Belle’s accompanying letter praised the ‘magnificent gardens’ of all the houses in the area: she thought Ramsden’s had been laid out by a professional landscape gardener from South Africa. ‘The beautiful cedar forests came right down to the houses and they were full of colobus monkeys, elephants and buffalo. One night five elephants walked right through our wheat fields leaving a very neat path, but little damage, whereas the warthog did tremendous damage digging up the wheat.’
Once the Barkers had climbed to the top of Kipipiri mountain through magnificent cedar forest, Peter slashing a way through stinging nettles. I didn’t like to tell Belle that now the forest does not even begin until halfway up the mountain and that the vegetation is thinning out daily, well-worn paths of charcoal burners and poachers like a growing spider’s web networking new routes between remaining pockets of forest.
When Mau Mau began, Belle explained, all the Kikuyu were removed from the area by the British government. This was basically all the available labour, so farmers had to bring in other tribes to help. Meanwhile, many of the Kikuyu freedom fighters were hiding in the Kipipiri forest – which stretched down to the edges of the farms. Most of the women and children were sent away to safer areas, while the men stayed together at Kipipiri House, going out on terrorist search patrols and trying to keep the farms running. Times were suddenly tense for the white settlers, the nights filled with terror as stories whipped round of grisly murders, of faithful servants taking Mau Mau oaths before opening doors to gangs of men who would murder their white employers.
My mother’s neighbour, Maureen Barratt, who used to visit relations in the Wanjohi area, remembers Dawson’s tower at Kipipiri House. ‘It was more like a strong room than a tower,’ she told me, then – visibly shuddering as she remembered sleepless nights – ‘It was creepy up there in those days of Mau Mau.’
Belle explained that the freedom fighters, however, were more inclined to raid farms situated further from the mountains, making it harder to track them back into their forested hiding places in a vast area of impenetrable terrain, full of wild animals. ‘When the women and children returned home, we still carried guns all the time and the army surrounded our houses with security fences as well as the labour lines,’ she added.
According to Ian Parker in The Last Colonial Regiment, in 1953 the British ‘C Coy’ under Major John Klynsmith was based at Ol Kalou. In November they were at Dawson’s farm, near a pencil slats factory, moving on to patrol Kipipiri and the Wanjohi valley.
Peter Hewitt, a police officer stationed in the area soon afterwards, wrote in his diary on 3 May 1954, published in 1999 as Kenya Cowboy: ‘The weather is awful! Really Scottish in its misty, damp drizzle. Worst of all is the mud created. It all but isolates us; the roads are impassable.’ A few days later he wrote about visiting the inspector at the ‘Sattimer (sic) police post’, also on the slopes of Kipipiri: ‘His post is appalling; they all sleep in tents. Furthermore, like many others, he is at loggerheads with the local settlers – they like to dictate, he won’t permit it. Had an awful ambush session tonight; poured with rain, scrambling and sliding in inky darkness.’ In October he records that the Mau Mau made an abortive raid on Barker’s, after which Hewitt and his men attempted to track the gang ‘right over the stark and forbidding mass of Kipipiri’ until they were defeated by rain, along with lack of food and blankets. Days later the Mau Mau stole twenty sacks of newly harvested wheat from a farmer just below Dawson’s. On 4 November Hewitt watched the Lincoln Bombers targeting the Aberdare forest, ‘which means that the terr’s [terrorists] will flood this area in no time at all. Where do they come from? Why are we always several steps behind? Where do they vanish to? It is virtually their war, they dictate the terms.’
But in spite of troubling times, Belle Barker concluded her letter nostalgically: ‘Before Peter died he said that the happiest days of his life were the ten years spent developing Mara.’
Belle also contacted Randall and Vi Franklin’s daughter, Sheilah Simons, who wrote to me from South Africa: ‘I understand that Sir John ceded the estate to his son to avoid death duties, and then the son was killed in Malaya by terrorists when his regiment was stationed there, and due to death duties Sir John had to sell his land at Kipi.’ Sheilah had also been to the Catholic mission to revisit her childhood home. She wrote unemotionally that a huge church had risen up in what was once their horse paddock. Her father was called ‘Mununga’ by the African staff and her mother ‘Nycambati’, meaning ‘the one whose voice shakes the rafters’ – Vi could be, according to her daughter, ‘quite peppery at times’.
