Lamu, as the travel brochures will tell you, is one of those places where, as the cliché goes, ‘time stands still’ and you can ‘lose yourself in the maze of old streets that hearken back to a by-gone era’. What they don’t tell you – or didn’t back in 1975, not that I’d read any brochures beforehand – is that it’s true.

Lamu as photographed by Tim many years ago

After my trip with Pad and Roger to Lusaka and back and a brief job teaching on our return to Charles in Langata, it was a name – Lamu – that insistently resonated in my mind for some reason. People must have talked about it – the Maasai moran, over a Tusker beer in Nairobi (baridi sana – very cold!), on our journey down and back up East Africa. One way or another, I had to go there.

After my dusty, sweltering bus journey up from Malindi and a night on the mainland, looking across at the ancient island settlement of Lamu in all its Swahili splendour, I got very drunk with a Kikuyu businessman that evening. He played out the story of Kenya’s last 25 years for me, from the Mau-Mau Uprising to the collapse of British colonial rule to the current Jomo ‘Mzee’ Kenyatta presidency in which he feared the mask of ‘reconciliation’ concealed a ‘cesspit of corruption’ and political compromise. We swore eternal friendship and raised a final, hopeful toast in the wee small hours to a better world to come.

Next morning, I took the ferry across the lime juice sea in a balmy breeze and landed on the crumbling quay of the old town and mangrove port of Lamu. Beautiful peeling ‘turkish’ arches in the decorative Swahili style with their stubby pillars and a hubbub of yells and laughter from children scampering in and out in the dust. Women walked in pairs, completely covered in black with just a pair of glittering eyes and an ankle occasional exposed to view. No cars, just narrow, donkey-cluttered streets cut by sun and shade and full of ‘marchants, grainders and wotch-menders’ shops as I knocked on doors along the way. At last, at Kenya Lodgings, the rheumy-eyed proprietor, looked me up and down and offered me a room in his somewhat down-at-heel establishment.

In this black-beamed room up a rickety flight of stairs, you shared with whoever happened to have filled the other two beds in there before you. Weather-beaten Cockney sailor Lou was well-ensconced and ready to regale all and sundry with tales of his adventures in ‘the best whorehouses’ around the world. Then Ray, a Formula Three racing driver from Hounslow who, by all accounts, had been a close rival of the famous ‘Hunt the Shunt’, later to be World Champion in the Grand Prix world. And, finally, Charles, replacing Lou who had mysteriously vanished overnight as we found one morning, a well-groomed Cambridge graduate whose father owned a shipping-line and, after a night’s carousing, offered me a free ride to Yokohama, if I could get down to Cape Town in time.

Through the square window of our little room, I watched dawn, day, dusk and night revolve. Domes and coconut palms coloured the world before me dazzling white, dove grey, deepest blue and glossy green. In the narrow channel beyond, triangular-sailed dhows billowed silently and swiftly past through a glutinous sea, clean and sharp against the mangrove coast of mainland Kenya behind them.

And for the unfolding days and nights I lived there, nobody knew where I was, apart from Lou, Charles and Ray. I was entranced, literally, mind and soul, to the extent that I failed in my filial duty to let my parents know I was still alive.

One morning, while talking to someone from the island, he told me of a tribal dance and feast due to happen that evening in celebration of a new mosque that coincided with the launch of a freshly-built dhow in Matondoni, a village devoted to the dhow-building craft on the other side of the island. ‘Why don’t you come?’, he said. ‘’Would that be all right?’ I asked. ‘Of course. Just say I invited you. I can’t be there, sadly, but that is where my family are from. Just mention my name and they will welcome you. Head West. You can’t miss it.’ So I set off on foot that afternoon in what I hoped was the right, westerly direction.

Arriving at the village some five miles away or so along a rough track, having largely resisted the temptation to stop and explore too much of the vegetation along the way, I found the whole village engaged in preparing the Great Feast.

