The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  She stood up, the folds of her day dress shimmying around her, kissed Stewart goodbye and left.

  Euan had been lunching at White’s Club, just around the corner from the Ritz and close enough for Stewart to call in were he to effect a reconciliation. After Idina left, Stewart called for him. Euan strode over. Stewart was brief. There was not much he could say. After a short while Euan returned to Connaught Place, where he spent ‘the rest of the day completing packing and moving kit to Grosvenor Street, paying off servants, etc’. His life there was over. Euan was moving into the same street as his mother.

  That night he caught the sleeper to Glasgow, stayed in Scotland forty-eight hours and returned to a large dinner at the Ritz followed by the usual play. And then he and Barbie slipped away together alone. ‘Went to Combes’ dance.’ They stayed two hours. ‘We just danced together all the time.’ Long, lean, beautiful Barbie, swinging around him, curling up on his shoulder.

  Poor Dickie was ill at home in bed.

  On Saturday 1 March 1919 Euan walked from Edinburgh’s New Club, where he had stayed the night before, to the Court of Sessions with his solicitor. His petition for divorce was second on the court list. At ten-thirty he was called into the witness box. The questions were short. Within less than half an hour both he and two witnesses had given evidence and the presiding judge, Lord Blackburn, had stopped the case and granted Euan his divorce.

  Twenty-four hours later, back in London, Euan collapsed with a soaring temperature. ‘Teddie came round to see me and said I had got flu.’ Over the past twelve months Spanish flu had killed 25 million people around the world, a quarter of a million of them in Britain. ‘No visitors allowed.’ It took him two long, lonely days to decide to see a doctor, who then told him that the tonsillectomy he had had five years earlier was ‘badly bungled and my septic tonsils have grown again rather worse than before’. Euan needed another operation but at least he could have visitors.

  Barbie was the first to arrive.

  It would be two weeks at least before the infection had subsided enough to make it possible to operate. Euan’s throat was on fire, his temperature pistoned up and down. He couldn’t go out of the house and, when friends came to visit him, which they did in droves, he could barely talk. After a week he was allowed to be driven down to Old Lodge to see the children, as it was now his responsibility to do. Gerard, now three and a half, had an infernal cough and it dawned upon Euan that, however ill he himself might feel, if he didn’t arrange for his son to see a doctor, nobody else would.

  Euan summoned the grandest doctor he could find for Gerard, then, having had the remains of his tonsils dug out, decided to go abroad himself. It was customary, having been involved in a scandal, to vanish for twelve months. Ironically, Euan chose America, where, despite his efforts to keep the divorce out of the press, it had made the front page of the Washington Post – the newspaper of the very city in which Stewart had offered him a job. ‘Divorce Runs in Family,’ ran the strapline.4 The article raked over not just Euan and Idina’s divorce but also Muriel’s divorce from Gilbert and Gilbert’s subsequent divorce from his second wife.

  It was not a good beginning to Euan’s task in Washington. He was to travel as part of an ambassadorial mission from the then Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill. The aim of the mission was to establish an alliance between Britain, France and America. The political advantages of such a relationship were to be presented by the former Foreign Secretary, Lord Reading. The military point of view would be put forward by the war veteran and general, Sir Hugh Keppel Bethell. Euan was to propose that Britain and America should exchange intelligence and counter-espionage information. Nonetheless, he drove down to Eastbourne, found the boys some lodgings by the sea, hired a governess, not Idina’s Rowie but a Miss Jeffreys, to look after them, and left for America for a year.

  Meanwhile, on the last Thursday in March, Idina married Charles Gordon at Chelsea Register Office. It was a small, second wedding. She had three witnesses. A friend called Rosa Wood, the future collector of Surrealist art Charles de Noailles and Rosita Forbes.

  Within a week the newlyweds had sailed for Kenya.

  Idina had bolted.

  BOOK 2

  Kenya – Happy Valley

  CHAPTER 13

  IN APRIL 1919 IDINA AND CHARLES CROSSED TO FRANCE and took the train south to Marseille, where they boarded a boat for Mombasa in search of a new life and adventure. Their plan was to buy a farm, build a home and create a rural idyll on the other side of the world. Where Idina was going was new. Her husband was new. She, however, was as battle-scarred as the Europe she was trying to leave behind. She had neither fallen sufficiently out of love with her old husband, nor sufficiently in love with her new one. And she had had to give up her children.

