Looking for pictures to hang on the wall of my new study, I go through some old photos on the computer. Up pops a folder of “Kenya Pix” from a trip to the Maasai Mara in 2004. Among them is an image of a male lion in tall grass raked by a late-afternoon sun. Its jaws are clamped round the bloody remains of a young wildebeest. Among them, too, are pictures of Teri and our daughters, on the lookout for more wildlife from the back of a Land-Rover and enjoying a sundowner in the bush.

  Teri wouldn’t be up to a nine-hour flight at the moment, or to bouncing about in a Land-Rover. We’d hoped to make more use of our railcards in 2021. What we didn’t expect was that we’d be travelling with them from Worthing to Haywards Heath so that she could have an MRI scan. The walk of three-quarters of a mile from our house to West Worthing station in mid-October was the longest she had done in a while. In a bag we took with us, we had a hot-water bottle, a cushion that was supposed to help with back pain, and a gardener’s pad for kneeling on. At Gatwick Airport, where we changed trains, Teri made unorthodox use of one of the waiting areas. She couldn’t sit, so she knelt on her pad on the ground, resting her arms on the seat and occasionally letting out an “Aaoooow!”. A passing member of staff, thinking, maybe, that here was a passenger about to give birth, asked if there was anything she could do. At that stage, Teri was wondering if there was anything anyone could do. 

  The back garden in our new house is tiny in comparison with the garden we had. Its size might have put off other prospective purchasers, but it didn’t deter us. We loved the house, and we were intending to get out as often as possible, making the most of the sea air, the town centre and our proximity to the South Downs. At first things went to plan. 

  We joined that South Downs walk with the local Ramblers group the week we moved in. We took regular strolls along the prom, trying out cafés and restaurants. We swam a few times in the sea. Towards the end of August, we even enjoyed our first post-Covid gig, a session by a jazz quartet at the Hare and Hounds pub, 15 minutes’ walk from our front door.

  Well, it would normally be 15 minutes, but Teri was taking it gingerly. What had started as a twinge in her back at the end of July had developed into agonising pain, not just in her back but also down her right leg.

  We’d booked a table so we could eat before the band came on. Ours, we were told at the bar, was “9½” — an extra one, we reckoned later, for music nights. It was right next to the door — kept open for ventilation — and a stiff breeze was blowing in. Both of us were in summer clothes, and freezing, but we were determined to hear some live music. 

  One barmaid wore a mask, the other a kind of half face shield. Some customers put on masks when going to the bar or the loo, some didn’t. I put mine on the first time I went for a drink, but dopily forgot it the second time. 

  When an interval came up, and a couple sitting further from the door rose to leave, we raced over to grab their table. We’d stayed because the staff and the regulars were welcoming, and the band was impressive. We were close enough to see as well as hear the musicians, among them a bassist who seemed to be a part of his instrument rather than merely a player of it.

  We went back, every Tuesday for the next four weeks, up until September 21. Then we stopped. Teri had gone into lockdown. But the restrictions she was suffering weren’t a response to Coronavirus and laid down by the government; they were generated by her own body. She was in agony with sciatica. That MRI would reveal two prolapsed discs, one of which was pressing on the sciatic nerve.

  I used to think sciatica (irritation or compression of the sciatic nerve, which runs from the lower back to the feet) was an occasional pain that old people suffered. I remember Don Berry*, the man who brought me on to the Telegraph, having it shortly after the paper had made its journey from Fleet Street to London’s docklands, leaving behind hot metal for what we called “new technology”. One afternoon, Don was lying stretched out on the fourth floor of South Quay Plaza, behind the plate glass of the conference room. Colleagues passing by would know that his sciatica was bothering him again, and that he was mentally laying out that night’s pages rather than snoozing. The then home secretary, Douglas Hurd, on a tour of the glossy new Telegraph HQ, didn’t know that. As he was being walked past, he looked in on Uncle Don. “Well,” he said, “I see that in your new, high-tech world you’re maintaining some old post-prandial journalistic traditions.”

