The children held Thombili tightly around his tiny little throat. They told Mummsy that if she did not give them the money they asked, they would take the baby vervet monkey to the laboratory where they did tests on monkeys.
Mummsy and Fart paid for the little guy, who had been taken from his parents in the foothill forests of Mount Meru.
He was a petrified, shivering little guy. He clung to our Mummies’ blouse, looking like a small pink broach.
We had to feed him with an eyedropper at first. As he got stronger and bigger we fed him with mashed bananas and milk.
He grew and between him and the ducks – who pooped everywhere - became our favourite – sometimes. When he was bored he would pester our ducks and us. But he was our brother, so we humoured him.
He would never let Mummsy out of his sight, and sitting on her shoulders would cling to her long hair wherever she went.
We never put a chain or a nappy on him. He had free reign of the house. At night he would sleep under the mosquito net with Mummsy and fart.
Early in the mornings at ‘monkey get up time’, he would bounce around on mummsy and fart, swinging on the net until he was let out. He would sit on the windowsill, watching the sun come up over the Massai plains, gently chirruping and twisting his tiny hands in his lap – or scratching his bum.
When he tired of watching the sun, ‘the morning chase’ - our worst time. Cats are not morning people. We were chased around the cottage; pulled and pestered from room to room, over and under the furniture.
In the afternoons Mummsy would sit in the garden and read. Thombili would jump from branch to branch in the tree over her head. Sometimes he would do this with a flower in his mouth, sucking the nectar from it! When he needed a cuddle, he would drop straight onto Mummsy’s lap – from about ten feet. Immediate Mummsy heart attack! But Thombili would happily chortle away as he cuddled into her neck.
During the day when Mummsy and fart were at work Thombili would eat all the candles and anything else that was chewable. When they came home the house would be a mess of candle wax, flower petals and cats hiding in cupboards and under beds.
As he got older, he would sit on top of the high wall which surrounded the cottage, and look out over the coffee plantations of Mount Meru. We always wondered what was going through his little mind and felt sorry for him.
When we moved back to South Africa, Mummsy and Fart decided that we could not take him with us and we had to have him adopted.
A tour leader friend smuggled Thombili into Kenya to friend of hers who lived on a farm in Mombasa.
The last we heard was that Thombili would not let his new Mummsy alone. Troops of vervet monkeys passed through the banana and Papua trees every day. Then one day, the Mummsy adopted a little girl vervet monkey.
You must remember that Thombili, and the other adopted girl monkey, had never been associated with another vervet monkey.
As soon as Thombili and the little girl monkey saw each other, they rushed together and clasped each other tightly, like long lost friends - as monkeys do.
They stayed like that for over two hours and would not move far away from each other. Always clasping each other, grooming one another and chortling away happily. The two would sit on the kitchen windowsill and watch the troops pass by.
Then one day a vervet troop arrived, and saw the two sitting on the windowsill. They seemed to take an interest in the two. When the troop moved on the two lovers went with them.
Apparently the two lovers stop by on the windowsill for snacks of banana and pawpaw whenever they pass by – just to say hello to their human Mummsy.
This is a true story.
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