The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  About half an hour later, having dug deep enough under the front wheel to remove and change it, we were on our way again. Then my rear wheel suddenly started making a gruesome grinding sound, which I tried to ignore.

  ‘Oh!’ said Solomon ominously, leaning out of the window to listen, ‘maybe we get these bad devils from Happy Valley.’

  Oddly enough, when we reached Captain, with its roadside glisten of plastic bag litter, and I turned towards home, the noise stopped.

  15

  The House with the Golden Door

  After the old men’s talk of Ramsden, I was determined to visit his Happy Valley home, Kipipiri House, supposedly the best preserved in the whole area.

  So Solomon and I drove towards Clouds once again, crossing a deep gorge on a steep, winding road, where a few remaining indigenous trees, their lower branches chopped away, stood naked and exposed. A little farther on Solomon told me to turn left, bluffing his way through the gate of the large flower farm, although the guard was already opening it when he saw a white woman driving, my skin colour and sex rendering me doubly harmless. Kipipiri reared up behind, its higher slopes still darkly forested, as we drove between military rows of plastic greenhouses.

  ‘My friend Peter is a manager working here,’ said Solomon. ‘You can try to ask if we can see the Ramsden house . . .’

  The handsome young Dutchman leaned in at my car window and shook our hands. He seemed amenable, but I quickly realised he was only an employee of the wealthy Kenyan landowner. Behind him stood a massive and impenetrable cypress hedge. He must have thought I was one of those people who constantly glance over your shoulder during conversation, hoping to spot someone more interesting. In truth I was trying to find a chink in the hedge, glimpse the house lurking among its splendid topiary, so near and yet so far. But the hedge was as concealing as a midnight blackout on a foggy night.

  Solomon and I used all our powers of persuasion, to no avail. ‘You are welcome to my house anytime,’ Peter said consolingly, indicating the newly built manager’s house by the road, ‘but I cannot let you visit the big house – I do not have the authority.’

  ‘OK,’ said Solomon, ‘so now we must go up to the place I know we can turn the car around.’

  Peter melted back into the greenhouses, while we drove up to Solomon’s turning place, which he indicated with a triumphant: ‘Now you can see!’ A wooden side gate in the hedge opened out into a view of the expansive gardens, contained by vast hedges that swept grandly up to the side of the house itself. A long, low bungalow, it was black and white, mock-Tudor style, its red-tiled roof dusted with moss. Taking in the stretch of emerald lawn, the elegant line of smoothly clipped hedge and some shapely exotic trees, I suddenly thought I saw a face looking at us from one of the windows of the house.

  ‘We will just go quickly into the garden,’ whispered Solomon, clutching my arm. ‘There is nobody there.’

  It didn’t take any more to persuade me to switch off the engine, jump out of the car and stand excitedly beside the low gate. A watchman appeared from behind a hedge, wearing a trench coat and carrying a club. As he hurried towards us I thought, Well, that’s the end of that idea, but to our surprise he was friendly. ‘Karibu!’ he beamed, which is Kiswahili for ‘close’, and also means ‘welcome’, so we climbed over the gate.

  ‘Is the owner here?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody is here.’

  I decided not to mention the face at the window. ‘May we see the garden?’

  ‘Of course.’ Intrigued at our interest, he accompanied us around the beautifully kept gardens, smooth green lawns descending in terraces to ponds and water gardens, ornamental trees, clipped shrubs and hedges 30 feet high, entwining the enchanted gardens in protective green arms. There were two sculpted lions keeping stony watch over the front door. The imposing side door was a light, golden polished wood, carved with floral designs and a family crest which also incorporated a lion.

  I tentatively approached the beautiful door, followed by the intrigued watchman. ‘Do you come from America?’ he asked. ‘Sweden?’

  Solomon suddenly said to me in a dramatic stage whisper, ‘We must leave quickly – there is that woman at the window.’

  ‘Who . . .?’ I began.

  But Solomon was already striding back to the car.

  ‘But you are welcome to come back,’ said the watchman sadly, opening the gate for us to save our stepping over.

  ‘Who was that woman, then?’ I asked as we drove away hastily.

  Solomon was in a reverie.

