It did not in any way compare with the Marlu Assay Office. There was no equipment to speak of, and what was there was very old and the whole place was dirty. In a job as technically precise as assaying gold, where grains of metal have to be weighed on a balance to fractions of a milligram, it is not only essential to have the correct instruments to work with, but they must also be scrupulously clean. The laboratory at Geita which J.R. inherited was not worthy to be called by that name. It was more like a scruffy old workshop, and although the mine had been operational since the mid-thirties, it was quite obvious to him that before he could do any serious work in it, some vital re-organisation would have to take place.

When he had simmered down a bit, he suggested to Mr. Jenkins that the first thing to be done was for some new equipment to be ordered and then, either a new laboratory would have to be built or the existing one given a thorough scrubbing out and a re-paint. To save time and money, the latter procedure was decided upon, a spring clean was put in hand and new equipment ordered from South Africa - which took months to arrive. J.R. refused to put his name to any of the reports he issued from the office for at least a year, until the equipment had been installed and new staff trained.

Getting trained African staff was a problem because the local natives were, generally speaking, much less educated than the Fantis of the Gold Coast. These boys were largely from the Bantu tribes, with a sprinkling of Zulu and Masai and some others filtering in from Arabia, so that they did not all have negroid features and some were a good deal lighter skinned than others. But being so far inland, they had not been very much exposed to the western way of life. In fact, one boy employed as an office cleaner did not even know how to open a door. He had never seen a door handle before and didn't know you had to twist it, not pull it.

From this sort of unpromising material, J.R. had to build up an efficient Assay Office staff, and he was glad to have Tommy, now under training as an Assay Office assistant, to help him.

The biggest problem for me on my arrival was having to learn to speak Swahili, the lingua franca of that part of Africa. I quickly discovered that the name of our cook, "Juma", was also the word for Monday - so presumably he was born on a Monday - and he did speak a little English, but most conversations were carried on in Swahili on his part and English on mine, until I learnt the more essential phrases, such as "Jambo" (good morning), or "Lete Chakula" (bring the food). J.R. and I were "Bwana" and "Mem-Sahib", and any visitors coming to the front door of the bungalow would call out "Hodi?", which meant "May I come in?" A shop was a "Duka", a skilled workman a "Fundi", a "Shamba" was a garden or cultivated patch, and a "Boma" a stockade or Government station. I never made much headway with the language but learnt enough to get by, and that was chiefly the names of the different foods we required for our meals.

Our bungalow at Geita was bigger than the one we had at Marlu and built of wood instead of white-washed concrete blocks. It had two bedrooms and a very large main living room which had splendid views to the front and back of the land surrounding the mine, gently undulating down in the direction of Lake Victoria in the front and up to the hills at the back. We couldn't see the lake as it was fourteen miles away, but the nearer views included the newly built Club at the foot of the hill, where there was a swimming pool and tennis courts, and our next door neighbours' identical bungalows on either side of us, partly hidden by trees and shrubs.

The next bungalow to ours up the hill was occupied by an English couple, Chris and Glen Martin, and their small son Peter, and it was there we went for my next evening meal at Geita. I got on well with them both immediately. They were Cambridge University graduates and their strong point was languages. Apparently they had known each other since their mid-teens and had been dating intermittently ever since, and on their long walks together would converse with each other in French, German, even Swahili - just for fun. When they were both about sixteen, one of Chris's friends had ribbed him about his girl friend and teasingly asked him if it was serious.

According to Chris, his reply was, "What? Tombstone teeth and glasses? Have a heart!"

Teeth and glasses notwithstanding they continued to go out with each other throughout university and in spite of wartime separations, and married after the War when Chris returned from the Western Desert. He and Tommy had much in common, both-having been Desert Rats.

Glen was a tall girl, well built, and forever trying to lose weight. She played tennis and swam a lot, but ruined any possibility of weight loss by coming home afterwards and eating enough for two people. Between them, they gave me a run down on the other inhabitants of Geita, and they seemed to be a motley crowd.

