The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  24

  The Secret Garden of Happy Valley

  Driving to Gilgil, passing Galbraith Cole’s grave on the nearby hill, I received a text from a number I did not recognise. ‘They have destroyed the grave of Fraser Allen,’ it read. ‘It is very bad and he needs a decent reburial.’

  I called the number, totally baffled.

  ‘It’s Wahome,’ he said.

  ‘Who did it?’ I asked, ‘and why?’

  ‘It is a very bad thing,’ Wahome said, ‘and I do not know who did this.’

  The Delamere graves had also been desecrated on Soysambu, with both the 3rd Baron’s and Gladys Delamere’s skulls stolen. Sometimes, I’d been told, the skulls of wealthy or influential people are taken to be used as tools of witchcraft. A similar thing happened to Diana Delamere’s grave, which is not on Soysambu but on Ndabibi, Gilbert Colville’s former farm. Curiously enough, when, after divorcing Colville, Diana ran off with his best friend the 3rd Baron, it didn’t seem to affect any friendships. They remained a happy trio, regularly attending the races together, and Diana was ultimately buried along with two favourite dogs and between her latter two husbands. When we visited the tiny graveyard, atop a small knoll and circled by a hedge, it had been vandalised: stones were cracked, and although somebody had filled in the graves again, you could see they’d been dug up.

  ‘Did they steal the skull?’ I asked Wahome.

  ‘No, I don’t think they took the skull, they were after treasure.’

  ‘What treasure?’

  ‘They think you people bury their dead with valuables,’ Wahome explained.

  A friend from Europe was a passenger in my car. As Wahome and I had this conversation about skulls and treasure he began giving me nervous glances, as if I was a secret pirate.

  ‘Can you find a relative of Fraser Allen?’ asked Wahome.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I told him.

  Frank Daykin didn’t have contacts for any of Fraser Allen’s relations, nor did Janie Begg. I asked around among former settlers from the area: not many remembered Fraser Allen, but a few remembered his son, David, who they called Mambo – which means ‘news’, usually of a problematic nature. ‘Mambo’s father had been burnt alive in front of him,’ another friend said, ‘but Mambo is dead too now.’

  Wahome had asked if I was visiting the area any time soon, but my Land Rover was going through a phase of expensive repairs and it seemed unlikely. But in early 2011, the renowned photographer Nigel Pavitt drove me up to Happy Valley as he wanted to take photographs of some old houses. We were accompanied by a friend, Veronica Finch, better known as ‘Finchie’. As we sped up the new Chinese road, I realised I’d lost Wahome’s number, as Solomon told us that Kruger’s old farm had been grabbed ‘by somebody high up in the forestry department’. He shook his head: ‘Too many problems there now!’

  On a crazy whim I persuaded my friends that we should make a detour to look for Morgan-Grenville’s old place – although there were, of course, far more intact and accessible houses to visit and photograph. It turned out Finchie had been at school with his daughter, who’d later died of malaria, and remembered her arriving in ‘swanky cars’.

  Along the road towards the Daykins’ old home, still rocky and rutted, Solomon stopped us to check on some donkeys. He’d been involved in worming them and cutting their hooves, part of his general work with animals in the greater area. A child, who looked less than three years old, clutched a bag of sugar and eyed us from the grassy verge. There were no houses nearby and the youngster would have been dispatched on foot to walk, probably some distance, to buy the sugar. It never ceases to amaze me how such tiny African children undertake daily chores that would defy many a British teenager.

  A bright and sunny day, with the Aberdares clear and majestic before us, inspired our renewed search for Morgan-Grenville’s. But although we could see where the road cut into the steep mountainside as it zigzagged its way up, we couldn’t find the start of it. After we’d back-tracked repeatedly and done several five-point turns on the narrow road, a helpful lorry driver showed us how to get to it – through a fence. A farmer tilling the soil in the neighbouring field came over, pulled the fence aside and beckoned us in.

