by Paul Spicer
Nine
The Gathering Storm
IN 1936, JOSS AND HIS WIFE, MARY, MOVED INTO A BUNGALOW in Nairobi, close to Alice’s own pied-à-terre in the Muthaiga area. Alice and her old boyfriend became neighbors again, as they had been during the days of Slains. Despite Joss’s political leanings, it was true that he remained one of the few constants in Alice’s life. Their intermittent love affair had weathered their respective marriages to Idina and Frédéric and the divorces thereafter, Alice’s runaway romance with Raymund, her trial and imprisonment, her exile from Kenya, and her subsequent marriage and separation from Raymund, not to mention Joss’s numerous other affairs and his marriage to Mary. In 1936, however, Mary’s health was worsening and she needed to be near a hospital and her doctors. What’s more, Joss was planning to stand for election to the legislative council, and so he needed to have a more permanent base in the capital than his usual rooms at the Muthaiga Club. With Joss living in such close proximity to Alice, it would have been impossible for him to resist the occasional secret meeting with his old flame, a habit that had been established for so many years. Alice had always made herself available to Joss, and she continued to do so.
In that same year, in his role as Lord High Constable of Scotland, Joss was expected to take his place in the procession at the coronation of the new king, Edward VIII. Then came the abdication crisis, during which Edward declared he would rather marry a divorcée—Mrs. Wallis Simpson—than ascend to the throne. The coronation of Edward’s brother George was delayed until May of the following year. Alice would have followed these events keenly: Edward was one of her old friends from her Embassy Club days in London. When Joss did finally return from the coronation in 1937, it was announced that he would stand for the Kiambu constituency in the forthcoming elections. Kiambu was at the very heart of the Kikuyu tribe, about eight miles from Nairobi, and had its own club, mainly supported by local coffee planters. Joss Erroll was duly elected and sworn in on April 8, 1938. By now, he had put his affilitations with Oswald Mosely behind him, celebrating along with the rest of his expatriate friends when the Munich crisis was averted in September 1938. When Chamberlain arrived in London waving a nonaggression pact signed by Hitler, there was a new optimism that “peace for our time” was not only possible but a certainty.
Toward the end of 1938, Alice had good news of a more personal nature: She received word that her old friend Paula Gellibrand would be arriving in Kenya before the end of the year. After divorcing the “Cuban Heel,” the marquis de Casa Maury, Paula had married William Allen in Paris, but the marriage had lasted only a year. Bill Allen worked for British intelligence, and he would, in time, visit Kenya in the run-up to the outbreak of war in 1939. For her part, Alice had finally become officially divorced from Raymund in October 1937. The two women were single again, and Paula, who wanted to try living in Kenya, decided to stay with Alice for a time. The friends proceeded to make the most of each other’s company, living at Wanjohi and riding out each morning with Alice’s dogs. The warmth of the relationship between these two attractive women is obvious from photographs they took of each other at Wanjohi Farm. Taking turns holding the camera, wearing identical short-sleeved gingham shirts and cord trousers—a boyish look that Alice cultivated and that the stylish Paula had evidently adopted since arriving in Kenya—they posed with Alice’s dogs. There were frequent trips to the beach house at Tiwi in Alice’s new 1938 DeSoto car, her old Plymouth having proven too uncomfortable for the frequent eight-hour trips along the hot and dusty murram road south from Nairobi to Mombasa. By contrast, the DeSoto, a straight-six affair with enormous wheels and excellent suspension, effectively steamrolled along the rough roads, making driving in Kenya an altogether smoother experience. The front windshield was split and could be opened by two handles on either side, keeping passengers both cool and comfortable. The two friends and Alice’s little dog Minnie would have made an elegant sight as they motored from the city to the highlands and to the beach.
This happy time together was to be short-lived, however. One evening, Idina invited Alice and Paula over to Clouds for dinner and to stay the night. Idina had recently separated from her husband, Donald, and had taken up with Flt. Lt. Vincent Soltau of the Royal Air Force, who would soon become her fifth husband. That evening, Boy Long—the handsome rancher and one of Idina’s former conquests—was among the guests. He was recently divorced from his first wife, Genesta, and became immediately smitten with Paula. Paula returned the compliment, and the couple wasted no time in marrying. The wedding took place toward the end of 1938. Boy’s actual name was Edward Caswell Long, but he had been called “Boy” for as long as anyone could remember. Genesta once said of her former husband, “Life with Boy was electric. I think he was the handsomest man I have ever seen, with infinite charm but ‘difficult.’” Boy was certainly a flamboyant dresser, with a penchant for wearing Stetson hats and colorful Somali shawls. Together with Paula, one of the most fashionable women in Europe, they made a striking pair. But although Alice was delighted that Paula had found her true love, Paula’s marriage registered as a loss. Later, in 1941, she would write in a letter, “Paula is gone in a way. Our way of life lies apart and her big, bold paramour has changed her nature a little.”
With Paula otherwise engaged, Alice began seeking out the company of new female friends. In 1938, she met Patsy Bowles at the Muthaiga Club. Barely out of her teens, Patsy had married one of Alice’s doctors, Roger Bowles, a man sixteen years her senior. Patsy was happy to let Alice take her under her wing, and in the coming years the pair would often join each other for drinks or dinner around town, often accompanied by two other girlfriends, Rose Delap and Noreen Pearson. Patsy later confirmed that Alice retained all of her beauty during this later period of her life and that her distinctive wide-set gray eyes continued to captivate. Although it was clear that Alice had depressive tendencies and was dramatic into the bargain, she was nonetheless excellent company, someone who thrived in social situations, was quick to laugh, and adored a good party. Certainly Alice continued to rely on strong cocktails to mitigate her moods, but Patsy was certain that her friend was too intelligent to use drugs. She also confirmed that Alice never spoke of her family or of Paris during their friendship. By now, Alice’s American accent was barely discernible—after all her years away from her native country, she spoke in the almost neutral tones of one who has left her home nation long ago.
Patsy also remembered Alice’s rather odd taste in reading material. Over the years, in part thanks to two literary husbands, Alice had collected a large library. Toward the end of the thirties, however, she began collecting volumes on medical problems, psychology, and the occult. Patsy recalled one of these books in particular, A Journey Round My Skull (1938), by the Hungarian author Friges Korinthy, which has since been declared a masterpiece of medical autobiography. Korinthy’s memoir tells the fascinating, if grisly, story of his brain tumor and the operation he had on it with only a local anesthetic. Noel Case also recalled Alice’s “morbid mind” and “books on horrible diseases” and how Alice would repeatedly ask her to mark out one place after another for her future grave site. According to Noel, Alice would sit on her veranda at Wanjohi Farm, gazing at the river bend opposite her house and pointing to the bank beside the deep pool as one possible burial place. Then she would change her mind and point to a completely different location: the iris beds on the edge of the “cut,” which she had made to take the stream water right around the edge of her house and garden. Perhaps the traumas that Alice had never managed to acknowledge fully—her mother’s death, her father’s abandonment—were beginning to manifest themselves in these morbid obsessions. Or perhaps as she grew older, Alice merely sensed that her years were numbered.
The new year would not be a particularly happy one for many of the inhabitants of Happy Valley. Locusts would devastate crop production, droughts were imminent, and the news from Europe continued to go from bad to worse. Despite Chamberlain’s pact with Hitl
er, war now seemed unavoidable, and the colonists began making nervous preparations. In February, Joss took on his new role as deputy director of the Central Manpower Committee, his patriotism trumping any lingering fascist allegiances (unlike many of his right-wing contemporaries, he was now fervently opposed to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler). Joss’s new job involved, for the most part, planning for the necessary distribution of military and civilian manpower and, as such, kept him well occupied. He was often away for weeks at a time, traveling throughout the Kenyan countryside, where he mobilized some two thousand European settlers. Despite his marital problems and considerable professional commitments, he still found time to see Alice—his offices, by coincidence, were located right next door to her Muthaiga cottage.
