The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

American born and a wealthy heiress, Alice Silverthorne, who’d lost her mother at a young age, had an early introduction to the ‘good’ life, drinking cocktails with her father in European night clubs, paraded as a pretty young accessory in unsuitable venues. She grew into an eye-catching young woman, exuding powerful sex appeal with her short dark bob and wide, innocent eyes. In the glamorous circles of Paris she met and married the young French aristocrat Frédéric de Janzé, a count, politician, racing driver and aspiring writer, who also moved in high circles.

  After Alice and Frédéric had produced two daughters, Nolwen and Paola, the couple visited Happy Valley. They already knew Idina and Joss, who’d enhanced their high-flying Parisian circles with wafts of the exotic. Now the de Janzés could sample the Hays’ thrilling lifestyle. Enamoured, they decided to join it, buying a farm and moving to Wanjohi.

  Alice, like Idina, added a shot of scandal to a colonial farming community, where most settler wives lived challenging lives, creating homes and farms out of virgin territory, getting their hands thoroughly dirty while dressing for comfort and practicality. Idina and Alice could afford to hire others to do the boring work while they pursued their other interests. Between them they introduced a new fashion of soft, slinky trousers – offending those more conservative memsahibs even though trousers were so practical for chilly Wanjohi. Their freestyle sex lives wouldn’t have improved their image: Joss was soon commuting between Idina or Alice in Happy Valley and Mary Ramsay-Hill on the shores of Lake Naivasha. Meanwhile, if Alice disappeared for several days with Idina’s wandering husband, Idina herself could ride over to Wanjohi Farm and find solace with Frédéric, whose poetically erotic descriptions of her in his book, Vertical Land, might well suggest that the pair found comfort in each other’s arms.

  Alice’s pet lion cub, presumably a more exciting accessory than anything to be found in Paris, came into her life one morning when the de Janzés were out riding. They spotted a family of cubs near some rocks but left them alone, assuming their parents would be around. Later two young Indian princes, passing through on a hunting safari, invited the de Janzés and Hays to dinner at their camp. There the de Janzés noticed that two of the trophies were fresh lion skins: Alice, seemingly more sentimental about animals than children – hers had been left in France – immediately worried about the cubs. She was proved right the following day when they found the newly orphaned cubs: one was already dead, another died that night, but Samson survived, becoming as notorious as his new, adopted mother for misbehaviour at parties. No doubt stories of his antics also circulated amongst the Parisian cocktails.

  Frédéric de Janzé, although he liked lions, wasn’t particularly complimentary about the inhabitants of Happy Valley in general. He accused them of being restless, nomadic types rather than colonists; ‘indefatigable amusement seekers’ as well as misfits with nervous debilities, ‘who lacked the courage to grow old, the stamina to . . . build anew in this land’. He prophetically wrote in Vertical Land of his wife Alice: ‘No man will touch her exclusive soul, shadowy with memories, unstable, suicidal.’

  Then, as Ulf Aschan describes in The Man Whom Women Loved: The Life of Bror Blixen (1987), came a disruptive new arrival ‘in the demon form of Raymond de Trafford’, who plunged into a turbulent affair with Alice. Coming from an old and aristocratic English family of wealthy landowners, de Trafford knew the ‘right’ people, including Idina and Delamere. He slotted beautifully into the Happy Valley set – a dysfunctional philanderer who drank too much and argued even more, even daring to try (without success) to outclass the erudite Frédéric de Janzé on literary subjects. When Raymond’s older brother Humphrey offered him £10,000 to be castrated, Raymond, broke as usual, said he would have one ball removed for £5,000! Ulf Aschan documents Evelyn Waugh’s description of Raymond, whom Waugh met in Kenya in 1931: ‘something of a handful, very nice but so BAD and he fights and fucks and gambles and gets disgustingly drunk all the time’.

  Frédéric was less delighted with Raymond (or Raymund, depending on which book you are reading). He whisked Alice back to Paris, but she remained unrepentant, demanding a divorce. Raymond followed them to Paris and moved in with Alice. It was early 1927 – it had taken just over a year of living in Happy Valley to wreck their marriage. Frédéric appealed to the Vatican for an annulment, with custody of the children. Alice, who’d devoted more quality time to a lion cub anyway, didn’t fight for her daughters. Raymond was to be another matter.

