Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  But no such gossip-worthy guests came to our Sunday morning party on the lawn, which was surrounded by herbaceous borders of glorious colour and lush growth. There was a buddleia so big that Nellie had cut a sort of arbour out of it big enough to take a table and chairs. Her closest friends among her neighbours were the Lindstroms, who had arrived from Sweden in 1920 with four small children, a lot of optimism and practically no money at all. They lived in a hospitable and cheerful kind of muddle about two miles away. Gillis, known as Fish – his native name because of his expression – was often absent trying to make a little money out of safari work or managing plantations in unhealthy parts of Tanganyika, leaving Ingrid to take care of the children and to the gradual creation of a farm.

  Ingrid possessed a quality hard to define; I would not call it placidity since that suggests a certain torpidness, and she was anything but that; her sense of humour was as lively as Nellie’s and in her deep, slow, well-articulated voice she would deliver pungent comments which never crossed the border from shrewdness into spite. In all the ups and downs of life – and the Lindstroms had a good many downs – she remained calm, tolerant and good-humoured; I never saw her fly into a temper or give way to despair.

  Both Fish and Ingrid had an easy-going outlook which they shared with Africans, so that a harmonious atmosphere prevailed on their farm. Perhaps too harmonious in one sense; Kikuyu families gathered there in numbers bringing their goats and cattle, so that their farm, not a large one, became overstocked. Also it came to be regarded as a sanctuary by those who, for one reason or another, did not want the eye of authority to be focused on them. I do not mean to imply that it became a sort of thieves’ kitchen. Authority did its best to keep track of the country’s shifting and illiterate population, almost all of whom had no fixed address and were therefore out of reach of forms and means of registration. Every African who left his reserve to seek employment was obliged to carry, generally in a little metal case suspended from his neck, a piece of paper called a kipande, on which was recorded his name, tribe, and fingerprint, and on which his current employer signed him on or off; and every employer was required to keep a register of the people living on his farm, and to notify authority of changes. Some farmers were stricter than others in complying with these regulations, and strictness was not a Lindstrom forte. The extended family system was so far extended that an individual might have a hundred relatives, or more. Family visits were very much a way of life, and there was no definition of a visit; it might last a week or ten years.

  At the other extreme from the Lindstroms in their attitude to life and labour was the Harries family, headed by Black Harries, so called because of his swarthy countenance and bushy black beard. He was immensely strong. Nellie related how, when the cattle were going through the weekly dip, a young steer got stuck facing in the wrong direction; Black Harries, who happened to be there, picked up the beast in his arms, turned it round and put it back again.

  His attitude towards his labour was the reverse of permissive, and he was on bad terms with some of his neighbours, including Ingrid and Nellie; he conducted against them a war of chits which would arrive at all hours with messages such as ‘Your squatters’ cattle have broken into my maize’ or ‘I have reason to believe that you are sheltering one of my boys who has run away and is hiding on your land.’ No one paid much attention to these missives. Nellie said that the Harries lived like the pigs they kept, in a sort of gypsy encampment surrounded by discarded bones, but she was prejudiced against them, as she was the first to admit.

  On the other hand she loved the Barclays, Hugh and Patsy, who lived on a pipeline farm towards the extinct volcano Menengai that rose above what Delamere had called the cow-town of Nakuru. In a sense, Hugh’s farming career had started in the trenches of the First World War where he had been badly gassed, and subsequently advised to seek a drier air than Britain’s for the sake of his lungs. Of all those at our little Sunday gathering I think he proved the most successful in achieving his aims – not great wealth or personal fame, but the creation of a complex enterprise ticking over smoothly and supported by a contented human community, and which he was able, many years later, to pass on to his son. Hugh and Patsy had a reputation for looking after their labour force, and the families thereof, especially well.

  For many years holidays overseas were ruled out, but when conditions eased and Hugh and Patsy were able to go ‘home’ now and again, he pursued the small game of Britain, birds and fish, the big game on his doorstep having mainly been ignored; he was too busy, and later became a conservationist. He specialised in dairying, was the first to import Friesians of Dutch rather than British descent, and became one of the country’s foremost breeders. And, on his bit of the ‘plain of the rhinoceros without any milk’, as the Maasai had called this part of the Njoro levels, he bred Kenya’s first two-thousand-gallon cow.

