Mbali Upeo- The Patterson girls and a near miss with emasculation

Margaret and one of her beloved horses

We had always known the Patterson’s. Their father was the bank manager of Barclays for British East Africa and before the war they lived in the big Bank house- an impressively large double-storied house with a huge garden situated appropriately near Government House.
Our families had always been friendly and Ann, the eldest of the two daughters, was my age while Margaret was a year younger. I remember going to Margaret’s third birthday party and admiring the magnificent splendour of the house compared to the creeping tide of chaos that our sprawling house always seemed to be battling.

Margaret’s father was much older than her mother, she having been his secretary at one time. Marjorie had lost a previous fiancee in a motorbike accident in England just before the first world war. She had spent the war nursing wounded soldiers but suddenly found her skills unwanted when peacetime arrived. She moved to Kenya out of sheer boredom.
Margaret’s father on the other hand had been a staunchly Protestant local squire in Northern Ireland and had had ample time and money to pursue his passions of hunting and other various horse sports. Being the youngest and only son he ended up inheriting the squiredom at a young age but his five elder and unmarried sisters soon drove him to distraction and after a few years he ran away to sea to join the Merchant Navy. He was in South Africa when he decided he’d had enough of the sea and so he joined the bank there and had been steadily rising up the ranks ever since.
He had been given to expect that the next and almost imminent step for him, was a directorship of Barclays Bank in England. In preparation for this event the girls were packed off to school in England.

The war broke out soon after. Travel between Africa and England was forbidden for all except army business. The girls found themselves stranded at boarding school in Devon and their parents unable to visit them during the entire six years of the war.

We had very different wars, Margaret and I. Mine I remember almost with fondness but Margaret’s was a war filled with the ever-present fear of bombing, coldness, rations and drunk American servicemen.

After the war both girls sat exams to attend exclusive private schools in England as their parents made preparations to move back to the home country.

But just this moment one of the Barclay sisters married. The directorship was given to her new husband instead. After six months in England Alexander Patterson, bitterly disappointed and sour at the turn of events, returned to Kenya with his family, now to live in a rented house on the Ngong Road, just across from where we lived. Although he returned to his old job he knew there was little chance of further promotion and he began to drink heavily as he dwelt on the blow fate had dealt him.

Our parents had been friendly before the war and following their return the friendship was maintained and even increased between our mothers, now they lived so much closer.

Meanwhile, Ann and Margaret’s return was a matter of some interest to I and my mates. My friend Doug Carney in particular was very taken with Ann who was an intriguing mix of sharp tongue and flirtatious giggle. Margaret was more awkward and shy- I suspect the result of a bossy sister and a father who wished (and often told her so) that she had been a boy.

Both girls were mad keen on horses. So we would watch for when they would take the horses out exercising and suddenly “appear” on our bicycles.
As an obvious sign of our interest and affection we would try and make them fall off their horses if we could.
Always more hot-headed than her sister, Margaret once tried to run me down on her horse in retaliation for one of these pranks. I admit to a moment of frozen concern as the beast hurtled towards me but thankfully the horse turned at the last minute much to Margaret’s obvious frustration.
Another sign of affection were our names for them- “Fifi” and “Dodo”. I’m not quite sure why now. I think Ann was “Fifi” because she had fluffy, yellow hair.
With such signs of affection how could they resist? It wasn’t long until we all formed a little group that would meet up and go for walks together.

Margaret and “that dog”

After school would often find us at the girls’ house to do homework as they were the only ones who had a little attic room to themselves- a luxury the rest of us could not dream of. I’m not convinced all that much school work actually got done as I remember us spending most afternoons playing records.

Margaret’s father- now constantly irritable and crusty- didn’t like us very much and nor did his dog. The dog was an English bull terrier- a nasty looking thing with small slanted eyes and a long, bone-headed snout. He took its role as protector of the women in the house very seriously and seemed to view me as a particular threat. He would quite often lay in wait in small dark crevices on the stairs or landings and leap out at me, barking at full throttle. A few sharp kicks would often make him think twice about continuing its pursuit, but he never really gave up and a few times, when I lost my wary watchfulness, I would often find him attached to my shorts with a gnarling, snarling tenacity.

But our enmity was really solidified one day when I was mucking around with the girls, holding something of theirs up high so they could not reach it. I was teasing, they were laughingly annoyed. So carried away was I that I didn’t hear the dog’s familiar scrabbling sprint up the stairs. It burst into the attic room at full throttle, heading directly towards my nether regions with an accuracy that caused my dreams of manhood to flash before my eyes. I can still feel its hot horrible breath and sharp teeth  grazing against the groin region. I evaded emasculation by dint of a turn of speed I had not thought I possessed. I swiftly removed myself to the top of a desk with my hands protectively arrayed against further threat. The girls showed a distinct lack of sympathy but eventually they grabbed the bloody thing by the collar and ushered it back outside.

