Too Close to the Sun (49 page)

W
ITH SO FEW PRIMARY SOURCES, I WAS OBLIGED TO SEEK THE ADVICE
of strangers. In the very first months of my research I approached Errol Trzebinski, who wrote about Denys thirty years ago. She immediately opened her archive to me and has been on hand ever since to answer questions and track down leads. I am in awe of her unstinting generosity of spirit, and I wish to record my profound gratitude. Denys’s family were wonderfully helpful. His nephew Sir Michael Williams gave me both time and wisdom. Rupert Finch Hatton also offered valuable practical assistance, as well as warm encouragement. Shirley, Dowager Countess of Winchilsea, cheerfully watched me drive off with the car trunk crammed with precious family diaries.

In Denmark, I benefited enormously from the advice, hospitality, and friendship of Tore and Betty Dinesen. I also want to thank Marianne Wirenfeldt Asmussen at the Karen Blixen Foundation, and the formidable Blixen scholars Else Brundbjerg and Clara Selborn.

In Kenya, Edward and Anne Clay offered sanctuary while I plowed through the Nairobi archives. M.G. Vikram, known just as M.G., showed me everything I needed to see in the Voi area, including the spot where he unearthed part of Denys’s crumpled Gypsy Moth. Thanks also in Africa to Tobina Cole, Aidan Hartley, Rory McGuiness (who took me flying), Melinda Rees, Monty Brown, Sadiq Ghalia, Hamish Grant, and Tony Valentine.

In England and America, I wish to thank Mohamed Al Fayed for allowing me to read letters from Edward, Prince of Wales; Peter Beard for talk and hospitality in Montauk; Richard Cohen; Jamie Fergusson; James Fox; Emma Grove; Michael Holroyd; Patrick Kerwin in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Phil Kolvin; Mary Lovell for generously opening her Beryl Markham archive; Lucy McCann, archivist at Rhodes House; Alexander Maitland; David Marx for gun lessons; Douglas Matthews for another index; Reginald Piggott for maps; Brian Rice; Caspar and Sue Tiarks; John Richens at University College Hospital in London for syphilis tuition; Martin Village for golfing insights; David Yaxley; and Jenny York. And, as always, the indefatigable staff of the London Library.

I owe much to my publisher, Dan Franklin; my editor, Ellah Allfrey; my agent, Gillon Aitken; and my editor at Random House in New York, Susanna Porter. I relied, as always, on two valiant and insightful readers who battled through early scripts: Lucinda Riches and Jeremy Lewis. But my greatest editorial thanks go to Peter Graham. He read every line of every draft and set me right so often that
Too Close to the Sun
would have been a different book without him. It is a debt that, while deeply appreciated, I shall never be able to repay.

I am grateful to the following for permission to quote from published and unpublished works: the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Kermit and Belle Roosevelt Papers); Mary Lovell (
Straight on Till Morning
); the Provost and Fellows of Eton College (the
Eton College Chronicle
); Jonathan Moffat (
The Traveller and Other Poems
by Iris Tree); Nicholas Mosley, Lord Ravensdale (
Julian Grenfell
); the Northamptonshire Record Office (Finch Hatton Papers); Pollinger Limited (
West with the Night
by Beryl Markham); the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (Enniskillen Papers); the Rungstedlund Foundation (
On Modern Marriage, Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa,
and
Shadows on the Grass,
all by Karen Blixen); George Sassoon (
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
and “Attack,” from
The Old Huntsman and Other Poems,
© Siegfried Sassoon, by kind permission of George Sassoon); Sheil Land Associates (extracts from
In Royal Service: The Letters and Journals of Sir Alan Lascelles, 1920–1936,
volume 2, by Duff Hart-Davis, © Duff Hart-Davis, 1989, are reproduced by permission of Sheil Land Associates on behalf of Duff Hart-Davis); the Society of Authors and the Estate of Laurence Binyon (“For the Fallen (September, 1914)”); Errol Trzebinski (
Silence Will Speak
and
The Lives of Beryl Markham
); the University of Chicago Press (Isak Dinesen,
Letters from Africa 1914–1931
); and the Dowager Countess of Winchilsea and Sir Michael Williams (family diaries and letters).

