The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  ‘My nightie,’ purred a soft female voice.

  ‘I wish I could squeeze you . . .’ he began, before an explosive, masculine sound warned him that somebody was listening and the line went dead.

  Meanwhile, Bubbles, just to secure Happy Valley’s reputation, had told me that Bill’s first wife Rosemary (who’d been a friend of Alice de Janzé’s) and her friend had ‘carried on and entertained soldiers in a high-society brothel’. As second wives tend not to look kindly on their predecessors and Rosemary Delap wasn’t around to defend herself, I took the accusation with a fistful of salt. Bubbles also told me – on two separate occasions with an air of revealing a scandal – that Lyduska was very wild and had lived with her Italian boyfriend.

  During the war Lyduska and her boyfriend had gone to Italy, which was when the Wisdoms managed the farm. But they were back, Lyduska said, in 1948 and soon afterwards came the first mutterings of Mau Mau. People no longer trusted faithful servants with their house keys. Reports of murders on isolated farms or cows being hamstrung circulated wildly, deepening fear throughout the white settler community. Happy Valley was right in the danger zone.

  Lyduska recounted a night when there was a disturbance outside and some of the staff had alerted them: ‘My husband rushed out to the fields to check on the cattle and I just ran out in my nightdress without thinking.’ She paused and shook her head slightly. ‘I was about to go down the front steps, you know the ones?’

  I nodded, having ascended and descended those same steps.

  ‘. . . but it was as if an invisible arm held me back. I couldn’t go any further. My angel was pushing me away from the danger,’ she said softly. ‘There had been Mau Mau hiding in the orange trees at the bottom of those steps – seven or eight of them.’

  She had experienced something similar when she was young, in front of a German firing squad. She was the only one who wasn’t killed. ‘It was not my time then,’ she said, ‘And it was not my time at Slains to be killed by the Mau Mau either. My time will come, but not like that.

  ‘But who could you trust?’ she suddenly asked. She had known the victims of the notorious murder in the north of the region: ‘Fergusson told me that his boys loved him and would never hurt him. A week later he had been horribly murdered!’

  Lyduska had eventually sold the property in the early 1960s when the British government were buying up farms to downsize and allocate for native settlement. She sighed, ‘We only got £10,000 for nearly three thousand acres.’

  It had been a delightful tea and I didn’t want to outstay my welcome. I hadn’t discovered anything more about Count Cesaroni, nor had I asked Lyduska who she thought had murdered Erroll, but I vowed to come back and ask her again one day.

  6

  Slains Unearthed

  I couldn’t wait to go back to Slains. Alfred the caretaker had written to me in pencil, on lined paper that looked as if it had been torn out of a school exercise book, sealed in a grubby airmail envelope: ‘It is my sincere hope that you and your family have managed to cross the boundaries to this new year as we did,’ he wrote, asking after my research on the old, crumbling house. He added: ‘It is my hope that you have gone deeper as per the bone.’ Then he related how the sons of the owner of the farm had arrived with a pack of casual labourers and cut all the trees down: ‘Here is nothing but a total destruction,’ he lamented.

  Solomon shook his head at the news. ‘They do not care!’ he raged.

  When we returned to the ruin, six months had passed, and the vast cypress hedge, as well as every other tree in the vicinity, had been reduced to corpulent stacks of drying logs. We crossed the naked, newly ploughed earth where Idina (or her garden ‘boys’) must once have grown pansies, roses and probably even daffodils at this altitude, while Solomon delivered a sorrowful eulogy for the trees.

  But the plough had circled the old house with unlikely respect, even though it could have easily given it back to the earth. Now it was easier to see its layout and compare it with the old photographs. Even if the walls were only knee high in places, there were the stone steps descending in front of the door. And there was the cleft in the Aberdares behind, where a waterfall once dropped down. The shape of the land and the position of the house were exactly right. There was no mistaking Slains!

