Mbali Upeo- a new uniform and the death of my brother

Rounding up the pigs

We first-years boarded in the main building of the college that had been built when the college was first established. It housed a maximum of 30 students and it only had one toilet. More often then not you would be forced to go out the back door to a row of outdoor toilets which had no roof and an open drain taking the stuff God only knows where. It was a test of how badly you needed to go, particularly in winter or when it was raining. And since the fumes caused severe retching and gagging- you certainly didn’t linger.

As second years we used the same toilets but our digs were a block of 31 individual units with ceilings no more than 7ft high, concrete floors, a single bed and an open verandah that circulated the building.

And as third years we moved again to some ex-army huts which had three to four rooms to each. They weren’t lined or sealed and there was nothing much in the way of insulation. But they did have their own set of toilets and wash units,  although, again, outside. The showers consisted of a concrete floor with a sheet of corrugated iron circling it. Whoever built it obviously decided it wasn’t worth the expense of another sheet of tin and so there was a large gap at the bottom and the top which meant it was draughty whichever way the wind blew.

In winter these were the coldest bloody huts I’d ever been in. The students would all put copper pennies across the 15-amp fuses to stop them blowing when too many heaters were connected. We would do this until all the wires between the huts were literally glowing. The college provided one heater per room but most of the students already had (or rapidly aquired) a heater of their own. Unfortunately, even with the penny trick, it couldn’t usually take more than two or three heaters so we had to take turns as to who missed out on having the heater in their room that day.

We also had a tiny little cooker which we had to light and feed with firewood. It had a hot-top but you would actually have to sit on top of it to get any warmth from it. It’s main purpose was to heat the water for the showers. We had one bloke in our group who would get up at 5am every day without fuss and light the cookbox. He’d get us up an hour earlier than the others and keep the fire going so we all had a hot shower and then he would let it go out. Because even if the water was absolutely boiling, the draft in those showers was such that you would still be cold but at least your teeth wouldn’t actually be chattering nor your skin a curious shade of blue.

A sergeant in the tank regiment (sitting, in the middle)

As first years we were encouraged to join the Citizen Military Forces or what is now known as the Army Reserve in Australia. If you wanted to go into the military following college then your time with the CMF counted. I had no interest in a military career but I knew firsthand the powerful appeal of a military uniform on the ladies so I signed up in my first week. I took two further courses – one in radio communication and one on tank gunnery. I was soon promoted to corporal and in the uniform I looked pretty bloody smart I can tell you. I took every opportunity to wear the uniform and its success with the ladies was as I predicted. I soon earned my nickname “Buck” Sands.

Unfortunately, I think this started years of chronic deafness.  I was usually in the turret of the armoured car, directing the gunner underneath. We didn’t have any ear-muffs and so my ears took a drubbing as the huge gun blasted just 3-4 foot away. I also became captain of the rifle club at University and even then we were using big bore rifles that packed an audio punch. At inter-college shooting competitions there were eight .303’s exploding every 20 seconds. I was often pretty deaf at the end of gunnery courses or rifle competitions but it usually came back within a couple of days.

By the time I finished my second year course I was promoted to Sergeant in the tank regiment. We had to go on troop manouvres around the countryside in small units. It was pretty hilly countryside, just behind the Barossa Valley. On the second day we hit a muddy valley. I was in the rear tank of Number One Squadron and the leader had the front tank. The leader got his tank through but in doing so had churned up the ground so much that the second tank sank like a stone, right up to its belly. The leader directed that a 20 yard wire rope be used to pull out the stranded tank but it didn’t shift an inch. So he shifted his tank to a fresh spot to try a different angle and managed to get his own tank firmly bogged as well.

I had been watching all this with mounting frustration and finally got out of my tank and took charge. We had another three tanks not bogged so I got two of them on a split rope pulley and anchored the stranded tank to another tank sideways so essentially we had the pulling capacity of four tanks to a fixed point. It worked like a dream and we got both tanks out without hassle. That was probably my biggest military moment of triumph. The possession of a little mechanical engineering knowledge got me mentioned in dispatches, so I was well pleased.

Jack

It was also during my second year at college that I received the news that my brother Jack had died. While at the University of Oxford on his Rhode Scholarship he had joined an aerobatic flying display team and while practicing a complicated manouvre he had dived through a cloud and collided with a small civilian aircraft on the other side. Both pilots were killed.

Although we had never been terribly close Jack was probably the brother I liked the best. He was probably the brother everyone liked the best- he was gifted with both looks, athletic ability and an open-hearted sociability that never failed to draw people to him. It seemed such a terrible tragedy that he should have been struck down so early in a life full of such promise. But so it seems whenever someone young dies I suppose.

His death came as a horrible shock and for the first time I really felt the distance between Australia and Africa. I was grateful then when Margaret Patterson wrote me a touching and heart-felt letter of condolence.

The photo of Margaret I had on my wall at college

Her sister Ann was ostensibly still my girlfriend at this time (at least it was her photo I had on my wall in Roseworthy) but she probably only wrote me two letters in the four years I was in Australia. But Jack’s death prompted a regular exchange of letters with Margaret who was a talented and entertaining writer. Margaret was actually in London during this period. After inheriting money following the death of her grandmother she had decided to follow her dream of writing and acting on the stage and was attending the Guildhall School of Drama and Music.

