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The Ghosts of Happy Valley

Page 32

by Juliet Barnes


  I asked about the rumours regarding Beryl’s royal affairs while married to her second husband, Markham. ‘She had two sons,’ Jack told me. ‘Gervase was supposed to be Markham’s, but if you saw him in the flesh it was obvious whose son he really was. The other son, born later, was Prince Henry’s.’ On the latter occasion Beryl had discovered she was pregnant after she’d returned to Kenya, so she’d taken a ship back to England where she planned to have the child. But, Jack said, she’d been intercepted: ‘The royals got her off the boat in Marseille and she was whipped into a private clinic. That was the last she saw of her son.’ Beryl’s side of the deal was to keep off British soil and to keep quiet – permanently. Jack had seen the contract in which she’d been paid off – for life – by Queen Mary: £600 a year, which had probably sounded reasonably attractive to a woman with little education and who’d always been broke. Jack took a small sip of gin before making it clear that I could write what I liked, but he would deny everything he’d told me. ‘I’ve been offered so much money by journalists,’ he smiled, ‘but I won’t take it.’

  There have been two biographies of Beryl: Mary Lovell’s Straight On Till Morning (1987) and Errol Trzebinski’s The Lives of Beryl Markham (1993). Beryl’s own memoirs are recorded with poetic eloquence in West with the Night (first published in 1942). She doesn’t mention any princes or sons in her biography and Trzebinski is adamant the dates don’t support the royal bastard theory, although Lovell’s book does allow for speculation. The inter-war years had certainly been golden for the royal princes as they let rip in Kenya – pursuing women, married or not, in between hunting safaris. Edward, Prince of Wales, and his brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, both came to Kenya on safari in 1928, the Prince of Wales returning in 1930. On that initial visit everybody was falling over themselves to meet and entertain royalty, with Muthaiga Club destined to become the perfect venue for wild royal carousing. Happy Valley wasn’t the only place that tarnished Kenya’s name, or indeed that of the British Empire. Between the wars, there was plenty of bad behaviour in the smart circles of England, as well as in the colonies – and the royals were often in the thick of it. Alice de Trafford was often seen in the Embassy Club in London with Edward and George: the latter, Duke of Kent, was also a lover of Kiki Preston’s, an American lady notorious in Naivasha and partial to taking drugs. Greswolde Williams, the main supplier of Happy Valley’s drugs, actually had to be ushered out of Muthaiga Club for offering cocaine to HRH.

  The governor of the Kenya Colony, Sir Edward Grigg, declared the princes ‘indefatigable’. Sir Derek Erskine described how the Prince of Wales had thrown all the gramophone records out of the window of Muthaiga Club’s ballroom (assisted by Erskine’s wife). Edward P, as he came to be called, proved himself to be spoiled and devoid of manners, happy to keep his entourage waiting for hours while he vanished with a blonde (who turned out to be Beryl).

  The princes also knew Joss. Edward P and Joss had become even better friends during a ship voyage back to Kenya in 1930, with Beryl – now banished by the Palace – another passenger. As Earl of Erroll and High Constable of Scotland, Joss would later have to don his official robes to attend George VI’s coronation in May 1937 after Edward’s abdication in 1936. And of course Edward P and Joss were both old muckers of Oswald Mosley’s.

  Beryl slept around, as did plenty of beautiful women in the roaring twenties and thirties. She shared Denys Finch Hatton and Bror Blixen with Karen Blixen; Boy Long and Joss with Idina; and Joss and Tom Cholmondeley with Diana. Both princes shared her. Beryl’s son, Gervase Markham, had been born in England in 1929, but his birth was not registered for sixteen months. Back home in Kenya there’d been much speculation and Beryl apparently never denied any rumours. Trzebinski displays photographs of Beryl’s husband of the time, Mansfield Markham, and Gervase on the same page, pointing out the family likeness, but then Jack had other, very firm ideas. Unless she’d had an eleven-month pregnancy, or a prince had managed to slip into Kenya without anyone knowing, it seems impossible. Nonetheless Henry cared deeply enough about Beryl to support her regardless of the child’s parentage. It’s equally possible that Beryl had no idea who her son’s father was. She was ‘no one-man mare’, as Jack put it.

