When I sit Beneath the acacia, which shades the cottage verandah and frames distant Kilimanjaro and which is bedecked with weavers’ nests which hang bauble like from branches, I wonder if dad sat beneath the same tree.

‘How old do you think it is?’ I ask Ant.

‘Oh’, he says, ‘at least fifty years, probably more.’

And I am satisfied. I am sitting where Dad has sat.

We are in sprawling Tsavo West with its long tipping views that stretch to wrap huge mountains and greedily gather up great handfuls of spilling plains. We are staying the same bandas I stayed in as a child.

I sit now, beneath Dad’s acacia, watching my mountain view – back to front here for I live on Kili’s Western edge and so my perspective on it is slewed from this position. And  I chuck bread crumbs at the starlings and sparrow weavers and hornbills which cheekily beg. They come close and nag loudly, ‘more, more!’ They shout. 

As a child I sat motionless on the steps of the same verandah, a Hansel and Gretel trail of crumbs carefully and temptingly and strategically placed in the Hope I’d draw a squirrel in – for they scuttle  about here too, skittering nervously looking for scraps which they dainty raise to their mouths to nibble with two front paws. I wanted one as a pet. I wanted one so badly. When finally, after patient hours, one grew so tame it took crusts from my fingers, I imagined myself as some Dr Doolittle protege, conjuring conversations with wild animals.

When I get back home, to the right side of the mountain, I write a letter to mum. I describe the views, the camp, the squirrels and birds. I describe the elephants, the leopard we saw, the storms that rolled in and charcoaled the heavens black and then rolled out taking the rain so that they left the sky watercolour blue and the road wet – so wet we watched cheetah drink from puddles and whole herds of elephant wallow in them.

I paint as vivid a picture as I can. Huge, Technicolor brush-strokes; I hope my words will colour in the blanks. 

I hope she will remember something. Something of those precious, faraway long gone days. Of my back-to-front mountain view. Of the nighttime whoop-whoop of hyenas. Of the greedy, chattering birds. Of hurricane lamps and camp fires. Of dad taking us on safari to exactly the same place when we were little.

But it does not. She remembers nothing.

By lunchtime, when I speak to her, she has even forgotten the letter I’d written her which she read with her morning tea. She could recall no part of it.

So she did then what she has begun to do when gaps present; she changed the subject: ‘Will we see you when you are over here?’ She asks, politely.

‘I’m not over there, ma’ I say, ‘I’m still Covid-captive over here.  But as soon as I can get over, I’ll come and stay and we’ll go away somewhere. In the summer.’

But will we? Will we really?

There are so many variables. So many marbles beneath my feet.  I don’t know when I’ll get over there, to see mum. 

I don’t know if she’ll know me when I do.