For many years the Captain had sailed his vessel with his family on board – two of the children had been born at sea – across the Indian Ocean and the China seas, and the time had come to settle down. They chose an odd place to do so, eight thousand feet above sea-level and nearly four hundred miles from the sea. It was cold and bleak and truly at the back of beyond, with a few Dorobo hunters in the forest for neighbours, elephants and buffaloes for company, and the nearest settlement two days’ march away. They clambered up the scarp, crossed the plateau and, when they reached the forest and could go no farther, said to each other: ‘This is where we’ll make our home.’1
There was a difficulty: the district had not yet been surveyed, and until this had been done no land could be parcelled out for settlement. But the Captain had been told of a loophole in the law. You could take out a temporary prospecting licence, search for minerals and peg out claims, regardless of whether or no the land had been surveyed. Captain Fey was obliged to return to sea, leaving Mary in charge. She was a slight, wiry and energetic New Zealander. Directing a small force of Kikuyu labour they had brought with them, she had holes dug all over the surrounding countryside and pegs stuck in to mark her claims. Then she embarked on a three-day journey to Nairobi, registered the claims, and returned to build a dwelling-place and start to clear bush and forest. When, two years later, the land was surveyed, the Feys got what they wanted for a down payment of one rupee an acre.
The surveyor in question was a young man called Max Nightingale, and he married Nell, the Feys’ eldest daughter. I do not know whether Max and Nell’s three children were actually born in an ox-wagon, but that is where they spent their early childhood, travelling all over the Protectorate and with no other home. The eldest son, Jim, remembered walking along behind the wagon, at the age of four or five, to escape the jolts and lurches, and weeping in anguish when, unable to keep up, he saw his home disappearing in the distance in a cloud of dust. At seven years old he became the first pupil to arrive, on his Somali pony, at the newly opened Kenton College, a preparatory school housed in an imitation German schloss perched on a mountainside near Kijabe station. The headmaster, Captain Cramb, had been adjutant of the Black Watch. He enforced strict discipline, wielded the cane, lived for his job and kindled in his pupils an abiding interest in the wildlife of a countryside as yet undefiled. ‘We small boys had all of Africa at our doorstep,’ wrote Venn Fey, one of the sea-captain’s grandsons.2
It was at Kenton that Jim Nightingale started a lifetime’s love affair with bees. He would go off honey-hunting in the cliffs below the forest with other boys, to rob wild bees that bred in crevices among the rocks, taking the dark honey full of grubs. The boys wore no protective clothing and got badly stung, but it was a point of honour not to retreat. At Njabini, the Feys’ home, a half-Kikuyu, half-Dorobo man called Gichuhi took Jim on long expeditions into the forest to collect honey from the many hives he owned. Hives were made of hollowed-out logs, which one saw all over the place wedged in the forks of trees, and until I read Jim Nightingale’s treatise on the subject, tape-recorded in his old age, I had no idea how complex were Dorobo techniques.3 Beekeepers like Gichuhi knew just which flowering trees produced the best-flavoured honey, where they grew, and when they were in flower – there was one (Mimulus solensii) that bloomed only once every seven years. The commonest bee-tree was the Dombeya, whose clusters of pinkish flowers rather like cherry blossom gave rise to lavish quantities of honey. Every hive was individually owned, and to take another man’s honey a heinous crime never, or almost never, committed, for fear of supernatural punishments that would certainly follow.
Nowadays the march of progress, and especially the spread of Christianity, has undermined such sanctions, and hives are often robbed. So now they are generally placed close to peoples’ homesteads where an eye can be kept on them, instead of away in the bush and forest; nectar within the bees’ reach, therefore, is soon exhausted. The dwindling of the forests has also deprived the bees, who have become more aggressive, because the gentler kinds (there are several sub-species), more easily robbed, have tended to die out, and the fiercer kinds to survive. So bee-keeping has become more painful to humans as well as more difficult for bees. Jim Nightingale won a worldwide reputation among apiculturalists for his studies of wild bees, and for marrying traditional African practices to western skills. He imported modern hives, and taught African bee-keepers to separate grubs, comb, pollen and propolis (a kind of aromatic glue used by the bees in hive construction), formerly all mixed up together, from pure honey. For the first time honey became a marketable product, and a useful addition to African family incomes.
