Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  ‘They were the happiest years of my life,’ Cockie said. Yet she was nothing if not gregarious. Had they no neighbours, I enquired? One, she replied, a Doctor Popp, not a medical doctor but a learned Rhodes Scholar. He had a charming young wife, who left their home once a year to have a baby in Arusha. ‘That was her annual holiday.’

  Arusha consisted of two streets lined with Indian dukas, a couple of banks, a post office and the New Arusha hotel. To reach it, after a hundred jolting miles, was as great a thrill, Cockie said, as she had formerly experienced on approaching Paris. Arriving after nightfall, they were beckoned by a distant blaze of lights, or at least a twinkle, and drew up at the hotel to luxuriate in a four-course meal, a real bath, news of the outside world, a proper bed, and the anticipation of collecting their mail next morning. There was even a telephone and you could ring up Nairobi, though you could not count on getting through.

  Soon after they had settled at Babati, Blix was summoned to Arusha by Denys Finch Hatton, who was in charge of an important safari. The client was the Prince of Wales. Blix was invited to join the safari as second hunter; Cockie went back to Babati, only to be awakened from her sleep by the arrival of five weary, hungry and bedraggled travellers: Blix and Finch Hatton with the Prince and two aides, the Hon. Piers Legh and Alan Lascelles. They demanded food, but Cockie told them that the meat-safe was empty. ‘You must have something,’ said the Prince. ‘Only eggs.’ ‘Well then, scrambled eggs.’ They scrambled the eggs together. ‘Is Blixen leaving you all alone here?’ the royal guest enquired. Cockie said yes. ‘Then you’d better come with us.’ So Cockie did.

  The hunters’ main objective was to shoot a lion. Plenty of lions were about, and the best chance of success was to rise before dawn and hope to find one or more still feeding on an overnight kill. The Prince liked to sit up late talking and playing his accordion, thus rendering everyone unfit for early rising, sharp-eyed tracking and a steady aim next morning. Protocol demanded that the Prince should make the first move to go to bed. The hunters persuaded Cockie to break it by pleading weariness and retiring early. The others sprang briskly to their feet and did the same. Left alone, the Prince played his accordion to himself until two o’clock in the morning, and at dawn was just as bleary-eyed as ever. Nevertheless, he did get his lion.

  The safari was abruptly ended by the news of King George V’s dangerous illness. The night before the Prince started on a dash to his father’s bedside by car, train and finally naval destroyer, he remarked: ‘To think that in a few days I may be King of England!’ ‘And what, sir, will you do then?’ ‘I shall do exactly what I like!’ was the reply. Cockie felt a trifle apprehensive. He added that he would put back the clocks at Sandringham and Windsor, Edward VII having kept them half an hour fast to counter his consort’s habit of always being late.

  In the Prince’s character, Cockie recalled, self-indulgence and consideration for others were curiously blended. Even when on safari, he would abandon the chase after animals to chase almost any personable young human female who crossed his path. At Dodoma, he turned up several hours late at a formal dinner party, after disappearing into the night with the wife of a very junior official; and when in Nairobi he invited two young typists to Government House (Cockie said), filled them with the Griggs’ champagne and persuaded them to indulge in that old Nairobi pastime of dancing on the table. On the other hand, Cockie had admired an ice-making machine he had brought on the safari. ‘I’ll send you one,’ he told her. She thought no more of it, but several months later the device arrived at Babati with the compliments of the Prince of Wales.

  This was a relaxed and cheerful party, with the Prince in an easy-going frame of mind. But you never knew just how far you could go (Cockie said), no matter how close the relationship. One of the Prince’s oldest and closest friends was called G. Trotter. After the advent of Mrs Simpson, at the time when everyone concerned was trying to keep the affair hushed up, Trotter suggested to the Prince as tactfully as possible that he should not, in public places, allow Mrs Simpson to take his cigarette from his lips and place it between her own. ‘I hope, sir, I know you well enough to say this,’ Trotter added. ‘G, you do not know me well enough,’ the Prince replied, and he never spoke to Trotter again.