  I don’t think Don’s sciatica was on the same level as Teri’s, and I don’t remember it lasting long. But I can’t say for sure. According to the NHS website, “It usually gets better in 4 to 6 weeks but can last longer.” Teri’s has gone on and on. She can’t sit for any length of time. She can’t stand in one place without having to shift from foot to foot. She can’t walk far. 

  Since the end of September, she’s spent much of her time during the day stretched out sideways on the floor. She’s on a cocktail of painkillers, but even after taking those she’ll sometimes wake in the night in severe pain. “Oh, God! Oh, shit! Fucking hell!” is a litany I’ve got used to from a woman who, during the old normal, would be more likely to tick off others for swearing. I’m alone in hearing it. When friends or family are around she’s as cheery as ever, making a cuppa while shifting her weight from foot to foot, or reading to the kids while stretched out on her side on the kitchen floor.

  Between doses of pills, she attaches herself to a TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) machine, which treats pain with a mild electrical current, or lies down with a heated pad and a hot-water bottle on her back. Aside from drugs, electrical pulses and heat, her only relief comes from swimming. Several times a week, Jean, one of our new friends in Worthing, drives Teri to and from a gym so she can swim in the pool — and makes a point of  going via the prom so Teri isn’t denied a sight of the sea. Teri’s not up to stumbling over shingle to swim in the sea. Even the five-minute walk from our house to the beach, however much she needs and wants the fresh air, is a struggle. And this in a woman who led walks for her local branch of the Ramblers’ Association; a woman who has hiked in the foothills of the Himalayas.

  It’s particularly cruel that Teri’s been laid low now, when she should be making the most of more free time. Just before we moved house, she had retired after 40 years as a nurse, mostly spent caring for children with special needs, first in a children’s hospital, then in a special school. Unlike me, she’s the sort of traveller who can make herself useful when she’s away. She went to Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami that followed the Indian Ocean earthquake at the end of 2004, and helped set up a feeding centre for one of the hardest-hit coastal communities. And on our trip to Kenya in the summer of that same year, when I was expecting to be writing about how our daughters’ eyes had been opened by a safari, she took me in an entirely unexpected direction.

* * * 

In a cottage in the Muthaiga Country Club, one of the last relics of colonial Kenya, the First World met the Third. The First World was represented by our teenage daughters, Laura and Julie, busy with hairbrushes, dryers and make-up, looking forward to their first experience of the bush but keen to dress up the nines for dinner before they were stuck for a week with the earthy browns and greens recommended for a safari. The Third World was represented by Harun, the eight-year-old boy lying still and quiet on the settee, his leg stretched out so that Teri could treat the wound he had suffered when, sleeping on the street in Nairobi, he had been run over by a lorry.

  Daniel, pastor at a rescue centre that had just taken in Harun, looked on with his brother, Peter, as Teri soaked off the filthy, stinking bandages that had stuck to the boy’s skin. Daniel and Peter made reassuring noises. I did what those lacking first-aid skills always do in these circumstances: I made the tea. My daughters, dashing between bedroom and bathroom, paused now and again to tell Harun that he was the bravest kid they had ever seen.

  The boy was patched up and went back with his carers to the refuge. The girls got dressed up and went with their parents to the restaurant. There the story might have ended — but it didn’t. On our return home, Teri declared that she was going to go back one day and help out at that rescue centre. A year later, having taken a course in tropical nursing and learnt the basics of Swahili, she did. Laura, newly graduated in drama, went with her. Together they volunteered for a fortnight at the Emmanuel Boys Rescue Centre, a refuge for street kids in the Dagoretti area. They took with them donated football strips, and bought the boys — most of whom were barefoot or in flip-flops — trainers in a local market. 

