The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  ‘White mischief has become black mischief,’ complained Solomon as he materialised on the passenger seat, having removed the drunk, who had begun to bang his head on the bonnet.

  In my rear-view mirror I could see the smoke from the neglected fires of charcoal burners, running loose, eating deep into the forest, destroying yet more trees and expelling those remaining wild creatures.

  ‘But we can return soon,’ said Solomon, ‘to the house of Harris’s neighbours, Mary Miller and Major Bogosta. His house is very old.’

  ‘Bogosta?’ I asked, puzzled.

  Solomon wrote it down. ‘Bockostone’.

  ‘Ah! Buxton,’ I said.

  Geoffrey Buxton was the first settler in Happy Valley – before Mau Mau and both world wars; before Idina and Joss. According to a mysterious somebody who’d once lived there and drawn a very wobbly looking map by hand, then sent it to a friend of a friend who’d recently sent it to me, Major G. Buxton’s Satimma (sic) Farm was 2,500 acres. Next door, heading north towards Ol Bolossat, following the edge of the Aberdares Forest Reserve, was David Leslie-Melville’s Airdrie Farm of 5,000 acres, and bordering both was Ketai Farm – which, the artist had noted, was ‘bought in 1927 from Hamilton Harrison and Matthews Solicitors, previously Charles Gordon’s’. He’d been Idina’s second husband, with whom she’d run to Kenya on the rebound from her first marriage. Then, still heading north, there was Delap’s farm Rayetta, and beyond that Slains. This area, then, could have been Idina’s initial Happy Valley home. Meanwhile, on the other side of Buxton’s, towards the Kipipiri forest, the map marked Alice de Trafford’s Wanjohi Farm, which was 600 acres. Apart from the fact that the map is upside down if you put in the poles correctly, the rivers were right and the names tallied with my research.

  Our next safari took us into the heart of the valley to visit the old homes of Alice’s former neighbours. It was the dry season and the stony road from Ol Kalou to Wanjohi was flanked by flat, dusty beige country, its spikes of grass interspersed with the red-orange blooms of the hardy aloe plants. The blue bulk of the Aberdares ran alongside, to our left. Our progress was bumpy, dusty and slow, affording us plenty of time to make out a patch of old roof or wall, or a sudden flash of colour from an exotic flowering tree or shrub hiding behind the newer, concealing rows of fast-growing, non-indigenous trees. This was a safari planned to last several days and we were in no hurry.

  We stopped at a grey-stone, red-roofed house, built in Cape Dutch style – the first surviving house we’d reached on the right. The man who lived there, Solomon said, ‘used to whip his people!’

  ‘A very cruel man,’ Bubbles Delap expanded later. ‘He used to beat his staff.’ She used to ride over to see him (several hours away, but to young Bubbles it was presumably rare entertainment). ‘He was always very pleasant, inviting me in for tea. His wife would disappear hastily into the kitchen,’ she explained. ‘But then once he told me not to ride there again unless invited. He was up to no good!’

  A few months before independent Kenya’s new flag was raised at midnight on 12 December 1963, J.M. Kruger from Ol Kalou wrote to the East African Standard, complaining of the increase in violent crime, concluding it couldn’t be stopped because there were so many unemployed, hungry and landless people in the area waiting for their free gifts of promised land. Kruger ended his letter: ‘In these circumstances, some of us have decided to sell our loose assets and leave the country before independence.’ Presumably Kruger joined the many disillusioned Boer farmers on their trek back to South Africa, following the footsteps of their ancestors in reverse, just over half a century after they had first arrived to carve out a living in fresh lands. These dyed-in-the-wool men were not prepared to live under black rule.

  An avenue of chopped-looking jacarandas lined the drive to Kruger’s former house. The place felt eerily uninhabited as we wandered around the dry, empty pond, past an overgrown cypress hedge and round the back of the house to the many outbuildings, one of which would have been an outdoor kitchen. There was a locked door and a sign saying that this was the Land Settlement Office. The window panes were painted white, some sealed with newspaper from the inside, making it impossible to look in, although one broken window revealed a stack of files under the dust and cobwebs. Although it was a weekday, the silence was all-pervasive, as if the house had found peace at last and simply frozen into the bliss of it for ever.

