the bottom to hold it out. This meant climbing hand over hand down on a silk rope inside the chute, and often one slipped and fell to the bottom, where you usually did not break a leg only because the heap of spare canvas at the bottom broke your 30-foot fall. One Lent term the skies were blue and the weather freezing, so for six weeks we only skated and played icehockey. Each evening Mr Evill hosed the pond for a pristine surface the next morning. He could supply half the boys with ‘fen runners’ and the rest of us sent home for boots and skates. Arthur Evill was paid to get boys into public school, but he was not snobbish about which of them the boys went to. The parents chose and only very seldom chose Eton or Winchester. Ashdown teaching was good and there were few failures. Evill liked the navy and sending boys to RNC Dartmouth. He was pleased that Michael made it. When my parents chose Wellington he said: ‘Why do not you go for a scholarship? You might be lucky.’ There was no special preparation – I just went to Wellington and sat the exam. I (or my dad) was not lucky, but it was an honourable failure: ‘proxime accessit’ – roughly meaning ‘next to success’. Now, of course, most of the boys try for Eton. I joined Wellington College in September 1930. Blucher was my 32

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 dormitory, and C. M. Hughes-Games my housemaster. New boys started in Stocken’s Holding House until rooms were found for them in various houses or dormitories (there were five houses where parents paid more for the illusion of home with the housemaster’s wife as ‘mother’). The 11 dormitories were presided over by tutors, nearly all bachelors and hardly any of them homosexual. There were a few like Basil Readman, who was rich and had his own private house in Wokingham. He was a talented teacher and brilliant on Egyptian history and hieroglyphics, but if you misbehaved he used the ‘tawse’ – a Scottish implement of torture comprised of a leather thong that you received on the palm of your hand. My Uncle Tudor hated Hughes-Games because he did not want my cousin, Roger, as head of dormitory. One of his jobs as tutor was to prepare me, among others, for confirmation into the Anglican faith. Considering he was agnostic, he did this very well and imbued me with a religious fervour that unfortunately faded on the day of my confirmation. It was a glorious, warm summer day with about 40 of us keyed up to a pitch of ecstatic expectation at 11.00 a.m. on Whit Sunday in the chapel for the ‘laying on of hands’. Aunt Madge and Uncle Tudor had come from Henley and were taking me back for Sunday lunch at Southwood. At 10.30 a.m. we – the whole school, staff and lots of visitors – were assembled in chapel. The organ stopped playing an anthem and the headmaster walked to the altar rails: ‘I regret to tell you that his Grace, the Bishop of Oxford, has been delayed. The ceremony is postponed until 12 o’clock. Will the congregation forgive us – the weather is good and it will be pleasant to stroll on the South Front’ (a stretch of lawn adjacent to the chapel). Well, to cut a long story short, the Bishop eventually turned up at about 12.30. It was clear that his chaplain had failed to alert him and he had no sermon prepared. Even so, religious fervour might still have survived had it not been for Uncle Tudor who huffed, puffed and growled through his tracheotomy his fury at having had his day spoilt, his Sunday lunch delayed and the food ruined – overcooked sirloin and flat Yorkshire pudding. Normally, at Wellington, you did not make friends outside your dormitory or house. So, although I was at Stocken’s with Digby Tatham-Warter for a bit and actually sat next to him at the new 33

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES boy’s table in hall, we were never friends. However, this hardly explains why, from the day when we were first in Kenya together and for the next 40 years, he steadfastly ignored me, refused to acknowledge our close association at Wellington in 1930 and would never have anything to do with the Old Wellingtonian Society of East Africa, which Peter Vernon-Evans and I ran for about 20 years. Nine new boys were destined for Blucher in September 1930. We soon graduated from Stocken’s to the Blucher annex, prior to getting rooms in the dormitory. Here we were housed – as later in the dormitory – separately in small rooms furnished with a bed, a desk with chair and a cushioned settle under the window, under which ran the hot water heating pipes (no radiators). The partitions were about eight feet high, but did not reach the ceiling, so one heard snores. Most boys added a basket easy chair with cushions and hung pictures. I favoured highly coloured prints of Scottish scenes with highland cattle. Our clothes, except suits, flannel bags and blazer, were stored in the central laundry and we were issued with clean shirts and underwear twice weekly. Sports togs were kept in our lockers in the changing room. A surly, unfriendly ‘dormitory man’ Ernest Smith made our beds and cleaned our shoes. His other job, as chapel sexton, was to toll the warning ball for service and, on Sundays, in a black gown and long white wand, walk in front of whoever was going to preach. Our early segregation made making friends very easy. Peter ap Ellis, who followed his group captain father into the RAF, was my best friend. Closely following was Dick Levett, who was later at Cambridge, as was Lanoe Drew. R. O. F. Boyd, A. C. McGrath, Gerald O’Grady, Pery Standish and Christopher Gell, whose younger brother Nigel eventually became a sapper with R. O. F. Boyd and me, were also friends. Christopher Gell later made it to minor fame and great distinction. He joined the Indian Civil Service and had already established radical political tendencies, which made him uncomfortable in the ICS, when he contracted a disease that confined him to an iron lung for the rest of his short life. He went to live in South Africa, where he took up journalism and, from his iron lung, issued a stream of fiery articles attacking the apartheid regime. I was a bit handicapped by being unable to ask friends to stay 34

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 (my family being in Kenya) and the only time I was asked to stay was with Dick Levett. His father was a farmer at Brenchley in Kent; he had a sister called Josephine and a cousin who was a wicket keeper in the Kent county cricket side. Peter Ellis had a pretty awful uncle and a truly dreadful aunt who used to ask me out with Peter to lunch in Ascot. The attraction was that a lot of Bertram Mills’s circus animals were quartered in a big field adjacent to the hotel where we had lunch. The spartan regime actually worked well for most boys. I do not know if a schoolboy is a good judge of his school. Certainly, we all thought that Wellington was the tops and gave it all our loyalty. Looking back I think it was good, good of its kind in the period. Certainly, there were some truly awful ushers (masters), which is hardly surprising when the pay was derisory and you had to have a vocation, but there were a number of stars among the staff. Macdermott, Buckley and Potter were brilliant maths teachers. Potter was young, just down from Cambridge and a distinguished ‘night climber’ who had scaled the pinnacles of King’s College Chapel. He continued this hobby at Wellington – I remember his shadow flitting past my window in the early hours when he was off up the spire of the Butterfield Chapel. H. S. Scott was an inspired Latin and Greek master and had us writing Greek verse. His eccentricity was saving paper. He would dish out strips of paper, always already written on one side, and sometimes on both, on which you had to fit in the answers to his questions. A. H Lewis was the best science man; Kemp and Payne were not world beaters, but they got us through the school certificate exams. Monsieur Albert Noblet (French) was especially good at that too. Part of the exam was dictation, and you always got good marks because his diction was so marvellous. Braunholtz and horrible Wanstall got us through German. Tallboys was famous for getting boys history scholarships to Oxford. F. B. Malim ‘the Master’ taught divinity. He was the epitome of the dry pedagogue. He tried, but seldom succeeded, in remembering one’s name. Prince Albert founded Wellington in 1853 as a school for officers’ sons and it is still supposed to have a military tendency. George Bernard Shaw, invited to speak there, declined: ‘I will not address the inmates of that damned military prison.’ F. B. Malim was reputedly a pacifist, or the generals on the governing board 35

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES frequently complained of his lack of enthusiasm for all things military. This was strange, as one of his many children – a number of them adopted – was in the navy. At any rate, my father assumed I would follow his footsteps into the army and, when I wrote to him saying that I did not want to, my father wrote to Malim about this and said so in a letter to me. I thought this was a joke. After all, had not boys actually heard ‘the Master’ refer to the RMC Sandhurst as ‘that hell over the hill’? Anyway, in due course I was called to his presence. It was at once obvious he had done a lot of homework. However, the long and short of it all was that he persuaded me that I should join the army. How can I fail to believe now, after all these years, that this was a great headmaster of a pretty good school? It was not recognized at the time, but there was an outstanding musical tradition in the making that thrived outside but in parallel with the academic curriculum. W. K. Stanton, the head of music, had the whole school in training, singing in chapel. He and the assistant organists played the magnificent chapel organ marvellously and on the last Sunday of every term we would march out of the chapel to the last movement of Brahms’s first symphony. A. C. Lewis, who eventually became head of the Royal Academy of Music, was a dormitory prefect in Blucher in my first term. ‘FitzGerald, you have a nice treble voice. You will attend choir practice tomorrow evening at 5.00 p.m. in the chapel,’ he said. ‘Lewis, I understand that the choir is voluntary. I will not be there.’ These were the silliest words I ever uttered and they deprived me of a lot of pleasure and the beginning of a musical education. Apart from Lewis, W. K. Stanton later conducted the BBC Midland Orchestra, a boy called Sayers became a concert pianist and another called Royalton Kisch conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Holidays in England Looking back, I suppose I was disadvantaged compared with my cousins Roger and Michael StJohn, certainly in the important matters of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. It was my Uncle Maurice who recognized this missing element in my education as a young man – rather late as it happens, for I was 17. He had taken me out from Wellington on a glorious summer Sunday in 1934 and we 36

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 were having lunch at ‘The French Horn’, a well-known hotel on the river at Sonning. Through questioning he confirmed the awful truth that my knowledge and experience of these important activities was in the case of shooting nil, in hunting limited to a lot of fun beagling on foot and, in fishing, one or two memorable Irish holidays and some trout fishing on lakes and little rivers in Kenya with Dad. He was worried. Uncle Maurice suffered from a serious inferiority complex. He mixed a lot with well-heeled men, mostly stockbrokers who engaged in all three activities, but had never been able to afford, or I think felt inclined, to indulge himself. But he had my interests at heart and was determined to do something about it. Was there not opportunity enough to hand? Gerald Kinsman, my father’s first cousin, was a moderately affluent Essex landowner with some rough shooting. He had a son about 11 years younger than me, also called Gerald, who was, in old Gerald’s eye, unsatisfactory in ‘sporty’ respects. An enthusiastic Desmond, with a newfound passion for shooting, might be persuaded to become young Gerald’s role model. Then there was Aunt Lucy’s younger bachelor brother, Henry, a richer man who farmed near Horsham in Sussex. He had an adopted son who needed the good influence of a reliable public school-educated companion, and Henry enthusiastically supported the Surrey and Burstow hunt. These schemes, however, had no hope of success. In the first place, Henry did not care for Maurice and did not feel like encouraging his nephew’s ambitions. In the second, I failed Gerald Kinsman’s practical tests: I could neither pot a sitting rabbit nor ride at all well. Worst of all, I was lukewarm about shooting and hunting. On my only visit to Kenya in 1933 I had shot a Grant’s gazelle (at least broken its leg so that the hunter I was out with had to catch it up in his lorry and dispatch it), but thought little of organized grouse and pheasant shooting in England and Scotland. At Wellington I had learnt to be a good shot with a rifle at targets, but nothing like as good as my father who won spoons and cups for it in Kenya. Indeed, my father had ‘gone off’ shooting big game and even birds by the time I was at school in England. When we were in India, as I have described, he had found himself reluctantly on duty, shooting a tiger. As a boy I shared this reluctance. Fishing was another matter. I envied Michael and Roger StJohn 37

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES the opportunities I missed by never accompanying them to Scotland in summer holidays. My aunt and uncle used to rent out Southwood, their home near Henley-on-Thames, for three months between July and September. In this period they used to stay with Uncle Tudor’s mother, old Mrs StJohn, at Bletsoe, Aboyne. It was a bit of a squash because Tudor’s bachelor brother Andy was a permanent resident; with the boys that made six in the house, so I was never asked. It was my grandmother’s or my FitzGerald uncle’s or my mother’s other sister, Aunt Peggy Sim’s turn to have me for the summer holidays. I spent periods up in Aboyne only twice – once as a paying guest of Parson Tom Gray, the vicar of the Aboyne Episcopalian church, and the other time at Birse Lodge, a hotel abutting on the green. Then I realized what I had been missing. The StJohn’s first cousin, Johnny, was there. He was my age and, until he was superannuated at Wellington, we were fast friends. We went trout fishing in tributaries of the Dee (not a good time of the year for salmon) and after 12 August we were out on the moors with borrowed shotguns, walking up grouse. We had a lot of fun missing them and did not mind. Oxford and Cornwall: 1927–34 All seven of her grandchildren adored my Goodbody grandmother. She was grey-haired, short and always smartly dressed in black with a white blouse. Her skin was smooth and soft when you kissed her. She had a soft voice too – never raised, but she could be cuttingly sarcastic. She was unobtrusive. In her midsixties she was a bit remote from small children, but as we grew up she became really quite ‘with it’ as far as the young were concerned. She smoked very little but always had cigarettes in the drawer. ‘They’re called Kensitas you know, Roger dear’ – she pronounced the word ‘KEN-SYTUS. Roger found the packet and lit up. The fag burnt to a cinder between his lips. ‘Oh dear, they are a bit old and dry.’ My cousin Michael came out of a London nightclub one bitter, winter night; when the cold hit him he fell unconscious onto the wet and muddy pavement. Friends drove him in his car to Henley where, not wishing to face his parents, he asked to be left for the rest of the night at the Catherine Wheel Hotel. Next morning, bedraggled and unshaven, his dress clothes wet and muddied, he went to Granny’s at Shiplake. He knew he 38

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 could rely on her to give him a shaving kit, a bath and a bed, while Violet, the maid, did her best with the clothes with sponge and iron. Then he was able to appear, more or less presentable, up the hill at his parents’ house in Harpsden with a ready excuse. When she lived at 2 Bardwell Road, Oxford and I was about ten, holidays with Granny could be very boring. I remember once being so apprehensive at the prospect of leaving the Maurice FitzGeralds and Nesta at the Old Leigh Farm in Stelling in Kent and ending up in Oxford that, with Nesta’s help, I hid all my clothes in the loft so as to miss the train. My conscience got the better of me and I began to feel ashamed at how upset my grandmother would be if I failed to turn up. So, to Nesta’s disgust, I abandoned the ruse and when I did arrive at Granny’s it was worse even than expected – whiting with their tails in their mouths was served for lunch, a uniquely tasteless fish obscenely served. Granny was deeply religious and fasted on Fridays (eating fish was fasting). She confessed that this meal always made her feel sick, so she finished up with a good slug of brandy – a solace, all right by the Church but not available to me at ten years old. I had my books, magazines and trains. When it was wet Granny let me play with them on the upstairs landing. In grey flannel shorts, the hair cord carpet was hell on the knees. There was a beautiful walled garden behind the house with crazy-paving, Victoria plum trees trained against the walls and fussy little flower beds edged with dwarf box hedge. There was Beatrice the maid to play cricket with, but the garden was too beautiful and the windows too close for that to be an option. Beatrice was young, pretty and lively and we went together to the Michaelmas fair at St Giles’s just down the Banbury Road. It was fantastically exciting. There were coconut shies, rides on the roundabout, loud lilting music, fat ladies, fortune tellers and toffee apples. Beatrice made eyes at the lads and wished she did not have to take care of me. When I was safely in bed and could hear the blaring music in the distance, she went out again. The Cherwell River was very close by and on a fine day Granny and Great Aunt Margaret, if she were there, would take a picnic on it in a punt. No one could use the punt pole, until later when I was bigger, so we propelled it with paddles. This was fun, but it could have been more fun if one could have swum. Having been a 39

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES child in the tropics I was, of course, like a fish in water from the start. But this was where the problem of Granny’s worry about responsibility came in. She knew if I entered the river I would be caught in weeds and drown and it would be her fault. Sometimes Granny’s nephew, Tony Pritchard, came along. He was studying to be an Anglican priest at the university and was a rather staid young man in his late twenties who later made it to bishop. He took pity on me and took me to the cinema twice. Once it was Ben Hur, which was very exciting, but the other time it was a Greta Garbo ‘weepy’, which was boring for a ten-year-old and, I would have thought, unsuitable for a ‘makey-learny’ parson. There were no other children. The Dragon School was just down the road and there was a girls’ school next door, but it was always holidays when I was with Granny. Later, when Granny moved from Wallingford (where she had a house for a year or two in the late 1920s) to Shiplake (at the same time as the StJohns moved from the Old Mill House at Benson to Southwood, Harpsden) she gave way to her romantic attachment to the ‘real sea’, as she called it, and started taking furnished houses for six months of the year on the north Cornish coast. The ones I remember best were a fisherman’s cottage on the main street of Port Isaac, near Newquay, and a house within a short walk of the sea on the cliff at Carbis Bay near St Ives. At the latter we were joined by Aunt Peggy, my mother’s younger sister, and Uncle Noel Sim and their three children – John (two years younger than me), Peter (a year younger than John) and their baby brother, David (nicknamed ‘the Tadpole’ by my Uncle Tudor because of his outsized head). Uncle Tudor hated Noel who was stocky, powerfully built and ever so hearty. I really enjoyed being with Noel and the boys at the seaside, whether at Fahan in the Irish Free State just over the border from where Noel was stationed in Derry (still only a company commander in the York and Lancaster Regiment), in Pwillheli in North Wales, or here at Carbis Bay. Aunt Peggy had been a pretty, chocolate-box blonde, but after India she had grown fat and middle-aged. She had always been simple and, as a child, the butt of her sisters’ sarcastic barbs, but she was sweet and a good mother to the three boys. She was kind to me and I was always fond of her. Uncle Noel taught us beach games and played them with us, 40

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 indulged in acrobatic feats with his athletic son, John, and encouraged us to swim and surf in the erratic north Cornish currents, always very conscious of danger. Then we would drive to St Ives and hire a fishing boat, complete with crew, to fish for sea bass and pilchards. When he remembered my propensity for seasickness (of which he had had dire experience on the SS City of Paris), he would curse, order the boat back to the quay, haul the grey comatose semi-corpse out of the scuppers onto the shore and put out again. Then he would look back a few minutes later, in disgust, to see me standing there licking an ice-cream cone. At Porth the beach was thronged with children with whom to make friends and have fun, but the sea had a vicious undertow and one had to be ever so careful. One day, alone in my favourite cave (resting after an exhausting swim) I found that I was cut off by the tide. There was no Uncle Noel or Dad to look after me and no one knew where I was. Luckily, I was able, by dint of some rock climbing, to find a way out by a chimney, which was invisible from below, onto the dunes behind the beach. My grandmother never knew. Her senses were sharp in Oxford, but seemed dulled on the north Cornish coast. Another sea – another beach The English Channel and beach at Folkestone figure in my holidays both with the Maurice FitzGeralds and with my mother and father. Folkestone’s fame now is to do with the Channel tunnel. In the 1920s and 1930s it was a pleasant Edwardian seaside town: quite smart at the top of the cliffs on the Leas and excitingly plebeian at sea level. The Leas was a wide clifftop walk for welldressed ladies and gentlemen in Panama hats. Children tended to be tidy too and the young pupils of St Margaret’s girls’ school, where my sister Cynthia was often taught, could be seen parading in dinky blue dresses and wide-brimmed, broad-ribboned straw hats. There was a bandstand where in summer a military band was almost always playing, the classical Leas Cliff concert hall, and the Leas Pavilion repertory theatre where you could see a play while consuming tea and buns. There were two enormous Edwardian hotels with Portland stone facings at the west end of the Leas called the Metropole and the Grand where people took tea in palm lounges to the accompaniment of string orchestras. In their later 41

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES

Sister Cynthia and Desmond. Folkestone c.1928

years Aunt Lucy and Uncle Maurice used to stay at the Grand. Inland of the Leas were lots of private hotels and boarding houses, all built in Bayswater style. My father, mother, Cynthia and I often used to stay in one at 47 Augusta Gardens where the Nortons, who lived in the basement, let rooms. Our sitting room had heavy Victorian furniture and red 42

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 plush curtains. Mrs Norton cooked, the two Norton daughters waited and cleaned, and Mr Norton cleaned shoes, humped coal and, hardly surprisingly, drank. Mrs Norton was careful to take in only a ‘good class of person’ and we passed the test. Nanny Barnes, the grass widow of a rating in the navy who was always at sea, looked after Cynthia. When Dad was short of money I sometimes had to share a bedroom with Cynthia and Nanny Barnes and at times even a bed with a bolster down the middle. Whenever my sister Cynthia and I could persuade our parents to let us, we either went down to the beach or to Radnor Park, where there was a pond and I could play with my hot air model launch. The beach, however, was the preferred option. It was not only the beach and sea bathing, but also the pleasure pier and roller-skating rink, which we continuously used, and an indoor swimming pool (that smelt), which was useful when the sea was exceptionally rough. There were whelk and jellied eel stalls, and a very exciting fish market where one could see porters off-loading the trawlers and selling their wares. Watching incoming and outgoing channel steamers was a great source of pleasure, especially when they left the harbour and met the full force of heavy weather. The pier was magic with ‘What the Butler Saw’ slot machines and ‘Your Fortune Told for a Penny’. There was a theatre at the end where a concert party often played. When the tide was not too low, fishermen would dangle their hooks and floats and patiently stare into space – and, very occasionally, land a fish. The Folkestone beach is pebbly, but steeply shelved, which provided an exciting swim, especially when the sea was rough and the red flag was flying – when you were supposed not to go in. By the red flag pole there was an official notice enjoining decency. Swimmers were supposed to be covered from neck to knee. What was hilarious was that, when wet, the thin cotton costumes revealed the shape of every part of the anatomy and left nothing to the imagination. Modern bikinis are modest by comparison. To get home we returned as we had come – by water-operated lift. There were two of them, one on either end of the Leas. These devices are unique and, I am told, are still there. Two rail-mounted carriages were joined together by a steel cable. When stationary, one was at the top and the other at the bottom. When it was time to move, water was let into a tank underneath the top compart43

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES ment and under gravity it descended, at which time the lower compartment rose. The water at the bottom was pumped back up to the top and the process repeated. If we grew tired of the pebbly Folkestone beach, sandy beaches began at nearby Hythe, where there was an interesting church crypt filled with skeletons and bones. But the best beach of all was Dymchurch with miles and miles of flat sand, perfect for sand castles and beach games. A bus would get you from Folkestone to Hythe or, if you were my mother and me, you could cycle. Then you could travel on the miniature Romney Hythe and Dymchurch railway to the beaches and even to the Dungeness lighthouse (there was no power station there then). This was a delightful treat for a boy. Maurice and family did not cycle, but when I was with my parents my mother and I hired bikes and cycled everywhere, exploring the countryside and especially Romney Marshes – flat as your hand but seemingly the wind was against you whichever way you faced. From Folkestone we would walk or take a bus to the cinema (we called them ‘flicks’ then) at least twice a week. There was wireless in those days, but no TV, so everyone went to the flicks more than they do now. It is startling to recall that in the 1920s and 1930s women and quite young children could roam the countryside and walk about town in perfect safety. I remember Aunt Madge at Benson worrying about elm trees falling on us when we cycled to Wallingford in a strong wind and ordering us to walk in Crowmarsh and from there to Wallingford and in the town itself out of fear of the dangerous traffic, but any thought of muggers or child molestation would have been preposterous. As boys, if we misbehaved, we could be beaten by our fathers or schoolmasters, or even be cuffed by a policeman. Law and order were taken for granted Holidays in Ireland The Kenya holiday apart, these were the highlights of summer in Britain. There were only two in Ireland – in 1931 and 1934 – and we did not take the family car. Father hired locally when we went on trips and, on both occasions, the Bullocks, whom we got to know at the Butler Arms Hotel, Waterville, County Kerry, where we always stayed, often gave us lifts in their capacious Rolls Royce. Or, on the second occasion, it was in a replacement for the 44

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 Rolls Royce that the Irish stevedores at Rosslare had dropped in the sea between the ship and the quay. We had travelled with them from Fishguard, so we were there to witness the spectacular event. Sir Christopher Bullock, a senior civil servant in the air ministry, was a choleric gentleman, immaculately turned out even on the beach and, to put it mildly, he was not pleased and created a scene with the port authorities that rivalled the Roller’s dip in the sea. Once they had adjusted the crane’s braking mechanism, whose faulty functioning had caused the catastrophe, the huge vehicle was hoisted, dripping, from the ocean depths and deposited on the quay, where its contents – most of the Bullocks’ holiday kit – were spread out to dry and a replacement vehicle hastily hired to take them to Waterville, a longish drive. We had to catch a later train, which wandered around the stunningly beautiful Cork and Kerry mountains to our destination (I think it was Skiberreen) where we were met by the hotel car. Waterville was a magical place. The hotel was by the sea, but within walking distance was an inland lake where one fished for trout from a boat. The hotel provided delicious picnic lunches of lobster mayonnaise and such-like goodies. There were little trout streams running into the lake for bank-fishing. There was hare coursing in the hills and a ‘feis’ with music and dancing. If you wanted a change of scene, the Huggard family, who ran this fantastic fishing pub, had a hotel on nearby Caragh Lake; or you could enjoy other nearby beaches – the Ballinskelligs was one. There was even a nine-hole seaside golf links. The Butler Arms Hotel holidays were slightly marred for me by lack of sleep. To save money we occupied two double rooms – my mother and sister in one and my father and me in the other. How my mother endured father’s snores for 44 years is a mystery. For me it became traumatic. I would go to bed early to get some sleep before father retired. Otherwise, I would never make it. My father only needed 20 seconds before he was off. Then the snoring began – quietly at first and then in a tremendous crescendo, ending in a shattering snort. There was quiet for about 30 seconds, and then the concert would resume. I had 30 seconds in which to get to sleep, but it was not long enough. We made what was my first of several visits to Glin Castle, a fairly short drive from Waterville. On that trip we neither went 45

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES into the house nor saw any of the family, but the estates manager showed us around the grounds, consisting of woods and a very pretty garden. On the way we visited a ruined house the IRA had burnt to the ground, where Father had attended many riotous parties and balls. He described how it had once looked and where the ballroom was. This must have been when he was stationed in Limerick as a soldier. We never went there on these trips, but once mother’s Uncle Gerald Goodbody and his wife visited us at Waterville. I think my grandmother queered our pitch with the Limerick Goodbodys. She had written too many angry letters accusing them of doing her down after my grandfather’s death. Anyway, they were not particularly friendly or anxious to see or entertain us. Similarly with the Glin FitzGeralds, poor as they were we were still the poor relations and they were anxious in case we might try to touch them for a fiver. My trip to Kenya: 1933 Our fate as 1930s schoolboys was to stay ‘at home’. I was lucky to get one summer holiday in Kenya in my ten years at boarding school in Britain. It was a memorable 12 weeks, from mid-July to mid-October 1933, nearly six of which were spent on board ship and train between London and Genoa. Somebody had organized a party of a dozen or so male students, mainly undergraduates because Michael Wilkinson (whom I had not previously met) and I, both aged 16, were the only schoolboys. Michael’s father was the brigadier commanding the third KAR in Kenya and the fourth KAR in Uganda. My father, who as a retired officer and staff officer of the Kenya Defence Force (KDF) was nominally under Brigadier Wilkinson’s command, did not like him. No matter, Mike and I hit it off well from the moment we met at Victoria station and continued to be best friends for the next seven years. Mike nearly always looked as if something were amusing him. He was mature for his age and at 16 sported a welldeveloped moustache. Michael’s brother, Roger Wilkinson, an Oxford undergraduate studying for the colonial service, was also in the party. Roger was supposed to be in charge of me as well as Mike. He rode us on a very slack rein. He later retired as a DC (district commissioner) in Teita at independence. We had an exciting train journey to Genoa, with time to visit the 46

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 famous cemetery and Portofino, and embarked in the Llandaff Castle. My dad had paid a return fare of £67, which covered bed and full board for 34 days and transportation for about 8000 miles. Although we were travelling steerage, a uniformed steward dealt with our baggage and escorted us to our cabin – four-berth, two-tier bunks with shared wash basin and communal bath and toilet facilities down the passage. I drew the short straw – an upper bunk with only matchboard separating me from the propeller shaft tunnel housing. When a rough sea caused the ship to pitch, the propeller would come out of the water, the engines would race and the cabin wall, my bunk and I would vibrate violently and thrum to the noise of the thrashing screw. This only happened on the last four days of the voyage in the Indian Ocean, after we had rounded Cape Guardafui. The sea was calm in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The Llandaff Castle was one of three Union Castle Line coalfuelled steamships plying the London–Beira route. The others were the Llangibby and Durham Castle. They offered three classes of accommodation – ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘steerage’. Their running time, Genoa to Mombasa, was 17 days. The classes were housed and fed in separate areas of the ship, thus there were three dining saloons and separated deck space was allocated, very little in the case of steerage. Food, even in steerage, was plentiful and nourishing, and the service was good. Drink and tobacco were duty-free and dirt cheap. If you were lucky and there were women, it could be an enjoyable 17 days. Unfortunately, all the personable young women were travelling first or second. We occupied ourselves with bathing in the canvas tank rigged athwartships, with deck quoits, shuffle-board or other deck games, with cards, or with just sitting reading (or in the case of the undergraduates studying) under the double awning and going ashore at Port Said and Aden. It was wise to absent oneself at Aden because there the ship took on coal and its dust enveloped the entire living area, as well as the decks. At Port Said the attractions were Simon Arzt, eating delicious seafood (Red Sea prawns), driving round the town in a gharri or just enjoying the bum-boat trade on board (I bought Aunt Madge a china coffee set, but it was so awful I never gave it to her). There were boys diving for pennies, gully gully men (conjurers with chicks) and, of course, fortune tellers. They used to travel with us 47

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES on the trip through the canal. When finally we found ourselves at anchor outside Mombasa, the pilot climbed aboard, the tugboats were attached and we were warped through the mlango (the channel through the reef) and into our Kilindini berth. Mum and Dad were there to meet me, standing waving on the quay. While we were clearing immigration and customs, the early morning mist cleared and gave way to sun and blue sky. Duggie Galton-Fenzi, the well-known Kenya road pioneer, was there with my parents, with his large open V8 safari car to convey us over the Likoni ferry and to the adjacent Mackenzie–Ashton house on the cliff just across the water from the Llandaff Castle berth. Michael and Roger Wilkinson took the Nairobi train that afternoon and the next time I met them was on the return journey six weeks later, when we all went by train from Nairobi to join the Durham Castle. The Mackenzie–Ashton house was large, airy and adjacent to a small sandy beach. The Galton-Fenzies had rented the house and the FitzGerald family were their guests, including my 11 yearold sister Cynthia. I slept on the roof on a charpoy – a webbing bed with a wooden frame and four short legs – under a sheet and a single blanket and below a mosquito net. A ‘boy’ brought me my breakfast, which included a strange fruit that took a bit of getting used to: avocado pear. The Galton-Fenzi family consisted of Duggie, the tough, sunburnt, taciturn pater familias, his pretty, comfortably matronly younger wife Elizabeth, a seven year-old daughter Evelyn, as well as an older and younger son. We stayed a couple of nights. Duggie drove us all to Diani Beach for swimming and goggling and we had dinner under the stars in the Mombasa Club. Finally we took the evening train to Nairobi. At that time Mother and Father occupied a commodious bungalow on the hill just behind the Masonic Hall and close to the Lady Northey Home. This house had originally been the residence of the high commissioner of East Africa Territories, the forerunner of the governor of Kenya. It had a bathroom with hot and cold water but no WC, only a bucket latrine in the compound (where mother kept a hen), which a man came in the evening to empty. There was plenty of room for me, and Cynthia had her own room when she was on holiday from boarding at Limuru. We slept under nets. From this house Mother and I walked to the Nairobi Club to play tennis. Father fetched me by car of an evening for nine holes of 48

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 golf at Royal Nairobi. Father had a small KDF wood and iron office at the bottom of the hill, which he shared with Sergeant Major Paddy Cummings, who did the administrative work and took the KDF drills. Paddy was a typical Irishman with a great brogue, and he it was who organized for me to go out on the Athi Plains (now the Nairobi National Park) and shoot some buck. We went on safari as a family. Our first was to Lake Naivasha to stay with the Shaws in their two-storey house at Hippo Point on the north shore. Madge and Dacre, who was a leading Nairobi advocate, were brother and sister. Their sister Ivy and her husband Stephen Carnelly were building a rather imposing but architecturally offensive example of ‘Stockbroker’s Tudor’ house on the isthmus that divided the large from the small lake. Dacre had a small jetty and a 20-foot timber boat with an inboard engine in which Cynthia, Father and I went with Dacre and a boatman out fishing. Mother and Madge stayed at home. We used lures to catch bass and tilapia and saw a number of hippos. They were reputed to attack and upset boats, but did not seem to be in the mood to be aggressive on this occasion. The drive back to Nairobi along the old escarpment road was distinguished only by the need to stop at a spring conveniently located on the escarpment roadside to refill the steaming radiator. On the outward journey I had endured my only encounter with locusts. We drove through a cloud of them in the open car as we crossed the Kedong Valley. Mother and Father sitting in front escaped, but Cynthia and I in the back received their full attention, and were soon inundated in a creepy crawly mass of these large, sharp-edged monster grasshoppers. It was very unnerving. As well as golf, my father’s favourite pastime was rifle shooting. The Kenya Rifle Association, of which he was a founder member, held a weekly evening gathering on the range which, unbelievably, was located slightly skew of the centre line of the Uhuru Highway. My father was very good at this, as the collections of silver spoons he won signify. As he got older and his sight longer, he became good at scoring ‘possibles’ at 800 yards, but worse at 200 yards. I attended one or two of these gatherings and had a go, and did not disgrace myself and my father, but he was best. My parents had decided to build themselves a retirement house and had already acquired a four-acre freehold plot on Balmoral 49

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES Road (now Riara Road), four miles out of Nairobi. It had one indigenous tree on it. Father had surrounded the plot with a keiapple hedge. If you moved about on the plot you could see both the Ngong Hills and Mount Kenya, but not from the same vantage point. Old Miss Heath’s not quite so old wood-and-iron bungalow was the only building in sight, a few hundred yards back towards Nairobi on Balmoral Road (only murram surfaced). When I visited, only the foundation trenches for the house had been dug and Dad had had a foundation stone – carved with my initials and the date – prepared for me to lay formally. The house, a bungalow, was to be of dressed stone with a mangalore tiled roof. It had a hall, cloakroom, sitting room, veranda and separate dining room. Mum and Dad’s capacious bedroom had a walk-in wardrobe and an adjoining bathroom and separate loo. Father had a study with a bed in it and Cynthia’s room was just beyond, at the end of the bedroom wing. There was, at first, no spare room; one, with bath and WC, was added later. The kitchen was (unlike hitherto ordinary practice) incorporated in the house, together with scullery and larder. There were stone built servants’ quarters for three servants, with cooking and ablution facilities, and a deep pit latrine behind. Dad liked communing with nature after breakfast, so he had his own long drop too. When completed, the whole setup cost £650. I sold it in 1967 (with the spare bedroom and, of course, the land, now reduced to two acres) for £9000. The building and finishes were of high quality and the stonework to doors and windows elegantly executed. Father did not employ an architect, but entrusted the work and design to Arthur Wevill, a quantity surveyor with a number of nicely built dwelling houses to his credit. Wevill used the Scottish building method. With the aid of a clerk-of-works he directed and coordinated the efforts of a number of specialist subcontractors, obviating the employment of a main contractor. One afternoon I formally laid the foundation stone and poured the customary libation. All together, the family lived there for 34 happy years. The final highlight of my Kenya holiday was the five-day safari to Namanga on the Kenya border with Tanganyika, which Father got Budge Gethin to organize. Budge was in partnership with Duggie Galton-Fenzi when they pioneered various routes to the coast from Nairobi. There is a ponderous grey stone monument 50

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 adjacent to the general post office in central Nairobi to celebrate the journeys. Budge organized shooting safaris for rich men and rajas. His hunting ground was Amboseli, where he established a rhino camp, and he had another hutted camp on the Namanga River, a very pretty perennial stream. Maasai caretakers looked after the camps and Budge would take staff and provisions by lorry to open them up when he needed them to serve clients. We set off one early morning, the four of us, with Budge at the wheel of a box-body Ford V8 safari car. The provisions lorry had been sent off ahead so that everything would be ready for our arrival. We did not follow the present route via Athi River, but climbed up to the Ngong boma, left to the southern shoulder of the Ngong hills and struck off southwards across the plains, aiming directly, on an unpaved track, for Kajiado. There the track followed the line of the present road to Namanga, which we reached at teatime, having covered about 100 miles. The grownups needed to rest and recover from the journey. Cynthia and I explored the camp area and the river, and admired the Maasai moran standing one legged with the other curved round the shaft of his supporting spear. After a camp fire supper and bed, to the sounds of grunting lion, we were off next morning on the track to the extinct Longido volcano, where we were rewarded by views of masses of plains game: giraffe, ostrich, wildebeest, hartebeest, as well as jackal and hyena. Then there was the pride of lion under a thorn tree. We looked in vain for elephant and rhino. After a second night at Namanga, we set off for the 50-mile drive to Rhino camp where we saw all we needed of elephant, buffalo and rhino, and spent the night. Budge was fussing about the absence of leopard and cheetah. A final night was spent at Namanga. We never did see the missing cats, but to me it was more than enough to be going on with. A note on Nairobi Nairobi in 1933 was much more like Nairobi in 1922 than the millennium city of today. There were no multi-storey buildings – just a couple of monumental ones like the law courts and railway headquarters. There were maize shambas where Central Park is these days. All Saints’ cathedral and the Scottish church marked its northern boundary and the railway, which still passed close to the 51

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES GPO and the Norfolk Hotel, defined its southern one. A positive archipelago of small traffic islands were removed in about 1943 when RAF trailers carrying aircraft wings longer than latter-day low-loaders got hopelessly snarled up trying to negotiate them and caused serious traffic blocks. Government Road (Moi Avenue) was narrower than it is now and was flanked by small tin-roofed dukas. There were no traffic lights, but police on stands directing traffic with flamboyant Italianate gestures. Railway hutted accommodation stretched in rows right back from the station to Mama Ngina Avenue. There was not a single multi-storey government building. The colonial government operated entirely from wood and iron single-storey buildings. Dagoretti Corner, St Austins, Loresho, Lower Kabete and Runda were all outside the city limits and administered by Nairobi county council, as were Langata and Karen. The industrial area hardly existed. My memories of the return journey to Britain are hazy. I remember the Durham Castle as being not a patch on the Llandaff. She was smaller and wallowed uncomfortably in a rough sea, prone to both pitching and rolling simultaneously – a recipe for immediate nausea. I also recall the trouble some of us got into when, moored in the pool at Port Said, we went down the gangway and started swimming in the scummy, oily, heavily polluted salt water. The fierce master-of-arms came charging down and ordered us aboard on pain of immediate arrest. We did as we were told and scrambled back sheepishly on board, quite rightly a bit ashamed. Back at Wellington in the first week of October it all seemed like an exciting dream. The other boys did not believe my stories and ragged me. Boring old reality reinstated its grip. Sweet Thames run softly Granny Goodbody was sweet to me and I loved her dearly. Nothing could excel her welcome, whether at Oxford, Winterbrook, Lower Shiplake, Henley-on-Thames or at one of her north Cornwall houses. Again, I have loved Nesta dearly since she was seven and I eight. Her parents, especially my Uncle Maurice, besides giving me wonderful holidays, took more interest in my educational and financial welfare than anyone else did; and he encouraged my golf and my career after the army as he would that of his own son. 52

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 Although in my 14 years of education in England my parents only came four times (admittedly in my mother’s case for a year at a time), they always came first in my love and admiration, and the periods I was with them were the happiest and most enjoyable of all. Yet home for all those years had to be with Aunt Madge and Uncle Tudor, whether at Benson or Henley. Not always in summer, but always at Christmas and Easter it was Aunt Madge who wrote to say they were looking forward to having me; and when it was time to return to school it was she who rekitted me out, packed my school trunk, stocked my tuck box and, when I was away, minded my push bike and, latterly, my motorbike. Uncle Tudor attended to my discipline whenever it was needed, which was only once. I forget my misdemeanour, but for the first and last time I tried on the ‘barrack-room lawyer’ and protested: ‘You cannot beat me; you are not my real uncle.’ That got me nowhere at all, only a sore bottom. Aunt Madge worried about my welfare when I was at Woolwich. Once I forgot to tell her that I had been invited to a country-house weekend in Buckinghamshire and failed to turn up at Southwood when expected. So, when I did she gave me a right bollocking and I felt like a worm. They did not, however, bother much about my belongings. When I went off to war everything I owned, including my books, clothes and childhood toys, went to Granny at Shiplake. During the five years I was away my uncle and aunt sold up in Harpsden and moved to Aboyne. They could not leave Granny at Shiplake, so they sold her up too and carted her off to live with them in Aboyne until she died in 1943. When I started to wonder about my belongings I discovered a number of my books in the StJohn loft. Otherwise there was nothing left and I must assume it had been junked. Life with the Tudor StJohns, whether at Benson or Harpsden, was lived in the Thames Valley. At Benson, the river was 300 yards away; at Harpsden we were above it on a hill, about two miles off, but in neither place did the family have much contact with it. At Benson you went near the river on pain of severe punishment. There was a weir and a mill race – both dangerous for children. In my day, Uncle Tudor and Aunt Madge had no interest in punting or rowing and, even away from the mill, swimming was held to be dangerous. At Harpsden they planned 53

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES their three months away in Scotland to avoid the Henley regatta. However, when my parents were staying at the White Hart at Benson (pineapple sponge or peaches and cream), we used to hire a punt at Haines wharf. I used to fish for barbel, chub and pike, but it was a rotten sport compared with trout. When my parents stayed at the Baltic Guest House, right on the water’s edge at Henley, we used to go on the river a lot, either walking by it or swimming in a special place on the other side of it. The Thames Valley micro climate was only too obtrusive in winter and spring – mists and floods and all-enveloping damp – but in summer it was magical. On several occasions I escaped from Granny’s very early in the morning long before anyone else was stirring and drove down to a special place close to the river to watch the sun rise and the birds. The Old Mill House was a Queen Anne gem. It had a master bedroom with a dressing room (where I always slept), a spare room, a night and day nursery – occupied by Roger and Michael. It had only one bathroom/lavatory, and there was a downstairs cloakroom/lavatory. There was a drawing room, which was unused except for an upright piano, and a smoking room, which was used all the time, containing Uncle Tudor’s desk and a little room off the side filled with books. There was a big dining room and, at the other end of the back passage, a big kitchen, scullery and servants’ lavatory. The servants slept in the attic. There was a pebble-surfaced space in the front, with posts and chains, and a big garden at the back. A tumbled-down cottage and old stables flanked the house. Up the road to Benson there was a pub and the other way flintstone cottages. In between the drive to Greenhayes, a long way back, in a stand of trees, stood my granny’s house before she moved to Oxford in about 1923. That comprised the hamlet of Preston Crowmarsh. Further on towards Wallingford you passed the Chamberlain farm and beyond that, Howberry Park, the property of Lord Wittenham. He was my Uncle Tudor’s sponsor and the owner of the Old Mill House. The Old Mill House was lit by oil lamps, and there was no central heating. I remember it for the smell of paraffin. Aunt’s sole household chore was to polish the lamp glasses and trim the wicks, which she did in the front hall. If you had never experienced central heating you did not miss it. In winter, the ground-floor rooms (except the drawing room) were warm and 54

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 cosy, with coal fires; and the kitchen was heated by an enormous ‘Eagle’ double oven range, in which, at Christmas, you could roast a 30-pound turkey. Upstairs there was usually a fire in the day nursery, with its tall fireguard and, over the mantel, a picture of young Edward, Prince of Wales, and a hanging brass oil lamp. I slept in my uncle’s dressing room, which adjoined their bedroom. There was a great social life in and around Benson, Ewelme, Nettlebed, Wallingford and Shillingford. My Uncle and later Roger and Michael played a lot of golf at Huntercombe. I played at Harpsden, a modest course. There was a good deal of family bridge (usually on dark winter afternoons after lunch and before supper). If, as frequently was the case after Christmas and before Easter, there was a freeze, there was ice-skating on flooded gravel pits. Then Uncle Tudor was to be seen, a tall portly figure in tweed plus-fours and flying scarf, hands clasped behind his back, doing stately outside edges and figures of eight, the ice making ominous cracking noises under his considerable weight. At Henley, as at Ashdown Place if we were spending Christmas with the FitzRoy Chapmans, there was always mixed hockey on Boxing Day. These Ashdown Christmases were an eye-opener to a rather naïve and impressionable Desmond. FitzRoy was a pretty rich sulphuric acid tycoon who was stone-deaf and could only be communicated with by pencil and paper. He had a pet parrot, which was nice to men but savagely aggressive with all women. Audley was the prototype 1920s ‘bright young thing’ – very, very attractive, even into old age, with a hungry hawk-like look. Lithe, strong, tanned, a very good golfer, fond of walking the Scottish glens and hill climbing in the Western Isles, she drove an open Bentley ‘motor’, complete with outside hand brake and bonnet straps, at breakneck speed and, when in town, lived a wild social life. Had she been in Kenya, she would have fitted in perfectly with the Happy Valley crowd. One year there was a memorable fancy-dress Christmas party, starting with a families-only dinner preceded by cocktails. Roger must have been about 16 (which would have made me 10). He went as Dr Jekyll’s Mr Hyde, which involved him being made up to look very fearsome with his nose stuffed with cotton wool. When he got at the cocktails he downed several before anyone noticed and suffered instant inebriation. Aunt Madge had to drag 55

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES him off upstairs for treatment, which included being dowsed, headfirst, in a basin of very cold water. Then (Roger eventually rejoining the party) we proceeded to a lavish Christmas dinner – pâté de foie gras preceding the traditional turkey, ham, Christmas pudding, brandy butter, mince pies and coffee – all accompanied by champagne, white and red wine, a dessert wine and port for the gentlemen. Nuts and candied fruit went with dessert, served with little finger bowls. Most of the party were in a happy, festive mood, not to say intoxicated, and were throwing streamers and investigating the centres of crackers. Then the dining room door opened and in came a number of dim-looking men and women (and some children) – all stone-cold sober and wearing looks of disapproval. These were the neighbours – asked by Audley to join in for nuts and wine and jolly party games. To make a short story even shorter, from that moment on the next phase of the party never took off and, after a feeble attempt at jollification, the intruders made their apologies and departed. There were a number of worms gnawing away at this luscious peach – and luscious indeed it was. The staff included a butler, a housekeeper who was treated as family, a whole bevy of footmen and maids, an outside staff of gardeners and a large garage yard – which might have been a converted stable, containing several ‘Rollers’ as well as the Bentley and other smaller cars – all staffed by a head chauffeur and a number of other chauffeurs. The family was a sad collection apart from its star, Audley. FitzRoy had his stone deafness; the elder daughter Nellie was ordinary; the son Stewart, who was a sparkling youngster, suffered from a tubercular hip that killed him before he was out of his teens; and the youngest daughter Pat was reputed to be (how was I to know at ten?) a sex maniac (horror of horrors). Actually, Nell made quite a good marriage to Sotheby Bird, who had a good war and then carried on, so I was told, the chemical business. If only the Christmas parties in and around Benson had been half as exciting. The best of them had pretty girls and a reasonable jazzy-type band, but even these had the mums pressing us to enjoy ourselves and dance with their little darlings. And often, in the absence of discos, it was a scratch piano, violin and percussion trio with no rhythm. Michael and Roger made lists of the parties one must on no account go to, but Aunt Madge often accepted before 56

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 we got back from school. Imagine the recriminations! I was desperately awkward at partying and dancing and hated them all. Our run-of-the-mill amusement was playing trains. This was usually done in the nursery, but sometimes, in fine weather at Easter, we would lay out the tracks in and about the compost heap in the vegetable garden. In all weathers we cycled all over Berks and Oxon, often even into Bucks – very often our goal being a cinema show. Once, after a row with Aunt Madge, we ‘ran away’ on our bikes ‘forever’, and went to see a good film in Slough. We were a bit embarrassed when we slunk back, but nothing was said. There was tennis at the Hartley’s in Shillingford. Old Tom Hartley did not play tennis, but he did play the oboe and he taught Evelyn Rothwell, the concert soloist who later became John Barbirolli’s wife. At the StJohns there was constant bridge. At first, at Benson, three people used to be invited to play with Uncle Tudor, while Aunt Madge, who could not play, dispensed tea. Old General Godley came on his push bike in summer and in winter, and there had to be Irish whiskey. Then, one day Uncle Tudor said: ‘Madge, you must learn to play this game. You will never regret it, especially when you get old.’ She was forty-something at the time and did learn. It was good advice. She died after lunch just before a game in her drawing room at Craigveigh when she was in her nineties. Later Roger and Michael started to play, and there was a family four from which I was always excluded. I did not mind. Uncle Tudor’s younger brother Dick (Johnny’s father) had done well in business and ran a Daimler hire company. Uncle Tudor had a pompous photograph of him on his desk and used to refer to him as ‘the head cod at the fishmonger’s hall’. Johnny’s mother, Peggy, was very humorous, rather like an amateur Cicely Courtneidge. Having tea with her at Coventry Street Lyons Corner House one afternoon, when Johnny and I were 14, she became transfixed by some fellow guzzlers tucking into ‘sauss and mash’ and, tipping her hat to the top of her head, started imitating them in a hilarious music hall sketch that had us both in fits. They lived in style opposite Harrods in Montpelier Square. It was hardly surprising that, after being superannuated from Wellington, Johnny took to extreme left-wing politics and was always pitching up in trouble spots like Vienna and Naples, 57

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES financed of course by his capitalist father. At Wellington he used to show me newsy letters from his father. They were always typed by his father’s secretary and one of them started: ‘Your father has instructed me to write you his weekly letter, and to tell you that he had several good wins at Ascot races.’ Johnny later reverted to normality. In the war he was in the Royal Marines and later, had a distinguished career at Heinemann, the publishers. Getting about All my life it was important to me to be able to get about in England. This meant, to start with, mastering train travel. I would be nine years old and having to get from Oxford to Ashford in Kent. Now I come to think of it, such a journey would start with my having to catch a bus to get to the station, but let us take buses and taxis for granted. There were always problems with kit, which was much heavier than nowadays, but the ‘luggage in advance’ system solved these. My grandmother, or one of my aunts, would buy me a train ticket and would summon a van by telephone a day or so beforehand to take my trunk to the station. The trunk would then be waiting for me to collect at the station on arrival at my destination. Even as young as nine it would be my job to choose the train or trains. For a cross-country journey (not involving London), one would need to consult Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, which none of my female relations were either capable of using or keen to have in the house because it came out monthly and was quite pricey, so I would consult an up-to-date copy either in the public library or at the station. I was pompous about my proficiency with Bradshaw’s, but had one ghastly failure, which I kept to myself. I failed to notice that, on changing at Rugby to get somewhere or other, there were two railway stations some distance apart, and I missed my connection. At least, to get from Oxford to Ashford in Kent there was a through carriage all the way via Guildford and Redhill, so did not have to change trains at all. My favourite journey was from Oxford to Pwillheli in North Wales. Again, the train had a through carriage and was attached to a little single-line train that wound through glorious Welsh countryside and stopped at the station with 42 letters to its name. If one went anywhere that involved London there was a boring 58

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 publication, the ABC, in which one simply looked up a train to get you from anywhere to your destination. Night trains were the best fun (only just better than the Cornish Riviera Express). My own favourite was the night express from Paddington that landed you at Bodmin Moor or St Erth on an early misty morning after a comfortable journey in a third-class sleeper and with a holiday in Cornwall to look forward to. My father once took me from Folkestone to Penzance on a special excursion train. I knew from the start that he knew nothing about the art of successful travel: that journey was a hot and sweaty penance, especially the return journey, which took place during a September heat wave. However, not even my father’s incompetence could spoil the week we had at Carbis Bay with Granny and Aunt Marg, my grandmother’s younger maiden sister Margaret Pritchard. Aunt Marg was easily the ugliest woman I remember, but she was the nearest being to a saint I or any of her great nephews and nieces ever encountered. She was prim and proper in the Victorian mould, but her eyes sparkled with fun – when someone told a risqué joke, she would smile and say: ‘I think I’m shocked’. Aunt Marg, who was very poor, lived in Worcester with our great-aunt Ethel, who was older than my grandmother and, like Aunt Marg, single. I never met Aunt Ethel who kept very much to herself. She was reported to have been an exceptionally good pianist, but suffered from unrequited love, had a heart condition and had given up everything, including the piano. She must have been hell to live with, which is perhaps why Aunt Marg used to spend long periods staying in Oxford, and was often at Granny’s or Aunt Madge’s. In the summer in north Cornwall, two old ladies – unsuitably dressed, hatted and scarved – could be seen walking along the cliffs, bound for the little café where they knew they could enjoy a real Cornish cream tea. The death of Uncle Geoffrey My Uncle Geoffrey, 22 years old at the time and second lieutenant in the Royal Tank Corps, had a two-seater Wolseley with a dicky seat, usually occupied by – guess who? This car was a joy, so was my uncle. We would whizz along the Benson to Oxford road and do skid turns for fun. It was such a disaster when, in 1926, Geoffrey drowned by falling through thin ice on a lake in India, 59

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES

Aunt Marg and Granny walking on the cliffs at Carbis Bay near Newquay

while shooting duck. It was with the news of Uncle Geoffrey’s death and its aftermath that I became aware of the tension between my mother and Granny. It must have been going on since mother was a teenager. Perhaps, as the second child, she should have been a boy. It was not until their fourth try that they produced Geoffrey, who was the apple of Granny’s eye. In addition, Madge was a favourite daughter, while mother was always number one with her father. So time passed and when I was 12 Mother, Father and Cynthia came ‘home’. Mother told me why Granny was so upset and distant with her: she had said some cutting things, which for a kind and loving person was surprising. For instance, once I heard Granny say to Mother: ‘If you can’t look after Desmond yourself you should not have had him,’ and, on a lighter note, ‘I can’t understand how you people manage to use so much lavatory paper,’ and ‘Why is it that when I come back from church I find every window in the house closed?’ (Granny always had a passion for fresh air and first thing every morning, summer or winter, she flung wide all the windows. My mother, interferingly, went around after her closing them). ‘You remember,’ said my mother,

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MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 ‘when Geoffrey died?’ After six months my grandmother had apparently written my mother a letter saying how hurt she was that she had not written asking for Geoffrey’s photograph. She replied that she already had three framed photos of him and that it had never occurred to her to ask for another. The next letter that came was so abusive that mother was shocked. It said she had never cared for Geoffrey, never thought tuppence about any of the family, and never thought of anyone but herself. It was such an awful letter that she kept it. When Granny later started in on her again, she showed her the letter and said, ‘How would you have liked it if your mother had written you a letter like that?’ While she read it her face went white, and she said: ‘I never wrote it.’ My loving ‘vice-parents’ In my sixtieth year I sent Aunt Madge, celebrating her ninetieth birthday, a congratulatory letter telegram, signed ‘Cuckoo in the nest’. This went down well and vividly described my situation in not only the StJohn family, but also in the Maurice FitzGerald and Sim families. Such birds are reported to be cherished as interlopers by other birds when they are still fledglings, and thus it was with me. I look back with great love and gratitude to all those aunts and uncles. The best, of course, were the StJohns and I have lavished many words on my appreciation of them. Because of my beloved Nesta I have said lots about London and the farm, but not enough about Uncle Maurice, who really was a father to me. I must have cost him a lot of money quite apart from the allowance he gave me while I was at Corpus. I went twice with them to Switzerland for blissful fortnights at Axenstein and Axenfels on Lake Lucerne near Brunnen. And there were marvellous holidays in the south of France. Once with them in a Swiss train my Aunt Lucy, who could feign innocence, remarked: ‘Strange, all these stations seem to be called “Hommes”!’ It is typical of the Swiss to have railway stations of identical layout, so our compartment always landed up opposite the gents. Well behind in the list but deserving further mention was my debt to my uncle Noel Sim. I have told of my enjoyment of beach and sea pursuits under his auspices, but not of his tuition and encouragement of my boyhood hobby of photography. Though my interest in photography faded during the war, a childhood 61

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES interest began when I was given a Brownie 2 box camera for my eighth birthday in India, and I was soon an enthusiast. When the SS City of Paris sailed early from Bombay in February 1925 and prevented me taking proper leave of my father, it was films he had lobbed aboard across the watery gap. From then on, photography in the shape of taking snaps, having shops develop and print them, and sticking the prints between those little brown corners in albums became, with trains (model and real) and cycling, one of my favourite hobbies (gramophone records and the wireless came much later). Uncle Noel’s finest hour Before I leave Uncle Noel I have to mention my last but one encounter with him, in Egypt in mid-1942. He had come out as the commanding officer of the York and Lancaster Regiment, and in 1940/1 they were stationed in Cyprus. My Uncle was 50, which was ridiculously old for a battalion commander on active service. Things were fairly unsettled in Cyprus when the Germans overran Greece and, creditably in my opinion, Uncle Noel applied to be relieved of his command and got back to Cairo just before the crunch came. They put him in charge of an Italian civilian internee camp near Ismailia on the Suez Canal. I was in Cairo at the time, posted to HQ British Troops in Egypt, living the life of Reilly in a flat I shared with other drones. It was easy to get weekend leave (I had already had a memorable one with Michael when his submarine, HMS Traveller, was temporarily in Port Said), so one June weekend – at Uncle Noel’s invitation – I went to stay with him. Egypt is a wonderful place to be other than in one respect, which is that at all times of the year one is plagued by houseflies; they are at their worst in June and the Canal Zone was famous for being as bad for them as anywhere. It was with considerable surprise, therefore, that on entering his camp, which housed 9000 Italian civilians of both sexes and all ages, I found myself at once in a flyfree zone. Uncle Noel, in typical Noel style, gave me no time to remark before saying, ‘Have you noticed, Desmond, that there are no flies? Let me show you why’ and he led me out onto a concrete stoep in front of his bungalow. Centre stage on a slightly raised concrete plinth stood an evil smelling contraption, about a metre square and surrounded by a hemispherical moat containing 62

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 paraffin about eight centimetres deep. The contraption consisted of a flywire mesh-covered cube, framed in angle iron with four vertical legs raising the base of the cube off the concrete plinth. A blackened tin sheet closed the bottom of the cube, which had a square hole in its centre. An inverted pyramid of blacked tin, with the pointed end cut off to show a corresponding hole coinciding with the hole in the sheet stood on the sheet. A saucer of rotting meat crawling with flies was placed on the concrete directly below the holes and fly grubs oozed across the concrete into the paraffinfilled moat. The flywire mesh top and sides were a seething mass of live flies, with a layer of dead ones on the bottom plate. ‘Here we have an example of the Sim fly trap,’ said my uncle. He had about 50 of them stationed around the compound. The capo of each internee company was responsible for servicing them. All they had to do was wait until an hour after sundown when the fly activity had died down, to empty and dispose of the dead flies and replenish the rotten meat and paraffin. Noel inspected at dawn daily and woe betide any capo who failed to carry out his responsibility. And I had a fly-free weekend. Many years later I took my mother to stay the night with Noel. He was then in his late sixties and living in a council house in one of the poorer parts of Leamington Spa. My aunt had died in the late 1930s. His youngest son, David, was a parson in a nearby Coventry slum. He had a smelly, elderly sheepdog but otherwise lived alone. His house was grubby. We arrived late on a June summer evening, having eaten, so the only meal we had was breakfast. He said he would take us on a tour of Coventry, with its recently rebuilt cathedral, and would call in on David and his wife for a drink before returning to lunch at the main hotel in Leamington. When we got to David’s little rectory, he reintroduced mother and me and then cried: ‘David, bring out that bottle of sherry I gave you for Christmas. I’m sure there must be some left.’ (It was June). Outside the walls Even at the age of eight, small schoolboys begin to relate to events in the country at large. At 13 they may start to make value judgements, some of which may bring them into conflict with parental and teacher assumptions. So it was with me. An immense 63

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES technological adventure, which started during my father’s youth, was taking place. Father was born into an age when railways and water transport were well developed, but otherwise transport was related to the horse. Telephones had been invented, but longdistance communication was still by telegraphed Morse-code signals. The armed services used semaphore flags and heliographs (I was in London with my father when he bought a heliograph setup for the KDF in 1932). I was in on the birth of radio in 1922 – wireless transmission by the BBC from Savoy Hill. Uncle Maurice had a crystal set in South Kensington. Uncle Tudor had a homemade wireless set, with an outside aerial and a tangle of glass valves and condensers, powered by a high tension battery you had to renew, and low tension you recharged. There was no amplification to start with – you used headphones and, for general listening, my uncle used to put three or four sets in a big brass bowl. Later, there was amplification to a scratchy moving iron loudspeaker, made largely of stiff cardboard and flat conical in shape. Television began to come into homes in 1938. My first exciting experience was to see the boat race in March of that year, but the set belonged to a friend of Michael Wilkinson. What about aeroplanes? We saw them occasionally in the sky and once one landed in the field over the road from the Old Mill House, but it must have been in 1934 when my father took me to Lympne in Kent and we did a flip in Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus. You were lent a jacket and helmet and belted into a seat in the open cockpit behind the pilot. It was scary. The French pioneer, Bleriot, flew the Channel when my father was 29. At various later times in the 1920s and 1930s the American, Charles Lindbergh, flew the Atlantic, as did Beryl Markham. There were also the wellpublicized flying exploits of Cobham who flew to Cape Town, Amy Johnson and her husband Jim Mollison, Group Captain Campbell-Black who flew to India and Amelia Earhart, the American who was lost while flying the Pacific. However, most people still travelled by sea and went on doing so into the 1950s. Air travel was expensive and the journey to Kenya took a week, compared with 16 days by sea if you started from Genoa. There was the world economic depression, bringing unemployment and real suffering, then the rise of fascism in Italy and, following that, Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. The under64

MY SCHOOL YEARS IN ENGLAND, 1925–35 current of socialism and communism was not new. Did a Labour government not first get in for a very short period in the 1920s? And Ramsay MacDonald for an equally short period of Labour rule in the early 1930s, before it became the national government? But the cataclysmic event, which caused a political upheaval at Wellington and led to the banner headline in the Daily Mail: ‘red menace in public school: headmaster’s statement’ was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In this disturbance (like 99 per cent of the pupils), I was no more than an observer – just as well, as I was due to join the army and must distance myself from politics – but I was certainly biased on the side of the underdog, and espoused the Spanish government’s cause. T. C. Worsley, my tutor in the Blucher dormitory, was no more than a passive supporter of the government cause, but Esmond Romilly, whose brother Giles was in my dormitory, ran away from Wellington and joined the International Brigade fighting against Franco in Spain. Later, the Italian rape of Abyssinia caused little stir because Hitler was making all the running in reoccupying the Rhineland and taking on first Austria and then Czechoslovakia. All through the 1930s I was an interested observer of the political scene – the disintegration of the old capitalist system, the brutalities of the fascists, Nazis and communists and, in Britain, the Peace Pledge Union, Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, and the Oxford Union resolution: ‘This House refuses to fight for King and Country.’ Towards the end of the 1930s I was definitely left wing politically, inclining to the views of the Fabian Society under the influence of the News Chronicle and New Statesman. I once had a heated altercation with Aunt Madge on the subject of the Spanish Civil War, but I was defeated by her final thrust: ‘I’m older than you. I know better.’ I thought she probably did. Anyway, I could not be active politically because I was going to be a soldier; and, as for politicians, I had been counselled by my cousin Michael that they were bad news and warned not to have anything to do with them. And I never have.