It took me a long time before I came down off that table. I still have nightmares about it.

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Mbali Upeo- the end of the war approaches and a man-carrying box kite

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.

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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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Mbali Upeo- the war begins in Kenya

The main threat to Kenya in the first days of the War came from the Italians who had put 100,000 troops in their colony in Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia). Their goal was to push down through East Africa to Tanganyika (modern day Tanzania), which was a German colony. This would have made the whole of Northern and Eastern Africa belonging to the Axis. But Italians aren’t real soldiers.

I remember one story that circulated during the war about a British soldier in Libya who went out one day and found 20,000 Italians wanting to surrender to him. He phoned it back to his commanding officer and said “I’ve got 20,000 Italians here and 20 camels and the camels are giving me a lot of trouble.”

This was perhaps just as well. There were no real airports in Kenya at the time but nevertheless the Fleet Air Arm (the aviation arm of the Royal Navy) commandeered Wilson Airport on the outskirts of Nairobi. A small number of commercial flights had been running there since 1931 but these were now confiscated by the FAA and four ancient old bomber planes were put into use. It was a bit like Dad’s Army. They didn’t have any bombs so they made some themselves in rusty 44 gallon drums. They were so primitive you had to light the fuse just before you pushed them out. Unfortunately they hadn’t tried it out beforehand. There they were up in the air with the fuses lit when they discovered the width of the doors was too narrow to throw the drums out. Well by this time they had the strength of 10 men so were tearing the side of the doorway apart with their bare hands…they got it out just in time.

They got back and picked up the second one and back in the air but when they looked out there was no bomb site from the first. They discovered it was quite tricky getting those drums out of the plane and estimating the angle right. The second one overshot as well. Finally the third one hit home on a lone outpost on the Northern Frontier which had less than a company of soldiers in there and only one officer. But still, they were pretty impressed with themselves.

As the war went on the bombing didn’t really get much more sophisticated. They used a whole heap of nitro-glycerine and a substance that was a bit like black plaster-of-paris and anything else they could get hold of. They were even raiding the quarries of cut stone.

I was privy to all these stories because I spent a lot of time at the airfield. After the war broke out I patriotically decided I needed to do my bit to help the war effort. I headed to Wilson Airport with a friend in tow. They were taking all the damaged planes from the Indian Ocean and Eastern war front and repairing them. Since it was before the days of walkie-talkies my theory was that we would be worth our weight in gold as messenger boys between the officers and the other men on the base. This would also give us distinct privileges and access to all the war planes in Kenya which was a glittering prize in our eyes.

I was right and I was soon down there every chance I could get. If there were no messages I would help the teams working on the aeroplanes. In those days there were still fabric covered planes- the Hurricanes, the Walruses, the Swordfishes and the Albercores. They’d turn up to Wilson Airport peppered with bullet holes and the men would strip them down to make sure there was no structural damage and then patch them up. My job was to cut out heaps of mariakani (a base material which is a bit like a thick, unbleached calico) into patches, fray them about an inch all the way around and stick them on with glue combined with a shrinking compound and then it would be as good as new.

Swordfish plane (pic credit WW2 Total)

We must have made thousands of patches. In return of course we expected to go for test flights when the planes were fixed as most had more than one seat. This was the highlight of our lives and well worth the price of a war in our opinion. Nothing compares to being in an open air plane with African plains below and an empty expanse of blue sky all around.

When a plane was reported to have crashed somewhere up-country, we pestered the blokes to take us up as observers in the Swordfish plane when they went to look for it. The Swordfish has an open cabin, with two seats behind the pilot for a gunner and an observer so both of us were able to go up. We were about 12,000 ft high when a flash caught the pilot’s eye. He dropped the nose and we dived down- my stomach, intestines and all sense of my body stayed behind as we both held on for dear life screaming at the top of our lungs. And in the back of my mind a little voice was deeply relieved that I had, for once, decided to put my safety belt on that day.

I had a little log book and logged all my flights- who the pilot was, what type of plane it was, where we went. I had it for years but don’t know what happened to it. My mother probably gave that away as well.

Some of the planes that came in would be wrecked and would have to go for spare parts. It seemed a shame to let all those very useful bits and pieces go so we started putting them to our own profitable uses as well.

The flattened metalwork from between the wings were a good shape to make paperknives out of without too much work. We would find pieces that still had a thread at one end which we would screw a nut onto and cover it with a shiny chocolate wrapper or picture card. Then we would cut some squares, from the perspex that covered the pilot’s cabin, shape and mould it together to make a clear handle that fitted over the top of the nut. Grind it down smooth and then smooth the other end of the metalwork into a knife shape and job done!

