We were then ordered to return to the guest house. Mary and Bhalla were to be taken away, to God knows what. We could not permit this and surrounding them managed somehow to smuggle them inside. We dragged all the mattresses off the beds and laid them side by side in the main room, placing Mary and Bhalla in the middle. Some soldiers burst in during what was left of the night, bent on removing Mary and Bhalla from our protection, but seeing us all huddled close together gave up and went away. Early next morning we were ordered back into the CLO’s office and found that suddenly everything had changed. He actually managed a smile. Word had come from the King personally that we were ALL to be allowed to leave. We didn’t wait. We headed for Sikkim, while Shirley, Bhalla and Mary made for Calcutta, where Shirley was devoured by a hungry press. Thus ended a dramatic episode, but it didn’t put me off exploring. I have to add that Bhutan is now a democracy under a twenty-eight-year-old King, the world’s youngest monarch. In 2006 the magazine Business Week rated it the happiest country in Asia. What a difference the passing of the years makes.
CHAPTER SEVEN
African Adventure
Africa had cast its spell over me from the very moment I landed at Nairobi airport in the winter of 1955. Denys, who was researching a book about locust control, had gone ahead of me by at least a month as it was difficult for European women to enter many of the places he wanted to visit, such as Somalia. I hitched a lift in a light plane to the locust control camp, hoping to rendezvous with my husband, but sweethearts and wives were frowned upon in its all-male environment, so I was packed off back to Nairobi, where I then embarked on a lone woman tour to stay with anyone who would have me. I ended up on a farm on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and was filled with a burning desire to scale its magical peak. It is an ambition as yet unfulfilled, and I fear will remain so.
I loved the fact that the mountain had been given by Queen Victoria to Prince Friedrich of Prussia when he married her daughter, Vicky, the Princess Royal, in 1858. As a result the mountain became part of German Tanganyika and the mapmakers had to draw a little bubble in the straight line of the frontier between British Kenya and Tanganyika. The imperial couple reigned briefly as German Emperor and Empress; Fritz, as he was known, being seriously ill and dying just three months after his accession. They had strong liberal and Anglophile leanings, completely at variance with their eldest son, ‘Kaiser Bill’, who took Germany into the First World War. It is a simplistic view, but I like to think that there would have been no First World War, and subsequently no Hitler, and no Second World War, if Fritz had lived.
But I digress. Eventually I was scooped up by some friends of Denys’ cousin, Shaun Plunket; a friendship formed while he was doing a stint in Kenya with the British army. Peter and Susie Marrian had a coffee farm set beneath the Aberdare Mountains and I had arrived to experience the Mau Mau uprising at its height. The insurgents were nearly all Kikuyu, a tribe living between the farm and Nairobi, ninety miles away. They were actually more civilised than many of the other tribes, but some were committed to the savagery of the Mau Mau rebellion. In fact they murdered more of their own people than white settlers, although the atrocities involving Europeans made the biggest headlines.
One of their tricks was to terrorise the house servants so as to gain access to the houses of whites. At meal times on the farm, we sat with a gun each beside our plates and the house boy was locked into the room with us, using a hatch to receive food from the kitchen. All the farm workers and most of the house staff were Kikuyu and it was difficult to know whom to trust. Soldiers had to camouflage themselves and hide for days in the forest while trying to locate Mau Mau camps, but more soldiers were killed by marauding rhino than by the Mau Mau. I didn’t, however, let the Mau Mau stop me riding every morning, often exploring areas known to be dangerous. I was being foolhardy, but I found these gun-toting expeditions exciting and would often come across buffalo and rhinos. The rhinos fascinated me, and occasionally I’d follow one, believing that if it charged I could easily out gallop it. Later I discovered that when a rhino charges it can travel faster than a Derby winner.
