‘I think he means he’s literate,’ I muttered back. Plenty aren’t – even in modern Kenya.
Karanja’s brother, who was missing school to meet and greet us, was using one of the old attic bedrooms. There was a bed with his very few possessions scattered over a threadbare blanket, but little else. He had chalked on his door: ‘Actions speak louder than words’.
‘Perhaps your family would like to renovate the house,’ Karanja said hopefully to Buxton’s descendants as we left. ‘You can see we have no money for this . . .’
As we drove on to Kipipiri House, I heard more about their great-uncle, Chops. ‘He was tricky,’ Libby said. ‘I was only about seventeen when I visited him, but I remember it was intimidating. I remember his old manservant who wore a stiff collar that had once fitted him when he was still size fifteen, but he was now a size twelve, so it rattled round his neck. Every day he ironed the newspaper and put it on a silver salver.’ This had been at Ramsden’s Scottish estate, Ardverike, where Ramsden had returned to retire when he left Kenya. When Libby visited he would have been well into his eighties.
At the gates of the flower farm beside Kipipiri House, I spun a long story to the lady on security duty, explaining how we’d been before and now here we were back again with long-lost relatives (all the way from England) of the long-dead white man who’d built the old house. She wasn’t at all sure about us; and several lengthy Kikuyu phone conversations later, in which she’d evidently failed to explain why a bunch of white people – and Solomon – were at the gate and wouldn’t go away, she handed me the phone. I spoke to a somewhat suspicious Kikuyu gentleman called Nganga, who finally agreed we could picnic under a tree beside the house while waiting for him to arrive in about an hour’s time.
When we got to the house itself a beautiful Kikuyu woman called Virginia graciously received us and insisted we picnic in the dining room. She opened the carved door and welcomed us inside. As we walked peacefully down a cool veranda lining the interior courtyard, turning right into the dining room, I wondered about the mad woman with the panga. Solomon kept looking at me with raised eyebrows, so I knew he was wondering too.
Virginia seated us in the panelled dining room beneath the chandelier. A picture of Kenya’s President Kibaki watched us from the walls, where once Ramsden’s ancestral portraits would have hung. Libby produced a treat – Scottish smoked salmon – while wryly observing that it was amusing to be having a picnic ‘in stuffy old Aunt Joan’s formal dining room – she’d have had a fit!’ Virginia joined us for lunch and explained how a young woman, claiming to be the second Mrs Kanyoto, albeit merely a girlfriend, had arrived with a bunch of heavies and a lorry, triumphantly led by the mad woman with the panga. They’d forced their way in and made off with most of the furniture, all the crockery, cutlery and linen and plenty of the fittings. That, thankfully, was the last anyone had seen of her.
Just after we’d finished our picnic in such unexpected surroundings, Nganga arrived. This soft-spoken, elderly gentleman took us round the house and gardens.
‘No waving panga,’ Solomon said to me in an aside.
Thus, in a happier and more relaxed mode than previous visits, I absorbed the tangible peace in the grand old house as we admired the immaculate floors and polished wood panelling of the generously sized rooms. The bathrooms, their original fittings intact, were pristine and the old-fashioned chain flushes from the high cisterns worked perfectly. There were six bedrooms, four with fireplaces, four bathrooms and two living rooms – the larger L-shaped with window seats. The only casualty was a door, broken by the imposter-wife on her mission to take all the moveable assets.
The large kitchen with a Dover stove (New Crown, from Brisbane) extended into several pantries and stores, a walk-in meat safe, a wine store and serving room. Teams of white-jacketed servants would presumably have scuttled between them with silver salvers and bottles of the best wine and port. There was a long, covered veranda at the front – the first I’d seen in Happy Valley – which had doors into both living rooms and two of the bedrooms. The house, with all its rooms opening on to the inner courtyard, reminded me of Clouds. Idina had evidently liked Ramsden’s house and had her own built to a very similar design.
The pond in the courtyard was empty and the rills dry, so Virginia turned on the taps to reawaken the cooling sounds of water running through and filling the pond. It was a hot dry day in February, so the fireplace at the back of the courtyard seemed redundant, but when the chill of night descended from Kipipiri behind, it would be a place to enjoy the stars, absorbing the open fire’s warmth while sipping a glass of Champagne – although mulled wine might be more appropriate at this altitude.
