When we were kids we played in a field down the street from our house. If memory serves correctly (always a joke when it comes to my memory) the space was almost entirely undeveloped, so there was ample space for us to run and play. We rode our bikes down there, we chased butterflies, we caught bugs for science projects; I won't speak for my brothers or the friends I played with, but I also spent time down there letting my imagination go absolutely effing wild.

Reading Elspeth Huxley's memoirs of growing up in Kenya reminded me of the land at the bottom of Main Street. We certainly had no lions or giant pythons in that field, but I encountered plenty of them in my imagination. The field was our African wilderness, or anything else we wanted it to be.

Elspeth's family moved to British East Africa when she was a little girl. The land was almost entirely unsettled when they arrived, and she talks about colonialism from the viewpoint of a child. Certainly she wasn't involved in the more serious, adult subject matters, but she wasn't entirely blind to what was going on around her either. She picked up on quite a bit, the smart little whippersnapper that she was.

But she primarily concerned herself with the other aspects of living in Africa. She lived in fear that the wild animals would eat her pet. She wrote about being stuck in a rainstorm that made her wonder if the Kikuyu tribe was right in believing that storms were the product of an angry god.

Not unlike Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, the best part of this memoir are Elspeth's detail about the land on which she lived. I've never been particularly drawn to Africa (I really don't like the heat), but this girl makes me want to go, even though I know Kenya of today would be nothing like the Kenya she knew and experienced.

Aside from Dinesen, I also thought of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career: My Career Goes Bung, though Franklin's story (not a memoir) takes place in Australia instead of Africa... yeah... welcome to my head, this is how I make connections.

A great read, and I have her second memoir The Mottled Lizard to read when I'm ready, which excites me 'cause I'm a dork like that. Elspeth's family left Kenya during the war, and I'm curious to see what her life was like after the war when she returned to Africa.

For myself, I have no desire to return to the bottom of Main Street to see what that field is like now. Certainly there's a Wal-Greens or a Wal-Mart or fifteen gas stations in place of the hills and tress and grass that I remember. I would like to preserve that memory. Sometimes it's just not worth going back.

A very different look at the Africa I have been obsessively reading about. The year is 1913 and we are seeing Kenya through the eyes of a very young girl - she is six years old. The book was actually written when Ms Huxley was fifty-two in 1959.

I would have liked this better if it had been fiction rather than a biographical memoir. How could she possibly have remembered those events so many years later? All those people and the dialogue just didn’t seem natural if a child is supposed to be telling the story. Why did she refer to her parents as Tilly and Robin? Those aren’t even their names.

I found it very slow moving, didn’t like the animal killing scenes and I felt like I was missing something!! I can’t believe it was made into a mini series - like Little House in Africa?

Great stuff. Her memoir is from the early years of the Kenya colony — her parents’ new farm was one of the first established in that area, and the hinterlands were still pretty much as they were before the Europeans arrived. As others have said, the highlight of the book is the flavor of the East Africa of a century ago: sights, sounds, smells, animals, people. She was a wonderful writer. Not to be missed, if you are interested in East Africa, or this era. The cover photo on the 2000 Penguin reprint, of the author, her Mom, and her pony around 1915, is a fine preview of her story.

This is very nice country indeed. My parents lived in Kenya in the early 1970s. Their house was at 7000 ft., almost on the equator, so a near-perfect year-round climate. They had a view of Kilimanjaro from their front windows, and of Mt. Kenya from the back. This was an old British agricultural research station. You could see why the Brits didn’t want to give up their colony!

Elspeth arrived in Kenya in late 1913 at age 6 1/2. She went back to England with her mother in (I think) 1915 or early 1916, after the beginning of WW1. She returned with her parents after the War, and left Kenya for good in 1925 to go to college in England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elspeth...

I’m pretty sure her memoirs are fictionalized to a degree — I don’t doubt she remembered the highlights, and perhaps her parents and/or neighbors kept diaries or journals — but her account of (e.g.) her neighbor Lettice carrying on an affair with a gallant young colonial would have been beyond the comprehension of a 7 year old girl, I think. She did become a well-regarded novelist.

I first read the book in the late 1970s, and it’s stuck with me. I’m reading a battered library copy of the 1959 first American edition, which arrived a few days before the libraries closed for the coronavirus emergency.

