So the young family returned to Italy on leave. Imagine the changes in the three years since the young couple had left Abruzzo. The island had a new hospital, which functioned well. Ugo had encountered diseases he had never met in his previous posting. Through his experience, being the sole doctor for a population of 100,000, he had become a specialist in every field: gynaecology, surgery, tropical diseases. The whole family had been exposed to Swahili and English. Maria had undergone major surgery. And, almost miraculously, considering the cysts which had invaded her ovaries, she had a new baby.

Strangely, no-one remembers much about that first six-month family holiday,

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apart from the fact that everyone was delighted to see us all. I wonder whether they did any shopping to take back to Tanganyika with them. Did my mother crave pretty clothes? Did she stock up on nappies? Did my father buy medical equipment? Were there toys for the children? Photos show us all neatly dressed and happy.

The move to Musoma was a huge change. Musoma was a fairly large town. We arrived in October 1954, and spent three years there, until I was three and a half. This is where stories and photos begin to mingle with the very first buds of my memory. I can remember our Dalmatian dog, Fido, and I know that we had to get rid of him because I used to share all my food with him and my mother was concerned that I might get ill. I can remember the paisleyed border of a beige carpet.

But my sister, who was aged between three and six, has far more interesting memories of this period. She remembers that my father sat and passed a Swahili exam, and received some money as a bonus, which he spent buying my mother two beautiful dresses. ‘One was white with layers and layers of netting. The other was black with red cherries on it’, she remembers. I, too, can distinctly recall the smell of the taffeta black one. My father adds that the monetary prize was 400 Tanzanian shillings. Silvia also wrote the following to me: ‘I do have some nice memories of Musoma. First we lived in a house which must have been built on a kopje (hillock – ed) The kitchen was separate from the house and there was this great big sloping rock connecting the two.
I think that's where you got your dalmatian dog.

One memory - not nice- is that once we were in front of the house outside and a woman came running up screaming and all bloody - I think her husband had taken a panga (machete) to her. We were quickly shooed into the house while papy took care of her.
The road in front of that house became Fornari Avenue.

Then we got a house near the lake. We had a shamba (vegetable garden) by the path between the house and the lake and I can remember one night a hippo trampled all the shamba and in the morning we saw his great big footprints there.

There were acacia trees also in front of the house and under them sometimes there were little mushrooms and I can remember spending lots of time looking for fairies in them. I also started my fascination with little insects and that's where I discovered the ant lions that would make those funnels where the ants would slide down so they could grab them and eat them. I think we must have spent a lot of time grovelling around in the dirt.

There was a fallen tree between us and the next door neighbours and once I was climbing it in a dress and a chameleon climbed into my skirt - that's a real scary memory - won't tell you the gory rest...’

I wish my brother would come up with some information for me. It was during the Musoma phase that my mother started doing correspondence courses with us all, which were sent to her from Dar es Salaam, and then, when my brother was seven, he went off to boarding school in Nairobi. There are photos of him in his school uniform on the runway, beside a tiny plane. How did he feel? (‘Fine’, he tells me nonchalantly.)

After Musoma, the Government wanted my father to do a specialisation in Tropical Medicines, and so the whole family went to London for six months. London will be the subject of the next chapter.