The two nude statues that had once graced the courtyard, reminders of an unrestrained era, had been banished to a store at the rear of the house. Solomon was thrilled to find them. Perhaps the panga-wielding woman had hidden them, offended by their nakedness. We wandered on through the vast grounds, descending stone steps that cascaded into different parts of what once must have been a garden of breathtaking proportions. It was too soon for the central courtyard pond to have filled up, otherwise the water would have run beneath the house into the channels and ponds bisecting the sweep of front lawn with its majestic hedges rising either side. But although the grass was crisp and brown, it would only take a little imagination – and plenty of water – to green up those secret recesses of gardens and resurrect the withered flowers and shrubs running alongside the house in sun-baked beds. The cypress hedges remained green and well clipped.
‘We have two gardeners,’ explained Nganga as we headed for the shade cast by a couple of giant magnolia trees. From here we looked past the house to forest – deep green, apart from one ash-coloured scar on the side of the mountain left by a fire.
Kipipiri House and garden were crying out to be lived in again. I almost felt we were here on a mission.
‘It could be a hotel,’ said Virginia, echoing my thoughts.
‘But would Mrs Kanyoto sell?’ I asked.
‘Mr Kanyoto loved this house – and the forest,’ explained Nganga firmly. ‘His wishes were never to sell it and to protect the forest. The forest is my job. But if somebody would lease the house for a hotel, that would be good. Nobody uses it now.’
A charming summer house at the side of the garden, shaded by a vast, gnarled bottle-brush tree, looked out on to the forested valley running up the side of the mountain.
‘It was a court house,’ Virginia said.
‘Or a courting house?’ Libby wondered.
‘They used to watch the elephants from here,’ Solomon recalled. ‘They were coming to the salt lick.’
We climbed up Kipipiri on a path from the back gate, the hot sun striking our backs before we entered the cooler forest. Short of breath from the altitude, but inspired by the views, we scrambled up the steepening path until we came to three water reservoirs, fed by a mountain stream.
‘They were the original ones,’ Nganga explained. ‘Even now they provide water for the house as well as the flower farm.’ But the stone bases had cracked so somebody had lined them with less aesthetic black plastic.
On our previous visit, before being forced to flee from the mad woman, we’d intended to visit the grave of Count Gurienti. He had been a friend of Lyduska Piotto’s: she’d told me how his Greek girlfriend, the late Elly Grammaticus, shot him dead, allegedly after discovering in his safe a sheaf of correspondence with a pretty 19-year-old girl. ‘Greeks always have a tragedy,’ she’d sniffed, adding that the young offender had actually been his niece.
‘Oh, but Count Gurienti was a womaniser,’ Bubbles Delap told me. ‘Elly Grammaticus found out about one affair. She lay in wait, shot at his balls and killed him. He’s buried up there in Kipipiri forest.’
‘I knew Elly Grammaticus,’ said Janie, who knows everybody, going on to tell a story that echoed Alice de Janzé’s acquittal in Paris several decades earlier. Elly had also got off on the grounds of it being a crime of passion. A
renowned Nairobi lawyer, Byron Georgiadis, handled her case – presumably he was Greek too. Janie said that Elly had only intended to maim Gurienti in the testicles, ‘but somebody should have told her not to get so close with a shotgun.’ She snorted knowingly, ‘Of course it would kill him!’
‘Did Gurienti rent the house?’ I asked Janie.
‘Ah!’ she chuckled. ‘I heard a rumour, from an unreliable source! The story is that he won it during a night of gambling . . .’
The grave had a mossy fence around it, and a wooden cross and stone, both inscribed. The stone had been pushed back and partly on to its side as if someone had tried to roll it away. I read that Piero Gurienti de Brezoni had been born in Verona in 1922 – the same year Alice de Janzé married, while Idina was already living in Happy Valley with Gordon. He’d died in 1972, almost a decade after independence, aged fifty.
As we descended again a group of at least a dozen men and women with axes and machetes melted into the forest. They’d seen Nganga and didn’t want to be reported for illegally cutting these protected trees.
Janie Begg told me she’d found some old photos of Kipipiri House. I went to her new home, unusually situated on the edge of a very big African slum, an area most white people wouldn’t venture anywhere near, but her pendulum had apparently advised her to buy it. ‘And you can see Mount Kili,’ she said triumphantly, before asking, ‘Have you been up to Wanjohi recently?’
