Janie had her pendulum in her pocket – she was confident it would tell her. We looked at a couple of caves, including a very spacious one that would easily have housed a family, but Janie’s pendulum apparently said ‘no’.
Some way upstream we came upon a horizontal slit in the hillside at ground level. ‘We need to go into this one,’ said Janie. I looked at her in disbelief but she was already worming her way in on her hands and knees, followed by Solomon. The old man crawled in too, so I followed, muttering to myself that this really wasn’t a proper cave. Janie’s voice drifted out from the tunnel, sounding even more gravelly than usual: ‘It seems to have got very silted up!’
When we all got inside we could sit up – just. Solomon, the tallest, had to bow his head.
Janie’s pendulum went wild. ‘Yes!’ she said delightedly. ‘This is it!’
I eyed Solomon sceptically in the gloom, but the pendulum was very much his thing and he said, ‘Ah, yes, it is very good!’ The old man added admiringly in Kiswahili that Janie was indeed a muganga (witch doctor).
Brushing off the earth, our mission accomplished, we headed back to Gilgil, Janie regaling us with stories from the 1940s and 50s, pleasantly distracting us from the tedium of the rough road. Moving Ramsden’s sheep between his estates at Kipipiri and Naivasha had required veterinary certificates. But this became an inconvenience, so Ramsden bought the corridor as well.
‘That’s quite a distance to walk the sheep,’ I said.
But Janie, whose father had done it many times, shrugged: ‘Not really.’
I still longed to get into Kipipiri House. I thought about it often and even dreamed I was there, a step ahead of the mad woman, looking out through the windows on to green lawns and huge hedges . . .
I asked Janie about it.
‘Yes, I remember Kipipiri House well – it was beautiful,’ she replied, ‘Chops Ramsden got an architect from Norfolk to design it.’
I explained that we hadn’t been able to get in.
‘Oh?’ said Janie. ‘I can get you in there!’
I had been wondering if she was going to conjure up Ramsden’s ghost with her pendulum or work some other alarming spell, but she said in matter-of-fact tones, ‘I used to teach a very nice lad who is a friend of Kanyoto – the owner. I’ll get in touch with him. Nobody lives there anyway – it’s only very occasionally used.’
Janie duly found her ex-pupil, a charming, soft-spoken young Kikuyu man called Peter Mutua. We all met up at Gilgil Club and embarked on another long day’s safari to Happy Valley. Along the road Solomon pointed out people and places of interest for Peter’s benefit. ‘That’s Beth Mugo’s house’ – referring to a well-known Kenyan politician – ‘. . . that man running along the road, that’s the athlete John Kagwe . . . there used to be colobus in that valley . . .’
It was 50 miles from Gilgil to Kipipiri House – quite a distance to carry materials from the nearest railway station. Ramsden, as club chairman, certainly had to travel far to attend meetings and events there.
Peter, the Dutchman, had left the estate. Whoever had replaced him didn’t spot us as we sneaked past the greenhouses and up the road that allowed us the tantalising glimpse of green lawn, coiffured hedges and the lovely old house. We drove on round to the back gate, the official entrance to the house, where we were stopped by a one-eyed watchman. This was not the friendly guardian of our last visit and I wondered if we’d instigated his being fired. Meanwhile, his replacement glared at us with hostility.
‘May we park inside?’ asked Solomon. We were near the house now – I could have sprinted over and touched its old walls.
The watchman stood firm and eyed us suspiciously with his one eye. ‘You may not enter!’ he said.
Peter Mutua said something in Kikuyu but even he, with his politically useful connections, seemed doomed to failure.
Like a vision, a woman in a headscarf, anorak and long skirt suddenly materialised at his elbow, and I was reminded of a song my grandmother used to sing about the lady ‘with her one eye in the pot and the other up the chimney’. The squinting woman also clutched a panga which she held at the ready. It all felt very Jane Eyre and I wondered if she was the mad, locked-up wife of some important person who perhaps used this place as a bolthole.
Peter had dug from his pockets an impressively expensive mobile phone – a new mast had recently been erected in the area – and made a call. After a few minutes the watchman spoke to whoever was on the line in rapid Kikuyu. Then he looked us all up and down, and opened the gate, saying something to the mad woman before she raised her panga any higher.
She looked at me murderously. ‘Do you know Jesus?’ she asked.
I nodded rather weakly. It seemed imprudent not to.
She looked at Janie, who said something soothing in Kikuyu. She gave Solomon a crooked glare that was enough to put the forest behind him on fire, then seemed to make up her mind. She led the way towards the back door, glancing behind her to see if we were following.
Thus we were finally allowed into Kipipiri House, tiptoeing along corridors that flanked an open courtyard, unable to believe our luck, not daring to say too much in case the mad woman raised her panga or the watchman cursed us. Most of the rooms were locked, but the dining room was open. I silently admired wood-panelled walls and a stone fireplace, although the modern furniture was too ostentatious for my taste. Then Janie said, ‘I wonder if this chandelier is original . . .’ Out came the pendulum and before it had time to tell us the age of the chandelier, the mad woman took exception to such divinations and began to shriek, which turned into some sort of fit, the occasional religious utterance frothing forth. Janie, it was evident, was now being seen as the devil in disguise. It was time to leave, which we did in haste.
Janie wanted to see Mary Miller’s old house. I tried to dissuade her, suggesting we go to Alice de Janzé’s instead, which was also closer. But Solomon needed to find somebody who knew about a group of colobus in Wanjohi, and so we drove back around the northern end of Kipipiri and into the valley, passing Wanjohi and turning left up to Mary Miller’s house once again. It seemed even more ruined than before, as if something had eaten away another part of it. There was less roof, less wall and fewer windows. The place still felt as if it were shedding gloom into the surrounding atmosphere. Solomon wouldn’t get out of the car. I only walked to the fence. Janie’s pendulum froze, so she did not go much further.
‘This place is horrible!’ said Peter, who’d stayed behind me.
I remembered what had happened after we were here last time and Solomon echoed my thoughts: ‘This place can bring you very bad luck.’ Peter, a large and robust Kenyan who didn’t get fazed by trivialities, had turned pale under his dark skin.
‘We shan’t take any bad luck home with us. Let’s stop right here,’ Janie said as I drove away faster than usual, crossing the bridge over the Wanjohi River, not far from the house. So I stopped and at Janie’s bidding we all walked to the river’s edge and ‘cleansed’ our faces, arms, necks, feet and hands in the icy water. The pendulum woke up and we all felt better.
A gaggle of small children who had emerged down a path from the other direction dropped their empty water vessels and ran like hares at this unlikely sight of two white women and two African men, who stood on the green grass amongst clumps of nettles and thistles and shook themselves vigorously in the midday sun like mad dogs.
17
Times of Change
Although, like Mary Miller, some settlers remained, Ramsden had left Kenya and Erroll’s murder was old news when more new expatriates arrived in the colony after the Second World War. The newcomers built a flush of houses on smaller farms, subdivisions of vast estates like Ramsden’s. This was a very different type of farmer: my grandparents, by then farming below Mount Kenya, the other side of the Aberdares, would have referred to them as ‘respectable types’. These Happy Valley settlers became a close community by necessity, helping one another and working overtime to get
their farms up and running. They planted wheat and kept cattle. A few kept sheep. The second year they planted pyrethrum, which thrived in the high altitude and brought these struggling, hardworking farmers some very welcome cash.
Elspeth Huxley perfectly sums it up with understated wit in Forks and Hope: ‘The Wanjohi became a productive valley: still happy, on the whole, but on more bourgeois lines than in the days of its notoriety.’
Idina had left Happy Valley by then, and her light-headed lifestyle had departed with her.
A number of these ex-Happy Valley settlers are still around but their houses, purpose built after Happy Valley’s heyday, haven’t survived as well as some of the older ones. Indeed, they are often hard to find at all. I had imagined that these dwellings, built in the late 1940s and early 50s, wouldn’t harbour stories as gripping as those of their predecessors, but I was wrong. These were interesting times, not least because of Kenya’s new war of independence.
Mau Mau in Kenya has often been selectively reported, even misinterpreted, in history books, and it remains a popular modern trend to heap all blame and shame on the British side. The reality was far more complicated and I found fascinating reading in some of the lesser-known books on the subject – such as David Lovatt-Smith’s Kenya, The Kikuyu and Mau Mau (2005) – which offer an interesting, albeit unfashionable, perspective on this portion of Kenyan history.
