The Kirkwood Trilogy
2 primary works 3 total works planned
Book 2
The First World War is over, and parts of Natal are thrown open to white settlers for development; Donald Kirkwood acquires 1500 acres of raw veld to develop a cotton farm. While camping there with little more than a tent and a post box made from a biscuit tin, he builds a house and prepares the land. The farmers must cope with a fatal cattle disease, catastrophic floods, and locusts.
The settlement is rich with eccentric characters, not least little Mrs Potgieter, who delivers eggs wrapped in scraps of the Zululand Times; Eric, an American volunteer ambulance driver on the Western Front, and his French wife Marie; and Padraig O'Grady, an Irishman who fought with the Boers, and his wife Sarie, daughter of one of them.
Anyone who loves Africa will love this book, as will anyone desiring to gain a better un-derstanding of the complicated society in post-colonial South Africa. This is the second book in the Kirkwood Trilogy, the first being The Snake in the Signal Box.
The settlement is rich with eccentric characters, not least little Mrs Potgieter, who delivers eggs wrapped in scraps of the Zululand Times; Eric, an American volunteer ambulance driver on the Western Front, and his French wife Marie; and Padraig O'Grady, an Irishman who fought with the Boers, and his wife Sarie, daughter of one of them.
Anyone who loves Africa will love this book, as will anyone desiring to gain a better un-derstanding of the complicated society in post-colonial South Africa. This is the second book in the Kirkwood Trilogy, the first being The Snake in the Signal Box.
Book 3
1929, and Donald Kirkwood's Zululand cotton farm is abandoned. The family moves to Chelmsford, a clifftop house on the northern outskirts of Durban. Afrikaner right-wingers plot pro-Nazi support as Hitler continues his rise to power during the 1930s. In Durban, society is more concerned with horse racing and doing good works among marginalised Zulus and Indians. When war breaks out in Europe and north-east Africa, Donald Kirkwood's son Ewan enlists and is exposed to the full horrors of war. He joins the Springbok Legion in Addis Ababa, a fraternity for all servicemen to help those in need. Later, his romance across the colour-bar with a beautiful Indian girl leads to disaster. The novel is rich with characters - Keswick Jardine, the harbourmaster, who opens the French doors of his house with a system of levers linked to a ship's wheel in the sitting room; Jeeves, the Jardines' Indian butler, who chuckles away in his rooms at night, reading books by P G Wodehouse; and the pretty half-caste bar girl Rosa in Lourenco Marques who helps Malcolm Muggeridge disable the Italian consul, described by spy Kim Philby as "the most dangerous man in Africa".
This novel completes the Kirkwood family trilogy set in a troubled South Africa and 'bookended' by two world wars.
This novel completes the Kirkwood family trilogy set in a troubled South Africa and 'bookended' by two world wars.