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4 Further education: the RMA, SME and Cambridge

I

was in Heidelberg in Germany in April 1935 with Peter ap Ellis when I sent in my application to take the army examination. We were doing a two-month course, polishing up our schoolboy German, under the tuition of Frau Professor Clara von Duhn at Werrgasse 7. Peter and I shared an attic room and the bed was the hardest I ever remember. It was a mistake to go with a chum. Neither of us improved our German, Peter left early and it was eerie being on my own in the Nazi period when the Germans had just retaken the Rhineland. There were marching Hitler Jugend every weekend. They marched with shouldered shovels and sang the Horstwessel song. Jews with stars sewn into the backs of their overalls were sweeping the streets under the watchful eyes of Brownshirts. I went more than once to check up on the times of trains leaving for Paris. Frau von Duhn and her family were very nice and not Nazis. She was passionate for an alliance of peace with Britain, which, she was convinced, could be achieved if Chamberlain would join Hitler in the eagle eyrie at Berchtesgaden’s mountain fastness, and settle the world’s problems in a romantic Wagnerian atmosphere. Eventually I escaped and returned to Wellington to take the army exam in June 1935. The Royal Military Academy F. B. Malim’s prognostications were well founded. I passed second into Woolwich. Pat Ronaldson, a Harrow boy, whose father was an excellent portrait painter (of royals) with a nice house on 66

FURTHER EDUCATION: THE RMA, SME AND CAMBRIDGE Campden Hill overlooking Kensington Palace, was first and pipped me on the basis of being good at every known game for which the interviewing body gave high marks. I was a duffer at all games. At the end of the 18-month course we both slumped and I came out thirteenth (Pat was much lower), but I was high enough to make it into the Royal Engineers (RE). In truth I was not much of a military man and the RMA was very military – unremitting square bashing for six solid weeks with no leave out of barracks and, when that was over, the mindless military discipline continued, at least for the whole of the fivemonth first term. Your kit had to be spread out neatly at the end of your bed and the toes of your army boots brought to mirror polish. There were 24-hour guard duties, including sentry-go. You marched in and out of meals (the food was excellent). We forever had to change in and out of different variations of uniform: parade, riding, games. It was like quick changes in the theatre and you had a couple of minutes in which to appear immaculate. The class studies were mostly puerile and absolutely everything you did, even moving from classroom to quarters, was spied on and marked; any intelligent remark in a test was apt to lower your marks because it was not in the book. How I hated the Shop! It was easily the worst 18 months of my life. Even the army in 1939 did not think mounted cavalry would be much use in war, and on mobilization all horses were returned to the depot at Weedon. But in 1935/6 we spent a lot of time on horsemanship. It was the only fun we had. Finally the day came for the passing out parade and departure from Woolwich for good. The Christmas holidays (1936) were spent at Southwood with the StJohns, followed by gazettement as second lieutenant of the RE on 7 January 1937, joining at Chatham a fortnight later as a commissioned regular officer at the School of Military Engineering (SME) Mr Flint’s No 37 YO (young officers) Batch. There were 17 of us. It was pure coincidence that we were No 37; there were two batches a year, so No 38 Batch joined in July 1937. Royal Engineers Officer Training: 37 Young Officers Batch The system of training YOs at that time was that in a two-and-ahalf-year course two academic years were spent at Cambridge University on the engineering (Mechanical Sciences Tripos) 67

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES courses, and the rest of the time, including the Cambridge long vacations, was spent at the SME at Chatham. A lot of earth-shaking events were taking place at this time. King Edward VIII abdicated shortly before our transition from the Shop to the SME. Although he was never crowned, my new service dress brass buttons still bore EVIII insignia (I still have them). At the time of the abdication we were all avid to know who would be the next monarch. The field seemed to be open, with the Duke of York and Duke of Gloucester the front runners. It was known that York, the actual king-in-waiting, was reluctant to inherit. He was a shy man with a bad stammer and the duchess was against his becoming king. His organization for giving poor boys a holiday at the seaside and his other charities had made him popular, and the general feeling was that he should inherit rather than Gloucester, who was known to be unusually stupid, even for a Hanoverian. On the evening the abdication was announced we were in the indoor range being instructed in pistol shooting. As a matter of course, the discipline of gun handling was being strictly enforced, but when someone rushed into the back of the range and shouted ‘Gloucester is going to be king’, I was so horrified I accidentally fired my pistol into the ground and, luckily, just missed my foot. What a relief when this turned out to be an ugly rumour. In due course York succeeded as George VI. He signed our commissions and 37 YO Batch attended what was the first of my two royal levees at St James’s Palace in the summer of 1938, to receive these distinguished parchment documents. In Europe, Hitler was going great guns. The Rhineland had been reoccupied; Danzig was being threatened, as was the Czech Sudentenland; Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister, was pleading with Hitler at Berchtesgaden and waving his futile scrap of paper at Munich. These events had a profound effect on my mates and me. It became obvious that there was bound to be another world war and, looking back on the 1914–18 one, it was equally obvious, for we thought history would repeat itself, that our chances of survival were poor. In other words, it was an ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’ situation, which is my excuse for doing so badly at Cambridge and only getting a thirdclass honours degree.

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FURTHER EDUCATION: THE RMA, SME AND CAMBRIDGE Cambridge: the Mechanical Sciences Tripos Actually, the truth was that I was studying the wrong subjects and was not at all interested in mechanical sciences. I would much rather have been studying history, philosophy or law. I had no enthusiasm for heat energy and the abstract concept of entropy left me cold. The mathematics associated with dynamics were intriguing, but their application to the mechanics of machines could only excite me when Professor Inglis told his story of how the Queen Mary suffered badly from engine vibrations, and when he did a return trip in this great ship to New York he was able to use his obscure theories to cure them – by welding on some steel weights in specially chosen places in the machinery that drove the propellers. What I did not know at the time was that I was eventually destined to become a civil engineer and there was precious little in the Mechanical Sciences Tripos syllabus relevant to civil engineering. Another thing was the appallingly bad standard of lectures. The ‘heat engineering’ man was stone deaf. He came into the theatre, walked up to the blackboard, wrote on it rapidly in total silence for 40 minutes and disappeared. No chance to ask questions. The man who lectured on ‘statics of structures (civil)’, was one of those lecturers who attracted noise from the back, paper aeroplanes and, once, even a stink bomb. Inglis was good, but had a disconcerting habit of changing the symbols he was using half way through some mathematical formula. College life: Corpus Christi The two-and-a-half years at Chatham and Cambridge were a tonic after the Shop; the juxtaposition of army with academic life was very stimulating. Our Cambridge life in the 1930s was at a time when students, for the most part, were paid for by their fathers. There were virtually no state-sponsored students. Women were few: there were only two single-sex female colleges – Newnham and Girton. But of course the town, as opposed to the university, had the normal number of females. Unlike, say, 50 years before, a number of the dons were married men with families and lived out of college. I was welcome in two such homes and there were three demure teenage women with whom to play tennis. Mostly our life was monastic and male. I played golf on the ‘Gogs’ (Gog Magog Hills) course, and at Royston with college friends, and played a 69

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES weekly game of squash with Rob Gabriel at Queens College. I was a member of the ‘Corpus Wanderers’ rugby team and we wandered far afield, even to Kent. We lunched with each other frequently in college halls. My college, Corpus Christi, had very good food, second only to Michael Wilkinson’s at Peterhouse, which was superb – exquisite oyster omelettes and crême brulée. Michael and I went pubbing and in the all-male pub under the cinema in Market Place we used to meet for mutual swotting sessions prior to exams. Newmarket was nearby and the racing was a weekend attraction in spring and summer. The highlight of my Cambridge cultural life was when the Sadler’s Wells ballet came to do a week season at the Arts Theatre and my Wellington friend, Lanoe Drew, asked me to help him entertain Margot Fonteyn to supper before one of the performances. We were 21. She was 19, exquisitely beautiful and delightful. Lanoe and I swooned our way through the meal. She was almost fasting before her performance and, as we were interested in anything but food, no one ate or drank anything. During this period both Michael StJohn and I were balletomanes. Michael got in with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo at Covent Garden and was thick with a prima ballerina, Vera Zorina. I enjoyed Sadler’s Wells and had a girlfriend in the chorus called Gwyneth Matthews. I could drive up to London in my Hillman Minx from Chatham, attend the ballet and take Gwyneth out for supper, with a bottle of hock – all for about £5. During Cambridge months (October to June), my car was a problem. Undergraduates were forbidden to keep cars. I kept mine surreptitiously, two miles out, near the railway station, and had to travel by bus to get to it. I had a bad moment when, driving from London back to Cambridge one summer afternoon and passing through Tottenham, a small boy dashed off the pavement, cannoned into my rear nearside door and was temporarily knocked unconscious. Thoroughly unnerved and mindful of the ‘known fact’ that the Cambridge proctors were enthusiastic readers of the police court news, I found out from one of the crowd where the boy lived, bundled him into the car and, with a guide, drove to his back-to-back house. There I was greeted by an angry father, tearful mother and hysterical grandmother, so handed over the boy who had recovered and showed no sign of injury. As one does 70

FURTHER EDUCATION: THE RMA, SME AND CAMBRIDGE on such occasions, I gave them my name, address and insurance company and I parted from them on reasonably friendly terms, having exacted a promise that they would not tell the police. The university authorities never heard of the incident but my insurance company was, to put it mildly, not best pleased. Apparently, in the course of persuading the family not to report the incident to the police I had admitted liability and, as a result, they had had to pay compensation – including a fortnight’s holiday at Southend-on-Sea for grandma. They swore they would never renew my policy. Luckily, it was only about three months later that war broke out and the next time insurance came up it was paid for either by Cousin Michael StJohn or his father. Mike Molloy was a Canadian ‘tough guy’. He was also a DC in Tanganyika, and a friend of Roger Wilkinson – a district officer in Kenya at the time. In spring 1939 Mike and his wife Cecily-Ann were on leave in England. Cecily-Ann was attractive, blonde and reputed to keep a tame cheetah at Dodoma. Through Roger, Mike and Cecily-Ann came to Cambridge to look up Michael Wilkinson. On the weekend in March of the Calcutta Cup rugby match between Scotland and England (that year held at Murrayfield in Edinburgh), Mike offered to drive Michael Wilkinson and me (to whom Cecily-Ann had taken a shine) in his big Buick motorcar to the match. So off we set. Scotland won the match and it was very exciting, but to our disgust Murrayfield was alcohol dry. The match over, we made our way to our lodgings and then began a mammoth pub crawl in Edinburgh’s well-known Rose Street. We managed to get back to our digs and sleep the night, but in the morning, when we met the Molloy’s at their hotel, it appeared that, under the then strange laws of Scotland, the only way to get a drink on Sunday was to do a journey and become a ‘bona fide traveller’. So into the Buick we jumped and journeyed a few miles to a pub at sea level, right under the Forth railway bridge, where we signed the book as bona fide travellers and continued serious drinking. On the drive back to Edinburgh I passed out cold and the next thing I knew it was Monday morning. Michael Wilkinson had left me in the digs and, urging Molloy, had driven like the wind – not to Cambridge, where we had started, but to Chatham so as to mobilize for war. Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia over the 71

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES weekend, and I, like Michael Wilkinson, was supposed to have gone as quickly as possible to join the 23rd Field Company at Aldershot, on mobilization (in my car). So there I was – half-conscious, very short of money and not even aware of the crisis until I spotted a note from Michael explaining his defection the night before and his failure to wake me. I had enough money to get me out of the lodgings and into a train as far as Newcastle, where I was able to persuade a Lloyds Bank manager to ring my London bank and cash a cheque, so as to complete my journey to Cambridge. No need to go to Aldershot, as the evening papers were announcing ‘Flap over, no war, no mobilization’ – also no plastic cards, which would have solved my cash problem so easily. They were about 20 years away. Cambridge ended with a bang. Exams, the Corpus May Week ball. Pat Harris, an old tennis playing chum from Shillingford, Old Mill House days, came. We did all the regular things – the ball, the punt on the Cam, the breakfast at Newmarket – and I then went back to Chatham to complete the YO course. It was June 1939; we had only a physical training (PE) course to complete at Aldershot and a railway course at Longmoor. It was three months to the outbreak of war. The School of Military Engineering: Chatham Between 1937 and 1939 37 YO Batch spent nine months of 1937, four of 1938 and two of 1939 at Chatham, learning to be soldiers and military engineers. It was a great contrast to the Shop. The instructors were young (in their early forties) and enthusiastic. We learnt small arms at Chattingdean, floating bridging at Upnor and dry bridging and mining (tunnelling) in the Ravelin – a system of nineteenth-century deep trenched fortifications adjacent to the Brompton barracks where we lived. The prefabricated bridging equipment was the Inglis bridge (tubular steel struts, ties and steel plates) and the short and long box girder bridges. We practised preparing the sites for as well as erecting and dismantling these bridges. The much better Bailey bridge had not been issued in early 1939. The folding boat equipment was the floating bridge of the time. The pontoon bridge, with Bailey superstructure, came later, but very early in the war. We trained with it on the Somme in late 1939. We were also initiated into the basics of blacksmiths 72

FURTHER EDUCATION: THE RMA, SME AND CAMBRIDGE work (making horseshoes), fitting and machining (hammer and chisel work and lathes), as well as carpentry and masonry, so that we could command tradesmen, who were a major complement in the makeup of a field company (carpenters, bricklayers, masons, concretors, steel fixers, blacksmiths, electricians, miners and stokers). We did a lot of survey work, which included a very enjoyable three weeks on Dartmoor, living in holiday hotels in a village outside Plymouth called Yelverton. Unfortunately, we had been preceded two years previously by 33 YO Batch, which had left devastation among the local lovelies, a bad reputation for sapper officers and the mothers had ‘locked up their daughters’. Life was unbelievably splendid. The mess was like a good London club, complete with butler and staff. Food was up to club standard and the late Regency mess building was elegant with splendid pictures. We ate off Spode china with silver cutlery and on guest nights the mess silver sparkled on the polished rosewood tables. Vintage port cost 2/6 a glass and smoking was permitted. You were required to dine in mess no fewer than three nights a week. On other nights you could sign out, have a steak in the Sunshades bar of the Sun Hotel, go to the cinema, to the Chatham music hall, or to the Rochester casino for all-in wrestling. All this was on 10/– (50p) a day plus allowances, perhaps another 3/–. At Cambridge we paid for our room, rent, food and our buttery (bar) bill. The army gave us the allowances due to officers serving in ‘an isolated fort’. My Uncle Maurice also gave me £200 a year allowance for my two years at Cambridge, so I was mildly affluent. I could live well, run a car and even masquerade (for a short period before the mums found out) as a deb’s delight. This involved being invited by the mothers of young women who were ‘coming out’ to a small dinner, usually at the hostess’s house, then attending a ball at Claridges, the Dorchester, Grosvenor House or other similarly posh joint. For some reason my name was scrubbed from the lists early on, which was a pity because most of the debs were out for some fun and loved to slip the leash of their chaperones; the men were mostly young stockbrokers with nothing to them but a repertoire of jaded dirty jokes. Some of the women were way out of my class. The daughter of the heir to Lord Salisbury, at a ball at Hatfield House, stopped in her tracks as we danced and said: ‘If you tell me once more how 73

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES splendid you think this dance floor is I’ll stamp on your foot.’ With others, however, I had the upper hand. That is to say, I behaved even more abominably than they did. For example, at a dance at the Leander Club I abandoned Heather in favour of the champagne bar. The bars were an ever-present temptation and a refuge for bachelors because, in those days, the young women would not look for you in them (they would nowadays). I am glad to say I only succumbed that once, unlike my fellow male guests. The worst debacle took place at the RMA summer ball in 1936. I made up a party with my friend Michael Wilkinson. His partner was from a county family in Kent. Mine was cousin Nesta. It was a promising party – the Royal Artillery band was magnificent and drink, which Mike absorbed like blotting paper, was plentiful. His narrow face was flushed and glistened with perspiration (it was a hot night). Nesta took against him and, worse, he tripped on the wide stairway down to the supper room and threw up as he rolled to the bottom. That was the abrupt end to the party. Worse still, Nesta told her father (although she denies it), so when Michael later called at the flat to apologize, Collins, the manservant, turned poor Michael away, and insinuated that to call again would only cause embarrassment. I wonder what Michael’s partner said to her father and how Michael got her home to Canterbury. My sister Cynthia does not get much of a mention in these pages because not only was she five years younger, but she also was not around very much during my ‘formative years’. She was around, however, when I was at Chatham and Cambridge. Cynthia got back to Kenya just before war broke out and directly after finishing her domestic science course at Harcombe House near Lyme Regis in Dorset. I have two amusing memories of those times. The first was taking her out from school at Folkestone. I must have been 19 and I arrived at the school in my car. After a maid admitted me and showed me into a conservatory, to my surprise I heard the key turn in the lock behind me. I had never known I was that dangerous. The other incident was seeing young women hanging out of all the second and third floor windows of Harcombe House – a nineteenth-century mansion – as I was driving up a long avenue to fetch Cynthia. She and I had a happy afternoon together in Lyme Regis, and she insisted on my ‘hearing’ her prior to her domestic science exams. 74

FURTHER EDUCATION: THE RMA, SME AND CAMBRIDGE

My sister Cynthia at Balmoral Road, Nairobi, c.1940

We had a short period of intimacy when I was on holiday in Nairobi, late in 1940, prior to the Abyssinia campaign, but by the time I got back there again in 1945 she had already married 75

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES Arthur Moy-Thomas, and we enjoyed each other’s company for the shortest of time before Shell posted Arthur to Dar es Salaam and we again lost touch. Spasmodic meetings have happened since, but our relations have never developed into real intimacy. And so those happy, halcyon years came to a close. I was at Chatham on the morning of 3 September 1939 as I listened to Neville Chamberlain on the wireless announcing his declaration of war against Germany; and as I was due to report to the 23rd Field Company at Gibraltar Barracks, Aldershot, that very day, I was off in my car to Granny’s at Shiplake to say goodbye and then at once to join up. Roots Anyone reading these lines will be left in no doubt as to where my heart was when I left to fight the war in 1939. Not Kenya, not Ireland, not even Scotland – England. My birthplace and the first five years of my life were in Kenya, my lineage was Norman-Irish, but all my formative years were spent in England – in Kent, in Cornwall, but mostly in the Thames Valley in Benson, Oxford and Henley-on-Thames; with schooling in the Ashdown Forest and on Bagshot Heath in Berkshire. My residence for over half my life has been in Kenya, which is also my country of domicile. My roots are in England. Where my heart is now is another matter, and we will find the answer to that question at the end of this memoir. It is more than a matter just of residence. In England, at Benson, it was the clip clop of horses’ hooves on the metalled road as the groceries were delivered in the early morning and the rime on the bare branches after a frosty night sparkling in the morning sun. It was the Benson church bells pealing out in the still air of an early Sunday morning and the smell of autumnal bonfires of fallen leaves, and of cut grass when a lawn was mown. It was the flicker of a coal fire in a bedroom at night, of being tucked up, kissed and told to go to sleep. It was the swallows in autumn lined up on the telephone lines preparing to escape to sunny Africa, the cawing of rooks in the tall elm trees and robins foraging in winter gardens. In the early morning, it could be the raucous clang of the barrel organ and the rattle of pennies at the organ grinder’s feet. It was free-wheeling down Beggarbush Hill and hanging onto the back of a lorry on the way up. It was wet, lamp-lit streets in Henley on a 76

FURTHER EDUCATION: THE RMA, SME AND CAMBRIDGE December evening and listening to records in Belton’s music shop, choosing a toilet soap and scent Christmas present for Aunt Margaret in Boots, or a Christmas annual for oneself in W. H. Smith. It was sights, sounds and smells, and mostly (but not till later on) people outside the house: Mr Woods the Benson grocer; Halliday who helped keep our bicycles on the road; the carrier man who brought the luggage and railway parcels; the taxi man; the shop assistants at Field Hawkins and Ponking, the drapers in Wallingford, where your money whizzed in a little container on a wire across the shop to the cashier and back with your change; the cobbler and watchmender; watching the blacksmith making horseshoes and shoeing horses; and, of course, the lady in the sweet shop cum tobacconist. In London it was the open topped bus with the driver behind an oilskin protective apron (no windscreen); it was the crocuses in Kensington Gardens, Peter Pan’s Pool, starched nannies with little girls in button-up gaiters and games in Harrods on wet afternoons. At the farm it was primroses and mushrooms in the fields; Weeks winding the chain septic tank emptying machine; the ‘whoever sees the sea first – seen it’ game on the drive to Folkestone; and the humbug/gobstopper jars in the shop front in the little alleyway in old Folkestone. All these are memories of my early childhood. Perhaps too sentimental, but no apologies, that is how it was. Teenage memories are down to earth, more concerned with fun, games and entertainment in the days before television. If you wanted to be active, it was games. It could also be athletics or even skiing, but not for me. I could not even afford Austria where it was cheapest. Passive entertainment was the wireless, cinema and occasionally theatre, concerts, opera and ballet. Cinemas were everywhere. Aunt Madge used to prefer English films (usually shown at Gaumont theatres), but made some exceptions for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat, Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade and William Powell and Myrna Loy in Thin Man. My cousins and I did not mind whether they were English or American. We must have seen hundreds of good films with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis – stars too numerous to mention – and Hitchcock films like Rear Window. When I was at Cambridge, way-out films attracted me and I went with Mike 77

A TALE OF FOUR FAMILIES Wilkinson, Bob Courtice or other friends to a flea-pit cinema showing films starring the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton (all ‘oldies’ and mostly silent) and French films at the Curzon in Mayfair such as Carousel or Un Carnet du Bal. There was even a German favourite, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Glass Mountain. She also made the tremendous and frightening Nazi propanganda film Der Triomf des Willens. When I was at RMA, the big cinema houses began putting on mega shows. Beside the Arts Theatre at Cambridge, there was a repertory theatre called The Festival. There we used to see, for very little money, good productions of Shaw’s Pygmalion, Ibsen’s Ghosts and Russian plays like Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Seagull. There was a lot of good music in churches and chapels in Cambridge, but no concert hall. There was of course plenty of orchestral music in London, at Queens Hall and Albert Hall, and I often went with friends to hear Toscanini and Beecham concerts. Opera, also non-existent in Cambridge, was at Covent Garden (I slept through the Meistersinger) and at Sadler’s Wells – Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci. So there is the answer to the questions I am still asked after 43 years continuous residence in Kenya: Am I not Kenyan born? Why am I still a British passport holder? Surely I am Kenyan? No. In September 1939 I was Second Lieutenant DJO FitzGerald, RE. What else but a loyal British subject of His Majesty George VI, with roots firmly set in England? Sixty two years later am I still firm in these loyalties?

78

Part II Away to the War

5 Phoney war

I

had a lot of kit with me, so I drove in my Hillman Minx to Aldershot to join the 23rd Field Company RE at Gibraltar barracks. It was the afternoon of 4 September. As I drove I wondered if I would know anyone there. It would be untrue to say I was maudlin about the sudden breakup of 37 YO Batch, for it is only now that I realize I would see only one of them again in the next 48 years. The friendly face of Nigel Charteris greeted me in the small mess. I did not know him well, but he had been my contemporary at the Shop, at Cambridge and at Chatham, so I was not entirely alone. Mobilization was in full swing. The mobilization plan was priority number one in each individual army unit; it had been thumbed through and updated for the last two-and-a-half years once the outbreak of war had become imminent, and there it was being implemented, smoothly and precisely under the eagle eye of the second-in command, Captain Jack Brodhurst – a 35-year-old auburn haired, pale-blue eyed, lithe man, whom I took to at once. His first words were disappointing. ‘Nigel Charteris, who is senior to you, has just reported. He is taking over No. 3 Section. Woollett and Blomfield have been with us since we got back from Palestine and are still section commanders. So bad luck – you are for “B” Echelon – spare number – as the CO’s and my dogsbody.’ The good news was that I would be joining the brigade advance party (part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)) on 24 September to sail for France. John Woollett, the senior subaltern, was about 32, with a broad forehead and wide friendly smile. John Blomfield was an introvert, though friendly enough. He was a bit younger than Woollett, had lots of curly dark hair, and never 81

AWAY TO THE WAR laughed but often smiled. This was the crew I would mess and work with, though I did not know it, until the Dunkirk débâcle nine months later. I could not have been luckier. Major Colin Browning, the CO, bounced into the mess a few minutes later. He always did everything at the double, or at least at light infantry pace. Fortyish, he had greyish close cropped hair, and was stockily built with piercing blue eyes and a florid complexion. The following morning, 5 September, I kitted up and learnt to ride a motorcycle. The main fresh kit was battledress: blouse, trousers in shoddy material, anklets, army boots and fore-and-aft cap. Officers wore this outfit open-necked with a khaki shirt and tie. It was, of course, fitted with slip-on cloth shoulder badges. I did not take my sword to war, but I had a three-eight pistol and holster with ammunition belt, all in khaki webbing. There was also the standard camp kit – camp bed, basin with leather cover and folding wooden stand, mess tin and eating utensils. We were even issued with a shaving brush with stiff bristles (like a clothes brush) and soap and razor. Later that second day I was out on the barrack square admiring a shining brand new motorcycle. I knew how to ride already – I had used a motorbike for years, or so I thought. But this was a new experience. As I got going and opened the throttle the machine took off leaving most of me (including my legs) flying like pennants in the air behind me, while I hung on like grim death to the handlebars. Eventually, I tamed the brute. Mobilization proceeded. This was a regular army unit, so there were old soldiers either to be depot-posted or to stay at Aldershot as the company rear party. Some old soldiers did not want to miss the fun and petitioned to go with the lads. One, Sapper Browning, a stoker by trade (no relation to the CO), managed to stick around; he was a gnarled, grey haired oak tree of a man – incomprehensible and largely incoherent of speech, but a tireless worker. Bunce stayed behind and I took on Sapper Miller (Dusty) as my ‘batman’. Even second lieutenants in those days had a soldier servant to see them properly fed, watered and laundered, in order (so the excuse went) they could properly look after the welfare of their men and horses (some horses were sent off by rail to Weedon, the army cavalry depot, as part of the mobilization plan). I had a truck to myself (eventually), as well as the use of a motorcycle; my driver, who hailed from Halifax, was a 19-year-old with no teeth. 82

PHONEY WAR He told me they had often hurt, so he had told the dentist to remove the lot. His mother could cook the necessary pap for him at home, but he did not do too well on army tack and the medicos would not declare him unfit for active service. One of the main items in the mobilization plans was to bring G1098 up to scratch. This was the list of every item of equipment ordered by the army council that a unit should carry with it to war. Because the services were woefully underfunded in peacetime, important shortages had to be made up before the unit left its peacetime location. The most serious of these were vehicles (field companies by then were supposed to be totally mobile), so trucks were needed to carry about 300 men and all the company equipment. When we finally got them, our procession on the road consisted of 38 vehicles and about a dozen non-military requisitioned ones; the latter came from civilian construction companies operating in the Surrey area and were only replaced long after we had settled down on the Franco–Belgian frontier. Meanwhile, they had to be resprayed military green. While all this administration work was going on, we were being reminded that we were disciplined soldiers, and were being drilled and marched about. Eventually, 24 September came and we were off to France. Our advance party consisted of Jack Brodhurst, me, two trucks with drivers, a motorcycle dispatch rider and two sapper batmen. We were self-supporting in rations and water. At that time, units were not equipped with radio communications. Telephone line communication equipment and signallers were in the main body of the company, so we would make do with a public telephone if necessary. We joined the 1st Guards Brigade advance party at Southampton, loaded our vehicles onto the ferry and sailed by night to Cherbourg. The column, consisting of about 20 vehicles and led by the brigade major, Lumsden, immediately set out southwards – our destination being Evron, a small town in the Mayenne–Laval– Le Mans triangle just over 200 kilometres from Cherbourg. We made several halts on the way, and were enthusiastically received and refreshed with bowls of sweetened café au lait and bread rolls, which young women brought to us in our vehicles. There was also calvados and beer. We reached Evron at teatime and parked on three sides of the main square, leaving the fourth open to traffic to and from the mairie. It was a pleasant early autumn evening and 83

AWAY TO THE WAR we brewed up tea and broached our rations for a cold meal. It was then, while I was chatting idly with Phil Stenning, a fellow sapper subaltern in one of the advance parties, that we had our first adverse encounter with higher military authority. A staff car, flying a lieutenant-general’s pennant, drew up at the mairie and an orderly leapt out of the front seat and opened the rear door. Out of it stepped Lieutenant-General Sir John Dill, Commander First Corps, preparing to enter and pay his respects to His Worship the Mayor. Before he did so he stood on the steps and surveyed the military scene, and what he saw caused him to utter a loud bellow of disgust. Across the neatly mown park-like grass, flower beds and shrubs – a distance of perhaps 150 yards – he spotted Second Lieutenants FitzGerald and Stenning not standing to attention and not saluting, but munching baguettes and lounging about in a most unmilitary fashion against my vehicle. The bellow was followed up by a red tabbed officer in service dress galloping across the lawn. Phil and I did not at first realize that we were the cause of the rumpus. Then we saw that the galloping major was coming straight for us, shouting: ‘Hey you there, since when have sapper subalterns been excused the duty of saluting the corps commander? Give me your names and unit at once, please!’ Muttering ‘guts for garters, guts for garters’ he marched smartly back to join the general, who by then had disappeared into the mairie. By the time he came out again we were hidden away in our vehicles and nowhere to be seen. Two days later, after a couple of nights spent in great comfort in billets near the town centre and being fed like fighting cocks by our French hostesses, we resumed our march, this time northeasterly, and reached Arras on the afternoon of Wednesday 27 September. Arras was first corps headquarters and from then on it was all go, establishing ourselves in the farm houses and barns of rural agricultural Bachy, a small Flanders village on the Belgian frontier, facing Tournai, and about 12 kilometres east of Lille. Bachy was our home and place of work for the next eight months, until Hitler marched on 12 May 1940. The RE and its ‘fighting’ units are unique in the army. It is a service arm, seldom a fighting arm. It provides the fighting troops of the army with mobility by building and servicing roads, bridges and airfields for the RAF. In ruined towns it gets the water supply 84

PHONEY WAR and power services going again. In defence it blows up bridges, destroys roads and lays defensive minefields. When the advance resumes it has to clear its own and enemy minefields and disarm booby traps. In a static situation it is there to see to the comfort of the troops and, particularly, of brigadiers and generals, and to build defensive positions. It is almost always living and working away from and independently of its HQ. Thus, in the phoney war, though I lived in the field company mess and was billeted nearby, the work of my section was usually some way away. Our task was to extend the Maginot line, which only existed where the French frontier was contiguous with Germany. The Belgian frontier from the west of Luxembourg to the sea at Dunkirk was undefended by any fortifications. It was our job to fill in two or three miles of this 250-mile gap by building a system of anti-tank ditches and machine-gun and anti-tank gun pillboxes. If we were not doing that we were helping the infantry survive the approaching winter. My section was to support the first Guards brigade commanded by Brigadier Bootle-Wilbraham. The second Coldstream Guards, under CO Lieutenant-Colonel Annesley-Cook, was just one of three infantry battalions. I was duly summoned to his office in a disused railway station and waited while the sergeant major leftright-lefted a guardsman, cap removed, before the CO and summarily sentenced him for some offence to seven days ‘jankers’. ‘Ah, FitzGerald, I need 2000 sheets of corrugated iron to build shelters for my men. Please get them for me, delivered here by midday Friday.’ When I explained that by Friday the whole stock of corrugated sheets for the entire BEF would only be 2500, he said ‘Well that’s great, then. I only need 2000. See they are here. Good Morning.’ This was the splendid assumption that only the Coldstream mattered, and the rest of the army could go hang. Old Bootle-Wilbraham must have been about 45 – a small man with a bristly moustache and always sprucely dressed. He lived with his staff in some style in a commandeered château near Cysoing. The absentee owners had sensibly removed the best of the furniture and pictures, but a few of the many rooms were beautifully furnished by what was left. I had a problem. Winter was upon us and the château’s heating system was an under-floor maze of four-inch diameter water pipes serviced from a furnace and pump house in the back yard. The 85

AWAY TO THE WAR brigadier did not help by choosing to sleep in an upstairs room at the end of a wing, for the hot water got cold on the way. Once our plumbers had got the system working we found it had no prime mover for the pump, and it needed two tons of coal a day to keep the château even a bit warm. Luckily, we were in the middle of France’s coal mining district, so fuel was no problem. Sapper Browning was seconded to the brigadier and was just there to shovel for all he was worth. The brigadier was a fluent French speaker and got on well with the local farmers. He was also a spot-on military tactician. He had little faith in static defences like ditches and pillboxes. I was with him one day when he decided to site a pillbox in a farmyard. He asked the farmer where he would like it located. The farmer who, like all Frenchmen, had endured military service was nonplussed: ‘Mais, mon General.’ ‘This building will never be fought from. It will make a good potato store. Where would you like it put?’ Old Bootle-Wilbraham was right of course. None of the Maginot line, even the formidable bit facing the Saar, gave the Germans the slightest trouble. The brigadier was not, however, as hot on engineering as he was on tactics. One day we were about to start constructing a pillbox, sited on the edge of a half dug anti-tank trench. We had just got a large concrete mixer into position and were about to start work when the brigadier arrived during the lunch break. ‘Well,’ he said, pointing to the mixer, ‘when is this thing going to start digging?’ I gave my soldiers the nod, which said ‘do not dare start giggling.’ The reader will have gathered by now that my CO, Major Colin Browning, gave me orders about where to go and what to do, but as often as not, in support of infantry or gunner units, I was giving advice to senior officers like colonels and brigadiers. Even when I was inexperienced and junior I was duty bound to give these VIPs engineering advice, often at zero notice. I did my best and was not often caught out. It will also be evident that I seldom came into contact with senior RE officers, but I did from time to time come into contact with the first infantry division’s divisional commander who I remember well and still revere – Major General Sir Harold Alexander (later Commander, Middle East Land Forces). It may be recalled that when I left Aldershot I was still a member of ‘B’ echelon – that part of the unit that stays behind in a transit 86

PHONEY WAR camp at base and forms a reserve to be called forward if and when there are casualties, or, in happier circumstances, to replace people who have been posted. For me this fate was very short lived and, luckily, I was never left behind. I had not been more than an hour or so in Bachy before Jack told me that I was to take over No. 3 section under Sergeant Carter. ‘Why, what’s happened to Nigel Charteris?’ I asked. ‘Dunno, he has disappeared – last seen disembarking at Cherbourg on the 26th.’ A week later, news came that Nigel was hospitalized in Nice on the French Riviera; we never saw him again in 23 Field Company, or for that matter in the army. About two years later I heard he was ferrying fighter planes to the Middle East for the RAF, but as a civilian. It seems that he had suffered amnesia and was picked up in Nice with no notion of his identity or how he came to be in the south of France. Nigel’s was the not uncommon story of a boy who is a younger son of a successful but hidebound old soldier and has an intellectually brilliant older brother. Nigel had no pretension to more than average intellectual capacity, let alone brilliance, but was able to satisfy his father that he would succeed in following in his old man’s footsteps. This he duly did by passing not into Sandhurst but into the RMA Woolwich, where sappers, gunners and signallers were segregated from the cavalry and infantry who were thought to be less bright. Nigel did brilliantly as a soldier at the Shop, and became the senior under officer and winner of the sword of honour of his year. His undoing was that these distinctions entitled him, although he did not do too well in study grades, to jump the queue and join the corps of his choice, and he chose the RE and automatically became an undergraduate of Cambridge University. His proper niche was, of course, the gunners, in which he would have had a brilliant military career. Nigel was not up to the challenge of the Mechanical Sciences Tripos. True, he worked hard, but he failed to win an honours degree and ended up with an ordinary one, though he did distinguish himself athletically. One can only guess what strains he suffered, but the outcome was tragic until he made good in his civil life as a ferry pilot. I was lucky to have Nick Carter as my section sergeant in No. 3 section. He was a veteran of Palestine, had been in the army for about ten years, and had all the cheeky panache of his cockney upbringing. He was a brickie by trade, but his skills were military 87

AWAY TO THE WAR and looking after No. 1. Like most soldiers in Palestine, he preferred the Arabs as people, but had a sneaking admiration for the Jews for getting one up on their British masters. His best story was about the oil fuel supplier who had a contract to supply petrol to the local RAF airfield. It was quite a time before the RAF discovered that the fuel was not being discharged into their storage tanks, but pumped out of them. The section was billeted in a cosy hay loft in a barn. I sometimes joined Nick there for what started as a meeting about work, or the welfare of the men, and then degenerated into reminiscences of service in the Middle East. As a greenhorn I had a lot to learn about how to get on with the men, how to get to know them, how to get them to do what I wanted, and how to command them. I learnt a lot during those chats in the barn. Normally, however, I was living in the mess, going out for drinks, ham and eggs with my fellow officers, and going to bed in my billet. This was an unlined attic bedroom; when it snowed the flakes used to waft in under the roof tiles and the water froze in the ewer. It was sometimes so cold that I slept under the carpet as well as the quilt and blankets. The farmer’s wife cooked for and looked after us royally. At Christmas we gave a party for the family and their friends. Colin Browning had brought back some mistletoe from England and he hung it over the doorway. Around Christmas/New Year we all had ten days’ home leave, travelling by troop train and boat. I called at 11 Princes Gate Court, but only Clara Hellmann was in residence, so I went to find Granny at the StJohns at Henley. The third division was beside us and defending Lille. Major General Sir Bernard Montgomery commanded it and my friend Michael Wilkinson was there in one of the sapper units. Once or twice I met him at one of the excellent restaurants in Lille for a sumptuous meal. In March 1940 I went to Reims with the Guards Brigade advance party prior to them taking over a section of the Maginot line. We were put up in great luxury for the night in the Krug family château where we were served with the finest 1919 vintage Krug champagne. I have never forgotten the experience. Rumour of an impending German attack aborted our visit, so we hurried back to Lille, but not until after the Krug experience. When we were in Tilburg in Holland after the Overlord invasion four years 88

PHONEY WAR later, I sent a jeep to Reims to pick up a load of Krug to celebrate Robin Lindsay’s twentieth birthday. Alas, it was non-vintage, but it was still better than most vintage champagne. Again, alas, Robin contracted appendicitis on the very day of his birthday, so we had to enjoy it later without him – with Geoffrey Fairweather instead. That is another story. Lucien Haegelin was our French liaison officer all the time we were in France. He joined us at Evron. He was a dapper man and looked very smart in cavalry uniform, with riding breeches and polished boots. He was in a smart regiment and wore a Cambridge blue kepi edged in gold. To me, Lucien was mainly interesting as a conduit of information on the French people and the French army. He was obviously at odds with the political regime and made no secret of the fact that the people’s morale was low and the army’s even lower. Communism was rife and he hated the Reds. He kept his attitude to the war to himself; his attitude to the British and to us was correct and even friendly, but reserved. He said the only thing all French had in common was their hatred of the gendarmerie. He was with us until Dunkirk, but preferred not to be evacuated and stayed behind. Lucien performed his duties as liaison officer impeccably, and was a tower of strength in our professional relationship with the Département des ponts et chaussées (French Public Works Department), from whom we obtained all our construction materials. We accepted him at face value, but perhaps were not wise to do so. In the new year of 1940 our field park company (the stores unit of the divisional RE) received its complement of Bailey bridge equipment and pontoons. This was brand new stuff and we were excited to be sent off to the River Somme, near Amiens, to train in its use. The officers were put up in a pretty little château in a lovely park. The French owners were in residence and we were treated as family and royally entertained. Colin Browning was in his element as the honoured guest, also as a training officer, but he knew as little as the rest of us about how to put this floating bridge together, and we all learnt as we went along. Colin was in charge with his megaphone. John Blomfield was on one of the rafts already put together, with sappers manning ropes and four of them trying (and failing) to start up the Seagull outboard motors, which were supposed to manoeuvre the unwieldy raft into its 89

AWAY TO THE WAR position as part of the bridge. The Somme is a fast flowing river, and, as the raft and John slid downstream, Colin bellowed through his megaphone: ‘Mr Blomfield, bring the raft into bridge.’ Colin then turned to me, standing right beside him: ‘Mr FitzGerald, take four men, run downstream and catch the raft as it passes.’ He had neither removed the megaphone from his lips before addressing me nor lowered his voice. I was almost blown into the river. Colin allowed some of us to take the weekend off to attend the England–France Rugby Union match in Paris. We went by train. France won a wonderfully exciting match in front of a huge crowd. We took a taxi from the ground. On the way back to the station the driver urged us to break our journey at L’Etoile, a notorious knocking shop, but the CO had planned our journey for us and our return by a certain time, so we had to decline the offer. All good things come to an end and the absurdity of the phoney war duly ended one sunny evening on 11 May 1940. We were off at first light on the 12th bound for Brussels and beyond. It was just as well the phoney war ended when it did, otherwise we might have died of obesity and cirrhosis of the liver. All that high living was not good for us. The lads were also getting bored. This was only too obvious from their letters, which, due to unit censorship, we had to read before they went off. They could not see the point of sitting at the Belgian border waiting for something to happen – they would much rather be at home getting on with their idea of life. Sometimes this was rather crudely expressed: ‘Your last letter said you were looking forward to us going down the Gaumont. Forget it. Any movie you see will have to be shown on our bedroom ceiling.’ Sometimes it became a matter of fiction: ‘As I write I am sitting in a dugout with the shells whining overhead and the shrapnel pattering on the roof.’ This was before the German’s had invaded Holland. And ‘Just had a note from Jennie (sister) to say you are going with Jim Jennings. This is to say when this lot’s over, and I get back home, I’ll kill the bastard. Be warned.’ One such letter was actually implemented. The husband did go home and kill his wife’s lover.

90

6 Dunkirk, Leeds and Skegness

A

s we apprehensively girded ourselves for the impending onslaught, I must permit myself some observations on the military aspect of our situation. With hindsight, we all, and our masters in particular, had a lot to learn. In the first place, having spent eight months fortifying a defensive position, why abandon it at once to occupy a silly little stream like the Dyle, which had no prepared defences at all? Also, having fortified the Belgian frontier line with an anti-tank trench and pillboxes, why were these defences not backed up with barbed wire and land mines? Finally, what was the 23rd field company RE doing acting as infantry on the River Dyle when we got there? Our job should have been to blow the bridge over the river and improve the river’s natural obstacles with mines and wire. The corps commander, Dill, the BEF commander, Lord Gort, and the French commanderin-chief, Gamelin, should have had their heads banged together – even my pin-up, Divisional General Harold Alexander. Be that as it may, on that May morning we were part of an endless column wending its way through Tournai, Halle and Brussels – about 20 kilometres northeast to the line of the River Dyle, where the company found itself in defensive positions before dusk. On the way, the Belgians had fêted us with flowers and applause. This was the last time that European civilians would applaud the Allies for many years. We had Bren guns covering the road into Mechelen (the lace place) and the small bridge, and just before dark we saw our first German soldiers – two motorcycle/sidecar combinations with four men. They came as far as the bridge, turned round and drove away. No one fired at them. Then the mortar shelling began. This was the first ‘baptism of 91

AWAY TO THE WAR fire’ that any of us had experienced, so we took refuge in the sandy cutting of an adjacent lane, scooping out holes in the sides. Darkness fell and there was an eerie silence. Then there were noises, rustlings. It seemed as though the Germans were creeping on their bellies across the open field above our heads, beyond the cutting. I cocked my pistol and poked my head above the parapet. I could not see a thing. Then I saw it – a dark shape. I fired. The shape gave a moo and moved ponderously away. I had fired at a cow and missed. Other soldiers fired at random but shortly silence returned. The mortaring stopped, there were no creeping Germans and we had had no casualties. After two days and for no apparent local reason we received the order to retreat. Colin Browning mustered his company (and his senses) and we assumed our proper function – covering the line of retreat to Dunkirk by blowing up bridges. I think there were about 35 of them. Although Dunkirk is just in France, our line of retreat was all through Belgium. It took 12 days before we paused on a crossing over the ring of canals about ten kilometres short of the town. In the intervening period we had averaged three bridges a day. Some of them were very small and we blew craters in the approaches with our camouflet equipment. Apart from the big bridges in Brussels, which the Belgian army had prepared for demolition in advance and which we blew by order of higher formation, we used our own initiative and kept company HQ informed. This led to complications later. There were two spectacular demolitions in Brussels. One was a brick-built railway bridge on 120-foot piers over a valley, which went up in high style leaving the twin rail tracks and sleepers attached and still spanning the gap in a neat catenary bow. The other was a very heavily reinforced concrete low-level road bridge. We left in our canvas hooded truck with too little time to spare, and a piece of concrete with a reinforcing bar through it came bowling along the road behind us, caught us up and jumped into the back, breaking a man’s thigh. That was the only casualty we suffered until after my section had disembarked at Dover. We had one more later – one of my soldiers on leave in Brixham, Devon, got drunk, fell out of an upstairs window and was hospitalized. Although we always expected the Wehrmacht to catch us up and put out a protective military screen in case of interruption, they 92

DUNKIRK, LEEDS AND SKEGNESS never did. We were traumatically suspicious of spies, in particular, priests. I was crouching behind a soldier manning a Bren gun, covering our operations on a bridge in a lonely rural location when one such priest, in soutane and shovel hat, came towards us on the road wheeling a bicycle. He bent down to tie his shoelace. It was a signal – I knew it. My gunner put a shot over his head. He leapt onto his bicycle and rode away the way he had come. Another rural bridge site was the scene of a party of Belgian army gunners, with guns parked, peacefully smoking and fishing. I imagine by that time King Leopold had incurred Churchill’s wrath by surrendering to the Germans and the Belgians had lost interest in the war. The Wehrmacht were absent, but not the Luftwaffe. Their Stukas sought us out and dive-bombed and machine gunned us savagely. With our slit trenches we were safe except for a direct hit and, though the scream of the planes and bombs were terrifying, no one was hit. Then the road became crowded with refugees. Horse carts were crammed with children and belongings, the adults tramped along beside, radiating fear and scattering into the roadside ditches as the Stukas, often felled by machine-gun fire, arrived and the children screamed. When we dossed down for the night in their abandoned farms, cows would bellow to be milked. Many of the soldiers were country boys and stayed up all night relieving the animals’ pain and providing the rest of us with milk. I remember sharing with my soldiers the shelter of a rich man’s abandoned flat in Brussels, and living for 24 hours on a sole diet of chocolate and champagne. One could not live on it for longer. At last, on 25 May, we arrived at Dunkirk’s perimeter canal and were stopped by a red-cap who told us that no vehicles were allowed beyond this point and that if we wanted to get to Dunkirk we would have to do it on foot. I parked our vehicles in a field in the company of 200 trucks full of gun ammunition and went to inspect the bridge over the canal, which I found was not prepared for demolition. It seemed right to do so. When it was ready to blow and a party was manning the exploder, Sergeant Carter said: ‘Sir, all those gunner ammo vehicles and our vehicles would be a power of help to the Jerries unless we put them out of action.’ ‘Yes Sergeant, go ahead and do it.’ It was a rash decision. There were over 300 vehicles, most of them full of ammunition. 93

AWAY TO THE WAR Sergeant Carter’s method was to pour petrol over the loads and the engines and set them alight. Soon there began a mammoth fireworks display. Although it was daylight, the landscape was brilliantly lit. Shells whistled around haphazardly. The din was terrific. Long before the show had ended, an angry Captain John Fyson RE drove up on a motorcycle. ‘What the hell are you up to? You are to come and see my colonel at once.’ I knew John slightly. He had been at Chatham and was a lot senior to me. I jumped on his pillion and we sped quite a short way to a roadside farmhouse. At a table in his office was sitting a very cross colonel: ‘I am CRE Works of this area. I demand to know who instructed you to create this chaos. You have attracted the Germans’ attention to this position and it won’t be long before we are all being bombed and shelled by the enemy.’ I confessed that I had had no orders and had done it on my own initiative. ‘You are under open arrest. You will report the fact to your CO at the first opportunity. Captain Fyson will return you to your position.’ It was not long before Major Lumsden, my friend from Château Cysoing days and the Guards brigade major, pitched up and I acquainted him with my unusual situation. ‘Good God, how can you be in charge of blowing up the bridge and under arrest at the same time? You have my authority to ignore the order. I came to order you to blow the bridge at 0300 hours tomorrow morning. Cheer up my boy.’ So up went the bridge at 0300 – the colonel and Fyson still on the wrong side – and off we tramped in the direction of Dunkirk. The road was on a highish embankment with deep water-filled ditches on either side. Not far along it was an abandoned French motorcycle/sidecar combination. It started first kick. I should have known better. ‘Why walk if we can ride?’ I cried. ‘Jump on.’ So, the other five and I crowded onto the machine as best we could – me in the saddle – and off we set at double quick speed. It could not have been more than 100 yards before the wretched thing took on a life of its own, veered this way and that and, before I could stop it, we had sailed elegantly though the air into the right-hand ditch – three feet deep in water. A passing soldier cried: ‘Hell of a good show mate, do it again,’ and went chuckling on his way. And there was I – soaked to the crutch and dressed in my service dress and Sam Browne (I had discarded surplus loads at the bridge). 94

DUNKIRK, LEEDS AND SKEGNESS By the time we struggled to Dunkirk and onto the safety of the beach, we had dried off, had found Colin and the others and become a military unit once more. Nearly everybody seemed to be still present and correct. My section was 100 per cent, man with broken thigh excepted. We were not hungry as we had done pretty well on the way, but by God, were we tired! Colin wanted to be at it straight away, so he called an ‘O’ group (an anachronism – ‘O’ groups came a lot later in the war) in a deserted shed on the beach front. It was at night and we sat at a table lit by a kerosene lamp. Colin and John Woollett were sitting opposite one another across the narrow table (John had been second in command for months by then, for Jack Brodhurst had been posted away to command another company). John Blomfield and I were seated at each end. Colin began giving his orders, which were that we were to go to Bray Dunes a few miles along the beach to the east and assist the evacuation of the troops. The field park company had managed to get its folding boat equipment and other small boats to the beach and a scaffolding and pontoon decking jetty were being constructed to get people into the boats more quickly. The enemy was supposed to be not very far the other side of La Panne, about equal distance beyond Bray Dunes, and there was sporadic shelling. As Colin gave his orders I heard his words falter and, simultaneously, both he and Woollett dropped off and their foreheads met with a smack as they slumped forward. We helped the evacuation of troops continuously from 28 May. The weather was fine and the sea glassy smooth for the entire six days. The beach was gently shelved and sandy. There was an abandoned hulk of a small coasting vessel just offshore. Small boats from Ramsgate and other Kentish ports picked up their human loads and departed. No one was allowed to take any luggage aboard with them, so it was a great moment when the CRE (Works) – the officer who had put me under arrest – arrived with John Fyson, nicely dressed and with a suitcase. The lads knew who he was and one of them waited until he had waded out to the boat and had a leg over the gunwale before calling out: ‘Excuse me Sir, no luggage allowed,’ and relieved him of the case, spreading its contents all over the sea in the process. We slaved away in this manner for six days. A lot of the time the Luftwaffe machine-gunned, dive-bombed and occasionally shelled 95

AWAY TO THE WAR us. The RAF was nowhere to be seen. There was an abandoned armoured machine-gun carrier on the beach that my driver had got running – it was track driven and steered with two tillers – but we burrowed away at the sand underneath it and used it as an airraid shelter. One morning there was a gruff ‘Hello, there,’ and an elderly colonel barked: ‘Does this thing work? Good, take me at once to my unit down the beach.’ I demurred – I wanted to tell him that none of us had the slightest idea how to drive it. ‘Don’t argue, take me there at once.’ So off I set, with the old fool sitting on the edge of the vehicle with his feet over the side. It is not easy to steer with tillers, but I was able to get up speed and set up a fancy dance, which had him off the vehicle and rolling in the sand. I sped away and left him gesticulating and uttering threats. During this period, Major ‘Honker’ Henniker RE, a great favourite of us junior officers turned up to be evacuated. He had a passion for horses and was reputed to have wept at mobilization when his string of horses was evacuated to Weedon. He was in great form and entertained us with his story of a close encounter with the Germans: ‘I decided that the moment had come to charge the enemy, so I gave the order to fix bayonets, drew my sword and shouted “charge”. Some instinct caused me to look over my shoulder. No one was charging but me.’ ‘Honker’ eventually made it to major general, did very well in Southeast Asia under General Templer and became a prolific contributor to the long defunct Blackwoods magazine. The flow of would-be evacuees was drying up. On the night of 1 June the CO told me to take four trucks with drivers and make my way along the beach to La Panne, where I would find a party of soldiers who needed transport back to the mole at Dunkirk. I duly set out and, having passed La Panne and having found no soldiers, became very uneasy at the thought of Germans. So I decided to turn round and drive back. Now, the beach was firm going where the sand was wet, but not either above the high tide mark or in the water. The tide was coming in fast, so the motorable strip narrowed and eventually all four trucks were stuck in the sand. I asked some French soldiers to help push us out. They responded with enthusiasm, but pushed the trucks further into the sea and jeered at us as we abandoned ship and hurried back to Bray Dunes. I have never to this day felt the same about Frenchmen. 96

DUNKIRK, LEEDS AND SKEGNESS It was time to leave. We assembled on the Dunkirk mole at last light on 2 June. The destroyer, Winchester, swept up to the mole and seamen seized us and flung us aboard. I was wearing a French army cloak and when they threw me through a hole in the deck I seemed to parachute down to land on other bodies far below. I passed out. When I awoke the next morning we were in harbour at Dover. We were told later that it was only at the insistence of the naval C-in-C at Dover, Sir Roger Keyes, despite assurances that we were all off, that had caused the destroyer to arrive to pick us up – we were the very last to leave Dunkirk. The first reaction of course was enormous relief – a troop train, tea and buns pressed upon us by WVS ladies, all smiles, talk of the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ and of ‘Dunkirk heroes’. ‘To be honest,’ as a great friend exclaimed, ‘Dunkirk was only a miracle because of the wonderful weather and the heroes were the people in small boats who came to fetch us away.’ Dunkirk was an unmitigated disaster. The French were to blame because of their incompetence and lack of will to win. The British ran away and left the French in the lurch to carry the can. We were under orders but we were collective cowards. No wonder those French soldiers pushed me and my trucks into the sea. There was a lot in the UK press in early June 2000 about Dunkirk and they all said the last day of the evacuation was 4 June. They must be right, but I am certainly right about being among the last off. Leeds and Skegness We wandered endlessly and slowly round southern England in that troop train. I was familiar with the stations and was not surprised at the sight of Borden and Warminster, but on we steamed. Eventually we started to aim north and ended up at Leeds, in a makeshift tented camp in Roundhay Park. It went on being sunny and hot. There was a large and friendly pub a few minutes walk from the camp. Colin and John Woollett organized ten days’ home leave for the lads. We wondered whether they would come back, and some of them did not and had to be winkled out and dispatched, courtesy of telephone calls to local PC Plods. All but the drunk who fell out of the upstairs window finally got back to Leeds. It was impossible to feel anything but relief tinged with shame at what we had survived, but I was a little bit proud of 97

AWAY TO THE WAR having got all but two of my section home and dry: ‘Theirs but to do or die, but not if we can help it’ being the first (RE) rule of war in 1939–45. I went on leave to London, and was best man to Arthur Selwyn and Nesta’s wedding at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge. It took place on the day Paris fell and France capitulated. I wore the service dress and Sam Browne in which I had been dunked in the Dunkirk canal and had worn for those nine days before escaping. It dry-cleaned very nicely. Only my cap was new. Yorkshire hospitality was memorable. I had heard about it, but never experienced it before. We got used to being called heroes. We were picked up in cars and wafted to people’s homes. There were women. I remember having a round of golf at a smart country club. Eventually, when we had been kitted out, and the G1098 – left behind in France – had been replaced (more or less), we entrained for Lincolnshire and our billets at Wainfleet just south of Skegness. Re-formed, re-equipped and consisting of the same order of battle as in France, the first corps was charged with the defence of the Lincolnshire coast from the Wash to the Humber against an expected German invasion. Lincoln was corps headquarters, division was at Horncastle and first Guards brigade was at Spilsby. The sappers were charged with fortifying the coastline from seaward of Wainfleet, through Skegness and about two miles to the north. This meant guess what? Pillboxes, just like Flanders. There was a substantial ready-made ditch there – the North Sea. We thought that perhaps these pillboxes might actually be fought from. To make sure, we set about preparing bridges just inland for demolition and the plan was to blow them as soon as the invasion warning was received. No chance of using the roads for retreat. The terrain inland, until you got to the high ground of the Wolds, was farmland – as flat as your hand, just like Flanders, but with lots of dikes and ditches and with fewer woods and less populated. The Lincolnshire Wolds were pretty and rolling, and were well wooded, but it did not look as if we would ever fight in them. Wainfleet was a delightfully picturesque little country town, and all were in comfortable billets. Colin and the officers were billeted in the country house of the general manager of the Wainfleet brewery, which also served as the company HQ. It was a typical 98

DUNKIRK, LEEDS AND SKEGNESS manor house. It had a butler, a domestic staff and a good kitchen with an Aga cooker. We lived in great style and comfort and, if rationing had started, it certainly had no impact on the army. The Wainfleet beer was excellent. Skegness was one of those dreary English seaside towns that matched the spume-flecked greyness of the outlook to sea. Most of the population had been evacuated and, though it was late July, the Butlins holiday camp was deserted. Chalets adorned the sandhills backing the beach like a shabby necklace. The corps camouflage expert said we had to make our pillboxes look like the chalets, so we set about constructing pillboxes and enveloping them in tastily painted wooden boxes that were easily removable once occupied by soldiers. This never happened. The Germans stayed in Borkum and Heligoland. Our unexpected adversaries were the civil servants who looked after the sea defences, and were they fussy! The sea wall was an enlarged sand dune and heaven help you if you disturbed it in any way they had not authorized. It was particularly verboten to dig into it on the landward side. So the days and weeks passed during that endlessly cloudless, windless summer. One day there came a general order. It invited applications from officers of any rank to notify the War Office if they had knowledge of ‘an African language other than Arabic’. Putting two and two together was not difficult. What they were after was officers for the Gold Coast regiment, the Royal West African Frontier Force (Nigeria) and, of course, the KAR (Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya). I hurriedly rummaged in my brain and then wrote an application, asserting rather rashly that I was bilingual in Ki-Swahili and had a working knowledge of Gikuyu, Kikamba, Dholuo, and could say hello in Maasai. Three weeks later I was being interviewed in London. It was the first day of the daylight Luftwaffe bombing raids and most exciting: one saw for the first time those vapour trails of fighters decorating the clear blue sky. By October I had set sail for Africa in the Windsor Castle in a large convoy sailing from Liverpool around the north of Ireland and bound for the Atlantic – first stop Freetown, Sierra Leone.

