White Mischief (41 page)

No man who has taken part in an event can lie about it all the time. The conscious mind cannot mount guard over the subconscious indefinitely. The time comes when the conscious mind nods or falls asleep. Then the subconscious asserts itself.

It is no coincidence that Erroll was shot soon after Broughton had made the most extreme gesture of passivity he could muster, at the Muthaiga farewell dinner. Erroll
must have had a momentary sense of the danger when he said: “The old boy’s being so nice, it smells bad.”

Finally, what is the natural reaction of an acquitted murderer or of someone wrongfully arrested? To clear his name by discovering who had done it, by vehemently protesting his innocence, or by exhibiting at least some curiosity about the circumstances of the crime. What action did Broughton take? None. So many of the clues led to Broughton that, had he been innocent, he would surely have shown more curiosity about which of his friends could have organised such an elaborate set-up, which of them might have caused him to be hanged. He never denied his guilt to Diana. He simply told Juanita at a moment of severe emotional stress that it was he who had shot Erroll and that she mustn’t be frightened.

The story of Broughton’s last days in Africa is indeed a tragic one. Perhaps in the end Africa was to blame. Once Kenya had given Broughton some of his happiest days. In the future it was to provide Diana with her fullest years. She had been accepted. He had paid it one visit too many.

AFTERWORD

When
White Mischief
was first published in 1982, one reviewer wrote that the murder of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, had been, until that moment, “one of the great unsolved crimes of the century.” I was pleased that he thought I’d solved it. Certainly no evidence has emerged since, from all the volumes of print that
White Mischief
engendered, to alter my view of who did it. Some new, and quite startling, material, unearthed in 1993 and included here, points the finger evermore decisively at the acquitted man, Sir Jock Delves Broughton. He’d escaped through the brilliant presentation of the ballistics evidence by his lawyer (and the prosecution’s in attention to detail)—which convinced the jury that Broughton hadn’t pulled the trigger. Nevertheless, a chink of doubt remains, enough to keep the story alive, I suspect, forever. It allows the Hay murder to live on as a great unsolved crime. But the story further deserves distinction for its layers of context, its characters, and its time and place, which unleashed moral outrage across the zipped-up world of the British imperium—which perhaps never recovered.

But however much scandal the murder of Josslyn Hay had generated in wartime Britain, very few people outside the white community of Kenya knew about it or remembered it even by the 1960s, when I first started looking at it with Cyril Connolly. Its greatness had been relegated to the occasional attention of true-crime aficionados, collective anthologies, and the contents of one slim volume, laying out the facts.

The Hay scandal was a suppressed topic for journalists in Kenya, even three years after independence. Any reporter who tried to resurrect the story by doing some digging or asking questions would be swiftly warned off; I was told this, and I also experienced it when I suggested looking at the case for the paper I worked for. Such was the remaining power of the biggest white landowners, still in place, with whom Jomo Kenyatta had made a strategic peace at independence. Diana, by then Lady Delamere, the woman at the center of the crime passionel, had been ostracized by the white colonials after the trial. Twenty-five years later, having stayed on in Kenya, she had become rich and powerful through her marriage to the biggest landowner in the country at independence, Tom Delamere. Her survival in a predominantly black African country, and her ability to keep a hand on the story in those surrounding sand shut it down, were what first got my attention, more even than the crime itself.

White Mischief
touched a nerve, or several nerves, many of them to do with this misbehavior abroad, of being literally “out of bounds”—a particular British fascination, grist to so many novelists from Somerset Maugham to Graham Greene to William Boyd. The book became a number-one bestseller, and has remained in print ever since—something that I could never have imagined when, at the age of thirty-five, thinking myself a seasoned reporter, I offered my first draft to Tom Maschler, a famous publisher of his time. Later Maschler said he couldn’t remember something so chaotic transforming itself into something, for him, acceptably good. It was a difficult structure, with its flashes backward and forward to four different periods of time, technical challenges such as the need to make forensic evidence and legal arguments entertaining, and the need to weave in a miniature social history of the whites in East Africa. All this would read effortlessly, with pace and suspense and moments of comedy—or so I hoped.

