The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  Several visits after our unforgettable night at Clouds, we had been jolting our way home in the late afternoon while children raced behind the car and shouted ‘Mzungu!’ Captain’s profusion of roadside plastic bags shone in the slanting rays of the sun and even the familiar-voiced ring-necked dove seemed to be purring ‘mzungu’ at me in somewhat agonised disharmony with the stutter and drone of the Land Rover’s engine.

  ‘We can go again soon to the Happy Valley,’ Solomon said optimistically, as he disembarked with his bag of eggs and potatoes from Clouds. I’d switched off the engine but the doves, the shouts and the engine were still competing in my head. ‘I have heard about some very old men who remember so much about these Happy Valley white people,’ he continued, sticking his head through the passenger window. ‘I think at last we shall find this Slain house of Lord Erroll!’

  5

  The Search for Slains

  Even though the much desired, loved, talked about and written about Josslyn Hay only lived a handful of his years in Happy Valley during his brief stint as number three of Idina’s five husbands, his murder seems doomed to be eternally linked to this headily high-altitude spot on the map. This is probably in part because the hedonistic Happy Valley cast spilt their promiscuous reputation colony-wide, encompassing the Rift Valley when the Djinn Palace on the shores of Lake Naivasha became Joss’s second marital home. But it was certainly in Happy Valley, at Slains to be precise, that Joss’s reputation as seducer of other men’s wives and heartbreaker took off.

  Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll – Joss to those who knew him – came from an old and grand Scottish family. Adoring women always featured in his life, beginning with a doting mother. At the age of fifteen he was caught having sex with a maid and expelled from Eton. Eloping at twenty-two with the thoroughly unsuitable Idina, he escaped to Kenya in 1924. Already not the faithful type, newly married Joss was almost caught by the husband of the woman who was pleasuring him in her boat cabin.

  English gossip columnists pounced on Idina and Joss’s affair: she was twice married and eight years his senior, and his family weren’t delighted to discover they’d married on the quiet. It also sabotaged his budding career in the Foreign Office; after his father had pulled the right strings Joss had gained valuable experience in the diplomatic service, including three years as private secretary to His Majesty’s Ambassador to Berlin, perfecting his German and making him some good German friends. It was on his travels through Europe that he met Idina – hardly suitable as a potential future diplomat’s wife. While engaged and on a visit to Venice, Joss and Idina were introduced to Sir Oswald Mosley, who would become a good friend and whose Fascist movement would later attract Joss.

  There’s a well-known picture – the original decorated the cover of Tatler in 1923 – of Josslyn Hay and Lady Idina hand in hand and barefoot on an Italian beach. Idina had tiny feet and a girlish figure; the clement Kenyan climate would provide opportunity to display both more often.

  When the couple headed to Kenya, it was hardly into obscurity, for they quickly became infamous in Happy Valley and beyond. The freedom of life in the colony certainly provided space for Joss’s womanising talents to expand. Kenya’s white female population (married or not) continued to adore him and compete for his favours. Idina and Alice de Janzé apparently seemed content, as close friends, to share him, although by 1926, after Idina had given birth to their daughter, the marriage was not thriving: Idina launched into an affair with ‘Boy’ Caswell Long, a manager for Lord Delamere before he married Genesta (later the wife of Lord Hamilton). Meanwhile, Joss was enjoying a sexual liaison with wealthy, married Mary Ramsay-Hill (Molly to her friends), who’d only been in Kenya a year.

  By early 1928 Joss and Mary had hatched a plan to run away together. He’d been home to Happy Valley to collect whatever he needed, which didn’t include his young daughter. Mary was to secretly board the train at Naivasha to join him. Her husband, Cyril Ramsay-Hill, discovered she’d gone, loaded his pistol and rushed to Naivasha station. Finding he’d just missed them, he drove fast and furiously to Nairobi, arriving at the station before the train, which had to heave its carriages up the steep walls of the Rift Valley. He thought better of using the pistol, borrowed a rhino-hide whip (with the excuse he needed to ‘whip a dog’) and gave Joss a flogging in front of anyone lucky enough to be on the train that day. According to Charles Hayes in Oserian, Place of Peace, Ramsay-Hill’s parting shot was to cable the ship on which his wife and Joss were travelling: ‘You’ve got the bitch. Now buy her the kennel.’