  We were on the grassed-over track at last – climbing steeply in a series of tight bends, the drop below increasing dramatically as we reached an altitude of 8,500 feet. We stopped on one bend as Solomon felt sure we were close – we could see, above the densely forested slope to our left, a stand of tall eucalyptus. Excitedly, we abandoned the vehicle and ploughed our way through the undergrowth, scrambling up the slope, sticks tearing at our clothes and hair, until suddenly the forest thinned and there were signs of a former garden: cypress trees and clumps of agapanthus. ‘It is here!’ called Solomon from somewhere further up the hidden hillside.

  Suddenly we were completely out of the thicket, stumbling on to the same road we’d abandoned lower down. Up here it faded into a stone footbridge over a stream. Further along the steep mountainside, two more streams also gurgled and tumbled down rocks. There were sudden unexpected piles of old foundation stones; then, as we climbed up through nettles, a concrete plinth. As we began to explore more, we found blackberries, acres of blue and white agapanthus and a tangle of garden flowers that included blue periwinkle, yellow broom, golden honeysuckle and pink roses. There was even a real English oak tree. Nigel’s camera clicked constantly.

  Mabel’s legendary gardens had outlived her – here was a wild garden, flourishing untended as it wove through indigenous forest and multiplied. It was hauntingly beautiful, with the backdrop the dizzy heights of the Aberdares – so close you felt you could jump up and touch them – then below, chinks of a breathtaking view glimpsed through the thick undergrowth. When we stepped into a green, grassy glade, we could see far below the glimmer of rows of plastic greenhouses, where a Dutchman, newly arrived in the area, was growing flowers on the old Gillett farm, as well as the more pleasing shining expanse of Lake Ol Bolossat. I thought I could make out the roof of Fergusson and Bingley’s former home, but then there were so many roofs. Once Morgan-Grenville would have been able to see their lights at night – one of the few pinpricks of light in the dark expanse below.

  We turned back to the magical garden, festooned with garden flowers that had seeded themselves for generations, clambering at will over any rock, tree or foundation stone. There was an intoxicating feel of wanton abandonment in their wild loveliness. Yet apart from the tinkle of the streams and the calls of forest birds, it was wrapped in a deep peace: like a neglected graveyard. A shaft of sunlight beamed through the foliage on to Solomon’s head as he said in wonder: ‘How did this man Morgan discover this place and then think to build such a big house up here?’

  ‘And build that road all the way up too?’ I added.

  Finchie had found a cluster of hydrangeas, their blooms bigger than a watermelon. She remembered Morgan-Grenville at the coast in his old age. ‘He was tall and white-haired,’ she said, ‘but still a very attractive man.’

  Solomon showed us how to suck the nectar out of a peach-coloured moonflower – ‘copying the sunbirds’, he added – as he had in his childhood. He suddenly said, ‘I remember walking up here when I was young – over thirty years ago. It was such a big wooden house with a shingle roof and so many colobus monkeys, but nobody was living there.’

  ‘Why destroy it?’ asked Finchie.

  Solomon sighed, ‘That is Africa.’

  The wind roared in the ancient gums like an angry sea as we came across more signs of Africa – a torn shirt, some shards of wood where a tree had been chopped, a smattering of charcoal. Suddenly a dog barked, higher up in the forest, and another answered. ‘There are other people in the forest,’ said Solomon, ‘hunting the wildlife with dogs.’

  It was time to leave, armed with clumps of white agapanthus for Finchie to plant at home in Karen. As we walked back down the road, we passed a golden ground orchid and she knelt in the grass to photograph
it. Then she suddenly screamed, leapt up and began a manic dance, shedding all her clothes. She was covered in black siafu, or safari ants, which attack living flesh with their needle-like bites. They’ll literally eat you alive. As she leapt about and I tried to pick them off her skin, her clothes and her hair, the men tactfully walked on.

  ‘Morgan-Grenville’s army,’ said Solomon when we finally got back to the car, ‘he set them on us because we stole his plants.’

