In The Beginning Pt 3 With them the seeds of our family tree drifted south and fell two years later on the rich dark soil of Lake Naivasha at the bottom of the Rift Valley in Kenya, the British colony of East Africa. Naivasha was full of wild creatures that roamed fearless across the land; herds of eland, buffalo, zebra and long-horned impala lived in the hills; tiny dikdik and clipspringers capered on the black rocks scattered among the candelabra euphorbia. At night they came down to the lake's edge to drink and joined the hippos grazing on the lush Kikuyu grass and young papyrus shoots. The trees were filled with chattering, chirping birds and monkeys of all sorts, and thousands of bats lived beneath the thatch of the roof. They swarmed out in great sheets at exactly 6.45 every evening and returned just before the break of dawn. The lake was home to every sort of African water bird: spur-wing geese, yellow-bill and green-necked ducks, pelicans, flamingos, crested cranes, Goliath herons and cormorants, coots and lily trotters wove their lives among the fat mauve water lilies that opened and closed with the sun. These spread for miles across the shallow water, their fat green leaves forming platforms for the delicate long-legged aquatic birds who chased after dragonflies hovering over the blooms. Beneath them tilapia and black bass, introduced to Kenya by President Roosevelt on one of his safaris in the 1920s, thrived and multiplied on the mosquitos and little insects that hung everywhere. Lake Naivasha was a pulsating miracle of nature, renowned for the largest variety of birds on any lake in the world. The black and white fisheagle dominated it. They were the monarchs of the lake. Perched precariously on the tall fever trees, they gazed haughtily across the water, and with their heads thrown back, hurled their hunting cries into the sky. When the sun rose and set these great birds took to the sky. They rode the wind and circled like kites around their feeding grounds, swooping down on to the surface of the water with incredible speeds to pick out fish they had spied from high above, rising again on unbroken swoops with their prey wriggling in their powerful claws, then landed like ballet dancers on the tops of the acacia trees. The pelicans came and went, to and from their feeding and nesting grounds, gliding silently across the sky in perfect triangular formations, casting great moving shadows on the ground below. Sometimes they flew so low we could hear the air swooshing through their wings and when they flew away from the sun, their shadows preceded them, the only sign of their passage overhead. We visited our friends around the lake in fast speed boats putting birds to flight, like winged runners ahead of us and wove among the sleeping hippos that sometimes plunged after us at great speeds. Tormenting the hippos to elicit a chase became one of our favourite water sports. It was fast and dangerous and scared us stiff. I grew up with my brother Dorian and my sister Oria on Lake Naivasha. We were part of it, we shared it with the animals and the birds. It was our private playground. We knew nothing and cared little for the things that European children had. Our friends were black, our toys were made from bits of stick and string. We played with live animals instead of dolls and were cared for by a bevy of laughing black servants who were always there to amuse us, tell us stories, play with us and clean up after us. There was little discipline or restriction in our lives. We grew up naturally like the trees and the flowers that surrounded us. For the first few years we spoke only Swahili, and later, when an Austrian nanny called Adelina who spoke no English, joined us, we added German to our vocabularies before we spoke English. Then in 1939 the war came and took my father away from us. I was eight years old. The magic bubble burst and the first dark clouds began to infiltrate the light that until then had enveloped us, although for us youngsters they were still unnoticeable. Our mother took the brunt of the blow, when overnight she found herself having to face life without her husband and with three young children to care for. All funds from Europe were instantly frozen and for the first time in her life, she found herself with no money. She had never yet had to confront such a situation and had no idea how to cope. The memories of that singular night in l940 are still locked somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind. A sense of nervous anticipation hung in the air, which we did not recognise, but intuitively detected. My parents were careful to keep the fearful details from us. The human folly which was unfolding in Europe was beyond our comprehension. We had never ever heard of war and hardly knew the meaning of the word. That night we were sent off to bed with an extra pat on the cheek and a promise that if the nine o'clock news on the radio was good we would be awoken to share the celebration champagne with our parents. When we arose the next morning we were told by Adelina that our father had been taken away during the night and the horrible reality of the war was carefully explained to us at the breakfast table. Italy had allied herself to Germany and had thus made an enemy alien of our Italian father in the British colony in which we were living. That night he was taken away from us and did not return for four years. Our Garden of Eden had begun to crumble. For the first time in her life, my mother had now to think of earning a living to keep her family alive. She exchanged her artist's smock for the khaki pants and shirt of the Kenyan farmer and turned herself into the family provider. Advised by Jack Hopcraft, her dear friend and neighbour who lived on a nearby farm, she went into pig breeding and slowly turned our African playground into a productive farm. I was fourteen years old when the war ended and my father returned after four gruelling years in the Koffifontein internment camp. He was a broken man and never really got over the experience. He had lost all of his teeth and his raven-black hair had turned to snowy white. I was a tough, intensely physical adolescent, a bit like a young wild horse snorting and kicking at the bridle. Something had to be done to rein me in, so at nineteen I was sent to be 'finished' at a smart school which catered for young ladies de bonne famille in Hertfordshire, called the House of Citizenship. I spent eighteen painful months there; I grew fat and ugly, and suffered from unbearable homesickness. I finally ran away to Paris in a car my father had left with me on one of his visits. This was the smartest move I ever made. My life turned around, for it was in Paris, at my mother's suggestion, that I discovered photography. I was introduced to the great Franco-Russian fashion photographer Harry Meerson by some of my mother's cousins. I worked for him as an unpaid impassioned apprentice for two years. He taught me the rudiments of photography and lighting, but above all he taught me to see. He awoke in me an aptitude to recognise an image, a fleeting expression, a graphic shape that my mother, no doubt, had endowed me with. I never looked back. IN THE BEGINNING 3 of 3    <---- previous FOREWARD | IN THE BEGINNING | VANISHING AFRICA | IN THE BOSOM OF MY FAMILY