by Paul Spicer
Eight
The Return to Happy Valley
WHENEVER ALICE ARRIVED IN NAIROBI FROM EUROPE, it was her habit to go immediately to stay with Joss and Idina at Slains. But this was 1933, and Happy Valley was much changed. Joss and Idina had separated in 1928, and Slains had been sold while the divorce was still in progress. And so instead of making her way to Slains on her arrival in 1933, Alice went immediately to Idina’s new home, Clouds, about six miles up the road from Wanjohi Farm, on Mount Kipipiri (an old Masai word meaning “rain”). Here she took up temporary residence in one of Idina’s three guest rooms while Mr. Barratt, the lawyer, gave notice to the family renting Alice’s farm. Clouds was another settler house in the typical manner, with a large central drawing room opening up onto a sixty-degree veranda, where Idina often dined with her many guests. Along with her new residence, Idina had a new husband: In 1930, she had married an American, Donald Haldeman, but the union was an unhappy one, with Idina intent on carrying on her usual affairs. Donald’s money came from a clothing-manufacturing business, and after one of the couple’s blazing rows, Idina was heard on the veranda of Clouds wailing, “You makers of shirts, how can you understand us who have been wanton through the ages!” Another legend has it that Donald shot at the tires of one of Idina’s boyfriends in protest.
Joss, meanwhile, could be found living in great style at Oserian, built on the beautiful shores of Lake Naivasha, where hippos roamed freely at night. The house had been awarded to his new wife, Mary, as part of her divorce settlement and was a much-crenellated and-domed North African–style castle, complete with minarets. Here Joss had installed squash courts and a swimming pool, and he bred polo ponies and hosted matches on a weekly basis. Locals called Oserian the “Djinn Palace,” and although it did indeed look like an oversized Aladdin’s lamp, the pun on the word gin was intentional. Through the years, plenty of alcohol was consumed at Oserian, most of it by Mary, who was developing a serious dependence. The poor woman desperately wanted to conceive a child, and when this did not happen, she fell back on her favorite Black Velvet cocktails. It didn’t help that Joss and Mary’s closest neighbors were Kiki and Gerry Preston: Kiki was the “girl with the silver syringe,” the American socialite whose conquests included Prince George, Duke of Kent. Addicted to heroine, Kiki is said to have introduced Mary to the habit. What did Joss see in Mary? The general consensus was that he had married her for her money.
At the time of Alice’s return to Kenya, Joss had begun another new chapter in his life. Kenya’s governor, Sir Joseph Byrne, had recently nominated Joss for the position of councillor on the Naivasha District Council. Meetings, speech giving, and the responsibilities of public office now became part of Joss’s regular routine. Of course, Joss was happy to see Alice—she continued to exert a powerful attraction for him, and he had a talent for keeping on good terms with former mistresses—but he was busy. Not surprisingly, Mary wasn’t inclined to tolerate Joss’s extramarital activities with the same laissez-faire as Idina. As a result, Alice’s time with Joss would have been necessarily limited. The other linchpin in Alice’s Kenyan social life, Lord Delamere, had died in November 1931. Overall, the mood among Alice’s friends was considerably less frivolous than it had been in the twenties. Along with the rest of the world, the colony was entering a recession. Everyone, Alice included, was a little older, and without Joss and Idina to anchor her friendships or D as her champion, she would have felt adrift. What’s more, she no longer had Frédéric or Raymund to partner her in social situations. As an unaccompanied woman, even in the relatively freewheeling atmosphere of the highlands, there was only so much she could do alone.
