I Dreamed of Africa Read online

  Paolo and Mario had known each other from the old days in Italy. Although totally different, they enjoyed each other’s wit. There had never been any strain between them, as when my relationship with Paolo had begun, Mario and I had been separated for years. Occasionally, after that first time, and always unexpectedly, Mario started to materialize at our doorstep, on his way from, or to, some exotic destination. He brought special and original presents for all, and had many stories to tell. Paolo’s daughters were naturally particularly fascinated by him, mainly the elder, Valeria, who was developing into a beautiful woman.

  For Emanuele, Mario was more like a friend he liked but saw rarely. Paolo was definitely the father-figure in his life, the constant presence he could count upon, and his support and love were the structure around which he grew. Paolo’s mind was agile and original, and the many facets of his personality and interests made of him an irresistible model adventurer who appealed to the masculine instinct latent in any growing boy. Paolo was certainly Emanuele’s best friend in his early days. He taught him to stalk buffalo in the bush, to aim and to shoot straight. He taught him to cast and to fish, and satisfied the unspoken longing for a hero-figure every boy nurses inside himself. Many times during the holidays Emanuele joined Paolo in the lion hide, and they always went fishing together.

  Emanuele shared with Paolo some of his favourite books of adventure. Lately they had picked a recurrent phrase from a story by Wilbur Smith, The Sunbird, which had appealed to their imagination and which they had taken to using jokingly and affectionately to each other: ‘Fly for me, bird of the sun.’ A singular quote which was to be repeated again and again in the years to come, and which became symbolic and unforgettable.

  Like true companions, Paolo and Emanuele benefited from each other’s company. Paolo respected Emanuele; he admired his calm and determined way of coping with life, his wisdom and knowledge, and his peculiar capacity to get on with people, not by overacting, but simply by the sheer intrinsic value of who he was, which was evident in his quiet and self-assured countenance.

  When Paolo decided to build a simple look-out overlooking Ol Ari Nyiro Springs, with a makuti shelter to observe wildlife coming to the water and to the salt lick in the evening, he asked Emanuele to record, when he was there, the animals sighted. Emanuele met this task precisely and with great pleasure, and he kept a book in the little hut with all his notes. Often, during the full moon, we went to spend the night there, and watched leopard coming to the bait we hung on a tall yellow fever tree. There was an old rhino, very light in colour, which regularly came to the salt below the hut, which Paolo had named ‘Bianco’ (‘White’). It was fascinating to sit silently in the dimming light, listening to the noises of nightfall, frogs and francolin, guinea fowls and baboons, trying to distinguish the shadows of the animals coming to drink. To see Bianco walking slowly along the river, massive and ancient, was an awesome sight. We held our breath and focused our binoculars on the advancing mysterious shape.

  Emanuele was a born collector. He had started with minerals and assorted shells. Later he used to spend days cataloguing and updating his extraordinary cowrie collection. When he travelled to exotic seas like those around the Seychelles, the British West Indies and Madagascar, his specific aim was to find a particular variety of cowrie. Over the years, Paolo, Emanuele and I went a few times to visit Mario, who was living in Antigua in an exquisite old yacht, moored in the English Harbour; in which he had crossed the Atlantic many times on his own. We sailed down to the Grenadines and up to the Virgin Islands. I remember on one occasion searching with Emanuele the chilly waters of the Atlantic for the cowrie-related Ciphoma gibbosa, whose peculiar habitat is the sea fans growing in the shallows around an islet south of Virgin Gorda. When he finally found the first one, small as a smooth pebble and half-covered with the slimy orange snail-like mantle, stuck to a lacy purple gorgonian, his triumphant grin, even through the goggles, was unforgettable. He had read all the books worth reading on the subject, including some very rare ones which had taken years to locate, and knew absolutely all there was to know about cowries.

  When he was twelve, I brought him to London for a small nose operation intended to clear his sinuses, and for a week or so after it he was not allowed to fly. To occupy his days, he chose to go to the Natural History Museum Shells Department – where he spent hours and hours looking at the exhibits. He finally asked to be left there in the morning, with some pocket money for a snack, and picked up in the afternoon at a prearranged spot. One day I found him with a sort of curious glint in his eye: he had discovered one cowrie which had been wrongly labelled – some varieties were easy to confuse with almost identical ones – and he had managed to find one of the curators and had pointed it out to him: he was right! His bonus had been to be allowed to inspect boxes of cowries of all sorts waiting to be identified and labelled.

