'..... my mother and father too were to work very hard for many years on the farm "Kapkegora" at Lumbwa where my 3 sisters and I grew up. I was still very small when we went to live at Kapkegora but believe that for the first few nights we slept under the stars as there was no roof yet on the house which was being built with the help of an Indian 'fundi'.

Kisii stonemasons were hired to cut and dress the stone which was then hauled up to the house from the valley below in which it was quarried. The house had to equal the dimensions of a derelict barn on a neighbouring farm which my father had previously rented, so the roof had to be dismantled and brought over to Kapkegora in sections. There were no floorboards or ceilings for several years - the floors consisted of beaten earth and covered with various skins - zebra, lion, waterbuck, topi ... My parents owned 2 horses and were loaned a Somali pony from the Hopleys at "Mombwa" (a neighbouring farm) and I can remember how, when my younger sister Barbara was still quite small, we would ride two-up over Kapkegora and the surrounding farms, some of which were then still unoccupied. The Somali pony taught us a lot. We children might not have had much style when we learned to ride but we certainly knew how to hang on!

We had a wondeful childhood on the farm. Our mother, who had no teaching experience, enrolled us in a postal educational system - the PNEU (Parents National Educational Union) - corresponding with the Principals who were resident in Ambleside, England, and took on our education until we joined the Loreto Convent when it moved to Lumbwa from Nairobi during the war. ...'