Determined to make the best of things, Alice set about making a new life for herself. In her absence, her house in Wanjohi had been let to an English family named Case. The Cases had land in the area and were building their house slightly north of Alice’s Wanjohi property. They were serious farmers and pioneers, not in the least socially ambitious, and as such they had little interest in their wilder, grander neighbors. Their daughter, Noel, was in her twenties, and determined to run a good establishment. While Alice had been away, she had created a proper garden on the property (something Alice had overlooked), laying out lawns and a rose garden. She had installed new curtains and comfortable sofas in the house and generally trained the servants, who, under Alice’s tenure, had grown used to operating without instruction. Under Noel, the household staff were smartly decked out in long white kanzus and red hats, and the cook could make European dishes; Wanjohi Farm had been quite transformed. Now that Alice was back, Noel Case asked if she could remain at Wanjohi as an employed housekeeper, and Alice happily agreed—Noel possessed the necessary household and managerial skills that Alice so sorely lacked. When it came to settling bills and paying staff, Alice’s lack of acumen was appalling. This was never due to meanness or lack of funds; it was simply that she had no desire to deal with such mundane matters. The title deed of Wanjohi shows that on several occasions close friends such as Geoffrey Buxton and Idina were paying for Alice’s outstanding bills and taking a charge on Wanjohi Farm until Alice handed over the amounts in question. Once the furniture had been reinstated from the manager’s house, Noel moved in and ran the main house and kitchen. Alice bought herself a new Plymouth car and hired a driver, who was to remain with her for the rest of her years. His name was Ruta (he was of the Kalengin tribe and was therefore known as “Arap Ruta”). Alice brought her maid over from France, rounding out the new order at Wanjohi.
As always, Alice began acquiring pets. On her return, she adopted a little dachshund called Minnie, who became her particular favorite. She acquired a Rhodesian ridgeback, often called “the African lion dog” for its ability to keep lions at bay by barking. Also included in her menagerie was a magnificent pet eland, or East African antelope, which roamed her grounds freely. Alice’s days at Wanjohi were spent playing backgammon, riding, walking her dogs, reading, and drinking. She socialized with her neighbors, striking up a friendship with Fabian Wallace, an old friend of Joss from Eton. Openly homosexual and strikingly handsome, Fabian lived on a small but well-appointed farm at the entrance to the Wanjohi junction, near Gilgil, where he grew pyrethum. A remittance man, Fabian was also something of an epicure: He loved fine food and had his own cigarettes specially made for him in St. James’s Street, London, which were sent out to Kenya in boxes of one hundred. Another new friend was Pat Fisher, who had a cottage not far from Kipipiri, which she occupied while helping her husband, Derek, manage Sir John “Chops” Ramsden’s cattle on an estate near Clouds. Pat later remembered Alice’s potent homemade cocktails, which included a whiskey sour that was doused with grenadine and fresh lime and took immediate effect. Together with Idina, these new friends provided Alice with a much-needed social outlet on her return to Wanjohi Farm.
Just as Alice was establishing herself in Kenya, however, the recent past came back to haunt her. Toward the end of 1933, Raymund emerged on the scene. The couple were still legally married, but even so, Alice had not expected to hear from Raymund so soon. She had put up the money for him to travel to Australia, on the proviso that he not return for some time. Instead, it seems he had so alarmed his Australian host and hostess in Melbourne with his general debauchery that he had thought it best to leave, deciding to return to Kenya in a bid to revive his relationship with Alice. She fended him off to the best of her ability, but she often had to run to Idina for protection. One evening, Raymund arrived at Alice’s farm, having driven over from his farm at Njoro. He was already drunk and threatening, demanding dinner and accommodation. Alice allowed him to take a bath before giving him something to eat, but when Raymund failed to appear at the dinner table, the French maid put her head around the bathroom door, only to find him drunk and asleep in the tub. “Madame, one small push of the head under the water,” noted the maid to Alice, “and all your troubles will be over.”
Then, in the new year, Alice received very sad news: Frédéric had die
d suddenly in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 24, 1933. He was in the United States on assignment, writing a series of syndicated articles for the French papers on economic conditions, but he had fallen ill soon after his arrival. Two weeks later, he died of a septic infection complicated by meningitis. By his side was his new American wife, Genevieve, who had been married to Frédéric for a little over three years. Frédéric was only thirty-seven. Nolwen and Paola were eleven and nine, respectively, at the time of their father’s tragic death. Although they had been in Frédéric’s custody after the divorce, it was decided that they should remain in the able care of Alice’s aunt Tattie, now that their father was gone. Alice’s reaction to this loss is not recorded, but there is no doubt that she would have felt it deeply: Frédéric had been a loyal husband and good friend, not to mention a devoted father to her two children. Even so, her reaction must have been tempered by her desire to keep in abeyance difficult memories of her own early loss of a parent. Although she made sure to write to Nolwen and Paola, she did not return to France to attend the funeral or to comfort her two children in this immediate period after Frédéric’s death. Many years later, Alice’s housekeeper, Noel, would remember that Alice almost never spoke of her past or her children during this time; nor did she keep any photographs of the family at Wanjohi, not even of her two daughters. On one occasion, Alice mentioned to Noel that her father was in a home in the United States and that it was costing her a lot of money, but otherwise, she continued to promote the illusion that she was a woman without ties or a past.