I was regaled on stories of luvvies and drama-folk which made me chuckle and it wasn’t long before Ann’s picture had been replaced by Margaret’s in my room at college.

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Mbali Upeo- First year of college and a victory over “fagging”

Roseworthy Agricultural College

I enjoyed my years at Roseworthy Agricultural College. I was much older than most of the other first year students except for the only other “colonial” boy there, Peter Whitlock, who had been born and brought up in India and had also worked before coming to college. He and I got on ok but I suspect he thought I was a bit arrogant. This might possibly have been true as I did feel that my stint in the Northern Territory had given me an experience few of the others could equal. This did not however, I maintain, merit his revenge. I still wore my big impressive, curly brimmed 10-gallon hat around university. In my first year, as we were castrating and ear-marking some young cattle, I bent over to pull the testicles out of this young bull calf and as I did so Peter leaned over and ear-marked my hat. Those curly brimmed hats only stay upright because of the circle so of course the whole hat sank around my eyes. I could have killed him- if it had been an older hat or an ordinary Akubra it wouldn’t have mattered but now it was ruined. I tried sewing a piece of leather in the gap to restore the brim but it didn’t work and I was forced to buy another, much less impressive hat out of my slender resources.

Generally, my choice of clothes were a point for teasing at college. Not only did I wear beige, suede desert boots- which were almost unheard of in rural Australia- but I also donned brown corduroy trousers. This was my greatest sin in Australian eyes- such foppish workwear was the province of “poofters”. However, by dint of rearranging a few arms and faces, I soon brought about a change of opinion and I had very little trouble when I wore my cords after that.

I had also had already gained some credence with my fellow first year students for getting rid of the time-old tradition of first year “fagging“. Roseworthy had been founded in 1883 and no doubt the founders had been good Victorian gentlemen who had gone to English public schools where such things were considered the norm. Thus it had become part of the fabric of the college that first year students were to be at the beck and call of third year students and do their whim without murmur. Such servitude was to start with a painful and humiliating initiation ritual to be administered in their first few weeks of college.

Since I had arrived early I had heard of what was awaiting me and I was not keen on the idea.  Because my mother had such influential connections I was one day invited for tea with the vice-chancellor of the university and I decided this was an excellent opportunity to tackle him on the issue.

“Isn’t it about time you got rid of such out-dated and Victorian traditions?” I asked. I pointed out that “fagging” had been outlawed in most English public schools and it seemed a bit ridiculous that Australian universities should be lagging behind.

He looked a bit taken aback.

“Well yes of course I agree with you dear boy, but I’m not sure how we are going to stop it. Such activities have never been backed by the college…it just happens.” He smiled serenely at me and changed the subject. I realised I would get no real help from him and if I didn’t want to be initiated I was going to have to take matters into my own hands.

After doing some research I realised my greatest ally was superiority of numbers. By chance our year was one of the largest intakes on record and there were about 31 of us. In contrast the third-years were one of the smallest and had been reduced to just 19.

In the first week, I marched into the student union and called a meeting of first years. I told them I didn’t think we should accept “fagging” or “initiation” and we had the numbers that meant we didn’t have to. Of course this point of view received fervent agreement as most of the 18 year olds were quite frankly terrified of the coming ordeal. I called in the third year representative on the student union and laid down our terms.

“We’re not going to accept it and if any of your boys make the attempt there will be a riot and we outnumber you by almost two to one.”

He too seemed a bit taken aback but defended his position robustly- they had all had to undergo it themselves and otherwise where was the fun in being a third year?

I proposed that we would instead hold a concert for the third years, during which they would be allowed to do whatever they wished in the way of heckling and throwing things like rotten fruit etc but then that was to be an end of it. That was our final offer.

He finally agreed. So that’s what we did and it was a great success. All of the third years abided by the agreement except for one South African bloke who was a particularly loathsome bully. He decided he wasn’t accepting it and he woke one first year up with a pitchfork and tried to drag him outside to do an initiation rite. He was a big fellow but not big enough to hold his own against the three or four of us who instantly attacked him. He soon saw sense and we never had any problems after that.

This incident gave me instant kudos with my fellow first years so I got on pretty well with everyone after that.

Mum and my brother Ted, dressed up for the races.

My mother also came out to visit me for a few months in my first year. She still had a lot of connections in South Australia as her uncle had been an influential figure in politics and society. As a result she was cordially invited to spend her stay with the headmaster of the college. However, she also got on very well with my washerwoman, Mrs Daley. And so after two or three weeks she packed up her luggage and walked from the large house with the extensive gardens, crossed the road to a row of workers cottages opposite “the big house” and moved in with Mrs Daley. She lived there quite happily for another three weeks or so.

It helped confuse the local populace. Nobody could ever really make up their minds as to whether we were “class” or not and consequently never knew where to place us in the social circles.