  Gervase was brought up by the Markham family and saw precious little of his mother, who continued to live in London as royal mistress of the Duke. The Palace promptly removed him on an official visit to Japan – which he tried to resist – although he finally went at the end of March. By July he was back with Beryl, enjoying the good life with her in London until the end of 1929 when Queen Mary’s agreement was settled. Mansfield wanted a divorce and Queen Mary wanted Beryl out of her son’s – or possibly both her sons’ – way.

  After Beryl returned to Kenya in February 1930, Karen Blixen, who saw her on her arrival, wrote that the younger woman was ‘very unhappy and depressed. I can hardly believe that everything is as she describes . . . she is stranded out here now, parted from her child . . . and feeling very lonely and miserable.’ Karen then received a telegram at the end of April asking her to meet Beryl for lunch in Muthaiga and was astonished to discover that she was returning to Europe, and ‘had to leave the same day for Mombasa to catch the Italian boat on the 1st’. As ‘a stupid man’ asked to join them for lunch she never discovered what on earth had made Beryl take this unexpected step. It’s unlikely Beryl would have told her anyway, but she speculated: ‘Perhaps it is the Duke of Gloucester who cannot do without her any longer, and in itself I suppose it is better to be at home in England . . . If he is going to support her for a lifetime, the way her miserable husband has arranged things, then at least they can enjoy each other a little.’

  And thus until October 1930, Beryl was back in the UK, flouting the royal agreement, enjoying Prince Henry once again. But on 16 October he was firmly removed from her influence by the Palace. He was sent to Addis where he later contracted shingles – an illness caused by severe emotional stress.

  It’s possible that Beryl, on returning to Kenya in February 1930, was feeling vulnerable and unhappy because she was pregnant. On discovering this she might well have headed back to her lover in England, when she could have been forced off the boat in Marseilles. She could have been anything between three months on and almost full term: tall women can conceal it. Jack had no idea if Beryl’s ‘other son’ had survived. Another woman, who also wished to remain anonymous, confirmed a second son, adding, ‘he was called Miles’.

  On the voyage to Kenya with Joss and Edward, Prince of Wales, Beryl might have been showing suspicious signs, or perhaps she just had morning sickness. She might even have confided in Joss, while Edward himself might have let slip a few family secrets. Errol Trzebinski comments: ‘Naturally there would have been discussions about women.’ She later says that O’Mara (his false name), a young officer in the King’s African Rifles who supposedly had something to do with the cover-up of Erroll’s murder, ‘was convinced that Joss had some unpalatable information on the Duke of Windsor’. O’Mara wrote in a letter: ‘Why were they determined to eliminate Joss completely? He talked too much, knew too much, wanted too much, for silence about the Duke of Windsor’s doings and ambitions.’ When Trzebinski asked by letter, ‘Who do you think wanted him out of the way?’ O’Mara responded: ‘SIS – Lord E. had become an embarrassment.’

  Even if Beryl was – in some degree – an unwitting player in the whole Erroll saga, she’d rocked the royal apple cart, as would Wallis Simpson six years later. A woman, possibly the mother of one, maybe even two, royal sons, had lived and died with very little money, and nobody cared – but then nobody really knew. As Beryl herself wrote in the preface to her own biography by Mary Lovell, she had benefited from sharing memories – ‘But some memories I have kept for myself as everyone must.’

  Once, when I was in my late teens, I was collecting my parents’ post in Karen. Beryl Markham was collecting hers too. I knew who she was – everyone did. I watched her walking away – holding her
head high to detract from a slight limp – then driving off in a beaten-up old car laced with bullet holes, from the time she’d driven through a road block during Kenya’s abortive military coup. She’d had a don’t-give-a-damn air and a faded but eye-catching glamour. A little like I’d imagine Idina to be, although Idina didn’t end up alone and penniless. But she must have been another woman who kept many secrets.

  Conclusions at Clouds

  Having spent what felt half a lifetime pacing the dusty, broken floors and long-destroyed gardens of Happy Valley’s homes, it was time to return to Clouds – the place where I’d started my search and where I now needed to finish it. I wanted to revisit a house that had come to feel curiously like a second home, but more important I still hoped to find out the truth about Erroll’s murder. Maybe I’d become crazy enough to imagine Idina herself would step out from behind an apple tree and tell me what really happened.

