Mangoes

I may not be able to start a day without a banana but it isn't my favourite fruit. I think that for any child brought up in the tropics, that accolade must go to the mango. The trouble with mangoes is that there are hundreds of varieties and some are very much better than others. The mangoes in this picture came from the tree in our back garden in Jamaica but my memory of them is that, while the tree produced plenty of fruit, they weren't that good to eat.

A good mango should be juicy with a firm but not hard flesh, as little in the way of stringiness around its pip as possible - otherwise one spends hours afterwards getting the strings out of one's teeth - and a rich, full flavour.

My memory of East African mangoes is that the sweetest were the Lamu mango, but that the Bombay mango was also good. Mango trees grew everywhere: this picture shows me in the front garden of our house in Upanga Road, Dar-es-Salaam, where the drive to the front door circled round a magnificent, shady mango tree under which the ayahs would sit with their little white charges talking and laughing while the children played.

Eating a mango could be a messy business. If we had one for breakfast Ouma, our cook, would have diced the accessible flesh up so we could eat it using a spoon but the only way of dealing with the pip was to pick it up in our fingers and suck it - with mango juice running down our chins and onto our nice, clean tee-shirts. My mother, who was brought up in India and Burma, the home of the mango, always maintained that the best place to eat a mango was in the bath.

The tree itself has many uses. Being slow-growing it produces a heavy, hard wood one of whose uses is in making the hulls of the ngalowas that are the elegant local fishing boats along the East African coast.