Whole cows split in half, stomach, lungs and heart exposed to the light of day, their benign old heads still staring uncomprehendingly at their fate. Two butchers were yelling at each other, slashing razor-sharp knives within inches of their faces which glowed a demonic orange in the blazing heat of the cooking fires. Vast copper cauldrons were stuffed with rice, yams, great chunks of meat, releasing wafts of cinnamon as they simmered and bubbled under a close, stitched hide awning. While children raced around, blowing up bloody bladders and releasing them with hilarious, juicy farting noises. It was all blood and sweat and smoke and smells of spices and cooking meat, with voices calling, shouting, laughing, singing as they worked and played.

Then came the time for dancing.

It started with the Rainbow Dance, with the dancers stamping out complicated rhythms in the dust, palm rattles wrapped around their calves as they slowly formed a circle, lit by a single lamp which flickered and flashed vast shadows on the thatched, reed roves around them. Meanwhile the women stood behind them, blackly hunched in the shadows on the raised verandahs around the circle, uttering eery, warbling cries and ululations when anything or anyone pleased them in the dance.

Suddenly the ululations increased, rising higher and higher in the flickering shadows from whence they came. Something new was happening. A presence.

A towering figure that dominated all the rest.

He was what I can only describe as a kind of shamanic necromancer, part witch-doctor, part jester, demoniacally painted and feathered in brilliantly-coloured ceremonial dress, who led the dancers behind him with a driving, relentless drumming accompaniment into the centre of the torch-lit circle. With his inflated pig’s bladder attached to a stick in one hand, a broken glass bowl in the other, he whirled the bladder around his head while taunting his chosen victims, whipping all around him into a frenzy as the night darkened behind and the rhythm rose.

And then, eventually, the necromancer danced his way towards me, having picked me out and fixed me with his blazing eyes, the bladder a dancing ectoplasmic hologram of something out of Hieronymous Bosch.

Until he was there, Mephisto, his white-painted face with sweat streaming down, leaving black streaks as it fell and sprayed, spattering me too as he danced there, right in front of me.

Challenging, taunting, flirting, seducing, terrifying, teasing. It was utterly hypnotic. A presence I couldn’t escape, even if I’d wanted to. While the drumming, the dancing and the women’s high-pitched ululating cries coalesced into an impossible climax, swirling and spiralling, higher and higher.

When I woke up the next morning, I was lying on a simple and very comfortable straw mattress in a simple, cleanly swept straw hut. As I looked out, wondering how I got here, what had happened, with a vague memory of eating and drinking more than my fill following the dance, I saw that I was in the middle of this village devoted to generations of dhow-builders, those beautiful, single-masted, triangular-sailed boats with their curving prows, the design of which hadn’t changed for centuries, millennia even. And neither had their ceremonies.

‘Do not play with the thorn for it will hurt you’ sang the words of the song in my head. ‘You say hello to the man before he has come’. And I did, I did.

I walked on air back to join Lou and Charles in my lodgings in the Old Town, built over the last 700 years in the classic, traditional Swahili style bestowed by the merging of Arabic and African cultures over centuries of trading and a shared multi-cultural world that came together on this small island. The Swahili language was spoken by all, as it became the lingua franca across the whole of East Africa, a common tongue, of which I managed to pick up just enough to get by on my travels, in addition to the hundreds of individual tribal languages.

Somehow, days, then weeks went past, while, unbeknown to me, my parents were becoming more and more concerned about my whereabouts in the absence of a regular letter (yes, we wrote letters in those days). I, on the other hand, lived in this enchanted bubble, this Island in the Moon in which I became a rather more ascetic version of Blake’s Suction the Epicurean, living on my very limited budget entirely through my senses, siphoning up the other-worldly phenomena of the untethered world in which I found myself.

But it couldn’t last and, fortunately, I returned to a more prosaic consciousness before too many balloons had gone up to track me down. Nevertheless, it was a uniquely precious time in which one has no label except ‘traveller’ or ‘guest’, perhaps, open to wherever the beguiling breeze may take you, day or night, with the obligation only to receive, appreciate and be thankful in return, trusting in the goodness of humanity, the kindness of nature. And those times are rare.