  ‘Where are the people who work here?’ I asked Solomon, who smiled at me kindly as if I’d asked a stupid question.

  When our car refused to start, a man suddenly appeared, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. ‘I am the land settlement officer,’ he announced without enthusiasm, although presumably we did not look like anyone who would be asking him to find our file. He had been here three years, he added, as if that might excuse his exhaustion. We explained the car situation and asked for assistance in push starting it. After a despairing glance around at the surrounding emptiness, which failed to conjure up any help, the man looked at the heavy Land Rover wearily.

  ‘It will just need a small push,’ I said brightly.

  I was wrong, of course, and after we’d driven away from the poor man, who looked as if he would rather fall asleep under one of the jacarandas than walk the distance back to wherever he’d emerged from, Solomon said: ‘He is just staying here to rest!’

  After inhaling plenty more dust, we came to another house on the left that Solomon said was ‘Gillett’s house’. This tallied with the 1954 survey map, which differed from the hand-drawn version in showing the names of more recent settlers. John and David Gillett were two brothers about whom stories varied. ‘They used to go and visit Idina,’ said Bubbles. But Joan Heath, a Kipipiri resident in the fifties, told me, ‘John and David Gillett weren’t very sociable. We occasionally saw them at Ol Kalou.’

  Tim Hutchinson’s Up-Country Directory told me that Major David Weham Gillett married Myra, was at Ol Kalou in 1948, and was second-in-command in the Kenya Regiment, after being in the King’s African Rifles from 1939 to 1946. His brother, Captain John Stuart, married Moerag. Ian Parker recorded in The Last Colonial Regiment that David Gillett ended his war service in the senior ranks and rejoined the Kenya Regiment as a private, but was immediately recommissioned.

  Gillett’s stone house, with a mossy, green tin roof and various outbuildings, was built on a tongue-shaped spit of land, surrounded by an almost circular bend in the river. The place seemed deserted until a gaggle of small barefoot children in ragged sweaters appeared on the other side of the gate and climbed through the fence to get a better look at us. They didn’t speak English – except for one word: ‘Sweet!’ they chanted, holding out dirty hands. I managed to find a grimy half roll of mints in the car before we drove on.

  A little further along the road, Solomon instructed me to turn left again. ‘To a very big house,’ he promised. ‘It was the house of Gibbs.’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Alistair Monteith Gibb was the son of a Scottish engineer, Brigadier-General Sir Alexander Gibb, founder in 1922 of the British engineering consultancy Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners. Amongst its many designs was the 1936 Kincardine Bridge across the Firth of Forth. In 1927 Alistair married Rosemary, daughter of the Earl of Lovelace; they were divorced in 1940, after which he married the Hon. Daisy Yoskyl Consuelo Pearson, daughter of the 2nd Viscount Cowdray, (whose mother was a Spencer-Churchill) in 1944.

  Alexander Gibb was great-uncle to the current Lady Delamere. Lord Delamere later informed me that Alistair Gibb had bright-red hair, therefore half the Happy Valley children of the time were born with red hair. ‘They all swapped men on a Sunday,’ he said, ‘the women staying at home and the men moving wives.’ Lady Delamere laughed it off with, ‘Oh well . . .’ The Rooken-Smith brothers, former neighbours, told me later that John Gillett had managed Gibb’s farm. Alistair Gibb himself, when he was around, generously supported the fledgling Ol Kalou polo club (Joss had been a great polo player, initiating the game on a rough field at Slains
in the 1920s), becoming chairman. Ironically he was killed in a polo accident in 1955 in Britain.

  The imposing house was visible from some distance away while we approached it down a long, straight drive. As we grew closer I could see that this stone building with its steep shingle roof still looked reasonably intact by Happy Valley standards. The Aberdares reared up close behind, with some caves over to the left, about halfway up, where the Mau Mau had once hidden, and where before that, according to Solomon, the Happy Valley-ites had gone to wine and dine around splendid fires, their gourmet meals carried up the steep paths by a fleet of obedient servants.

  The spring that had once risen in the Aberdares and gushed down to supply water to the house had dried up, Solomon said. However, in spite of this former supply of fresh mountain spring water, he added, he’d been told by a former employee of Gibb’s that this English gentleman insisted on bringing in bottled water. I looked at the cleft in the mountain wall behind us, imagining it once long ago, misty from the spray of the waterfalls tumbling down. Now the ravine was dry and the vegetation sparse.

