Straight on Till Morning (5 page)

Life up country was not without its excitement, however. There were constant rumours of native unrest – particularly from the Nandi and Sotik tribes a little way to the north of Njoro. Trains were not allowed through the disturbed areas at night and up-country passengers had to sleep at Nakuru and go on next day.
⁴⁷

When Lord Delamere returned to England to raise capital to develop his farming interests in Kenya his admirable wife Lady Florence wrote calmly:

Native raids were not the only excitement at Njoro. There were periodic scares from lions and leopards who prowled around bomas (cattle enclosures built of thorn trees) where the oxen were herded for the night. There was always the chance of running into one after dark.
⁴⁹

Langley Morris, whose family lived on a farm at Njoro from 1906 to 1914, remembered that his father had once walked three miles home in the dark and had been ‘shadowed' by a lion. ‘It kept parallel to him the entire time, about fifty yards away. When he stopped the lion did too. He had only a pistol on him so it was pointless his trying to do anything unless the lion attacked. So he just kept on walking…and so did the lion.'
⁵⁰

Lions were classed as vermin, and were shot at will, although technically only proven cattle-killers could be shot unless the hunter had the requisite licence. They were not the only ‘game' presenting problems to pioneer farmers. Elephants, rhino, buffalo, zebra, giraffes and gazelles grazed on the crops. Lions, leopards and cheetahs threatened livestock.
⁵¹

Almost from the first, Richard, the elder Clutterbuck child, ailed. He had always been a sickly infant, slight and fair, but he now suffered a series of distressing illnesses which his parents attributed to the climate and altitude. Early settlers were by no means convinced that it was possible to rear children in the highlands, despite the views of H. M. Commissioner Sir Charles Eliot who in 1905 wrote that the fearful hazards of altitude, equatorial sun and disease had been exaggerated; fever was certainly not more prevalent than influenza in England: ‘…it will no longer sound incredible that European children can be reared [in the highlands] without danger or difficulty. The number of fat, rosy infants to be encountered on an afternoon's walk at Nairobi is quite remarkable.'
⁵²
The young Winston Churchill disagreed: ‘It is still quite unproved that a European can make the highlands of East Africa his permanent home…still less that he can breed and rear families [at heights of] from five to eight thousand feet above sea-level.'
⁵³
In September 1906 Richard was sent home in the company of friends.
⁵⁴

Settler life, despite the obvious improvements brought about since 1904, had not suited Clara. She enjoyed a busy social existence, loved parties and dancing, and could not accustom herself to the rigours, nor the social isolation, of her new life. Her single regular contact with civilization seems to have been a friendship with Lord Delamere's wife Florence, daughter of the Earl of Enniskillen. Before being taken to India by her parents, Clara too had been gently raised in a succession of ‘big houses' belonging to the Alexanders, a great Irish family. The two women undoubtedly shared the trauma of their changed circumstances, and the friendship between them was noted by Lord Cranworth:

But the friendship of Lady Delamere could not compensate Clara for the living standards and society she missed so much, and she was not able to adapt, nor accept the privations, so well as her neighbour. Three months after young Richard had sailed for England, Clara embarked on the SS
Djemnah
bound for Marseilles and home.
⁵⁶

In 1986 Beryl stated that her father always told her that Clara ‘ran off to England with Harry Kirkpatrick'. Major Harry Fearnley Kirkpatrick (whom Clara married some years later), was serving at the time in East Africa attached to the 3rd King's African Rifles,
⁵⁷
so this must be considered as a possible reason for the separation. But Clara's decision not to take Beryl back to England with her may have been because she originally intended to return to Njoro, and since Beryl was obviously suited to life in Africa there seemed no justification for uprooting her for the long and arduous journey to England. Whatever the reason, it was decided that Beryl would remain with her father at Njoro.

It will probably never be known whether Clara ever seriously intended returning to Charles and the farm at Njoro. Beryl would be a grown woman before she saw her brother or her mother again. In the little time she knew him as an adult, she loved her brother. But she never forgave her mother for abandoning her.

1906–1918

After Clara's departure for England, the African house-servants were given the responsibility of watching over the little girl while Clutterbuck worked to establish the farm. Before 1909 when a series of governesses appeared on the scene, Beryl's regular companions were African contemporaries, the children of the increasing number of migrant workers employed by Clutterbuck, or ‘Clutabuki' as he quickly became known to them.
¹
From them Beryl learned to speak the languages of Africa, exactly as the other totos (small children) learned. The African workers on the farm were mainly Kikuyus and people from the Kavirondo district; but there were also a number of Kipsigis – a pastoral tribe allied to the warrior Nandis who hailed from the country to the north of the farm – who made particularly good herdsmen. The child's days were filled with sunshine, the soft murmur of African voices, and the cracking whips of the Boers who drove the huge teams of oxen which were used to drag away the felled timber.

