Simon Barnes - Rogue Lion Safaris

‘No one to collect, George, we’re empty.’

‘Are you sure? I’m certain we had a booking.’

‘We did. There was that big Wilderness Express party, but they’re not coming, are they?’

‘Oh God. I’d forgotten that. What on earth possessed Joyce to get rid of them? I wish you hadn’t reminded me. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh well. Better go, I suppose. Helen? Anybody else coming? Joseph, Dan?’

‘I’m coming,’ I said. ‘I might see someone I know.’

‘He means he might get the chance to lust at Mrs van der Aardvark,’ Joseph explained to Helen.

‘Slander,’ I said. ‘Not my type at all, that one. You coming, Joseph?’

‘I’ll stay,’ Joseph said. ‘I have some work to do.’

‘Writing to Gianna,’ I explained to Helen, counter-teasing. ‘Dear Gianna, I send my love from the shower cubicle …’

‘Sex mad, my staff,’ said George. ‘Are you ready, Helen?’

When Helen had taken her place at the front of the vehicle, I climbed on behind. It was the standard vehicle of the Mchindeni Valley, a Toyota Land Cruiser with an open truck bed and a pair of benches fixed in the back, one bench higher than the other: a mobile platform for game viewing. But somehow, it didn’t look like standard transport. It was older than most of the vehicles run by the other camps. The doors of the cab had been removed, against conventional wisdom. Naturally, there was no windscreen. The vehicle looked as if it had done several seasons too many, mainly because it had. It had hit too many trees, had heaved itself through too many thorn bushes, had climbed the walls of too many dry riverbeds. Every square inch of its surface bore testimony to a million passages through all but impenetrable bush.

The company logo had been applied near each of the forward wheel arches: a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion surmounted by the words ‘Lion Safaris’. The word ‘rogue’ had been crudely painted beside this on each side in thick black varnish by an unknown hand. George had painted over this still more crudely in borrowed white emulsion. All in all, it was not a vehicle that inspired confidence in a non-bush-hardened client.

‘Well,’ said George. ‘Either we catch the plane or we don’t.’ He let in the clutch with his customary violence; my hand flew in a long-established reflex to my hat, once a racing trilby but now, like the vehicle, showing signs of hard use in the bush.

George’s driving was impatient at the best of times. On the road, the roads being merely graded tracks, he was a perfectly dreadful bush driver. Off the road (off-road driving naturally forbidden by the Manual ), he was reckoned to be even worse. In point of fact, he was superb in this area, but the ride was never less than alarming. Most bush drivers tended to cruise gently, giving the animals the best possible chance of being unamazed. George preferred to roar about the bush, crash-halting when a nice animal came into sight, catapulting the clients out of their seat, desperately clutching cameras and binoculars while exclaiming with delight. This morning, George had a licence to hurry, and he hurried. Bush roads are not designed for speed (‘never exceed 20 kph,’ said the Manual ) and the drive was rather like doing the Cresta Run on a tin tray. I stood, preferring to take the bumps through my legs rather than my back, removing my hat and standing on the brim to keep it safe. Impala flew from our roaring progress, puku scuttled away like huge fox-coloured rabbits. A party of zebra watched us amazed from the middle of the road, forcing George to lift his foot for a second. ‘Stupid bloody animals, don’t know what you see in the bloody brainless things, Dan …’

I pointed to one as we swept past and shouted over the engine’s noise: ‘Stallion!’

‘Definitely!’ George shouted back. ‘Bateleur, see, Helen?’ He crammed his foot to the floor again, still staring skywards at the eccentric tailless eagle of the Mchindeni Valley.

Helen craned her head back as we sped away, catching a fleeting glimpse of the gliding bird, and catching my eye as she did so. ‘Do you know what I say?’ she asked me, in a thoroughly unladylike yell.

I bent down. ‘What?’

‘Bugger the bloody plane!’ It was the first time I had heard her use an improper word. Both the word, and the sentiments were, I think, new to her. ‘Yes, bugger the plane. That was the most wonderful morning of my life.’

‘I believe you have fallen in love with Auntie Joyce,’ I said.

She turned to me again, and didn’t speak. Instead, an absolutely colossal grin. Then she asked: ‘Will we make it?’

We hit a bump, and I, in my unbalanced crouch, briefly flew, rescuing my hat with an adroit dab of the foot on touching down again. ‘Even money,’ I said. ‘Better, I’ll take six to four.’

I had never intended to be a safari guide. I was always going to be a racehorse trainer, like my father. I had grown up with racehorses. For twenty years, or since I could walk, I had been, or at least had seen myself as his right-hand man. I had been assistant trainer, mucker-outer, yard-sweeper, groom and work-rider. My father was a widower – I could hardly remember my mother – and he had never remarried. Horses were his life. He was English, but ‘by an Irish sire out of an English dam’, as he always put it. English enough in normal circumstances, he would become progressively more Irish with strong emotion or strong drink. Neither state was unusual; his stage Irishisms were deliberately self-mocking, deliberately endearing: ‘Sweet Jaysis, the focken dry season’s upon us,’ every time a bottle was finished, which was often.

He ran a string of a couple of dozen beasts, a mixed band of jumpers and flat horses. There was never a horse of any great distinction, but he, we, had a winner here and a winner there, ‘and God send nothing worse’. He loved horses, gambling, drink and chasing women, the women making a distant, hard-panting fourth. A big, bonhomous, bibulous man, he was greatly and widely loved, if seldom very profoundly. People tended to feel protective of him; I did myself. He was the most easy-going man in the world: generous and comfortable with clients, employees, women, horses. Perhaps that was why his horses never won quite as often as they might have done: he was a man without ruthlessness. But boundlessly optimistic: and as long as the horses won sometimes he was content.

Legends accumulated around him: he was that sort of man. They centred on his eccentricity and his extraordinary ability with horses. The best of these was the Derby winner he found wandering about on a motorway late at night, having dumped its rider and taken off that morning: how my father, having persuaded the frightened animal to trust him, led it home across country, arriving in the horse’s yard at two in the morning in full evening dress, leading a million pounds’ worth of horse in one hand, an open bottle of champagne in the other, a smouldering cigar in his mouth. In fact, it was not a Derby winner, nor a motorway, and the champagne and cigar were later embellishments. But the story was true, the racehorse was indeed a good one (Falco Spirit, went on to win the Cambridgeshire) and my father was certainly wearing a dinner suit. I know, I was there. I had picked him up after a dinner with one of his owners in Newmarket, and was driving him home. I remember seeing the horse and stopping: and then my father’s calm, matter-of-fact gentleness: ‘All right, me fella, what do you say to a few mints, now?’ Inevitably, he had a packet of Polos in his pocket: you could always tell my father’s movements around the yard by following the minty breath of his horses. Everyone in racing loved the story: well, everyone in racing loved my father. But they never sent him their best horses.