Meanwhile, in spite of all fundraising efforts and Solomon’s pledge to do a sponsored walk, no more colobus had been moved out of the danger zones, and after decades of Solomon’s frantic but fruitless efforts, there were very few left alive anywhere in Happy Valley. However, I stand in awe of Solomon’s readiness to challenge the deeply ingrained superstitions and traditional beliefs that have such a hold on the majority of his peers. Most of the latter are avid Christians, although they don’t always give up long-held practices and prejudices – such as the necessity to rid the world of owls. Solomon’s religious views are unusual, like him, and they were revealed unexpectedly after one of our Happy Valley safaris. As we rattled into Captain, I suggested we stop for a cup of tea as it had been a long day and we hadn’t eaten.
‘I know a good place,’ said Solomon. ‘It is away from the road and so it is peaceful.’ He directed me past Wanjiku’s Happy Photo Shop, which offered ‘colourful innovations’, and after a few more lefts and rights we drove into the Kenyan equivalent of a piazza, albeit a dirty, scruffy one, where we sat on the veranda of the Hollywood Bar and ordered chai. The tea arrived promptly and we were enjoying a companionable silence, during which I was thinking that Captain wasn’t such a bad place, when the peace was suddenly broken by what sounded like an explosion. It turned out to be bursts of very loud music, forcing its way through hissing, chest-high loudspeakers. The noise swelled around the Cheerful Kiosk at the far end of the square. We froze in horror and stared, dumbfounded, as a line of people, all dressed in red and black, began to bob slowly towards us, their curious, slow-motion gait keeping exact time with the agonised, contorted sounds from the loudspeakers. As the leader in the sinister line grew slowly closer, I could see another line had emerged from the corner behind us. In fact, all four corners of Captain’s peaceful square were spewing out lines of grim-faced men and women, approaching a central point in a terrifying sort of war dance. Feeling somewhat targeted and totally trapped, we stared in transfixed horror at the converging lines as they gathered to continue their sinister, robotic dance on the spot. A crowd was gathering to watch, most of them dancing too now, while the furious noise from the speakers was becoming unbearable.
‘What is going on?’ I gasped into Solomon’s ear.
‘They are for Jesus!’ he shouted back.
We left some money on our table and ran, leaving our steaming mugs of tea, although Solomon had the sense to grab the mandazi that had just arrived. As we somehow managed to get the car out from the melee without being massacred by the music or hypnotised into joining the dancers, the music stopped and somebody began to yell murderously through a microphone, the deadpan dancers still swaying as if in a trance.
We drove to the far end of Captain – until we could hear again. I stopped among the kiosks with their advertisements for drinks, cigarettes, malaria tablets, and ointment for aches and pains. If you listened to the Captain Christian brigade for any length of time you’d need the lot. Matatu touts were yelling, but even they were drowned out by the distant evangelists who had begun to sing now, if you could call it singing: it sounded aggressively ominous, as if bawling for revolution. It made my heart rate quicken, although women in headscarves, the babies on their backs sheltered by black umbrellas, walked by without looking particularly terrified. Men were leaning on bicycles. The Aberdares were smoky in the distance. Everything seemed very normal, almost peaceful – if you were deaf.
‘Heaven help us,’ I said. ‘What are they shouting about?’
‘They preach the word of God,’ said Solomon.
I glanced at him and saw he was smiling wickedly. ‘The Red Devils!’ he added.
‘But . . .’ I said finally, ‘they sound like . . . lunatics.’
Solomon nodded thoughtfully as he ate his mandazi. ‘Yes, they get it all the wrong way. These churches, why are they not preaching conservation?’ He sighed. ‘My religion is to not hurt. My church is the forests. I worship with the birds and colobus monkeys in Happy Valley.’
23
The Valley They Called Happy
Solomon has always referred to Happy Valley with less facetious intonations than those disapproving settlers who pejoratively spoke of Happy Valley back in the days of its prime. He’s right as it turns out. When I met Tobina Cole, she opened more windows on to bygone lives in Happy Valley, throwing light on how and why it was so named.
Geoffrey Buxton’s siblings had included a sister, Rose, who came to stay with him in Kenya. There she met Algy Cartwright, whom she married in 1923, and Tobina was their daughter. Some years back I’d been given an address for her, when she was living in Edinburgh. I wrote, but received a terse reply saying she’d had enough of spelling out her life history to writers.