She heaved some old photograph albums on to a table and found the relevant pages, although none of the albums seemed to have any chronological order. Most of the photographs were of Ramsden’s sheep: they were neatly labelled ‘2,000 ewes at Kipipiri’ and ‘2,200 hoggets on the Kimuru’.
‘Hogget?’ I queried.
‘A yearling sheep,’ Janie replied.
There was a photo of Lady Colville and Lily Begg standing outside the Gilgil Hotel, taken in 1927; David Begg and Jimmy Bird on horseback in an empty landscape, taken in 1946; undated ones of Lady Joan Ramsden, and Gilbert and Diana Colville. There were also pictures of Kipipiri House looking much the same as it does now. There were pictures of Ramsden’s other home, Waterloo House near Naivasha, and more of a small, stone house. ‘That was Kimuru House,’ Janie explained, ‘which was built by Ramsden after we lived in the cave – some time after the 1930s.’ There’d been no sign of Kimuru House when we’d gone on our caving expedition.
Another person with old photographs of Kipipiri House was Tobina Cole: she’d often accompanied her mother to visit her aunt Joan Ramsden. ‘Chops wasn’t friendly,’ she told me, ‘nor was Joan. But they were all good to us. Their daughter Joyce became my guardian in England.’
She looked askance at me for my interest in houses. ‘I don’t like houses,’ she said, surprising me because her own home, although small, was attractive and had a pleasant ambience. She remembered that Ramsden’s house at Kipipiri had been very dark: ‘You couldn’t see when you were inside the drawing room. I suppose people liked it after days in the bright sun.’ She claimed it had been built after the war, ‘about 1919’, and that Chops had designed it.
Ramsden left Happy Valley in 1953: ‘He had business in Malaya,’ said Tobina curtly. ‘His son John was shot there – by a Chinese crook. John was the farmer. So he sold Kipipiri and his other farms to Abraham Block – of Block Hotels – and returned to England, where he lived a long time – until 1965.’
Whether or not the Ramsdens had attended any of Idina’s parties (some writers mention Chops attending the occasional wild event), Tobina’s parents, she made it clear, had definitely not partaken in such decadence. ‘My mother disapproved,’ she said.
After looking at Tobina’s fascinating old photos of Chops and his friends, as well as the wonderful garden in its earlier stages, it was time for me to leave. Tobina was walking next door to read to a blind friend. ‘I read him the newspapers every day,’ she said, ‘and also we’re reading about the early life of Hitler – up to 1936.’ The time, of course, when Joss was involved with the British Fascist movement. I asked Tobina about his murder – after all, her uncle Geoff must have had his theories, as well as Chops – but she brushed it off with: ‘There have been so many unsolved murders. Why do people carry on about this one?’
Tobina has no mobile phone or email, only an unreliable landline, which in Kenya is dependent on the weather. Too much rain and the lines usually go down, then it’s anybody’s guess how long they will take to fix them, if ever. But I could borrow her photograph albums any time, she said, ending our conversation as abruptly as she had over the phone, without ceremony or goodbye. She walked away without looking back and vanished behind a yesterday, today and tomorrow bush, with its scented mingle of white, mauve and violet blooms. It was as if a curtain had abruptly been drawn across the stage. I sat in my car a while before starting the engine, suddenly exhausted.
26
Polo and Terrorism
I had imagined my research was finally done, but then Bruce Rooken-Smith contacted me with more stories. My grandparents had known the Rooken-Smiths, a vast family who seemed related to everybody and were somehow, albeit confusingly, linked up with the Wanjohi crowd. Between Bruce, his brother Don, and their 95-year old mother, Marge Nye-Chart, who lived in a South African Frail Care home, they explained – at length – their baffling family history. It took time to understand who was who, who had married who and how they were all related. It was a bit like doing a vast, very difficult jigsaw, eventually becoming easier as pieces slotted in and the picture began to take form. Once again I was caught up in Happy Valley’s constantly changing story, inspired by people whose upbringings were so similar to my mother’s. These farming people I could relate to, having spent the happiest years of my early childhood on my grandparents’ farm.
