Jane Goodall, page 21
Meanwhile, Jane had saved up enough money from her salary to buy a plane ticket from London to Nairobi as a gift to her mother, so Vanne lifted off from the first city on September 2 and settled down into the second on September 3, “fresh as a daisy after having had several good sleeps,” as she quickly reassured Danny, Olwen, and Audrey back in Bournemouth.
Vanne had been longing to see Jane again, but she was also worried, in a maternal fashion, about Jane’s well-being and (as she had put it in a letter written back in April) “the Brian problem.” Brian was away when she arrived, and Vanne informed the family in a letter of September 10 that she was “shocked by her [Jane’s] appearance when I arrived as she is terribly thin & on edge. But I really think that even after a week of fairly early nights, a little food & no Brian she looks better. I think it is mostly caused by the worry of her difficult situation out here & that there is nothing which can be put right.” In spite of such problems, however, Jane still had “masses of energy,” Vanne thought, and was leading her usual “mad whirl” of a life. A shopping trip into Nairobi, for example, would “have to be seen to be believed. Sal perches in the back with Hobo a larger springer spaniel on one side, LUCKY, a huge black and white dog on the other side, TANA, the small spaniel (a dream of cream & brown silk) on the floor. I sit in front clutching perhaps one or two mongooses called Kip & his wife, & yesterday KOMBO the monkey in addition. The mongooses like to travel inside one’s dress!”
Vanne soon met two of Brian’s best friends in Nairobi, Dave Cairns and Micky O’Brien Kelly, and found them both “absolutely sweet.” Both young men came to supper at the flat one evening and impressed her with their excellent manners and the fact that upon arriving they “immediately took off their coats, donned aprons & cooked the bacon & sausages & eggs!” In contrast to their English counterparts, Vanne concluded, Kenya-born men were “more mature.”
As for Brian, who was not expected in town for another week, she could only report that everyone she had met so far described him as “a boy of great charm, and he has only to suggest something and everyone (including Jane) follows him. The extraordinary part of it is that he is only 20!” Still, and most significantly, Vanne added with double-underlined emphasis, “no engagement likely.”
When she finally did meet Brian, around the middle of September, her initial conceptions and concerns were generally confirmed. Brian “would make a wonderful film star,” she wrote, even though “he is not my cup of tea.” Jane remained “very attached to him,” but Vanne considered much of that attraction to be based on the unhealthy emotional appeal of melodrama: “always a SITUATION!!” She elaborated: “Either Brian is dying, or cross, or about to commit suicide, or going to sell his car, or abandon Jane, or wring Leakey’s neck or go off into the blue, or just martyr himself in a quiet corner. OR he is on top of the world and all is well. The latter situation seldom occurs.”
But if Jane’s boyfriend provided a contrary mix of pleasure and turmoil that autumn, so did the menagerie. Vanne stayed in the flat’s second bedroom, which meant that the previous occupants had to be rearranged (though several of them were already well settled into their open-air quarters: the wire-mesh cage on the veranda). Soon after Vanne’s arrival, Levi and Mrs. Kip wandered off and disappeared. Jane and Sally spent many hours searching and calling for them, and finally Louis came down to the flat “with a very worried face” and urged Jane to write an SOS to be broadcast on the local radio station’s nine o’clock news. The mongoose, Mrs. Kip, never returned; Levi, the bush baby, finally “staggered” back into the flat the next morning, “half dead,” according to Vanne, who set to nursing the pathetic creature back to health.
A few weeks later Kip made the mistake of scrambling up the stairs, entering one of the second-floor apartments, and jumping into a baby’s pram. The baby’s mother, being “a Yorkshire fish wife type,” as Vanne put it, yelled down at Jane from her veranda. After Kip invaded the pram a second time, the woman lodged a complaint with the Nairobi public health authorities, who soon referred the matter to the Coryndon Museum trustees, who spoke to Leakey, who assured everyone he would look into it. At the same time, a city inspector was directed to visit the apartment. Jane, as Vanne reported back to the family, “exercised some of her fatal charm on the man, and we have heard no more”. . . until, that is, Kip ran up the stairs a third time and leaped into the pram once again. “Down came the fish wife, arms akimbo, skinny body alive with hatred of us and ours, and told Jane that if her damned mongoose came in to her flat again she’d wring its bloody neck!”
