Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  Tich dealt with this situation in the only way, I think, in which he could have brought off any measure of success. If the Amharic governors could be proud and haughty, so could he. If they called their big conical dwellings palaces, so would he. If they could quaff great quantities of tej – and their capacity for downing this fiery barley mead was prodigious – so could he. If they went about with armed bodyguards, so would he. The constant ill-health from which he suffered could only be worsened by the tej, and even his diminutive size was against him. But somehow, by his stylish mode of living and by a great deal of nerve and panache, he conquered these obstacles. Looking back on it, his courage was immense.

  It was not as if he liked solitude and rough living. On the contrary, he loved company, and friends, good food and drink, and laughter. It was poverty that bound him to his post. ‘I would take anything the powers that be think I can do,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘to get away from this exile.’ And to his sister Dolly: ‘It’s awful how old we are both getting, but let’s pray for a peaceful old age. I believe we both ought to have married and had quantities of young. If I’d had any they would have had to run about naked … The bank was rather savage about my overdraft.’ He concluded: ‘This is a wonderful country but a foul race inhabits it.’

  He did escape for two years, when Sir Edward Grigg engineered his posting to Government House in Nairobi as senior aide-de-camp. Here he was the life and soul of many parties. He had a parlour trick he often practised at Muthaiga Club: he went all round the ballroom without touching the floor, swinging by his fingers from the cornice like a monkey. He loved these parties. At an earlier one: ‘Berkeley Cole announced that everyone was bathing at Trouville and every few minutes a large wave came and we had to hop over it. I’ve never laughed so much in my life.’

  When his two years were up, it was back to the frontier. This could have been avoided. Through the good offices of friends, he was offered a job on the staff of the Governor-General of Canada. He wanted very much to take it, but the Treasury decreed that if he did, he would lose his pension rights even if he returned to the colonial service. Small though the pension was, it was the only source of income to which he could look forward. Despite Grigg’s intervention, the Treasury remained adamant. Tich refused the offer, and thereby signed his own death warrant.

  As time went on he grew more sensitive, rather than less so, to the brutalities and disregard of human life he saw all around him. Camped at Moyale was an elderly Afrikaner called Maynier who was engaged in buying Abyssinian horses. Four Somali askaris of the KAR decided to desert and, passing Maynier’s tent, wantonly discharged their rifles through the canvas, hitting him in the stomach, chest and limbs. ‘The deserters got away into the mountains and a patrol of other KAR Somalis who were sent after them refused to fire on them, so things weren’t very nice,’ Tich wrote. ‘I rode back swiftly fifty miles expecting to find a mutiny but things are quiet now … It is very sad and depresses me awfully as I had got very fond of the old Dutchman, and why should they want to kill the old man who had nothing to do with them except from fanaticism, and the belief that killing any white man will take them straight to heaven … I am afraid the poor old man died in awful agony, there was no doctor here and very little anyone could do.’

  Despite such tragedies, there were compensations. Tich enjoyed being treated as a minor royalty when he visited Amharic dukes and barons, who measured their own importance by the lavishness of their hospitality. At a town called Gardula, bleakly perched at 9,000 feet up, he found two hundred soldiers paraded to receive him. They bowed to the ground as he advanced to accept a present of two bullocks, five sheep, a hundred flat loaves of barley bread, ten pots of beer, five pots of tej, five pots of chilli sauce and ten bundles of firewood, together with twenty-five bundles of grass and two sacks of barley for the mules. While flattering, this was also embarrassing, as Tich knew that all that bounty had been taken without payment from the peasants. But he could not refuse it.

  The Dedjmatch, or duke, of Soddu received him on a throne of Persian carpets, and invited him to enjoy the spectacle of seven robbers who had just been hanged in the market place. They had burned a church, and killed sixteen of the Dedjmatch’s soldiers. This was in 1926, when Tich was on his way on mule-back to confer with the British Minister in Addis Ababa.