Sheilah also mentioned another close neighbour, Michael Allman Hall, ‘newly married and fresh from the UK’. He bought a farm bordering theirs and the Barkers’, naming it Ndatura, place of the doves. Initially he built a cedar house on the edge of a small ravine, against local advice, right in the middle of the elephants’ biannual migratory route. When the elephants inevitably arrived, puzzled by this obstacle in the middle of their ancient trail, they milled around it, drinking water from the rainwater tank and scratching their sizeable behinds, making the walls shudder. Sheilah related how Michael Hall sent his wife Dawn to the Franklins for help, while he stayed inside the house playing Beethoven on the grand piano.
Hall was set apart from the surrounding farmers by virtue of the fact he had capital and could afford a manager. At some stage he moved to the high, tea-growing hills of Kericho, where he had another farm. Meanwhile, Sheilah explained, a manager called Alan Gray ran Ndatura.
Coincidentally Alan Gray happens to live in South Africa, near his old friends – my aunt and uncle. Their bond is reinforced by the Kenya connection. It seems that this becomes a lifeline to many old colonials who left Kenya. ‘They call us the “when-we’s”,’ my uncle explained, ‘because we all get together and start every sentence with “When we lived in Kenya . . .”’ Through my aunt I established that Alan Gray had actually been manager for Dr Roy Thompson, who’d purchased the empty 2,000 acres abandoned by Hall. Gray set about developing the farm from scratch, stocking it with dairy cows and sheep. He planted pyrethrum on the poor soil, which had to be drained, gradually mechanising the farm. Cream was taken to Gilgil where it was transported on to the Nakuru creameries – it had to be kept fresh so it wasn’t shaken into butter on the rough roads. Dried pyrethrum was also taken to Nakuru to be made into insecticides. The average rainfall, said Alan Gray, was about 45 inches a year, high by Kenyan standards. There wasn’t much time for anything other than hard work.
A year after visiting Machinery, I was having tea with Annie Dunn, a Soysambu neighbour, who was relating a wild-sounding but not uncommon story for Kenya: while she was out on a walk, a very large python had wrapped itself around one of her spaniels. Unable to disentangle it, she and her son had carried the dog home, along with the tenacious python which endeavoured to bite them – so one of them had to hold its head, swathed in a sweatshirt. When they arrived home to more helping hands, the dog survived, but the python didn’t! Annie’s mother, Joan Heath, was visiting and she laughed off Annie’s lack of fear, jokingly relating it to her ‘hardy upbringing up at Kipipiri’.
‘Kipipiri?’ I cried, more interested in that than the snake.
‘Yes,’ Joan said, going on to explain how she and her late husband Peter had managed Hall’s farm before moving to their own, which they bought from an Afrikaner called Davies. ‘It was below Mara Farm on the road to Gilgil. We lived in a converted barn with pencil-slat parquet floors,’ said Joan. ‘We grew lovely peaches and plums, and elephants visited us and drank at the dam.’
As it happened, Solomon and I had visited an old house just below Machinery. There was the remains of an orchard and glimpses of a panoramic view through a straight line of tall, spindly cypress trees that once would have been a clipped hedge, their soft pine scent pervading the cabbage patch that had covered the terrace. We were invited in by the owner and sat chatting to him on a window seat. ‘This was the hous
e of a white man we called Tuchora,’ he said, using the Kiswahili word for artist.
‘Neither of us were artists,’ said Joan when I told her about it and showed her the photograph, ‘but that was our house!’
Delighted I had found another person who lived near Clouds in the 1950s, I questioned Joan without mercy. Luckily most of her generation enjoy reminiscing, although of course the human memory is not infallible. But somehow the variations and contradictions add to the intrigue of those bygone times.