The night sounds were those of the occasional roar of a lion in the distance, the snap and crackle of cedarwood fires, and the continuous shriek of hyraxes – attractive, small furry creatures, rodent-like but in fact the nearest living relative of the elephant.

The absence of her mother and brother undoubtedly had an influence on Beryl's character; indeed the strength and independence she was to show later almost certainly had their roots in this deprivation. Her lifelong habit of going barefoot whenever possible stemmed from these years, and her necessary intimacy with the African families who lived in squatter villages on the farm caused her to become almost more African than European in her thinking and attitudes. True, she acquired a veneer of European manners as she grew up, but these early years which did so much to shape her strength of personality also created within her a deep well of insecurity, and an inability to handle personal relationships. She simply ‘never knew what was required of her and her instincts were to survive at any price, no matter what the cost to other people', a friend told me.
²
Her own comments about her father are also revealing:

Beryl was always full of life and energy, and from contemporary recollections she might today be classified as a hyperactive child. But her charisma even as a young girl was outstanding, and she was regarded as having ‘powerful
dawa
' (Swahili for magic or medicine) by the African workers on the farm. Her ideas were treated with respect even by adults.
⁴

Although the highlight of her day was to ‘do the stables with daddy',
⁵
her father, with his immense workload, had little time to spare. Lady Delamere kept a watching brief over her welfare. The Delameres' own child Tom, two years older than Beryl, had been left behind in England when the couple went out to Kenya in 1902 and it therefore is hardly surprising that Clara's child on the neighbouring farm provoked a kindly interest from Lady D. Interviewed in the spring of 1986 Beryl still retained a vague childhood memory of riding over to the Delameres' house on her pony,
⁶
and of ‘a white frock' that she had been given by the woman described by Meinertzhagen as ‘very lovely, graceful and charming, and quite out of place in this savage country'.
⁷

Clutterbuck intended to make a success of his venture in Kenya from the start. He was more resourceful than many of the early settlers and he had the constant support and advice of Delamere; indeed it is difficult to separate Clutterbuck's early projects from Delamere's own concerns and interests. Much of Clutterbuck's initial work was performed on Delamere's behalf and was subsequently taken over by Clutterbuck, probably on very favourable terms.

Delamere pointed out to him the fact that the railway company had a number of redundant engines at various points along the line, and so Clutterbuck purchased two old engines and used them to power a mill to grind the maize and wheat grown by himself and his neighbours.
⁸
There was no easy living to be had, but Clutt's Mill, as it was known to the settlers, slowly prospered, in spite of numerous farming difficulties affecting the protectorate. Over the years Clutterbuck astutely acquired government contracts to provide posho (ground maize) for the workers on the Uganda Railway.

He was also quick to act on Delamere's early concern that despite the enormous quantities of trees available in the country, timber for building had to be imported because of lack of processing facilities in Kenya. Clutt bought two more engines in the autumn of 1906 and built a saw mill at the side of the railway track where it crossed his land. Delamere had spotted the potential of saw mills some time earlier and had ordered his agent in England to acquire and send out ‘two small circular saws, a large rack circular saw and other woodworking equipment'.
⁹
The equipment took a long time to arrive, but Delamere had postdated the cheque for the equipment by a year.

Timber processed by Clutt was used by a newly arrived carpenter, Mr Francis Morris, to build his own and then Lady Delamere's house in 1907.
¹⁰
Lady Delamere, writing to her husband, told him, ‘The rain has been awful, and the cold intense. I hope you won't be annoyed but I couldn't stand it any longer and have bought a little house and have hired a carpenter to build it.'
¹¹

‘Intense' cold, on a farm which has the equator running within its boundaries, is an interesting paradox, but Equator Ranch was more reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands than anywhere in Africa. Mr Morris lined the inside of Lady Delamere's house with bamboo. When he subsequently built a house for Berkeley Cole (Lady Delamere's brother), Mr Morris lined the walls with tapestry, a source of wonderment to his young son Langley, who thought it the ultimate in luxury.

