Straight on Till Morning (37 page)

After she left Santa Barbara she went to stay for a while with an old friend, Sir Charles Mendl, who was then living in Beverly Hills. Beryl probably first met Sir Charles in 1928, when Mansfield took her to Paris during their honeymoon. Sir Charles had been press attaché at the embassy since 1926, and was a friend and colleague of Mansfield's. On his retirement in 1939 he moved to California, and was known to be very kind to Beryl especially when she was in financial difficulties towards the end of her marriage with Raoul. The break-up of her marriage coincided with Sir Charles's own marital problems. His first wife (Elsie de Wolfe) renounced her title and regained US citizenship in 1946, and the couple were living apart when Beryl stayed at the Mendl house in Benedict Canyon. She seems to have regarded him very much as a father figure and kept his signed photograph to the end of her life.

During her remaining time in the United States, Beryl enjoyed a romance with a well-known folk singer. She left Santa Barbara and went to live in one of the small villages which dotted the Southern California coast. There in a timber cottage, she told a friend,
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she spent her days beachcombing while her lover produced a chain of hit songs which are world famous. It was a lazy, languorous period, unreal in many ways for it was a ‘between times' interlude. She still maintained contact with her many friends and among her papers some years ago were many letters dating from this period, including a friendly letter of encouragement from Frank Sinatra. It is the letter of a considerate friend to someone who is having a rough time. There was a friendly letter too from Joseph Kennedy, confirming a conversation in which he advised Beryl on her financial affairs.
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Raoul returned to the Toro Canyon ranch after Beryl had left it. A friend who accompanied him on the day he moved in recalled that despite her own personal fastidiousness Beryl had ‘lived like a little animal. The floor in her bedroom was thick with dust with sort of game-tracks leading from her bed to the bathroom and to her dressing table. No housework had been done for a long time and there was a lot of clearing up to do. Her typewriter was thick with dust and had obviously not been used for months.'
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Raoul continued to make a show of being a writer. For a while he made a determined effort to succeed. The actor Joseph Cotton and his wife Lenore had been friends of both Beryl and Raoul for some years, and now in an effort to help Raoul, Mr Cotton secured a contract for twelve radio ‘playlets' which Raoul was to write for him. Only two were ever finished. Raoul lapsed good-naturedly back into bouts of heavy drinking and though he sat each day at his typewriter he never again produced anything that was published.
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He spent some time helping a young writer friend by editing his work and generally providing encouragement, but was not himself able to write. A likeable man, he was very popular in Santa Barbara and everybody felt a great deal of sympathy for him. There was general relief when in 1952 he seemed to gain a new lease of life. With the help of a woman friend, Mary Lou Culley, he reduced his drinking and founded a company to make food-vending machines which enjoyed a brief success, but he lacked the application to maintain its progress.
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He divorced Beryl in 1960
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and married Gertrude Chase Greene in July of the same year at her family home, Hope Ranch, Santa Barbara. Scott O'Dell, himself newly married, saw Raoul again for the last time. ‘I was there to autograph copies of my latest book and Raoul came into the bookshop. He had recently married and was looking good and had put on all his weight again. He told me he had run a bar in Mexico for a while but nothing else as I recall. He was a listener more than a talker.'
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Raoul's stepson, John B. Greene Jr, who lived with the newly married couple, recalled him with affection. ‘He was a smiley sort of guy. He used to sit and pound away at the typewriter for hours.
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But Mr Greene's sister, the elder of the former Mrs Greene's children said, ‘I didn't like him. I don't think he ever wrote anything that was published after he married my mother – he didn't have to.'
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Gertrude was independently wealthy and seems to have cared a great deal for Raoul.

John Yabsley, an Englishman who worked first as major-domo for Mrs Greene's family and then for the newly married Schumachers, said, ‘Schumacher had the right sort of air about him, he could go anywhere in any company and be accepted. He never had any money and I don't think he owned any property, but people were glad to loan him places to live. He was liked by everybody in Santa Barbara. Until he married Gertrude Chase he had nothing, but he was very good for her and they were happy together.'
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Raoul was very overweight and in poor health when the marriage took place, and within two years, at the age of fifty-five, he died of a heart attack.
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All his papers are believed to have been destroyed when his widow died a few years later.
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Long before the divorce, Beryl had informally reverted to the surname Markham. Not surprisingly in the circumstances, this caused a howl of protest from the Markham family. However Beryl reasoned that her main claims to fame – her transatlantic flight, and her writing – had been done under that name, and her son's name was Markham. It seemed a logical and perfectly moral choice to her.

Spring 1949 found her in England to watch Gervase's passing-out parade from the Life Guards during his two-year period of compulsory National Service. She never returned to the United States although she always, for the remainder of her life, talked of doing so.

1949–1960

Beryl gave as her reason for her visit to England the fact that she wished to attend the regimental ceremonials for Gervase's passing-out parade, but there was more to it than that. She could see no future for herself in California. She was forty-seven and her health was – unusually for her – not good; she was apparently unable to write and had long since given up flying. She had therefore metaphorically kicked the dust of California from her feet, and what she wanted to do more than anything else was to return to Africa, her spiritual home. She had no money as usual, but rescue came in the form of an old friend, Tom, Lord Delamere, who provided her fare to South Africa.
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After spending some months in London with friends, she travelled to the Cape where she went immediately to call on Stuart and Tiny Cloete. They had recently returned from the United States and were surprised one day when Beryl ‘just turned up. She seemed at a loose end and stayed with us some two months,' Tiny Cloete recalled. The Cloetes had both liked and welcomed Beryl, having felt an ‘immediate bond' early on in the relationship due to Beryl's mendacious assertion that ‘her mother had died when she was a child and she had been brought up by Lady Northey', a cousin of Stuart's.
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Beryl was penniless – living entirely on the Cloetes' goodwill and, as usual when she was desperate, on her wits regardless of any possible consequences. Beryl told a friend that Cloete ‘wrote by the moon, in the way that some people garden by the moon' and often worked through the night at his work. On occasions, Beryl claimed, she did some nocturnal typing for him.
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Her involvement went further than typing. In an apparent attempt to raise money quickly she sent off some of Cloete's short stories under her own name, to the literary agent they shared, and when a short time later, Cloete also sent the same stories to the agent ‘there was a very awkward situation'. Beryl consequently left the Cloetes and they never saw her again, but after her departure Tiny found that many of Stuart's hand-made silk shirts and scarves had also left, and that Beryl had charged numerous items of cosmetics, expensive French perfumes and clothes to their charge accounts. ‘She had charm, but no warmth and was completely amoral,' was the opinion of her understandably disillusioned hostess.
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On many previous occasions Beryl had abused the kindness of friends by obtaining credit in their name. She lost many friends because of her complete lack of integrity regarding financial obligations, and she seldom repaid loans. But she could not have hoped to keep her breathtakingly blatant attempt at plagiarism hidden, so why had she attempted such an outrageous fraud? The only explanation seems to lie in a deteriorating health condition which seriously affected her judgement. The same condition had also possibly affected, for some time, her ability to write. But I think that writing had never been an ‘easy' thing for her and that whilst she was able to cope with writing personal reminiscences (in the way that many people are capable of writing an autobiography but never attempt other works) she could not write to order. She did not possess the sort of imagination that could invent plots; indeed Rose Cartwright – an old Kenya friend – was forthright about this lack of imagination. ‘She had no imagination whatsoever, it had never developed in her as a child and I think that this was why she was often brave to a foolhardy extent,' she told me.

After leaving the Cloetes, Beryl spent a period in Durban with her father, who had enjoyed considerable success as a trainer in South Africa.
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This was no mean accomplishment, for racing in South Africa is a far cry from Kenya. The Cape horses were international class and the competition for the huge prize money was fierce. It was one thing to succeed in prewar Kenya among trainers who were for the most part amateurs, but quite another to emulate that success in the racing world of the Cape.

