Wild life | 17 November 2016

 Aero Club of East Africa

  The world looked so clean and untroubled during the flight in Bob’s light aircraft to George’s memorial at the Aero Club of East Africa. It was a relief to get away from the farm for a few hours. On 27 October a mob of 300 Samburu warriors armed with spears and knives cut down our boundary fences and invaded with 10,000 cattle. Since then they’ve hurled javelins and rocks at us, flattened pastures to dust, destroyed 15 kilometres of fencing, smashed windows, demolished huts, robbed what they could, cut water pipes, broken machinery and threatened our staff with murder until half of them ran for their lives. For days before the invasion we received calls from friends saying that politicians were urging the mob to hit us. I hoped the warnings were not true given that we had good relations with many of our neighbours. Those trespassers who would talk to us revealed that they were attacking precisely in order to smash up whatever plans we had to help our neighbours with grazing and their cattle. George died of burns after his air crash and his memorial was outside the Aero Club bar. The reading from Ecclesiastes and speeches by the family were intermittently drowned out by the noise of machines taxi-ing and throttling up at take-off. George had been a Royal Marine and Conrad, his fellow Bootneck and a mountain of a Kenyan, recited Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’. Giles talked about George’s Boran cattle. George’s best friend Alastair told a funny story from their days at Rannoch, when at the age of 17 they managed to get an invitation from a couple of young Australian teachers who had previously been at the school to spend half-term with them in Paris. When it was time to return to Perthshire, they claimed to have food poisoning and skived off for ten days more.