Through the war years Mario fell ill several times with malaria. ‘I don’t know what is worse; the fever or the shivering,’ he wrote. ‘There is no quinine. Cold water is the best we can hope for.’ Beyond the heartache and the loneliness there was a cold reality about malaria in Africa that is as relevant now as it was then. With access to efficient anti-malarial drugs, Giselle and her children remained healthy. Mario, who like so many Africans today did not have the medicines he needed, did not.
Back in Kenya in the early 1950s he had a third bad attack, and in 1958 a fourth while on a long winter visit to Europe. After that, it would often strike when the rainy season was under way. Our farm, with its warm climate and its clumps of thick papyrus that stretched out for yards into Lake Naivasha, was the perfect habitat for the Anopheles mosquito that spreads the disease. In the rainy season, when the mosquito larvae hatch in their thousands, it can be especially bad, and even today we always sleep under mosquito nets.
I have had malaria only once, when I was eighteen. I had been on holiday at the mosquito-ridden Kenyan coast, and cared little about remembering my pills. That was enough. Soon after I returned, I began feeling unwell. I took my temperature. 101°F. By nightfall it was up to 104° and I was beginning to hallucinate. With any other illness, I have always felt that I was still myself. I might be in pain or feel nauseous, but I was me – only sicker. Sick with malaria, however, my body felt it was no longer my own. It had been invaded, as if it had been subjected to a military coup. I remember walking into my father’s bedroom; I watched myself, as if I were another person completely. The fever was just beginning to shoot up. The parasites in my blood that had invaded the red corpuscles were splitting them open and destroying them in a rampant urge to reproduce. I lay down on the bed, and passed out. After that everything is blank. My blood had been hijacked. That is how the delirium begins. ‘I have lain on my cot for forty days,’ the explorer David Livingstone wrote to his wife from Luanda, in present-day Angola, in 1854. ‘So fierce was the delirium that I remember almost nothing of it.’ The fever would kill him nearly twenty years later. Clearly, I was lucky.
My father gets it more often than any of us, and worse. Just a few days before I wrote this, he called to say he was ill again. ‘I began to feel colder and colder and colder,’ he told me, his voice thin with fever. ‘I got into bed with a hot water bottle and kept piling on blankets. For two or three hours I just shivered and shuddered as if I was in an icy blast. Then, suddenly, it stopped. And I started getting hotter and hotter and hotter, and throwing all my covers off. Forty-eight hours later it started all over again. And every forty-eight hours it’s been the same for about a week.’
As always, my father went to his Italian doctor in Nairobi, Mauro Saio, one of the world’s leading specialists in treating malaria. Dr Saio has worked so long with the disease that he named his speedboat Anopheles after the mosquito that spreads the disease. ‘You have headache, vomiting, diarrhoea,’ he explained, ‘and if it’s not caught in time and the parasites keep reproducing, you can have respiratory distress and systemic organ failure.’
For Dr Saio, combatting malaria is a campaign. As he told me the first time we met, ‘It’s a battle. A hard battle. I know this disease. I fight this disease every day of my life. It is my personal enemy.’
My grandparents tried to protect themselves and us, my sister and my four cousins. As far back as I can remember, the daily ritual of breakfast on the farm was broken on Sundays by the distribution of the quinine, or its modern chloroquine-based equivalent, Nivaquine: two tablets for the grown-ups, and for the children a spoonful of Nivaquine syrup, which was increased to two spoonfuls when we were about twelve years old. Oh, it tasted awful. It wasn’t like today, when pharmaceutical companies try to make their medicines palatable to children; in the 1960s they had other priorities—all a medicine was required to do was to work, and you just had to take it. Quinine is marked by its particularly bitter taste. Over the centuries, many people have refused to swallow it for fear that they were being poisoned.
Nivaquine is also bitter, and the vile taste of the syrup clings to your teeth and gums long after you have swallowed it down. Just writing about it makes me wince at the memory. It tasted so ghastly that my grandfather had to devise his own method for persuading us children to take it. He bribed us. If we swallowed down the Nivaquine, we were allowed to choose what we would have for Sunday lunch.
This was no mean bribe, for my grandfather was a tremendous cook. By his place at the head of the table lay a book covered in well-loved, shiny dark red leather. Il Talismano della Felicità was written nearly a hundred years ago, and it contains instructions for making every manner of Neapolitan delicacy. Once we had all swallowed our Nivaquine, my grandfather would pour himself another cup of black coffee, drop into it a lump of sugar, light a cigarette and then reach for his Talismano. Slowly he would turn the pages, stretching out the agony of anticipation. And then he would begin, in a deep, sonorous voice. ‘So, bambine, what will it be today? Pizze fritte? Sartù di riso? Maccheroni al ragù? Melanzane alla parmigiana?’ We would vie to be the one who made the final choice, completely forgetting the filthy taste of the Nivaquine in our anticipation of the meal to come. In our house, the danger of malaria was vanquished by greed.
When I was fourteen, I was sent to boarding school in England. I arrived at my new convent school in Sussex on a bleak January afternoon. Snow-filled clouds hung over the landscape like a laundry bag waiting to burst. One of the Irish nuns showed me into a dormitory with seven beds covered with old rose-coloured candlewick bedspreads. Her manner was brisk, and she didn’t stay long. I had arrived in the middle of the day in the middle of the school year, and she had things to be getting on with. The other girls were in class, and every bed in the dormitory had been taken except one, that stood alone in the middle of the floor. Slowly I unpacked my trunk, and stowed away the clothes my aunt had ordered off a long list from a department store in central London: thick white underpants (inner, changed daily), huge navy-blue serge underpants (outer, changed weekly). I thought of running barefoot in the soft African dust and splashing in the ditches by the side of the farm roads, and felt a bit sick with the longing to be back home. None of my roommates, it turned out, had ever been to Africa. They giggled among themselves and argued endlessly about the merits of rival pop stars. At night, they tossed and mumbled and farted in their sleep. There was not a moment of privacy. We even had to share baths. By the end of term the seven of us had been living so closely together for so long that our menstrual periods all began and ended on the same day. But that did not bring us closer. The loneliness of living in a foreign crowd so far from home was with me always. I felt that I had landed on another planet. There was something about the fact that my family, my entire tribe, had packed up everything it owned and turned its back on Europe that set me apart. It was as if I had lived my entire life in another language.
As the winter wore on through February and the windy weeks of March, I felt as if it would never end. I missed my sisters and the mental shorthand we assumed together because we had always lived in the same house. I missed the tropical rituals: barbecues at Christmas, snow that came in tins for spraying on the Christmas tree, and the way the sun went down every day at the same hour, whatever the season. I even missed the beastly Nivaquine, for the danger that forced us to take it was something familiar to me. I missed my grandfather’s sweet tomato sauce, and the smell of the land after it had rained. I missed everything so much that I would lie awake at night trying to conjure up the smells of home. It was as hard as sewing raindrops.
Then one day, on one of the rare weekends we were allowed out, a friend of my father’s took me on a long Tube journey to St Joseph’s Foreign Missionary Society in Mill Hill, in the very outer suburbs of north London, where he had to pick up a package. St Joseph’s was the male equivalent of the convent school I attended. But while