Susie the Dachshund

Susie the rough-haired dachshund became part of our family shortly before we left Dar-es-Salaam in 1950, and travelled up to join us in Mombasa by ship. This is the earliest photo I have of her, in the first house we had in Mombasa, a bungalow in Cliff Avenue. The little girl is Susan Gadd who lived next door: the cat Susie is confronting is hers.

Susie moved with us over the road with us to our second house in Cliff Avenue, a big, semi-detached two-storey house which had an upstairs veranda where Richard and I slept in hot weather. The ground floor had highly polished concrete floors downstairs upon which Susie slipped and fell over when she had cause to run - usually to 'see off' someone who had come to the front door.

It was at this house that Susie, up until then thought of as a rather useless if well-intentioned beast, made her name: she killed a green mamba, one of the more deadly snakes, in the front garden, chopping it up into several pieces. Everyone stood around waiting for Susie to die: she didn't.

Susie was Richard's dog, while Tinker, the long-haired black-and-white cat, was mine. Susie was as soft as they came, always very hang-dog when we went out and left her behind.

This picture was taken in the front garden of the third house we had in Cliff Avenue, the one which had the magnificent view across the channel leading in to Kilindini harbour. At this stage Susie was on the fat side but....

 ....by the time this, the last picture of her, was taken, she had slimmed down. She's seen in front of the veranda where she spent a lot of time lying in the shade on the cool concrete. I think the photo, a colour slide, may have been taken by my aunt Dorothy, my father's sister, when she came out to visit my parents in the late 50s or very early 60s.