The mongoose was confined indoors, and since he was used to having the freedom to dig all day long in the garden, confinement was hard—for him and, during the hours she managed the flat, for Vanne. Around the same time, the dogs also required special attention, Hobo from a bite on the eye, Tana from a minor episode of distemper following her vaccination, and Gringo with “tick fever.” Happily, however, responsibility for the care and maintenance of Jane’s menagerie was distributed evenly enough that Vanne still found plenty of time to go shopping, work on a novel, socialize with Jane and Sally and their friends, and, with Louis Leakey’s help, see some small and interesting portions of a vast continent.
During a trip to England that spring, Louis had arranged to meet Jane’s mother. Vanne had taken a morning train from Bournemouth to London on Tuesday, April 1, and they met in the early afternoon at the main entrance to Harrods department store. He had booked a table at a nearby restaurant, and they ate, as Vanne reported back to Jane, “a very good lunch,” during which “he told me lots and lots of things about Kenya and you and his work and you again.” Vanne felt she “could have sat there all day hearing tit bits about you” and was therefore entirely “loath to tear myself away.” She con sidered Louis to have “a wonderful flow of conversation and a very strong personality which I liked.”
When Vanne went out to Nairobi that September, Louis, who enjoyed playing the gracious host, arranged a number of small trips for her into the countryside. There was a visit to the Leakey house at Langata while their animals were being photographed (with an awkward introduction to Mary, who managed to emit an approximation of “How do you do” from inside a stable, being altogether “so rude that Leakey had to apologise to us for her”); a quick drive to Limuru through the Kikuyu reserve and into the White Highlands (“where a good many English people have settled & made the place as English as possible—dull!”); and a daylong expedition through “miles and miles of real African country,” descending to the floor of the Rift Valley with Mary’s aunt Toudy and two overdressed, “absolutely typical American ladies” to visit the spectacular Olorgesailie Prehistoric Site (where Louis and Mary had in 1942 stumbled upon an astonishing, enormous cache of large stone hand axes, cleavers, and round bola stones in a remote area of sandy desert plains).
Then, in October, Louis provided Jane and her mother with a weekend float in his research vessel, the Miocene Lady, on Lake Victoria. Leaving on a Friday morning, the pair were driven by Brian and Dave Cairns to the port of Kisumu, where they met the boat’s skipper, Hassan Salimu, and his second mate, Hamisi. During that glorious weekend excursion on the second largest freshwater lake in the world, Jane and Vanne spent a day exploring the uninhabited, monkey-filled island of Lolui. It was, for Vanne at least (as she then wrote home), a “dream which will live in memory forever,” where mother and daughter “sailed on and on and on, under a tropical sky, and landed on an uninhabited Island, and slept to the sound of a million croaking frogs, the faint plop of hippos wallowing, and were awakened at dawn by the most lovely skies I have ever seen. We returned on Tuesday and Nairobi seemed as dull as the old Bull and Bush after a glimpse of paradise.”
Louis also took Vanne on a brief excursion to Olduvai, which she described to Danny in a November 5 letter. Jack Evernden, a geophysicist from the University of California at Berkeley, had gone to Kenya with the intention of gathering rock samples from the various layers of Olduvai for subjection to new dating techniques; the young American needed help in finding the gorge. As Louis explained to Vanne, he had wanted to take Jane along as well but could find “no excuse except that he wants to take her!” Since Vanne was not a museum employee, excuses were unnecessary; and so, at 9:30 on Tuesday morning, October 28, Louis, Jack Evernden, and Vanne “tore off the horizons” in the Land Rover. They reached Ngo-rongoro Crater by sunset, ate a supper cooked by Louis (“a most delicious one as all his meals are”), and camped under the stars, with their camp cots set up next to the vehicle, Louis on one side, Evernden on the other, Vanne in the middle. “I hardly slept that night, the crickets produced their own symphony, the moon came up and turned our camp into a brilliantly lit stage, and before very long the birds began to sing again and we had to sit up and watch the dawn breaking the night sky.”
