Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  Welfare among Africans in Nairobi’s shanty-towns, and a charity that helped distressed Europeans, also took up a lot of Glady’s time. As the Depression deepened, farmers and business-men went bankrupt in all directions and their fate was grim. There was no social security, no insurance, no dole, nothing between them and starvation but the kindness of still-solvent friends, and, as a last resort, classification as Distressed British Subjects – provided that they were British – when they were shipped at government expense, penniless and steerage class, back to Britain. The East African Standard was full of pathetic pleas for help. ‘Steady worker, do anything for keep only.’ One John Hickey of Ruiru, declared bankrupt, ‘had lost all his money in a coffee shamba, an old man now penniless with no means even to get to Court that day’. Anyone with cash in the bank could pick up marvellous bargains. ‘Farm Sale. Kilima Logi estate, 998 acres, 381 planted in coffee with factory, stores and two houses, sold for £1,000 to pay the mortgage.’ Glady was involved in a charity which helped as many of these destitutes as much as it could, but more of her time was spent at Pumwani in an African clinic, washing and weighing babies and trying to persuade their mothers that a diet of almost undiluted carbohydrates based on maize-meal and cassava did not build the best babies.

  All this invokes an image of Lady Bountiful dispensing soup to the poor, and that was more or less the position. In the towns – and there were only two to speak of – the gap between the relatively rich and the evidently poor was wider even than in Europe, and roughly corresponded to the gap between the races. So the Lady Bountifuls were white and recipients of the soup were black. But this did not apply in country districts. Some of the Maasai, for example, were richer than the very richest Europeans – a single family might own several thousand head of cattle. They kept their wealth on the hoof instead of in banks, and felt no need to spend it on consumer goods. Few, if any, Indians either dispensed soup or received it. Their two separate communities, Hindu and Muslim, looked after their own and did not invite outside interference.

  Glady as Lady Bountiful weighing African babies at a welfare clinic does not at all accord with her image as others have presented it. She has been depicted as a bossy, bitchy and emotionally unbalanced woman, endlessly carousing at Muthaiga Club with Happy Valleyites, and so possessively in love with Lord Erroll that she was even suspected of having shot him – ‘He was her man, and he done her wrong.’ This may have been a true portrayal at the time of the Erroll murder case in 1942 – I last saw Glady in 1938 – but I doubt it. When I knew her, while she certainly caroused quite often at Muthaiga Club, the Happy Valley was not her scene.

  Joss Erroll had casual affairs with a great many women and Glady was probably among them, but he was not the man she loved and hoped to marry when he was free to do so; he was separated but not then divorced from his wife. When war grew imminent, Alistair left East Africa and she realised that the affair was over for good. When he got his freedom, he married someone else. Her antidote to despair was non-stop war-work, mainly in canteens for soldiers and airmen who flocked to Nairobi when it became the Allied base for the Ethiopian campaign. In this she was tireless, her life became frenetic and if at times she seemed unbalanced, this was because she needed to fill every minute and did not dare to stop. She burnt herself out. A stroke followed and she died, aged forty-five, in 1943.

  Had Glady been quite the over-bearing and promiscuous character some of those who never knew her believed her to be, I doubt whether she would have enjoyed the friendship of the Taylors, Charles and Kit. They were pillars of respectability. Charles was jovial, rubicund and avuncular. He had been the pioneer of coffee growing in the Thika district and had helped my parents to establish their own plantation. ‘Mr Taylor came up’ runs an entry in Nellie’s diary for a day in April 1914. ‘Planting coffee all day, busy counting etc: Finished in evening, total 33,278 trees planted 9 × 9, 54 acres about.’ Members of this small white community starting their plantations went on calling each other Mr Taylor, Mr Gooch, Mr So-and-so (not many Mrs’s) until the First World War broke it all up, and the men rode off to Nairobi to join the East African Mounted Rifles. Charles Taylor survived four years of bush campaigning in Tanganyika in pursuit of von Lettow Vorbeck and his elusive army.

