Smaller Dhows

If the big oceangoing dhows made the long journey from Arabia and western Indian ports, the workhorses of the coastal trade were the smaller dhows. We used to refer to them as 'Lamu Dhows' but they are properly called jahazi. This one is pictured in Mombasa's Old Port.

Unlike the big dhows, which have disappeared from African waters, there are still hundreds of jahazi working today. This photo shows jahazi beached at Bagamoyo in 2010. The main cargo being unloaded was cooking oil in yellow plastic cans.

This picture, taken several decades ago, shows a jahazi sailing out of Zanzibar. The building with the white clock tower to the right is the Beit al Ajaib, where my mother had her office when she worked for the Colonial Office between 1935 and 1941.

The mashua is a smaller vessel usually used for fishing but....

....it is also used as a cargo and passenger boat.

While all dhows are made of planks, traditionally they were sewn together using coconut rope, the belief being that, had they been constructed with nails, these would have been pulled out when they passed a magnetic mountain. Judging by this wreck on a Tanzanian beach, the tradition is no longer followed.

North Africa - 3

We reached Colomb-Bechar on the 15th July, ten days after leaving England, arranged to leave Olga at the prefecture, and then sat in that sweltering, dusty town for six days trying to get a lift south. The normal flow of massive trucks had stopped: there had been floods in Niger! So we gave up on that route, determining instead to hitch-hike east along the north African coast before working our way up the Nile to Uganda. Fortunately, we both had proper backpacks, so we loaded them and turned north.

Algeria is beautiful, its citizens generous with their lifts and only too keen to tell of the terrible war of independence they had just fought with the French. We travelled fast, to Saida the first night and to Algiers the second, the last lift with a man who owned a plumbing business and allowed us to sleep in his warehouse, which was close to the city centre. We spent three days in Algiers while we waited for visas for Egypt - for which this picture was taken.

Throughout the trip we ate simply, subsisting on local bread, tins of sardines, grapes, tomatoes and melons. We only allowed ourselves the occasional cup of coffee in a cafe and, very rarely, a proper restaurant meal. The lifts were good but we walked when we couldn't get one. We weren't proud: our slowest lift was in a cart pulled by a camel. We washed when the opportunity arose, and bathed in the irrigation channels or, when we were near it, the Mediterranean, where we found some stunning beaches.

At night we walked well out of a town or village, rolled out our sleeping bags and slept by the roadside. Nobody bothered us. Our main worries were scorpions and, if we were near a village, the local dogs, which often kept us awake with their barking.

On 28th July we crossed the border into Tunisia, at which point the lifts dried up. In the weeks to come we learned to sit in the dirt at the wayside and wait but we were impatient so, for the first and only time, we caught a bus....

....as far as Gafsa. On the 30th we were at the Libyan border, at Ben Gardane, where immigration found I had a problem with my visa. I had no choice but to turn back for Tunis, leaving Michael to cross into Libya as his visa was about to expire. The journey marked in blue was done in just over two days, some of the fastest hitch-hiking I have ever done - and in that time I collected the visa.

Along most of the Libyan coast the desert runs down to the sea but, in Roman times, the area was one of the breadbaskets of the empire. Leptis Magna, between Tripoli and Misrata, is one of the finest Roman cities in North Africa. When the guards closed it at night we hid. We slept in the ruins, took baths in the ladies' toilets (much cleaner than the mens'), and imagined what it would have been like to live in Leptis' neat houses, to walk in its public squares, and to enjoy its magnificent theatre.

We left Leptis on August 3rd, almost a month out from England. For most of the next stage the road ran through rocky, empty desert. Traffic was light. The local people were less friendly and generous. The lifts became increasingly hard work. I have always thought that we finally mastered the art of long-distance hitch-hiking - and, believe me, it is an art - on the desert roads of Libya.

Glengorse - 1

I attended Glengorse School from January 1954 until July 1958. Glengorse was a typical prep school, a boarding school with about eighty pupils aged between seven and thirteen. It occupied Telham Court (above), a large country house situated in rolling countryside near Battle in Sussex, built on the hill where William the Conqueror's army camped the night before the Battle of Hastings. The school was a business, owned by the headmaster, Robert Stainton, and his father-in-law.

