The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  Six young men were already tucking into the feast and Solomon joined them, sitting on the rickety bench beneath a crudely illustrated poster that proclaimed ‘I was crying that I didn’t have shoes. But I thanked God when I met a person without legs. JESUS IS REAL’, it concluded. From an unseen radio an American voice was crooning: ‘We gotta stop hurting each other,’ only she pronounced it ‘herding’.

  I had been suffering from a bad stomach and it caused great mirth when I declined food. I sat on a stool beside a wall painting of flamingos and braved some extremely sweet tea in a mug with a snowman on it, not without apprehension, for there were no flushing toilets up here, only pit-latrines that require you to squat and aim with precision. A brindled cockerel joined me in the café, defecating under the table while giving my shoe a sideways look. Through the plastic ribbons that fluttered from the doorway I could see sheep picking their way across the litter-strewn patch of bright-green grass. A gaggle of barefoot kids wandered past, stopping and giggling at the doorway when they saw me. Suddenly they scattered and ran as three older men came in. Dressed in threadbare jackets and felt hats, they greeted me in Kiswahili and proceeded to hold an animated conversation in Kikuyu, which, when you listen without understanding, seems a language crafted almost entirely out of vowels. They sat in a corner and Mama Maina served them mugs of tea. The young men appeared to have left without paying for anything, and I wondered whether our hostess ran the Destination Café on endless credit, or whether all these people were relatives and had to have freebies. Perhaps Mama Maina simply was not a good businesswoman, because when we left she refused to take any payment, ignoring my protestations while loading up the back of my Land Rover with fruit, and insisting we sat down again and had one more mug of tea. ‘You are a visitor here,’ she said firmly, ‘and you are very welcome.’

  Defeated, humbled by her generosity, having given up getting anywhere else soon, I sat down again and watched the world go by. A woman was sitting just outside the door knitting something at great speed in violently orange, synthetic wool. Beside her grazed a sheep in need of a haircut.

  Solomon always seems to know everybody. He kept rushing outside to glean more colobus news or ask about a tree nursery. The walls beside me were decorated with newspaper cuttings on subjects ranging from salvation to malaria, offering reading material to accompany the tea. While reading all about how Nice and Lovely products could care for my skin and hair I wondered why this place was called Machinery, because there wasn’t any sign of anything remotely mechanical.

  We made a diversion to Clouds with some outgrown clothes from my children for the Nuthu grandchildren. Gilgil Club to Clouds, via Captain and daraja tatu with the old bridges, was just under 33 miles, and had taken ten minutes short of two hours if I deducted the stops. We then turned back towards Wanjohi and Alice’s house, stopping just before Mununga at a primary school where Solomon wanted to see some of his Good Children.

  As we left the school we nearly fell over the scruffy, barefoot pupil who waited to see the head, standing wretchedly under the sign telling us: ‘Dedication is the answer’. The child looked as if he had not eaten for days, nor had anyone washed or mended his clothes for months. His eyes were fixed on the broken cement floor, his hunched, resigned posture suggesting he was probably in for a caning. I could only hope he wasn’t being punished for his appearance.

  Solomon wanted to show me ‘Hall’s house’, so he guided me back to the sprawling town of Miharati, lying between Machinery and Mununga Farm, just below Gordon’s. Like Machinery, Miharati has rapidly expanded from farmland to a noisy, grubby, busy town – all in less than fifty years. At the edge of Miharati an old wooden house stood starkly at the edge of a narrow ravine, its roof long gone. ‘That was Hall’s first house,’ Solomon told me. He took me deeper into the town to Hall’s second home – another European-style house: grey stone with a red-tiled roof, surrounded by an overgrown hedge. There were rows of agapanthus lilies lining the drive. Kipipiri rose behind, the Aberdares behind that stretching on towards the peaks of the Kinangop, mottled with afternoon light. The building was now a police station.

