The year that we arrived, women and girls were banned from wearing miniskirts or trousers in public. I had to go to school in a skirt four inches below the knees and Adam had to have savage haircuts before he came out for the holidays – quite an affront in 1969. Sinister men called the Young Pioneers would patrol the town with tape measures, giving transgressors 24 hours to leave the country.

_{Friends, relations and neighbours came to see the family off at Shoreham station in 1968. PHOTO: Jessamy Calkin}

When Dad arrived at FMB it was not in good shape and needed restructuring. But the intrinsic quality of the country’s agriculture was good. Its Chalimbana groundnuts (peanuts) were the nut of choice for leading retailers in the UK, while the high starch content of Malawi maize made it the preferred grain for London distillers.

What did my mother think of it all? She had been a VAD (voluntary nurse) and worked in hospitals in the Far and Middle East, and met my father in Cyprus. She was outgoing and embraced everything with a sense of joy and optimism. My mother found the whole experience amusing – she regarded our three years there as a sort of extended holiday. She chose not to have expat coffee mornings, and took a great interest in the garden. There were official cocktail parties to attend and host, and ‘progressive’ dinners and fancy dress. It was a post-colonial existence with many colonial habits still lingering.

We had a ‘houseboy’, a dignified elderly Muslim called Kaliate, and a cook called Whiskers (our neighbour’s cook was called Poison) who would check if the potatoes were done by lifting the lid of the saucepan and smelling them. I attended St Andrew’s, a school where the textbooks in the library were crumbling because they had been eaten by red ants. School hours were 7am until midday, when it became simply too hot to learn, and I would come home to play with my pet chameleons and rescue the lizards that our Siamese cats had hidden in the fringes of the Casa Pupo rugs. In the late afternoons I would teach English and maths to the gardener’s sons, Harry and Boy; they would report to my ‘school’ – a straw hut in the garden – with their pencils in paper bags.

Forty five years later, my father (now 84) and I arrive at Chileka airport in Malawi on the same plane as Thabo Mbeki, who happens to be visiting; a guard of honour is out in force on the runway to greet him. Outside the arrivals hall is a different kind of party – speakers balanced on the bonnet of a car and raucous dancing. It turns out that the Malawian candidate for the African version of Big Brother has just touched down as well.

_{How the Calkins’ house looked in 1969, with Jessamy’s mother’s rose garden in front and a mango tree to the right. PHOTO: Peter Calkin}

I have not been back since we left in 1971; my father has returned twice in the intervening time, but not for 20 years. My mother died in 2002. My father and I have come back for a holiday to see our old haunts and to visit places that didn’t exist before: Mvuu Lodge on the Shire River and Mumbo Island Camp on Lake Malawi; there wasn’t much tourism when we lived here. Waiting to meet us is our driver, and his name is Everlasting.

It is November, just before the rains. It is hot and humid, and the scarlet flame trees are in full flower. On the road into Blantyre from the airport the consequences of a massive hike in population – from four million in 1971 to 16.4 million – are immediately apparent: there are very few trees – they have been cut down to make charcoal for cooking (illegal but rarely enforced) – and the hillsides are eroded.

We arrive at the Ryalls hotel in Blantyre. When I lived here it was one of only two hotels in town, and it dates from 1922. My father unpacks, and we lament the fact that Malawi has one of the highest rates of deforestation in southern Africa. Dad tells me that Dr Banda railed against many conservation practices put in place by the colonials but was in favour of tree planting. ‘He implemented a law that on new farms 10 acres of gum trees (eucalyptus) had to be planted for every 100 acres of tobacco. Unfortunately this was seldom achieved.’ He looks sad for a moment, and then resigned. ‘Tant pis. Would you like me to look smart for dinner?’

_{Forest workers on Zomba Plateau, where hiking remains one of the region’s top tourist attractions. PHOTO: Jessamy Calkin}

Ryalls has an excellent restaurant, the 21 Grill. We chat about old times, and Dad casually mentions a minister who was hanged for treason. And the secretary of one of his colleagues, who tore up her calendar at the end of the year and put it in the bin. She had unwittingly torn through a picture of Banda, and she was deported.

