JOHN’S posting to Africa hastened my parents’ plans, and they were married on 27 September 1939 in Little Baddow church. John then left by ship for Cape Town, whence he travelled on to Nyasaland by train, and Jean followed in May 1940 in the flying boat Cassiopeia. Her rather dramatic journey took a week, with numerous landings for refuelling; one of them was in Rome, which caused some anxiety as Mussolini was teetering on the brink of entering the war on the German side, and had he done so at that point the Cassiopeia’s passengers would all have been interned for the duration of the war.
As soon as Jean arrived, John had to break it to her that he had been called up to join the King’s African Rifles (KAR) in Kenya. The young couple had only a month of married life in Nyasaland (during which time, calculating backwards, I must have been conceived) before they had to leave. The Nyasaland Battalion was sending a convoy by road to Kenya, where they were to train. John somehow wangled permission to bypass the convoy and drive himself. What he did not have permission to do was take his bride with him. The colonial wives of Nyasaland were under strict orders to stay behind, or go to England or South Africa, when their husbands trekked north to the war. As far as she knows, my mother was the only one who disobeyed. My wonderful parents smuggled her into Kenya illegally – which caused problems later, as I shall tell.
On 6 July 1940, John and Jean, together with their servant Ali, who loyally accompanied them and was later to play a big part in my young life, drove off in ‘Lucy Lockett’, their old rattletrap Ford station wagon. They kept a joint diary of their journey, which I shall quote in what follows. They deliberately set off ahead of the convoy, in case they might break down and need rescuing: a prudent decision, given that the very first page of the diary mentions that the car had to be pushed by a gang of boys to get started at all. Day 4 of the journal records, after a successful bout of haggling for some gourds:
This episode made us feel very cheerful, especially having won the battle and secured our gourds, and John was so hearty that he started the car before Ali was in the car & ripped off the door on a tree. This was very sad.
But even the mishap of losing a door didn’t depress their young spirits, and the trio cheerfully made their way north, past ostriches and under giraffes, with Kilimanjaro on the horizon, sleeping by night in the back of the car, making a fire at each camp to scare the lions and cook delicious stews and pies in an improvised oven – the kind of ingenious invention my father delighted in throughout his life. From time to time they met up with the convoy. On one of these occasions the Commanding Officer, a
big military gent . . . red hat and gold braid and minions, dived into an Indian shop, having commanded us to wait, and came out with a large bar of chocolate which he presented to me saying, ‘A present for a little girl going on a big journey!’ John ate the chocolate.
I wonder whether the chocolate was the genial commander’s way of winking at the illegality of Jean’s presence?
As they neared the Kenyan border,
We were prepared to bury me under the bedding rolls, and have Ali sit on top when the Kenya frontier appeared. But the frontier never materialized, and after the most amazing and wonderful trip we found ourselves driving into Nairobi, and no one any the wiser. John deposited me in the Norfolk Hotel and drove off to join up – with Ali, who soon pinched an askari uniform and appointed himself a soldier.34 Later he came out ‘top’ in an askari driver’s course, thereby drawing attention to himself and causing John much embarrassment.
Despite this embarrassing triumph Ali never was officially a soldier, but he travelled around as my father’s unofficial batman, accompanying him wherever he went, from training camp to training camp. At one of these, Nyeri, they coincided with the military funeral of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. As a former scout himself, John was drafted in to be a pall-bearer and march beside the gun carriage. I have a photograph of him on this occasion (reproduced in the plate section) and I must say I think he looks very dashing in his KAR uniform, complete with khaki shorts, long socks, and the hat whose increasingly battered remains he was to wear for the rest of his life. Incidentally, the tall officer marching (out of step) next to him is Lord Errol of ‘Happy Valley’, soon to be murdered in the notorious and still officially unsolved ‘White Mischief’ case.
For Jean, the next three years were a time of more-or-less continuous migration as she camp-followed John’s many postings, in Uganda as well as Kenya. As she remarked in the private memoir that she wrote for the family much later,
John was very clever at finding temporary homes for me near his different postings while he was training in the KAR. I did little jobs looking after people’s children, and working in a couple of Prep schools, as well as being just a paying guest. Once John’s commanding officer said when they had orders to go and take Addis Ababa that they’d better be quick or Jean Dawkins would be there first!
