The stage actress, 41, who played Cherie Blair in the film The Queen, recalls an idyllic childhood among snakes and sea urchins in Tanzania
Between the ages of six and nine, in the mid-1970s, I lived at 86 Haile Selassie Road in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. My father worked for the Foreign Office, and was posted there from Cameroon, which is practically 100% humidity, so we arrived mouldy with boils into the dry heat, which was beautiful.
The house was two storeys, painted white, with a horseshoe gravel drive. We never went into the right side of the garden: that was where the army ants lived. On the left were trees that we climbed; my father built a castle out of boxes and sprayed it silver.
A monitor lizard lived in the back garden; we’d lie on the ground and look at its eyes. We had monkeys at the front and love birds in the roof, which hopped all over the lawn in the morning.
Joseph, our cook, lived in a compound at the back with Bahari, his son. Bahari was a fantastic football player because he walked with a hobbled gait, which meant that, when he was dribbling, you never knew which way he would go. I loved sports, so Bahari and I played football all day. Apende, our ayah [nanny], seemed 1,000 years old, but my God she could move. One day, there was a snake in the kitchen. She ran in and whacked the shit out of it. My mum said: “Is it poisonous?” Apende said: “We kill first, ask later.”