In late 2010, hearing she was back in Kenya, I phoned and, although Tobina was brief on the phone, received an invitation to visit. As I drove across Nairobi to the retirement home near Muthaiga, a scruffy young man at a road junction tried to sell me a bunch of mauve-blue water lilies, still dripping with water. I thought about Idina’s water gardens, and the rivers and furrows at Buxton’s Satima. I bought the flowers, even though, judging by the potent cloud of alcohol surrounding the vendor, he might not be likely to spend the money wisely.
Tobina, elegant and deceptively young looking, had tried to leave Kenya – like so many other descendants of former settler families – but failed to escape permanently, returning to the sunny country of her childhood like a migrating swallow, until she settled here again in her twilight years.
The sun was streaming through open doors and windows and lighting up her garden, full of English flowers. ‘I shouldn’t really have come back from Edinburgh,’ she said after arranging the water lilies, ‘after twenty years away. I hate Nairobi – there’s nowhere to walk.’
A smiling maid dropped off some milk in the kitchen. A puppy jumped on to Tobina’s lap, where it wriggled around gleefully. ‘He’s called Conrad,’ she explained, ‘because he’s so black. You know, Heart of Darkness!’
Tobina told me the true connotations of the term ‘Happy Valley’. It was her uncle who’d named it thus: he arrived on foot in this high, green land with its seven rivers. He’d come from the dry Rift Valley station with its meagre river and that relentless dusty wind that gave Gilgil its name. And so Geoff Buxton delightedly called this new haven ‘my Happy Valley’, despite the lack of drink, drugs and orgies on offer. ‘He found his ideal farming country,’ said Tobina. ‘The name was nothing whatever to do with all the later shenanigans!’
My literary agent, Robert Smith, knew of another descendant of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. Edward North Buxton, who’d lived at Knighton in Woodford, Essex, had been pivotal in saving Epping Forest from destruction by local landowners keen to earn a fortune from property speculation. His efforts were rewarded by an Act of Parliament to secure the forest, which was opened by Queen Victoria in 1882. He even donated his own adjoining land to enlarge the forest for the public’s enjoyment. This great philanthropic Quaker family from East Anglia had made their money from brewing (Truman, Hanbury and Buxton) and banking (later subsumed into Barclays). Robert found a postcard from the Edwardian period showing a picture of the scenic ‘Happy Valley’ at Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex, not far from Robert’s own home. He wondered if that was where Geoffrey Buxton got the name.
Meanwhile, Tobina’s family history is intriguingly intertwined with Happy Valley’s earliest settlers, curiously full of connections and coincidences. Another Buxton sister, her ‘Aunt Joan’, had married Sir John Ramsden. A generation later, Tobina married Arthur Cole, son of Galbraith Cole, former neighbour and relation of the Delameres; Galbraith’s sister, Florence Cole, had married Hugh, 3rd Baron Delamere. (After Florence died, he’d married Gladys, who soon became a widow; she was another woman who’d adored – and some said killed – Lord Erroll.)
Galbraith Cole, Tobina’s father-in-law, had been afflicted with the agonies of arthritis when only in his early forties – until, una
ble to bear the pain, accompanied by the gradual loss of his sight, he’d ended his life on a hill, looking across Lake Elmenteita towards Soysambu. His hand too weak and crippled to hold up the gun to his head, his faithful servant held it for him as he sat in his wheelchair and pulled the trigger, while Galbraith’s wife, Lady Eleanor – Nell to friends – had taken the dogs for a walk. He’s buried in the place where he died, as he’d wished, on a rocky kopje looking across Lake Elmenteita, where he can hear the zebra barking. A few miles behind the house, Nell built a delightful rough-stone church in his memory, which she called the Church of Goodwill. She was a friend of my grandfather’s and he was sometimes a lay reader there. Many decades later I had got married in Nell’s church, looking across Lake Elmenteita towards the place I was destined to flee to when my marriage came to an abrupt end. Every time I drive up to Gilgil and on to Happy Valley, I pass the obelisk on the hill commemorating Galbraith.
Tobina is also godmother to Tom Cholmondeley, great-grandson of the 3rd Baron Delamere. She visited Tom weekly in Kamiti maximum security prison when he was awaiting trial for a murder he didn’t commit. ‘He was a very good prisoner,’ she said. ‘Years ago I was a prison visitor with Margaret Kenyatta.’ (Margaret was the English wife of Kenya’s first president.) ‘We went to check the kitchen and drains and things.’
