The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  Frank didn’t think Robert had another wife. It was more likely a confusion of names. He told me that Morgan-Grenville first arrived in Happy Valley in 1938 with his business partner, Archibald Fraser Allen – and the latter’s wife, Mabel. After Fraser Allen’s premature death, Mabel married Morgan-Grenville. It sounded suspiciously Happy Valley sort of stuff, but Frank assured me there were no affairs or murders – it had been death by accident.

  Frank’s father, Frank Joseph Daykin, had been a labourer in London, ‘one of the last to lay cobbles in Fleet Street’, Frank said. He’d left his first wife, running off with a barmaid called Elsie, Frank’s mother. One day in 1954 Frank Joseph walked past South Africa House and paused. On impulse he walked in and asked for a job. Morgan-Grenville happened to be there too. Six weeks later the Daykin family were on a boat to Kenya.

  Once they’d docked, the Daykins travelled by train to Gilgil, where they were met by an Austin lorry and a Mercedes pick-up, noted by nineteen-year old Frank and committed to memory. He was brimming with excitement at this wild adventure which had taken them across increasingly warm seas, into the hot and muggy but exotic port of Mombasa. Then there’d been the train ride across stunningly beautiful landscapes, replete with wild animals, pausing in Nairobi before finally descending into the dramatic Rift Valley. They passed Lake Naivasha and finally disembarked at Gilgil station. They then began climbing up out of the Rift Valley again, now driving on wet, slippery roads that stretched endlessly into a darkly mysterious African night. The rains had come, transforming the dust into perilously slippery mud known as ‘black cotton’, causing the vehicles to sashay and spin, sliding into ditches and thudding into the banks.

  Frank’s mother, very much an English city girl, was horrified. Then, when they eventually arrived at their new abode in the dark and the rain, Elsie Daykin discovered that the long-drop toilet and the kitchen were outside in the cold. She’d been one of twelve daughters and had produced five children herself in six years, so she was reasonably hardy, but arriving after such a long journey at this cold, bleak, primitive dwelling somewhere in Africa was totally overwhelming. Elsie burst into tears.

  When the sun arrived the next morning, its warmth taking a long time to have any effect because it had to rise above the huge hulk of the Aberdares, the new arrivals must have looked out at the golden light spreading across the vast plateau, towards distant blue mountains at the other side of the Rift Valley and gasped. Perhaps Elsie Daykin was moved by such an expansive, beautiful view, or maybe she just wished she could hotfoot it back to London to find a few ‘modern’ conveniences – and friends to chat to. This place, in the shadow of a cold mountain, with nobody to gossip with except the boss’s wife, must have felt like the world’s end. It was even less comforting to have arrived when Mau Mau was in full swing: the British press had not made light of it, and one of the grisliest murders – that of a white farmer whom everybody described as ‘a delightful old man’ and his poor young student – had recently taken place a stone’s throw away.

  Home was now a cedar house, perched beside a gorge on a ridge running up the high Aberdares to the Morgan-Grenville house. Frank loved it all. At least there’d been an indoor bathroom – with a tin tub, he pointed out, and piped water. ‘I wonder if the old Dover stove is still in the kitchen?’ he mused.

  A stone house was being built lower down the slope. As soon as this second house was ready, the Daykins moved there.

  ‘Our first house was near the Malewa River: you crossed over a rickety bridge and then drove up a steep hill. The second house was down below, not on the river. Down to the right of the workshop,’ Frank said, as if giving me directions to come to lunch.

  Both homes had looked down on to vast, open plains stretching west, towards where this high country drops down in a series of steps into the Rift Valley.

  Before I left Frank’s workshop, we’d made a plan to drive up to the area, so he could find his old homes – and look for Fergusson’s. I’d forgotten all about the mirror.

  19

  Finding Fergusson’s

  It was a cold, grey day with incessant drizzle when we headed up to the northernmost end of Happy Valley, somewhere I’d never ventured before. This was probably the sort of weather Frank’s mother had arrived in half a century ago, although we had the advantage of daylight and nor had we come all the way from England.

  Frank and his wife, Anne, had stayed at Gilgil Club the night before, along with Janie Begg, who was accompanying us. The rattles made by my Land Rover, when I arrived very early in the morning, were enough to convince everyone we should go in Frank’s Pajero – thankfully, as it didn’t leak. Solomon joined us at Captain, also delighted at a chance to explore Happy Valley’s northern reaches.

