During the war our already crowded family life grew more so as we housed two evacuee kids from Mombasa as well. The great fear amongst Kenya was a naval landing at Mombasa so all the children had been sent up country for the first two years of the war to ensure their safety.
My eldest brother Ted’s disease meant he was unable to join up and instead worked for a local company that made radios. Jack and Rod were only old enough to join up in the last days of the war so all of us were still at home.
Nearby were my cousins and in another house built by my father lived my grandmother and Dorothy (whom everyone called Dos), my maiden aunt who looked after her. My father had brought them all out from New Zealand at the same time- why I’m not overly sure since he had almost as many siblings as I did so there were still some left in New Zealand.
We would usually all take one family holiday together a year, at the coast, in the long school holidays in August. These holidays were no less crowded than our home life however as quite often many of the families we were friendly with had the same idea. These included David and his brother and another friend Robert “Stooge” Stocker who also lived on the Ngong Road. His sister, who was much older than he, owned the White Sands Hotel in Mombasa where we all used to congregate.
It was a great place for kids on holiday. The hotel consisted of simple huts that had wooden frames and hessian walls painted with white-wash. There were two rooms to each hut and an open breezeway in between. Little wooden windows that opened up with a stick and thatch made out of palm fronds. We would sleep under mosquito nets, not just to escape the bugs but also to stop the palm fronds wafting down on top of us in the middle of the night.
The hotel was right on the beach in the days when there were only a few large hotels occupying this space. Nothing can describe the magic of waking up in the morning and stepping outside your hut to be welcomed with just the gentle lapping of the waves and the occasional cry of a hopeful seagull. It was much like superior camping really. There were communal showers and toilets- six or seven stalls with a metal bucket under each one. Every morning you would hear the rattle of the used ones being taken away and empty ones put in their place.
In the centre of the hotel was the dining room- an open structure with a palm thatched roof. It managed to keep out most of the weather unless the rain was at an angle. We had all our main meals there. But my mother, by that time an expert in feeding a ravenous crew, never imagined the main meals alone, copious as they were, would be enough to satisfy our hunger. So packed into the cars also went an enormous 14-pound cheese (made by a Scots woman in the Aberdare Mountains who made the best cheeses in Kenya), an even bigger ham and a huge fruit cake. These were our three staples for snacks throughout the holiday. Once there they would be topped up with local tropical fruit- enormously fat mangos or sweet pineapples and fresh dates or coconuts.
The first three days would also find us slathering local coconut oil all over our bodies to stop the sunburn and keep the insects at bay. After that we didn’t bother and would all just build up a natural honey tan- Jim would go just about black by the end of the holiday. We wore very little other than sarongs and this led to one of our favourite activities on holiday when our maiden aunt Dos chose to join us. Dos, or Dorothy, was a thin woman who suffered asthma and the whims of an elderly mother with a round-eyed gentleness and general naivety about the rest of the world.
If we boys spied her sitting on the beach we would nonchalantly wander past before whipping off our sarongs in front of her. She never failed to squeal and try and shield her eyes. Privately I suspect she enjoyed every minute of it. But each time she reacted with enough fervour that we boys continued to do so.
We would sometimes take walks together as a family, or just a few of us if we happened to find ourselves with nothing in particular to do. In those days there was still plenty of bush areas surrounding Mombasa leading down to deserted beaches. But walking through the African bush is not to be undertaken without a stout stick in hand at all times. This was forever imprinted on my consciousness after one occasion when Jim and I had set out on a walk. We were intently following some scrub animal trails- our eyes glued to the ground to try and find some recent tracks. Luckily I happened to look up just in time to see a green mamba snake coiled up on a tree about to strike the back of Jim’s neck, in front of me. Adrenalin spurted through my body and I whacked the snake away from Jim and yelled violently. The snake rapidly disappeared and we continued our walk far more cautiously than before, with eyes peeled for wildlife both above as well as below.
It was also on one of these early holidays that my father taught me to swim. My father was a man who believed lessons were learned best through practical experience. Together we would wade into the sparkling blue shallows until it reached my chest. Then he would get me to hold his hands while kicking my legs.
“Kick harder. Kick harder,” he would command. I was concentrating so hard on creating a spray as far and wide as I could that I did not notice that the shore was steadily retreating and the water was now encroaching on my father’s chest. Suddenly he dropped his hands and informed me that I now had to swim back to shore on my own.
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on you,” was his reassuring comment as I yelled at his sudden treachery.
Knowing him well enough that screams were unlikely to make much difference I saved my breath for a furious dog-paddle back to shore, arriving exhausted with my heart still thumping.
My father grinned, congratulated me and then showed me some arm strokes. He signalled my swimming education was complete by saying
“Off you go- you know how to do it.”
I couldn’t help thinking that nothing was further from the truth and I stayed with the trusty dog-paddle for quite some time but eventually I tried using my arms and realised I could keep my head above water. I taught myself the rest as I went along.
Two years later we went for the day to the Mombasa Club which was in the grounds of an old military camp. There was a 25m pool for all the kids to swim in and this particular day they were having races. I was the fastest boy swimmer there regardless of age. I put my head down and didn’t breathe at all for 25 metres.
I remember my Father’s large grin on that day. Perhaps he was already aware that I didn’t like to be beaten and this was the best way for me to learn.
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