'Departure' 1954

I don't know how my mother was able to take this picture but it says something about her determination that what she was recording should happen and, perhaps, about her rather stern Scottish upbringing. In her photograph album she wrote underneath it, 'Departure'.

The small boy dressed in school uniform who is waving as he walks out across the tarmac at Nairobi's old Eastleigh airport is me. It's early January, perhaps 8th, 1954, I have just turned nine and, unlike my school friends who are going to secondary school in Nairobi, I am flying 'home' to England, 'unaccompanied' as BOAC termed it, to go to prep school. I wouldn't see my parents, or my Mombasa home, again until late July.

What the picture doesn't show is the state I was in.

Why didn't I run away across the tarmac? What was it that kept me going? A sense of duty? The blindness of tears? Or the incomprehension that the parents I loved should be inflicting this to me?

This picture was taken at the African Mercantile offices a couple of days earlier, just before we left Mombasa for Nairobi in our Morris Oxford, KAA 694. My parents' friend Bobby Thomas came with us so I presume that she took the picture. Knotted up in my hand is a damp handkerchief. My father wasn't accompanying us so this was the moment when I said goodbye to him. Look just to the left of his head and there's a hand waving: it's the African Mercantile's driver, who was taking us.

I remember playing the mouth organ almost the whole way. Somehow the music, terrible player that I was, seemed to help. The picture was taken at the bridge over the Tsavo river.

This was the next day. I'm dressed in my prep school uniform ready to leave - the only thing I'm not wearing is the school tie - so this must have been taken shortly before I boarded the 'plane at Nairobi. Richard is wearing his MEPS hat.

Once again I ask - why did I go along with this? I had already begged my parents, again and again, not to send me to England, alone, so why hadn't I already tried to run far, far away? I knew what I was going to - we had only recently returned from leave - and it was a miserable place compared to Mombasa; and I was going to the bitter cold of an English winter.

I spent the Easter holidays with an aunt and uncle in London. They were kind, but their children had already left home and I felt I was an encumbrance. There wasn't much to do, and London always seemed wet, grey and smelly. I lived for the moment I would return to Mombasa, which I did for the summer holidays of 1954.

For the next seven years this was the pattern of my life.