Gradually the number of Africans working on the Clutterbuck farm increased until there were over a thousand. When Winston Churchill briefly halted his train journey at the farm in 1907 there were nearly nine hundred employed solely on cutting timber and clearing the forest. Much of the timber was used to fuel the trains – a lucrative contract. Churchill described Clutterbuck as ‘A young English gentleman…a model employer of native labour'.
¹²
This labour force sounds huge by today's standards, but it was not unusual. Karen Blixen, for example, was welcomed to her farm in 1914 by a similar number of African workers.
¹³

The amount of effort involved in clearing land from the bush and forest was herculean. At that time there were no machines to pull the unyielding stumps from the ground even after the mass of timber was cleared. Many willing hands were needed, and teams of oxen. The Dutch who had trekked north from the Cape were the experts with oxen, and Clutterbuck took full advantage of their skills.
¹⁴
Beryl was later to write of her father's heroic work in

For Churchill's visit, Clutterbuck had a path cleared through the forest which linked a loop in the railway line. The path consisted of a leafy tunnel, about a mile and a half long, through the forest which Churchill described as dense and confused.

Characteristically, Churchill was not only observant of the scenery.

He talked of this to Clutterbuck as they scrambled through the forest path. But Churchill's conclusion – ‘It is of vital importance that these forests should not be laid waste by reckless and improvident hands. It is not less important that the Uganda Railway should have cheap fuel'
¹⁶
is oddly poignant, for in 1986 a visit to the site he describes reveals treeless farmland.

As time went on there was no sign of Clara's return to Kenya with Richard, but the farm thrived, thanks to Clutterbuck's efforts and administrative ability, and Beryl thrived along with it. The horses were her special love. Her father was not slow to notice the special affinity Beryl had with all animals, but particularly with horses. Even as a child she had the ability to make a horse ‘quiet', simply by touching it. She was, like both her parents, a natural rider totally without fear, and rode all horses on a long rein, with great sensitivity.
¹⁷
Her own special horse, acquired when Beryl was only six years old, was an Arab pony stallion called Wee Macgregor.
¹⁸
Years later Beryl wrote about her childhood friend:

Before race days Beryl helped her father and the syces (grooms) to load the horses, including her own Wee Macgregor, on to the down train bound for Nairobi. She always accompanied her father to the race meetings, she recalled, and they slept in tents…‘nearly everybody did'.

One race meeting in 1909 must have been especially exciting for the little girl, for her father won the Produce Plate riding Sugaroi, a horse he trained for Berkeley Cole. This race was being run for the first time in 1909 and soon it was regarded as one of the feature races in East Africa. No wonder Beryl grew up hero-worshipping her father when so often she saw him as king in his own country.

As well as stables full of glossy thoroughbreds, there were always innumerable pets around Green Hills: ‘orphans mostly', Beryl recalled: lambs, fawns orphaned by hunting ‘accidents', goat kids and dogs. There was a pure-bred bull terrier (her father's favourite dog, given to him by Lord Delamere), which was the sire of Beryl's own crossbreed, Buller. Clara had left behind the large and very beautiful English sheepdog she had originally taken out to Kenya with her, and there were also two imported greyhounds called Storm and Sleet, and two great danes. Beryl recalled sadly that nearly all of them were killed by disease or ‘taken by leopards'.
²⁰

However, and despite Beryl's assertions to the contrary in her memoir, there was another woman besides Lady Delamere who had some influence on her upbringing. It was her Aunt Annie. Clutterbuck's elder brother Henry
²¹
together with his wife Annie and their son Jasper had moved to Kenya from India in 1908 when the climate there proved too much for Henry's constitution. They settled at Molo, about half a day's ride from Njoro, and there was naturally some intimacy between the two families. Jasper was two months younger than Beryl and the two were occasional playmates.

Before her marriage, the tall and elegant Annie had been brought up in a very luxurious manner, one grandfather being Wykeham-Martin of Leeds Castle and the other the Earl of Cornwallis. Her photograph in court dress at the time of her presentation shows a poised and very lovely woman. In India she had been used to running her sizeable household with the aid of efficient, well-trained servants, and the privations of the farm at Molo came as a considerable shock. But she made the best of it and grappled valiantly with the odds. On one occasion during her husband's absence on business her servants told her, ‘Some men have threatened to come and break in in the night and kill everyone and steal the stock.' Annie calmly took out a revolver and loaded it before their eyes, slowly and deliberately. Then she lit a storm lantern and sat down in a chair facing the door. ‘Tell them,' she said, ‘that I shall be patrolling the house all night. If I see
anyone
moving at all I shall kill them immediately.'