  We parked in front, on the lower terrace of what once would have been a vast green lawn, sloping towards dams and a long view. An old cabbage tree grew in front of the house, but otherwise there was little garden left. ‘Colobus love this tree,’ said Solomon. Unlike the cluster of eucalyptus trees behind the house, which, he complained, suck up valuable water and prevent the growth of indigenous plants.

  We walked around the house, past semi-circular steps at the back door and the walled-in staff quarters to one side. We counted five chimneys. There were swarms of bees in the roof. I followed Solomon through an open side door, unable to shake off the feeling I was trespassing, down a long dark passage with locked doors at regular intervals. There was a pile of charcoal at the far end of the corridor. Chicken feathers were scattered around; either there’d been a cock fight, it appeared, or a chicken had been slaughtered in here. An old flip-flop lay halfway along the corridor, as if shed by some ghostly figure while running from something. Yet the whole place seemed extraordinarily empty, even of atmosphere. It somehow felt as though it had been built, but barely lived in.

  Back in the bright sunshine, we walked around to the front door, facing west and looking out towards the distant blue ridge that was the far side of the Rift Valley. There was a sign on the door: ‘Assistant Chief’s Office’. Another haven of apathy, it seemed.

  A neighbour had wandered over by now and he told us the old house was part of a secondary school. It was term time and the quiet behind the sealed doors was remarkable. Had the pupils taken vows of silence? Seemingly in answer to my puzzled thoughts, the headmaster himself appeared from behind a wall, introducing himself as Ngugi.

  ‘Is this really a school?’ I couldn’t help asking.

  ‘Yes, but it is not in use yet,’ he told us. ‘There is no money to renovate it, but if we can find money we will probably use it as dormitories for the girls.’ He looked at me hopefully, but I couldn’t see that it needed any renovations, just a good sweeping and scrubbing which wouldn’t cost anything. He was unable to help us with any enticing titbits on the house’s past, but stressed we were welcome to visit again any time, and bring friends, presumably rich ones who might help with the required funding.

  Continuing along the road, passing the cleft in the Aberdares which had once been the waterfall above Slains and the desecrated forest that lay above Rayetta, we reached the ridges of Kipipiri, rising to our right. On its northern foothills, a small knoll showed us the position of Alice de Janzé’s former farm, which back in the 1920s and 30s would have spread over Kipipiri’s north-facing, forested shoulders. Now these were untidily adorned with a mishmash of metal roofs, garish in the sunlight. We were entering the top end of the steep-walled Wanjohi valley.

  Nowadays Wanjohi town, the noisy new addition to the valley, nestles between these northernmost slopes of Kipipiri and the long, protective wall of the Aberdares. This green enclave, trapped in by mountains on two sides, is the only true valley, although of course none of the original scarlet women of unscrupulous morals ever actually lived in it. As I wondered what colour would be ascribed to men of similar morality, the shadows of the enclosing mountains fell on us. It was early, but the valley had already lost its sun. Solomon wound up his window while I shivered and reached for my sweater. We drove into Wanjohi town with its scruffy stone shops, butcheries smelling of last week’s slaughter, piles of second-hand clothes for sale along the roadsides and vegetables stacked on makeshift stick racks in open kiosks. The only sign of wealth was a Catholic church with a metal steeple and a fairly modest (for the Catholics) stained-glass window.

  ‘It was built when I was in standard two,’ announced Solomon, following my gaze. ‘I was ten and it was 1971.’ Solomon had told me he was born in 1959, so he was evidently getting his sums wrong. ‘See those big trees over there?’ He pointed over to the right – far more excitedly now. ‘That was my school and those are the trees I planted at the same time they made this church. Now my trees are taller than the church!’

  It was remarkable how Solomon could talk about his childhood and youth with any enthusiasm. Things had improved marginally by the time he reached his twenties; his mother, though now ailing, had mellowed towards her youngest son, while always warning him to keep his head down. But after she died, Solomon was left at the mercy of his brothers, whose contempt for him had not waned over the years. During one of his many foot safaris through the wider Happy Valley area, Solomon had met Esther. Once she’d agreed to be his wife, he took her home, but his brothers opposed the match, refusing to accept her into the family fold, not least because she was uncircumcised.