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7 Round Africa convoy

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t was very rough as the convoy assembled off Birkenhead and we waited at anchor. I was surprised and delighted to be allotted a single cabin in first class. The ship had not yet been converted to troopship standard. NCOs travelled steerage and second class and the troops were in converted holds. When we set off the sea suddenly became much rougher, the Luftwaffe bombarded us and three of about forty ships were sunk. We were still in the passage round Northern Ireland. I was in my bunk as sick as a dog. I remember actually looking forward to a German bomb. Once past Ireland and out into the Atlantic, the weather was kinder. The convoy was not bombed again, but the U-boat threat was ever present, with frequent frightening alerts. Mercifully, we did not lose any more ships. There were no women, not even a hospital nurse, among the 25 of us bound for Mombasa, but we did our best playing deck games and cards and getting to know one another. We made our landfall at Freetown, but were not allowed ashore; we just anchored in the landlocked bay for a week. Finally, we left and made fast time, free of the convoy, to Cape Town. It was now mid-November. We knew we had to tranship for our final leg to Mombasa and were looking forward to Cape Town, but it was not to be. There was only just time for the officers on board to be whisked off to a dance at a country club and a meal at the Mount Nelson hotel; then we were off, 36 hours later, in the SS Khedive Ismail – an ugly little tub that wallowed its way up Africa’s coast to Mombasa without stopping anywhere. It took eight days. Then, 36 hours later we were in Nairobi, in our tents at Waterworks Camp and, in my case, on the phone to my parents in Balmoral Road. It was 4 December 1940. 100

ROUND AFRICA CONVOY Interlude ‘at home’: December 1940–February 1941 The Waterworks Camp commandant gave me permission, provided I reported daily, to live at home, which was a few miles away. My father (now 65) was determined to serve the war effort and was in charge of air raid precautions. He had an office with a secretary in the basement of the masonic hall. My mother was still doing voluntary work for the League of Mercy and, with some other ladies, sorting old currency notes for incineration. Her colleague Mrs Niblock-Stewart had three beautiful daughters. My sister Cynthia (still footloose at 18) had many friends, including Bunny Burrell, whose brother Peter became my partner in the 1960s and 1970s, and Joan Findlay, whose mother Connie farmed coffee at Kiambu and was my mother’s best friend. ‘Bus’ Brown’s wife Dorothy lived next door and lent me her open Austin 7 car, so I had wheels. We hit the town most evenings – Chez Gaby for excellent food, Torr’s hotel for dances and the Claremont, an outdoors pub with a dance floor on the road to Kiambu. Christmas and New Year went by with the usual celebrations. When I arrived, Kenya was looking its best. There was a riding stable nearby and I rode in what was then St Austin’s coffee area, which was interspersed with avenues of jacaranda. The trees were in blossom and my horse trod a carpet of blue flowers. The rain nearly always fell at night. It was a blissful interval in the war. I also rode with Joan Findlay at Kiambu, with the Mua hills as a backdrop. Father’s plot had been excised from a large estate that stretched, still mostly undeveloped, across the Kerichwa Ndogo stream to the other side of the valley. There was one old woodand-iron settler house up the hill on the other side, in which the second Lord Napier of Magdala lived. He was a widower and he asked my mother and me to afternoon tea. On the pleasant walk there through fields and over a little footbridge, my mother said to me: ‘Just nip on ahead and make sure the old man has done up his fly buttons.’ All was well – the old man was in shirt sleeves and trousers looking pretty unkempt, but at least decent. The big local excitement then was the murder of Lord Erroll (Joss) in January 1941 and the involvement of Diana Delves Broughton and her husband Jock. It drove the war off the front pages of the local newspaper and was the number one topic of conversation. My father and mother had different theories about 101

AWAY TO THE WAR who did it, mother accusing Diana and father plumping for a Maasai in the pay of a Nanyuki farmer, Jack Soames. In early January I received my order to move to Mitubiri camp, and proceed to Garissa on the Tana River as intelligence officer RE to the CRE of the 11th African division, Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Buller. I was accompanied by my personal servant, Ndachi, a Kikuyu from Fort Hall. Ndachi was not an enlisted man and would not accompany me into the operational area. Forming up at Garissa Frankie Buller, son of General Redvers Buller of Anglo–Boer War fame, wore a monocle suspended on a watered silk black ribbon. He was six feet four inches tall, weighed 210 pounds and was 47. His passion was big-game hunting and in the early 1940s there were plenty of elephant and other big game in the area north of the Tana, and towards the Lorian Swamp and Habaswein. Colonel Frankie was a joy to work for. Life was a big joke. When I reported to him in his tent among the thorn trees and red sandy soil, he greeted me in a friendly way and said: ‘Well you’d better meet the brigadier. He is just across the road. His name is Sweetie Barkas.’ It was a hot still morning. In a clearing was a circular track round which a number of officers of varying rank and age were motorcycling. Among them, pouring with perspiration and bare to the waist, was an overweight, elderly gentleman who came to rest at our entrance. ‘Sweetie, I want you to meet Desmond FitzGerald, straight out from England, who’s just joined me as IORE. What on earth are you up to, cavorting about in the dirt on that machine in the buff? How can you expect junior officers to recognize you as the brigadier without your shirt?’ The colonel thought I would be happier living with a unit, so he had me fixed up with the officers of the first Nigerian field company. This was an interesting experience, a new kind of African and a very eccentric collection of Europeans. The Nigerians were Fulani and Hausa men – big tough warrior types and muscular. When they knocked off work they changed into mufti – white voluminous robes and turbans. Very often they drummed and danced, and sometimes they sang. This went on quite late. The officers were the only ones who were determined to live and mess on their own. Each of the four had his own setup, well away 102

ROUND AFRICA CONVOY from the others, in the corners of a clearing. Each had his own servant, who cooked the food in his own kitchen and served each individually. Sometimes a servant would bring a written message inviting one of the other officers for a drink. I, however, escaped to the divisional mess as soon as I politely could. I collected an orderly who, unlike Ndachi, was enlisted so could guard and serve me throughout the campaign. His name was Gariba Zuru. He was a Hausa from northern Nigeria. Ndachi stayed on as my servant until we moved to Somalia. I then paid him off and he returned to Fort Hall. Although I had only employed him for three months, I was sorry to lose him. He was a wonderful dhobi and used to turn me out very smartly in my ironed and starched khaki drill uniform. Our tasks while we waited at Garissa were to maintain the Garissa airstrip and dirt road from Thika, and build a pontoon bridge over the Tana River. There was no road engineering equipment for the road or airstrip, just manpower and shovels provided by a detachment of the East African Pioneer Corps commanded by Lieutenant Michael Blundell, RE. Michael had a British sergeant and a three-ton truck to ferry the working parties and fetch food and water. How he managed was a miracle. When we moved into battle, he stayed behind. Next time we met was in 1945 and he was Colonel Michael Blundell commanding the SME at Nanyuki. The Nigerian Field Company assembled and launched the pontoon bridge. There was no military bridge equipment in the country so the elements were made in railway workshops in Nairobi. The pontoons were of sheet steel and were fantastically heavy. The assembly, which was really a construction engineering project, took three weeks. The equivalent military bridge could have been launched and operational in eight hours. If there was a report of rain upcountry the bridge had to be quickly dismantled and the individual pontoons moored by the river bank, otherwise it would have been washed away. I think it eventually was. The aircraft that flew in were Vickers Valencia freight biplanes with a top speed of 75 miles an hour. Maribou storks on the runway were a problem and had to be scattered before landing and takeoff. Later, two SAAF Hurricane fighters were stationed at Garissa. One needed a replacement wing from Nairobi, so they roped it on the upper plane of the Valencia and flew it down. The pilot said it made little difference to the aircraft’s performance. 103

AWAY TO THE WAR The rations at Garissa were good but unusual – mealie meal porridge and strange jams from South Africa like mango and peach. Cigarettes were plentiful and very strong, but drink apart from beer was rationed, especially whisky. Officers got a bottle a month, except for Long Lou Llewellyn who got a bottle a day. I often wondered why he was there, for he seemed to have no rank or obvious function. Tom Henphrey was another mystery man. You would see him sitting under a thorn tree in earnest conversation with a Somali, but once we got going his function became obvious and glamorous. He led a mounted band of Abyssinian irregulars, wore a cloak and rode a pony with panache. Colonel Frankie only welcomed visitors from Nairobi who brought whisky. Among these were Michael Biggs and Tony Coombs, senior RE staff officers who came to tell us what to do. They were brothers-in-law, married respectively to the beautiful Harragin sisters Catherine and Anna, whose parents lived together but never spoke, communicating only by written message. Lady (Madge) Harragin was a sweetie, a great friend of my mother’s and an endless comfort to me when my mother died. Walter Harragin was the lawyer who prosecuted Jock Delves-Broughton for Erroll’s murder and made a fearful botch of it. Michael lived to have a distinguished army career and, after retirement, ran a ‘new town’ in southern England. Tony Coombs was killed in a car accident in Abyssinia and Anna remarried. The South African Brigade, part of the 11th (EA) division order of battle, arrived in the Garissa area – white South African volunteers (but with ‘coloured’ transport drivers) who wore distinctive orange flashes on their shoulders. They were a tough bunch, but well disciplined and no trouble. They thought it was a good idea to swim in the Tana – blow the crocs – until a soldier disappeared. No trace of his body was ever found. They gave up swimming in the Tana and later the Juba was off limits as well. On 15 February it was D-Day and a long dusty column wound its way slowly in the direction of Italian Somaliland and the first encounter with the enemy on the River Juba line. The advance to Addis Ababa One should have known. The Italian army would never fight, at least not on its own, and would retreat, according to the allied 104

ROUND AFRICA CONVOY timetable, whenever things got uncomfortable and, if necessary, all the way to Rome. All that fascist posturing and hot air was for the benefit of signoras and signorinas. Moving nearly 1400 miles in 50 days leaves little time for fighting and there was scant resistance throughout. The Juba River was defended at Mabingo, but the Gold Coast Brigade moved south to Gelib, just short of Kismayu (the coastal port), did a right hook around the river and threatened the enemy rear, so they hot-footed it for Mogadishu. Mogadishu, a beautiful coastal town with a comfortable hotel, was undefended. Italian civilian men sat in the shade drinking little cups of strong coffee and the Cioffi distillery, which like the Windmill theatre in London never closed, dished out a very passable version of Plymouth gin at 2/6 a bottle. But when a colonel was seen running trouserless down the main street on being chased out of a local brothel and the West African troops went wild we had to get on our way northwards quickly before the British army died of shame. Although miscreants could be flogged, only the regimental sergeant major was empowered to administer the strokes and he became so exhausted that a great queue of askaris awaiting punishment had to be dismissed to quarters. The 800-mile crossing of the Ogaden savannah – all thorn scrub, camels, heat and dust – to the Abyssinian highlands at Jigjigga took us 16 days. There were low ranges of hills and the road wound round the foot of them. To avoid bogging down in time of rain, the Italians had gone a good way with a stone-based road, but most of it was half built and it petered out after about 120 miles. After that it was a dusty track. At that time of the year it did not rain, so we got through without difficulty. Logistics were a problem, but once we were able to relieve the British Somaliland port of Berbera (which the Italians had captured in 1940), supplies would be easy for the investment of Abyssinia. The Italians decided to make a stand at Jigjigga and had fortified a defensive position on the Marda Pass just north of the town where the road to Abyssinia wound into the foothills. We were on a small hill behind a prickly pear hedge with the battlefield spread out in front of us. It was late afternoon. It put me in mind of a point-to-point race meeting in Worcestershire, except for the aridity and the heat. The general and his staff were standing with us, constantly scanning the scene through binoculars. ‘It is just like 105

AWAY TO THE WAR the battle of Waterloo,’ said the colonel, and so it was, except that there were no horses. Two of the three brigades were spread out in square formation, advancing, as infantry should, on foot. Little puffs of dust marked the fall of shot. Over to the left were the Indian mountain gunners, popping high trajectory howitzer salvos into an enemy position on the shoulder of the hill. Every shot looked a winner. ‘Oh for some cavalry,’ sighed an elderly officer. Tanks would be better, I thought, but then it would not have been Waterloo. ‘You had better tell them to dig in for the night,’ said the general to a staff officer. The troops had already taken over the town. I found a spot on the veranda of the Italian DC’s house, to put up my camp bed and doss down for the night. It was just getting light when I felt a heavy weight on my chest and a rough tongue licking my face. It was the Italian DC’s well-grown lion cub. A short time later it took fright and jumped into an open well in the courtyard and had to be rescued with the aid of a camouflage net. The officers decided to adopt it and it went along with us for a bit, but quite soon it became fierce and too much of a handful, so it was let loose to fend for itself and terrorize the locals. The Italians had abandoned their Marda Pass defences during the night, so we proceeded on our way first to Harar, then to Dire Dawa (a sort of Swindon railway town) and over the Awash River to Addis Ababa, which fell on 6 April. A mountain pass lay between high up Harar and much lower down Dire Dawa. While others were making good the Italian demolitions and constructing a temporary crossing over the Awash River, we hung around for a couple of days in Harar. Apart from a few half-built office buildings on properly paved roads, the old walled town was a fairly unsavoury place, but kept fairly clean by allowing hyenas to come in at night through specially provided holes in the wall. There was a victory parade in Addis. Numerous generals were there with their staff and it was hard to find accommodation, so yet again we decided to take to our tents. The city was agog with preparation for the ceremonial entry of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor Haile Selassie, Lion of Judah, who was coming in from the west with Colonel Orde Wingate, courtesy of the 5th Indian Division under the command of General Platt, which entered Abyssinia and fought a battle at Keren. 106

ROUND AFRICA CONVOY It took rather a long time – the emperor finally arrived on 8 May. It was then that I enjoyed what, up to then, was my finest hour. I, a one-star subaltern, was put in charge of the Djibouti– Addis railway. Admittedly, it was only a 72-hour assignment, but I had an Italian general and a lot of bemedalled senior officers under my command. The railway bridge over the Awash River had been blown up, but it was important that the section from there to Addis should be restored to working order. My orders were to inspect the line. A motorized trolley was provided, with an Italian driver and four Abyssinian guards, armed with the Italian version of a light machine gun. A civilian railway official accompanied me. The outward journey was downhill and we rattled along at an impressive speed until we encountered the first, indeed the only, blockage – an overturned closed freight van. Only the doors were open and its contents, about 100,000 packets of condoms, were strewn all round. Having manhandled the trolley past the obstacle we went on a bit. The distance to Awash was about 150 miles, but we had only done about 50 when it happened. One of the guards opened his knees and the machine gun between them fell heavily on its butt and went off – firing about 20 rounds at random. The driver and all four guards leapt from the vehicle and ‘went for bush’. The railway official applied the brakes. It took 90 minutes for the driver and one guard to rejoin us. We left the other three to fend for themselves, abandoned the safari and retreated to Addis well after nightfall. I was relieved of my command the next day. Prisoner of war in Gimma My colonel then decided that, as IORE, I should go and check the details of the demolished bridge over the Omo River at Abalti on the Addis Ababa–Gimma road. I set off on 15 April with orders to report to Lieutenant-Colonel Hopkins of 2nd Nigerian Regiment at 1500 hours. My reconnaissance party consisted, apart from me, of Gariba Zuru, my Hausa orderly, and we travelled in a small captured Italian Fiat pickup, which carried our kit, three days’ rations and water in a canvas chargul. Gariba Zuru was armed with a service rifle, I with a 0.38 Webley pistol. Colonel Hopkins laid on a simple plan for the excursion. His battalion was deployed on the lower slopes of the high ground to the east of the river, with outposts 1500 yards short of the river, 107

AWAY TO THE WAR and it patrolled the intervening ground as far as but not across it. The river was a fast flowing stream about 200 feet wide. At that moment it was low, with a rocky bottom but easily fordable; it narrowed into a low-walled ravine just upstream and to the north of the bridge crossing. The dry, stony ground with low thorn shrub on both sides of the river afforded little cover for movement except where folds in the ground and dry water courses crisscrossed the slopes. The Italians, with Eritrean troops, were settled on the west side, which sloped steeply towards the Abalti escarpment, rising abruptly about 3000 yards from and parallel to the river, to a height of about 1200 feet. From the top of this it was possible, as I was able to confirm later, to spot every move made on the eastern slopes for at least 6000 yards. Colonel Hopkins’s plan was to mount a diversionary night attack across the river, downstream and to the south of the bridge, starting at 0430 hours, while I approached the bridge at first light at 0530 hours, made my reconnaissance and returned to his headquarters by 0700 hours to write up my notes and make my report. I was ordered to reconnoitre my approaches to the bridge site and make my own plan of how to get to it and back again by last light that evening. The plan had a number of flaws. I had no local protection, I never met the platoons mounting the diversionary attacks, I had insufficient time to consider how close to the river I could get before getting out of my pickup, I did not know where to hide the vehicle while I reconnoitred or what route to use to get back to it in broad daylight afterwards. All I was able to do was a binocular survey from an observation post about 2000 yards back, from which I could not see the bridge site. In the event I free-wheeled down the road in the dark to within 600 yards of the river, parked the car on a bend in a low cutting, where I thought it would be difficult to see from the escarpment and, in the darkness, marched along the road to the bridge site with Gariba Zuru carrying a tape measure and notebook, by which time the noisy diversionary attack was rending the silence not far away to the south. The bridge turned out to be a steel framed cantilever type with a wooden deck. The demolition was successful and lay in a tangled mess in the river bed. The abutments had not been mined. I was measuring the gap, which was about 150 feet, with Gariba Zuru at the other end of the tape, when Gariba shouted. We were being 108

ROUND AFRICA CONVOY approached at a run by a crowd of thugs firing at random in a loud fusillade. We took to our heels, scrambled up the bank and ducked for cover, but the Eritrean soldiers caught us up quickly. Garibu Zuru was bayoneted to death and I would have suffered the same fate if I had not been saved by the timely intervention of an Italian sergeant. I was hustled across the river into a camione and driven up the escarpment to the Italian general’s eyrie in a cave, which had a wide-angle view of all the British lines. Here I was regaled with sweet black coffee and invited by the great man no less, an aristocratic officer with a fine command of English, to explain the tactics and strategy of the British campaign and the ‘order of battle’ of their forces. I stupidly decided not to observe the ‘name, rank and number’ rule of the Geneva Convention. As I was wearing an Australian army type slouch hat, I said I was part of an Australian division that had recently landed at Berbera and was forming up for the final push that would end the Abyssinian campaign and, indeed, the war. The general received this information with polite scepticism, he obviously knew better, but wished me good luck, a short incarceration and volunteered his belief that his own would be much longer than mine. Gimma, my enforced place of residence from 16 April (Cynthia’s nineteenth birthday) until 22 June, was a ramshackle African town with a few Italian-owned shops, a mayoral building and a sprawling military cantonment bristling with unemployed generals and other senior officers. Adjacent was a Regia Aeronautica (Italian air force) barracks and a functioning military airfield. Gimma was in a coffee-growing area, in fact Abyssinia’s main coffee-growing area and comparable with, though very unlike, Kiambu in Kenya. While European coffee barons ran Kiambu on large estates, with vistas of coffee and well-appointed processing and storage buildings surrounding the owners’ smart houses, in Gimma you had to look hard to see coffee growing at all in the smallholdings of Italian peasants. Nestling around creeper clad trees and the lush tangle of undergrowth, the family house was little different from the surrounding African huts. Roads, except in the town, were rutted cart tracks; and when I was there it rained heavily and incessantly from late May onwards and, unlike in the Kenya highlands, the rain fell mostly in the day. 109

AWAY TO THE WAR I was lodged for a couple of days in a police station cell. I had it to myself and it was simply furnished, dark, but not uncomfortable. I could move around freely inside the police station; my only complaint was that the ablution and toilet facilities were abysmal. Food, Italian pasta and plenty of fruit and vegetables, was ample. The noise was terrific. The police all talked both to each other and on the telephone at the tops of their voices. I seemed to be the only POW. I was visited by a priest, who provided me with solace, an Italian bible and a novel. He wanted details of my family and their address in Kenya. I later learnt that the first, indeed the only, news of my being alive and a POW came to my parents from the Catholic hierarchy in Nairobi. My mother, though a staunch Anglican, always had Irish priests as chums and no doubt it was they who primed the Pope’s intelligence corps to find out about me. Within a few days my captors had made a large wood and iron house on the outskirts of the town fit for white POWs, had secured it with a barbed-wire fence and had provided local askaris and a guard, Brigadiere Molinari, to look after us. I was introduced to my fellow prisoners, the crew of a SAAF bomber, two officers, and four white ‘other ranks’, who were lodged in separate accommodation (but inside the house). My living companions were Captain Stephenson and Lieutenant Dempers, SAAF. We occupied a large dormitory-cum-sitting/dining room, simply but adequately furnished with comfortable beds, chairs and a table. A wind-up gramophone and records were provided, no books but a daily news-sheet (in Italian), writing materials and paper. We had our uniforms removed and were dressed in brown, ill fitting jerkins, trousers and Italian army fore-and-aft caps. We looked a proper sight when we went out walking with Molinari on the open roads and attracted shouts of cattivi Inglese (nasty Englishmen) from Italian peasant women working in their gardens. Brigadiere (equivalent to a corporal) Molinari was a small, dark, dapper Neapolitan. He was an unconvincing fascist. He did a good deal of strutting and saluting, but could not stop himself being ingratiating to his very short-time captives. He had the usual passable tenor voice and liked accompanying Neapolitan songs on the records that were provided. He left us alone at meals, but organized frequent breaks, when he joined us for sweet lemon tea in glasses, or strong Italian coffee, which he prepared himself. When we went 110

ROUND AFRICA CONVOY for walks we often visited the houses of his coffee-growing peasant friends, where we were kindly received and served with cakes, tea and coffee. I soon picked up a bit of Italian; the South Africans made no effort to follow suit. The food was adequate but monotonous – pasta, vegetables and fruit. The meat was unusual. We had roast goat and sometimes horse, camel and donkey and, worst of all, mule. Horse and camel were not bad, but donkey and mule were white, sweet and disgusting. We all wanted to smoke. At first the local rough tobacco was accompanied by cigarette papers, but later we had to resort to rolling cigarettes in typing paper, which gave a very acrid and no doubt highly carcinogenic smoke. Occasionally, some rather nasty sweet wine was available, but twice we had a great treat. We were invited to the Italian air force officers’ mess and regaled with bonhomie and Black Label whisky looted from NAAFI stores in Berbera, British Somaliland, when the Italians drove the British out in late 1940. They also gave us packs of Tre Stelle cigarettes brought in from Libya. Apart from the weekly arrival and departure of the Savoia transport plane from Tripoli, the only air activity was the daily early morning show of force by the Caproni bomber and two CR 42 (Gloster Gladiator type) aircraft, when they patrolled the Gimma area. We never saw any air activity. All the time we were in Gimma, the ridge to the northeast on which the relieving British forces were encamped from early in June loomed over us fewer than ten miles from our POW lodge. The last fortnight of our incarceration was maddeningly frustrating. The first thing we heard was that the British were sending loads of flour into Gimma to be baked and returned as fresh bread to the waiting troops. Then, on 13 June, we watched the laisser passer procession of Captain Shaw of the Abyssinian irregulars riding through the town – a romantic figure in a flowing cloak, accompanied by a motley band of wild looking armed shifta, also mounted. Three hours later, after a meeting at Brigadier Fowkes’s brigade headquarters, the procession retreated the way it had come. Our patience exhausted, we formed a delegation and demanded to see the Italian general to request our immediate release. He received us with courtesy, but refused on the grounds of protocol – there was no precedent for just letting POWs slope off – we must be patient, only a few more days. Eight days later, on 22 June, the 111

AWAY TO THE WAR formal entry took place and we were free at last. I was able to shake Brigadier Fowkes by the hand (not for the last time). All was not well in the POW lodge. My SAAF colleagues were unhappy about the circumstances in which they had become captives. Their navigation orders had been to fly north until they hit the Dire Dawa–Addis railway, and then follow it to the east to land at Hargeisa. They had turned west, run out of fuel and ditched at Sciassamana, where they had allowed the Italians to capture them with the aircraft intact. Luckily, when the British took Sciassamana, it was recaptured intact before the Italians could get it away but Stephenson and Dempers did not know this. Meanwhile, the unhappy crew were feeling very edgy, wondering about the possible findings of ‘the subsequent court of inquiry’. Stephenson, an Anglo South African managed to keep his cool. Fred Dempers, however, was psychologically ill-adapted to the situation. The first thing he did was to stop speaking English. He would speak only to Stephenson and only in Afrikaans. Before he adopted this position he had given me a vignette of his attitude to this ‘British’ war. He reckoned he was fighting on the wrong side. It was only because Smuts had won the race to seize the reins of power in Pretoria that the Union (as it was then) had come down on the Allied side. He formed fists and a jutting chin to enquire whether I had anything to say on the matter. I had nothing whatever to say. I had been knocked out cold in the first round of my only boxing encounter. Dempers claimed to be a boxing champion and looked the part. He had been temporarily seconded for the war from the South African police, where he had been a motorcycle mounted traffic cop. He boasted of how many women he had ‘had’ on the pillion of his machine – not just giving them lifts. He was a trial to live with. He even refused to play ‘battleships’, a time-consuming but exciting game Stephenson and I would play on squared paper. You could easily lose the lira the Italians used to pay us weekly as POWs in unsuccessful bets. I am quite ashamed of how I avenged myself and the Allied cause on Fred Dempers. It came about that he got a jigger flea underneath the nail of his right big toe. If you fool about with a pin in this situation, you break the poison sac that the creature lays and septicaemia sets in. Dempers demanded medical attention and asked me, as the Italian speaker, to accompany him to the 112

ROUND AFRICA CONVOY Italian medical officer’s clinic. While, with me as interpreter, he was explaining his predicament to the doctor and exhibiting the suppurating toe, I noticed the doctor reaching for a vicious looking pair of pincers from the array of surgical instruments. An overwhelming joy flooded over me. I knew in advance what he was going to do. With great dexterity he whipped off Demper’s big toenail and had him hopping round the room, screaming in agony and threatening the doctor and me with instant annihilation. The doctor had him in an arm lock pronto (obstreperous patients being his speciality), administered a calming injection and dressed the wound. An unusually docile Dempers returned to his cage. As we departed on our separate ways (and courts of inquiry), Captain Stephenson and the four crew members apologized to me for Lieutenant Dempers’s outrageous behaviour. The final act in this inglorious episode was the subsequent court of inquiry in Addis Ababa. I was exonerated. The colonel presiding thought I had been led into an impossible situation and that LieutenantColonel Hopkins had not properly supported me. It took time to forget Gariba Zuru and his sad fate. His was the first death in action I was to witness. It taught me that life is totally unfair. The vultures picked his bones and he had no known grave, but at least my account made sure that his fate and gallantry was made known to his regiment and his family at home in Kano, Nigeria.

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8 Middle East posting

I

t was the rule that a released POW must be posted away from the theatre of war concerned. I was due some leave anyway, but could not return to Abyssinia, so it was goodbye to Frankie Buller and back to Nairobi in late July 1941, by DC-3 commuter aeroplane, for six weeks leave at home and then a posting to the Middle East. Only my mother and sister Cynthia were at home. Father was at Burguret, near Nanyuki, newly re-employed as a full colonel in charge of the Burguret Italian POW camp, established there since early April. It was already in full running order, with good hutted accommodation for all, including the POWs. His officers were recruited from local white settlers, who were members of the Kenya Regiment and had farms nearby. Father had his horses and was shortly to get a band; the Italians were establishing flower and vegetable gardens; the climate was (is) the best in the world and the social life of Nanyuki and Nyeri was at its height, regardless of the war. I visited him for a week in his Garden of Eden. Having had a short spell as a POW, I declared it to be bliss. While he was at Burguret, his camp suffered two mass migrations of elephant moving between Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. Four times, regardless of the barbed wire, they marched through the camp made havoc of the flowers and vegetables and went on their way. The wire and agri-horticultural damage was repaired and nobody escaped. The Italians who did escape temporarily were from the Nanyuki camp. Father held that job for 27 months and was then posted to be Commandant, Central Recruiting Depot (Uganda) at Tororo. He served there for 30 months and was finally demobilized in his seventieth year. 114

MIDDLE EAST POSTING

Colonel T. O. FitzGerald at the Italian POW camp, Burguret, Kenya

I spent the rest of my leave living it up in Nairobi. One day I was giving my mother lunch at Chez Gaby and at a neighbouring table were Jock (recently acquitted of the Erroll murder) and Diana Delves Broughton. ‘Doesn’t she look hard?’ Mother muttered, ‘I am sure she did it.’ I thought she just looked beautiful. In early September 1941 I was in a ship en route to Egypt. Ten days later we docked at Port Suez, queuing for passage at the entrance to the Suez Canal. We were allowed ashore and I made for the French Club where I found Tom Henphrey, last seen talking to a Somali under a thorn tree near Garissa. He greeted me like a long lost friend and we had a drink together before I returned to the ship. The next time I heard of him, in the late 1940s, he was a district magistrate at Naivasha. Bagush and beyond We docked at Port Said. The railway transport officer had a movement order and a train to take me (and a lot of others) to

115

AWAY TO THE WAR Maaten Bagush – a vast transit camp on the Mediterranean shore, just short of Mersa Matruh. The train, as military trains always do, wound its way ever so slowly across the delta – first real stop Alexandria. The delta is flat palm-tree studded land, squared off into countless rectangular plots and intersected by irrigation channels. Dappled shade and a light breeze moderated what would otherwise have been an oven-like atmosphere. Everywhere there were barefoot men and women, lightly clad up to their shins in water, toiling at the endless job of cultivating their fertile land. Crops of many kinds rewarded their labour. The train stopped at Alexandria only to take on water and more troops, and we proceeded out of the fertile delta into the semidesert for the last 60 miles to Bagush with the Mediterranean, its tempting coolness blue and sparkling, on our right and savannah on our left. Half way there we stopped. There was no station and rumour soon had it that there had been an enemy air raid ahead. It was sundown and we made tea with hot water from the steam locomotive. When we finally got to Maaten Bagush that late October evening, I was made welcome for the night in the transit camp officers’ mess and given my posting order the next morning. I would join Brigadier C. W. Gaussen, chief engineer 13th Corps, as his staff officer near Sidi Barrani. Lieutenant-General GodwinAusten was the corps commander and this corps was part of the newly formed Eight Army (latterly Western Desert Force), commanded by General Sir Alan Cunningham. I took heart that there were three old East Africa hands in the Western Desert to lend a bit of tone to proceedings against General Erwin Rommel and his German divisions, newly arrived in North Africa. If one must make war, this was the place to wage it. The Egyptian desert, Libya and perhaps eventually Tunisia were sparsely populated, for the most part deserted and had nothing very important to destroy by way of towns, agricultural lands or industry. There was something worth fighting for too. Middle East Command, under General Auchinleck in Cairo, was concerned to defend the Mediterranean basin against the dreaded Hun. Western civilization was at stake – ancient Rome, Athens, Carthage, a good part of the Orient, Persia, the Lebanon, Palestine and, of course, ancient Egypt. You also knew who your enemies were: the Hun, the terrible Turk (technically neutral), a pity about the Italians, of 116

MIDDLE EAST POSTING course, who were definitely on the wrong side and knew it. Their heart was not in the struggle at all. Ranged against the Allied forces were two German Panzer divisions, 90 Light Infantry and a motley collection of Italian divisions. Both sides were well equipped with air support, and we were continually being strafed and bombed, and not always by the enemy. SAAF fighters beat us up not long after I joined Kim Gaussen. They claimed that, having failed to find a German convoy off Malta, they had mistaken us for the enemy, but having watched them take off from an airstrip less than ten miles away and return there after their sortie we were unconvinced. It was unreal being one of a pair with Kim Gaussen in his office tent. Frankie Buller had had an adjutant, a liaison officer and me. Here there was an office vehicle operated by a chief clerk and a typist parked nearby, otherwise just us two. We each had a batman/driver, mine being Driver Simmonds, but they only came mornings and evenings. With a field telephone by my side I slept in the open on a camp bed in a shallow trench near the office hut. The mess was in a large tent lit by hurricane lamps – carefully blacked out at night and very stuffy. The food was plentiful but boring – lots of bully beef, usually served in a stew with tinned vegetables and army biscuits. We were issued with vitamin C pills and concentrated orange juice. Beer was readily available; we carried our own whisky ration (one bottle a month) and got ten ration cigarettes a day. We celebrated our first Christmas (1941) with bully beef, biscuits and a special ration of rum. There were a lot of officers in 13th Corps HQ. Michael Forrester was great fun and the camouflage officers were mostly eccentric. One, Bainbridge Copnall, was a fairly well-known sculptor. His job was to make squadrons of dummy tanks out of wooden frames and hessian canvas and he had a staff to help him do it. Copnall left it too late one evening to get back to camp and got lost in his vehicle in the dark. He turned up the next morning itching; he had spent the night in a hospitable bedouin encampment and his description of the experience was hilarious. Kim Gaussen and I put up with one another from early November 1941 to June 1942. Even in the difficult conditions of desert life in the open, he was always spruce, clean shaven and smartly turned out. He was intellectually inclined, an introvert, and never 117

AWAY TO THE WAR once let his hair down with me. If he had a sense of humour, I never found it. I treated him with great respect. What he wanted from me was help in writing reports and drafting routine letters. I was also his liaison officer and went all over the place visiting RE units and finding out what was going on. A lot of what was going on concerned the procurement and distribution of water. My old school mate Nigel Gell was part of an outfit designing and constructing a long pipeline with intermittent storage and pumps bringing water from Matruh to the Egyptian border (about 80 miles). More exciting to me was the ‘dew-pond’ water resource development – a system of linked trenches over an area of about 1500 acres in the flat ground immediately behind the sand dunes lining the Mediterranean beach at Buq Buq west of Sadi Barrani. Salt seawater seeped into the trenches through the underlying limestone and fresh water (‘dew’) collected in them from the landward side and floated on top of the seawater to a depth of about two feet. Carefully adjusted pumps skimmed the fresh water off into open reservoirs serving the army water bowsers. This unlikely system was a significant source of supply to the troops of palatable water containing less than 200 parts per million of salinity. There were four divisional headquarters and CRE offices to visit and I sometimes visited field companies. I particularly remember Colonel Cavendish, the CRE of the 4th Indian Division, who was senior to Kim Gaussen and a venerable figure, but suffered terribly from desert sores – suppurating abscesses on the backs of the hands. There was no cure, only palliative bandaging to ward off flies and dust. You only recovered once you left the area, which is what eventually happened to Colonel Cavendish, whose uniformed, turbaned Indian servants used to serve meals in such style on ex-India mess dinner services. All his white officers were relatively elderly, like him, and you felt a bit of a whippersnapper. Another sapper preoccupation was ‘movement’. Given that you could drive across the desert without bothering about proper roads, it was important to classify ‘going’. In other words, some bits of desert were better to move on than others. You could be completely bogged down in the Qattara Depression, comfortable on stony or rocky terrain and positively speed up on ‘salt pan’, provided it was not treacherously marshy. Maps were thus marked to classify going. For logistical supply, roads were still needed and 118

MIDDLE EAST POSTING there was a narrow bitumen-surfaced one all the way from Alexandria to Tripoli that had to be properly maintained. A few miles south much of the desert became featureless and there were few hills to aid as reference points for navigation. One bright spark invented the sun compass: a sophisticated sundial that, when set, enabled one to steer a compass course without having constantly to get out of the vehicle to escape its magnetic field. The weather was normally wonderful – not too hot, sunny, cold at night with spectacular dawns and sunsets – but not all the time. Quite often it rained heavily and the whole army would be in a morass and grounded until the desert dried out (as when Montgomery gave chase to Rommel immediately after El Alamein in November 1942). When it rained the dun-coloured desert burst into a mass of yellow and periwinkle blue, with carpets of flowers lasting as long as three weeks. The worst trial of all was the Khamsin wind – a hot gale that blew up the dust and reduced visibility to 100 feet. The only thing to do then was wrap your face in a scarf and sit in your vehicle with the windows up. The one I experienced lasted six hours, but it could go on a lot longer. The relief of Tobruk Travelling by truck to join the 13th Corps I saw the remains of Italian armoured vehicles and trucks littering the desert. This was the debris left behind when the Western Desert Force routed the Italian armies in early 1941 and drove them back to Benghazi and Agheila, with the Australian division having just occupied Tobruk. Rommel had by then arrived and rolled the British army back to the Egyptian frontier wire, leaving the Australians beleaguered in Tobruk and taking General O’Connor and a British general, Philip Neame, prisoner. When I arrived preparations for the big push to relieve Tobruk were almost complete and it was not long before we were on the move. When we kicked off on what we thought would be an unopposed 50-mile swan followed by heavy fighting round Tobruk, the 13th Corps was in the Sidi Barrani littoral plain bounded on the south by the Halfaya escarpment, which was about 1000 feet high. The 10th Corps, which was defending the Halfaya pass, had armoured car patrols on the plateau and well past the wire into eastern Libya. The 13th Corps HQ caravan, an armoured command vehicle (ACV), a mob of support vehicles and 119

AWAY TO THE WAR three tanks to look after our security, trailed up the pass and then westward in the wake of our four fighting divisions. Almost at once, things started to go wrong and get exciting. The ACV lost touch with all the divisions, both visually and on the radio. We were stationary on the open grassy plateau about ten miles west of the escarpment and equidistant between Sollum heights and Bardia. The general and his staff, including my brigadier, were standing on the tops of their vehicles anxiously scanning the southern and western horizons. How could 40,000 men, 300 tanks and countless vehicles disappear into thin (rather dusty) air? This was one of the acrimonious questions coming over the radio from army HQ. The interlocutor was Brigadier Sandy Galloway. Nothing happened, so Driver Simmonds brewed up tea, condensed milk, water and lots of sugar in a billy can. He had a fourgallon petrol can pierced with holes; he filled it with dry earth or sand, soaked it with petrol and put a match to it. The billy can, with the ingredients already mixed, was then brought to the boil. It was sweet, dark brown and delicious. Suddenly, a large dust cloud on the southwest horizon alerted the audience. ‘Morris – go and see who they are,’ commanded General Godwin-Austen. Lieutenant Morris drove off towards the cloud, went a mile, stopped, stood looking through his field glasses, turned, leapt into his vehicle and drove quickly back. ‘I think it’s the enemy, Sir, not our boys anyway.’ About 30 vehicles in a line facing east had halted two miles off. They were doing the same as us, standing on their vehicles, looking at us through field glasses. We did nothing. They got back in their vehicles and continued eastward. Who were they? We never found out. There can be little more embarrassing to a general than to be sitting the middle of a desert surrounded by vehicles and a large staff and to have totally lost touch with the battle, especially if Brigadier Galloway is constantly importuning him for a situation report. He did not say a thing to the onlookers, but disappeared into the ACV. We began to be aware of the noise of a battle far away to the southwest. The general got into his staff car and we wandered off behind him in the direction of the battle noises. We were going southwest on the Trigh Capuzzo. Dusk and then darkness fell. It was very dark with no moon. We ‘leaguered up’ (that is formed a nucleus of vehicles at least 50 yards apart) and 120

MIDDLE EAST POSTING fortified ourselves with bully beef and biscuits. We did not brew up for fear of giving our position away. The radio sets in the ACV began to crackle. We dossed down in our blankets by our vehicles. There was the noise of tanks on the move quite close by and then silence. We went back to sleep. As dawn began to break all hell broke loose. The noise of tanks starting up, moving off with guns blasting at very close quarters and then more tanks firing was deafening. Then there was silence and the unmistakable sound of Italians surrendering. It appeared that we had been blissfully sleeping with a lone Italian tank doing the same only about 100 yards away. This was the Italian Ariete division going eastwards and passing right by us without even investigating who we were. During the night the general staff had resumed radio contact with the divisions. The armoured division was engaging the enemy on the Sidi Resegh 15 miles southeast of Tobruk with Major General Sir Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand division in support. The other two infantry divisions were in contact with the German and Italian forces investing the Tobruk perimeter. Kim Gaussen ordered me to go and find the armoured division on Sidi Resegh and bring back news. I set off with Simmonds and just followed the noise as it got louder. Soon I found not the armoured division but New Zealanders and some British gunners engaging enemy infantry at point-blank range and Sir Bernard in the thick of it. I (thank goodness) could not actually see any enemy. No one seemed to know where the armoured division was, so I drove off away from the noise and imparted all I had seen and heard of the doings of the New Zealanders. I thought that Freyberg was well on the way to earning a second VC. At last light 50th division reported that a gap in the Tobruk perimeter had been secured for the entry of the 13th Corps. A narrow line of vehicles with tanks at each end proceeded slowly in and by midnight we were safely establishing ourselves in the Tobruk catacombs, which the Australians had made ready for our occupation. These were extensive limestone caves, reputedly of Roman origin, and gave good cover from air attack and shelling. The following personal signal was dispatched to Galloway from Lieutenant-General Godwin-Austen: ‘TOBRUK IS NOW AS RELIEVED AS I AM.’ Godwin-Austen’s bon mot seems to have gone unrecorded in history, possibly because he sank at once into obscurity. 121

AWAY TO THE WAR Enter Sir Bernard L. Montgomery It is still mid-December 1941. The Aussies are being evacuated to Paiforce (Persia and Iraq Force) by sea. The 1st South African division and a Guards brigade are taking over the garrison of Tobruk and Rommel is retiring to the Agheila line (where the coastline turns west south of Benghazi). Michael Forrester and I were detailed to go to Msus to pick a camp site. It had been raining for a day or two and Msus was a sea of pink and blue flowers. We found a lovely spot, got into our truck to drive back to camp for a wash, drink and supper. That’s funny, where is it? Not a vehicle, not a tank was to be seen! We cast around and soon found signs in the sand of a hasty departure in a northeasterly direction; now we began to hear ominous sounds of lorry and tank movement to the south. We had nothing but water with us and the petrol tank was only a third full. We took a quick decision to make for Mechili, about half way between Antelat and Tobruk. Night was upon us. This was the start of 8th Army’s second retreat from Agheila. Michael Forrester and I drove on in the darkness. We reckoned we had a chance to catch up the retreating corps headquarters, but when we heard the sounds of military movement nearby we could not be certain whether or not it was friendly and kept a safe distance. Eventually, our fuel gauge began to waver at zero, but just as disaster began to loom, the Beau Geste type fort of Mecheli hove into view and a few miles beyond it we caught up with the fleeing corps headquarters. Imagine our great relief. April, May and June were months of stalemate. Claude Auchinleck had brought an advanced HQ up to the Egyptian frontier and organized a deep defensive line, consisting of a series of brigade ‘boxes’, namely large areas surrounded by barbed wire and landmines in which an infantry brigade established a strong defensive position. Divisional sappers established wire and mine defence and armour was kept in mobile reserve. Kim Gaussen had me scurrying about the battlefield keeping in touch with 13th Corps CREs and field companies. I spent a night with the Free French and shared their petit déjeuner of rough brandy and water. I was parked with Driver Simmonds in the Knightsbridge box, close to one of the RAF fighter airstrips, when the balloon went up. Rommel attacked and overran the defences where I was unhappily 122

MIDDLE EAST POSTING present with a grandstand view of six Hurricane fighters being picked off one by one as they took off in turn, by a concealed German gun. I made for Tobruk but, to my horror, the South Africans had already surrendered without a fight and 13th Corps HQ was nowhere to be seen. So Driver Simmonds and I bumped down the Trigh Capuzzo eastwards to Egypt in headlong flight. The only thing I lost (besides what was left of my honour) was a tin box of drawing instruments, which the vicious bumps had evidently catapulted out of the back of my truck. The rout only ended when Rommel ran out of fuel, ammunition and food, and we finished up at Alam Halfa, which later became part of the El Alamein defences and the scene of the defensive battle so skilfully fought by General Auchinleck just before he and Ritchie finally left the scene and were replaced by General Harold Alexander and Lieutenant-General Bernard L. Montgomery. Driver Simmonds and I, with most of the 8th Army, had covered about 350 miles in the wrong direction in three days. The dust had scarcely settled when Kim Gaussen broke it to me gently that our seven-month association was to come to an end. I was to have a fortnight’s local leave and a posting on the banks of the Nile as engineer in command of the Middle East Land Forces. I left the 13th Corps sappers feverishly laying minefields. Driver Simmonds and I then left for Cairo by the direct ‘barrel route’ that formed the third side of a triangle: El Alamein–Alex, Alex–Cairo. It was 70 miles of almost totally soft sand. Finally, we made it and, having bid farewell to Driver Simmonds, I was soaking in an enormous hot bath in the Edwardian luxury of a bedroom in Shepheards Hotel. I spent my fortnight’s leave in a room at the New Zealand officers’ club. I then found accommodation with three other British officers in a flat in a six-storey building, which became my home until New Year 1943. It was not more than 20 minutes walking distance from the Semiramis Hotel. Cairo: June–December 1942 Cairo in 1942 was a dichotomy: on the one hand it was the capital of an independent kingdom ruled by King Farouk with an elected parliament, a ruling party and a British ambassador. In this guise it was a lively, bustling, over populated, not very clean, culturally rich, poverty stricken den of highly entertaining iniquity. There 123

AWAY TO THE WAR was a wealth of entertainment with good music, excellent cinemas and night clubs, top-class cuisine and, unlike blacked-out London, Cairo at night was ablaze with light. In stark contrast to all this was the other Cairo: headquarters of the Middle East Land Forces, centre of covert intelligence intrigue, the overt military and RAF presence, British troops in the citadel and in the suburbs, and the hum and bustle of the general staff in and around the Semiranis Hotel with its wired-off surround and military police surveillance. Beneath all this was an undercurrent of unease. Things were not going at all well in the war. The Germans had reached Stalingrad and what was to stop them crossing the Caucasus and walking into the Middle East? The Japanese were carrying all before them in Malaya and Burma and Rommel was battering at the gates of Alexandria. What would life be like, wondered the expatriate Cairo residents, if the Germans and Italians tanks actually arrived? Perhaps it would not be all that different: German instead of English spoken, the same Gezira scene with different faces. Though morale was low in the civilian population, in military circles determination, even optimism, was the order of the day because in July Harold Alexander was coming as commander-in-chief, and ‘Monty’ as 8th Army commander. Churchill had been here too demanding resurgence and advance. During my six months at Middle East HQ, I got away a number of times on weekend leave. There was my visit to Uncle Noel at his Italian internee camp at Ismailia that I have described. Then there was a memorable weekend at Port Said with Cousin Michael StJohn when we drank a lot of gin, ate Red Sea prawns and he showed me over his submarine. His job was to run aircraft fuel from Port Said to Malta in the ship’s ballast tanks, which were not armoured or proof against even a rifle bullet. It was clearly very dangerous work. I also got away to Alexandria for a weekend. I was invited to stay with Colonel Davy, who had the use of a luxurious house on the seafront with a snooker table. I was less lucky than Hugh Holmes, who described in his memoirs how he had a home and social life laid on for him whenever he was able to make it back to Alexandria. I joined the Gezira Club and managed to get quite a few games of golf and squash with fellow officers. I was almost always in the pool of an evening. Unfortunately, being bad at tennis I was reluctant to join in and so deprived myself of 124

MIDDLE EAST POSTING an easy entry to female company. As it was, I had to make do almost entirely with male service company, notably Oliver Roome, the South African Ron Ulyate and the ‘Stowick’ playboy Alan Gurney. These last two, who were my senior colleagues in the planning office in the Semiramis Hotel, shared a fairly smart flat in one of the Gezira blocks and were waited on by galabhiya-clad suffragis. They were permanently desk-bound staff officers, never destined to set foot in the desert. Oliver and I, on the other hand, not only hoped but knew that we would soon be posted back to an active unit in the 8th Army or, if we were unlucky, to Paiforce. During the intervals of planning work, I was sent over to do things for Major General Eustace Tickell, for whom it was a privilege to work. He was brilliant. His remit was to provide all the engineering materials for the Middle East Force and to be responsible for all engineering works in the rear areas of 8th Army. The chief engineer of British Troops in Egypt (BTE) was under him for technical purposes. He was there to ensure that the Middle East Force did not run out of things like cement and bitumen for road repair and surfacing, and to meet requests for structural and reinforcing steel and timber for construction. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the sources of such things throughout Africa and the Middle East. Christmas was upon us and I was to be posted back to the 8th Army early in the New Year (1943). I was sharing digs in a block of flats in central Cairo with a major in the housing department. His job was to arrange accommodation for army staff in Cairo. By mid-December it began to be difficult to get to one’s bedroom for all the ‘Christmas boxes’ that had piled up for him. He showed no signs of shame to be profiting in this way from his particularly dreary job. It was the first time (of many) when I have been able to observe bribery and corruption at first hand. I did not see it as my duty to do anything about it.

