1982 - An Ice-Cream War Read Online Free PDF Page B

scrubby thorn with the occasional small volcanic-shaped hill. Behind them lay the fertile Pare hills and the purple slopes of the great mountain, its flattish white top obscured by a cloudy afternoon haze. Temple’s mind turned to the von Bishops. What a train journey! Von Bishop seemed nice enough, but was he boring…And his voice: three days of that reedy falsetto had almost proved too much.
    She was a fine woman, though. Big-breasted and broad-shouldered, with that creamy freckly skin of one just fresh from Europe. It was hard to keep that look. It wasn’t so much the sun and the heat but the constant nagging ailments: the fevers, the attacks of diarrhoea, insect bites and sores that never seemed to heal…They made a very strange couple, he thought. He wondered what it would be like living with von Bishop: that voice, day in, day out.
    Temple winced, and looked at the swarming clouds of flies that buzzed around the rolling backs of the ox-team. Sometimes he wondered if he had been right to bring his wife and young family to Taveta, away from the comparative health and easeful climate of Nairobi. It hadn’t been very fair on Matilda or the children, he admitted. But he could never have afforded so much land in the highlands, could never have set himself up as he had down here. He gave a grim smile. Also, he doubted if he could have stood the society much longer: the mad aristocrats with their obsessive horse racing and hunting; the way the tiny society had evolved—almost overnight it seemed—its own rigid hierarchy, its preposterous code of values and bizarre snobbery. A club for senior officials and a club for junior ones. The endless bickering between the settlers and the government. The awesome privilege of riding after hyenas with the Maseru hunt, all hunting horns, tally-ho and view-halloo. God, Temple swore, the English! He was glad to have escaped. Now he had his own farm, a sisal factory and linseed plant that provided him with a steady turnover. He could stay at the Norfolk Hotel when he went to Nairobi now, take his entire family to the Bioscope—every night of the week if he felt like it. He squared his shoulders self-consciously and smoothed his moustache. It seemed better in German East. Less fun perhaps, but life was organized, and they appeared happy to accept everyone. Look at von Bishop, he thought, half-English, but a local hero.
    “Taveta!” Saleh shouted.
    Temple looked up. They had come over a small rise and the township of Taveta lay ahead. Among the dark green mango trees the sun flashed off tin roofs. Houses and buildings were scattered around haphazardly. The dirt road from Voi, to the east on the Mombasa–Nairobi railway, arrived and became Taveta’s main street. There was a post office, and a few bungalows belonging to the Assistant District Commissioner, the police inspector and a jailer. Some tin shacks did duty as the ADC‘s offices and courthouse. Forming three sides of a square were the whitewashed stone buildings of the police askari barracks, the jail and a stable block. An untidy heap of wooden huts and stalls at one end of the street marked the festering purlieus of the Indian bazaar. Sited as far away as possible, at the opposite end of town, was a new wooden store, run by a European. There were a few settler-farmers in the district, like Temple, but not many, as the Taveta–Voi district was not generally regarded as fertile farming land. Most of the farmers were Boers who, again like Temple, were not too enamoured of the British.
    Temple’s ox-cart creaked slowly into Taveta. It was late afternoon and there was little activity. The place reminded Temple strongly of small western townships he had seen in Wyoming, which he visited once as a young man in the 1890’s. He wondered briefly if he should stop in at the store, run by an Irishman named O’Shaugnessy, and have a drink, but as he still had an hour’s journey to go before he reached his farm he decided to press