Nicholas Best's short novel about a young schoolmaster and wannabe soldier, coming of age at a prep school in post-Independence Kenya's Masai country, is no masterpiece but it is a fine light comedy and should be better known.
The book's strength lies with its cast of eccentric characters including the headmaster of Haggard Hall, Desmond Gale, an ex-army man and former adventurer, "of a type well known in Kenya", the Padre with his enthusiasm for racing pigeons (notably 'Siege of Paris'), Gentleman's Relish and cricket, Lady Bullivant a brook-no-nonsense, riding-to-hounds colonial of a type familiar to viewers of the TV series 'Two Fat Ladies', and the regularly absconding pupil, Smith-Baggot, who through the book's pages seems to spend as much time in the bush as he does in the classroom (but nonetheless, with a certain amount of 'help' does get a Common Entrance to King's School, Canterbury).
I have yet to mention the book's principal figure, Martin Riddle - the young schoolmaster - whose move from Purley Way in Surrey to Haggard Hall (and back again) creates the framework which supports the text. Riddle is perhaps a little obvious, a mummy's boy who fails his Army entrance tests primarily because of a lack of self-confidence but who, responding to the force of circumstance, does rather well in Kenya and is thus set up for the future.
But I should include, primarily for the joy of the succinct introductory description of her, the school's matron Mrs Fisk, a former air stewardess. "She was in her early thirties, heavily made-up, with a hairstyle that spoke of private fantasy."
And I should also include at least one of the school's retainers, Mogadishu, an anti-Catholic and the only one of the Africans who knows how to roll the cricket pitch properly.
Thoroughly enjoyable. While not in the league of school novels by Waugh or, indeed, Huxley, Tennis and the Masai certainly lives with Ellis's AJ Wentworth BA and benefits immeasurably in being set far beyond England.
Tennis and the Masai by Nicholas Best, Hutchinson, 1986 176pp.
