The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  Although this had been a false lead, it spurred my mother into remembering that she’d had a sweetheart she used to write to when she was about fifteen. He’d been called Alan Wisdom and she even recalled his address: Aberdare Milk Products, Slains Farm, Wanjohi. ‘He used to mention some neighbours called the Delaps,’ she said. ‘I taught the Delap children at Nyeri School in the fifties. I remember little Susan Delap saying: My mummy’s name is Bubbles.’

  Perhaps at last we were getting warmer . . .

  I found Bubbles Delap, whose real name is Maureen, in the Charles Disney home for retired people, just around the corner from Muthaiga Club, where she can’t afford membership. This charming and amusingly eccentric lady was delighted to share her memories, and even more delighted at the idea that I had a car and might take her out. So I took her for a curry lunch, which seemed to be a great treat as no family members appeared to live nearby. ‘And I love curry, it’s my favourite,’ she said in a stage whisper, having mountaineered her way up into the passenger seat of my Land Rover, which still had vestiges of Happy Valley mud clinging to its flanks.

  ‘Needless to say I’m a bit of an exaggerator,’ she laughed over the spiced dishes of mutton and chicken between us in the almost-empty restaurant.

  I was dying to ask about Slains, but first Bubbles wished to tell me her own story. Her mother, Doreen, had run away from Roedean School aged sixteen and come to Kenya. Doreen was apparently an attractive and spirited girl; she served as a dairy maid at Windsor Castle during the First World War, before arriving in Kenya to work for Lord Delamere, who didn’t expect – or want – a female employee. Doreen – who, eccentrically for the times, always wore shorts – persuaded Delamere to take her on, but soon left to marry Ernest Hay ‘Sandy’ Wright, sixteen years her senior. Having given birth to Bubbles, Doreen was to divorce and remarry Wright, also later marrying Dickie Peel, an army major, and a professor in South Africa whose name Bubbles had forgotten. But, most famously, she had a child with Ewart Grogan, the highly intellectual and adventurous pioneer settler renowned for walking from Cape to Cairo to win the hand of his beloved Gertrude, who also happened to be an heiress – though the story’s romance is somewhat tainted by Grogan’s many affairs.

  In 1929, Doreen, by then among the 54-year-old Grogan’s conquests, gave birth to a daughter, June. Both possible fathers, Wright and Grogan, amicably stood by her bedside after the birth, joking about the child’s paternity. June grew up looking remarkably like Grogan, who was happy to fill the gap left by the non-maternal Doreen. He remained a dutiful parent, often taking June out from school, and built her a house at Taveta near the Kivoto springs, irrespective of the fact that Doreen had by then divorced and remarried Wright.

  Meanwhile, Bubbles Wright had grown up, and was in her late teens when she went to a ball at Muthaiga Club ‘with some Earl who talked politics’. He bored her, she said, but then she met the handsome Bill Delap, who shared her love of dancing. He was already married to Rosemary Montgomery, but later divorced her to marry Bubbles, now nineteen, in 1946. Bubbles remained ‘good friends’ with Rosemary, although inevitable tensions arose over the two sons of the first marriage – Bubbles was only eight years older than her eldest stepson. Rosemary, who according to Bubbles was very attractive and part of the original Happy Valley set, died of nephritis – a renal illness – at the age of thirty-nine. ‘She was very attractive and very wild,’ said Bubbles (who wore faded but unmistakable signs of beauty herself). ‘She said Bill beat her.’ She paused and added: ‘He never beat me.’ Plenty of women, she claimed, had been ‘after Bill’. Then she laughed, ‘One woman was always chasing him and she had a perfectly good husband.’

  ‘Idina?’ I suggested.

  She ignored this and said, with a touch of envy, ‘But by this time Happy Valley’s heyday was past and no one had what it took to recreate it. It’s a sort of glamour that goes with money and title.’

  ‘But you knew Idina?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes! Everyone knew her.’

  ‘And what was she like?’

  Considerably younger than Idina, Bubbles would have known her briefly in the 1940s. She smiled, with a hint of triumph. ‘She wasn’t a bit good looking, but she was small, dainty, elegant – like a bird – and she dressed beautifully.’