To my mind, the whole African experience was somehow encapsulated in this exotic confluence of music, scents, land, light and people alike, in a kind of, why not, orchid-enchantment, a distillation we all carry somewhere in our genes, if we did but recognise it.

I never made it to Cape Town and the free trip to Yokohama and wonder sometimes how different my life might have been if I had. These forks in the road we encounter, those critical choices that we make, to turn left or right, like Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, many of which are not really choices, perhaps, more going with the stronger current, the easier flow. Whereas to take the path of greatest risk – now that is a choice, unless… you are in love with risk.

Was Africa a risk for me? I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. So, no. I embraced it with both hands and loved it. Loved the people, loved the place. The Maasai moran with whom we hunted lions and learned their songs. Sleeping in bus stops, by baker’s ovens under the stars, in Charles’s schoolroom in the fume of ochre. Charles himself, a shy, somewhat sombre man, set in his ways but with a delightful smile when something pleased him. The best driver I have ever hitched a ride with who drove his Nissan truck like a rally car. Our guided tour from Timmy round all the best Congo music clubs in Lusaka. And perhaps one character who summed it all up in the song he sang, endlessly, round and round.

On our serpentine way down to Lusaka, we stopped off on a detour to Dar-es-Salaam to pick up a colleague of Roger’s who was stationed there called Dick Brummit. With him came a little boy called Justy who was in Dick’s care for a while and who shone a light on all who encountered him.

Somewhere before or after trekking to the Kalambo Falls, second highest single drop falls in Africa and now one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, we found ourselves by a perfect, crystalline pool, high up in the mountains near the Tanzania, Zambia border. Still with the sound of the falls ringing in our ears and the consciousness of 250,000 years of known human activity in the area around us, we stripped off our clothes and plunged into the icy water, just as those early humans might have done, right there, delicious in the full heat of the midday sun.

Little Justy, typically, found a high rock above the pool and with a ‘mojo, umbele, tatu’ (one, two, three in Swahili) leapt time after time into the pool with a great scream and splash of delight. All the while, scrambling back up to the rock, he was singing his song, round and round, just one word, ‘Apilola’, round and round.

What was this song, we wondered, ‘Apilola, apilola’? And then we got it.

‘I feel all right’ – ‘A-pi-lo-la’ – it was a well-known song by The Kinks. That’s it. ‘All day and all of the night… The only time I feel all right is by your side’.

So with that anthem to hymn us on our way, we left Roger and Dick and Justy to continue on their way, and we on ours, Pad and I, together and separately and, eventually, away from Africa back to England.

250,000 years of human activity. Activity that has made its way across the globe from its start, when Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens shared the space they had and gradually settled, faded, grew, and adapted to different climates, different terroirs. Yet all with a common ancestry which such as Richard Leakey, whom we met with Charles on one occasion, have painstakingly researched and uncovered the clues as to how we humans have emerged and thrived since those early communities at the Kalambo Falls and elsewhere in continental Africa

Fact is, we are one human race, descended from one common African ancestry, whatever distinctions or discrepancies creationists, arch-nationalists, supremacists, ‘racial realists’ or other ‘ists’ like to adopt. ‘Evidence’, or statistics, as we know, can be highly subjective and selective and it is often what we leave out that can change a particular conclusion into something very different.

Fundamentally, inescapably, the truth is we are all related, whatever our colour, creed, culture or country. Sadly, in our little blinkered, fearful worlds, we seem to forget this.

Like orchids, in our relationship with the air, the earth, the fire and the water, we are at one time both unique and universal, rare and, suddenly, everywhere one looks, vulnerable and yet immensely powerful. But if our dignity is disrespected, through slavery and abuse, through exploitation and greed, through arrogance and aggression, then it all starts to fall apart.

In all my time in Africa I was never threatened once despite travelling, hitch-hiking, sleeping, eating, as often the only white person, except when we were with Charles, meeting his white African friends, travelling with Pad and Roger or in my room at Lamu. And being white, we were mzungus, and thus, by definition, privileged and prosperous. But despite every opportunity in my travels not once was I robbed or made to feel anything else but welcomed. Well, apart from being arrested as a spy on that one occasion. But even then, when the confusion had been cleared up, all was smiles and, given lonely beats and lonely wives, the policeman’s lot wherever they are, I’d call it loving kindness all in all.

Perhaps I was lucky and life has changed since then, I’m sure. People have undergone conflict, famine, disease, exploitation of all kinds and are, perhaps, less trusting, less generous, less forgiving than they were when I was there in the 1970s, alone or with my travelling companions. The climate has changed too with a drastic effect on flora and fauna, let alone the crops on which people depend. So, being threatened, both people and land withdraw their favours and, sometimes, actively fight back. To our tragic loss, in both cases. But even now, I would do it again some 47 years later with the same belief that if you show trust and respect, an open hand and an open heart, it will be rewarded in return. Something that seems to have been forgotten in so much of the world today.

For now, I have the treasured memory of the East African people in the East African land with its endless horizons and infinite variety under a vast and ever-expanding sky. The horizontally-layered thorn trees rafting into the distance with upside down baobab punctuating the bush like Tolkien ents along the way. The dense tropical rainforest with its eery calls and mysterious rustlings. The grey, misty knuckles of the Ngong Hills. The lower slopes of Mount Kenya at dawn with every sort of snuffle and scuffle in the undergrowth as I broke the rules and went walkabout for three hours very early one morning, nearly meeting my comeuppance when I found I was not the only living thing climbing a particular rise. It was not until we met face to face at the top that the side-striped jackal and I both realised and simultaneously turned tail in terror. Or the miracle of water at the fishing hut, high in the Uluguru Mountains, the clearest, freshest, most delicious water in a world where it was more precious than gold – well, to me and Pad at least. And the orchid in the dambo at Mbeya whose scents and colours and other-worldly, after-death, before-birth suspension floated me into paradise.

But England, what of England, dripping with the juice of Spring – what would it be like to follow the Spring? I wondered. Like the poet Edward Thomas in his Pursuit of Spring or The Icknield Way, in my case to walk step by step, up the lush counties of Dorset, Somerset, Gloucestershire, up through the Welsh Marches and up the peaks of Snowdonia. And then, finally, look down on my childhood, at the place where, beyond the succour and safety of home, nature became my saviour.

Like many others of the so-called ‘privileged classes’, I too experienced the kind of ‘character-forming’ deprivations and rough, corporal justice meted out by the many unhappy, if not actively damaged, staff at what was called a ‘preparatory’ school, intended in the early days for those brave souls who sallied forth, like Charles and Arthur, to uphold the backbone of Empire. But even after the world was pink no longer, these schools still upheld the traditions and values that had once made us ‘Great’, a word now forever tainted with the echoes of the slavery and exploitation that took place to fill the coffers of the privileged few, amongst whom more than one of my ancestors must be included.

Again, I was lucky enough to be able to run and jump and read and write, even if I never quite learned to add up, let alone divide. So I survived, thanks to an ability to swim rather than sink. But many never recover from the forced incarceration imposed by, usually, well-meaning and well-heeled parents wanting only the best for their little ones, even if it means sending them away from the bosom of care at the tender age of seven years old. One only has to look around at some of those who sit, or lounge, at the top of the current political tree.

But, in my case at least, the one extraordinary compensation that has lived as a positive, sanity-sustaining force within me ever since, is that of an appreciation of the wonders of nature. Of being able to wander the wilds of North Wales with relative impunity and mounting delight which, as a by-product, perhaps, may have contributed to an ability to survive and, usually, thrive, without fear in more alien and potentially intimidating environments.

So with this cathartic ‘Pursuit of Spring’ in mind, I waved a grateful good-bye to Africa, not to return until more than 30 years later.