  After the reception came the banquet, when enormous helpings of underdone meat, sometimes scarcely cooked at all, doused in sauces made from chillis and other hot spices, were served with barley loaves, and accompanied by copious draughts of tej. Had he failed to keep up with his hosts in tej consumption, he would have earned their contempt. (A DC at Moyale had got into serious trouble when, feeling that he could stand no more, he observed a dog yawning at his feet, and poured the contents of his drinking-vessel down its throat.) Tich’s liver had been permanently damaged by amoebic dysentery, so that alcohol was almost a poison, but he refused to give the Abyssinians best, thereby winning their respect, or rather enhancing it. Their parting present, when he left Mega, was a silver-mounted drinking-horn.

  I last saw Tich when he was lying on a sofa on Glady’s veranda. He was too weak to rise, but not too weak to kiss my hand and make some joke or other. His face was like a death mask. He was on his way to England for treatment, but died in April 1934 within a month of his arrival. He was forty-four years old.

  His sister Dolly – Olive Tremayne Miles – had been his closest companion. Like her brother, Dolly was lightly built, wiry and deceptively strong. She had a nut-brown complexion, dark hair that tumbled about at will, somewhat prominent teeth and large dark-blue eyes, and was impetuous in movement, often funny and quite ruthless in getting her own way. She had followed Tich to Africa in 1910 despite his protests – he wanted her company but dreaded her demands, and felt unable to support her in any style at all on £8 a month. He warned her: ‘you will have to live in a mud hut and have only a mule to ride and bad food’. Dolly was not to be put off. Giving in, Tich told her to bring a camp bed and table, a chair, blankets, a saddle, a ‘split skirt thing’, a sun-helmet and a packed chop-box from Fortnum and Mason to be had for £2, £5, or £7.

  He had no need to worry about her response to rough conditions. Four years later she was to be plunged into an existence tougher and more stark than anything East Africa could offer. While Tich was off to ‘German East’, Dolly set out for Salonika, where French and British forces were assembling to go to the aid of Serbia, whose army was being overwhelmed by Austrian and Bulgarian forces under German command. Dolly had no training in any nursing or military skill, but was not deterred by that. She joined no unit, but with two no less independent and free-lancing friends simply boarded a small, old, dilapidated French vessel bound for the Balkan wars, submarines notwithstanding.

  Her companions were Lady Muriel Herbert and Miss Elia Lindon. The appearance of all three khaki-clad lady musketeers struck observers as unusual. A fellow-passenger was a woman doctor travelling to Serbia to join the Scottish Women’s Hospital, a unit raised in Edinburgh and staffed, financed and equipped entirely by women. ‘All have short hair,’ wrote Dr Emslie of the trio – short hair for women was then virtually unknown. ‘One is tall, dark and slim, with great tragic eyes and a lovely face [Lady Muriel Herbert]. The second has a great shock of hair and prominent china-blue eyes [Elia Lindon]. The third has a beautiful head and profile but is curiously disconnected in every way, all loose ends, coming undone everywhere.’8 This was Dolly. All fetched up together at Ghevgeli, where a field hospital was being hastily improvised to receive the wounded of the retreating Serbian army. Dolly and her companions attached themselves to the French Army’s Service de Santé. ‘They were quite untrained,’ Dr Emslie wrote, ‘but did excellent work, although their methods would have shocked, indeed did shock, our English sisters. They made up in intelligence and courage what they lacked in training.’ They were a curious sight; Dolly with her sweaters ‘buttoned up awry and gaping’. Dolly, for her part, was not overly impresse
d by the correctly uniformed Scottish nurses. ‘The Scottish Women’s Hospital,’ she wrote, ‘lost all their tent-poles and kept yelling for men to come and help them.’

  For the next three and a half years Dolly worked in French military hospitals, coping in the crudest of conditions with the ghastliest of injuries, and also with epidemics which killed more men than the weapons of the enemy. The bitter cold of the mountains, the biting winter wind, the black mud that blocked the roads, the mosquitoes, lice and flies, the scanty food hastily eaten, the desperate fatigue, the harrowing sights, all these failed to extinguish Dolly’s humour and her enjoyment of pleasures snatched whenever she could find them.

