As we walked through a large crumbling courtyard, where chickens pecked beneath the washing lines, I suddenly realised how much smaller the house was than it seemed from the outside; most of the imagined space was actually this open square. A narrow veranda edged the chipped and browning walls of the surrounding house, although most of its cedar roof tiles had dropped and rotted away and the remaining moss-covered wooden roof supports were concave or broken. Rows of closed doors led off into what I imagined were Idina’s guest rooms where, as the stories say, you never knew who you’d end up in bed with. Now some of these rooms provided cramped homes for the Nuthu sons and daughters along with their spouses and children. Others were empty, or were used as stores.
Mzee noticed me glancing at the wooden, shield-shaped plaques on the walls, and explained, ‘They used to be mounts for stuffed animal heads.’ (Perhaps he sensed I had been wickedly imagining the leering heads of conquered husbands.) Directly across the courtyard a scarlet rose bush bloomed outrageously, rising above the rubbish chucked indiscriminately around the courtyard.
Mzee unlocked the double doors and we stepped into a long, wood-panelled room, its wooden parquet floor partially covered by drying maize. In the muted light filtering through the grimy windows I made out a fireplace at each end, and window seats. What a room for grand parties: ample swinging space for at least three eightsome reels! At one end among dusty cobwebs were marks left by the removal of what must once have been many bookshelves.
Solomon suddenly elbowed me, pointed with his chin at a dim corner of the ceiling and whispered hoarsely: ‘See how many spirits of white people are hanging.’ In the gloom I could just make out, clustered together, the little inverted bodies of numerous bats, before we passed through a dark doorway into a spacious, empty room with another fireplace.
‘Here is her ladyship’s bedroom,’ said the old man, with a knowing smile.
The front of this dark, panelled room had been crudely partitioned off with plywood. ‘The Canadian Hunger Foundation Water Project rented part of the house ten years previously, and made these bedrooms for their staff,’ explained Peter, ‘but they never used them.’
The lonely iron bed on which Elizabeth laid my bedding roll was the only furniture.
The procession moved on to the bathroom. A tarnished lion’s head glowered over a green bath, above it a handle that must have once forced hot or cold water through its roaring mouth. Across the room was a dust-covered bench seat: was this where her guests swigged cocktails while watching Lady Idina bathe, apparently part of the pre-dinner rituals at Clouds?
The small room, with a green toilet, was powdered with dust and swathed with cobwebs. ‘There is no water now,’ explained the old man, ‘but Elizabeth can bring a bucket so you can wash.’ Then, with a mock bow, he said, ‘Now you are the Lady Idina and I am your servant! You will need some food?’
I looked at Solomon, who said, ‘Oh yes!’
The old man smiled: ‘You may come to my room to eat when you are ready.’
After the family left us, Solomon opened the door to one of the many cupboards lining the bathroom and stepped inside with the air of a man searching for a corpse. Nothing dead, but the cupboards were as wide as corridors and I wondered suddenly if this was how Idina’s guests had traversed their way from bedroom to bedroom in secret. After a moment’s silence Solomon answered my thoughts by colliding loudly with each end of the cupboard in turn.
‘This place feels bad,’ he said, emerging from the dark cavity and making me jump. ‘There are many spirits here!’
I kept silent. I’d already been wondering whether driving home in the dark through unknown Mungiki territory would be more frightening than braving the whole night here. The Mungiki are an illegal Kikuyu sect whose secret operations include the extortion of ‘protection’ money. They’ve been known to leave enemies’ heads in places for all to see – and be warned. Solomon knows a bit about the organisation because one of his brothers is involved.
Dusk was edging through dirty windows, and the crickets beginning their nightly whirrs and cheeps. Solomon seemed extremely jumpy as we crossed the darkening living room and courtyard. He clutched my shoulder as Paul appeared from an almost invisible doorway and conducted us into Mzee’s living space, another large panelled room at the rear of the courtyard, which had presumably been a guest bedroom. Thankfully it was warm with firelight and the smells of food, and felt light years from our dark, echoing quarters.
