You Have Not a Leg to Stand On by D.D. Mayers Page A

pushed myself on to the veranda. Everyone was there, merrily chatting away. I got a warm greeting from all the family, and a kiss from My little wife, ‘Hello, hello, have you had a lovely time?’ ‘I’ve had a wonderful time.’
    This moment, and its reaction was very significant. It meant I was getting back my independence. No one was trying to take away my independence, but inevitably, I’d become mollycoddled and it was now up to me, to show I could stand on my own two feet, so to speak.
    It must have been on this visit to my family in the Valley, we were driving into Nairobi when an incident took place with a traffic policeman. A new flyover had been built over our usual road, to relieve the incredible volume of traffic that had come about since we were last here. I made a stupid mistake and started to come down off the flyover into the oncoming traffic. Very quickly I realised the mistake and backed up, but two or three cars had to weave their way around me. Only a couple of minutes from joining the dual carriageway, a policeman stepped forward with his arm up in the air and the other vigorously waving me to the side. He was furious, ‘What do you think you were doing?’ he shouted in his thick Kenyan accent, ‘You could have caused a grave accident,’ ’I’m very sorry Officer, you see the last...’ ‘No, no, no, no,’ he shouted waving his finger in my face.‘Do not make excuses to me’, then pointing to his badge on his cap, ‘You have not got a leg to stand on.’ I paused and said, ‘Do you know Officer, you’re absolutely right.’ He stood back and puffed up, ‘So... I am right.’ ‘Yes Officer, I’m very sorry, I shall never make that mistake again.’ He paused and half shouted, ‘OK, this time I will let you go, but if I ever have to stop you again, I will throw the book at you, now go.’ I went.

Rotherhithe
    I later reflected on what he’d said. He was right, of course, not only literally but in any other sense as well. I think this must have been about 1983, seven years after the accident. We were living in our beautiful warehouse in Rotherhithe, just below Tower Bridge in South-East London. So why did I still have this terrible sense of nothingness, pointlessness, uselessness. It’s not as though we’d done nothing for seven years; and yet every morning I would wake up feeling sick; I would retch and retch until my stomach muscles ached. We’d borrowed a lot of money to convert the warehouse, but we paid it all back just by selling one floor, completely empty, twenty feet by sixty. In those days we still had bank managers. They would guide and advise and would look back through your financial record, and would let you extend your overdraft, as long as you let them know first. In this case he said, ‘I expect you’re going to have to do a lot of hard talking.’ We both said, ‘We think it’ll speak for itself.’ We picked him up in South Kensington, drove him over Tower Bridge, through all the huge derelict warehouses, to the Mayflower pub. The Mayflower ship did actually set sail to America from here, and our little warehouse nestled between two other monsters which soon would succumb to the developers. We pointed it out and he said, ‘Oh I see,’ and that was it. We drove him back to South Kensington.
    When it was finally finished and friends came to visit, it had the same sort of effect as people had when they first saw Kedong. It took their breath away; at any time, day or night, the tide, in or out, people’s jaws would drop.
    I should tell you of the immensity of the task upon which we’d just embarked. The owner of the warehouse was a friend of Marriott’s called Angelica Garnet, whose husband David wrote the book Aspects of Love, subsequently made famous by Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s musical. She asked £45,000 which even then,