  We took the tarmac road to Ol Kalou, cursing the vicious, hidden speed bumps at every small village or school. Then we turned right on to the road that eventually takes you to Wanjohi town, passing Slains on the way. It was a bleak and flat high plateau – particularly unappealing in bad weather. Somewhere over to our left, surrounded by swampy country, was Lake Ol Bolossat.

  According to Errol Trzebinski in Kenya Pioneers, in 1903 the East African Syndicate were given the lease of 500 square miles between Ol Kalou and Ol Bolossat. In 1916 it was surveyed and farms were up for sale: the first crop to be tried was flax, but in the early 1920s its price dropped, so flax was dropped too. By the end of the 1920s the Happy Valley crowd had moved in, not far to the south, where they were fast forging their reputation below those mauve and blue mountains, hidden by cloud this morning, but usually clearly visible from Ol Kalou. By the early 1930s Happy Valley’s reputation was spilling down steadily, tarnishing and toxic, reaching Ol Kalou town, now home to six Europeans, a hundred Asians and three hundred Africans. Many more local farmers passed through regularly with livestock, wheat and pyrethrum to sell, while elephant, lion and hippo still wandered through at will.

  Frank commented on former neighbours as we passed their old stamping grounds. Kruger, ‘who had good parties’; asthmatic Spooner with a ‘dolly-bird’ wife; a farm manager called Davidson who was a first-class shot and was rumoured to have been a bodyguard for Al Capone; Trudy Vidor, an Austrian who grew roses and bred dogs . . .

  Frank was confused by today’s roads. ‘I remember Kruger’s house being on the left, not the right. About four miles past Kruger we forked left, then it’s about eight miles to Morgan-Grenville, and only a mile and a half on to Fergusson and Bingley . . .’ he said, sounding a little uncertain.

  ‘. . . if anything is left of any of it,’ Janie wondered aloud.

  ‘It was very bad,’ Solomon told us, ‘because some of Morgan-Grenville’s farm was just grabbed. It was never sold properly.’

  Land-grabbing is a Kenyan grievance that has wormed its way into this century, with title deeds either not existing, or appearing in triplicate as many people lay claim to one piece of land. Even the British-driven million-acre scheme, it seems, had not been immune to such problems.

  We’d come to a section of broken tarmac where deep holes were concealed by water, causing us to hit almost every one. The ditches, too, were waterlogged, running alongside the road like canals. The horizon was heavy with thick, dark cloud and there was still no sign of the Aberdares. After a wild goose chase, misled by Solomon down a muddy road to nowhere we wanted to go, we stopped at a misty village we’d already been through.

  ‘It all looks completely different,’ Frank complained.

  We halted beside a mzee who stood impervious in the cold and rain.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked in Kiswahili.

  ‘This area is called Morgan,’ he replied. We felt we must be getting warmer, metaphorically if not literally.

  As if in response, a slice of the Aberdares suddenly revealed itself: a tantalising flank of moorland in the mist. It was much closer than we’d realised. Slains was somewhere off to the right, then.

  After establishing where we were heading, the old man
pointed back down the road we’d come from.

  Back at the junction where we’d gone wrong, we picked up a rain-sodden young man called Wahome, who squeezed into the back with Solomon, Janie and me, apologising for making us wet. He said there were so many roads he’d be better to just show us the way; and yes, he knew the way to the old stone house Frank was looking for. His grandfather Noah Kamau, who had died in 2001 aged 103, had worked nearby – for a man called David Fraser Allen. As he talked about his grandfather’s life, albeit before he himself had been born, he referred to those former times, astoundingly, as ‘the old good days’. Perhaps his grandfather had too.

  ‘Happy Valley was full of lions back then,’ said Frank suddenly.

  ‘So was Karen,’ said Janie wryly.

  This brought me back with a jolt to the murder of Lord Erroll, which I had shelved in my mind while going to so many other old houses. Indeed – it suddenly occurred to me, why would Broughton, or Diana, or anyone else, walk a mile in the dark through Karen, back from the quarry where the body of Joss lay curled up in the footwell of a hired Buick?