Evernden turned out to be “the nicest type of American,” Vanne thought, and they all “got on very well.” And after a breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, and tea, they packed up and set off into the Serengeti, which “far exceeded in strangeness and beauty what I had expected.” The Land Rover rolled across “the dried up shimmering Serengeti plains,” where they saw “cheetah slumbering under a thorn tree, and passed of course Ostrich, wildebeest, giraffe and all the charming antelopes.”
Olduvai Gorge itself, from which Leakey and Evernden began digging up stones to be transported back to America for dating, produced in Vanne “a profound melancholy. It was so silent, so utterly remote, so dry, and there on the face of the cliff, for those who could read it, was the story of the centuries. One felt small, lost, finite.”
When all the rock samples were finally gathered, the three of them returned to their second night’s camp, at the bottom of the gorge, where Louis fixed for Vanne a “private bathroom (a bowl on a soap box) with mirror, and hot and cold water. We all had a good wash but even a good wash cannot remove the red dust of Africa from hair and nails and feet.” They gathered wood, built a fire, and settled down for a “wonderful dinner” and an evening of sipping coffee in front of the fire before turning in for the night. At dawn the next day, they climbed the side of a cliff to watch the sunrise, and then, on the return trip, spent an additional day exploring the vast floor of Ngorongoro Crater and a final, glorious wandering, lingering, and viewing day traveling back to Nairobi.
In such a fashion, then, Vanne was caught in some of the drama and pleasure of Louis Leakey’s life and personality, and an important friendship began. It was a straightforward and ordinary one at the time—but then (as Vanne may have begun to realize on the day she ran into Mary Leakey at the museum without quite recognizing who she was, until a significantly scowling Louis appeared on the stairs), no friendship with Louis could be entirely simple. “I have never,” Vanne wrote to her mother and sisters after that minor epiphany, “been embroiled in so many intrigues, so many cross currents of fevered emotions, so many secrets to be kept from almost everyone, and so many comings and goings which may or may not be divulged. One’s head literally reels with it all, and sometimes the only possible refuge is bed!!!!” Still, because Louis had followed through on his promise to think of Jane paternally, he and Vanne now found that they shared at least one compelling mutual interest: the future of her young daughter and his young protégée.
They discussed the Brian problem, and they also considered Louis’s longstanding plan to send Jane on a brief expedition to study chimpanzees at the edge of Lake Tanganyika. Louis was still applying for the necessary funding and still fretting about the obstacle erected by Geoffrey Browning, the district commissioner in Kigoma, who refused to allow any European woman into the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve “alone”—that is, without a suitable European companion. “Louis told me all this one day,” Vanne once wrote. “I shall never know why I suddenly and without the slightest premeditation heard myself say how much I should like to go to Gombe.” Vanne would thus serve as Jane’s required companion.
But since Louis’s attempts to find a grant had so far achieved nothing, it was, as Vanne explained in a letter to Danny, “impossible to forecast Jane’s future.” The sensible move was for Jane to return to England for a few months to rest and repair and prepare herself. She could take a job in London, and once again Leakey would help. “Louis is now busy getting Jane a job in London,” Vanne wrote to the family in mid-November, “for the period after Christmas and before she comes out here again. He’s just like a magician. Want a job? British Museum? Zoo? Natural History Museum?”
