You Have Not a Leg to Stand On Read Free

to sew it up. I looked down, and indeed there was a nasty wound, a gash opening up to the bone, on the knee and right down the side of my leg. He had a huge needle and thread and proceeded to sew. It occurred to me I should be feeling a modicum of pain, so I assumed he’d injected a local anaesthetic, but there was no sign of any cleaning bowl or syringe. I drifted off. I awoke again looking into the face of another younger African in a white uniform. He spoke to me in English, ‘You have broken your back, and you will never walk again.’ I asked, ‘Is my wife here?’ He said, ‘No, she doesn’t know where you are, but we are trying to contact her.’ I drifted off. I awoke again and looked straight into my wife’s face. The feeling of relief was so intense, it took my breath away. I said ‘Hello Babe, I’ve broken my back, and I’ll never walk again.’ She turned away aghast. The African nurse with her said, ‘Be calm Mrs. Mayers he will be perfectly alright.’ My wife later told me, she ran to the loo, getting there just in time before the total contents of her bowels emptied themselves. If that nurse could see me now, in our beautiful converted barn. Sitting at the kitchen table, looking out on to a lovely, sumptuous courtyard garden, she’d have the right to say, ‘I told you so.’
    But that would be after years of devastating trauma yet ahead. I’m sure Africans generally cope with disasters much better than we do here in the first world as they live so close to it, in their everyday lives.
    Somehow it was arranged by my wife and our great friends Jill and Renaldo, for Peter and Jo, with whom we’d stayed so often, after delicious suppers and too much red wine, to come at daybreak. Driving the 100 miles from Nairobi to Nyahururu to collect me. We then made the long slow journey to Nairobi hospital, with me lying flat on a door and drugged to the eyeballs, in the back of Peter’s Range Rover.It seemed an eternity for my poor little wife crouched in the back, but I was ‘out-of-it’. Later I asked her how she’d found me, and what happened to the car.
    Earlier that evening she’d had a faint, faraway telephone call, from a man with a strong, almost unintelligible Kenyan accent, briefly shouting down the line, ‘Mr. Mayers has been involved in an accident, he is in hospital. Then the line went dead. She had no idea to whom she was speaking or to which hospital he was referring. All she knew was where I was headed that afternoon so I might have been in Nakuru hospital, where I was born, or I might have been in Nyahururu Hospital. They were sixty miles apart.
    My Parents were away on a much-needed, long-awaited holiday in England, so we were living in the family home, my wife running my mother’s business of Maasai Dancers. Busloads of tourists, from all over the world, would pour down the side of the valley every afternoon, to watch a troop of Maasai Moran (young warriors) performing their tribal dances.Then the tourists had an English tea with scones and cake, on the green, soft expansive lawn. To help her, living in the annex, she had a lovely young blond English girl, on her gap year, called Fiona. Fiona could never, ever have imagined the drama in which she was about to be involved.
    My wife and Fiona set off into the darkness not knowing where they were going. After about two hours driving, they stopped at the turning to Nyahururu. Should they go on to Nakuru, or turn off to Nyahururu. By now my wife was beginning to panic. She took the turning to the latter. It was after midnight when they crept into the small, dirty, pitch-black darkness of Nyahururu. They stopped, not having a clue where to go. Out of the dense blackness, into the beams of the car headlights, emerged two young African men. She knew she was taking a risk, but she had no alternative. She wound down her window a few inches and as they passed asked