by Paul Spicer
In 1925, the journey from Paris to Mombasa took a little over a month. The de Janzés flew from Le Bourget airport in Paris to Marseilles in September 1925, having sent their cabin trunks ahead by rail. On September 17, they set sail from Marseilles on the SS Gascon, a twenty-eight-ear-old single-funneled vessel of the French Messageries Maritimes line. The ship housed seventy-eight first-class cabins, two of which were of a superior variety. The de Janzés had one of these and it was located on the preferred port (left) side, where passengers could gaze out on the coast of France. In her teenage years, before the Great War, Alice had crossed the Atlantic from New York to Cherbourg on the Aquitania, the magnificent Cunard luxury liner popular with wealthy Americans making their way to France. By contrast, a working vessel like the SS Gascon must have come as something of a shock. Although the de Janzés dined at the captain’s table, they would have felt they had little in common with their fellow passengers.
The ship passed Monaco, then San Remo at breakfast time. At Genoa, there was time to go ashore for a drive before returning to dine on board. By the evening of the fifth day, the captain steered to the port side so that the more privileged passengers could see from their cabins the island of Stromboli, with its active volcano sending luminous red sparks of lava into the night skies. The Gascon navigated the Straits of Messina, where temperatures began to rise. In the evenings, a small band played on board and Alice danced. Three days after leaving the Straits of Messina, they arrived at Port Said, where Egyptian “Gully Gully” men, or conjurers, came on board to entertain the passengers. After the ship docked at Port Said, Alice and Frédéric went ashore to shop at Simon Artz, the famous department store, and to take tea at the Casino Hotel, reembarking in time to leave at midnight en route for the Suez Canal. At Suez, the Gascon stopped for half a day in order to off-load cargo. Alice and Frédéric would have looked down at the docks to see legions of completely naked ebony-skinned Sudanese laborers with massive halos of curly black hair (“Fuzzy Wuzzies” in the colonial lingo of the time). The passage through the canal took eight hours and was eerily calm after so many days at sea. The passengers aboard the Gascon would have appreciated the respite from the rolling of the ship as they contemplated Ferdinand de Lesseps and his miracle of engineering. By now, it was hot, with temperatures reaching ninety degrees Fahrenheit. In a time before air conditioning, everyone cooled themselves with cabin fans. Games were organized on deck. Four days after Suez, the Gascon arrived at Aden. Most people preferred to stay on board, since the only place to visit was the neighboring port of Crater, a prospect that seemed daunting due to the heat. One more dress dinner and dance and five more days later, they were through to the Indian Ocean.
The Gascon was bound for Mombasa. This lush island, connected to the mainland of Africa by a precarious-looking causeway, has its main port at Kilindini. As the ship approached its final destination, the view of Kilindini harbor would have been stunning: an ancient Portuguese fort, clusters of palm trees, hundreds of black porters, some in red fez hats, and Thomas Cook agents in sharp-peaked caps thronging the harbor. After disembarking, Alice and Frédéric were reunited with their luggage and taken by rickshaw to the main railway station, which was only half a mile away. The Mombasa railway station of 1925 was of basic construction. A simple facade bore the station sign; then another notice indicated “upper class passengers and luggage.” Just inside the station gates, there were lists posted with each carriage number and the names of the occupants. The de Janzés’ train left Mombasa station at four thirty in the afternoon to the sounds of applause and cheers from the platform and carriages. The engine pulled out across the causeway, heading toward the mainland, then moved uphill through coconut plantations and mango trees, the elevation increasing incrementally with each mile.
