To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

Richard Pooley

Fergus Flynn 1953 - 2025

In September 2021 I wrote a couple of articles for Only Connect* looking at the arguments for and against hunting by rich Westerners in Africa. In the first I mentioned that I had been encouraged to do so by a friend:

A few days later I got a call from another old Africa hand. He had just left Zambia for the UK after forty-three years of work there – cattle-ranching, fish-farming, pig-rearing, and game-farming. He had also been a volunteer game guard. I had first met him in Kenya in the 1970s, and been on holiday with him and his wife in Zambia in the early 1980s as bulldozers started creating what was to become the largest fish farm in sub-Saharan Africa. I have stayed with them several times since. The reason for his call? Would I join him in fighting the European and North American anti-hunting lobby led by “so-called celebrities” who know nothing of the realities of life (and death) in Africa?

“In 1977 when Kenya banned hunting, the country had 167,000 elephant. Today there are 28,000. Since 1977 there has not been a single lion killed by a fee-paying hunter. But the Kenyan lion population has dropped by 87% in just the last 15 years. These are unemotional facts. [Yet] very emotional people watching Gogglebox in the West label hunters as cold-blooded killers who are responsible for the demise of wildlife. {The truth is that] there are huge swaths of Africa which remain habitat-protected for the simple reason that hunters’ dollars keep them that way.”

The "old Africa hand" was Fergus Flynn, whose funeral in Norfolk my wife and I attended last month. His son, Douglas, director of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, is, like his father, a passionate advocate for Africa's wildlife. He gave a eulogy which had many of us in tears long before he had finished. Doug gave me his permission to publish it.

Here it is – a Life of many lessons:

Ladies and gentlemen, Ferg’s friends and family. Dad was not a conventional man, and this is not a conventional eulogy.

It is a piece of spoken word I have written for him, based on the view that Dad would not have wanted us to sit here feeling grim, and looking backwards. He was a practical man, a farmer, who would want us to get on and do useful things; to continue the work he had started, had grafted for.

So, inspired by a quote shared with me by his lifelong friend, Henry, here is the piece. It is called: “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

On the 19^th April 1972 the headlines in the British press read like this: “Teenage hero rescues three from deadly air crash. 18-year-old British student survived and dragged three women out alive.”

At 9.39am the day before, an East African Airways VC10 that should have soared into the Ethiopian sky was fatally floored and crashed into an awful fire ball that killed 43 people on board.

Dad walked away that fateful day with some deep burns on his arms but an indelible belief burnt into his heart. He had been given a second start, another chance; one more card for life’s great dance.

He rarely mentioned the horror of what he’d seen, or the accolades for the lives he’d saved. Only that, whoever sits in the sky and decides - that great referee of Life - had let him play into extra time; one more roll of the dice.

Maybe this was what made Dad feel so full of life. More than 6 foot in height but a presence that made him feel twice the size. Just look at those photos of him in his prime. That is someone who is not just surviving but absolutely thriving. Someone who grabbed with both hands the ball he’d been handed, who lived life as if he knew the clock was ticking, always listening for that referee’s final whistle.

So, remembering Dad should make us feel alive. Pick up the ball and run from behind our own line. Remind ourselves how sweet they really are these good times.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

Dad loved a quote. Countless times he wrote or spoke of words he admired or tried to live by. It says so much about him how many of them were superlatives – sprinkled with expletives! – but expletives and superlatives reflected the way he was and the way he lived. “Just give it your all” he would say – and it didn’t matter if that was work or play. “100%”. “Absolutely”. “Pure class” and “Throw caution to the wind”. 

In other words: Don’t waste it. Embrace it. Lace it with vodka and taste it, raise a toast and make the most of it. Because life has almost no guarantees, does not aim to please. For Dad, as for us all, it was those two imposters triumph and disaster. Fall down, get up, put on a plaster, don’t make the same mistake twice and you’ll learn faster. Plenty more fish in the sea.

Plenty more fish in the sea. Plenty more buffalo, gazelle or impala - or whatever Dad was after. All of us are only ever one day away from our own air crash disaster. And that’s why I know Dad would have loved this line:

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

Dad: so many memories of you when Bec and I were young. You leaning on a Landcruiser bonnet with a vodka and tonic. Your battered old TV with the rugby on it. When you put Bec and I on the front of your motorbike, we felt like we could fly. Endless walks and talks - how much we absorbed, how much we were taught, trailing behind your giraffe legs in short shorts. Led Zeppelin IV, Jack Russells at the door. Infectious laugh, too tall for the bath. Those huge orange scissors, you know, the old pair, you used each week to cut your own hair.

Farmers’ shirts, Clarks’ shoes, the World Service crackling with the news. Binocular lenses, Parker pens. A rod or gun extended from your arm, as you walked the kingdom of your farm. Talcum powder, Deep Heat, a thousand toothbrushes and gold in your teeth. A 20-pack of Peter Stuyvesant ciggies in your top left pocket.

I can see them now, those Peter Stuyvesants in Dad’s big, safe hands – the way a new pack smelled, how it felt, the sound of the peeling plastic as he unwrapped it. He drew so many of the farm plans literally on the back of those fag packets. And when he was done, he would put them back in that big left pocket and double tap as if to lock it.

But the difference – the defining difference - with Dad was that they never stayed as plans. Those Parker pen sketches would, with very few exceptions, transform into real world interventions – walls and roads and bridges and dams and even his own mechanical inventions.

Dad’s view was quite simple. If you loved something, you did it. If you wanted something, you went after it. If you saw a fish, you cast for it. He had no time for patiently waiting, procrastinating, hesitating. He was restlessly pacing, creating, making. With dad, something was always happening.

