The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  I finally slept astonishingly deeply. My dreams were bizarre: I was at a party, chain-smoking marijuana through a long cigarette holder. The women were in the sleeveless, waistless dresses, with shockingly high (at the time) hemlines, characteristic of the streamlined 1920s designs that had been straightened and simplified from the curvy, bosomed, long-skirted, quintessentially feminine styles favoured before the war. Fashion in the 1920s had made women’s lines more masculine and simple, yet somehow sexier. The short hairstyles and long, swinging strings of pearls added to this powerful new image.

  I seemed to know the people at this party and there were many I wanted to talk to, but I couldn’t get my feet to touch the ground, so had to be content with being ignored while floating about at head level. Perhaps potatoes grown at Clouds have magic-mushroom-like powers, I thought, between restless dreams.

  I was relieved when the sky paled and the melodious song of the orange-breasted, white-browed robin chat dispersed the stillness. Solomon was pacing about outside in the early sun, complaining of a very disturbed night too.

  Before we left, laden with generous, home-grown gifts, we warmed our hands with mugs of steaming tea, while Mzee proudly showed me Idina’s rose bushes he’d continued to tend, including several varieties he had grafted.

  We said our goodbyes behind the kitchen, which extended out on one side from the house. In most colonial set-ups, the kitchen (from whence servants produced astonishing feasts from wood-burning stoves, conjured up in the gloom cast by smoke-blackened walls and without any refrigeration or other mod cons) would have been a separate wing, designed with outside entrances through which the servants could come and go without disturbing the memsahibs and bwanas. Clouds was unusual with this attached kitchen, now a shed for the cows and sheep, tiles missing from its roof: the animals must huddle at one end when the rain lashed in.

  As we drove home Solomon complained that he had been ‘visited’ by bad spirits all night. ‘I will write a poem!’ he declared. Arguably Solomon’s ‘visions’ were influenced by his repeated reading of White Mischief, although it was odd that we’d both had somewhat parallel dreams.

  The next time I saw Solomon he presented me with an exercise book, in which he had laboriously written out his ‘visions’ that night at Clouds. Face to Face with White Mischief Spirits, he titled it. I read on, the poor English paling into insignificance as I took in its increasingly extraordinary contents:

  It was on 16 March 2000 that my friend Juliet and I decided to spend the night at Clouds House . . . My friend was the first white woman to sleep there after the white mischief departed, therefore I was fearing to see the ghosts of white mischief coming for us.

  After sleeping I started dreaming and it was not like a dream, it was like a vision. There were smells of smoke. I saw very many white people drinking and shouting to one another.

  Solomon dreamt that Alice de Janzé approached him, questioning who he was and where he came from. She demanded to know who had invited him to come and sleep at Clouds. When Solomon explained that he used to live on Alice’s farm and that his late mother, Juha, used to work for her, she softened and said that yes, she’d seen Solomon’s mother recently.

  Among the other bizarre conversations, Solomon dreamt that while he’d talked to Idina herself, a male guest sitting at the fire had pointed at him and said: ‘Where does that monkey come from?’ Idina had then further questioned his right to be there, as well as mine, for I featured in the dream as well. But Solomon explained that he was a colobus monkey, which fascinated all the other guests, who wanted to come and hear the monkey talking.

  Studying old photographs in various books it’s very evident that Idina had sex appeal oozing from every pore – and women probably found her attractive too, as the shot of her and Alice de Janzé both wearing velvet trousers and holding hands – reproduced in Errol Trzebinski’s biography of Lord Erroll – suggests. Comte Frédéric de Janzé (Alice’s first husband) wrote his own story about his time in Happy Valley, called Vertical Land (1928). He hints at Idina’s sexual power as she stood before the fire wrapped in a golden kikoi: ‘Her half-closed eyes waken to our mute appeal. As ever, desire and the long drawn tobacco smoke weave around her ankles, slowly entwining that slight frame; around her neck it curls; a shudder, eyes close. Contentment! Power!’

  My curiosity now fully aroused by my Clouds visits, I asked some of the elderly white settlers who’d stayed on in Kenya after independence in 1963 what they remembered about Idina. Before he died in the early 2000s, Mervyn Carnelly spoke to me on his sunny veranda overlooking the placid, acacia-fringed Lake Naivasha.