  With the money he had received as a gift for his operation, he decided to buy shells. A friend suggested a place close to Foyles, the bookshop. I was somehow disappointed to find what looked to me like a seedy little shop, crammed with cabinets and accumulated boxes. Emanuele cast an expert look around, asked the shop assistant some key questions, establishing an immediate link with him, and, turning to me, said in the quiet, determined voice I had grown to respect. That’s fine. Pep. You can leave me here for the day. I’ll help around. This is just paradise.’ He went every day and managed to pick up fantastic bargains and to acquire some rare specimens of shells, particularly the famed Aurantium, the Golden Cowrie he had coveted for years.

  Emanuele had kept a diary since he was nine. Infallibly, every single day, he wrote about whatever event had taken place. In his diary he noted that day, 29 September 1978, in his typical dry style:

  I bought Cypraea Schilderorum, Spurca, Decipiens, Edentula, Acicularis, Pulchra, Eburnea, Humphreysi, Irrorata, Nebrites, Xanthodon, Comptoni, Ursellus, AND an Aurantium for 300 dollars. Decipiens and Pulchra were a gift. I spent all the 500 dollars I had got from Mario. I have now over 87 different species of cowries in my collection. Pep went for dinner at Mireila [Ricciardi]. Today the Pope has died.

  The same year, on 10 December, Emanuele noted:

  … we went with Livia and Paolo to fish black bass at the Big Dam. We got a very large one and several small ones which we let go. Later, we were about to go buffalo hunting, also with Colin, but Robin Hollister arrived in his aeroplane, and we went to meet him. On taking off the engine stopped and the plane crashed. Robin was unharmed, but the aeroplane is a total wreck.

  Robin was an attractive young man we had known for years and whom we liked, but saw rarely. Surviving an accident of that sort – the aeroplane was totally written-off – without as much as a scratch was very weird indeed. This odd incident singled Robin out for us: little did we know, in that December of 1978, what the strange ways of destiny had planned for us, and for him.

  18

  Pembroke House

  I have had playmates, I have had companions,

  In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days, –

  All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

  Charles Lamb, The Old Familiar Faces

  To be able to be with Paolo and to learn to look after the place, I had to do something which is alien and extremely painful for an Italian mother: I had to send Emanuele to boarding-school. He was only nine years old, and this was one of the most difficult decisions of my life. Emanuele was an unusually private little boy with a fertile intelligence and hobbies which involved collections, books, papers, typewriter, and took a lot of space and time. His room was his kingdom, and he spent a great deal of his time there reading and rearranging his cowrie shells collection. The idea of his having to sleep in a dormitory, with no privacy and only a small locker for storing all his things, was a painful one. The knowledge that there would be nobody to answer his questions and to nourish the natural curiosity of his fertile mind kept me awake at night, yet there was no other solution. My stepdaughters
were a few years older; Livia was already at a boarding-school in Nakuru with Carletto’s daughter Luisa, and Valeria, the elder, stayed with a friend in Nairobi during the week and came up to the ranch with me for weekends. Emanuele was too young to be left alone in the house: he had to go.

  The school was at Gilgil, at the foot of the escarpment climbing up to the Kinangop. It was made up of a series of grey stone buildings in spacious grounds close to a river and crossed by the railway. Generations of settlers had sent their boys there since the early twenties, when it was established. The logo was a red pigeon in a blue field. Homing pigeons had been the passion of the founder, a Mr Pembroke, and in past days they were used by the school team to send the results of matches back to Gilgil. The motto in Emanuele’s days was still the outrageously arrogant original one: Anglus, in Africa sto.

