The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  As Idina returned to England with Dinan, their dream home, Slains, up for sale, a politically inclined gentleman called Johnston Kamau (better known as Jomo Kenyatta) went to London to promote the Kikuyu case concerning his people’s rights – especially concerning land, now that foreign farmers were settling in the highlands. Oblivious to such potential threats, Mary managed to get sole possession of the Djinn Palace, her grieved ex-husband’s exotic home on the verdant shores of freshwater Lake Naivasha. Joss was quick to marry her and return to the good life.

  Idina must have been hiding her emotions well at this point. She’d had her heart broken by Wallace, then Joss, having been denied the right to mother her two young sons. All she had left was her daughter. The ‘easy’ way to deal with such painful feelings would have been to anaesthetise them with drugs and alcohol – while finding another husband to ensure one wasn’t alone with too much time to think about things. Idina and Dinan returned to Kenya in 1930 with Idina’s fourth husband, Donald Haldeman. She bought a new farm and built Clouds, which was to become headquarters of the next episode of Carry on Happy Valley.

  By 1934 Idina was ready to leave another husband. Haldeman was a jealous, controlling man – neither of which trait would have made life with her easy. Nellie Grant wrote to Elspeth Huxley in 1934 from their Njoro farm, as recorded in Nellie: Letters from Africa: ‘Have just agreed to go . . . to Clouds tomorrow for one night only, as Dina wants moral support in facing Donald. Anyway we shall get some garden loot even if Donald does shoot us all.’ Perhaps, if he liked shooting, Donald was responsible for the heads that I’d found vanished from those plaques on the walls surrounding the courtyard on my first visit to Clouds. Nellie liked to visit Clouds, according to Huxley in Out in the Midday Sun, ‘to swap plants, the Wanjohi being a splendid gardening region, and must have been unlucky, for she never struck an orgy; though she did once find one of the visitors, Alice de Janzé, asleep on the floor at four in the afternoon’.

  Even if Haldeman threatened to shoot any man who touched his wife, he evidently had respect for his superiors. Elspeth Huxley also quotes from Daphne Moore’s diaries, in which she describes Gladys Delamere’s party at Muthaiga Club on New Year’s Eve 1932. The Haldemans were among the guests, and Idina met and danced with Byrne, the new governor: ‘The whole club held their sides to see Kenya’s most notorious vamp clasped in the arms of the King’s representative who was apparently making the most of it.’

  Idina managed to escape to England in March 1934, taking Dinan and leaving the little girl there at school, although I cannot help wondering if Idina later regretted that decision. Meanwhile she returned to Kenya in July with her new boyfriend, Chris Langlands, a pilot. But he didn’t last either and by 1939 Idina was on her fifth husband, Vincent Soltau. According to Frances Osborne, Idina was a kind stepmother to Soltau’s two children. The same year, Hitler invaded Poland and Mary, Countess of Erroll, died from the excesses of her lifestyle, alone, her arms covered in abscesses from injections of heroin and morphine.

  The early 1940s were difficult years. Soltau, whom Idina nicknamed ‘Lynx’, had been posted to Cairo, and it seems he never returned permanently. Loneliness must have been a new and terrifying prospect for Idina, who until now had successfully managed to avoid her own company. She would doubtless have continued to throw wild parties at Clouds, and there would have been no shortage of willing young men who needed to let off steam whenever home from war duties. But drink and drugs ravage the mind and body over time, and this couldn’t go on for ever. Idina was almost fifty and the menopause would be looming.

  Then Joss was murdered. At the news, a devastated Idina drove from Happy Valley to his Muthaiga home on the outskirts of Nairobi, where she failed to find the valuable family pearls that she was determined should be inherited by his daughter. (Maddeningly, the Erroll pearls had last been seen round the lovely throat of Diana Broughton.) Dinan was left to read the news of her father’s death in the headlines of the English newspapers. The same year Euan Wallace died in England of stomach cancer, and Alice de Trafford, Idina’s old friend and Happy Valley neighbour since the early days, committed suicide.