There were Sir Thomas Bowen and Jill, his wife, a young couple who were a classic example of the chorus girl marrying into the peerage - although that is not quite fair as Jill was not a chorus girl but "in rep." as she informed everyone, and she met Tom when she was playing the lead in a repertory theatre production at Windsor, She was very good-looking, Lady Bowen, fair haired and blue eyed, with an equally beautiful two year old daughter called Julia, and when I arrived they were daily expecting another addition to the family whom they hoped was going to be a boy - "for the title, you know". Jill was friendly enough to me, although a bit inclined to put on airs when she remembered her position. I once heard her commenting on another new arrival on the camp, who had had the temerity to call her by her Christian name about five minutes after meeting her.

"It's not that I mind people calling me Jill", proclaimed Lady Bowen in ringing tones, her voice pitched to penetrate to the farthest corners of the theatre. But you could see she would have preferred one to grovel a bit first. I was always very careful to call her Lady Bowen, until given permission to do otherwise.

The Doctor on the camp and his wife, Henry and Marita Wirtz, were middle aged European refugees from the Nazis. She was chiefly notable by reason of the way she drove their car around, in one gear only - bottom. If it ever became necessary for her to change up, as it sometimes did, she would abandon the car wherever she happened to be and wait for Henry to retrieve it. Their bungalow was at the top of the hill and nearly every day she was to be seen driving up or down, to and from the club or the U.A.C., looking neither to the right nor to the left, her dumpy little body three quarters submerged in the driving seat and just the top of her head visible. No wonder she was such a rotten driver, she couldn't see where she was going.

Her husband, Henry, was round and ruddy, otherwise known as "Michelin Man", and he was held in some regard and much fear by the Africans. When on his rounds in the African hospital, he had been known to look at some minor injury to a hand or foot and then utter the dread words, "That will have to come off!" The patient would go several shades paler if possible, his eyes round as saucers, hands clasped together beseechingly, and implore - "No, Bwana M'Kubwa!" (big master), and Henry would chortle away happily and pat the victim reassuringly on his woolly head.

Once one of the European shift bosses was bitten on the thumb by a snake, and in a panic his boy cut the thumb off to stop the poison going through his master's body. They both then rushed pell-mell to the doctor, carrying dead snake and severed thumb, and Henry laughed very heartily and unsympathetically because, as it happened, the snake was a non-poisonous variety. Too late, of course for the poor man's thumb; micro surgery had not yet been invented.

One person I met soon after my arrival was cross-eyed Alec Gray from Marlu, who had left there at the same time as Tommy and flown out to East Africa with him. In the few weeks he had spent in England, Alec had put in some useful time in hospital, having his eyes straightened. I believe he went to the hospital run by McIndoe, the famous plastic surgeon, and the result was that now Alec's eyes were perfectly aligned. But the strange thing is, after my first approving glance at him, whenever I encountered him around the mine I still saw him as cross-eyed.

Then there were Els and Peter Tait, another of the younger couples, she Dutch and he English, and an Australian pair, Aldyth and Ewen Tyler. Ewen was one of the mine surveyors and was always known, naturally, as Wat Tyler. There were several South African families of Boer descent, and a German couple called Gaitsche, who ran a shamba outside the mine, where we could buy vegetables for the table. Altogether, a very mixed bag.

So we were thrown very much on our own resources. There were only about fifty whites there, including wives, and we had the club and the swimming pool, but like nearly all the buildings there, they were hastily put up and not very well finished. The pool had a permanent leak and had to be refilled about twice a week. In retrospect, what a good place to settle down to write a book! A congenial climate, no interruptions, no small family, house boys to do the cooking and cleaning - why didn't I think of it?

I was happy to be able to settle down for a time. From our bungalow we could see the beginning of the working part of the mine - the offices, workshops, and the open cast workings a little further off. The Assay Office was visible across an area of rough grass, and the routine was that when J.R. appeared around the corner of the office, on his way home for breakfast after doing an hour's work, Juma just had time to slap the eggs and bacon into the frying pan to have it ready on the table as Bwana sat down. Service with a smile!

The short rainy season was almost finished when I arrived, and all through the summer months it was dry and steadily becoming drier. Drought was always a problem on the highlands of Tanganyika. The weather was never as humid as in the Gold Coast, but hot during the daytime and cool in the evenings. One result of the lack of rain was that gradually we obtained less and less of the locally grown vegetables and fruit, and lived more and more out of tins. It was cattle country, which meant there were a lot more flies, and this made it difficult to sit out of doors for more than a few minutes at a time as the flies settled on our hands and feet. But there were no tsetse flies and few mosquitoes. It was a much healthier place for white people than the West Coast, although I did see a lot more snakes.