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9 Tripoli, Tunis and preparing for Italy

I

received my posting order in mid-December 1942 to report for duty on 1 January 1943 as second in command with the rank of temporary captain to 571 Army Field Company RE (Commander Major D. Yates RE), presently at Sollum. I had had enough of life in Cairo and was delighted. The desert war had taken a decided turn for the better since I had left Alam Halfa in June. A new spirit of ‘get up and go’ (in the right direction for a change) was in the air. Although only temporary, promotion to captain in a field unit (albeit corps troops and hardly front line) was also welcome for the compliment it implied rather than the money. It was only when the war ended that money became significant. One was single and, even in Cairo, hardly spent anything. It is lovely to look back on a truly golden period. My first duty was to report to Lieutenant-Colonel Bickford, CRE 10th Corps Troops. ‘Ah,’ he cried, ‘just in time to join us for a New Year’s Day dip in the briny.’ The Mediterranean Sea off the North African coast was extremely cold, but I braved it and he was in there too with his staff and the sun was shining. I was only with 10th Corps Troops for two months, and had little to do with Bickford who, not long after I joined, was struck down with malaria and evacuated by air ambulance to Alexandria. It was exciting to be back with the lads in a field unit, even though not exactly a frontline fighting one, but I was soon made aware of the special difference between 10th Corps Troops and my previous unit in France. The former were territorial units from 126

ITALY, TUNIS AND PREPARING FOR ITALY Devon and, having only recently arrived and been mercifully spared any casualties, they formed a close-knit military club. The clannishness that is well known to afflict the West Country, where newcomers are ‘foreigners’ until they have lived there for 30 years, was a potent force in 571, which was almost entirely composed of inhabitants of Plymouth. The French unit had also been a club, but its members were all professional regular soldiers and I was accepted as ‘one of them’. I often visited the lads in their haylofts and was welcome to be there of an evening for a drink and a gossip, not so in 571. My main task during my two months with 571 was landmine clearing from advanced RAF operated airstrips. These were often strips we had originally established but that Rommel had used in his recent advance. On our sector we invariably found them mined and booby-trapped, and clearing them was both a number one priority and a hazardous task. I must add that in the officers’ mess I was treated with friendliness, and I came away with a great admiration for these stalwart sons of the West Country soil. For about a month the company became attached to the newly arrived (from UK) First Armoured Division, now at Sirte. This formation was equipped with new US Sherman tanks and its morale was sky high. Strict discipline was the order of the day and the soldiers were smartly turned out, even in the desert – ‘spit and polish’, whitewash the stones, salute anything not moving – that sort of thing. We old sweats viewed them with amused tolerance, knowing how short a time all this would last. Who should we find as our temporary CRE but Colin Browning, my previous OC in the BEF in France? It was only to be expected that he would take 571 in hand and in no time at all we were being equipped with ‘recce forms’ that laid down the routine for conducting reconnaissance. Whenever we were not on the move we did early morning physical training and other exercises, which were fine when we were ‘resting’ at base but unwelcome when we were part of a fighting advance and nearing Tripoli, which we finally entered on 28 January 1943. Our hearts sank at the thought of an impending victory parade on 1 February, which would be attended by no less than Winston Churchill and His Majesty the King. The central square of Tripoli had to be quickly stripped of its fascist emblems and pictures of 127

AWAY TO THE WAR Mussolini, and a special podium constructed upon which the VIPs, including of course Generals Alexander and Montgomery, would stand to take the salute. This construction became known to the troops as the ‘oxometer’ – an instrument for measuring bullshit. After another three weeks, in the last week of February, I received my posting orders to join 4th Field Squadron RE, as officer commanding with the rank of temporary major. This was to be my final posting while I remained on active service, and it saw me through to November 1944, when I left Holland to join the staff college at Camberley. Onward to Tunis with the 7th Armoured Division What a difference this was from 571 and what a handful for a 26year old! The ‘Shiny Fourth’ was an original squadron. As well as the Jerboa flash we wore two brass buttons on the cuffs of our service dress. We left the top button of our jacket undone and affected coloured silk scarves. We abandoned the khaki fore-andaft cap and adopted a squashy version of the service dress hat. If we did wear a fore-and-aft it was blue with gold facings, and the badge was not the round brass one but the RE ‘bomb’ in blue and gold. Later, all field companies became squadrons, but we were still superior. Moreover, we had distinguished, albeit distinctly raffish, origins. It was formed in late 1939, in East Ham in London, under Major Gerald Duke, who later became a distinguished major general. The recruits were tough, a lot previously unemployed and some with criminal records. With the aid of regular officers and NCOs, Gerry Duke recruited the requisite RE carpenters, bricklayers, masons and electricians and transformed this rabble, if not into a disciplined unit, certainly into an effective sapper squadron and, when called upon, fighting force. It had been in the desert since mid-1940. This was the body of men of which I was to be in charge. To make life even more difficult, when Gerry Duke left in early 1941 the OC became Major ‘Johnnie’ Walker – a hard-bitten 40year-old with an appetite for whisky to match his name. Walker was at least a regular officer, but his (and my) second in command was an ex-under manager of a London iron foundry called Spalding, who was older than me (in his late thirties). He was a boozing chum of Johnnie’s, was outraged at being overlooked for promo128

ITALY, TUNIS AND PREPARING FOR ITALY tion by a young whippersnapper and was determined, from the word go, to make life for me so insupportable that I would disappear without trace and he would become OC. Luckily for me he reckoned without our colonel, Tony Hunter DSO, the CRE of 7th Armoured Division, the famous ‘Desert Rats’. Captain Spalding lost no time in starting to rubbish me. He was affable in the mess, but when I was introduced to two of the three subalterns (John Hardiman was off visiting the 11th Hussars), Jock Thompson and Dai Owen, I knew at once that while they had looked up to Walker they were uncomfortable with Spalding. Spalding, however, quickly succeeded in making my life insupportable through a mixture of jocular ribbing and dumb insolence, but when I told Tony Hunter that he could choose between Spalding and me but could not have both, he quickly had Spalding posted away. Alastair Duncan-Millar, an experienced civil engineer of about 36, aristocratic of bearing and the son of a Perthshire landowner, replaced Spalding. I could not have been luckier. Alastair stayed as my second in command until we all returned to the UK from Italy, and thereafter to Normandy, when he was posted in command of another squadron. I was extremely sorry to lose him as we had become close friends. Later I heard that he had joined the Liberal Party, become an MP and was running the Perthshire estate, but we lost touch. The squadron was engaged in supporting the fourth armoured brigade and the ‘Cherry Pickers’ as Monty’s 8th Army pushed westwards from Tripoli towards the Tunisian border. Rommel was holding a defensive position at Mareth. The US-led 1st Army, under General Anderson, had landed in Algeria and was advancing eastwards along the coast towards Tunis. When I joined at the end of February the squadron was in camp just north of Tripoli, with 4th armoured brigade nearby in reserve. In the ten days of rest prior to joining the battle I had to familiarize myself with the radio transmission network with which the squadron had, for many months, been equipped. This gave a whole new meaning to control of the unit’s movements and operations. Radio control was in an unarmoured signals ‘pickup’ truck. The squadron was moving in convoy, in daylight, up the narrowish road from Tripoli towards Medenine and the battle developing at Mareth. There were about 40 vehicles. Radio silence was in force 129

AWAY TO THE WAR in case Rommel heard us coming. I was leading in my scout car. The control was by motorcycle dispatch rider. There were 100 feet between vehicles to minimize the effect of air attack. While encamped between a dusty gravelled supply route and the shore shortly after reaching the neighbourhood of Medenine, I was walking towards my jeep after having inspected one of my working parties when a passing truck’s front offside wheel set off a landmine. The vehicle masked me from the effects of the blast from my knees upwards, but my lower legs felt as if they were being whipped by a cat-o’-nine tails. My driver took me to a forward aid post where a doctor spent an hour picking bits of gravel out of my legs with tweezers. He got most of them out, but for several months afterwards gravel particles continued to work their way to the surface and I would pick them out myself. It was a lucky escape and I thought I had suffered no serious injury as I returned to duty. However, some weeks later I began to have earache and was treated for a burst eardrum, which the doctor attributed to the effects of the mine blast. The battle of Mareth was my first experience of a successful engagement with the German Army and it was comparatively painless. When it was over and the New Zealanders had got a long way towards Sfax at El Hamra, and Rommel’s lot as usual had managed to escape, we had an enjoyable swan into a fantastic, fertile, mountainous, forested area with French peasantry and picturesque villages. In the southeast region the country was still desert and the population African and Muslim. We admired the holy city of Kairouan on the border between desert and lush country and an interesting African town called Foum Tatahouine. It took six weeks for the 8th Army to advance 220 miles from El Hamra and for the allied armies to enter Tunis. There were hardfought battles at El Hamra (Wadi Akarit), Sousse and Enfidaville, while Anderson’s 1st Army made the final thrust from Goubellat and Medjez, 30 miles west of Tunis. We had not been committed in either the Wadi Akarit or Enfidaville battles, which were strictly infantry affairs. Our trek through the beautiful purple hills of French Tunisia via Bou Arada was fêting and flowers all the way from a population that had until then been untouched by war. But we had little time to enjoy it as we pressed on for the final thrust to Tunis. We expected a battle, but in the event it was a walkover. 130

ITALY, TUNIS AND PREPARING FOR ITALY We proceeded through Massicault (12 miles) and on to Tunis on 7 May and then switched north to join the Americans in Bizerta (originally Carthage), which they had taken the previous day. What problems we had were not with the Germans but with the US Air Force, which bombed both our armour and us as we passed through Massicault, luckily in our case without casualties. This and other such occurrences caused a stir in command circles. The problem was later improved (but not solved) by appointing air liaison officers equipped with direct radio contact with RAF and/or USAF command to divisional headquarters. With 300 men having to be fed, watered and as far as possible kept content, just looking after ourselves was a full-time job. We had to provide ablution and sanitary facilities, the latter at every night halt, and the place you are leaving must be left as you found it: clean and tidy. Men sleeping in two-man bivouac tents had to be dug down 18 inches to protect against shrapnel or mortar attack. Barbed wire has to be laid against attack and night guards mounted. Dannert concertina wire has to be unrolled and closed up and loaded back onto trucks before leaving. Discipline had to be maintained and morning orderly room held. A growing suspicion that the Desert Rats were urban pariahs was immediately confirmed when we were settling into comfortable billets in Bizerta. However, there was no chance of becoming acquainted with ‘dirty Gertie from Bizerte’ because the division was to move at once to Homs – about 100 miles on the other side of Tripoli, and 100 miles out of trouble. By 15 May we were sorting ourselves out in the sand dunes next to a sandy beach very close to the ancient Roman amphitheatre of Leptis Magna, so it was goodbye to Tunis and lush Tunisia! Preparing for Italy The powers that be had no particular reason to fear what might happen if the Desert Rats were let loose in a civilized urban environment like French Tunisia, but as it was we had to make do with Homs. Although we did not know it at the time, it would be ‘home’ for four months. The good news about Homs was that the beach was incomparable, the swimming safe and the climate between May and September ideal: ambient temperature 16°C, midday shade 28°C, sunny with a cool breeze. The Leptis Magna 131

AWAY TO THE WAR open-air amphitheatre could accommodate the whole division and everyone could hear. ENSA shows with stars like Noel Coward, Vivien Leigh, Dorothy Dickson, Leslie Henson and Bea Lillie were frequent. The dunes were dotted with shady palm trees and, being an oasis, there was an abundance of fresh water, and some irrigated cultivation of vegetables and fruit by the few resident Arabs within a half mile strip at the back of the coastal road. Games of all kinds were played on the sands. Homs itself was hardly more than a hamlet. There were no shops to speak of, but that did not matter because the NAAFI shops provided all the soldiers’ needs over and above rations, and the NAAFI canteen tents supplied beer, soft drinks, tea and buns and sausage and mash. Darts, bingo, pub games like dominoes and shove-halfpenny, and the occasional unit concert party also took place. Soldiers played strange gambling card games. All that was missing were women. Well, not quite. There were nursing sisters in the South African and New Zealand field hospitals, but they were rather toffee-nosed, so a divisional brothel was set up, over which the medical corps took charge. A suitable building in Homs was commandeered. Women were found (mostly Italian) and medically inspected daily. The hours were from 4.00 to 10.00 p.m. but when the queues grew too long these were extended to midnight. In the secular environment of the army at rest, it was decreed that the spiritual needs of the soldiers should be attended to. This meant church parades and services. It should be recalled that at the outbreak of war the universal decline in religious belief was already well on the way, but it was remarkable how a renewed acquaintance with the imminence of death tended to bring on religious revival. In addition, it was still assumed that every soldier belonged to some religious creed – it was inscribed on his identity disc so as to ensure the correct burial service. We knew we were destined for Italy, but did not know when or where the landings would be. We would embark at Tripoli, cross the Mediterranean and land and fight somewhere. This meant training for an unopposed embarkation, a sea journey subject to air machine-gunning, bombing and torpedoing for perhaps five days, an opposed landing and military operations in mountainous, wooded terrain intersected by water courses. As a very different environment from the one we were used to it also meant special 132

ITALY, TUNIS AND PREPARING FOR ITALY preparation of equipment and vehicles for the opposed landing, mainly water-proofing the vehicles. Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Hunter came into his element during this training period. He had it well organized and took a personal part, especially when it came to specialist officer training. He reminded me that he had been an instructor at the ‘Shop’ (RMA Woolwich) and how he had signally failed to induct me personally into the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. I used Tony’s multiple guess method of bridge classification on numerous occasions and it did not fail me. Tony had obviously been impressed by stories of escaped allied POWs on the loose in Italy and instituted training in ‘finding one’s way back to base’. The soldiers were taken in closed trucks to some unknown spot in the desert and, equipped with only a map, compass and water bottle, had to find their way back on foot to camp. On one of these outings I remember coming across an oasis I had never known existed, and feasting on lovely, ripe, bulging figs picked straight off the trees. ABCA and the Beveridge plan Alot of attention had to be directed at persuading the soldiers it was a good idea to keep them mucking about in the deserts of North Africa when they would far rather be back home with their families. This led to the formation of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) whose energies were directed at promoting the idea that when we had won the war Britain would become ‘a place fit for heroes’. This phrase was not in fact used, for it had been invented in the 1914–18 war and had not worked out quite like that then. ABCA was staffed by a lot of earnest left-wing exschoolmasters in spectacles who produced pamphlets describing, for example, the Beveridge Plan, the forerunner of the welfare state, and their efforts were enormously successful. Sometimes they visited us and lectured. We all became enthusiastic socialists and, once it began to look as if we might win, the temporary wartime officers with whom I used to hobnob started to plan their future political careers and decide which particular party bandwagon they would board. Most chose Labour because, I cynically believed, it would obviously win. Alastair Duncan-Millar could not possibly have believed that the Liberal Party would ever revive, but he was determined to join it just the same because he 133

AWAY TO THE WAR honestly believed in its principles – also, perhaps, because it was the natural thing for a Scottish laird to do. I was out of this fray because I was determined to go on being a regular RE officer. Events were moving forward. In August the Allies invaded Sicily. We were not involved, but it could not be long before we were on the move. Before that, two important events affected my life. First Lucy the hen arrived, then John Foreman. John Foreman was an Australian sapper major on attachment to 7th Armoured Division and Tony Hunter passed him to me. John was pushing 40 and as tough and gnarled as a mangrove root. He had had no active service experience, but was already well trained and experienced in all the skills we were busy painstakingly acquiring or polishing. The Australian engineers had all the same equipment, and he was experienced in its use. I took to him immediately and so did everyone in the unit. He knew at once that by age and experience he was way ahead of me, but without being asked he made it a rule never to impinge on or erode my growing, but still delicate, authority (how different from Spalding). In giving John Foreman to me Tony Hunter had shown his usual insight. The other OC Ralph Carr was much more of an age, and they could quite easily have not hit it off. I was 26 and comparatively immature, and this was not his patch anyway. I got on well with all the administration and man-management and, with Alastair, formulated and executed the training preparations. John did much more of the actual direct training instruction than I did, and got very close to the subalterns and soldiers. It was not long before he had got to know many of their names and to recognize the black sheep from the goats (there were very few ordinary sheep in the squadron). It was a very happy arrangement and it went on for just over a month before we were on our way and leaving Africa. When I get bored with latter-day Aussies going on about Poms, I only have to remember John Foreman’s coolness, kindness and bravery, and I can retrieve my serenity.

134

10 Italy and training for Europe and Overlord, 1943

W

e embarked at Tripoli on our own LST (landing ship tank) on 9 September 1943 with no Luftwaffe interference. All we knew was that we were bound for mainland Italy and that our landing would probably be opposed. To that end all 38 of our vehicles were ‘waterproofed’ – able to wade ashore through up to three feet of water without stalling – and we would leave the LST through the doors and ramp that formed the prow of the craft and opened for landing. Accommodation on the LST was spartan: you made yourself as comfortable as possible in what shade you could rig alongside your vehicle on the steel deck. There was a galley for the troops, with what served as cooking facilities. There were wash houses and ‘heads’ (WCs). US merchant marines manned the LST, so I commanded the ship, but this did not mean I could give the captain orders. He knew his destination. I did not until the second day out. Considering we were ‘limeys’, he was nice to us. He even invited me to a meal in his saloon. I overheard a US sailor say ‘Aw, Gard, chicken aghine!’ This summed up a difference in what we were used to. I thought it best not to eat with him more than that once. Better to muck in with the lads. We thought we would be at sea for four or five days, but had ten days’ rations, which would do for some days ashore. At sundown no lights could be shown and smoking was forbidden. We just had to sleep from about 7.00 p.m. to 5.00 a.m. The danger was as much from submarine attack as from the air. The officers, including John Foreman, were a lot more comfortable than the soldiers, for we all 135

AWAY TO THE WAR had our trucks fitted out as offices-cum-sleeping quarters. I shared mine with Lucy the hen. We had been living together by then for upwards of six weeks and she had laid me more than 30 eggs for my breakfast, which she continued to do on board the LST – several times on the steel deck. Driver McCullum and I shared the task of ministering to her few domestic needs. She had her basket, but a tiresome habit of wanting to roost at night. I opened the sealed orders I carried with me 48 hours out. They were laconic: we were to land in the third wave at Salerno. The first wave was to land the day we left Tripoli, 9 September. Our landing was to be between 14 and 18, by which time a bridgehead should have been established and we might expect a fairly peaceful landing apart from shelling and bombing. We had a rendezvous at Pomigliano d’Arco – 25 miles inland and to the north. We gazed in awe at the accompanying map showing Salerno, Amalfi, Naples, Sorrento, Castellamare, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Campanella and the Isle of Capri. Civilization at last! Roll on the landing! We burnt the papers as instructed and told the troops the good news. They had already heard from the Yanks (who had radio) that the landing was going well. We sat around impatiently. We passed the Straits of Messina at night, Etna glowing. Mercifully, there was no sign of the Luftwaffe. I am an optimist by nature and little in my life has caused me to be otherwise. One or two dear friends have let me down, but apart from that I have had no great disappointments. And so it was with the good weather and unwarlike procession from Tripoli to Salerno: I simply took it for granted and never gave the possible horror of rough weather, furious bombardment and possible death by torpedo in that basically unseaworthy craft a moment’s thought. We came to anchor in the Gulf of Salerno on the night of 14/15 September. There was a great flotilla of craft similar to ours. We were far enough away from the shore to be out of range of what seemed to be a battle going on quite close to the east of Salerno around two villages, Eboli and Montecorvino. The navy broke radio silence and our captain was given instructions on what time he was to beach his craft and at which section of the beach. These were confirmations of the instructions he had already received before leaving Tripoli. In fact, everything was going to plan. It was just light, 0530 hours and, as we drew near the beach we 136

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD began to be shelled. Again our luck held – near misses but no hits. The captain neatly beached on a steeply shelving strand. In prearranged order, with me in the lead, we trundled down the ship’s ramp straight onto the gravelly beach in about two foot of water. Beach parties were there to guide us off the beach and to give us route cards to Baronissi. All our vehicles made it without being ‘drowned’. We identified our fellow engineer units, had time to brew tea and then were soon off in convoy to Baronissi. There was sporadic, inaccurate shelling, but no air activity and we waved to our infantry in their defensive positions as we passed through their lines. It was a piece of cake. The landing at Salerno had not surprised the Germans and was hotly opposed for the first three days. Success had, at first, been in the balance until, with overwhelming air support and naval bombardment, our troops managed to consolidate and form a beachhead. Meanwhile, the Germans seemed to be pulling back to a strong defensive line along two rivers north of Naples, the Volturno and Garigliano. Their left and eastern flank rested on the foothills of the Apennines – the formidable obstacle that forms the backbone of the Italian peninsula almost as far north as the Alps. The war would be fought on the plains between these mountains with the Mediterranean to the west and the Adriatic to the east. Meanwhile, having reached Baronissi without incident, we covered the rest of the 25 miles and arrived before evening at our original rendezvous at Pomigliano d’Arco in an apple orchard, the trees laden with ripe fruit. As the military situation was still fluid, we posted guards and put out wire. The early autumn weather was balmy and there was no military activity. The local inhabitants were taking no chances and stayed at home. I strolled around the camp, making sure that everyone was settling in comfortably. There did not seem to be any need to dig in the bivouac tents, and it was better not to anyway, for the water table was only about two feet down (we had not thought about water tables in Africa). Suddenly, the heavens opened and I dashed for the back of my truck, flung back the canvas flaps and jumped in over the backboard. There was an agonized squawk and then silence. I had landed on poor Lucy and killed her instantly. McCullum and I buried her beside the truck among the apple trees. It was a sad moment. I missed her and my breakfast egg very much. 137

AWAY TO THE WAR A fortnight’s lull followed, caused, we were told, by part of the 8th Army east of the Apennines needing to catch up with us. Our infantry were taking up positions south of the Volturno River prior to assaulting the German defensive position. The enemy had of course destroyed all the bridges. The battle of Volturno River began on 5 October. By the 10th, after some hard fighting, the infantry had established a bridgehead at Cancello and had pushed on three miles. The plan was then to get the 7th Armoured Division across the river, and push for the next German position on the Garigliano River 15 miles ahead. A bridge was required to replace the blown one at Cancello. This was our chance, our first bridge in operational conditions. The river was in a steep-sided, wooded, narrow valley. The road, hardly more than a lane, followed the side of the valley down to river level, and then took a sharp left turn at the crossing site. Panic stations! The essence of launching a Bailey bridge is that you build it section by section on rollers – pushing it out as you go, but always balanced on the rollers so that there are as many sections built on the landward side as there are in the air over the river gap. This means you need plenty of space for building straight back behind the rollers. The narrowness and steepness of the valley sides at the Cancello bridge site meant that the space needed was not available. We needed a plan and required engineering expertise. The solution was elaborate and added 16 hours to our timetable: a shearlegs on each bank, a suspended steel cable, and a travelling block and tackle attached to the bridge nose. Did it work? I was not there to see. German artillery had registered the bridge site and I heard the shell coming. There was a slit trench full of water, but I chose to prostrate myself on the wet ground. The shell hit the ground about 15 feet away and a splinter entered my right thigh, passed through my left and ended up in the pocket of my raincoat. It severed my left thigh sciatic nerve. Bertie Bloomer took charge, gave me his sweater and, with me on a stretcher, drove to a casualty clearing station very close to the fighting where hard-bitten nursing sisters manned a small ward. I was in considerable pain. Morphine did not work, or perhaps in the end it did because I woke in a real hospital on a hill in the middle of Naples. It was 5 October. My ward companion was a second lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment who had shot himself in the foot to escape the ‘front 138

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD line’. His circumstances had not justified his action, but they made it understandable. He must have still been in his teens. He had only been a week out of England when he had found himself the only officer still alive in a German counterattack north of Salerno. He was a psychological wreck and, in due course, was evacuated through medical channels to Algiers. I was moved to an officers’ surgical ward. Some of the patients were seriously wounded and suffered severe pain. Although one major behaved like a spoilt child, in general the atmosphere in the ward was cheerful, even jolly, with the patients flirting with the sisters, and the sisters giving as good as they got. During the six weeks I was there, I cannot remember anyone dying. My wounds were not painful or dangerous, but I developed hepatitis and pleurisy. I had been enjoying the evening issue of ‘medical comforts’ (whisky), which cheered everyone no end at bedtime, but when the hepatitis struck I developed an unusual aversion to it and used to say no to the offer. Luckily this did not last long, and with the development of my yellow complexion my appetite returned. Then Tony Hunter brought the good news that I was not to be evacuated to Algiers, but would travel with the division, in a sickbay if necessary, when it left Italy for the UK. This was a singular privilege. Bobbie Erskine may have been unpopular with Kenya settlers during the Mau Mau, but he was certainly good with his troops. I could not wait to get away and in late November embarked on the Reine del Pacifico where I was accommodated, in considerable comfort, in the sickbay. After about ten days when I was judged unfit for service but well enough to leave the sickbay, I had more luck. The only accommodation available was a single cabin on the boat deck earmarked for a full colonel, so for the rest of the voyage I travelled in real style. At long last, just after New Year, we moored off Gourock in the Clyde near Glasgow and Red Cross and WVS ladies came aboard. On stepping ashore at Glasgow I suddenly became a technical casualty again and was whisked in an ambulance – along with a young infantry subaltern with a broken leg in plaster – to a hospital at Turnberry, near Ayr. The hospital was makeshift in a luxury hotel, and was in reserve, namely waiting for casualties who had not come, except for us. So, as the only patients, we were made much of. My companion was a more spectacular casualty 139

AWAY TO THE WAR because of his leg plaster. He said he had tripped over a tent rope in the dark at Foggia. I had been wounded in action, but got far less attention. At last we were medically discharged and whisked back to Glasgow by ambulance. There we were delivered into the care of a railway transport officer, issued with leave passes and railway warrants, and set off to London in a comfortable, firstclass sleeper. It was 5 January 1944. Training for Europe and Overlord After four-and-a-half years it was a shock to return to England. The ravages of bombing were everywhere, but for the time being there was a lull in the air war. Being January and mid-winter did not help: the darkness emphasized the drabness of the built-up areas; there were streets in ruins and rubble everywhere. It got light as we reached Birmingham and the appalling bomb damage was evident from there on – Rugby, Northampton and Luton. We ended up at Euston, where I had started from on my way to Liverpool and Kenya in 1940. Central London was devastated, John Lewis a burnt-out shell. Bryanston Court, where Maurice and Lucy were waiting to welcome me, was still intact. They had long returned from their refuge in the country and were braving it out in their wartime flat. That they shared an address with Wallis Simpson, later Duchess of Windsor, only slightly alleviated the stigma of spending seven years living north of the park, but this was to end a short time later when they made their final move to Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, an address of which to be proud. Back in England: January–June 1944 Nesta’s husband Arthur Selwyn had been invalided out of the navy and they were living at Sedbergh where Arthur was teaching at the famous school. I visited them for a few days, but was unable to get to Aboyne to see the StJohns. Towards the end of my leave, while entertaining a woman to dinner in the Savoy River Room, General Bobbie Erskine who was hosting a large party close by spotted me and sent a note asking us to join his party. My partner and I took to the dance floor, but on bidding thank you and goodbye to the general, he invited me to lunch at the Naval and Military Club, the ‘In and Out’ the next day. I had 48 hours of my leave still to go, but this was a chance I 140

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD could not possibly miss. However, the club was in a sorry state; a bomb had destroyed much of the building fronting on Piccadilly, so we lunched in the small dining room of the ladies’ annex overlooking Half Moon Street. Our base for the next four months was great for tank and artillery training but gamma minus for engineers. The soldiers of the 7th Armoured Division were, to put it mildly, not pleased to fetch up in West Norfolk, the part of England that most resembles the Western Desert of North Africa, especially at the War Office tank training ground at Thetford on an empty, sandy, almost featureless waste with some copses of evergreen trees near a couple of deserted and semi-ruined villages. The troops’ accommodation at Mundford was five star compared with what we had been used to: up-to-date wooden hutted barrack rooms with cosy stoves to keep them warm, and all mod cons. Rationing did not apply to the armed services; we got all we could possibly want. The Army Catering Corps manned the kitchens and its cooks prepared food the lads liked. With lots of ATS women around there was female company and Saturday night hops. No unit ever had trouble producing a band for dancing. The NAAFI canteen provided the venue for these, for concert parties, for cinema shows or just for loafing. The soldiers should have been happy but they were not. There was a lot of grumbling and petty crime and I was the victim of a robbery. The squadron’s money in a cash box in a drawer in the squadron office was stolen and the empty box found in a hedge nearby. In accordance with service tradition, the buck stopped with me (inadequate security). Anyway, the loss was £600 and £200 was docked from my pay. This was four months’ salary and quite a blow. My erstwhile host at the ‘In and Out’, General Erskine, administered justice. He looked stern and called me FitzGerald. I was delighted and honoured to be restored to my command and was given a rousing welcome. The soldiers had returned from home leave and the weather was cold and sunny. There had been some changes in the officers since October. Jock Thompson had been posted and we now had two officers per troop. Alastair Duncan-Millar remained second-in-command, and Dai Owen and Alan Jucker were still with us in command of two of the troops. The new troop commander was Dick Turpin, a lively Irishman 141

AWAY TO THE WAR from Tipperary. Then two supernumerary subalterns joined us: Tony Herbert and Robin Lindsay. We had obviously continued to skim the cream of the new intake. Tony Hunter was still the CRE. While I was away, he had collected a bar to his DSO. He ended the war with two bars, which means three DSO awards. To improve our skills at building Bailey bridges, we were able to escape from the windy wastes of Thetford and the icy Siberian gales. We spent separate periods on detachment bridging the Ouse at Thrapston near Corby in Northamptonshire and, more excitingly, the tidal waters confined by Chesil Beach near Weymouth in Dorset. We lived in a camp at nearby Wyke Regis. Tony Hunter was not involved in this training because he was preoccupied with divisional planning for the Overlord invasion of Europe, which was far too secret for us lower orders. However, at Mundford he did organize officer training in radio communications, reconnaissance drills and unit security in the field, and air photograph interpretation with particular reference to German beach defences. On seaborne invasion, we officers had to be instructed in organizing beachheads: how we disembarked, how we assembled once there and battle conduct once inland. Then there was the whole new technology of water-proofing vehicles. Of course we had done this prior to Salerno, but it was much more serious for Operation Overlord where there were to be German beach obstacles and might be a seriously opposed landing. By late April we knew that D-Day would be in June, but nothing else. In late May, when summer had set in and it looked as if we would be blessed with the same endless, calm, sunny weather we had had years earlier during the Dunkirk débâcle, we started edging towards invasion. Our first move was into the Waltham Abbey area of Essex, where we stayed for about a fortnight in a tented camp on a golf course with a magnificent stately home as a clubhouse. We then spent a few days in West Ham football stadium in East London. During this time I was allowed a few days’ leave with Maurice and Lucy at Bryanston Court, but we still knew nothing of the details of Overlord. On 1 June our advance party under Alastair Duncan-Millar disappeared in the direction of Portsmouth. On our last night at West Ham we were told only that we were to embark at Tilbury Docks on 3 June. Except for a section under Robin Lindsay, which was to embark with 22nd armoured brigade at Felixstowe, we all then 142

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD moved from West Ham and parked on the completed, but not yet opened, Southend bypass. The weather had broken, it was raining and blustery, and D-Day had been postponed for two days. We remained there for 48 hours – into the morning of the 5th – when at last we began our move to the docks at Tilbury and loaded the squadron onto a Liberty ship. This was completed, without enemy air strikes or interference, by the afternoon of the 5th. The weather had slightly abated as we set sail out of the Thames estuary. On board I opened my sealed orders and broke it to the squadron that we were about to land at Arromanches, adjacent to Bayeux (of tapestry fame), and were sailing half the length of the English Channel to get there. By 1000 hours, we were standing off Arromanches. It was fine, but there was a stiff breeze and the sea was choppy. There were sounds of a fierce battle ashore, but only the odd stray shell came our way, and there was no attack from the air. We were not alone: other Liberty ships and landing ships (tanks) were dotted about in the sea all around us. The time on board this Liberty ship lasted only 36 hours, but I have a vivid memory of its skipper, a tough, craggy, tobacco chewing Yank in a bad temper. He had landed in the English Channel by mistake, so it seemed. He had thought he was bound for the Pacific. He had no faith in the success of this particular venture and foretold imminent disaster at any moment. When we started to offload, he proved to be no great seaman – two of the LSTs into which we scrambled down rope nets were damaged through him bumping his ship in the choppy sea and breaking their moorings. It was 7 June 1944 – D-Day plus one. Overlord: the Shiny Fourth experience We offloaded the whole squadron, vehicles and all, into an LST, which drove to the shore and grounded its ramp on a sandy beach in about four feet of water. We drove ashore almost without a hitch; one armoured personnel carrier got drowned, but luckily it was off the ramp so did not block the egress of the following vehicles. We were under shellfire from a shore battery for a bit, but it was quickly silenced. There was no enemy air activity. It was evident that the Allied choice of landing zone had surprised the Germans and that our deception cover-plan, to persuade them we were bound for the Channel ports, had worked (only later did we 143

AWAY TO THE WAR realize that it was not luck but good management that had resulted in the comparative lack of resistance). The beachhead parties’ plans worked with precision, and we quickly cleared the beach and reached our reception area with no casualties so far. The powers that be of course already knew all about the bocage, little plots inside high hedges interspersed with big oak, ash and beech trees and approached by narrow lanes and cuttings, but it was a nasty surprise to us. It was not good, in fact bloody awful, tank manoeuvring country. To the east and south of the Bayeux– Caen road the country was more open, but that was not our territory. We were holed up in these cosy little plots with cleared fields of fire and little immediate possibility of useful manoeuvre. The powers that be may not have known about the camembert cheese factory just south of Bayeux, in which we temporarily established the squadron headquarters. It had ceased manufacture for the time being, but there was an adequate stock of fine, ripe cheese – more, alas, to the taste of the officers than the soldiers. Our lorried infantry brigade was pushing slowly towards VillersBocage, a small village about 16 miles south of Bayeux on the main road from Rennes to Caen and Monty’s fulcrum for his left hook through the Falaise Gap. Unfortunately, Mont Pinçon, a hill held by the Germans, overlooked all our movements as far north as the sea. It also masked from our view the hasty approach of a German division from the south, which had the coast as objective and was cutting the Allied invasion force in two, splitting the Americans coming south from Cherbourg through St Lô and Vire from the British advancing towards Caen. On 14 June the 22nd armoured brigade’s tanks were released and swept through the infantry positions to invest Villers-Bocage. At the same time, the 2nd Panzer division charged from Vire and Aunay-sur-Odon. An almighty battle followed. I was in VillersBocage when it started. Brigadier Mike Carver and his brigade major, Major Goldsmith, were sitting on the turrets of their individual Cromwell tanks exhibiting the famous British stiff upper lip. I was cowering in my armoured car. They seemed to be telling an armoured regiment what to do; at any rate they were peering at maps and speaking into microphones. Ominous noises coming from the direction of Vire to the southeast were of tanks clanking towards us and they were not ours. We did a quick bunk to 144

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD Caumont l’Evente, a short distance to the west. The Germans did not have it all their own way: skirmishes took place between tanks through corner-shop fronts, and tank hunting parties stalked Tigers. Our section was captured and, realizing they were being led towards a wall to be shot, made a dash for it, escaping. At one time they sheltered in doorways to escape gunfire down the street, but one of the men had a huge protruding stomach and he was killed. We were relieved to see them returning to us in an amphibian Volkswagen they had commandeered. Meanwhile, the rest of the brigade formed a tight ‘box’ about 1500 by 1000 metres in area. It was a sticky situation, as we were being attacked fairly constantly one way or another. At one time we received a deluge of shells and I was terrified. After a while I came to my senses, and thought I either die or I do not, it is as simple as that. Apart from taking sensible precautions, there is nothing one can do about it, so my attitude hardened and I was never unnerved again. I became seasoned, at times foolhardy. US guns gave support with accurate fire. At times, the Royal Horse Artillery acted as anti-tank gunners. The brigade major advised us to dig in as the Americans were to bomb a village in front of us and the division had nasty memories of them bombing wrong targets. He was right. They obliterated the wrong village. We watched the bombs being dropped from overhead, so knew we were safe. We were not doing anything useful in the ‘box’ so we were pulled out. Later we learnt from the French that the Jerries took off in the opposite direction at the same time. Now came a period of static warfare, as the opposing armies slogged it out, but we had work to do. I used to do my rounds of inspection on a motorbike, but after being tipped off several times into ruts formed by tanks turning off the roads, I took to a jeep instead. I saw Canadian engineers doing a first-class job of road repairs. They were efficient, never wasting effort. They tended to pick up something in the same motion of putting something down. They were big men compared with a lot of ours. Eventide for the Desert Rats Was it in Tunisia that 7th Armoured Division began to lose its shine, its bravado, its pride in being the elite among armoured divisions? I believe Monty had already begun to lose faith in us. 145

AWAY TO THE WAR Major Carol Mather, one of Monty’s ADCs, certainly thought so. We took no active part in the battle of Mareth, Wadi Akarit or Enfidaville and were accorded an unopposed front-seat entry into Tunis. Monty was happy to pack us back into Libya and lose us to General Mark Clark for the Italy invasion, and we were only in the third wave at Salerno when the hard fighting was over. Now we were back under Monty in Normandy and stuck in the bocage. The Desert Rats’ fine reputation was becoming frayed at the edges. This was the end of the line for the old Desert Rats. We went on wearing the jerboa flash, but we became an ordinary armoured division. The new commander was a General Verney, a forgettable replacement for Bobbie Erskine. Anyone interested in the internecine struggle between Eisenhower and Montgomery on what to do once we had broken out of Normandy, can read all about it in Monty’s memoirs. Churchill summed it up in volume 6 of The Second World War by saying that ‘strategists may long debate these issues’. Anyway, for us it was hell for leather for Antwerp, and a Rhine crossing at Arnhem. The curtain raiser for us was the entry to Caen after the battle was over, and the other divisions in 30 Corps had cleared the way for us to advance with them to the River Orne. As we were clearing Caen we got our third pasting of the war – this time it was the Canadians who did us over good and proper, with saturation bombing from a high level. Again, by a miracle, there were no casualties, apart from a plunge in our morale. The bridges over the River Seine had been destroyed, but troops built a pontoon Bailey bridge and we crossed at Vernon, about 90 miles from Caen, on 21 August. The Somme was our next obstacle; luckily, the bridges in and around Amiens were intact and the city was in our hands by 31 August. The defensive action at Wetteren It is no use pretending that I was not filled with apprehension at the prospect of fending off the German army. We were sappers, not infantry. My men were artisans, not warriors – albeit Cockneys and tough little devils. My overall aim these last 18 months – to bring the blighters home intact – looked like being dashed. I was far from cool; I was exasperated. For one thing we had, attached to our force what should have proved useful additions: a 146

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD Cromwell tank and a 17 pounder anti-tank gun, with crew. I arranged for the tank to attack a solitary house occupied by German duodenals some distance from the far river bank and for our armoured carriers – with soldiers – to storm the house. The tank shed a track and stopped forever. It sat there looking silly. Luckily it was menacing enough to bring the duodenals out with their hands in the air, so in a way this performance could be counted a success. However, the tank crew had to ‘abandon ship’, so that was the end of it as far as fighting value was concerned. The 11th Hussars, out in front, radioed that there were what looked like SS troops – infantry not armour – coming round towards us from the northwest. Soon we had confirmation, as the mortaring of our positions on the north bank began. I realized that I had more than a lot to deal with. I got on the blower and appealed for real soldier reinforcements and, if possible, even relief. By this time it was an autumnal evening and the lads were looking hungry and forward to a hot meal. It was then that the shambles ensued. I knew I could rely on the cookhouse crew to find shelter on the outskirts of the town, and to have the hot meal ready, and so it was. What I had forgotten was that it was the troops’ habit to get their hot meal at the cookhouse and not – as in this case it would have been proper – to have it dished out to them in their fighting positions. So these positions were all abandoned and they ran back, carrying billycans and mess tins, to queue for food. Two disastrous things might then have happened, but luckily did not. A well placed mortar bomb could have decimated the force, and the enemy might have attacked a lot of unmanned positions, and we would have been overrun. Night fell, the mortaring stopped, the men resumed their posts and the antitank gun was properly sited. I stopped being exasperated, but did not stop being apprehensive. I arranged for breakfast to be served to the men in their positions, and swore that I would personally shoot anyone who went back for food. Sentry lookout posts were posted. Stand to at 0530 hours. The German infantry attack came at dawn, preceded by more mortaring. We were in fact better armed than equivalent infantry. When our lads saw that they had the advantage, they forgot about the hated mortar fire and their tails went right up. The next time a wave of infantry attacked, they wrought even more mayhem, and the 147

AWAY TO THE WAR Germans turned tail. The afternoon of the 6th came and went, and during the following night the blessed rifle brigade relieved us. This episode had lasted 20 hours and I was thankful not to be an infanteer and have to endure such tension and the strain all the time, like they did. We had 17 men wounded, none too seriously and no deaths, but Dick Turpin lost a leg from a mortar shell. As we had left our medical support miles behind, I took the wounded, including Dick, to a nearby Dutch civilian hospital, which happened to be a Protestant establishment. The authorities demanded to know our religious credentials. Dick was the only non-Protestant and, to my surprise and disgust, they refused to admit him and we had to take him to a Catholic hospital where he was admitted. When Dick recovered he was repatriated to Tipperary. The other wounded were transferred to the medical corps, then discharged and returned to my unit, so one officer was my only loss. At the subsequent postmortem, which Robin attended, we decided we could take on the Germans any time. However, it would be better if we fought from fox holes rather than the halftracks, so as to be safer from mortars, and that it would be nice to be able to retaliate with some mortars of our own. Robin, the provider of unauthorized equipment, promised to do his best to ‘win’ some. As it happened, it would not be long before we were tried (but not, thank God, tested) as infantry once again. Robin had found us a three-inch mortar, which was better than nothing. We had a few days’ rest at Dendermonde and I let some of the lads off for 48 hours’ local leave in Brussels. I went too with a couple of the officers and found comfortable lodgings in a lush night-club. The local ladies were glad to receive the gallant conquering heroes and three men went AWOL and were 48 hours late with far-fetched excuses. Not the Rhine: make do with the Waal This is the story of our part in the failure to secure the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem. Montgomery’s plan was to secure bridges or to build bridges on the thrust line: Brussels–Eindhoven–Veghel– Grave–Nijmegen–Arnhem. The 1st British Airborne Division was to capture the bridge at Arnhem intact. General Dempsey’s 2nd Army and the US 82nd and 101st airborne divisions were also 148

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD under Montgomery’s command for these operations. As it turned out, the US divisions captured the Nijmegen and Grave bridges intact, as well as the bridge over the Wilhelmina canal at Best, but the 1st airborne division failed at Arnhem and its remnants had to be rescued. D-Day for the whole operation was 17 September 1944. We left Dendermonde on 10 September and leaguered up at Diest just short of the Albert canal waiting for the whistle to blow on the 17th. We were still in Belgium. The Belgians were friendly and their underground trustworthy. We were warned that this might not be so once we crossed into Holland. I was quartered in a farmhouse full of peasants. There was a warm slightly fetid atmosphere. Flies were everywhere and women were suckling their not very young infants. I was not used to this, even in Africa. I was instructed to join Lieutenant-Colonel Griffiths of the East Surrey Regiment who had been ordered to capture a canal lock on the enemy side of the Albert canal. The lock was supposed to control the drainage system all the way west to Antwerp, so could be used to flood a great tract of flat land and hinder the advance of the army. I was privileged to witness a pattern example of the infantry company at work from the CO’s control position. On 17 September the weather was fine and autumnal. We moved to Hechtel to start preparing to build a triple-triple Bailey bridge close to the blown bridge over the Meuse–Escaut canal about six miles up the road to Eindhoven. This was a major task and involved three other squadrons. We prepared the bank seats before dark, worked through the night under artificial moonlight and had traffic rolling by the afternoon of the 18th. The way was then clear for the squadron to move to St Oedenrode about five miles from Veghel where we were to repair a damaged bridge over a small river and put a Bailey bridge to replace one destroyed over the Zuid Willems Vaart canal in the centre of the town. The only other bridge the squadron built during the abortive attempt to cross the Rhine at Arnhem was at Dinther, the scene of my last encounter with Lieutenant-General Neil Ritchie. We were just about to start on the bank seats when Ritchie’s motorcade swept up and out he jumped, with binoculars at the ready and apparently unaware that he was trespassing in 30 Corps ‘land space’, the canal we were bridging being the boundary between the corps. The breached road stretched straight as a die in an avenue 149

AWAY TO THE WAR of poplars to a village about a mile on. Here there was a church with a steeple overlooking our bridging operation, on which we thought there might be a German gunner observation post. So far, however, no disturbances, but Ritchie’s display was too much for the enemy. He stood there in the open with his entourage, nicely dressed in his general’s hat, service dress, Sam Browne and red gorget patches flashing for all to see. Eventually, he made to move off but not before the first of a number of 88-millimetre ‘stonks’ arrived, causing a very quick withdrawal indeed and the abandonment of a jeep that had failed to start. Ritchie got away, but it was some hours before the German gunners left us alone. The Arnhem effort was petering out. Supply was inadequate. Canadians were clearing the Germans from Walcheren and other islands overlooking the entrance to the Scheldt and Antwerp, but so far Antwerp could not be used for supply. It was also being subjected to devastating V2 rocket attack, the vicious missiles that were beginning to cause havoc in London and southeast England. We were stuck in the mud on the west bank of the Maas while autumn closed in with increasing cold and incessant rain. To my considerable concern we were transferred to 12 Corps Troops to be employed, once more, as infantry. We were part of a force in defensive positions between ‘s-Hertogenbosch and Gertruidenberg, facing the enemy across the Maas river. We had learnt the lessons of Wetteren and were properly dug in, in the soggy ground. The positions were only occupied at first and last light and the Germans showed no signs of attacking. Meantime, the sappers were otherwise employed during the day. The country was eerie, with its stunted firs in sandy soil. The infantry were very thin on the ground, so we took up defensive positions at first and last light, feeling fairly secure as we had booby-trapped trip wires strung out in front of us. Still we had work to do in the day time. I became very tired but I enjoyed it just the same. I proved to be lucky while clearing an area of mines. It transpired that I had stepped on one of those little wooden anti-personnel mines, for the blokes saw my footprint on top of it. They called them ‘Blighty’ mines as they blew off one’s foot, doing little other damage. Luckily for me the Jerry had forgotten to pull out the pin. It was becoming cold, so one night we all slept at a brickworks, but never again, for one snorer kept the others awake. Later on, 150

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD an old couple invited us to sleep in their thatch roofed house. As we settled down on the floor, we wondered where they were going to sleep. They drew back what we thought was a window curtain, but behind it was a hole in the wall with a snug double mattress and bed, into which they hopped, drawing the curtain behind them. I preferred to sleep outside. The only time I could not sleep was when a bird kept me awake. Another time the crew of a tank was brewing up tea next to one of these houses and the flames caught the thatch alight, burning the house down in no time. At one time, we were in a leaguer with tanks, when a few shells landed. I was the first to hit the deck – in a bit of a hollow with two others on top of me. My bed-roll was peppered, so I was thankful that I was an early riser and had not been in it at the time. What really got me was that they had damaged my bed-roll. For some reason I was indignant about this, when normally I did not bother about such things. Sadly, a piece of shrapnel followed one of the tank crewmen into a tank as he dived in. This sporadic and pointless activity carried us through until the end of October. We were pulled out of our defensive positions, reverted to 30 Corps, and retired for a period of rest and recuperation to the pleasant little Dutch town of Tilburg. Winter had set in with increasing cold and relentless rain. Meanwhile, during our absence from 30 Corps, they had attacked and, by the middle of November, driven the enemy back across the river Maas in the area south of Venlo. This was an infantry operation: the armour was ill fitted to operate usefully in the soggy conditions arising from the endless rain. We remained resting at Tilburg. The curtain comes down We were quartered in a soft drinks factory. It was not operating, and there was no stock, but the buildings were substantial, and its large parking area served as a parade ground. The army provided us with barrack room furniture and coal burning stoves kept us all warm. We became very comfortable. The troops were not over burdened with duties, but as the Maas and the enemy were only 12 miles to the north we mounted 24-hour guards on the gates, patrolled the fenced area of the factory, and the troops remained fully armed. Brussels, about 100 miles away, was still the favoured 151

AWAY TO THE WAR place for short (72-hour) leaves, and we ran vehicles with leave parties to a leave camp that was already being established. Meanwhile, the lads were all writing home and sending parcels. Our duty as officers was to censor letters, but not to probe packages. One morning the mayor of Tilburg requested an interview with us, on behalf of the owners of a footwear factory who were complaining that my soldiers were raiding the shoe stores and making off with a good proportion of the stock. I cursed myself for not being more suspicious. These parcels were shoes consigned to loved ones. I forbade the dispatch of any more parcels, whatever the contents, and the thefts soon ceased. After ten days in Tilburg I received a posting order to attend the Staff College at Camberley as a student early in January 1945, after having had 28 days’ home leave. My replacement would arrive on 21 November and there would be a seven-day handover. I was saddened to be leaving, but exhilarated at the prospect of the Staff College, which was a significant step in my regular officer army career. Moreover, it had come straight out of the blue. I resolved to celebrate by throwing a party for the officers and for a friend from a sapper unit nearby, Major Geoffrey Fairweather RE. We had a sumptuous meal served with champagne (no food rationing in Tilburg), and caroused until about 3.00 a.m., at which time Geoffrey muttered that he should push off back to his unit. I laid on a farewell parade for the troops and said my sad goodbyes. Only a fortnight before I had left my bivouac area on a recce and had returned to find my batman, Driver McCallum, killed. A direct hit on my sleeping vehicle had finished him off. We buried his remains by the side of the road in a copse, and as there was no padré present, I read the burial service. He had been with me since I joined the squadron in March 1943. On the whole I think I was overjoyed to get away. Only later were there feelings of pride at having successfully led 300 men for 20 months at the age of 26/27, and of having almost succeeded in my ambition to bring all of them home safe and sound. Perhaps most important I felt the loss of close friends like Alastair Duncan-Millar (whose posting had also come through), Dick Turpin and Robin Lindsay who had both been evacuated as casualties, Tony Hunter who was also posted and NCOs like Carter who had been in the squadron far longer than me. 152

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD I left on 30 November 1944, by train to Boulogne followed by sea transport to Folkestone, and was with Aunt Lucy and Uncle Maurice in Bryanston Court two days later. England: December 1944 to October 1945 It was not at all like going from war to peace, more like transferring from one theatre of war to another. Although Luftwaffe bombing in Britain was over and the buzz-bombs menace (that lasted from 17 June to 28 August) was soon to be over, having caused 22,000 casualties, the V2 rocket attack on London had started on 8 September and was still going on at the rate of about 200 a month. These missiles, carrying a ton of high explosive and striking without warning were launched from the vicinity of The Hague, which was not yet liberated, and were plaguing Brussels, Liège and Antwerp in addition to London. The toll for London was 9200 killed or wounded by the time the launching sites were captured in April 1945. Another problem was rationing, which affected you if you were on leave from the services. One Saturday, when Uncle Maurice and I returned at lunch time from playing golf at Roehampton, we found that a V2 had struck an open area close to Marble Arch and there was consequent havoc, with mounds of rubble and ambulances removing the civilian casualties. My Aunt Lucy, in Bryanston Court nearby, was severely shaken by the explosion. Coincidentally, with my posting to the Staff College, my cousin Roger StJohn was posted there as an instructor. He was positioned at Minley Manor, rather than Camberley, and did not actually teach me, but I saw a bit of him and his family once or twice during the six months course. They were living in a bungalow in the Staff College grounds and Roger was soon in his element creating the flower and vegetable gardens. Staff College course: January to June 1945 After leave spent in Sedbergh with the Selwyns, Aboyne with the Tudor StJohns, and in London with Maurice and Lucy FitzGerald, I joined at Camberley early in January. We were worked very hard, but the work was fascinating and teaching methods were first rate. There were general lectures and a lot of outdoors work, but for written work we were mostly organ153

AWAY TO THE WAR ized in syndicates of (I believe) eight, with an officer tutor. Unlike Cambridge, you did not have to waste time taking notes from a blackboard – synopses of lectures and exercises were always issued and you got them in advance. A lot of written work had to be done in the evening and handed in the next morning. Unlike at Chatham, there were little – if any – group productions, and no chance to skive by volunteering to do the cover sheet. We were stroppy students, experienced in war and straight off the battlefield so thought we knew it all. Listening to people who were back from Burma straightened our ideas a bit, but not much. The staff consisted mostly of brigade majors from active service formations, and they were open season targets for dissension and argument. They were experienced soldiers, knew their stuff and gave as good as they got. A number of distinguished senior officers came down from Whitehall to talk to us, and some also came from operational areas, including Montgomery before the final push. I found him impressive, despite his reedy delivery. We got away from college at midday most Saturdays for the weekend and I usually spent it with Maurice and Lucy at Bryanston Court. On Sunday mornings Maurice and I played golf and I usually went with them to the cinema, which they always went to on a Saturday afternoon. Joan Findlay, ex-Kiambu and daughter of my mother’s best friend Connie, was living with her grandmother in the Surrey village of Abinger quite close to Camberley, so we saw a bit of each other and she came as my partner to the end of course summer ball. She was fun and we had ridden together a few times in the coffee at Kiambu, but we were just good friends. I also took some of Nesta’s childhood friends like Betty Morton, Anne Christopherson, Bunny Burrell, Dorothy Bragg and the gorgeous Patricia Niblock-Stewart out to lunch from time to time, but looking back, I wonder why I was so reluctant to become involved with any of them. I suppose my heart belonged in Kenya. While I was at the Staff College, there were two notable events – the monarch’s St James’s Palace levée at which I was presented with my gong, and VE day. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Maurice attended the levée and it was very grand. It was my party and I was very proud. Not that there were not a large number of other people being honoured. We had to 154

ITALY AND TRAINING FOR EUROPE AND OVERLORD stand in a long queue in an anteroom to be inspected by a uniformed official to ensure we were properly turned out (HM was well known to be a stickler). I was passed OK, but the lieutenant-colonel next to me caused the inspector to blench. ‘Good heavens, Sir, are you aware that you’ve got your shoulder badges of rank on the wrong way round?’ I looked, and it was true. I had not noticed, but both pips were above the crowns. ‘Oh Lord,’ the wretched man exclaimed, ‘so glad you spotted it,’ and he hurried off to the royal cloaks to put matters straight. Eventually, I was bowing in front of King George VI who was standing on a dais attended by flunkies who dished out the gongs and orders. Poor man, it was true about his stutter and, unlike Uncle Tudor, he had not the wit to put it to theatrical effect. He stammered out a few words of congratulation and it was all over. VE day in May 1945 found me, with a companion, in the middle of a good tempered throng, waving a Union Jack and shouting in front of Buckingham Palace. It was not my scene really, even at the age of 28. The good-tempered throng were celebrating relief from bombing and the end of rationing (which in the event went on until 1951, six more years). I was celebrating not having to mourn all that many dead and the marvellous summer weather. My posting came through in June. I was to be an instructor of national servicemen at Chatham, which was not acceptable. I was off in person to have it rearranged and in a trice I was promised a posting to East Africa Command in Kenya as soon as it could be arranged. Meanwhile, I was to kick my heels at the RE depot at Halifax (not Chatham as in peacetime) and await events. We were located very comfortably in a bit of Paton & Baldwin’s sports complex, and I was introduced to the complexities of bowls played on a beautifully manicured crowned green. There were also friendly fellow officers around who had already moved in on local society, centred on a very congenial pub in the centre of the town. There were local ‘lovelies’, among them the very attractive, amusing Christine Emmett. We fell for one another. Her father was the local boss of the Halifax Building Society and not without the odd farthing. It was Rolls Royces (no problem with petrol rationing) and the local country club for golf all the way. I was introduced to the joys of the Yorkshire version of ‘high tea’, followed later in the evening by supper. I soon got used to this novel meal routine. 155

AWAY TO THE WAR There did not seem to be much of a problem with food rationing either. I, and sometimes we, roamed the moors. Halifax was a horrible little woollen town near Huddersfield, full of smoke belching factories and in a stuffy valley, but you could walk out of it in whatever direction and after half an hour’s climb be in beautiful unspoilt moorland. Bradford and Leeds were nearby for amusement. Christine and I became engaged and, as Sedbergh was not that far away, we went together to see Nesta and Arthur and my four-year-old goddaughter, Jane. The Selwyns were welcoming and friendly to Christine, but Arthur’s mother was silent; her disparaging looks (just like my own mother’s later when I took up with Buff) spoke volumes. Finally, my marching orders for Nairobi arrived and in mid-September I sailed for Mombasa. Christine and I made vows of faithfulness and said sad goodbyes. We had known each other for about nine weeks. Victory in Japan day was about then. I cannot remember a thing about it. I do not think it made any impact at all in Yorkshire. Odd when you think of it – final end to the war and two atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people and changed the world forever. Still, there it is. Aged 28, I was being posted to Northern Area in East African Command, as Commander Royal Engineers, with the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel. But on the ship, which I think was the SS Empire Ken, I was still a major. The ship made good progress via the Mediterranean and Suez Canal, and we docked at Mombasa in mid-October. During the voyage Buff Denny and I met, made friends and fell in love. So much for my promises to Christine Emmett. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, of someone else. I did, however, accept responsibility for Christine, and I wrote her a long letter urging her to join me in Kenya. I received a rather tearful reply stating that she would be devastated to leave her mother. Off the hook! This was my cue to end the romance, which I did – not very kindly. It was a very shameful episode, but a short one. My life with Buff lasted over 14 years, nearly all of it exciting and a lot of it happy.

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Part III Peacetime Soldiering

11 Military service in East Africa, 1945–48

I

started to head this section ‘Soldiering’ but of course it was not. After November 1944 I never soldiered again. I served His (later Her) Majesty and drew the monarch’s ‘shilling’. As a career it could hardly be better. I have never been ambitious. During my active service I aimed to do my job and when it came to commanding troops my main object was to bring them home alive, if possible all of them. If this meant playing soldiers and perhaps, as at Wetteren and ‘s-Hertogenbosch, getting maimed or killed, so be it. And so it continued after 1944 – doing my job. Looking forward for a moment: my army career took me to East Africa for three years doing military engineering work; gave me two years’ training as a civil engineer ending with a vital qualification; a further two years doing civil engineering work in the army; and ending up with nearly three years in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Not bad, but hardly a money-spinner. At the end, as a major living in London with all the allowances, I was earning just about £100 a month and had to pay my own rent. If I had retired on pension, after nearly 19 years of service, it would have been £240 per annum (about £5000 at present-day values). As it was, I took a gratuity worth, nowadays, about £40,000. Looking back, I would not change those ten years for the world. Buff was in the FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) but if that is what they did in the First World War it was very different now. They drove generals about, rode powerful Harley Davidson motorcycles as dispatch riders; and ran military offices and telephone exchanges. Unlike the ATS, they were posh and, though not 159

PEACETIME SOLDIERING officers, they were treated as such. Their pay was meagre. Once, when she broke down on the road and a thief tried to steal her monthly pay, what Buff rescued after beating the little runt up was £20. But on that she could run a marvellous two-seater open Chevrolet, for nowadays one had to be mobile. When we docked we immediately parted company. Buff went to live in the FANY mess at Msongari convent in Nairobi where Madame Mauchauffée, a formidable ‘French’ lady, looked after her. Buff was later posted to Mombasa, and lived in the FANY mess there. Until then I saw quite a bit of her at weekends, using a powerful military car that I hired for a pittance. My posting took me to Nanyuki and into the clutches of the Northern Area commander, the formidable Major General CC (Fluffy) Fowkes. Before I joined I spent a few days with my parents in Balmoral Road and made contact with the East Africa Command Works Services Organization headed by Colonel Ray Rinaldi. One of his officers was Major Michael Murray and they were both architects, Michael at that time a ‘makee-learnee’ and Ray a mature, qualified man with a substantial practice waiting for him in Johannesburg. There were also a couple of quantity surveyors and George Vamos, a Hungarian émigré who had escaped the Nazi net by making a long and dangerous journey to the Middle East. He was an outstanding architect and artist who stayed on in Kenya and established a successful architectural practice. When I first met him, he had sketch plans on his board for a house for Sweetie Barkas on the other side of Nanyuki. It was a new experience for me to be involved with quasicivilian, qualified practitioners in the construction trade. Up to now I had dealt mostly with soldiers. It was also new to be listening to talk of bribery and corruption in high places, and Michael Murray saw it as his duty to gen me up on this. It was all taking place in an atmosphere of demobilization, dismantling camps and selling off surplus military equipment. Meanwhile, I was still a military man, and was off by train to Nanyuki to join Fluffy. Nanyuki has the most beautiful climate and it was a pity my stay there was so short. It was only three or four weeks before the whole Northern Area HQ was uprooted and relocated at Aerodrome Camp, Gilgil. Meanwhile, we were located in Nanyuki Club, which still did duty as a club, and we mixed happily with all 160

MILITARY SERVICE IN EAST AFRICA, 1945–48 the extraordinary, mostly eccentric, local settler civilian members. There were lots of women and a good mix of military. General ‘Fluffy’ had a reputation as a bad-tempered bully and people were frightened of him. I was warned to be on my guard and, indeed, I was apprehensive as I prepared to meet him for the first time. I had had lots of experience of brigadiers and quite a bit of generals, but they had all been kindly and affable. How would one handle this brute? I had no one to introduce me as I marched into his office and threw a smart salute. I must have presented an unimpressive appearance: 28, immature. Perhaps the blue and red ribbon helped. Fluffy had lots of medals, and I think the DSO was one of them. Well, I was still alive after the introduction, but I remember that Gilgil was a disappointment. It was a dump compared with Nanyuki, with sticky black cotton soil everywhere. Fluffy must have been pushing fifty at the time and, according to his FANY drivers and office aides, women adored him. His ‘manor’ was large – all of Somalia including the reserved areas of Ethiopia (east of the Awash river plus Harrar and Dire Dawa); Kenya, north of and including Nairobi; all of Uganda; and the Nile to Juba in the Sudan. His forces were correspondingly sparse: a brigade in what had been British Somaliland, centred on Hargeisa; a brigade at Nanyuki; the Somaliland Scouts to look after the Ogaden; the gendarmerie for the rest of Somalia; and the 4th Uganda KAR at Jinja. My job as engineer was to ensure that roads were kept open, to attend to troops’ housing and to organize the dismantling and disposal of military barracks and camps no longer required because the British army in East Africa was gradually being reduced. This policy of running down the British forces in East Africa was not, in fact, being pursued very vigorously. In 1946 the imperial dream was still a reality and a high-powered delegation including Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke spent a number of weeks in Kenya deciding where to site a mammoth services stores depot and imperial communications relay station. The general took Lord Alanbrooke and the delegation on a tour of Nanyuki via Thomson’s Falls, taking in his home area of Blood Pressure Ridge where Mrs Fluffy served lunch. However, perhaps to the general’s disappointment, they were more interested in a Major A. Sutcliffe of Montecarlo Ranch and his other ranch near Mweiga, whereupon the 161

PEACETIME SOLDIERING general, without bothering to ask the major’s permission, proceeded to mark a map and ordered surveyors onto the land to do a quick survey. When Sutcliffe got wind of this, it was out with his 12-bore and into his car to kick the military interlopers off his land at the point of a gun. Meanwhile, it was lunch time in the senior officers’ mess at Aerodrome Camp, Gilgil, and the distinguished visitors were to be entertained. There must have been nearly a dozen of us and the general decided to line us up in order of seniority to be introduced to the field marshal, juniors last. This left me, by far the most junior, lumbered with Alanbrooke for about 20 minutes while we waited for lunch to be announced. He turned out to be extremely nice. He talked to me very informally and we discovered we shared acquaintances in Arthur and Patience Guinness (Michael StJohn’s in-laws). Most riveting of all, he gave me an account of his recent visit to occupied Japan and his reactions on visiting the atom bombed and devastated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fluffy relieved me and took Alanbrooke in to lunch. My time at Gilgil lasted until July 1946, nine months. I was kept busy, mostly on safari. I went west to Eldoret and across the Uganda border for a night at the Tororo Hotel, where my father had spent several weeks waiting for a military quarter to be provided when he first took over as commandant of the central recruiting depot. My journeys took me north to Mbale, Soroti and Gulu, where there were military garrisons. I never penetrated Juba, or ever got to Kampala. My more exciting journeys took me to Hargeisa and Berbera, via Mogadishu. Once I did the whole journey by road. Starting from Thika, my first port of call was Garissa where I lodged with the DC. He had a comfortable bungalow and private squash court, where we had a game. It was extremely hot. The vehicle was an open backed Chevrolet pickup and I had a co-driver and an askari sitting in the back to keep a watch on our baggage. My co-driver was a military-politico bound for Mogadishu and we did not take to each other. It was a longish haul to Kismayu so we left Garissa well before dawn. Before first light, he at the wheel, he saw an animal’s eyes shining in the headlights right in the road. He stopped while a leopard strolled round to my side, poking his head in the cab when there was only canvas between me and the world. ‘Go on you idiot,’ I cried in 162

MILITARY SERVICE IN EAST AFRICA, 1945–48 terror and we eventually accelerated away and the animal’s hot breath was all that remained. After crossing the Juba River at Gelib we turned southeast towards the coast and early in the afternoon reached Kismayu, a small port in a picturesque tree-lined town developed by Italians along Arab lines. The garrison occupied a pleasant two-storey building, the top floor being an officers’ mess. Someone had shot a giraffe and the garrison officers had adopted its young female offspring together with a tame female lesser kudu. The two animals had long since cropped all the Italian flowers and shrubs, but the giraffe was tall enough to stick her head through the veranda trellis on the quest for tit bits. She was very fussy and, with a flutter of her pretty eyelashes, soon learnt to disdain the hard tack. The third leg of our journey was an easy run along the coast, with a stop for lunch at Merca and a teatime arrival at Mogadishu where I dumped my co-driver and made for my comfortable room in Major Boyes-Hinderer’s flat in the castello – a fortress on the sea wall with its feet washed by the sea at high tide. I had known ‘Boyes’ when he was secretary of the Mombasa Club and here he was the assistant town major with a cushy job concerned with the welfare of Mogadishu military officers. He shut shop for the weekend at midday on Friday and did not open again until 6.30 a.m. on Monday. He was in charge of the fuel store, so if you were on your way to Hargeisa and arrived on a Friday afternoon, you were forced to spend a pleasant weekend with him before filling up with petrol the following Monday. Boyes, a bachelor pushing 55, had a bushy moustache, port wine complexion and explosive temper, except when he had had one or two, which was usually by lunch time. He was very much at home in his airy tower and on Fridays it was open house for a fiery curry lunch with lots of pink gin. The last leg to Hargeisa was a long tedious haul round the foothills of the Ogaden savannah through Belet Wen, Dagabur and Dagamadu. Hargeisa in the late 1940s was a large tented camp with one proper office building, the political headquarters of Governor Somali Smith who, with a small staff, ruled what had been British Somaliland. The camp sprawled on both sides of the various channels of a wide dry water course and the sapper camp, where I had a tent and Lieutenant-Colonel Lloyd-Davis was CRE, was on the other side from the main source of entertainment, the 163