  ‘Everyone adored Idina,’ Carnelly said with feeling. His wife added that every man in the colony probably did, even if they had to keep it from their wives. Carnelly smiled: ‘The army used to visit – officers headed from Abyssinia straight to Clouds and several were having affairs with her.’

  Many people spoke very highly of Idina. She’d been such fun, by most accounts, as well as clever, witty and an excellent hostess. ‘There’s been too much going on about her exploits with men,’ complained one friend who’d been a distant neighbour in the 1940s, ‘and not enough said about what a fabulous person she was.’ In a letter published in White Mischief, Albert Andrew – who had visited Kenya in the 1940s and later read Cyril Connolly’s murder account – wrote to him about Idina: ‘Nobody could have been kinder or more thoughtful, and she was most certainly not snobbish. She was willing to be nice to anyone and the last thing she thought about was class. She was exceptionally nice to her servants.’

  Others were less complimentary. Lady Grigg, wife of the governor of the time, was horrified on visiting Clouds to find Idina’s clothes and pearls scattered over the floor; while Eileen Scott wrote critically in her diary of Idina’s setting the trend for ladies to wear shorts, which she saw as ‘ugly and unnecessary’. Lady Scott, a well known and respected settler, also accused Idina of doing ‘a lot of harm in this country’. The new breed of more conventional Happy Valley housewives after the Second World War, who had less time (or inclination) to waste on attending wife-swapping parties, further criticised Idina’s carryings-on in front of the Africans, some going so far as to say that she might have contributed to Mau Mau and the murder of Europeans by undermining the servants’ respect for their white employers. One even said Idina had African boyfriends (simply not done in those times).

  On one of my Happy Valley safaris I stopped beside a white-haired, toothless mzee hobbling along the road from Mawingo back towards the town called Machinery. This road sweeps through and around a series of steep valleys while slowly descending from the lower shoulders of Kipipiri. The deaf old man was apparently walking all the way back to the roadside town of Miharati. ‘Surely that would take him all night,’ I said to Solomon, but the mzee didn’t seem bothered and hadn’t waved us down, although he accepted a lift. Climbing into the Land Rover proved quite a mission.

  ‘We have been visiting Clouds House,’ Solomon said loudly in Kiswahili.

  ‘Oh yes! I know that house very well . . .’ The old man, it turned out, remembered Clouds back in the forties. If he’d been about fifteen in the late 1940s, he would only be in his mid seventies now. It was common practice to have a kitchen toto, a young boy taken into the kitchen to be apprentice to the cook or ‘houseboy’. I didn’t ask the old man his age. It’s not rude, as it is in western society, because traditionally in Kenya the older you are the more respect you command. However, these elders tend to have no idea of their date, let alone year, of birth.

  ‘So you must have known Idina!’ I bellowed, also in Kiswahili, as the old man didn’t speak English.

  That made him laugh: ‘Oh yes. She was on her own then, without any one husband, but lots of people came and went and there were big parties! One mzungu [white person] played on the marimbo and the other wazungu [white people] sang and drank a lot of pombe [beer, or alcohol] from strange glasses with stalks!’ (Alice had played a ukulele, altho
ugh she’d died in 1941, which would make the mzee very, although not impossibly, old.)

  ‘Was she a very bad lady?’ asked Solomon, hoping for some more scandalous details, while I smiled to myself at the perfect description of a wine glass.

  The old man’s eyes grew even mistier, his voice even more cracked. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘She was a very good lady! She was kind to us all.’

  Lord Delamere, stepson of the late Diana who’d married his father, the 4th Baron Delamere, told me that Josphat, his old cook who’d died in the 1980s, had also been a kitchen toto at Clouds from the age of about thirteen.

  ‘This poor lad was permanently in trouble for never knowing which bedroom required morning tea, and which fresh orange juice. How could he when those who had made their orders had ended up in the wrong rooms?’ asked Lord Delamere. ‘And as for returning their clothes, including some rather skimpy undergarments, which Josphat poetically compared to “ribbons of mist”, to the right rooms – it simply wasn’t possible to get it right!’ Presumably Josphat and his peers enjoyed great sessions of gossip in the kitchen, which tended not to be an area much visited by colonial memsahibs.

