The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  These bougainvillea-fed giraffe bred madly and some were transported to Soysambu. One evening, after I’d moved there, I came upon a herd of giraffe. I froze as one of these giants strode gracefully over, bowed his long neck and kissed my outstretched hand. He was one of my old Langata friends.

  I thought I’d closed my chapter on the enigmatic Mary Miller, but in early 2012, Solomon met some Kikuyu elders who’d told him some extraordinary – almost unbelievable – stories about her during Mau Mau. So I decided to go and listen to them first hand. Once again Happy Valley’s history had churned up something totally unexpected, this time a matter I’d never heard of before and which even surprised my parents.

  The tarmac road from Gilgil to Ol Kalou was broken and potholed. My Land Rover rattled at top volume. It was a cold, sunless July day and the Aberdares were hazy against a grey sky, their lower regions veiled by low cloud. My windscreen was blurred by drizzle, which my worn wiper rubbers failed to clear.

  We stopped to collect 78-year-old Kamwambao in Captain. He had dressed up in an old grey suit, purple shirt, scarf and jungle hat, smiling toothlessly as he was assisted into the Land Rover. He didn’t speak English, but spoke a little Kiswahili. Solomon had already warned me that this particular Mau Mau story was a delicate issue: we needed to avoid prying ears. Not all the elders Solomon had spoken to were prepared to talk. Mary Miller’s former driver was still alive, but too old, immobile and forgetful. Githuku Githaiga, the man who had killed Fergusson and Bingley (and many other Europeans, according to Solomon) had also declined. ‘He is feeling too much the blood of the white people,’ Solomon explained.

  Wanjohi had tripled in size in a decade, matched by the piles of roadside litter. People stared curiously as we stopped beside two more very old men and an elderly woman, who hoisted themselves into my Land Rover. Neither Solomon nor I fancied another trip to Mary Miller’s former home, so we drove towards Delap’s. The road had degenerated into a rocky quagmire. It had rained hard for months and the bridge over the swollen Wanjohi River had collapsed, although there had been some makeshift ‘repairs’. On Solomon’s assurance that it was safe, I drove tentatively across and continued along the road, realising that we couldn’t go back now as there was nowhere to turn. We eventually stopped in front of a locked metal gate and a field of sheep. On trying to turn around we got stuck anyway, so it seemed a good place as any to talk, although there was nowhere to sit. I was aware this interview had to be quick in view of the ages of the interviewees.

  Njuguna, who sported a cheap nylon suit and a tweed hat, was the youngster at seventy-two. He’d been a messenger during Mau Mau: messages were delivered by the fastest runners, relay-race style, but passed by word of mouth. Back in Wanjohi, when he’d first climbed into the Land Rover and shaken hands with Kamwambao, they’d suddenly recognised one another – although it had been well over fifty years: they’d known one another during Mau Mau.

  Mugwe was eighty-three and the most forthcoming. He was clad in a thick sweater, gumboots and a faded sports cap, and was the only one who walked without a stick. He’d fled into the forests with other Mau Mau fighters in 1952, he told us. Wanjiru, seventy-six and almost blind, was reluctant to say too much. She wore a long cotton dress, a threadbare sweater and a headscarf, leaning on her stick after placing her umbrella and woven basket on the ground. She’d been one of the women responsible for taking food into the forest to the Mau Mau freedom fighters – including her husband, who’d been killed during Mau Mau. Solomon later told me she knew many things about Mau Mau which she was not prepared to divulge.

  All four had taken the oath of silence, but now, nearing the end of their lives and with Mary Miller dead, they were prepared to talk, although Wanjiru’s contribution was mainly nodding or an assenting ‘eeeeh’. That same month, old grievances were being dug up in UK courts by three Mau Mau veterans, bringing cases against the British government. I’d heard and read of horrors inflicted by both sides, but I’d never heard or read any stories about white settlers actually siding with the Mau Mau.

  Mary Miller had been a very good lady, these wazee agreed. During Mau Mau she’d helped and supported the freedom fighters, assisting them with food, clothes and medicine, and allowing secret deliveries of supplies to the men in the forest to be made directly from her home. They told me that Mary had actually allowed the Mau Mau to conduct their secret nocturnal oath-taking ceremonies on her property – she hadn’t attended any oathing sessions herself, but she’d issued guards to warn them if any British troops or Kikuyu Home Guards were sneaking up. She’d even forewarned the Mau Mau of ambushes or attacks, often saving their lives.

