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BARRY
ALLEN:
A
GLAMOROUS AND GIFTED INDIVIDUAL
Coastweek
-- The
recent death in London, U.K., of Barry Allen must have
come as something of a relief to his numerous friends
in Kenya.
A pale shadow of his former self he had until the last
minute bravely battled in a hopeless and humiliating struggle against
a protracted and painful illness.
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In his prime Barry was both a glamorous and gifted
individual.
He brought huge helpings of life and laughter to his
amused (and, let's admit it, often 'amazed') relatives and relations
scattered across three continents.
Born and brought up in East Africa - including four years' at the
Prince Of Wales School, Nairobi - he spent much of
his childhood on the Kenya Coast, which provided him with a rare and
remarkable knowledge of its more interesting inhabitants and its most
fascinating and private places.
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Coastweek
-- Barry Allen
back from deep-sea fishing off the 'Blue Lagoon' Watamu beach
1968. |
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Handsome, athletic and profligate with his easy-going
charm his was a charismatic combination of good looks and captivating
personality.
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He was an early resident to discover that exotic and
secret magic of living and loving in Malindi - the 'milieu' of perhaps
the happiest and most memorable years of his life.
Consequently he was occupied at various times as:
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a professional fisherman,
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an excellent architect,
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a skilled boat builder,
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a peripatetic 'discotheque' proprietor,
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a short-order housing contractor,
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a capable steel fabricator and
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a very knowledgeable deep-sea diver.
His emotional contact with animals was always kind and
secure: it was with people that his feelings were sometimes fatally
flawed - he could be an often unreliable and even irascible
individual.
Those who were 'intimately aware' might further recall
him as being 'a very generous but amoral person'.
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Coastweek
-- Barry
Allen boat building
in Malindi 1969. |
The late North Coast poet Francoise Arned had lost her heart
(and her common sense) some forty years' earlier in a torrid love
affair with his amorous uncle.
From her retirement home in Lamu she recounted the unrequited incident in a trenchant piece
entitled "Love of a Gypsy" - its message also rings
true for Barry:
With promises of heaven in his eyes,
All the bliss of this Earth in his cheering smile,
On his skin, the warmth of a tropical sun:
But pass on, for those are the charms
Of a Gypsy.
He may say he will show you his kingdom.
Love you for ever. Gather a bunch of stars
For you, and tie them with a misty rainbow;
But pass on, for those are the lies
Of a Gypsy.
Sure! His kisses will burn you for ever.
For his gifts and happiness of an instant
You will lose peace on earth and eternity;
For he will only give the love
Of a Gypsy.
But those of us who were privileged to know Barry at
his best also fondly remember him as an absorbing raconteur, a man
always voracious in his lust for life, and a seriously colourful companion.
In later years Barry moved abroad and 'dabbled' in the
'import-export business' with varying degrees of success.
It included a frantic and furious intercourse of small
boats out of Gibraltar, Spain and Morocco.
One story goes that 'his face was remodelled' on
London's Chelsea Bridge by two drunken 'Skin Heads' who kicked him
senseless with their 'bovver boots'.
His final months of frequent facial surgery and
financial dependency must have been particularly awful and distressing
for such a vivid and forceful character.
However, to the very end he apparently maintained a
robust sense of humour and grimly joked about his appalling prospects.
His death leaves a curious mixture of loss and yet
release that his seemingly inexorable suffering is now over.
Perhaps the English poet John Donne shared a similar
sentiment when he wrote:
No man is an lland, intire of it selfe;
Every man is peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
If a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is
the lesse,
As well as if a promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy
friends or of thine own were;
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am
involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
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