Once when I was in the bath, I saw a very prettily patterned green snake come wriggling through a gap between the wooden window frame and the mosquito netting. In response to my yells, J.R. came rushing in with a panga belonging to Juma and with one lethal swipe he lopped off its head. I stood wrapped in a towel, shivering, while he scooped up the remains and took them outside, but before he came back another identical snake (its mate?) was in the process of coming in the same way. I fled and refused to enter the bathroom again until the hole had been filled in.

On another occasion (which J.R. has never been allowed to forget), he and I and Tommy were standing outside the bungalow when a wicked looking black mamba started to cross the footpath. He and Tommy had been out target shooting and J.R. still had a revolver in his hand. Waiting until the snake was only a foot or two away, while I stood rooted to the ground with fright, he took careful aim at it, and missed - twice. Tommy, laughing heartily, did the deed with a heavy stick, and a red-faced J.R. muttered something about the snake moving at the wrong moment. This incident did nothing to increase my love of the reptile, and it was simply no good them both telling me, as they constantly did, that the only snake which will make an unprovoked attack on a human being is the South American bushmaster. This may be perfectly true, but I prefer to keep my distance from the whole species.

My memories of Tanganyika are rather hazy by reason of the fact that instead of my being out there for two years as I expected, I was only there for eight months. Two things which completely changed my life happened in quick succession when I had only been at Geita for three months. First, my father died suddenly, and shortly afterwards I found I was pregnant.

My Dad had never been ill in his life. Always physically much stronger than my mother (she was the "creaking door"), the only disorders he suffered from were head colds, and when he had one of these he made sure all the family knew about it. But bronchitis, indigestion, arthritis, they all passed him by and nothing more serious had ever surfaced. I hadn't noticed anything unusual when I was at home at Christmas. He was the same as usual, a quiet, peace-loving uncomplaining man, although he did smoke a lot of cigarettes. But this was before the days when it was discovered that smoking can kill you. He had a hearty appetite, took very little exercise, and spent his days sitting at his office desk and most evenings sitting in front of the fire, listening to the wireless. Except for summer weekends when he spent all his time bent double in the garden, digging or weeding.

With hindsight, he was a prime target for a coronary, and that is exactly what he did have. On Sunday, May 18th, 1952, he sat down in his arm chair in our living room in the Finchley house, and quietly died.

The news was of course a very great shock to us. The news came to J.R. and myself by means of a cable delivered to our door on May 20th, which simply stated "Dad died in sleep Sunday. Funeral Thursday", and was signed by my brother Ken. I knew my younger brother, Norman, was away from home, doing his National Service in the Army, and I wondered if maybe he had been home at the time, perhaps on weekend leave. There were many details I wanted to know but no way I could find out anything quickly, and certainly no way I could get home in time for the funeral. Although there was a small landing strip at Geita for the mail plane, the weekly service had left two days ago. The only other possible method of getting to Nairobi to catch a plane to London was by lake steamer and train, and I knew how long that would take, having only recently done the same journey in reverse. So all we could do was send some flowers in time for the funeral, and this we were able to manage through Mr. Jenkins' wife, who had an account at Harrods in London. Being so far out in the bush our communications system was rather primitive, and I'm not sure now if there was a direct telephone line between Geita and London.

The thing which worried me most for some time, until letters started to come through again, was that bit in the cable - "Dad died in sleep". I had no knowledge of how a heart attack, which is what I presumed he had had, affects a person, and I had horrible visions of my mother stretching out her hand to Dad in bed, and finding him stiff and cold by her side.

A month or so after this happened, when I was starting to pull myself together again, I began to realise I was going to have a baby. Under normal circumstances I should have been delighted, but all I could think of now was, what a marvelous grandfather Dad would have made, and now he would never see his grandchildren. I also rapidly began to feel dreadfully ill.

I must have been a real pain to live with during the next few weeks. I was not actually sick very much, but I felt like it all day long and was worst in the evenings. This put paid to our going out anywhere, to anyone's bungalow for dinner, to the club for a film or any other kind of entertainment. I only wanted to go to bed.

