I loved this book! It's old fashioned and a bit romanticized, but is such a lovely way to "feel" what it might have been like to be an English child in Kenya at that time. I've just been reading some WW1 history, and the reminder that this book ends just as millions of men are about to die in the most terrible war makes the childhood storytelling of this book extra poignant. Recommended!

A memoir of the author's childhood in Thika, a farm area outside Nairobi in colonial Kenya, just prior to World War I in 1913 when the author was six years old. Her quirky parents traveled from England to Thika to start a coffee plantation. In the early 20th century, the area was a mosaic of English, Scottish, and Dutch settlers trying to carve out a place among the native Kikuyu and Masai tribes. Sometimes the two worlds intersected, but rarely did they blend.

Huxley looks back on her family's adventure among the wildlife and wild people of Africa and describes it with insight and humor. She includes tales of hunts, of Kikiyu and Masai tribes, and of her love for the people and animals of Africa. Coming from pioneer stock myself, I loved her insights into living on the frontier. Unfortunately, their adventure ended after less than two years because of the onset of the East Africa Campaign of World War I, but Elspeth spent most of her youth in other parts of Africa and then returned often to Africa as an adult. As a side note (not part of the book), the author married the cousin of Aldous Huxley, was friends with Joy Adamson, author of the African classic Born Free, and was widely considered to be a brilliant journalist, environmentalist, and government advisor. She died in 1997.

In 1981 the book was made into a seven-episode mini-series by A&E. It stars Hayley Mills as the author's mother and was shot on location in Kenya.

I had expected not to like this book. At the beginning of this year I began reading some books about British East Africa, now Kenya, how the British colonized it, and the "dirty war" the British fought during the 1950s against the Kikuyu tribe that was seeking the return of lands that the British had taken from them. Elspeth Huxley was the daughter of white settlers in the Thika region, and as such I had anticipated that she, her family and neighbors would be either dismissive of the indigenous population or look down on them in a paternalistic manner. What I found in this book was something more balanced and nuanced. Elspeth and her parents were critical of the neighbor who used harsh physical punishments to keep his workers in line and refused to take his advice in employing the same approach with their own workers. There was also a retired army officer who could not understand why his workers could not be motivated by setting up teams that were to compete with others. But then there was Elspeth herself, when struggling to understand the Kikuyu wrote: "Sometimes, when Tilly made a cake, she let me use the beater, which had a red handle that you turned. The two arms of the beater whirled round independently and never touched, so that perhaps one arm never knew the other was there; yet they were together, turned by the same handle, and the cake was mixed by both. I did not think of it at the time, but afterwards it struck me that this was rather how our worlds revolved side by side." Another neighbor also stated, "Perhaps it is all a mistake, our trying to change them, and introduce new worries, like Time's winged chariot hurrying near. And yet, those awful sores and bloated spleens...."

This is a beautifully written book. Elspeth Huxley described the country in such detail that I could "see" what the area looked like at the time, and she presented the people with such care that I felt that I knew them all. I am glad I read the book and did not allow my own prejudices to keep me from it.

This wonderful autobiography of an English girl in Africa is set in a time before World War I and suitable for adults or younger readers.

The Flame Trees of Thika is told through the eyes of a wise young girl who seems to notice everything. The book begins in 1913. What is now Kenya was part of the East Africa Protectorate controlled by Britain. The land was just being opened to European settlement.

Elspeth and her mother arrive in an ox-drawn cart to some very beautiful but undeveloped country her father Robyn had bought from a fast-talking salesman in Uganda.

Pioneer-style, the family recruits the help of some Kikuyu natives and builds a hut of grass for the family home. Elspeth’s father plans his farm while paying natives to begin clearing the land and plant coffee trees. The book tracks the efforts of what had apparently been a somewhat genteel family trying to learn to live on the wild land as they adapt and make a go of it.

As the family settles, they share the land with native tribes such as the Kikuyu and Masai and also with exotic animals such as pythons, leopards, hyenas. Elspeth kept a Dik-dik, a type of deer, as a pet until it sadly must return to the wild.