But what Beryl really wanted was to get back to Kenya. She was at a crossroads in her life and could not see where her future lay. It did not lie in staying with her father for she could not share him with Emma, Clutterbuck's faithful partner. She was bad-tempered and abusive towards Emma and created total disharmony in the Clutterbuck household. Eventually, Beryl's ill-natured behaviour irritated Clutterbuck to such an extent that he told his daughter to leave. Again, her appalling behaviour seems to have been partially caused by her physical condition. Clutterbuck gave her enough money to buy a second-hand car, an old Buick saloon, and to pay for the petrol and oil for her proposed journey to Kenya, and she left South Africa to drive alone to Kenya via Rhodesia. When she arrived in Nairobi in April 1950 she was destitute
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and entirely dependent on the generosity of old friends. But in her usual way she managed, living on her wits and credit, and was seen often in smart night spots such as the New Stanley Grill, always immaculately turned out and looking very glamorous.

She stayed for some time with a friend in Nairobi and subsequently on an up-country farm, but they were stop-gap solutions to the long-term problem of finding somewhere permanent to live. It was no time for a peripatetic existence. Kenya was beginning a period of great trauma, the result of growing nationalism among the Africans, and a desire for self-government. At its extreme this flared into anti-Europeanism in the shape of the terrorist movement known as the Mau-Mau, which involved secret oath-taking ceremonies where initiates (often unwillingly) swore to kill Europeans and those who supported them.
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It was the grisly, ritualistic manner of the murders which followed – of men, women and children of both races – that was so frightening. In the general fear and panic a State of Emergency was declared by the British and the leader of the nationalist movement, Jomo Kenyatta, was sentenced to imprisonment. It took five years to bring the situation under control, and it was to be a further five years before the Kenyan Africans achieved independence with Kenyatta as the first president. Meanwhile inhabitants of up-country farms lived in trepidation, and servants who had once been thought of as friends were necessarily treated with suspicion. It was not the Kenya that Beryl remembered.

Everything changed for her one evening in Nairobi when she met Charles and Doreen Bathurst Norman at ‘some formal function or other. She was all dressed up and looking fantastic – I'd heard of her of course, she was very much part of the old-Kenya legend…' Doreen recalled. When Beryl told the couple how worried she was at not having anywhere to live and no money, they did not hesitate ‘Our guest cottage is empty at the moment – you can use that!' they told her. At first Doreen silently half-regretted the hasty invitation and wondered what it was going to be like with that ‘blonde bombshell' around all the time, but the next day Beryl turned up at the farm at Naro Moru wearing an old mac and wellington boots. The women became friends from that moment.

The Bathurst Normans were an exceptionally close-knit family and one of the happiest things about this period for Beryl was the Bathurst Norman children, George and Victoria, who were aged twelve and ten. Active and self-confident, they attached themselves to Beryl, and much to her surprise they liked her and enjoyed her company. Equally to her surprise, for she had never been closely involved with children, she liked them in turn. ‘Victoria would carefully put her head around the door of the guest house in the very early morning, and if there was a welcome, she would jump into Beryl's bed with her.'

Over the next few years, many were the evenings they spent listening to Beryl's collection of Burl Ives records, with which they would all join in. Beryl taught them to play card games such as poker and backgammon, with matches as stakes,
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as her father had once taught her. They were fascinated by her stories of horses and people and places, and impressed by her horsemanship but, as they recalled years later, she never spoke to them of her own exploits. Beryl was essentially modest, and never discussed her adventures or successes. Possibly these children knew ‘the real Beryl' better than anyone else, for she was relaxed in their company.

Forest Farm, the Bathurst Normans' property at Naro Moru, was situated on the grasslands which intersected with belts of forest on the slopes of twin-peaked Mount Kenya, immediately below the perpetually glistening Diamond Glacier. Park-like grasslands were bordered by primeval forests of cedar festooned with curtains of lichen.
Podocarpus
of airy green, bushes of sweet-smelling, evergreen witch-hazel, and clumps of cedar dotted the grass, edged with the enchanting limuria bush, smothered in beautiful little jasmine-like flowers, at least as sweetly scented and which turned into a wild berry – delicious when fully ripe. Among the grass grew a profusion of wild flowers such as the wild gladiolus and the lovely
Acidanthra candida
, locally thought to be a freesia because of its scent. The air itself was crisp and thyme-scented ‘like the Sussex Downs', Charles Bathurst Norman used to say.