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Mbali Upeo- teenage courting and the death of my father

Final year of school

In the last few years of high-school I developed a real crush on Margaret’s sister Ann.  I’d always thought she was attractive, albeit pint sized. But my interest began in earnest after a holiday at the coast where Doug Carney came with our family and the Patterson’s were there at the same time. They were staying at a very grand hotel called the Nyali Hotel in Malawi, while we were in boori huts right with a bar right on the beach.  The advantage of the girls staying at the Nyali was that it hosted a lot of dances and balls. Almost every night we would sneak down there in our best clothes, try and look as old as we possibly could and saunter nonchalantly past the doormen and hotel lobby staff. The girls would keep an eye out for us and we could usually get quite a few dances in before her father would start looking suspiciously at the young men who seemed to be occupying so much of his daughter’s attention. We would then leg it before he decided to investigate- discretion being the better part of valour.

Unfortunately one night we got a bit carried away and two large hands were soon thumped on our shoulders. We looked up into Mr Patterson’s forbidding visage as he told us it was time to get out or be kicked out. We got out. We hung around disconsolately outside for a bit wondering what to do with ourselves when I heard a “psst”.  Ann had come out of the back of the hotel and motioned us through a different entrance. I was impressed. Even more so when she and Margaret sneaked us upstairs to their room. It was a long sneak…every time we heard steps we would be shoved into a nearby broom cupboard! But it was a memorable night and Ann became my official target of my attentions from that moment on.

Margaret, Ann and some of the gang

Back in Nairobi we would go into town and have a drink in the New Stanley Hotel, one of the big hotels in town which was a big meeting place for everyone in Nairobi at the time. It had an enormous lounge plus an open quadrangle in the middle of it and both could fit hundreds of people. Because children and teenagers were allowed in the lounge we could often get a drink at the bar on busy days because nobody had the time to take much notice of underage drinking! I made the most of it and it was a favourite past-time of mine to impress the girls.

We also went to a couple of high school dances together as a group. When I reached 16 I was allowed to borrow my father’s saloon car to take the group to the dance. It was a Morris 25 and it looked exactly like a Rolls Royce. It was a very high class car and in fact it had been formerly owned by Lady McMillan, a friend of my parents. This of course made me impressively popular and I basked in it during the lead-up to the dance. On the day of the dance I got it all polished up and picked up the girls and Doug and went up to the high school and had a good night. As the hall packed up and the band went home we headed to the car. The girls got into the back, chattering and giggling, and I tried to start the car. That terrible moment when the key turns and the car doesn’t start. It just did a sick kind of coughing. I had taken four girls to the dance and now I made them all get out, in their expensive ballgowns, and push the car until we hit a downward slope which thankfully wasn’t too far away. I think it’s fair to say they weren’t overly impressed and my popularity stakes plummeted. Not only that but they lost no time in informing the rest of the school of my stupidity either. I suppose the battery had probably gone flat. Being 16 I had no doubt left the lights on.

We all finished high-school and Ann and Margaret moved out to Karen where her parents had built a new house. But their father died soon after they moved there. He’d been steadily drinking himself to death following his return to Kenya and had now succeeded.

At about the same time my own father suffered a serious bout of tick-fever. During the long slow recovery he suddenly suffered a stroke and died also.

My father

Both men were Masons so neither Margaret nor I nor our mothers were allowed to go to our father’s funeral. It left us with an unreal feeling that he might still walk through the front door any moment.

My father’s death devastated my mother and afterwards she operated in a kind of daze trying to keep some semblance of normality about our family life. But she was in no state to deal with the sorting out of his business affairs which were complicated to say the least.

That was why, in the opinion of us kids, she let herself be victimised by Uncle Ken when they were sorting out his affairs.

Dad had never left a will but all the businesses were in his name or the company name of Sands and Co. Uncle Ken had worked for my father but as a book-keeper. As far as any of us knew he had never been made a partner. Yet Ken suddenly announced that he had been an equal partner and was entitled to 50% of everything.

My mother didn’t like it but felt incapable of resisting. Together Uncle Ken and his lawyers carved up Dad’s empire. By that time it was quite extensive including our house and the five acres it was on as well as the home farm on the Athi River. In addition there was another 6000 acre farm with an aerodrome, a 10,000 acre cattle block on the Mombasa rail line. There was also the big hall where the poultry sales were held twice a week selling 6-700 chickens in an hour. Near that was the auction house where they would sell everything and anything. He also had a share in an abbatoir outside town and a freezer-works as well as 20 acres on where there were cattle sales every week. Lastly, there was an office block- prime real estate in the centre of the city. Even in old days money Uncle Ken ended up with assets worth a couple of million pounds which he sold off.

It never caused an open rift in the family because my Mother insisted family life and gatherings should continue without incident, but all us kids were ropable.

We had kept the Athi River farm, because Ted and Jean said they wanted it. Ted had been working on tea plantations in the north of Kenya and Jean had just completed her agricultural degree. I’m never sure if that is what she actually wanted to do. She was packed off there after school because she had started seeing a bloke my mother didn’t approve of- I’m not sure why- he was quite respectable and from a good old Kenya family- but nevertheless Jean was packed off to college in South Africa to get her out his vicinity.

After school I also went to work on the farm with them but it wasn’t a good mix. I was no doubt pretty arrogant for my age. In my opinion they gave me all the shit jobs and refused to listen to my opinions, which included the fact I didn’t think they were doing a very good job.

For the sake of lasting family relations it was no doubt very fortunate that I was soon offered an apprenticeship on a nearby dairy farm owned by FOB Wilson. I was pretty happy as it was renowned as one of the most modern and extensive operations in Kenya at the time.