  The Blixens’ idyll at Babati ended. The coffee did not thrive and the enterprise was closed down by its owner. Cockie started a dress shop in Nairobi while Blix turned back to hunting for his livelihood, and also resumed his pursuit of attractive ladies. He was in turn pursued by a lady who had never met him but had heard so much about him in their native Sweden that she had resolved to become the third Baroness Blixen. So she set out for Africa, arrived at Babati, where Blix had his safari base, and announced that she had come to stay. And stay she did.

  For a while Blix, African-style, enjoyed the company of one wife in the bush and another in Nairobi; but when a friend invited him to stay and he accepted with the rider: ‘I shall bring both wives,’ Cockie responded with the edict: ‘You will take only one.’ He took Eva. So the marriage ended.

  Cockie took as her third and last husband the handsome Hollander Jan Hoogterp. They moved to Johannesburg, where living was expensive and entertaining on a lavish scale necessary, Hoogterp believed, in order to secure commissions. It was difficult to entertain lavishly when cash was short, but Cockie hit on an ingenious method of doing so. ‘You pack your guests in so tightly that no one can move. Then you say to everyone – do help yourself, the drinks are at the other end of the room. Practically no one can reach them. That way, all you need is one bottle of gin.’

  It was while in Johannesburg that Cockie had the unusual experience of reading her own obituary. Eva was killed in a motor accident in Baghdad and the leading newspaper muddled up the Baronesses von Blixen. The editor, on learning of the mistake, rang up to apologise. ‘Don’t mention it,’ Cockie responded. ‘I’m returning all my bills marked Deceased.’ The editor insisted that a correction must be published, in any words Cockie cared to choose. ‘Any words?’ Certainly, the editor confirmed. Cockie dictated the correction. ‘Mrs Hoogterp wishes it to be known that she has not yet been screwed in her coffin.’

  Her real name was Jacqueline but her father, when she was a baby, had called her coq-a-leeky after the soup, and the abbreviation remained after nappies had been discarded. He was a banker, though hardly a conventional one; Cockie remembers an especially appealing Christmas present: a pair of bantams, which were allowed to sleep under her bed. ‘For goodness sake,’ a friend wrote to her before she married Hoogterp, ‘don’t make a third mistake.’ Events proved that she had. The real love of her life was Blix.2

  But at the time of which I write she was married still to Jan Hoogterp, living mainly in Nairobi and acting, intermittently, as a kind of social secretary to Laura Corrigan. An occasional crumb from the rich lady’s table fetched up at Njoro. ‘Cockie arrived with lobster and Corrigan champagne,’ says my diary on a day in 1933. ‘Had a party.’ It cannot have been a large party with only one lobster, but perhaps there was more than one bottle of champagne.

  When Delamere died at the end of 1931, the obvious leader to succeed him was Ewart Grogan. He was experienced in local politics, well versed in finance and economics – he had at one time been the financial correspondent of The Times – and a fluent public speaker. Grogan himself expected to be chosen, but the elected members of the Legislative Council preferred Lord Francis Scott, a post-war settler with much less political experience but who was generally liked and trusted. Grogan had made enemies, in part through his cavalier treatment of his wife, and was never really trusted by his fellows, who thought him too clever by half and with eyes too firmly fixed upon the main chance.

  Francis Scott was a less pugnacious man than Delamere, less impetuous and eccentric, but he shared the same imperial ideas and could be just as quick-tempered and impatient. This was generally attributed to a war wound in the foot that caused him constant pain until it was amputated, but in fact the wound ha
d paralysed the sciatic nerve and his leg was numb rather than painful. Tall and distinguished-looking, fair and with ice-blue eyes, his perfect manners befitted a former officer in the Grenadier Guards who had been aide-de-camp to the Viceroy of India, the Earl of Minto, and had married the Viceroy’s daughter. He was a younger son of the Duke of Buccleuch and had eighty-four first cousins.