  We drove on through Miharati, up a dusty, uneven street, to find some more tea in a nearby ‘hotel’. Red, silver and gold Christmas decorations cast surreal patterns on the walls as they danced in a light breeze and we drank our tea out of mugs decorated with teddy bears in red vests catching fish. We were served cold, leathery mandazi, the Kenyan equivalent of a doughnut, but flatter and usually triangular. They are delicious when fresh, but these were definitely yesterday’s leftovers. The only other customer nodded and returned to his newspaper, but the kids outside kept peeping in at the door. When I waved they ran, exploding into fits of giggles. Then they’d come back again, creeping, daring each other, as if this was a game of grandmother’s footsteps. A visiting football team came in, the young men sitting down and staring at me as if I was a freak. The children outside fled and the man with the newspaper ignored us all.

  Solomon was sitting beneath a handmade sign with a crudely drawn picture of a man on a bed outside a hut. ‘He who relies on his relatives dies poor’ was the cautionary message.

  ‘That police station is the place where I was first locked up,’ Solomon told me. ‘The police, they beat me very badly and after that I became afraid to even sleep at my own house because they were always coming after me . . .’

  In the politically repressed one-party state of the late 1970s, the majority of people were at the mercy of greedy politicians, already accelerating flat out along the freeways of corruption, dragging mistrust and suspicion in their wake. No surprise, then, that Solomon was accused of having political motivations: his conservation activities were banned and he was threatened repeatedly until he was forced to move away. He’d found a job in western Kenya – but lost it after complaining about the company’s use of child labour. Back home once again, it wasn’t long before Solomon was arrested for his alleged anti-government stance and locked up for a week without food.

  Solomon, naively perhaps, continued to set up conservation clubs, whose members he encouraged to form football teams. It was his solution to keeping unemployed young people like himself busy and motivated – with a competitive edge. But Solomon was further hounded by the local authorities and the police. Under such circumstances, if you’ve got any sense you answer as expected or risk further beatings, but Solomon refused to lie and say that yes, he was politically motivated. So he was kept at Miharati police station for no reason. After being brutally beaten, he was finally let out and warned that next time he would be killed. The message was clear: don’t mess with us any more, and keep your head down . . .

  Worried and upset, Solomon took a matatu to Nairobi to visit Professor Wangari Maathai, coordinator of the Green Belt Movement, the woman who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in conservation. Maathai rang the local district commissioner, gave Solomon money for his bus fare home and assured him of his safety.

  But soon afterwards Solomon ventured far up into the forests of Kipipiri to investigate fires left burning by charcoal burners. Here he stumbled upon an illegal marijuana plantation and somebody saw him. This latest ‘interference’ put a price on his head, for Solomon had overstepped the mark – right on to the toes of political bigwigs who happened to be profiting from the venture. Now, it seemed, he was being watched.

  One clear day, after the long rains had carpeted Happy Valley with lush, green grass and wild flowers, Solomon had been slogging away to clear an old dam to provide water for his tree nurseries. In need of a break, he went to the local town, Ol Kalou, to meet up with friends. As soon as he’d got off the matatu and walked down a street, two policemen in plain clothes materialised at his elbow, pointing a pistol at his head and ordering him to go with them. In the words of his autobiography:

  They took me to the iron hut near the DO’s office where there were many policemen waiting for me. They asked me questions and told me to say yes, but I said no.
Then I was beaten and they caught me by my private parts of my body, and burned my hand with cigarettes. Then they took me to the Ol Kalou district mortuary. They switched the lights on so that I could see the bodies of the dead people. Then they took away all my clothes and chained me to the body of a dead girl. Near my feet there were many bodies lying there. They told me to play sex with that body of a dead girl . . . Then the policemen switched off the light and said: ‘OK enjoy yourself Solomon.’ I stayed there three hours, then they came back and said: ‘Now Solomon, are you enjoying yourself with your lover?’

  The football team listened with a weary sort of resignation as Solomon’s story chilled my bone marrow.

  ‘People asked me why I wasn’t giving up,’ he said, ‘they were asking me did I want to be killed?’ A few members of the football team sitting in the hoteli with us nodded knowingly.

  Although I’d read Solomon’s story in his book, it felt more immediate listening to him now, so close to one of the offending police stations.

  Eventually the football team left, but I didn’t even see them go. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that a man wielding a 6-foot pole had come in and sat down opposite us. He wore a hat made out of some animal skin and his suit, worn out at the knees and elbows, was decorated with many safety pins. He was too young to be a war hero from the Mau Mau era. He didn’t seem too interested in us, or in anything for that matter except for his sizeable stick.