  Mary married Joss in 1930, returning with him to Kenya, the same year Idina returned with her new husband, Donald Haldeman, a British-born American divorcé who had already been a white hunter in Kenya. This was when Idina bought Clouds. Mary, who’d clinched the title of Countess of Erroll, had managed to retain a very grand kennel – the exotic Djinn Palace, built by Ramsay-Hill. Living thus in style in Naivasha, Joss was busy with politics. In 1934, on a visit to England, when Kenya was struggling economically, he became a member of the British Union of Fascists. Joss, who believed settlers needed more power, told the East African Standard when questioned on his return, that the Blackshirts believed in action, not just words. He went on to give a series of talks on Fascism to settlers. But he also attended to lighter matters – he was commodore of Naivasha Yacht Club and chairman of Naivasha Club.

  As the years passed, Mary fell prey to her addictions, and she died aged forty-six of excessive drinking and use of hard drugs. It was 1939, the same year Hitler invaded Poland and Idina married husband number five.

  It’s debatable if Joss ever fell for any of his women for any length of time. His boredom threshold seems to have been extremely low. Diana Broughton simply wasn’t on the scene long enough for Joss to have tired of her. She supposedly fell for him, but their short and intense affair never had the chance to stand any tests of time.

  Joss was shot in the small hours of 24 January 1941. Later that same morning Broughton arrived at the mortuary, puzzlingly obliging: he wished to place his wife Diana’s handkerchief on the body. Alice de Trafford and the current Lady Delamere were already there. James Fox relates in White Mischief how Alice had put a branch on Erroll’s body, and another among Joss’s many female fans, Gwladys (as he gives her first name) Delamere – the 3rd Baron Delamere’s second wife, though by then his widow as she’d been many years his junior – had asked for his identity disc.

  Nobody did an aching heart count after Joss’s murder, but the list of suspects must have been just as impressive. Many friends and admirers attended his funeral, although Diana was supposedly too distraught and instead sent her husband with a letter to bury with her lover. The hearse was draped with the Union Jack, three volleys were fired and a bugler sounded the last post and Reveille.

  Inspector Arthur Poppy, who handled the murder investigation, returned at midnight with six convicts supposedly to ‘plant a rose bush’, but actually dug a very deep hole and retrieved the envelope – only, says Fox, to find it was a scrap of paper on which Joss and Diana had scribbled adoring lines to one another. Had Poppy really been hoping for an apology from Diana to Joss for murdering him? Or even a revelation of who did?

  Erroll’s remains lie in the Kiambu churchyard beside those of the Countess. St Paul’s, fifteen minutes’ drive from Nairobi’s upmarket suburb of Muthaiga, is a small pinkish-red stone church, English in style with its stout wooden door adjacent to its bell tower. A plaque in the entrance tells visitors that its construction dates from 1911. In the nearby graveyard, the oldest grave has a weathered stone cross in memory of a ten-month-old boy who died in 1914. In a forest of crosses and headstones in varying shades of grey, I found Erroll’s marble headstone standing out, pale and square, the pebbled rectangle above his bones scattered with leaves and a wilting frangipani flower. Its inscription (and Mary’s) read: Thy will be done. Looking at it made me wonder exactly whose will had been done.

  Erroll has been on the re
ceiving end of plenty of bad press, including allegations of unkind treatment of his servants. But he was liked and respected by many people – as a farmer and a friend. Genesta Hamilton wrote in her memoir A Stone’s Throw, when she heard of his death: ‘I was miserable. So few friends and so precious they are. And Joss, such fun, so loved life, so quick and bright, with a wit like sparkles on water.’ She had been less fond of Idina, understandably considering Idina’s affair with Boy Long, her second husband.

  Errol Trzebinski writes in The Life and Death of Lord Erroll that Joss was a serious and respected farmer as well as good to his staff, as asserted by his Kikuyu valet in court; and that his generosity extended to the families of all his workers every Boxing Day. Many Kenyans, however, do have a well-meaning, benign manner of saying exactly what they believe their interrogators want to hear. The truth often remains to be guessed. And nowadays we might not have the same concept as in the colonial era of what being ‘good’ to employees entails.