  Tom and Kate Petrie were Nellie’s nearest neighbours, both true Scots; Tom was more of a trader than a farmer, and Kate an excellent but frustrated cook; Tom was away so much that there was no one to cook for. If she got wind of someone being ill or even off colour, round would come a magnificent cake, and possibly a shepherd’s pie or rice pudding. Another Scot was Sandy Wright, who had raised the initial down-payment on his land by shooting buffaloes in the forest and taking their hides to the Kavirondo district where the local Africans prized them for making shields. They paid in cattle, and that gave him a start. He was a convivial extrovert who had recently taken to politics and got elected to the Legislative Council, and he was fond of quoting, rather too often, the maxim: ‘days of toil and nights of gladness’, the gladness being helped on by liberal tots.

  Another of our guests was Reggie Pelham-Burn, a hard-bitten, breezy individual, good at weekend polo when he could borrow a mount, who lived on the pipeline with his half-brother Trevor Sheen and a highly respectable, straightlaced widowed mother who dressed, no matter what the weather, in deepest black. She had led, we were given to understand, a sheltered life in Tunbridge Wells until she had been met at Nairobi station by Trevor Sheen in an ox-cart with a posse of all-but-naked Maasai warriors, and bumped off into a remote trading post in the Maasai reserve where Trevor was engaged in exchanging maize-meal and tobacco for cattle and sheep. Now she had settled in a shack on the plain in one of the clumps of black wattle trees, with wire netting instead of windows, an outside privy (which everybody had) and, one would think, very little to do, unless it was to brush dust or mud from her ankle-length skirts and pleated blouses.

  The most opulent of our guests was an American, Billy Sewell, who had commissioned Kenya’s leading architect, Jan Hoogterp, to build him a palace near Njoro. And a palace it was by local standards, in neo-Spanish style, with patios and marble-tiled verandas and a red-tiled roof and beautiful furniture, mainly French, kept beautifully polished, and Persian rugs strewn about. Billy loved his furniture and feared that the dry atmosphere of the highlands would warp it, and that it needed periodic refreshment; so once a year – or so the story went – he sent it to the Coast to be restored to health by the high humidity.

  Billy had spent part of his early life in China, and had brought with him to Njoro two Chinese servants. When we arrived for dinner they greeted us clad in handsome silk kimonos, and Billy affected one too. He had something of a Chinese look himself, being shortish with a wrinkled face and slightly slanting eyes, and at first glance we were in danger of confusing our host with his manservants. The meals matched up to the very highest gastronomic standards, in marked contrast to our usual tough mutton or scrawny fowl. I remember, even fifty years later, a pudding heaped high with threads of spun sugar, each thread as fine as a spider’s web, that shone and glittered in the light of the silver candelabra like a great golden fairy-tale wig. It seemed a crime to plunge a spoon into that crown of filaments and destroy it.

  Billy Sewell was a Bostonian, very precise, and with a reputation for stinginess spread, I think, mainly by his wife who, citing that as one
of her reasons, had left him for a handsome rancher with a less luxurious way of life. Billy’s earlier years had been much less epicurean. He had been one of three partners in a most adventurous little enterprise called the Boma Trading Company, whose object had been to open up trade between Abyssinia and the East Africa Protectorate across the 350 miles or so of the desert that was to become the Northern Frontier District of Kenya. This was a bold idea in 1907 when the company was formed with £1000 of capital, and with Winston Churchill’s blessing. The moving spirit was Captain Jack Riddell, who had done some surveying in this dangerous borderland not as yet in the grip of the Pax Britannica, and totally without roads, towns or even villages, where wells and water-holes were few and far between.

