The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley

Huxley’s stories, relayed with a delightfully dry sense of humor, remind us of life’s inevitable cycle of triumph and loss, and that it doesn’t do any good to complain. Disappointment is part of living, and hardly anything is ever so bad that there’s no overcoming it. Huxley reflects on various misfortunes that befall her family – fire, diseased crops, a batch of jellies that explode from improper canning before they can be sold, insufficient funds to fill the farm truck with petrol, bugs in the walls and tadpoles in the bath water – with a c’est la vie sort of shrug. But from her colorful upbringing, we have a treasure trove of rich, amusing, thought-provoking narratives, because Huxley and her parents chose to take setbacks lightly and to pursue each new enterprise with renewed vigor. Huxley’s childhood was far from conventional, and at times surely difficult. Huxley described her father as a “gentle, humorous, dreamy person whose dreams never came true.” Her mother, a tough, industrious woman whose reaction to hardship was more likely to be a sigh than a fit of tears, at one point resorted to educating Elspeth at home with “old copies of field manuals of instruction on everything from lace-making to the erection of simple stills, and the volumes of a pocket encyclopedia in minute type.” They were constantly devising get-rich-quick schemes, one of which was the purchase, sight-unseen, of the 500-acre farm in Kenya. Huxley’s parents were romantic, adventuresome types, and not very practical with money. Learn to look beyond hardships – and laugh

Through reading her books, I’ve fallen in love with the character of the hard-working pioneer brave enough to risk everything to make something out of nothing, and I’ve been inspired to adopt some of the attitudes that make Huxley’s life stories so enriching and enjoyable. But the life lessons she imparts are as relevant now as when she wrote them on her typewriter in the 1950s. Huxley’s childhood memories, recorded with charming warmth and wisdom in The Flame Trees of Thika (also adapted into a 1980s mini-series) and The Mottled Lizard, reflect a time and place long-since gone. At first the family lived in a grass hut, surrounded by dangerous wild beasts and far from many of the luxuries and sophistication they were used to in early 20 th- century England. The author and activist was brought up on a Kenyan coffee plantation with her parents, British settlers who were trying to make a fortune from the high, untamed African grasslands. If you want to read about an interesting life, try Elspeth Huxley’s books. Elspeth Huxley’s beautiful accounts of her rugged, unique life are still relevant and inspiring today.

The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley