| My journey did not end at Mombassa. I still had a long way to go.
At least fifty per cent of the passengers from the "Leicestershire" were travelling on to distant parts of Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda, to farms, hospitals, Government offices, etc. I had to catch a train to distant Geita Gold Mine up-country in Tanganyika, about five hundred and fifty miles due west of Mombassa, as the crow flies, and approximately fourteen miles from the southern end of Lake Victoria - a good long way from civilisation as I knew it. Ralph Kruger on the ship, who was South African born and knew a great deal more about the continent of Africa than nearly everyone else on board, reckoned Geita was at the end of the earth, the last place God made, and that I was out of my mind to contemplate spending two and a half years there.
Well, for better or worse I was on my way there. The East African railway system had trains running direct from Mombassa to Nairobi, but there I would have to change into another smaller train to Kisumu, on the north eastern shores of Lake Victoria. I would then transfer onto a paddle steamer to sail down the eastern shores of the lake to a town called Mwanza, across the border in Tanganyika, where I devoutly hoped J.R. would be waiting for me. The last thirty odd miles to the mine had to be done by car down a dirt track - it hardly qualified to be called a road - to Geita Gold Mine. As the through connecting train from Nairobi to Kisumu only went once a week, when I disembarked from the ship I found myself directed to the Tudor House Hotel in Mombassa, where I spent three days before being able to continue my journey.
It was not much fun arriving in Mombassa and not being met by anyone. The town stands on an island in an inlet of the Indian Ocean, where a break in the under water reefs originally enabled the sea-going Arab dows to reach safe anchorage. It was a beautiful setting, with calm blue sea, azure skies, brown sailed dows skimming past us, and it was also very hot. We soon passed the "Gothic", a large handsome ship, now in limbo awaiting further orders, with its royal passengers back in England attending to their melancholy duties. We lined the ship's rail in silence, watching and thinking our own private thoughts, until the dock side came into view and we were once again caught up in the bustle and confusion of arriving at a strange port.
As Geita was so far inland and off the beaten track, J.R. was not able to come to the coast to meet me, but I did not enjoy seeing other people being greeted by their husbands and other relatives, while I was still on my own. Margaret was claimed by her husband and whisked away as soon as the ship docked, but at least Mac and Dick were still around. Mac's office job was with Smith Mackenzie & Co., the Lloyds agents in that area for shipping, baggage, etc. and Dick was staying on the ship until they reached the next port, Dar es Salaam, where he also had a train to catch to a place called Kilosa. We all three met up in the evenings.
The Tudor House Hotel was a pleasant enough place, rather reminiscent of the Rest House in Takoradi, with chalets right on the beach and in a bay where swimming was possible. I spent most of the three days splashing about in the shallow water and trying to get more of a tan, J.R. not being around to tell me not to. The only disconcerting thing was the myriads of tiny crabs which covered the sandy beach, and when one approached they would scuttle at lightning speed down their holes, out of sight. I was always very careful where I sat down.
But the days were long. Most places of entertainment in Mombassa were closed, owing to the death of the King. I knew no one in the town. Mac used to pick me up in the evenings when he finished work and we would take a launch out to the "Leicestershire", at anchor in the bay, for a bit of companionship. Quite a lot of other passengers were, like Dick, still living on board, bound for other ports such as Durban, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, and we spent the time listening to music and the news on the radio, feeling rather low.
On the fourth day, early evening, I was escorted to the railway station by my two cavaliers and seen into my compartment, which I was pleased to see had a sleeping berth. I was less pleased to observe that I also had a companion, who viewed my entrance with something less than enthusiasm. She was an elderly, grey haired lady, very straight up and down, and with the pinched nostrils which give women a shrewish look. When the train started I waved goodbye to the two men, with the usual promises to write, and then, trying to be chatty, explained to her that I had come all the way out from England by ship and was now on the last lap to my destination, where my husband was meeting me. She sniffed a bit, obviously not having a very high opinion of young females who traveled out long distances to meet their husbands and managed to collect a couple of other men on the way.
After a while I gave up and settled down to read.
It was a long and uncomfortable night. To tell the truth, I was feeling very much alone. The pleasant company I had been mixing with for the last three weeks had melted away, and ahead of me lay several days of travelling completely on my own, to an absolutely strange destination, and accompanied by a mountain of luggage which I would have to see on and off trains and boats, before I could thankfully hand the whole lot over to J.R. It has always been my aim, never yet achieved, to travel light, i.e. with one small suitcase (on wheels) and a handbag, but wherever I go I never fail to have large suitcases or trunks and, in this case, a sewing machine as well, Added to which, my wanderlust was temporarily satiated and I wanted nothing more than to sit down in some place I could call home, and put my feet up.
