A few days later they finally reached their African landfall. For Gerald it was a moment of overwhelming magic:
The ship nosed its way through the morning mist across a sea as smooth as silk. A faint and exciting smell came to us from the invisible shore, the smell of flowers, damp vegetation, palm oil, and a thousand other intoxicating scents drawn up from the earth by the rising sun, a pale, moist-looking nimbus of sun seen dimly through the mists. As it rose higher and higher, the heat of its rays loosened the hold the mist had on land and sea, and gradually the bay and the coastline came into view and gave me my first glimpse of Africa.
Ahead, across the glittering waters, he could see a scatter of jungly islands, and behind them the coastlands that rose in forested waves upwards to where Mount Cameroon loomed, ‘dim and gigantic’, in the early morning light. Across the islands flocks of grey parrots were making their way towards the forested shore, the air full of their clownish excited screams and whistles. Astern, in the glistening wake of the ship, Gerald saw a fish eagle swoop out of the dispersing mist, and two brown kites circling overhead, scavenging for scraps. And then he smelled that magic smell again – ‘stronger, richer, intoxicating with its promise of deep forest, of lush reedy swamps, and wide magical rivers under a canopy of trees’ – the smell of Africa. ‘We landed,’ he recalled, ‘as in a dream.’
Years later, remembering that first landfall with aching nostalgia, he confided to a friend: ‘It had such a powerful impact that I was drugged for hours, even days, afterwards. One glass of beer that morning and I was as high as an eagle. To sit there, drink a beer, watch a lizard, vivid orange and swimming-pool blue, just nodding his head on the balcony. It’s there for ever in my mind, much more than reality, because it was alive and I was alive.’
For Gerald and his friend John Yealland every minute of those first few days in Africa – every sight, every sound, every face, every creature, every plant – was a source of wonder and delight. It was as if they had been born again – nothing was familiar, nothing expected. Hither and thither they went, ecstatic and bemused, like men in a mescaline trance. ‘On the very first night,’ Gerald recalled, ‘we had dinner and drifted down to the little botanical gardens there. The British always had a habit of making botanical gardens, like country clubs, wherever they went. And with torches we walked down a tiny stream with all this lush undergrowth. And like a couple of schoolkids we picked up whatever we found, tree frogs, woodlice, centipedes, anything, carted it all back to the rest house in jars and boxes, and oohed and gooed over them all until three in the morning.’
From the little white rest house on top of a hill in the flower-filled little capital town of Victoria (population a meagre 3500), Gerald wrote to his mother in the first paroxysm of enthusiasm: ‘The country around here is simply beautiful, and John and I go round gasping at the birds and flowers.’ Wherever they turned they found a myriad of exotic creatures. On a palm nut plantation a little out of town they discovered giant millipedes – ‘our first catch, six inches long and as thick as a sausage’. Down on the beach they were amazed to find a strange species of crab – ‘purple in colour, with one huge claw and one small’ – and a score of mud skippers, ‘a small fish with a head like a hippo’. ‘If everything is as plentiful,’ Gerald wrote home, ‘we should make a fortune in no time.’
Often they had to enlist the help of local Africans, communicating as best they could in pidgin English – a genuine lingua franca at which Gerald soon became highly adept. To his mother he described a typical encounter.
ME: Goodmorning. (Very British)
NATIVE: Goodmorning, sah. (Taking off filthy rag which is his hat)
ME: We look for small beef.* You have small beef here?
NATIVE: Sah?
ME: Small beef … SMALL BEEF.
NATIVE: Ah! Small beef, sah? Yes, we hab plenty, sah, plenty.
ME: (In Victorian tones) Where dis small beef, ay?
(Native now makes remark which I can’t understand, and points)
ME: (Pretending to understand) Ah ah! Dis place far far?
NATIVE: No, sah, you walker walker for fibe minutes, sah.
ME: (With lordly wave of hand) Good, you show me.
And so the procession started: the two natives in front, John and I behind, feeling like a Hollywood film set. We marched like this for half a mile, and then we found the two natives arguing on the banks of a very fast river. I asked one of them how we were supposed to get across, and he said he would carry us. Thinking we would have to get used to this sort of thing, I uttered a short prayer and got on his back. How he got across I don’t know: the water was up to his thighs, and the river bed was made up of these huge boulders. To my surprise he got me over safely and returned for John. I have never seen anything so funny – John clutching his topee, with one arm round the native’s neck and a huge bag of specimen boxes slung on his back. When they reached the middle of the stream, the most difficult part, John started to laugh, and this started the native off. They both stood there, swaying in the middle of the stream, hooting with laughter, and I expected at any moment to see them fall into the water and all my valuable specimens floating down stream.
Emerging from the river adventure safe and sound and laden with ‘small beef’, but dripping with sweat and very hot, the Englishmen asked if there were any coconuts about – coconut milk being the only safe thing to drink in these parts.
We punched holes in the nuts and sat by the side of the road drinking. About half a mile down from us they were pruning the tall palms, and we could see the men high up in the trees, sitting in the grass rope seats, chopping the great fronds off. Each time one fell it made a loud swish, and then a big thonk as it hit the ground. The workers were singing to each other as they worked, and it was most attractive to listen to. They make up a short verse about anything that takes their fancy and each verse ends with a prolonged wail like: Eoooo Eoooo. When the D.O. came along in his car they sang: ‘The D.O. is here in his car … eooooo eoooo.’ Then there was a short pause, and another one would sing out: ‘He is going to Bemanda to get milk … eoooo eoooo.’ And so on. What with the birds singing, the crickets shouting, the swish of the falling fronds, and this curious wailing song echoing through the trees, it was a wonderful experience. John sat there with sweat dripping down his face, his topee tilted back, swigging at his coconut and ejaculating at intervals: ‘Bloody marvellous, boy!’
Victoria was merely a curtain-raiser to the real show, and ‘small beef’ were small beer compared to the ‘big, big beef’ they hoped to find in the wild interior. Much of the first week was spent sorting themselves out and stocking up with supplies for the six months of adventures that lay ahead. Their immediate plan was to drive two hundred miles to the small up-country town of Mamfe, which would be their springboard to the wilder country of the primeval rainforest that stretched all around.
On Monday, 5 January 1948, they finally set off in a manner to which they were soon to become accustomed. For a start, the lorry turned up four hours late and turned out to be crowded with the driver’s relatives, whom Gerald had to clear out, along with their household goods and livestock. The driver himself did not inspire much confidence, for as he was turning the lorry for loading he twice backed into the rest house wall and once into the hibiscus hedge. The expedition’s baggage was tossed into the back with such wild abandon that Gerald wondered if any of it would arrive intact in Mamfe. ‘I need not have worried,’ he noted later. ‘It turned out that only the most indispensable and irreplaceable things got broken.’ The name of the lorry – ‘The Godspeed’ – was painted in large white letters above the windscreen. ‘It was not until later,’ Gerald was to write, ‘that we discovered what a euphemism the name really was.’
So the great adventure began. Gerald’s letters to Mother (never published before)