  Was she an eccentric old woman who hadn’t really known what was going on, I wondered. Pro-self government, but a bit naive?

  ‘She was good-hearted,’ said Mugwe, ‘she helped us because she truly liked us. She had no husband but she had one young son living at home with her.’

  I asked if any of them had actually taken the oath at Mary Miller’s home. All four nodded assent. They’d done so in the early 1950s: ‘It was in her store – behind the house,’ explained Mugwe.

  ‘Those were very hard times,’ said Njuguna.

  ‘We took the oath again inside her house in 1969. By then she had left,’ said Kamwambao. Solomon nodded – he remembered that too. They’d known Dedan Kimathi and confirmed he’d been a tailor and had worked for the Delaps. He’d also been a clerk and worked for many Europeans, including ‘Lord Ramsden’. They named other white settlers who they claimed had helped the Mau Mau: ‘Maran’, ‘Grace Hammerton’ and ‘Michael’. I later read in Tim Hutchinson’s Directory that families with the name of Malan, Michel and Hamilton had all lived around Ol Kalou in the 1950s.

  The wazee were tired and I didn’t keep them long. Thankfully it only took Solomon and the two more able-bodied of the elders to push us out of the mud. Back at Wanjohi, Njuguna and Mugwe promised to meet again soon and we drove away, silenced once more by the road. I thought about these hitherto untold tales, acknowledging that although many of the white settlers genuinely cared about their Kenyan employees, they also cherished the homes and farms they had created. Many must have hoped to stay on after the inevitable advent of independence. Perhaps this explained why some had secretly assisted Mau Mau – to save their own skins, as well as to secure their futures. Back in Gilgil I ran this by Solomon.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘That is what I think too. Mary Miller, she lived alone by the forest. She wanted to stay safe.’

  Mary had lived through the different decades of Happy Valley’s chequered career. She would have known Idina as well, being a neighbour and friend to Alice de Janzé. Alice had not lived long enough, or who knows what she might have got up to during the time of Mau Mau?

  Back home I was editing what I’d written about Mary Miller, thinking about her allegations that Alice was implicated in the Erroll murder, when I felt a cold, heavy weight on my foot. I looked down to see a very large lizard, stone still. I lowered my foot and it sluggishly moved itself on to my empty sheepskin slipper, where it took up a prehistoric posture, motionless yet threatening. It wasn’t like any type of lizard I had ever seen before – if it resembled anything it was a dinosaur. Alice, my house help, was horrified: ‘That is the bad type of lizard,’ she said, using a Kiswahili word I had never heard.

  ‘It’s not a chameleon,’ I said defensively, imagining she was being superstitious.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘That is the one that bites people! It is very dangerous.’

  I was puzzled. ‘Surely not . . . it didn’t bite me.’

  ‘You are lucky,’ she said darkly. ‘God was protecting you!’

  More unexpected Mau Mau stories emerged when I was doing some research for John Heminway, who was writing the biography of Dr Anne Spoerry. She’d always been revered in Kenya as the legendary ‘flying doctor’, selflessly involved in humanitarian work in Kenya until she died in 1999. Then Heminway’s article for the Financial Times had caus
ed waves of shock and disbelief. He’d interviewed Dr Louise Le Porz, who’d known Spoerry in Ravensbrück. Spoerry had been sent to this concentration camp in 1944, under the supervision of Carmen Mory, who became Spoerry’s lesbian lover. Le Porz revealed a very different side of Spoerry, a woman who’d murdered and tortured hundreds of Jewish women.

  Heminway wanted to see Spoerry’s first Kenya home near Ol Kalou. We found the house – a small and spartan affair. She’d lived there in the 1950s, then moved to Subukia in the early 1960s – where she learned to fly and became the fearless flying doctor who would land anywhere in the bush to help sick and injured people of any race or creed. What we weren’t expecting was the rumours of her cruelty during Mau Mau.

  Back in the 1950s many white settlers inevitably became frustrated with British policies, as had earlier politically minded figures, including the 3rd Baron Delamere and Lord Erroll. And now, during Mau Mau, a few angry settlers sometimes took matters into their own hands. Ol Kalou, it seems, had its share of such farmers, with whom Spoerry could rub shoulders with ease.

  A week later I drove to Wanjohi, where Solomon had arranged for me to meet and interview – in a secret venue – several maimed Kikuyu elders to whom Dr Spoerry remained a hated name. One old woman wouldn’t see me at all: she never wanted to set eyes on another white woman. The old men were victims of torture, which they claimed had been perpetrated by Spoerry and her Kikuyu assistant in her Ol Kalou clinic. One was missing an eye, another had bullet wounds, a third had a badly scarred leg. They told worse stories of fates that had befallen other Mau Mau fighters, many of whom hadn’t survived to tell their tales of castration and lethal injections. My informants still remembered who’d been good to their African staff – and who hadn’t. Morgan-Grenville had been generally liked, Delap too, but Fergusson, it seemed, was not. He was part of the group of white people, they said, who met with Dr Spoerry regularly.

  Feeling I needed to hear some validation of such stories from the ‘other’ side, I found an elderly memsahib, who was initially reluctant to talk about it and didn’t wish to be named. She remembered Spoerry, ‘very mannish, but a character. And she got on with everyone up there – especially the men.’ Anne Spoerry had regularly met up with some of the local men at settlers’ meetings in Ol Kalou during Mau Mau, while the wives went for a drink and a curry at the Ol Kalou Club. ‘My husband walked out,’ said my informant, ‘he told me he couldn’t handle the shocking cruelty, it was so bad. They were very cruel to get information out of the Mau Mau. They killed terrorists by putting gas masks on them.’

  At the start of Mau Mau, my father had just returned from an abortive trip across the Sahara where he’d watched two people die. Aged seventeen, he’d been rescued at the eleventh hour by the French Foreign Legion, hours from death himself. He returned to Kenya, now just eighteen, to find himself conscripted to the Kenya Regiment. There ended his job and planned career. He doesn’t often talk about Mau Mau, except for the time he was charged in the Aberdare forest by a giant forest hog – probably the only highlight in those dark days. After I’d met the Mau Mau veterans, my father was in hospital with a broken hip and a weak heart. I was touched when, on hearing this, one of the Kikuyu elders continued to call me regularly, asking after my father and assuring me that he was praying for his recovery. Mau Mau was indeed ugly in its time, but the fact that many of those who fought in it and are still alive bear no animosity, is a tribute to Kenyans of all races and loyalties, highlighting their admirable capacity to forgive and move on.

  27

  An Italian Legacy

  I’d often thought about Lyduska Piotto’s Mau Mau story, how narrowly she’d escaped death. She’d expressed her belief in fate, or some power greater than herself, no doubt brought into being by her extraordinary life story, which we’d only touched on when we met. Back then I’d been interested in Slains simply as Joss and Idina’s home, part of a scandalous era. But now I’d been drawn gently, through a wealth of stories about an area which seems never to have experienced a stagnant moment, into a present that was changing faster than ever before. I yearned to know more about Lyduska, who had lived through such dramatic shifts in history. As an Italian, she was seen as the enemy during wartime. Like Idina she was a strong woman, who defied convention and survived an isolated existence at Slains. And like Idina, Lyduska’s life and background were a book in themselves. I still had many questions about her, feeling that no story of Slains could be completed without the answers.

  Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, almost as if Lyduska herself had granted my request, her third cousin in Canada contacted me, also trying to find out more. Linda Tomlin was able to tell me a little about their intriguing family. She’d tracked their kinship back to two brothers, sons of poor weavers in northern Italy; after Biagio and Pantaleone Lenassi had been orphaned in 1813, they made their way to Slovenia, then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, living in the chapels of different churches. Pantaleone, Linda’s great-great-grandfather, stayed near Postojna. Biagio, Lyduska’s great-grandfather, made two lucrative marriages, thus ending up an extremely wealthy silk manufacturer near Gorizia in north-eastern Italy. Linda’s emails, together with a poor online translation of an Italian article, ‘The Countess who loved horses and Africa’, by Paola Prizzi Merljak, helped me piece together more about the strong-willed, charismatic and beautiful Lyduska de Nordis Hornik.