  Mombasa was achingly hot when Idina and Charles arrived. The turrets of thick purple baobabs bulged at them along the sea front, their outlines blurred by the clouds of dust. Oxen, with their sleepy eye-lamps and wing-mirror horns, loomed around the corners like silent motor cars. Idina and Charles rattled along the streets on the town’s trolleys: a bench for two balanced between an awning and a platform on tramlined wheels, pushed by barefoot Africans. On the slopes leading down to the seafront the trolleys careered off, building up enough speed for a longed-for rush of air to blast away both the heat and the stench of dried shark curling up from the boats below.

  Down on the ocean’s edge they drank at the Mombasa Club with its white plaster walls and greenish tin roof, the bloodstained sandstone walls of Fort Jesus and its inmates at their elbow and an endless sea ahead. They lolled on the upper floor’s verandah, catching the sea breeze, ice-laden gin and tonics at their fingertips. Soon it would cool down, when the rains came.

  Mombasa was a frontier town: shops on the ground floor and living accommodation girdled by dark-wood verandahs on the first. It was the entrance to the British East Africa Protectorate, an area that stretched a couple of hundred miles north up the coast and six hundred miles inland. Sixty years earlier a British explorer, John Hanning Speke, had walked that far through the German-controlled land to the south and discovered the great gleaming Lake Victoria in Uganda. The lands around the lake were promisingly fertile and Lake Victoria was also the source of the River Nile. The British Government saw control of both the Nile and Egypt as vital to keeping open the Suez Canal, which was the gateway to its empire to the east, and so decided to create its own route there. The area north of the German territory had so far been untouched in the scramble for Africa by European states: the tribes were inhospitable, much of the area was desert and the air was thick with disease-bearing insects. The British were undaunted. The route in was through the port of Mombasa.

  The British way into a new land was Church and trade: the missionaries wandered in with their bibles and the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) was set up to bring the business in. Neither, however, made much progress. The tsetse fly was so prevalent in this part of East Africa that it proved impossible to use animals to transport supplies inland. By the 1890s the IBEAC was heading towards insolvency. In 1895 the British Government took direct control of the region, in the process bringing a solution to the problem of transport. It would build a railway stretching the whole six hundred miles from Mombasa to Lake Victoria: the tsetse fly would be overcome. Five years and £5.5 million later, the railway was complete. The pride of British East Africa was just under six hundred miles of gleaming iron, single-gauge track and a long, round, smooth monster of an engine, gulping wood and belching smoke. This was the Uganda Railway, called the Iron Snake by the Maasai cattle herders through whose homelands it slunk. Before the rains came, Idina and Charles boarded the noon train. Their compartment was a square loose-box with no link to its neighbours, the windows were dark with stifling mosquito screens, the pinpricks of ventilation choked with red dust. And off they went through the palm trees and slowly up, up, up to grassy highlands as scrub-ridden and green as a Scottish hill. At te
atime the train paused for toast and rhubarb jam and, as the sun set at an equatorial six sharp, the white-tipped Mount Kilimanjaro hovered beyond the screens. At dinner time they stopped for a curry, besieged by insects, while their beds were made up with crisp linen sheets. At dawn jugs of condensed engine steam for shaving and cups of tea appeared beside the line in the hands of white-suited and red-fezzed waiters.

  They clambered out of the Iron Snake at Nairobi. The town had started as a tented camp at mile 327 of the planned Uganda track. By the time the railway line had reached it in May 1899, many of those who had built it were too ill to travel further. A few miles ahead the earth split into the Rift Valley, a great crack in the earth’s surface running the length of Africa. It was a vast plain of flat-bottomed canyon, channelled out of the highlands and framed on either side by vertical cliffs thousands of feet high. To build a railway down the escarpment was, to say the least, challenging, even for those who were well. The railhead paused. Headquarters were established. The Railhead Club, colonialism on wheels, pegged its guy ropes to the ground. Tents and shacks spread over the plains. In the rains groundsheets sank into a black soil malarial swamp. In the dry season the earth cracked, its debris flying up at the touch of a heel or hoof, coating every inch of flesh and fabric in a second skin of African dust. Eventually the railway builders moved on. The town, however, stayed.

