Overview

This memoir is a story that revolves around a town in Kenya's Rift Valley Province, called Nakuru. It is a history of my ancestors and of dislocation, recovery, murder and adventure in England, Scotland and Africa from about 1745 to 1971. The story tells of my remarkable parents, Spencer (""Spen"") and Peggy Welford who first met in interesting circumstances in Nairobi in December, 1943. It outlines their lightning romance and marriage and their stories before, during and after World War II. They were demobilised from their wartime military service in England, in November 1945. My mother told us about a memorable ""6 months Pub Crawl"" (her words) that they went on, through England and Scotland in 1946. They returned to Kenya via a river cruise up the River Nile to a port called Jinja, in Uganda, from where they returned to Spen's home in Kenya, by rail. I was born in October of that year. The opening describes a frightening childhood journey to Nakuru in the time of the Mau Mau rebellion in late 1952. Shortly after, another childhood journey took my younger brother, Geoff, and me six thousand mile north, to England, without our parents, where we stayed for four years with our Grandmother, Elizabeth, and my father's sister, Alice, in a small fishing village. It was a wonderful time for me and I learned a great deal, in two schools beside the River Exe. Spen died in Nakuru in 1971. He was 62 years old. A postscript tells what happened to the rest of his family after that. Peggy died in Ballarat, Australia, the day before my birthday in 2003. She had recently turned 90.

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JOHN WELFORD WAS born in Nairobi in 1946. His mother was a Scots South African from Cape Town. His father was English, from Lymm in Cheshire, but he had been working in Kenya since he was 18. They met in Nairobi during World War 2 and married in January 1944. John and his brother were brought up on farms in Kenya until the 1952 Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Because of their farm's proximity to terrorist hideouts, John's parents made the difficult decision to send their boys to England. It was a 2 day flight on a Handley Page Hermes. They were met by their Aunt Alice, their father's sister. For the next four years they lived with their Auntie and Granny and went to school in South Devon, going back to Kenya for a Summer holiday only once in that time. When they finally returned to Kenya, John and his brother had to go to boarding school in Nairobi from when he was ten until he left school, eight years later. Then followed another sojourn in England, studying for a B.Sc. During that time he learnt to sail and then became a sailing instructor in his vacations. A trip to Canada - picking tobacco in Ontario - earned him enough money to go back to Kenya for Christmas 1968. He found a job teaching Maths and Science at a Prep School in Kenya and did that for 8 years at two different boarding schools. He met a young lady from Geelong, Australia, who came to teach at his school and they got married at Morrisons, near Meredith, in 1976. He has lived in Victoria ever since. Because he had no teaching qualification, John spent the next five years tuning cars, having bought the franchise for Geelong from Home Tune. In 1981, He went back to teaching (with Permission to Teach) at Geelong Grammar School. This meant having to teach full time, as well as gain a Diploma of Education at Melbourne University. He spent the next 20 years teaching at GGS, including 15 years at Timbertop, Geelong Grammar's Year 9 campus near Mount Buller, in Victoria. It was an outdoor, physical life which he very much enjoyed. John contracted pneumonia at the end of 1999 which later turned into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and he spent 8 years recovering slowly from that. Since leaving Geelong Grammar he has worked part time at local Ballarat schools and became a mentor for troubled kids including two with Asperger's syndrome. He has also become a leader and facilitator for the Pathways Foundation which runs contemporary Rites of Passage camps for teenage boys, and their fathers or significant male mentors. The Victorian camps for boys are run on his property, in the bush south of Ballarat where he lives with his wife, Gaye. In his spare time, he still teaches sailing with Sailability in Ballarat, and he drives a 'hot' 50-year-old Peugeot 504 in rallies and autocrosses for fun.

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