  Even if the parties did go on, they could not mask what must have been considerable emotional pain for Idina: she’d finally ‘met’ the sons she had with Euan Wallace, both brought up by a stepmother. David she’d met up with in London in 1934, and Gee – finally – in 1943 at Muthaiga Club. While Idina had been dancing with Gee, clasped in his young, handsome arms, somebody had commented to him that she was old enough to be his mother, only to be told she was his mother! Idina adored her grown-up boys, making frequent efforts to see them or stay in touch, but she was grasping at borrowed time. The war would take both their young lives.

  After losing David and Gee, this time for ever, Idina was – according to friends – drinking too much, presumably to drown her sorrow. Her pain spills from the stark words, quoted in The Bolter, that she managed to write to Pru, David’s young widow and mother of his children: ‘What are words when one has lost all one loves – thank God you have the children . . .’

  The pain was not only emotional: Idina had mounting health problems. By early 1945, she had been through some sort of a nervous breakdown and was suffering from neuritis, or inflammation of the nerves, and had been medically advised to move down to the coast. Thus the ageing high priestess of a decadent and dying era finally left her beloved Happy Valley to live at Mtwapa on the Kenya coast, accompanied by her loyal lover James Bird (known facetiously as James VI), the man she never married and the only one she never left. Bird, the man whose chair was later to be abandoned to Janie Begg’s mother, was, according to Janie, a former sailor – complete with tattoos. He managed Idina’s farm, and evidently her too.

  Gee’s wife committed suicide and Idina never met her grandchildren. During this time, her estranged daughter, Dinan, seemed in no hurry to meet this absent mother of dubious repute. Correctly named Diana, Countess of Erroll, she had been at school in England since the age of eight, hadn’t set eyes on her mother for as many years and was now twenty and engaged. Idina was not invited to her wedding. Nor did she agree to see her mother in 1948, when her son Merlin was born. Idina thus returned home to Kenya nursing the pain of what must have felt like yet another loss. It turned out to be cancer of the womb, as if Idina’s body was responding to long-suppressed agonies. And now it was time for the final twist of the knife.

  Two years later, Idina returned to England again and this time managed a reconciliation with her daughter. Determined not to lose touch again, Idina planned to save money to bring Dinan and her husband out to Kenya, but Mau Mau began in 1951, its violent killings aborting Idina’s dream of planning a Kenyan safari with them. Idina didn’t even live to see the end of Mau Mau.

  ‘Poor Dina had had a desperate cancer for a long time’, wrote Nellie Grant to her daughter. It was October 1955: the same year that Diana (née Broughton) divorced her third husband, Gilbert Colville, and married the 4th Baron Delamere. Idina died, aged sixty-two, in Mombasa, in the country she called home.

  She’d had a hard life in many ways. Money and material comfort cannot compensate for the lack of love and security, the emotional balm that eases our passage through hardships. Growing up should be a protected time, a happy process that creates self-confidence and teaches a child to love and be loved. Loss of that most vital ingredient for Idina probably began with her father’s departure, worsening as she went through all her various husbands and lovers. Finally it manifested itself in the ultimate loss – that of her sons, the agony intensified as it would have been suffused with suppressed guilt. She’d never been able to give her children enough of her time, and although Dinan had been treated to a little more early mothering than her half-brothers, she’d been alienated from her mother for most of her life. Idina made her choices. Children, after all, are demanding, candid and tend to teach us lessons about ourselves we might not wish to learn. Idina’s were neither seen nor heard. It m
ust have been the final straw for Idina when, towards the end of her life, healing the rift with her only daughter and living child seemed doomed by events.

  A few days in a coma and thus ended all hopes that Idina might divulge who’d murdered Joss – as she’d allegedly promised. Did she really know, or was this just another of Idina’s elusive games? And if she had truly loved him, as some believe, how had that high-profile murder affected her? She was one of the few who didn’t have fingers pointed at her over Erroll’s murder. She was at home at Clouds at the time – although the lying, which seemed to come easily to the gin-soaked crowd of main players and witnesses, does make one wonder who was actually where that night. Idina could have hired a killer, of course, but there’s no apparent motive: if it was a crime of passion then she would have done it at least thirteen years earlier. Frances Osborne doesn’t draw any conclusions in The Bolter. But she does suggest that Idina always blamed Diana Broughton for this tragedy, irrespective of who’d fired the fatal bullet.

