We went to London in October 1957, when my father started his six-month course for his Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene at the University of London. An English friend in Tanganyika found us a house in Bromley: it was a sort of exchange – the doctor owner was away studying in America. She also left her car with us: my parents say it was like a London cab.

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My father took the car to the university.

I stayed home, and there are some fun stories about this period. I used to have very fair hair, and wore it in braids. It seems that my mum didn’t have time to braid my hair before taking the others to school – whereas I’d be happy to keep still for the necessary time later – and my dad didn’t like me looking so unkempt in the morning, so the plaits were chopped off.

One of my own memories from this time is helping my mum to bring in the washing from the outside line, and finding it completely frozen and hard. I also remember being fascinated by being able to see 'smoke' come out of my mouth when it was cold.

This is where I learnt to read. I don't know how - probably just by watching my brother and sister. My mum says we were all walking down a street one day and I looked at a sign and said 'That says 'bookshop'.' My mum asked how I knew, and I replied 'Because it's B-O-O-K for 'book' and 'S-H-O-P' for 'shop'.' There you are. Early roots of my interest in words, and probably the start of my scrabble obsession. It would have been simpler to deduce that it said 'bookshop' because there were books in the window.

A strong memory is of the fog. My mother remembers fumbling her way along the streets, feeling the walls, when she walked my brother and sister to school. In fact, for her, the London period was not much fun at all. She had spent her nine years of married life so far in a God-forsaken outpost in Abruzzo, an island stuck in the middle of a lake, and a small dusty town on the equator. This was her first experience, as an adult, of a big city. She was in a strange country, and didn't know a soul. Her days were spent looking after three small children and a home which wasn't her own.

Meanwhile, my father was having a ball. He was very busy at university. He followed his classes conscientiously, and still has his hand-written notes from that time, together with detailed drawings of insects, worms and micro-organisms. This is what fascinated him: the mystery of the vital cycle of these creatures.

We take for granted that when you are stung by a mosquito you may get malaria. It is only the female who carries the malaria parasite. In order to be able to bring her eggs to maturity, she needs to find food, and that food is human blood. And this is after struggling to find a suitable mate. We never give a thought to the very complex life cycle of the parasite carried by mosquitoes, or to the complicated mechanism devised in order that the blood sucked by the mosquito doesn’t clot on the way to the mosquito’s stomach: before sucking the blood, she injects into a tiny human blood vessel saliva from her salivary glands containing a substance which prevents the blood from clotting. It is this saliva that carries the malaria parasite. If the blood were simply sucked, malaria would not be transmitted.

Fleas also fascinated him. The plague-transmitting flea (again, always female) has to undergo similar hardships. At the time of biting, in order to get blood (as the mosquito, to ready her eggs) she has to suck it after vomiting masses of the plague bacilli which fill her salivary glands. My father participated in the anguish of both of these tiny creatures who had to suffer so much so that their species could survive. He muses that pairs of fleas, mosquitoes, and worms must have sailed side by side with elephants and cows in Noah’s Ark. Perhaps, this period of study contributed to his loss of faith.

It was in London that we discovered that my father, sister and brother had been infected with bilharzia. Bilharzia is a disease affecting the urinary or intestinal tract; it is caused by a worm (schistosoma) which has a double life cycle, one in snails, and one in the human being. It is prevalent in many places across the world, where both hosts are present, and is very common around Lake Victoria, from where we had just moved. To give an example of how it works: a child urinates into the lake. His urine contains eggs of the worm. The eggs hatch in the lake. The larvae from the egg penetrate into a particular type of snail. After a few weeks, the snail, excretes adult larvae of worms which actively penetrate the skin of humans. Eventually they settle either in the blood urinary plexus or rectal blood system. There they grow, reproduce, and the cycle starts again.

My father smiles as he tells me: ‘the male is smaller than the female. The couple lives monogamously in their less than heavenly surroundings. At this stage they are big enough to be visible to the naked eye. As a result of their love, thousands of eggs, provided with an appropriate spike, make their way through the wall of the blood vessel and bladder or rectum, and are thereby excreted'. And so the wheel turns again.

The bilharzia contracted by the members of my family was ‘subclinical’ which means not very serious. It gave no symptoms. In its full-blown form, there is continuous loss of blood in the urine or faeces, and the sufferers become very weak and anaemic. My father says wryly: ‘What an intelligent design.’

When my father got his diploma, we returned to Tanganyika, this time to the town of Kigoma, on Lake Tanganyika, which will be the subject of the next chapter.