The first thing Aunt Edith did when she collected ten-year-old Tenniel Evans from the London docks was to replace his lightweight tropical outfit with English winter gear and woollen gloves. It was November 1936. Ahead of him lay middle-class life in a Midlands rectory with four unknown cousins. Behind him was an unconventional childhood running wild and barefoot with the totos amongst his hand-to-mouth, tumbledown family, scratching a precarious living on the fringes of Kenyan society.
It was the winning of a scholarship to Christ's Hospital school that took him for ever from his halcyon youth at Porgies - a mud-and-wattle bungalow facing the blue hills of the Trans-Nzoia - to Allesley Rectory, a big dark house run by the wonderful, horse-faced Cousin Ailie. In England he learned that life was extremely serious and that chilblains itched just as much as tropical jiggers. But he learned too that his second family at the rectory was just as loving and idiosyncratic as the parents and siblings he had left behind, and whom he was not to see again for twenty years.