We were shown to wooden chairs beside the Formica-topped table, where the paraffin lamp lit up a circle of the smoke-blackened ceiling. There was no sign of any of the original furniture. Marula reed matting lined the walls and the windows were covered by thick cardboard and large, heavy pieces of cloth, protecting us from the night’s chilly darkness.
Mzee introduced us to his wife: an elderly woman in a headscarf, her bare feet gnarled and twisted like tree roots. She greeted us in Kikuyu before returning to the adjoining room, which I guessed had once been an en suite bathroom. It is not customary in rural Kikuyu society for women to eat with their men. Kikuyu men traditionally had several wives and if a wife was not obedient or hardworking it was acceptable to beat her. Neither idea has entirely died out in many parts of Kenya today. My impressions of Mzee Nuthu as a modern gentleman, however, were confirmed when he said: ‘My wife does not speak English or even much Kiswahili. She is a simple woman, but I love her. I have never seen the need to take another wife.’
Elizabeth brought a basin of warm water to wash our hands before Mzee said grace, thanking God for new friends and this food. After the prayer, Elizabeth left and I was the only woman at the table, but I was a guest and it would not do to question my ‘right’ to be there. We ate African style, with our hands, while the old lady retired to sit by the fire, and Peter chatted from a nearby sofa with a worn cover of an indiscriminate brown resulting from many years of decay. His wife would be preparing his meal for him, so he declined to share ours. Mzee and Paul shared with us the bowl of irio: mashed potatoes with beans, maize and nettles (‘Good for diabetes,’ said Mzee when I expressed surprise that something with such a vicious sting should taste so delicious), all washed down with tin mugs of sweet tea. Kenyan tea, known as kinyeji, is stewed on a fire with plenty of milk and sugar, pleasantly tainted with wood smoke.
Feeling perfectly well fed, we moved to sit beside the fire that would once have warmed Idina’s overnight guests. Clouds actually has nine chimneys, although judging by what they got up to nobody should have been cold.
The old man smoked the cigarettes I’d brought him and told us about himself. He came to Clouds in 1967, having been a political detainee during the state of emergency. It is likely that he had contacts in the right places, plus he was of the ‘right’ tribe, maybe even a friend of Kenyatta’s. Thus he ended up getting a valuable piece of land during the redistribution. He told us that he used to be an accountant in Muranga (known in colonial times as Fort Hall). Solomon, who is given to expressing admiration loud and often, was told by Mzee: ‘It is easy with accounts! You give with the right hand and take with the left and that is called debit and credit.’ Mzee smiled and continued. ‘Now I have twenty-five grandchildren and I am happy to be retired. We can live off the land: money is short so unfortunately we cannot repair the old house, and also we have medical expenses for Elizabeth.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said. ‘I hope it’s not serious.’
The old man looked at the fire. ‘She is frequently sick: she has the fits and falls down. So she cannot work. And Paul, he does not work, but Peter is a teacher at a government junior school, forty minutes’ walk away.’
‘It pays badly,’ Peter explained. ‘It is difficult for everyone. The school is supposed to be free, but parents have to pay for books, uniforms and harambee funds, so not everyone can afford it. Primary education is compulsory, but if you have no money for these harambee meetings what do you do?’
Harambee is Kikuyu for ‘let’s al
l work together’, once a seasoned chant of Kenya’s first president, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. But by the time of our visit the word had become charged with apprehension: a school harambee usually meant that parents must donate money or risk their child being thrown out. Peter explained that the combination of lack of government funding and mismanagement of what was available, due to the corruption of many of the Kenya government’s educational employees, compounded the problem.
Numerous small, scruffy grandchildren with bright dark eyes and winning smiles came into the half-lit room to be fed leftover irio. They took turns to stand between their grandfather’s knees, until they grew drowsy, eyed by the skinny cats mewing from the shadows.
‘So now,’ concluded the old man, ‘you can return to tell your friends that you spent a night at the Clouds.’
I asked him what he thought of the carryings-on in Clouds in those early days. He shrugged: ‘Who really knows the truth?’ Then he added, ‘In those times there was much injustice in the white man’s treatment of Kikuyu men: they were employing them as house servants when it is against Kikuyu culture for men to serve women; and also the white people were calling them “boys” – even if they were old men. This is a terrible insult to a Kikuyu who has been circumcised.’