We would sometimes drive up into the forest, hoping to see a few rhino, although this was frowned on by the security services, as the whole Aberdare region was a Mau Mau fiefdom. From the forest boundary one could walk to Treetops, an observation point built in a giant fig tree and overlooking a water hole frequented by animals. It was there, in 1952, that Princess Elizabeth, at the start of a Commonwealth tour, became Queen. She was filming wildlife when her father, King George VI, died in his sleep at Sandringham, three thousand miles away. While she was there two water buck had a fight, and one was fatally wounded. There is a Kikuyu legend that when two water buck meet in combat and one dies, this signals the death of a great chief. How strange that that came true that night. Regrettably, Treetops was torched by the Mau Mau, but it was rebuilt on a much larger scale on the same site. The Queen made a return visit there in 1983.
Back in 1952, I sent a letter of condolence to the new Queen, and six days after she succeeded to the throne she replied, saying that I had ‘struck the nail on the head’ by saying that it must have been ‘agony’ to be away when ‘Papa died’, and adding: ‘It really was ghastly; the feeling that I was unable to help or comfort Mummy or Margaret, and that there was nothing one could do at all.’ He had died ‘so suddenly’, leaving her stunned, shocked and disbelieving. She thanked me for my letter, and said, touchingly: ‘Letters are such a comfort, and every one of them gives me further courage to go on.’
A year or two later Denys went alone to Zambia, gathering information for a new book. It was there that he met Jolyon Halse, who later moved to Kenya with his wife Stafford. They became very great friends, and as he was a freelance geologist, he was fully equipped for every possible kind of safari. It became a passport for us to see many parts of the country, which would have been impossible for the ordinary tourist. One time, sitting in the Halses’ garden in Kenya, we began planning a safari to the far north of the country. We had long wanted to explore the remoter regions of the Northern Frontier District, the wildest and most exciting part of Kenya, hoping to circumnavigate Lake Rudolf, now called Lake Turkana. This was an over-ambitious plan as we had, at that stage, no idea about the driving conditions or the time that such a trip would take. If we wished to go right round the lake, it would, as a geographical necessity, mean entering Ethiopia, where the river Omo would have to be crossed. I had a wonderful idea that we should get Lever Brothers to script a commercial showing us washing our smalls in the river Omo with Omo washing powder!
As luck would have it, that following summer we were delighted to be invited to a dinner at Windsor Castle, in honour of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. He was over to attend the Garter Service in St George’s Chapel, having in 1954 been made a Knight of the Order, Britain’s oldest order of chivalry. The Emperor would only admit to speaking French, so the Queen placed me beside him, as she knew that I would be able to converse reasonably well in that language. It seemed strange to be seated in one of the oldest inhabited British castles, talking French to an African Emperor. He, of course, sat on the Queen’s right, and I was able to study him covertly until it came to my turn to talk to him. He was small and spare, with the finely honed features of the Nilotic people. I took the chance to ask him if we would be allowed to cross into his country, so as to reach Lake Rudolf in Kenya, the far northern end of which cuts into Ethiopia. He indicated that this would be possible, with the brief reply: ‘Mais oui, naturellement’ and although I never received a personally signed pass, I suppose, in the circumstances, he couldn’t say ‘Non’.
After all, the Queen was entertaining not only himself and many members of his family, but also his large retinue. It was Royal Ascot week and the Queen was hosting her usual Windsor house party. Little did we know then of the Emperor’s tragic future. In 1974, the year after we met, he was deposed, spending the last months of his life as a prisoner. Many members of his fam
ily were executed, but when he died in 1975 the official government version of his end was that he suffered respiratory failure following complications after routine surgery. Suspicions about the cause of his death remain and supporters believe he was assassinated. In 1992 his bones were found under a concrete slab in the grounds of his palace and reports suggested that they were discovered beneath a latrine. His Garter banner, which during his lifetime hung in St George’s Chapel, was returned by the Queen to the surviving members of his family.
