Straight on Till Morning (17 page)

Their love of Kenya was a shared passion, though Denys's feeling for the country was that of an onlooker compared to that of Beryl who had grown up within its many cultures. A safari with Beryl was a new experience even for Denys, for she was as much a part of the untamed bush as the animals who wandered through it, and she taught him to see it in a different light.

Denys has been called selfish, and his attitude to Tania was undoubtedly so, though he had probably never given her even the remotest grounds for hoping that he would ever become her husband. To him, marriage – even an acknowledgement that a formal relationship existed – would have been a cage. It is more than a possibility that during their relationship he had taken other lovers, briefly. Tania too, it seems, had indulged in brief relationships.
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Beryl never saw the selfish side of Denys for their affair ended tragically, while it was still at its peak. She never looked further than the day that existed. ‘Live each moment to the utmost and never look ahead,' she advised me.

After flying a few times with Denys she, predictably, wanted to learn to fly herself. The advantages of being able to reach remote parts of the colony in minutes rather than hours, and hours instead of days, made a great deal of sense to her, but she also saw it as a fresh and exciting challenge. Denys, sensibly, refused to teach her; he was too new at it himself. So she turned to an old friend, Tom Campbell Black, now Managing Director at Wilson Airways in Nairobi, and with him as instructor she began taking lessons in April 1930.

Tom Black, who had known Beryl on and off throughout the 1920s,
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mainly through horse racing, had recently made headlines in the world's press by rescuing the famous World War One German air ace Ernst Udet, who had been a leading light in the Richthofen Flying Circus. In March whilst Tom was on his way south from Europe to Nairobi he had stopped to refuel at Malakal in the Sudan and heard that the airman was lost somewhere in the desert. He set out on a careful quartering search of the area and after many hours located the man's position. He had been in the desert for over forty-eight hours with no supplies and was nearly dead from thirst. Tom dropped a message to tell him to make some sort of clearing and, after flying back to Malakal to report Udet's position, Tom returned but was unable to make a landing. He dropped wet towels and a leather water bottle to Udet and landed some way off. Then he found his way on foot to the stranded airman and together they cleared enough distance of scrub to make a take-off practicable.

Under Tom's tuition Beryl proved an apt pupil, and after only eight hours of dual tuition she made her solo flight. But in the meantime a tragedy occurred.

With Tania's impending departure for Europe, and wanting to provide himself with a fixed base for his belongings, Denys had decided that he would build a larger house on his land on the coast and plant mango trees there.
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However he was due to leave on a photographic safari with another professional hunter, Donald Seth-Smith, in June, so in early May he decided to fly down to Takaunga Creek, returning via Voi to investigate the possibilities of scouting elephant from the air. This had not been done commercially before, and he thought that he could provide a good service to safaris by giving the precise position of herds of game, rather than them spending days tracking it. However he was aware of the potential dangers. An engine failure – common in aircraft at that date, though not usually disastrous near ‘civilization' – could mean trying to land in inhospitable country, and a suitable landing place might not be available.
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Tania asked to accompany him on this trip, and at first he agreed to take her, but later he changed his mind and told her it would be too rough because of the possibility that he might have to land and sleep in the bush, and that he would need a boy with him, presumably to help clear a bush strip for take-off. Although she does not say they quarrelled over this, Tania's comment – ‘I reminded him that he had said he had taken out the aeroplane to fly me over Africa'
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– leads one to suspect that even their last meeting may have been clouded with the stormy results of her jealousy. After Denys had said goodbye to Tania he spent a few days in Nairobi.

Over dinner at Muthaiga on the night before he left, he asked Beryl if she would like to accompany him down to the coast.
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He thought she might particularly enjoy the return journey which he had told Tania would be ‘too rough' for her. Beryl was ‘thrilled at the idea' but she had arranged for some dual-flying instruction with Tom the next day and said she would have to clear it with him before she left.
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Denys took off on 9 May with his servant Kamau. Earlier that morning Tom had dissuaded Beryl from going with Denys because he had a premonition of some kind. Also he reminded Beryl of her lesson and the fact that she needed only another hour or so before she could ‘go solo' – plenty of time later on to go flying with Denys. It is a tribute to the respect that Beryl felt for Tom's opinions that he was able to persuade her not to accompany her lover on what promised to be an enjoyable and fascinating trip. Perhaps Tom was recalling the condition of Udet, or even two men he had rescued earlier that very week. They were employees of the Shell Oil Company whose plane had come down near Marsabit. The plane he used for the search was a D H Leopard Moth and he could not land it in the scrub, so dropped supplies of tinned fruit and meat to them, as well as a message that he would return next day with a Gipsy Moth which had a slower speed and was able to take off and land in a shorter distance. When he found them they were almost ‘delirious with hunger, thirst and sunstroke', and unquestionably he saved their lives. In the event he could not even land the Gipsy Moth safely and the two men were eventually brought out on camels.
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As Denys landed at Vipingo he chipped the propeller on coral, and he cabled Tom asking for a replacement to be sent down. Meanwhile he stayed at his house and put things in order as he had intended. The new propeller was duly dispatched with a mechanic, and by 12 May the aeroplane was ready to fly again. The next day Denys took off for Voi. En route he saw the elephant herd he had hoped to spot and so when he arrived at the home of friends with whom he was to spend the night, he was feeling pleased with himself.
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‘Denys and I were entertained at a party given by the District Commissioner,' wrote fellow guest and friend J. A. Hunter who was there with a safari client. ‘Denys told us he was flying up to Nairobi in the morning…to make arrangements for a safari of his own. We left fairly early, for we wanted to be away without any delay in the morning. Denys came and waved us off. The District Commissioner's wife had given him a great armful of oranges and he stood at the door of the bungalow with the light reflected brightly from the fruit.'
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On the morning of 14 May 1931, shortly after taking off at Voi, Denys's Gipsy Moth crashed and burst into flames, killing both pilot and passenger instantly.
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After taking off it had circled twice, presumably to signal goodbye to his hosts who had come to see him off, and to gain height. As it came back across the airstrip at about two hundred feet it appeared to sway and spun in, apparently out of control. Hunter was ready to leave as planned at 8 a.m., when his attention was drawn to clouds of black smoke rising from the aerodrome. ‘Fearing the worst we hurried to the scene. We were too late: Denys had crashed during his take-off, the plane was a blazing inferno, and as we watched in horror, held off by the intense heat, a few blackened oranges rolled out from the wreckage.'
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Tom Black immediately flew down to investigate the cause of the crash but reached no firm conclusion. Finch Hatton's biographer raised two possibilities. The first was the effect of down-draught, an ever-present problem in hot conditions, particularly around hills, and the second was cramp – a condition which had been causing Denys some annoyance during the previous weeks.
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Beryl has never spoken of her personal reaction to Denys's death, but she wrote fleetingly of him in her memoir. Friends say that it was a catastrophic event to her,
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and it does not require much imagination to picture her distress. The news was broken to her by an old friend at the Muthaiga Club – the same friend who said that Beryl ‘was mad with love for him', and their love was still at its very peak when Denys was killed. Interviewed in 1986 Beryl was certain that she accompanied Tom Black down to Voi as soon as the news came through, but Tom took aircraft accident investigator Major C. A. Hooper with him to inspect the plane, not Beryl. It is of course possible that, knowing of Beryl's attachment to Denys, in order to console her and to convince her that Denys was indeed dead, he flew her down there later that day or on the following morning to look at the wreckage. Years later she confessed her love for Denys to her friend Doreen Norman in terms which led Doreen to believe that he had been the only man in Beryl's life who could have competed with her father.