  Solomon and Esther built themselves a small hut on the edge of his family land where they constantly had to watch their backs. Esther gave birth to their first two children, both daughters, and cultivated a small corner of the plot to grow their food, while Solomon found temporary work in the tea estates of the Nandi Hills in western Kenya. Many people in Kenya leave their rural homes and families to find work in towns or on large farms, sending money home. Now Solomon was able to send Esther the bulk of his monthly wages, pitiful as these were, so at least she had a little spare cash for luxuries like tea and sugar, or in case one of the children fell sick.

  Solomon was fired from his job after he’d reported the illegal charcoal burning that daily destroyed the nearby forest. He was lucky to find another job and even luckier when his constant cries about the destruction of the forest were heard by an expatriate manager. The man listened to Solomon, took him under his wing, promoted him and created a new job for him, starting tree nurseries with the aim to replant the area’s decimated forests that had once surrounded the tea plantations. Solomon was ecstatic to be embarking on an environmental career at last, as well as now having a little more money to send home.

  But his luck ran out. Tribal clashes hit the area, accompanied by violent killing, looting and burning. Solomon’s expatriate friend returned to the UK. Solomon tried to continue his tree-planting work, but without his friend’s support he soon discovered that no more money was forthcoming for ‘unimportant’ conservation projects. It was then that Solomon received the cruel news that his hut had been burnt down and his wife and children chased away from their home.

  Solomon pointed out where his old home had been, on the lower foothills of Kipipiri, above Alice’s former farm. We drove on, passing the Wanjohi River, which runs through the town, its pristine waters sullied by a jumble of plastic litter. Off to the left was the road that went up to Delap’s, first crossing the river. We drove along it, as Solomon wanted to show me ‘a historic house’. Immediately after the bridge, on the right, a stark brick ruin, stripped naked of roof, windows and doors, stood in the middle of an untidy field of green grass behind a broken fence. Once it must have been an imposing double-storey home and, going by the hand-drawn map, it would have been on Charles Gordon’s Ketai Farm.

  ‘Any
idea whose it was?’ I asked Solomon as we gazed at the ruin.

  ‘It was the house of somebody called Davis.’ Solomon had only known it in the early 1960s. ‘Then later my mother took her pyrethrum there. Then it was the office of the settlement board. Now it has been grabbed!’

  We drove back into Wanjohi, turning left, then left again to Wanjohi hospital. Solomon’s friend Suzanne, a Canadian volunteer studying AIDS, was temporarily staying there. ‘Suzanne likes colobus monkeys very much,’ Solomon enthused, ‘and she helps me.’ Suzanne was currently away, but had said we could stay in her house. ‘It is a nice house,’ Solomon smiled. ‘It even has a toilet that can flush!’ The relatively new hospital lay between two rivers, one of which was dry. Green grass, soiled with litter, surrounded the ample, mostly empty staff housing. White arum lilies stood stiffly to attention in a line along one side of the hospital. We walked past the long, open corridors stretching between the empty wards. A smell of eucalyptus and pine wafted across from the trees lining the river banks, but there was no whiff of disinfectant, chloroform or even hospital food. Through a window I could see an empty bed with a curtain rail around it, but no curtain. Apart from a poster about a World Bank project on sexually transmitted infections, there was no sign of life – or even death.

  Somewhere underneath all this, Solomon said, lay the foundations of the former house of a white farmer the locals had called Murefu, meaning tall. One old man we spoke to said that ‘Ceaserone’ had lived here: was this Lyduska’s Count Cesaroni? The 1954 map (which misspelt or simply missed out altogether some names of people and farms, but presumably once helped British troops work out what was where during Mau Mau) marked the dwelling beside the Wanjohi River as ‘Turner’ – next door to ‘Case’.

  I asked around exhaustively but nobody had heard of any Turner living in the Wanjohi valley. Finally Bubbles Delap unexpectedly came up with the answer. ‘Oh yes, the Turners left for England,’ she said, ‘so we leased their farm – it was called Flau Farm.’ (She spelt it out, in case I’d spelt it wrong, which I had.) ‘It was right on the river – we used to swim there. Once I remember a buffalo swimming down it! We grew daffodils there . . .’