What is clear is that she did not neglect Nolwen and Paola entirely. In this period after their father’s death, she sent letters and later made visits to France to see her daughters. In 1931, the Imperial Airways flying service had begun regularly scheduled fights from Southampton to Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, which meant that Alice could travel back and forth to Europe without enduring a monthlong sea voyage. Flights were swift, if expensive, usually only stopping at Alexandria for refueling. Paola later remembered being taken out to restaurants in Paris by her mother, who would regale her children with stories of animals and Africa. Paola remembered that on one occasion Alice was convinced that an African waiter serving them hot chocolate was from Kenya, and so she tried to give her order in Swahili. In fact, the waiter was from Algeria and spoke fluent French. According to Nolwen, Alice had a delightful sense of humor, willingly laughed at herself, and was a good leg-puller. She was, Nolwen said, “très pince-sans-rire [very deadpan] despite that dreamy gaze of hers, which was due to her extreme nearsightedness.”
Despite her regular visits to Europe, Alice had already given up her apartment in London and was beginning to expand her residences in Africa. She acquired a new cottage, called Portaluca, conveniently located in the Muthaiga area, close to the center of Nairobi, which made it ideal for socializing with her city friends and for those times when she felt unduly isolated at Wanjohi. Alice’s new pied-à-terre was approached by a secluded drive and surrounded by a garden terrace. The main living room formed a central tower in the house, with two bedrooms on one side and a maid’s bedroom on the other. During her stays at Portaluca, her driver, Ruta, and her French maid would accompany Alice. The house was conveniently located close to the Muthaiga Club, but when she wanted to visit, she was forced to do so on Raymund’s membership. Entry was a tricky proposition for a single woman: The bar was for men only, as was membership in general. Alice found herself having to sign her name de Trafford, despite the fact that she was doing everything in her power to put a distance between herself and her estranged husband.
During this period of her life, she also began to look for a house on the coast. Most people from the Wanjohi area—up-country people, as they are known—regularly spend a few weeks at the coast every year as a respite from the high blood pressure induced by living at six thousand feet above sea level. Alice set about exploring the Diani area, south of Mombasa, where she discovered an old coastal house at a place called Tiwi. The house, also called Tiwi, was small and in disrepair, but it was close to a quiet beach lined with palm trees and facing the Indian Ocean. Sunshine was tempered by ocean breezes and the nights were magical, lit by moon and stars and lulled by the gentle lapping of waves. Alice quickly negotiated a rent for the house, hired two local servants, and proceeded to do it up, surrounding it with bougainvillea. Water was drawn from an old Arab well, and the outside “long drop” was the only available latrine. It consisted of a grass-roofed hut with an eight-foot pit and was fitted with a wooden box overhanging the pit. While Tiwi wasn’t particularly smart or comfortable, it was idyllic, and Alice loved staying there and hosting friends. There was plenty of fresh fish to eat, along with tropical fruits such as pawpaw, mango, pineapple, and watermelon. The house had four bedrooms, but Alice, who was never good with numbers, often invited too many guests for the existing space. On one occasion, she was forced to add more bedrooms at short notice. Such was the haste with which the rooms were assembled that none of them were symmetrical; nor were they interconnected with the original house. At all three of her houses, Alice kept an especially big and luxurious bed for herself. The guest beds, however, were notoriously hard and uncomfortable. And so Alice began a new chapter, moving among her three residences frequently. Back at Wanjohi Farm, Noel Case would often be driven to distraction by her mistress’s impulsive behavior. Alice never thought to give notice of when she would be leaving or returning, often disappearing for days on end. Part of this secrecy was probably based on general carelessness and a need to avoid Raymund, but it also had to do with the general air of privacy that Alice cultivated during this time.
