My father built a large wooden house with a corrugated iron roof and a verandah running round all four sides. Huge galvanised iron water tanks stood at the four corners of the building to catch the rain. He planted up the land with coffee and, in due course my mother and Jock joined him and I was born when Jock was 5. This should have happened in the hospital in Eldoret – some 40 miles away – but the rains had started and the heavy black cotton soil made the roads impassable.
Consequently, I was born on the farm with my father acting as midwife, a hurricane lantern for light and a manual on midwifery, to which he constantly referred, beside him on the table. The manual advised that he should wash his hands at frequent intervals and use sterilised towels and rubber gloves! The kitchen and small Dover stove were on the other side of the house and so he decided to use his recollection of delivering calves and lambs and proceeded accordingly. I used to think back on this event when I was having my own babies and consider how hard it must have been for my poor Mum.
After the birth my father sent an African runner to the nearest small township, Kapsabet, to bring back a doctor to check out that all was well with my mother and me. A couple of days later an Indian arrived on a motorbike and, after a cursory examination, pronounced us both well. However, when my father queried the reason for my having a blood red ring round the iris of one eye, he is reputed to have said that I would probably be blind for life as I shouldn’t have had my eyes open for nine days! It appears that there was no doctor in Kapsabet and the volunteer was a stockman’s assistant!
It must have been a hard and lonely life for my parents. They made very good friends with their nearest neighbours who lived about ten miles away over rough roads. Geoff and Hannah Cockman (tea planters I think) and one or two others who lived in the area used to meet up for social evenings at the Kapsabet Country Club. This was a rather grand title for the small wooden building with a self-service bar and a rough murram tennis court.
Living some miles away in an African hut, with an African woman, was Lord Kitchener (brother to the famous one). He had pots of money but chose to live like this and do a spot of farming of some sort. All I know was that he constantly borrowed my father’s equipment and failed to return it. Many years later he was taken into Eldoret Hospital where he died. My step-mother to be, Rene Smith, was nursing there and later told my father that Lord Kitchener was the only man she had prepared for burial without removing his socks (which had grown into his filthy feet!).
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