I felt quite nervous setting off on my own for the first time but Dick and Ann were living in Kenya at that time, and met me off the plane and took me to their house in Thika. Dick was the agricultural officer there for an area in the Fort Hall district called Kandara and that is where I went for my short holidays. They were so kind to me and we had fun. It was quite a big garden surrounding the house and we did our shopping in Thika at Mr Nemchand’s grocery.
The extraordinary thing about this was that a couple of years later ,when I had met and married Mike, he was posted to exactly the same place. By then houses had been built for the English staff so we actually lived in Kandara but I still did my shopping at Mr Nemchands in Thika.
I travelled up to Nakuru by coach from Nairobi and was disgorged at a hotel called The Stags Head.This was a favourite haunt for the students from Egerton College as Nakuru was where we did our shopping and you could get lovely Milk Shakes at the hotel. The college was at a place called Njoro to which I and another student were taken by the college bus. It was a spacious campus and there was a hostel for the women students of which at that time there were only ten of us. Across the lawn was the main college where the dining room was and the student’s common room. There were also two small cottages for married students. The labs were on the drive to the farm which was about 700 acres I think. They had a dairy herd of Friesians and arable land where we grew wheat and maize. I remember the first day there when we had to harvest the maize by hand and strip off the cobs. It was a hot and exhausting day. We also had to learn to drive tractors and plough and harrow etc. and milk the cows. It was just what I had hoped for and I loved it. It was Mau Mau time and so there were very few students as a lot of them were part time soldiers. There was a forest nearby where the Mau Mau used to hang out. I think the total number of students was only about 40-50. I don’t remember being particularly frightened by the Mau Mau but on the radio you often used to hear of farmers being killed by their staff who had been forced to take the Mau Mau oath. The Njoro club was quite near bye and that was where we used to go in the evenings. I was lucky enough to meet up with a neighbouring farmer’s wife who had been at Wycombe Abbey and I used to go over to them and ride their horses and sometimes stay the night, I think. There were two students there who lived near Thika. They had the most ramshackle old vehicle tied together with string more or less and I could get lifts from them down to Thika to stay with Dick and Ann.
During my last term, Egerton had a group of new recruits to the agricultural department come on a short course to get the feel of agriculture in Kenya. There were about ten on the course and I remember saying to a friend, “I am going to enjoy myself with these young men”. Well I did and as one of them was Mike Langdon, it was a momentous decision. He took a fancy to me and I reciprocated it and the end result was that we got engaged, after knowing each other for 14 days. I was studying hard for my final exams and as Mike was busy all day, the only time we could meet up was in the evenings. I was quite strict about how much time I could stay with him and still do my two hours of revision nightly, but it was enough to know that we were meant for each other. We got a lift to Nairobi to buy a ring, found one in a shop outside one of the two big hotels, The New Stanley, I think and Mike put it on my finger on the pavement outside. I had fancied an emerald stone but was deterred by the shop keeper who whispered,” Emeralds are very expensive” so we settled for a solitaire diamond which I still have on my finger but minus the diamond which fell out a great many years later. I finished my final exams and got a diploma with credit. I was only one point off a distinction and I do think they might have given me the extra one point, especially as it was the highest mark anyone had ever got.
I then returned to Ethiopia and Mulu to have my one year doing what I had gone to college for. Looking back, it was perhaps a bit mean of me but at that time, I never thought we would end up farming at Mulu and it seemed like my only chance of doing what I had set out to do. Mike came up to visit me and I went down to Kenya to see him and we were finally married on January 3 rd 1956 at St Matthews Church in Addis Ababa by my godfather, Austin Matthew. I had inadvertently put my ring to Mike on the wrong finger and he spent most of the time the talk took trying to get it off one finger and on the right one and I was terrified he would drop it on the ground. The wedding feast was at the English School and Mike had paid for his mother to come out to be at the wedding. I think she found her whole experience of Ethiopia and the Sandford family rather strange but funny!
We spent our honeymoon at Bahr Dar where three things stand out. We had to fight to get hot water to wash in but discovered that a high class bishop had hot water so we persuaded the management to let us have it too, we sailed on Lake Tana in a tanqua which we had bought, having discovered it was cheaper to buy one than hire one, we rigged up a sail using our towels and finally emerged from the lake, having hob-nobbed with hippo just as a large python also decided to come ashore. We also went to see the Blue Nile falls and crossed the tree trunk that acted as a bridge under which the full flood of the Blue Nile poured through a gap only about six feet wide.
We spent time at Mulu where we had a feast for the farm staff and they presented us with two cows and then all indulged in gallons of talla. We then went back to Kenya to start fifty years of married life together.