 Teri dressed old wounds and treated minor ailments, including ringworm, a fungal infection that causes a rash but which can be quickly cleared up with over-the-counter lotions. She gave primers on health, hygiene and HIV awareness, and taught the older boys — they ranged in age from seven to 18 or 19 — about contraception and use of condoms. She told them, too, about female genital mutilation (which would be outlawed in Kenya in 2011 but is still rife in the Kuria community in the south-west) and the harm it does to physical and mental health. Several boys said afterwards that they would never allow it to be done to any daughters of theirs.

  Laura got the boys acting out experiences they had had on the streets, then talking about their fears and questions of right and wrong. There were scenes of innocent boys being chased and beaten by the police; scenes of not-so-innocent boys picking pockets so they could eat.

  Together, Teri and Laura organised a party, with chips provided by a local stall-holder and chickens by a chef at the Holiday Inn. The boys were introduced to games such as pass-the-parcel and musical statues. “The whole thing was like a holiday club,” Teri recalls. “And I hope we left them with some happy memories.” Once back home, she began raising funds for the centre, and encouraging a British-based charity to support it.

* * * 

I couldn’t have envisaged any of that when we arrived in Kenya. Nairobi, I assumed, would be no more than a stopover en route to the Maasai Mara. We’d expected to spend most of our first day by the Muthaiga’s pool. As it turned out, we ended up at a police station — not to report a crime but to spring two boys from jail.

  Teri had a friend, Amanda, who had worked for several years as a missionary in Nairobi. Though she had two young sons, one with special needs, she had somehow found time to help out at the Emmanuel Boys Rescue Centre. She also found time to show us around Westlands Market, where at every turn among the soapstone carvings and Maasai spears we were approached by little boys calling her name. One boy with glazed eyes, drowning in a jacket three sizes too big, came up and she frisked him half-heartedly. “Where is it?” she asked, demanding that he hand over the glue that he and so many kids use to blot out hunger and the night-time chill. 

  Amanda asked after two other boys, and was given disturbing news: they had been arrested four days earlier and were still in Parklands police station. So off we went to find out why. 

  The station frontage was like a breaker’s yard, stuffed with wrecked cars. The front desk was a rough-hewn high counter, the green gloss walls behind it decorated with a colour portrait of the police commissioner, a black-and-white one of the president and a well-meaning notice: “Parklands Police Station welcomes you, our customers. We are here to serve you.”

  After an hour’s wait to see the officer in charge, Amanda had the boys released into her care. They were aged eight or nine, and in surprisingly good spirits. They had been seen trespassing in the grounds of a school and arrested. “What were you doing there?” Amanda asked one. “We just wanted to go to school,” he said.

  Kenya had recently introduced free primary education, but a child who was without a home was still without a school. Amanda said there could be as many as 60,000 street children in Nairobi and 250,000 in the country as a whole. 

  We met some of the luckier ones at the refuge centre. We had brought a box of baby rabbits from the market for the children, and were mobbed when we stepped from the car with them, 40-or-so barefoot boys rushing to shake our hands and stroke the rabbits. They drew us into their tiny classroom, sang hymns and then, in accordance with local custom, asked each of us to say a few words in response.

  As we were leaving, Daniel, a former street child himself, having heard that Teri was a nurse, asked if she would take a look at one of the latest arrivals, who had wounds on his legs. There was nothing we could do for him on the spot, but we had a first-aid kit back at our cottage. Thus it was that a black boy from the street ended up on the set of White Mischief.

  In colonial days, the Muthaiga Club was synonymous with the fastest of a fast-living set; men and women who night after night succumbed to the three As: altitude, alcohol and adultery. It’s tamer now — or so we found it — but behind its pink walls old ways endured. Cash never changed hands (all payments were transacted on chits), stuffed lions mouldered in glass cases and members and guests were expected to be “formally dressed” after 7.30pm while in the public rooms. If the rules were a little starchy, the staff weren’t. We were made to feel very welcome — though I was the only one allowed a look at the Men’s Bar.

