Straight on Till Morning (43 page)

Buster was champion jockey five times in Kenya. He won the title each time he contested the championship and was never beaten. When, in the mid 1960s he was offered a good post in Ireland, Beryl was very unselfish. ‘Of course you must go,' she told him when he expressed doubts. ‘It's a marvellous opportunity!' It was, for he became champion jockey there. This might be considered surprising in view of the fact that for some years he had been riding in Scandinavia and East Africa, areas not noted for prominence in first-class racing circles. However it indicates the level of performance that he and Beryl had jointly presented in Kenya.

As always, in social matters she was unreliable. She would accept dinner invitations and just not turn up. ‘Silly little man, he must have made a mistake!' she'd say, when her host complained. This was a well-entrenched habit noted by Florence Desmond twenty-five years earlier. Probably it stemmed from her upbringing; East Africans have the same disdain for time. But if a horse was involved Beryl was always punctual and was never late with a feed or a poultice.

Once in the 1963–64 season Beryl won forty-six races in twenty-six days' racing; her stable won everything that year except the Leger. ‘Horses came first, second, third and fourth with her. That's why we got on so well together,' Buster said.

‘Banks are robbers with a licence,' Beryl used to grumble when she owed them thousands. By the mid 1960s she was running everything herself, for Jørgen had bought his own farm at Nanyuki in partnership with the Bathurst Normans' son-in-law. She was hopeless at administration and budgeting and at times, despite her huge success, was so broke that Buster had to scratch around to pay the horses' feed bills. ‘But the horses never went without the best, no matter what. I remember one night our dinner consisted of potato soup, followed by baked potatoes, and we drank crème de menthe all evening. It was all there was, and that's bloody desperation! The week after that we had eight winners and two seconds in a two-day meeting and we were back on champagne again.'

When the Markham stable went down to a race meeting they often used to take twenty horses: twelve which were to run, and eight reserves. The reserves hardly ever ran. Once, the railway track was washed away at Thika and the horses were walked from Thika to Nairobi, but even so Beryl got six winners at that meeting.

Beryl and Buster often fought noisily. Times without number Buster walked out. ‘Right! That's it. I'm leaving,' he'd storm.

‘When?'

‘As soon as I can book a flight out to Denmark!'

‘What are you waiting for, then?'

And he'd stump up to his cottage and pour out his grievances to Anna. Two days later there would always be a knock on the door and one of Beryl's houseboys would be standing there with a package. ‘From the memsahib. She says will you come up to the house?' Often the parcel would contain a couple of silk shirts, or a nice tie. ‘By then my temper would have cooled off anyway, and I would go up to the house to find Beryl fluttering about. She would never discuss the quarrel – instead she'd say, “How about a little pinkie, darling?” and everything would be back to normal.'

One of these stormy scenes was enacted on the day before the Oaks. ‘This time,' Buster told Anna, ‘I really mean it. Pack up, we're definitely going this time. I can't take any more.' Without telling Buster, Anna went up to Beryl's house, taking the racing silks as an excuse.

She found Beryl in tears and drinking heavily. ‘Please send him up to me…don't let him go…' she said. On the following day Blue Streak won the Oaks and no more was said about going home – until the next time!
¹⁶

‘She really didn't know how to take me. At first, like the other jockeys, I called her madam, but later I called her Beryl. I was the only one allowed this privilege. Once Tony Thomas called her Beryl inadvertently. She looked over her shoulder to see who he was talking to…'

Beryl used to hold weekly court sessions for the employees on pay days, with a ‘Fines and Advances book' very much in evidence, for minor misdemeanours such as poor work and drunkenness. Beryl spoke fluent Kipsigis, Kikuyu, and – of course – Swahili. She also spoke Luo and a little Maasai, though she pretended not to. ‘If we had any trouble I couldn't cope with she'd have the culprit in, and sit and question him for hours,' said Buster. ‘They could hide nothing from her for she spoke their language and also, more importantly, she knew how their minds worked. She could be just as devious as them and she had the advantage of superior intelligence. She always got the truth in the end. For major crimes like robbery, the man would be put off the farm, and if he didn't go quickly she'd set the dogs on him! But there wasn't much of that, and nor did she have any trouble during the Mau Mau because she knew her people. We had eighty staff on the place – syces, riding boys, shamba [garden] boys, house servants. If we needed sixty people to run things, Beryl would have eighty – that was her way.'

‘Beryl never gave me an on-course instruction in all those years I was with her,' Buster told me at the end of his three-day interview. ‘On the gallops, or over dinner we'd discuss tactics, but never on the course. If I won, she'd always say, “Well done, sweetie. I knew you'd win.” If I lost she'd say, “Never mind, darling. You did your best.” If there was ever a problem about a horse she'd have the first choice at solving it. If she was wrong, I got my crack next time round.'

A short time after Beryl moved to Naivasha, ‘Romulus' Kleen returned to Kenya and visited her. She had last seen him nearly thirty years earlier, in 1934 when she was ill with malaria after their abandoned flight to England. One evening he dined with Beryl, Jørgen and Charles Norman. When the other two men had left, they began to talk and Romulus told Beryl a story he'd kept to himself all the intervening years.