Among Jean’s many kind hosts during this period were a Dr and Mrs McClean in Uganda, who took her in as a nursemaid for their toddler daughter ‘Snippet’.
The McCleans in Jinja were kind to me, and I trailed after Snippet doing this and that. The houses in Jinja were all around a golf course on the lake shore, and hippos used to play on the greens at night, belching and grunting, and marauding gardens too. There were droves of crocodiles, lazing in the water and basking at the shallow edges just below the falls, where I stupidly used to paddle. The crocs were funny keeping their jaws wide open so that their little pet bird friends could safely pick their teeth for them!
The symbiotic cleaner habit is now well described in coral reef fish. I wrote about it and the interesting evolutionary theory underpinning it in The Selfish Gene, but it hadn’t occurred to me, until I read my mother’s memoir much more recently, that there is a similar relationship between crocodiles and birds. I would expect the underlying evolutionary theory to be the same, best expressed in the mathematical language of game theory.
It was while staying with the McCleans that my mother got the first of her many bouts of malaria, which were to recur during her nine years in Africa and were one of the reasons for my parents’ eventual decision to return to England. On one later occasion, when they were living in Nyasaland after the war, she has a vivid memory of hearing, through her fevered delirium, the urgent voice of Dr Glynn, senior physician of the Lilongwe hospital, saying: ‘If they don’t call John Dawkins quickly it may be too late.’ Probably wrongly, she attributes her recovery to overhearing the doctor’s fear that she was dying and her defiant resolve to prove him wrong.
However, one of her first suspected bouts of malaria at the McCleans’ house turned out to have a different diagnosis:
The doctor was a cheerful breezy chap and one day he said: ‘You know what your trouble is, don’t you?’, and I said: ‘malaria?’, and he said, ‘You’re pregnant, my dear!’ That was a shock, but we were delighted. Of course looking back it was very wrong of us in such an unpredictable and homeless situation. But then, had we been prudent and sensible and safe we would not have got Richard! So there! We took it in our stride, and I started making baby clothes and of course we were lucky. Luck stayed with us all the way. But now I realize it must have been hard for Richard later on being dragged all over the world, and may have been alarming to him. We made a list of how many times his little suit-case was packed in his first few years. Many nights were spent in the Kenya and Uganda Railway trains. Everywhere there were new faces and his early years must have been pitifully insecure.
I have found the list she made, covering my peregrinations during 1941 and 1942. She wrote it in a notebook, the ‘blue book’, now very tattered, in which she also recorded some of my childish sayings, and later those of my sister Sarah. The only place in the list that I remember is Grazebrook’s Cottage, Mbagathi, near Nairobi, probably because we were there on two separate occasions. Here we were the guests of Mrs Walter, her war-widowed daughter-in-law Ruby, and her little grandsons.
My mother’s memoir continues:
Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika are full of memories, many very happy and wonderful. But a lot of sorrow and fear and anxiety and loneliness after John went away for long periods and there was no news. Letters were very far between and tended to come in bunches with very old dates. I was often frightened and lonely and always anxious but we did have a lot of good kind friends and I was so lucky in that. Most notable were the Walters at Mbagathi who totally adopted Richard and me.
I was there when the telegram came to say that [Mrs Walter’s son] John, who had just been home on leave, had been killed. Mrs Walter had been through it all before with her husband in the first world war when John was a baby. It was very very bad.
So we all concentrated on young William Walter and then later on posthumous Johnny. Richard had them as brothers and Mrs Walter as a granny for quite a while. She was a remarkable and splendid lady and she kept busy and positive. She concentrated on giving happy holidays to servicemen on leave and I used to be sent into Nairobi, ferrying in and out batches of soldiers and sailors and airmen, in Juliana who was not a very predictable form of transport. Juliana had two fuel tanks, she started on petrol, and then with luck switched over to paraffin. Once I only just survived the 20 odd miles home. An enormously fat huge naval cook, badly drunk I soon realized, who I’d fetched from the New Stanley Hotel fell asleep across the seat and leaned against me so heavily I could barely steer the car and I couldn’t move him. It was very difficult.
I think those men really enjoyed the Walter ménage. They played with the children, did lots of man-about-the house little jobs for Mrs Walter who treated them as boys and fed wonderful meals. It was a real home for us all.
Richard and I built another mud hut at Mbagathi, a splendid double one of two rondavels [the traditional circular form] elongated with a straight length between them. It was lovely.