  I suddenly smiled at the unkind irony that Malcolm Watson’s wad of memories had somehow ended up in the original home of two of the people he really could not abide, and whom he incorrectly named as ‘Jocylyn Hay (sic) who became the Earl of Errol’ and ‘Lady Diana Hay-Gordon-Haldeman’. In fact, few of those who’ve written about Slains seem to have been there. Even Errol Trzebinski, the most comprehensive of researchers, says that the house faced Lake Ol Bolossat and Thomson’s Falls, and was built at an altitude of 5,500 feet. It’s actually closer to 7,800 feet and would have faced Gilgil, with Ol Bolossat over to its right.

  As I stood on the steps of Slains I recalled Trzebinski’s luscious descriptions of the Hays’ life here with a French maid and European manager among the retinue of employees – and streams of guests. Apparently, after Joss and Idina’s early morning rides, Joss changed into a kilt before enjoying a breakfast of porridge and cream. In spite of the Champagne-cocaine-morphine-tainted reputation of the Happy Valley clique, Joss was a non-smoker, an extremely moderate drinker by Kenyan standards and the first farmer to breed high-grade Guernsey cattle in Kenya. Unusually for the times and his background, he apparently didn’t like hunting, shooting or fishing either.

  But Slains played only a small part in Joss’s life; after leaving Idina he maintained his philandering lifestyle regardless of whether he was married or divorced, or whether his current wife was dying or dead. As well as affairs with Phyllis Filmer, Diana Broughton and Gladys Delamere, he seduced wild child Beryl Markham. Beryl was one of the very few women who wouldn’t have wanted to murder Erroll: she’d had no shortage of love interests, including her flings with royalty. It’s surprising nobody murdered her: she was not Karen Blixen’s favourite person, particularly as she was allegedly having an affair with Denys Finch Hatton, Karen’s lover, when he was killed in a plane crash in Tsavo in May 1931. Another great friend of Beryl’s was Frank Greswolde-Williams, who as Trzebinski says in The Lives of Beryl Markham (1993) apparently kept the Happy Valley set happy by supplying them with cocaine.

  From the front steps of Joss and Idina’s first home, the views expanded across the high plateau country, to the hazy Rift Valley, dropping away towards the pale blue wall of the distant Mau escarpment which forms its far side. In the foreground was a row of agapanthus lilies, clearly sturdy survivors. I had a strong feeling that this house and farm had been loved and that people had been happy here – and an even more powerful sense that I’d been here before, even if only in a dream.

  I thought about Joss. In the photographs he’s a slightly podgy man with those effeminate looks that had been fashionable in the twenties. He doesn’t look attractive in black and white – you evidently had to meet him in the flesh to experience his fatal charms. He’d been a ‘pretty boy’ as a child, not helped by the fact that his mother, as was the aristocratic fashion of the times, grew his hair and dressed him as a girl. There were mutterings of homosexual affairs at Eton, while later on his good friendship with the openly homosexual Fabian Wallace in Happy Valley days led to speculations that he could have been bisexual. He even allegedly wore women’s perfume.

  It’s possible that Joss, in spite of supposedly sexually awakening many women, was never satisfied with any of them himself, thus his serial infidelities. Or was he just a misogynist who needed to create a safety net of multiple women to ensure he would never be alone? Some psychologists say that men who have affairs are working out childhood needs, fears and conflicts. Nowadays they call them sex addicts. But whatever Joss’s secret reasons for bed-hopping, his female following was not to be underestimated. Nobody is still around to verify stories of his incredible skills in b
ed, nor can any woman alive claim to have penetrated that charming, heartless veneer to discover a soul mate. Skills between the sheets aside, many women get their ‘fix’ from imagining they will be the one who changes their man, stilling his roving eye in a fantastical, fairy-tale ending. At the end of the day Joss probably just slept around because he could: after all, plenty of women made themselves readily available.

  Solomon suddenly called me from behind the house, where the tearing out of roots and toppling of layers of soil had unearthed something. Among the broken clods lay a rusted cartridge, a piece of a knife blade, stained dark as if somebody had been stabbed with it; then, as we began to dig around, a blue glass perfume bottle and many fragments of broken china and glassware, one of them proclaiming it had been ‘made in England’. There was a piece imprinted with ‘Grindley’, one with a Chinese design, another hand decorated, a cracked fragment of a floral painting on glass. We had stumbled upon the old rubbish dump.