Like Denys Finch Hatton, S
ARA
W
HEELER
was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford. Her books include
Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica; Travels in a Thin Country;
and
Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard,
all available from the Modern Library. When not traveling, Wheeler lives with her family in London.

ALSO BY
SARA WHEELER

TRAVELS IN A THIN COUNTRY

TERRA INCOGNITA

CHERRY

*1 A Finch Hatton township, named after the brothers, still processes cane in the lush hinterland south of the Clarke range.
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*2 Tatham fell to his death off an alp in 1909.
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*3 The Winchilseas were proud of the role played by a distinguished ancestor in the making of English cricket. In 1787, the ninth earl, a generous sporting patron, had been the chief backer of Thomas Lord when he opened a private cricket ground on Dorset Fields in London’s Marylebone. (Lord moved the ground to its third and present site in 1814.) Winchilsea had guaranteed Lord’s investment, and without his support neither Lord’s, arguably the most famous cricket ground in the world, nor the hallowed Marylebone Cricket Club would have come into existence.
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*4 British East Africa was not named Kenya until July 1920. To avoid confusion, however, from now on the territory will be referred to in these pages as Kenya.
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*5 Antinous was a Greek servant boy who became a favorite lover of the emperor Hadrian. He was beautiful, intelligent, witty, a great hunter and athlete—just like Denys. But he drowned in the Nile before he was twenty. In his grief, Hadrian had him deified—a poor boy transfigured by love, and the last great god to emerge from the Roman Empire.
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*6 In 1933, the Williams family sold the rocky, romantic peninsula to a cousin, Clough Williams-Ellis. On it, he built Portmeirion, the celebrated Italianate village designed to prove that development of a naturally beautiful site need not lead to its defilement.
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*7 They were still at it when the author was a Brasenose undergraduate, though the vintage Pol Roger had long since been glugged.
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*8 John Julius Norwich counts Iris as “the only true bohemian I’ve ever met.”
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*9 The Fourth ceased to exist in 1967.
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*10 Denys still went to drafty Dunston, but it had become a sad place. Guy had gone up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the end of the first summer term traveled up to Scotland as usual for a week of salmon fishing on Loch Shin with his father. One morning, with a fish on the line, the twenty-year-old Guy lost his balance and fell heavily into the shallows among the boulders. The gillie panicked and rushed along the bank to fetch Guy’s father. When they got back, Guy was dead.
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*11 An aristocrat who descended to trade, Rolls had imported French cars into Britain before teaming up with the engineer F. H. Royce and forming a manufacturing company.
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*12 No relation to Beryl.
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*13
Boy
was used to refer to any African servant or porter. He was not necessarily young. The Swahili word
toto,
widely deployed in English, referred, on the other hand, to child servants.
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*14 During the Second World War, Somali troops resented being considered Africans at all, and demanded to be treated differently from the Bantu regiments.
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*15 Queen Victoria allegedly gave the flat-topped Kilimanjaro to her grandson the kaiser as a birthday present, as he had no snowcapped mountains in all German East Africa, whereas she, in Kenya and Uganda, had some to spare. Cartographers had only to draw a kink in the frontier, and Kilimanjaro was German. Like many good stories, this one is probably apocryphal.
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*16 Both sides viewed the indigenous people as expendable parts of the country they were fighting over. As one historian has said, “Lettow-Vorbeck’s brilliant campaign was the climax of Africa’s exploitation: its use as a mere battlefield.”
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*17 Meinertzhagen took a few potshots while he was gathering intelligence at Tanga. One of the figures at whom he aimed, and missed, turned out to be von Lettow himself. After the war the pair became friends, and von Lettow recalled the incident in his autobiography. “This was my first social contact with my friend Meinertzhagen,” he wrote of the shooting. During the Second World War, Meinertzhagen sent the general food parcels.
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*18 Meinertzhagen was eloquent in his condemnation. “Jollie [a colonel in the Allied forces] is a decrepit old woman,” he wrote of one officer, “without the courage of a hedgehog or the energy of a guinea pig, and in saying that I am libelling two charming little creatures.”
