Tim Bannerman's Orchid Chronicles - Part 3 - Leeds United For The Cup!
We didn’t find it, the lion. Or, more significantly, it didn’t find us, on our Great Lion Hunt with the fearless Maasai moran. We did, however, end up in a village across the valley from us, having given up finding any trace of the lion. No-one had caught it by its tail and so earned the Lion’s Mane Headdress that comes with that honour, let alone killed it. Whether or not it deserved its intended fate, we shall never know. It wouldn’t be allowed now anyway. By then, up in the village, we didn’t care. We had discovered changa’a.
At risk of reverting to my cider, or should I say, calvados-drinking tales, let me give a word of warning here. Should you find yourself invited on a lion hunt and, not finding one, be invited to join some ‘pals in the village across the way’ for ‘a little light refreshment’ – don’t!
It seemed impolite to refuse to share in the contents of the old petrol can being passed round our friendly gathering, sitting in a circle in this nearby village, inhabited by a different but very friendly tribe of – oh, just the kind of people one might meet at the Valiant Soldier or the Royal Oak or – you name it. We were just a bunch of folk enjoying the craic. So what that two of us were two little innocent white boys who, just because they’d done the King Street Run, thought they knew how to hold their drink?
But changa’a isn’t ‘drink’. The nearest equivalent is probably Pere Leconte’s calvados, may he rest in peace. Which was beautiful. And evil. In much the same measure. And distilled, fermented maize in a petrol can arguably has more of the latter than the former in both taste and effect.
When we woke up, we found ourselves back in the schoolroom, having been tenderly carried back and put to bed by our Maasai friends, who then giggled at us for days afterwards at our sad inability to hack it as ‘real men’ should. Although Pad says they were drunker than us so who knows how any of us got back.
Oh well, we lived to tell the tale. And, thank Engai, never met the lion.
But, a few weeks later, we did meet Orchids.
An ‘elysium of orchids’ as I describe it in my scraps of notes I took as we made our way with Roger the Botanist, from Kenya down through game parks where we camped one night and woke up with the impressively large spoor of an elephant right outside the door flap of our tent, completely covering the tent peg.
Our adventures along the way included being arrested in the middle of the night, having camped unwittingly next door to a ‘Protected Area’, a military installation of some kind we had no idea was there. It took the rest of the night in the nearby police station before our interrogators accepted that we were, indeed, the naïve and hapless flower-hunters that we were.
But in the darkest moment, when we were contemplating several years of incarceration, with or without trial, it was only the sign on the wall above our heads that Pad suddenly noticed with a nudge, that gave us a gleam of light. Hope of some humanitarian succour, when all else seemed bleak and hopeless.
The sign read:
BE KIND TO OUR POLICEMEN ON THEIR LONELY BEAT
AND DON’T FORGET THEIR LONELY WIVES
And then climbing an impossible tropical rainforest scarp with a Norwegian god we met high up in a Catholic Mission in Morogoro, Tanzania, where they only had on average two cars a year that made it up that far. On being invited for a ‘stroll up the mountain’, we soon realised that only oxygen or a piggy-back on Trygver, who could have carried us both, would get us to the top.
We did, amazingly, get there under our own steam, literally, only to find something unexpected in what felt like an undiscovered version of Conan Doyle’s Lost World.
There, at the peak, exhausted and at the very limits of our endurance, we saw the plinth, the cairn – okay, a trig point – on which were carved some ancient runic symbols. On looking more closely we saw inscribed:
‘Leeds United for the Cup’. ‘Brian Ogden’.
So much for ‘Livingstone, I presume’ and all the rest of it. Thanks, Brian.
And what African safari could be complete without the beasts of the bundu. We were dazzled by the amazing diversity of creatures that we saw in the National Game Park at Arusho, Tanzania. By ‘Game Park’, I mean a vast, endless expanse of wilderness in the middle of which we’d blithely pitched our tent one night.
This is how I describe what happened when we were brusquely woken next morning:
‘Rhino! Quick! Get up!!’ Roger’s blazing eyes and hoarse whisper summons me from sleep in my cosy if somewhat flatulent tent, shared with the morning-averse Pad, as dangerous as a cornered rhinoceros any time before breakfast.
We peer out from the tent and there, two hundred yards away on the far side of the lake, four lumbering, long-horned black rhino are grazing and ambling in the half-light of dawn. Two smaller, younger ram-raiders are romping in the short, muddy grass nearby.
Twenty yards behind them, we make out a small herd of buffalo, arguably the most dangerous of all the beasts of the bundu, like massive, tweedy Margaret Rutherfords, snorting and waggling their handbag horns.