The following day is overcast; everything is on edge, as if waiting for the rains. Everlasting takes us to change money in town – when we lived here, it was one kwacha to the pound; now it is 497 kwacha. The economy is in a bad state. In fact, primary-school children are demonstrating in Blantyre because their teachers have not been paid by the government for three weeks.

We take a tour of old Blantyre, and I am sideswiped by memories that I didn’t know I had. We pass the Chinese restaurant that opened when we were living here – such glamour! We always went there on the night before my brother had to return to school. Everlasting, who is in his 60s, remembers a lot of the places my father knew. We visit my old school and pass the Kandodo supermarket where we used to do our shopping, and Kamuzu Stadium – huge, ugly and now condemned – where we used to watch the annual independence celebrations.

The road to the suburb of Namiwawa, where we used to live, seems familiar. I am hoping that we will be able to find our old house, but everything has changed so much in 40 years. There are no road names and we don’t know which turning to take – there has been so much building here that the road is unrecognisable. Everlasting gets out to ask if anyone knows of a house owned by FMB, and several eager youths are keen to advise but everyone is too young to remember. A helpful chap in a French football T-shirt goes off and fetches a policeman. Then I remember our photo album in the back of the car, which contains pictures of our back garden and its spectacular view of the mountains.

There is a lot of pointing and arguing – others have joined us now – and a group of men are leafing curiously through the album, looking at photos of my family and our pets. We have worked out that we are close, so we go back down the road and take the next turning. Definitely not this one, says my father. Let’s just see, says Everlasting. At the top of the road, I notice a familiar-looking mango tree and a house that seems smaller and a bit dilapidated, but there is the gate with its familiar pattern. It was a standard pattern that everyone had, says my father, who is not inclined to believe this is our place because the garden looks shockingly unkempt and there is a fence obscuring our once-idyllic view. Everlasting goes off to find the owner; she is about to leave for church but says we can have a look around.

_{The Namiwawa house in 2015, with its distinctive mango tree still outside. PHOTO: Jessamy Calkin}

It is our house. A wrecked version, but still our house. Where my mother’s rose garden once was, the remains of the pergola are still standing, and I recognise the steps on which I used to eat mangoes from our tree. There is no sign of the little straw hut where I taught Harry and Boy, which was made of reeds with a concrete base. I had written my name in the wet concrete and left my footprint, and my cats’ and dog’s paw prints too. I start looking around in the dirt and see some writing on a broken piece of concrete. It says, very clearly, jessamy. It is my writing, all that is left of the base of my house.

I suddenly feel very emotional. I call excitedly to my father; then the church-going owner comes back. Her name is Violet Whisky. She takes us into the house. The ceilings have been eaten by termites but the layout is the same: the familiar fireplace in the sitting room and the kitchen steps down to the little courtyard where I used to watch the servants prepare their mealie nsima. My father is pleased that many of the trees he planted in the garden are still there: gmelina, jacaranda, frangipani, avocado and bougainvillea. The most striking change is our view, which was formerly of an empty valley where I used to go hunting for chameleons, and is now just a sea of buildings and makeshift housing, stretching for miles right up to the foothills of the mountain.

_{A ten-year old Jessamy Calkin with her pupils, Harry and Boy, in Malawi. PHOTO: Peter Calkin}

We drive on towards Limbe, where my father used to work, and where the tobacco auctions were held that he would attend most days during the season to check on prices for the smallholder-produced tobacco. FMB operated markets throughout the country, employing a mixture of expats and Malawians. In 1971 it became Admarc (Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation), which is still operating now. The office is a rather garish, blue painted building, and in the reception, to my father’s consternation, is a female guard with a gun. Dad explains to the young receptionist that he used to be general manager. Could he please see the chief executive just to shake his hand? She looks at him blankly, dials a number and hands him the phone; a secretary says he is in a meeting and could we come back tomorrow.

