Going Solo Read online

  Then Robert Sanford stopped and raised his rifle and took aim, and I thought surely he is not risking a shot at a moving lion when it’s got a woman in its jaws. There was an almighty crack as the big gun went off and I saw a spurt of dust just ahead of the lion. The lion stopped dead and turned his head, still holding the woman in his jaws. He saw the arm-waving shouting cook and he saw Robert Sanford and he saw me and he had certainly heard the rifle shot and seen the spurt of dust. He must have thought an army was coming after him because instantaneously he dropped the cook’s wife on to the ground and broke for cover. I have never seen anything accelerate so fast from a standing start. With great leaping bounding strides he was in among the jungle trees on the hillock before Robert Sanford could ram another cartridge into his gun.

  The cook reached the wife first, then Robert Sanford, then me. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I was certain that the grip of those terrible jaws would have ripped the woman’s waist and stomach almost in two, but there she was sitting up on the ground and smiling at the cook, her husband.

  ‘Where are you hurt?’ shouted Robert Sanford, rushing up.

  The cook’s wife looked up at him and kept smiling, and she said in Swahili, ‘That old lion he couldn’t scare me. I just lay there in his mouth pretending I was dead and he didn’t even bite through my clothes.’ She stood up and smoothed down her red and white spotted dress which was wet with the lion’s saliva, and the cook embraced her and the two of them did a little dance of joy in the twilight out there on the great brown African plain.

  Robert Sanford just stood there gaping at the cook’s wife. So, for that matter, did I.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure the simba didn’t hurt you?’ he asked her. ‘Did not his teeth go into your body?’

  ‘No, bwana,’ the woman said, laughing. ‘He carried me as gently as if I had been one of his own cubs. But now I shall have to wash my dress.’

  We walked slowly back to the group of astonished onlookers. ‘Tonight’, Robert Sanford said, addressing them all, ‘nobody is to go far from the house, you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, bwana,’ they said. ‘Yes, yes, we understand you.’

  ‘That old simba is hiding over there in the wood and he may come back,’ Robert Sanford said. ‘So be very careful. And Pingo, please continue to cook our dinner. I am getting hungry.’

  The cook ran into the kitchen, clapping his hands and leaping for joy. We walked over to where Mary Sanford was standing. She had come round to the back of the house soon after us and had witnessed the whole scene. The three of us then returned to the veranda and fresh drinks were poured.

  Dar es Salaam

  5 June 1939

  Dear Mama,

  It’s pleasant lying back and listening to and at the same time watching the antics of Hitler and Mussolini who are invariably on the ceiling catching flys and mosquitoes. Hitler & Mussolini are 2 lizards which live in our sitting room. They’re always here, and apart from being very useful about the house they are exciting to watch. You can see Hitler (who is smaller than Musso and not so fat) fixing his unfortunate victim – often a small moth – with a very hypnotic eye. The moth, terrified, stays stock still, then suddenly, so quickly that you can hardly see the movement at all, he darts his neck forward, shoots out a long tongue, and that’s the end of the moth. They’re quite small only about 10 inches long, and they’ve taken on the colour of the walls & ceiling which are yellow & become quite transparent. You can see their appendixes, at least we think we can …

  ‘I don’t believe anything like this has ever happened before,’ Robert Sanford said as he sat down once again in his cane armchair. There was a little round slot in one of the arms of the chair to carry his glass and he put the whisky and soda carefully into it. ‘In the first place,’ he went on, ‘lions do not attack people around here unless you go near their cubs. They can get all the food they want. There’s plenty of game on the plain.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s got a family in that patch of wood on the hill,’ Mary Sanford said.

  ‘That could be,’ Robert Sanford said. ‘But if he had thought the woman was threatening his family, he would have killed her on the spot. Instead of that, he carries her off as soft and gentle as a good gun-dog with a partridge. If you want my opinion, I do not believe he ever meant to hurt her.’

  We sat there sipping our drinks and trying to find some sort of an explanation for the astonishing behaviour of the lion.

  ‘Normally,’ Robert Sanford said, ‘I would get together a bunch of hunters first thing tomorrow morning and we’d flush out that old lion and kill him. But I don’t want to do it. He doesn’t deserve it. In fact, I’m not going to do it.’

  ‘Good for you, darling,’ his wife said.

  The story of this strange happening with the lion spread in the end all over East Africa and it became a bit of a legend. And when I got back to Dar es Salaam about two weeks later, there was a letter waiting for me from the East African Standard (I think it was called) up in Nairobi asking if I would write my own eye-witness description of the incident. This I did and in time I received a cheque for five pounds from the newspaper for my first published work.

  There followed a long correspondence in the columns of the paper from the white hunters and other experts all over Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika, each offering his or her different and often bizarre explanation. But none of them made any sense. The matter has remained a mystery ever since.

  The Green Mamba

  Oh, those snakes! How I hated them! They were the only fearful thing about Tanganyika, and a newcomer very quickly learnt to identify most of them and to know which were deadly and which were simply poisonous. The killers, apart from the black mambas, were the green mambas, the cobras and the tiny little puff adders that looked very much like small sticks lying motionless in the middle of a dusty path, and so easy to step on.

  One Sunday evening I was invited to go and have a sundowner at the house of an Englishman called Fuller who worked in the Customs office in Dar es Salaam. He lived with his wife and two small children in a plain white wooden house that stood alone some way back from the road in a rough grassy piece of ground with coconut trees scattered about. I was walking across the grass towards the house and was about twenty yards away when I saw a large green snake go gliding straight up the veranda steps of Fuller’s house and in through the open front door. The brilliant yellowy-green skin and its great size made me certain it was a green mamba, a creature almost as deadly as the black mamba, and for a few seconds I was so startled and dumbfounded and horrified that I froze to the spot. Then I pulled myself together and ran round to the back of the house shouting, ‘Mr Fuller! Mr Fuller!’

  Mrs Fuller popped her head out of an upstairs window. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got a large green mamba in your front room!’ I shouted. ‘I saw it go up the veranda steps and right in through the door!’

  ‘Fred!’ Mrs Fuller shouted, turning round. ‘Fred! Come here!’

  Freddy Fuller’s round red face appeared at the window beside his wife. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s a green mamba in your living-room!’ I shouted.

  Without hesitation and without wasting time with more questions, he said to me, ‘Stay there. I’m going to lower the children down to you one at a time.’ He was completely cool and unruffled. He didn’t even raise his voice.

  A small girl was lowered down to me by her wrists and I was able to catch her easily by the legs. Then came a small boy. Then Freddy Fuller lowered his wife and I caught her by the waist and put her on the ground. Then came Fuller himself. He hung by his hands from the window-sill and when he let go he landed neatly on his two feet.

  We stood in a little group on the grass at the back of the house and I told Fuller exactly what I had seen.

  The mother was holding the two children by the hand, one on each side of her. They didn’t seem to be particularly alarmed.

  ‘What happen