Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  That finished them as farmers; and Gertrude decided that she would like to start a hotel. An unusual ambition: she was by then in her sixties, and had no experience whatever of keeping hotels. When I asked her what had appealed to her about it, she replied: ‘I wanted to have a swinging sign.’ Her son-in-law, farmer-artist David Furze, designed one for her, a splendid sign with a pair of leopards couchants on top, and underneath pictures of heads of buffaloes and several antelopes, and a pair of trout. This was the sign of The Sportsman’s Arms. Excellent fishing was to be had in clear, cold streams born in the glaciers and stocked with rainbow trout, and other visitors came to climb the mountain, at least part of the way up. I wondered whether two women on their own in an outback kind of place might have had trouble with roughs and toughs and drunks. ‘Not much,’ Tuppence said. ‘We learned to cope.’ I could believe it; Tuppence, tall, deliberate of speech and with a good handicap at polo, would not have been easily ruffled. The landlords’ worst troubles, she said, apart from the normal crises of hoteliers, came from certain units of the British army stationed in Nanyuki. Once a military lorry drove up at dead of night and carried off all the furniture on the veranda.

  If you wanted to explore the mountain, the man to guide you was Raymond Hook, brother of the Commander – naturally called Boat Hook – who kept the Silverbeck hotel. Both were sons of the painter Bryan Hook, who in 1912 had travelled in East Africa with his son Raymond and his eldest daughter, and bought some undeveloped land near Nanyuki. Raymond stayed on as a pupil of Delamere’s, soldiered through the East African campaign and then settled on his father’s land, but never seriously farmed it.

  He came to know the mountain like the back of his hand. Tall, heavily built, tough as an old boot and with a voice soft as a dove’s, his nature was a curious blend of the gypsy and the don. He lived like a pig, oblivious of squalor and inured to discomfort, yet could quote in the original Greek pages from Homer or Plato, and had made a study of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Off he would go up the mountain with a bag of posho, and another of beans, loaded on a mule, with a groundsheet for shelter and a thumbed copy of a Greek classic in his pocket, to disappear for weeks on end. Nothing escaped his eye. Once, Tuppence told me, as they rode through the bush, a tiny mouse shot across the path, visible only for an instant. Without hesitation, he named its genus and species. Another, and less agreeable, memory was of lunching with him in his dwelling, in which animals were just as welcome as humans. Becoming aware of an unpleasant smell, she enquired as to its origin. Raymond Hook replied: ‘Watch where the bluebottles settle.’ They settled in a corner on a stinking mess that proved to be a litter of very dead puppies.

  He became an expert at catching wild animals to be shipped off to zoos, a cruel and heartless business as it seems to me. He was the first man to trap a bongo, that shy and secret denizen of the forest, and sent it to the London zoo – the poor caged creature gave birth to a calf on shipboard. Raymond crossed zebras with horses to produce zebroids, and tried to do the same with buffaloes and cattle, but without success. ‘Although he loved his animals,’ I was told, ‘he didn’t look after them properly but adopted a policy that if you had enough of them, it didn’t matter much if half of them died.’8

  Cheetahs were a speciality. He lassoed them from horseback on the plains and sold them to zoos and to an Indian Maharajah, who used them for hunting gazelle. Since cheetahs have clocked up speeds of sixty-four miles an hour, almost twice that of the fastest horse, he had to tire them out. This involved galloping at full tilt over terrain riddled by invisible pig-holes.

  Raymond Hook took twelve cheetahs to London, intending to match them against greyhounds at the White City, but the managers of the track turned down his proposal. A race was organised elsewhere but disappointed; the cheetahs shot away and left the greyhounds standing; the dogs could do no more than forty-two miles an hour. Then he went off into the Aberdare mountains to search for the spotted lion, said by some to belong to a separate species or sub-species. A farmer had shot two specimens and had photographed the skins but not kept them; they were not only spotted but smaller than those of the average lion. With a rich young sportsman, Kenneth Gander Dower, who wrote a book about it called The Spotted Lion, Hook searched the chilly bogs and jungles of the mountain in conditions of extreme discomfort, Raymond discoursing on Greek philosophy and comparative religions while soaked through, hungry and benighted in some uncharted ravine. The hunters never caught so much as a glimpse of their quarry.9

  Surprisingly, perhaps, Raymond Hook married, and Joan, his wife, did her best to civilise him, but with little success. ‘He was uncivilisable’ was the general verdict. Twin daughters were born. After less than ten years of marriage the parents parted company – Joan Hook couldn’t any longer stand chickens nesting under beds, goats bouncing in and out, and snakes under the kitchen stove. Thereafter they lived at different ends of the property, and it fell to Joan to create a farm from the land Raymond had used merely as a perch, and to bring up her daughters. Their father was proud of them in some ways, but ignored them in others – ‘he always forgot our birthdays,’ one of them said, ‘but was most upset if we forgot his’. Yet when they were away at school he wrote them long letters designed to kindle and enlarge their interest in wildlife and their surroundings. When one of them married, he gave her half her mother’s cattle as a wedding present.

  His story ended sadly. He ran out of money, his health deteriorated and, after several months in hospital, he lost the will to live. Then, in 1968, Joan was found murdered in her house, a mystery that was never solved. The shock worsened his condition, and within a few months he, too, was dead.

  In the snapshots of those days, contrasts between black and white were often sharp. A chalky face, a black shadow. So it was with many of the people. In some, like Raymond Hook, the elements were mixed within their natures; with others, the contrast lay between the civility of their backgrounds and the crudeness of their lives. There was, for instance, Taffy, whose sister Lady Bettie, with her husband Eric Sherbroke-Walker, kept the well-known Outspan hotel at Nyeri together with its tourists’ magnet, Treetops. This has become a 78-bedroom mansion built theoretically in a tree, actually on a huge platform to which customers are conducted to eat their five-course dinners by characters dressed as big-game hunters in bush-shirts, and carrying rifles. When I knew it first it really was in a tree, and had six camp-beds and little else; we took sandwiches, it cost £5 for Gervas and myself, and your money was returned if you failed to see elephant, buffalo or rhino at the salt-lick below.

  The Sherbroke-Walkers opened the Outspan on 1 January 1928, and soon afterwards Lady Bettie’s sister, Lady Victoria Feilding, arrived on a visit. The sisters came of a family of ten born to the 9th Earl of Denbigh and his wife. The Earl had been Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria, who had consented to stand as godmother to the Denbighs’ newest offspring, but had died before she could fulfil her promise. The child was nevertheless christened Victoria. The Denbighs owned five thousand acres and their residence had one hundred rooms – or so it was thought; no one had actually counted them. In the garden was an elm tree in whose branches the children had built a house from which to watch rabbits. Eric Sherbroke-Walker, when a guest and prospective son-in-law, had observed this tree-house and said to himself: ‘If rabbits, why not elephants?’ That, so the story goes, was the origin of Treetops.

  The resources of the family did not run to supporting their brood, and after she came to Kenya Taffy, who had decided to stay on, rubbed along in a number of jobs, such as delivering milk and helping on a poultry farm, before marrying Miles Fletcher, a brawny and impecunious Tasmanian. Instead of an engagement ring, he gave her a second-hand tyre for her lorry which was so dilapidated, she wrote, that ‘it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’.10

  After Powys Cobb went bankrupt, Keringet had been sold to a rich Italian, Commandatore Inginero Dario Vincenzini, and it was here that Miles and Taffy Fletcher found a job. Taffy had tr
avelled adventurously, if not actually as a stowaway then not far from it, before her marriage, and had been impressed by the beauty of the flower arrangements in Japan. In the Fletchers’ shack set down on what Roy Campbell called ‘the bare veld where nothing ever grows save beards and nails and blisters on the nose’, elegant arrangements of single thorn twigs and a spray or two of wild jasmine stood in cracked jugs on tables made of packing cases and amerikani. Once a visitor pushed open a bathroom door to find a heap of dirty towels on the floor. ‘Which bath towel shall I use?’ she asked. ‘Oh, take the one that looks the cleanest.’

