Home, sweet home
Aidan Hartley
Kenya coast
We are gathering to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday at the home where we grew up on Kenya’s coast. She is one of the serried ranks of great Mums, who more than generals or MPs deserve to be in Who’s Who. She was born in Lahore, daughter of an Indian Army colonel; served in a women’s unit in Burma while still a teenager; Aden, Baghdad and Kurdistan with my father; raised four children on remote farms in East Africa; built three homes of her own design; farmed cattle in Devon while we schooled; helped my Dad as a volunteer helping the poor in Uganda and northern Kenya — and much else besides.
‘An asteroid is passing very close to the Earth,’ she announces as we exit the Range Rover after the drive from Nairobi. On hot nights she sleeps on her flat roof under the stars. ‘My favourite stars are like friends. But I’m worried about this asteroid ... ’ I have brought her a present: corms of dahlias, anemones and begonias. Will they grow here on the Equatorial Indian Ocean seashore? ‘My dahlias on Mount Meru were the biggest anybody has ever seen,’ says Mum. When I think of her, I am always reminded of her garden. Next to the path down to the white sand beach are 12 baobab saplings planted in a circle. She calls them the Apostles. She got very annoyed today because she claims a host of large land snails was sucking the sap out of one baobab, causing it to wither. She also frets if the grass gets too long, because it might attract a pair of spitting cobras that recently killed a neighbour’s dog. We dismissed these concerns, until my wife Claire walked up the path at dusk and felt a serpent slither across her foot.
At dawn, the moonflowers stay open for a few minutes. There are crimson gloriosa lilies — Kenya’s national flower — hibiscus, petrea, jasmine and many colours of desert roses. She has the reddest desert rose I have ever seen, which the late botanical British consul used to loot quietly for cuttings. In the spreading branches of a fig tree to the right of the house are enormous, multicoloured, bird-catching spiders in their trapeze net-sized webs. Clouds of butterflies drink nectar, orioles and coucal birds flop about in the trees, cicadas sing and at night fruit bats squawk and choirs of frogs sing arias.
Each time we visit we buy trees for her to plant. Usually these are seedlings of mbambakofi, the hardwoods that were once used to build ocean-going Swahili dhows for the trade to India, but which now grow only in tiny patches of coast forest. But there are all sorts of other trees in the garden, each one with a story from our childhoods attached. Some have medicinal properties. Sometimes Mum drinks tea made from neem leaves, which protect her from fevers. Or she puts the leaves between the pages of my father’s old Africa books so that the white ants don’t eat them.
Every day the fishermen bring their catch of snappers, rock cod, Sabaki prawns and mangrove crabs. Mum appears with the newspaper before lunch. ‘Who are these silly men like Bob Geldof with their little guitars? I like African singers whose voices come from deep down in their chests!’ Or she says, ‘Isn’t it shocking, those terrorists come from where I do — Pakistan?’ I ask her how she feels. ‘I feel old,’ she says. She has a bad knee that slows her down on the walk up and down the stairs. We worry for her on her own, and want her to live in Nairobi closer to family, at least for some of the year. But whenever she visits us upcountry, she can never stay away for more than a week or two. She has to get back to friends, the staff, the garden, the water bill and her dogs.
This month the turtles are still hatching from the beach in front of the house. The marine-park people say there were many fewer nests this year along our beach than last year. But Mum knows of several nests they haven’t yet found. ‘Of course I’m not telling them,’ she says. ‘They’ll only come and take the eggs away.’ These turtles have been nesting here since long before the family arrived on this spot 40 years ago. Lots of things have changed, but the fishing boats still go out every day. More rubbish washes up on the beach than I remember and there are fewer fish in the rock pools. But on the whole my small children Eve and Rider enjoy the same things as we did as kids at the coast. My granny lived into her late nineties. I hope my mother does, too, because I can’t imagine this place without her here.
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