by Elspeth Huxley, 1959
Beautifully written autobiography about Elspeth’s childhood years in Kenya in the early 1900’s before World War I. Her Mom and Dad, whom she calls Tilly and Robin, are determined to make it as coffee farmers in Kenya, despite no one having done so before and them not having the skills or the knowledge. But, they did have the determination and the heart, and they would have made it had the War not forced them to leave their beloved farm. Beautiful descriptions of the animals, the people (Kukuyu and Masai) and the land. Robin bought the farm sight unseen and when they finally got there after train, wagon, mule, walking, it was a desert.
…Robin pulled up and said, ‘Here we are.’ We did not seem to be anywhere. Everything was, just the same, biscuit-brown, quivering with heat and grasshoppers. There was not even an erythrina tree.
But they built a small house (grass hut) and started planting and began to love the land and its people and animals. They had a few European neighbors with whom they developed relationships. There was drama, danger, hard work, beauty, and tragic death. Here is the last paragraph of the book; Tilly and Elspeth are on a train from Nairobi to a port in order to embark on an ocean voyage to Europe:
I made a face at Tilly. She saw the pawpaw, and frowned; we were trapped, the train had no corridor. She did not hesitate; smiling with all her charm, she asked the red-faced gentleman to help her stow our soda-water bottles on the rack, and in five minutes he was eating out of her hand. I looked through the open window at the undulating purple ridge-back of the Ngong hills, a haunt of lions and buffaloes, and was glad that I had kissed the four walls of the grass hut at Thika, and was bound to return.