We also made photo frames. We’d find two shaped bits of Perspex that could lie on top of one another and then two bits of copper tubing. We’d cut a slit in copper tubing and fit them onto the Perspex- one at the top and one at the bottom. We’d smooth off all the edges and rub up the copper so it came up really shiny and that would be it. I could make those up in 20 minutes or half an hour. Both the paper-knives and the photo frames were very popular down at the Nairobi Emporium where we had found a couple of the shops willing to sell them on commission for us. In fact I had a photo of my wife Margaret in one of these photo frames when I was in Australia for college.

By then I had also expanded into a side business trading these purloined bits of plane to the Italian prisoners of war.

Just outside of Nairobi they had built a big prisoner of war camp that housed, almost exclusively, Italian soldiers. On weekends and school holidays it was my job to help my father deliver the milk to the hotels, the hospitals, the military camps and finally the prisoner of war camp- a huge ground of swiftly constructed long houses surrounded by barbed wire and observation posts and with the blue green hills behind them.

I was a fierce barterer and I think the soldiers all rather enjoyed these energetic little interludes in what must have been a dreary war for them. I used to trade them blocks of aluminium from the planes which they would carve into cigarette lighters and such and then trade onwards. In return I wanted military badges. I had a collection of English regiments and Italian regiments and by the end of the war my Italian collection was really quite impressive. They were impressive badges as well- big flashy things, although not terribly high quality brass- bit like the Italian soldiers.

I also ended up with an impressive collection (as did our whole family) of Italian rifles, pistols and hand-grenades. By the end of the war Kenya was swimming in them and you could often pick them up very cheaply or sometimes just find them lying around.

About the same time I also realised there were no toys in shops for Christmas except for a few locally made things. My parents had given me a little toy making kit when I was about eight years old. Unfortunately the kit was no more than a toy itself and I think I broke the saw the first time I used it. But it opened my eyes to the possibilities of making toys from scratch and working with wood.

I started hunting for bits and pieces of timber that I could cut and shape into wheels and a central block piece so that when I glued it all together it looked like a tractor. I’d paint them in local colours and sell them at the emporium as well. I had a pocket knife and would also carve little model aeroplanes- usually out of cedar which was a nice soft, pliable wood. You could buy plans of all the aeroplanes being used in the war or find them in the newspapers. I used to make quite a lot of money out of Whitleys, which were the early English bombers, and then later on the American Liberator bombers. They were quite easy to make because they were just a rectangle shape with wings. But the Hurricanes and later the Spitfires needed a bit more carving.

I needed more tools, and for that I needed more money to buy tools. This led to my most profitable business enterprise yet.

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Mbali Upeo- a passion for collecting

Our family life was noisy and it started early. My father stored the milk from the dairy on the front verandah overnight in preparation for the first delivery of the day. At 5am the workmen arrived at the back of the house (as is traditional) but then trekked their way to the front verandah and clattered out again with the steel milk cans on their shoulders. They evidently enjoyed their work and loaded them with vim onto the steel trucks often singing or humming as they did so. The milk was then taken on the early rounds to hotels and restaurants and a few private customers by my father in the truck while the rest of us remained awake, but silent, until breakfast at 7am.

(from l to r back row) My brother Rod, sister Jean, my brother Ted, my brother Jack.
First row (from l t r) My cousin Lorna, my cousin David, my youngest brother Jim and myself (looking less than happy)

In addition to us six children and our nanny there were also of course the African staff which consisted of a cook, a kitchen jojo and at least one, usually two, houseboys. The large kitchen at the back was their domain and they lived in quarters about 40 yards behind the house and another building which had been intended a motorcar shed but was early on transformed into sleeping quarters as my father brought friends and family out from New Zealand to help him with his businesses, including my Uncle Ken. But as they moved on and my brothers grew older, they soon occupied it.

My mother had her own kitchen, having converted one of the original bedrooms into her baking house with two electric stoves in it. Here she created cakes on an epic scale that were sold to private clients or through my father’s auction house. She was a glorious cook and there was always something delectable to eat in the house- puftaloons, waffles, pancakes, banana bread, mountainous meringues, sponges, biscuits etc etc. Entrance into our house was often greeted with the sweet smell of butter and sugar combined and cooked in many and various ways.

The upshot of this was that we children were all very popular people amongst our peers. We usually had one or two friends accompany us home from school on most days, adding to the general chaos of the house. I rapidly used this advantage to place myself at the head of a notorious little gang, forcing hopeful joiners to undergo many and varied initiation rites to prove themselves worthy of membership.

