At first I thought she wanted love and then I found she wanted freedom

For millions of years before Kenya was called Kenya, the name belonged to the greatest mountain there. Our farm is in Njoro, and you can see it standing on the farm. The mountain is in the British Territory of East Africa, and the far end of the ridge is sharply demarcated into golden grasslands. On the top of the mountain is the snow that does not melt all the year round, just like wearing the snow and ice crown to the mountain. Behind our farm is the Mau Forest, which is shrouded in a blue mist. In front of the farm, Longgai Gorge slopes down and widens until it joins the Menangai crater, known locally as the "sacred Mountain". On the other side of the farm are the Aberdare Mountains, surrounded by blue-grey hills. At dusk, purple smoke hung over the hills, which grew shadowy and faded into the night.

We first came here in 1904. At the time, the farm was little more than 150 acres of wild brush and three weather-beaten log cabins.

"Is that all?" "My mother asked. The air around her seemed to be ignited by her anger, splashing with a buzzing spark. "You sold everything for this?"

"The other farmers are worse off, Clara." "My father said.

'But you're not a farmer, Charles! Mother shouted and then began to cry.

Actually, my father was a jockey. He was familiar with steeplechases and fox hunting, and spent his days on the training tracks and fenced fences of Rutland, England. But he had read in a leaflet that a large piece of imperial land had been bought cheaply, and it had stuck in his mind ever since. So we left Westfield, where I was born, and traveled 7,000 miles through Tunis, Tripoli, and the Suez Canal. The waves on the river were like gray mountains, constantly swallowing the sky. Then we passed through Killindini port and came to Mombasa port. With the pungent smell of spices and the stench of dead fish, we caught a train to Nairobi. The railway snaked along, the Windows covered with red rust. I looked around with my eyes wide open and felt a fear I had never felt before. Whatever the place looked like, it was unlike anything I had ever seen.

We stayed here and tried to make it more livable. We tried to fight the wilderness, but it took everything with it to defeat us. Our territory had no clearly visible borders or fences, and our wooden houses had no proper doors. Sly colobus monkeys trooped through the burlap that covered the window. There's not even a pipe in here. When you want to relieve yourself at night, you have to go outside in the dark. There's all kinds of unexpected dangers out there, and you need to get your hips up a little bit. If you are afraid, you can only whistle away the fear.

Sir Delamere and his lady were our nearest white neighbours, and they lived seven miles away. There are large bushes between our houses. They were baron and Baroness, but those titles did not spare them from living in mud and thatch huts. Mrs. D kept a loaded pistol under her pillow and advised my mother to do the same -- but she didn't listen. My mother didn't want to kill snakes for dinner, or walk miles to fetch water before she could take a proper bath, or live in these lonely conditions for months at a time. There was no social interaction, and her hands were dirty all day. Life was hard.

Two years later, my mother booked a ticket back to England. My brother Dickie had to go with her, too, because he was too weak to adapt to the African climate. At that time, I was not yet five years old. Mother and brother boarded the twice-weekly train to Nairobi, carrying suitcases, clutching handkerchiefs and wearing travelling shoes. Mother kissed me and the feathers on her mask quivered. She told me to be brave and strong, and she knew I would be fine because I was a strong big girl. She also promised to send me a box of licorice sticks and pear candies bought in Piccadilly, which I could eat by myself and not share with anyone.

I watched the train on the black track, not quite believing that my mother was gone. As the last car was swallowed by the yellow hills in the distance, my father turned to look at me and then returned to his work on the farm. Up to that point, I thought it was all a mistake, and it wouldn't be long before they realized how wrong they were and put it right. Mother and Dickie would get off at the next stop, or turn around in Nairobi and return the next day. But none of this happened. I had no choice but to wait, listening to the roar of the train and watching the horizon. I felt my heart beating cautiously, afraid to miss something.

Months went by with no news of my mother, not even a brief telegram. Then, I received candy from my mother. The candy box was heavy, and my name was written on it alone -- Beryl Clutterbuck, in my mother's usual cursive script. Looking at my mother's handwriting, at the familiar dots and circles, MY eyes blurred with tears. I took the box and tucked it under my arm. Then I found a private corner and cried. I ate more than half of the crumbled sugar until my stomach couldn't hold it anymore and I spat it out again.