This was the famous “Lunatic Line”—the legendary railway built between 1895 (the first year of British rule in the Kenyan Protectorate) and 1901. Stretching from Mombasa on the east coast across nearly six hundred miles to the shores of Lake Victoria in the west, the railway had first been proposed by the Imperial British East Africa Company but had been bedeviled by political controversy from the start. Back in London, there were questions about its cost (5 million pounds, about 450 million pounds in today’s money) and if there was actually any real need for it. Those in favor argued that the line would be a strategic move for the new British colony, a counterbalance to the imperial expansion being undertaken by the Germans in East Africa. Opponents argued that the line was a folly, built to prove the extent of British might and engineering ability rather than in response to a measurable need. The British radical politician Henry Labouchère dubbed the project the “Lunatic Line,” insisting that the railway was completely without purpose. The crux of his argument was that it crossed many hundreds of miles of completely empty and unoccupied lands en route to nowhere. His scathing poem about the project goes as follows:
What will it cost no words can express
What is its object no brain can suppose
Where it will start from no-one can guess
Where it is going to nobody knows.
What is the use of it none can conjecture
What it will carry there’s none can define
And in spite of George Curzon’s superior lecture
It is clearly nought but a lunatic line.
The majority disagreed with Labouchère and building went ahead, continuing apace over a period of five and a half years. In the words of Albert Thomas Matson, who went on to become the health inspector for the Colonial service in Kenya, this was “the most courageous railway in the world,” and along with the Orient Express and the Trans-Siberian Express, the Lunatic Line provided one of the world’s great train journeys. Never before had a railway crossed such varied and often perilous terrain, spanning jungle, desert, mountains, plains, forest, and swamplands, climbing from the coast to around eight thousand feet above sea level. Thirty-two thousand Indian workers were shipped in from the subcontinent to lay its tracks, many of whom died of heatstroke and tropical diseases or were devoured by man-eating lions during the construction. The track itself was only one meter wide and mostly single track to help facilitate the steepness of the climb. Thirty-five viaducts and 120 bridges and culverts had to be built before it reached its end.
Wood-burning steam engines were British-made UR 35s, the type also used in India. They belched black smoke, and frequent stops were required in order to refill the boilers with water. Despite this, well-to-do first-class passengers who boarded such trains in 1925 were treated with ample care. Alice and Frédéric dined in a grass-roofed hut after disembarking at Voi, some 150 miles uphill from Mombasa. Waiters were white-clad stewards from Goa, in India, who served up a menu of tinned salmon, meatballs, fruit and custard, and, for the first course, Brown Windsor soup. (This beef and vegetable broth was very popular in Victorian and Edwardian times, especially on the railways, and was often said to have built the British Empire.) During dinner, attendants would carry the bedding into the carriage’s berths in order to make up the beds. On reboarding the train, Alice and Frédéric would have gone to their berth, closed their mosquito nets, and opened their windows so as to enjoy the cool air coming in from the plains. First-class berths were comfortable, given the circumstances, and designed to accommodate two people, with private lavatories equipped with a small sink. Second-class berths were large, open affairs and could sleep four. Third-class carriages had simple slatted wooden benches and no beds at all. In 1925, the axles of the passenger carriages would have been badly sprung, causing an immense jolt each time the train’s wheels hit a gap in the rail. The joke went that couples honeymooning in Kenya would never forget their time in one of the berths of the Lunatic Line.
During such a bumpy ride, sleep would have come fitfully, if at all. Alice and Frédéric may have deliberately tried to stay awake, eager to see signs of wildlife from the window. Even so, the almost total blackness of the African night would have prevented any sigh
tings. As the passengers dozed in their berths and seats, the train climbed through forest and red rock to the great plain that slopes from one thousand feet above sea level to six thousand feet at the foot of the Kenyan highlands. At Makindu, the de Janzés joined their fellow passengers in an outdoor refreshment room for breakfast. Porridge, eggs and bacon, and tea were the standard fare. By the time they returned to the train, dawn was breaking and the engine resumed its pace toward the Athi River. At six in the morning, when the sun rose, Alice and Frédéric would have shared the delight of witnessing herds of giraffe, antelope, zebra, and perhaps even elephants moving across the vast plains. At twelve thirty in the afternoon, the train arrived at Nairobi Station, some 329 miles from Mombasa. Looking down at their clothes, Alice and Frédéric saw they were covered in a thin layer of red dust blown from the burnished rocks en route. They would have felt immensely weary from the journey, and the thin air at such an altitude would have only added to their tiredness. By arrangement, no one was there to meet them. They knew that their friend Joss Hay would contact them later in the day at Nairobi’s Norfolk Hotel, a favorite meeting place for Kenya’s expatriate settlers and visitors. So they took two rickshaws and went to the Norfolk for hot baths. The Lunatic Line had delivered them to Nairobi twenty-four hours after their departure from Mombasa.