We can’t – we are on our way to Zomba, Malawi’s old capital. Zomba Plateau is a verdant tranche of a mountain covered with woodland. We used to drive there at weekends for lunch at the old Ku Chawe Inn; Dad remembers a leopard once strolling across the road in front of his car. Now we pass an endless stream of people elegantly transporting piles of wood on bicycles, and children selling small baskets of local raspberries.

We are staying at the Sunbird Ku Chawe (a newer version of the inn; the old one was damaged by fire) with its lush green gardens patrolled by shrill monkeys. Over a Malawi gin at the bar, Dad tells me about Dr Banda’s powerful girlfriend, Ms Kadzamira, whose official title was Hostess, but whom he used to called ‘Nurse’. We eat grilled chambo fish and delicious little local potatoes and repair to bed. ‘The trouble with these international hotels is that they’ve lost their rural charm,’ Dad says, after we’ve said goodnight to a waitress called Loveness.

_{Mumbo Island Camp at Lake Malawi. PHOTO: Jessamy Calkin}

It’s still quite rural, I say. There’s no hot water. ‘No hot water!’ my father exclaims and marches off to reception. ‘Only for 15 minutes,’ the receptionist says, and we look at each other – 15 minutes of hot water per day? It turns out that she means you have to let it run for 15 minutes because the boiler is so far away. So, still quite rurally charming then.

I open the curtains to see a family of baboons playing outside. After breakfast we take the scenic old Ku Chawe road down the mountain, pausing at a metal stop sign that is full of holes – to prevent people stealing it to turn into cooking pots. We wander through the peaceful botanical gardens. Then Everlasting manoeuvres us through the local market, past meticulous piles of fish, fruit and vegetables. My father pronounces that the Chalimbana peanuts are not as large or as tasty as they used to be.

That evening a bunch of NGO workers – some from Save the Children – are drinking in the bar of the Ku Chawe hotel. ‘I think they should concentrate less on saving the children and more on teaching people how to avoid having so many in the first place,’ my father says pointedly.

In the car the following day Everlasting tells us that, as a young man, he had worked in Dr Banda’s office for 25 years. I ask him what he thought of life under Banda compared with now. He puts his hands together as if in prayer, and thinks carefully before he speaks. ‘There was peace,’ he says emphatically. On the road to Liwonde, we pass a stream of small businesses – the Trust God Hardware shop, the Oh So Heavenly Drug Store, the Celebrities Joint – and vivid redbrick houses with roofs made of straw and occasionally corrugated iron. Mangoes are arranged in tidy little pyramids along the roadside, and we stop to buy some. A few miles further on, a fat shiny policeman stops us. ‘Good morning, how are you?’ he asks, peering into the car, before waving us on. ‘Zomba is now ending,’ Everlasting says with great portent.

As we approach the Shire River, I see my first baobab tree of the trip. We drive through Liwonde – a hectic, vibrant town shrouded by flame trees – to the port for the boat to Mvuu. Our boat driver is called Danger. Motoring down the river, we pass people fishing in dugout canoes, until the Liwonde National Park begins and the fishing stops. Crocodiles and pods of hippos emerge promisingly from the river’s surface.

The baobabs become more prolific. Some of them are vast – three feet roughly equals 100 years of age. Recently the elephants have started attacking them, tearing off the bark or sometimes even pushing them over. Nobody really knows why. Closer to Mvuu Lodge, particularly precious baobabs have had their trunks painted with engine oil to deter the elephants.

_{A baobab tree at sunset in Liwonde National Park PHOTO: Jessamy Calkin}

Mvuu Lodge (and its sister property, Mvuu Camp, which is more of a family destination) is set on the banks of the Shire; it has eight double or twin tented chalets, reached by wooden walkways built on sand. There is a glorious open-sided central dining lodge on stilts, with a fine view of grazing hippos, passing crocodiles and bathing elephants.

