After we’d picked our way through another field of carrots and chickweed, we halted by a patch of brambles, protectively entwined around whatever was underneath. Wahome explained the concealment: ‘We Kikuyu keep the headstone covered up so as not to be haunted.’
The grave had that peaceful feel, exclusively reserved for the resting places of the dead. The remains of Fraser Allen certainly had a lovely view of Lake Ol Bolossat, I noted, following Solomon’s gaze as he stared out distractedly across the cabbage field towards the lake.
‘A soft granite,’ Frank said, pushing aside the thorns and fingering the smashed pieces of the old headstone. A jumble of inscribed letters was discernible: 42 . . . D . . . In . . . Har.
‘Why is it broken?’ I wondered aloud.
There was no reply.
As we left Fraser Allen’s grave, Frank explained, ‘He was killed under a tractor which caught fire when he was lighting a fag.’
Janie Begg shuddered. ‘Oh yes – that was a horrible accident. I thought it was in a harvester.’
The Daykins had, of course, arrived well after the tragic event, by which time Mabel Fraser Allen had become Mabel Morgan-Grenville.
We headed on towards Lake Ol Bolossat, and Frank began to talk about Charles Fergusson and Richard Bingley. ‘They were murdered at the very beginning of 1953,’ he said, ‘just before my family arrived.’ The news can hardly have helped lift Elsie’s already dampened spirits. Then she learned that she and her husband would have to be armed and that there was an electric barbed-wire fence around her new house, powered by a generator that worked all night, its noisy rattle masking more sinister sounds that might be out there. Added to this was the constant Kenya Police Reserve presence. Special enclosures, called bomas in Kenya, were built to protect the cattle, though Elsie didn’t get one of the towers built by some settlers to protect their women and children. The Black Watch were based on the Kruger farm, Frank told me, and every evening one person from Morgan-Grenville’s farms had to go out with either the Black Watch or the King’s African Rifles to check the labour lines in the areas. ‘One guy with a beard, who we called “Harpic Round the Bend”, used to bring bodies in a truck for us to identify,’ Frank said. Presumably for Elsie the outdoor kitchen and latrine quickly paled into insignificance beside such grisly occurrences. However, apart from cattle being let out of their fields at night, there had not been much Mau Mau trouble on the Morgan-Grenville farm.
‘This was Fergusson’s house,’ said Frank suddenly, stopping before I’d even noticed the nondescript grey-stone building with a red-tiled roof. It was small and built in the typically conservative style of the 1950s, very obviously as a bachelor dwelling, making little effort to be attractive, even if the imagination tried to visualise its better days. The only saving grace was a panoramic view of Lake Ol Bolossat. The French windows and front steps faced on to this view – which, I thought, would be beautiful at sunset on a better day. I thought of the elderly Fergusson, whisky in hand, looking at this same view on that fateful New Year’s Day, savouring those moments which he could not know were his last.
The house had its back to the Aberdares, like other old settler houses between here and Wanjohi. I can see why they wouldn’t want to face such a big bulk of mountain – too diminishing.
The sun was now dancing in and out from behind clouds, allowing patches of blue sky to give us occasional windows of warmth, but there was still a predominant chill to the air.
‘This place makes me feel bad,’ complained Solomon.
‘It was deserted for years after the murder,’ said Frank, ‘but it looks like it’s used now.’
The grass was neatly cut and there was a spartan garden: arum lilies, daisies and periwinkle. But perhaps with no memsahib to plant trees to yield succulent peaches or delicious-scented gardenia blooms, nor to lovingly tend beds with phlox and narcissus, it had always been dull.
Anne had discovered a sign: ‘Kirima Dispensary, Ministry of Health, open Mon to Fri 8–5.’ This was Saturday, so the house was all locked up and there was nobody around to let us in – if indeed we wanted to enter, which Solomon didn’t. I was actually surprised to find the place devoid of atmosphere, as if any ghosts had departed in peace despite the violence of their end. Perhaps the dedicated work and prayers of those running the clinic had cleansed the place.
I wondered about that fatal night, what had gone through the minds of the older farmer and his young friend before they were hacked to death with machetes. Had they seen their cook, who’d apparently let the Mau Mau in? My mother remembers Bingley: ‘Such a nice young man.’ According to one Kipipiri resident of the time, he’d had rheumatic fever when he was young. She remembered going to his twenty-first birthday party, not long before he was murdered.