  ‘Solomon?’ I said.

  He looked up. ‘But it is a beautiful house,’ he said sadly, adding secretively, ‘I have been in long ago, but now there is a mad Kikuyu woman inside, with a panga!’

  We drove on to Clouds, a few more miles up the road, passing a small, neat homestead surrounded by hedges clipped into triangular and ball shapes, as unusual in this sort of area as Father Christmas would be.

  ‘The mzee who lives there now, he is one of Ramsden’s old gardeners,’ said Solomon, explaining away my bafflement as if I’d somehow passed it on telepathically.

  After we left Clouds and drove back to Machinery, passing Kipipiri House again, in my mind I could still see the face at the window, and yet I was sure it had been a pale, ghostly one: a vision from the past.

  I was excited by the house – after all it was the first totally intact old house with a well-kept garden we’d seen in Happy Valley.

  Sir John Frecheville Ramsden, as he was correctly called, had made his fortune from the rubber estates in Malaya. He then bought vast estates in Kenya: Kipipiri Estate up by Happy Valley, and Waterloo flanking the shores of Lake Naivasha, now called Marula and still a prosperous farm, today owned by Italians. Kipipiri Estate once flanked the whole western side of Kipipiri mountain, its northern reaches bordering Alice’s farm, with Clouds and the area of the white highlands called North Kinangop to the south. Once he’d secured the corridor for his sheep, his land stretched all the way to the acacia-lined shores of Lake Naivasha. Not much over a decade earlier, before the First World War, Lord Delamere had been refused his application for 100,000 acres of land stretching from the Aberdares to the Rift Valley on the grounds that it was intermittent grazing land for the Maasai. Delamere had already had a previous application for Laikipia land (in between the Aberdares and Mount Kenya) turned down because it was too far from the railway. In the end, says Elspeth Huxley in White Man’s Country, Volume 1 (1930), he had to settle for unoccupied land at Njoro, before he managed to buy Soysambu. But after the war the picture changed dramatically. The Maasai and anyone else would have to make way for the new soldier-settlers – even the likes of Lady Idina Gordon, and including the more respectable Sir John Ramsden.

  One of Ramsden’s neighbours in Naivasha was Delamere, the other Ewart Grogan, who had impregnated Bubbles Delap’s mother. Grogan owned Longonot Farm and was also developing estates at Taveta near the Tanzanian border, in the domed shadow of the high, snowy peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro; here he built a palatial dwelling – some called it a folly – on a small hill, where it stood deserted and reputedly haunted for many decades until somebody converted it into a lodge. It was largely thanks to Ewart Grogan that Happy Valley’s rivers were stocked with trout: he originally imported 40,000 of the fish to Kenya in 1906.

  According to Edward Plaice in Lost Lion of The Empire: The Life of Cape to Cairo Grogan (2001), at the end of 1938 Grogan needed more funds, so he enticed two big spenders, Ramsden and Maurice Egerton (4th Baron of Tatton and a farmer from Njoro in the Rift Valley), to join him in partnership. Elspeth Huxley states in White Man’s Country Volume 2 (1935) that in 1925, Colonists Ltd, a land agency in southern Tanzania, was formed with £6,000 provided mainly by Ramsden, Egerton and Delamere. Ramsden had certainly been one of the big shots. Tim Hutchinson’s Kenya Up-Country Directory mentions him as being at Kipipiri Estate in 1926, and also records that he was President of Gilgil Club from 1926 to 1
933.

  Errol Trzebinski refers to Ramsden’s 70,000-acre estate stretching down from Kipipiri. She adds that a builder from Norfolk had built the house and that ‘Chops’ Ramsden, as he was known to friends, also built Slains before Idina and Joss’s arrival. Ramsden, had he been around, probably would have had plenty to say on Joss’s murder. Latterly I’d been hearing more about Mau Mau and those more recent killings, but the question of who murdered Joss continued to needle at me.

  It was a few months later when Solomon summoned me for an interview. ‘I have found a very, very old man. He is more than a hundred and ten years old! He built Ramsden’s house!’ he shouted excitedly through a crackling phone line.

