How two children vanished for a week en route from Africa to London

As we all know by now, the pandemic distorts time like a concertina. Life before March is a world that seems too distant, an image viewed down a telescope held the wrong way — yet there are moments when the months retract into almost hours. We are still castaways in London, still waiting for the airspace to open so that we can fly home to Kenya. I feel glum about it, then remember how my father was marooned for 12 years in southern Arabia and Africa on either side of the war. He missed his mother, as I do, sitting in his mud tower on the edge of the Empty Quarter listening to Churchill on the wireless broadcasting about faraway battles. Letters arrived every few weeks or months and he just got on with his adventures.

These days one’s physical disappearance means very little so long as you can talk to people at all hours of the day. This reminds me of the escapades of legendary Kenyan beauty Yolanda McIntyre made famous by her cameo role in the movie Out of Africa, when she slips out of the Muthaiga Club with Bror Blixen and leaves her knickers on the back seat of the jalopy for Meryl Streep to find. But her adventures began way before that. When she was 14, and it was time to head back to Millfield at the end of the school holidays, her mother said goodbye at Nairobi airport. Yolanda, accompanied by a child named Michael, flew cattle class on EgyptAir. This was in 1972. After they landed in Cairo, where they were to switch planes, a man in a fez came up and announced that no flights would be connecting to London for a week. The children had no money and it was four o’clock in the morning.

After wandering around the airport, Yolanda and Michael decided to jump on to a bus full of chickens and somehow this took them right up to the gates of the British embassy.