Mvuu is the only lodge in Liwonde National Park. It is run by the Malawi experts Wilderness, whose ethos is that everything must be sustainable; if they were to pack up and leave there should be no impact on the environment. There are game drives every evening but the real beauty of the place lies in the wonderful boat safaris. The wildlife you can see from a boat on the river is extraordinarily prolific at this time of year, when everything is dry and the elephants turn up to drink in huge numbers. Apart from elephants, the park has a few rhino, buffalo, one lonely lion (they have been waiting for two years to get permission to import a mate), many different species of antelope, including the highly endangered sable antelope, and wonderful birdlife. The rhino enclosure is a magical, wooded place: there are woodland kingfishers and fish eagles everywhere.

After the game drive we eat supper on tables set outside, with a crackling fire behind us; just on the other side of a wall, a few hippos are munching gently in the moonlight. Half of Mvuu’s market are local residents (who receive a substantial discount) and it is interesting to meet Scottish teachers and Australian nurses who work in Blantyre. My father is a big hit with his stories of the old days.

The following morning I notice that a large crocodile is firmly parked on the little island outside our lodge; it is a female and she is guarding her eggs, which are buried nearby. She remains there in the dogged heat for the three days we are there, only leaving her post for a quick cooling dip in the river.

_{Elephants paddling in the Shire River. PHOTO: Jessamy Calkin}

The boat trips are unique because you can get so close. We watch a group of male elephants jostling each other up to the water’s edge. The oldest male is always the boss – ‘even if he’s an idiot’, according to Mathews Matewere, the head ranger. We see a fish eagle snatch a fish out of a crocodile’s mouth. One very large local croc, known as the President, is 13ft long and so-named because his territory is the area of river where Banda supposedly had some of his enemies disposed of.

Liwonde National Park was established in 1973, and Mvuu has been here since 1995. There are 110 staff (for both Lodge and Camp) including 14 guides, three carpenters, one plumber, four mechanics, one electrician and assistant, a boat mechanic, a builder, a carpenter, two tailors (who make and repair the uniforms and mosquito nets) and one shoemaker. Water comes from a borehole; rubbish is incinerated; bottles and cans are ‘recycled’, which means they are placed in a bin at the rubbish dump and local people help themselves. The laundry is done in three giant baths and ironed with a charcoal iron by two ladies.

My father loves the boat trips. On our final one we see a pied kingfisher, which looks as if it is wearing a bra, and a mother crocodile lurking in the shallows with 30 freshly hatched babies the size of small lizards. We see an African open-billed stork perched casually on the head of a hippo, and a baboon sitting on the beach with a pile of palm fruits in front of him; he looks as if he’s running a stall.

On the day we leave, it is 37C. We buy water in the Beyond Understanding mini shop and drive back through Liwonde, along flood plains towards the lake. During the rainy season there is water everywhere here, Everlasting says, and people fishing on the streets. He tuts at the houses being built, which he says will just get washed away as they do every year. (And indeed they have. Malawi has just suffered its worst floods in half a century.)

_{Hippos in the Shire, the largest river in Malawi. PHOTO: Jessamy Calkin}

When we lived here we would go to Lake Malawi for our holidays, along a terrible dirt road, and stay at an FMB-owned cottage in Nkudzi Bay. There was no such thing as sunblock so my brother and I would get painfully burnt, and be forced to sit in a deep ancient bath full of extremely hot water, ‘to take the sting out’. And I remember Timothy the Hippo, the friendly, supposedly tame hippo who lived in the lake and was widely loved. I later heard that he died while being transported to some sort of aqua park.

