The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

Elspeth Huxley's novels have revealed for many thousands of readers the heart of Africa (sic). In this new book she describes her own childhood there, amongst the Kikuyu, during the years just before the First World War. With her valiant mother and her hopeful, gullible, kindly father, she trekked out to make a home in the Kenya wilderness. They built a grass house, they ate off packing-cases spread with damask table-cloths, they learnt how to train oxen and grow coffee and understand something of the African mind (sic). Amongst their neighbours were an Edinburgh nurse married to an absentee elephant poacher, a tough Boer farmer, the vivacious and unconventional Lettice and her stiff ex-calvary husband. There are ant-hordes, leopard-hunts, cattle-thefts: the witchcraft of the Kikuyu and the love-affairs of their white neighbours are equally mysterious to the child. Intent on her own affairs yet absorbing much of the savage and beautiful world around her, running wild and growing in wisdom, she lived the pioneer childhood which now, so evocatively, she writes about.