My Parents' Retirement

It is very easy with the power of 20-20 hindsight to judge the mistakes others made in their lives, particularly those with whom one has been close. It's not that I think my parents made many. On the contrary, I admire many of the decisions they did make, not least the courage that both showed in leaving England and setting off for the unknown of East Africa in the inter-war years.

My father left school at fourteen without any qualifications and, after a time as an errand boy in a small business in London which imported dress materials from France, he joined a company called Scruttons as an office boy. Scruttons had once been a cargo shipping line and my grandfather, Ernest, had been one of their captains, but they were now providing labour for the London docks. Ernest persuaded my father....

....to take a job in Port Sudan on the Red Sea with a Greek shipping agent called Contimichaelos Darke. At 21, it was a leap into the unknown but it was the makings of him. Amongst other things, he looked after his father's ship when it came in to the agency.

Similarly, my mother had the courage to leave a job as a shorthand-typist with Shell in London to take a post in the colonial administration in Zanzibar. She was better qualified than my father, having passed her matriculation exams at sixteen. She would have carried on in education and trained to be a teacher - and made an excellent one - but her parents felt they couldn't support her, so she left home in Manchester to train and then work in London. For her, too, the job in Zanzibar was a gamble.

They had many years of happy life together in East Africa, in Zanzibar, Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa, but when it came to their future after Dalgety's took over the African Mercantile it was my father who was keen to return to the UK. His idea of retirement was a country cottage with a garden to work and a pub down the road to which he could repair for a pint or two at lunchtime.

The move was a mistake. My father may have achieved his ambition when they bought Amberheath but he was quickly bored. He did try to take work with a local company called Vidler, as an estate agent, but he couldn't adapt to working for other people so he gave up quickly, and he never looked for another job.

My mother seemed to accept the return to the UK but I cannot believe she did so happily. Unlike my father, she loved East Africa's sun, beaches, and people, and I do believe that, given the chance, she would have stayed there. However, my father's determination to return and the fact that her two sons were at school in England meant she had little choice. For several years after settling in England she kept working, taking the train twice a week from the nearby halt to London. Her job was interesting but the journey, particularly in winter, was long and tiring.

My father was sixty, my mother fifty when they came 'home'. They enjoyed entertaining friends, they went to watch cricket together, but I think their life was 'okay' rather than 'exciting', as it had been in East Africa.