  21

  The Temptress and Murderous Thoughts

  Like Idina’s, Alice’s life and death continued to intrigue me. Like Idina, too, Alice used mood-altering substances, probably to negate an intolerable past. But it’s also likely she suffered from clinical depression, the type which brought on moods dark enough to kill herself.

  Suicide is an uncomfortable subject. Most of us avoid thinking about it too much – if we can. I regret not talking to my grandfather about his cousin’s suicide – and I’d heard his grave somewhere on a hillside in Subukia didn’t have a headstone. Alice didn’t get one either, until her granddaughter came to visit her old home.

  As well as clarifying many aspects of Idina’s life, Frances Osborne’s The Bolter added to the fund of stories about Alice. Frances believes that Alice and Joss had been enjoying intermittent affairs in Paris before either of them married. Idina then invited the de Janzés on their first Kenyan holiday – with ulterior motives: pregnant, she’d need somebody to keep Joss from straying. Better the devil you know, especially one so neurotic as Alice, and thus not a serious threat. In December 1925 the de Janzés stayed at Slains before they accompanied the Hays to Muthaiga Club, carousing their way through the festive season while awaiting the arrival of Idina’s baby. Alice didn’t fulfil her task – while Idina was in hospital having the baby, Joss met Mary.

  When Idina returned home, she promptly left the baby with a nanny – as one did – to go on safari with Joss and the de Janzés. By the arrival of the long rains in April 1926, Frédéric’s hopes of escaping this foursome arrangement were thwarted when Joss became ill with suspected malaria and ended up in Nakuru hospital. The de Janzés were left to hold the fort – and presumably the baby. While Idina was away from Slains, keeping faithful vigil at Joss’s bedside, the nanny resigned, Frédéric had an altercation with a rogue elephant and broke a rib, and the farm accounts fell into a state of neglect.

  When Idina and Joss finally came home in June, Alice had bought Wanjohi Farm. She and Frédéric moved there towards the end of 1926, but a peaceful married life was not on the cards – enter Raymond de Trafford. According to Frances Osborne (who also reveals that Idina was the owner of Mickey, Minnie’s twin), on that fateful day in late 1941, Alice walked Minnie to the river bank, where she shot and buried the little dog immediately, before going back to her bed and shooting herself in the mouth with her revolver.

  Paul Spicer had been in touch while writing Alice’s biography, asking for information on distances and roads. He emailed me a photo of Alice’s house taken in 1930. A pyrethrum cart was parked in front. The house was of dark wood, its light further blocked by surrounding farm buildings and groves of indigenous trees. There appeared to be five chimneys: fires must have been essential. A few creepers scaled the walls and there were some flower beds, but otherwise it looked sparse and bleak. It was nothing like so attractive or glamorous as some of the neighbouring houses – especially Clouds. I wondered how much time Alice actually spent there, with her social life in Nairobi to conduct – and a house at the coast too where she apparently added extra rooms when more guests were expected. Those cedar off-cut walls with a narrow veranda on the inner sides seemed unfocused, as if a veil of drizzle had been drawn across the camera lens. There was no telling from the black and white photograph if the sky was blue, and the house looked cold and secretive, as if tightly holding in Alice’s pain and unhappiness: its sightless windows were like closed eyelids, completing the sense of privacy, even isolation.

  Early in 2008 Alice’s granddaughter, Angelique, was poised to come to Kenya, planning to stay with me, and we intended to visit her grandmother’s old home to see the new grave. She also planned to restore the old manager’s house, intending to provide funding to convert it into a school library. But Kenya was in the throes of postelection violence and tourists were cancelling their safaris. We didn’t blame Angelique for going to Tanzania instead, with the rest of the world branding us a danger zone.