  Wahome directed us left, past the Step Hotel, on to a very stony road that slowed us down further. He was thrilled at Janie’s mastery of the Kikuyu tongue. Meanwhile we drew nearer – we hoped – to our goal. Solomon remained silent, casting suspicious glances into the grey surroundings.

  ‘Morgan-Grenville’s house was up there – over eight thousand feet,’ Frank explained, looking at the bulk of mist in front of us. ‘He used to grade the rocky road.’ He shrugged at the road we were rattling along. ‘Maybe this was our access road, but it seems different – it was more than fifty years ago.’

  ‘It must have been miserable up there in the cold season,’ I commented.

  ‘September was the worst,’ Frank replied. ‘The thin ice on the puddles was like fine glass – it crinkled as you drove though, then slowly the sun would rise over the Aberdares, reach our houses – and thaw us out.’

  We passed a place where a shallow stream spilt over the road. Frank suddenly brightened as he exclaimed, ‘This is the river that passed beneath Morgan-Grenville’s old house, supplying water to all of us.’ His recognition of something at last on this lonely, misty road was a relief to us all.

  ‘But it only runs when it is very wet like now,’ Wahome told us. ‘Otherwise it is always dry.’

  Frank raised his eyebrows. ‘It never used to dry up. I remember walking upstream with a sieve to clear Morgan-Grenville’s blocked drains. I used to fish in his garden too.’

  We crossed the bridge over the Malewa, then passed the old workshops, now disused.

  Frank suddenly cried out: ‘There it is! There’s our old house!’

  Veiled in grey drizzle, the grey-stone house sheltered like a tramp beneath a threadbare shingle roof, the many holes patched up with flattened-out tin cans. We walked around, chilled by the persistent rain. An overgrown muddle of salvia, nasturtiums and daisies were struggling valiantly to break through a mantle of litter. At the front of the house, beds of healthy carrots, beans and potatoes seemed better cared for. A group of young men gathered around: white faces were evidently a rare sight here. When they discovered that Frank was revisiting his old home, they became fixated, following his every move and hanging on every word he said. An elderly Kikuyu mama let us into the house, almost reverently, welcoming Frank back into his home as if she had somehow expected him.

  We went from room to room as Frank retraced his footsteps of many decades ago. As he stood in one dark room, a pale and ghostly figure against the smoke-blackened walls, he whispered: ‘This was my bedroom!’

  I had grown used to the dim light by now and I suddenly realised that his blue eyes were bright with tears, his cheeks wet. I stepped back outside, not wanting to intrude.

  The Daykins’ first, cedar home, where Frank’s mother had broken down in despair upon their arrival, was higher up the hill. It no longer existed, according to Wahome, but he could show us where it had once been. Damp and shivering, we climbed back into the relative warmth of the car and headed towards the site. This weather, Frank said, reminded him of arriving, that very wet night, decades ago . . . the type of adventure a young man craved. He’d found it impossible to fathom his mother’s exhausted sobs.

  The road climbed in a series of slippery bends before Wahome told us to stop on a shelf of green land. Frank got out and looked around, then said quietly, ‘Yes. This is it.’ There were still pink and white lilies springing from the verdant profusion of Kikuyu grass, mingling among stinging nettles. The trumpet-like blooms grew in a circle, as if by magic, giving the impression that their exotic, stiff beauty could protect the scattered stones that Frank identified as the veranda floor.

  ‘Here was the sitting room,’ Frank said, standing beside a clump of blue agapanthus that had taken the liberty of spreading themselves into the space that once might have held a sofa. Behind him the long view stretched out into the grey distance. At the back, the former kitchen was another pile of stones, beside which a few guava trees had survived. The outside bathroom was now deep in nettles, concealing the deep pit which had been the long drop. Going outside on cold, wet nights cannot have helped Elsie’s rheumatoid arthritis and pleurisy. Frank told us that Dr Anne Spoerry, of Flying Doctor fame, had looked after his mother. Dr Spoerry had lived nearby, before moving to Subukia. ‘She was a nice old bird,’ said Frank.