  After a visit to England in March 1927, Raymond returned to Paris to tell Alice the sobering news that his strict Catholic family forbade their marriage. If he imagined he could simply see her off at the station after a nice lunch, then move merrily on, he was underestimating her: there at the Gare du Nord, Alice pulled out a gun and fired at Raymond, hitting him in the chest, kidney or groin (books also vary over this), then shot herself. The incident was reported in the international press; the news reached Idina and Joss, who hastened from Kenya to France, visiting Alice in the women’s hospital of the Saint-Lazare prison. Raymond licked his wounds in England, while his family must have been basking in relief at his dual lucky escapes, from both marriage and death.

  On 23 December this true femme fatale was tried for attempted murder. Alice claimed she’d intended suicide, but acted on impulse. Raymond agreed it was an accident. It seemed that the Parisian judge had also fallen under Alice’s spell: she got off with a minimal fine.

  Alice went back to Kenya, but was deported in March, an action engineered by a bristling Lady Grigg. She couldn’t abide Alice’s very public affair with Joss, as if the French station scandal had not been enough. Thus labelled a wicked and disreputable divorcee, whose tarnished reputation would certainly not enhance that of the colony, Alice found herself back in Paris. One of her first visitors from Kenya was Joss, en route to England after the death of his father. He now had Mary Ramsay-Hill in tow – presumably she’d already worked out that her new paramour was not the faithful type. Raymond, who’d been drinking and womanising back in Kenya and was running short of money, was another frequent visitor. In 1932 Alice married Raymond: he needed her money and she wished to return to Kenya, which she could do as a ‘respectable’ married woman. Lady Grigg, mercifully, had moved elsewhere.

  It can’t have surprised many when, after three months, the de Traffords separated. Alice resumed life in Happy Valley with her pet eland and a dachshund called Minnie, who must both have been pleasantly easy company after de Trafford.

  By the late 1930s, Alice was administering drugs with a silver syringe to quell her pain, be it emotional or physical – the latter an unkind reminder of her own bullet. In Naivasha, Mary, now Joss’s wife, was addicted to morphine. But now there was the less frivolous influence of the war.

  When Erroll was murdered, Alice came under suspicion. Her ‘houseboy’ had apparently found a revolver on her land, by a bridge under a pile of stones. The car in which he’d been shot reeked of Chanel No. 5 – her perfume. Above all she’d had a practice run in the Gare du Nord. Another male admirer of Alice’s, Julian Lezard (known as Lizzie), brought her to the mortuary where she laid her erotic memories to rest. According to James Fox in White Mischief, Lezard claimed that before putting a tree branch on Erroll’s body, Alice kissed him on the lips, pulled the sheet back, smeared it with her vaginal juices and told the dead Erroll that now he would be hers ‘for ever’. Lezard was another who suspected Alice of murder, his suspicions sealed by this incident.

  Alice wasn’t arrested this time: she’d supposedly been in bed with Dickie Pembroke when the murder took place. Pembroke, a young major, was apparently obsessed with Diana Broughton, who thought him boring – probably just as well considering the several complicated love triangles raging. Evidently Pembroke didn’t mind a roll in the hay with another attractive female, while this conquest might have amused Alice, who hated Diana.

  Alice frequently visited Sir Jock Delves Broughton in jail, taking supplies and books. Many of her friends
said she never got over Joss’s death, believing this intensified the unhappiness that shadowed her remaining years. According to her letters Alice was still visiting Erroll’s grave just before she died. Meanwhile she had health problems and had to undergo surgery, her precious dog, Minnie, was ill and Dickie Pembroke was posted to Cairo.

  Alice finally put her little dog down herself and then took an overdose, but was resuscitated by a friend and a doctor. According to friend and neighbour Pat Fisher, she was very depressed and had developed a preoccupying interest in the occult.

  Alice had written to Pat after this first suicide attempt, saying: ‘Life is no longer worth living when you no longer care whether you are wanted or not.’ She asked her friend for discretion, saying in a letter published in the ‘Letters from Wanjohi’ chapter of White Mischief that it would be better if people thought she was suffering from postoperative depression: ‘It is kinder towards Dickie and my children and better for you and Flo and William.’ William was Dr Boyle – her surgeon and lover, father of Alice Percival, who had visited Clouds with us. Flo was her housekeeper.