Because of the climate, the funeral had to be arranged hastily for the next day. Tania remembered that Denys had expressed a wish to be buried in the Ngong Hills, on a ridge overlooking the vast Athi plains, and from where Tania's house could be seen in the distance. On one occasion the couple had been there at sunset and from the spot Denys had picked for ‘his grave' they had seen both Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro. The body was transported back to Nairobi by train for burial in accordance with Denys's wishes.
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The
East African Standard
reported the funeral sadly: ‘A few hundred yards off the Kajiado road in the Ngong hills, overlooking the game reserve that stretches for miles, the Hon. Denys Finch Hatton was on Friday, laid to rest in a simple grave in the presence of friends and fellow hunters…'
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The rains which had stayed away for years, and the absence of which had undoubtedly been a major factor in the failure of Tania's farm, were heavy that spring. On the morning of the funeral Tania and her friend Gustaf Mohr went up into the hills to organize the digging of the grave. The site was enveloped in cloud and in a matter of minutes they were both drenched and cold. Tania recalled that there was an echo in the hills, and when the boys began digging ‘it answered the strokes of the spades, like a little dog barking'.
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Her grief was terrible to behold. From the moment when she had been given the news by Lady MacMillan after a luncheon party on the day she had expected Denys to return to Nairobi, Tania had appeared like an emaciated old woman, her face a mask of suffering.

Beryl's memory of the funeral, at a distance of fifty-five years, was less poetic, but none the less strong. ‘He was buried in the hills at Ngong. It was a lovely death – no, not death – what is it you have when you die? Funeral! That's it. I never go to funerals because I hate them. His was the only one I've been to in my life. Everyone knew about how close we were and they let me stand right next to the place. Tom took me out there. It was very sad for me and for everyone, he was so well thought of, you see, there was no one like him…' Her own tribute to Denys in
West with the Night
, as eloquent as any of Tania's writing, subtly betrays the depth of her feeling for Denys.

There was a large crowd of mourners, including many people who had heard of Denys's death by cable and had driven long distances overnight through the sodden bush to be there to say farewell. Tania was spared the sight of Bror and Cockie at the funeral – they were at Babati in Tanganyika. By the time they got the news the funeral had already taken place. ‘Dearest Tanne,' Bror wrote, ‘It is terrible for all of us with Denys's death but worse for you who always had such great support in him. It was a great loss for Kenya…a great sorrow to all his friends. When I got the news I thought I would fly to Nairobi to see if I could do something for you – but when one has no money one is so helpless. Can I do something for your boys or your dogs?'
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Tania received the sympathy normally allocated to a widow, and few offered comfort to the stunned Beryl, whom many thought, once again, had ‘acted badly'.
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Her predicament was desperate. Separated from Mansfield, and full of grief at the sudden death of her lover, she was in despair. I was told that she contemplated suicide. It is important to recognize that Denys had filled for Beryl not only the role of lover but that of the all-important supporter which she needed all her life. Her inbuilt insecurity and lack of faith in herself and her ability, was assuaged only when she had the support of a strong personality on whom she knew she could rely. Her extreme anguish when her father left for Peru was a parallel of her anguish when Denys died. She tended to regard those who fulfilled this need of hers as infallible beings.
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Friends rallied around, however – Beryl's lost-child appeal could almost always occasion assistance. Tom was a prop during these days, flying her to her farm because she needed ‘to be alone'. Later she stayed with her father for a while at his neighbouring farm and there in the country she had loved and had embraced so wholeheartedly as a child, she sought to work out her grief among the horses and the familiar sights and sounds.

It was nearly a month later that she returned to Nairobi to take up flying again, and now there was a new determination about her attitude. Tom noted it and approved. She worked hard to learn the rules of navigation. Grief had sloughed off that veneer of sophisticated insouciance she had adopted in London. It was a turning point in her life.