  After his return from the wars, Charles became a boardroom farmer as well as a practical one; his was the moving spirit in founding the Coffee Board of Kenya which organised the marketing of the entire crop; he sat on the boards of various banks and companies, oversaw the management of many plantations, and lived to be the Grand Old Man of coffee to whom everyone came for advice. He had been one of Delamere’s trustees, and could not have been more helpful to me, as I think he was to everyone.

  Kit Taylor was tall and thin, grave in manner, precise in speech, orderly in mind, Christian in outlook, and given to good works among Africans. An unobtrusive sense of humour underlay the gravitas which was one’s first impression, and she was (and is) an excellent mimic. The Taylors dwelt in a cottage at Loresho with their only child, Kathini, called after another coffee estate. Kathini inherited Charles’ business acumen and Kit’s stalwart spirit, and, after the white farmers’ diaspora, was to become the founder and boss of a successful property agency in London.

  Kit had reached East Africa in 1904 when her father had been appointed Nairobi’s first Town Clerk. Ted and Helen Sanderson had started their new life in tents with two camp beds and sleeping bags, two trunks to sit on, a folding table and very little else. Hyenas howled all round, their whoops and chuckles mingling with the thump of native drums. Later, they moved into a wooden bungalow so rickety that it shook when their terrier ran across the veranda; their bedroom had no windows but five doors. When Helen bought some real china cups at a sale, having hitherto made do with chipped tin mugs, she felt ‘uplifted’. Amid these primitive conditions – ‘we could not get a candlestick so we made a hole in a potato and cut it flat, and it did quite well’ – the ladies dressed to the nines when they dined out. In August 1904 a party of eighteen invited to Government House sat down at a table decorated with pink roses and silk mats, and arches of asparagus fern embellished the doorways. After dinner everybody sang, Ted’s ‘Fairy of the Ring’ winning several encores. At a luncheon party at the same venue Helen, properly corseted, wore a white satin and lace blouse, a white scarf and a broad-brimmed black hat. Afterwards they all went to the races where the principal event, a steeplechase, had three entrants; Sir Claud de Crespigny won in a canter. There were only about twelve horses in Nairobi, so the racing must have lacked variety, if not incident. (Meinertzhagen recorded that a rhino had had to be shoo’d off the course before one of the races could start.)7

  One hundred guests, a sizeable proportion of Nairobi’s white population, picnic’d with the Governor and his lady in the forest, played games until tea-time, and then danced the Lancers in the open to the music of the Kings’ African Rifles’ band. That evening was something of an anti-climax, however; the Sandersons dined with the bank manager, the cook got plastered and howled outside the door until the host went out and thrashed him, when he howled louder than ever. Helen Sanderson attempted to drown the uproar by pounding on a piano, but when a snake was found under Ted’s chair the hostess understandably went off into a fit of hysterics. In that legendary Nairobi, you could buy six pounds of mutton for one rupee, about seven pence, and pay your somewhat unreliable servants – they seemed to get drunk a great deal – the equivalent of about 28 pence a month.8

  CHAPTER 5

  Cockie, Blix, and the Prince of Wales

  Almost every ‘early days’ account of Kenya brings in Jim Elkington, a resplendent figure who rode handsome horses and imported a pack of English fox-hounds with which to pursue jackals and small antelopes on his farm, Masara, about six miles from the centre of Nairobi. Sometimes the quarry led hounds and hunters into the nearby Kikuyu reserve, and Nellie, freshly out from England where she had pursued the fox over green pastures, was startled to hear a view-hol
loa followed by the cry: ‘There they are, running like hell among the bananas!’ That was in 1913.

  The bungalow in which the Elkingtons had lived in, I think, 1905 was still there when I was at Loresho. So was Mrs Jim, as she was always known, a stoutish, respectable old lady, and her only child, Margaret. The resplendent Jim, who had a roving eye, had died of gunshot wounds believed to have been self-inflicted because a married lady had refused to go off with him, but there was a rumour, probably no more, that the gunshot wounds had been inflicted by the lady.