As for the farm I don’t think Ted really liked running the farm and Jean had met Doug Semini by this time so soon married and moved away. The farm ended up being sold a couple of years later.

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Mbali Upeo- war games and the siege of a school

Me and my gang at the coast

Despite their cowardly avoidance of hard work when building my boat, I still kept around me a strong little gang of intrepid adventurers. I must attribute this to the power of my Mother’s baking than any personal magnetism of my own, but nevertheless I made the most of it and appointed myself General-in-chief and deviser of all tests of our mettle.

One of these tests was a long-running war game with the local Nubian (Sudanese) kids.

The Nubians lived on the outskirts of Nairobi, further down the Ngong Road from us. It was a small village which began as a settlement for returned Nubian servicemen from the first world war. Now it has become one of the biggest slums in Nairobi but it wasn’t back then- it was clean and orderly and on a Sunday afternoon huge numbers of the African population in the capital would walk or bicycle out there to buy their home-made gin and beer.

It was notorious stuff and made from pretty much anything they could manage to ferment or distill- sorghum, potatoes, anything lying around. You had to sip it judiciously and it burned like a live fire snake down the throat. A glass of it would probably kill you or at least do immense harm to your insides. Every now and then you would see a local drunk on the stuff. It was a scary sight and enough to keep me from testing it for many years to come.

But I had gotten to know a lot of the Nubian kids pretty well because they made up the majority of the caddies at the Nairobi golf club. Whenever I was at a loose end, and my father too preoccupied to keep a close eye on his sporting goods, I would head down there with a couple of his golf clubs in hand- one for me and one for the caddy. We would play golf together and a couple were remarkably good at the game.

But as I formed my little gang there started being a bit of a rivalry between us. It was all very friendly and sporting…although we did use some pretty painful weapons on each other including catapaults and mud-sticks. (For the uninitiated, mud-sticks consisted of a whippy piece of branch on which you would mould a clump of mud onto one end. Once dry, the branch would launch the hardened clay far further then you could ever hope to throw it- at least 150 yards or so).

One day my gang and I discovered an an old rainwater tank with no bottom to it. I felt this was a piece of equipment too good to ignore. I laid out my military strategy to my troops and then ordered them to arm themselves heavily. We lay the tank on its side, scrambled into it and rolled it with our feet until we topped the rise of a slight hill. Our trojan horse sailed into their trenches easily allowing us to leap out and attack with all our ammunition still intact. They couldn’t resist for long and were soon fleeing down the street.

I cannot remember any particular defeats we suffered, although that might be because I have erased them from my memory, as every good general does. I do however distinctly remember our most famous victory when we laid a siege to their school.

We were all upon our bikes and at a loose end one day so we decided to head out to the village despite the fact it was a school day for them. I can’t quite remember why we ourselves were not at school…I assume it must have been a holiday. None of us ever took more more than one day off school… at a time.

Anyway we went down there on our bikes. I marshalled my forces into a tight formation and sent them circling around the school while I stood in front and demanded they come out and surrender.

They all rushed out, even the teachers who thought it was very good fun and were laughing. Our adversaries attempted to breach our siege numerous times but they couldn’t. Eventually they declared surrender and we accepted their white flag magnanimously and headed back to my house for a well-deserved victory tea!

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Mbali Upeo- the ghostly hyena

The Kikuyu believe wild dogs and hyenas are evil spirits who will take away their soul, so they never hunt them. The Masai also left them largely alone, preferring instead to hunt animals they considered brave, like the lion, and for whom there was glory in the kill.

Yet the skulking hyenas managed to cause a surprising number of fatalities amongst the Masai while they slept out with their herds in open country. If a hyena was passing they would often take a chunk out of a sleeping body and you would see lots of Masai with funny lips or half their face chewed up from these attacks.

We had a lot of hyenas on our home farm on the Athi River. There was a bacon factory on the farm with a big smokehouse killing about 50-60 pigs on a three-day killing week. The blood would run down a rocky ridge from the factory into a gully at the bottom which then drew hyenas from miles around every night. One of my most vivid memories is sitting in the farmhouse at night listening to the hyenas chewing and crunching the big bones of cattle and fighting each other over the final scraps. It scared the life out of me and I hated them. However, Dad considered it fortuitous because their nightly sojourns were also cleaning up the water table for him.

Over the years the gully gained the nickname Hyena Valley and eventually of course their numbers grew out of control, so my father agreed that my friends and I would be allowed to try our luck shooting them.

It was a steep-sided valley with thick bush covering both sides but half-way down on one side there was a little, bare knoll that stuck out. There we would perch with our rifles at the ready, the excitement of the hunt rippling through our young bodies.
The hyenas had made some well-worn paths through the short scrubby bushes and you had about two seconds from the time you spied a hyena in one of the small gaps in the bushes before they disappeared under cover again.
It was probably one shot in five that you would actually get one but the intense thrill of triumph such a shot would cause was addictive. The adrenalin rush, combined with the lack of self-preservation that many teenagers exhibit, would cause us to leap down the side of the hill to make sure the ones we had shot were dead.

I shudder to think how many hyenas were still hiding in the bushes not more than a few yards away from us when we did this. Given that hyenas are not particularly shy of humans nor averse to taking a quick chunk out of them it’s a miracle we all remained intact after these shooting trips.

