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  ‘You must not tell them, Mdisho,’ I said.

  ‘But why not?’ he cried. ‘Have I done something wrong?’

  ‘Quite the opposite,’ I lied.

  ‘Then why must I not tell my people?’ he asked again.

  I tried to explain to him how the authorities would react if they found him out. It simply wasn’t done to go round chopping heads off civilians, even in wartime. It could mean prison, I told him, or even worse than that.

  He couldn’t believe me. He was absolutely shattered.

  ‘I myself am tremendously proud of you,’ I said, trying to make him feel better. ‘To me you are a great hero.’

  ‘But only to you, bwana?’

  ‘No, Mdisho. I think you would be a hero to most of the British people here if they knew what you had done. But that doesn’t help. It is the police who would go after you.’

  ‘The police!’ he cried in horror. If there was one thing in Dar es Salaam that every local was terrified of, it was the police. The police constables were all blacks, acting under a couple of white officers at the top, and they were not famous for being gentle with prisoners.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the police.’ I felt pretty sure they would charge Mdisho with murder if they caught him.

  ‘If it is the police, then I will keep quiet, bwana,’ he said, and all of a sudden he looked so downcast and disillusioned and defeated that I couldn’t bear it. I got up from the chair and crossed the room and took the scabbard of the sword down from the wall. ‘I shall be leaving you very soon,’ I said. ‘I have decided to join the war as a flier of aeroplanes.’ The only word for aeroplane in the Swahili language is ndegi, which means bird, and it always sounded good and descriptive in a sentence. ‘I am going to fly birds,’ I said. ‘I shall fly English birds against the birds of the Germani.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ Mdisho cried, brightening again suddenly at the mention of war. ‘I will come with you, bwana.’

  ‘Sadly, that will be impossible,’ I said. ‘In the beginning I shall be nothing but a very humble bird-soldier of the lowest rank, like your most junior askaris here, and I shall be living in barracks. There would be no question of me being allowed to have somebody to help me. I shall have to do everything for myself, including the washing and ironing of my shirts.’

  ‘That would be absolutely impossible, bwana,’ Mdisho said. He was genuinely shocked.

  ‘I shall manage quite well,’ I told him.

  ‘But do you know how to iron a shirt, bwana?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You must teach me that secret before I go.’

  ‘Will it be very dangerous, bwana, where you are going, and do those Germani birds have many guns?’

  ‘It might be dangerous,’ I said, ‘but the first six months will be nothing but fun. It takes six months for them to teach you how to fly a bird.’

  ‘Where will you go?’ he asked.

  ‘First to Nairobi,’ I answered. ‘They will start us on very small birds in Nairobi, and then we will go somewhere else to fly the big ones. We shall be travelling a great deal with very little luggage. That is why I shall have to leave this sword behind. It would be impossible to carry a great big thing like this with me wherever I go. So I am giving it to you.’

  ‘To me!’ he cried. ‘Oh no, bwana, you mustn’t do that! You will need it where you are going!’

  ‘Not in a bird,’ I said. ‘There is no room to swing a sword when you are sitting in one of those.’ I handed him the beautiful curved silver scabbard. ‘You have earned it,’ I said. ‘Now go away and wash the blade very well indeed. Make sure there is no trace of blood left on it anywhere. Then wipe it with oil and return it to its glove. Tomorrow I shall hand you a chit saying that I have given it to you. The chit is important.’

  He stood there holding the sword in one hand and the scabbard in the other, staring at them with eyes as bright as two stars.

  ‘I am presenting it to you for bravery,’ I said. ‘But you must not tell that to anybody. Tell them simply that I gave it to you as a going-away present.’

  ‘Yes, bwana,’ he said. ‘That is what I shall tell them.’ He paused for a moment and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Tell me truthfully, bwana,’ he said, ‘are you really and truly glad that I killed the big Germani sisal-grower?’

  ‘We killed one today as well,’ I said.

  ‘You did?’ Mdisho cried. ‘You killed one, too?’

  ‘We had to do it or he would probably have killed me.’

  ‘Then we are equal, bwana,’ he said, smiling with his wonderful white teeth. ‘That makes us exactly equal, you and me.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose it does.’

  Flying Training

  In November 1939, when the war was two months old, I told the Shell Company that I wanted to join up and help in the fight against Bwana Hitler, and they released me with their blessing. In a wonderfully magnanimous gesture, they told me that they would continue to pay my salary into the bank wherever I might happen to be in the world and for as long as the war lasted and I remained alive. I thanked them very much indeed and got into my ancient little Ford Prefect and set off on the 600-mile journey from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi to enlist in the RAF.

  When one is quite alone on a lengthy and slightly hazardous journey like this, every sensation of pleasure and fear is enormously intensified, and several incidents from that strange two-day safari up through central Africa in my little black Ford have remained clear in my memory.

  A frequent and always wonderful sight was the astonishing number of giraffe that I passed on the first day. They were usually in groups of three or four, often with a baby alongside, and they never ceased to enthral me. They were surprisingly tame. I would see them ahead of me nibbling green leaves from the tops of acacia trees by the side of the road, and whenever I came upon them I would stop the car and get out and walk slowly towards them, shouting inane but cheery greetings up into the sky where their small heads were waving about on their long long necks. I often amazed myself by the way I behaved when I was certain that there were no other human beings within fifty miles. All my inhibitions would disappear and I would shout, ‘Hello, giraffes! Hello! Hello! Hello! How are you today?’ And the giraffes would incline their heads very slightly and stare down at me with languorous demure expressions, but they never ran away. I found it exhilarating to be able to walk freely among such huge graceful wild creatures and talk to them as I wished.

  The road northwards through Tanganyika was narrow and often deeply rutted, and once I saw a very large thick greenish-brown cobra gliding slowly over the ruts in the road about thirty yards ahead of me. It was seven or eight feet long and was holding its flat spoon-shaped head six inches up in the air and well clear of the dusty road. I stopped the car smartly so as not to run it over, and to be truthful I was so frightened I went quickly into reverse and kept backing away until the fearsome thing had disappeared into the undergrowth. I never lost my fear of snakes all the time I was in the tropics. They gave me the shivers.

  At the Wami river the natives put my car on a raft and six strong men on the opposite bank started to pull me across the hundred yards or so of water with a rope, chanting as they pulled. The river was running swiftly and in midstream the slim raft upon which my car and I were balanced began to get carried down-river by the current. The six strong men chanted louder and pulled harder and I sat helpless in the car watching the crocodiles swimming around the raft, and the crocodiles stared up at me with their cruel black eyes. I was bobbing about on that river for over an hour, but in the end the six strong men won their battle with the currents and pulled me across. ‘That will be three shillings, bwana,’ they said, laughing.

  Only once did I see any elephant. I saw a big tusker and his cow and their one baby moving slowly forward in line astern about fifty yards from the road on the edge of the forest. I stopped the car to watch them but I did not get out. The elephants never saw me and I was able to stay gazing at them for quite a while. A g