We first lived in Nyeri where Mike was working. We had a largish house with three bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen and an enormous garden. I had never cooked properly so spent my time with my nose in a cookery book. I could manage various ways of cooking eggs but not much else. Mike’s mpther came to stay with us and that added to the anxiety over cooking. But she was very kind and probably taught me a lot. John and Peggy Benson lived in Meru. He worked for the coffee union and they had a lovely house with a beautiful garden. We went to them for our first Christmas and I made a Christmas cake. It was so good and far outshone the cake another guest had made, and Peggy praised it which was a triumph as she was quite frank over her opinions, so I have made the same recipe every year and passed it on to a lot of you. It has never failed me in the fifty six years I have been making it. Nyeri was quite a colonial town and I found that difficult to get used to, with the superiority the British showed to the local people. I seem to remember that Mike also worked for a while in Embu but we did not love there. I suppose we were still in Nyeri. Then he was posted to the Fort Hall district and we lived in Kandara. Much more my cup of tea as he was working with local African farmers, helping them with terracing, growing things and being friends with them. I started off on a goof footing as a lot of them re membered Dick who had worked in the same area. There was still racial prejudice but I was able to cope better and ticked the English colonials off for their superiority complexes. We made good friends there. One, Travis Garland who was a great joker, another new District Officer Dennis Marsden and dear Jean who married Dennis in Kandara and we have stayed friends ever since, as you all know. She is Christopher’s godmother and they live in Grange over Sands.
I used to get a bit bored so decided to take a course on how to become a writer and I wrote some drivel for women’s magazines but never dared to send it off. We had no garden so I managed to get a band of prisoners up from the camp and they dug a bench terrace for me and I made a lawn and flower beds and grew vegetables. We seemed to live off pineapple and papaya as Mike would be given presents of these fruits when he visited them. He also started a chicken farm in order for the local farmers to get better breeding stock. The hens laid so well that it was quite an embarrassment, getting the eggs sold, the proceeds going in the kitty bag. Everyone had a kitty bag to do things, that the government did not give you funds for. I used to go round with Mike quite often and once spent a night away. We took a tent but when we got there we discovered the local chief had built us a palace with bed room, living room and a long drop. I felt they had put in an enormous effort for one night, so did not do that again as I felt uncomfortable with amount of effort they had put into a one night stay and they would not let us use our tent.
Mike got a wire haired terrier from a friend which was inevitably called Leb and we had a cat and kittens. Leb used to carry a kitten in his mouth when we went for a walk and the kitten insisted in coming with us so Leb gave it a helping mouth so that it did not hold us up. We had a cook called Mwangi who had actually worked for Dick and Ann and a gardener called Kamau who turned his hand to anything and who built us a garage, grew marvellous beans that grew so tall that it was like Jack and the beanstalk. He also built a hen house where we had a few hens but a mongoose burst in one night and killed the lot. There was a tennis court built, probably by the prisoners and we played fast and furious games every weekend and often in the evenings as well. There was a small club house where we indulged in soft drinks and beer and gossip. One year we had a district officer who was OK but had a poisonous wife who was very racist. I remember us getting one of the first African district officers posted to us and she and her husband gave a party to greet him and she asked me if I would mind talking to him as she did not like to ask anyone else to so demean themselves but she felt that as I came from Ethiopia, I would not mind. I felt so sorry for the chap . No wonder they were glad to be rid of us Brits.
Marion came to stay with us and we took a trip to Nairobi to meet up with a friend of hers. It was muddy and the car got stuck. It was a peculiarly coloured red mud and very sticky and we got covered in it and slunk into the hotel to meet her friend and then bullied the proprietors into letting us rent a bathroom for an hour to get clean. I don’t remember much more about her visit, the mud having banished all other memories.
We tried a bit of DIY and stuck tiles up in the bathroom. We were awoken regularly through the night with tile after tile falling off and crashing to the ground.
Then the great day arrived. October 1st 1957 and Piers arrived. I had been busy beforehand with my own DIY as I made a carrycot and a stand for it. The stand was very wobbly so had to be fortified. I can remember the colour of the canvas, blue and white. We had asked Jean Marsden to drive to Nairobi with us as it was a journey of at least an hour. I can remember deciding the baby was arriving just outside the church but Jean said it wasn’t but we needed to hurry. I think the name of the hospital was the Princess Elizabeth. I had a very nice doctor who helped me to produce Piers very easily. Mike had had to take Jean back so that she was in time for work so he was not there at the birth, though I remember calling out to him to wait as the baby was coming. He either did not hear or didn’t want to stay. Dads did not at that time attend the birth of their children so he had to wait until the afternoon, before seeing his son for the first time. I remember to my shame going into the nursery to look for Piers for feeding time and I was faced with a large number of cots and wondering how I was going to pick him out. All babies look the same but luckily he had a tag on his arm so I found him.