Credit: Zoofanatic on Flickr

But one of the strangest experiences I had with a hyena was on another holiday which I spent with the family of a friend of mine, Pat Mulholland. Pat and I decided to go out one night shooting guinea fowl on the veldt above his house. We crept out of the house and up the escarpment enjoying the eerieness of the country lit up all around us by the huge, fat moon. As we climbed up onto the plain we saw, perhaps 100 yards in front of us, an anthill and next to it was a hyena. I could just about count his whiskers but it was his eyes that really put the fear of God into me- they were an intense red that reminded me of the embers of a hot fire. The night landscape can often play tricks with the eyes so were not too worried. We made a bit of noise to try and scare him out of our way. He put up his head and looked straight at us and then returned to his digging.

“Cheeky sod!” we thought. So we walked a bit closer. Still he took no notice and still those eyes burned ever more brightly. Something wasn’t right, we could feel it in our bones. We looked at each other but dared not speak the ghostly thoughts we were entertaining. We walked all the way around him, slowly, warily, never taking our eyes off him. We could still see him. It wasn’t a trick of the moonlight.
By this time we were less than 20ft away from him and as one we both levelled our guns and shot him- the bullets splitting the air together. Given his proximity and the fact we had two shotguns he should have had a large chunk missing from some part of his body.

He didn’t take the slightest bit of notice and kept digging.

That was it. We fled as fast as our legs could carry us.

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Mbali Upeo- a run-in with African Hunting Dogs

For my other school holidays I was often farmed out to other people. I’m not sure why. Perhaps my mother felt one family holiday was more than enough for her nerves or perhaps both she and my father were too busy. Sometimes I knew the people and sometimes not. Some were friends of my parents and who wanted company for their children who were home from distant boarding schools. Other times I would stay with Margaret, my former nanny on her farm at the Kinangop. She and her husband had a pyrethrum (which is a natural insecticide) farm there. He had joined the scouts for the army and so was away for much of the war years. My nanny was trying to run this farm on her own so in the school holidays I would help her out on the farm.
On one holiday, when I was about 13, I was sent to stay with a vet, Mr Alcock, who was a friend of my father’s. He had a daughter who liked riding horses and at the time I quite liked riding horses- ever since a little white pony named Benny had come up as the last lot in one of my father’s auctions and he had bought him for me. Benny had a thick forelock through which he surveyed the world with the jaundiced eyes shared by most Shetland ponies. Destined to be the learning vehicles of small children has given the Shetland pony a permanent sense of grievance. They are not averse to kicking, biting and stamping on small limbs when small eyes are focused on something else and Benny was no different. However, we were both of a stubbon nature so our little war of wills continued for quite a number of years.
Mr Alcock and his family lived at Naivasha, which was only an hour’s car drive from Nairobi, but I was less than impressed for the majority of the journey. I did not know this family and I had only been informed of the plan about two days previously. My thoughts were distinctly mutinous. My mutterings sulky.
However, on arrival the girl- Jill- was on the verandah with her father to greet me and it was very apparent she was in possession of rather voluptuous figure for her age. My opinion of the holiday reversed more rapidly than my father’s truck in the driveway and without even waving him good-bye I put my most winning smile into active service. Jill soon became my first real girlfriend.

We had a good holiday. We spent a lot of time wandering around the cliffs and occasionally chasing rock rabbits- little mammals with short teddy-bear ears that squeak a lot and which are very good fun chasing.
One day we went riding on a veldt above their house- a big open plain of singing grasses and the occasional tree. Under one of these trees we found a big pack of about 40 wild African dogs.
Applying the same logic as I had to the rock rabbits and thinking this was a prime time to impress my new girl, I started galloping towards them to make them scatter.
Unfortunately no sooner had I broken into a gallop when the wretched things stood up as one and started walking, then trotting and then running towards me.
Wild dogs are very persistent and strategic hunters. They will pick on something- say a herd with a couple of young ones in it- and they’ll start separating into twos. One pair will dive into the herd to scatter them while the pack outriders coralling a few into a certain direction. Others will come up behind and turn them in a circle so the first dogs can then rejoin the chase. It means there are always fresh dogs joining the chase so they can run the prey down through tiredness.
The fear of God now flooding through me I wheeled my horse around as swiftly as possible and dug my heels into its side. Jill, still galloping up behind me now caught sight of the pack and hauled on the reins to turn around. Together we set off galloping away from the dogs, but still they followed, now running fast.
They chased us nearly a mile back into the outskirts of town, which was a Somali village- usually the butchers and policemen of Kenya. We galloped down the main street yelling. The dogs were closing in hard on us now and our horses were flagging. They didn’t hesitate to keep following us into the township. Thankfully all the Somali’s came out of their houses and started yelling and throwing things at them. Finally the pack broke up and disappeared. Another 200 yards or so and they probably would have had one of us. It put the wind up me, no doubt, I was very grateful to get out of it.
Despite this I didn’t learn my lesson though and when I was much older and married I took my wife Margaret and I out on the property I was managing at the time. We were inspecting a new dam that had just been built and I discovered that some prime Boran bulling heifers had been attacked by dogs. They had cut out some of the herd and taken them into the thick bush. It was riddled with hyena tracks and so dense you couldn’t see where you were going. Nevertheless I was so angry that a red mist had descended over all rational thought. I sprinted back to the car, grabbed my rifle and ran down one of the hyena paths, Margaret following me close behind.
We got closer and could hear them ripping one of the heifers to pieces and making a terrible racket. I shot a couple and they dispersed quickly- luckily not in our direction. As the red mist cleared it was replaced by a cold shiver as I realised how stupid I had been- not only putting myself in danger but also my brand new wife.