  ‘And what about her wild reputation?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, she had lots of army boyfriends,’ confirmed Bubbles. ‘So many people tried to restart Happy Valley and failed,’ she explained. ‘But Sunday lunches at Clouds were still memorable occasions: Idina was a great entertainer. Once she announced “I feel like a swim” and got into her sunken bath fully clothed!’ As Idina was living at Clouds by then where there was no sunken bath, Bubbles may have been referring to one of the ponds in Idina’s much-admired water gardens, her memory blurred by whatever they were drinking. Bubbles added: ‘She never had much education, she learnt from her husbands – and of course she adored books . . .’

  I showed Bubbles my recent photographs of the remaining wooden house. ‘That was the original house Bill built,’ she said. ‘When I married Bill an Italian POW built us a stone house. He used to sing on the roof. It had four or five bedrooms and was L-shaped.’ I produced the next photograph of the lonely chimney and she raised her eyebrows: ‘I’m surprised there’s nothing left of it. I have some photos somewhere . . .’ She concentrated once more on using her naan bread to polish off the mutton curry, afterwards managing a kulfi icecream and a spiced masala tea as well. I got the impression it was a very long time since anybody had wined and dined Bubbles, and was grateful for the privilege.

  When we got back to her rooms, she couldn’t find any of her photos anywhere, so she sat down again and described her former home in Happy Valley, with its lovely view across the crystal-clear trout stream at the bottom of the garden: ‘The Wanjohi River – we used to swim in it . . .’

  The rich soil had been ideal for market gardening, as well as supporting their Jersey cattle, pigs and ducks. The Delap farm was called Rayetta Estate. ‘It’s a Maasai name – I can’t remember what it means,’ Bubbles said vaguely. ‘It was 15 miles to Ol Kalou, along the worst road in Kenya! Once it took us twenty-four hours . . .’

  I remembered seeing a sign for Rayetta Primary School near the old home. Another old name lingering on.

  Bill had written a weekly column, The Shamba Man, for a local newspaper. ‘He was also a prize-winning photographer. And he used to take people up the Aberdares,’ explained Bubbles, her train of thought tumbling from one subject to another. Bubbles’ two stepsons had gone to school at Pembroke House in Gilgil. She and Bill had three daughters.

  In 1963 the Delaps had left for Australia, ‘but we returned after a few months to sack a dishonest manager’, Bubbles said. ‘By then we had six hundred acres: three hundred under pyrethrum, a school, a duka [basic shop] and plans to build a church. But when we left at independence we got a rotten price from the British government – only £4,000!’

  Bill Delap died in 1982 and was buried according to his wishes at Point Lenana, the third-highest peak on Mount Kenya and the highest that can be reached on foot. Bubbles smiled: ‘I have some pictures of him skiing up there! Nobody else did that, you know . . .’

  It had been hard to glean the information I wanted as Bubbles was actually very deaf. As I was leaving, I asked about her neighbours. Bubbles remembered an Italian neighbour. ‘She was called La Duska – I think she was a duchess – and she made gorgonzola cheese. They had a red-brick dairy. She threw marvellous parties and was very wild and attractive – a very good cook. She lived in a lovely old whitewashed mud house with parquet floors, full of beautiful furniture. After that she had some manager there for a bit . . .’

  ‘Was the manager called Wisdom?’ I asked excitedly and very loudly.

  She confirmed that he was.

  ‘So the farm was called Slains?’ I shouted.

  Bubbles thought so.

  I asked around about an Italian duch
ess who’d lived at Slains after Idina. One elderly ex-settler thought she was a countess. The wazee in the area had mentioned ‘La Dushka’. Somebody else vaguely remembered an Italian count living ‘somewhere up there’. ‘Count Cesaroni,’ confirmed another. ‘Oh yes, that is Ceaserone,’ said Solomon. But nobody knew if the duchess and the count were connected in any way.

  The former’s name is spelt variously by historians. Elspeth Huxley mentions in Pioneer Scrapbook that Liduska Hornik’s excellent gorgonzola cheeses made the area famous, while Tim Hutchinson’s Kenya Up-Country Directory lists Ladiska Hornik under ‘Thomson’s Falls’, also mentioning gorgonzola cheese. A retired farmer, Tim has laboured away for years to provide a Who’s Who of Kenya’s white settlers, who lived where – and sometimes when. A real work of love, it often relies on people’s memories, so it inevitably fails to be totally accurate all the time. Under ‘Gilgil’ in Hutchinson’s book there is a ‘Cesaroni, Maj Count A, Kipipiri 1931’, who had one daughter and, once again, the gorgonzola connection.