We returned to Kenya in the early spring of 1974 and began serious planning. It would be advisable to have two vehicles in case of disaster. The aim was to circumnavigate Lake Rudolf, the world’s largest permanent desert lake, named in 1888 in honour of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria by an Austrian explorer, Count Samuel Teleki de Szek, who was the first European to have visited the lake, which after Kenyan independence was renamed after the region’s predominant tribe. At last D-Day arrived. Jolyon and Stafford Halse, and Denys and I, set off from Nairobi on 7 February 1974, driving north through Nyeri and on over the shoulder of Mount Kenya, and then down towards Isiolo and the flat plains which stretch endlessly towards the horizon. We made camp the first night by the banks of the Uso Nyro and for the first time heard the roar of lions, the most exciting noise imaginable.
Soon after leaving our camp at first light, we caught sight of the wonderfully shaped Mount Ololokwe rising with incredible suddenness from the desert plain, its sides steep and cliff like and its top completely flat, which reminded me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, the sort of place where one can imagine that prehistoric beasts might still roam. Further on, we came to Marsabit, another mountain rising alone out of the desert, tree covered, and home to herds of elephants. The great Ahmed, Kenya’s largest elephant, whose long tusks swept the ground, lived there. This valuable feature put him constantly at risk from ivory traders and he had his own platoon of Askaris to guard him from potential poachers.
We made camp that night on a horrible, windswept plain. We hardly slept and left very early, with no other vehicles to be seen. We were now to cross the Chalbi desert and passed a noisy and colourful meeting place, for what I think was the Rendille tribe. There were a hundred of them with their camels, and it was a great treat to have seen them. Later we reached a small oasis of tall reeds, and decided to stop and have a look. We had with us our guide, armed only with a spear. We were walking in the grove when suddenly some atavistic instinct brought on a sense of danger. Then I saw the glint of metal and dark faces hiding in the reeds. It was the Shifta bandits, who originate mostly from Somalia, and their guns were pointing directly at us. It was not a good idea to run, and so with our hearts in our mouths we assumed nonchalance and sauntered back to our vehicles. The Shifta could have finished us off and stripped us of our belongings. Why they didn’t I’ll never know. Wild animals would have completed the job and we would have simply become another example of travellers who had just disappeared.
Our journey became increasingly rough as we drove over ridges of black lava. It was incredibly hot, and ridge after ridge succeeded one another as we began to despair of actually ever reaching the lake, which is about three hundred miles long. But at long last, as we crested yet another rise, we caught a glimpse of water ahead. It was the Turquoise Sea, stretching as far as the eye could see. Our first instinct when we reached the shore was to jump straight in to cool down and we waded out into the deliciously cold water. Then one of the guides spotted a flotilla of two-eyed lumps breaking the surface. They were crocodiles, the sight of which put a dip right out of our minds. We were told afterwards that Lake Turkana contained Africa’s largest population of Nile crocodiles, 14,000 of them, and all very hungry indeed. It was a lucky escape.
Our next problem was to find a possible campsite. We saw a line of trees some distance away, but when we got nearer, to our horror, we spotted a land rover already parked there, the first vehicle we had seen for over 200 miles. We drove on regardless, and to our astonishment, found that the occupant of the camp was none other than Wilfred Thesiger, the remarkable explorer of Africa and Arabia. He was kindness itself and showed us another site a little further away, where we camped. We invited him to dinner and he told us enthralling stories of Kenya and the Empty Quarter of Southern Arabia — and also frightening ones of the murders of local missionaries by the Shifta. Wilfred Thesiger had lived with the tribal peoples of East Africa since 1968, only occasionally returning home. He was knighted in 1995 and I met him again over lunch with Queen Elizabeth at Clarence House. He was nearly blind by then, but he remembered our chance meeting so many years before.