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Mbali Upeo- holidays at Mombasa

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.

Holidays at mombasa

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.

My father swimming with Ted, Rod and Jack

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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Mbali Upeo- an early head for business

During the early days of the war, the main fear was that the Italians might break through into Kenya. Because they presented enticing targets for bombers, all the schools were emptied of boarders who were sent to Naivasha to stay in a big hotel there. But by the time I entered high school in 1941 the fear had receded somewhat and the boarders were back in the schools in Nairobi including mine. I was now at the Prince of Wales School which was a state funded school but run on English public school lines. The expectation was that we would be young English gentlemen when they had finished with us.

Of course you couldn’t buy lollies or chocolates once the war broke out. But I had since discovered a few shops in the Indian Bazaar that had a few boiled lollipops in store. I bought a few for about 5 cents or a ha’penny each and paraded my largesse the next day at school.

I was instantly set upon by other children with a crazed, sugar-lust in their eyes. The boarders were particularly insistent as they demanded to know where I had found such precious, sugary treasure and could I procure them some. I agreed and in the lunch hour rode down the long hill into the centre of town to the bazaar. I bought as many as I could find. Originally I was selling them for the 5 cents I had paid for them but then word went round and soon the orders were plentiful. I decided it was time to get businesslike and suitably rewarded for the effort I was putting into obtaining the schools’ sweet stocks.

I started demanding 10 cents for each lollipop but the customers baulked at such a price hike over such a short amount of time. So I decided to try and cut my overheads instead. I went looking for, and found, the wholesaler of the lollipops- a horrible, dirty, little bazaar shop with tanks of lolly water made up in a small back-room. Into this was thrown any odds and ends of sugar that happened to be lying around and any odd bits of wood were then used as the lolly sticks.

The Indian owner looked somewhat askance at me when I entered but he was not one to dismiss the chance of secure income, no matter the youth of the business minded customer. We soon struck a deal that he would sell wholesale batches of 100 sweets at a time to me with each one costing 2.5c. Confident of my consumers’ lust for the product and ability to shift such quantities I dropped my price back to 5c. I was soon reaping the rewards of a 100% mark-up.

Thus my business skills education was complete.

Through this I ended up being able to buy quite a few tools for my toy making and also to buy cigarettes which my mates and I would smoke together or sell back to the Italian POWs. But when I reached the age of 10 or 11 I discovered a new passion that ate up all my sweet-selling profits.
Boat building.

I had a mate who was two years older than me and possessed a book that showed you how to design and build a boat. He had begun doing so and I was deeply impressed. I monitored his progress closely and after a few weeks decided it didn’t look too hard and it was time to build my own boat.

I didn’t have the same tools as him but slowly, though my entrepreneurial efforts, I started accumulating a saw and a drill and other bits that I needed. When I had what I thought were the essential tools I began to draw extensive plans and put great mathematical efforts into working out where the centre of effort and centre of force needed to be so it would sail properly. I worked out every piece of wood I would need and the exact length it had to be.

The cost of the wood I knew to be beyond my slender boyhood means and I pondered this problem for some time. I decided there was no option but to appeal to my parents. My father, when approached, gave no clue as to what he thought of my aspirations but he agreed that he would pay for half the wood if I paid for the other half. I felt this was more than fair and so I trotted down to the timber yard with a detailed list of all that I would need clutched in my probably very grubby fist.

The mill staff were in equal parts amused and impressed at my serious face and unequivocal demands. Grinningly they would present me with samples of wood asking “is this bit good enough?”, “do you want a different pack of wood?”. But they made up all the bits for me and I was in a triumphant mood on the day I accompanied my father in the truck to pick up my hessian covered stack of planks.

Other than helping me buy the timber, I don’t think either of my parents took the slightest interest in my boat, despite the fact I built it on the verandah of the house and it took about eight months to do. However, my mother never once mentioned the amount of mess I was creating. This was either a testament to how busy she was or relief that I was appeared to be occupied every hour there was on something she could see and appeared to be mildly constructive.

I even cast aluminium in wooden moulds to make the rudder…although I discovered afterwards there were much easier ways of doing it. I made every single rivet and even sewed every hole needed to loop the rope through from the mast on the sail . I was very proud of that first boat- it was 6ft long and a bit like a sabbo and it sailed well. We had lots of fun in it.

The finished product- my boat

“We” was me and my friend David Walker. He was the only other one in my gang who was interested in boats and this interest rapidly elevated him to become my second-in-command.

He lived a few houses down the street from me and together we also made a canoe together. This was a less successful enterprise as afterwards we realised it was only designed for one man and we had gone somewhat awry with the stability meaning one of us usually got a dunking every few minutes we were in it.

David’s other valuable quality was that he was very good at schoolwork. I had now embarked on building my next boat- a 14-ft racing boat- a much bigger and more ambitious project by far so obviously I needed much more time on it. I couldn’t waste precious hours completing school work so David proved his worth as a friend by completing all of my assignments.