  ‘Josphat was well trained at Clouds: he became loved by all, the real old-fashioned butler type,’ added Lady Delamere. ‘He will always be remembered for his blissful cooking, which he taught to many others. Sadly he died of a heart attack about twelve years ago – he was only eighty-five.’

  I asked Lord Delamere what he thought of the Happy Valley crowd.

  ‘Unfortunately it was just a dozen or so people who were bored, sniffed copious quantities of cocaine, injected heroin and drank too much,’ he said. ‘They gave the colony a bad name, while the majority of farmers, including my grandfather, were working extremely hard and had nothing whatever to do with them.’

  He was astonished to hear of my visits to Clouds. He’d known many former settler houses when he’d worked in the Lands Resettlement Offices in the early 1960s. Like most people, he thought Clouds would have fallen down after years of neglect. I imagined that Lord Delamere would get on well with Mzee Nuthu, both being old-fashioned gentlemen with a sense of humour, both interested in plants. Neither had any racial hang-ups either.

  ‘When you come to visit us again, you will be welcome!’ Mzee Nuthu had told me when we left after our overnight visit. Thus over the next two years we continued to visit Clouds, often accompanied by other visitors, although unfortunately Lord Delamere’s failing health prevented his ever accompanying me. Alice Percival, a friend’s cousin from England, wanted to revisit the old house: she’d stayed there as a child, accompanied by her grandmother. On the drive up, Alice was shocked how fields of maize and beans now replaced the thick forest she remembered. She and Solomon discovered a mutual concern for the environment and debated the future of Kenya’s rivers and lakes without their vital forests as a water catchment, acting as a slow filter for heavy rain, allowing it to drip gently into the water sources.

  The long rains had been heavy and Clouds was surrounded by verdant growth. As we stood on the front steps carpeted with blue periwinkle, surrounded by overgrown baby-blue hydrangea bushes and a tangle of nettles, purple salvia, tiny white daisies and pink fuchsias, we imagined Idina’s original gardens, buried somewhere beneath today’s cabbages and beans. Most of Kenya is too hot and dry for such non-indigenous varieties – it takes the high-altitude, cold, wet climate of Clouds to produce these very English flowers.

  Alice pointed – through a ragged line of high, concealing cypress hedge – towards what had once been a wonderful view: one that had contributed towards plenty of giddy behaviour. The heady view had once influenced one of Idina’s American friends too. On safari in Kenya, Rhoda Lewisohn had fallen in love with French pilot Gabriel Prudholme, fifteen years her junior, abandoning her husband in America to come and search for her dream home in Kenya. Having stayed at Clouds, Rhoda wanted her own version. Gabriel tirelessly flew her over Kenya’s plains, valleys, hills and mountains, until she spotted a love nest that had been built on the slopes of Mount Kenya for another American woman, who finally agreed to sell her precious home. Rhoda restyled this with no expense spared – and called it Mawingo, after Clouds. After the Prudholme love story soured, the house had a stint as the Mawingo Hotel and then became the Mount Kenya Safari Club, where millionaires hobnobbed with film stars – and celebrities still luxuriate today.

  ‘We used to have breakfast here on the terrace and look out over the Rift Valley below,’ said Alice. It occurred to me, as we soaked up the sun on the same terrace, that none of the Happy Valley houses had verandas, unlike most other colonial houses in Kenya. It was obvious why, of course – it was simply too cold. You sat in the sun to keep warm in the early morning or late afternoon, but closer to midday its rays were harmful at that altitude. When the chill of evening descended you moved to your indoor fire, laid and lit by the servants.

  Alice was saying: ‘Idina was very slim, clever and well read. You sparkled in her company.’ Here was the other side of Idina again: the gracious hostess, impressing a young girl with her elegance, and no mention of orgies being instigated at the dinner table.

  That day Mzee and Paul had gone to the nearby town. Peter was also away, teaching. The younger children had noticed us admiring the flowers, so they picked us every bloom in sight, thrusting forth their offerings with increasing boldness and muffled giggles. The old mama, Mzee’s wife, together with Elizabeth and Peter’s wife, escorted us, exchanging news. Mzee had been suffering from a bad cough for a while, they said. One of Peter’s younger sons watched us from the doorway: he held a tiny Siamese kitten, a worm-infested throwback, perhaps, to more aristocratic feline blood, many generations ago.