  We drove for miles across high, open plateau country along the Kiambaga Ridge, running between Gilgil and Wanjohi, until finally we came to the simple homestead. A white-haired, white-bearded man met us – he certainly looked a century old – and introduced himself as Amos. I assumed that Amos was the old man we were to talk to, but Amos said, ‘My father is ready to welcome you.’ He added that he’d only been born around 1930 himself, but his father had been born in the 1880s, which would make him as old as Broughton and Colville, and even older than Idina, had they still been alive!

  We followed Amos along a pathway to a round mud hut with a conical grass roof: the traditional way of building, avoiding corners for bad spirits to hide in. Around to the far side, an ancient man, bent over his stick, stood in the doorway like a cracked dusty statue. Amos said something in Kikuyu and the old man held out his hand. It felt like dry, worn leather and I was almost afraid it would come away in mine.

  As the old man used his stick to find his way to the low stool and eased himself on to it, I realised he was blind. His eyes were milky white but bright, while his nails were like long, twisted extensions of his bent fingers. His bare feet were as crooked and dry as old tree roots. As he sat warming himself in the sun like an old tortoise, leaning forwards over his knees because he could not straighten his back, he suddenly seemed to come alive. He welcomed us in Kikuyu, which Amos obligingly translated into Kiswahili for my benefit, and told us that although they never came here now, he remembered the arrival of the very first white people in these parts.

  I gazed at the old man. In these back-of-beyond places, a man who has had a hard life can look old in his sixties: was this mzee really born in the 1880s? As if sensing my scepticism, Amos explained that they could determine the old man’s approximate age by his circumcision age set and what he had done before this, even though they had no idea exactly how old he was.

  The old man talked slowly, his voice husky and bubbling with phlegm, which he frequently spat out on one side of the stool. He remembered being a young boy and the excitement amongst his people when those first white men had passed by. Later came the first farmers, he said, then the First World War, when he went with the white men to fight in Taita and then Tanzania. Much later, after the next war, which he also fought in, although by then he was old, Mau Mau began. But by then he was too old to do more than watch and wait.

  ‘But I did,’ added Amos, ‘I fought against the white men.’

  The old man had gone to Maasailand to get circumcised after the First World War, by which time he had already built Kipipiri House. ‘So that’s why he brought his bride very late,’ explained his son, referring to the old custom of paying cattle or other valuable assets to his future wife’s family. ‘So he was old when he had his children.’

  ‘How many children does he have?’ Solomon asked.

  This stalled the old man, and eventually after counting with the help of his gnarled fingers and his son, the verdict was only four sons and two daughters. ‘But I have fifteen children,’ said Amos proudly. He turned aside and blew his nose into the grass, using his hand to apply pressure to one nostril while clearing the other.

  ‘So he built Ramsden’s house?’ I prompted, not wanting to go off on a tangent.

  The old man nodded, his misty eyes shining as he talked about his skills in bricklaying and carpentry. He was chief builder, he added. After that, he’d also built the Gilgil Golf Club and the house that became Pembroke House Preparatory School. But he’d still divided his time between Gilgil and Wanjohi, as he was also, by then, building Alice de Janzé’s house.

  ‘I built Wacheke’s house with timber, but it had stone floors – she was there living in a tent, alone . . .’ he said, using the same name for Alice as the Kiambogo elders. On one occasion when he’d returned to Gilgil to put in the windows and finish the roof at the club, somebody had done a shabby job in his absence: ‘The roof fell down and killed three builders . . .’ Amos translated matter-of-factly.

  I asked him to tell us more about building Ramsden’s house.

  ‘It was a very big house and we had to get it exactly right,’ he explained, ‘but Kimondo was not living there.’ Ramsden, who was busy in Naivasha, had moved in after they finished, the old man continued, but even then he had divided his time between his Kipipiri and Naivasha farms. He gave a sudden, toothless grin: ‘He was a very good man. Those first white men, they were very good, but the later ones, the Boers from South Africa, they were very bad. They beat their workers.’

  Tea arrived, stewed in a tin kettle. We took our steaming tin mugs, their handles almost too hot to grip, and moved our stools from the increasing glare of the sun into the shadow cast by the hut. The old man stayed to soak up more warmth, still talking while his son translated: ‘Kimondo’s house, it was a very expensive house. The people were afraid of it. They said the door was made of gold.’ He couldn’t remember exactly when it was built, but his son said he thought it was in the early 1920s.