  Alice finally shot herself on 27 September 1941, after marking her furniture and all her possessions for distribution amongst her friends, then tidying her bedroom, filling it with flowers, dressing up and making up the bed with her best bed linen, embroidered with the de Janzé crest. Stories vary: some say her bloody corpse was found by a lady guest who’d returned after shopping, while others say she was discovered, not quite dead, by her housekeeper. Alice had apparently requested that a cocktail party be held at her grave. Nellie Grant, a pioneer who arrived in the protectorate with her husband in 1912, wrote a fitting epitaph in a letter to her daughter Elspeth Huxley: ‘Alice de Trafford shot herself the other day – with surer aim, poor thing, than she applied to Raymond at the Gare du Nord. She was very miserable, did about one mile to the gallon on gin, and had had a major operation and lost her beloved little dachshund.’

  The first time I visited Alice’s former home, its dark atmosphere affected me. I somehow sensed that a lost and lonely soul had lived here. I’d imagine her to have been plagued by buried fears and feelings, perhaps to the point of paranoia. She’d had a strange childhood, treated as a ‘grown up’ by a father who has been portrayed as unbalanced himself: I couldn’t help wondering if Alice had been sexually abused. It also seemed likely that Alice was suffering from a depressive illness, which back then would not have been understood or even recognised.

  Or was I reading too much into her? Was Alice just bored by it all, determined to drop the stage curtain with a dramatic flourish?

  When I took Alice Percival to Clouds, she had talked about Alice de Trafford. As we headed along the old Wanjohi road and crossed the Malewa River, just before today’s newly erupted village called Demi, Alice said, ‘This was where Noel and Tom Eaton-Evans lived; I stayed there with them.’ She glanced off to the right at some ruins that might once have been farm buildings beside the curve of the river. ‘But I can’t see the house,’ she continued as we slowly navigated our way around rocks and chasms in the muddy road. ‘Noel Case, she was originally. She was Alice de Trafford’s manager, when she was in her late twenties. Alice never paid her staff – or Noel, who had to pay them all for her.’

  I asked if Noel had been around until Alice’s death. ‘Yes indeed. A sobbing runner called Noel after Alice’s suicide. Noel said that Alice had still been screaming inside the room, but by the time Noel had broken down the door Alice was dead.’

  Alice Percival’s father, Dr Boyle, who was by all accounts an extremely attractive man, once had a fishing cottage near Ol Kalou, Alice now told us, although he actually lived at Muthaiga. There were no signs of any fishing cottages now. Presumably they too had been smothered by today’s noisy, busy and rapidly spreading town – once just a village with a church, one duka, a branch of the Kenya Farmers’ Association and a post office.

  Alice de Janzé had plenty of friends: according to Beryl Markham’s biographer, Mary Lovell, Beryl enjoyed parties with Alice. Karen Blixen’s published letters record that she also liked Alice, well enough to invite her to stay while sorting matters out before her expulsion from Kenya. On another occasion, Karen relished the discomfort of some of her more strait-laced, highly disapproving guests when Erroll came to visit ‘for a bottle’ and brought Alice. The 5th Baron Delamere and many other friends were also said to be very fond of Alice. Then there was Idina: there was something puzzling about Alice having regular sex with the man Idina loved. Equally strange, Idina apparently condoned this liberal arrangement with the justification that Alice was her ‘best friend’. There was no mention in any books of Idina attending Alice’s funeral.

  I asked around Alice’s former neighbours. One told me that Alice had to have a policewoman living with her all the time. ‘You see she was an alcoholic and she owed money. And she had black irises grown especially for her funeral, you know!’ she added in hushed tones. Lyduska Piotto said: ‘I remember Alice; she had a deep voice and talked a lot. She adored her dogs and she had a pet cheetah. She had a parrot who said “Hole in your bum”!’

  It seemed ironic that Alice, who abandoned her own two little girls in France for the Happy Valley life, now lay beneath the pitter-patter of many thousands of little feet. I listened to the sound of the Wanjohi, gurgling unseen below Alice’s unmarked grave. Francis Bacon once compared time to a river, ‘bringing down to us things which are light and puffed up, but letting weighty matters sink’.

  The schoolchildren had backed off and now they just seemed like a bunch of rather bumptious kids in torn, ill-fitting uniforms – blue shirts and crimson sweaters, and shorts for the boys, crimson skirts for the girls. Hemlines were ragged and most of the children’s uniforms looked at least seventh-hand. Some wore worn-out shoes, but most had walked to school barefoot. One child, I noticed, seemed much paler than the others, as if his ancestry was rooted somewhere in Happy Valley’s heyday. The others had been pushing him forward as if they suspected something amiss too.