Always eager for a new conquest, however, Joss was also turning his attentions elsewhere. Phyllis Filmer was the wife of Percy Filmer, the managing director of Shell in East Africa, who had arrived in Nairobi in 1935. No one in Joss’s circle quite understood his fascination with Phyllis; she was considered rather dumpy and ordinary, at least by the standard of his more glamorous previous wives and mistresses. Even so, Joss continued to seek her out. Rumor has it that he was once discovered making love to her before dinner on the billiard table at the Norfolk Hotel. Alice would doubtless have felt not at all threatened by someone as unexciting as Phyllis—a small, rather conventional-looking blonde with none of Alice’s flair—but it is safe to assume that the affair would have rankled nonetheless.
To make matters worse, Alice’s health was in decline. In March 1939, she visited her favorite doctor, William Boyle, complaining of stomach pains. The injury she had sustained during the shooting at the Gare du Nord often bothered her, but it is also possible that she was developing the first symptoms of ovarian cancer. Dr. Boyle arranged to have her hospitalized and a drain was inserted. As soon as she was well enough, Alice flew up to Nakuru in an ambulance plane with a nurse and went home to Wanjohi Farm. By now, Alice’s devoted housekeeper, Noel, had left Wanjohi, and Alice began to rely increasingly on Flo Crofton for help running her household. Flo was the daughter of a former Kenyan governor, Gen. Edward Northey, and was married to Dick Crofton, a white hunter living near Gilgil. After Alice’s return from the hospital, Flo agreed to look after the house so that Alice could leave Kenya to visit her children in France. Despite her recent operation, Alice was determined to make the trip, aware that if war was declared, it might be one of her last opportunities to see Nolwen and Paola for some time. On March 16, 1939, she wrote to Aunt Tattie in France that the large rubber drain had been removed from her stomach, replaced by a gauze one, which the nurse would remove in small pieces each day. It was still hard for Alice to sit up, and so her doctor had attempted to convince her that she should stay for another week to build up her strength for the journey home, advice that Alice had decided to ignore. She admitted to feeling greatly unsettled by the German army’s recent march into Prague, but despite her anxiety about events in Europe, she went on to say that she was making all the necessary travel arrangements. It is revealing that Alice’s greatest concern in the letter was not her children, but her fear that passage on British ships might be restricted if war broke out and that she might somehow be prevented from returning to Africa. If all went well, she hoped to visit friends in Athens on her way home in June, traveling on a Belgian line. “I do hope and pray there will be no war,” she wrote. “Heaven knows what happens to our homes in such a case.”
Alice arrived in Paris in late March, as planned, remaining there for two months in order to spend time with Nolwen and Paola. Soon after her arrival, however, she decided to change her travel plans. She began to make arrangements to return to Kenya via Belgian West Africa, rather than by way of Athens. The Congo interior was a place that her friend Idina had visited two years previously, venturing deep into the rain forests to see the indigenous Pygmy tribes living there. In the 1930s, there were still many thousands of Pygmies living in the region—Idina must have returned to Wanjohi and regaled Alice with stories of her trip, because now Alice became determined to see the Pygmies for herself. Although Alice had also visited the Congo during her 1932 safari with the Vanderbilts, she had not been able to visit the tribes, as her American host was interested only in hunting. And so on March 29, 1939, just after her arrival in France, Alice wrote to her uncle Sim in New York to ask for funds from her “Fifth Avenue Account” to be processed so that a letter of credit of $2,400 and a further $400 in traveler’s checks could be provided for her Congo trip. She intended to leave on June 4, traveling across central Africa all the way to Kenya. The trip would last about four months, she wrote. For two months, she would be in places so remote that she would be unable to send or receive mail or cables. She asked that her checks be cashable in the Congo towns of Matadi, Kinshasha, and Stanleyville, as those were the places where she “will be quite alone, and between the first and last place mentioned, out of all communication.”
