The temperature in the shade was around 120ºF on board the SS Mantola as she crept southwards down the Red Sea towards Port Sudan. The breeze was behind us and it blew at exactly the same speed as the ship. There was, therefore, no movement of air at all on board. Three times during the first day they turned the ship around and sailed against the wind to blow some air through the port-holes and over the decks. This made little difference and even the sinewy sunburnt gophers and their tough bony little wives became silent and exhausted. Like me, they sprawled in deck-chairs under the awning, gasping for breath while the sweat ran down their faces and necks and arms and dripped from their elbows on to the wooden deck. It was even too hot to read.
During the second day in the Red Sea, the Mantola passed very close to an Italian ship which, like us, was going south. She wasn’t more than 200 yards away from us and her decks were crowded with women! There must have been several thousand of them all over the ship and not a man in sight. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked one of the ship’s officers, who was standing near me on the rail. ‘Why all the girls?’
‘They’re for the Italian soldiers,’ he said. ‘What Italian soldiers?’
‘The ones in Abyssinia,’ he said. ‘Mussolini is trying to conquer Abyssinia and he’s got a hundred thousand troops in there. Now they are shipping out Italian girls to keep the soldiers happy.’
‘You’re pulling my leg.’
‘They’re going out in boatloads,’ the officer said. ‘One girl for every soldier in the ranks, two for each Colonel and three for a General.’
‘Be serious,’ I said.
‘They really are for the soldiers,’ he said. ‘It is such a rotten pointless war and the soldiers all hate it and they are fed up with massacring the wretched Abyssinians. So Mussolini is sending out thousands of girls to boost their
morale.’
I waved to the girls on the other ship and about 2,000 of them waved back at me. They seemed very cheerful. I wondered how long they would be feeling that way.
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At last the Mantola reached Mombasa, and there I was met by a man from the Shell Company who told me I was to proceed at once down the coast to Dar es Salaam, in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). ‘It will take you a day and a night to get there,’ he said, ‘and you travel on a little coastal vessel called the Dumra. Here’s your ticket.’
I transferred to the Dumra and it sailed the same day. That evening we called in at Zanzibar where the air was filled with the amazing spicy-sweet scent of cloves, and I stood by the rail gazing at the old Arab town and thinking what a lucky young fellow I was to be seeing all these marvellous places free of charge and with a good job at the end of it all. We left Zanzibar at midnight and I went to bed in my tiny cabin knowing that tomorrow would be journey’s end.
When I woke up the next morning the ship’s engines had stopped. I jumped out of my bunk and peered through the port-hole. This was my first glimpse of Dar es Salaam and I have never forgotten it. We were anchored out in the middle of a vast rippling blue-black lagoon and all around the rim of the lagoon there were pale-yellow sandy beaches, almost white, and breakers were running up on to the sand, and coconut palms with their little green leafy hats were growing on the beaches, and there were casuarina trees, immensely tall and breathtakingly beautiful with their delicate grey-green foliage. And then behind the casuarinas was what seemed to me like a jungle, a great
tangle of tremendous dark-green trees that were full of shadows and almost certainly teeming, so I told myself, with rhinos and lions and all manner of vicious beasts. Over to one side lay the tiny town of Dar es Salaam, the houses white and yellow and pink, and among the houses I could see a narrow church steeple and a domed mosque and along the waterfront there was a line of acacia trees splashed with scarlet flowers. A fleet of canoes was rowing out to take us ashore and the black-skinned rowers were chanting weird songs in time with their rowing.
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The whole of that amazing tropical scene through the port-hole has been photographed on my mind ever since. To me it was all wonderful, beautiful and exciting. And so it remained for the rest of my time in Tanganyika. I loved it all. There were no furled umbrellas, no bowler hats, no sombre grey suits and I never once had to get on a train or a bus.
Only three young Englishmen ran the Shell Company in the whole of that vast territory, and I was the youngest and the junior. When we were not ‘on the road’, we lived in the splendid large Shell Company house perched on the top of the cliffs outside Dar es Salaam, and we were treated like princes. Our domestic staff consisted of a male native cook affectionately called Piggy because the Swahili for cook is mpishi. There was a shamba-boy or gardener called Salimu and a personal ‘boy’ for each of us. Your boy was really a kind of valet and jack of all trades. He was expert at sewing and mending and washing and ironing and polishing and making sure there weren’t scorpions in your mosquito boots before you put them on, and he became your friend. He looked after nobody else but you and there was nothing he did not know about your life and your habits. In return, you looked after him and his wives (never less than two) and his children who lived in their own quarters at the back of the house.
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My boy was called Mdisho. He was a Mwanumwezi tribesman, which meant a lot out there because the Mwanumwezi was the only tribe who had ever defeated the gigantic Masai in battle. Mdisho was tall and graceful and soft-spoken, and his loyalty to me, his young white English master, was absolute. I hope, and I believe, that I was equally loyal to him.
The first thing you had to do when you came to work in Dar es Salaam was to learn Swahili, otherwise you could not communicate either with your own boy or with any other native of the country because none of them spoke a word of English. In those benighted days of Empire it was considered impertinent for a black man to understand English, let alone to speak it. The result was that none of them made any effort to learn our language, so we had to learn theirs instead. Swahili is a relatively simple language, and with the help of a Swahili-English dictionary and a grammar book, plus some hard work in the evenings, you could become pretty fluent in a couple of months. Then you took an exam and if you passed it, the Shell Company gave you a bonus of a hundred pounds, which was a lot of money in those days when a
case of whisky cost only twelve pounds.
