Tsavo Visitors

As a family, we visited Tsavo National Park, usually Tsavo East, on a number of occasions in the 1950s and early 60s. At the time it was relatively unspoilt and contained a huge variety of game, although, because the landscape was largely thick acacia bush, it wasn't good for seeing the big cats.

At the time the elephant population was going through the 'maximum' stage of its cycle, with the result that, while elephants were easy to find, they were doing huge damage to the vegetation. In the normal way, this would result in a fall in the food supply, which would have reduced the population, but this was hastened in the years after we left by mass poaching which would almost destroy the great herds.

One of the highlights for those visitors who came out to stay with my parents was a trip to Tsavo. My Aunt Dorothy, my father's sister, came out in 1958 and was taken by my mother to the park - and was terrified: she had expected the animals to be in cages. She asked to be driven to Tsavo station so she could catch a train back to Mombasa but the only train was the overnight sleeper which came through in the early hours of the next morning, so she was drugged up and spent the rest of the day asleep on the back seat.

My mother's brother, Sandy Wilson, came out to visit late in our days in Mombasa and was duly taken to Tsavo. Sandy, as well as writing musicals, was a painter and he captured four of Tsavo's features in this oil painting: the twisted wreckage of its trees, the shades of red in its earth, the endless ranks of flat-bottomed cumulus clouds, and the layered Yatta plateau. He gave the picture to my parents, and it now hangs in the passageway in our house.