For the time being, home was a railway compartment with a very hard bunk, in a train which made many inexplicable stops. By the time we had traversed the thickly forested coastal plain it was dark, and nothing could be seen through the windows except the black night. Nothing could be heard, either, apart from the panting of the engine away up in front and the occasional bark of a distant animal - a lion, perhaps? I wondered if the engine could be on the point of breaking down, or was this stopping and starting the normal procedure for Kenyan trains?
The grey lady slept soundly through it all. Each time we stopped, after ten minutes or so another train would be heard approaching and would swish past us in a blur of steam and lighted windows. Then at long last, when I was becoming resigned to staying in this spot all night, our train would creak and shudder into movement and before long we were rattling along again at about thirty miles an hour, which seemed to be its maximum effort. It was all very mysterious.
However, with daylight all was revealed. I saw then that we were traveling on a single track line which formed a loop every so often, usually at a small wayside station, and here trains had to wait to pass each other. Coming from a railway family and having traveled on trains all my life, I should have guessed this.
We had a spartan sort of breakfast delivered to us by smiling black stewards, and the morning was made for me by a stunning glimpse of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest African mountain at over nineteen thousand feet, about sixty miles away to the southwest, covered in snow and sparkling in the early morning sun. We also saw giraffes in the distance, running across the plain, their heads swaying with their movement. Giraffes in their natural habitat! This was really Africa.
The landscape now seen from the carriage windows was different from anything I had so far seen in West or East Africa. We had evidently climbed several hundred feet in the night, and perhaps that was why the engine had sounded so distressed, because the tropical rain forest was gone and in its place was an undulating, grass-covered plain with a few trees dotted here and there. My grey-haired companion, who had unbent slightly and who now informed me that her name was Cecily and that she was a school teacher, said we might also be lucky enough to spot elephant or rhino, but the only other moving objects which unveiled themselves were herds of gazelle, wildebeest and impala racing alongside the train. The sticky heat of the coastline had gone too, as we found out when we pulled in to Nairobi station, where it was sunny and cool.
I spent the best part of the day in Nairobi, doing nothing very much. Although Kenya straddles the equator, the moderating influences of sea and altitude have given it a climate that favours European settlement over large areas of the higher ground. Nairobi is over five thousand feet above sea level, and as I walked about the town I noticed that there were at least as many white faces as there were black.
It was 10 a.m. when we arrived, and as my connecting train to Kisumu did not leave until 10 p.m. that night, once I had supervised the unloading of my luggage and seen it stacked against the wall of the one platform, where I was assured it would be safe, I had all day to explore the town. It did not take very long. There was a main street lined with shops, including the inevitable U.A.C. and decrepit looking Indian stores, and one presentable hotel, the New Stanley, where once I had exhausted the delights of the town, I had lunch. The afternoon was spent in the hotel lounge, writing letters, and finally I decided I had better return to the station to keep an eye on my luggage. The station did at least have a waiting room with seats.
And here, as the swift tropical dusk came down and I was beginning to nod off after my uneasy night, things started to change for the better.
The waiting room door was suddenly flung open to admit a small blonde bombshell, who exclaimed, "Oh, there you are! I've been looking all over Nairobi for you! They told me at the mine that you would be here today, and I promised J.R. I would deliver you safely. I was beginning to think you'd changed your mind and gone back to England!"
This, it turned out, was the young wife of one of the mine officials at Geita, who had been spending a few shopping days in town, as was readily evidenced by the number of parcels she was carrying, She seemed delighted to see me and I was equally delighted to see her, because I was by then feeling friendless and alone, a bit like an abandoned parcel myself. All this was now changed. I bombarded her with questions about the rest of the journey, the mine, what the other people were like, and, bearing in mind Ralph Kruger's disparaging remarks, I ended, somewhat anxiously, "Do you like it there?"
"Like it?" she cried, indignantly, "it's my home!"
Well, that took care of that. She said her name was Rita Morgan, she had two boys at school in Nairobi whom she had just been visiting, and now she had had enough of the "big city" and wanted nothing more than to get back to the mine and her husband.
Our train backed into the station fairly soon. We saw our luggage on board, had a quick meal at a restaurant outside the station, and finally found our sleeping compartment on the train. I was glad to discover that Rita had brought with her some maps of the district we were headed for, and these I studied with great interest.