  Masara was such a perfect example of the Early Colonial style of settler dwelling that I wished it could have been preserved as a folk museum, complete with bleached and horned animal skulls lining the walls, a veranda that ran all round the ramshackle wooden bungalow, littered with riding crops and bits of saddlery; with dog-bowls lying in wait to trip you up and the dogs themselves waddling about, fat dachshunds as I remember; with a population of cats, and a caged parrot so positioned that it gave early warnings as to the nature of callers who approached the bungalow’s steps. If they had black faces the parrot would call: ‘Tafuta pesa! Tafuta pesa!’ meaning ‘look for money’ – the assumption being that the caller was offering bananas, eggs or some other commodity for sale. A cry of ‘Just coming! Just coming!’ greeted white-faced visitors. But I suppose the bungalow was too far gone in white-antery to have survived much longer. Coffee bushes reached almost to the veranda steps. Most of the furniture had been bought at auction sales about thirty years before and looked it.

  The Elkingtons had brought up their daughter on strict Victorian lines, sending her to bed at six o’clock until she was seventeen or eighteen years old. Margaret never went to school, and grew up to be rather simple-minded, but knowledgeable about horses and their breeding. Her youthful playmate and companion had been a large black-maned lion named Paddy, an amiable beast raised from a cub who roamed the place at will, uncaged. Then one day instinct erupted and he seized a visitor, a young girl named Beryl Clutterbuck, by the leg. A posse of syces headed by Jim brandishing a whip came to the rescue and Beryl was freed, and recovered, but Paddy was caged for the rest of his life. All stories about potentially dangerous pets end sadly in one way or another.1

  Regardless of the whims of fashion, both Mrs Jim and Margaret continued to dress in ankle-length skirts made of khaki drill, blouses buttoned at the neck, and black button boots, though Margaret wore a divided skirt for riding. After about thirty years at Masara, they decided to replace their tin hip-bath, filled with debbis carried in from the kitchen, by a modern porcelain appliance filled from taps. With considerable reluctance, Margaret agreed to take the first plunge. Like the dachshunds, she had by then grown somewhat portly, and the bath must have been a small one: she found herself stuck. Her mother was unable to dislodge her. A frantic search ensued for some garment with which Margaret could be covered before help could be called in. Mrs Jim found an old sou’wester oilskin in which she swathed her daughter; houseboys were summoned and, amid rousing cries of ‘pull! pull! pull harder!’ Margaret was extricated. She never used that bath again.

  In all the years they had lived in East Africa they had never once been ‘home’. Then came the coffee boom of the ’fifties and, after about half a century, they took the great decision to see England once again. Their own ways had not changed, and they did not expect England’s to have done so either. At the last moment, Margaret rebelled; she could not face a parting from the dogs and cats. But the fares had been paid, and she was almost dragged into the aeroplane in floods of tears. They planned to stay at Brown’s hotel in Dover Street, to hire a car with chauffeur, visit such relatives as survived, and buy new outfits. When Mrs Jim went shopping, she was appalled: the shops were full of horrible, indecent garments she would rather die than wear. Fortunately she found a dressmaker who agreed to copy exactly the garments she had brought with her. There was a long chase, eventually fruitful, after button boots.

  Nevertheless, the visit was not a success. There were too many changes; Margaret was homesick and wrote a postcard to the dachshunds every day. They cut short their holiday and were thankful to be back again. Had nothing in England, a friend enquired of Mrs Jim, altered for the better? Yes, she said, after some thought; London was quieter. The friend was surprised. London’s roaring traffic could hardly be described as quiet. ‘Quieter than flys and omnibuses,’ Mrs Jim replied.

  Mrs Jim died not long after this excursion and Margaret never left East Africa again. The dachshunds grew fatter and more sluggish, the cats sleeker, the house dirtier, curtains and covers more frayed, but Margaret’s horses thrived and won a satisfactory number of races. She died in 1976, aged 81.

  Soon after my arrival in Nairobi the famous Laura Corrigan appeared: famous for her wealth, derived from her husband’s steel mills in the United States; for her lavish hospitality; and for her dedication to the pursuit of people of title, and wherever possible of royal blood. The most distinguished among the guests at her dinner parties, held in the former home of Mrs George Keppel, would, after enjoying a meal prepared by (it was said) the best chef in London, receive a costly gift – a gold cigarette case, say, or a diamond wrist-watch. Game, set and match went to the hostess who entertained the Prince of Wales, and in time she achieved this ambition.