Alexander William Rooken-Smith had come to Kenya from South Africa in the early 1900s. He’d had three wives. Two of his children from his second wife were Violet (who married Bertie Case, son of William and brother of Noel) and Harold, Bruce and Don’s father, who married Marge. Marge complicates the story: her father, Frederick Eeles, had come out from England and married her mother, Daisy, one of the nine Aggett children. When Frederick decided to return to England, Daisy refused to leave Kenya. She had an illegitimate son, Neville, with a white hunter, Posma, who planned to marry her after his next hunting safari, but it turned out to be his last: he was killed by an elephant. Daisy then married Lionel Griffin (who adopted her two children) and the couple had three more children. One of them, Marge’s half-sister, married the half-brother of Marge’s husband, Harold. Later on, after Harold had been killed in a car crash, Marge married Fred Nye-Chart. Fred’s mother, Nellie, had been another of the Aggetts’ nine children and a sister of Daisy Griffin (née Eeles, née Aggett), so Fred and Marge were actually first cousins. It made everyone seem remarkably interrelated in one small valley.
Daisy and Lionel’s son, Ken Griffin, had taken over Satima as manager after the Charts and McLoughlins left, buying it just before independence and consequently finding himself bought out in the initial phase of the million-acre scheme.
The Rooken-Smiths were all polo players, keeping up a tradition Joss had begun on the first pitch at Slains. Solomon had pointed out the second polo field to me, near Buxton’s house, still a flat open space, providing excellent grazing for cows and sheep. Don had been a teenager when Fred Chart ran the Wanjohi Polo Club on Satima Farm in the late 1940s. It closed down in the early 1950s when Chart left, but the show went on, using another rough pitch nearer Ol Kalou. Don meticulously recalled the names of players and horses – including Admiral Steve Arliss, ‘who fought at the battle of Jutland and drove a Rolls Royce’, and Billy Baldock (a woman), who called her home ‘Much Bottle in the Marsh’ and ‘had a nice mare called Trial Trip’. All the neighbours played polo, including Dr Anne Spoerry, Alastair Gibb, John McLoughlin and the Gillett brothers. In late December 1952 the Ol Kalou Polo Club had a team playing in Nairobi for the New Year tournament, the same
week Fergusson and Bingley were murdered. The polo went on, but the dedicated Ol Kalou players drove back and forth daily on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Bruce recalled: ‘A round trip of some 200 miles each day – and then on the Sunday, still dressed in britches and boots, we did a sweep after a gang, behind our house!’
My interest was thoroughly awakened by Don’s next story. Of all the tenuous links between me, Mary Miller and this more recent farming family, I never expected it to be a giraffe! Don Rooken-Smith had known Jock Leslie-Melville at Cirencester, but got to know him better years later, when Jock was translocating the threatened and last remaining herd of Rothschilde’s giraffe from Soy, in western Kenya, to better-protected areas. The Rooken-Smiths had recently moved to Soy, so Don assisted in the cowboy operation: mounted on polo ponies they charged after the cantering giraffe, the aim being to herd them towards a man sitting in a bucket seat attached to the mudguard of a vehicle, wielding a noose attached to a giraffe-neck-length pole, which he planned to lower over their unsuspecting, spotted heads. The horses were terrified of the giraffe, high grass concealed warthog holes into which the horses frequently fell and after everyone had fallen off their mount (one woman’s horse even somersaulted) they called it a day. However, eventually a number of giraffe were moved, some to the outskirts of Nairobi.
Coincidentally, in the 1990s I lived across the forested valley from the Leslie-Melvilles’ Giraffe Manor, where Jock and Betty had started their sanctuary. The hand-fed giraffe, who’d happily stick their heads through the Leslie-Melvilles’ dining-room window for a piece of toast and a kiss, spent their day entertaining schoolchildren and tourists at the educational ‘giraffe centre’ below the house. At night they were herded into the sanctuary, the forested foreground to my view of the blue knuckles of the Ngong hills. Forgoing all indigenous delights, the giraffe joined me every evening, heading straight for my bougainvillea bushes, beheading ‘poisonous’ plants like euphorbia and poinsettia. I would sit on my veranda looking up at multiple long, spotted legs, watching their owners drink the contents of my birdbath in several gulps. My children went to sleep listening to heavy giraffe footsteps and loud munching beside their open windows. If there was a moon they’d get a close-up of the spots.
The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 26