Jomo Kenyatta, in his book Facing Mount Kenya, explains some of the Gikuyu (Kikuyu) customs and the importance of land to his people, Bantu agriculturalists at heart: rendering the earth sacred. He recounts how the Kikuyu lost their best lands: they looked upon the new Europeans as ‘wanderers who had deserted their homes and were lonely and in need of friends’, so they helped them out, while believing they would finally get tired of a restless existence and return to their own lands.
Before the first white people even arrived, Mugo Wa Kibiru, a Kikuyu visionary, had foreseen the arrival of these pale strangers with their curious clothes and killing sticks. He’d also predicted a vast iron centipede, breathing fire and stretching west to the big inland water. He prophesied that these newcomers would strip his people of all they possessed, but more happily that they would depart again.
‘Of course when these white men came,’ the old man said evenly, ‘there was nothing in this area except thick forest, wild animals and a few Maasai passing through. They bought this land incredibly cheaply – two cents an acre!’
Solomon was shaking his head sympathetically. I thought about how impossible the imposition of the British on Kikuyu culture must have been. Traditionally the Kikuyu didn’t mention things in exact numbers as it would bring ill omen upon that which was being counted. The British saw this as shifty. The Kikuyu have a complex naming system which the British also failed to understand. Kikuyu boys were circumcised at about fifteen and girls before menstruation started, at about twelve. Female circumcision was an old and valued custom in many tribes, perhaps not handled sensitively enough by early missionaries. Aside from the many justifiable arguments against it, the fact that it still happens in parts of Kenya today shows how embedded it is in ancient cultures.
Respect for elders is paramount in Kikuyu culture, so the idea of an old man being ordered around, often abusively, by a young memsahib was reprehensible. Traditionally Kikuyu men hunted, fought, tended fields and looked after cattle, while women attended to the house and food, and the vegetable garden around the house. Swapping roles made you a laughing stock, yet suddenly men were cooks and ‘houseboys’ – as they were condescendingly called then (and extraordinarily still are, even by the Kenyan Africans themselves!) – in white households. Everything had worked fine with bartering, and the occasional intertribal skirmish, but suddenly with the arrival of the white people it was all about money and the increasingly pressing need to earn it.
As for adultery – if a woman strayed she was returned to her parents and the dowry was paid back. Honestly, what had the Kikuyu thought of Idina?
It was time to return to my gloomy quarters to pass an uneasy night. I thought of women in poor African households where the entire family will sleep cosily in one bed. By all accounts Idina wouldn’t have slept alone in a cold bed either. It was chilly up here at over 8,000 feet above sea level, and whistling draughts crept through the broken glass of my window. I put my head inside my sleeping bag to muffle the creaks of the rickety roof and moaning of the wind, and thought about why I was here . . .
4
Thoughts, Words and Misty Memories
Houses have always fascinated me. To me they are imbued with laughter, sorrow and myriad feelings in between, left behind by the people who have lived in them, slowly distilled over the years into powerful energies, some peaceful and happy, others disconcerting: even totally terrifying, as I was to discover on future explorations in Happy Valley.
I especially love old houses. In Kenya an eighty-year-old house is really old: very few permanent buildings have survived that are much older. As it happens I rent a relatively old, mud-walled house on Lord Delamere’s Soysambu ranch. Over a century before, the 3rd Baron Delamere had arrived, dedicating his foresight and fortune to the country he’d fallen in love with. Now his grandson was my landlord.
But why Happy Valley? Perhaps I was inspired by my own family history: my paternal grandmother used to ply my young mind with colourful stories. As the gin in the bottle went down, her memories of working at Nairobi’s well-known New Stanley Hotel grew wilder. She was behind the reception desk when Lord Erroll and his mistresses, including Diana Broughton, flitted through; she remembered the night he was shot.