These two huts with a shared roof only took about a week to construct. They constitute what I believe is my earliest memory.
Mrs Walter had by then purchased a bit of land. One day when she was clearing bushes with an African there was a huge explosion and the poor man had the back of one lower leg blown clean off by (we presumed) a first world-war left-over-mine. She was a very tall strong person and she lifted him into her box-body old banger and brought him home. We propped him and covered him, and she took him to Nairobi. He remained totally cheerful and chattered throughout. We could not believe such amazing bravery!
It is easy to forget that the First World War reached far down into sub-Saharan Africa. Tanganyika (plus Rwanda and Burundi) was in those days German East Africa and there was fighting in the area, including even naval battles in Lake Tanganyika between German boats on one side and those of Britain and Belgium on the other (the west coast of the lake was in the Belgian Congo). Elspeth Huxley, in her truly great novel Red Strangers, an epic saga of Kikuyu life, portrays the war through Kikuyu eyes as a mysterious and unspeakable aberration of the white men, in which Africans became horrifically caught up. Not only was it horrible, it was completely pointless, because the winning side didn’t end up driving home any of the losers’ cattle or goats.
Not all the shocks of this time were to do with wars, current or past.
Sometimes I was sent on Ruby’s horse called Bonnie to take a message to the Lennox Browns’ neighbouring farm. The first time I went the house boy showed me into their big drawing-room while he called the Memsahib. The room was dark with chintzy curtains drawn against the bright sun and as I waited I suddenly realized that I was not alone. There was an enormous lioness stretched full-length on a sofa, who yawned at me! I was fairly paralysed. When Mrs Lennox Brown came in she smacked it and pushed it off the sofa. I gave my message and left.
My mother’s picture of the incident, painted recently from her memory, appears in the picture section.
Later, Richard and William Walter used to play with two pet lion-cubs at another farm. They were about the size and heaviness of full-grown big Labradors (with short legs) and very rough and powerful. But he and William seemed to find it fun. We used to go for picnics up into the Ngong hills driving over the short mountain grass – no roads. Cool and high and splendid. But we were certainly stupid because there were buffaloes there in huge droves over those hills.
My next two memories are both of injections: the first by Dr Trim in Kenya and the second (more painful) by a scorpion, later in Nyasaland. Dr Trim was fortuitously well named, for he was presumably the one responsible for having me circumcised. Obviously I wasn’t asked for my consent, but it seems my parents weren’t either! My father, away at the war, knew nothing of it. My mother was simply informed as a matter of routine by a nurse that it was time for me to go for my circumcision, and that was that. Apparently it was the default presumption in Dr Trim’s nursing home – as it may have been in many British hospitals of the time: at my various boarding schools, the numbers circumcised and uncircumcised were about even, and there was no obvious correlation with religion, or social position, or indeed anything else that I could detect. The situation is different in Britain today, and I understand that America is beginning to move in the same direction. A recent landmark case in a German court ruled that even religious circumcision of infants is a violation of the rights of those too young to give their consent. This German verdict will probably be overruled because of the shrieks of protest that to prevent parents circumcising their children is a violation of the parents’ rights to practise their religion. Significantly, no mention of the child’s rights. Religion enjoys astonishing privileges in our societies, privileges denied to almost any other special interest group one can think of – and certainly denied to individuals.
As for the scorpion, it gave me a painful rebuke for my deficiencies as a budding naturalist. I saw it crawling across the floor and I misidentified it as a lizard. How could I? Lizards and scorpions don’t resemble each other in any respect that I can now see. I thought it would be fun to feel the ‘lizard’ run over my bare foot, so I stuck it in the animal’s path. The next thing I knew was a burning pain. I screamed the house down and then I think I passed out. My mother tells me that three Africans heard my screams and came rushing in. When they saw what had happened, they took turns at trying to suck the poison out of my foot. That is a recognized emergency procedure for snakebite. I have no idea whether it is effective with scorpion stings but I am touched that they tried. I now actually have a horror of scorpions, such that I would not pick one up even if it had had its sting removed. As for the eurypterids, the giant marine scorpions of the paleozoic era, some of which reached six feet long . . .
