The Bolter Page 15
The same month Idina and Joss went back to Koblenz to see his parents. Victor Kilmarnock had exploded with anger when he had heard of the wedding. Idina and Joss had given him three months to calm down. Now they had come to say goodbye before leaving for Kenya. Faced with a farewell for what might be several years, Joss’s parents brought themselves to make some sort of peace with the couple. Idina charmed them, promising to take care of their precious ‘child’ in Africa. By the time she and Joss left a few days later, she was on good enough terms with her parents-in-law to call them ‘Darlings’ when she later wrote to them.15 The affection was clearly returned. As a tribute to the happy couple, when Idina and Joss walked out of the Residence, fur-stoled and buttoned up against the biting January cold, Victor gave them a traditional Scottish exit for newlyweds and had them piped out by his tartan-clad sentry.
Within weeks Idina and Joss had crossed France to Marseille and boarded a boat for the two-and-a-half-week passage to Mombasa. At first the journey was a novelty for Joss. On board he and Idina were surrounded by colonial officials and farmers, big-game hunters and missionaries, all dutifully studying the local lingo before they arrived. But by the end of the first week Joss was bored. While Idina was having a drink before dinner in the ship’s cocktail bar, he slipped into a female passenger’s cabin. Her husband, like Idina, had already changed and gone for a drink. The woman deftly unbuttoned Joss’s trousers and fell to her knees. Her husband returned to the cabin door to ask why she was taking so long to change for dinner. Equally deftly, the woman pulled Joss into the bathroom with her and locked it, calling through the door that she would be along just as soon as she had finished.16
Joss laughed about the incident with Idina, who, in turn, made light of it.17 While her husband openly stalked other women, Idina recounted the story to show how little she cared. It was her fault, she said, and, as if in an attempt to regain power over the situation, claimed that she had taught him to behave like that.18 But open marriage to Joss was already steadily heading out of her control.
The couple reached Mombasa in May and took the train straight up to Nairobi, the Hispano-Suiza they had brought with them from Europe strapped on to an open carriage. Once they had reached the capital they checked into Muthaiga and started putting the word out that they wanted to buy a farm. By the time the long spring rains had dried up, they were back upcountry at Gilgil. Idina had found two thousand acres of grazing and forest land a few miles north-west of her old farm. This new property was, however, at a slightly higher altitude and right at the foot of the steep slopes of the Aberdares, twenty-five miles from Gilgil.
The shamba was called ‘Lion Island, because the lions used to breed there’, wrote Joss to his mother in Koblenz.19 He and Idina had not bought the farm outright but had leased it ‘at a very reasonable price, 15/- an acre on terms over ten years’.20 Idina and Joss’s aim was ‘to be entirely self-supporting; killing our own sheep, beef etc. growing our own maize, wheat oats, barley etc, and to make money in dairy farming’.21 They bumped the Hispano-Suiza across the countryside and up to the highest flat spot on their new land, immediately hiring 150 local adult ‘boys’ to help them clear it and raise a long, grass-roofed banda to live in until their house was built. It was hard work: ‘We neither of us have a vestige of a tummy left.’22 And at night when they fell into bed it was in the privacy of their own canvas tent, along with both dogs and guns to fend off any returning lion or adventurous leopard.
By the end of June they had dug the foundations for a low, single-storey house, with a short stretch of verandah-fronted main rooms flanked on either side by bedrooms and – as was always the case in Kenya – a separate building for the frequently fire-ridden kitchen. The predominant feature of the house was its roof – vaulted to keep the rooms cool, eaves protruding over the windows to provide shade. The walls were bricked and whitewashed to the top of these windows and any above that were cedar-shingled up to the roof, which was of corrugated iron. It had English cottage bay and casement windows and the simple layout of a French villa. It was almost twee, and deeply unpretentious. It was, at last for Idina, a home. Joss insisted that they call the house Slains after his family’s recently sold ancestral castle.