  At the end of the year Solomon, now the proud owner of a mobile phone, phoned me almost in tears. ‘They have broken the grave completely!’ he told me.

  ‘Who? Where?’ I said.

  ‘Harris’s! It is all smashed. No stone now and no fence.’

  I was shocked into silence.

  ‘The new headmaster, he is angry,’ continued Solomon. ‘He says the white people promised to help them but they didn’t. So now they have done this terrible thing!’

  Early in 2009 I received a letter from Solomon on a torn-out page of an exercise book. He explained that the fence around Alice’s grave and the gate had been ‘taken’. He said the old wooden manager’s house had been ‘terribly destroyed’ and would now be impossible to renovate. The new headmaster and chairperson of the school were selling the timber from the old house, he added, although some people were against it, notably families whose grandparents once worked for Alice. He gave me the contacts for the Kikuyu head and chairperson.

  I wrote, but never had a reply.

  Finally, in 2010, Paul Spicer’s biography, The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice, Countess de Janzé, was on the shelves, offering a new Erroll murder theory – one that implicated Alice. Spicer’s enjoyable book certainly brings to light some interesting new stories, but also contained some anomalies, particularly what appeared to be the suggestion that Erroll’s biographer, Errol Trzebinski, agreed with James Fox that Broughton pulled the trigger. The book also confuses people – Delap’s first wife, Rosemary, with his second wife, Bubbles (Maureen) – and places: Boy and Paula Long’s farm Nderit with Delamere’s. (Boy Long had earlier worked for Delamere on Lake Elmenteita, but their farm was beside Lake Nakuru.) The book states that Idina had moved to the coast before Alice’s suicide, but later contradicts this claim. There’s further confusion of identities: the book claims that Mary, who married David Leslie-Melville, was the granddaughter of Lord Portman, although it was actually her husband who was his grandson. I was surprised at the suggestion that the de Janzés could employ local Kikuyu farmers who had smallholdings in the area. In fact the only Kikuyu in the area at the time were a few labourers on neighbouring white-owned land. Today’s smallholdings appeared in the rash of growth after 1963.

  However, Spicer engagingly expands on Alice’s character, offering new detail about her tragic, turbulent life. I read with interest how the young Alice’s doting father threw her mother out of the house on a winter’s night, causing her subsequent illness and death, then married her mother’s cousin with whom he’d been having an affair anyway. When Alice was thirteen, her mother’s family won their custody case and removed her from her father’s indulgent influence. This estrangement was apparently devastating to Alice. She showed early tendencies to suicide and attempted to slash her wrists at school; Spicer believes she was already suffering from a mild strain of manic depression called cyclothymia. Despite having many suitors (including a gangster boyfriend in Chicago), he thinks Alice was probably a virgin when she ma
rried in 1923, but never really found sexual fulfilment with Frédéric. After the births of both her daughters, Alice suffered from post-natal depression; all efforts in France having failed, Frédéric tried the distractions of Kenya. Spicer says that although the Hays and de Janzés had met in Paris in 1923, Alice’s affair with Joss began later, during their first visit to Kenya, in late 1925. Joss’s alleged ability to bring women to orgasm easily would have instigated Alice’s sexual awakening.

  The de Janzés bought their 600 acres from Sir John Ramsden, helped by friendly neighbours Geoff Buxton and David Leslie-Melville. The small manager’s house was already there and provided a home for Alice and Frédéric while they built their main home. Buxton introduced Alice to Raymond (or Raymund, the spelling Spicer follows some other authors in preferring) at a dinner party. Meanwhile, Alice still floated between France and Kenya, once naively taking a monkey back to wreak havoc in the Parisian apartment and drive the Portuguese nanny to distraction when it showed blatant disregard for valuable china. As if this wasn’t inconsiderate enough – of the nanny and the African animals – Alice also added to the chaos in Paris by importing a crocodile and the rapidly growing lion cub. The unfortunate Samson ended up in a children’s zoo, his story inevitably ending in tragedy after he was ill-treated in a circus and finally shot by mistake. History does not relate the crocodile’s demise, but the monkey had a lucky escape back to Kenya with Alice.