Mumbo Island sits in the southern part of Lake Malawi, six miles from the mainland at Cape Maclear. We take the boat there, a 45-minute ride. It is a tiny, lazy, beautiful place with huge boulders rising out of the water and a perfect beach. There is little to do apart from swimming in the rocky bay and snorkelling – the water is rich with cichlids. It is a cash-free, technology-free island (you settle up at Cape Maclear when you leave; if you want to send an email you write it out by hand and give it to the daily supplies boat) with immaculate green credentials. Mumbo Island Camp – which originally opened in a much more primitive format in 1996 – is built of timber, thatch and canvas; there are seven tents, including a double family unit that sleeps four. There is no electricity – the solar-powered lights and torches sit out recharging in little rows every morning; there are bucket showers and compost loos, and very few mosquitoes. It is not for the luxury-loving, but you can clean your teeth while watching the lizards play on the rocks outside.

Mumbo Island is less than a mile in diameter and has never been inhabited. There are no mammals, except otters in the lake, but there are snakes, monitor lizards and lots of frisky, colourful birdlife. And trees – bizarre, entwining rock figs and a paperbark tree, which sheds its thin, papery bark all year round, revealing the fresh green wood underneath.

_{The beach at Mumbo Island Camp, a low-tech paradise in the southern part of Lake Malawi. PHOTO: Jessamy Calkin}

My father is unused to this not-doing type of holiday, but he manages well on books and Scrabble for three days, and we leave on a hot, hot morning, taking the boat across the lake to the depot. Everlasting is there to greet us.

After a diversion to the shipyard at Monkey Bay so my father can visit the Chauncy Maples, an early Lake Malawi steamer being converted into a travelling hospital ship, we get back in the car to head for Mua Mission, east of Dedza. We pass some strange mounds and Everlasting tells us about the Ngoni, who won’t use coffins because they are warriors and lying down is a sign of cowardice – they are buried sitting up so they can see who’s coming. There are many examples of Ngoni culture at Mua Mission. Established in 1902, it has a hospital, a guest house and a fantastically lurid museum of masks and other artefacts recounting local history and culture. There is a training centre for wood carving and a wonderful, inexpensive shop. The whole place relies for funding on its own activities and on donations.

Two gum trees mark the end of the Mangochi district. Neat bundles of illegal charcoal are for sale along the roadside. There are goats everywhere, and in the villages with their small, square brick houses, smaller square buildings can be seen. ‘That is a good village,’ Everlasting says, ‘because every family has a toilet.’

_{Jessamy’s father, Peter Calkin, chats with a boatman during the trip. PHOTO: Jessamy Calkin}

Leaving the Great Rift Valley, we take a detour along the old escarpment road, now tarred – and a far cry from the rutted dirt track my father remembers. It is a beautiful drive. Near the Mozambique border a heartbreaking little boy is pushing a small toy car made of wire. Children play football everywhere. It is a peaceful evening and people are returning from work in the fields with all manner of tools balanced on their heads. I don’t think I could ever get tired of driving through Africa. On the outskirts of the capital, Lilongwe, we begin to see women in city clothes rather than traditional dress; graffiti appears, and rubbish, dust and dirt.

Later, tucking into a salad of grapefruit, avocado and mango at Heuglin’s Lodge, we reflect on the trip. My father says he didn’t have great expectations because, ‘I always have qualms about revisiting anywhere. But the plus side here is the people – they are as friendly as I always remembered them.’

In July 1971 Dr Banda made himself life president (he died in 1997). In 1972 my father decided not to renew his contract with Admarc, and we left Malawi. ‘I had done what I had been asked to do and it was better to hand it over. I was running on empty.’

For myself, I am so pleased to have returned. I feel intoxicated with memories, which are chiefly of the country’s charms rather than its complications. And even the city of Lilongwe is lovely at five o’clock in the morning, as we barrel along to Kamuzu International Airport.

Rainbow Tours (020-7666 1250; rainbowtours.co.uk) can offer a seven-night trip to Malawi, combining three nights at Mvuu Camp with three at Mumbo Island Camp on a full-board basis and one night at Heuglin’s Lodge on a half-board basis, from £2,270pp. The price is based on two sharing and includes flights with British Airways from London Heathrow into Blantyre and out of Lilongwe, road and boat transfers, and activities