The Ghosts of Happy Valley

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The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 13

by Juliet Barnes


  Geoffrey Buxton was the grandson of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton – an MP known as ‘the Liberator’, who carried on William Wilberforce’s great work after Wilberforce died, securing the Act in the House of Commons for the total abolition of the slave trade in the British Dominions. Sir Thomas died in 1845.

  Geoffrey was born in England and educated at Eton. There he became good friends with Toby Finch Hatton, older brother of Denys, who himself was a great friend of Geoffrey’s younger brother Guy: they were at Eton together and Denys spent many holidays with the Buxtons. In 1906, Geoffrey Buxton, rather than going to university, left home to forge his future in British East Africa. Errol Trzebinski in her biography of Finch Hatton, Silence Will Speak (1977), says that the tall, dark, handsome Geoffrey’s enthusiasm and confidence in East Africa inspired many friends and relatives to go there too, including Denys. When Denys subsequently met and fell in love with Baroness Karen Blixen, she also became a good friend of Geoffrey Buxton’s. In 1920 Karen wrote home, enclosing some photos of Buxton’s home in Wanjohi: ‘You can see the sort of landscape it is up there, it is like an old painting or tapestry,’ says a letter published in Isak Dinesen: Letters from Africa 1914–1931 (1982).

  I longed to see inside the Buxton house, but the teacher had returned to the business of shaving, so we left.

  Solomon seemed dazed this morning. His sentences had all been half-finished: ‘Oh what a lovely . . . It is a beautiful . . .’

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ I asked him.

  ‘I had a very bad dream last night,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Very, very bad. I will write it for you. I dreamed that Jean came to me and told me that my son had died.’

  By then Solomon and Esther had four children – two sons had followed their daughters. He was referring to Jean O’Meara, a middle-aged lady artist who had been a staunch supporter of Solomon’s. She’d taught him to make paper out of various indigenous shrubs, sedges and elephant dung, as well as baskets for his tree seedlings out of dried maize stalks. When she died of pneumonia on 12 January 2000, a month before our first trip to Happy Valley, Solomon had been devastated. He planted a memorial forest for Jean at his home. His neighbours, who called Solomon Karuru (Kikuyu for ‘bitter’, or ‘unpleasant tasting’), shook their heads at his madness. Now that year’s drought was taking its toll on his trees.

  This was before the days of mobile phones. It was mid-morning, and I asked Solomon if he would like to go straight home.

  He shook his head slowly. ‘We go back after this – we see one more house. The house of Mary Miller.’

  11

  House of Terror

  The first I’d heard of ‘Miss Miller’, as they’d called her, was when we’d been talking to the wazee about Alice de Janzé. One of the elders, Karihe, had known her since he was a boy, when he’d lived on the Case farm. She was deaf, he said, and from 1941 he’d looked after her Jersey cows. She’d left after independence.

  Solomon directed me, first backtracking towards Wanjohi town, then turning right towards the Aberdares. The house was a mile or so up another bad road. I had an uneasy feeling about the place before I even spotted it. As we rounded the bend I could see part of a house: a chimney, a slice of roof and a half-smashed wall. Invisible, ice-cold tentacles seemed to reach out from it. I glanced at Solomon who was sitting forwards in his seat, his expression anxious. ‘This is a very bad place,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you about the oaths?’

  Not a soul was around. I couldn’t even see a bird, nor hear one sing. When we reluctantly emerged from the car, the air temperature seemed to drop further. There were the vague lines of terraces at the front and an old pink rambling rose had collapsed on to a broken wall. We walked behind the old house, over the remains of some steps. Like Satima House, it was made of brick, plastered with a muddy looking substance.

  ‘Cow dung,’ Solomon said.

  The remnants of a shingle roof clung to splintered roof beams. Any remaining window panes had been broken, leaving jagged holes, their distorted star shapes looking inwards into ominous darkness. I kept my distance, disturbed by a sudden feeling that a sharp object had been thrust through from the inside and that the unseen person, or even creature, clutching the weapon was waiting there. The silence was beginning to unnerve me too and I had a moment of terror when I found that Solomon, who I thought had been right beside me, had vanished.

  I recalled the part in Solomon’s memoir about the oath-taking ceremonies he was forced to attend in 1969. They were created as an expression of Kikuyu solidarity. ‘My mother and other people were talking in secret,’ he wrote. ‘There was to be a tea prepared by president Jomo Kenyatta and all the Kikuyu community must go and drink that tea. If anyone refuses he will be killed.’

  A gang of masked men had come into Solomon’s school, brandishing sticks, machetes and clubs. The children were told to follow them. Solomon’s instincts made him question this, for which he was thrashed with a stick and tied to another boy. Thus they were marched to Mary Miller’s empty house. On arrival Solomon was beaten again, stripped naked and made to join a long line. When it finally came to their turn, the group of children were sent inside the house where a man in a white robe presided over the ceremonies. Solomon remembers passing beneath a banana leaf arch, being shown a bloody knife and told the meaning of the colours of the Kenyan flag: black for the people, red for the bloodshed while fighting the white men, green for the country. They were made to chant: ‘This is our soil and we shall not sell to other people and we shall not be ruled by other people, we shall forgive our enemies, but we shall not give our people twice to the hyenas. We shall shed blood for this country!’ After swearing this oath, Solomon writes, ‘We were given a piece of soft meat to eat, and a piece of banana and sugarcane as the sign that we had sworn. Ashes mixed with something was rubbed on our faces and we were warned not to talk.’

  Elspeth Huxley’s anthology Nine Faces of Kenya explains the power of oath-taking, which was an integral part of Kikuyu society. Donald Barnett and Karaji Njama in Mau Mau From Within (1966) describe a Mau Mau oath-taking ceremony, not dissimilar to the one Solomon attended after Mau Mau was over: armed men in a hut, a banana arch, the removal of any European clothes or trappings and then the initiation. Seven people had a band of goatskin put on their right wrist, then were bound together with the intestines of a goat and sprayed with beer and millet. Their fingers were pricked and their blood smeared on to the heart and lungs of a billy goat, before they were marked with blood from a gourd, made to lick one another’s blood and finally to swear their oath, passing through the arch seven times. They vowed not to reveal the secret and to die if they violated any rules of the oath. Facing Mount Kenya, holding a ball of soil and encircled by intestines, they swore again while pricking the eye of a goat seven times with a kei-apple horn. A cross of blood and oil was made on their foreheads to end the ceremony, the necessary warnings issued.

  Whether it was the oath-taking that had given Mary Miller’s house its brooding atmosphere of ill omen I could not tell, but I felt gripped by unfounded panic, deepening when I couldn’t see Solomon. My heart pounding, I ran back towards my car. ‘Solomon!’ I shouted.

  ‘Madam?’ he said, suddenly behind me. (He was nervous enough to call me Madam instead of Juliet, as if he’d just run into Mary Miller and was confusing us.) ‘I do not like this place. I think we shall leave quickly.’

  The next day Solomon rang to tell me that Caleb, his youngest son, aged twelve, had died at ten the previous morning – the exact time we had been at the Miller house.

  The burial was two days later. Solomon had put up signs, but some had been taken by wind or ill-wishers. After turning off the old Wanjohi road running into Happy Valley from Captain, the roads were almost non-existent – and Solomon had always confused his left and right, even when he wasn’t consumed by grief.

  Lost in the middle of dry, desolate country, I stopped beside the only person on the road. She had been badly stung by bees and
her lips were swollen. She had wrapped a leso around her head. ‘I know Solomon’s house!’ She climbed into the Land Rover. ‘There are bad people around here,’ she said suddenly. ‘Solomon is in danger.’

  It was a fair distance from the main road – probably two hours’ walk. Solomon and Esther’s small compound was surrounded by a tidy fence and filled with Solomon’s trees, those which hadn’t died in the drought. There was a modest, mud-walled house and a smaller, wooden one next to it, into which I was ushered by a relative. Solomon wore his usual cap, with white trousers and a baggy white shirt. ‘I thank you for coming,’ he said, his voice cracking.

  His wife, Esther, looked thinner and older. We’d only met once, not long before, when I’d taken my children to visit; their access road had put me off going regularly. She grasped my hand, tears pouring down her cheeks. She wore a white sweatshirt and white headscarf over a brown skirt and gumboots. Their two teenage daughters, Naomi and Julia, sat quietly, their heads also covered, both wearing white. The youngest boy, Adam, was sobbing.

  It was time to move outside, under some shade netting and canvas that usually protected the young trees. Somebody had arranged seats. ‘Please sit with the family,’ said Esther, still holding my hand.

  People were arriving, filling the seats, the garden, even sitting on my Land Rover – the only car. Caleb’s classmates, relatives and elders congregated in the compound. Women carried sleeping babies on their backs. Esther seemed carried along on a wave of grief, her eyes misty, as if seeing nothing.

  First of all a group of children stood and sang a haunting Kikuyu song – and yet its words (which I did not understand) felt uplifting, as if they were singing of somewhere better than this. I was the only white person there, but my mother and some of the other women artists had sent cards and letters, which I was asked to read out. Someone translated my words into Kikuyu. All the other speeches were in Kikuyu. A man stood up and read briefly in English from the Bible, from the book of Revelation. Then he apologised to me for being rude, but he would read the rest in Kikuyu – which he did for an hour. The only word I understood was ‘Jerusalem’.

  Babies cried, children sat still as statues, people came and went, and a relentless dry wind blew through the compound, dusting us all and passing over the lifeless body of Caleb, open to view in his wooden coffin. A toddler paused beside it and briefly touched him.

  Finally a man took photographs of the family standing together – without their youngest member. It had become blisteringly hot by the time the coffin was closed up and lowered into the hole. I stood inhaling dust and pepper tree scent, shedding tears for a boy I had not known, wrenched into grief from watching Solomon and Esther’s pain. We all threw in a handful of earth, as is customary.

  I sat with them for a while and shared their tea and irio, then left them to their private sorrow. I gave a lift to two pretty girls from Naomi’s class, two silent women, and a very chatty man who said he did research ‘like Charles Darwin’. I barely noticed the bumps on the roads, painfully aware of the absence of my own two children, who were with their father and his new wife. Our recent, unpleasant divorce felt all the more raw. Life suddenly seemed too short for all this acrimony.

  Later Solomon wrote down his strange experience: just before Caleb’s funeral, Solomon had been in bed, half awake, when he saw Caleb sitting on the bed. His writing spiked with sorrow, Solomon relates how Caleb told him not to worry: he was in a place with no hunger or pain and with all his ancestors. He’d tried to talk to his mother and brother, but they couldn’t see him. Just after he died, Caleb said, he watched his family and friends crying around his coffin. Solomon concluded: ‘I understand those who died just change . . . they are still surviving, but they just crossed the barriers of nature.’

  The next time I saw Solomon he told me he believed Caleb had been poisoned. ‘I have many enemies,’ he said. ‘They want to do this terrible thing to us to frighten me. But I will not let them do this.’ I maintained a shocked silence, not sure how to take this, feeling we should not go on any safaris to Happy Valley for a while.

  I asked a couple of the old memsahibs of Happy Valley about Mary Miller. Bubbles Delap called her ‘the merry widow’. Her third husband had been a jockey, Bubbles said, ‘although she had lots of boyfriends and I never knew which was which. She rather fancied Bill.’

  Mary Miller was ‘completely mad’ according to another memsahib. ‘She had lived off lorry-loads of Champagne and booze before shooting herself.’

  ‘Oh yes! She was very depraved,’ said another old-timer, lips pursed. She married David Leslie-Melville after his wife died; she was the governess, ‘very much beneath him’, sniffed yet another, adding that Mary then became stepmother to David’s children, Gillian and Jock.

  The truth is somewhat different. Mary Miller wasn’t the governess, but was the real mother of Leslie-Melville’s children. According to the online peerage, Capt. Hon. David William Leslie-Melville was born, one of six, in 1892. His parents were the Hon. Emma Selina Portman – daughter of Lord Portman, a British Liberal MP – and Ronald Ruthven Leslie-Melville, 13th Earl of Leven. David married his first wife in 1914, was decorated and awarded an MBE in 1919, divorced in 1928 and in 1929 married Eleanor Mary Barrell Abrahall, daughter of Arthur John Abrahall. David and Mary had two children – Gillian Mary, born in 1930, and John David (better known as Jock), born in 1933. David died in 1938, aged forty-six. Eight months later Mary married Capt. Arthur Miller, who died in 1942, while on active service. Mary lived until 1974.

  Jock Leslie-Melville married a Baltimore girl, Betty, becoming her third husband. She would have slotted into Happy Valley (had it still existed) as she fitted into Kenya, like a hand into a glove perfectly designed for it; as a profile in her hometown Baltimore Sun put it, she had ‘scampered across two continents like the heroine of a picaresque novel, leaving a glittering wake of crazy and glamorous stories’. Now saving giraffes in Kenya became Betty’s new raison d’être. After Jock’s death in 1984, Betty returned to the USA and remarried. She once remarked to journalist Peter Marren: ‘I have one philosophy. You are only sorry for what you don’t do, so try everything on for size and wear what fits.’

  Betty Leslie-Melville’s son from another marriage, Rick Anderson, later ran Betty’s giraffe centre on the outskirts of Nairobi with Bryony, his wife. Bryony was able to fill me in with some additional information on Mary Miller. Apparently Mary had been married by proxy in 1919 to a farmer in Uganda. Travelling out on the ship to Mombasa to join him, she’d met the handsome cavalry officer David Leslie-Melville, who was returning to Kenya to farm. They became lovers. On reaching Mombasa, Mary travelled by train, then ox cart to join her husband in Uganda. Soon after her arrival, she headed for the Wanjohi valley – with two donkeys – in search of David. Mary went down with malaria during this epic journey and was given a heavy dose of quinine by some missionaries; it saved her life, but she was always hard of hearing as a result. Mary and David had three children, but one died of leukaemia. David himself died of peritonitis, Bryony said, while Mary’s third husband, Arthur Miller, died in a riding accident crossing a river.

  ‘I remember meeting Mary and was quite intimidated by her very blue, blue eyes and obvious strength,’ Bryony wrote in an email. ‘Mary was one of those really tough women that did so much for Kenya’s development.’ According to Bryony, Mary was too busy to be part of the Happy Valley scene, remaining on the periphery of the parties, although she once talked to her daughter-in-law, Betty, about ‘pick-a-dick’ parties. Mary supposedly didn’t do drugs, although latterly she probably overdosed on what Jock called her ‘morphine cocktails’, but she had the genuine excuse of being in terrible pain before she died of cancer.

  I’d also heard it said that Betty had inevitably asked her mother-in-law the million-dollar question: who shot Lord Erroll? Mary had been in no doubt. It was her neighbour, Alice de Trafford, of course!

  12

  The Bones of Alice


  It was over a year after our meeting with the wazee at Kiambogo that Solomon discovered another mzee living near the school who had known Alice. And so we drove the long road back to Happy Valley School, now renamed ‘Satima Primary’ by a new headmaster. We left the car beside the dry stream, on the disused road that had once been Alice’s drive, walking across a green field spotted with cow-pats to meet Danson Mwaura, who lived in a small wooden house. We could hear the distant shouts of the schoolchildren.

  Mwaura turned out to be Alice’s former herdsman. He showed us a tattered newspaper article with some stained pictures of Clouds, and Alice holding her lion cub on her lap defensively, like a shield, but couldn’t remember who’d sent them to him.

  ‘But I will show you something better,’ he said.

  It was early evening now and the schoolchildren were heading home, the last lingering groups laughing their way up the track. We walked across the broken bridge, past Alice’s old manager’s house, pausing at the foundations of her own home. ‘It was a big house,’ Mwaura explained, showing us around as proudly as if it were still there in all its 1930s splendour. ‘There were plants climbing up the walls and the roof, here beautiful flowers and there so many fruit trees. These ones were the flower beds for decoration and this was the swimming pool . . .’ (Further questioning revealed that he actually meant an ornamental garden pond, fed by a furrow from the river.) ‘Here the bedroom where she had a photograph by her bed, here the kitchen.’ We walked over the crumbling stones that lay in barely discernible lines, stepping like ghosts through spaces where walls had once been. One of Alice’s former neighbours had told me the rooms were partitioned but had no ceilings, creating some interesting sound effects when people paired off at parties . . .

 

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