Suddenly on the far distant horizon, the snowy cap of Mount Meru spurts, then oozes hot raspberry and caramel as the first rays of sunrise catch the peak.
Gazing in awe at the scene before us, a jab in the ribs from Pad turns me around to see five elephant, trunk-to-tail, in silhouette on a thorny ridge, not 50 yards from our tent. Quite possibly the same ones who’d been using our tent as a convenient dumping ground during the night.
Later, I am watching a small herd of beautiful, dark, loose-limbed waterbuck through Roger’s field-glasses, a Sacred Ibis contemptuous on the water’s edge. And then I catch sight of what seems, at first, like a pale, fawn-coloured, smooth-edged rock, alone, quite close to the lake. A rock with a long, curling…
‘It’s not – is it?’ I ask Roger. ‘Good Lord, no’, he replies with the confidence of the Compleat Man About Africa, as he returns the glasses to me. Almost immediately, I watch the rock stir, stretch and sit up, twitching its long curling tail this way and that.
We watch the lioness slowly undulate her way up to the forest edge, stop, crouching, to stare at a tasty-looking reedbuck. A quick lick of the chops – but no, something more substantial for breakfast required, methinks, and she slinks off into the slim, soaring forest trees, and disappears.
But the orchids.
This is what I wrote on re-emerging from a dambo – read snake-infested marshland – near Mbeya, Tanzania, not far from the border of Zambia after nearing the end of our long, long journey down through the heart of East Africa. The photograph of me clutching the spray of orchids you can see in the picture below, was taken just before I sat down in the battered but unfailingly dependable old Toyota Landcruiser and wrote the below .
A field, a bog, an Elysium of orchids. Tumescent buds on pale, slender stalks, erupting in sprays of white drops and feathery spikes. Deep passionate red merging in pinks and orange, large and rich. Small faded blue sprouting flowers on deep purple-spotted stems. Brilliant orange, almost fluorescent, perched on frail, thin stalks with no leaves. Jasmine primrose yellow, five small petals with furry tongues. All orchids so thick and rich, intoxicating in their scent and beauty. Eulophia, Satyrium, Platycoryne, Disa, one rare blue orchid. And Habernaria – anaemic green, creamy white, a spiky mask by Salvador Dali, with strange hoods and pointed buds, amongst the Scrofularia scattered pinkly in the garden party of brilliant multi-coloured Ascot hats. And in my attempts to describe it, all so difficult to give justice to the sheer magnificence without seeming contrived or just inadequate.
As Pad says, with ochre ankles and sparkling eyes: “We crash among these flowers like clumsy creatures always on the move. The orchids just grow and sing their loveliness with no hurry, just come and fade. We have to snare beauty; it is beyond us to be delicate, to be lovely, to be graceful”. And there, there, the ghost of Aphrodite flitting naked through this field of flowers.’
Actually, what did slither naked in the marsh, just ahead of where I was about to place my foot, opened up a wake of 15 foot or more as it made its leisurely, sinuous, un-Monty python-esque way into boggy oblivion.
Tim with orchids, in a remarkable old photo taken at the time that somehow became water-damaged, giving it an almost magical oil-painting like appearance
Many years later, having maintained a rich and precious friendship with Roger Polhill – actually one of most distinguished and respected amongst the dazzling alumni of the Herbarium at Kew Gardens, and a world authority on mistletoes, along with his wife, Diana, herself a distinguished botanist in her own right– I met up with him in the spectacular Temperate House at Kew, perhaps the greatest glasshouse in the world, containing 10,000 plants from temperate zones around the planet.
Having shown me round the glorious High Victorian wrought-iron building, the intricate latticework with its 15,000 individual panes of glass soaring above us, he handed me a large, plain, brown paper folder, tied up with string.
I am looking at it now.
‘Open it’, he said, eyes twinkling under the ever-bushy eyebrows. ‘Carefully though.’
Intrigued, I very carefully untied the simple bow that held the string around the folder. And opened it.
There was tissue paper between each A3 sized, thick, brown, water-colour textured page. And inside the tissue paper, still faintly stained by the last traces of the living plant as it dried inside the press – were my orchids. The ones I described above, that Pad and I picked in our semi-demi-professional role as co-hunters and carriers for Roger and, by then, his colleague, Dick Brummit, also from Kew but stationed in Dar-es-Salaam at that time.
‘You can keep them’, said Roger. ‘As a memento of our time together on our trip.’
My orchids. The ones I pressed that day at the dambo, forever branded on my memory as the day orchids assumed a different status in the realm of living things.
And here they are.