We went off the following morning to scout out the land further north. There was a howling, hot gale and there were no visible tracks to follow, though the ground was hard and easy to drive on. At one point, Jolyon leant out of the window to point out some lion spoor. We stopped to look further, only to suddenly see two large black-maned lions lying down about twenty yards away; we re-embarked pretty fast. It now became clear that we would not succeed in our planned aim of reaching the Ethiopian border. The drive to the lake had taken far longer than anticipated, due mainly to the very slow going over the endless plains.
We rescheduled our plans and aimed instead for Mount Kulal on the eastern side of the lake. Over 7,000 feet high it was split in two by a great chasm. One side had a mission station on it, while the other was largely unknown, with no track up it. We had some confusing and unclear notes made up by a British Army survey team, which included such gems as ‘turn left where there are three thorn trees’. There is, of course, one thorn tree per foot of ground in Kenya. Despite such difficulties, we looked for any wheel tracks and continued to climb until darkness fell and our headlights carved columns of light into the black sky. We could no longer see what was under our wheels and had to stop.
We camped in the teeth of a howling gale: it was impossible to cook so we bedded down hungry, and with a sense of potential danger. We had seen a rhino in the headlights before we stopped and there had been signs of other animals around. We left at first light and soon came upon the ruins of a pipe-laid water supply. Sadly, with no Europeans still here, it had not been maintained, though no doubt elephants had something to do with it. At last we reached a bare grass mound and found two wood cabins, protected from the eternal wind, looking like a Wild West film. They had been built to allow the local British administrators to escape the heat of Lake Rudolf below. We quickly made them our home and that night enjoyed a proper cooked meal. There is no pleasure to equal that of sitting round a campsite at night, after a long hot day, drinking a whisky under the vast and wonderful canopy of the African sky.
In the morning we received a visit from a good-looking young warrior. He was bare-headed and was wearing only the ubiquitous piece of red cloth, and armed with a spear. He had a particularly handsome necklace, on which the Halses commented. He told them that it indicated that he had killed a man. We decided to go exploring and soon came upon a spring in the forest, where the cattle were watering. We were greeted with suspicious looks by the cattle herders, as water is such a precious commodity and intruders are unwelcome. After a bit of Swahili banter, they offered to show us the way to the summit, which we had failed to reach the day before. This was great news, as of course there were no tracks to follow.
Our guide was a splendid man with a turaco feather stuck in his curly hair. As we climbed, the trees became stunted and we were fascinated to see the tracks of lion and elephant as we climbed, which was surprising at such a great height. At last we reached the top, which was bare and grassy. Almost immediately below us was the chasm dividing the two parts of Kulal. The ground fell away into dizzying depths, where the mist swirled and one really felt that no European had set foot before. We could see swifts flying and we could hear the thrumming of their wings. Far, far below we could see the faint blue smudge of the lake. I shall never forget that particular sight. There were other safaris, but this one has always stoo
d out as the most exciting of them all.
Another adventure was to Petra. Years later, after Denys died, I was at Sandringham staying with the Queen, when I met Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and his wife Sarvath, the daughter of the Foreign Minister of Pakistan. They were very nice and friendly. One traveller’s tale led to another, and over dinner one evening I told Prince Hassan that I had long wanted to visit Petra, described by John William Burgon as ‘a rose red city, half as old as time’. They immediately invited me to stay with them at their place in Amman, together with Lady Susan Hussey, one of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, who was at Sandringham at the time of their visit.
Prince Hassan had been heir to the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan for three decades, until in 1988 his brother, King Hussein, named his own son Prince Abdullah as his heir. It must have been a great shock to him, as it was done so abruptly and so unexpectedly. Hassan and Sarvath were charming hosts, but they kept apart in the day because of the regulations for Ramadan. When we accompanied them we went everywhere in a heavily armour-plated car, the doors of which weighed a ton to open or shut. Hassan and his wife were greeted enthusiastically by the villagers we met and it was obvious that they were very popular. At one time we stayed in their small country house on the banks of the Jordan.
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