PEACETIME SOLDIERING open-air cinema. One evening we strolled across to watch the show. It was a brilliant starry night. Suddenly there was an ominous rumble and a sudden rush of floodwater (known as a tugh in Somalia) was upon us. It arrives unexpectedly with a roar as a three-foot-high wall of water carrying anything in its path before it. It lasts, at the most, about half an hour and has a disconcerting habit of changing the channel of its course, which was what happened while we were watching the film, though safe enough on high ground. We had to hang around for a bit waiting for the flood to subside before we could make our way back to the tents, which one had to keep securely battened down at night to avoid having one’s head bitten off by marauding hyenas. My job was to talk to various senior officers stationed in Somalia and ensure that Colonel Lloyd-Davis and his various engineer outposts were looking after them satisfactorily. LloydDavis did not take kindly to my importuning. I was about 15 years younger and a bit of an upstart. The outposts to the east were at Sheikh and Berbera and to the west at Borama and Jigjigga. When I visited them I went with a regular RE officer, Captain Dick Begbie – a big boisterous fellow with a taste for alcohol. The distinguishing feature of the hot and nasty seaport of Berbera was its high-pressure water supply, which had been piped from nearby hills without the usual break pressure arrangements and gushed dangerously when you turned on a tap. Sheikh, a cool, lush, breezy hill station about 3000 feet up with lots of comfortable bungalow accommodation, was another matter. You reached it by a tortuous, winding, oneway track up a steep pass, which one had to ascend before noon and descend after noon. There was a rock face with prehistoric carvings halfway up. Its garrison was very comfortable indeed – no complaints. One reached Berbera and the foot of Sheikh by a good paved road on which an Irish bridge about 700 yards long crossed a large culvert. It was said that if a tugh arrived when you were crossing the bridge, you were in danger of being washed away before reaching the other end and that vehicles and their occupants had disappeared without trace. It was more fun to go to Borama and Jigjigga. The latter was quite a civilized little town nestling against the Abyssinia Hills, made more so by the presence of Heinie Lustman, Lloyd-Davis’s garrison engineer, and a few Greek and Italian residents besides 164

MILITARY SERVICE IN EAST AFRICA, 1945–48 the local Somalis. It must have been 60 or so miles to Jigjigga along a dead straight road. Heinie’s main job was to keep it in good nick with hordes of local Somali labourers sweeping the gravel from side to middle. When we got to Jigjigga Heinie entertained us royally. Borama, which was off the road in the bush to the north, was not very interesting, so Dick and I decided to extend our safari along an existing track northwards towards Asea, where the Addis Ababa railway crossed the border into French Somaliland. There were herds of buck, a scarce commodity in most of Somalia at that time, so how about a little shooting? We both had 303 Lee Enfield service rifles and enough ammunition, so we leapt out of the vehicle (driver left in charge) and fanned out to walk up to a herd of Grant’s gazelle. We bagged a fine male with a good head and the meat was delicious. I thought it was my trophy but was never quite sure. We returned to Borama, successfully negotiating a wooden bridge we had had to build to cross a small stream on our outward journey and returned to Hargeisa. In due course I bade my host farewell and wended my weary way back to Mogadishu where I picked up a couple of cases of Cioffi’s gin and a load of fuel and, with my trusty driver, made for Kenya. It has always been my habit, wherever possible, to return by a different route so, ignoring Garissa, off we set with compass, map and enough food and water. All went well to start with. My dead reckoning located a track that left the boundary cut where I expected and we seemed to be aiming in roughly the right direction. There was no traffic at all. There were animals but no people. It was a dry time of year and the bush was thick but desiccated. The track wound crazily, but seemed to be well worn and level. I began to worry. Surely we should have reached Wajir by now? The map and vehicle tachometer both showed that we should have. We caught up with a lone Somali. He had no information. We knew that there were water holes but that no local man would dream of telling us where they were. Anyway, we still had plenty of water. On and on we travelled along the twisting track, flat as your hand, no topographical feature, visibility as far as the bush in front. At last, with much relief, the Beau Geste fort of Wajir was there right in front of us. There was no military presence, but a DC and a cool drink. I made two further visits to Mogadishu and Hargeisa, but both 165

PEACETIME SOLDIERING by air. Air travel was often exciting. The aircraft were DC3s and the pilots South African. Once, as we were approaching Hargeisa, the pilot came on the blower to say that half the airstrip was under water and that it would be a bit tricky to land. We would all have preferred not to have been forewarned. We suffered half an hour of extreme trepidation before we started to circle the strip, so that the pilot could confirm his plan. There was a sigh of relief when we saw that the flood was only on about a third of the runway. Anyway, the pilot did what he promised and all was well. Social life was not up to Nairobi standards, but it was not bad. In Nakuru there was a cinema and the Stag’s Head Hotel. Getting there along 25 miles of murram road on solid black cotton was often a problem and you could get wonderfully stuck when it rained. Gilgil Club was going then, and it was a social focus. We had parties there and there were a gaggle of FANYs who were a lot of fun, including Christine Turner who later married Captain Michael Elliott RE. We played golf on the club course and fished for trout in a pool on what we then called the Malawa River. Some of us lived it up at ‘Clouds’ on Kipipiri, the mountain retreat of the Lady Idina Gordon, a relic of ‘Happy Valley’ days. It could not last. In mid-1946 word got out that Northern Area would be closed down. We dispersed in early July, Fluffy to retirement and his farm on Blood Pressure Ridge, joining Brigadier Duke and several other generals. Colonel Kammermann was not yet ready for retirement to his home in South Africa. He still had business to attend to in Mogadishu, so he was found a job where he could still go on visiting Somalia. The army played me a mean trick. If you served nine clear months as a temporary lieutenantcolonel you became war substantive and could not be demoted until peacetime conditions prevailed. I was hauled down to major just before my nine months were up and after that never made it to lieutenant-colonel again. I was posted as staff officer RE Grade 2 to CRE Works East Africa Command. My office was in Waterworks Camp, Nairobi and my boss was Robin Lindsay’s uncle Colonel Kenneth Lindsay RE. It was great working for him. He was strict, but not too much of a disciplinarian. He had his nice wife with him, and they lived in a rented home not far from my father’s in what was then Balmoral Road. My job was to help Ken direct the efforts of quite a large sapper 166

MILITARY SERVICE IN EAST AFRICA, 1945–48 establishment, namely keeping military camps going in and around Nairobi, as well as in Eldoret, Nanyuki, Thika, Mombasa (Nyali) and Moshi in Tanganyika (as it then was). We then had to close them down, sell off the movable and fixed assets of camps as the British army reduced its size, and finally demolish them. To start with I lived in a Nissen hutted camp on a hill near what is now Westlands shopping centre and known then as Forces Lane, with a thriving and well run mess and in company with such kindred spirits as John Dods, Stan Ireland, Alan Marles, Tony Stacy-Marks and Mike Elliott, who formed Ken Lindsay’s staff. At that time Buff Denny was posted in Mombasa, and then in Moshi, and I saw little of her except when I got weekend leave. We had some fabulous nights in and around Mombasa, dancing under the stars at Nyali Beach and Kikambala. I used to go down on the Friday night train and return on the Sunday night. Mary and Brian Russell had a banda on the beach at Likoni, which we used to borrow. Brian was in the South African Air Force (SAAF) at the time and was enormous fun. Eventually, Buff was posted to Nairobi, as supervisor of the EA Command telephone exchange and we hurriedly made arrangements to live together on Riara Ridge, Limuru, while Buff was getting her divorce from Bill Denny. Buff had her car, but I had to acquire wheels as well to get me to work. The army would not provide a vehicle so I bought an ‘Indian’ motorcycle and commuted on that. The road to Nairobi was mostly gravel, with a section where there were two bitumen wheel strips. In fine weather it was easy to skid on the gravel, in wet you skidded in the mud, so either way you fell off. I tried to keep my frequent upsets from Buff, but they became common gossip not only among our friends but among the African servants, and eventually she issued an ultimatum: it was either the bike’s banishment or her. I sold the bike to an airman. It was a sad parting. Time passed pleasantly enough. It was now 1947 and I had just returned for a three-month stint filling in for Captain Harper, who had gone on long leave and was garrison engineer (GE) at Nanyuki. Living there was very pleasant with magical early mornings. You could watch the elephant in the morning light drift down in procession, in silhouette, from the upper slopes of Mount Kenya and make their way across the flatlands to the Aberdare Moun167

PEACETIME SOLDIERING tains beyond. My Hargeisa acquaintance Captain Dick Begbie was in Nanyuki now and, as mess secretary, he was very much the life and soul of the party. We had convivial guest nights. I cannot for the life of me remember what I did to incur Harper’s hatred, but he returned from leave, took over his old GE job from me, and once we had completed the obligatory military handover I quit Nanyuki and returned to Nairobi as DCRE. Harper was an introverted ex-Japanese POW who kept to himself, and he did not join in the going-away party for Tony Stacy-Marks who was leaving Nairobi for Kilindini that evening by train on posting to the UK. The party started at lunch time and was getting a bit rowdy when suddenly someone shouted ‘Tony, you’ll miss the train, it leaves at 4.00 p.m.’ Everyone packed into various transport bound for Nairobi railway station. I had only got as far as Slater & Whittaker’s grocery store when I managed, with no outside intervention, to turn over a top-heavy safari wagon. I was flung out of the car onto the road unconscious. My passengers, miraculously, were unhurt. Everyone knew about my liaison with Buff and that she was in charge of the command telephone exchange. Harper rang her to say ‘Major FitzGerald has just turned over the station wagon. He is drunk. I hope he is dead.’ I was not, but I was unconscious for about 48 hours. I came to in a ward in the military hospital to see a medical orderly on 24 hour watch and Ndachi. It was five years since I had employed him as my personal servant and we had parted at Garissa. He had heard of my accident and run 50 miles from his home at Fort Hall to come and make sure I was going to recover. I had broken some ribs and my pelvis was cracked in three places. It took about six weeks, lying very uncomfortably on a mattress on boards, to recover. The hutted ward was stuffy and we had our beds outside on the veranda. At that time, the upcountry train passed by in the valley just below the hospital, so I had lots of visitors and this helped me gain strength. Ken Lindsay came to my bedside to inform me there would be an inquiry into my accident and he was there in an official capacity to record my evidence. Colonel Ken was my friend. I forget the details but it was a whitewash job and I did not get into trouble. Soon after that I was posted to the UK to attend a civil engineering course at the SME in Chatham, which was a better 168

MILITARY SERVICE IN EAST AFRICA, 1945–48 posting from the point of view of my future civilian career than the one our ultimate boss in Cairo, Major-General A. D. Campbell, managed to quash as an instructor at Sandhurst. This tiresome bigot wrote in my confidential report that he could not understand how anyone could recommend me to teach young officers at Sandhurst. Someone had told him I was living with a woman! I had the right to challenge his entry and went before the military secretary who dealt with such matters. He assured me that one such report on its own was unlikely to be taken seriously. It must have been in late 1946 when Buff suggested it would help her make her peace with her parents in Kericho if she took me to their Kaisugu tea estate one weekend to introduce me. Her relations with them had been strained since she left home on her first marriage and I was billed as the (fairly) respectable successor. We travelled by night train and arrived at Londiani very early in the morning. A car met us and we arrived at Kaisugu in time for breakfast at 8.00 a.m. Colonel Bill Brayne had already done a couple of hours on the shamba. He was about 65 years old, very tall, spare and economical of speech. He greeted me without any evident enthusiasm. The Brayne household had its own distinctive flavour. It was a matriarchy. The colonel had abdicated domestic authority years before. His domain was the 600-acre shamba he ran with conspicuous success. Among the Kericho estates owned by Brooke Bond, Findlays and other corporations, Kaisugu was unique as being family owned and had a reputation for being the best run and most profitable in the Kericho district. Bill Brayne was its devoted owner/manager. Knowing nothing about such matters I was impressed by the neatness of everything: the labour lines, the manicured tea, even the factory. Mrs Brayne (Gwen) oozed parental authority. She was short, tubby and puffy-faced and her eyes, which were like black olives, sparkled with a sort of humorous malice. Like many houses in those days in Kenya, the kitchen was detached from the house. A long, open-sided, covered way led to it. Mrs Brayne seldom went there and an mpishi cooked the food in this smoke-encrusted hellhole on a Dover stove. What came to the table was delicious, though a lot of the dishes were either totally cooked or embellished on the way by Mrs Brayne, who would be crouched over the sitting room fire. 169

PEACETIME SOLDIERING It was not a happy home. The eldest child, Robin, abandoned ship forever when he was about 16. By then Bill Brayne had been married to Gwen for upwards of 30 years, and for the early part of those years had served in the Indian medical service in Burma, India and Nepal. His practice – and one can hardly blame him – was to escape from home for protracted periods from time to time to gain respite from Mrs Brayne’s python-like embrace. He thought, I was told, that he would be safe enough in Nepal, in Kathmandu. Before the days of airstrips there, the formidable approach by packhorse through the Himalayan foothills made it seemingly impossible for a housewife to join her husband. But Gwen Brayne turned up, unannounced, and Bill’s paradise was lost. Once the colonel had learnt the craft of growing, preparing and marketing tea after a six-month stint under his brother’s tuition on a tea garden in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), he left his family in England to come on his own to Kericho to start the show. He omitted to do much about living accommodation for his family so when they finally arrived in 1924 (Robin six, Buff two, Pat a baby and Jennifer as yet a twinkle in her father’s eye) they were dumped in a group of mud huts. Here they got to know Kericho’s glorious morning sun and its daily afternoon deluge when, from two o’clock onwards, the rain started to pour down heavily and inexorably. It was not more than a few months before there arose a fairly commodious wood-and-iron house in the trees, with no view, where the family lived for some years until the burra sahib residence, with its fabulous view to the west towards Lake Victoria and a wide veranda, which was fine but made the whole house dark, became their home. The wood-and-iron house was still there when I came, unoccupied but for about 50 cats, some only partially tame and some extremely wild. Until I moved from Gilgil to Nairobi in July 1946, Buff and I had only managed to see each other at weekends, either in Nairobi or in Mombasa, where she had been posted and was living in the FANY mess on Mombasa Island. Then, in late 1945, we decided to live together. Being unmarried (Buff was still married to Bill Denny) we could not do that in an army quarter, so I bought 20 acres high up on Riara Ridge, Limuru, on which we erected a water tank on a staging, then put up tents for ourselves and grass huts for servants and builders. At that time, an Asian contractor 170

MILITARY SERVICE IN EAST AFRICA, 1945–48 started to build us a very basic, but quite substantial, stone and corrugated iron house. My duties sometimes demanded my presence in the RE mess at Westlands, where I had a room, so Buff was often alone. Otherwise, I commuted on my motorcycle. All the time Buff, who had resigned from the FANYs, had a job as supervisor of the command telephone exchange. She earned £20 a month, and I, once I was back to major, about £80 – at presentday equivalent values about £300 and £1200 respectively. We were well off. The extra money went on buying the land, building and furnishing our home. There were about ten acres of mature black wattle on the plot when we bought it, so we sold that to a contractor, keeping enough for firewood, for about £100, and being self-sown we soon had another crop coming on. We had no power to start with and existed on oil lamps and a paraffin fridge, but the national power had arrived on the ridge long before we left. By then we had started building another more ambitious and larger pisé-de-terre (rammed earth) and cedar shingle-roofed house, which we thought might do as a home for us to live in permanently. Of course, being a regular officer in the army we knew that I would eventually be posted, but we thought that both houses would be lettable and bring in an income. We were convinced we would end up living permanently in Kenya. It must be appreciated that ‘living in sin’ was socially unacceptable in the late 1940s, and for at least another ten years after that. This meant that Buff and I could not socialize with the army set and had to be very circumspect with our respective parents, mine in particular, living as they did in Nairobi. It was only with the more relaxed ‘settler’ community of Limuru that we were accepted as acquaintances or even friends. Thus, my relations with my mother and father had become a wee bit distant, for I had to pretend I was living as a bachelor in the Westlands mess and they were to know nothing of the Riara Ridge establishment. I snatched the odd nine holes of golf with the old man and introduced Buff casually at one of my mother’s standard roast chicken and coffee ice cream lunches. Mother did not take to Buff. She much preferred her younger sister Pat, who stayed with my parents for a time as a paying guest when she was doing a secretarial job in Nairobi. Father, on the other hand, got on well with Buff and Pat. Father was taking quite equably to his greatly delayed retire171

PEACETIME SOLDIERING ment. He went on with his hopeless golf and played bridge one evening a week at Nairobi Club (mother never played). He took to going up with mother to Dorothy and Kenneth Brown’s holiday house on the Kinangop; he and Kenneth fished for trout – or rather Kenneth fished while father huffed and puffed and ineffectively cast to little or no effect. Mother and Dorothy came for the walk and watched, hoping that Kenneth would catch enough fish for the four of them, and then trudged back to the house for their afternoon rest. In those days, ladies always had an afternoon rest. Father grew substantial crops of grenadillas (passion fruit) in his garden, and with one of his friends – Colonel Geoffrey Lloyd – he got quite a profitable little business going, bottling and selling passion fruit juice. This, iced and mixed with gin and a dash of lemon juice, made a very palatable cocktail that caught on, even in the UK. Uncle Tudor used to import cases of it from father, and regale his friends in Aboyne with ‘gin and pash’. Unfortunately, it was not long before the hygiene people from the Nairobi City Council insisted that Dad and Murioki, the cook/house servant, wore white coats and rubber gloves, that the kitchen have shiny white tiles and that something be done about the floor, so Dad gave up in disgust and Geoffrey and he dissolved their partnership. My father maintained his half-century-old connection with the KAR. Every year he would drive up to Thomson’s Falls for the November remembrance day service, and then carry on to Maralal for another one, organized for the Samburu by the DC Mr Chenevix-Trench. But day to day he was always interested in the wellbeing of the remnants of his Nubian (Sudanese) troops and their descendants from the First World War whom he had arranged to be settled in that insalubrious part of Nairobi, Kibera, just across the Ngong Road from the family house in Balmoral Road. He had long since given up chastizing them for wrong doing, but the elders still called him up to give advice and iron out grievances; several times in the 1940s and early 1950s when the chief native commissioner was on overseas leave, he became a coopted member of the Kenya Legislative Council (LegCo). Mother, at this time, was only 55. She lived happily with father (though sometimes irritated by his growing deafness), and pursued her own social life and interests. She and Mrs Niblock-Stewart still saw to the sorting and burning of old bank notes, which brought 172

MILITARY SERVICE IN EAST AFRICA, 1945–48 in a pittance, and remained on the committee of the League of Mercy. Lady Macmillan roped her in to help establish the European old people’s home, the Louise Decker, for which father, for some years, acted as honorary treasurer. Dad helped her, from his meagre savings, finance the building of a small, three-roomed guesthouse at the bottom of the garden, which she used to let (mostly to female secretaries) and which brought in a steady income of £40 (£600 at present day values) a month. Thus were my father and mother contentedly passing life’s evening at the time in late 1948 when I was posted back to England. Sometime in 1947, for some military purpose or other, I was sent to Zomba in Nyasaland (now Malawi). I flew in a Dakota to the Northern Rhodesian railhead town of Ndola, and from there went by train to Lusaka, the capital of Northern Rhodesia and still then, of course, a crown colony. Lusaka was still a ‘wild west’ kind of hick town in which the main excitement was to meet the mail train. After a short stop I left in the afternoon on the other leg of my train journey for Bulawayo and Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. I shared a compartment with a taciturn colonial office official from Whitehall who was dressed, as if he had just left his London office, in bowler hat, spongebag trousers and all, and acted as though he suspected that I was determined to discover the details of his secret mission and was determined to reveal nothing. We duly left by night and, in pitch darkness, heard but did not see Victoria Falls as we clattered over the border bridge across the Zambezi River. We reached Bulawayo and changed trains for Salisbury. The train did not boast a restaurant car, but no matter – it stopped, not at a station, but in the middle of a field with a substantial brightly lit hostelry beckoning us. In the twilight we climbed down onto the grass, straggled our way across the field and ate and drank amply and well. When the locomotive gave a warning hoot, we clambered back into our compartment and the train lumbered on its way to Salisbury. Salisbury was very different from Lusaka. It was a big, bustling, neat city with paved streets and neon lights. I parted from my bowler hatted travelling companion and booked into the smart, but at the same time dowdy, Meikles Hotel. The next stage – to Blantyre and Zomba – was by a de Havilland Rapide light aircraft. Zomba was a charming, picturesque, small town in the Nyasaland 173

PEACETIME SOLDIERING hills: very lush, with lots of poinsettia and bougainvillea and little babbling brooks on the roadsides. The club, where a cricket match was in progress, reminded me very much of Nairobi Club 20 years before. My army guide took me to Lilongwe: now the capital of Malawi, but back then there was nothing but a few dukas and a large army camp. After a couple of days I flew back to Nairobi. Time was running out for me in Kenya. I was already coming up for three years there, a long time for a posting in what was now a peacetime army. By now I was out of the fighting arm of the Royal Engineers and firmly fixed in what was called works services. I might as well, I decided, become a professional engineer. And there it was, offered on a plate – a civil engineering course with a qualification as a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers beckoning at the end of two years. Goodbye to gallantry. Buff agreed and her view counted because, now she had finally got her divorce, we had decided to get married once back in England. I was surprised at her mild acceptance, at 26 years’ old, of the upheaval and trauma of leaving Kenya and starting a new life in ration-ridden, socialist England where her only experience had been two years of boarding as a senior in a girls’ public school. Perhaps she knew she would be back in Africa after not too long. As it turned out, it was not far short of seven years.

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12 Back in the UK

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o we began the slow process of moving, of packing up the Limuru House, deciding what to leave and what to take and saying goodbye to our friends and relations. We had to leave Buff’s precious open Chevrolet, which was a wrench, but were determined not to leave behind our beloved brindle bull terrier bitch, Snuffles. A lot of our friends had preceded us, including Colonel and Mrs Ken Lindsay, Michael and Catherine Murray (Michael already doing an architectural course at Trinity Hall, Cambridge) and Alan Marles and his new wife. I said goodbye to my parents (Cynthia and Arthur had already been posted and were in Dar es Salaam). Mother was looking a bit glum – she had not got used to the idea of my marriage to Buff. I left first, in a troopship, the Empire Windrush, via Suez. Buff left six weeks later, via the Cape, in a civilian Union Castle ship. She arrived in late November and I met her at Tilbury. We got married on Friday 10 December 1948 at the Kensington registry office. Sometime in November I had moved to Chatham, and as there were no married quarters for students I searched for, and found, temporary rooms in the village of Shorne, close to Gravesend and about ten miles from the SME Brompton barracks, Chatham, where I put up in the mess pending Buff’s arrival. The course was due to start there after New Year 1949. Strete Court, Shorne, was the dwelling house of a 50-acre, park-like home farm. Mrs Noakes kept a dozen or so Jersey cows and there were good orchards and an excellent vegetable garden. It was a delightful setting for the start of married life in southern England. Not far away was the Thames Estuary, at that time a major shipping highway with its accompaniment of mournful siren sounds, particularly in foggy 175

PEACETIME SOLDIERING weather. Our rooms came with full board; home farm produce and full cream Jersey milk softened the impact of wartime rationing, which was still being rigorously applied three years after the war had ended. The house was Jacobean, large, rambling and a bit creaky. The interior was spooky as well as creaky. The hall and stairway were panelled with heavy and overpoweringly ornate ecclesiastical carvings, which Mrs Noakes said had been pinched from a Spanish monastery during some sixteenth-century war. Buff and I lived at the Noakeses for about six months while I completed the part of the course comprising lectures and practicals at the SME. When the next part started, and I became seconded to John Mowlem & Co Ltd, and worked on an oil refinery construction site on the Essex shore of the Thames Estuary, we crossed the river and lived in and around Southend-on-Sea. This was a bad experience compared with the Noakeses. At least there we were living among our own kind, eccentric though they might be. Essex was a far cry from our full social life of Nairobi and, though it was summer and the sun shone, the skies were pale, the wind howled across the marshes and the people were different. We were lucky to have two of Buff’s three maiden aunts, Alice and Helen Morris, living at Leigh-on-Sea, the westernmost component of the Southend conurbation. Helen was a semi-invalid and lived with her sister, Alice, who was principal of a primary day school for boys, Caedmon House. The third sister, Edith, ran a more successful school near Wallingford in the Thames Valley, which we visited from time to time. Buff and I found rooms close to Caedmon House. The first were disgusting. The carpets stank and, one day, exposed electric wiring set one of them on fire. The second lot were little better. It was a job to keep Snuffles, our bull terrier, away from the landlord’s Pekinese – a sensitive creature whose protuberant eyes had a disconcerting habit of falling out of their sockets and dangling. Buff and I were not enjoying life. She decided to study architecture and started a correspondence course, augmented by study and practical survey at Southend Technical College. By then she was 27 and a ‘mature student’. Her mother in Kenya became aware of her predicament and sent a cable that read: ‘TAKE TWO BROMIDE AND PLANT SOME ROSES IN YOUR AUNT’S GARDEN.’ Therapy of a sort, but it did not help much. I, of course, was less disturbed 176

BACK IN THE UK because I was studying, getting practical experience as a contractor’s man and having a generally stimulating time. Autumn and winter came and the howling wind grew colder and the evenings darker. Most of our amusement consisted of going to the cinema. We made no friends and made do with, in Buff’s case, ‘poly’ acquaintances and, in mine, Mowlem workmates. The wet streets shone in the street lighting, which was turned off at 1.00 a.m. Eventually, we found really comfortable rooms with awful furniture but good food at Westcliff-on-sea and life took a turn for the better. It was early 1950 and we stayed there until the course ended the following Christmas. It may be difficult for civil engineers to believe, but in the early 1950s the two subjects keen students thought were at the cutting edge of engineering progress were soil mechanics and prestressed concrete. For the next four years I embraced both with enthusiasm. I started with soil mechanics because the Shellhaven oil refinery project, which I joined as an assistant to the site agent, Vincent Collingridge on becoming seconded to John Mowlem, provided ample scope for experience in establishing the stability of earth embankments, trench walls and the foundations of heavy oil refinery distillation towers, oil containers and cooling water intakes. H. Q. Golder was the boffin-in-chief, and wrote learned papers for Geo-technique, of which Roderick Glossop was editor. Harold Harding was a dreamer whose passion was the design of the Channel tunnel. My favourite mentor was Roddie Glossop. He was the practical man of the trio, and the one we used to see on site at Shellhaven, and later on the drilling barges when we were taking samples in the Thames. Although in his sixties and due for retirement, he befriended me and we had meals together. He was one of the few really socially amusing professional engineers I can remember. Usually they are as dull as ditchwater and their wives worse, but not our Roderick. Vincent Collingridge was very different. He was little, bustling, bald and a meticulous site agent. He had a little black book in which he recorded the detailed costing of all the engineering activities in which he and his staff were engaged. Collingridge had a splendid open Austin 16 with gate gears. I thought he was a bit of a misery so asked him if he would like to come to a guest night at Brompton barracks. Did he have a DJ? Yes. And could we go in 177

PEACETIME SOLDIERING his car? Yes. So off we went, in splendid June weather. With luck we might be home before dark. That would be best. ‘I do not drink you know. I hope you do not mind.’ It was over the Woolwich ferry on the outward journey and back by the Blackwall tunnel. It was hard work, but he appreciated the glittering mess dress of the officers and the polish of the rosewood table with the mess silver down the centre. When the servants twisted the linen runners each side and whisked them off, he was impressed. I unkindly persuaded him to break the habit of a lifetime and have a ‘wee snort’. He did and on the way back he was as sick as a cat by the side of the road. Poor Vincent! George Wild, the assistant site agent, was a different kettle of fish. He lived in digs in Woolwich and went home at weekends to his family in Ascot. Ever so genteel he was, as was his wife. He had two children who rode and were members of the Ascot Pony Club. George asked Buff and me to come to a meeting, which took place on a non-racing day at Ascot race course. It was a glamorous occasion. Some years later George and Nancy Wild turned up in Nairobi and George managed the Mowlems branch for a time. When I aspired to fellowship of the Institution of Civil Engineers I had some fairly distinguished support from senior men in the trade and asked George to sign up. ‘But, Desmond, you haven’t done anything big. I do not think I really can, sorry.’ Pompous bastard! As winter dripped into spring and the days lengthened, the weather got warmer and life on that bleak construction site became more bearable. Texan oil engineers wore stetsons and went about their work with an aggressive swagger as the time approached for them to erect the distillation tower on the foundations we had already constructed. It came in one 80-foot long piece on a solid-tyred, multi-wheeled, low loader tractor. We had prepared a special approach track with precast concrete slabs. As the great load rolled slowly over the track, each concrete slab in turn snapped in two places with pistol cracks. A crowd began to gather. We were promised further spectacular entertainment and were not disappointed. Cables were hitched to specially prepared anchorages and to the halfway height of the tower. Its foot was secured to the foundation by trunnions and, as winches began to raise the tower from its prone position, there was an even louder pistol crack, followed by two others and a flurry of whipping steel 178

BACK IN THE UK cable. There was the tower, again prone, but squelched into about two feet of muddy clay. The US engineers took off their stetsons, mopped their brows and slunk off for a snort in their private mess. We, the senior Mowlems staff, had our private mess as well. It was strictly non-alcoholic, but served elegant lunches. It cost 2/6 a head for three courses plus coffee, and we were served on tables for four with white tablecloths and table napkins by uniformed waitresses in old-fashioned caps and frilly aprons. The labourers got more calories in rougher conditions. They were paid every Friday afternoon in cash in little transparent envelopes. There were often raised voices, sometimes even a mild schemozzle. The average takehome pay for a week was between £3.10 and £4. The labourers often spent Friday mornings huddled in groups in sheltered spots, filling in pools forms. It seemed as if a possible win on the pools was all that stood between them and despair. One could be wrong though: the atmosphere on site was, generally speaking, bloody-mindedly cheerful. The five-day week had already arrived in the early 1950s, so there was no Saturday work. Towards the middle of 1950 I got myself transferred, within the Mowlem group, to Soil Mechanics Ltd, whose offices and laboratories were in London. This meant commuting by train from Westcliff to Fenchurch Street and then by underground. I did this for the next nine months. It meant leaving home at 6.30 a.m. and staggering in again at about 7.00 p.m. During the winter months, for five days of the week I never saw daylight at home. But, it was worth it because a laboratory technician, a Mr Askwith, was teaching me all the soil testing techniques and the senior engineer, Eddie White, got me drafting reports. Mobility Buff and I shared a passion for mobility. For a start it had to be ‘Corgi’ motor scooters, and they made all the difference to our lives after we acquired them soon after moving to Westcliff. Buff could commute to Southend Tech, and I to Shellhaven, wrapped in heavy army greatcoats, helmeted and goggled in poor weather. During our life at Westcliff and subsequently at Chalkwell we went on three mammoth camping trips – twice to Sedbergh to stay with the Selwyns and once to Dorchester in Dorset. We used to turn into a likely field, sleep à deux in a two-man army bivouac 179

PEACETIME SOLDIERING tent, cook breakfast on a spirit stove and otherwise eat in pubs. One could not have guessed, but Essex–Yorkshire was a piece of cake compared with Essex–Dorset when it rained incessantly. On that trip, after spending 36 hours of non-stop rain stuck in our little tent in the wilds of Dorset, we eventually threw in our hand and took the train from Salisbury back to Southend, riding in the guard’s van. Later we bought a dinky little second-hand Morris Minor, which did us proud until we moved to London in early 1953. While we were still in Southend we hung onto the Corgis because they allowed us to go our separate ways. We continued to have very little social life. I was commuting to and from London. Buff was busy with her architectural course. When I finally left Mowlems to do my trial stint on the course, this time with the consulting water engineers Binnie, Deacon & Gourley, I went on commuting to London, but now to their offices in Artillery Row just off Victoria Street. Lord, were they old fashioned! It was obligatory to attend dressed in a dark suit, shirt with detachable white collar, bowler hat and rolled umbrella. It was the first and only time I had owned a furry bowler. A more senior sapper officer had done a stint with Binnies a year or two back and had refused to conform – he wore an ordinary soft trilby hat, which upset them so much that my course master warned me to toe the line or it would be curtains with them forever for would-be sapper civil engineers. I was only with them for five months, apprenticed to a junior partner – a Mr Andrew Binnie – who was kind and introduced me to the middle and junior staff. Mr Binnie was in charge of a number of major UK water supply projects, among them the Daer Valley catchment dam and pipeline to Lanark, a suburb of Glasgow. There was a hydroelectric component to the Daer dam, and as I was obliged to produce some engineering drawings to show to the examiners, Mr Binnie gave me a section of the treated water reservoir and the turbine site and discharge basin to design. I was always a lousy draughtsman, but an array of women tracers in the office tarted up my efforts no end and made them look quite professional. Such women were a dying breed even then and were very poorly paid. It was Binnie policy to attach its design engineers temporarily to the resident engineers on site to see how their designs worked out in practice, which was a bright idea. So, early one misty morning in late autumn I left the 180

BACK IN THE UK night train to Glasgow at Lockerbie to be whisked to the site of the Daer Valley project, which was already in progress. To my mild surprise, a lot of lightly clothed men and women were jumping about in a squad and doing physical jerks to the command of an extremely ancient cove in a blue and white striped singlet. The old cove turned out to be the resident engineer who was in his mid-seventies and ruled his site staff with a rod of iron. It was my only experience of a really old man being employed on engineering works in the field in Britain. Even in the 1950s most people retired at 60 or 65. Binnies must have thought a lot of him. Early in 1951 my civil engineering course came to an end. We assembled at Chatham for final lectures, completion and the submission of our theses (mine was on the design of reinforced concrete retaining walls). We filled in our applications for membership of the Institution of Civil Engineers, assembled our submissions and drawings, and waited to be called to Great George Street for a viva. In my case there was a hiccup caused by the loss, temporary as it turned out, of my application form. These forms had to be initialled, and in some cases embellished with statements of enthusiastic support by people under whom one had worked. In my case one such was Major Crombie Armitage, who had retired and whose address was in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). I thought his signature would do me good and sent the form off to him. Six months passed. I was in despair. Crombie’s executors eventually returned this valuable document to me, unsigned, with the information that he had, sadly, died. The day of the viva interview arrived. I was very apprehensive. My interviewer was to be the director of the Cement and Concrete Association. How could I hoodwink this repository of all knowledge that I was fit to be a member of this illustrious institution when I had been aware for years of my technical inadequacy to masquerade as a civil engineer? I need not have worried. We talked about cricket and Kenya. Concrete never entered the agenda and I passed. The army for once acted with good sense and posted me as garrison engineer to the Ministry of Supply’s Proof and Experimental Establishment (PEE) at Shoeburyness with the rank of major. This was a posting where I could make use of my newly acquired civil engineering knowledge. My boss was LieutenantColonel Lewis Robinson, RE, technically talented, fiftyish, with a 181

PEACETIME SOLDIERING compliant military wife and primary school-age children. Lewis had a cynical sense of humour and was fully aware of his own supreme competence, which once got him into trouble. One winter afternoon, in a warm and stuffy wooden hut, we were meeting a delegation from the Ministry of Supply to examine proposals for the construction of a large gun workshop for the Royal Artillery at Shoeburyness. Lewis and I were in uniform. The ministry people were all in plain clothes. No one had introduced us, but we knew the major general, who had been a distinguished wartime scientist. The major general did not take the chair. That was occupied by an indistinguished looking man wearing a donkey jacket and Wellington boots. He opened his briefing document by questioning the accuracy of the £250,000 estimate, to which Lewis replied: ‘Sir, I do not know who you are, but I am the CRE Works. I have done the estimate, myself. I say the building will cost £250,000, and if I say so, that is what it will cost.’ ‘Thank you Colonel. I am the Minister of Supply, Harold Wilson.’ The project was approved and the ministry appointed Travers Morgan & Partners to do the detailed designs. Prestressed concrete was used and Albert Goldstein, whom I thought was a genius, undertook to supervise the design. I became his enthusiastic engineeering disciple and was continuously in the firm’s office in a war-damaged multi-storey building just off Victoria Street. The senior partner Mr L. Scott White was a quiet elderly man and the sort of person one went to for advice. When I was later leaving the service and looking to become a partner in a firm of consulting engineers, I thought of him at once as the sort of man I should like to emulate, so I invited him to lunch at the Whitehall Court Hotel. His advice on professional comportment was to consult one’s conscience and act accordingly. At the time I thought it rather silly, but in my early days as a consulting engineer partner when one still had to bother with ethical behaviour, I tried it and it seemed to work and when I did not try it, I wished I had. Nearly all our employees in CRE Works, Shoeburyness, were civil servants, and I must not deny their industry or capability. Apart from overseeing the construction of the gun workshop, the work at the PEE was varied and interesting. We built a concrete base representing the deck of an aircraft carrier on which tests were carried out on newly designed restraining gear. There were 182

BACK IN THE UK water tanks in which the navy carried out underwater tests on torpedoes. There were strong concrete structures in which the effects of explosives were studied – nothing nuclear though at Shoeburyness. Sometimes the boffins would let off rather large explosives on the testing ground, Foulness Island, and then there would be a flood of complaints and claims from people living the other side of the creek surrounding the island. I would be off to visit the ‘victims’ and inspect their shattered windows and cracked walls, and assess and report whether the damage had occurred at the time, or perhaps ages before. At the eastern end of the island there were gun ranges for testing fall of shot. If tests were going on you could be marooned for hours on an observation tower, waiting for the ‘all clear’. The weather at this eastern end of Essex was Continental – hot summers, bitter winters and not much rain. The PEE had a technical liaison going on with another Ministry of Supply establishment in Hampshire where army (RE) military equipment was tested. I went down there a lot, taking part in experiments on soil stabilization for quick construction of RAF airstrips. We tried all sorts of stabilization agents, but they all failed except lime and cement. The Intelligence services (MI6) In early July 1952, with my two-year posting at PEE Shoeburyness almost over, I got a summons to attend Room 070 in the War Office in Whitehall. Since we had only three months’ notice of my posting to Whitehall, we at once went about finding accommodation in London. Buff had managed to get on an architectural course at the Architectural Association School of Architecture as a mature student. The only student we knew there was Richard Hughes, who with his wife Anney and baby Bridget, was now ensconced in the barge Diogenes moored among a pool full of other craft off Cheyne Walk. It was July and Buff’s first term started in October, so it was number one priority for her to start on time in this most prestigious of schools. Through a very posh house agent in Sloane Square we found we could lease 24 Ormonde Gate, unfurnished, for the princely sum of 10 guineas a week and we were in before the middle of August. As we had, so far, been living in furnished houses, we had to set about equipping our new abode. It was a four-storey brick built 183

PEACETIME SOLDIERING terrace house with a capacious two-roomed basement kitchen. There was an open basement area, with a coal bunker under the pavement which was served from a glass-prismed manhole cover. You could open a gate and walk down steps to the kitchen door or enter by the smartly painted front door with its polished brass handle and letterbox flap. There were two rooms on each of the four floors, and bathroom/loos on the first and third. The front ground-floor room was smallish and could be a study. The back one was large with a door leading down steps to a communal garden that Chelsea Council maintained and that served all the houses in our terrace and the one opposite. We used the garden a bit – most of the other house owners, mercifully, very little. By now Snuffles was no longer with us, but our Siamese cat, Pooks, was the garden’s animal ruler. On the ground floor there was also a ‘cloaks’ and pay phone alcove. There was no central heating, but the house was piped for gas and there were metered gas stoves in all the rooms; we installed a paraffin stove in the entrance hall, which kept the stairwell and landing warm in winter. The firstfloor drawing room with a fine marble fireplace and double mahogany polished door overlooked the garden; and a capacious double bedroom with a little balcony looked onto the street. There was a ‘goods’ lift to the ground floor from the basement, which wound up and down by hand, and a quaint communication system by speaking tube. We did not use it much, but it was fun to have. The most splendid architectural feature of the house (apart from the fireplace) was the staircase with a very elegant polished mahogany rail and 92 white painted uprights. It all sounds wonderfully impressive, but the reason why it was so cheap to rent was its condition, which was wretched. It badly needed several coats of paint and there was dry rot in most of the skirtings. Buff’s idea was to keep the basement, ground-floor front room and first-floor bedroom for ourselves, and let everything else to paying guests, preferably secretaries for whom one advertised on newsagents’ boards. Ormonde Gate abutted on Pimlico Road and was parallel to Tite Street, which was notorious just then for a gruesome murder. A young man living there had murdered his parents and tipped their bodies over a cliff somewhere in the West Country. It was of particular interest to us that the murderer’s name was Giffard, and 184

BACK IN THE UK that his uncle was General Sir George Giffard who had been the last but one governor of Burma and whose wife was my sister Cynthia’s godmother. Young Giffard was convicted. His solicitor and George implored him to avoid the noose by pleading insanity. The boy refused. George went completely off his trolley, organizing petitions and protest marches, all in vain, and the young man was duly hanged. The sad thing was that the boy’s brother, Robin Giffard, a colonial civil service administrator in Kenya, decided that with a murderer brother who was obviously non compos mentis and a dotty uncle, he must have bad genes and would never marry. Barbara and I knew Robin well; he was a super person. He retired from the administration, became eccentric, lived alone on a boat at the coast and died very young. It was very sad. It was about then that the Conservatives won an election and rationing ended at last. We had a ceremonial tearing up of ration books in one of the local butcher’s shops. There were no supermarkets then and the King’s Road was like a village street: full of good shops, not very expensive restaurants and of course excellent pubs. Television had not really caught on then. What there was was black and white, so we were at the cinema at least twice a week. For a treat we went to the theatre, sometimes in the West End, but often in the music hall under the arches at Charing Cross. Meanwhile, although having moved in at Chelsea, I was still working at Shoeburyness so I had the odd experience of commuting there backwards, so to speak, in empty trains both ways. This went on until autumn began to set in, in October. It had been early July when I reported to Room 070 in the War Office to be offered a two-year posting with MI6. It was not a career commitment, only a short-term posting. I would be relieving Major Hugh Holmes Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. A Colonel Bowden nabbed me at once for positive vetting and a lecture on security. I filled in endless forms for MI5 to check my credentials. This was just at the time of the Burgess/Maclean débâcle, but the vetting system (started of course long after they entered the service) was extremely rigorous. The object, he said, was to supply the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) of the Cabinet with everything it ‘needed to know’ about secret intelligence. An enormous amount of information came into the office from all sorts of sources and from agents on the ground. It could 185

PEACETIME SOLDIERING be political, economic or military. All of it had to be evaluated and weeded of its dross before the JIC report was drafted. Separate reports went to the Foreign Office, the War Office and other ministries, all on a ‘need to know’ basis. My boss at the Firm was to be Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Green, but the next stage was to be introduced to Hugh Holmes, who would hand over to me. Hugh and I had not met before, but he was a brother officer of my cousin Roger StJohn in the ‘Fighting Fifth’, and of course knew Roger very well. (I met Hugh later in Kenya.) We had a fortnight’s handover and he was off. Henry Green was seconded from the Guards. His hobby was commentating at horse races. You heard him on the wireless quite often doing that excited crescendo, ending: ‘and it’s Shaving Brush – by two lengths from Phenobarbitone – Onomatopoeia trailing third, three-and-a-half lengths, phew, what a race!’ Henry also suffered badly from gout in his toes. Mary Morris, his secretary, always had to draft his memos. It must have been dyslexia, but anyway he was illiterate. Mary was a jewel and enormous fun. Unlike most of the secretaries, she was ‘not like us – not out of the top drawer, my dear,’ as my mother used to say. The others mostly came from stately homes via the St James’s secretarial college, were pretty and had names like Georgina. I would not let Mary draft my letters or memos; I thought I was perfectly capable of doing it myself. One of my more mundane jobs was to sign all release orders for uncustomed packages consigned to the Firm from Germany. Mostly they came via the Hook of Holland and Harwich. I used to drive a Firm’s car to Hogg Robinson & Capel-Cure’s office at Liverpool Street station and collect consignments, mostly late at night. I never knew what was in them. On the occasions I was away, on leave or duty, I had to leave Mary with up to 20 bits of paper with my signature. Mary said she had no difficulty copying Hugh’s signature but mine completely defeated her. I had a variety of responsibilities, some exciting, all interesting. There was liaison with the Post Office secret operations unit, which organized phone tapping and room bugging. From Colonel Bowden’s office window you could see the window of a room in the Foreign Office 800 yards away. A boffin demonstrating a clever instrument pointed it at the window and you could then hear people speaking in the room. I received numerous manu186

BACK IN THE UK scripts on various subversive wartime organizations and had to read them to decide which department to send them to for censorship. There was one by a Colonel Scotland and a riveting one by Eddie Myers on an operation to blow up a bridge in Greece. Then I had quite a lot of vetting to do of army personnel, which involved drawing from the War Office and perusing the confidential reports of officers. It was then that I got used to seeing brilliant reports marred by perhaps one or two successive bad ones on the same person, and had to worry out why this might be – usually personal prejudice on the part of the reporter. There inevitably came the day when I needed to be fitted out with false documents, and then one was admitted to the department that produced such things. This organization was linked with the one often visited that invented and manufactured sabotage equipment items, such as time pencils, limpet mines and so on. There was also a training establishment for would-be saboteurs located in a handsome manor house somewhere on Salisbury Plain and run by one of the Sterling brothers of Long Range Desert Group fame. Most of my problems concerned this establishment because there was a retired officer named Colonel Blackstone on the staff there with whom I had to deal on the subject. The trouble was that Colonel Blackstone had been OC in Mogadishu in 1946, and he took extraordinary exception to having to take instructions from someone who had been the lowest of the low and had called him Sir in Mogadishu days. Life in London, living in Chelsea, in 1953–55 was stimulating and a lot of fun. It was before the traumatic 1960s. The Lord Chamberlain still ruled the censorship roost. The country was busy going to the dogs, with the unions starting to put the British staple industries out of business – shipping, motorcar manufacture and steel (offshore oil production did not save the country’s bacon until a lot later). The politicians, whether Tory or Labour, looked on impotently and thought the solution to economic disaster was to soak the rich, so taxes went sky high. But the worst, like rampant inflation, was still to come, and Keynes’s economic policies leading to the destruction of the value of everyone’s savings, were still over the horizon. The food standards of eating out were still abysmal, but social life was pretty good. We had a number of friends at hand, as well as people we could 187

PEACETIME SOLDIERING get out of town to visit at weekends and bank holidays. Among the locals were Richard and Anney Hughes and young Bridget, just down the road off Cheyne Walk in Diogenes, and Catherine and Michael Murray somewhere in Fulham. There were Buff’s obscure student chums from the AA school living in spectacular squalor in digs in the Paddington area. It was in the time of the property racketeer, Rachman, and a lot of stucco terrace houses had become cheap tenements. Aunt Madge, who was in her late sixties then and still very spry, came once or twice to stay with a Greek friend in an upmarket penthouse flat in Portman Square, but said that if we insisted on living in the wilds of Chelsea, how could she possibly visit us? (The No 9 and 11 buses passed within 50 yards of our door). So we took tea off her. Our closest and dearest relations were Aunt Lucy and Uncle Maurice FitzGerald at Queen’s Gate and we were welcome there for tea whenever we felt like going, which, somehow or other, was not often. Friends and relatives outside London came to stay and we often went to them at weekends. Among the attractions we could offer was the fag end of the 1951 Festival of Britain, especially the Battersea Fun Fair, opposite us on the south bank of the river. The number one London event was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in June 1953. When the day arrived, Buff and I were invited to watch the show from an upstairs room with balconies in Grindlay’s Bank overlooking Parliament Street. It was a prime viewing site and was augmented by a large TV screen, so we had the Abbey as well as the procession. It poured with rain. Everyone looked miserable and bedraggled – all, that is, but the Queen of Tonga, a huge woman who smiled and waved as if the whole thing were a very enjoyable joke, water streaming down her beaming face. The poor generals on horseback, in full dress with cocked hats and drooping plumes, were a different story. In the evening there was a great fireworks display, which we watched from the roof – still in bucketing rain. Buff, meanwhile, was enthusiastically working away at her AA course in Bedford Square. Although a mature student, she soon integrated fully with the others and made many friends. As I was a qualified civil engineer, I became involved in tutorials for students struggling with the structural engineering section of the course. All my pupils managed to persuade their lecturers that they had mas188

BACK IN THE UK tered structures. I also got involved with Buff’s research for her thesis – Byzantine architecture – to both of us a fascinating insight into a historical period known to us only, so far, as the Dark Ages, a villainous misnomer. But Buff was getting serious about a return to Kenya, and enrolled with the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, to study Kikuyu. Buff and I had taken a spring holiday in Cornwall in April 1954. I was having unaccustomed problems with my digestion and losing weight in an alarming way until I was tipping the scales at only 150 pounds. Then I began to have pains in both legs and took to walking with a stick, so I turned up for a medical checkup with the household brigade medical officer in Chelsea Barracks. He looked a bit worried and referred me for tests to the nearby military hospital at Millbank. They muttered about King George VI’s disease, thrombosis, and took some time to think of examining my gut. It was three weeks later that, after giving me barium meals, they diagnosed malignant cancer, carcinoma of the upper bowel. By that time I was already hospitalized at Millbank. I was in a ward in Millbank with matchboard partitions separating the beds, so one had some privacy but not from the noise, especially snoring at night. I was in dreadful pain. My gut was completely blocked with nothing, not even air, able to pass. Although I had been there a week or two and it was Sunday, I was to have an emergency operation during the night. Buff had been assiduously attentive in visiting. I was fractious, nasty even. I was less nasty after the operation, which took place in the Westminster Hospital nearby. I do not remember going there or coming back, but it was an eight-hour operation. Apparently, I was lucky. An army major had recently had an identical operation and was the pathfinder for mine. My army surgeon, Lieutenant-Colonel Stephenson, had a wonderful bedside manner. The food was not bad and the nursing excellent. It was June and I was convalescent. Would I like to spend it in Osborne House convalescent home in the Isle of Wight? You bet! I had heard all about Osborne, Queen Victoria’s favourite English residence when she was in purdah after Prince Albert’s early death. King Edward VII hated it, so when the old queen died, he very handsomely endowed Osborne as a convalescent home for service officers. Later it was opened to civil service officers as well. There 189

PEACETIME SOLDIERING were women patients too – big bosomed, bossy ones recovering from obscure ailments. There were youngish, attractive female dieticians dressed like parlour maids in frilly caps and aprons who told me, ‘No, Major FitzGerald, it is spaghetti and mince for you, not grilled steak.’ Lieutenant-Commander Stannard thought differently: ‘In my view, a good rump steak and trimmings would do you all the good in the world. I know a splendid place in Newport. We will go this morning. There is a bus that leaves outside the gates.’ I was not at all sure about the therapy. It was not long since the contents of my stomach had stopped sorting themselves out, but it sounded fun and Peter Stannard was a sparkling companion. He was my age (37), but had already been in command of a submarine when he was struck down with a (fortunately mild) attack of polio. He was determined to get back to active service and had set himself a target – back to sea by Christmas. The excursion to Newport was an enjoyable success. I consumed a substantial steak and never looked back. The grounds of Osborne were beautifully kept. There were lots of trees and a large glass house where a host of gardeners tended delicate plants. The view from the house down to a little bathing beach was of the Solent and you could watch the arrival and departure of handsome ocean liners like the Queen Mary. Only part of Osborne House was reserved for the convalescents. The greater part was open to the public as a museum full of grotesque, outstandingly ugly presents that royalty had received from foreign potentates. Osborne House was comfortable (apart from the hospital beds), much like a nicely furnished Victorian hotel. The furniture was old fashioned and there were pretty portraits of royalty by Winterhalter and other minor Victorian artists. In July each year every bed would be occupied, some booked in advance. Senior officers from all three services would suddenly discover the need to convalesce from some disease or other, and would stay in comfort, for Cowes week, duly armed with a doctor’s certificate. I duly completed about six weeks of delightful indolence and was back in Chelsea and at work again in Broadway by mid-July. But then our sights became set on retirement and a return to Kenya in new professions: me as a civil engineer and Buff as a chartered architect. The excitement of life in MI6 was succeeded by a period of 190

BACK IN THE UK boredom and my next army posting was looming. The War Office department concerned with RE postings was located at Stanmore, a northern London suburb, so one afternoon I went there by underground to see my old acquaintance from BEF days, Phil Stenning. I found him brimming with importance and claiming to be banging at the frontiers of technical knowledge by informing me that being medical category ‘Z’ I could not be posted abroad except perhaps to Germany, that if I went to Africa I would get dysentery and die inside six months and that, at best, I only had another five to ten years to live. ‘Good God, Phil,’ I said, ‘I am only 37. They never told me any of this in Millbank!’ My mind was buzzing. Why was Phil so down-beat about my future? Why had not the real medicine men told me I was condemned to death before I was fifty? Why did it have to come from a grade two nontechnical staff officer? What was obvious is that I got very bad advice from someone I had no reason to distrust. Buff and I weighed the matter up very carefully. First, we were determined to go back to Kenya, but it did not actually matter if it was deferred for a couple of years. Two or three years previously, before MI6, when I was still seconded to Binnie, Deacon & Gourley and working in Artillery Mansions, Victoria Street, I was rung up by Peter Amcotts. He was an engineer with John Taylor & Partners, similar consultants to Binnies and engaged in water works and sewage treatment works design. He had heard I was familiar with Kenya. Would I have lunch with him? Peter was in his early thirties and walked with an odd lift to his left shoulder. He had done military service in the Far East and was married, with no children at that time, to Daphne, a bright attractive woman. They lived in Esher. Peter’s words gushed out of him like water from an open three-inch valve. ‘You and your wife must come and stay a weekend with us soon! We are determined to go abroad. Kenya sounds just the place – go-ahead, plenty of civil engineering opportunity. I must pick your brains about Kenya,’ and so he went on. Well, Buff and I did go for a weekend, several in fact, and were captivated by their infectious enthusiasm. We genned them up on Kenya and life in the colonies. I was little help professionally, for I had not come across any professional engineers in the 1940s, but I gave Peter the name of a friend of my father’s, Godfrey (Jimmie) Rhodes, ancient, but still in the Kenya 191

PEACETIME SOLDIERING & Uganda Railway. Jimmie had been in the Royal Engineers and had built a strategic railway in Iraq in the 1914–18 war, and had been knighted for distinguished service. Quite soon Peter gave in his notice to John Taylor & Partners and they disappeared to Kenya to a job in Nairobi. We kept in touch and the latest news in 1955 was that Peter had started up on his own in an ex-army hut in Nairobi. Daphne was running the office. What about joining? It was October 1955. I had recovered from my operation. Buff had got her AA diploma and I had been offered a job in Nairobi provided I swotted up on sewage works design, Peter Amcotts’s civil engineering line at the time. My five-year stint after the course was up; it seemed the moment to change horses. It would be a shame to miss the Amcotts’ bus. We took the plunge and one sunny October morning sailed from Tilbury for Kenya with all our belongings in the SS Uganda. Looking back, I am surprised at the almost furtive way in which I left the army. Normally an officer on retirement would be ‘dined out’ at Brompton and I suppose I could have applied to attend a dining out guest night; anyway I failed to do so. I was in thrall to the idea of a new life of civil engineering in Kenya and Buff was similarly possessed by the excitement of returning to what we called ‘home’. I was entirely unfazed by the idea of leaving the army. Leaving for good was subject to the fact that we still had not got the whole of the money to pay for the Amcotts partnership. We wondered if Uncle Maurice would lend me the balance of £1280. It meant persuading Maurice that a partnership with Amcotts was a good bet. I had had the sense to introduce Peter two years back, so they had met, but Maurice clearly did not like the cut of his jib. I managed to persuade my uncle that a lot of go-ahead people in commerce were not gentlemen and that Peter was a professional engineer and had won the Telford medal for excellence in design at the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1952. He was certainly a flyer in his profession. I managed to win Uncle Maurice over. Not only that, he gave me the whole £3200 as a gift, so I could save my £1820 gratuity. He and Aunt Lucy treated us to a farewell dinner at 27 Queen’s Gate and we parted with sadness. My uncle survived my father into the 1960s and I saw him once more before he died. His money had transformed my life at Cambridge and was now earning my passage into my new career. Bless him! 192

Part IV Kenya: My Second Career, 1955–99

13 Down to earth

A

s we sailed on 15 October 1955, I could at least congratulate myself on an orderly progress out of military into civilian life. I had an assured new job at £90 a month, a good prospect of a partnership in a new state-of-the-art consulting engineering firm, a steady marriage, the future life I had dreamed of in Kenya, and being close to my parents in Nairobi. Peter Amcotts had told me that one of his two new partners was Sam Roughton, ex Royal Engineers. Sam I remembered at Chatham, but only as an acquaintance. He had been up at Corpus just before me and had been in Kenya for several years. He had learnt the art of structural engineering design from Arthur Sutcliffe, sole owner of an old and very reputable one-man partnership in Nairobi. I knew little of what was in store. For the 17 days of the voyage I sat in a deckchair on the poop deck of the SS Uganda swotting The Work of the Sanitary Engineer by Escritt and Rich. Amcotts had told me that directly I arrived I would be in charge of the design of a sewerage and sewage treatment scheme for Kitale, a small town in northwest Kenya. Since I knew nothing about the subject, I was daunted by this prospect. While I was thus engaged, and trying to keep awake – Escritt was not enthralling reading – Buff was living it up all over the ship. I remember breaking off from Escritt and watching her on the greasy pole over the pool, battling it out against a hairy ape of a man, and winning. Apart from meeting her for meals (we were of course at the captain’s table) I saw very little of her throughout the voyage and made no social contacts myself. Finally, we arrived in Mombasa. The sight of the palm-fringed shore in the early morning haze was, as always, enchanting and 195

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 exciting; as was the picket boat, the pilot’s climb up the swinging rope ladder, and the slow and stately entry into Kilindini harbour. The commotion of the crowd of officials and dockers swarming on board followed the neatness of the berthing manoeuvres. My years with Amcotts & Roughton: 1955–64 While still in the army I remember ruminating on how carefree life was even during the war. I was keen to advance in my military profession but few make it to general, so I seized the opportunity the army afforded in its civil engineering schemes and looked forward to a new career outside the services. Meanwhile, I would have been well-advised to have thought about how to cope with the ‘rat race’ and worries about money and power. When I joined Peter M. Amcotts & Partners in Church House, Nairobi, in November 1955 as a salaried engineer I was aware only of it as a two year-old firm with an immediate claim to respectability in that Peter Amcotts, the senior partner, was a member of the Association of Consulting Engineers of London and a very young one at that: he was still in his twenties. I bought a new Ford Anglia motorcar and Buff’s mother Gwen bought Buff a Spanish-style, three-bedroom house on Loresho Ridge with a large garden in which we lived until we parted in December 1959. Not only was Peter highly qualified and a Telford medallist, he also had three years’ experience as a water engineer prior to arriving in Africa. He was energetic, keen to join local engineering societies and had an attractive wife. In fact, he had all the right qualifications bar one – he was not a ‘gentleman’. This was not much of a handicap, for few top engineers in Nairobi were. In fact, I can only think of two gentleman engineers, both nonentities in the profession – Sam Roughton and me. However, Amcotts not being a gentleman did matter to Sam. Amcotts was the civil engineer specializing in water and waste disposal design. Sam was the structural engineer, not much of one actually, with the more lucrative personal practice and close to a lot of important architects like Grahame Barker. He had also started earlier than the others (in Kampala) after an apprenticeship with Arthur Sutcliffe who, though old fashioned, was a first-class structural engineer. Peter Campbell, the third partner, was also structures oriented. About the same age as Amcotts, and the boffin 196

