Raised by her eccentric grandparents at Annes Grove in County Cork, an Irish stately home famed for its beautiful gardens, Diana Duff grew up in an enchanted world of family ghosts, buried treasure and banshees. Hers was a magical childhood, filled with a wealth of fascinating characters: Doyle, the diminutive and belligerent stablehand, Great-Uncle Beresford, who conversed with God in the bath, and the redoubtable Molly O'Reilly, cook, housekeeper and the heart of the household. At the age of eighteen, Diana left Annes Grove in search of the excitement, glamour and heady freedom of fifties' Kenya. After working as a stand-in for Grace Kelly in the film Mogambo and a short stint as a nurse, she married a young officer in the Colonial Service, and the couple moved to an isolated house in the heart of Kikuyu land at the height of the bloody Mau Mau rebellion. On the move again in the sixties, Diana and her family relocated to Tanganyika, where she founded the first mixed-race nursery school in East Africa before a transfer saw the family shifting to a South Africa cruelly divided by apartheid. With the Irish charm of 'Angela's Ashes' and the exotic appeal of 'Out of Africa', 'Leaves from the Fig Tree' is an utterly beguiling memoir.
