Not long ago, I watched Lost in Living, a film which aims to explore what happens to the creative impulse when a woman becomes a mother. From the lofty viewpoint afforded me by – to date – six years of motherhood and, um, several hundred hours browsing Mumsnet’s talk boards (delightful as it is, that place could be used to define “time sucker” – ideal for a procrastinating writer), I laughed out loud when two heavily pregnant young women – one artist, one writer – were talking about how life would be once their babies were born. You wait, you just wait, the little voice in my head said. To be fair, both women were expecting changes: the artist was predicting that her output would slow and the writer worried about how she would get her daily three hours writing done. Both had correctly predicted the practical hurdle to their creativity that their baby would pose. And, all credit to them, this was more than I did when in the same situation (I hadn’t then discovered Mumsnet). However what neither had guessed – and, really, how could they? – was how their status as best friends bonded mainly over their artistic lives would change as the tentacles of parenthood grew stronger.   

In contrast to these two young women, the film also shows two older women – their families now grown. Again, one is an artist and the other the writer, Merrill Joan Gerber, who is not nearly as well-known as she deserves. It was the interviews with their adult children that I found most illuminating. Of course, there are parallels with any pursuit (many professional jobs, for example) that take both a parent, and that parent’s attention, away from a child for long periods of time. And yet there are things peculiar to the arts that are questions worth asking. How many of us would really like to have our lives depicted in our mother’s books? And how many would not feel some resentment of a mother who prioritised locking herself away to paint pictures that, at least at the time, brought little fame and less money? Can writing, and its artistic equivalents, achieve equilibrium with family life?

Unless, god forbid, our children predecease us, motherhood ends only with our deaths. With the birth of the first baby, that’s it: motherhood is the job there’s no resigning from. At first, it tends to assume a pre-eminent, crushing importance, which squashes everything else. But slowly, slowly, most women want their “me-ness” back. It seeps out in different ways for different people: first post-baby trip to the hairdresser, the pub or a swim; then, perhaps, a return to work or a much loved sports club. Isn’t writing just an extension of that?

Oh, I wanted the trips to the hairdressers and the pub, the swim and, hell, even the return to work.  But I was….greedy….I wanted to keep putting dozens of different lives on paper. And writing requires the sort of time, space and, crucially, head space that few other pursuits do. I snap at people who interrupt me when I’m writing and sit on my chair, twitching, waiting for them to leave the room. If what I was doing was regular paid employment, I could justify it more easily (‘Don’t you want your swimming lessons?’ ‘What about the roof over your head?’). I can’t even say that I write because I have to; that it makes me a nicer person and a better parent. Any adult listening to such an explanation would surely see that as pure selfish indulgence and ask why I hadn’t learnt better self-control; a small child simply wouldn’t understand.   

However, my daughter is only four and my son six. How can I know how they will respond to what I do(n’t do)?  In my gloomier moments, I think, well, what does it matter anyway? Phillip Larkin was right. Whatever path I take, I’ll f*ck them up. That’s the job description, right? And on other days when I’ve had more than five hours’ unbroken sleep, when the sun hits the Acer in my garden at just the right angle to show off its glorious redness and my tea has brewed for precisely the right number of minutes and seconds, there’s nothing that could make my life better. I have my family, I have my writing and, in combining the two, I am treading a path already well laid out by others and, I hope, showing my children a valid way to be happy.

I’ve done what I’ve wanted to for ever such a long time: I’ve written a book. In fact, I spent so long writing it, editing it, rewriting it, changing a comma here and a semi-colon there that I’d quite forgotten why I’d written it at all. Not why I was writing – not that, never that – but why I had written that particular story. And then someone asked me.

‘It was the place,’ I said, thinking aloud.

‘The place? Africa itself, you mean?’ she said. I could see the scepticism on her face.

‘No. Yes. Well, sort of.’ I nearly gave up trying to explain then and there. I wanted to tell her just to read the book but I couldn’t because it’s not published yet, perhaps never will be, and I hate the idea of shoving my work at friends or family who haven’t specifically asked to see it. ‘East Africa,’ I went on. ‘Savannahs and wildebeest migrations; Masai herdsmen in checked blankets; Englishmen with money and ideals who imagined they could make it their land. That sort of thing.’

Her eyebrows, already raised, went a little higher but I was comforted by the explanation. It went some of the way to explaining the genesis of the book. It began with a place, and there’s always a reason why we go somewhere. Even if the reason is a bored travel agent telling us that our £200 budget will stretch only as far as a two star hotel complete with construction site and cockroaches in Kavos, that’s no more or less a reason than Gerald Durrell’s mother, Louisa, deciding to relocate her family somewhere warmer and cheaper than “Pudding Island”.

 Like the Durrells – and perhaps because of them – it was to Greece that I was planning to go in the long ago summer of 1999, once I’d augmented that £200 budget with money from the premium bonds that had never given me back so much as a tenner. And then the friend for whom the trip was really planned – an American who was thoroughly seduced by the idea of island hopping in the Ionian Sea – came home early from work one day with a headache. As it turned out, it wasn’t just any headache: an unseen aneurysm bulged and then burst. Less than two weeks later, she was dead.

Anaesthetised by a grief I vaguely felt was not mine to feel, I cancelled the Greek trip. I was busy at work and, I said to myself, deadlines and late night cocktails would be as good a distraction as any. My best friend disagreed. She turned up at my door early one Saturday, woke me up and waved a sheaf of rainbow-hued brochures in front of my face. What about, she suggested, taking that trip to Africa we’ve been talking about for years.

Hobbled by a hangover and too much caffeine, I blinked. I picked up one of the brochures. Stretching across its cover was a blue sky kept from crystalline perfection by clouds like cobwebs. Warmth began to wash through my veins and an internal video player clicked onto a film gleaned from years of Attenborough documentaries: millions of wildebeest trekked across plains that shimmered in a hazy heat I never got to experience in England; indolent lions sprawled, sun drugged, in long grass; and flamingos, perched on absurd chopstick legs, coloured lakes pinker than candy floss.

And so it was, having cashed in all the premium bonds, a month or so later, my friend and I were on our way into Nairobi in a taxi with a sign on the dashboard that read God Speed Us. It was dark and once we had entered the city, we could have been anywhere, were it not for the splayed, spiky-topped acacia trees that paced the main road. The neon signs (Drink Coca-Cola! Sony Sounds!) were the same as everywhere and most of the buildings looked as large and high as those in any British city.

However, as we rounded a corner, the driver waved a hand vaguely towards the left and said, ‘Norfolk Hotel’. I saw a veranda, lit by hanging lanterns spilling streams of light into bushes gaudy with flowers. Behind was the hotel building itself, snug in the darkness. I knew that in the early twentieth century many settlers had started their trek, along the rough red roads to the Highlands, from that hotel. Most of those settlers are long gone and cars replace their oxen, yet the Norfolk remains. At that moment, something of the history of the place entered me. And it’s not left yet.