At The Swimming Club

This photo of me was taken in the late September of 1954. I'm on the beach at the Mombasa Swimming Club, which we'd very likely reached by cycling down to Mombasa's Old Port and hiring a water taxi across the harbour to the club.

The snap was probably taken by my mother on her Box Brownie. By her standards it's a good composition - at least I'm central in the frame. My father took far better pictures.

However, it's also a slightly odd picture because it doesn't include my brother Richard, which suggests he wasn't there. This, again, suggests that he had gone back to school at the local primary, and my mother had taken me to the club because my summer holiday in Mombasa was nearing it's end and, in the next few days, I would be heading up to Nairobi to catch the BOAC flight back to prep school in England.  This is supported by my expression, not the expression of a happy nine-year old.

I had good reason to be unhappy. I would next see my home in Mombasa in ten month's time. I would spend the other two holidays with various aunts and uncles in England. Over the next few months I would cry, a lot. I well remember one air stewardess stopping in the isle beside me as our 'plane taxied out to take off from Nairobi and telling me, in a very firm tone, to "stop blubbing." I did, and thereafter struggled to confine my misery to the hours I lay curled up in chilly English beds.

I have no idea what damage, if that's the right word, was done to children like my brother and I by being 'sent away' to school as we were. I knew a few people who preferred being at school in England to life in East Africa, but I thought they were very peculiar indeed. I spent the rest of my life remembering Mombasa and its climate and beaches and sand castles.