  The clubmen followed us out on to the plains of the Maasai Mara — or at least the tones of their conversation did. Within half an hour of arriving by light aircraft from Nairobi, we were out among a herd of wildebeest, those skittish creatures that look like bison on a diet. There were thousands, but it seemed that four or five were speaking for the herd. “Uh. Uh. Hemmm. Hemmm,” they seemed to be saying, like district commissioners nodding over the port.

  Richard, our guide, had asked us which animals we were keenest to see. The girls and I mentioned the big cats, and he was quick to deliver, taking us inside an hour within close range of a lioness and her triplets of seven or eight months. Close enough to see the mother’s teeth as she yawned. 

  I’d waxed lyrical about a trip I had made on my own to Kenya a dozen years earlier — about the big skies and the endless plains, about animals roaming as nature intended. Teri and the girls were as blown away as I had been but, initially, a little worried too.

  “Are you sure we’re safe?” one of them would ask every so often in the first couple of hours. And Richard was so sure, with that quiet confidence that instils faith, that none of them questioned his judgement again over the next four days — not even when he took us at a 30-degree angle through a dried-up riverbed or when the Land-Rover conked out three times in one afternoon.

  August is a good time to be in the Mara: the grasses are long, the game abundant. On that first evening alone we saw Thomson’s and Grant’s gazelle, hartebeest and, as we returned to camp, a spotted hyena.

  We heard hyenas that night shortly after turning in. In daylight, our tents had seemed ridiculously substantial — and more so after our visit to Dagoretti: each was a heavy canvas room complete with four-poster, dressing table, desk and shower. In the dark, as we cuddled hot-water bottles against the African night, the tents turned flimsy. 

  A lion’s roar can carry for five miles, I had told the girls, so don’t worry; but when we first heard that sound its source seemed much closer. Nameless creatures skittered over the tent roofs. Early in the morning, we heard an enormous rush of water, as if a giant basin were being emptied down a sink. We didn’t get out to check, but it must have been an elephant or a hippo in the river below.

  We all found it hard, even with coffee and biscuits delivered to our tent, to get out of bed each morning at six for the first of the day’s three game drives. I had forgotten how cold it could be — cold enough for teenage girls to demand their parents’ jumpers and pull socks on as gloves.

  But it was beautiful, too, the huge skies first tinged with pink, then turning a Bunsen-burner blue. The wildebeest migration, in which millions cross from Tanzania into Kenya, was under way, and we packed breakfast one morning and drove out to the Mara River to watch it.

  Hundreds of animals, a few dozen zebras here and there among the wildebeest, milled about on the far bank. From the middle and far distance, thousands more were crossing the plain to join them. Now and again an animal would venture down the slope to the water. Four or five others would follow. The four or five would become a dozen, a hundred. Then a particularly brave zebra or wildebeest would dip a hoof in the river, start back, dip another hoof, and then jump in and start swimming. And immediately the water would be full of wildebeest, bounding down the slopes, tumbling into another another, leaping over their fellows in their haste to get into the water and over to the other side.

  Just as it took only one brave animal to start the crossing, so it took only one timid animal to stop it. A zebra or wildebeest would be spooked, rear back, and the whole herd would dash from the water and retreat up the bank, the fear sometimes rippling so far that it reversed the direction of the herd on the plain.**

  We were still talking about the riverside spectacular as we went to bed that night, settling down in those giant tents. No danger in those of being run over in our sleep by a lorry.

* Journalists don’t have heroes, but Don Berry, who died at 86 in 2023, was one of mine. He was highly unusual in our trade in being as good at managing people as he was at managing pages. You can read some tributes to him in the British Journalism Review.

** I’ve read countless descriptions of the wildebeests’ crocodile-imperilled crossing of the Mara River. Tim Dee, in his book Four Fields, made me look at it afresh: “Entering the slapping river they seemed stripped naked, forced to endure a swimming lesson by an instructor who, for all his severities, sits nowhere but in their own heads.”