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Sometimes I would have to go on safari upcountry and Mdisho always came with me. We would take the Shell station-wagon and be gone for a month, driving all over Tanganyika on dirt roads that were covered with millions of tiny close-together ruts. Driving over those ruts in a station-wagon felt as though you were riding on top of a gigantic vibrator. We would drive far west to the edge of Lake Tanganyika in central Africa and on down south to the borders of Nyasaland, and after that we would head east towards Mozambique, and the purpose of these trips was to visit our Shell customers. These customers ran diamond mines and gold mines and sisal plantations and cotton plantations and goodness knows what else besides, and my job was to keep their machinery supplied with the proper grades of lubricating oil and fuel oil. Not a great deal of intelligence or imagination was required, but by gum you needed to be fit and tough.
I loved that life. We saw giraffe standing unafraid right beside the road
nibbling the tops of the trees. We saw plenty of elephant and hippo and zebra and antelope and very occasionally a pride of lions. The only creatures I was frightened of were the snakes. We used often to see a big one gliding across the dirt road ahead of the car, and the golden rule was never to accelerate and try to run it over, especially if the roof of the car was open, as ours often was. If you hit a snake at speed, the front wheel can flip it up into the air and there is a danger of it landing in your lap. I can think of nothing worse than that.
The really bad snake in Tanganyika is the black mamba. It is the only one that has no fear of man and will deliberately attack him on sight. If it bites you, you are a gonner.
One morning I was shaving myself in the bathroom of our Dar es Salaam house, and as I lathered my face I was absent-mindedly gazing out of the window into the garden. I was watching Salimu, our shamba-boy, as he slowly and methodically raked the gravel on the front drive. Then I saw the snake. It was six feet long and thick as my arm and quite black. It was a mamba all right and there was no doubt that it had seen Salimu and was gliding fast over the gravel straight towards him.
I flung myself toward the open window and yelled in Swahili, ‘Salimu!
Salimu! Angalia nyoka kubwa! Nyuma wewe! Upesi upesi!’, in other words, ‘Salimu! Salimu! Beware huge snake! Behind you! Quickly quickly!’
The mamba was moving over the gravel at the speed of a running man and when Salimu turned and saw it, it could not have been more than fifteen paces away from him. There was nothing more I could do. There was not much Salimu could do either. He knew it was useless to run because a mamba at full speed could travel as fast as a galloping horse. And he certainly knew it was a mamba. Every native in Tanganyika knew what a mamba looked like and what to expect from it. It would reach him in another five seconds. I leant out of the window and held my breath. Salimu swung round and faced the snake. I saw him go into a crouch. He crouched very low with one leg behind the other like a runner about to start a hundred yard sprint, and he was holding the long rake out in front of him. He raised it, but no higher than his shoulder, and he stood there for those long four or five seconds absolutely motionless, watching the great black deadly snake as it glided so quickly over the gravel towards him. Its small triangular snake’s head was raised up in the air, and I could hear the soft rustling of the gravel as the body slid over the loose stones. I have the whole nightmarish picture of that scene still before my eyes – the morning sunshine on the garden, the massive baobab tree in the background, Salimu in his old khaki shorts and shirt and bare feet standing brave and absolutely still with the upraised rake in his hands, and to one side the long black snake gliding over the gravel straight towards him with its small poisonous head held high and ready to strike.
Salimu waited. He never moved or made a sound during the time it took the
snake to reach him. He waited until the very last moment when the mamba was not more than five feet away and then wham! Salimu struck first. He brought the metal prongs of the rake down hard right on to the middle of the mamba’s back and he held the rake there with all his weight, leaning forward now and jumping up and down to put more weight on the fork in an effort to pin the snake to the ground. I saw the blood spurt where the prongs had gone right into the snake’s body and then I rushed downstairs absolutely naked, grabbing a golf club as I went through the hall, and outside on the drive Salimu was still there pressing with both hands on the rake and the great snake was writhing and twisting and throwing itself about, and I shouted to Salimu in Swahili, ‘What shall I do?’
‘It is all right now, bwana!’ he shouted back. ‘I have broken its back and it cannot travel forward any more! Stand away, bwana! Stand well away and leave it to me!’
Salimu lifted the rake and jumped away and the snake went on writhing
and twisting but it was quite unable to travel in any direction. The boy went forward and hit it accurately and very hard on the head with the metal end of the rake and suddenly the snake stopped moving. Salimu let out a great sigh and passed a hand over his forehead. Then he looked at me and smiled.
‘Asanti, bwana,’ he said, ‘asanti sana,’ which simply means, ‘Thank you, bwana. Thank you very much.’
It isn’t often one gets the chance to save a person’s life. It gave me a good feeling for the rest of the day, and from then on, every time I saw Salimu, the good feeling would come back to me.
Dar es Salaam 19 March 1939
Dear Mama,
If a war breaks out you’ve jolly well got to go to Tenby otherwise you’ll be bombed.
Don’t forget, you’ve got to go if war breaks out …
