We saw a good deal of the Cobb family, whose standards of dress and behaviour were considerable higher than those of my own. Dorothy Cobb, who was two or three years older than I, envied me because I wore shorts, whereas she was clad in clean and tidy dresses, and her younger brother Tom in sailor suits. He possessed a most enviable little blue cart which was harnessed to a pet lamb. We stalked pigeons with bows and arrows copied from those of the Dorobo, but I do not think we ever hit anything. To begin with, both Dorothy and Mrs Cobb had ridden side-saddle, but they soon gave that up and rode astride like everybody else. Years later, Dorothy told me that I had taught her to tie shoe-laces; I suppose it had been done for her before that.
The Cobbs’ labour force was drawn from several different tribes, and each tribe had its own village and headman. Maasai were employed to tend sheep and cattle, Kiksigis to serve as grooms, Kikuyu for the cultivations, and men from the Nyanza province near Lake Victoria to be trained in iron-work and carpentry. There was a foundry, a sawmill, a brick kiln and a carpenters’ shop, in fact a miniature town up on those downs. Self-sufficiency was the Cobb objective.
I remember an alarming pack of large dogs in the care of Coley, the nanny’s husband, who did the butchery – every worker had a regular ration of meat. The Maasai reserve was less than a dozen miles away, and the Cobb’s high-grade cattle were an irresistible temptation to the warriors. Parties would come through the forest to frighten the herdsmen and drive away as many of the cattle as they could. The dogs would be put on their trail and bay the animals until Powys Cobb or one of his assistants arrived to put the warriors to flight. The hounds themselves never attacked the rustlers. They were descendants of Prospero and Prosperine; and bloodhounds, fierce as they look, are gentle, sloppy-sentimental creatures. They would never go in for a kill. But lions and hyenas had also to be dealt with, and some of the bloodhounds were crossed with mastiffs, who introduced the needed strain of ferocity.
Until war came in 1914, a number of young Europeans were intermittently employed at Keringet, for Powys Cobb, like Delamere, was a strong believer in the white settlement of the highlands. He saw Keringet as a training ground for pioneers, much as the floating school of his dreams was to train young seafarers. Pupils used to pay for their apprenticeship then, rather than the other way round. Obviously this custom was open to exploitation, but, equally, a young man straight from school in Britain with no Swahili or farming skills was of little or no value to his employer for a year or so, and sometimes a liability.
Ned Powys Cobb had a passion for machines, the larger the better, and with great expense imported a pair of enormous steam engines which broke the flimsy bridges between Molo station and Keringet, and sank into the rivers. Once extricated, he stationed one on each side of the block of land he wished to plough and connected them by a cable and winch. A plough with six discs was then drawn to and fro between the engines. In theory, this greatly speeded up the cultivation, since a two-furrow disc plough was the most that oxen could manage. In practice, the engines often broke down, an untrained labour force got the chain and winch hopelessly tangled up, and the engines, which were wood-burning, needed a labour force of their own to keep them supplied with logs.
Once a year, the whole Cobb family migrated to the Coast, where Ned could indulge his passion for the sea. He also started there a sisal plantation. A safari into Jubaland – then part of the British Protectorate, later ceded to Italy – persuaded him that cotton would thrive on the estuary of the Juba river. Only a large plantation would do, to be worked by the most up-to-date plant. So machinery of gargantuan proportions arrived from America at Kismayu, on the mouth of the river. Kismayu was a very minor port indeed, attuned only to dhows. Somehow the machinery was got ashore but there it quickly, and irretrievably, sank into the mud. Great big dredgers and other colossi lay about in attitudes of abandonment and despair for many years, and may lie there still for all I know.
Many years were to pass before I again saw Marindas and Keringet. Both the Hill-Williams and the Powys Cobbs had gone. Despite his age and the aftermath of a serious injury – he had fallen into the blades of a mower, been gashed to the bone and stitched together by Powys Cobb – Jack Hill-Williams re-joined the army in 1915 and, two years later, died of cerebro-spinal meningitis contracted in Dar es Salaam. Hilda and Tuppence were then at school in Nairobi. They stayed for half a term. They were old enough to help their mother on the farm, and there was no money for school fees.
