I had become great friends with a girl called Muara Kellagher. She was very pretty. I thought she looked very like Grace Kelly. Muara had two children, Belinda (Bindie) and Richard, the same age as Graham I think. After dropping Graham off at school, I would call in for coffee with Muara and we had long talks.  She was not at all happy with her husband Alan although they had been much in love in their early days. They had travelled to various countries in the far East and Alan had picked up some weird ideas about sex, or so it seemed to us. He wanted Muara to dress in a bikini and dance for him before making love and various other practices which I won’t go into. No doubt this would have been perfectly alright if both parties thought it was fun, but Muara found it obnoxious so all was not well.

We played tennis together and she spent a lot of time at our house. Jack, of course, did a lot of sailing and I was not able to join him as I had both children to look after. I spent many weekends while Jack was sailing, going on beach parties with the Stringers. Muara said she would like to learn to sail and so she and Jack would often go off on trips together and I was fine with that. Joan and my father came to stay with us which was lovely. It was while they were staying that Jack took Muara out one evening and the plan was that they would return for supper around 7pm. In fact they didn’t get back until about ten thirty by which time I was quite worried. Jack said that they had become marooned on a sand bank and had to wait for the tide to float them off. I made lots of hot soup for them and we had a good evening together. Some years later my father said that he and Joan had been surprised that I was so easily taken in, knowing what a proficient sailor Jack was ands how attractive his companion, it was highly unlikely he would have  been marooned on a sandbank! Nevertheless, it was true that I had not the slightest suspicion. Shortly after this Muara and Alan went on leave.

I used to call in at Jack’s  office sometimes to see Jack during working hours or to collect the mail. On one occasion I went in and as he was out, I sat down to write him a note. I opened the desk drawer to get a piece of paper and saw a pile of letters addressed to him in Muara’s handwriting. I read the top few and they were all passionate love letters. I was absolutely shocked to the core. I confronted Jack with this evidence and he admitted that he was in love with Muara. I decided to take the children and go up to Eldoret to stay with my parents. I drove to Mombasa and went to stay with the Stringers, who were living there. They were not happy with me having to drive the five hundred miles up to Eldoret on my own, especially as it was the rainy season and the roads were very bad. It was decided that their son Clive, who was about nineteen, should drive up with me. We set off and had hoped to get to Voi before nightfall but there were several floods across the road. On one occasion, I was driving, Clive was pushing and brave little Graham was standing at the top of the hill waving a torch to stop any oncoming lorry from bearing down on us wile we were stuck.As we were in the middle of a game reserve I was terrified that a sleepless elephant or some night creature might appear near him at any moment. However, we got through that bit and finally reached a spot where there was a total flood and several other vehicles in front of us. We all had to sleep on the floor of the Voi Hotel and the following morning we managed to get ourselves and the car on to the train and get to Nairobi. We drove on up to Eldoret and Clive took the train back to Mombasa.

I corresponded with Jack and he professed himself to be really sorry and asked if it was possible for us to try to make a go of things. I finally agreed to return to Tanga and see if we could make a new start. Muara’s marriage had broken up and I think she was in Nairobi with her children. Things between Jack and I didn’t seem to improve. He still showed little interest in the children and we just seemed to be drifting apart. Jack was spending a lot of sailing time with a very good looking South African girl called Jill Lead, whose husband owned a large sisal estate and was an important client of Dalgety (for whom Jack worked) and I was being pursued by the local bank manager, Ken Lownie, whose divorced wife lived in Scotland. This was all such an unhappy time that my memories are very muddled.

For his holiday period Jack had undertaken to sail a yacht down to Durban with a friend of his. I followed with the children on a steam vessel and was met in Durban by my brother Jock and went to stay with him where he and Daphne were running a kennels. Jack flew back to his job and after a brief stay with Jock we were to fly back as well. I remember we nearly missed the plane because Graham was helping the gardener and managed to cut his knee open with a scythe. He probably still has the scar. On the plane back to Tanga I found myself travelling with the wife of the manager to the Lead’s sisal estate. The subject of Jill Lead must have come up because I told her that in my view Jill was just a little jaarpie tart with the morals of an alley cat. It felt good to let out some of the bitterness I felt and she was very sympathetic – but it was unwise and foolish because she must have repeated this to Jill and it eventually got back to Jack who was absolutely furious as he said it might jeopardise the Lead’s account with Dalgety’s! I’m not proud of all this. It was all rather sordid, didn’t do anything to help our marriage work and I finally decided to leave and return to Eldoret and start divorce proceedings.