  ‘It is OK, he is mad,’ said Solomon reassuringly, seeing that I was trying not to flinch every time the stick was raised and examined.

  The picture opposite me was of a chimpanzee dressed in a suit, tucking into a plate of frankfurters. My head was spinning with Solomon’s alarming stories of brutal torture and I had half an eye on the 6-foot stick. I felt a little crazy myself.

  The madman followed us out and stood in the middle of the road, staring at nothing in particular as we drove away.

  We stopped outside the Quickserve Duka, flanked by Ebenezer Tailoring and Popular Café. Solomon had spotted a kindred spirit. ‘He is a colobus man,’ he threw back at me as he leapt from the car. After all, these sojourns into Happy Valley were also colobus-counting trips. Solomon always had places to go and people to see.

  I peeled and ate an imported South African orange that I had found in the mess of my car, looking through a dusty windscreen at a world I couldn’t fathom: a jumble of potholes, litter, goats, chickens and loitering people. A lady stopped to talk to me, her eyes shifting all over the inside of my car, unnerving me. ‘I own a bar,’ she told me, then added: ‘also I am a public health officer.’

  Her eyes fastened on my orange, so I gave her the other half and she walked off, munching happily, tossing the peel into the road.

  Our final stop that day was the simple mud-walled, earth-floored home of an old man called Njoroge, who together with Solomon had arranged for a handful of Kikuyu elders to come and dredge up some memories. Njoroge’s elderly wife brought in firewood to make tea as we sat down to listen. Njoroge didn’t know his age, but thought he had been born in ‘about 1927’. Many Kenyans, especially older ones like Njoroge, would never have celebrated a birthday in their entire lives. They couldn’t when they didn’t know the day or month, let alone the year. Njoroge had worked for ‘a bwana called Barker’, helping with the chickens and ducks. He remembered ‘another bwana called Dowson’ arriving at the same time. ‘After that,’ he confirmed, ‘the white people left and the big hay barns were used to store government machinery when the land was being allocated to the Kikuyu people.’ This would have been when Kenya gained independence.

  Muthoki, older and equally vague about his age, was born in ‘about 1920’, he thought. He worked for several white bwanas and memsahibs as gardener, builder and fundi (which roughly translates as an odd-job man, or jack of all trades). ‘Dowson,’ he said, ‘drove very fast.’ His memories went back further, to when Ramsden – who they called Kimondo – lived there. ‘He had a very beautiful house, made of mud and bricks. It had a beautiful courtyard and many ponds, and short, green grass where no cows were allowed to graze.’ He remembered being a young boy, in awe of the rich, powerful white man. ‘Kimondo was very tall and very rich!’ he said. The local name Kimondo had apparently been coined because Ramsden always carried a bag full of nails, and other bits and pieces that might come in useful. It literally means ‘the one carrying a goatskin bag’.

  I had now read a bit about Sir John Ramsden, a friend and neighbour of Joss and Idina, as well as Alice – and then again of Idina, when she’d later lived at Clouds. A wealthy owner of vast tracts of land, he’d been a contemporary of the 3rd Baron Delamere.

  I also remembered that a pilot friend, who’d flown over Happy Valley and the surrounding area in a light aircraft, had talked excitedly about one very well-preserved house on the side of Kipipiri, with grand, well-clipped topiary. ‘It must be Clouds,’ he’d said.

  ‘Clouds doesn’t have any hedges,’ I’d replied. ‘What colour is the roof?’

  ‘Red.’

  ‘Then it’s not Clouds.’

  ‘It is called Aberdare House,’ Solomon had told me. ‘It is a very beautiful house.’

  ‘It belongs to a political bigwig,’ somebody else had said. ‘You’ll never get in there!’

  There were all sorts of stories about the current ownership of the hedged-in house. It belonged to the President. It belonged to a powerful minister. It belonged to the chief of the CID . . .