Three years after the end of the Second World War, in 1948, a Kikuyu oath-taking ceremony was held in protest at the imminent arrival of Britain’s Duke of Gloucester, who was to award Nairobi city status. In 1951 the British government refused to increase the number of elected Africans on the colony’s legislative council and Mau Mau began in earnest, with the state of emergency declared the following year. This was the same year that HRH Princess Elizabeth visited a treehouse hotel called Treetops, in the Aberdare forest, a prelude to the unfurling of a new chapter in British history.
Hunter Jim Corbett’s last book, a beautifully illustrated booklet on Treetops, vividly describes that day, 5 February 1952: the forest with its pink-flowering Cape chestnut trees and view of the Aberdares. That same morning he’d had, by telegram, an invitation from Princess Elizabeth to accompany the royal party to Treetops. They had arrived at the Royal Lodge in Sagana two days earlier – and the previous day the Duke had played polo at Nyeri, on the far side of the Aberdares. Corbett, concerned about security, had missed the polo to ensure their safety. As it happened, the biggest threat turned out to be elephants, who uprooted four of the biggest trees – plus ladders built for people to scale the trees to escape the elephants and other dangerous animals.
Corbett, who’d shaved twice, apprehensively watched a herd of forty-seven jittery elephants with their small calves approach the salt lick – right below the tree in which the hotel was built. As the important guests approached, Princess Elizabeth, in front, remained completely calm. Luckily the wind was on the side of the royals and Corbett heaved several sighs of relief when all were up the ladder and safely in Treetops. He praises her courage, adding: ‘A minute after climbing the ladder the Princess was sitting on the balcony and, with steady hands, was filming the elephants.’ HRH was rewarded with excellent game viewing and, entranced, requested tea on the balcony.
As evening drew on, Corbett talked to the Princess about her father’s illness, although she was confident he’d seemed much better when waving her off in London. After dinner the royal party returned to the balcony to watch nine rhinos and, at dawn, Princess Elizabeth was out on the balcony to do more filming, making notes on all the animals. Corbett marvelled that ‘though she had spent so few hours in sleep the Princess had started that day with eyes sparkling and a face as fresh as a sunflower’. He noted that it was a ‘radiantly happy princess’ who returned to the Royal Lodge – only to receive the sad news that her father had just died. Corbett wrote the famous words in the Treetops register, noting that for the first time in world history a princess had ascended a tree and descended a queen, ‘God bless her.’
Treetops was burned down by Mau Mau on 27 May 1954, as was Nyeri Polo Club, allegedly in protest at British anti-terrorist operations. Both places had the royal visit in common. Operation Blitz had run through the Aberdares in late 1953, resulting in the deaths of 125 Mau Mau, followed by the King’s African Rifles’ Operation Hammer and its shoot-on-sight policy.
Seventeen months before Treetops fell prey to arsonists, at dinner time during the evening of New Year’s Day 1953, the brutal murder of an elderly white farmer and his young apprentice took place under cover of darkness – at their own dining table. It was almost thirteen years since Erroll’s murder, and eight and a half since the end of the Second World War. The Africans who had fought foreign wars for the British in various parts of the world had, as in the First World War, seen the vulnerability of men – including white ones – and now they were embarking on their own battle to gain independence for their country.
When I’d talked to the Kiyuku elders about their memories of Alice de Janzé, the conversation had inevitably touched on Mau Mau. One-eyed Gichuki, who didn’t seem to know anything about Alice, told us – after announcing with pride that he had eleven children – that he’d been an informant during Mau Mau, which had begun in earnest a decade after Alice’s death. ‘Eeeeh! I took tobacco and food into the forests – and the forests were very big in those days.’ There were murmurs of assent. ‘Once you took an oath, you must die if you break it,’ he cried. More agreeing murmurs.
Major Mururi, who’d acquired his rank as a freedom fighter, warmed up to the subject. ‘Eeeeeh! I was young and unmarried in those days,’ he said. ‘But I ordered the slaughtering of the white men’s cattle!’ Several others nodded conspiratorially.