In 1907, after Winston Churchill returned from his visit to East Africa as undersecretary of state for the colonies, he brought back news of the line. He was impressed by it, describing it as “one of the most romantic and wonderful railways in the world,” and adding, “The railway is already doing what it was never expected within any reasonable period to do, it is paying its way.” Indeed, by the time of Churchill’s visit, the railway had begun to pay for itself. In a bid to justify the line’s existence, the commissioner for East Africa, Sir Charles Eliot, had invited settlers from the British colonies to farm the land surrounding the newly founded railway town of Nairobi. In this way, it would be possible to say the railway was serving the purpose of connecting these farmers and their goods with the coast, thereby silencing those critics who questioned the line’s practical purpose. In other words, the British had built the line and then come up with a reason for its existence. Recruitment of farmers began in 1901 and the first pioneers started to arrive in 1903. They came from as far away as Canada and New Zealand, as well as from Great Britain, and although many from the British contingent were aristocrats, the majority were middle-class men and women who faced the enormous odds of farming this uncharted territory with little capital but great tenacity.
After the end of World War I, a second wave of European settlers—made up mostly of ex-servicemen—arrived to farm the land and to help swell the numbers of whites in the area. The colony’s foothold seemed ensured, and by the early 1920s, the settlers had established their own parliament and legislative council. It was at this juncture that the early pioneers began to sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labors. They started to build large stone houses for themselves, with verdant lawned gardens and airy verandas. They employed local servants to tend to their properties and staff their kitchens. This was the era of the “English squires established on the equator,” as Evelyn Waugh described them, and these moneyed residents were determined to translate the English way of life to Africa. Servants were taught how to be “proper” butlers and chambermaids, how to lay tables with polished silver in the correct manner, and how to serve and cook imitations of English cuisine. Meanwhile, their masters played polo, tennis, and croquet and held luncheons and tea parties. There was now an impressive level of comfort to the lives of many of the colonial settlers in Kenya.
Wealthy socialite travelers had begun to come to Kenya for adventure, romance, and safaris, and many of them decided to stay. The undisputed ringleaders of this small but decadent new circle were the de Janzés’ friends, Joss and Idina. As part of Idina’s divorce settlement with her former husband, she had inherited 2,500 acres of farmland in the Wanjohi Valley north of Gilgil. The Hays had built a house on the land, calling it Slains after the Erroll family home in Scotland (sold by Joss’s predecessor, the profligate nineteenth earl of Erroll). Here, Idina began to throw house parties for visiting friends and local socialites. The flow of cocktails only served to fuel natural highs brought on by the extreme altitude of the highlands. Far from home, the Hays and their clique of friends found themselves freed from the restrictions of their families and society. Inhibitions were cast aside with abandon. Idina’s parties would often last for days at a time, and it was even rumored that—at the hostess’s insistence—every guest would have to sleep with someone other than the person with whom he or she had arrived before the party could finish. This liberated atmosphere was to give rise to the name “Happy Valley.” It was also the heady realm into which Alice and Frédéric were about to enter.