The pupils were terrified of the headmaster. He was powerfully built with piercing blue eyes beneath bushy eyebrows, and he wielded the cane on any of the small boys who misbehaved. He was a keen sportsman - he had captained the Sussex cricket team - and had flown in Mosquitos in the war. This is a poor picture of him - I recall being very afraid when I asked if I could take a photo - but look at the postures of the pupils.

We had a strict regime, which included being sent to one of the several toilets each morning, and then having to report if our bowels had moved: if they hadn't, an intimidating matron dosed us on syrup of figs - ugh! We slept in large dormitories which were bitterly cold in winter, the food was bland and left us permanently hungry, and the regime required us to participate in sport every day except Sunday - and that was worse because we would go on a group 'walk', either into the country or, if it was wet, in a crocodile along the country roads.

Glengorse's extensive grounds included football, rugby and cricket pitches, and it had a gymnasium in which, along with gymnastics, the main event was the annual boxing competition. Everyone had to take part unless one obtained a note from matron - impossible - and we spent weeks training for it. In the autumn term we played soccer, in the spring term rugby, and in the summer cricket. Every week in summer we were taken to the White Rock swimming pool in Hastings.

In our last year, aged 13, we took the Common Entrance exam. The resulting grade dictated whether we obtained a place at the public school our parents had chosen for us. The school was, therefore, under considerable pressure to ensure that as many of its pupils as possible managed to get in to their first choice school.

Scotland 1958

Instead of going to South Wales or Cornwall, in August 1958 Gill's parents took her and her sister Pauline on a far more ambitious caravan holiday to Scotland. To do this, Don bought a second hand Thompson four-berth caravan.

To tow the caravan he had an 'alpine blue' Sunbeam Talbot which he also bought second hand. One of its features was a sunshine roof which can be seen in this picture, taken near Cannich. From left to right, Gill (with her dog Crackers), Bea and Pauline.

Being a member of the AA, Don was able to obtain a route map which consisted of pages of road maps which Gill, who sat in the back, used to navigate for him. Their first night was at Tarporley near Chester, the second at Carlisle, after which they passed through Glasgow and headed up the A82. This picture was taken in Glencoe.

They made the Camaghael camp and caravan site in Fort William their base for expeditions into Argyll. They visited Loch Sunart and Ardtoe, and one day set off for Mallaig. The single track road made Don car sick so, Pauline, who at the time only had a provisional license, had to take over and drive them back to Fort William.

Gill was desperate to climb Ben Nevis, which is visible from Camaghael, but no-one would go with her.

From Fort William they continued on the A82 to Fort Augustus and then on to a site at Beauly, where they camped by a river and enjoyed the hospitality of the Scottish midge. From there they headed northwest to Loch Maree (pictured) where they picnicked on a lovely sunny day. One of the places they visited was Inverewe Gardens.

From his photographs, it is obvious that this place particularly impressed Don. It's Gruinard Bay, and he took this picture of the bay itself and....

....another looking inland into truly Scottish scenery.

They were away for three weeks. Years later Gill returned to the west coast, to Ardnamurchan, where we lived for twenty-one years. Our daughter, Rachael, went to secondary school in Fort William, where she boarded. Her hostel overlooked Camaghael campsite with Ben Nevis rising behind it. She fulfilled her mother's ambition by climbing Ben Nevis.

Footpaths

After twenty-one years of living in Scotland, where the 'right to roam' legislation enables ordinary people to enjoy wide access to their countryside, we feel constrained on our rambles by the need to stick to England's footpaths. Rightly, the English are very proud of their footpaths, which are hundreds if not thousands of years old, but there is nothing to beat Scotland's freedom to wander at will, within some simple constraints, across land which belongs, not to the landowners, but to the people.

The wheat is being harvested in the huge fields to the south and west of our house. The harvest began after weeks without rain and was interrupted by last week's storms. Despite the drought during its growing season the wheat crop looks okay but the sugar beet and onion fields, where they haven't been irrigated, have suffered.

So we stick to the footpaths. These sometimes follow farm tracks, sometimes skirt the huge fields, sometimes cut straight across them - presumably a legacy of a hedge grubbed up long ago - and sometimes....

....plunge into the shade of woodland. Our walk today took us along a strip of woodland which hides two ponds, both covered in thick mats of weed, probably encouraged by the rich runoff of fertilizer from the fields. In one of the ponds....