  Erroll’s unsolved murder having begun to intrigue me, it was time to focus on the search for Slains. Perhaps the old house held on to some hitherto undiscovered secrets.

  Solomon arranged meetings with elders of the Wanjohi region and we asked about old settler homes. One old man remembered Idina’s neighbour, although only by the single name Ramsden, and had heard of Erroll. ‘He was the son of Ramsden,’ he insisted. Others only came up with their versions of names of people who had lived in the area later on: ‘Ceaserone’, ‘Dushka’ and ‘Dilap’.

  Looking for clues, but still with nothing much to go by, we visited an old settler home which Solomon had discovered on one of his foot patrols through the area while investigating the plight of the colobus monkeys. ‘It is the house of Dilap,’ he said.

  Nestled between the steep sides of the Aberdares and the gurgling waters of the Wanjohi River, the former homestead was reduced to an old cedar cottage with a shingle roof. The use of cedar was not restricted to roofs: it would have provided cheap, easily available building materials in those days – and termites don’t eat it. A red rose bush scrambled up one corner, clutching at gaps in the roof tiles with unkempt talons. Further away a brick fireplace and stone chimney stood, bizarrely isolated. Presumably the main house had either burnt down or been dismantled for timber. The only other sign that anything, or anyone, exotic had left their mark here was an ornamental palm, looking equally out of place. The grinding howl of chainsaws disturbed the chilly air as Solomon suddenly grabbed my arm: ‘Colobus!’

  There were four bewitchingly beautiful, long-haired, black and white monkeys watching us from where the dark line of forest suddenly opened into cultivated fields. Colobus are dependent on indigenous trees for their food, homes and protection. Unfortunately, as fast as they are forced out of their receding forest environment they raid these subsistence farmers’ vegetable patches, where they are trapped and their valuable skins sold.

  Solomon launched into a fiery lecture on conservation – aimed at half a dozen women of varying ages who had paused from digging the adjacent field to stone the monkeys. ‘So you must not harm them! They are my friends and brothers,’ he concluded.

  ‘They steal my potatoes,’ returned an elderly woman.

  In the silence that followed, the chainsaws paused as if in silent mourning for a brief moment, before a splintering crash heralded the falling of a tree that had probably taken several hundred years to reach its magnificent size. Solomon winced. The women bent again to tend their fields. A rare tacazee sunbird flew over their heads, a regal flash of purple, green and gold. A turaco called from the forest behind, a large, indigo-crested bird that reveals ruby wings in flight. In the far distance I could see the Mohican profile of the long-crested eagle. All these birds depended on the trees too . . . did anybody round here ever notice these exotic feathered creatures?

  The colobus had gone, taking flying leaps between high branches. Around us were encroaching acres of brown earth, their nakedness broken by fat tree stumps. The new fields were enclosed by fences, roughly built from those destroyed trees. The high backdrop of the Aberdares was pitted with black and brown scars where fires had left brittle groves of dead trees. Its rich, green shawl of mountain forest was losing its daily battle for survival; Solomon’s unvoiced thoughts and my own were probably similar, as we wondered how long the shrinking forest could continue to provide life and shelter for so many plant, insect, animal and bird species. How much longer could its roots hold back the rich topsoil from washing away down Kenya’s rivers, affecting the shorelines of the Rift Valley’s lakes and upsetting yet more fragile ecosystems?

  Solomon was sorrowfully examining an old tree stump, 4 feet in diameter. ‘Look!’ he said, brightening as a giant green grasshopper marched stiffly up his arm. ‘So beautiful!’

  The demented drone of the chainsaw tore through the air again. Some wealthy and influential outsider would benefit from the sale of the endangered hardwood. But these people living in tin-roofed houses made of cedar off-cuts, relying on firewood for fuel and selling their charcoal for a small amount of cash to buy school books and uniforms for their many children, had no inclination to save trees either. If the forests were gone in a couple of decades, so what? It wasn’t their problem. Shauri ya mungu – ‘the problem is God’s’ – as many Kenyans say.