  At Rongai, about 120 miles up-country, the Scotts had built a two-storeyed house, something hitherto unknown in farming regions, called Deloraine. It was, for those days, an imposing edifice in local stone shaped by Indian masons, with lofty upstairs bedrooms encircled by a wide veranda, and proper plumbing. The Scotts had brought from Britain many of the trappings of civilisation – good silver and china, linen, family portraits, books, valuable furniture and comfortable mattresses. They lived in some style, with a lady’s maid called Loder and a Scottish nanny, later replaced by a succession of governesses to educate their two daughters. Loder was a forthright, uncompromising cockney lady who ordered the houseboys about in a manner one would have expected them to resent – ‘them black bamboos’ she often called them, bamboo being her version of the Swahili word for bloody fool, pumbafu – but she removed the sting by solicitude for their health and frequent cups of tea liberally sugared. Bamboos later graduated into bastards. She outlived her employers and became housekeeper at Muthaiga Club, where she never pulled her punches when commenting on those members who did not, in her opinion, behave as ladies and gentlemen should. ‘Airpins in ’is bed again,’ she would announce in disapproving tones.

  Eileen Scott lingers in my memory draped in chiffon scarves, clasping a French novel and a gaily coloured parasol, and uttering at intervals bird-like cries of ‘Oh, François! François!’ when some domestic mishap stung her husband into an outburst of irritation. Setting forth on an expedition in their battered old T-model Ford was quite an undertaking since, as well as the dogs and novels, Eileen surrounded herself with a quantity of props such as cushions, towels, a tin of Keating’s flea powder, a first aid kit, a picnic basket, a bottle of smelling salts and a parasol, and wore beige cotton gloves. She was seldom without her parasol, and would hold it aloft when riding about the farm on her pony.

  In politics, Francis was a good and steady leader whose judgement was said to be sound – rather a damning word perhaps, but it implied that he did not make inflammatory speeches about birthrights and Christian civilisation, and would never have led a mob of angry settlers to the steps of Government House shouting ‘Resign! Resign!’ at the Governor, as Delamere had done in his salad days. In fact, Francis Scott was a ‘moderate’. The eleven members elected to Legislative Council by the Europeans had a ‘Left Wing’, also called ‘Progressives’, consisting of a Captain Cotter and a fiery Irishman from Eldoret named Tommy O’Shea. Their aims would not be labelled left wing or progressive today. They were hell-bent for full and unrestricted self-government, i.e. government by a small white minority freed from all Colonial Office control.

  As there were then some 40,000 Europeans and about three million Africans in the Colony, this idea did not commend itself to any British government, of whatever complexion. Indeed it had been the Duke of Devonshire, Colonial Secretary in a Conservative Government and hardly a rip-roaring radical, who had set his signature in 1923 to the white paper which had laid down that: ‘Primarily, Kenya is an African territory, and H.M. Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.’ You could hardly be more definite than that. Although the next paragraph administered a soothing pat to the slapped faces of the Europeans – everyone’s interests would be safeguarded, there would be no drastic policy reversals – this statement continued to be the bedrock of British policy in Kenya until independence came just forty years on, when drastic reversals of policy did indeed occur.3

  Francis Scott and his ‘moderates’ realised self-government by whites to be immediately unattainable, but it still remained, despite the 1923 white paper reinforced by another in 1930, their ultimate aim. Meanwhile they pressed for closer association of the settlers, who were the mainstay of the country’s economy and its principal tax-payers, with the processes of government – an aim that ‘government by agreement’ during the Grigg régime had partially, but only partially, achieved.

  If the settlers’ demands often seemed absurd and their voices strident, one of the reasons was the irritating, at times infuriating, habits of bureaucracy. If that bureaucracy is not only permanent and immutable but also centred six thousand miles away, frustration can build up a powerful head of steam. Bureaucratic delays, nit-picking and complacency can be bad enough in a democracy where at least the citizen can vent his fury by writing to his MP and, if that way inclined, march with banners. A white Kenyan could, certainly, write to his Elected Member, but what could that Member do? LegCo had a large, permanent majority of officials who could, and on important issues did, outvote all the unofficial members combined. The Governor, advised by an Executive Council, could at any time direct the votes of his officials. He in turn was under orders from the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who in his turn was the agent of whatever political party was in power in the United Kingdom. Thus the chain of command stretched from Westminster to Nairobi and beyond, down to the junior district officer in his boma at the bottom of another chain which stretched up to the Chief Secretary, who was directly responsible to the Governor. So it was government by bureaucracy down to the African herding his cattle in the bush and the white farmer filling in forms for whatever board or commission organised the marketing of his produce.