Then, unable to drink any of my father's tea, I plucked up the courage to say what I feared most: "Mother and Dickie are not coming back, are they?"

My father looked at me with a pained expression. "I don't know.

'Perhaps she's waiting for us to come to her.

My father was silent for a long time before finally suggesting that she might think so. "This is our home now," he said. "I haven't given up on this place, have you?"

My father gave me the right to choose, but the choice was not easy. The question was not "Do you want to stay here with me?" that decision had been made months earlier. He wanted to know if I would love life here as much as he did, if I would love this place, even if my mother would never come back, and I might never be with her for the rest of my life.

How do I respond? Looking around, the half-empty cabinet reminded me that my mother and brother had left, and that they had taken with them the things that had once been there -- four gold teacups, a pack of game cards, amber beads on a necklace that was my mother's favorite. My mother's death still hurts me. I did not know how to forget my mother, and my father did not know how to comfort me. He carried me into his lap, and I was a little dirty with my long arms and legs, as if I had always been. So we sat in silence. At the edge of the forest, a group of hoodoos warned each other with their shrill cries, and one of our greyhounds pricked up his ears for a moment, then sank down by the fire and fell comfortably asleep. Finally, my father let out a sigh. He lifted me up with both hands, looked into the dried tears, kissed me gently, and laid me on the ground.

2

Miwanzo means "to begin" in Swahili. But sometimes it is only when everything that was there falls apart and disappears that there can be a new life. My mother's departure was exactly that, though I hadn't thought of it yet. I was depressed and miserable for a long time. Are my parents divorced? Does mother still love and miss us? How could she just leave me like that? I wasn't ready to ask my father, because he wasn't always as gentle as other fathers, and I didn't know how to share these secret, sad feelings.

In the days that followed, something special happened in my life. On the edge of our farm, near the Mawu forest, there are some Kipisikis. They lived in huts made of mud and branches, surrounded by tall spiny plants called "Bomas". I don't know where they learned about my situation, before I opened my mouth, they volunteered to help me. One of the older women picked me up and whispered a string of magical words as she tied an agate shell around my waist. Her movements were solemn, as if in some sort of ritual. The agate shell was strung on a leather rope and swung back and forth, as if imitating the closed "shell" between my legs, in order to dispel the evil spirits within me. This is what they do when every Kipisikis girl is born. Even though I was a white girl, the daughter of their white boss, what happened to me made them obligatory. No mother in Africa would leave her child, or even think about it, and I was healthy, neither disabled nor infirm. So, they took the first step toward me, accepting me as their "Lakhvi," which means "little girl."

I was thin, I walked with a slight instep, and my light blond hair was always unkempt, but my new status soon made me strong. I ran all day between the hills and the villages of the Kipisikis, and soon hard calluses developed on my feet. This land used to terrify me, but now I know it very well. Increasingly familiar, too, are the zebra skins on the beds. When night fell, I would crawl under the skin of the zebra and lie there, waiting for the footman to walk into my room barefoot and light the lantern. Sometimes the lizards were frightened by the sudden light of the fire and the hissing sound of the burning wick, and they crept into the cracks, making a sound like little sticks beating against the straw. And diurnal insects, such as wasps and wall flies, have begun to return to their nests, which are on the walls of my room. I would stay like this for an hour or two, watching the shadows of the furniture in the room, which was made of paraffin wax boxes. I listened until my father made no more noise, then I would slip out of the open window into the dark fields to find my friend Zippy, whose house was near a bonfire.

On nights like this, Zipi's mother and other Kipisikis women liked to sit around the fire and tell tales of the origin of all things over dark tea brewed from bark and nettles. I learned most of my Swahili from them. At the same time, I like listening to their stories more and more. From these stories, I know how the hyena sprained its foot and how the chameleon was patient. I also know that the god of wind and the god of rain were once human beings. Most of these women have wrinkled skin, toothless bodies like soft ebony. Beneath their faded shuka clothes are limbs with shrivelled muscles. I loved them and the stories they told, but I wanted Zippy to be like the other toto (boys) -- the young Moran who was guarding the village.