Mwanza, the nearest town to the mine, was where we were due to disembark from the lake steamer, and a lot of other place names were equally strange sounding - Nyalikungu, Malialuguru, Shanwa, Igaragara, and others. But there was an inlet of Lake Victoria immediately north of Mwanza which rang a bell in my memory - Speke Gulf. My mind skipped back to school days when I read about the explorers, Burton and Speke, who were the first Europeans to venture into the chaotic interior of the Black Continent in the mid-1800's, and who exposed the widespread existence of slave trading in this part of the interior. They were followed by the more famous Livingstone and Stanley, but it was Burton and Speke who found Lake Tanganyika, and Speke alone who went on when Burton was ill and in 1858 discovered the wide expanse of water, looking like an inland sea, which the natives insisted was there to the north. He named it Lake Victoria, for the Queen Empress. He was also convinced that this lake contained the source of the River Nile, for which explorers had been searching for years. He was right, too, but this fact was not verified until twelve years after his death. Speke Gulf must have been the place where he first saw the waters of the lake.
This was the stuff of history and romance. As our train gathered speed and plunged into the night, I sat gazing out into the blackness and thinking of the novels of Rider Haggard, set in this part of the world, and pondering on the changes which had come to Africa in the last hundred years. It was due to the unremitting efforts of these early explorers, and the hardships they suffered in their pursuit of knowledge and glory for the Empire, that I could now travel across the continent in a comfortable train, in safety and speed, and in the certainty that no painted tribesman was going to burst in, howling for my blood and ready to slit my throat just for the fun of it.
That is what I thought at the time. Looking back, I can't understand how I could have been so sublimely ignorant of what was already happening on the Kikuyu Highlands east of Nairobi, the beginning of the Mau-Mau uprisings, which were to result in the final independence of Kenya, with Jomo Kenyatta, the instigator of all the troubles, becoming its first Prime Minister. But ignorant I was at that time, and perhaps it was just as well for my peace of mind. Otherwise, each time the train stopped I would have expected to be grabbed by some be-feathered warrior and carried off at spear point, perhaps to be flung into a cauldron of boiling water over a huge fire and cooked for the village supper.
In any case, I didn't sleep much on this second night in a train, it was all so strange. Rita, like my last night's companion, was soon soundly asleep, but I dozed on and off and was fully awake at dawn, gazing out of the window in awe and fascination. The noise of the carriage wheels was what had really roused me, as they began to have a different sound.
I looked out to see that we were swaying slowly across what looked like a very unsubstantial suspension bridge, and underneath it was a long, deep valley swathed in ribbons of mist, which with the rising sun took on all the colours of the rainbow. It was incredibly beautiful, almost out of this world, and having studied Rita's maps so carefully the evening before, I knew that what I was gazing down at was part of the Rift Valley. Slowly, so slowly, we crossed to the far side and once our wheels were back on solid ground, I could relax. This was another place which I wished to re-visit when I had time on my hands. So far this has not happened, and in any case I would probably never look at it again with the same astonished wonder which struck me so totally when I was young and impressionable.
Some time later that morning the train deposited us at the quayside at Kisumu, right next to the paddle steamer which was to take us on our three day cruise down the lake. And there before us was Lake Victoria, the inland sea. I believe Lake Superior in North America is the only freshwater lake in the world which is larger, but this certainly looked big enough to be the sea, a placid pale blue sheet of water stretching right to the horizon, with no sign of a farther shore to be seen. On this day there were tiny little rippling waves breaking on the sandy beach, but Rita told me that on occasion it could become very rough. Unlike other lakes in the area it is not in the Rift Valley, which branches to either side of it, and is not very deep, but is apparently an important source of fish for the natives living on the quite densely populated shores.
The boat reminded me of the paddle steamers which used to operate on the Thames, on the tourist runs to Margate and Ramsgate, and who knows? it may even have been one of them. My passage had been booked for me in advance, and I found I had a tiny cabin with room for one bunk and very little else. Rita had no booking, and as the boat was full, nowhere to sleep except the floor, but she wouldn't hear of me giving up my bunk to her. I didn't press her, but suggested a pillow and blanket on the floor. Whether she took me up on this, I can't say, because after our meal in the small dining saloon I went straight to bed and slept till morning, lulled off by the rocking motion of the boat as it cruised gently down the eastern shore of the lake. I was pretty tired after two broken nights, and although once or twice I roused sufficiently to appreciate that some sort of party was going on right over my head, on the main deck, I was too lethargic to get out of bed to investigate. Rita was bright eyed and perky at breakfast next morning obviously she had slept on someone's floor, or in someone's bed.