Vanne had gone to Kenya intending to stay only three months, and Jane had already planned to return with her to England. They booked their passage on British India’s Kenya, to sail from Mombasa on November 30 and, after a passage through the Suez Canal and stops at Aden, Port Said, Malta, and Barcelona, finally descend the gangplank in Southampton on December 20, just in time for Christmas at The Birches.
Sally was to stay in the flat for another few weeks, until January 17, meeting her grandmother in the meanwhile and returning with her via Europe. Sally and some of Jane’s friends at the museum had agreed to help resettle much of the menagerie in various new homes, except for the rat, who was soon back in place as a school science pet; Levi, who fell ill and died that December; Dinkie the hedgehog, who was released; and Boozy and Kip, who would be flown to England at the end of December to join the family in Bournemouth.
Vanne prepared her mother, Danny, in advance about Kip. “Now although at first sight Danny you may not entirely take to him because he dashes about in what may look to you a mouselike fashion, he is no more like a mouse than Rusty was, and in fact tiny though he is, his character is such that he makes himself felt in no uncertain fashion.” Vanne illustrated her point with an example:
Imagine—two huge dogs are having a bit of a rough and tumble, beautiful little blonde Tana joins in, and perhaps the large fat Siamese so that there is a fearsome jumble of legs and frolicking bodies. Kip busily engaged about his pursuits at the far end of the room spies the fray, and immediately without thought he dashes into it, just ankle high to everyone, but so fierce that soon the dogs hide their heads from him and the cat leaps away. If he cannot get his own way he’s likely to draw himself up to his full ridiculous height and scream defiance.
Jane bade farewell to the museum staff on Saturday morning, November 22, spent the evening washing and packing, and then left with Brian in his Land Rover at half past noon the next day. They were planning a last safari together. Vanne believed that her daughter would “say goodbye to Brian forever before we sail,” and both Jane and Brian shared that depressing expectation.
Brian understood that Jane intended to return to Africa, perhaps within a few months, but if she had her way, she would be returning to a different place and in a new capacity, to follow through on the plan of studying wild chimpanzees on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. It was a crazy scheme, certainly, one that even Brian, who must have appreciated Jane’s energy and endurance and her capacity for focused determination, considered improbable. Jane had told him of the plan only a couple of months earlier, and Brian knew enough of the area and situation to harbor some perfectly sensible misgivings. “At the time I very much doubted that she could live by herself in such a place with only a few Africans to assist her,” he has recalled. Jane, after all, still knew very little about “life in the bush,” and she still had not learned any Swahili. “Moreover, I happened to be familiar with some of the terrain farther south east of Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, for I had spent several months there and knew that it was a difficult and little known country.”
For the moment, in any case, they drove east in the direction of Mombasa, with the intention of having a final safari together at Tsavo National Park. They pulled up around six that evening at the park entrance. Tsavo was closed during the winter wet season, owing to the danger of washed-out roads, but after the park director examined a personal note from Louis Leakey, he “immediately spread his arms wide,” as Jane wrote to Sally on December 1, “& said the Park was ours! Of course!” Thus, aside from a few game rangers, Jane and Brian were now possibly the only two people within 8,000 square miles of wilderness, and they drove out to a spot known as Mzima Springs.
“There one is, in dry almost desert country, sweltering hot, and surrounded by burnt looking scrub,” Jane wrote. “Suddenly, before one’s as tonished eyes, there is a splash of luxuriant greenness—palm trees, flowers, bright green grass. You reach the place and getting out of the car, hear the music of rippling water. There, from the seemingly barren rocks, sweet ice cold water trickles out, across the water-worn pebbles, and so forms a most enchanting hippo pool.” Soon, around a dozen enormous hippos “regarded us with their piggy little red eyes, waggling their stupid little red ears. One had the most horrible expression, and she turned her head as we came to the water’s edge and gazed long and malevolently at us. The reason for her rage became apparent when a little toto popped up his head beside her. He too gazed at us, but so curiously. He was a little poppet. Then we saw an evil looking form slide into the water—Brian says there are very few croc and I was lucky to see one just there.”
