‘No, not me,’ Miss Graham said. She dipped her brush into the pot of cobalt. ‘But the family I was with before were in India for a while.’

‘What colour is India?’

‘Gold. And orange.’

‘What about America?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know America,’ she said brusquely.

Two of the totos appeared with the laundry, laughing and whooping. They were younger than me, probably no more than twelve, and my mother must have ordered their kanzus in the wrong size because they were both tripping over their hems. One of them carried the washtub, the rub board and soap banging against its sides as he walked. The other carried a pile of clothes and bedding that was higher than him. When the first toto saw Miss Graham he stopped, and the second crashed into him, dropping most of my father’s shirts.

Miss Graham rapped her easel with the handle of her paintbrush; it made a sound like a gun-crack, and the first toto flinched. ‘Shall I tell Bwana Miller that you throw his clothes on the ground?’

The totos mumbled something.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘They’re dirty anyway.’

‘You have to instil discipline,’ Miss Graham said. ‘The natives are awfully lazy.’ She turned back to them and made a flapping motion with her free hand. ‘Pesi pesi.’

We’d been out in Africa long enough to know that meant ‘get on with it’.

The totos crept past us and sat on the jetty, whispering to each other as they washed our laundry. Maud watched them with a confused look on her face. After a while I went back inside.

If the totos were afraid of Miss Graham, they were even more afraid of my mother. A few times I’d been in the kitchen with them, bothering the cook, when someone had muttered ‘Bibi Miller’, and everyone had melted away.

Joseph, the cook, was the only person who didn’t seem intimidated by her temper. He was a good-natured old man whose fingers were covered in calluses. Once I saw him use his bare hands to take a hot cast-iron dish from the oven and realised where the calluses came from. Two months after we moved in, when my voice began to change, becoming cracked and hoarse, Joseph made me a special hot drink that tasted bitter and grainy.

‘You a man now, Bwana,’ he said. ‘This drink make you into a good husband.’

Joseph could cook anything, but he loved schnitzel and potatoes, which drove my father to despair. For my fifteenth birthday, Joseph made me apple strudel with ice-cream. The pastry was light and flaky, the apples were soft and tasted of burnt sugar and cinnamon. It was the best cake I’d ever had.