Tobina spent many happy years of her childhood on Satima Farm. After her parents had split up, her mother came to live on Satima in the mid 1930s. Six-year-old Tobina shared a governess with Idina’s daughter, Dinan, and Gillian Leslie-Melville. David Leslie-Melville had a pack of hounds, so on hunting days they were all let off school. Learning polo was also part of their education. ‘We did our lessons on the veranda of the Leslie-Melvilles’ house,’ said Tobina. ‘I rode a horse to school, or went in the milk lorry.’ Dinan would have had even farther to come, Clouds being the other side of Kipipiri mountain.
Tobina jumped up, still sprightly for a lady in her eighties, and found an old, heavy album the size of a small table. Her grandmother had been a photographer and developed her own photographs, and Tobina had old photos dating back to 1853. We looked at pictures of her mother and her eight siblings, until she found the more ‘recent’ photograph of two little girls: herself and Dinan Hay, who looked strikingly like the Idina I knew from photographs. ‘Gillian and I called her Dina. She was about eight, older than me, but we were the same size. Then she went off to live with her grandmother in England and went to school there.’ The girls had kept in touch (‘more or less’, Tobina said) until Dinan had died of cancer – relatively young, like her mother before her.
Buxton’s Tudor-style house was ‘such a dark house’, Tobina said. But outside exotic plants flourished – almond trees and yellow arum lilies lining the Wanjohi River. Her uncle Geoff had also been one of the first to plant pyrethrum, getting the plants from Japan. ‘Nowadays,’ complained Tobina, who had a tendency to digress, ‘the pyrethrum marketing is a disgrace. I went to the Nairobi Trade Fair recently to fuss at the pyrethrum board, to give them a lecture . . .’ Her cook’s wife had still not been paid for her pyrethrum, she said angrily. ‘It’s not fair on them – they depend on that income!’
Idina had first interested Tobina in pyrethrum: ‘She was such a nice woman. She taught me to play backgammon. I planted pyrethrum with her – she showed me how to plant it – eighteen inches apart. My mother loved her too. They all had jolly good parties, just occasionally, but most of the time they worked hard on their farms – even Alice.’
‘What was Alice like?’ I asked, imagining her as less child friendly.
‘She was so kind. She grew ducks, chickens and eggs for the Gilgil Hotel!’
These had been challenging times for farmers – the roads were deeply rutted, too muddy to negotiate after heavy rain. Tobina remembered oxen being chained to the car to pull them out. ‘Money wasn’t easy to make until the war,’ Tobina added, ‘although my uncle Geoff was old by then, and the altitude no longer suited him. Fred Chart, his manager, became his partner after the war. I think my uncle gave his share to Fred.’
Tobina Cole filled in more about the woman Solomon had referred to as Patricia Bowles. When living in Happy Valley she’d been Alice’s neighbour, and was known as Pat Fisher. ‘She was an actress from South Africa and she was the lead singer in some show. That’s when Derek fell for her,’ she said. Tobina had liked Pat, describing her as ‘very doughty – she battled on’. After Derek died she ran her Pat Fisher Salon for Beauty and Hair in Nairobi’s Mansion House, next to the New Stanley Hotel.
Tobina also mentioned a homosexual couple, ‘Fabian Wallace and Graham Beech’, who’d lived in a wooden house near the Fishers’ ‘black and white house’ – which would have matched the farm buildings. Tobina told me how her mother had explained to her about homosexuals in the car once, on the way back to Gilgil. ‘Fabian was a pilot, much liked by everybody, and Graham didn’t do much. But they lived a very upright life with excellent food and wine.’
I puzzled over the houses: if Tobina’s memory was totally reliable maybe the Fishers’ original house had fallen down and the wooden house we’d visited in the Catholic school, which we’d then thought was Patricia Bowles’s, had belonged to Fabian Wallace. But we’d passed another wooden house, not far from the one tucked inside the mission, which could also have belonged to Wallace and Beech.