When Romulus had arrived in Nairobi in 1934 before the proposed flight to England, a mutual friend of theirs, considerably older than both of them, took Romulus aside and said to him: ‘Now my boy, I am going to give you some fatherly advice, and it is this. You have very little money, so do not get emotionally involved with Beryl, because if you do, you will be put in an awkward position should anything go wrong with the aircraft during your journey, and you have to make prolonged stays in hotels on the way. As neither of you is exactly a teetotaller, when the moment comes for you to pay the chits (which you will naturally have signed), you may – to put it mildly – pale beneath your tan.' Romulus thanked the well-meaning friend for his kind warning, and accordingly, when – on most nights that he was her guest – Beryl had appeared at his bedroom door to wish him goodnight (sometimes repeated several times), he had merely responded with a cool and formal, ‘Goodnight, Beryl. Sleep well.'

Beryl was highly amused at his confession, and told him, ‘Well, I do admit to having wondered at the time if you could possibly have been gay! Oh dear, now you will never know what you missed!' The incident was not finished, however. Over dinner that evening Romulus had told Beryl that he had to ride a race in Nairobi the following week. Since he had been with the UN Force in the Congo he had not been on a horse for a month. ‘Could I ride work for you tomorrow morning to get my muscles back in shape?' Romulus asked, adding hopefully that his first mount should be a quiet and steady sort. ‘No problem at all…' Beryl assured him.

Next morning after the gallop he dismounted with buckling knees. He was received by a grinning Beryl, and her two amused male companions of the previous evening who had obviously been invited to rise early in order to come along and watch the fun. ‘He ran away with you, didn't he?' Beryl asked with obvious delight. Romulus admitted that the pace had been considerably faster than he had intended. He did not add to her obvious satisfaction by revealing that his shins were bleeding, and his entire body felt as though it had been put through a mincing machine. Later Buster Parnell told him that the horse he had been given to ride was Speed Trial, the Derby winner of the previous year and known to be the fiercest puller in Kenya.

At times Beryl's humour had a slightly sadistic side to it, Romulus recalls, and he had noticed this even in the 1930s. On one occasion when he was flying with her she suddenly started circling over broken country. After about half an hour of this he couldn't help asking if she had a problem. She replied that everything was fine but she had to wait for the clouds to clear over her intended landing strip. ‘Why?' she asked, grinning wickedly at his discomfort, ‘were you getting frightened?'
¹⁷

One of Beryl's greatest moments on the track was in the 1963–64 season, when Lone Eagle won the East African Derby. Like her little filly Niagara, Lone Eagle was by Toronto out of a mare called Xylone, which Beryl had bought in-foal, for Norman & Thrane Limited, at the Nakuru horse sales. Lone Eagle ran first in their colours: farm companies were allowed to own horses but they had to be run as though they were privately owned. As the date for the Derby drew close it was obvious that Lone Eagle stood a very good chance and another of Beryl's owners, Lady Kenmare, bought the horse from the Norman/Thrane consortium ‘because she dearly wanted to lead in the Derby winner', Doreen Bathurst Norman said.
¹⁸

With justification Block and Soprani were annoyed when Lone Eagle walked off with the Derby trophy. Their own horse, Mountie, had been a fancied Derby prospect, and Beryl had not run him. This caused a bitter row. Beryl had run Lone Eagle to please Enid Kenmare and because she loved Lone Eagle, whom she had delivered as a foal, and reared from that day on. In addition to the Derby winner that season, Beryl trained Fair Realm to win four races including the Spey Royal Cup and Kenya Guineas, and Spike (an outstanding two-year-old by Kara Tepe out of Harpoon), who won races with style and grace: ‘…but once Spike, a beautiful mover, was called upon it was all over,' enthused the
East African Standard
. ‘He is a fine colt and it will be interesting to see if he can stay, and become an E.A. Derby winner in the traditions of Niagara and My Realm.'
¹⁹

All that spring, however, Beryl's winners were becoming harder to find, and in the summer of 1964 it was realized that a mystery illness had attacked all but the older horses. It was a strange sort of lethargy, which Beryl later attributed to an excess of fluoride in the water. Her horses still looked magnificent but the muscles were affected in some unexplained way which prevented their expanding in exercise, and they could not gallop. No matter what she did she could not cure the problem, and in particular Lone Eagle, Mountie and Spike were affected by what Beryl called ‘fluorescent poisoning'.

One of Kenya's most respected journalists, the late Mervyn Hill, visited Beryl at this time and asked her over lunch how the thrills of flying and racing compared. She told him, ‘In flying you are handling the plane yourself and no one can interfere for good or bad. In racing you can produce a horse in the paddock as fit as you think it can be. After that it's up to the jockey. Within minutes, even seconds, months of planning and hard work can be undone.' She was emphatic about the greatest gift a trainer could have. ‘Infinite attention to detail. Your judgement grows over the years, but you can never afford to let up. Flair alone will not win races.'
²⁰

Beryl never let up for a moment. ‘In mechanical terms she was born with a super-charger and no governor on the accelerator,' Doreen Bathurst Norman said.
²¹
Beryl's appalling behaviour to the Bathurst Normans in the first year after she returned to Kenya had not only been caused by her illness, which was real and serious, but also a frustration which drove her at times to the edge of madness. Now, successful and fulfilled despite her problems over paperwork, she could stand back subjectively and cope with them. Jørgen often spent weekends at the Naivasha training establishment to help with such matters, and the mere fact that he was available was enough to maintain Beryl's confidence in her ability.