‘I visited Clouds in 1955. It had a water garden and there were even daffodils and bluebells,’ Joan recalled. ‘Idina had left such a lovely garden!’ It felt refreshing to hear praise for Idina’s creativity with plants, rather than disapproving judgements regarding her inventiveness from earlier decades. Joan also remembered Mununga when the Franklins had lived there: ‘A lovely, cosy old house with a hedge of rambler roses.’ She added how horrified she’d been to revisit Kipipiri House, after the last white settlers had left, to find that the walnut trees had been cut up into firewood, then stacked in a beautiful old pink bath.
It wasn’t all drudgery. With a twinkle in her eye, Joan told me about a New Year party at the Hall house when she’d been dancing with Bubbles Delap until Bill had objected to his young wife having so much fun. He’d dragged Bubbles home and locked her in the tower, where, according to Joan, she whiled away the long hours painting imaginative pictures.
‘That first police station where you were beaten up by police was once Hall’s house?’ I asked Solomon later.
‘That one,’ Solomon assented.
I suddenly had a flash vision of Michael Hall playing his grand piano. Nobody had actually concluded that story: had Beethoven sent the elephants running on their way or encouraged them to stay for another long drink at the tank?
18
Murder Beneath the Mountain
Looking back to my first trip with Solomon to Clouds, I realised how much my quest had changed and expanded. Inevitably, perhaps, I’d initially become riveted by the Happy Valley hype – drugs, sex, scandal and murder. It’s a ‘forbidden’ world that horrifies, even repulses, and yet we can become caught in a compulsion to find out more. I know plenty of people in Kenya today who are overly dependent on alcohol, sex and drugs for their pleasure and even their ‘survival’. My paternal grandmother was an alcoholic whose marriage and career were destroyed by her addiction; as a child I watched her blot out each day before we’d even got as far as breakfast. Perhaps this explains why I was attracted to research a part of Kenya of such tarnished repute.
But then Happy Valley’s history takes a U-turn, with a new generation who remind me of my maternal grandparents: hardworking farmers with little money, often managing somebody else’s farm, or struggling to save up enough to repay the purchase of their own. My grandparents, after decades of managing a farm, bought their own small one in 1958, just when my 21-year-old father proposed to my mother; they’d met in Nyeri, where she was teaching at a boarding school and he was posted during Mau Mau. And thus we move into the realms of living memory, my interest stimulated by my own family’s stories about this new episode in the life of Happy Valley. Farmers like my grandparents struggled to keep their farms productive, while in the rest of the world friends and relations read with mounting alarm newspaper headlines that told of horrifying murders on Kenyan farms – and particularly those near the vast forests of the Aberdares where the terrorists were hiding. The murder of Charles Fergusson and Richard Bingley sent shock waves worldwide, but for their neighbours, it must have been thoroughly nerve-wracking.
Bubbles Delap told me about one night when she’d heard Mau Mau intruders. ‘They were on the roof, breaking in that way. Bill, after a few whiskies, heard nothing, but I called my daughters into one room, then ran around the house slamming doors and shouting until they went away. Later we heard they had planned to kill us!’ After that incident they’d built a fortified extension with an iron door and barred windows where they could sleep securely at night. ‘I felt safe in that fort. We were all nervous at night of course. We used to see Fergusson and Bingley sometimes in Ol Kalou Club, but I never went to their house. That murder was terrible. At about nine at night, just after it had been discovered, all the neighbours came over to us; the men rushed out with guns and the women stayed at our house. I learned to use a gun after that.’
Caroline Hanbury Bateman lived closer to Fergusson and Bingley, making it clear that the ‘Happy Valley lot’, as she described them in denigrating tones, were worlds apart from those nearer Ol Kalou, the lifestyle of the former not remotely representative of the majority of settlers. After the murder on the evening of New Year’s Day, her mother and stepfather, Joyce and Durban Cowen, rushed over to the tragic scene. Caroline, who was with them, was only ten, but her impressionable young mind absorbed two sharply contrasting moments, ‘a thatched back porch with the outside light on and then carnage inside . . .’