My mother’s family had farmed at Dundori, north-west of Happy Valley, at an even higher altitude. From the back of their bamboo house they could see the peaks of Mount Kenya behind the hump of the Aberdares, the latter’s lower slopes protecting the secrets of Happy Valley, almost always shadowy and dark, often obscured by cloud. My mother’s older sister, Susan, now in her eighties, wrote from England: ‘I do remember my mother pointing out Lady Idina sitting on a chair on the veranda of the Stag’s Head Hotel in Nakuru. It didn’t mean a thing to me, I just thought she was another memsahib.’
Then there was the tragedy of my maternal grandfather’s cousin, rooted in a later Happy Valley scandal. In 1942, when my mother was eleven, news of her Uncle Rowley’s tragic death finally reached her at boarding school in Molo, many hours away; initially they’d feared it was her father because the paper only reported the surname – Platt. Rowley, apparently a kind and gentle soul, had married an ‘unsuitable’ Irishwoman. They’d farmed in the Subukia valley, on the equator, 30 miles north of Happy Valley, and Rowley’s wife, Mary, had been swept into what remained of the Happy Valley set, her antics contributing to his despair and ultimate suicide. It was all hushed up at the time but my maternal grandparents used to speak of it with deep sadness.
‘He only had one ball,’ my grandmother once told me, with a slight twinkle. ‘But he was a darling, sweet man – while she just couldn’t keep her clothes on! She used to swim naked in their pool and cavort with that lot.’
‘She wore the most hideous purple hat . . .’ retorted my aunt.
Still unable to sleep, I began to scribble in a notebook by torchlight. There had been plenty written on Happy Valley, so ultimately what was left to say? Was there any hope of my solving a murder which had continued to create speculation for half a century? And here I was chasing after any lingering memory or whiff of past antics in the home where Lady Idina – first wife of the murder victim – had stayed the longest, and by all accounts played the hardest . . .
I’d read a few more books on the subject by this second visit. Almost every historian writing about Kenya’s colonial past touches on Happy Valley and its colourful cast. The most astonishing thing is how the murder mystery continued to ignite theories, beginning in the 1980s when James Fox’s White Mischief implicated the cuckolded Sir Jock Delves Broughton. In 1969 Fox and Cyril Connolly had discovered that nothing written on the Erroll murder since 1941 had solved the mystery. They teamed up to investigate it for the Sunday Times, their research stimula
ting their fascination with the saga as they unearthed new evidence.
White Mischief is a riveting read and probably remains the best-known book on the Erroll murder. But critics claimed that Fox’s final and concluding ‘evidence’ was hardly tenable. It was taken from the mouth of a teenager, daughter of one of the least likeable Happy Valley characters. Young Juanita Carberry was not renowned for being truthful – and no wonder, considering her lonely, abusive upbringing, which she wrote about in her autobiography, Child of Happy Valley.
Then in the 1990s, in Diana, Lady Delamere and the Lord Erroll Murder, Leda Farrant used Diana Broughton’s supposed ‘admission’ to seal her guilt. Diana is another character who arouses intrigue, although her connection with Happy Valley, the place, was nonexistent. Her final stamping ground, apart from her Kilifi home by the sea, was her fourth husband’s: Lord Delamere’s cattle ranch beside Lake Elementeita. This is the same ranch on which I live, a mere 3 miles from the home that was once Diana’s. From the dusty field beside my house where one of the late Diana’s retired racehorses grazes beside a tattered, rescued donkey, I look across the scorched plains to the distant blue outline of the Aberdares. With the setting sun at my back, and if there’s no cloud masking the mountains, it’s easy to distinguish Kipipiri rising in front, slightly to the right as if providing an opening for the imagination to slip in. Happy Valley feels closer than it really is. From my parched lawn, I can see if it is raining at Clouds . . .
Meanwhile, Alice de Janzé’s biographer had just been in touch with me with questions about the area. Alice was a friend and neighbour of Idina’s and her life is another tale of carousing, love affairs and eventually tragedy, for she committed suicide in 1941. Like Idina and Diana, she retains that sexually charged, magnetic power to invite people to wonder about her long after her death.
Lots of history, I thought sleepily: what about the present? And what of a murder left unsolved?
The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 4