Huxley captures the look and smells and feel of Kenya. She has a terrific eye and ear for the people around her. With a discerning eye she paints scintillating portraits of her family, her neighbors, and the natives with whom they are involved.

This is not a tale of fighting and bloodshed. It is rather the story of real people struggling to survive and get along in an exotic and very different culture while maintaining a grip on their own.

One very memorable neighbor, the beautiful Lettice, is torn between her upright but honorable husband Hereward, a military man who gave up the military to marry her, and the handsome adventurer Ian, and she finally makes a choice. Their love story is told quite indirectly, through the eyes of a young girl who picks up hints and offhand remarks.

As fascinating is Huxley’s observations of the native African people. The native Africans do not try to stop the arriving Europeans who swarm in to claim their ancestral land. Indeed, many of them work for the pioneers although their laid-back African manner of working is upsetting to the settlers. The Africans maintain their traditional hierarchies topped by tribal chiefs who have the last word in disputes but one can see the pioneer presence is changing and eroding their life by bringing in new customs, different ways of doing things, and money.

As this first volume concludes, the pioneer males are volunteering and marching off to fight World War I. This book was so popular, Elspeth wrote two more autobiographical volumes dealing with her experiences growing up in Africa.

It was difficult to rate this book for it entertained and insulted in equal measure. Being Kenyan, I was unable to see myself through the writer's eyes and those of her family or relate to her narrative of our culture. I struggled with portrayal of strongly held, disdainful, predominantly erroneous opinions and casually formed opinions as unassailable truths. In as much as I appreciated the fact that I was unlikely to share her perspective, I still struggled with the sanitization of the colonial enterprise.

That being said, the book was both well written and entertaining and made for good reading. It also challenged me to examine a number of things that I had so readily taken for granted or assumed about my country and my fellow countrymen.

4 stars, despite the unsavory subject: Europeans taking over Africans' lands, oppressing them to use as cheap labor, replacing/denigrating their culture.

The story is told through the voice of a young girl brought from England to outside of a small village in Kenya, in the years before the first World war. This young girl tries to make sense of the world of the adults that surround her: their racism towards the natives, the disregard for their culture, and the dynamics going on between them. The beauty of the land and the natives and the Flora and fauna of the area are what makes this book remarkable and thoroughly lovely.

Curiously, there was a link between the last book I read, "Our Mutual Friend," and the next book I'm reading, "Possessing the Secret of Joy." Ian is a character who is in love with Lettice, the wife of another man. Ian's dream is to be a lock warden on the Thames; in "Our Mutual Friend," a character is a lock warden. In "Possessing the Secret of Joy," Thikka, Kenya is the main setting of the books.

The Kukuru and Masai that the Whites live among wear very little clothes:
P.118
" 'nakedness doesn't seem to matter when people are black or brown, ' Lettice remarked. 'White bodies look like clay waiting to go into a kiln. Natives look as if they've been fired and finished; perhaps that's why they don't strike one as indecent.' "

Natives live close to the land, and only the passing seasons mark time for them:
P.187
" 'perhaps it's as bad to feel one isn't getting old fast enough, as to know that one is getting old too fast,' Lettice agreed. 'We are always trying to make time go at a different pace, as if it were an obstinate pony. Perhaps we should do better to let it amble along as it wishes, without taking much notice of it.' 'That is what the natives do,' Tilley said. 'And perhaps that is why they seem happier. Perhaps it is all a mistake, our trying to change them, and introduce new worries, like time's wingéd Chariot hurrying near...'

A nod is thrown out to those who care about the cruelty to animals, as many parts of this book describe scenes of cruelty to animals:
P.242
" 'The Dorobo will finish it off and gobble it up,' Kate Crawfurd said. 'How very carnivorous they are! But I suppose we are just as bad, only we cook it first, which makes everything a little more restrained, but doesn't affect the principle, that we all live on dead animals, like hyenas and lions. I used to think that vegetarians were cranks, but now I wonder; perhaps they have climbed a rung higher on the ladder of civilization. Perhaps it is more spiritual to live on beans and spinach, with possibly an egg now and then. Do you think we ought to try it, Humphrey, and give up being carnivores?' "
Humphrey does not.

Read at Shirley's behest - not a book I would have picked up to read, but glad I did.