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*19 Twenty years later, the battle for Lake Tanganyika inspired C. S. Forester to write a novel called
The African Queen.
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*20 In the terrible months of January–March 1916, when hundreds of men lost their lives in the abortive efforts to relieve Kut, the usual incomprehension manifested itself in communications between base wallahs in Basra and soldiers on the ground. One officer, when asked during an artillery bombardment to report on the attitude of the enemy, dodged a volley of bullets to signal “Hostile.” When he was asked by return to elaborate, he wrote, “Very hostile.”
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*21 A typical bit of forces’ doggerel went:
Is this the land of dear old Adam,
And beautiful Mother Eve?
If so, dear reader, small blame to them
For sinning and having to leave!
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*22 British involvement in the region was not over. Between the armistice and 1922, the cost of Iraq to the taxpayer was in the region of £100 million. One wonders if the cycle of war and massive expenditure to protect the god of oil will ever end.
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*23 In the Maasai age-set system,
moran
were young males between adolescence and marriage.
Moran
are usually described in English as “warriors.”
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*24 By special provision of succession made when Field Marshal (Horatio) Herbert Kitchener was granted a peerage for his performance in the Sudan, his elder brother (Henry Elliott) Chevallier Kitchener succeeded to the earldom when the former drowned in 1916. When Chevallier first arrived in Nairobi, a woman he met at a Government House reception asked him if he was any relation to “the” Kitchener. “Young lady,” he replied, “in my family I am ‘the’ Kitchener.”
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*25 The idea that white women were constitutionally weaker than men, and therefore unable to withstand the tropics, persisted for decades. Well into the thirties, white female teachers were obliged to spend one year out of every three “resting.”
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*26 The
terai
was a felt hat, usually double-brimmed and usually worn by women. Men generally favored the sola topi, made from the Indian sola plant.
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*27 Neither British nor American forces would have Thomas, because he was a foreign national, so he made his way to Canada to enlist. At the recruiting station, he was asked if he was a homosexual, the evidence being that he was wearing a wristwatch. He said he was not. There were no further questions.
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*28 After unseemly squabbling, both Britain and Belgium received mandates from the League of Nations in respect of German East African territory. In 1919, Urundi and Rwanda were ceded to Belgium and the rest to Britain, much to the displeasure of the German and Austrian farmers now returning to properties they had worked before the war. Of all the countries whose people had fought on the side of the Allies, Kenya was the only one to lose land after the war. Jubaland, its northeastern province, was promised to Italy in 1915 in return for that country’s participation in the conflict. In the mid-1920s, the deal was ratified.
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*29 She lived until 1988, and never learned to boil an egg. At her funeral, guests were kept waiting for the arrival of the coffin, as Cockie had stipulated that she wished to be late for the event. The last line of her obituary in the
Daily Telegraph
read “Her species has become extinct.”
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*30 Some commentators have since introduced doubts about whether Tania actually was pregnant in 1922, or just had a late period and mistook the signs. The important thing is that she believed she had been carrying a child.
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*31 The massive disparity between African and European land ownership was a major cause of the (largely Kikuyu) Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s. Kenyatta, a mission boy, was born Kamau wa Ngengi.
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*32 These lightning-like pains are classic syphilitic symptoms, and Tania experienced recurrent bouts in the twenties. She was suffering from
tabes dorsalis,
or syphilis of the spinal cord, and although her treatment had been partially effective, small numbers of spirochetes were still present in her body. (Some of her odd and undiagnosed symptoms represented a form of allergy to spirochetes.) Even if all spirochetes were eliminated, which is possible, by the mid-twenties Tania’s nervous system was irreversibly damaged. There is characteristically a fifteen-year hiatus between early syphilis and the tertiary neurosyphilis that she was to endure.
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*33 Swahili was the lingua franca of all East Africa, though few settlers progressed beyond the kitchen version. The
Leader
