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Chapter 1
One
Childhood in Kenya
My earliest memory is of sitting in a high chair spitting out spinach—strange for someone who turned into such a passionate foodie. In my late teens I became determined to improve the experience, even enjoy it, and today spinach is one of my favorite vegetables—but it has to be right: steamed, chopped, and mixed with double cream, white pepper, and nutmeg. Delicious. Raw in a salad, it’s even better. But at the age of two I couldn’t get the repellent dark green mess out of my mouth fast enough.
I was living in Scotland, at a house in West Lothian my grandparents had bought when I was a year old in 1945. We lived with them at that time, and my mother remembers the move from Somerset: taking me on a train—in an ordinary carriage, as she puts it—with all our belongings, and the embarrassment of having to feed me during the journey amid a group of soldiers. I was her first child, of six, and she was a young, nervous mother. Shortly after we arrived in Scotland my brother Colin was born. He is almost exactly two years younger than I am and I remember examining him when he was a baby and noticing that there was a small difference between us. He was a huge baby, and as soon as he could walk he followed me everywhere.
Another early memory is of holding a stick in my hand and telling Colin to pick up a wasp I could see stuck in the crack between some paving stones and delighting in the howls that followed. I am told I also tried to feed him with a petrol capsule—the sort used to fill lighters. It looked like a miniature baby’s bottle, so I pushed it into his mouth and the poor little thing had burns all over his lips. I don’t remember that episode but I do remember trying to kill him by burying him in the sandpit in the garden. Luckily my mother noticed in the nick of time and rescued him.
My parents were living at Howleigh House, near Taunton in Somerset, when I was born. My mother and her twin brother, John, had spent most of their childhood there. They had been born in India but sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight, and in the holidays they stayed with an aunt at Howleigh House. Their father, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander E. Drysdale, DSO, MC, was in the Indian army, and Vivian, his wife, a rather exotic figure with a penchant for pink gin, visited England and the twins about twice a year. So sad, but Vivian had also been born in India and shipped home to be educated in England, so history was repeating itself.
I never knew my great-grandfather but he sounds splendid. His name was Alexander Stuart-Martin and he was also born near Lucknow, in India—in 1870. He fought in the Indian Mutiny and the British government rewarded him for his bravery with indigo and sugar plantations, which made him wealthy. He, too, was educated in England, as most colonials were, then became an engineer and built many of the bridges and railways in India. It was on a trip to England that he met and married the beautiful Elizabeth Sabin, who, unusually for those times, was a divorcée, having managed to escape from a terrifyingly brutal husband. They returned to India together, where she had two daughters, Vivian, my grandmother, and Frances, but there were complications with the second delivery and Elizabeth died soon after she had given birth. Alexander lived on—in some style. He drove around in a magnificent Bentley that he had had shipped out from England. For years it behaved beautifully in the heat and dust, but finally gave up the ghost. Undaunted, my great-grandfather hitched it up to a couple of oxen and continued to travel in the style to which he was accustomed.
The two daughters, Vivian and Frances, were sent to school in England, where they were looked after by relatives, returning to India once a year to visit their father. You could only travel by sea in those days and the journey took two weeks. On one of the voyages the young Vivian met Alexander Drysdale, my grandfather, on his way to join his regiment. Many years later they met again, at a tennis party in Lucknow, fell in love, married, and Vivian gave birth to twins: Diana Frances, my mother, and John, my uncle, who never married and has spent most of his life abroad.
The twins were well looked after at Howleigh, and there was no shortage of money. A cook, a scullery maid, and a pantry maid ran the domestic side of life, but the aunt was Scottish born and bred, so life was simple. She didn’t entertain much or lay on anything for the children, so Diana and John seldom saw other children during their stays. I can’t imagine how bereft they must have felt with their parents thousands of miles away, or how a mother could bear to see her children no more than two or three times a year, but I suppose in those days she would have had no choice. And, having suffered the same fate as a child, she probably thought there was nothing unusual about it.
I was born, weighing seven pounds, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1944; hence my name. My mother had been convinced she was having a boy and had thought of me as Michael for nine months, so as she had put no thought into girls’ names, I was called Patricia Anne. I don’t know whether it was the shock of discovering that I was not a Michael, or the inordinate length of time I took to be born, but she had a sort of breakdown afterward—I suppose you would call it postpartum depression today—and to begin with I was looked after by the now aged aunt, May, who had cared for Mummy, and by my grandmother, who was back from India. My grandfather had retired from the army, leaving India for good, and they planned to settle in Britain. They stayed initially in Somerset with Aunt May, but when she sold Howleigh House, they bought a house in Scotland and the whole family moved there.
Brigg House was beautiful, with extensive grounds and a walled vegetable garden, but the cold, damp West Lothian winters proved detrimental to my grandfather’s health, so in 1947 he sold it and moved to Kenya with my grandmother, leaving my parents, Colin, and me to fend for ourselves. We moved south and rented a house near Guildford, in Surrey, where my sister Jenny was born in November 1947, when I was three and a half. She wasn’t actually christened Jenny: my mother named her Helen Mary, to please a couple of aunts, but I had a favorite teddy at the time called Jenny and I insisted my new sister be called by the same name.