  Early in 1908 Jack Riddell, Billy Sewell and Freddie Ward, all under thirty, arrived in Addis Ababa to seek the Emperor’s permission, without which nothing could be done. This, they were warned, might take a year, and the British Consul advised them not to leave the capital without an armed guard. The Legation’s interpreter, however, a Scot who had taken part in the battle of Magdala in 1868, said: ‘Give me a hundred pounds and I’ll fix it’, and within a week handed over a scroll bearing the royal seal, which commanded the governors of the Emperor’s distant provinces to aid and abet the three foreigners.

  They were intent on buying ponies. Abyssinian ponies were famous for their hardihood and endurance, and would find a ready sale in Nairobi, but the export of horses was forbidden. The three young adventurers hoped that the royal seal would overcome this difficulty. Armed with one rifle and a hundred rounds of ammunition they rode across part of the Danakil desert and bought one hundred horses for the equivalent of £2 a head, but they still had to get permission from the local Ras, or governor, to take them across the border into British Somaliland. This the Ras refused to give, despite the Emperor’s safe conduct. ‘Bribery and plenty of tej’, Billy said, ‘did the trick’, or part of it; the Ras allowed Riddell and the ponies twenty-four hours to get away. As they crossed the border they saw a long line of horsemen galloping towards them – just too late. They drove the horses through Hargeisa to Berbera on the Red Sea, only to be told by customs officials – this part of Somaliland was then a British Protectorate – that the horses would be subject to an export duty of one hundred rupees a head. A good deal of wangling scraped them over this last hurdle; the horses were shipped via Aden to Mombasa and were sold in Nairobi for £30 each.4

  The Boma Trading Company’s agents established posts in what was to become the Northern Frontier District before the Government got there: these stations were at Marsabit and Dolo, and at Moyale on the Abyssinian border. They opened up a trade in sheep and cattle exchanged with the nomads for cloth, copper wire and beads. But the Government was deeply suspicious of these independent traders roaming about the hinterland and permitted, by an agreement Riddell had secured from the Colonial Office, to carry arms. In 1910 the Governor, Sir Percy Girouard, sent up one of the early administrators, Geoffrey Archer, to take over from the Company their camps, equipment and rifles, and their trading posts became government bomas, as they remain today.

  There were others among Nellie’s neighbours at her party on the lawn: John and Hilda Adams who sent carnations to Nairobi as a sideline, packing them at night when it was coolest and taking them down to the station about midnight; Len Spiers and his wife Kay who bred and trained racehorses; I cannot remember them all. Most of them (not quite all) were hard-working and optimistic – they had to be – striving to keep afloat on the stormy seas of the Depression as best they could. They lived frugally, the going rate for a farm manager was £10 a month. Nearly all of them did manage to survive, if only just.

  The time had come for me to move on to Nairobi to make a start on Delamere’s biography. It was sad that, after so long an absence, I could stay for so short a time. How much more sensible, I have often thought, were Africans than Europeans in their treatment of time. Although it could not be ignored altogether, they did not surrender to it as we have done. One day was as good as another; tomorrow would come, and what had been left undone today could be continued then, or the day after, or the day after that. They never invented clocks, the tyrants of our age. Even now, when so many have opted for the western way of life, clocks and Africans have never really forged an alliance. This is often a source of irritation, even fury, to Europeans who have chopped up their days into hours, and grown accustomed to keeping appointments, even sometimes to the minute. Time, for most Africans, flows rather than proceeds in measured jumps. Climate is no doubt responsible and, resourceful as we are, we cannot change climates – except for the worse, it seems, as we are doing, by destroying all the trees. So, back to Loresho I returned.

  CHAPTER 4

  Adolescent Nairobi

  Nairobi was at an awkward age when I returned in the early 1930s: a frontier town no longer but not yet to be taken seriously as a capital city. The Norfolk hotel was much the same, though the hitching posts outside for mules and horses had gone, but the New Stanley was a lot bigger and proudly proclaimed itself to be the only hotel north of Johannesburg with a bathroom attached to every bedroom. Other landmarks remained: Elliot’s bakery, Duncan’s the Grocer, the Post Office and the DC’s office always packed with black humanity, and Whiteway Laidlaw’s, Nairobi’s first and for a long time only department store. Sixth Avenue had not yet been renamed after Delamere. Vacant lots still yawned like gaps between molars, and wooden bungalows on stilts with rusting tin roofs, hot as ovens, still accommodated many government departments. Blue-gums with peeling bark and narrow rustling leaves, mostly planted by John Ainsworth, the town’s first Commissioner, cast pools of shade along Government Road, which had been tarmac’d. Rickshaws had been replaced by box-body cars.