Jim in due course married Barbie Polhill, daughter of a fellow farmer on the Kinangop. Her father, Stanley Polhill, had come to Kenya to take charge of the monster-machines imported by Powys Cobb, including three ponderous combine-harvesters which had no guards to protect people from their moving parts. Stanley Polhill’s jacket got caught up in the cogs of one of the machines. He was dragged in and cut open from chest to groin; one lung and several ribs were torn away and his anatomy exposed to the skies. This was at Mau Narok. The nearest hospital was over thirty miles away along the roughest of wagon-tracks, and his ambulance an almost springless early-model Ford. How he survived to reach Nakuru was a miracle. A further miracle was performed by Dr Burkitt. He fitted a football valve to a bicycle pump which he attached to the surviving lung, and organised two-hour shifts of Africans to pump air all round the clock. It was nearly a year before Stanley Polhill was discharged from hospital.
When he settled with his wife and family on the Kinangop in the usual mud-and-bamboo cabin with a cowdung floor, his wounds still needed daily dressing, and he was too weak to drive a tractor. His wife and a young governess took over. They marked out a stretch of grassland, ploughed and drilled it, only to find when they harvested their crop that their wheat was unsaleable – the Depression had started – so it stayed where it was to rot in a shed. His daughter Barbie still remembers the smell of mildew mixed with that of iodoform from her father’s dressings.4
After she and young Jim Nightingale were married they established what must surely be a record, though it is not in any Guinness book. Since to buy a farm of their own was financially impossible, they moved in with Jim’s parents, Max and Nell Nightingale. In twelve years, Barbie bore six children and they all lived together amicably, so Barbie assured me, under one roof. The phrase ‘under one roof’ is perhaps not strictly accurate, since Kenya houses had a habit of expanding to meet new needs, a rondavel or two being run up now and then, but they did all feed at one table except for children under seven. Jim worked his father’s farm and learnt more and more about bees until, after twenty-four years of marriage and living with in-laws, he and Barbie could at last afford to build a house of their own. They called it Sasumua, after the yellow-flowered hypericum so much relished by bees. This was in 1959.
In their mountain fastness they had, like others, failed to read the writing on the wall. In 1962 the Kinangop area was bought up by the Government for division into African small-holdings, and the white farmers had to go. Jim and Barbie took their bees, their cattle, sheep and horses, their turkeys, rabbits and hens and all their possessions as far as Njoro, where a new Sasumua came to birth. Jim’s grandparents, the sea-captain and Mary, had died in 1936. Stanley Polhill had lived to breed an improved strain of pyrethrum which he gave away to his neighbours and which is still being grown, and to climb the summit of the Kinangop, at nearly 13,000 feet, with his one lung.
Between the eastern side of the Aberdares and the foothills of Mt Kenya, lie the rich farmlands of the Kikuyu and, north of these, the great open plains of Laikipia. Although I was loyal to my childhood home at Njoro I think this was my favourite region, because of its wildness, its sense of freedom, the feeling that you could see to the ends of the earth and beyond, and the wild animals still there in abundance, whereas in the settled districts round Njoro most of them had gone. Abo
ve the plains the great brooding presence of Mt Kenya rose not abruptly but gently, like a swelling breast, to its twin white nipples; even when it was concealed by cloud you always knew that it was there. Something of its spirit seemed to permeate the air, a spirit ancient and impassive, indifferent to all human concerns and yet charged with unvoiced secrets. As I walked in its shadow a few lines from a poem by Walter de la Mare5 used to come into my mind: although written of the Sphynx that
Gazes with an unchanging smile
Man with all mystery to beguile
And give his thinking grace
they seemed to fit the Mountain.