Idina filled the house with furniture shipped to Mombasa, transferred on to the Iron Snake and offloaded at Gilgil on to heaving ox carts which nearly toppled as they swayed their way up to the house. Their cargo was an eclectic combination of rustic pieces, the antiques Idina had bought in Koblenz, a few more that she had found in Naples on the boat journey down and Sackville family furniture. There were sixteenth-century painted dressers, gleaming Napoleonic tables with intricately carved feet, studded Zanzibar chests, Persian carpets and high-winged sofas that her grandfather had taken from Knole when his brother had moved into the house. At one end of the main living room sat a wide fireplace, a pair of buffalo horns twisting up the wall above. At the other, she covered the walls, floor to ceiling, in bookshelves. Week by week the latest novels arrived from England. Idina turned the pages until she shut down the generator at ten-thirty each night. She filled the rooms with fresh flowers, paintings, photographs and a large mirror, its frame carved and coloured with flowers. Idina fixed it to the ceiling above her bed: ‘So,’ she explained to one of the house’s later occupants, ‘I could see all the different positions.’23
Around the house rough grassland was mown into gently sloping English lawns. A path led down to them from the verandah through an explosion of beds of pansies, roses and petunias. Cedars encircled the grass and, at their roots, daffodil bulbs were scattered. At first sight, it could have been an English hillside, until the nettles, looming over a man’s head, trembled with an unseen animal’s roar. Or the ground shook with the giant grey pads of a rogue elephant pounding its way across the grass.
A hundred yards down the hill they built a red-brick dairy. ‘Dairying,’ wrote Joss to his mother, ‘is apparently going to be a very paying thing here, and we seem to have come at the right moment, the beginning of the boom.’24 A large ‘creamery combine’ was being started at Gilgil. Idina and Joss’s neighbour, Sir John ‘Chops’ Ramsden, who owned seventy thousand acres, was planning on milking a thousand head of cattle.
Muriel sent them half a dozen of her prize Kerry cattle as a wedding present. They bought another fifty local cattle ‘to grade with Friesian bulls’25 and started building up a dairy herd, sending the churns back down the hill to Gilgil. Encouraged by their early success with cattle, Idina and Joss had a flock of sheep shipped over from Scotland but, once installed, they started to die. Trying to work out what was so different from this otherwise Scottish landscape, Idina concluded that it was the strength of the sun. The Europeans in Kenya were fanatically sun-shy. Children wore not just wide-brimmed hats but thick spine-pads under their clothes to stop the sunlight harming their backs. Idina wrote to her brother and asked him to send down a hundred knitted wool sun hats. She made holes for the sheep’s ears and dressed each sheep. Still, the animals continued to die – from an unseen African parasite.
The Kerries remained a success, however. Idina took farming immensely seriously. The writer Elspeth Huxley later praised the work that the couple had done at Slains: ‘They enhanced rather than damaged the natural charms of their valley, by leaving native trees alone and . . . by paddocking green pastures.’26 In the Edwardian era in which Idina had grown up, landowners had thrown themselves into farming with gusto. Many knew every inch of their land, every detail of their livestock, and made a hobby of trying to improve both – vying ferociously with one another at local agricultural shows. Muriel had done just this, in both building Old Lodge and breeding her rare Kerry cattle.
Now, instead of being ‘so free that you can see the four walls of your freedom’,27 Idina was busy from dawn to dusk: turning virgin equatorial territory and its thick-rooted weeds into good land for both grazing and growing cattle fodder was hard work. There were no tractors. Teams of oxen were harnessed to ploughs and driv
en slowly through the thick, clodded earth tangled with the roots of gigantic sun- and water-fed weeds. At every turn a new obstacle was encountered: a ploughshare twisted, an ox that stumbled and failed to rise. Idina spent her days walking and riding around her shamba. When the irrigation failed, when her dairy cows calved with difficulty, she was there. She designed herself workwear of an open-necked man’s shirt and corduroy trousers that she had run up by the dhersie (tailor) in Gilgil. Idina rapidly became so at ease with her new environment that, like the local Kikuyu tribesmen and much to their amazement, she both walked and rode barefoot, the stirrups and thorns tearing into her flesh. When one friend was helping her apply a ‘scalding poultice’ to a ‘very swollen and obviously painful’ foot afterwards, Idina ‘never flinched’. The friend ‘asked if she was afraid of anything. “Yes, one thing – old age,”’ Idina replied.28
It was not, however, a life of unceasing toil. Idina taught her watu (staff) how to mow and weed. A Mr Pidcock ran the farm. Marie, Idina’s French housekeeper, ran the place and directed the mpishi (cook) and his totos (kitchen boys). This left plenty of time free to pursue the non-agricultural aspects of the Edwardian idyll that Idina and Joss were recreating. As she and Charles had done, they rose at dawn to horses saddled up and waiting and galloped across the balmy, dewy hills for two hours before breakfast. They marked out polo pitches on the grasslands below Slains and employed a soldier-settler, Captain Lawrence, to school their polo ponies and racehorses. They went off on safari for days or even weeks at a time, walking or riding through eye-level grass – the excitement of being surrounded by so much unseen danger sending adrenalin pumping around their veins.