  Once Idina and Charles’s car had been rolled off its wagon at the back, its earth-covered canvas peeled off, engine tinkered with and re-oiled until it was purring again in a haphazard way, they drove a couple of miles out of the centre of town to a newish club, the Muthaiga Country Club, which had opened only a few months before the war had begun and real time had halted. Muthaiga was long, low and colonial. Its external plaster walls were painted a desert pink and surrounded by a garden at first glance classically English. The grass, however, was just a little broader, the flowers brighter and the vegetation as lush as any in the greenhouses at Kew. Inside, dark-wood floors and window frames enclosed floral-print English armchairs and African hunting spoils, including an entire stuffed lion.

  Before Muthaiga had opened, the British and European gentry abroad had stayed at the Norfolk Hotel, in the centre of town. When Muthaiga arrived, all those who were members of suitably exclusive gentlemen’s clubs ‘back Home’ migrated to the welcoming restrictions of the new establishment. There were rooms in the main building surrounded by a lush garden, perfect for newlyweds with nowhere else to go.

  Idina and Charles did not, as yet, have a farm, a shamba, as they called it there. They hoped to be allotted one in the British Government’s land raffle to be held in a few weeks’ time. The Uganda Railway had created a secondary industry of farming alongside its tracks, from where those legendary three African harvests a year could be piled downhill, on to the Iron Snake and taken straight to a waiting steam ship in Mombasa, for delivery to a hungry Europe. All that was needed was farmers, and a great many of them, for no fewer than two and a half million acres needed tending to. When the war had ended, Britain had started to overflow with trained soldiers in search of a new life. The British Government, in the manner of a parish church fête, decided to hold a tombola to distribute farms in the East African Protectorate to these war veterans; given the unwillingness of the indigenous people to surrender their lands, all the better, went the thinking, that the territory should be occupied by men who knew how to handle a rifle. Anyone who had served six months in the armed forces could enter. That included Charles Gordon.

  The farms being handed out ranged from 160-acre plots, which were free of charge, to larger farms of three thousand acres for which payment was to be made. Each was numbered and applicants had to list these in order of preference. When a man’s, or indeed a woman’s, name was drawn, they would be allotted the farm highest up their list that was still available. The raffle was set for the middle of June, after the long rains. That gave Idina and Charles two long, wet months to draw up their choices. The rains had already started in Nairobi and in the farmlands upcountry, and the mud tracks leading down from the farms to the railroad had dissolved into deltas. The best research would be here, in town: in the wood-panelled bar of Muthaiga, where the chaps were gentlemen, or ought to be, and in the glitzier environs of the Norfolk bar, open from eleven in the morning, where even the faster sort of fellows could ply their trade. Those piling out of Europe in search of the new had been both mentally and physically toughened by the war. Some had come here to find farm work, either on their own land or as crop experts or cattle-herders. Others, all too familiar with handling a gun, came to be white hunters – men who could lead tourists on long hunting safaris into the bush.

  Several long, bar-fuelled weeks later Idina and Charles followed the crowds into Nairobi’s Theatre Royal, a parapeted and colonnaded stone building that functioned as a meeting room as well as a music-hall. On the stage two large tin drums turned, containing the name of each raffle entrant. There were two thousand names and fewer than fourteen hundred farms. Name by name the would-be farmers were drawn out and their list of choices produced. Idina was lucky. Charles was called, and he was called early. They had won one of the three-thousand-acre farms. It was up in the Highlands, on the edge of the Aberdares, a range of high, rolling hills overlooking the grassy, antelope-covered plains of the Rift Valley and teeming with wildlife themselves. At the foot of the hills, as the slopes softened into a plateau, was rich, thick farming soil.

  Idina and Charles hired a Somali houseboy (a male head servant to run their home), packed tents, tables, chairs, cooking equipment, lamps, candles and matches, and loaded them, along with a couple of horses, on to the next train heading west. At nightfall they tumbled off the train at Gilgil, a cowboy town on the edge of the Rift Valley escarpment halfway between Nairobi and Lake Victoria. A few low-built shacks and corrugated-tin huts lined a railway siding, surrounded by a crowd of local Kikuyu and Maasai tribesmen who had gathered from hill and valley to meet the train. The houseboy hired a guide, porters, hut builders and a team of general servants, and pitched camp for the night. The following morning Idina and Charles’s belongings were tied on to a couple of carts and oxen were harnessed at the front. They mounted horses and set off uphill. By nightfall they had reached their land. Ahead of them the Aberdare Hills rolled dark green in the setting sun; from them fell ice-cold brooks, swollen by the recent rains. Below these their virgin farmland glowed with luminescent grass and thick, red soil. This was Idina’s new home.