DOWN TO EARTH of the partnership, Peter could really present a mathematically calculated structural design. Richard Hughes, an up-and-coming architect who was at the AA School with Buff and who cared about design more than money, would laugh at the idea of having Sam as his structural engineer but was keen on Peter Campbell. Unfortunately, Peter had to think about money. He had none of his own and several young children, so his priority soon became teaching at the university and we lost him as an active partner. Though a qualified civil engineer, I was without experience in either design or the supervision of contracts. I joined as Amcotts’s assistant in the water engineering, waste treatment and disposal field. His number one job was the sewerage and sewage treatment of Kitale, and it was not long before I was doing design for this in Nairobi, and spending a lot of time on site surveying sewer lines and setting up pump houses in Kitale. Amcotts was also chasing up dam jobs in the Nairobi and Kiambu areas – among them Ian Sinclair’s dam at the northern end of Loresho Ridge, where Buff and I were living. In February 1956 Peter decided to take back the civil engineering design work in Kenya and have a go at starting an office in Dar es Salaam. I was to be in charge and Terry Powell (whom I had met in London with Richard Hughes) was to be my assistant. We were duly installed in an office in the Barclays Bank building and Peter, living in his boat at the yacht club moorings, introduced us to the contacts he had among local architects, quantity surveyors and engineers who might, he thought, be the source of civil engineering projects. One of these was Alan Bignell. As well as the business introductions, Peter introduced me to David Coward, the Dar es Salaam branch manager of the main Standard Bank of South Africa and his wife Joan. Peter and Daphne had already become close friends of David and Joan in Nairobi. I had an introduction of my own to a friend of my mother’s, Ann Francis who was living in Dar es Salaam with her business tycoon husband. It was not long before the Amcottses disappeared over the northern horizon leaving Terry and me to establish our legal presence in Tanganyika, set up and staff the office, find somewhere to live pro tem and get some paying work. Terry was still unmarried and Buff had good professional and social reasons for not joining me, so we were both living as 197

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 bachelors in Chez Margot’s rooming house. Being February, the weather was hot, sultry and airless, and the air-conditioned office and hotel bedroom were cool refuges. For the rest, one sweltered and sweated. Terry, who had spent a lot of his life on a sisal estate near Sultan Hamud, took the climate in his stride. I did not like it and, anyway, was not feeling well. On the fourteenth day, after a night spent in the Savoy Hotel in Morogoro, I was struck with a blinding headache and hot and cold rigor shakes. It was probably malaria. I rang up Ann Francis who said I could not possibly go to the government hospital because it was multiracial. She suggested I consult a doctor who ran his own nursing home in Oyster Bay. He diagnosed malaria and sent me by ambulance to his nursing home. In no time at all I was in a large private room being administered to by a pretty Asian nurse. There the good news ended. Whatever the treatment, it did me no good. I started to rave. Miraculously, Terry appeared, helped me out of bed, out of the building and into his car. No one seemed to notice. We drove straight back to the town and in next to no time I was in a bed in an open ward in the government hospital. Terry had alerted the Nairobi office. It alerted Buff and she mobilized her mother who, conveniently, appeared at my bedside the same evening I arrived. She was bearing what she knew was the proper treatment for my ailment – two bottles of champagne. Without asking she went to the ward fridge, swept the serums to one side, and put in the bottles. From that moment I never looked back. In no time at all I was ready for discharge and convalescence. Mrs Brayne had already booked a short flight for herself and me to Zanzibar and a ten-day stay in a small hotel just outside the town. The days with Gwen Brayne were surprisingly exhilarating. Her encyclopaedic knowledge of hedgerow life and growth in England, which had impressed me in her days with us in Chelsea, was augmented by her revelations about Zanzibaran and Far Eastern spices. Gwen proceeded to Mbozi, as originally planned, and I returned, reinvigorated, to the Dar es Salaam fray. The Dar es Salaam practice never got off the ground. I cannot remember us landing a single substantial structural or civil engineering job, although God knows we tried. On the social side the only success I had was making friends with a leading quantity surveyor, David Thomson of Armstrong & Duncan. We remained 198

DOWN TO EARTH friends and colleagues for 40 years. Hastings, the architect with the biggest practice, had structural engineering tied up with a crony and the other two architectural practices were in a closed professional ring. Howard Humphreys had had everything in the water development and waste disposal line tied up for years. Still, we had hopes in that line in dam work, and the Public Works Department was talking about letting us do waste disposal schemes for Arusha and Moshi. Its engineer Bignell suggested nongovernmental approaches in private estate dam design or large scale irrigation. There was a gold mine in a remote area of Singida where a mammoth catchment dam was contemplated. People were talking of reopening dam and irrigation works east of Dodoma for crops other than the originally discredited groundnut scheme. And, with rumours of deposits in southern Tanganyika, uranium mining might be a possibility. Also, a Dr Williamson was reported to need civil engineering assistance in his diamond mine enterprise on the eastern shores of Lake Victoria, south of Mwanza. Bignell was too nice to tell us to bugger off and let him get on with his work and Terry and I were too naïve not to get excited by these romantic ‘projects’. They kept us going for months, wasting the firm’s money, but in the process I had the opportunity to visit many of the more remote corners of Tanganyika. At the end of May the Amcotts turned up in their boat and Peter offered me a partnership, which I accepted. I was to do an allTanganyika safari, write a report and then hand over the Dar office and return to Nairobi. Nothing was then said about closing the Dar es Salaam office. In mid-June the generally enervating weather of Dar gives way to about six weeks of a cool, fresh and stimulating European-like spring. I left this to go on my journey in search of contracts. Going west to Dodoma, Tabora and, finally, Mwanza, I took in the fabled Singida gold mine and dam site – from the point of view of a tourist (not for someone in search of engineering work) well worth the visit. After a comfortable night, and hospitality from an Italian family, I continued on my way and left that idyllic place for ever. The Singida experience was typical of the whole six-week safari – interesting and enjoyable, but unproductive in every way except in demonstrating that I, at any rate, would never succeed in drumming up work in central and southern Tanganyika. Another more salesman-like type might 199

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 have had more success, but all I had to report was that what work there was would always be found in the Dar es Salaam, Moshi, Arusha areas. At Dar es Salaam, when I got back, I found that Amcotts had been and gone, having ordered the closure of the Dar es Salaam office, and Terry and the others were busy packing up. I left them to it and beat it for Nairobi. The ousting of Amcotts In early September I clocked in on the fourth floor of Church House as the newly fledged partner. Alice Williams, the secretary, greeted me warmly, but there was a cold aggressive atmosphere in the main office. Amcotts was away. Sam Roughton was humped over what looked like accounts ledgers. Peter Campbell was lost in a structural design, but roused himself sufficiently to welcome me as a new partner. ‘Pisspots,’ Sam shouted, ‘is busy ruining us.’ He then went on to accuse him of spending our money like crazy in London, entertaining the world in the Cumberland Hotel at our expense, opening an office in Guildford, hiring an engineer to run it, and lots more. ‘You are a partner now,’ he said, ‘we must get together and stop him.’ My reaction to this bombshell can be imagined. I was being pitched into a partnership dispute the first time I walked in at the door. Amcotts was my sponsor, the whole reason why I was here. Sam was an ex-fellow sapper and Cambridge man, but I hardly knew him. I had only just met Campbell. Buff and I had got quite close to Peter and Daphne in London, but had lost touch while they had been in Kenya. Peter was being accused of all sorts of jiggery-pokery and Roughton, incandescent with anger, was raging at me. Campbell seemed unperturbed. What was I to do? With hindsight it was obvious. I should have stood back from the problem, waited for Amcotts to come back, given him a fair hearing and tried to mediate. Even now I think I can be forgiven for doing none of these things, mostly because I had no idea how to behave in a partnership and was totally out of the picture on what the financial position really was, or how relations were inside the partnership. And was not Sam the gentleman, and was not Amcotts rather suspect with his humped shoulder and slightly shifty eyes? Anyway, what I did was allow Sam to bulldoze me onto his side, to hear his side of the financial story and to hoist 200

DOWN TO EARTH aboard his numerous tales of Amcotts’s misdemeanours. Inside ten days I became completely committed and Sam and I were on the train to Mombasa planning to confront Peter Amcotts on his arrival back in his boat at the Kilindini Kempton mooring. The proceedings then degenerated into farce. Sam and I lunched at the Mombasa Club and then stationed ourselves on the firstfloor balcony with its view of the open sea and Kilindini harbour approach. Amcotts’s little boat duly appeared bobbing on the water, sails set, moving to our joint doom. Sam and I judged the timing to a nicety and were at the Kempton boatyard at Kilindini to witness his arrival. An undignified confrontation followed with shouted accusations and counter charges. I got the impression that Peter and Daphne were not altogether taken by surprise; at any rate they gave as good as they got. Daphne was magnificent in defence of her mate. I, of course, remained silent. I had nothing to contribute except an indication of solidarity with Sam. We broke off the waterside engagement, but there was still more to come that evening when both protagonists boarded the evening train to Nairobi. Sam and I had no stomach for further confrontation and it must have been the same for Peter, but Daphne came looking for us down the swaying corridor, and confronted us in our first-class coupé. Gosh, she was Junoesque in her anger and scorn, and I was completely won over by what was a performance of high drama by a beautiful woman. Eventually, Daphne swept out and we ate our dinner and then our breakfast separately in the dining saloon. The break had been irrevocably made and there could never be any turning back. At the office the two sides saw their lawyers and prepared for the coming contest – arbitration. Meanwhile, I suffered intervention by several well-intentioned folk, all of it adverse and disapproving. The first to set about me was Lee Harragin, at that time still a practising advocate with Hamilton, Harrison & Mathews. He saw me in his office. I did not know Lee at all. I had only just arrived in the country, had not met him in the 1940s and took against him like anything. He took the line that in taking sides against Amcotts I was behaving in an unprofessional manner and one unbecoming in a person who had been to a decent public school. This man of my own age was patronizing me in an outrageous fashion. I gave him short shrift, told him to mind his own business and stamped out of his office. 201

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 The second, and oddest, was my father. He was acting as an intermediary of General Sir Godfrey (Jimmy) Rhodes, to whom I had originally given Amcotts an introduction. His was a similar message to Harragin’s, but embroidered by the suggestion that, as the fellow’s initiative was what had brought me my partnership, I ought at least to have given him a fair hearing before I joined the enemy camp. This barbed arrow found its mark and I felt bound to go and talk to Jimmy, especially as Amcotts had made him an associate partner. The interview was uncomfortable. I saw his point, but it was too late. The die was cast; I could not back out. The clash that caused the most long-lasting hard feelings was with David and Joan Coward. David had returned to Kenya some years after Buff and I had been his guest at an enjoyable weekend in a beach house at Bognor Regis. He was now the registrar general of the colonial government and had recently married Joan. Buff and I had become friendly with them again in the year that had passed since our return. Now there came an immediate rift, for the Amcotts and the Cowards had become very close friends since they had arrived in the colony, more or less simultaneously, several years previously. It was about ten years before the rift was repaired and by then I was married to Barbara. A dispute was declared and both parties agreed it should be settled by arbitration. Thus began my lasting preoccupation with this method of settling disputes. It was not a happy harbinger for the future. I was later professionally involved in several different capacities in many arbitrations but never again as a disputing party. I am vague about the issues of the dispute, but they comprised accusations of abuse of position by Amcotts, as senior partner, and a demand that he should either resign or be dismissed from the partnership. Amcotts, the respondent, was as impressed by the accolade of Queens Counsel as he was by his own membership of the Association of Consulting Engineers, so he bagged one of only three QCs in the country – Clive Salter. Salter was a flamboyant, hard-drinking, florid-faced, gouty Old Wellingtonian, distinguished by his hatred of the other local, distinguished Old Wellingtonian, Michael Blundell, a leading liberal white politician. Roughton briefed Gerald Harris, a nice, quiet, plodding Irish advocate, who later became a high-court judge. The arbitrator was one of the other QCs – Humphrey Slade – who later was, for 202

DOWN TO EARTH many years, the speaker of the parliament of republican Kenya, but who oddly, in 1956/7, was the extremely right-wing leader of the settler opposition in the colonial legislative assembly. Humphrey was greatly respected by all. He conducted the arbitral reference as if it were a case at law, but it was held without wigs in the Hamilton, Harrison & Mathews law library. Sam and Amcotts were the only witnesses. Salter did little obvious study of the case and relied on his native wit and eloquence to sway the arbitrator. Harris burnt the midnight oil and, with what turned out to be a weak case, did well to bring about a pyrrhic victory: Humphrey’s award being that Amcotts should leave the partnership but be awarded compensation of £3200. So there went my money for the partnership right down the drain: £3200 was a lot of money in 1957 (about £48,000 at 1999 values) and Amcotts’s departure gravely compromised our financial situation (he left Kenya forever about three months later). I did not realize it at the time, but Humphrey’s award was, for me, an unmitigated disaster. Not only was my money gone, but without Amcotts and his experience I had no hope of contributing the sort of profits for the partnership that Sam and Campbell were bringing in, not that those were large. Peter Campbell was lucky if he got a monthly cheque of £100 and I £125. Sometimes we got nothing and Campbell, with his large family, was in despair. I continued to be the lame duck of the partnership up to the time, seven years later, when I was finally displaced from RC&F. I sometimes wonder what would have been my fate had Roughton left the partnership and the original firm of Peter M. Amcotts & Partners had continued into the 1960s. Certainly, with Amcotts’s energy, enthusiasm and ambition we would have prospered in the civil engineering line and perhaps, like Roughton & Partners ten years later under Hansen, become a force in the highway engineering field, but perhaps not. Ib Hansen, as a personality and a vibrant genius, would always tower over Peter Amcotts. So ended the short-lived consulting engineering firm of Peter M. Amcotts & Partners. Long live (but not for very long) RC&F. Social life: 1955–57 In 1955 the Mau Mau rebellion was hardly a serious menace, though European women still wore pistols in their belts or carried 203

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 them in their handbags, and there was the odd stir, with hunts for terrorists in the coffee plantations on the ridge. Our local Kenya musical star Roger Whittaker was warbling his country songs, and Jeremy Taylor was from time to time singing Ach Pleez Daddy at the Norfolk Hotel. It was less than eight years to independence, but few predicted the speed with which it would arrive, not least because an organization in London was still encouraging young British people to come and settle in Kenya. Buff and I presented the image of a fairly happily married couple, not interested in starting a family because we were both practising professional people. Buff (35) the architect, me (40) the civil engineer, comfortably installed in a modern, nicely furnished home on Loresho Ridge with a good-sized garden and several servants. We had dogs, cats, rabbits and deep-litter chickens. We both played golf and were a two-car family. In fact, Buff and I had begun to live separate lives and it was not long before we were sleeping in separate bedrooms. Family-wise we still socialized. My sister and her husband had long left Africa, but my parents knew Buff’s sister, Pat, very well and my father had given Pat away at her wedding. As we no longer lived on Riara Ridge, Limuru, we no longer socialized with the Limuru lot, though I stuck to using Kenneth Moss as my dentist, and fought with him the losing battle against tooth decay and dental dissolution. I am not sure about his competence as a dental surgeon, but he was entertaining to mumble at from the old-fashioned upright position in the dentist’s chair. Brian Russell we saw from time to time – singing in musical shows and also in charge of the choir when we went to church in Limuru. Buff was the Russell daughter’s godmother. Buff and I had our separate friends. She had her golfing mates, shared David and Joan Coward, Robin and Cherry Lindsay and the Amcotts, as well as neighbours on the ridge, and I quickly became friendly with Sam and Ann Roughton and resumed relations with Richard and Anney Hughes and Kenneth and Dorothy Brown. My golfing opponent was my father at Royal Nairobi, where we often played nine holes of an evening. Life with Buff was never dull, despite the gradual cooling of our marital relations, and could be highly entertaining. Although we were ensconced in the house Mrs Brayne had bought for Buff in Nairobi, we still owned the two little houses we had built on the four-acre Riara 204

DOWN TO EARTH Ridge plot in the 1940s, and it was fun to go there at weekends to escape from Nairobi. While we were there one day a jolly looking, youngish man and a rather lugubrious looking woman hailed us from over the hedge. He was planting tea on his slightly larger acreage. ‘Like to sell your place?’ he enquired. ‘We would not have to build a house if we could get yours.’ We agreed immediately. Professional behaviour in engineering consultancy My friend and professional architect colleague, Tom MacKenzie, fixed me with a steely glare: ‘What are your views on touting for work, Desmond?’ Tom said this to me in his Mombasa office some time in the mid-1960s. I had just asked whether there was anything going for my consulting firm, as work was a bit short just then. That was still the form, if you abided by the guidelines of the Association of Consulting Engineers, as Tom did as a fellow of the RIBA. You did not tout for work and could not compete because the method of charging fees was standard for all members. Things are different now: competition is cut-throat and consulting engineers have shiny brochures and long lists of employees with impressive CVs. Often these lists are beefed up with names supplied by personnel companies that sell them for large fees. Membership of the Association of Consulting Engineers conferred the privilege of touting for work under the association’s auspices. Clients would go to the association for recommendations for consultants, but it was noticeable that established, well-known firms would tend to be recommended, whereas small new firms like RC&F would stay out in the cold. Robin Lindsay in RC&F: 1959–62 Earlier I described Robin Lindsay’s service in the RE with me during 1944, in England and then during the Overlord operation in France, Belgium and Holland, and his sudden evacuation in November after an emergency appendectomy. He had been a superb young officer and it was a pleasure, in 1959, to recruit him into RC&F. Between 1945 (when he was demobilized aged 21) and 1959 Robin had matured. At 35 he was an experienced civil engineer. He had spent three years at Cambridge on the Engineering Mechanical Services Tripos, joined a civil engineering contracting firm in England for practical experience and in 1951 205

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 he returned to Kenya. He then went to Uganda to work, again as a contractor, for the Owen Falls Construction Company’s hydroelectric project at Jinja. He then returned to Kenya and operated against the Mau Mau in the Air Wing; when things quietened down, he joined the Public Works Department at Nakuru. Robin was innovative and experimental in temperament, especially with regard to the use of water, its conservation, flow and interrelated projects, such as land erosion. He had married Cherry Vernon and was living near Njoro when I again contacted him and persuaded him to join our firm – the idea being that he should first learn the ropes in Nairobi, and then open an office for us in Arusha, Tanganyika. When Michael Zibarras joined me in Nairobi Robin went to Arusha with Cherry and baby daughter, and set up in a rambling ex-German house with office attached. He quickly established a wide ranging practice in and around Arusha and at Moshi. It was, admittedly, not very lucrative, but did not lack interest. Robin went on to develop compost manufacture, a special WC flush for Swaran Singh, the plumber, and an automatic gate device to prevent silting at dam spillways. It was a great loss to the firm, and to me personally, when the Lindsays decided to emigrate just before independence. They left Africa in early 1961, for Australia. Work in Kenya and Uganda: 1957–64 RC&F’s work was, from the first, centred in Uganda and was mostly structural. Kenya structural work was entirely in and around Nairobi. As the leading consultant in structural engineering is almost always an architect, and Sam Roughton’s architect contacts in Nairobi were limited, as I recall, to Grahame Barker, structural appointments there were few and minor. The exception was Tony Gasston’s KPCU coffee processing plant headquarters in Nairobi, which was a big fee earner for RC&F. Tony, with Steve Barbour, operated a small but efficient and successful mechanical and electrical engineering design firm, with a branch in Kampala and a big clientele throughout Uganda of Asian-owned cotton ginneries. Tony never worked for architects; if he needed one he employed one. As the architect Graham McCullough was his only rival in East Africa in construction team leadership and as he had a healthy contempt for architects anyway, he was able to spurn 206

DOWN TO EARTH them and operate successfully as team leader on all factory work. Some, but not much, of this work came RC&F’s way. RC&F faced formidable competition from structural engineer designers who, let us face it, were more competent. Arthur Sutcliffe from whom Sam learnt his trade was still operating, though soon disappeared from the scene, but Sven Geleff, the aged Swede (known affectionately as ‘Junior’) still had a faithful following. Then there was Reinforcing Steel Ltd, a South African lot with whom I had an unfortunate experience in London while exploring the employment market before leaving the army. Having replied to an advertisement I was invited to an interview at 12.30 at the Hyde Park Hotel. I was left kicking my heels in the vestibule while the interviewers had a leisurely lunch and was summoned, starving, at 2.30. Only a few minutes was necessary to establish that I knew nothing about structural design, that they would on no account employ me and that I would rather die than work for them. Crummy as they no doubt were, they had a big structural design practice in Nairobi. Meanwhile, Roy Robinson, Robin Lindsay’s successor in Arusha, was carrying on Robin’s good (but unprofitable) civil engineering work in northern Tanganyika. In Uganda the scene was different and better. Sam had dug in there in the early 1950s before he joined Amcotts. He had a oneroom office in Kampala and used to sleep under the drawing desk. On Friday afternoons he would travel 450 miles to Karen on a motorbike to join Ann and the family and be back in Kampala and at the drawing desk on Sunday evening. Tough! Sam had many friendly contacts among architects in Uganda and with British civil servants in the ministries, and they doled him out a lot of work. Uganda’s Makerere University was expanding and private architects were designing lecture theatres, dining halls and residential blocks galore. Then Uganda Hotels’ in-house architect needed structural design for hotels at Tororo, Jinja, Mbale, Gulu and Kasese. Structural appointments proliferated and in 1958 the Kampala office was opened with Michael Rutherford as Uganda manager. Michael and his assistant engineer, Tadek Korbusz, were both very competent, and the office was soon awash with staff, including tracers. Despite the ever-increasing overheads, the Kampala enterprise was a ‘nice little earner’. There was a slight problem. Michael Rutherford began to get 207

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 aspirations au dessûs de sa gare and his wife Margaret began to talk in public of Michael as ‘a partner’. Sam, for some reason, was determined this would never happen. Still, the partners did pay for Michael to build himself a nice little house on one of Kampala’s seven hills. Something went wrong with the ceiling insulation and it was actually a very hot little house. Margaret became something of a grande dame in Kampala’s mainly British society and an ornament of the Kampala Club. Sam did not get on with her. Margaret, who was petite, attractive and – albeit bossy – a very good social asset to Michael in his work, seemed unabashed. Meanwhile, Sam Roughton lived and practised in Nairobi and confined his Uganda activities to periodic visits to Kampala. Rutherford’s profitable regime lasted five years and then he and his family disappeared to Europe. It seems appropriate here to recount that in the following 30 years, while Michael was becoming established as senior partner of a thriving structural engineering consultancy in England, Margaret, the pushy little housewife in Kampala, studied law, took silk in London and, apart from becoming a successful barrister, specialized in arbitration and finally, in the 1990s, became chair of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. Civil engineering appointments began to materialize in Uganda and about the same time, in 1961, Roy Robinson took over from Robin Lindsay in Arusha. Earlier, in 1958, Alan Bell, with his wife Bertille, had appeared in Uganda to handle them. Alan was a good and hard working engineer and by the time I left RC&F (in which he outlasted me) he had established himself and his family in a house right on the shores of Lake Victoria at Jinja. Here, he and Bertille became part of the social scene, and he was designing and supervising a number of civil engineering projects in the Jinja area, including the Jinja aerobic pond sewage treatment works. While Alan Bell was coping with the Jinja work I, like Roughton, was living in Nairobi and, with the assistance of Michael Zibarras in Nairobi and Roy Robinson in Arusha, was handling the civil work in Kenya and Tanzania. By the end of 1962 the jobs Amcotts initiated had all been completed. Roy’s work was decreasing and eventually, in 1963, we closed the office and he went off to work for the Ministry of Works in Kericho. The work load in Kenya was hardly more impressive. There were reports to write for the 208

DOWN TO EARTH Office of Works in London on the Templer Barracks project at Kahawa and the supervision of the civil works at the Langata seminary. Independence was looming in the following year, with a slump in economic activity in all three colonial territories, and the only country where engineering work hardly faltered was Uganda. So it was that, in the latter part of 1962 and early 1963, I took time off from Kenya and settled in with Bardana the contractor in his delightful tented camp in the lower reaches of Kigezi, close to the border of Queen Elizabeth Park to do the onsite design and supervision of construction of five small bridges that had been washed away by floods the previous year. This is a little known part of Uganda where tourists never penetrate; it is heavily forested, sparsely populated and a paradise for bird life. I worked and messed with Bardana who, like all Italian contractors, ran a luxurious camp with excellent Italian food. During my four-month absence I made three or four trips to Nairobi, where I was living ‘in between wives’ in a house next door to the Roughtons. Michael Zibarras was holding the fort workwise in Nairobi. Michael Zibarras, teaching and the Roughton tragedy Michael was a pupil engineer. He came to us in 1959 and stayed for four years. His Greek family was not well off. They had been sisal farmers in Tanganyika but were now living in a large, ramshackle bungalow in Nairobi. There were a lot of them, including a number of girls. Michael’s younger brother, James also came to work for us, but only for a short time. James had an eye for where the money was and you did not need to slog your guts out for it. He later became the manager of a plumbing firm in Dar es Salaam and did well. Unlike James, who was bright and breezy, Michael was serious and hard working. He was in his mid-twenties, welleducated in Nairobi schools and highly intelligent. I taught him all the engineering I knew and he passed the exams for the Institution of Civil Engineers of London first time. Michael went to Greece to find his bride and not long after they were married he left us and set up as a consultant on his own. Sadly, after hardly a year, he was killed in an aircrash on the Ngong Hills. Barbara and I attended the burial service at the Langata Road cemetery and Michael’s wife jumped onto the coffin already in the grave – poor woman, so young, such a short time married and now alone in 209

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 alien Africa. I had the task of helping an actuary estimate the loss of earnings for Michael’s estate following his death for insurance purposes – one of my more difficult assignments. Looking back, I am sure that I should have bumped it up a lot higher. As well as teaching Michael Zibarras, between 1962 and 1964 I also gave one lecture a week on urban engineering at the Nairobi Technical College. It was not very well paid and I never enjoyed lecturing, so I gave up at the end of the second year. By mid-1963 I had been with Roughton for six years. I had had a lively time, but had brought in very little money and Sam Roughton was more or less supporting me with the fruits of his lucrative Uganda structural practice. This was the year in which Ib Busch Hansen barnstormed the firm. It was also the year in which J. M. R. (Mike) Elliott joined as a partner and opened an office in London. The most cataclysmic occurrence in 1963 was the death of the Roughton’s eldest child and only son Oliver, who was 17 years old, on an outward bound climbing exercise organized by his school, Malvern, in the Scottish Cairngorm Mountains. When the news of Oliver’s death arrived, Sam was away in Dar es Salaam. Ann was distraught. I was next door and she came to me for help and comfort. Her teenage daughters were both at the Limuru girls’ school. It took time for Sam to get back to Nairobi, so I had the grizzly task of going with Ann to break the news of Oliver’s death to the girls at the school. Sam was pole-axed by Oliver’s death. Time is supposed to be the great healer, but it worked very slowly, if indeed at all, with Sam. Ann was more resilient. The disaster had a surprising effect on what had been my close relations with the Roughton family. I was at once shut out and have been no more than a close acquaintance ever since. No doubt there is a psychological reason, but I have never fathomed it. Ib Busch Hansen Ib Hansen, Michael Rutherford’s replacement in Kampala when he and Margaret left Africa, was Danish and, in 1963, about 37 years old. He was a staggeringly attractive man and was nearly always smiling, which concealed an iron will and resolve, but could not avoid revealing that he was basically a very kind man. Women, of course, all died for him. This was the ‘titan’ that erupted onto the RC&F scene. Ib had recently come from working 210

DOWN TO EARTH with Ove Arup who, in the early 1960s, was a name to conjure with in the British construction world. He too was Danish and practised engineering in London, but his reputation was international. By the time Ib was working with Ove, Ove had already been notionally retired from Ove Arup & Partners, in the sense that he had handed over the firm. But, relieved of all tiresome administrative responsibilities, Ove was still there dreaming up new structural designs amid a coterie of young aspiring engineers, including Ib Hansen, and Ove Arup was his role model. Ib was in Britain to escape military conscription in Denmark. He was called up while at the university and objected to the interference with his engineering career. However, he was not a draft dodger from cowardice, for when the Second World War was on, and Ib was 17, he joined a gang of contemporary youths who habitually harassed the German ‘butter boats’, namely the barges on the canals taking Danish butter to Germany. Although English was not Ib Hansen’s mother tongue, he spoke it like a native and wrote it impeccably. This was the 37 year-old who took over the management of our Kampala office in 1963. Sam and I were 46. Sam’s birthday was in April, mine in February. Michael Elliott Mike Elliott was 39 years old. He and I met first in 1946 when he joined me as a 22 year-old subaltern, still a temporary soldier, in my works service unit in Nairobi, and we were engaged mostly in disposing of military property as the army ran itself down at the end of the Second World War. I had known his wife Christine Turner before her marriage when she was in the FANYs and Mike and I were serving General Fluffy Fowkes at HQ Northern Area at Gilgil in 1945/6. By the time I met Mike again it was 1960. We had both left Kenya and come back again, I a retired sapper and he still a serving officer. Mike was seconded to the UK office of Works, and engaged as resident engineer on the construction of Templer Barracks, Kahawa, just outside Nairobi. Barbara and I were living together at the time (from 1961) and I had chummed up again with Mike and Chris who lived in an army hut and we enjoyed socializing. It was not until later that Sam and Ann came to know them. On learning that Mike had recently decided to retire from the 211

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 regular army and continue as a retired officer in the works services with a posting to Germany, I was instrumental in persuading Sam Roughton that it would be a good idea to recruit him into RC&F. So Chris and Mike went to Britain. Mike retired, built a house near Sevenoaks, started a small office over the road from Big Ben and soon began to bring in some work. It cannot have been more than a few months before the plotting began: admitting Ib Hansen as a partner and ousting me from the partnership. Of course, there could be no complaint. That is business. My departure was a condition for Hansen’s entry to the partnership, which was obviously a coup of major importance for the firm. As it turned out, of course, three years later Roughton was also ousted and the new Roughton & Partners (R&P) continued to prosper until Hansen and Elliott ended up as millionaires. What happened to me? Well, for the 17 years between 1965 and 1982, courtesy of Ib Hansen I was never without well-paid, fee-based work. Social life: 1958–64 The spectre of independence for all British colonies in Africa was beginning to loom. To all intents and purposes the Mau Mau rebellion was over, but a period of uncertainty succeeded it during which expatriates were polarizing economically and politically. In Kenya, where the economy was expatriate-led, this brought an economic recession and a reduction in engineering projects. The Kenya settlers became frightened and a lot of them developed a siege mentality. There was even talk of fighting the British army, and the hardliners rallied to the cause of outright resistance to independence under political leaders like Group Captain Briggs and Humphrey Slade. There also grew a politically liberal section of the European settlers, which crystallized in the Capricorn Africa Movement, which Bill Sterling had started in what was then Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Its aim was a gradual transition to full democracy with qualified voting lists meanwhile and the reins of government still in civilized (namely European) hands. It was bound to fail as it never found favour either with the general mass of Kenyan people or with hard-headed European politicians like Michael Blundell and Bruce MacKenzie, who soon adopted the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ attitude. The hardline settlers dubbed this appeasement, but eventually realized there was 212

DOWN TO EARTH only one other option: to beat it for South Africa, Australia or Britain, which is what a lot of them did. Most Capricorneans shut up politically and sat it out by staying put. Some hardline politicians like Humphrey Slade turned into statesmen and, in his case, ended up as speaker in the independent Kenya parliament. The Asians, who were far more numerous than Europeans, just sat tight and hoped that nobody would notice them; after 36 years of independence the Kenya government still has not managed to root out those whose jobs could well be filled by indigenous Kenyans. Buff was still a ‘stayer’ in 1958 and was keen for us to buy a plot and build a house on the coast at Watamu. Plots there were going cheaply and the only development was Ian Pritchard’s residential pub. Ian was a paraplegic – he hit a submerged rock while water-skiing – and his mother and wife administered to him and helped him run the pub for a number of years before he died. After we separated, Buff found two friends to share the plot and proceeded to develop it until eventually (in 1961) we got divorced and she left Kenya, first for Britain and finally for Australia. I was a ‘stayer’ throughout. I had no feeling of patriotism for the country or urge to become a citizen, but I loved living there. In spite of Kenya being my birthplace, I clung fiercely to my British passport, looking on it as a lifeline to safety should disaster strike after independence. Also, it was not long before it became clear that, as an engineer, I did not need a visa or work permit to stay around, for engineers’ services were far too badly needed. In fact, visas for engineers were only introduced in 1984. Also, my mother was still alive in 1958, a sprightly 68 year-old living in our wholly owned family house in Balmoral Road, and she had no intention of laying her bones anywhere but by my father’s side in Langata cemetery. She got very edgy at any sign of my leaving Kenya and when later, after marrying Barbara, I wrote from Dublin to say we were looking for a house to buy, she became very agitated indeed. So, mother also tethered me to Kenya. So we stayed on and at the end of 1959 when Buff and I separated, I left home. Buff soon disposed of the property she owned on Loresho Ridge and we split the contents between us, more or less amicably. I then set up a bachelor establishment in a rented house in Karen (next door to the Roughtons). I had been living with Buff for 14 years and found the fresh bachelor existence pretty tedious. 213

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 Ann, Sam and the girls were wonderful at looking after me and stopping me pining, but they did not have to bother for long. Only just over a year later Barbara came into my life. Lancaster House constitutional conferences took place. The last governor, Sir Patrick Renison, called Jomo Kenyatta the ‘leader to darkness and death’. Sir Patrick gave way, after ‘Jamhuri’ in June 1963, to Governor General Malcolm Macdonald. In December 1964 ‘Uhuru’ (independence) was declared and Jomo became the first and founding president of the Republic of Kenya. At more or less the same time, Teddy Twining handed over and Julius Nyerere became president of the United Republic of Tanzania, and Milton Obote became the first president of the Republic of Uganda. To start with, it was difficult to adjust to life under ‘the leader to darkness and death’. The lawyers were scared and flocked to immigration to adopt Kenya citizenship. A few staunch exceptions (like Jack Couldrey) bucked the trend. A very few who were not constrained by the threat to their careers, Chris Archer was one, became citizens by choice. Architects, like engineers, were under no threat to their jobs, but Chris thought he owed it to the country of his birth to do the patriotic thing – adopt citizenship and work for the good of his country. I thought this admirable but not for me. For people like me it was mostly an adjustment of attitude. Clubs in Kenya Clubs in Kenya were in a touchy situation race wise. Until very shortly before independence membership was barred to Africans. In about 1959, Nairobi Club called a special general meeting. The African staff was told to leave the room, the doors were closed and the president said, ‘Gentlemen, this meeting is called to consider the admission, as ordinary members, of members of the Jewish faith. Can we really continue to bar friends like Jack and Tubby Block from membership, or even bring them in here for lunch?’ A couple of years later, on a similar occasion, African men were no longer barred. Amusingly, lady membership is still restricted in the Nairobi and Muthaiga country clubs and no woman has voting rights. So, if no racism, sexism rules OK. In 1962, shortly after African men were to be admitted, another urgent meeting was called at Nairobi Club to postpone indefinitely a scheme to construct a swimming pool on the grounds that ‘who 214

DOWN TO EARTH knows what Africans will do in the pool, especially their children?’ A government pathologist member killed the motion and brought the house down in gales of laughter by countering, ‘I cannot see what anyone can do in a swimming pool that cannot be countered by a good dose of chlorine.’ My father introduced me as a military member of Nairobi Club in 1941. He had helped found the club before the First World War and never joined Muthaiga. Most Muthaiga members may have had pretensions to gentility, some were even aristocrats, but its atmosphere was louche, tainted with Happy Valley morals, and not for Dad and Mum. In the European social divide there were officials, settlers and business people; below were shop people and engine drivers who did not qualify for clubs. Of the social clubs there was a civil service club for the officials and Nairobi Club for people like my parents, who had one foot in the official camp and the other in settlerdom, and also for respectable settlers of modest means and professional and business people. In the 1950s and 1960s all this changed. Happy Valley ceased to exist and respectable settlers rushed to join Muthaiga. My motherin-law Gwen Brayne introduced me in 1963. By 1999 Muthaiga was the number one social club with a membership that was largely diplomatic, geriatric European, young cosmopolitan and about 20 per cent African middle class. Nairobi Club has a few ancient European members (like me) but is predominantly African business and military. There are a few Asian members in both clubs, but for the most part they have their own ethnic clubs. Barbara enters my life During Easter 1961 Penny Hodgson, through Alice Jeffreys, the Nairobi Hospital matron, introduced me to Barbara Guild, previously Shortt, née Hogg, who had left her husband and was living in Langata. At the end of 1961 Barbara moved in and we lived together, joined in 1962 by her brother, Michael Hogg, who had left his wife and had custody of his children Virginia (3) and Colleen (2). Almost at once, Buff and I divorced and I was free, but we had to wait for Barbara to free herself from Nigel Guild. When my mother decided to give up the family house and live in a rented flat opposite Nairobi Club, we all took up residence in Balmoral Road. Barbara and I only moved from there in 1968, 215

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 nine months after Katie was born (in April 1967), but Mike and family took off shortly before Barbara and I were married, having bought from my mother the house just over the garden hedge that she had built for letting purposes after father died. Meanwhile, Dorothy Hogg, the granny, was living in a residential hotel over the road from the casino, which was convenient for her hush hush work in the still British special branch office, situated over the carpet shop just across the road. Michael by now had, for some years, been working for Micky Migdoll at Esquire Ltd, the men’s shop in the centre of Nairobi. I was still with RC&F. The years 1960 to 1963 could be called my shooting and fishing years. Father had died so, except for the odd game at Royal Nairobi, I played little golf but often went fishing with my new friend and colleague, Peter Burrell, as well as a bit with Sam Roughton and his family. In the years before independence there was plenty of good trout fishing in Kenya because the fish wardens were British and saw to restocking streams and the prevention of poaching. With Sam, I fished the Malewa at Naivasha, and rivers on the Mau near Kericho and Sotik and in the Aberdares. Peter Burrell introduced me to fishing in the Kipkabus–Kaptagat area, and to his favourite rivers on the Kinangop and above the Blue Posts, north of Thika. Shooting with Sam and family was always beyond Magadi, in the area west towards the Uaso-Nyero River, and below Shomboli Mountain. This area was actually out of bounds for shooting, so we had to be careful. We used to go as a family, camping, and it had to be close to Magadi Lake as everywhere else was infested with mosquitoes. Sam and I would forage for firewood, and Ann would knock up delicious meals. We had no tents because it never rained. Peter Burrell Peter Burrell retired from the Royal Engineers in 1956. He was born in 1915, two years before me. He was second generation English Kenyan, his father having been a Kiambu coffee farmer. Peter was married to stunningly pretty, russet-haired Liza, who was 17 years younger than him and they had three sons and a daughter. In 1960 they were farming at Kipkabus near Eldoret and the boys were at Kaptagat school. Liza was the school secretary and did most of the farming. Peter played cricket. 216

DOWN TO EARTH Peter and I first met in 1952 when I was finishing my civil engineering course and Peter was an instructor at the SME at Chatham. He had spent nearly all his army time in India and our paths had not crossed, even at Cambridge, because he finished there in 1935 just before I went up. Peter and I met up again in 1960. We, in RC&F, had our eye on him as an employee, especially as John Elmer had commissioned us to design and have built a dam on a wattle estate at Kipkabus. Peter duly took charge of the supervision. However, the contacts then were mostly social and, even before Barbara and I married, it was fun to go up and stay at Kipkabus and get to know the local settlers. Sam and Ann did not fit in there and only went once. When Roughton and Elliott ditched me it was natural to cast Peter as a partner in a new consultancy. He was not fully qualified as a civil engineer though he had a 2:2 degree in the Mechanical Sciences Tripos at Cambridge – much better than mine. We were great friends and I would rely on him utterly. He also had a bit of money of his own, which was another plus compared with me. In 1964 we became partners in Desmond FitzGerald & Associates (DF&A). Second marriage On 31 October 1964 Barbara and I got married in the old Nairobi office of the then DC, Gerry Dashwood. It was a private ceremony attended by my mother Audrey, Barbara’s mother Dorothy Hogg, and Barbara’s brother Michael and his daughters Virginia and Colleen. The reception, for about 30, was in the old family house in Balmoral Road. That also was fairly exclusive: no one from R&P was there and, apart from the family members who had attended the ceremony, I only remember our Dutch friends, Jan and Agnes Boutenwijk with their children, Liza and Peter Burrell, and Judy and Desmond Harney. Judy helped Barbara prepare the food. So for me the end of 1964 was the beginning of a new phase of my life. I was coming up to 48, newly married and starting a new consultancy firm with Peter Burrell. Barbara and I left others to clear up the party debris at Balmoral Road and took off for England and Ireland on a month’s November honeymoon.

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arly in 1965, Barbara and I started afresh. We went on living in the family house at Balmoral Road, Michael Hogg and his daughters down the garden. Michael had, by then, divorced the mother of his children and married Ruth, a spectacularly beautiful Dane who, as an air-hostess with Scandinavian Airlines, had regularly spent time off with the aircrew in Nairobi. It was not long before there was an addition to the family – a son, Christian: born in Denmark. The Burrell family had abandoned Kipkabus and were living in the Kiambu/Limuru area. Peter and I set up a new building design partnership of architects, quantity surveyors and engineers in a wing of Triad House on Muthaiga Road. Soon Kathleen Mathews joined us as secretary. Business associates Triad was a distinguished firm. Its senior architect, Amyas Connell, then in his seventies, had to his credit listed buildings in London in his name dating back to the 1920s. Mysteriously, he had abandoned Europe, buried himself in obscurity in Tanga, Tanganyika, and re-emerged in Nairobi shortly before independence, where one of his memorable achievements was to design and supervise Kenya’s parliament buildings. In the 1960s and early 1970s he was undoubtedly the doyen of architects in East Africa. Connell’s partner was a young Scotsman, Graham McCullough, who as far as I was concerned was a star to work with. Peter and I did the civil works, water supply, drainage and roads. The elderly Swedish 218

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 structural engineer Sven Geleff was also in the Triad group. Peter Greensmith handled the landscaping, while Harry Barker and Brian Barton were the Triad quantity surveyors. ‘Junior’ (Sven Geleff) Sven Geleff was a fascinating man. Because of his great age he was known as ‘junior’. He was a practising structural design engineer into his late seventies and only retired then because his wife lost her sight and needed his attention at home. He put some of his savings into a house in France, to which they intended to retire, but both of them died within a year of moving there. Sven and his wife always gave a Swedish party to celebrate the pre-Christmas festival of Santa Lucia in early December. This was when we were all initiated into the rites involving schnapps, lager beer and skol. Peter Greensmith Peter Greensmith was a green-fingered genius. He was a life-long bachelor and, as he grew older, became more and more eccentric. During pre-independence and later he was the horticultural architect of Nairobi when it was truly ‘the green city in the sun’. He superintended the city council’s horticultural section, operating from City Park, and was responsible for the beautification of the streets and gardens. Mrs M Peter Burrell and I practised consulting engineering as DF&A from 1965 to 1976, and all the time until 1975 at Triad House. We could not claim to have set the civil engineering world on fire, but we managed to keep the home fires burning, to educate our children and, incidentally, had quite a lot of fun. We were aided and abetted in the latter by Kathleen Matthews who worked for us until Peter died in 1976. Then, when I moved from Triad first to Keith Osmond’s office in Hurlingham and finally to Ngong Avenue, we were together until when, in about 1980, Gordon Melvin took her over and she did a little work for me part-time. The association must have lasted 14 years, all of it enjoyable. Where is the work? In 1965 this was the great question. On leaving Roughtons I had 219

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 automatically lost all my work. I ferreted around. My forte was still waste disposal and treatment. I became excited about a small scheme at Naivasha, so phoned an acquaintance on the town council, Joan Wolseley-Lewis. She said the council had just awarded design and supervision to Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners because one of the young Gibbs was staying at Naivasha Lake Hotel. It was maddening to be gazumped for a job because of such cronyism, especially since that world famous firm hardly needed such a petty little job. Meanwhile, apart from the Elmer dam at Kipkabus, we had nothing. When work finally came it was from a most unlikely source, the man who supplanted me Ib Hansen. Although Ib Hansen was a structural engineer and the Uganda practice was, to start with, all structural, his eyes were focused on the big money to be made from road design and supervison, first in Uganda and later in southern Africa and the Middle East. Ib lost no time making the necessary contacts – no professional delicacy here. Working from Mike Elliott’s new London office, Ib lunched the key people in ODA, then hopped across to Brussels to lobby the European lot. Roughton & Partners (R&P), as it had now become, established its head office in Southampton where, with Sam’s departure in 1968, Ib Hansen took over as senior partner and it was from there that he organized the engineer groups and launched them first into Uganda and then into Lesotho. He amalgamated R&P with a Danish firm in Nairobi to form Carlbro-Roughton, predominantly structural, and eventually pulled out altogether from Kenya; thus the firm that was originally Kenyan disappeared altogether from the Kenya scene. Tanzania was, from the first, a non-starter. The R&P African parish was, as far as Hansen was concerned, Uganda, Lesotho and later the Sudan, Gambia and Swaziland. Of these countries, Uganda was where DF&A first became involved. Work in Uganda for R&P: Ib Hansen Our first job for Ib Hansen was a materials survey for the Soroti– Gulu–Wabulenzi–Kampala road in Uganda. We recruited Ronnie Apps to take charge, and provided him with equipment, soils surveyors and clapped-out second-hand Bedford trucks to do the work. R&P did the laboratory testing. In overall charge for R&P was Stan Clements who was doing the road design, including 220

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 topographical survey. Ronnie and Stan were memorable characters, and while both were hard working and technically competent, in other ways they were opposites. Stan was stolid, hot-tempered and utterly honest. Ronnie was thoroughly untrustworthy, with money at any rate. Soroti meat processing plant and our visit to Zagreb While surveying for R&P in Uganda, we began to pick up other DF&A work there. An important appointment, in 1965/6 was the Soroti meat factory, a government project with unlikely sponsors – President Tito’s communist government of Yugoslavia. Soroti lies at the southern end of Uganda’s Karamoja province. The Karamoja are nomadic and run cattle and goats, so it was thought a meat processing factory would do them some economic good. The Croatians in Zagreb had a lot of surplus (and we later found out obsolete) meat processing equipment, so what better idea could there be than to offload it on the unsuspecting Obote at Soroti? DF&A’s part in this project was concerned with roads, drainage and effluent treatment. A number of Croatian technicians erected the factory buildings and installed the machinery. Ronnie Apps and his wife had settled comfortably in Soroti with their big dogs and loved the place. Ronnie was competent at doing the necessary design and overseeing the constructors. However, it was I who snapped up the opportunity, funded by the Uganda government, to visit Zagreb to see how the meat processing factory there (of which Soroti’s was a replica) worked. This would fit in well, in the summer of 1966, with Barbara’s and my holiday trip to Britain, where we intended to buy and ship out to Kenya, on behalf of the firm, a new Peugeot station wagon. It was our first overseas holiday since our honeymoon in November/December 1964. We had not yet started a family. Also, there was the prospect of returning to Kenya by sea. The Lloyd-Triestino ocean liner had a great reputation for comfort and good food. We booked the car and ourselves on the SS Europa, embarking at Trieste with a fiveday stop at Venice thrown in, some time in August 1966. This was an overseas trip to remember. We were still newly married. I was a bit long in the tooth for a young lover, but Barbara – still well in her thirties – was at her peak of beauty and vivacity and captivated anew all my friends and relations. We flew 221

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 to Heathrow, and stayed in London at my club. We took delivery of the car in Victoria, and drove in it to Pam and Mike StJohn at Bepton Lodge near Midhurst, to stay some days. We stayed with Nesta, my cousin, in north Oxford and, as always, lots of her family were there. Once we had driven up to Scotland to stay with my Aunt Madge, we embarked on our epic journey back to Kenya by way of Southend, Rotterdam, Cologne, Heidelberg, Austria and Trieste, with a diversion to Zagreb in Yugoslavia before, finally, SS Europa, Venice and Mombasa. We were to be looked after by the meat processing staff throughout our stay in Zagreb, and an affable English-speaking official duly met and took us in his car to a large, rather stark but adequate hotel situated in farmland outside the town. He would meet us in the morning and take us both (he insisted Barbara come too) to meet his bosses at the factory. The meeting went off well, but my tour of the factory could not be made until the following day. In the meantime, would we care to accompany them that evening to a restaurant in the country, some way from Zagreb, for dinner? We said we would be delighted. We were duly collected from the hotel and, with the interpreter and driver in front, embarked on what turned out to be an eerie and seemingly endless journey along a straight tree-lined road. We arrived, by that time in darkness, at a moated Gothic castle, and were greeted by a number of hosts, all non-English speaking men, and seated at a plain refectory table for a delicious meal of minced raw beef, followed by grilled trout from the moat, lots of local red wine and Slivovitz. Barbara was not enjoying herself. She was convinced we were being abducted and were already on the wrong side of the iron curtain. Not understanding Serbo-Croat made conversation impossible and the total absence of women made her uncomfortable. At about midnight we were delivered, very relieved, back to our hotel. I was to be picked up the following morning. This time Barbara would kindly occupy herself at the hotel. The following morning the atmosphere changed. The interpreter became brusque. There would be no inspection of the factory. We would kindly pack ready for immediate return by train to Trieste. The interpreter would pay our hotel bill, provide us with tickets and take us to the station. No explanation or apology for this change in arrangements was forthcoming. After waiting on a dirty 222

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 platform the train for Trieste appeared. Although there were still 90 minutes to wait before its scheduled departure, the train finally took off on its four-hour journey, stopping at a number of stations where hawkers sold snacks to the travellers in the train, for there was no buffet or restaurant car. When we halted at the frontier, a number of fierce looking Yugoslav customs inspectors invaded the train. Bags were opened and their contents emptied onto the seats. The contents were stuffed back into the bags, the inspectors departed and the train moved on. Finally, we reached Trieste. With a certain feeling of relief, we boarded the SS Europa, bound for Venice, Bari, Suez, Mogadishu and Mombasa. Back in Soroti we coped as best we could without the benefit of an inspection of a working example of the meat-processing plant. The factory was duly completed and commissioned. There was an opening ceremony with President Obote presiding. To honour the occasion there was a special production run and a cascade of tins of bully beef. The factory was then closed down and ‘mothballed’. To my knowledge, it was never put back into production. Gasston & Barbour and the Kampala coffee processing plant The consulting mechanical and electrical engineers Gasston & Barbour figured largely in my professional and social life in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Steve Barbour was an acquaintance, but Tony Gasston was the man with whom we dealt professionally and later became friendly socially. Tony and Honor lived near Dagoretti Corner. The first time we went to their house we were mildly surprised to find the dining room being used as Tony’s workshop, and also as the construction space for a substantial seagoing motor cruiser. Honor did not seem to mind. Tony, ever a man of resource, found Kenya in one of its periodical recessions and his firm short of work, so he left it to Steve Barbour to keep going, rented a large area of arable land near Eldoret, turned himself into a temporary farmer and took a number of very profitable mealie crops off it and, a couple of years later, closed the enterprise down and returned to Nairobi and mechanical engineering. During my time with Roughtons he had a big project in hand, designing and supervising the construction of the Kenya Coffee Marketing Board processing plant in Nairobi. Sam was engaged as structural consultant and first alerted me to 223

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 Gasston’s outstanding ability as lead consultant. I had no hand in the project but when, due to the success of the Nairobi project, he was awarded the Coffee Board work in Kampala, he brought me in to cope with the civil engineering work. Tony Gasston organized the whole building operation and did it so well that working on the site was a real pleasure. Although it was not my concern, I became fascinated by the care he exhibited in personally examining every single sheet of asbestos cement corrugated roofing. He had his own personal mark to identify all rejected sheets. Later, I was amazed to see many of Tony’s marked sheets turning up on the Toray Rayon Mill factory construction at Thika, and being accepted by the architect, Graham McCullough, an expert construction organizer but not as thorough as Gasston. Beginning of family life When Barbara and I got back from our ‘honeymoon’ in England and Ireland, we had already seen the Christmas lights go on in Oxford Street, and the festive season was upon us. We celebrated Christmas with Mike Hogg and his wife Ruth, and Virginia and Colleen, his daughters. Dorothy Hogg, my new mother-in-law, was living in the Ainsworth Hotel and still working for the special branch, and she came to join in the festivities. My own mother, who hated Christmas, went on spending it with Kenneth and Dorothy Brown at Migumoni, Karen, and had her usual moan about Dorothy’s two pugs, ‘those dreadful snuffling hounds’. Kenneth Brown then died at the age of 92, in mid-1966. He was physically hale and hearty to the end, but sadly wandering in his mind, when he had formerly been a hard-nosed businessman. Dorothy was desolated. They had married late, in 1943 when Kenneth was 69 and Dorothy 53, so it was a Darby and Joan marriage and very close. Dorothy stayed at Migumoni and set about closing the books, as my mother expressed it, and preparing for death: ‘Audrey dear, I know you’ve always admired that Chippendale bureau in the sitting room. I’m leaving it to you.’ Ironically, Dorothy died in October 1966, only a month before mother, and I was the lucky beneficiary of that little period gem. It was when we returned from the Zagreb trip in early September 1966 that our daughter Katie’s conception took place. Barbara had already had four miscarriages, but her South African 224

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 gynaecologist saw to it that, this time at least, Barbara would have her baby. She was put on a strict diet and constantly weighed and lectured. Doctor Waghmarae took a personal interest in her and all went well until the end of March 1967 when some spasms and bleeding started. It was a false alarm, but she was back in hospital on 25 April and Waghmarae prescribed a caesarian section. It was, thank God, before the days when husbands were expected to be present at delivery. On 26 April 1967 I was put in a waiting room, fairly close to the delivery room. People started scampering up and down the passage. I had had lots of experience of hospitals (though not, of course, of childbirth) and knew that when people started running in hospital passages something had gone wrong. I became very alarmed. No one was there to tell me what was happening. Suddenly the door burst open and the matron and sister entered. ‘You are the father of a beautiful baby boy’. ‘Girl, Matron’, said Sister. ‘Nonsense,’ said Matron (matrons dislike being contradicted). Exit ladies, to return at once. ‘Yes,’ said Matron, ‘you are the father of a beautiful baby girl.’ My mother’s death That happy event was preceded six months earlier by the sudden death – in November 1966 – of my mother, a few days away from her 76th birthday. My mother knew about Barbara’s pregnancy but also knew about the miscarriages and was therefore uncertain whether this child would be brought to birth. She was only a onetime grandmother, of Cynthia’s daughter Caroline who was already 16, and would have so enjoyed having another. Mother had left her Balmoral Road home about three years earlier and, with the faithful Murioki to look after her and the flat, was ensconced in a block with Lady Harragin next door and Mrs Hamilton above her – two old ladies she had known all her Kenya life. Mother had been a patient of old Dr McCaldin for several years, for what everyone thought was a mild heart condition, so on the evening of her death, when we visited her and found her already in bed, I for one was far from worried. ‘I am a bit tired. I think I will do without supper. I have told Murioki. Desmond, would you please put the car away. The keys are on the dressing table.’ We left her dozing off. The next morning she was dead. Murioki found her. Madge Harragin phoned Dr McCaldin and 225

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Catherine Audrey FitzGerald (née Goodbody). Mother (1890–1966)

us. Madge was marvellously comforting. Dr McCaldin said: ‘Well, your mother beat me at last.’ I asked what he meant. He replied: ‘I have been prescribing medication for her for four years and I made sure she bought it. I am sure she threw it out of the window.’ Cynthia came at once and was with us on the evening of the second day. She asked what had happened to mother’s diamond 226

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 engagement ring, which she nearly always wore. She was not wearing it when she died. We asked Murioki. ‘Memsahib’s maridadi ring? Oh yes, it’s in that cupboard by the window. You will find it in the third drawer down, in a little box.’ There it was! Murioki was utterly trustworthy. Mother was always hiding her household keys, presumably from Murioki, and she would then be unable to find them. ‘Murioki, where are my keys?’ Murioki would fumble under a sofa cushion and hand them to her. Mother had left instructions about her obsequies. She was to be cremated. There was to be no memorial service, just a funeral service in Karen Anglican church, and the celebrant was to be the chaplain of the Duke of York’s school. She had worshipped each Sunday at the military chapel on the Ngong Road, but there was some reason against that venue. The Karen Anglican church incumbent was a tiresome person and I had a job persuading him to allow the chaplain to take the funeral. Cremation meant no committal, no grave and no ropes. We just watched the undertakers wheel her away to the hearse and the crematorium. The next morning I mixed her ashes with the marble chips on father’s grave in the Langata cemetery. Later we added her name to the gravestone – such a mercy to die with such ease. We got home and were sitting on the veranda having tea. Suddenly, a large black bird flew in and broke the green glass shade on the hanging veranda lamp. We had installed that rather modern shade after mother had moved to her flat. When she visited she said how much she disliked it. Was it coincidence? Balmoral Road It was late 1967 and we were still living in the Balmoral Road family house. Two secretaries were renting the guest house in the garden and Michael Hogg and his family were in mother’s other house, the other side of the hedge. We lived in the Balmoral Road house for about six years, before and after our marriage. It was well placed for commuting to and from work for both Barbara and me and it was convenient for golf at Karen and Royal Nairobi. Some time before Katie’s birth, however, Barbara and I had become disenchanted, not so much with the house as with the locale. It was so noisy. Most of the trouble originated from a bawdy house someone had started just down the other side of the 227

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 road, with an approach in the form of a longish, unpaved, black cotton track directly onto the Ngong Road. In the rains it was bedlam because taxis bringing clients would get stuck in the drive, and there would be lots of shouting and whirring of engines and skidding wheels. So, for a year and a half we made a hobby of looking at houses for sale once or twice a week after work in our chosen areas of Karen or Langata. It was a lot of fun; there was no hurry, we were perfectly comfortable where we were, but it was important to find the right property. Warai Road North, Karen Finally the estate agent came up with a property in Karen opposite where Sam and Ann Roughton used to live. This was it at last. Six acres, a borehole, a developed garden, a separate dining room, a big veranda, three big bedrooms and one small one for Katie’s nursery and it looked out onto a big jacaranda, then in full flower. What matter that the builders had forgotten the foundations and the cracks only closed up when it rained? For £9000 it was a snip. We sold the old family home and in January 1968 we moved in. It was to be our home for the next nine blissful years and it was not long before we had paid off the small mortgage. Barbara was earning a salary as secretary of the Wild Life Society, and I was earning a dividend from DF&A, so we were not badly off. When, in 1969, Michael Hogg and his family left Kenya to live in Sutton, Surrey, we took on their ayah, Ester, to help with Katie. Ester was highly intelligent and more like a good English nanny in the way she played games with the children as they grew up. She could also cook. Counting her service with the Hoggs, she served the families for 13 years. Katie’s early life We started life at Warai Road North when Katie was nine months old, Barbara 39 and I was 51, so a bit late for more children. Katie was ten when we sold. Kenya in the highlands was then, and still is, an ideal place in which to grow up. Katie’s upbringing was suburban, but very countrified, with lots of space, open air life all year round, and good nursery and primary day schools to go to. There were animals around too – leopards from time to time in our own garden. 228