As for her relations with Joss, these were complicated by the fact that Alice did not approve of his recent political attachments. In April 1934, Joss had flown back to London with Mary, spending the summer there. It was during this trip that he became a card-carrying member of the British Union of Fascists. Sir Oswald Mosley—known as “Tom”—had founded the union in 1932 and had been an acquaintance of Joss since the early 1920s, when the two men had first met. Now, with an entrenched worldwide depression, support for Mosley’s brand of staunch protectionism was growing, especially among members of the English upper class. The cause was a controversial one from the start. In June 1934, only a month after Joss’s initiation into the union, Mosley’s black-shirted stewards clashed violently with police and hecklers in London, causing an outcry and damaging the party’s already-dubious image. The union never recovered and was unable to gather sufficient support to play a part in the general election the following year. But Joss was convinced of the rightness of Mosley’s solutions, especially in terms of their application to the economic difficulties being experienced in the colonies. If the threat of foreign markets could be removed and trade within the British Empire developed into an economic stronghold, Joss reasoned, the possibilities for Kenya would be enormous. In Mosley’s thrall, he spent the following months attending rallies, meetings, and parties, appearing at the annual Blackshirt Cabaret Ball of 1934 with the union’s badge in silver on his sporran. By the time he returned to East Africa in August, he had been made Mosley’s delegate in Kenya.
The timing of Joss’s political conversion couldn’t have been worse when it came to garnering support for the fascist cause in the settler community of Kenya. By the middle of 1934, Kenya itself was feeling the direct threat of fascist forces. The Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had stationed his armies on the Abyssinian border with neighboring Italian Somaliland. It was believed that British Kenya, which bordered Abyssinia, could well be the next line of attack. Up until this point, Abyssinia had managed to fend off its aggressors, remaining one of the few independent states in European-ruled Africa, but everyone was beginning to feel nervous about Mussolini’s intentions in East Africa. In October 1935, a border incident between the Abyssinians and the Italians gave Mussolini the opportunity he had been waiting for: With the League of Nations failing to intervene, Mussolini and his troops pushed
back the Abyssinian army, taking Addis Ababa on May 5, 1936. Abyssinia’s young leader, Haile Selassi, was forced to flee to Jerusalem via the Suez Canal and Haifa with the help of the British, taking with him 150 cases of silver coins so heavy that the sailors could carry only one case at a time. As head of the Coptic Church, he was given a sensational reception in the Holy City. Mussolini’s troops were now even closer to Kenya’s northern border.
None of these events would have gone unnoticed by Alice, but, unlike Joss’s, her politics inclined her strongly to the left. During one of her mother’s trips to Paris in 1936, Nolwen, then age fourteen, was sternly cautioned by Alice about expressing a preference for the fascist leader Francisco Franco over the Republicans in Spain. “My mother rebuked me with restraint but real indignation in being wrong thinking about the Civil War in Spain. She was fervently Republican. I, on the other hand, had been told how the Communists pumped up the bellies of innocent nuns with bicycle pumps…!” This was evidently not the only political situation about which Alice had a definite point of view. Alice’s elder daughter admitted to being “alarmed by my mother” on several other occasions—“not for fear of being shot by her, or because of some latent undercurrent of violence which I might perceive in her, but because I was inclined to much forthrightness in expressing opinions…. Poor Mama! Luckily there was Paola, who cared nothing for religion or politics and preferred animals above all.”
It was during the same trip to Europe that Alice extended her visit to include a rare trip to see her father in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. William Silverthorne was in ill health. In 1925, he had married a woman name Myrtle Plunkett “in order to have a nurse to look after him,” according to his daughter Pat Silverthorne. William was nearing seventy and had only a few years to live—perhaps Alice sensed that this would be one of her last opportunities to see him. Father and daughter had remained in contact via their correspondence, and—as Alice had suggested to Noel Case—she was helping to foot his medical bills. But even so, the visit does not seem to have constituted much in the way of reconciliation between father and daughter. It was too late for that. Again, Alice left for Africa, putting a distance of many thousands of miles between herself and her troubled past. She was thirty-seven and living an independent life, one that she had chosen for herself. Removed from the United States and Europe, without a husband, she shored up in her beautiful African houses with her books and her cocktails, a woman apart.