There were about twenty passengers on the boat, mostly men, and I couldn't help wondering where they were going. Rita knew several of them and reported that they were nearly all on short leave from various Colonial Service offices in Nairobi and Kampala, and a lake cruise was just the job to relieve the tedium of keeping the flag flying in their respective outposts of Empire. Rita, with her bright blue eyes, short fair curls and vivacious manner, was most of the day and evening surrounded by eager young men, plying her with food and drink, and she eyed me speculatively more than once, no doubt wondering what I was making of all this conviviality. She needn't have worried. I didn't care whose cabin she slept in, being by now totally absorbed with the knowledge that very shortly I would be re-united with my husband after a separation of almost a month.
We made one stop at a small town called Musoma, where we off-loaded cargo and two passengers. That night there was a violent thunderstorm, turning the formerly calm water into choppy waves, but next morning all was placid again with the sun shining on the sheets of water stretching away into the distance. As we approached Mwanza, we passed numerous rocky islets and wooded inlets, and the increase in the number of white houses and bungalows scattered up and down the hills gave us an indication that we were getting near a town of some size.
I find my memories of this town are very dim. The buildings were mostly of the white-washed, tin roofed variety which I had seen in West Africa - stores, municipal buildings and a Bank or two, with the residential bungalows up and down the sides of the steep hills surrounding the town and the quay. It was certainly situated in a lovely position, with the blue sky, blue lake, green vegetation everywhere and brightly coloured tropical flowers in great profusion. But I hardly noticed this at the time, being entirely taken up with trying to pick out J.R. from the group of people waiting at the quayside as the boat drew near. Whatever should I do if he wasn't there? I was nearly out of money, stuck in the middle of a hostile continent with no friends, and rapidly running out of self-confidence, never my strongest point.
But of course he was there. I recognised the O.G.Bowling Hat before anything else (a replacement for the discarded shrunken one), being waved at me from the middle of the group, and there was J.R. in his customary white shirt and shorts, next to another figure who looked vaguely familiar.
This turned out to be Tommy Rowe from Marlu, and it was the first time I knew of Tommy having left Marlu to follow J.R. out to East Africa.
We stayed overnight in the town's one hotel, and had a celebratory dinner that evening. I don't remember a single thing about the rest of that day, except the great relief I felt to have almost completed this lengthy journey on my own.
Next morning we started out on what was really the last lap. First we had to board a launch which took us and our luggage across a small arm of the lake to the other side, where a car from Geita mine was waiting for us. Rita's husband had also joined us and we were a merry company, seated under the awnings and trying to spot the crocodiles and hippos with which I was assured the lake was well stuffed. We passed some very strangely shaped rocks which looked older than time, but thankfully no crocs or hippos.
The wind was fresh, and as we approached the opposite shore my sun hat blew off into the water, but was quickly rescued by several African natives who cheerfully dived in, crocs and hippos notwithstanding.
We then had a 50-mile drive across the grassy plain to the mine, along the so-called road. I could see by the lack of trees and the grey-green waving grass that this was very dry savannah country. All sorts of animals could hide in this grass and I had the feeling that many of them were there, watching us go by. It was lion country, a high, cool plateau rising to 5,000 feet in places. But on this occasion the lions remained hidden. In fact, I never did see any all the time I remained there, but J.R. had two or three encounters while driving to and from Mwanza on other occasions, once being able to sit in the car for about half an hour, watching a lion family playing in the shade of some trees.
There was a feeling of limitless space about this country, of wide skies and emptiness, so entirely different from the crowding, over-hanging vegetation of the West African bush, which sometimes makes one feel breathless from lack of oxygen. Here I felt I could breathe great lungfulls of the pure, invigorating air and walk for miles across the rolling plain.
But we still hadn't quite arrived. I was tired of constant travelling and when in the distance we could at last see a range of hills and I was told that on the other side of these was the mine, I sat up in my seat in anticipation. We topped the last rise and started to coast down the gentle slope on the far side. Now I could see bungalows stretching out to the foot of the hill, each one enclosed in its own cultivated garden, white painted, green roofed, and having more of an air of permanency than the ones at Marlu. Figures came out to the front doors as we passed, waving in welcome.
|