As a child I stayed in a district north of Nyeri where the shoulders of the mountain began to flatten into the plain. All this land had been surveyed and ‘opened up’ under the Soldier–Settler scheme launched in 1919, so most of the scattered white community were Captains, Majors, Colonels and even Generals, with an occasional Commander or two, and their wives. My hosts were General Beynon and his wife, who had a permanent, red-bearded guest, with the highest (i.e. best) polo handicap in the country, Colonel Durand. The reason for my intrusion with my pony into this military stronghold was the Beynons’ daughter Kate, a few years older than I and assumed to yearn for the company of other children. This was not the case; she was perfectly content with a life centred round the care of a large pack of very large Irish wolfhounds, which constantly barged about with lolling tongues and lashing tails knocking things over, and defeating Mrs Beynon’s half-hearted attempts to keep the rondavels which made up the homestead in some sort of order.
However, the wolfhounds turned out to be a blessing, as they needed great quantities of meat supplied by wild animals, anything from zebras to the waggle-tailed tommies of the nearby plain. I was going through a horribly bloodthirsty phase, and was delighted to act as a self-appointed hunter.
I would dress by the light of a hurricane lamp, fill my pockets with cartridges and go forth in the chilly, mysterious dawn, with ribbons of pearly mist lying in the gulleys and the great bulk of the mountain at my back shrouded in cloud which flushed flamingo-pink just before the sun came up behind it to flood the plain. The bush almost came up to the rondavels, and was interspersed with steep little ravines and with tongues of open glade, ideal for stalking; every step you took was an adventure. You picked your way with all your senses tight as a bowstring, your eyes alert for the quiver of a twig or a flash of movement – oryx? impala? eland? – or for a creature frozen into immobility with horns upright for a split second before vanishing like a spirit; and your ears pricked for a rustle in the long grass, the click of hoof on stone, a reedbuck’s whistle, the warning call of a bird. For years, in later life, I kept a print made from a watercolour by Bryan Hook: a rhino was emerging from behind a clump of bush to gaze impassively at three oryx with uplifted heads; in the background rose the mountain’s peak. This picture trapped a fleeting moment, and encapsulated the loneliness, the wildness, and the spirit of a primeval world that had existed since time began and where man was an intruder. Now the print, the creatures and that world are all gone.
I hoped, when on these sorties, to come upon a lion sloping off, perhaps, to digest his night’s kill. A lion was the most sought-after of all the trophies and it could be killed without a licence, which elephants and buffaloes could not. I had a beautiful little Mannlicher-Schonneur .256, very accurate, which most people said was too light for big game, and that a great big double-barrelled .450, whose kick was liable to knock you down, was the right weapon to use. But I had read that Neumann, perhaps the greatest elephant hunter of all, always used a .256 to bring down his prey. I learnt later that Gilbert Colvile did the same.
One day I saw what I was hoping for – a round, tawny, whiskered face with yellow eyes glaring at me from the long grass about fifty yards away. I fired, the face disappeared. I approached the spot with caution, as I had been taught to do; there was no movement; the tawny body lay stretched out, stone dead. But it was spotted. When half obscured by grass or bush and fleetingly seen, a cheetah’s head can be mistaken for that of a lioness. I would never knowingly have killed a cheetah. An African escort always came with me, carrying a knife and a rungu (a kind of club) tucked into his belt. We skinned the cheetah and for years I had its supple, black-and-yellow pelt beside my bed.
To console me for my disappointment, General Beynon undertook to get me my trophy, but in the Indian not the African style. The British in India shot their tigers either from the backs of elephants, or by sitting up all night over a kill in a machan, a platform built in a tree. A suitable tree was selected, a machan constructed, a zebra shot and dragged to a position almost underneath the branches, and at nightfall we ascended by means of a ladder, which was then removed, and settled down for a night’s vigil – the General, the Colonel and I. On the first night, nothing came. On the second, we heard crunchings and snufflings and other unsocial noises and saw, by the light of a half-moon, that hyenas had arrived. The zebra had begun to smell. The machan was most uncomfortable. I kept falling asleep and wondered what was to be done if I needed to pee. On the third night, the zebra was stinking to high heaven, the hyenas there in force with a jackal or two, but still no sign of a lion. After that we gave up, and I decided that Indian methods might be all right for tigers but they were uncomfortable, boring and unsporting when applied to African lions.