Foremost amongst these was to climb along the six foot high fir hedge that formed a long wall at the back of our house. Of course we broke a bit more of the hedge each time we did it and usually required the services of either the gardener or the nanny to help me conceal this from my parents. The other part of the test was to climb up a group of trees that were 10ft away from the house and were some 30-40ft high. But I never asked them to do anything I was not willing to do myself and soon I had around me a firm group of staunch friends all as keen for adventure and to conquer the far horizon as I was.

Kenya in those days was a paradise for an independently minded boy and by way of a winning smile (that usually netted me more than my fair share of the chocolate cake) and the natural result of a chaotic family life, I largely spent my days doing what I liked, when I liked which suited me very well.

I attended the Killimani School which was about two miles away from our house travelling on gravelled urban roads and partly cross-country over a plain that frequently had game grazing peacefully on it. My sister Jean and I would travel this route every morning on our donkeys with an African each running along behind with a tree-branch in hand to keep up the pace.

Other than this morning routine however my sister Jean and I had little to do with each other. She slept in a bedroom with the nanny, while I shared with my elder brother Rod. She also had the ability, known only to elder sisters everywhere, of being able to rile me up beyond reason. I distinctly remember being in such a rage on one occasion that I tried to punch her in the chest….unfortunately I tried to do it through a glass door. I was cut quite badly and it left me at a decided disadvantage.

Nor did I have a great deal to do with my elder brothers other than taking long family walks together on occasion. My sole attempt at convincing them to let me join their manly pursuits was to begin smoking at the age of seven. It didn’t have any effect other than to create a habit I did not give up until the age of 47 and quite a lot of lung damage.

Mostly though my siblings and I were all perfectly civil to each other when we crossed paths at the breakfast and dinner table but that was about it.

It was probably my younger brother Jim with whom I spent most time with out of my family. Once the first shock was over, I rather enjoyed having a younger brother. From the age of three or four he began following me around everywhere and was an eager listener to my many stories. I had just started reading and I had a book called “…” which I read avidly. I would soon invent stories where I myself was the hero of these stories and I would tell them to Jim who never doubted the truth of them. This was a quality I valued highly in any audience. It was one of three qualities he had that I approved of- he was not averse to doing whatever I told him and he shared my passion for collecting things. Sadly the first two qualities dissipated somewhat as he grew older but the third remained a bond between us for many years.

I was a zealous collector of everything I could think of- stamps, coins, wildflowers, grasses, birds’ eggs, cigarette cards, model planes, the list was endless. Jim and I had a collection of over 250 different types of bird eggs which, by dint of assiduous nest robbing, we had found all ourselves.

One day we found a silky oak tree with a little cup nest right near the top. It was quite a thin tree so I nodded to Jim. He knew what to do. He scrambled up there and confirmed there were indeed eggs inside but, on closer inspection, they seemed a bit thick. I figured that meant there must be chicks inside so told him to bring them on down. He obediently put three eggs into his mouth so he could use both hands to climb back down the rather bendy and unstable tree.
Unfortunately he slipped and, as he fell, bit down on the rather “fruity” eggs.
He was most upset and swearing a good deal. Possibly my laughing so hard I could barely stand contributed to his sense of grievance. He was certainly in high dudgeon for quite a few days following this incident.

I would go down to the museum to have the eggs classified if I didn’t know what birds they were and, if I could, I would shoot a bird of that type to take with me as well. I’d always been around guns. My uncle Ken had been a crack shot and represented Kenya in inter-colonial competitions as well as in London. He had given me my first gun when I was seven- an old .22 repeater pump-action rifle. He’d had it as a kid and it was almost worn out, but it still worked and I did quite a bit of shooting from a young age.

After a while the blokes at the Museum taught me how to take a skin out so I could do it at home, so then I’d just take an envelope with the skin in it. They would taxidermy it and make a stuffed bird to sit in a tree. They must have liked the fact I was so keen because they gave me a big book “Grants Book of East African Birds”– there are more birds in East Africa then there are in the Amazon in South America and this was the definitive collector’s book. It was a treasured and precious gift and I kept it, along with all my collections in various boxes, cases and tins- under my bed.

Unfortunately when I went to Australia to go to college my mother became possessed of one of those inexplicably female cleaning frenzies and decided to clear out our rooms. She gave all my collections away, including the book and a very valuable stamp collection I had got off a mate whose father had been a discerning collector (it included some very early African stamps from about 1830 onwards). I was most upset. What’s more she gave them to a cousin that I didn’t like!

The war years in Kenya were a boon for my collecting passion as I began adding military badges to my assortment. I was nine when the war broke out. I still remember sitting cross-legged on the floor in the sitting room in front of the big old radio listening to the announcement. Most of the time the radio was full of crackles and pops and had a habit of suddenly going very faint and then very loud. But on this occasion I remember Chamberlain’s speech as being crystal clear against the heavy silence of the rest of the house; the worried look on my mother’s face; my father’s frown.

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