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 The schools were far enough away in the Langata area to require school runs. After two years in nursery school we enrolled Katie at the Banda, a school Jim Chitty ran in what had been a country hotel in outer Langata. Dicky Dyer’s boy, Christopher, was miles further on, so Dicky picked Katie and other children up and did practically all the school runs. He worked as an aircraft instrument mechanic at the airport, which was only a little further on, so it was an ideal arrangement, especially for the rest of us. When Jim Chitty retired, Douglas Dalrymple took his place. He collected together a splendid and dedicated (mostly expatriate) mixed female and male staff, he placed enough importance on athletics, swimming and games to give the school a good reputation for winning competitions, and he was successful enough academically to get children into good British schools. The Banda was an independent, fee-paying school following a British school curriculum and since the period from 1974 to 1985 was well into the era of independence, no racial bar existed. Political upheaval: Tom Mboya Katie’s first ten years passed in a tranquil political period under the largely benign, albeit autocratic, regime of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. The evil contagion of corruption, hardly evident at all at independence, was only just beginning to strangle the Kenya polity; the judiciary was still independent, the military was kept in its place, the civil authority was still (just) on its feet, and the police were only just beginning to demand kitu kidogo (a little something). The East Africa community was still operative, though badly hobbled by Idi Amin having seized power in Uganda in January 1970 (Kenyatta used to refer to him as ‘that madman up the road’). His regime only ended when the Tanzania army ousted him at the end of 1979. Tanzania pottered on, enmeshed in Marxist poverty, under Julius Nyerere. The East African shilling was still the common currency of all three countries. Minor upheavals took place early on. There were two political murders, the most memorable being that of Tom Mboya in 1969, still in his late thirties. Tom Mboya, a Luo, was an up and coming, radically minded, intelligent, sophisticated politician, with roots in trade unionism. He had been a thorn in the flesh of the latter-day colonial administration and the settlers hated him. He posed a 229

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 threat to the largely Kikuyu administration and to the presidency of Kenyatta, who always had a rough ride on the rare occasions when he toured Nyanza province, the Luo tribal homeland. Mboya was a Catholic and when he was murdered the Catholic hierarchy decided to hold a memorial service in the Holy Family cathedral in Nairobi. It was a very high profile affair, attended by President Kenyatta, his cabinet and the whole of the diplomatic corps. The Luo community in Nairobi also selected that day to hold an anti-government demonstration outside the parliament building, which happens to be adjacent to the Catholic cathedral. Not long after the service started the Luo demonstration developed into a riot. The noisy commotion outside the building caused the numerous priestly celebrants on the podium to become very uneasy and they began to look over their shoulders at the cathedral entrance in case of ungodly intervention. Worse still, the building began to fill with tear gas fumes, entering through the unglazed louvres on each side of the nave. Mzee looked cross. All this was being broadcast to the nation on black and white television, which Barbara and I were watching, enthralled. The deaths of Peter Burrell and Dorothy Hogg In July 1976 my DF&A partner, Peter Burrell, died aged 62. Peter had been ailing for at least nine months and had done nothing much in the way of work since the previous November. His doctor had told him to exercise because he had a heart condition, so he spent a lot of time sailing up and down the East African coast. Peter’s sister Bunny had always had it in for Peter’s wife, Liza, and accused her of not looking after him in his last few days, but I do not think Peter needed or wanted looking after. He was a splendid partner and my best friend. No one took his place. I missed him badly; he was one of the best. Peter’s death knell was also the end of DF&A. We dissolved the firm. With the aid of Peter Johnson, the accountant, Liza obtained her pound of flesh. I would rather have died than argue with Peter’s widow about money. In early January 1975 Barbara’s mother, Dorothy Hogg, died in Nairobi. She had left Kenya in 1969 to go and live with the Hogg family in Sutton, Surrey, and was out on holiday, staying with us in Karen for Christmas and seeing some of her old friends, when she was suddenly taken ill at the New Year. She rests close to my 230

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 father and mother in Langata cemetery. Dorothy was 71 when she died. Latterly her life had been that of a widow (divorcée) in straitened circumstances who had known affluence – a state my grandmother used to say was not to be recommended. When she and her husband came to Kenya with Michael and Barbara in 1949 and bought a small farm near Thomson’s Falls their marriage was already in difficulty. After a bit Ralph Hogg returned to London and they divorced. The farm went into bankruptcy and was sold. At first Dorothy worked for the South African consul in Nairobi, and then latterly for the Kenya government special branch, both under colonial rule and after independence. Dorothy was a positive, possessive person. I became very fond of her. She had been a wonderful mother to Barbara and Michael. Visits to Britain Annual overseas leave was an attractive option, but not while Katie was an infant. Nesta was always welcoming and in Oxford we had our own bedroom and could leave clothes in her cupboards. Aunt Madge was still in full control in Aboyne, but was not good with children. We took Katie there only once, when she was two-and-a-half. Madge took against her and always referred to her as ‘the child’. This 1969 visit to Britain was a disaster all round. On the journey from Aboyne on the Aberdeen–Kings Cross sleeper Katie yelled all the way south and, while shaving in the swaying compartment before arriving at Kings Cross, I saw myself in the mirror covered with red blotches, which, on further examination, had broken out all over my body. It was a severe attack of psoriasis, brought on by Katie’s endless shrieks. The next disaster struck poor Katie, not me. At Sutton staying with the Hoggs, the plastic potty she was sitting on broke and cut her in the crutch. Ruth, of course, had instant access to a National Health GP, and in a trice Michael was whisking us to the nearby St Helier hospital. This was my first experience of the NHS and one could not fault it for promptness and efficiency. All was well, however: a whiff of ether, some stitches, and voilà! The second time we took Katie to England was a year later, in 1970. We spent a night with Aunt Lucy at 27 Queen’s Gate and left Katie in her charge while we went to the theatre. Aunt Lucy was over 80 and rather unnerved at the responsibility. When we 231

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 returned at about midnight we found the flat in total darkness and Lucy in an upright chair, still dressed, in the hall outside Katie’s bedroom. She was poised, in trepidation, to act if the child woke. France and the Frasers Then we left for our first visit to France, with the Frasers – a fortnight – and left Katie with Ruth Hogg at Sutton while we were away. Ian Fraser had come into our lives when he was still in the colonial service and chief secretary in the colonial government of the Aden protectorate. He had come to Kenya on holiday in the late 1960s, and was spending it with a mutual friend – Maureen Thompson. Later Ian was posted to the Bahamas in a similar post, where he met and married Margaret, the handsomely financially endowed widow of a Frenchman. Margaret and Ian, who had retired from government service, formed the habit of visiting Kenya for several months at a time and staying in a guest house rented from our friends, David and Joan Coward, in an inner suburb of Nairobi. Much of an age – though Joan and Barbara are a lot younger – we all became firm friends, and as the common interest was wildlife we went on a number of safaris together. Ian and Margaret Fraser were in and out of our lives for the better part of ten years. They were immensely generous, seemingly intent on disposing of an impressive wealth in the interests of not only themselves but also their friends. Although they were only intermittently in Kenya, we kept in touch with them on their travels, which took them frequently to America and also to Cyprus and France. The place they settled for longest was the Château de Maillebois, southwest of Paris between Dreux and Chartres, where we paid them four extended visits between 1970 and 1978. When Margaret’s French husband died, his family invited her to establish a home in the family castle, the Château de Maillebois, and she took over a floor in one of the wings of this historic place. On our last trip to the Frasers in 1978, we took the train from Paris to Dreux, and were met by Ian in his curiously elderly Peugeot 204. ‘Have you heard?’ he said, ‘Jomo Kenyatta died yesterday. It was on the radio.’ We had thought he had plenty of time left. Had there been any funny business? Who would succeed? Surely it would not be that nonentity Moi from that obscure little Kalenjin tribe? Little did we guess that Charles Njonjo was 232

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 making sure that ‘the nonentity’, the vice president Daniel arap Moi, would take over and be there for more than 20 years. For some reason or other Ian and Margaret abandoned Maillebois and France and went to live in the Bahamas. Later they became disenchanted with the Caribbean and came to rest in Madeira, where they must now have been living for over ten years. We were to have visited them there in 1994, but the collapse of Barbara’s knee in the Naval & Military Club in June made it necessary to cancel the trip. We have met occasionally in Britain in the intervening years, but have seen very little of these generous friends in the last 20 years. Midlife madness All right, I was 60, but madness it certainly was. I decided I must work towards a bolthole in Britain. The trouble was that Barbara and I had absolutely no money outside Kenya and exchange control made it impossible to transfer funds from Kenya. The elements of what mathematicians call an elegant solution were becoming manifest. Ib Hansen was offering me work in Lesotho, paid in offshore currency in Britain. I could stash this away and support my family in Kenya by selling our house in Warai Road North and renting instead. After a bit there might be enough to buy a property in Britain with the help of a mortgage. It is difficult to recall my state of mind or what caused this ‘siege’ mentality. I felt confident about Kenya’s future, for it was 14 years since independence and Kenyatta was still in power. The odd political murder (Tom Mboya) and tribal clashes hardly called for a new hard look at one’s family security. Advancing age and the possibility of retirement before completing Katie’s education was a possibility as was a desire to retire in England. Nevertheless, madness it was, and we sold Warai Road North to John Lucas – as it turned out, not very well because house prices rocketed only nine months after we had completed the deal, and have continued to rise ever since. Instead of renting, we arranged with our friend, Richard Gethin, to build a cheap house on his property. We would live in it rent free for six years and then either vacate or continue to live there paying him a rent. This part of the scheme went swimmingly. We built him a nice, three bedroom, two bathroom house with servants’ quarters and a garage, fully serviced and 233

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 fenced, for £15,000. We actually lived in it for eight years at the equivalent of £170 a month, including interest. It was a very happy time; the house was comfortable and the garden and birds a dream. The sale, in 1972, of the Warai Road North house netted us £22,000. By the time, in 1982, my work for R&P in southern Africa had petered out, we had a fully paid up flat in Bath, about £25,000 invested offshore and had lived very comfortably (and begun educating Katie in England) for nearly five years. Katie’s education, I must confess, was being subsidized by an unsolicited, handsome and immensely generous contribution from my ex-wife Buff, the amount of which, at her request, must remain a secret. It was an incredible action and showed her up in a truly kindly light nearly 20 years after we had parted company. We are everlastingly grateful. Needless to say, by 1982 there was no question of retirement, or of ratting from Kenya. The quality of life During the 1970s we lived the sort of life that, while commonplace among our contemporaries in East Africa, was beyond the dreams of those in Britain. We had servants, a gardener, a cook and a maidservant-cum-ayah. We entertained people to dinner. We gave and went out to bridge parties. We organized wine tastings. We often went to the theatre and to classical concerts. When it came to local leave, we went with friends on many notable camping safaris and often rented houses at the coast where I became besotted with goggling in the coral reefs and, as Katie got older, she began to enjoy it too. Barbara preferred to get herself a tan. At home I built Katie a tree-house (with a little help from our gardener) and it gave enormous pleasure to her friends as well as to her. The weather was endlessly benign. The sun shone. At night the sinister racket of tree hyraxes would wake us; by day the birds (including turacos, flycatchers and bee-eaters) shared our garden, as did our succession of dachshund dogs, a black Labrador and, for a time, our Siamese cat. When we sold up Warai Road North we virtually cast all of this into the bin, but not quite. Our handsome suburban life was enlived by proximity to the ‘genuine bedouin’ Africa. It was not, as one might imagine, at all like living in Surrey. We sometimes heard leopards at night in the garden. The Banda, Katie’s school, was only just over the fence 234

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 from the Nairobi National Park and she and a friend once met lions while riding to school. The Ngong Hills, no more than 18 miles away, were the haunt of herds of buffalo. They came quite close once, when we were up there with the entomologist Charlie Dewhurst. Charlie was more interested in dung beetles and so was five year-old Katie, who was entranced to watch these energetic creatures rolling balls of dung uphill in the dry, coarse grass. Our camping safaris in the bundu gave us an abiding love of the sounds of Africa, particularly the contented rumble of an elephant’s stomach, the hyena’s chuckle and, near water, in the dawn, the avian chorus. Earth tremors and quakes The Rift Valley is reputed to be an earthquake zone. A fault is supposed to run right through what used to be Elizabeth BarclayMathews’s country hotel, the Njogu Inn, on the road to Naivasha, just north of Nairobi. Nonetheless, that building, now a religious establishment, still stands; and while the Nairobi area is supposed to be subject to almost continuous, very mild, tremors, and architects and engineers have for many years been designing buildings to resist earthquakes, no serious geological disturbance has occurred within living memory, and geothermal activity in Hell’s Gate (near Lake Naivasha) and at Lake Bogoria (north of Nakuru) is the limit of what, to some people, might be worries. We are probably living in a fool’s paradise, and some catastrophe is waiting to occur in the near future. I remember two mild tremors. One, which did not do much more than rattle the pictures, occurred some time in the early 1960s. The other was quite severe, about 5.4 on the Richter scale. It was in 1975 and Barbara and I were at a pianoforte concert in the Kenya National Theatre, given by a fairly well-known pianist from Britain. In the middle of a vigorous piece the tempestuous music was suddenly overtaken by a deep subterranean rumble, which sounded like a London underground train passing under the theatre floor with a great crescendo. The whole building started to sway and shake. The pianist played on until a huge blanket of filthy dirty cobweb fell from the roof and enveloped him and the piano. There he was, in full evening dress, struggling to extricate himself from the cobweb’s sooty embrace. The theatre staff were 235

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 slow to lower the safely curtain and no one appeared on stage to counsel calm. Luckily, it was a warm night and the emergency doors on the left of the stalls were already open. The rumble and shaking must have gone on for little more than 30 seconds, but at once the audience in the stalls began to thin. No panic. Perhaps music lovers are staunch, or perhaps this lot were anaesthetized by the beautiful music. Anyway, many remained rooted to their seats, including us. Not because we were brave – the open door beckoned. The trouble was that next to Barbara sat the architect, Heinie Lustman, alone and unaccompanied by his handsome wife and he remained obstinately seated. ‘Don’t you dare climb over Heinie,’ I hissed, ‘we are definitely braver than him.’ Eventually, after the shock had abated, he rose ponderously to his feet (he was a big man) and we thankfully followed him out of the theatre. We returned to the theatre just in time to see the pianist, miraculously once more immaculate, but now in an ordinary suit, standing before his piano – all evidence of the cobweb removed – and saying ‘I shall now proceed with the Schumann piece from the 105th bar.’ There was no further disturbance. The concert proceeded to its conclusion before a slightly depleted audience and to tumultuous applause. The Old Wellingtonian Society of East Africa I do not know what possessed me to get involved. It must have been because of my congenital inability to say no. After all, after my first ever return visit to an open day at Wellington in about 1945 when the only man I recognized was David Ascoli, whom I hardly knew and never liked, had I not sworn never to do it again and to relegate the old school to a forgotten past once and for all? And here I am now, 54 years later, still supporting the flagging Old Wellingtonian Society of East Africa (with Barbara’s enthusiastic help) after nearly half a century of trying to get other reluctant Old Wellingtonians to come to meetings and dinners and organizing schoolboy visits, with prizes of maasai spears for essays on ‘The Kenya Experience’. Indeed, the love affair with the old school, if it exists at all, would be singularly one-sided even if you were one of those old codgers who lived in Crowthorne and used to turn up in blazers to watch cricket and go to services in chapel. 236

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 I wonder if their successors still do. The old school, let’s face it, does not give a fig for its alumni. Anyway, it was not very long after my return to Kenya, in 1955, that I found myself drinking Tuskers with a number of fellow Old Wellingtonians in the bar of a hotel on Loresho Ridge, which has long since disappeared. And there I was, hooked! Actually, it was not all that bad. The dinners, which to start with were men only, were often very enjoyable. They took place annually, usually at Muthaiga Country Club. There were sometimes as many as 20 Old Wellingtonians, and to start with never fewer than 14. The funds came from the profit from the dinners. A telegram was sent to the master recording the event and the names of those present. The chairman made a funny speech and called for ideas to identify the local society with the school (we had non-Kenya members and, for a time, one of the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia’s sons). Apart from the visits, essays and prize spears, I recall proposals for planting trees in the avenue at Wellington and other fanciful schemes that were never implemented. There were some quite distinguished members in the 1950s and 1960s. The dinners were always convivial and occasionally hilarious. Once, the dinner coincided with a wedding reception in the club. Liza Burrell was at the latter, while Peter was with us at the dinner. Liza, high on champagne, organized a raiding party and we found ourselves warding off an attack by a number of inebriated wedding guests. It was all very good tempered, but proved too much for poor old Maurice Churcher, then in his mid-eighties, and it was his last attendance at an Old Wellingtonian dinner. Shortly after that episode, with members dying and our members dwindling, we brought in wives, and kept the dinner numbers at about 20. In the 1980s, Peter Vernon-Evans – who, throughout, was the secretary of Muthaiga Club – was chairman. I was honorary secretary and Barbara did all the work of typing and organizing the dinners. They continued to be enjoyable. Recently Peter and I handed over to John Weller and James Hutchings, who continue to keep the society successfully afloat. The Oxford & Cambridge Society of Kenya Although I have enjoyed the company of fellow Old Wellingtonians for the last 44 years, the privilege of being a member of 237

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 the Oxbridge Society, and of being master for one year and on the committee for a number of years, has been much more satisfying. It is much bigger – 50 to 70 members sit down to the annual dinner (again at Muthaiga Club). The membership is cosmopolitan and there are a number of indigenous members. The scholarship fund, which seems to grow and grow, enables local boys and girls of scholastic excellence to attend one or other university, which is a worthwhile contribution to Kenya and more than justifies the society’s existence. Apart from dinners and the May Ball, there are a number of functions to do with sporting activities that add to the gaiety of life. The Old Wellingtonian society is hardly at all concerned with this country; it regards its fellow members a lot and the school rather less. The Oxford & Cambridge Society is greatly concerned with Kenya. Moreover, Cambridge University concerns itself a lot with its alumni. There is a magazine Cam and a plastic card. When I turned 80 the Master of Corpus Christi College sent me a congratulatory message. I often attend a college feast while in England, and am seated at the top table. Having spent a mere two, pretty undistinguished, years at Corpus more than 60 years ago I value these attentions more than I can say. Work and play in Uganda lodges and hotels (before Idi Amin) Some of my most enjoyable professional experiences arose from my involvement, in the 1960s, with the architectural partnership of Inglis, McGuinness & Wilkinson in establishing Uganda park lodges. Paraa and Chobi were located in the Murchison Park and Mweya in Queen Elizabeth Park. Roger Freeman was the superintending architect for Chobi and at Mweya it was Chris Archer. The contractor at Chobi and Paraa was the splendidly flamboyant Italian, Bardana. Paraa Lodge, at the bottom of the falls, was already there when I first became involved. Its accommodation was being extended and it needed improved water supply and waste treatment. I had my favourite engineer pupil with me, the Greek lad Michael Zibarras. We used to do what we called ‘instant survey’ together. He moved and read the theodolite or level, and I held the staff and booked the readings. It had to be instant because Paraa was the devil of a place for buffaloes. Uganda buffalo, luckily, are comparatively placid compared with those in 238

FAMILY LIFE AND DF&A, 1965–76 Kenya. They were supposed to be infested with TB, but still not animals to be trifled with. Chobi Lodge was a new construction above the falls, half way between them and the bridge over the Nile that carries the road from Kampala to Gulu. Roger Freeman had designed an attractive lodge, with a large veranda overlooking the Nile to offer the sounds of grunting hippos at night and a good view of all sorts of wild life in the day. Freeman was a good architect, but terribly lazy about making supervisory visits to the job. Bardana had built a temporary house for himself and guests a little lower downstream, on an even more spectacular site. At Mweya Lodge in Queen Elizabeth Park Chris Archer was doing the most exciting work of all. Chris, who was born and brought up in East Africa, was the ultimate wild life buff with a passion for archery, or Chris’s version of it. You did not shoot at targets, but at wild life. I saw him shoot and land fish (tilapia) in Lake Albert with a cross-bow, a sophisticated version of what the English archers used at the medieval battle against the French at Agincourt. Just before lunch on a very still, sunny day, we walked down to the little slipway below Mweya Lodge, where a rowing boat was moored. There was not even a ripple on the water. The fish, Chris said, were basking just below the surface of the water. He fired the cross-bow and reeled in a sizeable tilapia with the first shot. I was amazed. I had not even been able to see the fish. I got into the boat and got my face just over the gunwale, close to the surface. I could just see several motionless, basking shapes. Chris was standing on the jetty, his eyes about 12 feet above mine. He had ten goes and landed eight fish.

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15 Nomad roaming from place to place, 1976–81

I

was that nomad and the places to which I roamed, always from Nairobi, were Lesotho, Uganda, Antigua, Swaziland, southern Sudan and the Nubar Mountains, Gabon and Mozambique. I was often in Johannesburg (in South Africa) and Southampton (in England) and briefly in Rome. The ‘pastures’ for which I was searching during my six years of nomadic life were dollars and I was away from home on average for nearly six months a year. Barbara visited me in Lesotho in 1976 and, with Katie, again in 1979, where we spent time in Johannesburg and Cape Town. On my own I visited the seaside town of Hermanus to stay with Mike and Pam StJohn in their rented house, in 1977, thus missing the total eclipse of the sun, which Barbara and Katie saw in Kenya. I was earning US$ 100 a working day on these travels, so was about $90,000 in credit, a lot of it, the equivalent of about £60,000, safely stashed away in Guernsey. Some of this went on a flat in Bath and a lot on Katie’s education in the Isle of Wight, Oxford and London. Although selling up the house in Karen was a considerable financial disaster, those six years enabled the family to come up smiling at the end of the 1980s, having lived on the £32,000 equivalent that the sale fetched, plus my earnings in Kenya, for the 12 years to 1987. We forged on from there into the future, with what was left of our savings invested in a cottage in Church Street, Bladon, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire.

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NOMAD ROAMING FROM PLACE TO PLACE, 1976–81 Freelance FitzGerald: work for R&P in southern Africa In Lesotho, on and off for six years, I was the engineer in charge of a team designing roads for R&P. My second in command to start with was Alan Cutler, but he was soon succeeded by David Upton when Cutler was posted to the Gulf. I was commuting between Nairobi and Maseru, Lesotho’s capital. Upton took up residence in an old colonial house with his wife and two daughters and became manager of R&P, Lesotho. There were two assistant engineers – Tony Hodge and Andrew Mansell. Tony was a bird of passage, but Andrew was still there in Lesotho when I left for good in 1981. On arrival on 14 January 1976 in Maseru, where Ib Hansen was waiting to greet me and ensconce me, I found we were to be accommodated, both for living quarters and office, in the airport hotel. It was modern and clean, but essentially a crappy one-star, ten-room place given over nightly to rave ups for the locals, and pounding to the thump, thump of pop music rehearsals during the day. It was unacceptable, so within ten days we were out of it and into an old rambling colonial house with two rondavel appendages to serve as an office and domestic quarters for David Upton and his family. To start with I was accommodated in the smaller but more homey of the two hotels in the centre of town, the Victoria, the other being the bigger, brasher Holiday Inn with its casino and array of one-armed bandits. While Ib briefed me on my duties, and introduced me to the clients, the chief engineer of the Ministry of Works and other officials, I was coming to terms with the astonishing (to me) new world that was southern Africa, or the bit of it encompassing the land-locked Kingdom of Lesotho – the Orange Free State and, looming 200 miles to the north, the Transvaal and Johannesburg. If you are looking for a stick with which to beat the Brits and the more insane manifestations of their colonialism, you need look no further than the British high commission territories in southern Africa: Swaziland, a small, land-locked tribal kingdom in a partly mountainous, picturesque enclave in northeast South Africa surrounded by Mozambique, the Transvaal and Natal; Botswana (formerly Bechuanaland), a huge sparsely-populated, sprawling, low-lying, hot desert republic rich in wildlife and precious minerals and embracing the Kalahari; and, most absurd of all, the Kingdom 241

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 of Lesotho (formerly Basutoland), which is again land-locked, mountainous and all of it more than 4000 feet above sea level. How these three territories came to be independent states administered until the late-1970s by a British high commissioner stationed in Pretoria, is a tale beyond the scope of this book. Botswana has perhaps always been economically viable because of its geographical size and comparative wealth, but it is not politically so. Though huge, it by no means comprises all the Tswana people, who mostly inhabit the former South African homeland of Baphutotswana, which like a human archipelago straggles southward through the Transvaal, its southernmost ‘islands’ almost reaching the borders of Lesotho. Swaziland and Lesotho are nonviable economically and politically – they are just bits of the map of Africa painted red on the whim of some colonial power broker. Lesotho Like a 300-mile long and 180-mile wide bristly sea slug Lesotho sprawls northeast to southwest across the northern border of the Transkei. The mountainous spine of the country is a spur of the Drakensberg Mountains, and they cradle the source of the mighty Orange River, which wanders westwards through the Orange Free State and eventually reaches the Atlantic Ocean on the southern border of Namibia. In 1976 there was only one road of note, which ran along the Caledon River boundary from Maseru through Butha Buthe, eastwards to Joel’s Drift. Lesotho’s only high quality agricultural export is mohair, a product of a species of goat from which exquisite blankets and garments are manufactured. But Lesotho’s main export is manpower with about 25 per cent of the male population destined as labour in the gold, diamond and platinum mines of the Orange Free State and Transvaal. There were some not very valuable diamond deposits in the mountains and to exploit these de Beers had paid for a good, metalled approach road about 80 miles long that snaked up from Joel’s Drift through the Moteng pass past Ox Bow. Water was copious and later became a nice big earner for Lesotho when, by means of offshore credits from Brussels, the Lesotho Highland Water Project was developed to supply and sell surplus water to the Transvaal. A by-product of the project was hydroelectric power, which made Lesotho self-supporting, with 242

NOMAD ROAMING FROM PLACE TO PLACE, 1976–81 exports into the Free State. When I first arrived in 1976 all power was imported from over the border, from coal fuelled stations. The mountains are bare of vegetation, the lowland areas treeless, except in the towns. Most of the two million or so population is concentrated in the lowlands and in and around Maseru, the capital. At first the town boasted one or two small Portuguese run general stores, but later a supermarket was established. The main eating out place was ‘Fat Alice’, where the owner dispensed quite good food. There was a bad golf course and the popular multiracial Maseru Club, the place for a good cheap lunch, which most of the white population joined. R&P’s office was just over the road. The cold (very cold) winter weather lasts from mid-June to early September. There are short, sharp heavy snowfalls but for the most part the sky is clear, day and night, with the result that there are nightly frosts and the temperature falls to –7°C and by 11.00 a.m. can be up to 20°C. In winter, which is dry, the grass turns not brown but white. For the most part the houses were not centrally heated, but people used portable electric heaters, which they took with them from room to room. In the late 1970s people had not been alerted to the health hazards associated with asbestos cement, and thin sheets of this material, with electric filaments embedded, was the most popular portable heater. The local populace lived in well-built thatched rondavels and, in the still of the early morning the town would be blanketed by a smoke haze from hundreds of coal fires. In those days there were no shanty towns, such as now ring cities like Nairobi. The people kept themselves and their surroundings spotlessly clean. It was also pleasant to see clean, shining public transport in the streets. When we in R&P began to penetrate the mountains with a view to building roads, we found only precipitous mountain tracks and small isolated rondavel villages, sometimes with religious, usually Roman Catholic, settlements. We saw very few vehicles. Colourfully blanketed men in distinctive Chinese-style hats would gallop past on ponies as you edged your way gingerly down the track and wait for you to arrive at the inevitable hairpin bend before they galloped on. The lack of wheeled traffic posed ludicrous problems when we were set the task, at the outset, of determining what standard of road to build by doing economic feasibility studies, which according to the book should include, among other things, 243

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 initiating vehicle traffic counts. Often the only traffic was our own, travelling to and from the traffic count points. The first road we were commissioned to design was easily the hairiest for alignment. It started at Roma (where the University of Swaziland and Lesotho was established) and crossed a substantial river, the Makhaleng, at Ramabanta, before scaling the heights to a place called Semonkong, where there was a Roman Catholic monastery. The track must have been no more than 50 kilometres long. There were several alternative choices of alignment between Ramabanta and Semonkong, all over existing, terrifyingly precipitous tracks. Alan Cutler would drive the pick-up truck on a roughhewn rock surface, usually shiny wet with recent rain, with me in the passenger seat trying not to put pressure on the truck door due to the tilt of the three-metre wide track outwards and downwards towards a 1000-foot precipice. Then one would encounter, on a spur, a truly horrific hairpin bend with no chance of negotiating it without backing at least once, which inevitably meant that, before you were able to start the next leg, your pick-up rear end would be hanging over the 1000-foot drop with the back wheels right on the edge. I was usually out of the vehicle by then and pretending to direct operations. When one reached Semonkong and was drinking coffee with the Italian abbot, you would be imploring him to show you on the map, or even perhaps by coming with you, a less frightening alternative route down. When the preferred route had been selected, we would shift our attention to Johannesburg and to the services of the Air Operating Company (AOC) for an aerial survey. It would send an aeroplane from Johannesburg to pick up the marks its surveyor, René Engler, had laid on the ground and located on the map, and do the air photography. It sometimes took a while for the weather to become suitable, though the photography was very quick. The mapping, done in the AOC’s offices, soon followed and then it was my turn to plot the alignment, which I would do at a desk in the AOC office and which would keep me in Johannesburg for some days. Although the AOC’s offices were integrated, the apartheid rules were irksome in public. If Mr Murumo, the engineer-in-chief in Lesotho, came to Johannesburg on professional business there were only one or two hotels in which he could stay, the most expensive, the Carlton, being one. If one wanted to take him out 244

NOMAD ROAMING FROM PLACE TO PLACE, 1976–81 to a cinema or restaurant, one was again restricted, in the latter case to the pricey Carlton. Even in Lesotho, where there was no segregation, the ugly face of apartheid still obtruded. As a white you had to be very careful not to do anything that a black with a chip on his shoulder could construe as a racial slight. When I arrived in Maseru, the country was about to achieve its independence from Britain and was enduring the fag end of colonialism. Brits still ran the civil service and what a crummy lot they were – time servers on the verge of retirement without a vestige of interest in the country or its inhabitants. Lesotho was certainly at the bottom of the list for money for development. Nothing had been done to improve the roads or encourage export, whether agricultural or industrial, though good carpets using Lesotho wool were being manufactured over the border. The Lesotho royal family headed by King Moishoeshoe did a little to support such industries, but the king was always away pursuing his academic advancement in Oxford. The country was under the iron, but on the whole benevolent, control of Chief Jonathan who paid scant attention to the views of his unelected advisors, did puji to the high commission’s representative and kept order with the aid of a small posse of mounted police. If there were riots Chief Jonathan would summon help from over the border; if there were a serious enough fire, the Ladybrand fire brigade would be called. All electric power came from South Africa. Lesotho belonged to the southern African customs union. This was a one-sided arrangement because Lesotho had virtually no exports and South African goods entered the country tax free. Republic of South Africa/Lesotho White South Africa was strictly Calvanistic in its moral tone, at least in public, and films were heavily censored. The live musical shows of the time were Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar. There was, however, good classical concert music, opera and ballet. There was excellent horse racing and good polo. Travelling from Nairobi to Lesotho by air could be a problem. The Kenya government at one time banned both Kenyans and Kenya residents from travelling to or from South Africa and one’s passport had to be void of all evidence that you had been there. To 245

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 start with, a compliant South African immigration service provided the solution by stamping pieces of paper instead of the passport on entering or leaving Jan Smuts airport. Then they became bloody-minded and stopped this practice, so the British high commission started issuing temporary passports, valid for one year and additional to your real one, which you used just for being stamped at Jan Smuts. The system was also used for Britons travelling through Arab countries to Israel. In 1978, after a lull in my work in Lesotho in 1977, I moved into the living quarter Ib Hansen had built, originally for himself, in the new main R&P office. It was quite luxurious, with a big bed/sit, kitchenette and usual offices. It was on the same plot as the old house in which David Upton still lived with his wife and two little girls, but at least 100 metres away the other end of the garden. Only a dusty road separated the office from the Maseru Club. I lived there for 23 weeks in 1978, including 13 between May and August, hard at work on the design of the Mafeking– Mohales Hoek and Mokhotlong–Taung-Sani Top roads. There was little to do of an evening, other than listen to the radio, which was quite good – BBC from the local relay station and excellent music on Radio South Africa. There was no television in South Africa until 1980, the apartheid regime rightly believing it would only stir up trouble, and when I went to theatre or cinema it was always in Johannesburg where, apart from one or two day visits, I spent two weeks on centre-line plotting in the AOC office. The Reverend Dick Begbie The Revd Dick Begbie visited me in Maseru. Dick had been a contemporary of mine when we were officers together in the Royal Engineers. As I mentioned earlier, in the 1940s he was the mess secretary in the RE mess in Nanyuki, Kenya, unmarried and the life and soul of very frequent parties. Here he was now, in 1978, a man of the cloth, drinking coffee with me in Maseru and announcing that he was chaplain to the South African forces serving in South West Africa (later Namibia) who were fighting for the Angolan rebel, Jonas Savimbi, against the legitimate Cuban-backed Angolan government. Was not Dick Begbie a man who, however misguided and however much he mocked God, had made up his mind and acted upon it by, at little 246

NOMAD ROAMING FROM PLACE TO PLACE, 1976–81 or no reward, risking his life on a battlefield to bring Christian comfort and succour to conscripted soldiers on active service? And is this not admirable in comparison with the attitude of the many whites of British stock who profited hugely and enjoyed an enhanced quality of life in South Africa and, while aware of the wickedness and injustice of apartheid, did nothing about it until, when the going got rough, they packed their bags and ran for home? To be fair, because of the stringent foreign exchange laws, they were unable to take their profits with them. Despite the impending change in my own life-style from 1975 to 1981, when I became that nomad, it must be stressed that Karen was still home and my office remained in Nairobi, now in rooms rented from the advocate, Keith Osmond, in Argwings Kodhek Road. We still lived at Warai Road North and Katie was in her third year at the Banda School in Langata, and doing very well. DF&A was still in existence, but Peter Burrell was ailing and not contributing much to the practice. At home we employed an ayah, a cook, a house servant and a gardener. We entertained lavishly and during 1969–78 had numerous holidays – besides ten weeks in Europe in June, July and August we also took a weekend in Meru Park and three weeks at the coast in Diani. I do not think we ever had a more profligate year. Upheaval: from Warai Road North to Ol Olua Ridge, 1977–79 The move took place between July 1978 and September 1979. Although we had exchanged contracts with John Lucas to sell the house in October 1977, we stayed on until the following July when the money was finally paid. The idea of building a house on Richard Gethin’s land first crystallized in early 1977, and that July we started looking at the Timsales show timber house, a one-metre modular design with standard timber sandwich panels. Richard Gethin showed us the chosen site for his manager’s cottage in August. It was hard up against his boundary, which was a possible disadvantage because the nextdoor occupant kept horses (flies) and noisy Kalenjin syces, but in other respects it was blissful. It had a dell, a disused quarry once used by a previous owner in which Barbara developed a lovely rock garden. Bee-eaters nested in holes in the rock face. There were turacos and fly-catchers and lots of other spectacular 247

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 birds. We left our tree hyraxes behind at Warai Road North, but had giraffe instead. In July there was, of an evening, a sparkling of glow-worms in the dell trees, for we were in the indigenous Ol Olua forest. Pat Gethin, just over the vlei, was our statutory water undertaker. He spent most of his time and energy doing his duty for us and a number of other residents. The power was fairly reliable in those days, as was the telephone. There was a slight problem at the bottom of the plot in that an unpaved road at times brought clouds of dust. However, we learned to live with the dust and the flies and the rowdy syces. We were blissfully happy there once we had moved in. It was not so good for poor Barbara and Katie during the move though because they were living, from July 1979, in extremely cramped conditions in Terry Clarkson’s cottage annex, while I was, most of the time, living it up in Lesotho, Antigua and sundry other exotic places. Also, Barbara was supervising the construction work, which lasted from August 1978 to September 1979. I did the basic design ‘on the back of an envelope’ and the Timsales designs office developed proper working drawings. Not being an architect, I made one or two bad mistakes. There was no sound insulation; the three bedrooms were separated by built-in clothes cupboards and I thought the clothes would muffle sound but they did not; if you entered the front door and looked left you stared straight at the lavatory if the door was open; the kitchen roof leaked badly over people sitting in the dining space; and the servants’ quarters were too close to the main house. But there was a good sheltered veranda where you could have breakfast in comfort, a cosy sitting room with a wood fire and the best kitchen we have ever enjoyed in all six houses we have lived in. After six years Richard, who was an invalid and could no longer live at 6000 feet above sea level, sold up late in 1985 and we had to move. By then we were ready to leave; Kevin and Carla Craig-McFeely’s murders in early 1985 had unsettled us, especially since the murderers’ escape route had been right through our garden. Kevin and Carla had been dear friends and neighbours. Kevin was an architect, an aesthete and an accomplished artist in pen and ink. He had been Nairobi city council’s town planner, but was now a partner in a leading firm of Nairobi architects. He was a classical music addict and had a fine collection of records and 248

NOMAD ROAMING FROM PLACE TO PLACE, 1976–81 cassettes. He was Carla’s second husband and she was quite a bit older. One night Kevin was awoken by the noise of breaking glass by the front door and went to investigate. Raiders shot him through the adjacent window. Carla heard the shots and hurried to the scene and was also shot. Both died instantly. The maid had pressed the alarm button in her quarter and the security guards came promptly, but in time only to save the property by chasing away the thieves before they gained entrance. One of the guards was also shot and killed. The raiders made their escape through our garden. Men were duly arrested, tried and hanged, though one was never quite sure that they were the real culprits. Barbara and I attended the memorial service in a Catholic church Kevin had designed. Kevin and Carla had no children, but many friends of all races. It was a very highly charged and affecting occasion. Venture into the Caribbean Early in 1979 Ib Hansen asked if I would like a short assignment in Antigua, which involved laying a centre-line for a short, eightkilometre access road in the northeast of the island with Alan McGougan as my assistant. The works department would provide me with survey and bush clearing teams. Although McGougan, whom I had already met, was not my idea of a sole running mate, I accepted with alacrity. Here was the chance for a paid excursion to the Caribbean, that holiday haunt of people like Noel Coward and the various 007s. It would be seasonally balmy, out of the hurricane season, and Ian Philip, my neighbour in Karen, had given me introductions to his friends and accountant colleagues living in plushy seaside villas close to the capital, St John’s. Antigua is, for the most part, low-lying and featureless, a large limestone atoll, but its southeast extremity accommodates a granite outcrop enclosing Nelson’s Harbour, a spectacularly beautiful land-locked bay with many elegant Georgian buildings and always crowded with smart seagoing craft. The island must be less than 30 miles long and at its widest not more than five miles, yet the climate on its windward northeast coast is dry and bracing and markedly different from the damp, relaxing southwest side. When I flew in on the late evening of Sunday 18 February 1979 and could see the whole island from the air, it looked like a brightly lit, completely built-up area. In fact, there are a few open 249

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 spaces, many of them uncultivated scrubland, or derelict sugar plantations, and no forests. The winding roads are lined with small timber houses, each with a pretty little garden. Buildings are nearly all of timber construction, owing to the prevalence of the hurricanes that sweep across the Caribbean each year between June and October. They seldom hit any one particular island – in 1979 it had been about 20 years since the last one struck Antigua – but then there is always widespread devastation. Virtually nothing is exported. Vegetables are imported all across the USA from California. Tourism is the sole earner. There are often three or four tourist ships in St John’s harbour at any one time, and the tourists throng the little town buying trinkets. I found the people, with their oddly Welsh intonation of speech, very attractive and friendly. There were a number of tourist hotels and resorts round the coast, and coming from Kenya where such establishments abound, Alan McGougan and I spent one Sunday touring them for comparison with ours. We found them, with two exceptions, expensive and inferior. The food was boring and the beaches unattractive and dirty, the tidal range being only about one metre. Owing to the prevailing power failures most hotels had their own generators, but these were not sound-proofed, often on a lawn just outside bedrooms, and the noise from them was unbearable. Electricity failures were, of course, accompanied by water shortages, and this compounded the discomfort of daily life. Ib Hansen had rented us a three-bedroom bungalow on the outskirts of St John’s, and a Mrs Brown came in daily to cook and clean for us. She was a superb cook of delicious Creole food which, when there was a power cut, she produced on an earthenware charcoal stove on which she could boil and grill. The food was just as good as when cooked on an orthodox electric cooker. When Ib left I was alone with Alan, a fairly rough-cast Glaswegian with whom I had nothing in common. It lasted 48 nights and I was relieved when it was over. I expect Alan felt the same. The road we were surveying was estimated to cost three-quarters of a million US dollars, so it was not a huge job. The ODA was financing it and P. H. Hilton, the Barbados-based engineering adviser in the British development division in the Caribbean, visited us twice. How the British government was conned into financing this white elephant was a mystery. Its only obvious purpose had 250

NOMAD ROAMING FROM PLACE TO PLACE, 1976–81 been to provide access to the previous prime minister’s private residence and he had not only been voted out of power in a recent election but was also on bail facing charges of corruption. Eventually Alan and I returned to London, and, after a week completing the report on our work, I was back in Nairobi on 14 April. Was the road ever actually constructed? I do not know, but I very much doubt it. Yei, southern Sudan: October 1980 This was another Mike Elliott excursion, but this time I was alone. I flew into Juba from Nairobi on 16 October and was back home by the evening of the 19th. Mike had a small construction gang working at Yei, improving the water supply to the semi-permanent accommodation of an NGO. I was to inspect the work and report. Yei is about 60 miles west of Juba along a well-maintained gravel road. After a night in a rest house, Mike’s supervisor, Chris Lyon, met me at Juba and drove me there. I had met the members of the gang, talked to the NGO director, made my inspection and returned to Juba by late in the evening of the 17th. I was surprised at how lush the countryside was. I had expected it to be desert, like the rest of Sudan. Instead it was green, and there were groves of teak planted, I was told, by Germans many years before. It shared the climate of northern Uganda, which was temperate with a good rainfall. The border was only 25 miles away. Juba, with its disgustingly dirty airport, seemed to be populated by mutually antagonistic NGOs whose personnel were holed up in compounds or, in the case of the Americans, in the exclusive US Club complex with swimming pool. Not only were they unfriendly to each other, they kept strictly away from the local populace. Most of all, they were unfriendly to me and that included the UK ODA mission, which reluctantly provided me with a room for a one-night stay, rejected my offer of a report on the doings of R&P in Yei and cold-shouldered me throughout. Indeed, it was just as well that I only carried an overnight bag because I was refused a vehicle to take me the two miles to the airport and had to trudge my way there on foot in stifling heat to catch my flight. It was mysterious, this universal rock-bottom lack of morale on the part of the expatriate community. Unique in my experience, except in the army in mobile conditions, was to find the ODA 251

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 people, though living in a two-storey building, entirely without sanitary facilities. Everyone, male or female, had to march 300 yards out into the surrounding bush, armed with a shovel, and dig themselves a hole in the ground. It was as if they were all paralysed by fear, with their bags packed, poised for flight. It can be imagined how glad I was to find myself back in bed in Karen. Roads in Swaziland and a side trip to Rome It started at the beginning of March with Ib’s offer to take charge of the design and preparation of documents for two roads in Swaziland. It was thought that Barbara might accompany me and we could make a home there for a time. We did not know anything first hand about the place, but Ib approved a flying visit to Mbabane, and a quick look at one of the two roads (the Mkondo River–Mahanga one) on the way home to Kenya on the 21st. R&P had an office in Mbabane, which Mike Ross ran. Because the prime minister of Tunisia was paying an official visit to Lesotho, the travel arrangements went completely haywire. I missed the connection to Manzini (Swaziland) and was forced to spend an unscheduled night incarcerated at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg. The following day I booked into the Swazi Inn, and Mike Ross briefed me prior to driving along the road the next day. It was my first visit to Swaziland. How different it was from Lesotho. It was hilly and forested, but not mountainous with a low-lying sugar growing area in the central plain. The south and west were uninhabited scrubland, but green and well watered by the Mkondo, a substantial perennial river. At first sight it looked very attractive and the Swazi people were reputed to be friendly. However, the big Lesotho job – the pre-feasibility report on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) – began to intervene, and it was not until the following September, when I was on holiday in England, that Ib summoned me to Southampton to rebrief me. I was to visit Rome and see a Mr Corrado of Comtec, an Italian consulting engineering firm that was anxious to pull out of Swaziland, and discuss taking over its work there, which was the design of the Tshaneni–Mlaula road in the eastern, sugargrowing area. We would visit Swaziland together in October and (bringing in Mike Ross) finalize arrangements. Rome in September is at its very best – cool, with a magical haze 252

NOMAD ROAMING FROM PLACE TO PLACE, 1976–81 cloaking the historic buildings in mystery. The Corrados put me up for five nights in a spare room and gave me continental breakfasts. Otherwise, we ate in pavement cafés while working in the centre of the city and returned late to the Corrados’ palatial villa on a hill in a walled enclave you entered and left by car-operated security gates. The view from the veranda was of the whole of the city and its twinkling lights in the gloaming. On my last evening the Corrados invited guests to a fabulous supper party to meet me. I wangled some spare time and spent it exploring the Roman ruins and shopping in the Via Veneto. Travel was easy and incredibly cheap on the public bus transport. Leaving Rome by air was a nightmare. I had been warned of a strike at the airport, so got there with a good two extra hours to spare. The departure terminal was in total darkness except for one spot-lit desk manned by a single stewardess, apparently with no English. She was ticketing for all the departing aircraft. The queue snaked round the building and the wait seemed interminable. I reached my turn and did my best, in broken Italian, to reply to questions. The stewardess finished my ticketing then addressed me in perfect English: ‘You have five minutes to board your plane. You had best run!’ I had no hold luggage – only what I was carrying. Just as well. A couple of weeks later I was back in Mbabane with Ib and picking up Corrado’s threads in Swaziland. Corrado joined us. Ib had kept it from me until now that Comtec was in trouble with the Swazi Public Works Department and, in taking over its road, we must avoid getting involved in Comtec’s problems. Ib left after a day; I stayed a week, inspecting the road and writing a report. I was working against time. The plane was to leave Manzini at 1.00 p.m. I needed the report typed and did not know the Swazi typist in the bureau, so resolved to stick around in her office to be available to interpret my writing, which is universally condemned as execrable. The Swazi did not ask a single question and produced an immaculate typescript. I told her she would make a fortune in Nairobi. She said she was happy in Mbabane. Mozambique: Maputo’s waste disposal problem In October 1981 Ib Hansen arranged for me to join a team organized by a Dutch firm of consulting engineers, Grabowsky & 253

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 Poort, to make a preliminary report on how to improve Maputo’s waste disposal system. It was said that untreated sewage was being discharged into the sea at resort beaches near the city, causing pollution and spoiling a local amenity and tourist attraction. My job was to help this Dutch firm write its report in intelligible English, despite the lingua franca of Mozambique being Portuguese; apparently it was not important that none of the party spoke Portuguese. With the northern and central parts of Mozambique at that time riven by a bloody civil war (only the south was peaceful) it was judged wise to conduct the operation from Mbabane in Swaziland. Mbabane is only 70 miles from Maputo and it could provide all the facilities, including hire vehicles, a good typing agency and comfortable hotels with conference room facilities. I travelled separately, via Johannesburg. It was October and jacaranda time in Nairobi. Both Johannesburg and Mbabane were also awash with the blossom, but when we got to Maputo, the jacaranda show there beat all for exuberant beauty. Our problems, such as they were, started at the frontier where the authorities were suspicious of the purpose of our visit, but everything went smoothly once Mrs de Mello, a beautiful young English-speaking black woman of unusual competence, came and guided us through the obstacle-course of immigration. She travelled with us to Maputo and saw us into our spartan secondclass, albeit spotlessly clean, accommodation. Our guide then left us to the tender mercies of the Dutch embassy, where I discovered something I had suspected for a long time, namely that embassies, other than British, take it for granted that they are there to look after their expatriates, to treat them with friendliness and kindness and to give them all the assistance possible to help them pursue the object of their visit. In Maputo, the Dutch embassy welcomed us, including me, provided us with a room in which to work, secretarial assistance and advice on local expectations. When we complained about our hotel breakfast, one of the secretaries invited us to have breakfast with her at the Grand, so the five of us trooped across to the Grand at about 8.00 a.m., mentioned the secretary’s name and ate our fill in sumptuous Edwardian style. The Grand, a relic of the original Lourenço Marques, was adorned with gold leaf, had high ceilings and one of those slow, open-work decorated cast-iron lifts operated by a uniformed flunky. At first, the dining 254

NOMAD ROAMING FROM PLACE TO PLACE, 1976–81 room staff raised their eyebrows at the number of friends the young lady had suddenly acquired, but soon got used to us and scorned any suggestion that we might pay for the food (the embassy picked up the bill). We went round the city taking photographs. The city was immaculately clean and the British manager of Barclay’s Bank said there was comprehensive collection of garbage daily throughout the city including Sundays. The problem of waste disposal boiled down to the need for a treatment works and some upgrading of the sewerage system. We were assured that the crabs, prawns and langoustes were caught off islands some way from the city beaches and the seafood restaurants, which had been famous even back in Portuguese colonial times, were excellent. Mrs de Mello saw us safely back to Swaziland and accompanied us again on a second short visit. We asked her what she would like as a token of our appreciation and she chose underwear and shoes. Back in Nairobi, on 26 October, I attended Grabowsky & Poort’s office and drafted their report. My aim was to land the treatment waste project, but the job went to others. The preparatory economic feasibility study of the LHWP In terms of size, involvement in this project, estimated in 1981 at US$ 1.3 billion, was the zenith of my civil engineering career. It concerned no less than turning round most of the flow of the infant Orange River in the Lesotho Maluti Mountains, and its discharge, not into the Orange Free State but through a tunnel under the Caledon River into the Transvaal. My job was to write the pre-feasibility study. It occupied nearly all my working time from January to August 1981. The time of construction was to be eight years and it consisted of 67 kilometres of tunnel, three concrete dams, pumping stations (but mostly the flow was by gravity) and a hydroelectric power station to supply the whole of Lesotho and, of course, ancillary approach roads. The European Development Fund financed the study and South Africa was to pay Lesotho, annually, a sum of money in US dollars that, net of repayment and running costs, would be as large as all the rest of Lesotho’s foreign earnings put together, including the earnings of Basuto mineworkers in South Africa. It was fascinating work and it took me to conferences in the UK, 255

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 to the European Commission headquarters in Brussels and to Pretoria for discussions with the South African apartheid government. The Pretoria visits were an eye-opener. It is necessary to appreciate the extraordinary prevailing circumstances. This pariah government was to benefit by the provision, in the right place, of all this water, which was, at present, running to waste through the Karroo and into the Atlantic Ocean. The rest of the world only supported the project because of its immense benefit to Lesotho. The money for finance was to be dispensed by the EEC for the benefit of the African, Caribbean and Pacific states, from which South Africa was barred by economic sanctions, and this included a ban on the use of all South African materials. One consequent anomaly was cement, required in great quantities and available from just over the border. However, this could not be permitted. The key issue for Pretoria was control of the water at the point of its exit from Lesotho, near Joel’s Drift. This must, Pretoria insisted, be exercised by South Africa. Once the South African agricultural economy came to depend heavily on this water, it would become a defence issue, even a matter of national survival, to ensure that it could not come under the control of a foreign power – perhaps not necessarily Lesotho. This issue occupied a lot of our time and by the time I left had not been resolved. Quite apart from this, the South African government was suspicious of our motives as engineers, quite apart from those of the Lesotho government and the EEC, so was extremely difficult to deal with and obstructive at every turn. My report had to satisfy Mr Murumo, the engineer-in-chief of the Lesotho Ministry of Public Works. This was no problem, for by then we had been working as colleagues for about five years. European Development Fund officials, in Maseru and Brussels, were altogether another matter and the greatest cross I had to bear was the Cross of Saint Patrick in the shape of a Dublin Irishman named Hegarty. Hegarty was, quite rightly, interested in my engineering proposals and the costing of the project; however, he arrogated to himself the responsibility of making sure I expressed myself in his idea of written English. He would require me to rewrite sentences in words he would dictate and I grew to detest the man. I have always been grateful for the chance to see the EEC at work in Brussels – the monstrous ‘Pentagon’-type antheap of bureaucracy 256

NOMAD ROAMING FROM PLACE TO PLACE, 1976–81 that dominates that charming city and drains it of its humanity. It has coloured forever my perceptions of Europe and the United Kingdom’s goal of eventual federation. That was virtually the swan-song of my work for Ib Hansen. It was not just that Barbara’s arthritic knees started to need surgical attention and she really needed me at home, or that I was approaching the British pensioner’s age, or that Ib Hansen and Mike Elliott had already made so much money that they were exhausted by the Midas chase. Most of all, it was not because of a falling away of R&P’s work. It was still hard at it, both at home and internationally, now drifting away from Africa and into the Middle and Far East. A lot of it had to do with R&P’s new men, who looked askance at old fogeys, even when they posed no threat to younger men careerwise. There was a particularly obnoxious creature running the Carlbro-Roughton office in Nairobi and I did not get on either with the up-and-coming new boss in the Southampton office, Ian Armstrong. The warning bell was tolling. After one more short-term foray into Uganda to resuscitate privately owned tea estates, I bade R&P goodbye. Dear old Percy Bailey, the company accountant and another old man also disappeared. It was time for a change of direction.