‘The cook threw soup in his face before they chopped him up,’ another elderly memsahib added gruesomely.
Had the two men been victims of a random attack, or an easy target – or did somebody have a vendetta against one of them?
Two new tin porches had been added on to the house, looking out to the unruffled surface of the lake which mirrored a brightening sky. We climbed the porch steps and pressed our faces against the window: I could see the living room, a new wall slicing through the middle of the room, cutting the unused fireplace in half. Then we walked around to the back door to the kitchen, and looking through the window could see this was now a laboratory, newly painted blue and white. ‘This door is where the cook let the freedom fighters in – he’d been forced to take the oath,’ said Frank.
We turned away. ‘Behind the house it was all forest,’ Frank said, gazing at the naked foothills. Solomon clucked angrily. Now the lower slopes were an example of poor farming: without terraces to contain it, the soil was surging down in the powerful sweep of every rainstorm. A rocky cliff stood like a scar on the naked hill. ‘That used to be a waterfall,’ Frank said, watching the goats and sheep clawing their way up the steep sides like multicoloured ticks.
Solomon was chatting now to Wahome, who was surprised to hear that the lake had 300 species of birds, although he knew about the resident hippo. ‘It is such an important lake,’ said Solomon. ‘I would very much like to start an indigenous tree-planting project in this area!’
There wasn’t the usual gathering crowd of spectators, just one woman who told us the doctor was on leave, assuming that was the reason for our being here.
‘We are just looking at the old house,’ Solomon explained.
She gave us a puzzled glance, before walking on.
Solomon wanted to see somebody about his idea for a new tree nursery at Ol Bolossat, so we stopped in Ol Kalou on the way back, opposite a shop building with its date – 1946 – carved into the stone above its entrance. Further along the street an old house had been awkwardly absorbed into the new town. Now Hunter’s Butchery, its disintegrating shingle roof and dirty walls clung together as if in sorrowful respect of the fact it had once been somebody’s beloved home. An angora goat wandered past its entrance, seeming somehow as unlikely as seeing a Thompson’s gazelle in London. A matatu emblazoned with the name ‘The Morgan’ blared past us, kicking up dust into our windscreen. Presumably it was in a hurry to get to the place we’d just left.
Frank and Anne wanted to stop at the old St Peter’s church in Ol Kalou. Its history is told in They Made it Their Home (1962): during the Second World War, Morgan-Grenville had given land, money had been raised locally, and the church and the vicarage beside it were built. The women of Ol Kalou, many of whom kept the new and large-scale wheat farms going, had a place to congregate and pray for the safe return of their men.
St Peter’s graveyard was bursting with stiff arum lilies and red-hot pokers, shooting up above a riot of brightly coloured geraniums and dahlias that crawled over the mounds and depressions of unmarked graves, concealing old stones with missing plaques. Some dated back to the war. These few names didn’t include any of the old Happy Valley lot: even if they’d wanted to be burie
d here in the nearest church to their old homes, they were probably too wicked – and suicide cases like Alice wouldn’t have been allowed a Christian burial anyway.
The old, square church tower with its corner buttresses and short nave had a tacked-on extension of a rear nave and porch, its unimaginative windows smacking of 1950s taste. As the caretaker told me that nowadays over 400 people attended Sunday services, I looked along the rows of old wooden pews with crosses carved into their sides, lining an aisle where spots of sunlight stole through the holes in the roof, playing on the old brown carpet like elusive gold coins. There was a pump-action Stevenson organ which still worked, and in the vestry an old wooden font with a tarnished bowl, some old books and a register of services dating back to only 1963. Behind the wooden altar rails, a brass plaque on the chair commemorated ‘A.H. Fraser Allen (died 1942)’.
As we left there was a loud peal of thunder from over Ol Bolossat way.