  ‘I was not so young then, although it was before my circumcision,’ confirmed the mzee. ‘So I had not yet taken my first wife. Kimondo, he had a wife, but I never saw any children.

  ‘We built the house of earth and stone and timber, with a tiled roof,’ he continued. ‘It was very cold there – and dangerous: we saw many lions, elephants and hyena in the surrounding forest. Kimondo used to come to check on our work, but he would stay for no more than three days before going back to Naivasha.’

  I listened to the rasping intonation of the old man, his son’s low voice quietly filling the gaps with Kiswahili translations. I could imagine him sitting on this stool in the evening sun, entertaining his great-grandchildren – he must have many – with stories, as is the custom.

  There was a pause and I felt that perhaps we should leave: the old man must be tired. But suddenly he rapped his stick in the dust and laughed: ‘The white men had too much land. All the land was Delamere’s and Ramsden’s!’ The mzee looked out with sightless eyes towards an empty blue sky where a tawny eagle circled. ‘If you rode on horseback from one end of the white man’s farm to the other, the horse would drop down from exhaustion.’

  ‘We must find a way to go inside this house of Kimondo,’ said Solomon thoughtfully as we laboured back along rough, dusty roads.

  16

  From Caves to Grandeur

  Soon after this, when passing through the Nairobi suburb of Karen, I bumped into Janie Begg. I told her about the old man.

  ‘My father,’ she said unexpectedly, ‘was Ramsden’s sheep manager. He also looked after Cartwright’s sheep. His brother was another sheep fundi, back in Scotland.’ The insertion of Swahili words into everyday conversation is common in Kenya.

  I looked at her in surprise, but she was off on another subject. ‘Did I tell you I have Idina’s chair?’ I accepted her invitation to coffee back at her small rented cottage, part of a converted stable block in Karen, where she showed me a very high-backed, wooden, carved dining chair. ‘Probably a set of twelve, a reproduction they say,’ she went on, as I sat gingerly in the chair imagining the conversations that must have gone on around it in its murky past. Idina had left it to James Bird, better known as Jimmy, who Janie described as Idina’s ‘last boyfriend’. How curious to leave someone only one chair, I thought as Janie sai
d accusingly that he had gone to South Africa, leaving it behind for Lily Begg to look after, but he never returned nor had he ever contacted the Beggs again. ‘I remember Jimmy Bird,’ said Janie darkly. ‘He drank like a fish!’

  I closed my eyes once more, imagining Idina sitting in this chair, quaffing excellent wine. I wondered about her thoughts the last time she sat here, many loves and losses down the line . . .

  Janie was saying something about a cave along the Kimuru River on Ramsden’s farm. ‘My father used to take the sheep up to the high pastures,’ she said between heavy drags on her cigarette, ‘so we all went – we lived in the cave!’

  I blinked a bit, but she said. ‘I was very small, but my sister remembers it well.’

  At Janie’s bidding her sister, Sheila, wrote to me from South Africa:

  My memory goes back to the age of four when we lived in the cave and I only have one distinct memory of it. I was squatting down on my haunches looking towards the entrance as Mum was cooking our lunch in a saucepan over three stones. At my back was the Kimuru River with a hazardous precipice at the edge. As I was so small it probably was not as steep and hazardous as I thought.

  Janie was psyched up to find the cave, so we headed to Happy Valley again with an excited Solomon, taking the road from Captain to Machinery, stopping at daraja tatu.

  Somewhere near here, on this river that Janie, like Solomon, called the Kimuru, was the cave.

  We asked an old man, digging his field beside the road, about caves.

  ‘Eeeeh,’ he said, ‘there are some old Mau Mau caves up the hill.’ He laid down his jembe and joined Solomon, Janie and me as we scrambled up a steep, winding path, lined with spiky green aloe plants and ash-blonde tufts of dry grass. The old man, delighted at Janie’s fluent Kikuyu, said, ‘I remember that once, a long time ago, some white people were living in one cave!’ But he wasn’t sure exactly which cave.