  Solomon had introduced me to Janie Begg, adding that she knew ‘much history’. Janie’s late father, David Begg, once lived near Gilgil, where he met his wife Lily who’d worked as barmaid at Lady Colville’s Gilgil Hotel. They married and had three daughters; Janie is the middle one. Eccentric, independent and unmarried, she speaks Kikuyu fluently and dowses with a pendulum. It was Janie who put me in touch with the mysterious ‘La Duska’. Mrs Piotto, as she was now called, lived in the Nairobi suburb of Karen, just round the corner from the spot where Erroll was murdered on the junction of the Karen and Ngong roads, beside St Francis’ Church.

  I waited at the locked gate with its sign ‘Piotto’. It took a long time, and several trips on foot from the gate along the lengthy drive to the house, for the gardener to persuade Mrs Piotto to let me in. She eventually agreed after protracted explanations that I had just visited her old home and really wanted to talk to her. ‘But she’s in a hurry,’ he told me warningly as he finally opened it.

  An elegant lady with navy slacks, grey hair and a long string of pearls over a pastel sweater met me and called to an elderly manservant for chairs to be set out in the garden. I explained I was a writer, interested in Happy Valley, which was definitely the wrong thing to say.

  ‘A writer? Ha! They all write rubbish, all of them,’ she cried in an engaging Italian accent. ‘Dina and all these people they are dead. Why not leave them in peace? It is not interesting anyway,’ she admonished. ‘They were all just people!’ She stood up, ready to see me leave. ‘Everything said about them is lies,’ she added fiercely.

  ‘I have visited Slains,’ I said tentatively. ‘I could show you some photographs.’

  I’d dug myself an even deeper hole. She let rip at me now. Why would anybody want to visit an area now ruined by the Africans? Who would want to look at destruction and ruins, at wasted farmland? Anyway, she wanted to cook lunch now . . .

  As I hastily prepared to leave she gave me a second look. ‘If you want to visit me again,’ she said very severely, ‘telephone me so I can prepare something. Here is my number.’

  It took me some time to muster up the courage to call Mrs Piotto. She wasn’t sure she even remembered me, but she invited me to tea at four o’clock sharp.

  Having tea with the duchess, who wasn’t actually a duchess, I discovered that her real name was Lyduska – she spelt it out for me. She was very much the charming hostess today and happy to talk to me, although I didn’t dare mention anything about Happy Valley, let alone any murders.

  Lyduska Piotto’s mother was Italian-Austrian and her father was a Czech in the Austrian army, she explained, as we enjoyed a beautifully prepared afternoon tea: anchovies and capers on bread, almond biscuits, and tea in bone china cups. It was a warm afternoon, but we sat beside a crackling fire – transporting us back to another life many decades ago. It would have been cold enough to need that early evening fire at Slains, nestled in the lap of a high plateau where chilled air dropped down from the Aberdare Mountains.

  I tentatively explained how much I loved houses, and the sensation of déjà vu I felt experiencing the wonderful ambience of Slains.

  Lyduska Piotto gave me a searching but gentle look. She had astonishing, brilliant-blue eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I always felt that beautiful atmosphere there too.’ She told me the story of finding this, her present home, how she had fallen for its ‘feel’. It had been a wreck of a place, but it attracted her because it was right out of town and had many beautiful trees. Her husband had thought her mad, but then he’d only lived here a very short time. She mentioned a car crash, then changed the subject.

  Lyduska told me she had been incredibly happy at Slains, perhaps the happiest ever in her life. She’d been strictly brought up. As a child, her birthday present might be a single rose. ‘I was always called a silly goose,’ she laughed, suddenly gesturing out of the window at her honking gaggle of geese, ‘so there are my sisters who live with me now!’ She smiled: ‘I love my dogs and horses too. They are friends – if you are sad you can go and be with them.’ She looked at me hard, as if suddenly reading my own thoughts: I was emotionally reeling after an unpleasant divorce, and as it happened I was sobbing nightly into the nearest cat or dog. ‘Everyone has problems,’ she said quietly, going on to tell me that her parents had separated when she was young – largely due, she believed, to her maternal grandmother’s hatred of her father. Thus she barely saw her father and when she tried to visit him before he died, it was the war and the Germans wouldn’t let her. ‘But I abused them strongly – in German,’ she added. I believed her: she’d already displayed her fiery Latin temperament on my first visit. I almost felt sorry for the Germans.