  Twenty miles from the Equator, the land north-east of Gilgil should have been arid, yellowed and browned by the sun until the grass crackled and the mud powdered. But, eight thousand feet above sea level, the rules of climate – for a start – changed. The altitude took the land right up to the freezing fingertips of the clouds. At night, when it was cool, it was very cool, those cloudy fingertips wrapping themselves around each blade of grass. At dawn the sun arrived to chase off the cold, damp night air and evaporated the freezing dew into a chilly mist. By midday the heavy African sun had illuminated the sky a quivering blue. Its glare bent the air and seared napes and noses, cheekbones and cuffs. Then, when it had coaxed the flowers out of their buds but before it had sucked every inch of moisture from them, the sun started to dip below the horizon and those fingers of cold air and all their soggy, green-tinged moisture worked their way back in.

  It was an earthly paradise. The landscape was genuinely familiar, indeed almost Scottish. Lumpy green grass spread over gentle slopes. The air hummed with the persistent buzz of insects. A burn of a slender river – the Wanjohi – gurgled and danced over flat stones. Bushes burst from the ground in a profusion of pale, paper-thin leaves and dark, rubbery plants. Tall, grey-barked trunks rose bare to a high crown of shortening branches covered in thousands of tiny leaves. Bristling bushes spiked up in between.

  Yet, in a very unScottish way, every growth was magnified in colour, size and even intensity. Each bush throbbed with creatures large and small. Elephant, giraffe
and antelope rustled through, breaking out and swaying across open land. Leopard and monkey hung from trees reverberating with birdsong. The insect hum was deeper, lower and more menacing than back Home. And rather than the vague, sweet scent of rolled lawn, the air was filled with a pungent, but compelling, smell of animal dung mixed with freshly picked herbs. At night, when Idina and Charles sat outside, they were surrounded by lookouts watching for wandering elephant, big cats or buffalo – its long, curved horns the most lethal of all.

  Idina fell in love with the landscape, dazzled by its beauty and the sense of adventure it offered. This was to become her longest love affair. British East Africa (shortly to be renamed Kenya) would be ‘her adopted country’1 and she would ‘muster wholesome fury against those who she thought were trying to damage the land’.2 Time and time again she would return to make a new life here, until she simply stayed.

  At first they lived under canvas, sleeping with at least two dogs, a shotgun and a rifle beside them. The first buildings to go up were grass bandas – huts walled with tree trunks and roofed with grass – and mud rondavels which rose from dried cow-dung floors. In the meantime they wriggled out into the six o’clock dawn and damp morning mist, washing in a tent thrown up for the purpose and slipping behind another for the lavatory. Then they pulled themselves up on to their horses, saddled and waiting. By the time they returned to their camp for breakfast a couple of hours later, the large sun rising steadily through the sky had burnt the clouds and dew away, leaving a lush landscape in a kaleidoscope of green, each leaf, each blade of grass, so vibrant that it looked as though it had a light inside it.

  By day they walked and rode around their farm, or stopped and bent double on their hands and knees, clearing the land for crops and grazing. They decided which breeds to order from England. They plotted and planned how to re-create up here, thousands of miles from home, the Edwardian agricultural idyll of their childhoods. And, once their farm plans were under way, they went on safari with friends. For a month at a time, half a dozen white men clad in cotton suits the colour of sand walked and rode through head-high grass harbouring unseen beasts. Behind them trotted ten times their number of barefoot porters, balancing swaying bundles upon their heads. At night they sat cross-legged around the fire, flames licking their toes, hearts racing with the excitement of danger. Out there they were as hunted as they were hunters. A single rogue elephant, buffalo, big cat or invisible snake could end their lives as rapidly as they could pull a trigger. Hesitating, ears pricking at the sound of a heavy rustle or thud of elephant, their glasses emptied – whisky safer than water – their fears dissolved and fingers, stretching towards well-oiled rifles, relaxed.