A Million-Pound View

I have been fortunate enough to live in two houses which had million-pound views. This is the view from one, the house at the end of Cliffe Avenue in Mombasa in which I lived during the last two holidays of my time in East Africa, in 1960 and 1961. It looked almost due east so, from the upstairs veranda from which this picture was taken, we would drink our early morning tea and watch dawn break across the Indian Ocean.

The view looked across the golf course, with its brown greens made of beaten lateritic earth; across the coast road, Azania Avenue; and across a narrow coral fringing reef to the main channel along which the larger ships approached Kilindini harbour - a merchant ship is seen leaving port. Two white-sailed jahazis are visible heading for the other harbour, the Old Port.

The 'elephant' is the remains of the wreck of the Ahmadi which came ashore in 1909 below the lighthouse at Ras Serani headland, just off the picture to the left, while a local attraction, the Florida Club, is just off picture to the right.

When my parents left Mombasa in 1961 their great friend, John Hall, painted them this picture in which he exercised a little artistic license to show part of the front garden with the bird bath being visited by a yellow weaver bird, and also the great Andromache reef which protected the approach to Kilindini and across which the great ocean swell destroyed itself in a maelstrom of white-capped breakers, the boom of that destruction a background to every moment lived in that lovely house.