  The Kikuyu headmaster, who wore a thick black trench coat, welcomed us, asking if we would like to see around the school. I accepted, hoping to find more clues about Alice lurking under desks or behind a door. ‘Happy Valley School’ was chalked in large letters on the wooden back door of Alice’s old manager’s house. Exuding wafts of the past, an untrimmed pink rose rambled up one corner of the dark cedar wall, while a stiff parade of white arum lilies grew alongside. The rest of the school buildings – newer, cheaply constructed classrooms of grey stone with tin roofs and wooden shutters – were set to one side, covering what would once have been Alice’s front lawn. Someone had more recently planted daisies and marigolds in rows along the paths and around the school offices.

  While I avoided stinging nettles on the way to the wooden hut built over the pit-latrine, Solomon had managed to acquire a handful of large, yellow-fleshed crimson plums from the staff room. Had one of Alice’s ‘garden boys’ once planted the plum trees, I wondered, as plum juice ran down our chins. We ate them round the back, like naughty, pilfering schoolchildren.

  Solomon suddenly said: ‘I can arrange a meeting with some local wazee who can remember Harris. They can tell us the real history.’

  8

  Recollections and Dreams of Alice

  Solomon kept his word. Some weeks later we left Gilgil at first light, arriving at Happy Valley School by mid-morning, pausing on the dirt track just below the school to collect Paulo Ngugi, an old man who lived in a tin-roofed mud house beside the Wanjohi River, a few rapids down from Alice’s old home. A thin boy who looked about ten, but was probably a malnourished fourteen, watched us with a beaming smile, carrying a trout fingerling threaded on to a reed. ‘But there aren’t many fish in this river now,’ said Solomon sombrely. ‘They kill them too fast and no more are coming!’

  My Land Rover wheezed its way up a steep, deeply rutted road on to the southern shoulders of Kipipiri to a village called Kiambogo. We parked out
side a wooden shack. ‘This is the hoteli,’ Solomon announced, as proudly as if we’d just arrived at the Hilton. The hotel had one cramped room, one small window with a wooden shutter and a narrow door looking out across Alice’s former home: grey stripes of the tin roofs of Happy Valley School beside the snaking river. Behind that, the view extended north over a densely populated plateau, stretching all the way to Lake Ol Bolossat and the house where the grisly murder of Fergusson and Bingley had taken place. Kipipiri’s highest peak rose up behind our backs, its dark folds still concealing a few secret pockets of forest. To our right the smoke of huge forest fires obscured the mauve-blue walls of the Aberdares.

  ‘You are most welcome,’ said a young man in a white T-shirt advertising an American basketball team. He could have been the hotel manager, the chef or just a friendly passer-by. As he never reappeared, I never found out.

  We stooped through the wooden doorway into the relative gloom of the one-roomed hotel where we joined a group of very old men and one old woman, seated on hard benches beneath a ceiling of plastic sacking. The ones who weren’t blind peered at me with great interest.

  I ordered chai (tea) and chapattis all round. There wasn’t much else on the menu (not that an actual menu existed) and Solomon said they needed food that was easy to eat: true enough, for most of them had no teeth.

  ‘It’s best not to confuse them with too many questions,’ he explained. ‘I have just asked them to remember things and we shall just listen.’

  I listened as the wazee took pinches of snuff and reminisced in a mixture of Kikuyu and Swahili. I understood the Swahili, but Solomon had to act as translator for the curious cadences of their native tongue.

  Ngugi spoke first. He was already used to my pale and alien looks, having come in my car. ‘I was born in about 1928 and I was Alice’s cookie. I was doing ironing and housework for Alice,’ he told us. ‘She was a kind woman – she loved her dogs.’ He added that he used to be left in charge of the dogs when she went to see ‘Mr Boli’ (presumably Dr Boyle). ‘Then one day we were instructed by Alice to dig a hole before she shot her dog, then herself,’ he said in a matter-of-fact way, as if announcing part of the kitchen routine. ‘Then many wazungu [white people] came and they buried her. She even left a note on her table saying no one should be blamed!’ Ngugi would have been around thirteen when Alice died, which means he must have been the kitchen toto.