A few weeks later, I was drinking freshly ground coffee on Frank and Anne’s Kitengela veranda, looking over Nairobi National Park towards the distant high-rise buildings of the city, dwarfed by distance. Pekinese dogs squirmed round Anne as she said, ‘I think it’s amazing how pleased they were to see Frank in view of the history!’ I thought about this on the long road home to Soysambu. Over a mere half a dozen years I’d explored Slains, with its secrets and stories going back to the 1920s, then, at Fergusson’s former home, flitted between dark memories from three decades later. And now Elsie Daykin’s former garden was rambling unrestrained over the slopes above it all. Perhaps I’d glimpsed and understood the meaning of rapid change. Maybe I’d even gained deeper insights into times of war. I’d certainly realised one thing: if Lord Erroll – or indeed Mr Fergusson – had been murdered during times of peace it would have been an entirely different story. Or perhaps in both cases there would have been no murder.
III
Politics, Bullets and Broken Hearts
20
The Bolter’s Love, Loss and Pain
The years had passed relentlessly since Mzee Nuthu’s death in 2002. As I became embroiled in various other concerns, looking at foreign boarding schools for my children, then agonising over the unpalatable idea of sending them away to South Africa or the UK, my visits to Happy Valley had become few and far between. I realised with a pang of guilt that I hadn’t even visited Mzee’s grave at Clouds when Idina’s great-granddaughter, Frances Osborne, contacted me from England, wanting to visit Happy Valley as she was researching a book about her notorious great-grandmother: Frances’s grandfather was one of Idina’s two sons from her first marriage to Euan Wallace. Idina had, not surprisingly, abandoned both sons when she ran off to Kenya with Joss. The Happy Valley-ites didn’t tend to keep kids around them – they can’t have fitted in with the lifestyle. One simply doesn’t imagine the elegant Idina with milk stains on her blouse and lumps of baby food in her hair, fondly reading about the Flopsy Bunnies.
Frances was on a quest to dig out the truth about Happy Valley. ‘Were those Clouds parties really so debauched?’ she asked me. What did I think?
Well, actually I imagined Idina’s parties were fairly shocking at the time, but are probably pretty bland compared with what goes on at parties nowadays.
Naturally a visit to Clouds was essential. Now that mobile phone networks had reached the area we could contact Peter before we came. The Nuthu family were delighted, as well as curious about meeting Idina’s great-granddaughter – especially Paul, who’d inherited his father’s copy of White Mischief.
After a warm welcome and a tour of the house, Solomon, Frances and I walked with the Nuthu family to the old dams. They were overgrown, but clumps of arum lilies still stood stiffly to attention beside their still waters. Solomon was ecstatic to see evidence that colobus monkeys had been raiding the crops and launched into a lecture on why we should be protecting ‘our brothers’, although I sensed his audience weren’t convinced. Frances might have been more monkey friendly, but the speech was in Kiswahili, so it didn’t have a stirring effect on her either.
We visited the old man’s new gravestone and I felt a deep sadness that I had not said goodbye, nor been there at his burial. I’d never known his first name was Norman. I’d always known him as simply ‘Mzee’. I also learnt that he was born in 1932, when Idina was married to her fourth husband, Haldeman, and living at their relatively new home, Clouds. That same year in Nairobi, the Carter Land Commission was appointed to inquire into the question of Kenyan native land grievances. Further away, Oswald Mosley was setting up his British Union of Fascists.
Mzee Nuthu had died aged only seventy. ‘You were the pillar of our strength,’ read the inscription. ‘Those who live good lives find peace and rest in death.’ I wondered what Idina’s inscription was: apparently she’d been buried at English Point in Mombasa in 1955.
Frances Osborne’s book, The Bolter, came out in 2008. I read it as soon as I could get my hands on a copy, and discovered that Idina’s brother, Buck, had flown to Kenya for her burial. There he lay a headstone revealing only the date of her death, but inscribed: ‘In loving memory of a warm, generous and courageous person.’ After Frances’s visit I had gone down with brucellosis, tick fever and two types of amoeba – all at once. ‘Probably as a result of spending time eating and drinking in strange places when you’re in Happy Valley,’ said a friend. Meanwhile, no publishers wanted a book on Happy Valley, or not one that involved a Kikuyu conservationist who had wacky dreams. I even tried, albeit briefly, to turn my back on Happy Valley, but failed.
But Idina continued to puzzle me. I know, having supported someone close to me through rehab, that those who tend towards excessive lifestyles are often the most complicated, loving and intelligent people, many of whom have become lost on their search for life’s meaning.