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look back on our domestic life in the years from 1979 to 1985 with particular nostalgia. True, the first three were disturbed, and for just under half of each of these years I was hardly at home, but when I was at home, what a wonderful time we had, particularly during holidays overseas. We gave Europe a miss in 1979, and had a month’s holiday at the coast in August. In September we moved into the new house on Ol Olua Ridge. Katie is growing up Katie’s last year at the Banda ended in June 1980, when she was just 13. We had chosen Upper Chine girls’ school on the Isle of Wight for her secondary education. We had done some research on schools when we were over in Britain in 1978, and had considered Down House, the posh school near Newbury where my goddaughter, Jane Selwyn, had been, and had actually visited Mary Selwyn’s school, St Mary’s, at Wantage. I had been on an exeat day with Nesta and Arthur to pick Mary up some time in the 1960s, and had liked both Mary as a product and the look of the school itself, as well as the ambience of that charming Midlands market town. Although we had an appointment, the headmistress greeted us with very little interest and summoned a bouncy 17 year-old to show us around, but after seeing the school we struck St Mary’s, Wantage off the list. The Owles family had already decided on Upper Chine for their daughter, Juliet, who was Katie’s contemporary at the Banda. They knew the bursar and a number of 258

LIFE ON OL OLUA RIDGE AND KAMUNDU, 1979–89 Kenya people who had sent their daughters there. We went over from Portsmouth, met the headmistress and liked what we saw of both her and the school. So there we were on a weekend in midSeptember, leaving our slightly disorientated and apprehensive daughter at the door of her ‘house’ in a wooded dell. She would be mostly there, but also at Salisbury with godmother Janie Olden, and spending half-term with other friends and relations and, of course, backwards and forwards to us in Kenya for the holidays, until June 1983. Much to the chagrin of the Upper Chine staff and headmistress, we took her away for the two-year sixth form period and lodged her at St Clare’s, the sixth form college in Banbury Road, Oxford. Judging by the successful results of Katie’s education, the Upper Chine experience might have been a lot worse. Early adolescence might have been a lot worse too. Apart from a fairly dodgy two years early on, while one could not say it was all sweetness and light, the 1980s passed moderately peacefully and Katie grew to be a sensible, beautiful and highly artistic young woman. How fortunate that was for her doting parents. Caring friends during Katie’s UK education A lot of people took a lot of trouble in loco parentis, looking after Katie while she was at school in the Isle of Wight – either for a long half-term exeat or sometimes when she did not come back to Kenya for holidays. We are everlastingly grateful to them. First and foremost were Janie and Richard Olden, living with their four daughters in a homely extended labourer’s cottage at Whaddon near Salisbury. Janie is Barbara’s best schoolfriend, and Katie’s godmother. Kindness is too tame a word for what they extended to Katie. Barbara and I were also recipients of their hospitality. When we visited them on our honeymoon, they gave us a sumptuous weekend in a hotel on the outskirts of Salisbury (they were moving house at the time). There were also presents (Janie said that as this was Barbara’s third marriage she would not have the silver engraved). Nesta, my cousin, whose four daughters are of course a lot older, was Katie’s surrogate mum, especially during her St Clare’s years in Oxford. I have written elsewhere of happy days at Belbroughton Road where we had our ‘own room’. My maternal 259

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 first cousins, Roger and Rosemary StJohn and Mike and Pam StJohn, also opened the doors of their homes to Katie and us in continuous hospitality, as did many others like Hugh and Celia Owles, Mike and Vivienne Ramshaw, James and Rosemary Bevan and Amaryllis Bryce. Noticeable for absence from the above tally of names are, of course, Michael and Ruth Hogg who had already left Sutton before Katie hit the Isle of Wight and were living in the borders of Scotland. So they were not at all handy and Katie only saw Michael (Ruth died in 1981) very occasionally. Barbara and I, on the other hand, always benefited from their, and later Michael’s, hospitality whenever we came back to Britain on our almost annual visits. Trip to Lake Turkana Easter 1980 saw us taking a bus to Lake Turkana where we camped for three nights on the eastern shore of Ol Tukai. The Jade Sea was everything it was cracked up to be. We had been warned that it would be very hot and extremely windy, but I was surprised at how cool the water was in the lake. It was mildly saline and the haunt of some hippos and a lot of crocodiles, but these did not seem to be dangerous and I spent a lot of time up to my neck in the cool water. On the outward journey we spent one night in a camp near Maralal and another by a Samburu village and, on the way back, one night in the Chalbi Desert and another at Buffalo Springs in Samburu National Park. Douglas Dalrymple, the Banda School headmaster, organized the trip and carefully chose the party so there would be no misfits. The young New Zealand driver drove in his bare feet and when the bus broke down in the middle of the desert he was handy with a hammer to beat the engine back to life. We were supposed to be in radio contact with headquarters in case of trouble, but there was no evidence that the instruments worked. At 63, I was by far the oldest passenger. African staff did wonders producing good, if rather monotonous, meals and cool drinks. At night we erected, and in the morning dismantled, our own tents. It was a very energetic, but enjoyable, experience. Ruth Hogg In mid-1980, while we were staying with the Hoggs in Jedburgh, 260

LIFE ON OL OLUA RIDGE AND KAMUNDU, 1979–89 Barbara’s arthritic knee began to get really serious and Ruth (still apparently in the best of health) helped me more or less carry her down a hill. By mid-November, however, Ruth had died of cancer at the age of 50. This was desperately sad for the Hogg family, especially of course for Michael, who had had nearly 20 happy years of marriage, and for Christian, then in his mid-teens. Ruth, a big, handsome, blonde, had been a wonderful wife and mother not only to her son but also to her stepchildren. Virginia and Colleen, though by then already in their early twenties, still badly needed her steadying influence. We all enjoyed her hospitality in Sutton and Jedburgh, and it was a joy to talk to her and share her love of music and literature. She was an accomplished linguist, and had latterly started a fresh career as an interpreter and translator of French and German. We all loved her and missed her dreadfully. Barbara’s knee operation Barbara’s right knee was the worse affected by arthritis and her surgeon Bencivenga treated the operation as something of a tour de force. His medical students attended a lecture and demonstration in the Kenyatta National Hospital X-ray theatre. Barbara was fit again, and able to drive, by mid-July 1981, but was still attending physiotherapy sessions up to November. Barbara was operated on again in June 1982 for the removal of the hardware in her right knee and was walking without a stick on the fourth day. Then it was the turn of the left knee. Bencivenga operated on 27 September. Barbara returned home on 4 October, convalesced there and began physiotherapy on the 19th. On 23 November, Bencivenga said that she could put her foot on the ground. By 7 December she could start to walk, and by the 14th she had discarded her crutches – 11 weeks in all. Yet there was a dark side to this success story. Barbara, though wholly paralysed by the anaesthetic and unable even to blink an eyelid, felt the whole of the operation on her knee. She could in no way signal her distress. She could hear all right, and because of that was later able to prove the truth of the experience by repeating the surgeon’s and anaesthetist’s chatter. Imagine the agony of such an experience! It was not surprising that it turned Barbara’s hair white and, until recently when she took to grey, she has had to pay hairdressers to keep her brown and young looking. When a 261

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 subsequent patient complained of a similar experience, they found the machinery was giving wrong readings. People suggested that we should sue the hospital for negligence, but we were too grateful to Bencivenga and the hospital for the success of the two operations to indulge in what would be a crude act of simple revenge. But, when the second lot of hardware was removed from her left knee, we insisted on a change of anaesthetist. Easy money versus property: the Bladon house My Dad had spoken in favour of capitalism. ‘If you want to accumulate, you must speculate.’ That was before he had discovered, the hard way, that his brother, Maurice, was a rotten stockbroker, and that ‘Malayalam’ and other Malaysian rubber stocks were plunging in value from the moment, at Maurice’s advice, he bought them. Then Dad changed his tune about making easy money the investment way. I should have listened to him. In the late 1970s, when hard-earned dollars from my labours in southern Africa were looking good in the bank statements of the Jersey branch of Standard Bank, I started to fancy myself as a budding Rothschild or Soros. Wiser heads than mine had persuaded me of the wisdom of investing in property, and I had gone in with Sam Roughton, buying the ground and basement floors of his terrace house in Bath, which he had bought to house his elderly mother in her declining years. But there was about £20,000 to play with, and I had taken out a subscription to Resident Abroad, which was a monthly magazine stuffed with advice on good, sound – albeit profitable – investment. Barbara had applauded the property investment, but stood back from this stocks and shares lark. I persuaded myself, if not her, that unit trusts were the thing and it was exciting studying the form. Unbelievably, this aberration lasted about eight years and only ended, really, because of a factor I had never considered – a catastrophic decline in the value of the pound against the dollar. I did not lose much because the investments were good, but I made nothing, so I gave it all up and made Barbara happy by sinking all our savings into property. In 1985/6 I sold the Bath flat back to Sam and bought the freehold of a terrace house in Bladon near Woodstock, six miles from the centre of Oxford. The mortgage was £22,000 and in the mid-1980s rates were sky-high, reaching 262

LIFE ON OL OLUA RIDGE AND KAMUNDU, 1979–89 about 14 per cent a year due to rampant UK inflation. It was not until 1994 that we disentangled ourselves from the building society’s python-like embrace. Then, of course, as it was a 150 year-old labourer’s cottage it cost a lot in upkeep. I was lukewarm about the whole enterprise, but in the end it worked out well. In the intervening years the value of the property has appreciated, we are told by at least two-and-a-half times, while bringing in a net profit of £5500 a year in rent. It is indeed a ‘nice little earner’. We have, however, never lived there and no longer regard it as a bolthole, although it could still be one. Katie chooses her art school It was mid-1985 and Katie had finished her two years at St Clare’s sixth-form college in Oxford. She had taken the international baccalaureate examination very successfully. There had been suggestions when she left Upper Chine that art was her number one subject, and these had been amply confirmed by Paul Savill, the St Clare’s art master. Paul not only proved to be a great art teacher – he also taught her to smoke cigarettes. Barbara and I had chosen Upper Chine with only moderate success and, having failed to get Katie into Wellington College’s sixth form, we sent her to St Clare’s, which was a brilliant success. However, Katie was determined to make sure she got into the right art school, so she set out, without us, on a tour of inspection. She decided on a trial first year at the City & Guilds Art College at Kennington, South London and we went along with her choice. We did not have to pay any fees because, from the start, she won a full bursary. Accommodation and living expenses in London at that time were quite enough, by themselves, to put a strain on our resources. All in all, the course lasted four years. She now runs a factory employing more than 100 people producing decorative art objects and has gained a high reputation for the beauty, elegance and quality of her products. They sell very successfully in the local Kenyan as well as the tourist market. A temporary change of dwelling In 1985, when Richard Gethin decided to sell his property on which we had built the Timsales house, we decided to look around for another house to rent on Ol Olua Ridge and José Hay’s was 263

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 available. It was next door to our good friends Arthur and Joan Wolseley-Lewis and we knew the house already because Jack and Pat Barrah had lived in it for a while and, though it had a niggardly veranda, they had given some enjoyable parties there. The house was half-way down the ridge, towards the Ngong Road and it was not bad. It had a separate stone building, which I turned into an office. But you entered it though the kitchen. We were ensconced by 1985. It was not long before we became aware that we were in the hands of the proverbial grasping landlady, and she was aided and abetted by her boyfriend, Bill Armstrong, who, as house agent, could not be blamed for doing his best for his client. Soon we were looking for ‘a better hole’, but did not finally extract ourselves until 19 months later, and that was a real upheaval – out of Karen and to Kiambu coffee country at Kamundu. Out of Karen into Kamundu, Kiambu We were sorry in many ways at the time to leave Karen, and were not quite sure about Kamundu. The house could not be faulted. The sitting room/dining room was, it is true, rather awkward with a dreadful dividing see-through barrier of wooden shelving, but the master bedroom was large and had a dressing room annexe adjoining the bathroom/WC, and there was a good room for Katie and a guest’s spare room with another bathroom and separate ‘loo’ for her and guests. There was also a nook at the end of the passage for an office desk. The kitchen was excellent and led onto a courtyard with servants’ quarters, outbuildings and garage. There was no veranda, but there was a paved patio and pergola. The garden was enclosed by a hedge and there was no view (we missed the Ngong Hills), but there were two massive bombax trees, which were a joy when they were in blossom. There was a small wooden house at the end of the garden, which was mostly empty but Henrietta Remnant lived in it for a while and she became a great friend. Down the drive was the bwana makubwa’s house, at first David Petrie with his wife Felicity, and later Brian and Venessa Williams. There was a large dam the other side, the nesting place of fish-eagles with their nostalgic call. Birds were numerous, but not a patch on Ol Olua Ridge. We need not have worried, for we were very happy there and whenever we visited 264

LIFE ON OL OLUA RIDGE AND KAMUNDU, 1979–89 Karen we noticed the degradation of the area and were glad of the transition to Kiambu. Between 1987 and 1990 there were a number of momentous events – Katie’s motorcar accident, Barbara’s motorcar accident, Katie’s wedding and my cardiac arrest. Nesta was staying with us at the time of Katie’s accident. Katie crashed the Honda Civic in August 1987. She was on holiday from the art school at the time, and was meeting two friends arriving at the airport for a holiday. Julia Parrish, with her in the front of the car, was unhurt and was stalwart in the aftermath. Katie was seriously injured and the two arrivals, young men, sustained minor injuries. The first Barbara and I knew was when Jeremy Cumberlege drove over from the other side of Kiambu in the middle of the night to tell us – the telephones, as usual, were not working. We will always remember Jeremy’s kindness on that occasion. Because of this, Katie missed the whole of the winter term at art school. Barbara’s sixtieth, Katie’s wedding and my cardiac arrest In 1989 we were in England in late May until mid-July. Nesta gave us the hospitality of her Belbroughton Road garden for Barbara’s sixtieth birthday on 20 May, and a great gathering of friends living in England graced the occasion. The year 1990 saw Barbara’s motor accident (in February), Katie’s wedding (in April) and my cardiac arrest (in June). We had had no phone since November 1989. It was reconnected on 9 January but was off again on 7 February, the day before an unlighted BMW car ran into Barbara in the dark at the Muthaiga Country Club entrance. Luckily Barbara was not badly injured. She spent nine days in hospital, had a recuperative weekend with friends at Nakuru and Dr Karioki gave her a clean bill of health on 27 February. Our Datsun was a write-off. Our insurance claim, and the BMW owner’s counterclaim for damages for Barbara’s alleged but mythical dangerous driving, occupied a lot of my time at Muthaiga police station, but the intervention of Peter Walker, our friend and advocate, finally saved the day. Our telephone came on again a few days before 21 April, the date of Katie’s wedding to Philip McLellan. The service was in Limuru church and the reception and disco dance were at Muthaiga Club. Lots of people (about 250) attended. I made a 265

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 dotty speech. Dear old Charles Dewhurst was the best man and he made an even dottier one. Robin kindly paid for the disco part of the Muthaiga party. It was a famous occasion. Barbara had been complaining of my bad temper, and on 12 June the cause was revealed when I had a cardiac arrest. It started when we were in Muthaiga Club entertaining our friend from South Africa, Peter Roberts, to supper. It was fortunate for me that our Kamundu neighbours, the Petries, were in the club, and David, Barbara aboard, drove me like a demon to Nairobi Hospital and I was trollied, by then unconscious, straight into intensive care. There an Irish female doctor jumped on my chest and brought me back to life. I was so pleased to be alive that I began enjoying life from the moment I came to. It was not easy to start with, for I could not speak with tubes down my throat, but I wrote encouraging messages to Barbara and other visitors (like Om Bhatti whose was the first worried face I saw on regaining consciousness) to cheer them up. I reproved the Irish doctor who had jumped on my chest for forgetting to remove her high-heeled shoes, thereby cracking two of my ribs and was rewarded with a grin at my sally. The intensive care ward was so full that they had to wheel in extra beds, so on some days they were touching. I was more (gruesomely) interested in those who were wheeled out, to see which occupants were going feet first, but happily I did not spot a single one. I spent four nights in intensive care before being transferred to a private room. By 21 June I was back home convalescing. On discharge I was up in front of Dr Warshow, receiving my sentence. He was reading from a script (doubtlessly prepared by Barbara). ‘I see you smoke. You must stop.’ I was too frightened even to dream of disobeying. After more than ten years I have smoked nothing except the odd cigar that my friend, David Stogdale, has given me at parties. It is a great joy, but I am never even tempted to start again on my beloved pipe. I convalesced for ten days and by Monday 2 July I was back at work.

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y physical recovery from the cardiac arrest was phenomenal – back at work in three weeks – a lot less so my earning power as a freelance engineering and claims consultant. At the beginning of 1990 I had had a good deal of work and there was a small arbitration in the pipe-line. During February Barbara’s accident and injuries had interrupted the work and after the motor accident Katie’s wedding began to occupy a lot of my time. Then there was the onset of value added tax (VAT), which started for consultants at the beginning of 1990, and the bookwork and the VAT inspectors’ importunities began to increase my work load, not to mention having to pay, monthly, money that I had not received, which was a growing financial worry. In July I only did 57.5 hours of paid work (out of 154); August was better with 114; September was 107; October 108 and November 93. I was working at under 60 per cent of my capacity. In November, Om Bhatti took me aside and offered me a salaried position on the staff of his TM-AM construction company. He was also happy for me to carry on doing my arbitrations and other work if I liked. I accepted. The arrangement started in December 1990 and continues, with salary increases to take account of inflation. I only paid VAT on my non-TM-AM work and of course all my dues of income tax. This was a princely gesture on his behalf, for which I am eternally grateful – and I eventually escaped having to administer and pay VAT, as my ‘VAT-able’ earnings did not reach the lower limit. I was occupied, throughout this period, with claims work for TM-AM, arbitrations and claims advice for other clients and, latterly, adjudication. My office was in TM-AM’s office more or 267

KENYA: MY SECOND CAREER, 1955–99 less opposite Timsales. TM-AM provided me with a Peugeot 504 car (fairly unreliable) and a driver for my exclusive use. From 1994 onwards the driver was Moses, an Abaluhya man from Kakamega who has been wonderfully reliable, and latterly has been second only to Barbara in looking after my welfare and well being, afflicted as I was, from 1990 onwards, with chronic angina. Problems with health My father never had a day’s illness in his life until he succumbed to liver cancer in his last months. So he was fitter than I. However, he took to wearing spectacles earlier (I was 78 when I began to wear them for reading) and his hearing began to let him down in his late sixties. My ear trouble dates from the mid-1980s when I was about seventy. My cousin, Michael, had earned a disability war pension for hearing impairment due to his service in submarines and, having failed to persuade me to importune the British government to award me a service pension, he started to bang on at me to apply for one for my deafness, and I thought I would give it a whirl. So, in June 1994 I was seen by an audiologist in a caravan in the grounds of the Churchill Hospital, Oxford, with a satisfactory outcome – a one-off payment of £6000 for an 18 per cent disability. Time passed, my hearing deteriorated further and this time Barbara, driven demented (as mother had been by father’s inability to hear her pearls of wisdom), urged me to give it another go. So, in August 1999 I was again tested, this time in a caravan in a supermarket car park in Taunton. I got a disability pension of £55 a week, not a fortune but not bad; it doubled my state pension and is ‘indexed’. I could boast my father’s similarly robust health until struck by a cardiac arrest. Thus ended my life of pipe smoking and greedy eating and drinking, and instead submitted me to a lifetime of pill swallowing and, in the interests of safety, I was persuaded to give up driving. So I lived on, an invalid – albeit a happy one – in the care of Barbara for the succeeding ten or more years and, courtesy of Om Bhatti, mitigated my nuisance value by bringing in the equivalent of a British major’s army service pension. Things only began to fall apart when, in May 2000, I suffered a mini-stroke, followed in July by unstable angina and, in October, by a severe and persistent attack of influenza. 268

THE LAST LAP: 1990–2000 Meanwhile, the family was not without its tribulations during the 1990s. In 1996 and 1997 Katie had to be operated on twice for malignant melanoma in her back and in 1995 a recurrence of arthritis caused Barbara to endure a knee operation in King Edward VII Hospital for Officers (Sister Agnes’s). Grandchildren Charlie McLellan was born in July 1992, Samantha in March 1994. Charlie is dark, compact and athletic; Samantha is blonde, big and bouncy. To compare them would be invidious – let us say that they are a joy to their grandparents and leave it at that. Both are at Pembroke House Prep School at Gilgil. Pembroke is as unlike my prep school, Ashdown, as it is possible to be. We were honed and shaped; Pembroke children are cosseted and tended like precious plants. Who knows what is best for coping with the world of the future?

269

Index

Abalti, 107–8 Aberdares, 114, 216 Abinger, 154 Aboyne, 38, 53, 140, 153, 172, 231 Abyssinia, 4, 65, 75, 104–6, 114 Abyssinia Hills, 164 Adamson, Joy, 4 Addis Ababa, 10, 106–7, 112–13, 165 Aden, 22, 26, 47, 232 Adlercron, John, 29 Aerodrome Camp, 160, 162 Agheila, 119, 122 Agra, 24 Air Operating Company (AOC), 244, 246 Alam Halfa, 123, 126 Alamein, El, 119, 123 Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus, 64 Alanbrooke, Lord, 161, 162 Albert Canal, 149 Albert, Lake, 239 Albert, Prince, 35, 78, 189 Aldershot, 72, 76, 81, 82, 86 Alexander, Harold, 86, 91, 123–4, 128 Alexandria, 116, 119, 124, 126 Algeria, 129 Amboseli, 51 Amcotts, Daphne, 191, 196–7, 200–1 Amcotts, Peter, 191–2, 195–7, 199–201, 203 Amiens, 89, 146

Amin, Idi, 229, 238 Anderson, General, 129–30 Andrews, Mrs, 23 Angola, 8 Annesley-Cook, LieutenantColonel, 85 Antelat, 122 Antigua, 240, 248–50 Antwerp, 146, 149–50, 153 Apennines, 137 Apps, Ronnie, 220–1 Archer, Chris, 214, 238, 239 Architectural Association (AA), 188, 192, 197 Armitage, Crombie, 181 Armstrong, Bill, 264 Armstrong, Ian, 257 Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), 133 Arnhem, 146, 148–50 Arras, 84 Arromanches, 143 Arup, Ove, 211 Arusha, 199–200, 206–8 Ascoli, David, 236 Ascot, 35, 58, 178 Asea, 165 Ashdown, 31 Ashdown Forest, 76 Ashdown House, 10, 23, 29–30, 32, 55, 269 Ashdown Place, 55 Ashford, 58 Askwith, Mr, 179 Athens, 116

271

INDEX Athi Plains, 15, 18, 49 Athi River, 51 Auchinleck, Claude, 116, 122–3 Aunay-sur-Odon, 144 Australia, 8, 206, 213 Austria, 65, 77, 222 Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), 141, 159 Awash River, 106–7, 161 Axenfels, 61 Axenstein, 61 Ayr, 139 Bachy, 84, 87 Bagshot Heath, 76 Bagush, 115, 116 Bahamas, 232–3 Bailey, Percy, 257 Ballantyne, James, 8 Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, 70 Ballinskelligs, 45 Ballynaville, 5 Banda, 229, 234, 247, 258, 260 Barbados, 250 Barbirolli, John, 57 Barbour, Steve, 206, 223 Barclay-Mathews, Elizabeth, 235 Bardana, Mr, 209, 238–9 Bardia, 120 Bari, 223 Barkas, Sweetie, 102, 160 Barker, Grahame, 196, 206 Barker, Harry, 219 Barnes, Nanny, 25, 43 Baronissi, 137 Barrah, Jack and Pat, 264 Barton, Brian, 219 Bath, 234, 240, 262 Bayeux, 143–4 Beckwith, Major, 25 Begbie, Dick, 164–5, 168, 246 Beira, 18, 47

Belet Wen, 163 Belgium, 92, 149, 205 Bell, Alan, 208 Bell, Bertille, 208 Bencivenga, Dr, 261–2 Benghazi, 119, 122 Benson, 17, 20, 28, 40, 44, 53–7, 59, 76 Berbera, 105, 109, 111, 162, 164 Berchtesgaden, 66, 68 Berkshire, 76 Bevan, James and Rosemary, 260 Bhatti, Om, 266–8 Bickford, Lieutenant-Colonel, 126 Biggs, Michael, 104 Bignell, Alan, 197, 199 Binnie, Andrew, 180 Binnie, Deacon & Gourley, 180, 191, 205 Bird, Sotheby, 56 Birkenhead, 100 Birmingham, 140 Birse Lodge, 38 Biscay, Bay of, 17, 27 Bizerta, 131 Blackstone, Colonel, 187 Bletsoe, 38 Blomfield, John, 81, 89, 95 Blood Pressure Ridge, 161, 166 Bloomer, Bertie, 138 Blue Posts, 216 Blundell, Michael, 103, 202, 212 Bodmin Moor, 59 Bogart, Humphrey, 77 Bognor Regis, 202 Bois, Jack, 3–4 Bombay, 11, 22, 26, 62 Bootle-Wilbraham, Brigadier, 85 Borama, 164–5 Borden, 97 Botswana, 241–2

272

INDEX Bou Arada, 130 Boulogne, 153 Boutenwijk, Jan and Agnes, 217 Bowden, Colonel, 185–6 Bowring, Sir Charles, 13 Boyd, R. O. F., 34 Boyes-Hinderer, Major, 163 Bradford, 156 Bragg, Dorothy, 154 Braunholtz, Mr, 35 Bray Dunes, 95, 96 Brayne, Bill, 169, 170 Brayne, Gwen, 21, 169–70, 196, 198, 204, 215 Brayne, Robin, 170 Brenchley, 35 Briggs, Group Captain, 212 Brighton, 41 British Expeditionary Force (BEF), 81, 85, 91, 127, 191 Brixham, 92 Brodhurst, Jack, 81, 83, 87, 95 Brown, 224 Brown, Dorothy, 101, 172, 204, 224 Brown, Kenneth, 172, 204, 224 Brown, Mrs, 250 Browning, Colin, 82, 86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98, 127 Browning, Sapper, 82, 86 Brunnen, 61 Brussels, 90–3, 148, 151, 153, 220, 242, 256 Bryce, Amaryllis, 260 Buckinghamshire, 53 Buckley, Mr, 35 Bulawayo, 173 Buller, Frank, 102, 104, 114, 117 Buller, Redvers, 102 Bullock, Christopher, 45 Buq Buq, 118 Burguret, 114 Burma, 21–2, 124, 154, 170, 185

Burrell, Bunny, 101, 154, 230 Burrell, Liza, 216–17, 230, 237 Burrell, Peter, 101, 216–19, 230, 237, 247 Butha Buthe, 242 Butler Arms Hotel, 44–5 Caedmon House, 176 Caen, 144, 146 Cairo, 62, 116, 123–6, 169 Calais, 13, 27 Camberley, 128, 152–4 Cambridge, 34–5, 67–74, 77–8, 81, 87, 89, 154, 175, 192, 200, 205, 217, 237–8 Campanella, 136 Campbell, A. D., 169 Campbell, Peter, 196, 200, 203 Campbell-Black, Group Captain, 64 Canal Zone, 62 Cancello, 138 Canterbury, 74 Cape, 17, 136, 175 Cape Guardafui, 47 Cape Town, 18, 64, 100, 240 Capri, 136 Capricorn Africa Movement, 212 Caragh Lake, 45 Carbis Bay, 40, 59 Caribbean, 233, 249–50, 256 Carlbro-Roughton, 220, 257 Carnelly, Ivy, 49 Carnelly, Stephen, 49 Carr, Ralph, 134 Carter, Nick, 87–8, 93–4, 152 Carthage, 116, 131 Carver, Mike, 144 Castellamare, 136 Caumont l’Evente, 145 Cavendish, Colonel, 118 Ceylon, 170, 181

273

INDEX Chalkwell, 179 Chamberlain, Neville, 65–6, 68, 76 Chapman, Audley, 30, 55–6 Chapman, FitzRoy, 55 Chapman, FitzRoy, 55 Chapman, FitzRoy, 56 Chapman, Nellie, 56 Chapman, Stewart, 31, 56 Charteris, Nigel, 81, 87 Chartres, 232 Chatham, 67–74, 76, 81, 94, 154–5, 168, 175, 181, 195, 217 Chattingdean, 72 Chelsea, 184–5, 187–90, 198 Chenevix-Trench, Mr, 172 Cherbourg, 83, 87, 144 Cherwell, River, 39 Chevalier, Maurice, 77 Chitty, Jim, 229 Chobi, 238 Chobi Lodge, 239 Cholsey, 28 Christopherson, Anne, 154 Churcher, Maurice, 237 Churchill, Winston, 93, 124, 127, 146, 268 Clara, 7 Clare, 4, 259, 263 Clark, Mark, 146 Clarkson, Terry, 248 Clayton, Jack, 29–30 Clements, Stan, 220–1 Coldstream Guards, 85 Collingridge, Vincent, 177 Cologne, 222 Comtec, 252–3 Connell, Amyas, 218 Coombs, Tony, 104 Copnall, Bainbridge, 117 Corby, 142 Cork, 45 Cornwall, 38, 52, 59, 76, 189

Corpus Christi College, 61, 69, 70, 72, 195, 238 Corrado, Mr, 252, 253 Corrado, Mrs, 253 Couldrey, Jack, 214 Courtice, Bob, 78 Courtneidge, Cicely, 57 Covent Garden, 70, 78 Coventry, 57, 63 Coward, David, 197, 202, 204, 232 Coward, Joan, 197, 202, 204, 232 Coward, Noel, 132, 249 Craig-McFeely, Kevin and Carla, 248 Craigveigh, 57 Crowmarsh, 44 Croydon, 32 Cumberlege, Jeremy, 265 Cummings, Paddy, 49 Cunningham, Sir Alan, 116 Cutler, Alan, 241, 244 Cyprus, 62, 232 Cysoing, 85, 94 Czechoslovakia, 65, 71 Daer Valley, 180–1 Dagabur, 163 Dagamadu, 163 Dalrymple, Douglas, 229, 260 Dance, Sergeant, 32 Danzig, 68 Dar es Salaam, 76, 175, 197–8, 200, 209–10 Darke, Miss, 31 Dartmoor, 73 Dartmouth, 32 Dashwood, Gerry, 217 Davy, Colonel, 124 de Mello, Mrs, 254, 255 Dee, River, 38 Delhi, 24 Delves Broughton, Diana, 101, 115

274

INDEX Delves Broughton, Jock, 101, 104, 115 Dempers, Fred, 110, 112–13 Dempsey, General, 148 Dendermonde, 148–9 Denmark, 211, 218 Denny, Bill, 167, 170 Denny, Buff, 156, 159–60, 167–71, 174–80, 183–4, 188–92, 195–8, 200, 202, 204, 213, 215, 234 Derry, 40 Desert Rats, 129, 131, 145–6 Desmond FitzGerald & Associates (DF&A), 217, 219–21, 228, 230, 247 Devon, 92, 127 Dewhurst, Charlie, 235, 266 Diani, 48, 247 Diani Beach, 48 Dickson, Dorothy, 132 Diest, 149 Dill, John, 84, 91 Dinther, 149 Dire Dawa, 106, 112, 161 Dodoma, 71, 199 Dods, John, 167 Dorchester, 73, 179 Dorset, 10, 74, 142, 179, 260 Dover, 92, 97, 169 Dreux, 232 Drew, Lanoe, 34, 70 Dublin, 6, 213, 256 Duke, Gerald, 128, 166 Duncan-Millar, Alastair, 129, 133–4, 141–2, 152 Dunkirk, 82, 85, 89, 92–8, 142 Durban, 18 Dyer, Christopher, 229 Dyer, Dicky, 229 Dyle, River, 91 Dymchurch, 44 Earhart, Amelia, 64

East Africa, 3, 8, 24, 34, 48, 155, 159–61, 166, 206, 218, 229, 234, 236, 238–9 East African Pioneer Corps, 103 East London, 18, 142 Eastbourne, 30 Eboli, 136 Edinburgh, 31, 71 Edward VII Hospital for Officers, 269 Edward VII, King, 189 Edward VIII, King, 68 Egypt, 62, 115–16, 123, 125 Eindhoven, 148–9 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 146 Eldoret, 4, 162, 167, 216, 223 Elizabeth II, Queen, 188 Elliott, Michael, 166–7, 210–12, 217, 220, 251, 257 Ellis, Peter ap, 34–5, 66 Elmer, John, 217 Emmett, Christine, 155–6 Enfidaville, 130, 146 England, 3, 8, 11, 15, 20, 26, 29, 30, 36–7, 53, 58, 71, 76, 78, 88, 90, 97, 102, 104, 139–41, 150, 153, 170, 173–5, 198, 205, 208, 217, 224, 231, 233, 238, 240, 252, 265 Engler, René, 244 Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), 132 Erroll, Joss, 101, 104, 115 Erskine, Bobbie, 139, 141, 146 Essex, 37, 142, 176, 180, 183 Ethiopia, 161, 237 Eton, 32 European Development Fund, 255, 256 European Economic Community (EEC), 256 Evill, Arthur, 29, 31, 32

275

INDEX Evill, Mrs, 30–1 Evron, 83, 89 Ewelme, 55 Fabian Society, 65 Fahan, 40 Fairweather, Geoffrey, 89, 152 Falaise Gap, 144 First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), 160–1, 170 Farouk, King, 123 Felixstowe, 142 Findlay, Connie, 15, 101, 154 Findlay, Hugh, 15 Findlay, Joan, 101, 154 Findlay, Kenny, 15 Findlay, Ronald, 15 First World War, 8, 13, 25, 172, 215 Fishguard, 45 FitzGerald, Barbara, 185, 202, 209, 211, 213–15, 217–18, 221–2, 224–5, 227–8, 230–7, 240, 247–9, 252, 257, 259–63, 265–9 FitzGerald, Cynthia, 17, 20–1, 25–6, 41, 43, 48–51, 60, 74, 101, 109, 114, 175, 185, 225–6 FitzGerald, Henry, 37 FitzGerald, Katie, 216, 224, 227–9, 231–4, 240, 247–8, 258–9, 263–5, 267, 269 FitzGerald, Lucy, 20, 30, 37, 42, 61, 137, 140, 142, 153–4, 188, 192, 231 FitzGerald, Maurice, 20, 30, 36–7, 39, 41, 44, 52, 61, 64, 73, 140, 142, 153–4, 188, 192, 262 FitzGerald, Otho, 3, 8 Flanders, 84, 98 Foggia, 140

Folkestone, 9, 11, 20, 41, 43–4, 59, 74, 77, 153 Fonteyn, Margot, 70 Foreman, John, 134, 135 Forest Row, 23 Formby, Eric, 31 Forrester, Michael, 117, 122 Fort Hall, 102–3, 168 Fort Jesus, 18 Foum Tatahouine, 130 Fowkes, Brigadier, 111–12, 160–2, 166, 211 Fowkes, Mrs, 161 Fox, George, 5, 77 France, 61, 81, 83, 86–7, 89–90, 92, 98, 104, 126–7, 205, 219, 232–3 Francis, Ann, 197, 198 Franco, Francisco, 65 Fraser, Ian, 232 Fraser, Margaret, 232–3 Fraser, Mr, 30 Freeman, Roger, 238–9 Freetown, 99–100 Freyberg, Bernard, 121 Fyson, John, 94, 95 Gabriel, Rob, 70 Galloway, Sandy, 120–1 Galton-Fenzi, Duggie, 48, 50 Gambia, 220 Gamelin, Commander, 91 Garigliano, River, 137–8 Garissa, 102–4, 115, 162, 165, 168 Gasston, Tony, 223–4 Gasston, Tony, 206 Gaussen, C. W. (Kim), 116–18, 121–3 Geleff, Sven, 207, 219 Gelib, 105, 163 Gell, Christopher, 34 Gell, Nigel, 34, 118 Geneva Convention, 109 Genoa, 46–7, 64

276

INDEX George VI, King, 68, 78, 155, 189 Germany, 64, 66, 76, 85, 186, 211–12 Gertruidenberg, 150 Gethin, Budge, 50 Gethin, Pat, 248 Gethin, Richard, 233, 247 Gezira, 124 Gibraltar, 26–7, 76, 81 Giffard, Robin, 185 Giffard, Sir George, 184 Gilgil, 160–2, 166, 170, 211, 269 Gimma, 107, 109, 111 Girton College, 69 Glasgow, 139–40, 180–1 Glin Castle, 45 Glossop, Roderick, 177 Gloucester, Duke of, 68 Godley, General, 57 Godwin-Austen, Major General, 106, 116, 120–1 Gold Coast Brigade, 105 Golder, H. Q., 177 Goldsmith, Major, 144 Goldstein, Albert, 182 Goodbody, 8 Goodbody (née Pritchard), Alice, 30 Goodbody, Audrey, 14 Goodbody, Catherine Audrey, 5, 13 Goodbody, Ellis, 5, 7, 8, 13 Goodbody, Geoffrey, 13, 59, 60–1 Goodbody, Gerald, 46 Goodbody, Granny, 17, 20, 38–40, 52–4, 59–60, 76, 88 Goodbody, Jenny, 14 Goodbody, John, 5, 6 Goodbody, Jonathan, 7 Goodbody, Lewis Frederick, 7 Goodbody, Mark, 6 Goodbody, Robert, 7 Goodship, Phyllis, 16

Gordon, Lady Idina, 166 Gort, Lord, 91 Goubellat, 130 Gourock, 139 Grabowsky & Poort, 254–5 Grattan, Ellen, 5 Grave, 148, 149 Gravesend, 175 Gray, Tom, 38 Greece, 62, 187, 209 Green, Henry, 186 Greenhayes, 17, 20, 54 Greensmith, Peter, 219 Griffiths, Lieutenant-Colonel, 149 Guild, Nigel, 215 Guildford, 58, 200 Guinness, Arthur, 162 Gulu, 162, 207, 220, 239 Gurney, Alan, 125 Habaswein, 102 Haegelin, Lucien, 89 Hague, The, 153 Halfaya, 119 Halifax, 82, 155, 156 Halifax Building Society, 155 Halle, 91 Hamilton, Mrs, 225 Hampshire, 138, 183 Hamra, 130 Hansen, Ib, 203, 210–12, 220, 233, 241, 246, 249–50, 253, 257 Harar, 106 Harcombe House, 74 Hardiman, John, 129 Harding, Harold, 177 Hargeisa, 112, 161–3, 165–6, 168 Harney, Judy and Desmond, 217 Harper, Captain, 167, 168 Harpsden, 39–40, 53, 55 Harragin, Anna, 104

277

INDEX Harragin, Catherine, 104 Harragin, Lee, 201, 202 Harragin, Madge, 104, 225 Harragin, Walter, 104 Harrar, 161 Harris, Gerald, 202, 203 Harris, Pat, 72 Hartley, Tom, 57 Harwich, 186 Haslemere, 20 Hastings, Mr, 199 Hay, José, 263 Hechtel, 149 Hegarty, Mr, 256 Heidelberg, 66, 222 Hellmann, Clara, 88 Henley-on-Thames, 33, 38, 52–5, 76, 88 Henniker, Honker, 96 Henphrey, Tom, 104, 115 Henson, Leslie, 132 Herbert, Tony, 142 Hipkin, Miss, 23, 29, 30 Hippo Point, 49 Hiroshima, 162 Hitler, Adolf, 64–6, 68, 71, 84 Hodge, Tony, 241 Hodgson, Penny, 215 Hogg Robinson & Capel-Cure, 186 Hogg, Christian, 218, 261 Hogg, Colleen, 215, 217, 224, 261 Hogg, Dorothy, 216–17, 224, 230 Hogg, Michael, 215–18, 224, 227–8, 231, 260–1 Hogg, Ralph, 231 Hogg, Ruth, 218, 224, 231–2, 260–1 Hogg, Virginia, 215, 217, 224, 261 Holland, 88, 90, 128, 149, 205 Holmes, Hugh, 124, 185–6

Homs, 131–2 Hook of Holland, 186 Hopkins, Colonel, 107–8, 113 Horncastle, 98 Horsham, 37 Huddersfield, 156 Hughes, Anney, 183, 188, 204 Hughes, Richard, 10, 183, 188, 197, 204 Hughes-Games, C. M., 33 Humber, 98 Humphreys, Howard, 199 Hunter, Tony, 129, 133–4, 139, 142, 152 Huntercombe, 55 Hurlingham, 219 Husband, Ian, 197 Husband, Pat, 170–1, 204 Hutchings, James, 237 Hythe, 44 India, 10, 13, 22, 24–5, 29, 37, 40, 50, 59, 62, 64, 118, 170, 217 Indian Mutiny, 24 Indian Ocean, 26, 47 Inglis, McGuinness & Wilkinson, 238 Inglis, Professor, 69 Institution of Civil Engineers, 174, 178, 181, 192, 209 International Brigade, 65 Iraq, 122, 192 Irelan, Stan, 167 Ireland, 4–5, 8, 13, 44, 76, 99–100, 217, 224 Isle of Wight, 189, 240, 258–60 Ismailia, 62, 124 Israel, 246 Italy, 64, 129, 132–3, 135, 139, 146 Jade Sea, 260 Japan, 162

278

INDEX Jedburgh, 260, 261 Jeffreys, Alice, 215 Jigjigga, 105, 164, 165 Jinja, 161, 206, 207, 208 Joan, 224 Joel’s Drift, 242, 256 Johannesburg, 160, 240–1, 244, 246, 252, 254 John Mowlem & Co Ltd, 176–7, 179 John Taylor & Partners, 191–2 Johnson, Amy, 64 Johnson, Peter, 230 Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), 185 Jonathan, Chief, 245 Juba, 251 Juba, 161–2 Juba River, 104–5, 163, 251 Jucker, Alan, 141 Kahawa, 209, 211 Kairouan, 130 Kaisugu, 169 Kajiado, 51 Kakamega, 268 Kammerman, Colonel, 166 Kampala, 162, 196, 206–8, 210–11, 220, 224, 239 Kamundu, 258, 264, 266 Kano, 113 Kaptagat, 216 Karen, 52, 213, 224, 227–8, 230, 240, 247, 249, 252, 264–5 Karioki, Dr, 265 Kasese, 207 Kathmandu, 170 Kedong Valley, 49 Kemp, Mr, 35 Kensington, 67, 77, 175 Kent, 31, 35, 39, 58, 64, 70, 74, 76

Kenya, 3–4, 10, 13, 17–18, 34–5, 37, 44, 46, 48, 50, 55, 71, 74, 76, 78, 99, 101, 109–10, 139–40, 154–6, 160–1, 165, 169, 171–2, 174, 176, 181, 185–6, 189–92, 195–7, 200, 202–4, 206, 208–9, 211–14, 216, 218, 221–3, 225, 228–33, 235–40, 245–6, 250, 252, 259 Kenya Defence Force (KDF), 46, 64 Kenya Highlands, 3 Kenya Planters Cooperative Union (KPCU), 206 Kenya Regiment, 114 Kenya Rifle Association, 49 Kenya, Mount, 50, 114 Kenyatta, Jomo, 214, 229–30, 232–3 Keren, 106 Kericho, 169, 170, 208, 216 Kerry, 44, 45 Keyes, Roger, 97 Kiambu, 15, 101, 109, 154, 197, 216, 218, 264–5 Kibera, 13, 172 Kigezi, 209 Kikambala, 167 Kilimanjaro, 18 Kilindini, 18, 48, 168, 196, 201 Kinangop, 172, 216 King’s African Rifles (KAR), 3, 9, 13, 15, 46, 99, 161, 172 King’s Own Royal (Lancaster) Regiment, 3 Kinsman, Gerald, 37 Kipipiri, 166 Kipkabus, 216, 217, 218, 220 Kipling, Rudyard, 22 Kisch, Royalton, 36 Kismayu, 105, 162, 163 Kitale, 195, 197 Knightsbridge, 98, 122

279

INDEX Korbusz, Tadek, 207 La Panne, 95–6 Ladybrand, 245 Lanark, 180 Lands End, 177 Langata, 16, 52, 209, 213, 215, 227–9, 231, 247 League of Mercy, 101, 173 Leamington Spa, 63 Leas, 9, 11, 41, 43 Lebanon, 116 Leeds, 97, 156 Leigh, Vivien, 132 Leigh-on-Sea, 176 Leopold, King, 93 Leptis Magna, 131 Lesotho, 220, 233, 240–2, 244–6, 248, 252, 255–6 Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), 252, 255 Letty (StJohn nanny), 20 Levett, Dick, 34–5 Levett, Josephine, 35 Lewis, A. C., 36 Lewis, A. H., 35 Libya, 111, 116, 119, 146 Liège, 153 Likoni, 18, 48, 167 Lille, 84, 88 Lillie, Bea, 132 Lilongwe, 174 Limerick, 4–5, 7–8, 13–14, 46 Limuru, 160, 167, 170–1, 175, 204, 210, 218, 265 Limuru Girls’ School, 48 Lincoln, 98 Lincolnshire, 98 Lincolnshire Wolds, 98 Lindbergh, Charles, 64 Lindsay, Cherry, 204 Lindsay, Kenneth, 166–8, 175 Lindsay, Robin, 89, 142, 148, 152, 166, 204–8

Liverpool, 26–7, 99, 140 Llewellyn, Long Lou, 104 Lloyd, Geoffrey, 172 Lloyd-Davis, Colonel, 163, 164 Lockerbie, 181 Lodwar, 4 Lokichokio, 4 Londiani, 4, 169 London, 9, 28, 38, 46–7, 58, 61, 64, 70, 72–3, 77–8, 98–9, 105, 124, 128, 140, 150, 153, 159, 173, 179–80, 183, 187–9, 191, 196–7, 200, 204, 207–11, 218, 220, 222, 231, 235, 240, 251, 263 London Philharmonic Orchestera, 36 Long Range Desert Group, 187 Longido, 51 Longmoor, 72 Loresho, 52, 204 Loresho Ridge, 196–7, 213, 237 Lorian Swamp, 102 Lourenço Marques, 18 Lucas, John, 233, 247 Lucerne, Lake, 61 Luftwaffe, 93, 99–100, 135–6, 153 Lumsden, Major, 83, 94 Lusaka, 173 Lustman, Heinie, 164–5, 236 Luton, 140 Luxembourg, 85 Lyme Regis, 74 Lympne, 64 Lyon, Chris, 251 Maas, River, 150, 151 Maaten Bagush, 116 Mabingo, 105 McCaldin, Dr, 225 McCallum, Driver, 152 McCullough, Graham, 206, 218, 224

280

INDEX McCullum, Driver, 136, 137 Macdermott, Mr, 35 Macdonald, Malcolm, 214 MacDonald, Ramsay, 65 McGougan, Alan, 249, 250 McGrath, A. C., 34 MacGregor-Ross, Mr and Mrs, 16 MacKenzie, Bruce, 212 MacKenzie, Tom, 205 Mackenzie–Ashton house, 48 Macmillan, Lady, 173 Madeira, 233 Mafeking, 246 Magadi, 216 Makerere University, 207 Makindu, 18 Malawi, 4, 173–4 Malim, F. B., 35–6, 66 Malta, 117, 124 Mansell, Andrew, 241 Maputo, 254 Maralal, 172, 260 Marda Pass, 106 Mareth, 129, 130, 146 Markham, Beryl, 64 Marles, Alan, 167, 175 Marsabit, 4 Marseilles, 13, 20, 26–7 Maseru, 241–3, 245–6, 256 Massicault, 131 Mather, Carol, 146 Mathews, Kathleen, 218 Matruh, 118 Matthews, Gwyneth, 70 Matthews, Kathleen, 219 Mau Mau, 139, 203, 206, 212 Mauchauffée, Madame, 160 Mbabane, 252, 253, 254 Mbale, 162, 207 Mboya, Tom, 229–30, 233 Mbozi, 198 Mechelen, 91 Mechili, 122

Medenine, 129, 130 Mediterranean, 19, 26, 47, 116, 118, 126, 132, 137, 156 Medjez, 130 Melvin, Gordon, 219 Merca, 163 Mersa Matruh, 116 Meru Park, 247 Messina, Straits of, 136 MI6, 159, 185, 190–1 Middle East, 86–8, 114, 124–5, 160, 220 Middle East Command, 116 Migdoll, Micky, 216 Migumoni, 224 Millbank, 189, 191 Miller, Sapper (Dusty), 82 Ministry of Supply, 182, 183 Mitubiri, 102 Mogadishu, 105, 162–6, 187, 223 Mohales Hoek, 246 Moi, Daniel, 52, 232 Moishoeshoe, King, 245 Mokhotlong, 246 Molinari, Brigadiere, 110 Mollison, Jim, 64 Molloy, Cecily-Ann, 71 Molloy, Mike, 71 Mombasa, 17–18, 24, 47–8, 100, 156, 160, 163, 167, 170, 195, 201, 205, 222–3 Montecorvino, 136 Montgomery, Bernard L., 88, 119, 123–4, 128–9, 144–6, 148–9, 154 Morogoro, 198 Morris, Alice and Helen, 176 Morris, Edith, 176 Morris, Lieutenant, 120 Morris, Mary, 186 Morton, Betty, 154 Moshi, 167, 199–200, 206 Moss, Kenneth, 204

281

INDEX Mount Mellick, 6 Moyale, 4 Moy-Thomas, Arthur, 21, 76, 175 Mozambique, 8, 240–1, 254 Msongari, 160 Msus, 122 Mua Hills, 15 Mullaghanard, 5 Mundford, 141, 142 Munich, 68 Murchison Park, 238 Murray, Catherine, 175, 188 Murray, Michael, 160, 175, 188 Murrayfield, 71 Murumo, Mr, 244, 256 Mussolini, Benito, 128 Muthaiga, 218 Muthaiga Club, 214–15, 237–8, 265–6 Mwanza, 199 Mweiga, 161 Mweya, 238 Mweya Lodge, 239 Myers, Eddie, 187 Nagasaki, 162 Nairobi, 3–4, 11, 13, 15–16, 25, 48–51, 75, 100, 103–4, 110, 114–15, 156, 160–1, 166–8, 170–2, 174, 176, 178, 192, 195–201, 204, 206–11, 214–20, 223, 227, 230–2, 235, 240–1, 243, 245, 247–8, 251, 253–5, 257, 266 Nairobi Club, 48 Nairobi Technical College, 210 Naivasha, 220, 235 Naivasha, 115 Naivasha, Lake, 49, 216 Nakuru, 166, 206, 235, 265 Namanga, 50–1 Namanga River, 51 Namibia, 242, 246

Nanyuki, 102–3, 114, 160–1, 167–8, 246 Napier, Lord, 101 Naples, 57, 137–8 Ndachi, 102–3, 168 Ndola, 173 Neame, Philip, 119 Nelson, Dr, 30 Nepal, 170 Nettlebed, 55 New York, 69 New Zealand, 8, 121, 123, 132, 260 Newbury, 258 Newcastle, 72 Newmarket, 70, 72 Newnham College, 69 Newport, 190 Newquay, 40 Ngong, 51, 227–8, 235 Ngong Hills, 50, 209, 235, 264 Niblock-Stewart, Mrs, 101 Nice, 87 Nigeria, 99, 103, 113 Nigerian Field Company, 103 Nigerian Regiment, 105, 107 Nijmegen, 148, 149 Njonjo, Charles, 232 Njoro, 206 Noakes, Mrs, 175, 176 Noblet, Albert, 35 Norfolk, 52, 141 Normandy, 129, 146 North Africa, 116, 133, 141 North Horr, 4 North Sea, 98 Northampton, 140 Northern Rhodesia, 4, 99, 173 Norton, Mr and Mrs, 42 Norway, 23 Nyali Beach, 167 Nyanza, 230 Nyasaland, 4, 99, 173 Nyerere, Julius, 214, 229

282

INDEX Nyeri, 114 O’Connor, General, 119 O’Grady, Gerald, 34 Obote, Milton, 214, 221, 223 Ogaden, 105, 161, 163 Ogaden savannah, 105 Ol Olua Ridge, 247, 258, 263–4 Old Leigh Farm, 39 Old Mill House, 20–1, 28–9, 40, 54, 64, 72 Olden, Janie, 259 Olden, Richard, 259 Omo River, 107 Operation Overlord, 88, 142, 205 Orange Free State, 241–2, 255 Orange River, 242, 255 Orne, River, 146 Osborne House, 189, 190 Osmond, Keith, 219, 247 Overseas Development Agency (ODA), 251 Owen Falls Construction Company, 206 Owen, Dai, 129, 141 Owles, Celia, 260 Owles, Hugh, 260 Owles, Juliet, 258 Oxford, 33, 35, 39, 41, 46, 52, 54, 58–9, 65, 76, 222, 224, 231, 237–8, 240, 245, 259, 262–3 Oyster Bay, 198 Pachmarhi, 11 Paddington, 28, 59, 188 Paiforce, 122, 125 Palestine, 81, 87, 116 Paraa, 238 Paraa Lodge, 238 Paris, 13, 27, 62, 66, 90, 98, 232 Parrish, Julia, 265 Payne, Alan, 35

Peace Pledge Union, 65 Penzance, 59 Persia, 116, 122 Peterhouse, 70 Petrie, David, 266 Petrie, David and Felicity, 264 Philip, Ian, 249 Pim family, 7 Pim, Elizabeth, 6 Pim, Margaret, 7 Platt, General, 106 Plymouth, 73, 127 Pomigliano d’Arco, 136, 137 Pompeii, 136 Poona, 22, 25, 26 Port Elizabeth, 18 Port Isaac, 40 Port Said, 11, 19, 26, 47, 52, 62, 115, 124 Port Suez, 115 Porth, 41 Portofino, 47 Portsmouth, 142, 259 Potter, Mr, 35 Powell, Terry, 197, 198–200 Preston Crowmarsh, 54 Pretoria, 112, 242, 256 Pritchard, Alice, 5, 30 Pritchard, Ethel, 59 Pritchard, Ian, 213 Pritchard, Margaret, 39, 59, 77 Pritchard, Tony, 40 Proof and Experimental Establishment (PEE), 181–3 Pwillheli, 40, 58 Qattara Depression, 118 Queen Elizabeth Park, 209, 238, 239 Queens College, 70 Radnor Park, 43 Ramabanta, 244 Ramsgate, 95

283

INDEX Ravelin, 72 RC&F, 203, 205–8, 210, 212, 216–17 Reading, 28 Readman, Basil, 33 Red Sea, 19, 26, 47, 124 Remnant, Henrietta, 264 Renison, Sir Patrick, 214 Rennes, 144 Retford, 5 Rhine, River, 146, 148–9 Rhodes, Godfrey (Jimmie), 191, 202 Rhodesia, 8 Riara Ridge, 167, 170–1, 204–5 Rickman, Carrie, 28 Rift Valley, 235 Rinaldi, Ray, 160 Risley, Eric, 47 Ritchie, Neil, 123, 149–50 Roberts, Peter, 266 Robinson, Lewis, 181, 182 Robinson, Roy, 207, 208 Rogers, Ginger, 77 Roma, 244 Rome, 5, 105, 116, 240, 252–3 Rommel, Erwin, 116, 119, 122–4, 127, 129–30 Romney Marshes, 44 Ronaldson, Pat, 66 Roome, Oliver, 125 Ross, Mike, 252 Rosslare, 45 Rothwell, Evelyn, 57 Rotterdam, 222 Roughton & Partners (R&P), 203, 217, 220–1, 243, 246, 251–2, 257 Roughton, Ann, 204, 207, 210, 214, 217 Roughton, Oliver, 210 Roughton, Sam, 195–7, 200–4, 206–8, 210–12, 214, 216–17, 220, 223, 228, 262

Roundhay Park, 97 Royal Artillery, 74, 182 Royal Engineers, 67, 78, 81, 84, 87, 156, 171, 174 Royal Engineers (RE), 67, 86, 89, 91, 98, 102, 104, 118, 126, 128, 134, 152, 155, 164, 166, 183, 191–2, 195, 205, 211, 216, 246 Royal Military Academy (RMA), 67, 74, 78, 87, 133 Royal Tank Corps, 13, 59 Rudolf, Lake, 4 Rugby, 58, 140 Ruiru, 15 Russell, Brian, 204 Russell, Mary and Brian, 167 Rutherford, Margaret, 208, 210 Rutherford, Michael, 207–8, 210 Sadi Barrani, 118 Sadler’s Wells, 70, 78 St Clare’s, 259, 263 St Erth, 59 St Ives, 40, 41 St James’s Palace, 68, 154 StJohn, 10, 61 StJohn, Andy, 38 StJohn, Dick, 28, 57 StJohn, Johnny, 38, 57–8 StJohn (née Goodbody), Madge, 5, 14, 20, 28, 30, 33, 44, 47, 49, 53, 55–7, 59–61, 65, 77, 188, 222, 231 StJohn, Michael, 16, 20–1, 28, 30–2, 36–8, 55–7, 62, 65, 70–1, 124, 162, 222, 240, 260 StJohn, Pam, 222, 240, 260 StJohn, Peggy, 28, 57 StJohn, Roger, 16, 20, 28, 30, 33, 36–8, 55–7, 153, 186, 260 StJohn, Rosemary, 260

284

INDEX StJohn, Tudor, 20, 28, 30, 33, 38, 40, 53–5, 57, 64, 153, 155, 172 St John’s, 249–50 St Lô, 144 St Oedenrode, 149 Salerno, 136–7, 139, 142, 146 Salisbury, 73, 173, 180, 259 Salisbury Plain, 187 Salter, Clive, 202–3 Samburu National Park, 260 Sandhurst, 36, 87, 169 Satara, 11, 22, 25–6 Savill, Paul, 263 Savimbi, Jonas, 246 School of Military Engineering (SME), 67–8, 175–6 Sciassamana, 112 Scotland, 37, 54, 71, 76, 222, 260 Scotland, Colonel, 187 Scott White, L., 182 Scott, H. S., 35 Second World War, 146, 211 Sedbergh, 140, 153, 156, 179 Seine, River, 146 Selassie, Haile, 10, 106, 237 Selwyn, Arthur, 98, 140, 156, 258 Selwyn, Jane, 258 Selwyn, Mary, 258 Selwyn, Nesta (née FitzGerald), 20, 25, 39, 52, 61, 74, 98, 140, 154, 156, 222, 231, 258, 259, 265 Semonkong, 244 Sfax, 130 Shaw, Captain, 111 Shaw, Dacre, 49 Shaw, George Bernard, 35, 78 Shaw, Madge, 49 Sheikh, 164 Shellhaven, 177, 179 ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 150, 159

Shillingford, 55, 57, 72 Shiplake, 38, 40, 52–3, 76 Shoeburyness, 181–3, 185 Shorncliffe, 20–1 Shorne, 175 Sicily, 134 Sidi Barrani, 116, 119 Sidi Resegh, 121 Sierra Leone, 99 Sim, Brigadier, 28 Sim, David, 14, 40, 63 Sim, John, 14, 26, 28, 40, 41 Sim, Noel, 14, 26, 28, 40–1, 61–3, 124 Sim (née Goodbody), Peggy, 5, 14, 26, 27, 38, 40 Sim, Peter, 14, 26, 40 Simmonds, Driver, 117, 120–3 Simon Arzt, 11, 26, 47 Simpson, Wallis, 140 Sinclair, Ian, 197 Singida, 199 Sirte, 127 Skegness, 97, 98, 99 Skiberreen, 45 Slade, Humphrey, 202–3, 212 Slough, 57 Smith, Ernest, 34 Smith, Somali, 163 Smuts, Jan, 8, 112 Soames, Jack, 102 Soil Mechanics Ltd, 179 Sollum, 120, 126 Somalia, 103, 161, 164–6 Somaliland, 104–5, 111, 161, 163, 165 Somme, 72, 146 Somme, River, 89 Sonning, 37 Soroti, 162, 220–1, 223 Sorrento, 136 Sousse, 130 South Africa, 3, 34, 104, 166, 213, 241, 245–7, 255–6, 266

285

INDEX South African Air Force (SAAF), 103, 110, 112, 117, 167 South African Brigade, 104 South Kensington, 64, 140 Southampton, 21, 83, 220, 240, 252, 257 Southend, 71, 143, 176, 179–80, 222 Southend-on-Sea, 71, 176 Southern Rhodesia, 173, 212; see also Zimbabwe Southwood, 33, 38, 40, 53, 67 Spain, 65 Spalding, Captain, 128–9, 134 Spanish Civil War, 65 Spilsby, 98 Stacy-Marks, Tony, 167–8 Standard Bank of South Africa, 197 Standish, Pery, 34 Stannard, Peter, 190 Stanton, W. K., 36 Stelling, 39 Stenning, Phil, 84, 191 Stephenson, Captain, 110, 112, 113 Stephenson, Lieutenant-Colonel, 189 Sterling, Bill, 212 Stewart, 172 Stogdale, David, 266 Stott, Angela, 23, 25 Sudan, 161, 220, 240, 251 Suez, 11, 26, 175, 223 Suez Canal, 11, 62, 115, 156 Sultan Hamud, 198 Surrey, 37, 83, 154, 228, 230, 234, 260, 261 Sussex, 23, 31, 37 Sutcliffe, Arthur, 161, 195, 196, 207 Sutton, 228, 230, 231–2, 260–1 Swaziland, 220, 240, 242, 244, 252–5

Sweden, 218 Switzerland, 61 Tabora, 199 Tallboys, Mr, 35 Tana River, 102, 103–4 Tanga, 218 Tanganyika, 8–9, 15, 50, 71, 99, 167, 197, 199, 206–7, 209, 218 Tatham-Warter, Digby, 33 Taung-Sani Top, 246 Taylor, Jeremy, 204 Teita, 46 Templer Barracks, 209, 211 Templer, General, 96 Thames Valley, 53, 76, 176 Thetford, 141, 142 Thika, 103, 162, 167, 216, 224 Thompson, Jock, 129, 141 Thompson, Maureen, 232 Thomson, David, 198 Thomson’s Falls, 161, 172, 231 Thornville, 13, 14 Thrapston, 142 Tickell, Eustace, 125 Tilburg, 88, 151, 152 Tilbury, 142, 192 Tipperary, 4, 142, 148 Tito, President, 221 TM-AM, 267 Tobruk, 119, 121, 122, 123 Tonga, Queen of, 188 Tororo, 114, 162, 207 Tournai, 84, 91 Transkei, 242 Transvaal, 241, 242, 255 Travers Morgan & Partners, 182 Triad, 218, 219 Triad House, 219 Trieste, 221, 222, 223 Trigh Capuzzo, 120, 123

286

INDEX Tripoli, 111, 119, 127, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136 Tunbridge Wells, 31 Tunis, 129, 130, 131, 146 Tunisia, 116, 130, 131, 145, 252 Turkana, Lake, 260 Turnberry, 139 Turner, Christine, 166, 211 Turpin, Dick, 141, 148, 152 Twining, Teddy, 214 Uaso-Nyero River, 216 Uganda, 3–4, 46, 99, 114, 161–2, 192, 206–10, 214, 220–1, 223, 229, 238, 240, 251, 257 Uganda Railway, 3, 16, 18 Ulyate, Ron, 125 United States, 8 United States Air Force (USAF), 131 Upnor, 72 Upper Chine, 258, 259, 263 Upton, David, 241, 246 Vamos, George, 160 van Straaten, Ozzie, 244 Veghel, 148, 149 Venice, 221–3 Venlo, 151 Verney, General, 146 Vernon, 146 Vernon, Cherry, 206 Vernon-Evans, Peter, 34, 237 Victoria (London), 27–8, 46, 191, 222 Victoria, Lake, 170, 199, 208 Victoria, Queen, 189 Victoria Falls, 173 Vienna, 57 Villers-Bocage, 144 Vire, 144 Voi, 18 Volturno, River, 137, 138

von Duhn, Clara, 66 von Lettow Vorbeck, General, 8 Wabulenzi, 220 Wadi Akarit, 130, 146 Waghmarae, Dr, 225 Wainfleet, 98 Wajir, 165 Walcheren, 150 Walker, Johnnie, 26, 128, 129 Walker, Peter, 265 Wallingford, 28, 40, 44, 54–5, 77, 176 Walters, Mr, 28 Waltham Abbey, 142 Wanstall, H. J. B., 35 Wantage, 258 Warminster, 97 Warshow, Dr, 266 Wash, 98 Watamu, 213 Waterville, 44, 45 Waterworks Camp, 100–1, 166 Weedon, 67, 82, 96 Weeks, Mr and Mrs, 77 Wehrmacht, 92, 93 Weller, John, 237 Wellington College, 10, 30, 32–3, 35–7, 52, 57, 65–6, 70, 236–7, 263 Westcliff-on-sea, 177 Westlands, 167, 171 Wetteren, 146, 150, 159 Wevill, Arthur, 50 Whaddon, 259 White, Eddie, 179 Whittaker, Roger, 204 Wild Life Society, 228 Wild, George, 178 Wilkinson, Michael, 46, 48, 64, 70, 71, 72, 74, 78, 88 Wilkinson, Roger, 46, 48, 71 Williams, Alice, 200

287

INDEX Williams, Brian and Vanessa, 264 Williamson, Dr, 199 Wilson, Harold, 182 Winchester, 32 Wingate, Orde, 106 Winterbrook, 52 Wittenham, Lord, 54 Wokingham, 33 Wolseley-Lewis, Arthur, 264 Wolseley-Lewis, Joan, 220, 264 Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), 97, 139 Woollett, John, 81, 95, 97 Woolwich, 53, 66–7, 87, 133, 178 Worsley, T. C., 65

Wyke Regis, 142 Yates, D., 126 Yei, 251 Yelverton, 73 York, 40, 62 York, Duke of, 68 Yorkshire, 33, 98, 155, 156, 180 Yugoslavia, 221, 222 Zagreb, 221, 222, 224 Zanzibar, 198 Zibarras, James, 209 Zibarras, Michael, 206, 208, 209, 210, 238 Zimbabwe, 212 Zomba, 173 Zorina, Vera, 70 Zuru, Gariba, 103, 107–8, 113

288