My parents married when they were young and inexperienced, and, like hundreds of other couples who married during the war, they knew next to nothing about each other when they walked up the aisle. My mother was seventeen when she met Jock Boyd at a dance in Somerset. He was twenty-three and, of course, dashing in his RAF uniform, with smart brass buttons and gold wings on the left shoulder. Also, he danced like a dream. He was tall and handsome with blond curly hair and cornflower-blue eyes; she was petite and beautiful, with luxuriant chestnut hair. They danced all night, and after just two more brief meetings Jock wrote to Diana and asked her to marry him. Her mother, my grandmother, who was a controlling sort of woman, encouraged her to say yes. I think she wanted to get my mother off her hands, and Jock, she had established, came from a good family. He had money, too, or so she had been told by his mother. All in all, he was the perfect catch. But once they were married it turned out that he had no money, and my mother, having been used to quite a grand lifestyle, found it difficult to manage.
Jock’s real name was Colin Ian Langdon Boyd. His parents had a farm in the Fowey Valley in Cornwall. His mother was a strange woman. By the time I knew her she and Jock’s father had separated and she was living with lots of dachshunds. According to my mother, she had never really liked children, so Jock and his younger brother and sister were brought up by aunts living in Bideford. Poor Jock had a miserable childhood but he spent a lot of it hunting and shooting, and horses were his passion. He was sent to Kelly College, a small public school in Tavistock, then went on to Sandhurst and into the Cheshire Regiment. But he never fought as a soldier. A car crash prevented him going out to the front with his regiment and he was seconded to the RAF, first flying Lysanders and later, when he joined Bomber Command, Wellingtons. When he met my mother his squadron was stationed at Weston Zoyland in Somerset and he and his friends went regularly to the Castle in Taunton for a drink or two in the evenings.
Soon after they were engaged, just weeks after that first meeting in early 1942, Jock was sent to Malta, where he had the most terrible accident. There was a strip of runway, with bombers taking off and landing from opposite directions, controlled by traffic lights. He was taking off in a plane fully laden with bombs and fuel with the green light in his favor, but there was a fault: the light at the other end of the runway was also green and the two planes collided head-on and burst into flames. My father jumped clear before the plane exploded but his face and right hand were very badly burned. He was lucky to be alive. Several of his crew and men from the other aircraft were killed—including two who got out of one plane but lost their bearings in the smoke and were decapitated by the propeller.
Jock was flown home and taken straight to East Grinstead, in Sussex, to the burn unit at Queen Victoria Hospital run by the famous pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe, where he became one of McIndoe’s Guinea Pigs—so called because of the experimental reconstructive work McIndoe was doing on burn victims. Before him, people with burns as severe as my father’s would probably not have survived. My mother went to see him in hospital, fearing that she wouldn’t recognize him—the ward was full of heavily bandaged men with missing noses and ears. Jock’s head was covered with bandages but she could see two very blue eyes and knew at once it was him. I have the same color eyes and so does Colin—and it was the Boyd eyes, years later, that made me certain that someone who thought she might be my half sister, in America, really was.
As soon as my mother sat down beside Jock’s hospital bed he said, “I’ve got something for you.” He opened a drawer and out came a matchbox with lots of cotton wool inside which was a ruby and diamond engagement ring. It had belonged to his mother, but because she was such a horrible woman, my mother disliked the ring from the start.
It was not a good omen. Apart from the ring, though, Mummy was uncertain about the marriage. The accident seemed to have changed Jock. She went to see him in hospital several times and they would sit together not saying a word. She was very shy and didn’t know what to talk about, and he would sit staring vacantly ahead.
Physically, they patched him up as well as they could. He was left with a badly burned forehead and the tendons in his right hand had been irreparably damaged, so he never flew again. Emotionally, I don’t think he ever recovered. From that day on he was locked into himself. He would never talk about the accident; in fact, he would scarcely talk about anything. My mother had fallen in love with this handsome, spirited, brave young pilot, who had swept her off her feet on the dance floor, and he had gone, the spark had died. But having said she would marry Jock, and with the terrible thing that had happened to him, she didn’t have the heart or the courage to call it off.
Six months after the accident, on September 14, 1942, they married. It was a big wedding for the time, with two hundred guests and a reception at Howleigh House, but my mother says that even as she was walking out of the church she knew she’d made a big mistake. She didn’t feel comfortable with Jock: there seemed to be a barrier between them. They went on honeymoon to Scotland and, as my mother puts it, muddled along. Jock now says he felt the same way and that, anyway, they were far too young when they married.
My father went back repeatedly to East Grinstead for treatment over the following months and spent time in various other rehabilitation places to try to get his fingers moving, but without success. His right hand remained claw-like and both were discolored; as children, we found his injuries fascinating. Unable to fly, he ended up in the War Office, which was enough, according to him, to drive anyone mad, so when my grandparents suggested that he and Mummy join them in Kenya, he leaped at the idea.
When I was four, we moved to Africa, to the large, sprawling house that my grandfather had built in Langata, near Karen, about half an hour from Nairobi. I remember that flight—it took hours: there were no direct flights from England to Africa in those days because the planes needed to refuel at regular intervals. Flying BOAC from London, we stopped at Cairo, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, and finally Nairobi. I was horribly sick throughout the trip, into the sturdy brown bags that were routinely tucked into the back pockets of the seats in front.
My grandparents’ house stood at the bottom of a long, winding gravel drive—on which, some years later, I learned to ride a bicycle—with glorious views in every direction across the game reserve that surrounded it. It was a single-story house with a veranda that ran almost all the way around it. My grandparents had brought paintings, china, and cutlery from the house in Scotland but they had had the furniture made in Nairobi of mooli, the most beautiful honey-colored local wood. There was a huge garden, with lawns, standard roses, peach trees, and nasturtiums, that ran straight into the wilderness. It was quite common for giraffes, lions, or other wild animals to wander in and, because of the bushes, it wasn’t always easy to see them. The dogs, though, would bark incessantly until the interlopers left.