  Taffy could turn her hand to anything – decarbonising engines, plucking fowls, repairing tractors, dosing sheep, icing cakes, rearing lambs – though not so artlessly as a Turkana woman she saw suckling her baby from one breast and a lamb from the other – and she was generous, witty, good fun and rather stout. Eventually her marriage foundered, Miles took another wife (and then another), their two sons sought their fortunes in Australia, and thither, in the evening of her days, Taffy followed them to come to roost in a caravan.

  I have sometimes wondered why a privileged background and the habits of a vagabond should have quite often gone together. Indifference to what others think is, of course, the badge of the aristocrat. Never mind the Jones’s, I make my own rules. Also there was reaction against convention, and adoption of a set of priorities in which respectability and tidiness came low on the list. What Karen Blixen (no lover of the British) called ‘the fearful living death of English middle-class mediocrity’11 was, to such people, more to be dreaded than physical death on the horns of a buffalo or in the jaws of a lion.

  But it would be wrong to assume that most of the white farmers discarded the standards of their race and class to live like tinkers. It was only a few who did so, and they only did so sometimes. The apparent prevalence of Earls and Old Etonians in Kenya’s white society has created an impression that the settler population was drawn mainly from Britain’s aristocracy. This was far from the case. Afrikaner transport riders, Scottish cattle traders, Italian mechanics, Irish garage owners, Jewish hoteliers, and farmers drawn from the despised and mediocre middle classes, were all there too, in much greater numbers. They did not make news, whereas errant Earls and dashing barons did. They were in a small minority. We hear a lot about small minorities these days, always making headlines by blowing up, gunning down and outrageously offending the great, virtuous, law-abiding majority. It is naive to dismiss such activists because they are few. The yeast moves the dough. It was, after all, a very small minority of Jews – eleven, to be precise – who started the spread throughout the world of the Christian religion. The errant Earls and dashing barons did set a certain stamp on the colonial society they adorned, and sometimes scandalised.

  They came in quest of adventure, stayed to make a colony and, in the process, destroyed what they had come to seek. They brought wives, and wives make homes. An inexorable process began. Patterned chintz replaced the sacking and amerikani spread over packing-cases to be used as tables; curtains went up over unglazed windows; china cups bought at local sales replaced tin mugs. Soon prints of the Midnight Steeplechase hung on mud-block walls, followed by the Laughing Cavalier and Van Gogh’s sunflowers on roughly chiselled stone ones; creepers half-concealed corrugated-iron roofs; then came dressed stone bungalows with wide verandas, and tennis courts and stables, herbaceous borders, tea on the lawn. By stealth, civilisation had arrived.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Powys Saga

  I think it was in 1922 that my father decided to inspect some land he had drawn in a lottery under the Soldier Settlement scheme. It lay at an altitude of about 9,000 feet up on Mt Kenya and appeared to be honeycombed with rivers; at any rate, the map Jos got from the Land Office showed a lot of little wiggly lines. The nearest place marked on the map was Nanyuki, so thither we went on our ponies from Thika. We enlisted the help of Major Gascoigne in procuring a few porters, bought provisions from his store, and set forth up a slippery track made by elephants through the forest. Above the cedars came a belt of bamboos whose feathery tops met overhead like Gothic arches, and filtered the sunlight to a lambent green that made me think of crême-de-menthe. Many of the trunks had been knocked over by elephants, and when our ponies trod on them they exploded with loud bangs like crackers. Above the bamboos came the moorland with its strange vegetation, giant groundsel like cabbages on stalks, and giant lobelias like huge phalluses covered with furry scales.

  At night we shivered in our tiny tent, and there was ice on the water in our canvas basin. By day, although everything sparkled in the sunlight once the mist had cleared, it did not seem much warmer owing to a chilly wind. The little wiggly lines turned out not to be rivers at all, but gulleys, which may have carried water in the rains but were then bone-dry. Nellie, always optimistic, thought that sheep might do well, but Jos, always fond of weak puns, retorted that the Land Office had fleeced us. Our porters and our ponies were miserable, and I started to develop chilblains. We returned to Nanyuki, and our claim to that bit of Africa lapsed.