The Colonel and the General were avid polo players and spent much of their spare time in a wire cage mounted on a wooden horse and bashing polo balls about; the cage was so constructed that the ball always rolled back to the feet of the striker. Fierce weekend battles took place between the Nyeri team and that from Nanyuki, the focus of the soldier-settlers on their scattered, unmade farms. I think the polo ground must have been laid out before almost anything else at Nanyuki except for a few dukas and the rough wooden post-office-cum-store put up by Major Lionel Gascoigne. His wife Renie was a masterful and energetic lady said to be eccentric. This is a quality that can only be defined by giving examples, and actual examples, I have always found, are hard to obtain. ‘He did some odd things’ is generally about as far as you can get. The only instance of Renie Gascoigne’s eccentricity I heard of was related by a friend of hers who met her walking along Nanyuki’s single dusty street at ten o’clock in the morning in an elegant blue velvet evening dress. When her startled friend enquired the reason, Mrs Gascoigne replied: ‘There’s a dance this evening at the club, and it’s always such a nuisance changing one’s clothes.’
There was no railway to Nanyuki and the railhead was at Thika, about a hundred miles away. Sometimes wagons and the early motor cars could get through and sometimes not, and produce had to get to market as best it could. One of the first settlers in the district, possibly the first, was Arnold Paice, who was there before the 1914 war. He sent his pigs to market on foot over the top of the Aberdares. The journey took ten days and the pigs, he claimed, lost no more than twelve pounds each by the time they reached Naivasha station, and fetched £2 a head.6 Optimism is endemic in the pioneer mentality, and it was carried to extremes by one Paul Chapman who in 1910 started a market garden and poultry farm on the far side of a river that could only be reached, or the produce taken out, by swinging across from the overhanging branches of trees. This must have led to a lot of cracked eggs.
Besides the soldier-settlers, the other main element in the white population was the South Africans. Seagar Bastard was a well-known figure; his wife sent turkeys once a week to Thika in a wagon in two tiers, hens at the bottom and gobblers at the top. The Bastard clan proliferated; it was said that if you walked down the Nanyuki street and called out ‘Bastard!’ every second European would turn a head. But another South African family, the Randalls, took the palm for fruitfulness with eight boys and six girls. The district’s first medico, Dr Doig, had no car, so he built a hut near his dwelling where wives could come and have their babies, if they got there in time.
Nanyuki was (and is) right on the equator, thou
gh you would not think so on a cold August day, and Commander Logan Hook so designed his Silverbeck hotel that the equator ran right through the bar. You could have one drink in the northern and the next in the southern hemisphere, or one drink in both at once, a foot on each side of the line. By the time I re-visited the township in 1934, a second hotel had appeared. It was then about a year old, and could put up eight guests, and the owner and manager was an old friend, Gertrude Hill-Williams, assisted by her daughter Tuppence. Gertrude had sold Marindas at Molo after Hilda, her eldest daughter, married David Furse, and bought the Beynons’ farm where they intended to grow wheat. Tuppence had become an expert self-taught mechanic and brought up two tractors, almost the first in these parts – this was in the mid-1920s – cleared some of the bush where I had stalked the wolfhounds’ potential dinners, and got in several hundred acres of wheat. Warthog rootled in the wheatfields and then came zebras from the plain. The zebras were having their last fling. They were still out on Laikipia literally in millions, so that ‘the very air’, wrote Raymond Hook (Logan’s brother) ‘vibrated with their monotonous call’.7 The slaughter had already started, carried out mainly by Dutchmen on horseback who could get two or three shillings for each hide. Raymond Hook recorded that a Dutchman he went out with shot forty in a morning, and that this was about an average bag. What finally sealed their fate, so I was told, was a decision by the Bulgarian army to clothe their men in zebra-hide boots.
The Hill-Williams fenced against the zebras, but then locusts came. ‘Have you picked your wheat yet?’ Tuppence was asked – a sick joke because a few ears on broken stalks was all that was left, together with a nasty smell. Tuppence and her mother tried again. This time they reaped a splendid crop, sent it off, got an advance and reduced their overdraft. Suddenly, prices collapsed. The Hill-Williams had to pay back most of their advance.
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