  There Emanuele lived for over three years, perhaps the last years of his childhood. Gone was the freedom to choose what to do with his time, what to wear, what to eat. Clad in a dull, uninspired grey uniform, his blond hair cut unbecomingly short, I will never forget my feeling of loss and despair, of failure and guilt, when I left him there for the first time in the care of strangers, a sad little boy trying to be brave, lost in an identical crowd of unhappy little boys, waving to me from the dark doorway of the chapel to which a bell had been peremptorily summoning them.

  Back home that same night, sitting in his room empty of his presence, I wrote in Italian in my diary:

  And then, I left. The engine had an acrid smell of burnt petrol. The sun had already set. A bell rang imperiously, calling the children. You had gone, you, my little one, trussed in your new grey blazer, too big, your hair too short, your too-wide eyes full still of little boy’s dreams … by what right did I abandon you in that anonymous garden … in your bed, where I shall sleep tonight, your child’s smell lingers, and I love you …

  Yet, seen finally in perspective, Pembroke probably gave Emanuele something which, as an only boy, he could never possibly have achieved in the sheltered protection of our home and presence: the independence, the ability to cope, the sense of leadership and survival in a strange, indifferent and perhaps hostile world, and certainly the self-assurance which comes from managing alone and from being able to win friends and to make a mark in a totally new environment, on his own. At the end of the first term, I asked Emanuele how he had coped and promised him that, if he had really been too unhappy, I would seek some other solution. Emanuele admitted he had not been happy, and had felt homesick often. ‘But,’ he added with typical fairness and generosity, ‘the first term is always the most difficult. I did not have any real friend and, you know, everything was so different from home. I would prefer to try another term to see how it goes.’

  I have always felt that you can guess a person’s quality from the quality of his friends: Emanuele was always surrounded by the older, quieter, nicer boys. Charlie Mason, who later became Pembroke’s head boy, was one of these. His parents lived in Kilifi and, since it was often impossible for them to fetch him for half-term, he usually came to spend it in Laikipia with us. Emanuele and he got on extremely well together, sharing the same passions, like riding and sailing and fishing. Kind, polite, loyal and good-natured, Charlie was the perfect guest, and it was a pleasure to have him to stay. Now an officer in the Royal Navy, he keeps in touch; and postcards arrive from him from the strangest places, or photographs in which the same young, pleasant face, little changed over the years, though the body has grown to almost seven foot, grins cheerfully below the cap of his naval uniform.

  To allow Emanuele more freedom, I sent his grey horse Cinders down from the ranch. Although this meant that other children rode him during the lessons, Emanuele did not mind, and he could then gallop round the grounds in his free time. Rules were very strict at Pembroke in those days, and parents were never allowed to visit, apart from Parents Day once every two months or so. This was particularly painful as I drove past the school whenever I went up to Laikipia, and it was sheer torture to pass in front of the building, especially on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon when I knew he had no lessons, and not to be allowed to see him. We devised an innocent trick to make life happier. One of the horses’ paddocks was along the Gilgil road, next to the railway bridge, and it had a wooden gate. Although he was not allowed to go out, Emanuele could ride as far as that gate, and we decided that I would put messages or small presents under a stone by the left-hand post. I found, however, that there were no stones of any decent size, in that area, and finally brought one from Nairobi, a grey stone which appeared to me totally out of place and terribly conspicuous compared with the reddish-golden sandy soil of Gilgil. Sometimes there were other people about and I had to wait for a while before I could safely hide my small parcels. All in all the scheme worked, however, and to have this little secret added some excitement to Ema’s monotonous life and partly relieved my anguish.

  Emanuele’s success at school gave him some privileges, of which the most treasured one was writing home in Italian, to maintain the excellent command he had of the language. This allowed him the freedom to explain, in uncensored letters, exactly what went on. Although Emanuele was generally too polite to become involved in petty mischief, he often wrote about having been given ‘tackies’, the mild physical punishment still much in vogue in all such schools. The reasons for this were almost invariably ‘for having kept snakes in the locker’. Yet, when they once discovered a nest of puff-adders in the roof, the teachers themselves asked Emanuele to get them out, and soon he became the acknowledged ‘expert’ in anything to do with reptiles.