  ‘Do you know of anyone,’ Peter Nuthu had asked me on a previous visit, ‘who might like to repair this home and use some of the rooms for the tourists to come and stay?’

  ‘But . . .’ I began, and then didn’t have the heart to tell him. ‘It might be a bit difficult!’ I ended lamely. The truth is that millions of shillings needed to be spent to make the house luxurious enough for tourist home-stays. Then there’s the fact that this relatively densely populated country with its denuded hillsides might not have the same appeal to overseas visitors as viewing a tarted-up, traditional Maasai homestead on sun-kissed plains – and there isn’t even the added attraction of elephants or leopards in the area any more.

  Then, with that strange way my Happy Valley adventures had of slotting into place at exactly the right time, Solomon and I were asked to take up a motley group of interested friends, including two artists, Leonie Gibbs and Sophie Walbeoffe, who wanted to paint the old house. The new Chinese road was in use, even if the last few miles to Clouds were worse than ever.

  The dark avenue of towering eucalyptus trees was now a row of fat stumps and you could see the house from the gate. It had been so long I’d lost Peter’s number, if indeed they still lived here. But Paul came limping up to see why there were vehicles at the gate, and his face lit up when he saw who it was. Elizabeth, another brother, John, and the elderly but sprightly wife of the late mzee, Grace, rushed out and hugged us all. Even Leonie and Sophie were treated like long-lost relatives. Peter was away teaching, but his eldest daughter, Njeri, now had her own baby strapped to her back, a startling reminder of how much time had passed since my previous visit with Frances Osborne.

  ‘Why did you stay away so long?’ they all chided.

  The wind hissed through the remaining gums – they were gradually removing those 150-foot non-indigenous trees, planted by Idina’s servants. ‘They are a danger in these winds,’ Peter explained. One corner of the roof above the old kitchen had collapsed under a heavy fallen branch. As if in answer to Peter, and rage the forests that once acted as windbreaks had gone, a gust of wind blasted down from the mountains.

  ‘This is the most beautiful place I have ever been in Africa,’ cried Sophie, oblivious to the crumbling house. ‘I could live up here!’

  Leonie’s sister Miranda is married to Peregrine, son of Diana Denyse Hay, or Dinan as she was nicknamed. The family called her ‘Puffin’. Dinan had left her first husband, Iain Moncreiffe, father of Peregrine, who’d then married Hermione, Leonie’s mother’s half-sister. She and I had also discovered I’d met her parents in Fife, when at St Andrews University. Additionally, Sophie’s driver, Saidi, found he knew Peter and Paul’s sister in Nanyuki – and suddenly the whole day was taking on the surreal feeling of a reunion. Sophie knew the Erroll family too: at a heartbroken stage of her life she’d stayed with her great friend, Merlin, 24th Earl of Erroll, Dinan’s other son.

  We walked around the old house. Elizabeth’s ‘home’ was now in the room beside Idina’s old bedroom, leading off the bathroom where Idina supposedly bathed in Champagne. The tarnished lion’s head tap above the bath still drily watched over the dust-cushioned seats. ‘Idina’s old water system is still in place and we still use it,’ said Paul. ‘We just don’t bring the water in here.’

  Bats still watched us silently from their inverted positions in musty corners, and in the long, large front room there remained that disconcertingly powerful feel of times past, as if its lack of present use had never expelled all those old ghosts. It was early March, and the end of Kenya’s hottest, driest season, but it was cold up here at over 8,000 feet and the one little boy who wasn’t at school wore a woollen hat. He was sick, Paul pointed out, but he wasn’t going to stay in bed, not with something as exciting to watch as a motley crew of white guests.

  In a corner of Grace’s room, where she and mzee had lived together, there was an old wing chair with a cloth thrown over it. It looked exactly like the one Idina sat in beside the fire at Clouds, in her twilight years, pictured in The Bolter. Leonie gave Paul and Elizabeth her copy as a gift. She sat on the dusty, dark wooden window seat in a shaft of bright light that illuminated the floor around her feet, which was covered with dried maize cobs. She read aloud to them Frances’s words near the end of the book about Solomon guiding us up to Clouds, ‘raising his long, thin fingers to indicate left or right. A couple of times we had to give up and turn back, find another way. How on earth, I ask, did Idina drive her Hispano-Suiza along here?’ Solomon wasn’t listening – he’d gone outside to see if he could see any signs of colobus.