In the Kenyan hills, Idina had created a mix of rural idyll and raw adventure with which she could be truly happy. Photographs of her around the farm and bent double pulling weeds out of the mud show a radiant woman. She had a cosy home with breathtaking views, a busy farm with its constant cycle of life and a husband whom she adored. But there was one thing that neither Joss nor she could do without: sexual adventure.
New bed companions were not, at first, easy to find. The average white farmer in Kenya was, like Idina, hard-working but, unlike her, would have been appalled by the prospect of bed-hopping. For the most part, Idina and Joss needed to find like-minded ‘Edwardians’ among the Muthaiga Club set of landed gentry in exile. This was a growing group. Safaris had become an established tourist activity before the war, bringing the moneyed classes to the then East Africa Protectorate in droves in search of big game. Dazzled by the landscape, wildlife and sense of virgin territory, some stayed. Others, disheartened by a Europe at war, had returned since 1918: the number of whites in the country had more than doubled since 1914. Many of these were younger sons of peers who could afford in Africa the thousands of acres and dozens of servants that their elder siblings had acquired in England by birthright. Prominent among these aristocrats (although an elder son himself) was Lord Delamere, known as ‘D. D’, who had been an early settler and now owned tens of thousands of acres on the far side of Gilgil from Slains, around Lake Elmenteita in the Rift Valley. He had started as the unofficial head of the settlers and was now Leader of the eleven Elected Members of Kenya’s Legislative Council. D had been followed by his two brothers-in-law, Berkeley and Galbraith Cole, sons of the Earl of Enniskillen, and a rush followed. This included Denys Finch Hatton, the magnetic and enigmatic younger son of the Earl of Winchilsea. Finch Hatton had first come to the East Africa Protectorate before the war and had tried his hand at both shop-owning – he bought a chain of dukas (small shops) – and mine-owning before becoming a prominent white hunter who led visitors to Kenya deep into the bush for weeks on end. In between these expeditions he was the lover of the aviatrix Beryl Markham and, most famously of all, of the writer Karen Blixen – the affair immortalised in the film Out of Africa.
Regardless of each individual’s private practice, all had been brought up to regard marital fidelity as infra dig and extramarital sex a normal course of behaviour. The key criterion between good and bad behaviour was discretion and remaining tight-lipped about others. When not at Muthaiga, however, it was hard to talk about anything to anyone. These folk were spread out across several hundred square miles of the area known as the White Highlands. This was the rich farming territory on the high-altitude lands in the centre of Kenya which, after a great deal of gun-toting and foot-stamping by some of the white settlers in 1920, had now been officially reserved for colonisation by whites only and not the fast-growing new Indian population.
The roads in the Highlands, where they existed, were no more than dirt tracks. They were regularly graded and, just after grading, could provide hard, fast, dirt racetracks along which to rattle. Rain, however, reduced them to rivers that hardened into a mudscape of peaks and gullies. The going, even in the racing Bugattis, solid Model T-Fords or even Idina’s Hispano-Suiza, its silver stork splattered with liquid orange earth, was slow. A lover was likely to be a full morning or afternoon’s drive each way, the adventure of even a short African journey spilling over into the meeting. And, with only an equatorial twelve hours’ daylight for travelling in, a single encounter could take a day or two at a time. This was a day or two away for which an excuse – such as needing to look at some potential livestock – would be politely, if barely plausibly, concocted, and equally politely, if incredulously, accepted.