  One of the leading Parisian surgeons, M. Roux-Berger, taught her to administer chloroform, and thereafter she worked as an anaesthetist, sometimes for so long at a stretch that she ‘never knew it was possible to be so tired and be alive’. Skill in giving chloroform, she wrote, was like having good hands with a horse: you were born with the knack, or without it. Dolly was a brilliant horsewoman, and spent much of such leisure time as she was able to enjoy on borrowed mounts, mostly supplied by French generals, from the Commander-in-Chief downwards, with whom she made friends. She described how she would ride a grey horse into the hills and ‘Discover all sorts of little plants that smelt good, and all kinds of frog and cigale that were croaking in the pools, with the background of the mountains, and the divine sunsets, and afterglow eternally changing behind the unchanging Olympus. I would lie down on the down-like turf and sleep, and the grey horse seemed to understand that I was dead-beat, and never ran away but just stayed quite near grazing … Sleep overtook one directly one sat down a minute. I slept through all meals, and eventually I took to dozing while standing up, even at operations, only to be woken up by Roux-Berger cursing me.’9

  When the Balkan war ended, Dolly moved on to the Caucasus to work in an orphanage set up by Americans for Armenian children who were starving to death. ‘In its vastness and sadness and aloofness that Caucasian country is like no other,’ she wrote. ‘Since those days I have wandered much in the far and lonely places of the earth, and yet my mind goes back often to those great plains, and a longing comes over me to see them again.’

  I do not know whether she ever did see them again, but certainly she travelled much in the far and lonely places of the earth, and taught herself to speak several of the less familiar languages. She went often to East Africa, and to stay with Tich at Mega. Nellie, an old friend, found her visits a mixed blessing. Dolly talked loudly and persistently in her sleep, the walls were thin and the little house seemed to reverberate with her shouts. As she grew older she became rather deaf, and would turn up her transistor radio to its fullest and keep it blaring away all night. She had a mania for washing her clothes but never pressed them, handing bundles over to poor Mbugwa who had to spend hours at the ironing table. She was mean about tips, and short-tempered when thwarted. Her former companion in the Balkans, Lady Muriel Herbert, was by then married to Dr Jex-Blake, and living on a coffee farm near Nairobi, another of Dolly’s pieds à terre. Lady Muriel was still tall, dark and slim though I did not think her bright brown eyes were tragic. She was an expert gardener of the kind who values plants more for their rarity than for their splendour, and might dismiss a bed of dahlias as merely showy while enthusing over some tiny little cactus that bloomed once in seven years. She dressed in bold flowered chintzes except when riding, which she did every afternoon – rather dull rides, I thought, among coffee bushes planted in straight lines. The coffee plantation came almost up to the veranda and was shaded by grevillea trees that made the house dark, as did mosquito netting over every window to keep insects at bay.

  Dr Jex-Blake had left Harley Street to practise as a heart specialist in Nairobi. A tall, grave-mannered, precisely-spoken man, like his wife an expert botanist, he had little small talk and so was rather alarming, although at heart good-natured and kind. When out of doors he always wore dark glasses, as he believed that sunstroke came through the eyes, and that hats were therefore unnecessary. His views may have hastened the demise of the sola topee and the double terai, which in the 1930s were beginning to fall into desuetude, although it was not until the Second World War that Europeans altogether abandoned the belief that anyone who ventured hatless out of doors between the hours of ten a.m. and four p.m. would very likely fall down dead.

  It was no doubt fortuitous that the phasing out of the sola topee coincided with the decline of the British Empire, but believers in a magical basis of the universe might see the topee as an emblem or totem in which the strength and confidence of the imperial spirit resided. Fell the totem pole, and you strike at the roots of the tribe; discard the topee, and with it goes belief in the virtue of the imperial mission. However, I do not suppose that Jex saw the matter in that light. A governess for their daughter Daphne, and Muriel’s former ladies’ maid, shared the Jex-Blakes’ bungalow, but were seldom seen; each had a bed-sitter at the back where she lived in solitary state, even having meals alone.