  ‘Our father used to read White Mischief to us. We read it to our children,’ said Paul delightedly. ‘Now we can read this new book to them.’ They didn’t seem to have any other bedtime literature – buying books can hardly be a priority when it’s tough enough finding funds to feed, clothe and educate your family. Dipping into The Bolter, Paul raised his eyebrows. John was reading over his shoulder. ‘Do all white women behave like this?’ he asked nervously.

  We walked outside. The whole area around Clouds was desperately dry and even the lawn was brown, but the scarlet roses still bloomed behind the old house. ‘And the pear, apple and plum trees in the back field have now been fruiting for almost ninety years,’ Paul told us proudly.

  ‘Do you make apple pie?’ asked Leonie dreamily, leaning on the fence and gazing across her sister’s grandmother-in-law’s orchard towards the brooding bulk of Kipipiri.

  There was a pause – pastry was not in Paul’s vocabulary and proved difficult to explain.

  ‘You cook the apples, with sugar,’ I attempted, not very successfully, ‘and then cover it with . . . something a bit like chapatti and cook it in an oven.’ Paul was trying to be polite to the foreign guest, but didn’t manage to look impressed at the idea. There was no longer an oven at Clouds anyway.

  I noted sadly that even more forest had been shaved off the lower reaches of the mountain. Blue-grey plumes of smoke rose from its upper slopes, still dark with forest. Back around the front of the house the dams were dry and the stream was no longer running, with only a few soggy depressions between the rocks to hint it ever had. Solomon and Paul were intent on finding the caves in the narrow valley they’d told us about, but the nettles clinging to its steep sides put the rest of us off. We walked on into the neighbours’ fields, past the concealing trees, suddenly coming into the open and seeing the view Idina would once have admired from her windows. The sun was now being replaced by heavy afternoon clouds rolling in from the Rift Valley below. It’s usual up here to have sparkling mornings then afternoon rain. Standing there above the approaching clouds that inspired the house’s name, it did indeed almost feel as if I was on a cloud. Given a glass of Champagne, a herd of elephants splashing in the dams in the light of the setting sun, a handful of dashing, vagabond men and a woman as entertaining as Idina to host dinner – it would have been cloud nine!

  Later I studied an old black and white photograph Lyduska had given me: it must have been taken from the front door of Clouds. It looked over the water gardens, the bac
kdrop the staggering view we’d just seen. I suddenly realised the figure I’d thought was a dog, was actually an elephant. In Idina’s day many wild animals had trekked between the mountain forests above Clouds and the expansive plains beneath, pausing to drink at the dams below the house. Today all we saw were two Sykes’ monkeys, and in the centre of the maize patch below them, a trap with carrots inside to seduce the ‘pests’. Solomon was there already, embattled and ready to dismantle the structure, but Paul stopped him: ‘That is not our land,’ he warned.

  ‘Come, Solomon,’ I said gently. ‘Come and paint the house with the other artists.’ Sophie was already at her easel, creating a kaleidoscope of magic with colours that I felt would have made Idina laugh with delight. Leonie joined her, sitting on the grass, creating another delightfully impressionistic portrait of the old house, her brush strokes transforming it into that merry place where you could imagine much laughter and many parties. The figure of Idina moved across the foreground, ghostly, blue-tinged and mysterious. ‘I had to put her in,’ Leonie suddenly said. The altitude was affecting Leonie and she said she felt dizzy, suddenly falling asleep under a pear tree.

  Sophie wanted to paint the living room. ‘Will you sit on the window seat?’ she asked me. Sitting there, I naturally thought about Idina. I’d looked up the meaning of the name. Evidently unusual – most sources didn’t list the name Idina – there seems to be as much controversy about her name as literature about her life. One said it was a variant of the old English Edina, meaning ‘rich friend’, another said it came from Adina, meaning ‘noble’, while a third said it was a name from Israel meaning ‘gentle’.

 

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