Dad
Dedicated to my father, Colin Haynes.
What do I remember about Colin ……..
I remember first meeting him. I lived in the YWCA in Nairobi Kenya and my friend who also lived there introduced us. Her boyfriend worked with Colin at the East African Standard newspaper. We went to meet him in his flat and he was lying on the floor trying to get his tv to work.
Our first date was a trip to the local wild animal park.
Many other trips, he loved to travel like me, up north to see Lake Naivasha and the millions of flamingos and hipos, the Abedair Hills where the Mau Mau lived (terrorists wanting freedom from Britain), and to Thompson Falls where he bought me a chameleon from a young boy. We took it home and it disappeared for good when we put it out on his balcony into the leaves of the floral climber. The Serangetti, the sulphur flats, Amboselli and Malinda by the coast and the Ghedi ruins.
Last date before we left Kenya, the Kenya Independence Ball that Colin was covering for his news paper.
After leaving Kenya we drove south thru so many African countries. Dirt road all the way, very few people and hotels and garages only spaced between a car tank’s capacity, if you didn’t fill up you’d be in real danger as there were wild animals all around, all the way to Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and he got a job with the local newspaper and I went to work at the TV station. After several months there we drove on to South Africa as the civil war in S. Rhodesia was getting nasty. We couldn’t find anywhere to live as all the Whites had moved from the newly independent countries and we sailed back to UK just in time for Christmas.
I know he was an excellent reporter. He started working in the UK for a pig magazine then was hired by a newspaper and covered court hearings. He met Frederick Forsyth at this paper who worked with him and he was such a bad reporter Colin would write his report for him. He met him again when we lived in Nigeria and Freddy worked for the BBC. There was civil war The Biafran War when part of Nigeria wanted to be autonomous - Freddy went to interview the so called President of the new country and stayed, writing stories that were flattering to the rebels. The BBC re-called and then fired him.
Our time in Lagos Nigeria was fascinating but very difficult - terrible climate, worries about the war, the Biafran rebels got a plane filled it with home made bombs and flew it over Lagos, bombing as it went. However one bomb blew up the plane and it landed very close to our house, it reminded me of living thru the Blitz.
But Colin loved reporting about the Biafran war. It was the most exciting time of his career and Agency France Presse, for whom he worked, loved him. Several times he the BBC corespondent Peter Stewart, the AP and Reuters corespondents all went off into the Bush with the Nigerian army and us wives wondered if they’d ever come back alive.
We both contracted Jaundice towards the end of his posting and we went back to UK and Colin worked for Ford for several years but he was desperate to leave, he missed the wilderness and excitement of Africa so he got a job in S.A. where we lived for ten years.
Robert and James left High School in S.A. so were liable to be called up by the army and as Colin had a friend who worked for Newsweek who’d just lost his son after he stepped on a land mine on the Angola border we decided to leave S.A.
We moved to the USA after being turned down by New Zealand where he really wanted to go, because 'we had too many children' we were told, but Colin was never happy here even though he wrote 8 computer books with his second wife Kate, he missed Africa and went back after a couple of years, there he married for the third time and eventually moved to Ireland where he lived and died.
Colin was a born journalist, loved the excitement and weaving a good story. He could write a story out of practically nothing and make it sound interesting.
Wherever he worked he broke stories other journalists didn’t have. I remember a journalist from The London Times who came to Nigeria to write a story about the Biafran War, came and interviewed him as he lay in bed ill from jaundice as he was told by the Embassies that ‘Colin was the man to speak to’.
I asked him to write my biography for me once and he made me sound far better than I was. “This doesn’t sound like me”, I told him “Don’t worry, once they’ve hired you you’ll be fine”.
A born story teller.
Colin loved adventure. Together we lived in various houseboats on the Sausalito Waterfront. He loved to cruise around the bay in an inflatable and electric canoe with our dog Shadow, reading the local paper. Visualize that and smile.
I did not know what a hoarder Colin was. Nearby he had a large storage container that I never entered. Finding out about that was a big shock. That's another story.
We soon cut loose from our lives on the Waterfront to explore for a while in his Argosy, towing my old Airstream. Those were happy days indeed. Colin built a bookshelf into the Airstream. Neither of us could live without books. He built drawers under the bed where I kept my beads, torch and glass and a small tank of oxygen so that I could make beads along the way. Somehow we ended up in Mexico. We lived in a stable on a piece of land I was going to buy with an inheritance. My Airstream became my studio. Colin wrote on a battery run computer and helped me with two books I would probably not have written without his help. No telephone, not much electricity, and the shower was a sun warmed big black bottle hung from a tree. We did have a loo. We had a big wooden bed handmade in Michoacan. A classic. We both had bicycles and rode into the village for groceries that we cooked under a makeshift shelter. Colin could always make a place work for us, whether it was a nutty kitchen or an extension inside the stable for me to work my beads. I was filling bead orders worth thousands of dollars, and shipping them back to the USA, so we had a kind of security...The stories of our life together could make a funny book. I did change my mind about living in Mexico, so we somehow returned to the USA, landing in Arizona and I bought a house in Bisbee.
That's when I really found out about the hoarding. It was ongoing, so, not only did Colin take trips to his storage container in California to bring back insane amounts of stuff, but he would also drive my Dodge Ram to the flea markets at the weekends. That is another story.
Colin was a sad man, I could not heal him. When he left for another phase of his life, I could only hope more light would come into his heart. He was adventurous. He had a wonderful and magical mind that I truly loved. He had 10 books published in the 8 years we were together by big publishing houses. I tried to get him to write fiction because in any first chapters I could see future successes but Colin stayed with the computer books.
I had to let him go. Colin very soon married again, and I was soothed to know that his new wife was a nurse. She would take care of him and I could move peacefully on with my own life. We never communicated again and I hope he was able to find good meaning through the rest of his years. God Bless your soul Colin. You were a very special man and I learned a lot from you and experienced some precious and magical years through our marriage. Please Rest In Peace..
Coming soon
Coming soon
Coming soon
Coming soon