William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

So it was with less reluctance than usual that Temple allowed his father-in-law to grasp his hand and shake it vigorously for a full minute. The Reverend Norman Espie was of average size and was a wiry, fit-looking man considering he was in his fifties. But his lack — almost his complete absence — of shoulders gave him an unalterably puny appearance. From the back, his silhouette resembled a pawn in a game of chess, his arms tapering smoothly up into his neck with no interruption and his round bald head tee-ed up on top of it. Indeed he was the sort of man, Temple often thought, whose weakness was a kind of challenge: it made you want to punch him in the chest, just to prove you weren’t affected by it.

“My son, my son,” Espie was saying, “we have been praying for you.” He released Temple’s hand and fell to his knees — to Temple’s extreme embarrassment. Temple assumed his father-in-law was about to offer up an impromptu prayer for their deliverance, but in fact he was only positioning himself the better to sweep his grandchildren into his arms and smother them with kisses. From this humble posture he looked up at Matilda, who at this point had just stepped off the train. Espie clambered to his feet crying, “My child, my child,” and wrapped his arms about her.

“Now, now, Father,” Matilda said. Her father was the only person who could provoke a show of irritation in her. “Don’t fuss so, we were in no danger.”

“The barbarians!” Espie exclaimed. “If you knew the stories that have been coming out of Belgium. To think that in Christian Europe we can harbour such—”

“Shall we get along?” Matilda said in a business-like way. “The baby is very tired.”

“The baby, the baby,” Espie intoned. Temple went off in search of the baggage.

♦

He saw his family loaded into Espie’s — or rather the mission’s — motor car (the ayah was sobbing plaintively for some reason) and waved them goodbye. Then he climbed into a rickshaw and gave orders to be taken to the Norfolk Hotel.

The rickshaw moved steadily away from the station up the long stretch of Government Road. Temple saw the new stone post office standing alone in a great field of grass looking quite incongruous. A red flag was flying from the roof to signify the arrival of the Mombasa train and to alert any letter writer who wanted mail sorted and carried on up to Entebbe in Uganda.

He looked curiously about him as they reached the built-up areas and jogged past the astonishing number of shops and stores Nairobi possessed. For such an out of the way place it was truly incredible what goods were on sale. There were large general stores, taxidermists, jewellers, tobacconists, chemists, photographic studios, wine merchants, milliners and tailors selling all the well-known brand names from Britain. He passed Cearn’s Outfitters, boasting proudly in their window that they possessed ‘all the luxuries and necessities of the colonial gentleman’. He saw advertisements for Burberry and Aertex, ‘K’—shoes and Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. He passed the wooden and corrugated iron two-storey building of the Stanley Hotel, one of eight hotels in Nairobi. The Norfolk was half a mile further on.

At this stage the flow of traffic was considerable: some motor cars, lots of rickshaws and bicycles, bullock carts and horse-drawn buggies. Temple hadn’t been in Nairobi for months and the throng and bustle always made him feel a little excited: the country boy come to the big city. All this traffic raised clouds of dust from the dry mud road which hung in the branches of the small tattered casuarina pine trees which lined the street and gave it a ludicrous air of pretending to be an avenue.

The Norfolk was Nairobi’s best hotel. It was an unassuming single-storey stone building with a tin roof and a large verandah running the length of the Government Road frontage. It was not nearly as grand as the palatial Kaiserhof in Dar, but it did have electric light throughout and hot and cold running water, and was the central meeting point and social centre of the town.

Although Temple became excited by his visits to Nairobi, he very quickly grew irritated by the place. Just as the tattered spindly trees in Government Road seemed to indicate ideas above its station, so too did Nairobi’s newly-won international renown as a big-game shooting resort allow the town to affect a similar inappropriate grandeur and sophistication which it could never possess in reality. And the presence of the British made that affectation almost insupportable. There was the Turf Club with its race meetings. The gymkhanas and polo matches, the Maseru Hunt, the golf club, the Masonic Lodge…all the trappings of an English provincial town. Many times Temple had listened to discussions about who would win the Governor’s cup, about the cross breeding of wanderobo hunting dogs with fox hounds for the hunt’s pack; whether Somali ponies were better than Abyssinian ones; if it wasn’t really about time that ‘shirt sleeve order’ was banned at race meetings. He would shake his head in rueful wonder at the shouting incongruities that presented themselves daily. The immense mock-Tudor Government House, with its leaded lights and half-timbered upper floor; lady golfers in boaters and long white dresses driving off into a wilderness on a first tee where the air was dark with thousands of buzzing flies; the piping shouts of tally-ho as the Maseru Hunt took off after some hapless hyena, and above all the snobbish hierarchies that existed, symbolized by the Nairobi Club on the Hill for senior officials and the Parklands Club on the plain in Parklands for junior officials. Being an American, and one who, lately, at any rate, had some money in his pocket, meant that he was always something of an outsider and that he was naturally excluded from the phenomenally exact social rankings which obtained in polite Nairobi society. He had no complaints on either count.

♦

Temple occupied his room at the Norfolk, had a bath and went to sleep for a couple of hours. Later in the evening, feeling much refreshed, he walked through the hotel to the bar. To his surprise the place was crowded with men, spilling out of the room onto the verandah and even down the front steps onto Government Road. They were all dressed, moreover, for the bush, as if they were going on safari. Many wore crossed bandoliers of cartridges, and rifles and shotguns were propped in corners or leaning against the backs of chairs. Temple recognized a group of fellow Americans: Ward from the Afro-American farm enterprise at Voi, Paul Psainey, a millionaire big-game enthusiast and others he knew from the American Industrial Mission. Although the bar was crowded and nearly everyone was drinking heavily, the mood was one of boredom and irritation. Temple joined the group and ordered a whisky and soda. The sight of a new face acted as a catalyst to their flagging spirits and great commiseration was soon being lavished on him over the loss of his farm.

There was no real interest. All these men had streamed into Nairobi at the outbreak of war to volunteer their services in the defence of the country and as reinforcements to the hard pressed battalions of the KAR. Temple found himself something of a celebrity for actually having been a victim of Furor Teutonicus and he was prevailed upon several times to repeat his account of the seizure of his farm and of Wheech-Browning’s heroic stand at Taveta. By unanimous assent it was agreed that Wheech-Browning’s luckless bearer was the first casualty of the war, a war which everyone fervently expressed the hope would last long enough for them to have a squareheads. Temple was encouraged to join two of the volunteer units that had been swiftly formed to defend British East Africa. He could choose between the more prosaic Nairobi Defence Force or the East African Mounted Rifles — an aristocratic and cavalier crowd, requiring the ownership of a horse or polo pony. This particular outfit had claimed most of the Americans as it was a polyglot assembly of nationalities containing also Boers, Swedes and three Italians. Members around the bar that night included a musician, several publicans, an ex-circus clown and a Scottish light-house keeper.