  An African safari was on the list of recreations. Early in 1933 Laura Corrigan left Nairobi for the bush accompanied by the Vicomte de la Rochefoucauld, Count and Countess Paul Munster, two white hunters, a French maid, and Cockie, one of Nellie’s oldest friends. She and I, then aged eighteen, had travelled together to England in 1925 in a small, slow, cramped and scrupulously clean Dutch vessel whose plump and jovial captain had ogled Cockie outrageously, and shared with her many quips and sallies which made him shake like a jelly. He stood us both van der Humm liqueurs every evening after dinner. Cockie declared that I lost my passport three times, once at each port of call, but of this I have no recollection. On our arrival in London she had taken me on a shopping spree among entrancing dress materials whose names I had never even heard of – crêpe de chine, georgette, triple minon (incredibly light and fine) – and then on to a ‘little woman round the corner’ from Belgrave Square who had fashioned them, for next to nothing, into garments considerably more presentable than the khaki shirts and shorts or trousers in which my life had hitherto been spent.

  Cockie had come to Kenya immediately after the First World War with her husband Ben Birkbeck, hoping, as all the soldier-settlers did, to make their fortunes. They soon ran out of money and Ben went back to England to raise some more. This left Cockie homeless. ‘Nellie invited me for a weekend and I stayed for three months,’ she declared. They laughed for much of the time. Cockie had a repertoire of music hall songs described in those days as risqué. ‘You don’t know Nellie as I do, said the naughty little bird in Nellie’s hat’, was a favourite because of my mother’s name. No one knew how it went on, but several versions were invented.

  It was during Ben’s absence in England that Cockie met the Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, husband of Tania, or Karen, author of Out of Africa, who later was to write under the name of Isak Dinesen. The Blixen marriage was already on the rocks. Tania’s famous love affair with Denys Finch Hatton was under way and the Baron, Blix as he was known, had been expelled by Tania’s family from the management of their farm at Ngong. The farm was heading for the rocks too, though not yet actually on them. Blix, possessed of much charm but no money, was living a kind of gypsy life in the bush with no fixed abode, existing on tick, and dodging his creditors. There was a shop in Nairobi called The Dustpan, kept by a Mr Jacobs, where Blix got his bare necessities. Mr Jacobs was patient, but there came a time when Blix was threatened with imprisonment for debt. He was in despair. Cockie offered Mr Jacobs her pearls in settlement. Mr Jacobs refused the pearls, saying: ‘The Baron will hear no more of this little difficulty.’ And he did not.

  Blix and Cockie worked out an unusual way to make their assignations. They concea
led their messages in the barrel of Blix’s rifle, which was taken to Tania’s farm manager, who acted as go-between. ‘It must be our secret,’ Cockie said of their affair. One day the manager’s wife discovered the ruse, informed a furious Tania, and Blix wrote: ‘It is our secret no longer.’ In 1922 Tania and Blix were divorced, thankfully on his part and somewhat reluctantly on hers. Despite Blix’s extravagance, fecklessness and philandering, the hearts of neither friends nor wives ever hardened against him. Cockie’s divorce from Ben followed two years later. ‘I hope you’ll both be very happy,’ said a friend after their wedding. ‘So do I,’ Cockie replied, ‘but that may be difficult, literally without a penny.’ The friend’s response was to offer Cockie £800 a year to go to Tanganyika, locate some land whose lease he had been granted, and plant coffee.

  So they set out in a rickety old lorry with a tent, basic supplies and two African servants. Their destination was Babati, a small cluster of dukas lying about a hundred miles south of Arusha, northern Tanganyika’s bush-capital. They set to work to clear the bush and build themselves a shack with a corrugated iron roof to catch rain-water, which at first was all the water they had in the dry season; the land lacked a spring or river as well as almost everything else. When the rains broke they had a great deal too much water; floods surrounded them on all sides and cut them off for weeks at a time.