The decision to travel to the Congo was extraordinarily bold and, some would say, even dangerous. She would be venturing far into central Africa, a single woman, alone, unwell, with Europe on the verge of war, and—as she underlined in her letter to Uncle Sim—traveling to a remote area where she would be unable to make contact with the outside world.
The tribal region she was to visit was three hundred miles southeast of Stanleyville, now Kisangani, the provincial capital of Tshopo Province and itself the farthest navigable point upstream from the capital, Kinshasa. Certainly her doctor strongly advised against her going. But Alice was determined, and after leaving Paris, she sailed for West Africa. In some sense, the adventure was an act of defiance—Alice had always been headstrong and prone to making impulsive decisions—but perhaps it also represented her continuing need to live on her own terms during this period of her return to Happy Valley as a single woman, without Frédéric, Raymund, Joss, or her American or French families. In any event, Alice survived her extraordinary expedition and returned to Wanjohi toward the end of the summer of 1939.
On her return, there was news of her ex-husband. Raymund had left Kenya in disgrace after getting very drunk one night at his farm in Njoro and striking one of his employees, whom he injured badly. The matter was taken up by the police and the local district officer. To avoid any further scandal, Raymund was asked to depart for England immediately. Back in England, something altogether more serious had happened: He had been driving from a race meeting in Cheltenham and accidentally killed a woman cyclist. There had been a witness in the car—someone whom he had offered a lift to on his way back to London—and this person testified that Raymund was under the influence of drink when the accident occurred. On June 7, 1939, just after Alice left France for the Congo, Raymund was given three years penal servitude for manslaughter. In sentencing him at the Gloucester Assizes, Justice Charles said, “You have been found guilty—and very properly found guilty—of as bad a case of manslaughter by driving a car in a criminally negligent manner as I can well imagine. You drove like a lunatic. The sentence I pass upon you must necessarily, not only from a punishment point of view, but as a deterrent to others, be severe.”
Raymund had been sent to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, one of the toughest and most secure prisons in Great Britain. Escape was known to be impossible—water between the island and the mainland was unswimmable, being multicurrented and having four strong tides every twenty-four hours. Alice must have taken pity on Raymund, because she wrote to him often during this time, and he replied. Evidently, she remembered her own time in prison and how Raymund had been one of the only people to write to her while she was there. Despite everything that had taken place, she felt sorry for him. At the time of Raymund’s incarceration, Parkhurst housed some of Britain’s most hardened criminals, including at least four leading IRA militants and several forgers. With his charm and ability to turn matters to account, Raymund had already discovered how to do his time in reasonable comfort. He made arrangements via the war
ders for extra provisions, including his favorite foie gras; he figured out how to place his bets on the horses, and how to find out the results. He also learned to communicate with his fellow Catholic convicts, who were IRA members, talking to them during exercise without moving his lips. His cell was scrubbed and washed out by other inmates, who were keen to earn a few extra pounds, an arrangement Raymund was able to honor. As usual, he read voraciously and had an ample supply of books, not only from the prison library but also from friends, who brought them to him on a regular basis.
Then in September 1939, a month after Alice returned to Kenya, war was declared in Europe. Alice’s two children were taken to the United States, where they remained at Aunt Tattie’s house in Chicago for the duration of the conflict. Although Alice was removed from the hostilities at Wanjohi Farm, the war had one immediate consequence for her: She was no longer able to travel freely to see her children. In November, she wrote to her daughters via Aunt Tattie, unsure if any of her letters would ever arrive. At this time, air mail letters sent from Kenya could be delivered only to the countries of the British Empire. Alice worried that it might be years before her letters reached their destination, “if they’re not sunk on route.”