  To make a box-body, you got hold of a second-hand chassis and built the super-structure out of planks, roofing felt and wire netting. Canvas curtains at the sides were rolled up to be secured by straps, and lowered when it rained. Wire netting was often stretched across the open back and sides to keep in dogs, luggage and the African passengers who crowded into every vehicle that moved. These passengers were hard on the springs, and carrying them was not really altruistic, for when you got stuck they would all leap out and push to the accompaniment of a rousing, rhythmic chant culminating in cries of ‘sukuma! sukuma!’ (push, push) which seemed to generate sufficient power to lift the vehicle right out of the ruts. My father, who was prone to feeble puns, called them pushengers.

  When I left in 1925, most of the pushengers were clad in a lightweight blanket knotted on one shoulder in the manner of a Roman toga; now nearly all wore tattered khaki shirts or trousers, or sometimes a thick, heavy khaki overcoat left over from the First World War. The women had resisted change. They streamed in every morning from shambas outside the town bent double under heavy loads of produce, generally with a little black head, shiny as a billiard-ball, bobbing about on top. So distended were the mothers’ ear-lobes that blocks of wood six inches in diameter could be inserted, or even an empty whisky bottle. Only now and again did you see a girl in a shapeless cotton ‘mother hubbard’ dress, signifying her attachment to a Christian Mission. European attire was more colourful; the fashion was for brightly coloured corduroy trousers and silk shirts for both sexes, and for broad-brimmed hats sometimes adorned by strips of leopard-skin.

  ‘A cross between a dust heap and Lyons’ Corner House’ was how the town appeared to Daphne Moore, wife of the new Chief Secretary (number two to the Governor) who arrived in 1929. Her first impressions were unfavourable. ‘The atmosphere is one of intrigue, suspicion, dishonesty and unkind criticism … The Service is underpaid, disgracefully housed, and given no encouragement to do honest work.’ Governor Sir Edward Grigg, she wrote, was universally distrusted and ran the country in cahoots with two scoundrelly accomplices, Hugh Martin, the Commissioner for Lands, heavily in debt, of dubious honesty and seldom sober, and Grigg’s private secretary, Eric Dutton, a devious plotter. The Moo
res had come from Nigeria, where things were much better ordered. ‘Talk is the curse of this country. Even the man who comes about the electric light talks and talks while I stand on leg after leg and finally subside on to the dustbin.’ Grand dinner parties were no better. The food was much too lavish and pretentious – asparagus, lobsters, foie gras in aspic – the conversation boring and the women kittenish, except for Glady Delamere who was ‘charming and clever and suggests Elinor Glyn and sofas strewn with tiger skins; the cats in the village say that she has never recovered from her great success with the Prince of Wales.’1

  Daphne Moore was also far from kittenish – more like an asp, at least as regards her tongue. She was intelligent, well-read, and had considerable talent as a sculptor. I found her alarming, and others felt the same, but her hiss was worse than her bite.

  Like most colonial civil servants posted to Kenya, the Moores had been warned against the wiles of the wicked settlers and advised to keep them at arms’ length. At first they followed this advice faithfully, but as time went on her reactions became less prickly and she wrote: ‘We are not likely to get into the pockets of the settlers, but it seems silly to both of us to take up a snooty attitude to them socially; it doesn’t help matters officially for one thing.’ Even the Governor earned words of praise. He was informal and unpompous, and ‘I have never before met a Governor who neither walked first into a room nor was served first at meals. He is most genial and easy to talk to.’ She attended a dance at Government House in honour of the Neville Chamberlains, but they got stuck on the plains and failed to arrive; meanwhile Tich Miles, the senior aide-de-camp, had invited all the people normally barred from Government House on moral grounds, and a good time was had by all.