Took me a good while to finish this book, but I put it away for a while, and then came back to it. It's a very slow paced book, things happen in their own good time - and so I made it an excercise in "taking my time" along with it. Mentally slow down fast thoughts, action and drama. Just - reading about a childhood in Kenya, building a home and adjusting to the wilderness around.

I don't think I'll read it a second time, but I may surprise myself in the future.

really interesting about living in Africa - all the bugs and animals were great to hear about - might make a good battle book for teens

4.5 stars So atmospheric, a real joy to read!

n  

We were going to Thika, a name on a map where two rivers joined. Thika in those days - the year was 1913 - was a favourite camp for big-game hunters and beyond it there was only bush and plain. If you went on long enough you would come to mountains and forests no one had mapped and tribes whose languages no one could understand. We were not going as far as that, only two days’ journey in the ox-cart to a bit of El Dorado my father had been fortunate enough to buy in the Norfolk hotel from a man wearing an Old Etonian tie.

n

This book is deservedly a classic of the “white colonials in Africa” genre. Ostensibly it is a memoir of Elspeth Huxley’s young life in Kenya. At the age of six, Elspeth travels with her parents from Nairobi to the “Kikuyuland” where her father hopes to establish a farm. Her father’s head is stuffed with dreams of a thriving dairy and orchards and coffee plantations before his wife cuts into his reveries to say “And in the meantime, it would be nice to have a grass hut to sleep in, or even a few square yards cleared to pitch the tent.”

The elements of the story are Nature, the beauty and harshness of it; the characters of the author’s mother and father; the people the Huxleys encounter; and the challenges and the disappointments they face. Huxley really shines at character portraits, although all of her writing is vivid and atmospheric. In this novel, there is no such thing as an “African” - rather, there is a diverse variety of tribes and personalities. The European settlers are not quite as varied, but still, there are different nationalities and a mixture of foe, ally and true friend.

The narrator is meant to be the young author herself, but this is no childish point of view. In truth, the novel/memoir was written in 1959, when Elspeth Huxley was 52 and the narration and the specificity of detail most definitely comes from a sophisticated and observant mind. Although the events of the novel are entirely recounted by the young child Elspeth, it’s a real stretch to think of a child telling - much less remembering, 45 years later - this story. The subtitle describe the book as “memories” - to be differentiated from explicit memoir - but I still don’t understand how this book reflects the child’s experience in any way other than the merest skeletal outline sense of that word. It was a short experience, too - as World War I breaks out not much longer than a year after the family sets out for their Thika outpost. Still, that was just a personal niggle of mine - and it didn’t really detract from my reading pleasure.

Like many I’d seen the miniseries back in the ‘80s. After rewatching it recently I decided finally to read the book. In the very English tradition of Call the Midwife and My Family and other Animals it’s a memoir so highly fictionalized that it should be considered a novel.

While reading, I spent a lot of time comparing it to the series whose central story sometimes seemed to be the love triangle among Hereward, Lettice & Ian. In the book that’s more of a side story whose details are only hinted at. The dramatics with Ian and Lettice in the television series are more reminiscent of an entirely different story about another big game hunter in the book’s sequel, The Mottled Lizard.

I'd say the main theme is Huxley falling in love with the natural world of East Africa while wondering at the perplexing motivations and actions of the adults around her, both African and European, as settlers like her parents set about changing that world forever.

There’s some beautiful and humorous writing here. The story of her restless parents trying to build up their coffee farm and getting involved in other money-making schemes is an overarching background for a very episodic narrative.

I very much enjoyed it and it’s caused me to become a lot more interested in that part of the world.

I remember watching the excellent TV series of 30 years ago with the haunting theme tune which made me dream
Of going to Africa But somehow never bought the book
Loved the descriptions of the Bush and beauty of the unspoilt landscape as it was in 1913 . The innocence of the world of those early settlers in Kenya is shattered at the end with the outbreak of the First World War which touches even their remote corner of paradise and adds poignancy as one realises everywhere will change forever and can never be the same . Elspeth knows in her heart she will never be able to return even though she kisses the four walls of their home as instructed. A very special book which I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did