The family water stories that have become legends

When I met him as a boy, Terence Adamson was an elderly fellow whose face had been half torn away by one of his brother George’s famous lions. His disfigured features made him hard to look at, but Terence taught me how to dowse for water. He’d pick up any old stick and divine with that, or he used a pendulum or two metal rods held out in front of him as if gripping an imaginary steering wheel. In time I reckoned I could find water on my own with bent bits of coathanger wire, though I was hopeless at discovering much more than its presence. I used to watch Terence staggering around with his twigs shaking violently as he determined the salinity, flow and yield of water beneath the African soil. I think he occasionally did find fresh, plentiful water. To this day at our beach house on the Kenya coast we have a well that my father dug on Terence’s advice that is so brackish we’ve never drawn a bucket from it, while up on Mount Kenya I saw one of his wells excavated in rock by men with picks and shovels to quite a depth that was bone dry.

This week the Coconut Man visited the farm.