  The fire was becoming too hot now, but I didn’t want to move as Lyduska had begun talking about Slains. In 1938, aged seventeen, she first came to Kenya to live with her uncle on her mother’s side, who’d bought half of the farm. ‘You see my aunt had first met Dina in the smart circles of Venice,’ she explained, ‘and so she came home saying she had met a very pretty woman who lived in some funny place called Gilgil. That was how it began.’

  ‘Idina?’ I asked.

  She nodded, smiling fondly.

  One of Lyduska’s first social engagements in Kenya was a ball at Muthaiga Club, where she saw the Happy Valley set for herself. ‘Dina was flirting with everyone and dancing,’ she said dreamily: ‘I didn’t like Erroll – an artisan praticco – but Dina was madly in love with him. I loved to watch her.’ This puzzled me, as Idina and Erroll certainly weren’t together at the end of the 1930s. However, with the way they all carried on, it was perfectly possible that Idina still had her dalliances with her ex-husband.

  Lyduska continued with an affectionate smile: ‘Dina was not beautiful – frail looking but not frail at all, small bones but well covered in flesh, naughty but a lovely person.’ She paused, then suddenly frowned: ‘She should be left in peace. All those people should be. Writers write such rubbish about them!’

  I’d been about to ask her who she thought had murdered Erroll, but remembering her angry comments about writers on our first meeting, I asked instead about her early days in Happy Valley, which she seemed glad to talk about for hours. The young Lyduska, who I suspect was a great beauty herself, adored running wild in this exciting new and untamed country around Slains. It worried her aunt, who used to reprimand her intrepid niece: ‘She said to me, “If you don’t stop your wanderings a Maasai will rape you out there in those lonely places!” I did not listen to her, I loved this wonderful country,’ Lyduska laughed.

  When her aunt and uncle had left, Lyduska had stayed on, running Slains, which she had come to love deeply. ‘It was a beautiful house. There were waterfalls and a stream running past. The house was built of cedar tree posts, with mud in between, and it was very big – you could sleep seven or eight guests: there were chimneys in all the rooms. The main fireplace was copied from the El Greco house in Venice . . .’ She made a serpentine motio
n with her hand. ‘The walls were wavy – like this!’ She laughed: ‘Dina and her contractor were drunk when they built it.’ Her eyes shone with remembered happiness. ‘You liked my house too?’

  It would have been unkind to elaborate upon the state it was in now. ‘Yes,’ I said simply, but truthfully. ‘It’s a very special place.’

  Idina had moved away, Lyduska thought, in about 1929, leaving some silver, a few pieces of furniture and lovely French carnations in the garden. She indicated the black and white photograph of Idina in its silver frame on an elegant table. ‘She was a wonderful person, so why do they write such bad lies about her?’

  She remembered all the old Happy Valley crowd: Alice and her neighbour, a woman called Pat. She also remembered Bubbles: ‘She was a very good-looking young lady . . .’ They’d seen one another frequently as Slains and Rayetta were within reasonable riding distance of one another, the track running directly between them more negotiable to a horse than my Land Rover. I gleaned that they’d enjoyed something of a love-hate relationship. ‘She was your best friend one minute and shouting at you the next,’ Bubbles had said, adding that she enjoyed going to lunch at Slains as Lyduska was an excellent cook and entertainer: ‘She had a very pretty house, but then we fell out!’ Fifty years on, I’d noticed how both these women, each retaining a certain faded glamour, were still inclined to snipe at each other, as well as their neighbours.

  Lyduska was warming up now, relating some of the spicier stories. They all had ‘party lines’ in the 1950s: this was to do with telephones rather than drugs. There was one shared line, but each user had their own ring. So when somebody wound the handle of the telephone receiver to dial the exchange, they would ask for a certain person, and that person’s signal of, say, one long and two short rings would echo through all the houses. The person whose ring it was should have been the only one to pick up, but of course anybody could listen in, which was presumably how the exchange workers passed the long, tedious hours. Lyduska remembered listening in to one call, probably along with the rest of the valley, and hearing a breathless male voice asking: