It was cold, in spite of the slanting rays of sun, and the chilling atmosphere was disconcerting. Solomon kept looking over his shoulder as if someone was following him. We stood on short, green grass with clumps of pink thistles, in a space that had once been the courtyard. ‘Over there,’ continued Mwaura, ‘were pig sties – but they were destroyed and their materials used for some of these classrooms. That was the house for her clerk.’ He pointed at the wooden house. ‘The big house also looked like this – with wooden walls and a roof of wooden tiles. Alice’s house was a school for some time, but then they pulled it down to increase the playing fields. And then new classrooms were built. That was about 1987.’
We walked past a classroom which had some of Alice’s old window frames and doors slotted in amongst its more modern materials, until we reached a grassy bank where we sat with the old man above the river, looking towards the enormous hulk of the Aberdares, indigo in the failing light. The neglected fires of charcoal burners breathed misty smoke that writhed around shadowed ridges and valleys like claws of doom.
Mwaura pointed: ‘Here Alice and her dog Minnie are buried. The dog was very small.’ The unmarked grave, unrecognisable as such, was roughly halfway between the football goal posts and the school pit-latrines. ‘Myself, I dug the hole for the dog too, beside the hole for Wacheke – in 1941 when she killed herself.’ For effect he dramatically re-enacted the drama. His cracked yellow teeth flashed as he pointed an imaginary gun at his chest, made an explosive noise and fell back on to the grass. Three Hadada ibis, their dark wings splashed with glowing green, had been pecking about near us, but they suddenly took off, uttering the hoarse shriek that gives them their name. There was a gust of cold wind and that disturbing atmosphere I always felt around Alice’s old home deepened into something almost sinister.
‘This football field was once covered in trees,’ said Mwaura, heaving himself upright again.
Some children had appeared in the golden light of early evening and were playing football with a bundle of plastic bags and feathers, tied up with string, apparently oblivious to any strange vibes. ‘They are the school team,’ explained Mwaura.
As we sat watching the sunset, the footballers suddenly decided that watching us was more fun. Their noise and cheeky shouts were becoming irritating, but they ignored Solomon’s remonstrations. ‘These children are not good!’ he complained. ‘They are influenced by the bad spirits in this place.’
‘Did Alice live here all alone?’ I asked the old man.
‘Wacheke had a clerk,’ said Mwaura, ‘but one day she got angry and sent her clerk to Nakuru. She told the staff to keep out of the house and she wrote a letter then poisoned her dog and herself. But she didn’t die and at two in the afternoon her clerk came back and called for help. Three people came – one I remember was a woman from the Charts’ house, but it was not Mr Chart’s wife. They gave Wacheke first aid. She was taken to hospital – to Nakuru and then King George, but after six months she was back. When she died the next time they put her in a cedar coffin and many mourners came. They lit a fire.’
I looked at the ragged skyline: gums, pines and a few cedar trees pointed heavenwards. The light was dimming and Mwaura’s eyes seemed misty. ‘She kept very private in her house,’ he said when I asked about Alice’s drinking and drug-taking tendencies. ‘She was very nice. Her husband was a tall pilot but he went to Uganda, and crashed and died.’ No, he didn’t know his name and she never had another husband, nor did she have any children.
Only parts of Mwaura’s story agreed with what I’d read. He was an old man and perhaps his memory wasn’t always accurate. Suddenly he said proudly, ‘Wacheke came from the royal family – she had crowns on her cups and cloths.’ After Alice’s death, he added, there was another lady who lived here for about five years. ‘We called her Nyakaroki because she woke early and made everyone work hard. Then Sterling came.’
I’d made a mental note and when I returned the next time I brought the children a football. They crowded around us again, potentially terrifying my visitor from England, until I repelled them with a severe lecture about manners – then produced the football. They fell back slightly with a variety of shamefaced grins and less respectful grimaces. All eyes were on the football, which was kicked into action as soon as we left.
‘Mwaura has died,’ Solomon told me as we walked around the side of the wooden house. We were welcomed into the headmaster’s office. My eyes were drawn to an old picture of the school amongst the clutter – packets of aspirin, piles of papers, a pot of paint, an out-of-date desk calendar – on the shelf above his desk. The photograph was taken in 1966, a group of pupils in the foreground, in front of Alice’s original house. The headmaster obligingly stood on his chair to reach the photograph. Something indefinable which seeped out of it made me inexplicably depressed. It looked dark in every sense of the word.
After signing the visitors’ book, which rural Kenyan schools usually produce to ensure they have your address in order to invite you to the next fundraising event, I peeped into a classroom where children were squashed on to an odd assortment of stools and benches, sharing desks and pencils. The lady teacher, a former pupil herself, told the pupils to stand up and greet their visitor, then came outside to chat, while the pupils swivelled round, stood and even peered through the windows to get a better look at us. She remembered Alice’s old house: it had been U-shaped and rather dark, but it had served its purpose as a useful building, big enough back then to contain the whole school.
‘Nowadays it’s all harder because there are many problems,’ the teacher explained. ‘There is a shortage of government teachers. We are paid very little – less than eight thousand shillings [around £65] a month. There is a shortage of funds. The parents must pay for books and uniforms, as well as activity fees, a district education board levy, cost sharing levy, evaluation tests, exam registration fees and development funds.’
‘What if they can’t afford it?’ I asked.
‘We try to assist a few of the children, mainly ones who are orphans,’ she told me, ‘but there are too many children. Half of them attend in the morning and the other half in the afternoon, because we do not have space for them all at once.’
After sitting their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (if their parents can afford the examination fees) at about fourteen years of age (although some are as old as eighteen by the end of their primary career), these kids, however bright, have little hope of going to secondary school. ‘Secondary will cost eight thousand shillings a term or more, so they must just stay at home and do nothing,’ the teacher said.
Kiswahili, English, maths, science, GHCR (geography, history, civics and religious education) are compulsory subjects, she explained, warming up to my interest, while music, art and craft, and business education are extra. But there are no pianos or flutes or art materials and the majority of parents cannot afford such luxuries anyway, so any talent in those fields will remain dormant in these children – along with so many other youngsters all over Happy Valley, and indeed Kenya and Africa. Meanwhile, African MPs and their cronies blithely send their kids to vastly expensive British public schools and to universities in the States.
A few months later I received a letter from the head teacher of Happy Valley School, or Satima Primary as it now was, inviting me to a fundraising event. ‘Please attend and participate,’ said the green invitation card that also listed all the expected guests of honour and old pupils of renown. An accompanying letter said: ‘I would like to assure you that the stakeholders of Satima Primary school are very happy with you people.’
‘You must not give them money,’ warned Solomon. ‘If you want to give them something, it is better to take pencils or other useful equipment.’
I had a surprise call from a friend of a friend, asking if I could take a lady from France up to Happy Valley – she was related to somebody up there who’d died back in the 1940s. I invited her to visit, delighted when she turned out to be Ali
ce de Janzé’s granddaughter: Angelique was a charming, elegant woman and I could see in her fine and suddenly familiar features, traces of the Alice I had studied in the photographs. We got on instantly, sipping our tea in between the excitement of a disgruntled buffalo appearing on the nearby track.
After Angelique had returned to Paris she wrote to me with a few snippets about the grandmother she’d never known. Formally, aptly too perhaps, she called her Alice:
According to my mother, Alice was mad about animals, part of her attraction for Kenya . . . I suppose. In Paris she kept a monkey . . . to the delight of my mother and my aunt. He played lots of tricks and one day he was locked up in the bathroom where he decided to turn on all the taps full tilt and pulled the chain of the loo so that the water ran over down through the floors! He also liked to pour the water out of the vase on the grand piano carefully into the neck of a guest sitting conveniently below.
According to Angelique, Alice also had ‘small alligators in aquariums’. I wondered if these unfortunate creatures had actually been crocodiles, taken from some Kenyan lake or river to a Parisian life of incarceration. There’s something disturbing about anybody wanting a pet that could snap your hand off.
Angelique’s aunt, Alice’s other daughter, had got on better with her mother, according to Angelique, having a similar affinity with animals. Both girls only saw their beautiful, elusive mother occasionally on her annual visits to Paris to stock her glamorous wardrobe – and briefly kiss her rapidly growing daughters. Angelique told me the story of when her mother, Alice’s elder daughter Nolwen, had written to Alice proudly to say she had got into Vassar College in America, but when Alice had called her a ‘blue stocking’ she’d changed her mind and gone to a more avant-garde, less academic college – which she’d always regretted. Nolwen had apparently talked very little about Alice, although she’d once admitted that her mother must have suffered from the loss of her own mother at the age of four. Alice’s mother had died of pneumonia after being turned out by her drunken husband on a winter night. Angelique wrote: ‘He felt guilty for the rest of his life which was not going to be beneficial for Alice.’
Meanwhile, Solomon had suddenly announced that he had found Alice’s ‘real grave’, which was ‘somewhere else’. This is not surprising in Africa, where supposed truths suddenly disintegrate before your ears and eyes. Angelique visited again, this time while I was away, and accompanied Solomon to visit her grandmother’s latest grave site. Afterwards she left Solomon with enough money to erect a gravestone and to arrange subsequent payments to the school for the upkeep of the small garden he would plant around her grave. All of this Solomon did with great enthusiasm, visiting me regularly with updates so I could email the latest to Angelique back in Paris.
‘But,’ I questioned warily, ‘how do we know it is Alice’s grave this time?’
‘Because,’ said Solomon, suddenly lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘the people who I hired for digging to make the grave nice, they were digging too deep and they found Harris. I saw the bones!’
13
Monkey Man and More Mischief
During our early meanderings into the area, Solomon had said he would take me to ‘Patricia Bowles’ house’. She wasn’t someone I knew anything about, although I’d remembered her mentioned in White Mischief. ‘She was a friend of Harris,’ Solomon said, ‘her farm was called Munungu because Patricia Bowles, she planted very many mununga trees.’ These attractive forest trees are indigenous, and thus Patricia had incurred Solomon’s admiration. My tree book actually spells the Kikuyu name ‘mungnga’, unlike Solomon, who gave me the spelling that eases pronunciation.
Mununga was between Clouds and Alice’s home: 10 miles from Clouds and just under 5 miles from Alice’s – although it would have been much faster cross-country on a cantering horse, than jolting about in my Land Rover in first gear.
The name had lived on. We’d passed ‘Mununga Girls’ Secondary School’ with that excited feeling of ‘getting warmer’ like in hide and seek. Some of the classrooms, although not old themselves, had very old mabate (corrugated iron sheeting) on the roofs, faded red, as if it had been stripped from older farm buildings.
Just up the road, a couple of mossy fence posts, a few stone barns with chipped and dirty white walls, and fading red tin roofs, and a defunct cattle dip, indicated an old farm. We were there at last.
‘Some say the house it has gone,’ said Solomon. ‘But there is an old wooden house inside the mission just here, so maybe that can be the house of Patricia Bowles!’
We ventured into the walled, gated compound of a large Catholic secondary school where Patricia’s house, we hoped, might be lurking somewhere among the glut of new buildings. Smartly dressed schoolgirls stared at us curiously as they said ‘Good morning’ and hurried past to lessons. A friendly administrator sat inside a bottle-green office – she had never heard of Patricia Bowles, nor had the deputy principal, Sister Theresa. But we were welcomed and taken on a guided tour of the whole place. ‘There is one old building down here,’ Sister Theresa finally said, leading us down a path that ran alongside a furrow, towards a grove of leafy mununga trees. ‘I think it was once a house for some white people.’
We walked past washing hanging on fences and I caught a glimpse of a chimney and a faded roof, then suddenly we were standing by an old house, built of cedar off-cuts. This old house was probably very similar to Alice’s. It wasn’t unlike her manager’s house.
‘This is our St Peter’s polytechnic for girls,’ explained Sister Theresa.
Past the trunks of the old, gnarled mununga trees we could see patches of new cultivation and funnels of smoke as farmers and charcoal burners continued eating their way up into the Kipipiri forest. Behind us the view stretched across the plateau into the Rift Valley, ending in the pale blue line of the Mau escarpment. These old settlers had certainly picked prime sites to build their homes: isolated in those days and probably lonely – but beautiful.
An old rose bush straggled over one corner of the house, and there was a row of drooping moonflowers, a member of the deadly nightshade family, their poisonous trumpet-like blooms glowing white in the shady gloom cast by the mununga trees.
We walked through the old house over creaking floorboards, opening heavy doors with beautiful brass handles, looking at wood-panelled rooms with fireplaces. Water had leaked into the back of the corner fireplace of what must have been the sitting room. The kitchen was separate, situated at the back. The master and guest bedrooms were now dormitories, crowded with bunk beds. It was swept and impeccably tidy: there were no posters or pictures, no hints of the young women who slept and studied here.
In a large, long room that might once have been an indoor veranda or children’s playroom, rows of girls in neat black ties and immaculate blazers were seated in front of old-fashioned treadle sewing machines. They stood up as we came in. Sister Theresa made a hand signal to the two girls nearest the door, and they hastily went out, returning with chairs for us. Then the girls sang us a song (‘of welcome’, explained Sister Theresa) and recited a poem, before sitting down again, looking at me expectantly. Sensing it was now my turn, with nothing poetic or musical in my mind, I made a rather fumbling speech of thanks, explaining that we were here to look at the old house that was now their college, that I wanted to write about it. Solomon did far better, rising confidently to talk conservation. He pointed out that the house looked down towards Lake Ol Bolossat, an important wetland in dire need of protection, emphasising the appeal of its hippos and bird life, explaining how it must be preserved for future generations and that it could bring in an income if managed properly. The girls listened politely but they were watching me, taking in my windswept, dust-laced hair, scruffy shorts and T-shirt and old flip-flops. I usually dressed in my hardiest, most comfortable attire for these arduous expeditions. I probably looked as if I was about to start begging from the nuns.
‘Who knows what is a colobus monkey?’ Sol
omon asked. He was talking about Kipipiri forest now.
Nobody moved.
Solomon said the name in Kikuyu.
Then most of them nodded.
‘Who has seen one?’ asked Solomon.
A few hands went up.
‘When I was a child there were so many colobus monkeys,’ Solomon said sadly after we’d left. We were driving past a dam, choked up with weed: a few sacred ibis, a brown hammerkop and a pair of duck pottered across the spongy surface. Solomon clicked in exasperation: ‘And look how they have neglected this dam!’ I had a sudden flashback to my own angry tears as a teenager, when I’d visited my grandparents’ former farm in the late 1970s, hoping to relive happy childhood memories. The farm had been reduced to barren, treeless waste, with no sign of the lovely old house, nor even the many varieties of fruit trees.
Thanks to my frequent visits to Happy Valley with Solomon, I was inevitably becoming involved in his life and work, which are inextricably intertwined. His life, back in the days the family still lived on Alice de Trafford’s former farm, continued to haunt me.
Naturally Solomon had been forced to leave his childhood home in Happy Valley after the mindlessly cruel burning of his and Esther’s simple home that destroyed their few possessions. As soon as Solomon had heard the grim news from Esther, he’d rushed home. It would have been challenging for Esther to contact Solomon – she’d have had to get to the nearest town to make a phone call or send a telegram. But bad news tends to travel at high speed and Solomon knew about the loss of his home very soon after it had happened.
Moving must have been a relief in some ways – but it didn’t mean his life would get easier. Thus he’d bought some land from another of his brothers, closer to Captain, moving Esther and the children there, building a new home from scratch and settling down to his conservation work again. Money was paid to his brother, but title deeds were not forthcoming. Solomon shrugged this off without giving the matter too much thought; he knew such things take time and carried on regardless. But the police quickly discovered his whereabouts and, once again, Solomon was being watched and harassed, as if he were a political dissident or convicted criminal. His new neighbours kept their distance – he was obviously a troublemaker and they weren’t prepared to be associated with him.
The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 14