As I have mentioned, Neville and I went to different boarding schools. She went to Limuru Girl’s School and I went to St. George’s School, Turi – about 30 miles from Nakuru. It was very isolated and our days were pretty boring. During the war years we had foreign teachers a lot of the time and I don’t think the academic standard was high. There was a rotund little woman with red hair called Miss Hazel and she had a wretched time. Two of the main classrooms were in separate blocks a little way down the hill from the main school. On her first day with our class, 3B, we locked the door and pretended we didn’t believe it was her trying to get in. When we finally let her in and she tried to take the roll call, we all gave her false names. I told her I was Pennalopy Mackapeeny. We were quite horrid to her. Her bedroom was two doors up from the room I shared with Pam Phillips and one night I heard crying from behind her door. I knocked and went in to find poor Miss Hazel sobbing her socks off. I put my arms round her and patted her on the back and said I was really sorry for making her life a misery.   Several of us managed to persuade the rest of the class to give her a break after this.

The terms always seemed very long and on the weekends there were only a few lucky ones whose parents came to take them out for the day. There was much sucking up to these girls to get an invitation. But most Sundays were very boring, particularly during one term when we had a very religious RE teacher who persuaded the Head Mistress that we should not be allowed to play tennis or any other games and could only write letters home or play hymns on the piano.   Several of us were punished for having jazzed up two or three hymns and danced to them by having to write out scripture verses. Roller skating round the old hall was another forbidden pastime.

One term was relieved by my getting a bout of malaria and having to be taken to Nakuru Hospital for two or three days. Then there was the great fire which engulfed St Andrew’s School, the junior school, about half a mile away.   This occurred in the middle of the night and all the pupils were evacuated up to us.   Each child was put on a mattress between two of our beds. Down at the school everything that could be grabbed was either thrown into the swimming pool by the staff or carried out onto the lawn. The only fatality was the headmaster’s terrier, who sadly got locked in the study at night and couldn’t be rescued.

The following term was even better because Italian Prisoners of War were brought in to St Andrews to do the repairs. Men!!! They used to take walks around the area and it was amazing how many girls found themselves sitting on the fence at the extreme limits of our bounds, swinging their legs in the lane!  

Our final exams were all written with carbon paper to make second copies in case the first lot got sunk on their way to UK. Art finals all had to be done twice for the same reason.

In 1944, I was taken out of school for one term when I accompanied my parents to Addis Ababa. My father, Rene and I drove in a fairly posh limousine that was to be delivered to some official in Addis. We were accompanied on the ten day safari by several army trucks. It was a wonderful adventure for me. We travelled north from Nairobi through Isiolo, Archer’s Post, Marsabit and on through all sorts of terrain to Addis. At one stage there was evidence of a large bush fire and the road bridge had been burnt down so we encamped for twenty four hours while our sappers built a new one. Out in the desert area we slept in the open on camp beds and an old army veteran showed me how to cook a wild duck that they had shot by covering it in wet mud or clay and burying it in the hot sand. Eventually all the feathers came off with the mud and it needed very little extra cooking as I remember. I think I spent about three months with my parents in Addis. It was a fairly boring time for me as there were no girls of my age. My mother did manage to find one girl, the daughter of the Commissioner of Police, and she and I used to go riding with a young Ethiopian police constable to guard us.

I used to accompany my parents to tennis parties at the British Legation where we would meet people from all the other Legations. It was interesting to watch a group all speaking English and then joined by someone from the French Legation, and all start speaking French, then perhaps joined by a German and drifting into that language. My father, of course, was not able to do that, not being a regular diplomat but merely an army officer.

The Emperor Haile Selassie was often there. He spoke both English and French and was sometimes accompanied by his large fat wife, referred to as the ‘old bag’. Poor old thing, she was quite uneducated and found the social affairs very difficult. On the way to these parties my father used to be careful not to take a route that passed one of the many gibbets in the city, which frequently had a body still hanging there in the sun. Hanging in Addis was not very scientific and   I overheard my father telling my mother  how sometimes they slowly strangled to death or, if the man was particularly heavy, his head might come right off.

The Ethiopians were a cruel people. They ran horse taxis in the town and shod the horses with rubber so that they might have a better grip on tarmac. These became very hot and the horses legs would swell. They also tethered them out in the fields by roping their heads to a hind leg, so that  the horse could eat or drink but not go very far or fast, but I suspect their necks ached intolerably. Sheep would be kept from roaming by wiring up a foreleg. We all employed an armed house guard. I remember ours used to rush out to meet us and fall down to kiss my father’s feet. My father begged him to cease this practise as, in the course of these oblations, his unreliable weapon would be pointing straight at my father’s heart ! I overheard my dad telling a story one day at lunch about a fellow officer who had grown tired of the burglaries to his home. He promised his night guard a bonus for a body and a slightly less amount for a good blood trail. Some night’s later the guard produced a body. Suspiciously, it was a very old lady. On investigation it turned out to be the guards own grandmother!