  Expertise in gardening was the common ground shared between the Jex-Blakes and Dolly Miles, who came and went like a migrating swallow. Dolly had by this time taken to the air. It had been in India, in 1911, that she had made her first flight, sitting on ‘what seemed to be a hot boiler, holding tightly on to wires with my feet dangling in the air space.’ Her second flight was at Ghevgeli, where a Serbian pilot took her up in an army bomber. From that moment, she wrote, she was determined to learn to fly, and in 1928 she got her pilot’s licence. She kept a little aeroplane called Birdie in a field in Gloucestershire, and used it to go out to luncheon, and to visit friends in Scotland. I knew her best when her flying days were over and she had settled – though she never settled for long – at Avebury in Wiltshire, where she lived alone save for a beloved labrador and a ghost. Dolly was ghost-prone and quite often saw them; this was a harmless one who seemed to be a sort of monk. ‘He was sitting opposite me last night at dinner,’ she would say.

  She was a skilful gardener, but her garden, like her person, was often untidy, because she was liable to take off for some distant destination at a few days’ notice instead of staying at home to put out the wallflowers or prune the roses. She wore grubby old trousers and shapeless sweaters as a rule, but her wardrobe was packed with well-cut suits and rows of expensive-looking shoes, which looked unworn. She had a number of grand friends, and I suppose wore these garments when she visited their mansions, where she was as much at home as she had been in the Balkans or Caucasian mountains. Once she disappeared for two years in the direction of China, some said on a mission for the Secret Service, a possibility that her closest friends thought most unlikely.

  Like Tich, she never married. Before the First World War there had been an ‘understanding’ with a Gloucestershire neighbour who, in 1914, went off to the wars and did not return. Soon after Tich’s death, she started to copy out extracts from poems that had appealed to her into a small red album which she took with her wherever she went. She must have read widely in the poets, and her taste was catholic, ranging from the sonnets of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh to the moderns of her youth like Yeats, Masefield, Bridges, de Musset, Baudelaire and others less exalted. I found this a sad and touching little volume. The theme of loneliness and loss, reaching sometimes almost to despair, runs through the extracts. A fox-hunting poem by Siegfried Sassoon ends:

  I shall forget him in the morning light,

  And while we gallop on we will not speak:

  But at the stable door he’ll say goodnight.

  Broken hearts are out of fashion, but I think that the ghost of the young man from Gloucestershire who died in the war rode by her side. Or was it for Tich that she grieved? From Belloc:

  I said to Heart ‘How goes it?’ Heart replied:

  ‘Right as a Ribstone Pippin!’ But it lied.

  The last entry in the album is the only attempt she made herself to write verse. It is addressed to a horse she loved called Greyma
n. Scrawled at the bottom is the note: ‘I can’t bear it here without you.’ Beneath her leathery armour lay, bottled up, love that found no outlet save in her dogs and horses. There also lay that fumbling search for certainties to which a dusty answer is so often returned. ‘She was a pilgrim’, said a nephew, ‘in her way.’

  Her end, at eighty-one, was mercifully sudden. She fell down stone-dead while answering the door-bell to an electrician.

  I have mentioned several of those whom Sir Richard Turnbull has called ‘the great men of the North’: V. G. Glenday, Gerald Reece, Tich Miles, Sharpie and others. The last name on this roster should be that of Turnbull himself. Unlike the others, he belonged to the post-First World War vintage, having reached Kenya in 1935, but in the NFD he continued the Glenday tradition of toughness, austerity and hard trekking, into the period after the Second World War. Unlike the others, also, he is still alive, and given still to hard trekking, nowadays over moors and sheep-fells instead of deserts and camel-tracks, having exchanged the Ethiopian frontier for the Anglo-Scottish one.