  Our pockets full of pieces of plate, the blue perfume bottle in my handbag, we returned to Alfred, who invited us into his home. Inside the cool dairy with its stone floor and heavy wooden doors, I sat on a large, scratched, leather-covered chair with hardwood armrests: the type that would cost plenty nowadays in an antique auction.

  ‘Utirere! [Kikuyu for ‘listen!’] From the historic house I rescued this chair – and these.’ Alfred showed me a wardrobe and a dresser – now painted red. They were not elegant enough to be Idina’s prize pieces, unless they had been in a corner of a dark room, I decided. ‘I’m a bit modern,’ Alfred grinned, sensing my aversion to the paint. ‘There were also grape vines, fruit trees and so many flowers all around the house, but everything went. And the roof, windows and doors, all taken. The people around here do not value history!’ He was sitting in a newer imitation-leather seat, above which hung a two-year-old calendar proclaiming the President’s support in eradicating polio and AIDS, and a plastic picture of a pagoda with formal gardens. ‘East or west’, read the inscription, ‘home is best’. The remaining wall space was papered with old newspaper cuttings and outdated election posters of an ex-MP.

  I pictured parts of Slains strewn far and wide: a bit of roof on a chicken house here, a solid wooden door on a goat house there, the smoke of valuable old furniture and cedar window frames used as firewood dispersed everywhere.

  Alfred’s eldest daughter served us generous platefuls of chicken, potatoes, carrots and rice, with mugs of soup, heavy with fat. Solomon swigged soup while extolling the colobus monkeys’ rights, outraged at Alfred’s story of one recently being trapped and killed in the area. He leant forwards in his seat beneath a line of gaudy Christmas decorations. A shiny picture of a green lawn with fountains, flowers and peacocks hung behind his head. ‘The great thing in this world’, the bold writing at the bottom told me, ‘is not so much where we are but in which direction we are moving’.

  Our host was more interested in discussing his financial problems: he had five children, ‘one is stranded from school because of no money’. He shook his head. His landlords were not paying him his due 500 shillings (around £4), his monthly wage, and the river was drying up because an aborted water project upstream had blocked its passage.

  The radio, in between crackles and fizzes, was playing ‘When the going gets tough the tough get going’. ‘Utirere, we all want better for our children than we have,’ said Alfred sadly. He talked about his father, Githuku, who’d worked for Bill Delap as cattleman alongside Kenya’s leading freedom fighter, Dedan Kimathi. When the British were grappling with the problem of Kikuyu terrorists melting into the forests without trace, Kimathi had been their most wanted man. He’d also been Delap’s milk recorder, Alfred explained, and Githuku had been one of the first men to go into hiding in the Aberdare forest with Kimathi soon after Mau Mau started. Ian Parker in The Last Colonial Regiment: The History of the Kenya Regiment (TF) states, with no mention of Delap or Wanjohi, that Dedan Kimathi was a milk recorder in Subukia until six weeks before the state of emergency.

  I told my grandmother’s story. She’d been on a farm on the edge of the Dundori forest with a dozen young live-in pupils from neighbouring European farms who attended her home-based school, which necessitated boarding because everybody lived too far apart to work it otherwise. My grandfather had been called up, so he was away tracking Mau Mau fighters deep in the Aberdare forest. One morning, when the cook brought in the tray of early morning tea, he seemed agitated and the cups were rattling like castanets. ‘What’s the matter?’ my grandmother had asked. The cook had tremblingly stuttered that ‘a man’ was by the kitchen door. My grandmother went out in her dressing gown and found a freedom fighter, his hair in unkempt dreadlocks and his clothes ragged and filthy. ‘His eyes were like a wild forest animal’s!’ she’d told me.