  ‘Moi was hiding here when people were saying that he had died,’ Solomon later told me. He was referring to Kenyatta’s successor, the dictatorial President Moi who reigned supreme until 2002; supposed to be dying of throat cancer decades ago, at the time of writing he still looked good. ‘Nobody was supposed to know, but we all knew.’

  I asked the old men about it. ‘It was the house of Lord Ramsden, before Dowson,’ Muthoki nodded. ‘He was the father of Lord Erroll.’

  Njoroge disputed this: ‘No, Kimondo was father of Idina . . .’

  ‘Yes!’ Solomon agreed, less interested in the offspring than ownership, ‘it was the house of Ramsden! It is near to Clouds House!’

  Njuguna, who had no teeth or hair, was very deaf and almost blind. He seemed the oldest of them all. Nobody had any idea when he had been born, but he actually remembered Idina, as well as Kimondo. ‘Idina didn’t have one husband all the time,’ he said, ‘but she was never on her own.’ This made Solomon laugh. Njuguna laughed too, adding: ‘But we were always in the kitchen, cooking them big meals – sometimes as many as fifty of them all ate together there.’ Solomon asked if he ever witnessed any wild parties, probably hoping to get a lurid description of an orgy, but Njuguna shook his head: ‘No, we didn’t know their business.’

  A young woman – another wife, or perhaps a daughter or even a granddaughter, served us tea, eyes shyly averted while she laid out the steaming tin cups, then silently left on bare feet.

  The old men sipped their tea while joking about the food the white people had liked, suddenly remembering English words for alien things like ‘ham’, ‘roast’ and ‘something called pudding’.

  ‘There was a vegetable-like cabbage eaten cold and uncooked – with carrots,’ said Njuguna and they all laughed.

  ‘They called the sauce DRESSING!’ chuckled another of the old men.

  The Erroll murder had passed them by, but when Mau Mau started, Njuguna and Muthoki had been arrested and moved to Fort Hall, where they remained until 1957. Njoroge had joined his fellow freedom fighters in the forest. He’d already learnt a lot about white men and about fighting in Burma, he said, when they were fighting the white man’s war there.

  It was time to go home. As always, part of me wanted to linger in Happy Valley. The slanting rays of mid-afternoon sun accentuated the red berry-like blooms thrusting above the spiky aloe plants, warmed the golden grasses and breathed features into the indigo mountains jutting into a pale sky. The rains had been good and the roads were awful. As t
hose clouds, which had inspired Idina to name her home, rolled in from the Rift Valley, the sky turned stone grey and the colours began to fade. Suddenly the black, pregnant sky cast a premature and foreboding darkness over us and the first huge drops began to hit the windscreen. And thus the heavens opened, pounding us with equatorial rain. At which point we got a puncture. Solomon and I struggled with my brand new hi-lift jack, which stubbornly refused to go up or down, or do anything it was supposed to do. I cursed the rain, which was making our hands, the ground and the jack increasingly slippery, but as I later discovered, it wasn’t only the elements: they had actually overdone the paint job on the jack, preventing the teeth from gripping. No amount of dry weather or expertise would have made any difference.

  All we could do was retire, shivering, to the car and wait. We watched the rain move across the plateau, and the sun suddenly came out again, sparkling and dancing through the fields like a joker. We were on a road nobody ever drove along, judging by the state of it, so there wasn’t much hope of anybody else coming to our rescue – and even if they did, would they have a jack strong enough to lift a heavy Land Rover? Various passers-by gathered and began to offer advice. One old man, less interested in the jack, asked me if I’d known the Barkers.

  ‘Well . . . kind of,’ I said. ‘I have heard of them. Did you know them?’

  ‘I was their cook,’ he replied.

  Somebody had come back with a spade and somebody else had a machete. Between them they were digging a hole under my punctured wheel. Now the rain had subsided, we were able to sit on the damp grass. The old cook told me how during Mau Mau, the freedom fighters had spied on Ramsden’s former home, Kipipiri House, from a tall cedar tree. ‘They could see the white men, and they knew when they went away and when they came back. But the bwanas did not know they were there, watching from that tree!’ We sat on the bank, the Barkers’ old cook and I, looking out at the lovely mountains, united in our separate thoughts inspired by the vision of the unseen spies in the tree.