The Lunatic Express

We used to have hundreds of books but various moves, particularly the ones from Essex up to Ardnamurchan and then from Ardnamurchan down to Suffolk, forced us to reduce their numbers drastically, yet we still have many shelves of them. This is one of three which hold my Africa books, several of them dating back to my childhood. In many I wrote inside the front cover where and when I acquired them, a habit I now regret dropping.

I do feel that books should be read rather than used as ornamentation or, as has recently been pointed out in our new age of energy awareness, as wall insulation, so I have made a point of working my way through the best books so I can justify keeping them. Some I have now read three or four times but 'The Lunatic Express' was recently read for only the second time. As well as containing an excellent potted history of Kenya and Uganda, it tells a stirring tale of the trials and adventures that accompanied the building of the railway from Mombasa to Nairobi and then on, across the Rift Valley, to its terminus at Kisumu on Lake Victoria. It was completed at great cost, amongst other things in human lives at Tsavo, where two lions ate black, white and brown people indiscriminately.

People wrote it off as a waste of money at the time but it has turned out so successful that the Chinese have now built a second line which runs parallel to the original. It's a classic example of the sort of development that the British imperial exploiters carried out for which they get no credit today, even though it's been of inestimable economic and social value to Kenya and Uganda.

I travelled the Mombasa-Nairobi section several times, on the overnight sleeper which, in its day, was the height of luxury. Waking in the morning and pulling up the blind to watch the slow passage of animals and scenery was an unforgettable experience, as was the evening meal. Of course, it was always better the Nairobi-Mombasa direction because that meant we were at the beginning of one of those wonderful summer holidays in Mombasa.