The Gramophone

Of all the objects that have traipsed round the world with me this is possibly the most unlikely. It's made of a slightly rubbery plastic and used to sit in the front of the polished wooden box that housed my father's HMV gramophone, the first imported into Kenya that had stereophonic capability.

This is a machine very similar to the one my father had. The orange plastic thing is clearly visible, and it lit up when the gramophone was turned on. To go with the gramophone he bought the two large, floor-standing speakers which, while the gramophone was rapidly outmoded, we continued to use until we left Maldon in 1997.

I know when he bought the gramophone because its arrival coincided with the move from the Hoey house at Nyali to the African Mercantile's manager's house on Mombasa island. Richard and I had spent almost every moment of the summer holiday of 1958 on the Hoey house beach and did not take kindly to the idea of living in the house at the end of Cliff Avenue. Our mother was pleased, as she did not approve of our happy isolation at Nyali and felt we ought to be socialising with other young people, so one of the first things she did when we arrived for our 1959 holiday was to organise ballroom dancing classes in our sitting room - and the music for quickstep and foxtrot was played on my father's wonderful new gramophone.

I hated the dancing classes as they involved girls, and at the tender age of fourteen they terrified me, particularly as the dance teacher told us that, for some dances, we had to hold them close against us. However, the young people who danced with us became great friends, and a holiday which had threatened to be disappointing turned into one of the best we ever had as we spent so much time in their company, riding round Mombasa on our bicycles, being taken to game parks and beaches, and playing records - though they were the Everly Brothers, Elvis and Connie Francis rather than Victor Silvester.

So I have kept this little piece of plastic as a memento of a holiday long ago.