An African Journey - 1

The following is an extract from ' A Life' which my mother wrote after she left East Africa and returned to England in 1961. It tells the story of a journey she undertook from Dar-es-Salaam to Mombasa in 1950 with my brother and me, then aged three and five.

We were only six months in the new house ay Oyster Bay just outside Dar-es-Salaam when the direction came from London head office for Dad to move up to Mombasa, and Cyril Hunt would take over from him. There was no house for us in Mombasa at that time so I arranged that we would go up to Mountain View, the farm where Kay Grantham was now living, and spend some time with her until we heard that a house was available.

Map of Tanganyika railways with main places mentioned in text arrived in green.

Dad saw us off at the station with one African staff to help us, and he flew up to Mombasa to take over the Shipping Department and live in the Club until a house became available.

We got off the train at Gulu*, having slept overnight, and Kay was there to meet us with a lorry. The boys and I got in the front and the Africans in the back and we set off. Kay said it was too far to get to the farm by nightfall so we would stay the night in the hotel above Kongwa. This was run by two veterans of the Burma campaign. They had plenty of water and a swimming pool, but Kongwa had not had rain since March. We had a most entertaining evening with the men telling us stories of the Burma campaign, and I wish now I had noted them down.

We set off the next morning and drove until the road came to an end on the side of a hill and we all got out and Kay said we had to walk up the bank to the farm as there was no road. I had to carry Richard as it was too far for him but Jonathan marched on and we soon arrived at the farm. It was situated in a valley with hills all round and Kay said the valley was very fertile.

Donald, Kay's husband, had bought a plough and the boys were to start work on ploughing up the land for tobacco. We had a nice rondavel (a round hut) with three beds and a fireplace and crittal windows, but there was no glass in the windows as it had not arrived. We used to bath in front of the fire, and at night we could hear a leopard coughing as it prowled round the hills above the farm. Kay had taken delivery from England of a consignment of day old chicks and they were growing fast but were busy 'feather plucking' for some reason and most of them had bare bottoms. She was hoping to supply new laid eggs to the residents of Kongwa.

Kay said that Donald, who had been loaned by the Government to the Groundnut Scheme*, had taken on a man and his wife from the Scheme to work on the farm and they would be arriving on the Sunday. I asked where they were to live and Kay said we would go over the next day and check their quarters and see that all was ready for them. Jonathan went off walking with the Africans and Kay said there was a donkey for Richard to ride, but the donkey was not inclined to carry a passenger and I whipped Richard off just before the donkey bolted.

We walked up the valley and came to some buildings which Kay said had originally been pigsties but they were quite good quarters and that was where the new couple would be living. There was a wood stove and she had made a debi* into an oven and the quarters had been well cleaned out and she thought they would be ok. I was a bit doubtful as, before the war and Army service, the man had worked for the Newcastle tramways and I thought he and his wife would be, to say the least, surprised at the quarters being provided.

*I think my mother mens Gulwe: Gulu is in Uganda.

* The Groundnut Scheme was a UK-government backed effort to grow peanuts on a very large scale

in Tanganyika, using machinery left over from the war - such as tanks converted to bulldozers.

The scheme was a failure - see more here.

* A debi was a fuel container equivalent to the much better 'Jerry can'.