So, I think, Dad’s lesson to us all is to take our shot. To not stop when we’ve got those plans in our top pockets. But to take them out, say “stuff it!” (well, Dad would have said something a lot stronger, but this is a church)… To not stop when we’ve got those plans in our top pockets. But to take them out, say “stuff it” and build our rockets. “You only get one crack”, was always his advice, as he looked at you with the light of life in his eyes.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

You cannot think of dad without smiling about his sense of humour. His love of laughter. The jokes you knew for sure he’d told you before and would again the year after. And stories. Always stories. Tell-me-mories. Former glories. He would paint a picture that never left you, transport you to all those magical places he went to. Dad didn’t read many books, but he could have written a few. Written a few that would include killing a man-eating croc from a leaking canoe. Shoot-outs with poachers in a place called Sichifulou. A childhood game of golf cut short, as a thousand-strong herd of buffalo crossed the course.

And so many of his stories were tales of fishing success. Several people have written since his death to say that Dad was the best fisherman they had ever met. With Dad it wasn’t the one that got away, it was about the one that was in the net.

So whenever you next see some sparkling stretch of water or walk beside a shifting tide, think of Dad in the evening light, dad full of life and casting a fly.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

There was no Dad without Mum. As he would often say, if anyone deserved credit for what he had done, she was the one.

Neither of them like their praises sung, but what they achieved together had never been done. It was, quite literally, groundbreaking as they walked in front of a bulldozer together to make the first road ever into the place they would stay a few years less than forever beside the great, grey-green Kafue river. In sickness and in health the Bible says, well this was Biblical fires and floods, rescues by helicopter and a battered old book of mum’s called ‘Where there is no Doctor’.

And with mud and blood and sweat and tears, and a partnership of 40 years; powered by those most potent of fuels called purpose and service they built something much bigger than just a farm. They built a little oasis of hope, in one of the countries that needed it most.

And that is why Dad and Mum live on in so many Zambian hearts. These are people who moved mountains with them in Kafue and then, when Mum and Dad moved, many went with them. Moving their jobs, their homes their families to be with bwana and madam and to not give up what Mum and Dad had given them. How special for Mum to get a stream of WhatsApps from former Zambian employees, colleagues, friends with such heartfelt messages – how they had lost, in their words, a brother, a father and a leader among men.

But their work does not just live in human hearts. They live in countless animals living free in Zambia’s National Parks. Just last year there was a story which, at least to me, demonstrates what it really means, that much-used word of legacy. A legacy for the lechwe.

The Kafue lechwe is a graceful, semi-aquatic antelope with specific adaptations to the trials and tribulations of those volatile Kafue floodplains (so, not unlike Mum and Dad in many ways!).

With a habitat so confined, in the wild this species is in a freefall of decline. But since the 1980s, Mum and Dad had been quietly observing, conserving, preserving a precious herd of this species. Last year every single one – more than four hundred adults and young – were released back into the wild, securing a future for this beautiful animal; a future in the wild that once looked so fragile.  

“For the animal shall not be measured by man, In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the Earth.”  Henry Beston

These words are engraved beneath a beautiful statue of two Kafue lechwe in the forecourt of Lusaka airport. Every single time we flew, it was a place that Dad would lead us to. The words meant so much to him, and we would lean on his leg or stand next to him and take every word in. How special that so many of this species – fellow prisoners of the splendour and travails of the Earth – are free once more, thanks to the work of Ferg and Di.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

Dad always said to us – remember me exactly as I am, with all my faults, failures and problems. And he would chuckle to hear me say he had more than his fair share. Irish temper and a short fuse, stubborn as a rhino and just as hard to move. As with all of us with the human condition, Dad’s life was full of contradiction and imperfection and paradox – I mean, how does it make sense that someone of British descent, born in Uganda, supported the All Blacks?!

On the day before he died, I spoke to him on the phone, told him that we loved him, said everything would be alright, that Mum and Bec and I would be fine and cried. He thanked me and said “Let’s leave it there then, Tigs”.

“Let’s leave it there then, Tigs” using the same line he’d said a thousand times after one last cast, one last walk with the dogs before dark.

Dad has now cast his last cast, but the baton has been passed. This beautiful river we call Life retains its relentless forward flow, no matter how much we want it slowed. When Mum called me to say that Dad had died, I walked outside to stand under the Mozambican sky. The heavens had opened – bringing back the flood to a continent Dad loved, the motherland that flowed through his blood.

As I looked up towards the light, the flying ants began to fly. Thousands, maybe millions would take flight that night, taking their fleeting shot at life - one ephemeral try. Dad knew we were no different to flying ants – him and you and I - given just one shot as the river rushes by.

And Dad’s life flows through all of us in this church, and countless more around the world who called or wrote when they heard. Dad taught Bec to understand that other creatures are no less than man, to understand them in the way that he could but very few can; he taught me everything I know about Africa’s forests and plains and game and with him gone my work will never be the same again.

He is in those naughty giggles of his gaggle of grandchildren - Theo, Rom and Pia; their joie de vivre, their lack of fear - their joy just to be here.

So, although Dad is no longer going to duck his head through the door, we can each walk a little taller when we think of his six foot four.

Walk a little taller, laugh a little louder – and according to the rules Dad wrote, that includes laughing at your own jokes even harder.

Spend time on the things we love. Hold our loved ones for that little longer hug. Work hard. Stand for something. Keep learning all our lives.

Goodbye, Dad. Thanks for all the good times. To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

NB: “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” is a line in the poem Hallowed Ground by the Scottish poet, Thomas Campbell (1777 - 1844)

*https://www.only-connect.co.uk/post/is-animal-sentimentalism-causing-the-destruction-of-african-wildlife

https://www.only-connect.co.uk/post/western-animal-sentimentalism-is-causing-the-destruction-of-african-wildlife