Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  He was tried for murder, for which the penalty was death, by an all-white jury, and acquitted. There had been instances before when all-white juries had returned questionable verdicts in cases involving fatal injuries to Africans. The Government decided to make an example and the Governor, on orders from Whitehall, issued a deportation order on the grounds that ‘the Hon. G. L. E. Cole is conducting himself so as to be dangerous to peace and good order in East Africa and is endeavouring to incite emnity between the people of East Africa and His Majesty’ – a charge which would have been difficult to substantiate. Galbraith left the Protectorate in ignominy and with no prospect of return. This was in September 1911.

  In the years that remained to him, Galbraith was to suffer agonies from a particularly vicious form of rheumatoid arthritis, and it was generally believed that he had contracted this during his exile. But the first stages of the disease were already with him, for he had been invalided out of the army before he ever reached East Africa. His exile worsened his condition. Bitterly resentful and frustrated, he could settle nowhere. He tried ‘German East’ but could not abide the Germans – ‘too beastly for words to express’ – and wrote that he was ‘like a storm-tossed ship without a helm and so must drift before the wind … I keep fairly well on the whole but still get these bouts which wear me down, especially when I am on short rations … I shall have to disguise myself in the end and go back to look at my own place.’ Disguise himself he did, as a Somali, and got back to Gilgil, but only for three days – he had to ‘hustle out of the country again very quickly’.

  War had broken out by then and his brother Berkeley had been put in charge of six hundred goats which, for some reason, the Government wished to send to Zanzibar. He engaged Galbraith as an ‘assistant stockman’ under the name of Egerton. When they reached Mombasa, Berkeley was recalled and ‘Egerton’ instructed to take goats on to Zanzibar. He did so, at government expense. The deportation order was still in force, but war came to his rescue. His mother pleaded his cause with Lord Harcourt, Secretary of State for the Colonies, and in October 1914 he was back at Kekopey.

  It was at this period of Galbraith’s life that the writer Llewelyn Powys became his unlikely but congenial manager. Powys was a consumptive who had come to Africa to join his younger brother Will in the hope that the clean highland air would purge him of the disease. Will and Llewelyn were sons of the Rev. Charles Powys and his wife Mary, who reared eleven children in their vicarage at Montacute in Somerset. Mary claimed the poet William Cowper as an ancestor and, more remotely, John Donne. Of her six sons, three became writers of distinction; although not widely read today they have a faithful following and a journal devoted to their works, and in their time stood high in the estimation of literary cognoscenti, if not on lists of bestsellers. These three were John Cowper, Theodore and Llewelyn. Of the daughters, Gertrude became a professional painter, and Marian a world authority on lace. Theirs was an intellectual, vital and exceptionally close-knit family. Most of the men enjoyed striking good looks; they were tall and well-built with fine-cut, positive features and tightly curled hair.2

  Will, the youngest son, had the family good looks, but nature and the land appealed to him more than the arts. As a schoolboy he reared orphan lambs (his sister told me) in the orchard. His father obtained for him the tenancy of a farm on the Montacute estate, and he was happy there until lured away by the prospect of adventure in the wilds of Africa. Family tradition holds that too much time spent following the Blackmore Vale fox-hounds had something to do with his change of intention. If that was so, he made up for any neglect of duty by an almost obsessive devotion to it later on.

  Early in 1914, at the age of twenty-six, he set sail for East Africa with practically no money and no plans save to visit an old friend called Barry who had a farm near Eburru in the Rift Valley. Barry had no job for him but lent him a mule on which to go and look for one. On the Kinangop, he wrote, ‘I met a wild-looking man, Seymour, on a motorbike. He gave me a job at once for my keep, but he did not like it much because I ate a pot of jam a day. I spent my time digging wells for windmills.’ He was also instructed to round up any stray livestock he could find and drive them on to the government farm near Naivasha with whose manager Seymour had a feud.3

  Will Powys moved on to work for the East African Syndicate whose huge block of land, almost all undeveloped, stretched from Gilgil to Thomson’s Falls (now Nyandarua). Most of it was high, cold and wild with a good deal of forest, and it was here that Llewelyn joined his younger brother just after the start of the First World War. Llewelyn, still coughing blood, barely had time to pick up a smattering of livestock knowledge and Swahili before Will rode off on a mule to join the East African Mounted Rifles, leaving his brother in charge of two thousand head of cattle, fourteen thousand sheep and a virtually untrained labour force.