My interest in learning how to build things was always strong. Once my gang and I managed to build a very impressive treehouse right near the house. It was one of those traditional flat-topped African trees and we dragged poles and bits of plank we had purloined from yards….only if it wasn’t being used for something else- I was very firm about that- my principles allowed, nay even promoted the reduction of wastage but I could not condone stealing.

The treehouse

We dragged the timber up this tree, at least 25 feet up from the ground which took a degree of co-ordinate effort in itself. I designed the house which had a triangular shape, about 10ft wide and even had a roof on it. Originally we tried a thatched roof but that wasn’t very satisfactory, mostly because we couldn’t get up to lay the thatch….possibly, although it costs me to admit it, the sub-structure wasn’t that good.

Anyway we ended up roofing it with some black building board- like a fibro sheet but made out of milk protein instead of asbestos. We made the walls of the same stuff and then had a hole in the middle of the floor where we could drop nasty things on anyone walking below who we didn’t want coming up.

Funnily enough, despite my continued belief that I was a very tolerant supervisor, as soon as I started putting my gang to work on the next large project, my boat, it was amazing how their visits soon dropped off.

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My Dad and his life- Mbali Upeo

The joy of a blog is that you can be as self-indulgent as you want to! So I apologise to those few readers who are not friends or family for the following posts.

My Dad, Bill Sands with his daughter Kathy and granddaughter Nicky

My Dad died this week and as you might know from a former entry I was trying to write his memoirs for him. He has unfortunately died before we could complete it and I feel rather upset about that. I am going to try and complete it in his absence and so I intend to post on this blog…for the next few months… what I have so far of his story. If anyone has other stories to tell about him or details to add to it please leave a comment on this blog or email me judysands@hotmail.com.

So here goes….

MBALI UPEO (the far horizon) the lifestory of Bill Sands

I’ve always been called Bill- never William. At college I was called Buck for..er…well the same reasons a male rabbit is called one, but that’s perhaps something for a bit later in the story.

I was born in Kenya on the outskirts of Nairobi in 1930 and my first memory of life is perpendicular. I was, at the time, being very firmly held upside down by my nanny who remained impervious to my shrieks of torture. This particular nanny’s arrival, a tall, raw-boned young Australian girl called Margaret, was a turning point in my life. I had been a sickly fifth baby, unable to drink milk and forced to subsist on barley water. Probably because of this I had been indulged and allowed to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to do it.

This was a perfectly sensible way of life in my opinion. I had no intention of it changing just because I no longer needed constant care and attention. Between the ages of two and three I worked out that a nicely judged tantrum with elements of kicking and biting was often all that was required to ensure life continued to have satisfactory outcomes. The swift and exhausted departure of my nanny after only a few months was usually one of those outcomes.

Only one, a delicate, silvery-haired woman named Miss French, had lasted. Presumably because of her hair I had decided I couldn’t possibly kick someone who was so old. In turn she never presented me with any reason to do so. She was always perfectly happy to let me have my own way and help me clean up after my adventures. I was very fond of Miss French and it was with a heavy heart I waved goodbye to her as she married and went off to have her own family.

Enter Margaret. She was nowhere near so amenable and had the temerity to try and instigate a routine enforced by discipline. We embarked upon some epic battles which usually ended up with myself upside down, feet caught in a steely clamp, my face puce with rage and frustration as I attempted to punch and bite thin air.

Eventually I had no option but to declare peace-terms and she and I came to a mutual understanding. This largely consisted of me pretending I was still doing whatever I wanted and it just happening to coincide with what she was telling me to do. Her indulgence of this little fiction led me to regard her with distinct affection over the years. But then she too, like Miss French, married and left us.

It was a normal route to finding husbands for middle class girls in those days and one my mother had in fact trodden herself many years earlier.

My mother, Gladys (a name she detested so most people called her Mickey) had been born in England and her father was a doctor who I believe had something to do with the invention of plaster-of-paris. This is all I know of them and the rest is shrouded in dense mystery. I was never sure if they had died in an accident or if something more sinister had happened- either my mother did not know or she chose never to tell us- but when she was three, and her brother just 18 months, they were put on a wool clipper, in the charge of the captain, and sent to Australia. There they were brought up by an uncle who was a doctor in South Australia.

After leaving school she trained as a nanny. This career was soon stopped short by the first World War where she instead joined the Women’s Land Army in Australia. But after the war she set off, as so many young Australians still do, on a tour around Europe, relying on her nannying skills to provide her with funds along the way. She applied to an agency in England and soon found herself the new nanny to the crown prince of Denmark (Frederick IX). Perhaps it was this contact with European royalty at such a young and impressionable age that forever cemented her ability to move with ease between all classes of people. She saw a lot of Europe as every grand family did in those days but when the crown prince became old enough to have a tutor she was out of a job.

She returned to England and the same agency to find another job. This time she became nanny to the Newland family- an Australian family living in Kenya. Victor Newland, a decorated veteran of two wars, had stayed in Africa following the Boer War and had set up business with another South Australian, Leslie Tarlton, a legendary white hunter. Newland and Tarlton (N&T) were transport contractors and export agents but their fame largely lay with the fact they were also Kenya’s first safari outfitters. In fact they more or less invented the concept of the luxury safari.