In the village, a girl's duty is to stay at home and work. But because of my special status, I broke that tradition. At least, in those days, the grown-ups of the tribe allowed me to train with Zippy in javelin-throwing or warthog hunting. Zibe's father, Myra, was an Arap of the village, the leader of the guards and my idol. Zippy and I learned tactical operations from him. In my mind, he represents fearlessness and strength. I learned to make bows and arrows, and with them I hunted turtledoves, waxwings, and pretty starlings. I know how to make a whip out of a rhino's skin, and I can make a noose out of a rope tied to a stick, and then I can swing it out and hit it. Soon I was as tall as Zippy, and then I overtook him. I can run across the grass as fast as he can. The grass was covered with tall, golden grass, and our feet were very gray in it.

Zippy and I often walked out into the night. There is freshly cut grass around the farm to mark the boundaries of the farm. We crossed the border and went straight ahead. The tall grass was dewy and wet our thighs. We climbed the green mountain and came to the edge of the forest. There were leopards in the woods at night, and I had seen my father lure them with goats. As my father and I crouched down on the tank to avoid the leopard, the goat that was being used as bait seemed to smell the leopard and began to shout. Father adjusted his rifle, hoping for a single hit. The forest is full of danger, but we understand who is making every sound and the message behind it. These noises are made by cicadas, tree frogs and fat, vole-like hoodoos, which are distantly related to elephants. Sometimes we hear elephants running from far away, but they are afraid of horses, so they don't come too close. In the tree holes lived snakes that coiled themselves around the trees and swung like ropes, or wound themselves around the equally smooth mahogany with just their smooth undersides.

Zippy and I spent countless wonderful nights together over the years. On long afternoons, we would hunt or ride horses together. By chopping with machetes, pulling with ropes, treading with feet and sprinkling with salt, we finally cleared away the wild trees and weeds and made the place suitable for farming. My father planted corn and wheat here, and they grew very well. With the money my father earned, he bought two old steam engines. We put the steam engines in the mill. They were the heart of the mill, and Green Hill farm was the most important artery in Njoro. Soon, when you stand on the top of the hill and look over the terraced fields and the one-man high cornfields, you can see the rolling oxen hauling grain to the mill. The mill went on and on. The number of workers we employed doubled, then tripled. We hired Kikuyu, Kawilondo, Nandi, Kipisikis, and the Dutch. They waved whips and drove along in oxcarts. Our little iron shed was taken down, and a stable was put up in its place, and then several more. The pens were full of hay, and the best horses in Africa, my father told me, and the best horses in the world.

Lying in bed at night, hearing the noise on all sides, I still think of my mother and Dickie. They never wrote to us, at least not to me, so IT's hard for me to imagine their lives now. Our house in England has been sold. Where are they living now? The trees and stars were completely different from what we had seen in Njoro, the rain was different in England, the feeling of living there, the color of the afternoon sun, everything was different. We've been apart for so many months, so many afternoons.

Gradually, it became difficult for me to remember what my mother looked like, what she said to me and the time we spent together. I have a long life ahead of me, longer than I could have imagined. Time changes everything, the shape of the Menangai crater and the hard blue peaks of Kenya. It's safer for me to move on, because I can push my mother to the edge of memory, to a place where she can't hurt me. Then I wouldn't have to think about her anymore, and if I did, I could take it as a necessary test. I took my mother's departure as a test I had to complete in order to become The "Lakvi" of Kipisikis.

One thing was certain: I belonged to the farm, to the land. I had blended into the thorny trees, the high cliffs, the vegetated slopes, the deep rock crevices, the thick weeds, I was a part of them. I'm living again here, it's like having a second life, a real life. This is my home. Though it may one day be as scattered as the red dirt between my fingers, at least it was the perfect paradise for me throughout my childhood. I really love this place. I was born for it.