  Anyone more unsuited to the life of a farmer in Africa it would be hard to imagine. Llewelyn had been a schoolmaster and had tried his hand at essays and sketches, up till then with scant success. His cast of mind was intellectual and aesthetic, his nature sensitive and sweet. The Powys good looks and charm of manner were his in full measure and, despite his illness, he seemed to overflow with zest for life and vitality. Women inevitably succumbed. ‘His face had the beauty of an apple orchard under the sun,’ wrote one of his mistresses, Alyse Gregory, whom he eventually married. Even when he lay dying in a Swiss sanatorium the novelist Ethel Mannin testified ‘I have never known such charm – charm that kindles the senses like sunlight.’ ‘Lulu is in love with life and the visible world,’ wrote one of his lovers. ‘Those were his real paramours.’ He was a pagan with a deep religious sense, a hedonist who shrank from hurting others. ‘Deliberate cruelty is the only unpardonable sin, and personal fulfilment the principal virtue,’ he wrote,4 summing up the philosophy of the intellectual pace-setters of his day, before cruelty became a commonplace and personal fulfilment a justification for selfishness and greed.

  To maroon such a man among the crudities of African farming was rather like pitching a maestro with a Stradivarius into a village brass band. He hated the cruelty and indifference to human life he saw in his surroundings, and the uncouthness of those Africans, and the coarseness of those Europeans, he encountered; hated them and feared them, yet responded to the country’s beauty. One day, riding in the forest, he came upon a young and all but naked Kikuyu girl filling her water-gourd at a pool. Beguiled, he returned to assignations with her beside the pool and ‘the long, lonely years I had passed in Africa made my whole being cry out for something to love, for some romance, for it is exactly this that is lacking in the great dark continent’. He contemplated a retreat from civilisation’s complexities into a romanticised primitive world, and proposed marriage, African style. The girl’s father named a bride-price but she herself shrank from so traumatic a step. So Llewelyn ‘never again looked into the provocative eyes of this rare hamadryad of the African forest.’5 He may not have looked into hamadryads’ eyes but it was not in his nature to live for long without women. ‘I see in the background three Kikuyu girls from far away,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘I shall perhaps select one when I come back to dinner tonight.’ But the local women soon disillusioned him. He had been docking lambs’ tails with a red-hot iron, an operation at which ‘I am not very deft … even the black women give me small compensation – great black Gilgil trots poxed for the most part and without modesty.’ In another letter he complained: ‘how they lie and steal and deceive you – what duplicity behind their dusky skins!’6

  After the East African Syndicate changed hands, he moved down to Kekopey in the Valley where life was rather more civilised. He and Galbraith Cole took to each other, though with reservations; in character and outlook they were poles apart. Galbraith (Llewelyn wrote) might be ‘as hard as flint and crafty as a snake, and cold as ice, but by Jove he has a brain and one can say anything to him, and he will switch his brain on to it and ferret it out. He has more intelligence than anybody
else in East Africa and more distinction of mind. He will discuss after our manner, and if he was not a Spaniard with the heart of an inquisitionist he would be a very delightful and illuminating companion.’ Never in his life before, Llewelyn added, had he met so strong a character. That character had been forged in solitude and tempered by pain, ‘I’ve lived much alone in my life and utterly alone in my thoughts,’ Galbraith wrote in 1917. ‘For sixteen years, ever since I thought at all, I’ve been in Africa and in some ways it’s a hard country. One is constantly at war with nature and this must needs leave its mark on one’s thought and ideas. Few people I’ve ever met would care to know the things I think and fewer still would sympathise or understand them, so I’ve shared them with the trees and the hills and the stars in the sky more than with people.’7

  Galbraith regarded his new manager with wry amusement. ‘When he first came, he used to ride furiously from one point to another and except to get a series of crashing falls he effected very little, but now he has learnt a lot and is really very good. He used to say, I don’t know why I get so many falls while riding around looking at the meringoes, as he used to call them. I used to say, I should go a bit steadier if I were you, but still used to see him going like the wind over pig-holes and stumps as if there weren’t any.’ Llewelyn was ‘not a lover of big silent places. He likes a walled garden where he can sit under an apple tree and have “exciting conversations” … He is so innately good that he is quite incapable of living up to his own theories.’

  For Llewelyn, Africa was ‘a country frequented by clawed creatures with striped and gilded pelts, where nettles sting like wasps and even moles are large as water-rats’. Worse than that, it was a continent where ‘the sun, naked as when it was born, sucks out one’s life blood, and nourishes savagery long since made dormant by the pious lives of one’s ancestors’. ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! is the mandate of Africa’ he wrote in Black Laughter, one of two books of sketches based on his African experiences. ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ is the title of the last chapter, in which he relates how, on the shores of Lake Elmenteita – which he called Lake Elemental – the vultures, ‘that host of godless hooped fowls’, were drawn to him by his blood-red shirt, the shirt of a ‘renegade stockman who, go where he might, was destined to carry upon his back until the day of his death the shocking striped band of Africa’.

  In 1916 Lady Eleanor Balfour, daughter of the second Earl of Balfour and niece of the former Prime Minister, braved the submarines to spend a few months with her cousin Alison who was married to the Principal Medical Officer of the Protectorate, Dr Milne. Her fiancé had just been killed in France. She was young, tall, blue-eyed, fresh-complexioned, vivacious and attractive, endowed with intelligence, enthusiasm for good causes, a strong sense of duty and the heart of a lion. Galbraith hated what he called the ‘peculiar vulgarity’ of Nairobi and never went there unless compelled to do so by business. On such occasions he stayed with the Milnes, who kept open house for up-country folk. Under their roof he fell precipitately in love with Lady Eleanor. She went on safari with the Milnes, and stopped a few days at Kekopey, where Galbraith took her out in his car to shoot a buck, lending her a light rifle. She took careful aim at an impala and shot it through the heart. ‘I did not know until months later,’ she wrote, ‘how much hung on that shot. Galbraith had said to himself “If she kills it, our friendship will ripen; if she misses, it will come to nothing.” Well, I killed it all right.’8

  After she returned to England, he continued his courtship by letter. In the following year he went ‘home’ to seek treatment for his rheumatism, and in December he and Nell were married in London. Her uncle, Arthur Balfour, gave them the wedding breakfast. They returned to a scene of disaster. Drought had so shrivelled the pastures that nearly half the sheep had died. What hadn’t shrivelled had been devastated by fires so ferocious that Delamere had had to drive his car on to his veranda to escape the flames. Rinderpest was decimating the cattle. Delamere had come over to inoculate Galbraith’s beasts, had broken a precious syringe but managed to jab a thousand head with an old and blunt instrument. On top of that, East Coast fever, a tick-borne disease, had broken out. There was no dip for the cattle to go through at Kekopey, and one was hastily built. To crown it all, Galbraith collapsed with an attack of dysentery which very nearly killed him, and his arthritis revived in an acute form. Nell wrote: ‘Galbraith is absolutely on the rack and can’t last much longer in that pain.’ He got no sleep, and acute colitis and toxaemia developed. ‘I don’t know how it will all end but if he can’t get relief soon it will kill him.’

  In this extremity, Dr Burkitt was sent for. Although there was little he could do, he had (Nell Cole wrote) a ‘life-giving personality’ and his mere presence did Galbraith good. Nurses came from Nairobi, and their neighbour Lady Colvile, who was French, volunteered to come and cook invalid dishes. Then came Spanish ’flu among the labour force, smallpox among the herdsmen, and Delamere’s cook died of bubonic plague. ‘My house is overrun with plague-carrying rats,’ Llewelyn wrote. ‘I am now trying to catch them and in one day have caught thirty.’ The fleas that transmitted the infection were only supposed to be able to jump two inches, but ‘not a few have had spring enough to reach my trousers, where to my great content I have caught and killed no less than three of these naughty insects’. The trials of Job were re-enacted in this beautiful but seemingly lethal Valley. Lady Colvile turned out not to be a good cook. Spanish ’flu put the railway and post office staff out of action, so an instrument needed to lance a painful abscess Galbraith had contracted failed to arrive. The nurse had to return to Nairobi. ‘A serval cat got one of my turkeys,’ Nell wrote, ‘the boys are breaking all my china and I can’t get the motor to go.’ Over four thousand sheep died that year.

  Gradually, painfully, Galbraith pulled round. He and Nell went off on safari beyond Laikipia to look for land free of the ticks that were destroying their sheep. There were no roads, and rhinos were so plentiful that in three days they saw twenty-one which they scared off with whistles. Galbraith kept going on twenty grains of aspirin a day. They found the land they wanted, and another stretch of open plain, almost waterless, was added to their estate.

  There were credit items on this ill-starred ledger. Two sons were born. On the birth of the eldest, Galbraith sat on his veranda and thought of David’s future. ‘The apparently unending plains I see before me make me hope that his outlook will be as wide and free as those plains. I set little store by achievement. I would have him with a faculty for discrimination and for observing and appreciating all beautiful things and with a mental outlook that had no limit; if he had these, I should be content.’9

  When at last the war ended, Will Powys came back to Kekopey after many adventures. He had captured six Germans, Llewelyn reported: ‘the bullets whizzed round him but he did not care, when he got to their camp he ate a Hovis loaf and a great fat sausage.’10 Later he had been put in charge of buying cattle in the Belgian Congo and transporting them to the armies in the field, and had been awarded a Belgian decoration. His return released Llewelyn to sail thankfully back to the civilisation to which he belonged. Time softened his memories of that unblest continent. Some years later he wrote to Galbraith’s widow: ‘Think of your being back at Gilgil again! Some day we will be seen walking together as we were fifteen years ago – our ghosts. What days they were! How odd that it should have been from you and you alone that I learned so many of the ways of life. I am glad I outlived him, glad I can still know like any spurfowl when the sun rises. Think of you having seen the sun rise in Africa again!’11

  After four years of marriage, Galbraith wrote to Nell: ‘The joy you bring me completely transcends all the pain I have suffered, ever.’ But the pain did not abate as arthritis intensified. First he was obliged to walk with sticks, and once hobbled into the bush after a lion, and shot it. Then he was forced into a wheel-chair. The decision was made to retreat to England and a house was bought in Gloucestershire, but Galbraith felt ex
iled once again and longed for his own land, his sheep, and his servants, especially the Somali Jama Farah, who had been with him for many years and nursed him with great devotion. Galbraith lost the sight of one eye. ‘I sit here watching the clock as if I were in prison … I want to die where I can hear a zebra barking.’ He and Nell returned to Kekopey, where he sat on the veranda looking out across the lake and the plain with his one good eye while his flocks were driven past for inspection, and plans put before him for a new wool-shed and manager’s house. The pain did not abate.

  One day in October 1929 Nell loaded his revolver and took the dogs for a walk. Jama Farah supported his arm while he raised the revolver to his head. ‘There is nothing sad about the spot where Galbraith lies,’ Nell wrote. ‘Its beauty is so exquisite it takes one’s breath away.’ And ‘he lies there,’ a friend related, ‘looking out across the plain, watching the buck, watching the changing lights upon the lake and the sun going down over the Rift Valley.’

  Galbraith’s age was forty-eight. His brother Berkeley had died, unmarried, four years earlier, at the age of forty-two. Florence Delamere had also died young.

  Nell took over the active management of Galbraith’s two big ranches, with their many flocks and herds and Maasai herdsmen. She also became a moving spirit in the Moral Rearmament movement which swept through Kenya in the late 1930s. Known to begin with as the Oxford Group, it had been started by Frank Buchman with plenty of American showmanship and evangelical gusto. ‘Absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love’ were the cornerstones of its doctrine. Those who sometimes faltered in pursuit of these aims foregathered periodically at ‘house-parties’ to confess their sins. At the MRA headquarters at Caux in Switzerland, super ‘house-parties’ were held to which the chosen were invited with all expenses paid, and it was rumoured that cakes and ale were more to the fore than sackcloth and ashes – probably this was merely a malicious rumour. I am sure that Nell Cole, like many others, was wholly sincere in her conviction that human morals stood in urgent need of reform and that the place to make a start was in one’s own life and character, here and now.