The plains, on the other hand, were warm with life. Giraffes clustered around trees, nibbling at the upper branches, and swooping long necks down to nuzzle at their babies, already taller than my father. Fifty or more zebra marched in a long snaking line towards a nearby pond, where a herd of wildebeest were bathing, the mud darkening their spindly legs. One of them raised his head and stared at the train. He had the gentle eyes of a cow, but a horse’s long face.

‘Look, Theo,’ Maud said, pointing.

I saw a flash of white, brown and black – four gazelles running and leaping abreast of each other to rejoin their herd.

‘They’re so sweet,’ she said, clapping her hands.

I pressed my face against the screen – Dar es Salaam had been exotic, but this new Kenya was the Africa I’d dreamed of, the Africa of H. Rider Haggard, and I was impatient to finish the train journey, to start living in this incredible landscape.

Eventually we saw a city on the horizon. It got closer and closer, the buildings on the outskirts made of daub and wattle, or yellow stone, then sturdier brick buildings, then the train pulled into Nairobi, and we piled out with our luggage onto the wide platform, with the station clock swinging from the canopy above us, showing twelve thirty in the afternoon.

‘Well,’ my father said. ‘Are we ready for our new lives?’

In the hotel lobby I saw a framed photograph of the town in 1904 – rows of identical huts along a dirt track and The Norfolk, newly opened. Nairobi had grown since then, but the hotel still looked the same: a long, low building with a mock-Tudor front, surrounding perfectly manicured gardens and a turquoise pool in a courtyard area. Inside, the roof was supported by rows of gleaming white columns and criss-crossing white beams. It was the grandest building I’d been in. I didn’t wonder that Roosevelt had chosen it for his hunting trip.

Our interconnecting rooms were homely, decorated in soft greys and caramel browns and furnished with sleek sofas and lacquered dressers. Chrome and frosted-glass desk lamps provided soft pools of light, and slatted doors to the garden kept the heat out. My father tipped the bellboy another penny and closed the door behind him.

‘What do we think?’ he asked my mother.

She lay down on the bed in their room. ‘A soft mattress at last,’ she said. ‘Maud, come and unpin my hair.’

My sister knelt by the side of the bed removing hairpins one by one until her hair fell in a fiery mane across the pillow. Maud had inherited red hair from our mother, but hers was a dark mahogany colour, not the pure copper that gleamed before us now.

I met my mother’s eye. ‘Can we go for a swim?’ I asked. She shrugged, but gripped my wrist as I turned to collect my bathing shorts.