  We continued on to Gibb’s house, still visible from the road and worth photographing to Nigel Pavitt’s expert eye. Instead of it becoming dormitories, as the headmaster had told us it would on our last visit, some schoolteachers had moved in. It was Saturday and nobody was around, except one teacher’s wife who was living in the old staff quarters. In the centre of a muddle of chickens, children and litter, she was hanging out copious quantities of washing that stretched from her doorway to the broken roof of what had once been the generator house at the other side of the narrow courtyard.

  We walked outside again and around the southern side of the house, followed by a dozen children, with more materialising at every step to join the gathering throng. There was a smell of open drains and nobody had cut the grass, cleared the nettles or collected the unsightly litter that had been chucked indiscriminately around the former flower beds and lawns. The door to the long corridor swung open and we walked down it past locked doors – behind which, we were told, lurked the teachers when they were at home. The wooden floors of the corridor were soiled with cow-pats and decaying litter, while the walls were plastered with mud, grime and graffiti. Somebody had been practising their English down the far end, using a piece of charcoal, spelling most of the words wrong. One former bedroom at the back remained unoccupied, its filthy floors broken and sagging, its cupboards and fireplace still intact. Next door the bathroom had been gutted, except for the bath itself, which had lost its taps, so nobody – had they been inclined – could attempt to clean it of layers of litter and dirt. By now we had an entourage of about forty giggling children. Their feet were bare and their clothes ragged and dirty, but their eyes were bright.

  ‘And this is their teachers, who are living like this,’ cried Solomon afterwards, ‘setting an example to those children!’

  We drove on, photographing Slains, which had been swallowed up by acres of cabbages and maize, its few remaining mounds of mud wall barely visible. Finchie was intrigued by the ruin beside the Wanjohi River, just before Wanjohi town. A few years earlier, when we’d passed by with Frances Osborne, she’d wondered aloud if it could have been her great-grandmother Lady Idina Gordon’s very first home. Now the house had undergone a facelift: a shiny tin roof, wooden shutters painted blue and an avenue of young hargenia trees heading up to it from a wooden, slatted gate. It had the air of an old French countryside villa.

  Our final destination was Buxton’s house, surrounded by a new flush of growth: emerald-green lawns surrounded the flower beds which bordered the house, the variety of surviving blooms including fat roses and opulent heads of hydrangea. A white bottle-brush flowered at the side of the house, the plum trees were heavy with fruit and the tangle of orange and yellow nasturtiums had climbed all the way up the back to the roof. But the years had taken their toll on the old house: a little more plaster had dropped from its sides, a few more windows were broken.

  ‘My father, he was killed in Wanjohi town last Easter in a fight,’ said the new young Kikuyu owner, Karanja, son of Solomon’s former teacher. ‘He liked to drink changaa.’ A local brew, supposedly illegal, changaa can be made out of anything that will ferment. Often highly toxic, it regularly kills people.

  Solomon later told us that Karanja had inherited his father’s liking for local brews, which perhaps explained his persistent demands for money. We had brought tea and sugar, which we gave to Karanja’s pretty young wife, as well as biscuits for the children, but Karanja kept up his constant negotiations for cash as he showed us around the garden, the fees he demanded for allowing us to photograph the outside of his decaying house far exceeding any I’d ever paid at the stateliest of Britain’s National Trust properties. ‘The roof is leaking badly,’ Karanja said gravely. ‘We need assistance for the repair.’ But we were welcome to picnic in his field, he said, so we sat on a rug and tucked into a deliciously elaborate picnic provided by Finchie. The Karanja family joined our feast: the little girls trying apples for the first time, but preferring the sugary biscuits we’d brought them. Karanja, his younger brother, his wife and a delightful mzee, who just happened to be passing, also sampled new culinary tastes, including olives (which proved too alien) and roasted sunflower seeds (which were extremely popular). They all expressed great mirth at our complicated picnic, not to mention the fact that Finchie had packed plates, knives, forks and various condiments. Solomon, used to European-style picnics, ate his with a nonchalant air.