  The Colonial Office was, in those days, a very curious institution indeed. A young man who chose the diplomatic service for his career would be posted to some foreign capital and spend the next twenty-five years or so moving from embassy to embassy, with spells at headquarters in between. So no one could reach the rank of Under-Secretary in Downing Street without knowing what went on in foreign parts, nor become an Ambassador without knowing what went on in Downing Street.

  Not so with his counterpart in the colonial sphere. Either he joined the Colonial Service, was posted to an outpost of Empire and spent the rest of his working life overseas, or he entered the home Civil Service, chose the Colonial Office for his province (having failed to get into the Treasury or the Home Office, almost every entrant’s first and second choice – the Colonial Office came low in the pecking order) and spent his working life in Whitehall. So he could retire to enjoy his knighthood and his pensioned ease in Godalming or Sevenoaks without having set foot in any of the countries whose destiny he had directed. So, also, a district officer could rise to the rank of Chief Secretary or even Governor with no first-hand knowledge of the Office that ordered his career. Home is home and overseas is overseas and never the twain shall meet seemed to be the basic principle.

  They did meet sometimes, of course, especially after aeroplanes replaced ships, but only briefly. Senior Colonial Office men would appear from time to time in colonial capitals, stay at Government House, confer in the secretariat, buy curios for their children and depart, little the wiser as to what went on in the outback beyond Government Road. They feared, it seemed, contamination by uncomfortable notions and ideas that might compromise their impartiality. Detachment was the aim.

  I came across an instance of this point of view during the Second World War, when the colonies were virtually cut off from Britain. Only very occasionally did someone overcome the various obstacles to travel and find a way to London. I was employed at the time by the news department of the BBC. It had occurred to someone that these rare visitors might have interesting tales to tell about the war effort in the Empire overseas that would hearten us all in our beleagured island. So I was temporarily attached to the Colonial Office to trawl for any such stories as there might be.

  One day there c
ame into my office a young man from Mauritius who had, on his own initiative, set up a radio station to broadcast pro-Allied news to Madagascar, which was believed to be providing a base for German submarines. He was full of enthusiasm for the Allied cause, and it occurred to me that, as no other Mauritian had been seen in Britain, so far as I knew, for nearly four years (this was in 1943), the man in charge of the Mauritian desk, whoever he might be, would be interested to meet this visitor and hear his story. The gentleman in question, located in a small dark room in the inner recesses of the Office with a smallish carpet – rank in the hierarchy could be measured by carpet size – glared at me when I entered his lair as if I had been something nasty escaped from a zoo. I explained the situation. ‘Has he an appointment?’ the gentleman icily enquired. I had to admit that he had not. ‘I do not see anyone without an appointment,’ he replied, taking up his pen to inscribe another minute in the file. I had to report to the young man from Mauritius that unfortunately the head of the relevant department was engaged in an important conference and could not be disturbed.

  It would be unfair to suggest that every Colonial Office man shut himself in his bureaucratic burrow. Now and again a tall, bulky, redhaired individual would stride into my office and pace the small room (small carpet) like a caged tiger, gesturing freely and letting flow a spate of talk, often original and stimulating but sometimes rather out of control; he did not seem able to stop. This was Andrew Cohen, a brilliant intellectual, left wing in his politics (in the British, not Kenyan, sense) with a Cambridge doublé first in Classics. He was ambitious, impetuous and accused by some of arrogance, which I think was justified, but he had considerable charm, a lot of drive and was clearly a man to be reckoned with.