At Marindas their lives were solitary; all the younger folk had gone to the wars. They all but lived on their ponies, became proficient stockmen and mechanics, and grew to adulthood almost without contact with other white children. Africans were their companions, Swahili and a smattering of Kipsigis and Kikuyu their foreign tongues. They were much more scared, Hilda told me, of other European children their own age than of lions and leopards, which were all about. Their mother carried on their education by means of a correspondence course, and managed always to have books in the house. Determined to keep her own mind from rustication, at the end of the day’s work she made time for serious reading; Hilda remembers that Gibbon’s Decline and Fall was one of her favourites. Not until 1921, when they were nineteen and seventeen years old, did they leave Africa for an introduction to the civilisation of Egypt, as a start, and then of Europe.2
The fortunes of the Cobb children took a different course. The family returned to England in 1915, Powys Cobb wishing to re-join his regiment despite his age, forty-three. But he was found unfit for military service and went back to Molo, leaving his wife and children behind. They never re-joined him. All the pupils and managers had gone from Keringet, and help was badly needed. An acquaintance of the family heard about the situation and volunteered to fill the gap. She was young, intelligent and enterprising, the daughter of a successful architect and niece of a painter who became president of the Royal Academy. The moment Ethel Dicksee set eyes on Keringet she fell in love with it, and in due course its owner fell in love with her. After an interlude, she became the second Mrs Cobb.
But Keringet did not long survive the many wartime difficulties such as the disruption of markets – two hundred fattened pigs, for example, were killed and buried on the same day – followed by the currency débâcle of 1922, which increased the Cobbs’ overdraft by fifty per cent. This broke him, and his bank foreclosed. He and Ethel salvaged thirty-seven heifers and, each riding one pony and leading another, drove them to the far end of the Mau escarpment, where a block of land called Mau Narok had not long since been released for white settlement. Like Molo, it was unoccupied, high and cold, and the Government considered that, if developed, it would act as a buffer-between the Maasai and the Kikuyu, who were already moving into the Rift Valley. Here Powys Cobb acquired another 30,000 acres. How he managed this when a penniless bankrupt I cannot imagine, but he did. He and Ethel went back to tents and oxen and, bit by bit, on borrowed capital, built up another enterprise and made another home.
Many waters cannot quench love, and bankruptcy did not quench Powys Cobb’s passion for grandiose schemes. The shipping of produce to distant markets was unreliable and expensive; Powys Cobb decided to build his own fleet. For a reason it is difficult to fathom, plans were made to lay the keel of the first vessel on the shores of Lake Naivasha, by rail nearly four hundred miles from the Indian Ocean. How it was eventually to have reached the sea was never revealed. An American engineer called Thaxton arrived to take charge. He, Ned Powys Cobb and Ethel stayed for some days at Kekopey while the project was being launched, an experience that the vessel itself was never to enjoy. Nell Cole was unsympathetic. ‘I never met a man who could talk rot so unceasingly,’ she wrote. ‘Galbraith says he is like a buzzing mosquito that one longs to catch in a net.’ Others, however, thought him an excellent raconteur who could keep his audience in fits of laughter.3
Delamere, too, thought kindly of him. The rains in 1930 were exceptionally heavy, and ruined seven hundred acres of the Cobbs’ bar
ley which rotted on the ground. Prices were slumping and the rest was not worth harvesting. ‘I’m afraid it means their selling the developed part of their farm and starting again on another bit,’ Delamere wrote. ‘Rather hard at Cobb’s age to start all over again, and for her after making their home so nice. But it has happened to all pioneers in all the countries they have made. Their joy is in the creation of something out of nothing.’4 Powys Cobb himself made the same point. ‘One works because of the fascination of it, because each furrow turned, each calf born, is a tiny step towards a distant goal.’ But in a disillusioned moment he exclaimed: ‘Africa is a sink!’ With restored confidence, he quoted the saying: ‘Farming is more than a living, it is a way of life.’ One of his Molo neighbours, Jack Lipscomb, adopted as his maxim: ‘Live as if you would die tomorrow, farm as if you would live forever.’
