This is a beautifully written memoir of Huxley's time on a Kenyan coffee farm when she was a young girl - I believe it starts when she's around six and covers a couple of years, up until the beginnings of World War One. So she was very young, and the prose here is immensely well-balanced. There are clearly currents - particularly in race relations and in romance - that six year old Elspeth has no real understanding of, and yet the Huxley who wrote this, and wrote it in her early fifties, I think, makes it absolutely clear to her adult readers what is happening, all the while filtering it through the perspective of a child who is more interested in making mud pies and riding her pony and being freaked out by soldier ants than anything else. This, admittedly, has the slightly unnatural effect of having young Elspeth appear rather more mature than she was, but that's the inevitable consequence of childhood recollections: they're always filtered through adult understanding. 

Despite the undercurrents here, this isn't really a book that addresses any of the issues surrounding colonialism. Because it's told through the perspective of an adventurous child, there's a strong emphasis on wonder and exploration, shot through with bemusement at inexplicable adults and moments of sheer horror (most of which are to do with animal abuse, which is pretty rife, to be honest). More than anything it feels like a snapshot, I think, a sort of golden-tinted nostalgic haze, early memories of duikers and coffee plants and leopards. And it's lovely, as most snapshots of that kind are, but it also comes across as a bit romanticised... but then are the recollections of time as a happy six year old ever not?