And now – at last – Idina’s life, not such a bed of roses after all, became clearer. By now I had read a variety of books with a range of ideas about Idina, but Frances’s highly readable and comprehensive biography painted a vivid and more sympathetic portrait of her: after an unhappy childhood in a broken home, Idina’s young heart had been broken by her first husband. Not that she wasn’t culpable too – she’d liked the good life and committing adultery came easily – but overall Frances’s Idina comes across as a likeable character. She was born Lady Idina Sackville in England in 1893, a couple of years before the birth of the East Africa Protectorate or the Uganda railway. It was the same year that missionary Stewart Watt arrived in Machakos with his family – having walked almost 300 miles through predator-infested, hostile bush to spread the Christian word. This was a world that was changing rapidly, and the changes were nowhere more dramatic than in this new and faraway continent that would eventually seduce Idina away from her home country and family.
The silver spoon in Idina’s mouth did not compensate for the agonies of a broken home: her father, the 8th Earl de la Warr, Gilbert Sackville, had married her mother Muriel Brassey for her money, in return for the title of countess. When Muriel had her second daughter, Avice, Gilbert left his family in the Manor House in Bexhill-on-Sea, and ran off with a can-can dancer.
Lady Idina married Euan Wallace in 1913, but six years and two sons later, they were divorced. The war was over, caps were being thrown in the air, and Idina married Charles Gordon, joining him on the ship to Kenya, and leaving behind her two small sons, David and Gerald (known as Gee). In those days plenty of virgin brides arrived in Mombasa, were met by their betrothed, married quickly and respectably in Mombasa Cathedral and then were packed on to the train to impossibly remote places where they somehow managed to create comfortable homes. Idina’s arrival, as always seductively clad in an expensive designer outfit, would have raised a few eyebrows. More tongues must have waggled at her introduction to Nairobi society in Muthaiga Club.
Meanwhile, at Nairobi’s Theatre Royal, over 2,000 soldier-settler applicants held their breath while revolving drums paused for names and numbers to be drawn. The
number indicated the order in which the applicant could choose his farm from the government’s list, which didn’t often describe the land accurately. But Charles and Idina Gordon were in luck: his prize in the land lottery was 3,000 acres in the coveted Wanjohi valley.
Pith helmets and spine pads were not for the glamorous Lady Idina Gordon, but nevertheless her lifestyle quickly plummeted from beautiful socialite, flitting between Paris and London, to pioneering wife on a remote farm, living rough, and surrounded by wild animals and African labourers, none of whom would have appreciated her expensive fashion sense. Having probably married Gordon on the rebound from Wallace, the man her great-granddaughter believes was her true love, Idina soon found she had also lost her two sons by running off to Kenya into a doomed marriage. She was thrilled by Kenya, but bored by Gordon, who accused her of being a nymphomaniac, probably because she was not faithful, possibly, too, because she was just using him – or sex – to escape her unhappiness.
She kept herself in touch with designer trends by wafting back to Europe on a regular basis, a habit that would continue almost until she died. On one of her jaunts ‘home’ the following year, she visited Wallace, possibly to renew old passions, but instead found he was getting remarried while making it clear that Idina’s sons now had a ‘new’ mother. Not the type of girl to wait around in sorrowful celibacy, Lady Idina returned to Kenya and Gordon, distracting herself from her broken heart with endless safaris. Ten months later, realising her second marriage was truly over, 25-year-old Idina returned to London in mid-1921.
After a handful of years billowing through Europe’s party circuit, Idina was back in Kenya again, wreathed in scandal and on the arm of the handsome future Earl of Erroll. Accounts vary as to whether she bought, leased, or inherited as a divorce settlement the 2,000 acres where she built Slains. Frances Osborne settles the matter, quoting from a letter Joss wrote to his mother, explaining that they leased the farm for fifteen shillings an acre over a period of ten years. But Idina was not destined to become a countess. Early on in their liberal marriage, Joss had already met the woman who would have that title conferred on her, beautiful, auburn-haired Mary, then married to Cyril Ramsey-Hill. He began flirting with her while Idina was in hospital having his daughter, Diana, nicknamed Dinan. Joss then hopped between the beds of Idina, Mary and Alice de Janzé, until 1928 when he finally ran off with Mary.
The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 21