And then there came a third blow. When I was about three months along, I paid a visit to Dr. Wirtz to make sure that all was well, but when J.R. came home from the office that afternoon, one look at his face told me that all was not well. The doctor had been to see him and informed him that, owing to my vast age (thirty), I could not have the baby on the camp but would have to go into hospital in Nairobi, or go back to England for the event.

I felt crushed. Nothing was going according to plan. I didn't at all fancy the idea of travelling to Nairobi by myself, perhaps eight and a half months pregnant, and maybe going into labour on the way. I felt I should be all right staying on the camp, but then I didn't know what it was like to have a baby and had to give the doctor credit for knowing what he was talking about.

After much discussion, and bearing in mind that J.R. did not feel very settled at Geita, it was decided that I should go back to England for the birth. Then in the spring I would either fly out again with the baby, or he would come back to England and look around for another more rewarding job. I decided to travel back home in the autumn (once again), when I would be six months pregnant, and the only detail to be finally sorted out was whether I should fly or go by ship. I was in favour of flying, even though that meant going to Nairobi, but J.R.'s preference was for the ship. He thought it was safer and that a sea voyage would set me up for the winter in England - and also, I could take all the luggage with me. I think he was already making up his mind to leave East Africa and go back to the West Coast, although he had not admitted it to himself yet.

Meanwhile, we had a few sunny, peaceful months to ourselves, the last time we would be on our own for many years. We only left the mine once and that was for a trip to Mwanza to play in a cricket match. and for this event we had to stay the night in the town.

It was a magical evening. The sun went down behind us as we drove down the track towards Mwanza in three cars, and by the time we boarded the launch to cross the lake it was almost dark. We didn't often have a night out, a welcome break from routine, and we were all prepared to enjoy ourselves. Someone had brought along a few bottles of wine and after two or three glasses of this we no longer worried about the fragility of the small craft or whether the driver could see where he was going in the dark. I resolutely turned a deaf ear to Tommy and Alec, who were trying to curdle my blood with horror stories of boats being overturned by unseen under-water creatures, and previous cricket parties disappearing without trace. I believe the lake is quite deep in that area and I couldn't swim anyway, so if any disaster did overtake us I knew it would mean the end of me.

Before we were halfway across the inlet, heading straight for the town, we noticed a faint pink glow appearing low down in the sky ahead, silhouetting the roofs of Mwanza, and this became brighter and rosier as we watched. Fascinated, we all sat there wondering if there could be an immense grass fire burning out of control somewhere beyond the town, and were quite at a loss to explain it until the full moon rose out of the middle of it and flooded the land with a fiery red light. It really was a blood red moon, which I wouldn't have believed unless I had seen it, and a weird sight it was to see our faces blushed with shining pink in the moon's reflection. The dry, dusty atmosphere near to the land after months without rain caused this optical illusion and it made a lasting impression on me - the red African moon.

As it rose it gradually lost its ruddy tone until it was floating freely in the sky, a big honey-lemon disc with small wisps of cirrus floating over it. Gazing up at it as we glided across the smooth water, all thoughts of crocodiles and hippos went out of my mind.

When we arrived in Mwanza we were directed to different bungalows, where various cricketing enthusiasts had offered to put us up for the night, and J.R. and I found ourselves being driven to a fair sized bungalow on a ridge overlooking the lake. The middle aged woman who came to let us in said her name was Mrs. Leakey, and that her husband Louis was an anthropologist, at present away from home working on a dig. Luckily, we had heard of Louis Leakey and so were able to converse quite intelligently with her about her husband's work. The Leakeys were to become more famous a few years later with the discovery, by Mrs. Leakey herself, of the primitive skull which became popularly known as "Nutcracker Man" - presumably because of the size of its teeth. Louis and his brother David, who was later brutally murdered by the Mau Mau, together with most of his family, were the sons of missionaries. They were brought up with the Kikuyu tribe, spoke the language fluently, and were thus considered a potential threat by the Mau Mau organisers, which was no doubt why David Leakey was attacked and done to death. Probably the attackers thought they had the other man, as Louis Leakey had been the official interpreter at the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, who was found guilty of managing the Mau Mau and jailed.