  She’d grown up an only child at her family home in north-eastern Italy, the Villa Nordis in Solkan (Salcano in Italian) on the banks of the Isonzo, near her great-grandfather’s industrial complex. Lyduska’s grandmother, Lidia Maria Lenassi, was born in 1861 and married off at the age of thirteen to 31-year-old Antonio de Nordis, moving to his family home, which dated back to 1830. They had two daughters: Eleonora was born in 1881 and Lidia Emma in 1888.

  Lidia Emma later met Francesco Hornik – an Austrian officer born in Czechoslovakia and stationed at Gorizia. She fell in love and married him, in spite of her mother’s disapproval of nobility marrying beneath them. They had one daughter – Lyduska. (I remembered her telling me that her parents’ marriage had been sabotaged by her grandmother, who presumably had not married for love.) Lidia Emma’s equally adventurous sister, Eleonora – known as Norina – wrote a book, Giornale di Carovana (1934), detailing her travels in East Africa, Malaya and Ceylon with her second husband, a keen big-game hunter, who is incorrectly named as Francesco, but who I later discovered was Paolo Dolfin Boldu. Lyduska called him ‘Pula’ – Sanskrit for ‘great’. At some point Norina and Pula met Idina in Venice, presumably around the beginning of 1929 when Slains was up for auction, and it is likely to have been then that they bought their Happy Valley farm.

  Lyduska came to Kenya to visit them before the war, although during the German occupation of northern Italy she was confined at the Villa Nordis. She would have been barely twenty, although she’d mentioned returning to Italy with a boyfriend. Meanwhile, back in Kenya, Italians were being rounded up and interned. With Italy now fully engaged in the war, attacks into Sudan and Kenya from the troops in the Italian colonies of Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland and Eritrea commenced in mid-1940. According to Lyduska herself, she returned to Slains in 1948, then stayed on after her aunt and uncle left.

  On 1 March 1951 in Nairobi, as recorded in the Kenya Gazette, Lidia Hornik (Lyduska’s real name), a ‘spinster’ from Ol Kalou, made application in General Notice 627 for the administration of the estate of Count Paolo Dolfin Boldu. It states that Count Paolo died on 1 December 1947 at Rosa, Italy, and the request was made by Count Francesco Dolfin Boldu, ‘son of Paolo’, to open up the estate and get it finalised. Norina, widowed at the young age of fifty-six, presumably stayed in Italy.

  According to the Italian article, which was proving to be very inaccurate on many counts, Lyduska received a Kenyan estate as a wedding gift from her uncle, Francesco Dolfin, when she married the man she loved, ‘bohemian’ Nanni Piotto, who was neither noble nor rich. (In fact, she was not marri
ed to Nanni – real name Francesco –at this point and, moreover, Francesco Dolfin was not her uncle.) This in spite of her having a crowd of admirers belonging to the international jet set, for Lyduska spoke half a dozen languages. The writer further describes her as a fearless horse rider, often seen riding barefoot at all hours through the Italian mountains, in spite of suffering a fall as a child which caused chronic infection of the bone.

  After the war, on learning of the redrawing of borders between Italy and Yugoslavia, Lyduska hastened back to Gorizia to determine the fate of her family villa, located right on the future border. The article states that she could even divert borders: these were forced to turn sharply, ensuring that her entire estate remained in Italy! Although Lyduska continued her life in Kenya, where she pioneered what are now described as organic farming methods, she was always the talk of her native town, the writer concludes, visiting annually with a glittering entourage. In 1970, Nanni died after a car accident in Latisana, not far from Gorizia. Lyduska remained in Kenya until her death in 2006. Her ashes were, as she wished, laid in the family tomb in Gorizia.

  Count Cesaroni remained a mystery. The Kenya Gazette states that on 11 February 1941 under the act of The Trading with the Enemy Ordinance, 1939, Custodian of Enemy Property:

  His Excellency the Governor has been pleased to order as follows: 1) the farm in the Wanjohi Valley, Gilgil area being the property of Anselmo Cesaroni and Adrianna Massaria Cesaroni, which is set out in Schedule hereto, is hereby vested in the Custodian of Enemy Property, subject to any encumbrances which may have been created thereon. 2) The power is hereby conferred upon the Custodian of Enemy Property to sell the said farm either by public auction or by private treaty.