ran a column, “Swahili as She Is Spoke,” mocking the Franglais of the day. The language evolved by white would-be Swahili speakers was classified as “Kisettla.” Denys was quite good at it.
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*34 Cockie Birkbeck, a confidante of Beryl’s, told two separate writers that she helped arrange an abortion for Beryl in England in April 1924. Another woman, Genessie Hamilton, told a third writer that she paid for this abortion, which was performed by an osteopath. The baby had been conceived at about Christmastime. Several men were paternity candidates, but both Genessie and Cockie stated that Beryl thought the baby was Denys’s. There is no proof, which is why I have included this material only in a footnote. But neither informant had a motive for making up the story.
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*35 In his brilliant book
Hearts of Darkness,
about an earlier period of African history, Frank McLynn notes “a very clear inverse relationship [in Victorian explorers] between intellectual calibre and enthusiasm for the hunting of big game.” The only contemporary parallel I can think of is the size of sports cars, and I believe in that case McLynn’s argument stands up.
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*36 Ingrid said that she did not recognize her own portrait in
Out of Africa.
She appears as a bizarre mix of ancient Swedish peasant and laughing Valkyrie. Tania had turned her into an archetype, as she did with many of her characters, including Denys.
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*37 The region known as the Serengeti plains in Kenya, east of Kilimanjaro, is not the same as the more famous Serengeti National Park created in 1951 in today’s Tanzania, which is west of the mountain. The Serengeti ecosystem in fact covers an area in excess of thirty thousand square kilometers—more than double the size of the national park—and it includes chunks of Kenya, such as the Maasai Mara game reserve. In Denys’s era, the term “Serengeti plains” was applied to large stretches of land on both sides of the border, east and west of Kilimanjaro.
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*38 In 1930, Tich’s posting as aide-de-camp to the governor expired, so he went back to Mega. He missed company and hated the job. It was a life sentence, and he was dead within four years. He was, as Grigg once said, a slayer of dragons.
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*39 Husbands in those days seemed to consider it an honor if a king or his heir slept with their wives. It was not considered adultery. It did not count.
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*40 Denys also hired Andy Anderson, Pat Ayre, and the war hero and game warden Monty Moore VC. To look after the Duke of Gloucester, he hired Alan Black and, to back him up, Sydney Waller. Bunny Allen helped out.
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*41 Hunting was banned in Tanzania for five years in the 1970s. This led to an explosion of poaching and a dramatic drop in government revenue, so it was reintroduced, on a strictly controlled basis.
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*42 John Evans-Freke, as he was born, became the tenth baron and third baronet Carbery at the age of six in 1898. The barony, as opposed to the family name, was spelled with one
r.
In 1920, he renounced the title and changed his name by deed poll to John Evans Carberry, with two
r
’s. He was a tall, handsome, and satanic figure who hated England so much that he became an American citizen (though he was deported from the U.S. for bootlegging) and a Nazi sympathizer. His first wife divorced him for cruelty; his second, Maia, was an aviatrix who died when her plane crashed near Ngong in 1928. In 1930, he married June Mosley; she dealt with the problem by drinking. Carberry flew with a pipe in his mouth. It was he who, at the bar of the White Rhino, dared Beryl to fly the Atlantic.
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*43 When Denys died, he left nothing like the sum of £8,000. His estate was valued at £1,487 (£52,327 in today’s terms).
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*44 Sisal was introduced to East Africa in 1893 by an entrepreneurial German who imported two thousand bulbils from Florida. Sixty-four survived the voyage, but it was enough. In due course, the crop became Tanganyika’s major export, and sisal plantations continue to flourish in the Kilifi section of the Kenyan coast.
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*45 Campbell Black was a great love of Beryl’s, though their affair had not yet taken wing. In old age she kept his photograph on the wall over her chair, and she told several people that he was the love of her life. But he went off with an actress without telling her. Beryl read about it in the press.
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*46 Later that year Toodles, about to go on holiday to America, asked her friend Wallis Simpson to look after the prince in her absence.
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*47 The Labour administration returned in 1929, serving for what turned out to be a brief hiatus, and when the Conservatives came back to power in 1931 Sassoon was reappointed undersecretary of state for air, a post he held for another six years.
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