But this was all in the future when I was in East Africa and nothing could have been more peaceful than the evening we spent with Mrs. Leakey, which culminated in her showing us her unique collection of paper, bone and ivory ear-rings worn by the Kikuyu women. These were in all shapes and sizes, colours and textures, and she had them stored in a custom-made cabinet, drawer upon drawer of them. We could only marvel and admire this collection, and thank her for allowing us the privilege of viewing them.

At the cricket match the next day, Geita won the toss and went in to bat first. J.R., as third batsman, unwittingly created a diversion and a ripple of excitement amongst the onlookers, who were mostly supporters of the home team, when, having put on his pads and cricket cap, he sat down outside the club house to await his turn to bat. And this excitement was caused by his blue cricket cap.

Back at Marlu, Theo Climas had been very proud of Marlu cricket team and during J.R.'s last tour there he had had cricket caps made, at his own expense, for all the players. These were of bright blue material with the initials M.C.C. for Marlu Cricket Club in large white letters emblazoned across the front. So now when J.R. sat there wearing his cap, several of the opposing team viewed him with dismay, and one was heard to mutter to the assembled cricketing enthusiasts, "There's a chap here who's played for the M.C.C.!" The misunderstanding was soon sorted out, but knowing Theo, I did wonder if that thought had been in his mind at the time he ordered the caps. Its the sort of thing that would have amused him.

The rest of my time in East Africa, before I left to return to England, was spent quietly in the mining area, knitting for the baby and making myself some maternity outfits to travel in. We discussed endlessly the names we were going to bestow upon the infant when it arrived. Penelope it would be for a girl, and for a boy, the family name of James, plus Guy for Guy Gibson, the famous wartime bomber pilot who was shot down and killed in Holland not long before the end of the War. We had both been in the Air Force, J.R. and myself, and had both been stationed for short periods at Scampton, in Lincolnshire, where Gibson's Dam Busters raid originated. It seemed fitting, somehow.

One night during this time, I spent a disquieting evening while J.R. and Tommy decided to take a canoe out on the lake to go crocodile hunting. They were gone for hours, and when they did eventually return I was so relieved to see them back unharmed that I didn't ask too many questions about their adventures. It wasn't until months afterwards that I heard - and from Tommy, not J.R. - that they very nearly didn't get back at all. One crocodile overturned the canoe in the shallows, and J.R. and Tommy had to stand back to back with rifles, covering the boat, boys and themselves, until they were all back on dry land again. Well, if they would go out hunting crocodiles! Its not my idea of fun, even if it had resulted in a croc. handbag or two, which was their main reason for doing it. I don't know how many similar trips were made after I was safely out of the way in England, and perhaps that's just as well. I don't think I have the pioneer spirit.

In September Jill Bowen had her baby, amidst much disappointment that it was another girl. Tom was quietly philosophic and said they had plenty of time, but Jill was heard to announce that she wasn't going to try again for a long time.

We spent many early evenings down at the swimming pool, paddling when the water was not deep enough for total immersion, listening to the baboons shrieking and gabbling from a nearby hill. My clearest memory of those late summer days was a gradually increasing feeling of regret that I was about to leave J.R. once again. There didn't appear to be any alternative, given that the doctor had forbidden me to have the baby on the mine, and Nairobi was the only place with a first class hospital. It looked as if I was in for a long train journey down to Dar es Salaam to board a ship there. I didn't look forward to it one bit.

We used to sit on the verandah outside our bungalow before dinner in the evenings, Fluff on my knees, watching the grass burning as far as the eye could see. At the end of each dry season as September approached, the intense heat of the sun on the dry brown grass would give rise to spontaneous combustion, and the grass would burst into flames. I always wondered why the trees didn't burn too, which I have heard happens in parts of Australia, but I suppose the vegetation was not dry enough for that. It was eerie to sit there watching the threads of fire snaking across the grasslands, always coming to a halt at the edge of the compound where the earth had been dug up and roads and houses built.

At last the dread day arrived when I waved goodbye to Glen and Chris and, promising to return in the spring with the new addition, set out with J.R. and a lot of luggage down the bumpy road to Mwanza and the train. J,.R. could only come as far as Mwanza with me, and I think it was mean of the Geita management not to allow him to accompany me to the ship. Luckily by now I was feeling fairly well, but it was in very low spirits that I saw Geita disappearing behind us and realised that yet another chapter of my life was ending.

Try as I would, I could not picture my return, with or without baby, and the whole future looked hazy and uncertain.