I’d seen an old black and white pictorial record of Mau Mau, A Collection of Photographs Recording Kenya’s Battle Against Mau Mau. Printed and published by The English Press Ltd, Nairobi, Kenya Colony, the price was three shillings and fifty cents. I looked through it with some trepidation. There was the most unflattering photograph of Jomo Kenyatta I had ever seen, followed by gruesome images including cows with their back legs broken and innards gouged out, captioned as ‘bestiality’; sheep eyes impaled on kei-apple thorns captioned ‘accessories of barbarism’; a hanged cat; an abducted Asian baby; and fires lit by arsonists. Most horrific were the pictures of human murders: bodies after nocturnal Mau Mau attacks, including the Lari massacre of 150 Kikuyu women and children whose husbands were loyal to the British; and of an African chief, who’d also been on the ‘wrong’ side. There was a photograph of the bedroom of a young British boy, Michael Ruck, murdered on a North Kinangop farm, not far from Clouds: blood-stained sheets beside a train set, a globe of the world and a teddy bear. A chamber pot had been placed underneath the bed, presumably a sensible precaution so the little boy didn’t have to go outside. He’d never need to again.
Then came the photographs of the Fergusson and Bingley house after the murder. ‘A young farmer, Mr Richard Bingley and an old settler of 30 years’ standing, Mr C.H. Fergusson, were attacked at their Ol Kalou Farm as they sat down to dinner, and killed’, read the caption. ‘Neither Mr F nor Mr B had time to use their weapons and they were struck down as they sat at the table.’ In the lounge were visible the ruffled carpet, books on the floor absorbing blood, pools of blood around the coffee table, and an ominously open door behind a blood-spotted chintz chair. The photos of the dining room gruesomely showed a soup plate on a round, polished table, swimming in blood, with a bloodied spoon and fork, blood all over the side plate and butter dish, soaking the crumbs of bread. Then there was a picture of their cook after he was arrested. Fergusson’s house, I thought with some trepidation, must have a dark atmosphere considering what had happened between those walls. But nobody seemed to know where it was.
I happened to have an old, gold-framed mirror that needed fixing and a friend recommended Frank Daykin, ‘the best antique restorer you could find in Nairobi’.
It turned out that Frank had read a couple of articles I’d written on the old Happy Valley houses. ‘We lived up there once,’ he said, ‘closer to Ol Kalou, near Fergusson’s house.’
That’s how I ended up spending the best part of a morning with this slight, grey-haired man, captivated by the sparkle in his incredibly blue eyes, listening to his stories, as we sat among a treasure trove of broken furniture and dusty old clocks that all told different times. I sat on a three-legged chair beside a scratched walnut bridge table, making my notes.
Frank Daykin’s father, he said, had worked for a man called Morgan-Grenville.
This rang a bell: Solomon had once told me, ‘There was a man called Morgan who had a very big house that was high up the Aberdare Mountains. It even had a river underneath.’ I had wondered a bit
at this, but Frank now confirmed that yes, Robert Morgan-Grenville’s house had indeed been perched on the steep sides of the north-western Aberdares at the top of a road that had mounted the precipice in a series of hairpin bends. ‘It was a cedar house, with twenty-seven rooms, stuffed with antiques,’ said Frank. ‘It also had a magnificent garden with rhododendrons, willow trees and bridges arching over a river that flowed right under the drawing room. This was a special room, only used occasionally.’
Morgan-Grenville had two adjoining farms, one of which Frank’s father had managed. The young Frank had run the workshops. ‘Morgan-Grenville was a nice man – always had a cigar in mouth – like Churchill,’ said Frank. ‘He gave the impression of being stern, but we got on well.’ As he elaborated further, I began to picture the man he described: tall and aristocratic looking, talking with a slow drawl, wearing a Stetson . . . a man of habit, doing his weekly shopping in Nakuru, driving over the Dundori ridge, then spending the night at the Rift Valley Club. Frank had also liked his wife Mabel: ‘She sparked off my interest in antiques, took me with her to all the sales.’ Cars were another of the young Frank’s interests. ‘Morgan-Grenville had a huge Buick Cadillac,’ Frank added, ‘then a Jaguar: he loved American cars.’
I suddenly remembered that Lyduska had also mentioned Morgan-Grenville. ‘He was very rich. He was shy – quite weird,’ she’d said, adding, ‘His wife Maisie was very learned. A very good gardener.’
The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 19