‘The wazungu made up the word Mau Mau,’ Major Mururi continued disdainfully. ‘Once there was a meeting of elders. African informers to the white men were listening outside with their ears to the walls so that they could tell the white men what was said. They heard nothing but mumbling: M-m-m-m-m-m! So when they were told this the wazungu invented the word Mau Mau.’
It was a good story and caused much hilarity, although Solomon commented in an aside that Mau Mau actually comes from Uma Uma, Kikuyu for ‘Go! Go!’, which of course could equally be corrupted by eavesdropping.
I then discovered that my daughter’s school friend’s grandmother, Elspeth Harte, née Dawson, had known the area after Ramsden left and during the Mau Mau era. Her sister had lived at Kipipiri, she said, putting me in touch with Belle Barker, who now lived in South Africa.
Belle wrote to me, filling in some of the history post-Ramsden. The company Block and Massada had bought Kipipiri Estates from Ramsden in 1950, then dividing up and selling the farms in the early 1950s, while the government offered generous terms to encourage new settlers. Belle’s brother-in-law had carried out the survey of the twenty-three farms, after which Belle’s (and Elspeth’s) brother, Fergus Dawson, bought two blocks, including the one containing Ramsden’s main Kipipiri House. The Dawsons lived there before selling both farms to Italians and renting Clouds in early 1954. Belle’s husband, Peter Barker, also bought a farm. Another couple, Randall and Vi Franklin, bought two blocks including the main manager’s house, Manunga, where Belle said that Derek and Pat Fisher had lived.
‘I believe Sir John Ramsden also built Clouds for Lady Idina,’ Belle wrote, explaining she’d read about the Happy Valley crowd in the book she thought was called ‘White Magic’ but had never met Idina. Below the Barkers, Belle informed me, John and Didi Gordon bought a farm. She was an artist.
‘Didi was Danish,’ another elderly memsahib said. ‘She was very pretty – and very flirty!’ This threw more light on the Gordon who’d have built the tower we’d visited, near Machinery, but nobody seemed to know if John Gordon was any relation of Charles, Idina’s second husband.
A 1956 RAF map charted all these houses and dwellings for the sake of identification for British troops brought out during the emerge
ncy. The Barkers’ home is marked at 7,850 feet, below Kipipiri House, then Dawson’s at 8,150 feet. Clouds is highest, at 8,200 feet. The majority of other names of the time are South African – Potgeiter, Van Rensburg, Nel, Kruger, Steyn, Pieters, Spooner.
‘Our farm was called Mara,’ Belle wrote, ‘as that was what the Maasai called it, which means “shadows”, or “black and white”, as there were mounds on the land which gave this effect.’ When the Barkers first arrived there had been nothing on their farm apart from a sentry box, from where a guard had kept watch over Ramsden’s sheep, fending off wild animals. The Barkers started off living in a shed, building their stone house in 1956. Peter Barker was a former district officer, so farming was new to him. Luckily for him his neighbours were seasoned farmers: his brother-in-law Fergus Dawson and friend Randall Franklin. Belle wrote: ‘None of us had very much capital so we all worked very hard indeed, in fact my brother had his tractors working all night to try to get in the maximum acreage the first year. One night the driver fell asleep and the tractor came to rest just at the edge of the steep gorge.’
When, after some more correspondence, we’d established the whereabouts of the Barkers’ former home, I wrote back to explain to Belle that their old house had now been swallowed up by the untidy tin-shack village called Machinery. Belle replied: ‘Maybe the village is called Machinery because we had two big wheat sheds on the farm and they may have been used later to house machinery.’
She enclosed a photograph of a painting of the Mara farmhouse done by Rowena Bush – an artist’s impression with flowery surrounds and sunny fields stretching into far horizons. She also sent a cine film of the area taken in the 1950s, which my father managed to show on his old and temperamental projector. Between erratic jumps and behind surface scratches that leapt across the screen like hyperactive stick insects, the beauty of Mara Farm unfolded: golden fields of wheat stretched towards an indigo Kipipiri, its mantle of forest touching the edges of the expansive and productive farms. The farmhouse itself, a modest stone bungalow, was surrounded by beds of lovingly tended, colourful blends of exotic flowers, in front of which toddled blonde children. There were two large wheat stores just behind. Otherwise the horizons were devoid of any buildings. It was hard to believe that all this had disappeared under the flimsy shacks and exploding new population of Machinery.
The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 18