Talking Location With Kelli Estes – The West Highland Way, SCOTLAND
Novel set in 1950s Kenya
21st May 2017
Leopard at the Door by Jennifer McVeigh, novel set in 1950s Kenya – plus #TalkingLocationWith… the author.
Jennifer McVeigh came to prominence with her first book, The Fever Tree, set in 1880s South Africa, which was picked for the Richard and Judy bookclub, garnering a lot of high starred reviews.
Leopard at the Door is set in 1952 Kenya, when the white settlers and their way of life are facing growing resistance from the local population. But even amongst the indiginous Kenyans there are diverse factions, the most extreme being the Mau Mau insurgents who, it seems, will go to any length to disrupt and intimidate the white rulers. India gained independence a few years previously, Kenya now, in the 1950s – at the very time Queen Elisabeth II is ascending the throne – is heading that way and the writing is on the wall for those who choose to see it. It is a tough place, it has always been demanding of the settlers: “men who haven’t lived in Kenya cannot know what it asks of you..”
Rachel has been away for some six years, at boarding school in the UK following the death of her mother. She returns to 
her beloved homeland, where she is searching for the connection to family life that was so cruelly cut short. Her dog is still there, the servants are still in post, but her father has omitted to share with her that he has a new woman by his side, who has brought her son Harold with her into the relationship. The set-up feels so familiar to her in many ways yet profoundly unsettling in others.
From her memory she dredges an incident from her childhood that comes to haunt her throughout the story. The author does not stint on descriptions of the utter cruelty and madness that was rife during this period, both to humans and animals, and through her excellent prose draws a crackling and credible story of the last days of empire.
The author is masterful at creating characters within a very well described setting – both politically and environmentally. Kenya of the time feels very real. It is the pathos of the story unfolding that kept me absolutely hooked in, and without doubt this is one of my top reads 2017. Highly recommended. The recommendation does come with a warning, the levels of violence described are quite disturbing, although I am sure reflect things as they were.
Finally, before I sign off, I just have to mention the cover, both first (left) and second (right). Our review copy is the one on the left, the first one, and those eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that it is still – as I write – the cover for the paperback edition due out in July. I understand that it will also be changed to the one you see here on the right.
I pushed our early copy on out “To be read” (TBR) to one side, three times. I looked at the cover, thought maybe it was some 1950s re-hash of a story, very much of its era, a little too wholesome and rather old-fashioned. It in no way conveyed the excellent and riveting content. Cover two I fear will also have people passing over it, although there is a distinct improvement with the stronger and eye catching colour on the right. Neither really would catch my eye in a book shop, and that is a real shame. I am giving the content 5* and hope that readers will indeed pick up the book irrespective of cover.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
Over to Jennifer for a #TalkingLocationWith … feature,
A Journey in the Footsteps of a Character
The Muthaiga Club
Leopard at the Door begins with a journey. Rachel – the young girl in the novel – is returning to the family farm in Kenya in 1952, after five years in England. Two years ago, I embarked on a road trip to retrace her footsteps. Like Rachel, I spent my first night in Nairobi, at the Muthaiga Club – that famous bastion of colonial life, opened in 1913 by settler farmers. It is a pink, colonnaded building sitting placidly in an oasis of well-watered green lawns, stubbornly holding back the chaos and fumes of Nairobi’s rapidly developing urban center. The rooms within are paneled with dark wood, lined with photographs of English men in cricket whites, and an old display cabinet at the end of the corridor holds a lion’s head shot by a white hunter in a bygone era. Life moves slowly at Muthaiga, and the air is warm. Dinner is served on a squeaking trolley, and just outside on the darkened terrace, a man sweeps up the jacaranda blossom, in a rhythmic, soothing motion. Flicking through the pages of Karen Blixen, it was difficult to believe that Independence had changed this country; population explosion and telecoms seemed to be words from a far off future.
Jennifer’s car parked by a lake on safari in E Africa
The following morning I set out on Kenya’s notoriously lethal roads, for the long drive to Rachel’s farm on the edge of the Rift Valley, in what was formerly known as the White Highlands. Beyond Muthaiga was Nairobi; a city in overhaul, crammed with cranes and half-erected concrete blocks. Music – reggae, raga and harder beats – boomed out of passing cars. We drifted into a traffic jam, sun radiating off glinting metal. A pick up truck with fading blue paint panted out clouds of black smoke, the back crammed arm to arm with thirty guys talking, joking, sleeping. Nairobi has a sweltering, infectious energy.
We drove out of the city with the windows wound down, a grey dust sifting through the windows, growing redder as we left the city. The road was bordered with billboards, carcasses of empty buildings plastered over with painted advertising, shops with corrugated roves, their walls a lurid pea-green, blue, red. Women sprawled on a stretch of lawn set back from the road, in smart city clothes, laughing. We overtook a lorry, driving into the black smoke which pumped out from under its tyres, then slowed down for a security check point. A large printed sign read, This is a no corruption zone. Giving and Receiving money is strictly prohibited.
Road Side shacks in East Africa
The landscape became more rural, the density of buildings outside Nairobi giving way to lush vegetation, banana palms and fruit trees. Terraced fields were patched across the lower slopes of a mountain, and schools were advertised, their metal signs painted in the large formal, faded lettering of the colonial era. “Secondary school: day and boarding,” and “The East African Leadership Academy.” I wondered how different this was from the Kenya of 60 years ago. How much of this would my character have seen on her way back to her farm in 1952, after six years in England?
We passed football pitches behind a sagging wire fence, kids in uniform kicking a ball on a dusty pitch. Flat topped acacias cast their shade over villages nestled into the landscape, metal roves winking in the sun. A man walked behind a herd of sheep, a stick resting along his neck and shoulders. The sheep stood bleating on the side of the road, their wool filthy and matted, until he beat the earth around them and they stirred into scattered motion. Everywhere was a riot of colour. Women with babies strapped to their backs were wrapped in brightly coloured scarves. It had rained and the grass was an iridescent green. Cow hides dried on the side of the road. A man was fixing upturned bicycles under the shade of an acacia, while a woman squatted beside him cracking open coconuts. Over a bridge, and a muddy brown river. A boy far below bent down and dipped a yellow drum into the river to collect water. Cactuses with bright yellow flowers sprouted from the bushes. The wooden shacks had their slatted sides hand-painted with Safari.com.
I spotted the first giraffe, its long neck stretching up like the leafless trunk of a tree. We drove on through the urban sprawl of what was once the tiny colonial town of Nakuru until an hour later we were deep in the bush, on a dusty, pot holed track which stretched as far as the eye could see. On into a land of staggering beauty, scarcely changed since time began, into the heart of my story.
The drive remains with me, a vision of Kenya’s past and its future, and the very foundation of Leopard at the Door.
Thank you so much to Jennifer for this brilliant piece, trying to get a feel of present-day Kenya and what it might have been like in 1952. You can follow her on Twitter and via her website
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I love books about Kenya – and I’ll never forget “White Mischief.” I stayed in the fabled Norfolk Hotel twice when I was in Nairobi. It still conveys the atmosphere of the long-gone days of British rule.