March 1959
It is hardly possible to read this delicious book without several pangs of envy. Mrs. Huxley seems to have been provided with all the equipment for a rich and satisfactory childhood: wild, beautiful country, real things to do in it, parents who never put stupid brakes upon her enjoyments, and a life charged with adventure and magic. It is what all children want, and it is delightful to read about one who never seemed to have to make do with substitutes for the real things.
Her parents went in 1931 to make a coffee farm at Thika (which was then a name on the map in Kikuyu country in Kenya). Gradually, in spite of innumerable difficulties, they attract Kikuyu labour, acquire a headman who is half Masai, half Kikuyu, build a house and plant their coffee. They have neighbours: a tough Boer farmer, an Edinburgh nurse married to an absent elephant hunter, an English couple straight out of a Pinero play - and the Kikuyu. The author naturally collects an assortment of interesting animals, but she does not seem to have had any companions of her own age, and it is possibly because of this that she observed so much of the life around her: the Kikuyu - thick with witchcraft, ruled by totally different, but rigid values of necessity, propriety and right; Sammy, with his Masai habits, behaviour and legends; and the white neighbours with their grown-up problems of love and happiness - all this she absorbs with the acute, impassive attention of a child, accepting the different phenomena with impartial interest, and adding it to the store of experience that she is accumulating on her own.
Mrs. Huxley not only writes about all this extremely well - she never makes the mistake of looking back on her childhood as a grown up, so that her memories here are pure, and not tainted by grown-up present reflections upon them. There is a wonderful description after the war had begun when the author is sent to stay on a farm up-country near Molo on the western wall of the Rift Valley. Here are forests of olives and cedars, threaded by paths made by game and the little Dorobo, hunters who are hardly ever seen. She goes for an early walk, and comes upon one of the mysterious and beautiful glades where are two small buck who watch her with blackberry eyes until she moves, when they spring away and vanish. Then she becomes aware that she is being watched, and a moment later a little Dorobo magically appears. There is a marvellous feeling in this story - the forest soaked in morning dew, the way in which she and the Dorobo accept each other with the few words they both have in common and simply go off to continue the adventure together - that displays the essence of the book.
This is understandably the Book Society Choice for March and we published an excerpt from it earlier this year. Mrs. Huxley is well known for her writing about Africa, but for those who have not previously read her, this work will be a most charming and worthwhile introduction.