Knowing their love for animals, Gore-Browne had shipped them a blue galago, a kind of bushbaby from Northern Rhodesia. He’d laughed out loud, reading Ethel’s account of how the creature had caused havoc at one of their grand dinners with lords and cabinet ministers. ‘I knew Mary Galago had got into the room’, she wrote:
because I suddenly heard a small chattering but I couldn’t see her and didn’t want to alarm the guests. They were all so stuffy, you know how these politicians are. Anyway, she must have climbed the drapes because all of a sudden she landed on X’s shoulders in the middle of dessert. You never heard anyone let out such a yell and as for the racket from the ladies, you would have thought it was a lion from all the screaming. It made me think of you out there in the bush with all those wild creatures. Still at least it got rid of them early!
His mother had been horrified when she had heard of his gift, and made her disapproval clear to her sister-in-law, telling her ‘the thing must be full of diseases and fleas, the African kind, they’re the worst!’ and demanding she send it to London Zoo immediately. ‘I said at least we’d give it a holiday here in Surrey first,’ wrote Ethel.
Source:
Lamb, Christina. “Part One: 1914-1927, Chapter 3.” The Africa House: The True Story of An English Gentleman and His African Dream. Harper Collins Publishers, 2004. 35-6. Print.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...