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Apart from the chimney — and final coats of paint being slopped on — our home is finished. The farm is up and running. Three years ago we first pitched our tent in virgin bush and began bathing in buckets. Today we can chill a beer, flush a loo, switch on a light, sleep in a bed and have a swim. The butcher Kinguku ogled the plumpness of our first steers for sale and even raised his price by a bob a kilo. Bees buzz in hives, sheep bleat in oceans of red oat pasture, Muskovy ducks waddle by and everybody on the farm lives off vegetables from the shamba. We’ve planted 20,000 trees, built three kilometres of dry-stone walls, pumped water a long way uphill and employed a large number of people.
I’m boasting now, but when Michael Cunningham-Reid saw all this at the weekend he told me, ‘When I first met you I thought you were a w*****.’ Michael is 79 and after suffering a stroke he’s in a valedictory mood. He said, ‘I was wrong. I think you’ve achieved wonders here.’ I like to take all the credit but the real heroes are my wife Claire and the movie industry that pays her, together with Joseph Kariuki Kang’ethe. Mr Kang’ethe — carpenter, mason, plumber, painter — constructed an entire homestead without a single architect’s blueprint. He and our hardware supplier Shankar, who gave us so much on credit, always showed tolerance of my ignorance and chronic lack of money.
I would not say Claire was so tolerant. For three years, she has thrown gumboots, books, wedding photos and food at me, so exasperated at times has she been with the experience. Michael C-R said, ‘Luckily you made her love the place, because to begin with she didn’t.’ People say you only build one house in your life and I can see why.
Now, the real problems begin. I have dreams of burning thatch. Termites eat the timbers. A snake emerged from the bath plughole. Yesterday donkeys trod on a sewage pipe and I was up to my elbows in raw filth fixing the problem. Every machine on the farm breaks. After frying the generator, last month somebody hooked up a welding machine to the solar batteries and the whole system exploded, plunging us into darkness for weeks.
Our trees nod with bananas, citrus, pomegranates, mulberries and papaya. Attracted at dawn by delicious fruit smells come the elephants, which can at a gallop gracefully clear five-foot garden walls. Advancing baboons, which go mad for the taste of tomatoes, deploy tactics they might have learnt at Sandhurst. The alpha male even stalked my son Rider, five, and there I drew the line.
Rather than allow monkeys to eat my offspring we decided to hit back hard. At twilight I joined a group of men and moved to surround the baboons at roost, aiming to capture the biggest male. Instead of executing him, the idea of this exercise is to paint him white, head to foot. Then you let him go. Relieved, he scampers off to join his chums and they, horrified at this hairy and pale apparition, flee to get away as fast as they can. They never stop running.
The grass and bush have grown dramatically since we arrived, though the elephant have smashed hundreds of trees to bits. You can tell where the pachyderms are by the way tall acacias vanish in clumps — as if King Kong was out there. As we walked through the long grass towards the baboons I heard not a sound. I stopped to listen. It was so quiet I could hear the blood pump in my ears. While I was standing some way off from the rest of the men I took the opportunity to break wind, at which point the tree line erupted from a few metres ahead. A herd of buffalo, panicked by the noise I had made, stampeded in the other direction. On the hill above elephants trumpeted. The baboons, roused from eating each other’s fleas, barked in alarm and scattered. Everybody had a laugh and, walking home to a smoky chimney, I considered how lucky I am in all ways.
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