  Solomon had discovered a shallower series of pits. ‘The trout ponds,’ said Frank. He now stood on a flat area with periwinkle and amaryllis carpeting the spot where his parents had once slept. ‘Their bedroom looked out on flower beds and tall hollyhocks.’ Frank’s blue eyes were bright as he gazed out of the imaginary window on to a view that was familiar – but changed. ‘There were so many more indigenous trees than there are now,’ he said softly, averting his eyes from the crowd of staring people who had arrived, most of them in bare feet and ragged sweaters. Just about everyone wore woollen hats or balaclavas. A few of the older men wore gumboots. Solomon quickly commandeered a panga from an old man, and went off to dig up some plants. The children stared at us as if we were aliens, giggling at anything we said or did.

  ‘Where do you go to school?’ asked Anne, who is a dedicated learning support teacher.

  The replies were in their best broken English, as they pointed down the slope. ‘In the river,’ said one; ‘There down,’ added another.

  Frank retreated into quiet thought as we left his old home and headed north along the base of the mountains to look for Fergusson’s house. The rain persisted as we passed a seasonal waterfall, a trickle of water threading down the jagged cliff. The blanket of cloud had lifted – only very slightly – so we could see the lower slopes of the Aberdare Mountains now, but their hidden heights had a giddy air of mystery as they vanished into sodden, grey skies. An uneven patchwork of shambas clung on to bare foothills. ‘That was once wheat, with fields terraced by my brother,’ Frank suddenly said.

  ‘But there are no trees anywhere here – it is very bad!’ Solomon shook his head sadly.

  Somewhere to our right was the old road that had wound up the Aberdares to Morgan-Grenville’s. ‘But it is too bad for the vehicle,’ said Wahome, ‘we would have to walk.’ Nothing at all was left of Morgan-Grenville’s home, he added, not even a stone. Nobody wanted to walk anywhere in the rain, although I longed to see if any rhododendrons still survived – I’ve never seen one in Africa.

  ‘What happened to the Morgan-Grenvilles?’ I asked.

  ‘They retired at Blue Lagoon,’ Frank said, referring to the northernmost beach at Watamu, a couple of hours’ drive north of Mombasa. ‘They’d always had a house there, opposite the rock shaped like a turtle. When they moved there permanently they had to increase the size of the house to fit in all their antique treasures.’ Frank was living in Nairobi by then, but Robert Morgan-Grenville still brought his car over 300 miles to Nairobi for Frank to service.

  The electric fence, built to protect th
e Aberdare National Park from human encroachment, was only half a dozen kilometres away from here, according to Solomon. To our left we passed a wealthy and well-kept homestead, with neat fences, a small stone house and a flourishing patch of maize and beans. ‘It belongs to Morgan-Grenville’s old cook,’ Wahome said.

  A little further along the road, also on the left, was another neglected colonial relic. ‘That’s Fraser Allen’s old house,’ said Frank.

  We parked by the road and walked in, inhaling the eucalyptus smell in the soggy air. The rain had finally stopped, but persistent mud clung to our shoes, making them as heavy as wooden clogs. The rusting remains of an ancient car crouched in front of the cedar off-cut walls and tin roof of the house, like a fossilised watchdog. ‘1950s Ford Escort,’ said Frank, looking at it with interest.

  The house looked small and poky, with tiny windows: if I’d lived in this bleak, damp place, letting in the light would have been a priority, but of course you had to get the glass panes up here on these terrible roads. We walked along an old hedge, now a row of tall cypress trees, into the orchard. Attached to a fence post was an old, defunct grinding mill, still bearing its inscription of origin: ‘R Hunts and Co, Earl’s Colne, England.’ Behind an oleander hedge, the upper reaches of the Aberdares were finally emerging as the clouds lifted and dispersed, blowing smoke-like into patches of blue sky. A mzee came from the fields to meet us, unfazed by the host of white strangers tramping in – it seemed no big deal. He had been Kruger’s carpenter. ‘I can show you the tomb of the white man who lived here,’ he said, adding: ‘It is on my land now.’

  ‘That will be Archibald Fraser Allen’s grave. He died in 1942,’ said Frank. We followed the old Kikuyu landowner through muddy, turned earth, where he’d been digging up potatoes and beans. We waded through more clay-like mud, our shoes becoming bigger and clumsier with each step. Small children had suddenly emerged around us, their mud-stained skins and tattered clothes blending into the muddy terrain as if they were spirited from the soil. The smallest ones, presumably the old man’s grandchildren, had never seen a white face: they screamed and ran at the startling sight.