Well out of Africa

Two years ago SOPHIE WILLIAMS' husband dragged her off for a life of adventure in the wilds. Now that's over, she explains why she won't leave London in a hurry again

IT WAS a very dark February when my husband Guy first suggested a "trip" to Kenya. A Kenyan himself, he longed to return. His campaign to crowbar me away from England really got under way when he was offered the job of running a beach camp there.

It's not as though Guy didn't know me, my phobic response to the country and my love of Agns B, not to mention my dependency on telly. In the end his sales pitch had little to do with my agreeing. Yearlong tans and mangoes on the beach are all very nice but the real reason I said yes was far more pathetic: I wanted to be the sort of woman he wanted me to be. So, just as London was getting really groovy, I was off to some Third World outpost. I never stopped to consider if I could actually pull it off. I just panic-shopped: caseloads of tropical-strength Clarins, even more khaki-coloured Nicole Farhi. Good friends tried to confront me, but I just told them they didn't know the real me, the me who hungered for a great adventure with my 16-month-old son. Our arrival was a blunt one. They told us that the camp was a four-hour drive from town. They didn't tell us the forest we'd drive through housed tsetse fly. Then there was the river that had to be crossed by canoe. Hippo are not sweet, they have big teeth. The camp itself looked like a Red Cross unit in a 'Nam movie. Puff adders and lions circled, leaving me a little tense about getting the buggy out for a stroll. Day one had me repeating the whispered sentence: "How could he have brought us here?" But he didn't, I did. The beach could be reached over a range of sand dunes. I tried it once, the baby strapped to my back and a sun canopy strapped to him. We encountered a frisky black snake and baboon not much smaller than me. I got back too angry to cry. The odd letter from home would arrive, telling me of life back on earth, where people walked on pavements and went to dinner parties. I grew to dread these reminders. In an effort to normalise my surroundings I tried to transform the camp's eating area, adorning the rhino skulls with lampshades and throwing out the scorpions living in the sugar bowl. The lack of walls made my efforts seem futile. A low point had me trying to play the theme tune from ER on my son's xylophone. Then there were the guests, the weird people who paid $300 a night. On meeting them, I was always frightfully apologetic, they must feel so let down, but they always had my husband's eyes, using words like "paradise" and sighing "wow, you actually live here". My husband would interrupt, terrified of my response, whisking them away for another 10-mile trek to see the waterbuck. My relationship with Guy was getting savaged. I blamed him for my miserable life and he blamed me, this shrew he had to share a tent with, for his. I prayed for a miracle: my getting malaria and being airlifted out or a typhoon washing the whole nightmare into the sea. When seven Somali bandits attacked us, the one night when Guy was away, I wondered if I had tempted fate. There is no way I would go through that night again, the fear of believing you were about to be killed. But the morning after, alive and well, the relief felt almost like happiness. I had visualised a teary reunion with Guy, him begging my forgiveness and a BA flight booked by sunset. It didn't happen like that. He gave in his notice and we left the same day - the camp, not the country. The new job was running a game reserve in a suburb of Nairobi; Feltham with mud huts. There was far less to complain about, we had a video, a bath and shops. I hired servants, and told myself how lucky I was I didn't have to do the washing up. I didn't miss London: I yearned for it like a lovesick teenager. It's odd, the things you miss. Tucked up in bed I longed for the sound of drunks tripping home on a Saturday night. Instead I got the sounds of Africa. The first time I heard a tree hyrax I thought my maid was being murdered. To forsake your own life in exchange for your partner's is not something I would recommend. For a long time I was too scared of giving him any kind of ultimatum. Gradually that fear became less important as my daily routine grew ever more dull. As a couple, we looked less and less likely. Here was this rugged Kenyan cowboy, fit and lean, with his appalling round wife, never out of tracksuit bottoms. Last summer I came home for a visit. London was looking ludicrously beautiful. The smell of rain on Tarmac, plane trees like Czanne paintings, girls with coiffed eyebrows and funky backpacks Life had moved on. I was like a spectator, a bumpkin up for the day. My son couldn't get enough of parks. I couldn't get enough of my mum's sympathy or of my friends. I made sense here. I kept putting off the return date and then I made the decision: I wasn't going back. If there was any way I could have been the woman Guy needed me to be I would have been, but there wasn't. Underneath the Nicole Farhi flak jacket lurked the same north London person who plans her evenings out to coincide with bad TV nights. I miss my husband, and I still see myself as married. I don't have an ending for this story. I couldn't change: I guess I'm waiting to see if he can. * Cutting Edge - Safari Strife is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.

Copyright 1998
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