  Peter’s wife invited us to tea in her home, which was one of the rooms at the back of the courtyard where I had not been before. It was very similar to Mzee’s room, with its fireplace and a room leading off it which would once have been a bathroom. By chance it turned out to be the very bedroom where Alice Percival had slept all those years ago. ‘What an extraordinary coincidence!’ she exclaimed, as we sipped very sweet tea out of tin mugs. ‘It makes me feel quite strange!’

  I usually wrote to warn Mzee of our arrival, but letters often didn’t arrive. Yet somehow important news does get through in Africa. One day in 2002, I arrived to stay at a friend’s house near the small and scruffy town of Gilgil.

  It took Solomon at least two hours to walk from his home to Gilgil, and I have no idea how he knew where I was staying that night. The area above Gilgil Club’s golf course, once farmland, is now subdivided into smaller plots where plenty of retired Europeans live, many of them ex-farmers. There were various houses I could have been staying in, but Solomon, prone to unnerving psychic bouts, visited the right one and left me a note before I’d even arrived. It was sad news – and had astonishingly reached me within twenty-four hours of the event. He wrote, without bothering about punctuation:

  dear Juliet, how are you I am fine Now I think you are okey and the children. Now I had from one of my friends today that Baba Nuthu had died do you know that because I just told with doubt your friend Solomon Gitau

  Having finally worked out what it was telling me, I stared at the crumpled page torn from an exercise book. Now two long-term owners of Clouds had grown old and died in its lifetime.

  Peter had written to my Delamere Estates address and invited me to the burial, but his letter arrived well after the event. I wrote back to the family, expressing my sympathies as well as my admiration for their late father, but later discovered my reply never got there . . .

  ‘History,’ said Lord David Cecil, ‘is only interesting as long as it is strictly true.’ When I first visited Clouds in early 2000, having only read White Mischief, I thus believed, along with most people I had spoken to, that it had been Idina’s home from the outset, when she was married to Josslyn Hay, more fondly known as Joss. Fox subtitled his photograph of Clouds ‘Joss and Idina’s home in the Aberdares’. Fi
rst, though, it isn’t in – or even beside or below – the Aberdares, it’s on the far side of Kipipiri, and second Joss never lived there anyway. According to Fox, Idina arrived in Kenya with Joss in 1924, moving to Clouds – ‘a thatched mansion’ – in 1925, the venue for all those wild parties. Thatch is the traditional roofing material in Kenya, but Clouds was never thatched – the pitch of the roof was too shallow to prevent thatch leaking during the heavy rainstorms that prevail in the Kenya highlands. Clouds is roofed with cedar-wood shingles.

  Charles Hayes in Oserian, Place of Peace (1997) further compounds the confusion when he writes that Idina and Joss started off at a farm called Slains, but also bought a second home called Clouds in 1925, describing the house as being alongside a river flowing from the Aberdare Mountains (such a river would actually have to flow uphill again to get to Clouds). He also mentions a waterfall and a green cement bath at Clouds. Fox mentions a bath too, in the centre of the room. Having seen the bath at Clouds, I knew it was green, but it certainly isn’t cement, nor is it in the centre of the room.

  Errol Trzebinski’s book The Life and Death of Lord Erroll (2000), besides thrusting forward a revolutionary murder theory that MI5 had ordered his assassination, confirms that Idina and Joss arrived in Kenya in 1924. Trzebinski explains, however, that they lived at another home called Slains, which Idina sold before her divorce from Joss was made absolute in 1930, building a similar property – Clouds – where she lived without him. She further clarifies the situation with her description of a green onyx bath in the centre of the majestic bathroom at Slains where Idina would wallow in Champagne.

  Having established that Idina’s first marital home was not Clouds but Slains, I hoped her first Happy Valley home with Joss, if we could find it, might give some more clues about the life – perhaps even the death – of the enigmatic Earl. But where on earth was Slains? During those early Clouds expeditions it had become apparent that nobody on this side of Kipipiri mountain seemed to know where Slains was – or if the house still existed.