I don’t think we stayed long in the hospital and then it was back to Kandara to try my best at being a good Mum. I did drop the carrycot once and Piers banged his head on the cement floor. You might say that accounts for a lot of things. I did feel very ashamed and worried but lusty howls reassured me. My Mum and Dad came down to stay with us. I think they might have been on their way back from Dar es Salaam where the Knights were. Anyway they came and stayed. We had rather a nice guest room in the garden separate from the house and they slept there. Mike and I had been playing the fool round our bedroom a few days before they came and I fell and banged my eye on the bedpost and developed a really colourful black eye. Mike was worried that they might think he had been beating me up, but even if they wondered they did not say anything. We took them round for them to see what Mike was up to and at one moment as he was leading the way down a very steep hill to see the hen project, my Dad tripped and went careering down the hill trying to regain his balance. Thank goodness he did so. I hate to think of the damage he might have done himself if he had crashed to the ground. My Mum was being very motherly and insisted on feeding me gruel so that I would have lots of milk for her grandson and I think took charge of him of him if he had a howling fit in the night. Anyway, it was great to be spoiled rotten.
The other visitors we had were Leslie, Dick and a friend of theirs, possibly Bryan Church, drove down from Addis and came to stay. I seem to remember we had lots of laughs and I have a feeling that the idea of Mike and I coming up to run Mulu, came up then. Mike’s contract was due to come an end in a few months’ time and he had to decide if he wanted another four years of the same. He still had not lost the idea of having his own farm, and as my Mum and Dad were getting elderly and Dick told us he did not want to be at Mulu but that it needed fresh blood to carry it on, we seriously considered the possibility. I told Mike he had to decide as I loved Mulu so much, that I was biased. We had been up once on leave so he knew the set up and the end of it was, that we decided that was what we would do.
WE drove up in our Vanguard van. We put a roof rack on it and proceeded to fill it up. We soon filled the interior and anything else had to go on the roof rack. That became a familiar remark…..” put it on the roof rack”. Quite soon it became obvious that the roof rack could take no more. We decided the rest would have to go up by rail and sea. Thank goodness for Jean Marsden who undertook to get it all the right shippers. We knew we could not take everything with us so had arranged with a company to take the rest. So off we set. We spent the first two nights with the Bensons in Meru, said farewell to them at Isiola over breakfast. They thought we were mad. The only room for Piers was either on the front bench seat with us or just behind the front seat where we had made a bed space for him. This is where he slept on the nights that we camped. We decided he would be safer there than in the tent with us. Lions etc. you understand! We spent the first night in Wajir. The road was fairly obvious to there. But after we left there, the road was just a track in the bush with several unidentified turnings off it, so we just had to guess which one to take. The long suffering roof rack decided at one point to leap off the roof but to our amazement and luck, we happened to meet a passer-by who helped us to lift the entire rack onto the roof without having to unpack it. It was actually quite nerve racking as we did not really want to camp in such a lonely desolate place. We just managed to make the border town, Moyale, before dark and spent the night in the District Commissioners house. He thought we were mad too. The next day into Ethiopia at their border post and then on northwards. The road was more identifiable in Ethiopia and we reached the turning to Neghelli. Unfortunately we did not realise that we had to go into Neghelli and at the next village we were stopped by hoards of people who insisted we returned and go into Neghelli, as our passports had to be checked. On we went, until we finally arrived in Addis Ababa. Goodness knows where we went to but I expect it was the school. I guess we went out to Mulu to leave our stuff there and decide where we wanted to live. We very much wanted to have our own house and decided we would build one above the old dairy. Well, eventually it was decided that that would be too expensive so it was decided we would occupy the office block, but that was after we came back from England.
Remember we were actually on leave from Kenya and on our way to England so that Mike could meet up with his family after four years away and introduce me to them. So we did not stay long but flew on to England, where Marion met us and took us to her house in Batchworth Heath where Piers enjoyed running or trying to run on the lawn. He was not actually walking much by then. I think we hired a car outside London and then drove to Bourton on the Water where we met up with Mike’s mother and father at Dial House and more of the family. I remember buying some clothes for this big event and realised I had over done it – buying clothes more suitable for a cocktail party in Addis Ababa, or a smart do in Kenya. Memories are a bit muddled over this time and how we got where but I remember staying one night in a smart hotel in Taunton where luxury was the word and then I suppose on to Cawsand where we spent most of our leave. Somewhere along the line, Mike went and looked at farm machinery and chose the implements he thought we would use on the farm. I think we got the tractor from Mitchell Cotts in Addis Ababa. Mike organised the shipping of the implements to Djibuti and then on up to Addis by train I suppose. Mike was thrilled to be home in his beloved Cawsand and various members of his family met up with us there. We had days on the beach where Piers ate lots of sand and was introduced to the sea, as was I. I don’t think I had had much times on seaside beaches before this period on my life.