As the end of the war approached my brothers Jack and Rod were finally old enough to join up and they headed for the RAF. They were sent down to Rhodesia for pilot training and in the meantime we had another bloke come to stay with us. Robin Matthews came off a farm up near Mt Kenya but was boarding with us while he trained as a chemist.
Despite the fact he was so much older than me, I got on much better with him than I did my own brothers. He was a man after my own heart with as deep an interest in carpentry, inventing, experimenting and the principles of engineering as my own. We spent a lot of time together devising various inventions and one of our greatest was a man-carrying, box-kite.
We had found the plans in a magazine one day and both our eyes widened at the thought that such a feat could be possible, right here, on the front verandah. I would rush home after school each day and impatiently wait for him to finish his studies. Then we would spend the last few hours of the day laying our plans, measuring wood and calico and studying the principles of aerodynamic flight.
It was a proud day when we took it up one of the nearby hillocks on a windy day and soared off the ground like a rollicking, drunken airborne ship.
We never actually tested its “man-carrying” abilities, however, mostly because I felt my feet slowly but surely freezing as I gazed upon its swerving and diving flight that day and thought of myself clinging on inside it. I had always suffered from car-sickness and boat-sickness and I could sense my stomach rising up in rebellion just at the sheer thought of it.
But I felt it would be unmanly to show such fear and so, licking my lips a little, I agreed to get inside it. We ran like maniacs down the hill. But as soon as I felt the ungainly contraption lift slightly off the ground I instantly decided that the art of self-preservation dictated that I should never fall more than five-feet.
Since I was the smallest it was me or no-one. I could sense Robin’s disappointment keenly but he very kindly never referred to my cowardly loss of spirit. Instead our walk home was filled with plans for how we could take it apart and use the bits to invent something else.
On our annual holiday to Mombasa that year Robin and I spent our time making African spears to fish with- with little arrow heads made out of flattened six-inch nails and barbs carved into them.
Later we moved onto Hawaiian fishing spears, where the arrow was held in place by a piece of rubber that would hold the tension until the spear was almost on top of the fish and then let go. That was a very successful fishing method and we netted quite a few meals that way.
It led us to decide that if we had goggles and snorkels we could expand our hunting territory even further. Diving goggles and snorkels and even scuba gear were very new-fangled concepts at the time that had only ever been seen on naval divers when engaged on underwater warfare.
First we tried mimicking the African solution, which were carved bits of wood with a chunk of glass wedged into a hole dug through the middle. They achieved a rather horrifying effect of magnifying the eye-ball 10 times its size that was entertaining and useful for scaring the life out of maiden aunts…but eventually we concluded that they were not only difficult to make, but probably not very good for the eyes.
Eventually Robin and I made a pair that were a bit like the modern goggles of today in that it had a band of rubber (from the inner tube of a car tyre and carved to fit) that went right over the head and round bits of glass screwed into it and tied with butterfly clips. They were very good and didn’t leak at all. Then we’d make some snorkels out of hollow plastic tubing, also purloined from some car garage, and our snorkeling equipment was complete.
As the summer of 1945 ended and the war sputtered to its end my brothers finished their training and Rod was sent to Oman as Aide de Camp to the squadron leader and Jack to air headquarters in Nairobi helping to repatriate people coming back from the war.
But peacetime work did not fulfil their dreams of heroic action and so eventually they both left to pursue their university studies. Both were clever and Jack won the prestigious Rhode Scolarship to go to Oxford in England and then went onto study at Cambridge. Rod meanwhile went to Cambridge and then onto the University of Reading before spending a final year in Trinidad studying tropical agriculture.
Back in Kenya and I was by this time 15 as we settled down to peace-time. It saw the return of my future wife, Margaret Patterson, from England.
himalayan epiphany 