  Later, recalling the days at Pembroke, under the heading ‘My First Snakes’, Emanuele wrote:

  At the time I was at Pembroke, a boarding-school at Gilgil, a small town 150 km northwest of Nairobi. There were quite a few snakes there, but I could only capture a few, which I was forcibly persuaded to release by the teachers. One of the first of these was a striped skaapstaker, a common grassland species, which I caught in my hat on the games pitch. Skaapstakers were quite plentiful around Pembroke and I saw many more … I also caught a slugeater, a small docile snake which unfortunately escaped from my locker, and a few of the lesser snakes, such as house snakes and juvenile grass snakes … I remember that one sunny morning the Headmaster had taken my class out on to the golf course during a lesson. On crossing a patch of long grass, he did a most spectacular jump of about three feet up in the air, as did the long brown snake he had trodden upon … A lot of puff-adders were killed at Pembroke, including one which disrupted a cricket match passing between the legs of the referee … there wasn’t much left after the cricket bats were through with it …

  After the third term, in fact, Emanuele proudly brought me back a special present: a cured, perfectly patterned puff-adder skin, which is still nailed to the bookshelf in my bedroom in Laikipia.

  Pembroke House was, all in all, a positive experience in Emanuele’s life, and years later he recalled that time, with typical equilibrium and a glint of amusement, as ‘not bad at all for a prison’.

  19

  The First Snake

  ‘One day. Pep, you too will understand the hidden beauty of snakes.’

  We used to go to the coast for the school holidays. It was a needed change from the dry windswept climate of the Highlands, and Paolo was extremely keen on fishing. With his little rubber dinghy he managed to accomplish unusual feats of sportsmanship which, having survived an attack by a Bull Shark when diving out of Vuma, culminated in his decision to try deep-sea fishing. In his first season he caught several marlins, and won the trophy for the largest billfish fished out of Mnarani Club. Deep-sea fishing became his new passion.

  We liked Kilifi. The hot balsamic air, humid and ripe like fruit and jasmine, was a pleasant contrast to the chilly nights with a log fire and blankets in Laikipia. I enjoyed the smell of coconut, of seaweed, the breeze from the ocean, the long walks at low tide, peering into pools for shells and strange surprises from the sea. In
the evenings I sat, back to the largest baobab in the garden, looking out at the evening tide and at the fish jumping, and for Paolo’s boat ‘Umeme’ to come back. I always tried to guess from a distance, by the colours of the flags, what fish they had caught, and to recognize their figures, waving at me from the deck, wind in their hair, my men returning from the sea.

  Paolo had started making friends with the fishing community of the Kenya coast. They were mostly retired farmers who had sold their properties to satisfy the advancing settlement and land hunger, bought a house and a boat, and spent their days pursuing the dream of persuading the largest fish in the ocean to come to their bait. Some of them were passionate sailors, like the Masons in Kilifi, Emanuele’s friend Charlie’s family. Some of them had unusual hobbies, like the Jessops in Shimoni, who had accumulated a world-famous collection of shells, Emanuele’s delight. Others drowned their ‘good old days’ nostalgia in seas of pink gin. Some, like Diana Delamere and her entourage, brought with them the grander aura of long-gone times, when the privileged of the so-called ‘Happy Valley’ lived a gilded life between the large estates in the Highlands or on the shores of Lake Naivasha, the racecourse meetings, and the parties in the Muthaiga Club.

  I liked Diana. There was an unbending style and strength in her ways, in the deep arrogant voice and the ice-cold blue eyes, in the perfection of her grooming and flawless hair and skin even after a long day of fishing out in the rough high seas. When her boat. ‘White Bear’, moored, invariably with many flags, she appeared fresh and straight, unaffected by her many seasons and by the curiosity she always stirred, wrapped in the charisma of her mysterious life, and one could not help falling under the spell of her legend. For the two fishing weeks in Shimoni at the end of February and the beginning of March, when the season was at its peak, she moved to the Pemba Channel Fishing Club in room number one, and in the evening changed into flowing chiffon caftans to hold court through round after round of vodka and lime, tabasco and oysters, gracefully and regally devoting most of her attention to all the men present, irrespective of their age. Stories of past fishing adventures, of people long dead, favourite horses and memorable parties, unfolded as in an old photograph album.