  Nobody here had heard of Slains or Lord Erroll. We negotiated the washed-away track running north along the base of the mountain range. This had been Solomon’s idea and I was not convinced that we shouldn’t have gone back to the roads we knew went somewhere. A man on a bicycle with a full sack of giant cabbages strapped on to his carrier actually overtook us. To our left the yellow-grey plateau country stretched out: spiky clumps of highland grass, the umbrella-shaped acacia abyssinica trees and dark grey rocks mottled white with lichen. Once fields of golden wheat had grown here, while sheep grazed on the grasses as far as the eye could see. Now fences criss-crossed the expanses and tin roofs flashed fiercely in the sun: even traditional thatched roofs were slowly becoming extinct.

  We eventually passed an old-looking red-brick building beside some towering gum trees. An unused metal container lay by the entrance like a giant’s milking pail. We stopped in the narrow road – surely no one else would be insane enough to drive this way – and a man emerged, introducing himself as Alfred, the caretaker. ‘There is a historic home not far away,’ he told us. ‘This used to be for cooling the milk,’ he indicated the brick building, ‘now it is my home!’

  Alfred led us through a field past a pit-latrine, behind which lay a much older, albeit broken bath, discarded amongst the weeds. ‘Follow me,’ he said, heading on up the hill. ‘It is not too far . . .’

  I suddenly felt a profound peace and a rich sense of the unknown, as though the wind was laden with stories. Solomon, who has an unlikely fund of information, mused: ‘I think this can be La Dushka’s house. The wazee remember her as a famous lady who lived near Dilap.’

  What house? I wondered as we walked on towards the towering Aberdares through this strangely tranquil field, with no sign of any house anywhere. I asked our guide if he knew who had lived here.

  ‘Lord Malcolm,’ he said firmly. ‘His daughter, she visited, and left some papers . . .’

  We walked through two lines of closely planted, gigantic cypress trees, now well over 50 feet high. ‘This was the hedge,’ said Alfred, standing beside one of the trees, its circumference as thick as several men, ‘and this was a stream, here a pond.’ He pointed out dry depressions in the ground. ‘And here the old house!’

  In the thick undergrowth I could just make out something like a large anthill, but as we ploughed our way through the nettles and tangled bushes, crumbling mud walls emerged. Solomon, who has absolutely no fear of snakes, vanished and later reappeared on a window ledge beside what was just recognisable as a corner of the house – there was even a determined patch of white plaster clinging to a vestige of wall. ‘There are rooms,’ enthused Solomon, ‘a fireplace too. This
is a big house!’

  ‘Was,’ I said.

  ‘When I arrived in 1963,’ said Alfred the caretaker earnestly, ‘the house was beautiful. But the natives they come and destroy everything – they pull down the roof and all the wood. They steal the furniture.’

  I blinked at him. Nobody nowadays uses the word ‘native’. It has the smack of colonial superiority.

  The sun was slanting through the high eucalyptus that lined the track below us. We had to get back to a real road before darkness confused us further. Before we departed, Alfred presented me with a thick wad of typed sheets left by a mysterious, elderly lady called Diana who had visited the house because, Alfred said, her father once lived here. Could this be Diana, Countess of Erroll? She’d be in her late seventies now . . .

  My excitement was short lived. The memoir turned out to be written by a pioneer farmer who described his life in another area altogether, near Thomson’s Falls, on the northern shoulders of the Aberdares. Several months later a friend of my mother’s, who’d also grown up in that area but now lives in Australia, identified the writer as Malcolm Watson – she’d been a bridesmaid at his wedding. The mystery Diana’s addresses were on an attached page: Diana Watson, care of a man in Germany or a monastery in England. I wrote to both addresses but never had a reply.

  Malcolm Watson had at one point worked for Delamere at his other farm Manera, in Naivasha. The typed sheets described their many guests, including those who were less than welcome and whom he called the ‘remittance men, who had been given a remittance from their families as long as they kept well away from the UK and shaming their relatives’. This was the Happy Valley lot. Watson probably sums up the feelings of many settlers of the time with his comments: ‘The capers of this group were notorious for their utter immorality. Africans were afraid of working for them and Europeans avoided them if they could.’ He recalls how they arrived at his Manera home, claiming Lord Delamere had said they could stay: ‘Lord Delamere of course knew of these people, but had little in common with any of them.’