Porters would carry everything from refrigeration to drinks cabinets. Foodstuffs were imported from Fortnum and Mason in England and chefs would prepare three course meals for those returning from the hunt.

Their clients were royalty and the aristocracy and in 1909 they outfitted the much publicised safari for ex-President Teddy Roosevelt which broke all records for size and splendour including 500 uniformed porters and a half-dozen white hunters.

But for me personally N&T had a far greater significant role to play. For the organisation provided the meeting place for my mother and father.

My father, Arthur Buchanan Sands (or AB to most) was born in Ballarat, Australia. My grandfather had been an enterprising gentleman with greater ambitions than the family farm in Scotland, near Stirling, could provide. He boarded a clipper to Australia with the glint of gold in his eyes in 1857. He soon worked out that the real money to be made was not in mining gold itself but providing meat supplies to the miners. When my father was three the goldfields of Victoria began to dry up and the family followed the miners who followed the scent of bullion across the channel to New Zealand where alluvial gold was to be found in the plentiful riverbeds there.

And so my father grew up on a comfortable farm in the rich and green pastures of the North Island in New Zealand. He studied architecture at college and while there, fell in love with one of the few women studying medicine at the time. They married as soon as he graduated. But no sooner was the wedding reception over, than the first world war crashed in upon them.

My father had some small experience of the armed forces from serving as an army cadet during his university years. He now joined the New Zealand Machine Gun Corp as a subaltern and boarded a troop ship for the muddy and brutal plains of France where the death toll from the freezing and hellish conditions were almost as high as from bullets and artillery shells. He survived and finished the war as a captain but that is all I know of his experience. Like so many who returned from that war he never spoke of it. One can only imagine the horror and the terror, but on top of it, he added heartbreak as his wife wrote to him confessing she had fallen in love with someone else in his absence.

Little surprise that on his return to New Zealand on repatriation he jumped ship at Mombasa and remained in Kenya for the rest of his life, getting a job with Newland and Tarlton (N&T).

His job involved travelling around Ethiopia and Somalia to collect prime Boran cattle to sell at N&T’s auctions for the farmers of Kenya. But I imagine what first brought him to my mother’s attention was the fact they were both keen tennis players. My father displayed enough skill at the game to become a doubles tennis champion in Kenya and won himself a wife.

Mum and Dad

They married in 1924. When the depression hit four years later N&T decided to sub-contract parts of their business and my father bought the auction house off them. He must have been about 28 or in his early 30s but had inherited my grandfather’s enterprising spirit. He was soon expanding into all sorts of areas and at the end of his life had 10-12 businesses including three farms (one a dairy), a share of an abattoir and an office block in the heart of Nairobi.

My mother meanwhile devoted her time to bringing up six children, five of whom were boys. I can’t imagine this was the easiest task in the world. As mentioned I was the penultimate child- preceded by my eldest brothers Ted, Rod and Jack (twins) and my sister Jean and followed by the youngest, Jim.

I remember my father as remote but not inaccessible. He was over six foot with a belly that, over the years expanded until he was almost as wide as he was tall. In fact he had to start custom fitting the cabs of his farm trucks so he could fit behind the wheel. But despite this he remained energetic and active until his death. He was no better a father than I at playing games with his children, but I distinctly remember sitting on his knee in the evenings to tell him my many adventures.

He had designed the house we lived in which was a typical colonial style Kenya house. It was made from a distinctive blue-grey cut stone that was mined in plentiful amounts in the nearby quarries. It had high ceilings and a 12-foot verandah surrounding two sides of the house with a big open space in the middle to let the breezes cool the house. There were two bathrooms with the toilet in one set up high like a throne with three concrete steps leading up to it. It needed to be high for the septic tank drainage and was often transformed, in my youthful imaginings, into the throne of some heroic King (played by myself, of course).

But as any King could tell you through history, such grandeur is not without its hazards. My throne was the same. Never one to waste time I had continued working on some toy or project while I sat upon it one morning completing my morning ablutions. The screwdriver slipped with force and went straight through my hand. I felt myself passing out and my last thought was to throw myself against the window on the wall next to the toilet as I knew my pain and injuries would be considerably increased if I added falling down those concrete steps to my tally.

We had a large dining room. It had to be to fit the large dining table in it which fed all of us and one of those large Victorian sideboards on which the food was placed for breakfast in true English tradition. The sitting room in our house was dominated by an enormous fireplace which was never used as far as I can remember. Being right on the equator Kenya had a wet season and a dry season and that was about it really.

On one eerily moonlit night during the wet season my brother Ted and I, both unable to sleep, decided to go for a walk together to try and catch sight of some of the night prowling animals which were plentiful in those days and for whom the wet season was a noisy and happy hunting ground. Of course my poor mother came in to find our beds empty and sent my father out, post-haste in his dressing gown and slippers, to look for us. Unfortunately he stepped into a rather deep puddle right outside the front gate. His expletive-ridden turn of phrase succeeded in waking up the rest of my brothers and sister who gleefully informed us on our return that we were “definitely for it”. We were indeed both firmly administered six of the best from a leather strap but looking back I suspect my father was being rather restrained compared to what he would have liked to have done to us.

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