  The man had shown her his finger, badly severed at the joint, and she had cleaned, treated and bandaged it for him. Some hours after the man left, the schoolchildren had discovered a strange structure below the garden, at the edge of the forest. It was designed to catch the wind, which would clash two sturdy sticks of bamboo together.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ warned the African staff. ‘That man was Kimathi himself and he has left this symbol to tell others to leave this house alone . . .’ This was at least 40 miles from the Aberdare forest, but Kimathi was apparently able to cover long distances at a run.

  ‘Utirere!’ said Alfred. ‘When he died Kimathi was missing one finger!’

  My grandmother, by the sound of it, had failed to save Kimathi’s finger, but their home remained untouched throughout the state of emergency.

  Alfred himself had been born on the Delap farm in 1954 – a year after his father had been one of three freedom fighters to launch one of the first attacks on British settlers. Together the three men had crept up on the home of Charles Fergusson, the white settler-farmer who’d been in Kenya for thirty years. As the elderly man sat down to dinner with his young student farmer, Richard Bingley, they were attacked and murdered.

  I thought of the coincidences: one of Delap’s servants had done the horrible deed – and now I’d met his son. Perhaps Githuku had even been one of the men who hid at the base of the steps at Slains that night Lyduska had run out in her nightdress.

  ‘Slaughtered into pieces,’ concluded Alfred, waving a chicken bone. ‘Then after many years when Kimathi was killed by the British my father went back to work for Delap and they all became friends again.’ The song on the radio had switched to ‘It’s a Beautiful Life’.

  7

  Soccer After Suicide

  The pupils of Happy Valley School had spotted us through the windows. They streamed out of their classrooms, surrounding us on the playing fields: at least 400 wildly excited children between the ages of five and fifteen. They pushed around us, pressing in close enough to touch our skin and hair. I had a friend from France with me – also blonde – and we were both feeling uncomfortable. This invasion of our space was becoming threatening. The noisy, undisciplined mob around us made it impossible to see beyond the thick wall of dark faces.

  ‘These children are very rude!’ Solomon appeared, brandishing a large stick, causing them to scream and scatter. ‘Many of these children have not seen a white person before,’ he explained. We were visiting the former home of the third member of Happy Valley’s notorious triumvirate, the beautiful, colourful Alice de Janzé, later de Trafford. Portrayed by different writers as unbalanced and unpredictable, Alice was also irresistible: before taking her own life, she not only played the ukulele, but sang seductively, mixing wicked cocktails in between popping drugs. In photographs she always looks exotically sultry, even eccentric: with a lion cub on her lap, or posing with the Happy Valley brigade on the front steps of rambling bungalows. But she never smiles.

  Alice’s former farm lies roughly halfway between Slains and Clouds, on the western shoulders of Kipipiri. Her house would have faced Lake Ol Bolossat, now a glistening sheet of water to the right of the many new
tin roofs of Ol Kalou town, although then there would have been no houses to mar Alice’s view. The Wanjohi River flowing to our right would have provided her water supply. All that remained of Alice’s home now were a few foundation stones, half buried under a sprawl of Kikuyu grass. Solomon pointed out the one surviving walnut tree in the middle of a field, looking as if it had come under frequent assault from an axe. There were some long, low buildings at the back: the old servants’ quarters. Meanwhile, at the side, where the road circled round and crossed a small ravine, was Alice’s manager’s house, built out of dark-stained cedar wood with a tin roof, although parts of it still had patches of older shingle.

  Solomon knew this area more intimately than any other corner of Happy Valley. ‘Harris [as he pronounced Alice – the Kikuyu tend to mix up their r’s and l’s] was buried somewhere around here.’ He indicated a football goalpost close to the river. ‘And I was born just there!’ He pointed at the nearby hill. Perhaps his own roots accounted for his particular fascination with Alice: of all the Happy Valley crew, she’s the one he talked about most.

  I’d read a bit about Alice, plenty of sensational stuff unravelling a story of drama and despair. James Fox, in White Mischief, along with various other writers on Kenyan colonial times, provides a kaleidoscope of detail that seems to shift with every turn of the page.