Mau Narok was not far by crowfly from my parents’ home at Njoro, although some distance by road. One day Nellie, on impulse, decided to pay a call on the Cobbs by walking along the crest of the escarpment which rose steeply above her farm. So far as anyone knew there was no path, only thickets of giant heather and even taller brambles, with slithery tufts of coarse, reedy grasses growing in boggy ground in between the thickets. We planned to camp on top and make an early start so as to reach our goal before the sun grew fierce. The Cobbs, we thought, would give us lunch and we could make our way back to camp in the cool of the evening.
The plan did not work out like that. We loaded up a donkey with our gear and, taking Mbugwa and several dachshunds, clambered up through the cedar forest, then through a belt of bamboos, then out on to the moorland with its dripping heather and squelchy turf, and found a spot relatively sheltered from a chilly wind for our camp. On one side lay the Maasai reserve stretching down to the Tanganyika border and beyond, on the other side the Rift Valley, but we could not see either because of the giant heather and, at daybreak, a clammy mist. The only wildlife we saw, apart from a pair of mountain francolins, was a solitary eland. Cockie had come with us and next morning, over an early breakfast, suggested that we might stay the night at the Cobbs. Colonial hospitality seldom failed, and they would be sure to have a nice warm fire and a good dinner. So we started later, taking toothbrushes, and Cockie wore her pyjamas underneath her shirt and trousers. The dachshunds came too.
Mau Narok, which means the black mountain, turned out to be much further than we had expected and the going a good deal worse. We had to keep changing our direction in order to avoid bogs, steep ravines or patches of especially thick bramble and heather. The dogs leapt over and among the tussocks like so many porpoises; they kept on gallantly but, when we paused, cast us reproachful glances. Nellie was nervous lest they might lag behind and come upon a leopard, or the leopard upon them, and it was far from unlikely that we might encounter a herd of buffalo; nor were rhinos out of the question.
Hours went by before, footsore and weary, we sighted thankfully the first sign of human habitation – a fence. Then came a cart-track of sorts and at last a shingle roof rising above a grove of young trees. Too late for lunch, we feared, but no doubt we should be offered something. Cockie congratulated herself on her foresight in bringing her pyjamas. No one was at home.
We dug out of his hut a surly house-boy who led us to a spacious sitting-room lined with cedar slabs and bookshelves, with large windows commanding a tremendous view, and with great cedar rafters supporting a lofty roof. It was well furnished, nothing shoddy; gone long ago were tables made from petrol boxes and amerikani. I dimly remember, after so many years, a big, polished gateleg table standing beneath a large window, and sprinkled with magazines and journals, many of them scientific, proceedings of learned societies and the like. Archaeology and astronomy seemed to be the favoured subjects – the past and the stars.
There was a long wait before the owner appeared, summoned from the wheel-side of an ailing tractor and in no mood for colonial hospitality. He was a smallish man with very pale eyes, no noticeable eyebrows and a trim pointed beard like that of General Smuts, whom he somewhat resembled; in fact, I think he had taken the General for his model. He told us that Ethel was away and his cook on holiday, and offered us a cup of tea. It was an exhausted little party, human and canine, that limped back to camp with blistered feet and aching limbs through a misty drizzle and a fading light.
That was my last glimpse of Ned Powys Cobb. In thirty years he and Ethel between them with their African labour – I think Ethel was the real driving force – created a better, more productive, more successful enterprise than that at Molo, which had passed into the hands of an Italian family. Thousands of bags of wheat and barley jolted down to the station, cream to the creamery, pigs to the bacon factory, fat beasts to the slaughterhouse, wool to the London auctions. More white farmers came to the district, and so did many Kikuyu families with their goats and cattle and ever-growing families. Ethel had no children. In his eightieth year, in 1952, Powys Cobb sold most of his farm to the European Agricultural Settlement Board, which was buying land from white farmers and dividing it into smaller units for lease or sale to immigrant newcomers. He kept back what he called ‘a foothold’ of 5,000 acres for Ethel.
His youthful ambition to go down to the sea in ships had been shelved, not forgotten. ‘I want,’ he wrote, ‘to end my days in freedom, and only the sea can give that.’ He bought a yacht, and he and Ethel cruised for several years among the Greek islands and around the Mediterranean. But he was no longer able to sail his own vessel, and a hired master was not the same. So he retired again, this time to a houseboat on a mere in Holland, where he died in 1959.
Ethel returned to her 5,000-acre ‘foothold’, and turned it into a well-stocked, well-organised and fruitful farm. At the same time, and like Nell Cole, she created a lasting memorial to her husband – a church. This she designed herself from start to finish, built it with the aid of semi-skilled masons, and carved with her own hands the altar-rails and other features. It was a replica of an English village church in every detail, and of no mean size. Her neighbours looked on with a certain wry amusement, for Ned Powys Cobb had often proclaimed himself an atheist.
Like most of the white farmers, those of Mau Narok were almost completely insulated from the political tremors that could have warned them of the earthquake to come. ‘I have just heard,’ Ethel wrote in 1961, ‘that there is a plan afoot for Government to buy the whole of our lovely Mau Narok and place Kikuyu squatters on it with ten acres to each family. It is a terrible thing …’ She had, she wrote, one thousand acres under crops and large flocks of sheep; ‘the farm is very nearly developed to its capacity and looks so lovely, it breaks my heart.’ Twenty-nine other white farmers in the district would have to go. And ‘what will become of our old employees, some of whom we’ve had for thirty years? I simply don’t know how I could possibly leave my lovely little church to its fate. I feel I must try to stop and look after it.’
But two years later she said goodbye forever to the church, the farm and her employees and to her home, and bought a couple of acres on the Isle of Man. Farming was in her blood, and it is an infection for which there is no known antidote, not even failure. Soon she had one hundred and seventy acres and was keeping sheep and cattle again. Also she designed and had built a number of self-contained flats for the elderly, and when she died in her eightieth year in 1975 she left most of her remaining property to provide for the upkeep of Ballycobb, as she had named her modern almshouses.
And the little church? The faces of the congregation have changed colour, but there are many more of them than before, and the church is well maintained. A simple inscription in the porch commemorates the name of Edward Powys Cobb.
CHAPTER 9
Under the Mountain
Only dwellers in a country often pulverised by drought would have written: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help’, because that is where help does come from, from springs and storms. Help for the livestock barons of the Rift Valley c
ame mainly from the Aberdare mountains, rising darkly to the east, mantled with forest and moorland and frequently muffled in mist and cloud.
One night a long time ago my parents, a young syce called Chegge and myself emerged from the dripping forest on ponies stumbling with fatigue to see a light winking at us through the trees, a sight as welcome to us as a safe den to a hunted creature, for we were cold and hungry and had lost our way; the night was resonant with menacing noises, Nellie had broken a stirrup, Jos had lost his compass, Chegge kept muttering about evil spirits, and a boil on my bottom was giving me hell.
We had arrived at a low and rambling log house beside a stream, and were greeted with surprise – for we had come unannounced and by an unusual route – by Captain Ernest Fey and his wife Mary. Above their outpost, forest rose to the summit of the Kinangop, the southernmost of the Aberdares’ three peaks – like all these names, a Maasai one, derived from a phrase meaning ‘those who live in the mists of high places’. Below lay a sweeping open plateau, bare of trees and creased by an occasional gulley, ending in an escarpment dropping into the Rift Valley.
Sometime in 1906 a curious procession could have been seen setting out from Naivasha station beside the lake of that name. In the van walked Captain Fey and his son Jim followed by Mary in a sedan chair borne by four hefty Africans. Beside it walked their daughters Nell and Norah clad in the long, tight-waisted skirts and blouses with mutton-chop sleeves of the day, and creaking along behind was an ox-wagon piled high with all their gear.
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