  After the feast under the fig tree, sacred to the Kikuyu, Karanja extorted a generous wad of money out of Nigel Pavitt. The financial negotiations over, we laughed and joked like old friends, while Karanja teasingly called Nigel ‘Lord Egerton’ after another colonial character, albeit one who’d never lived in Happy Valley. During all this, a young man with rakish looks, his cowboy hat at a jaunty angle, stopped to watch. He’d lovingly decorated his bicycle from handlebars to pedals with anything he could find – strips of cloth tied like ribbons, plastic bottle tops threaded on strings, Christmas decorations, a gourd and miniature flags, both Kenyan and American – the result being colourful and eccentrically festive. But when we praised his efforts, we discovered he was deaf and dumb.

  It seemed ironic that Buxton’s home, once so morally upright, now sheltered a family partial to tippling; conversely the late Mzee Nuthu was teetotal, as were his family still living in the formerly gin-soaked Clouds. Solomon had written that people in today’s Happy Valley were similar to their partying predecessors, but the old houses, it seemed, didn’t seem to retain any bad influences from the past.

  Soon afterwards, Janie Begg gave me the contact details for Robert Morgan-Grenville’s son, Richard, who was living in South Africa. He told me his father arrived in Kenya in 1933 and started building his house four years later. He also explained Fraser’s death, using his mother’s nickname for him: tractors in those days ran off parafin, but were started on petrol. Fraser turned the magneto, which sparked setting alight the petrol in his hand. Fraser was very badly burnt and died two days later. Richard didn’t have any photographs of the house where he’d spent his childhood, but said if I visited their house on the coast at Blue Lagoon I’d find a painting of it. So I did – and there were several: the house, surrounded by flowers and shrubs, with a bench at the top of a green slope of lawn; a lovely stone statue in thoughtful repose; the view through the gum trees above a white-flowering border; a weeping willow over a pond. Although they were probably never great paintings, even before they’d faded, they still conveyed a sense of the lovely home.

  I thought of the place today, a garden of remembrance, shedding a sense of finality and peace that would blow with the winds down towards Fergusson’s old house.

  25

  A Picnic Under the Chandelier

  A few months later we were back in Happy Valley with two of Geoff Buxton’s great-nieces, Jane and Libby, visiting from England. I was happy to take them, always eager to learn more about Happy Valley’s curious past. It also meant good tips for Solomon, always gratefully received. Jane and Libby’s grandmother, Olive, had been one of the seven Buxton siblings in Geoff’s generation, so they were also related to Chops Ramsden. Linda Muir, née Cole, a relative of Tobina’s by marriage, also joined us. It had been a long dry season, and the Nye-Charts’ wooden house stood starkly in a bare and dusty wasteland. Next door in the main house, Karanja was intrigued by these relations from foreign climes – and welcomed us warmly. We stood on the front lawn, cropped short by cows and sheep, and looked at the L-shaped house. With a little imagination and some whitewash it cou
ld have been straight out of Country Living magazine. Jane and Libby were totally enamoured.

  ‘It makes me feel quite peculiar,’ Libby said.

  ‘I could live here,’ added Jane.

  ‘You may see inside the house,’ Karanja offered, knowing a fee would be forthcoming – I’d negotiated with him over the phone in advance.

  We trooped around in the gloom: broken floorboards were sinking into the foundations, missing window panes were blocked up with cardboard to avert draughts, smoke-blackened ceilings were falling into the rooms, mouldering where the rain had leaked on to them. There were two flights of wooden stairs to the upstairs bedrooms. The stairs were still sturdy, but upstairs flecks of blue sky peeked down through gaps in the wooden roof tiles. The former bathrooms were devoid of fittings.

  Another man was accompanying us, although we never discovered where he fitted in. ‘My name is Mwangi,’ he said. ‘I am an ABCD man!’

  ‘What is that?’ whispered Jane.