I am often asked whether my African childhood prepared me to become a biologist, and the episode of the scorpion is not the only indication that the answer is no. Another story suggests the same, and I blush to tell it. Close to Mrs Walter’s house when we were living there, a pride of lions had made a kill and some neighbours offered to take the whole household to watch them. We drove in a safari car to within 10 yards of the kill where the lions were gnawing, or in some cases lying around as if they had already eaten too much. The adults sitting in the vehicle were transfixed with excitement and wonder. But, my mother now tells me, William Walter and I stayed on the floor, totally absorbed with our toy cars, which we were driving around saying vroom vroom. We showed complete indifference to the lions, despite the adults’ repeated attempts to arouse our interest.
What I lacked in zoological curiosity I seem to have made up for in human sociability. My mother says that I was exceptionally friendly, with no fear of strangers: an early talker with a love of words. And despite my shortcomings as a naturalist I do seem to have been an early sceptic. At Christmas 1942 a man called Sam dressed up as Father Christmas and entertained a children’s party in Mrs Walter’s house. He apparently fooled all the children, and finally took his departure amid much jovial waving and ho-ho-ho-ing. As soon as he had left, I looked up and breezily remarked, to general consternation, ‘Sam’s gone!’
My father came through the war unscathed. I guess he was lucky to be fighting not the Germans or Japanese but the Italians, who perhaps had by then seen through their preposterously vainglorious Duce and were sensible enough to have lost interest in winning. John played his subaltern’s part in armoured cars in the Abyssinian and Somaliland campaigns and then, after the Italians were defeated, was sent for training to Madagascar with the East African Armoured Car Regiment, expecting to be posted to Burma. There he might have met his younger brother Bill, who was by then a major in the Sierra Leone Regiment, fighting the much more formidable Japanese and later to be mentioned in despatches. However, in 1943 the government gave higher priority to John’s agricultural than to his military work, and he was recalled to civilian life, along with others of the Nyasaland Agriculture Department.
The welcome news of his demobilization so excited Jean when she read it that she was nearly run over in the street, carrying me. She was fetching her mail, as usual, from the poste restante box in Nairobi. John’s letter purported to be a description of a cricket match. But she had no interest in cricket, as John knew well, and he would never have bored her with it. It had to have a secret meaning. The couple had previously worked out a private code, and had used it several times before, because mail from army personnel in wartime was routinely opened and read by censors. Their code was a simple one: read only the first word of each line and ignore the rest. And the first words of the next three lines about the cricket match were ‘bowler . . . hat . . . soon’. Unfortunately the letter doesn’t survive, but it is easy to imagine. ‘Bowler’ ostensibly referred to the cricket bowler, and John must have worked ‘hat’ in somehow (perhaps the umpire’s Panama; my mother doesn’t recall) and then ‘soon’ in some plausible comment about the match. What did it mean? Well, a bowler hat was the epitome of civilian dress – demob kit, civvy street. ‘Bowler hat soon’ could only mean one thing, and Jean didn’t need to be a crossword expert to discern it. John was about to be demobbed, and Jean nearly got herself and me run over in her excitement at the realization.
Actually getting back to Nyasaland, however, was not so easy. The illegality of Jean’s original entry to Kenya now came back to haunt her. The dundridges35 of the colonial government couldn’t give her a visa to leave Kenya because, as far as their records showed, she had never arrived. And Jean and John couldn’t drive down together in the way that they had driven up, because this time John was under strict orders to travel with the army: he was not officially demobbed until he reached the Nyasaland Battalion’s headquarters in its home country. So the couple had to leave Kenya separately, and Jean couldn’t leave because she wasn’t there. Mrs Walter was wheeled out to vouch for her existence and Dr Trim to vouch for mine – as, having brought me into the world, he was in a position to do. Finally, it was my legal birth certificate that did the trick, and the reluctant dundridges grudgingly stamped Jean’s leaving papers. She and I, aged two, set off in a small plane of the kind that would today be called a puddle-jumper – pretty exciting puddles, no doubt, filled with crocodiles and hippos, flamingos and bathing elephants. We lost all our luggage when changing planes in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) but it soon didn’t matter. My parents were delighted to find that their trunks, shipped by sea from England at the beginning of the war, had finally arrived in Nyasaland, having survived, presumably, a navy-escorted convoy, and containing, as my mother happily recalled in her memoir–
All our half-remembered wedding-presents, and my new clothes. It was a tremendous home-coming, and Richard there to help explore the boxes.