Thika is now an industrial town of about 280,000 on the outskirts of Nairobi, served by an 8-lane superhighway, and the rest of the country has changed drastically too. Fortunately, Kenya has protected substantial areas of the country as National Parks and Preserves, some of which I’m familiar with from when my parents lived there. I haven’t been back, though I’ve long intended to.

The Flame Trees of Thika is Elspeth Huxley's reminiscences of her childhood in British East Africa (what is now Kenya) from 1912 to 1914. She was only six years old in 1912 and must have been a very precocious child with a good memory to be able to write this narrative almost 50 years later. She tells the story of how her parents, Robin and Tilly, moved to Africa to start a coffee plantation on 500 acres between the banks of two rivers near Thika. Her father, Robin, bought the land sight unseen with the faith-based knowledge that the soil was ideal for coffee growing and the expectations of making a fortune a few years down the line. But first, the land had to be cleared and planted during the rainy season. The native people, the Kikuyu, had to be persuaded to help in this task and most of them were very reluctant to do so. But eventually, the land was cleared and a crop planted. Huxley tells the story of living on the land and observing and delving into the culture of the native people and the beauties and hazards of the landscape. These hazards included wild animals and insects including ticks which Elspeth learned to pluck off of her and squash them in her fingers. "There were also jiggas. These burrowed under your toenails, laid their eggs, and created a swollen, red, tormenting place on your toe." And then there were the siafu or driver ants that could attack and eat animals to the bone.

But Elspeth learned to enjoy her home in Africa and had a couple of chameleons as pets. She also had a young duiker, a small antelope, that she kept as a pet. It often got into the family's garden and its exploits reminded me a lot of the novel The Yearling. Eventually, the duiker ran off to be in the wild but when it did, Elspeth thought it may have been eaten by the python that lived in a pool in the river. The python was swollen after eating some kind of larger animal but it turned out that after it had been killed, it had swallowed a young goat. She also tells of her white neighbors and their relationships that were probably hard to understand for a six-year old. There were also the eccentricities of some of the neighbors, such as having a velvet upholstered couch and a grand piano in a dirt floored cabin. But mainly this narrative was about living in the wildness of Africa with Mount Kenya in the distance.

At the outbreak of WWI, Robin joined the armed forces to fight against the Germans and Elspeth and Tilly returned to England. Elspeth and Tilly did go back to Africa after the war as related in her book, The Mottled Lizard.

I enjoyed this look at the early days of life in Kenya. It was an interesting narrative of a time and place now long gone. There were some disparaging comments made by some of the whites against the native Kikuyu who often viewed them as lazy savages. The "n word" was also used a few times in these descriptions but I think Huxley did this to show the narrow-mindedness of the settlers at the time. Overall, I would recommend this to anyone interested in European involvement in turn of the century Africa.

My grandma recommended and lent this book to me, so I started reading it with the, "i have to read this" attitude. It was pretty good, and I enjoyed reading it but it wasn't really something that I would have chosen to read on my own.

Basically, its little house on the prairie, Africa version. It is a true story, and actually really interesting how this little girl lived in Africa for so long. I actually learned a lot in this book, because I didn't really know much about how the Europeans settled in Africa. I also learned a bit more about world war 2 and there was tons of stuff I didn't really realize. The characters were really cool to get to know, and the perspective and insight of this girl was really interesting.

Now, this book was one of those "oldy" books where there's a LOT of detailed descriptions. Like, huge thick paragraphs of them. The text size was also really small, and I found myself accidentally not so accidentally skipping over chunks of description. This book also had a whole lot of names in it. I remembered the main names, and several of the minor ones, but there were a whole lot of times where I had no idea who that person was. It would be like, "Then Bob came over, oh I loved Bob!" and all I could think was, "Wait... who's Bob? Is he that one guy who lives in a hole, or that guy who sells cats.{Ponders for a few seconds} Yeah I have no idea."

The story was really interesting overall, and I would recommend it for people who like detailed novels with lots of imagery in them. It took me a long time to finish this book, because I never really got fully into it, and I would get bored after a while. I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone I know personally, but I it was a nice book to read in-between other books.

I’ve never read anything like this before. I picked it up at a summer fete thinking it was a novel but when I started to read it discovered it’s actually a memoir. I wasn’t sure if it was my cup of tea as I read the first couple of pages but after I decided to properly give it a go I couldn’t put it down. It was fascinating learning about the different tribes of Kenya and how they built their houses and how many Europeans moved there to start their own farms. I had no idea about any of this so it was an interesting read. I had to stop to do a fair bit of Googling throughout as African words were used without a definition but it was worth it.