In between, Idina and Joss might go for several long days at a stretch, wandering around the vast expanse of their farm without seeing any of their mzungu – ‘white people’ – neighbours. Only a trip down to the dukas in Gilgil to buy provisions and order more pairs of corduroys to replace those ripped to shreds on fast rides through the bush presented an opportunity for social interaction. Even then they would be lucky to turn up there at the same time as one of their crowd.
This all changed on livestock auction days, held regularly at Gilgil and the neighbouring towns of Naivasha and Nakuru. These were true, double-entendre, cattle markets. An assortment of both hands-on and verandah farmers – so called as they directed their farm employees from the verandah rather than work in the fields themselves – would roll up in gleaming cars a couple of hours after dawn, having driven down from the hills the day before and stayed nearby. Out they stepped into the thick red dust, suited, hatted, their wives dressed up to the nines, cigarettes tipping out of long, black holders slid between grey gloved fingers, and their eyes just glimpsed through the veils hanging over the top half of the face. As the animals were herded through the ring in lots, bids rising, these men and women leant over the rails and eyed their neighbours who lived so far apart. After weeks of the stark, staring, monotonous claustrophobia of sitting across the dining table from the same single face, an army of servants catering to their every possible need, even some of the industrious, God-fearing, buttoned-up types found a frustrated desire for fresh human contact overwhelming.
Auction days, and even the odd day’s horse racing organised in the towns, were, however, thin pickings compared with Race Week in Nairobi. Here the proportionally idler, richer and grander Kenyan farmers all drove to Nairobi and booked into Muthaiga for the duration. The club was packed. Rooms were fought for, and then their inhabitants fought over. Instead of a maximum of a few hours around a bullring in which to operate, the promiscuous had a full seven days in which to identify, catch and devour their prey. It was not hard. Race Week presented a rare and precious period in which to spend time with somebody other than the person you were married to and saw almost every night of the year. Emotions soared and fell with horses and the bets placed on them. Heavy drinking began from noon with pink gins at the course side or in Muthaiga’s bars. Gin fizzes saw out the afternoon until teatime, when sundowners of ferocious spirit blends kicked in. Every evening there was a ball, for which the female guests had to wear a different outfit each night – and they dressed to kill, glittering with Paris silks and family jewels from some of the grandest houses in Europe. The dress was so absurdly ov
erdone that one night Joss borrowed a sequinned black evening gown from a larger female friend and strung Idina’s pearls around his neck. ‘Pearls must be worn!’ he squeaked in a falsetto, as around him, intoxicated and unsatiated, new bedfellows tried to trip discreetly up and down the stone steps, everyone else turning a studiously blinkered eye.
The months stretched in between Race Weeks. Idina and Joss alternately muttered that they had to see a friend or a chap about a cow and slipped off for a day or two. Idina was certain that she would return. Slains was her self-contained paradise, a house, garden, even cattle that she seems to have mothered in place of her children. And she was, despite her varied sexual appetite, smitten with Joss: ‘My darling Lion,’ she called him.29 However, even this name carried the suggestion that Idina understood he might wander off periodically as male lions do. Her other name for him, ‘the child’, connoted a more permanent separation: that one day he might simply grow up and leave for good. As if to encourage him to stay as long as possible, Idina made life on the farm as much fun and as irresistible as she could.
Guests were invited for weekends – and came – driving six or seven hours each way. Insect-bitten and dust-coated, they arrived at bath time on Saturday. As they drew up at the house, half a dozen men in fezzes and long, white robes started appearing from all directions. Their cars were emptied of bags and these were whisked from them as they were ushered through into bedrooms scattered with tapestries and antiques, each with its own bathroom, fed by a bonfire-heated outside tank that filled a bath within minutes. When they hauled themselves out of the tub, glowing, steam-cleaned, hair swept back or brushed down, their bags had been unpacked and put away, leaving only a pair of patterned silk pyjamas on the linen pillowcase – a present from Idina, and still the rage back in Europe. Beside them lay a bottle of whisky.