Another elderly gentleman remembered Fabian Wallace living near Thomson’s Falls. He said that Michael Lafone was Wallace’s live-in lover then, although James Fox describes Lafone as ‘a fierce womaniser with an eye-glass who was briefly and disastrously married in Kenya to Elizabeth Byng, daughter of the Earl of Strafford’, also quoting the limerick that circulated, tarring Lafone with the same brush as de Trafford:
There was a young girl of the Mau
Who said she didn’t know how,
She went for a cycle
With Raymond and Michael,
She knows all there is to know now.
Whether the dashing Michael Lafone batted for both sides remained to be surmised. Photographs reveal him as effeminate looking; in one he wears a silk dressing gown, and he stands very close to Joss, to whom he bears a slight resemblance. In the Happy Valley of their time, with all the drinks and drugs on offer, it can’t have mattered much at parties who you ended up with for the night.
I also spoke to Benjie Bowles, who lives in Kilifi, north of Mombasa, and who was able to throw more light on Patricia Bowles. Benjie’s father Dr Roger Bowles had married three times. His first wife was Evelyn, with whom he had a son and two daughters. Evelyn hated life in Kenya and fled back to England, leaving their three small children behind. Roger’s second wife, Patricia, was known as Patsy Bowles. She inherited three stepchildren and meanwhile she and Roger had one son – Benjie himself – in 1941. But the marriage had not lasted. Roger’s third wife was also called Patricia, which is confusing, although presumably it simplified things for Dr Bowles. She was Pat for short, and was the former Pat Fisher. Roger was her third husband; her first, back in the 1930s, had been Roddy Ward, who’d farmed near Thomson’s Falls. Pat had then married Derek Fisher and they’d lived at Kipipiri, working for Sir John Ramsden.
‘Both Pat, my stepmother and Patsy, my mother, were close friends of Alice’s and Idina’s,’ Benjie explained.
Roger and Patsy Bowles happened to have bought a farm in the high and fertile Subukia Valley, not so far from Happy Valley – just the other side of Thomson’s Falls – and also prime land, tending to attract wealthier farmers, although it doesn’t quite have that giddy beauty of Happy Valley itself. The farm, Gemdin (or, as another friend formerly from the area insisted, ‘Glendin’), had belonged to a Rowland Platt. ‘He committed suicide,’ added Benjie.
‘He was my grandfather’s cousin!’ I exclaimed. ‘Do you know where he’s buried?’
‘It was on a hillside. But I’m almost sure it was an unmarked grave . . .’
Patsy, Benjie’s mother, had built a big ho
use with a lovely staircase: Benjie recalled sliding down it on trays.
Meanwhile, up in Happy Valley, Pat and Derek Fisher had one son, Peter, who’d grown up with Benjie. ‘We both went to school at Pembroke House in the early fifties,’ Benjie added, ‘and we used to go on our days out up to Idina’s. I remember catching trout there!’
And who did Pat think had killed Erroll? She never talked about it, Benjie said. ‘If she knew anything she kept it hush-hush.’ Patsy, on the other hand, believed it was MI5 – and so does Benjie. But, as Benjie pointed out, living in Kilifi, as did Diana until she died, it had inevitably been a closed subject – out of respect for his neighbour.
When living at Kipipiri, Pat Fisher had evidently been a good neighbour and friend to Alice de Trafford. Benjie also explained that Derek had been cattle and forestry manager for Chops Ramsden and had remained there throughout the war, as some farmers did, providing food for British troops. Their son, Peter, was killed in a car crash in 1975 when his Land Rover rolled in Limuru.
I thought about how life in Kenya seems to involve so many tragedies, too many goodbyes, yet many white farmers and their descendants stayed on because of that special something about the country that is not easy to explain: a curious but powerful mix of intangible qualities – including a wonderful climate, stunning scenery, unlimited space and freedom, a thrilling lifestyle that allowed the shooting of the teeming big game on your own land, and of course plenty of cheap labour (including servants) – which first magnetically drew people from foreign climes. And thus they built homes close to the equator, in a land that wasn’t truly theirs and would one day be handed back to the Africans, breaking many settlers’ hearts when they had to leave. My grandmother was sent from the slopes of Mount Kenya to live in a home in England, after her doctor forbade her to live at altitude. Re-reading her poems and letters is heartbreaking. The people in England were strangers to her: she described them as ‘dull and grey – like the sky’. She felt keenly that her sorrowful spirit had stayed on in her Kenyan garden, gliding beside the shadowed waters of a clear trout stream, watching her rose bushes trampled by goats as her lawn turned to dust.
The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 24