A very enjoyable read. I don't think I would have liked the life but Elspeth made it sound interesting and rewarding.

So good! I have a weird thing for books about white people in Africa (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Out of Africa, The Poisonwood Bible), and this is a new favorite. Huxley is a lovely writer and is especially good at recounting adult situations from a child's perspective. Plus, the love story between Lettice and Ian Crawfurd KILLS me.

I really enjoyed this book and though it was slightly slow at the beginning it hooked me emotionally in the end. The plot took a long time to unfold and was slightly uninteresting at the but then became very interesting towards the end.

The voice of this book is just pure charm. It's one of those books that, despite the historical injustices implicit in its premise, is irresistible to me along the same lines that little house on the prairie is irresistible: the inherent drama and adventure of settling and establishing a farm in a "wild" country. In this case, the story is a slightly fictionalized version of Huxley's family in the late 1910s, after they impetuously buy a plot of bush at Thika outside of Nairobi on which to establish a coffee farm.

The narrator has the innocence of a child overlaid with the knowing canniness of the adult author, who is an excellent technical storyteller. Robin and Tilly, the narrator's young parents, are wonderfully illustrated characters: talented, optimistic, and perpetually failing. I love the bits of botanical and mechanical info that's sprinkled in through them as they make elaborate plans for the farm and flounder about trying to make it all happen. It's especially hard not to fall in love with Tilly, the narrator's intelligent, emotional, and endlessly resourceful mother. The cast of characters around are equally captivating. Much of the plot surrounds the family's interactions with members of the Kikuyu and Masai people who they hire on as labour, and the sometimes funny sometimes tragic results of their different cultures colliding. As a child, the narrator occupies a liminal space between cultures - the local beliefs and customs are real to her. Thus, the descriptions of things like magic spells, the patriarchal social order of the neighboring village, and local customs around illness and death are untainted by irrelevant logical criticisms - they are simply matters of fact. The other major plot involves a love triangle that their white neighbours, the Palmers, are tangled in. This provides some narrative tension that's helpful for the book's arc. Here, the innocent and mostly uninterested child hears things she doesn't understand, but of course we do. This device was deployed with enough precision and subtlety that it wasn't too contrived.

Is it realistic that Elspeth Huxley remembers the details of so many conversations from her early childhood? No. Is the story of romance likely to have transpired exactly as is? No. Is this a politically correct per 2017 rendering of colonial Kenya? definitely not. Is it a well-crafted, bursting-with-life, everyday adventure story from a kid's perspective with amazing and memorable detail? absolutely.

Some important caveats: though the narrator herself isn't prejudiced, the racism embedded in every aspect of her family's story and this period of African history is glaring. For a contemporary reader, it's a clear and unflinching documentation of the attitudes of the white settlers of the time. The narrator's critique of these attitudes is pretty obvious tonally, but she doesn't break character to address it directly from an adult's perspective - this is simply the world she lives in. From the little that I've read about her, Elspeth Huxley in her later years was a liberal-ish voice who eventually came around to advocating for the independence of African states from colonial rule. But, colonial Africa was very much the environment she was immersed in and it's unequivocally the perspective she writes from. Obviously, reading her is not at all a replacement for reading black African writers. For what it is though, this is a great story.

This book reminded me a little bit of Little House on the Prairie with some adult bits thrown in. The main character is a young girl who comes to Kenya with her parents so that they can do the pioneering thing: working with the Kikuyu and Masai, planting coffee, grafting fruit trees, swapping spouses. Meanwhile the little girl waxes poetic about killer ants that can only be avoided with ashes, her pony, buffaloes, war dances, murder, and snippets of the adult world. Her view of Africa is somewhat fractured due to her age, but that only makes it more beautiful. What a fun read.

Reading this book felt like sipping chai on the veranda while listening to the insects settling in for the night. The stories of Elspeth's childhood are charming, strange, and a sweet glimpse into what life may have been like in British East Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. There is an implied elitism in this book that would have been standard for European colonialists during that time, but if you can get around that you'll find a book of well told stories looking back at a time and a place that no longer exists. I'd had this one on my to-read shelf for many years and glad I finally got around to it.