....we came across a young family of mallards pushing through the weed soup as they made for cover, but this young moorhen largely ignored us.

The wildlife is there if you look for it. We continue to find beautiful butterflies, like this comma, and find....

....more and more new dragon- and damselflies some of which, like this darter, I can't identify.

North Africa - 2

We drove south along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. After the mad dash through Europe we slowed down, stopping at a beach where we set up camp and....

....assisted in our discussions by a small and very friendly tortoise, for the first time began to think realistically about our plans. Olga drank petrol - I think she did less than 15 miles to the gallon - so we simply couldn't afford to drive her much further, yet we had to return her to the UK as my parents had put a hefty deposit on her. So we determined to make for Colomb-Bechar, which stood at the north end of one of Algeria's two trans-Sahara roads, where we would leave Olga and start hitch-hiking.

Half way across Morocco we came across two Germans, a young man and his heavily pregnant wife, who were cycling down to South Africa and, like us, planned to cross the Sahara from Bechar. Their sense of adventure buoyed us up, so we squeezed them in, along with their dog, tied their bicycles on the roof, crossed the Atlas mountains, and plunged into the desert. It wasn't the great sand dunes which one imagines but rocky, often utterly flat terrain with flat-topped hills. The road was a series of braided, rutted and sand-filled tracks so, for the first time, the Land Rover came into her own.

We drove from oasis to oasis. The shade, the water gurgling in the ditches, the birdsong, all were in stark contrast to the bleached landscapes and heat of the desert. We drew beautifully sweet water from the wells. At each oasis we had to register with the Cait, giving our estimated time of arrival at the next. The roads were patrolled by lone men on a bicycle like the one pictured.

The last oasis in Morocco, Figuig, was seething with troops. Had we done our homework we would have known that Morocco and Algeria had only just called a truce on a border war. The border, the Cait told us, was mined. It would be very difficult to cross. We couldn't drive hundreds of miles north to get round the problem so felt our way across it, through barbed wire entanglements and past the wreckage of vehicles. The Algerian army officer who met us thought we were idiots: we'd crossed a minefield. Idiots? He was right.

'Departure' 1954

I don't know how my mother was able to take this picture but it says something about her determination that what she was recording should happen and, perhaps, about her rather stern Scottish upbringing. In her photograph album she wrote underneath it, 'Departure'.

The small boy dressed in school uniform who is waving as he walks out across the tarmac at Nairobi's old Eastleigh airport is me. It's early January, perhaps 8th, 1954, I have just turned nine and, unlike my school friends who are going to secondary school in Nairobi, I am flying 'home' to England, 'unaccompanied' as BOAC termed it, to go to prep school. I wouldn't see my parents, or my Mombasa home, again until late July.

What the picture doesn't show is the state I was in.

Why didn't I run away across the tarmac? What was it that kept me going? A sense of duty? The blindness of tears? Or the incomprehension that the parents I loved should be inflicting this to me?

This picture was taken at the African Mercantile offices a couple of days earlier, just before we left Mombasa for Nairobi in our Morris Oxford, KAA 694. My parents' friend Bobby Thomas came with us so I presume that she took the picture. Knotted up in my hand is a damp handkerchief. My father wasn't accompanying us so this was the moment when I said goodbye to him. Look just to the left of his head and there's a hand waving: it's the African Mercantile's driver, who was taking us.

I remember playing the mouth organ almost the whole way. Somehow the music, terrible player that I was, seemed to help. The picture was taken at the bridge over the Tsavo river.

This was the next day. I'm dressed in my prep school uniform ready to leave - the only thing I'm not wearing is the school tie - so this must have been taken shortly before I boarded the 'plane at Nairobi. Richard is wearing his MEPS hat.

Once again I ask - why did I go along with this? I had already begged my parents, again and again, not to send me to England, alone, so why hadn't I already tried to run far, far away? I knew what I was going to - we had only recently returned from leave - and it was a miserable place compared to Mombasa; and I was going to the bitter cold of an English winter.

I spent the Easter holidays with an aunt and uncle in London. They were kind, but their children had already left home and I felt I was an encumbrance. There wasn't much to do, and London always seemed wet, grey and smelly. I lived for the moment I would return to Mombasa, which I did for the summer holidays of 1954.

For the next seven years this was the pattern of my life.