Through the forest rushed and bubbled a mountain stream, careering downhill like a Scottish burn. Born in the glacier and flowing through peatlands before it reached the forest, it provided an endless source of delicious uncontaminated drinking water, filtered through hard black basalt stone thrown up by the last earthquake which had left its core in the mountain's peaks. The brook became a branch of the Naro Moru River (Naro Moru being Maasai for Black Stone), which had been stocked with trout that could be seen where sunlight hit the water, glimmering in pools overhung with flowers and ferns.

The Bathurst Normans had bought a tract of this paradise to remove their children from the coast where Charles was stationed as district commissioner (Mombasa), and where their son George ‘had shown every inclination of trying to die of malaria'. The choice of district for them was therefore dictated by the fact that 7000 feet was the lowest altitude guaranteed free from the malaria-carrying anopheles mosquito.

‘It was wartime then, and by no means certain who would win the war, and as Charles could not leave his post the matter was becoming extremely urgent,' Doreen related, but a friend suggested they should consider the western slopes of Mount Kenya and arranged that Doreen be taken there by a land agent. She fell in love with this enchanted country at first sight, and so – a short time later – did her more cautious husband. They bought a completely undeveloped piece of land which had previously been used by its owner only on rare occasions to graze a dry herd. The die was cast and thereby several people's lives were changed – including Beryl's.

The land had no house on it and was approached by a rough track, occasionally used by the forestry officer who had built a camp higher up. What was more, nobody could be found to build the house. One day Charles said to Doreen, ‘I think you'll have to go up and build it,' to which she simply replied, ‘All right.'

The train carrying Doreen's station wagon arrived late, but it was unloaded instantly and she set off for Naro Moru over appalling roads. At last, blinded by dust and desperately tired, she stopped at Fort Hall for a drink, where a party of the British Army was doing the same. She collected a young officer as co-driver, and they joined the army convoy which provided better lights than her car – blacked out for use in Mombasa. Eventually they reached Nyeri where, thinking enough was enough, Doreen booked into the White Rhino Hotel for the night.

Next day she proceeded to instal herself in a mud hut at the bottom of the farm, below a small belt of forest which lay between her camp and the site chosen for the house – both sites chosen for their proximity to the river. There at night herds of elephants could be heard watering, and the magical night sounds of an African forest lulled her to sleep, the odd screech of the hyrax being the last thing she heard. The African gang, which consisted of carefully selected old retainers, erected the house in five months. The children transferred there and George never suffered from malaria again.

The couple were encouraged to think, quite erroneously as it turned out, that the farm would be suitable for Jersey cows, so cattle, a few fodder crops with maize shambas for the labour force, together with their own vegetables and fruit, became the mainstay of the farm. The milk was turned into cream and sent off to the creamery to be turned into butter. Doreen made soda bread from the butter milk. This is how things were when Beryl first arrived.

When she first went to stay at Naro Moru, Beryl was often unwell, unusually for her; but initially she refused to see a doctor because of her aversion to hospitals. At times, her condition made her difficult and argumentative and Doreen was particularly aware of Beryl's feeling of ‘total insecurity'. Charles was a barrister by profession, and had a successful and busy up-country practice with offices in Nanyuki.
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When her hosts discovered that Beryl could not only type, but type extremely well, an obvious solution to some of Beryl's problems occurred to them. Beryl became legal secretary in Charles's law practice, and she was thus able to earn some pocket money. ‘Her typing was fast and accurate and her spelling impeccable,' Doreen stated, adding that she had always treated the gossip of Beryl's rumoured illiteracy as utter nonsense, and adopting a course of ‘never apologize and never explain', along with Beryl. The work also gave Beryl something with which to occupy her mind, but her health continued to deteriorate.