The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  Another of Solomon’s colobus-loving friends was introduced as Mama John, using the name of her eldest son. This is common in Kenya – I have grown used to being called Mama Michael. Mama John lived next door to Suzanne in another of several hospital staff houses – built on what was once presumably part of the Turners’ and then the Delaps’ garden. Judging by the older, hand-drawn map we were on land that would once have been Charles Gordon’s before the second wave of post-Second World War settlers arrived to try their luck on smaller farms, sized down from those of the original soldier-settler scheme.

  Mama John’s husband was a doctor, employed by the government, but he’d gone to work elsewhere as the hospital was devoid of equipment, including drugs. John himself, her eldest son of about three, was aptly dressed for the cold in a woolly hat and anorak. He jumped on to my lap with a beaming smile and said: ‘Kendal!’

  ‘Kendal was the volunteer from America who was here some time ago,’ explained Solomon, ‘and to us all white people look much the same!’

  ‘We all liked Kendal,’ said Mama John from the kitchen.

  ‘Why are there no medicines at this hospital?’ I asked Mama John when she came back with steaming tin mugs of sweet, stewed tea.

  She shrugged.

  ‘But what do people do when they are sick?’ I persisted.

  ‘Finding medicines is bahati [luck],’ she replied. ‘People just have to go to the private clinics. That is where my husband has gone to work.’

  The doctor came back later. He explained that a Catholic missionary organisation had built the hospital, but then left it up to the government. ‘But how can we work here when the government gives no money or equipment?’ he asked.

  John was showing me the exercise book in his school bag. Somebody had written the alphabet in capitals, and he had scribbled his own designs below each letter.

  ‘Kendal,’ he repeated happily.

  The doctor told me that Kendal and her husband, both VSOs, had been deported for upsetting some political bigwig who was illegally selling endangered hardwood from the ‘protected’ forest. Such stories are so common in Kenya one’s mind tends to gloss over the details.

  Our hot water (for washing, Mama John explained) was heating outside on a jiko, a small charcoal-heated cooker, and meanwhile we were served delicious yellow omelettes made from eggs laid by the friendly chickens who kept wandering into the kitchen. Mama John’s house was luxurious compared with most of Happy Valley’s rural homes; its stone walls encased several rooms, albeit very small ones. The cramped living room managed to squeeze in a bed, two sofas, two low tables with crocheted covers in a loud pink, a very modern, shiny dresser and a sewing machine. The walls sported a glitzy clock, all gold paint and roses, and several out-of-date calendars with very European scenes – tulips and windmills, New Forest ponies and the Alps.

  Outside, the grass was flecked with gum leaves and plastic litter. ‘Case planted these gum trees,’ said Solomon, indicating the 100-feet-high giants, quietly shedding their aromatic leaves around us. ‘I remember a big dam here when I was a boy. There were so many birds then.’

  Damp darkness descended like a heavy blanket, cold air blowing down from the Aberdares, catching us unawares. It was time to bed down in Suzanne’s house, where there were light switches but no electricity. ‘Once there was a generator, but it was stolen,’ said Mama John, producing a candle. A few dim lights issued from one hospital window – ‘the maternity wing,’ she said. I consoled myself with the thought that as most Kenyan women are so practised at having (and delivering) babies, presumably the lack of light and doctors was not a problem.

  The lights of Wanjohi town were on now, the evening star suspended above as if poised to guide the wise men. Voices floated up, and somewhere in the town a dog yelped. Exhausted from the long day on rough roads we slept well, grateful for a proper toilet and even a shower – with cold running water. I opted for washing in the hot water Mama John had heated in a sufuria.

  Mama John brewed us more sweet tea the next morning. I took mine outside, drinking in the bracing air and wondering if Idina had stood on this same spot when she first arrived in Africa, a young bride for the second time, her two young sons back in England. How had she felt, beneath that initial giddy exhilaration of being in a beautiful, untouched valley in Kenya’s highlands?

  10

  The First and the Cursed

  After many farewells and John’s disappointed face to see us, like Kendal, leave so soon, we drove on past a track on the left where Solomon pointed at the newly built house lurking behind a high kei-apple hedge: ‘That used to be the home of W.H. Case. Now only the old chimney is left.’ In Kenya people tend to have signs on their gates, usually with their initials and surname, which would explain why Solomon remembered the name and initials from his childhood days. There was something faintly disconcerting about the place. ‘It is cursed,’ said Solomon after we had passed. ‘All the family there have died, and the ones who are left, they are mad!’ ‘Mad?’ I asked.

  ‘Yesss! See there?’ Solomon pointed at a shadowy figure on the road ahead, who dived into a hedge and vanished.

  Debbie Case, who lived in Naivasha and did tireless charity work in the area, was the granddaughter of William Case, who originally came from Australia. Excited to have first-hand information on another settler, I spoke to Debbie, who’d endured a difficult life and was to die prematurely of cancer. She explained that William and his wife, Elizabeth, had three children: two boys, one of them Debbie’s father, and their sister Noey.

  ‘Noel?’ I asked, thinking of several books on Happy Valley which mentioned Noel Case.

  ‘Not Noel,’ Debbie insisted. ‘Noey – the writers got it wrong.’

  Vi Case, Debbie’s aunt, had died fairly recently in Australia. They’d lived on the Malewa River, nearer Ol Kalou. Vi Case had probably been the last person alive who might have known Count Cesaroni and the Turners – she might even have remembered Charles Gordon.

  ‘I remember the station was called stationi ya sanduku [Kiswahili for ‘the station of the suitcase’],’ Debbie told me. No railway had ever ventured into Happy Valley, so presumably she meant one of the stations on the now defunct Gilgil–Thomson’s Falls line, which was begun at the end of 1928 and completed in 1930, making life marginally easier for settlers who, up until then, had to haul ox wagons through deep, glue-like mud which would regularly engulf the only road.

  Former neighbours confirmed that the Case family hadn’t been remotely interested in the parties of the Happy Valley set, although Noey had got to know Alice de Janzé well. When her parents were building their house in the late 1920s, Noey had ventured up the hill to look around Alice’s farm. It was available for rent while Alice was in exile. The Cases took it on, Noey tending the garden and house, then staying on as housekeeper when Alice returned in 1933.

  Still in search of Buxton, we drove deeper into the valley. With Alice’s farm now up on our right, Solomon directed me left down a track until we came to a wooden house on the right, just beside the track. ‘This was the house of Mr Shaht!’ said Solomon. ‘The manager of Major Bogosta.’

  Karihe, one of the old men we’d spoken to in the hoteli above Alice’s house, had remembered Buxton’s manager. ‘We called him Kanyinya. He trained horses. Everyone in Happy Valley took their horses there, until he left in 1939. He had cows too,’ Karihe added with considerably more enthusiasm, ‘and his other name was Mr Shaht.’

  It was a small, modest, rectangular house: cedar off-cut walls, capped by a tin roof. There were no windows, only wooden shutters that looked as if they had not been opened for a long time, giving the impression the house was sleeping soundly. An elderly man in a torn shirt came out, taking off his hat to reveal white hair. He was delighted at our interest in his house. ‘I was born here,’ he told us in Kiswahili, ‘I became the gardener for Mr Shaht. He was a very good man. I live in here now and I look after the garden. I built this new kitchen here after Kanyinya l
eft.’ He pointed to the outdoor kitchen, standing like a modern shrine to those old, colonial outdoor kitchens, where the memsahibs taught astonished Kikuyu ‘boys’ the intricacies of soufflés and brandy snaps. Today’s affair was a basic kitchen, open on one side with a charcoal jiko, a low stool for the person cooking to sit on and a washing line stretching from its corner post to a tree. Tea and maize meal with a garnish of vegetables were probably the forte of this kitchen.

  The old gardener pointed down the rough track. ‘Major Buxton’s house is just down there. It is even older and made with mud. I was told it was the first house built around here. But Major Buxton lived only half the year here, the rest of the time he lived in England.’

  A little boy in flip-flops several sizes too big followed us around shyly as we looked at the garden, where surprisingly there was a profusion of red and yellow daisies, dahlias, a tangle of roses and even a productive orchard, with tree tomatoes and apples rising triumphantly above the maize. ‘I planted these flowers and trees, so I will always look after them,’ the old man said proudly, his eyes suddenly clouding. Then he brightened again: ‘You will come inside for tea,’ he said.

  ‘We just had . . .’ I began, but Solomon gave me a look. Nobody is allowed to refuse tea, let alone be in any sort of hurry, in rural Kenya, so we trooped into the dark house, ducking under the broken guttering, along a wooden passage, through a panelled room and into a dark sitting room with a red-brick fireplace. We met the old gardener’s wife, then another younger wife – although I didn’t establish whose – and a gaggle of youngsters who could have been children or grandchildren.

  The young wife said in English, ‘Wherever you go you must take breakfast!’ and we were ushered into a small dark room and invited to sit on a new, imitation-leather, high-backed seat. The old gardener, wise to the ways of Europeans, forced open the shutter. The house, one eye suddenly open wide, was filled with a shaft of light down which specks of golden dust danced. We were looking on to the sunlit side of the Aberdares, so close you could see the cap of moorland above the feathery forests of bamboo, clinging to the steep upper slopes. The young wife chattered away, enjoying practising her English on us. ‘My sister is married to a mzungu,’ she explained. ‘Myself, I am a nursery school teacher at Passenga. You know the place?’

  All the old gardener’s children lived here, he explained happily. The grown-up ones had their own wooden huts, erected in the field outside. There was a wonderful sense of security about it all, and a contentment seldom found in our own scattered, fragmented families. But the old wooden house was letting itself go, as if it was too old to care any longer. The planks of the floor were blackened by the jiko in the middle of the room. The smoke-darkened ceiling was pitted with vacant, black holes.

  The old gardener talked about a Mr Griffin, who had also lived here. His memories came and went, suddenly melting away like the dew on the grass outside.

  After we had been generously fed with uji, delicious maize meal porridge, and augmented by more tea, we thanked our kind hosts. ‘It was a blessing to have you,’ they assured us.

  ‘Tell Mrs Shaht,’ said the old man suddenly, ‘that I still care for the garden every day.’ He sighed and went quiet.

  His grandchildren giggled behind their hands, but I shook his hand and said, ‘Of course I will.’ At that stage it was a rash promise, as I had no idea where the Shahts, actually the Charts, were.

  Through Janie Begg’s sister, Sheila, I was able to contact Jean Konschell, née Chart, in Zimbabwe. Jean wrote back promptly, delighted to hear the garden they’d enjoyed from 1930 for almost two decades was still blooming. She recalled her happy childhood ‘in that beautiful valley, playing polo and fishing in rivers that were teeming with trout’. Solomon had already pointed out to me the old polo ground, still a flat open space, as if commemorating those galloping steeds.

  Jean related how her father, Fred Nye-Chart, had been five when his family was one of those paid by the British government to come up from South Africa prior to the First World War. Fred’s mother had been the eldest of nine Aggett children, some of whose descendants still live in Kenya today. Fred had later become farm manager for Colonel Buxton and his partner Sir Alexander Gibb. After the Buxtons returned to England, Fred had been made a partner in Satima Farm. The Charts had then moved from the small wooden house to the Buxtons’ bigger, Tudor-style house.

  ‘My father was known as Bwana Siagi [Kiswahili for ‘Mr Butter’],’ Jean wrote, ‘because he made butter which had to go by ox wagon, taking two days, to Ol Kalou. The wagon then returned with supplies and the mail.’ As well as the dairy herd, the Charts kept Arab horses. ‘As children we didn’t have prams, but were led on a horse, strapped in a basket saddle. Our father often rode in a horse and buggy. Later on we had an old Ford which was occasionally cranked up to take us to boarding school in Nakuru. But horses were our main recreation and transport. My sister, brother and I used to ride to the Millers’ house next door . . . a beautiful home and garden and a lovely Norland Nanny named Marjory Thompson.’

  She continued, ‘Dad was not allowed to join up for the war as he was needed on the land, running all the surrounding farms for those who did join up. I remember my mother growing vegetables in that beautiful black soil and packing them into kikapus to go to Nairobi. That was her war effort.’ Like all the other families in the colony, the Charts anxiously listened to every radio broadcast for news of family back in England.

  Later on Fred Chart had several heart attacks and eventually had to move to a lower altitude near Lake Elmenteita, where he farmed – not far from my current home, near the southern end of Lord Delamere’s Soysambu. The 5th Baron Delamere remembered him, relating how once, when invited up for lunch, Fred had given him some grass to plant which was supposedly good for feeding cattle. ‘He’d bought it from what was then Southern Rhodesia and the grass is now all over the country,’ said Lord Delamere, adding that Chart had the grass’s scientific name wrong.

  ‘Fred Chart was kali,’ Janie Begg told me, using that wonderful Kiswahili word that emphasises the sharpness of a knife, the potency of a curry or the fierceness of a dog – or a bwana or memsahib.

  Another lady who can be kali, Janie’s sister Sheila Begg, wrote from South Africa. She remembered staying with the Charts in the manager’s house in 1936. Margery Chart had home-schooled Sheila and her own two eldest children. As British schools were few and far between, most farmers’ wives taught their children until they were ready to go to these boarding schools – although the unluckier ones were sometimes packed off at only five years of age. Sheila returned to stay with her childhood friend Jean in about 1944, she thought. By now the Charts had moved into the main Buxton house. They slept upstairs – the first time Sheila had been in a two-storey house: ‘It had a beautiful, well-kept garden with a stream running through it and a water mill for electricity. Fred Chart was a very hard-working, go-ahead fellow and a colourful character.’ She added: ‘One of the Buxton brothers was keen on bowls so had built the long, enclosed veranda, the whole length of the house, for indoor bowls. The Buxton brothers also built Gilgil Club and the present Gilgil River Lodge. To me the Buxton family is far more interesting than Alice de Janzé. The Buxtons did something constructive for the country.’

  After the Charts left in 1947 Satima was managed by John McLoughlin, who later went on to manage Ndabibi, the farm by Lake Naivasha that Diana, by then Lady Delamere, had inherited from her third husband Gilbert Colville. McLoughlin and his wife Hilda finally retired at Soysambu, where Diana ruled the sizeable roost. However, after Hilda had died of an asthma attack, John – unable to bear the loneliness – shot himself on the front steps of Jolai House, only a few miles from where I would make my home thirty years later.

  Heading on to the Buxtons’ house, we inched down a road where huge boulders alternated with deep ruts. It was evident that nobody drove, or even cycled down here – there was a much better footpath off to our left. The hardy Land Rover bounc
ed along in a crescendo of rattles, until we were beside a lovely old house with chipped white plaster clinging to mud-brick walls: similar building materials to Slains, but this English-style home was double storey, with eaves and attic windows set prettily in its steep, mossy, shingle roof.

  ‘It is very old,’ said Solomon, ‘it was built by Major Bogosta at the same time as Ramsden’s house. Ramsden’s house is a very big house and very interesting, but it is difficult to go there.’

  I didn’t pursue the matter of Ramsden’s house. We could hear rivers on both sides, gurgling and swishing, bringing a constant supply of fresh mountain water to the verdant garden. A man sat in a low wooden chair on the sunny lawn, washing his face in a bowl. When we walked over to introduce ourselves, he turned out to be Solomon’s old teacher, now elderly and smelling of alcohol. I later asked Solomon if he’d liked his teacher, but he shrugged. In most of rural Kenya you put up with any sort of teacher – you’re lucky if you have one. He didn’t ask us what we were doing wandering into his garden unannounced, just welcomed us with friendly interest.

  ‘Yes, there are two rivers. There is a furrow here too,’ he said, when I asked about the rivers. Golden-winged sunbirds flitted among the plants that grew along the closer river and across the other side there was a pair of noisy trumpeter hornbills, alerting me with strident braying calls. Behind the flourishing fruit trees that lined the river, the Aberdares ascended dramatically into a baby-blue sky. What a fabulous site for a house – and the surroundings were as I would imagine the garden of Eden to be.

  The retired teacher was relaxed about us wandering around, although we were not invited inside the house. ‘The garage has been demolished,’ he explained. ‘This room . . .’ he indicated the long, low wooden bowling room tacked along one side of the house ‘. . . maybe for their animals?’