Joss arrived to meet his guests at the Norfolk Hotel on October 25, 1925. The three friends were reunited at the hotel’s door, excited to be meeting again so far away from Paris. They would have spoken in a mixture of French and English. Joss explained he had left Idina behind at their home for a very good reason. She was pregnant and the journey to Nairobi was bumpy and arduous. Joss was driving his brand-new 1922 long-bodied, open-top Hispano-Suiza, a wedding present from Idina. It was a car of enormous power, with an in-line six-cylinder engine, a single overhead cam, and over six liters in capacity. The car’s massive semielliptic front and rear suspension had been designed to cope with rough Spanish roads, making the car ideal for the challenges of the steep and rutted Kenyan byways. Practicalities aside, there would have been few cars more glamorous than Joss’s in 1920s Nairobi, its hood topped by a flying stork, “La Cigogne Volante.” The man behind the wheel of the Suiza would have been just as imposing, his blond hair ruffled from the drive, his skin tanned from the African sun, and his body clad in a well-cut safari suit.
Joss had brought with him a Ford box-body car, a backup to the Suiza, driven by a Somali who carried a spear. The following morning, after an early breakfast, Joss’s servant loaded up the two cabin trunks on the Ford. Joss, Frédéric, and Alice climbed into the front bench seat of the Suiza. It would have been characteristic for Joss to insist that Alice sit in the middle, between the two men, ensuring she was thigh-to-thigh with him for the journey to Wanjohi. The gear handle and hand brake of the car were to the right of the driver (who also sat on the right), so there was nothing to come between Alice and her attentive host. Joss set off at high speed, his preferred tempo. The roads leading out of Nairobi at this time were made of murram, a degraded stone gravel dug from nearby quarries that was crushed, then spread and rolled, making for a dusty ride, especially at high speeds. The Suiza quickly scaled the Kikuyu Escarpment, some six thousand feet up and twenty miles from the city. Here, a heart-stopping sight awaited the travelers. Looking down from the precipice, Alice and Frédéric could see below them the sheer drop of the Great Rift Valley. This continental divide, a literal rift through the heart of Africa, stretches four thousand miles, from Mozambique to northern Syria, and is one of the true marvels of the world. Herds of wild game roam the valley floor, which is dotted with defunct miniature volcanoes, including Longanot or Mount Margaret and the double-headed Suswa (described by H. Rider Haggard in King Solomon’s Mines as the “Twin Bosoms of Cleopatra”). It would have been an exhilarating prospect for the de Janzés, who had still only recently left behind them the tightly gridded streets and boulevards of Paris.
Next, the Suiza began the descent to the bottom of the valley. Driving downhill at such an incline was enough to put an enormous strain on any car. The Suiza’s brakes, although powerful, would have burned out had Joss not shifted into second gear to brake his descent. The engine grew hot, and at the bottom of the decline, Joss refilled the radiator with water from the stream that crossed the road and was fed by a shaded spring. Next, he raced across the road, heading to the right turn that would take them back uphill toward Gilgil and the Wanjohi Valley. Again, the cli
mb was steep on a road that was rougher and dustier than the rest, so that by the end of the drive, a fine layer of red murram dust covered all three passengers. Alice wore a hat, but even so, her hair was thick with red specks. Joss, ever attentive and gracious to women, especially a woman as wealthy and beautiful as Alice, reassured his guest that Idina had brought a French lady’s maid to Kenya and that she would wash and dress Alice’s hair for dinner that evening.
Everything was conspiring to intoxicate Alice: the hot sun, the high altitude, the breathtaking views, the glamour of riding in the Suiza next to this attractive and confident Englishman. The two cars sped down the private road to Kipipiri, overlooked on the left by the Aberdare Mountains, before sweeping into the drive of Joss and Idina’s farm. Idina was waiting for them, dressed casually yet elegantly in trousers and a blouse, her preferred outfit while in Kenya. The whole household had turned out to meet the new houseguests: the number-one houseman, a cook, a kitchen toto (Swahili for child), a dhobi (washerman), as well as the French maid, Marie, who immediately took to Alice when she heard her speak French. The house, which had been built to Idina’s specifications in 1923, had four bedrooms with bathrooms, an elegant drawing room with a large raised fireplace, a dining room, and an office. The rooms were fitted out with imported antique English furniture, old silver, leather-bound books, and grand family portraits of Idina’s and Joss’s mothers.