ALL THE WAY HOME Stories from an African Wildlife Sanctuary by Bookey Peek

Little Books, £7.99

EVERY LITTLE BOY NEEDS A best friend. For two years, from 1958 to 1959, mine was a flaxen-haired, short-cropped tomboy of a little girl called Bookey Scammell. We were both about 8. Her father was a scion of the lorry manufacturers of the same name. Her mother was a ravishing Dane who (it was whispered) had once been a top model. And their only daughter Bookey was, for me, the girl next door.

We lived in Denham Close, in a green and hilly suburb of what was then Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. The Scammells had a swimming pool (we didn’t); the Scammells gave sophisticated parties, drank gin and tonic and went to the races at nearby Borrowdale Racecourse (we didn’t). We had a Humber Hawk (they had a Ford Zephyr). She went to a private school (I didn’t).

But Bookey and I scorned the clinking glasses, the crooning romantic songs on the wireless and the whole world of smart grown-ups. We climbed trees (and fell out of them). We searched for deadly green mamba snakes in the banana trees in our garden (and found one). We rode bicycles, madly, everywhere (and fell off). We climbed into the top cupboard in my parents’ bedroom and made death-defying leaps on to their big double bed.

We searched for the meerkats that lived in the elephant grass near our house (and never saw them). We made Grand National jumps on our scorched and yellowing lawn and pretended to be buffalos and zebras, snorting, whinnying and jumping over them. And we tended to a cage of white mice, my beloved pets.

I didn’t know that her father was in financial trouble. I did suspect I was crazier about her than she was about me, but we both swore we would be best friends forever. Neither of us knew that I was going to be gay, that Ian Smith and African nationalism were soon to tear apart our world of pale blue skies, the yellow-brown winter veld, blazing mauve jacaranda trees, granite kopjies, smiling servants and endless sunshine; or that soon Rhodesia would be called Zimbabwe.

I was taken once to Cecil Rhodes’s grave in the indescribably beautiful Matopos hills, and supposed the wilderness that his tomb surveyed would be his and our inheritance forever. I think we both thought that.Then one day she went away. Her father was to try a new occupation as a hotelier in the Vumba Mountains. Bookey was tiring of me by then, anyway. She had discovered horses, as girls do. I never thought I would see her again.

She writes little, in All The Way Home,of what came next in her life. It seems she spent time as a young woman in London, where she discovered that she didn’t want to work in an office (I could have told her that). She travelled the world. And then, in her mid-thirties, she returned to Africa to live. She married an old flame, Richard Peek, an African wildlife expert and fanatic working in the Zimbabwean National Parks Department, and together they realised a dream.

Except that it has been an occasional nightmare as well as a dream, and Bookey is sick of people telling her in a patronising way (I could have warned anyone never to patronise Bookey) how marvellous it must be to have realised her dream. About 15 years ago they bought Stone Hills, 6,500 acres of wild land in the Matopos (now Matobo) hills, fenced it with 15 miles of six-wire game-proof fencing, built a thatched lodge for visitors, and opened their own, private reserve.

This book is really the story of that adventure. It is a wonderful book. I never knew Bookey could write. Perhaps she couldn’t then, but she can now — lyrically, funnily, passionately, rudely, spellbindingly. And what a story she has to tell. Of giraffes and zebras, of owls and eagles, of bringing up a baby kingfisher fallen from the nest; of house fires, and mamba-bite panics, and poisonings, and political anxieties; of staff lunatic and loyal and of guests and clients who range from the loveable to the ludicrous.

Through it all — the thread on which she strings these beads — is the story of Poombi the orphan wart-hog, brought up as one of the family (her little son David nestled with him in his hole) and finally released into the wild. Bookey tells how David, whose only world has been animals and animal experts, proffers a biscuit he had never tasted before (a Romany Cream) to a guest: “Try one of these; it’s a new species of biscuit.”

There is something here of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, but through the hilarity Bookey never hides her commitment to the natural world, and her heart-stopping love of Africa. In a moving sequel to his Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, Peter Godwin’s latest memoir When a Crocodile Eats the Sun describes how Africa can scare and horrify you, then “choke you with affection”. Bookey’s story does just this. It deserves to be a big success.

How I hope that she and her husband will be able to stay. How vividly that girl I haven’t seen for half a century leaps from these pages: cheeky, earnest, clever, impatient, impertinent — even her hair looks the same. She says she doesn’t remember why she was nicknamed “Bookey” — but I do.

At the end of the Acknowledgements she writes: “None of this would have happened without Rich, my one true love and my dearest friend and companion.” Silly, I know, but I winced when I read that. Good luck, Bookey, the girl who liked spiders, my tomboy girlfriend when we were 8.

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