  Others who drew soldier-settlement ‘farms’ had the same experience: no water. One man was lucky. He drew a block of one thousand acres in the district of Timau which had on it a spring, Kisima. This was Will Powys, Galbraith Cole’s manager. When he had saved enough money he bought twelve hundred Somali sheep and drove them to Kisima, taking all his belongings, including a wool-press, in an ox-wagon which toppled over the side of a dam, releasing his hens from their crates and cracking the wool-press. At Kisima it was so cold that two hundred of the sheep died during their first night there. He managed to rent land at a lower altitude and moved the sheep in time to save most of the rest.1 This was in 1925. Then he returned to Galbraith Cole’s to complete his contract, leaving the sheep in the care of a young nephew, until he could settle permanently at Kisima and start to breed up his sheep with merino rams as he had learned to do at Kekopey.

  Will Powys was one of those men who, like Galbraith Cole, had a natural affinity for sheep and displayed a skill amounting to a form of genius in their management. That half-true definition of genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains applied in his case exactly. He was held in the grip of what is today known as the Protestant work ethic, and lived as austerely as a monk. The white-washed mud-and-timber cottage that he built at Kisima still stands: two rooms, no ceiling, and his bed a bullock-hide stretched between four posts. Four a.m. saw the start of his day. Before dawn, he would be off to some distant dip or shearing station, or perhaps to track down a lion that had seized a steer, or to carry out a post-mortem on a sheep. Much of the land round Kisima had been abandoned, or never taken up, because of lack of water. Bit by bit, Will Powys bought it up and gradually developed it by means of pipelines and dams, and stocked it with sheep which, by judicious breeding, turned in time into almost pure-bred merinos.

  Fortune favoured him a second time when he found a mate whose tastes, character and hardihood so closely matched his own. Hers was the comfortable and peaceful background of a country house called High Legh, in Cheshire, where her father, a younger son of a former Secretary of State for India who had been created Viscount Cross, managed the family estates. On the outbreak of war in 1914 Elizabeth Cross, when she was barely eighteen, joined Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Army Corps (equivalent to the ATS in the Second World War), hoping to drive ambulances at the front. But only women over twenty-one were sent to France. After a period of frustration, Elizabeth added two years to her age, got away with it and reached Abbeville early in 1917. This was as near to the front line as women were allowed to get.

  ‘Crossie arrived like a breath of fresh air,’ a fellow officer recalled. ‘She had a great gift for leadership. After the retreat of the 5th Army we came in for a lot of trouble. Anyone from anywhere with nursing experience was called for. Crossie volunteered and we two were sent down to the station each time a train came in, where we worked as best we could dressing the wounded, giving morphi
a and tea to men in cattle trucks till the train left. Then she was sent to Camp I in temporary charge. We were bombed fairly badly and had to get the girls, all over-worked and tired, into trenches when the planes were expected … There was a direct hit on the trench and several girls were killed. Crossie was buried in the rubble and her shoes torn off. She organised the girls, then ran half a mile to get help from the nearest camp – her feet were very sore for a long time afterwards.’2

  The Military Medal ‘for distinguished services in the Field’ was her reward. ‘She was knocked down’, runs the citation, ‘but immediately got up and, after obtaining assistance, worked with the doctor amongst the killed and wounded while the raid was still in progress.’ The price was shell-shock, for which she was invalided home.

  ‘Oh show me how a rose can shut and be a bud again,’ Kipling wrote of a proposal by the Admiralty to turn young men who had gone straight from school into four years of warfare at sea back into naval cadets. To return to the conventional life of a young woman of her class with its round of hunt balls, shooting parties and the London season would have called for a similar metamorphosis in Elizabeth Cross. Most of the ex-WAACs and VADs managed to settle back among the teacups but a few were too restless and emotionally churned up to do so, and sought a more abrasive and demanding scene where qualities of self-reliance and initiative they had discovered in themselves would continue to be tested. Perhaps they also knew instinctively that action was an antidote to bad dreams. Africa offered this scene and this antidote. Elizabeth Cross heard of the Soldier-Settler lottery for which her war service qualified her, entered her name and drew a block of land. It might have been expected that her family would have raised objections, but her father was an understanding man. He gave her a rifle, a shot-gun and his blessing. She sailed in the Garth Castle and reached Mombasa on Christmas Eve, 1919.