The title certainly gave the book a good start. It told the story well. “White mischief” became the generic term for English bad behavior on the equator; it served for fashion headlines, particularly for features on lingerie. It went tabloid. It became the tag for the Africa of the British imagination, which, wrote Connolly, “insinuates violence, liberates un acted desires.” The latter, at least among the British upper classes that relocated to the White Highlands, was not in doubt. As the critic Richard West wrote, “Few of the women in Happy Valley had much to learn about sex. This book should put paid forever to the idea advanced by sex educationists that upper class English women before the war used to clutch the side of the bed and think of the Empire.”

But what has kept
White Mischief
alive and generated several further books and a movie is not the remaining chink of mystery alone. It is, perhaps primarily, the decades worth of Kenya white-tribe lore and gossip, one of the most virulent strains of rumor known to social history, a word industry that had been fuelling itself during all the years the story lay dormant to the outside world. It took off on a new flight, of course, when the book appeared. The rumor mill never depended on new evidence, and ignored anything that might have spoiled a good story. It was about “characters” and their legends. To say that someone was a “character” in the Kenyan context was usually to claim reverence for some eccentric, stranded figure who told amusing stories, a figure with links to the old pioneer settlers to whom anecdotes or scandal could be attached, with which the white hunters could entertain their safari clients. Kenya was still full of them in the late twentieth century. The book publicists for
White Mischief
came up with a lapel button that read, “Are you a character or do you live in London?”

White Mischief
caused annoyance in some settler circles because it was seen to have portrayed the ex-colony in a poor light. No good the several pages taken up in the beginning of the book describing the struggle of the early settlers, their courage and resilience, the immense difficulty of farming, and the setbacks—and pointing out that the Happy Valley characters were a small minority within a minority.

“Kenya inspired an almost fierce, possessive loyalty among these white farmers, many of whom had put into their land every penny they had and a lifetime of effort challenged by drought, locust invasions, slumps in world prices and other disasters. They were jealous of the country’s good name,” wrote the distinguished Kenyan-born author Elspeth Huxley, reviewing the book. It was a problem the settlers had had since the 1920s when the gossip began about upper-class hedonists making their home in the Wanjohi Valley in the Aberdares. And it lived on into the 1970s, with the added bitterness of the “white man’s country”—as they publicly declared Kenya when local rebellion began—being no longer theirs.

But the bad name the story brought to Kenya didn’t stop the locals from having their own theories about who had killed Lord Erroll. Forget about “that book.”

Many of those who challenged my version hadn’t read my book anyway, which helped keep the industry going. “Bloody book,” said Hilary Hook, a very likeable army officer once of the Sudan Light Horse, about
White Mischief
, on the radio, in those clipped, David Niven–ish tones rarely heard on the BBC these many years, as he promoted his own memoirs. You heard “bloody book” a lot, and I took it as a compliment in a certain English way. At least it wasn’t patronizing and the book had seriously claimed their attention. It often came from non-readers in the tourism industry, some of whom had been forced to skim the contents in order to converse with those safari clients. If they hadn’t read it, they could always bluff by saying it was all nonsense anyway.

A small shelf of books came in the wake of
White Mischief
, managing where possible to include my title on their covers. The best was
The Bolter
by Frances Osborne, about her great-grandmother Lady I dina Sackville, daughter of Earl De La Warr, “the woman who scandalized 1920s society and became
White Mischief
’s infamous seductress.” Lady Idina had also been married to Joss Erroll, though they had parted fifteen years before he was murdered.

It is true that Idina almost single-handedly gave Kenya its scandalous reputation by fleeing from marital scandal in London and then practicing a sexual libertinage in the Aberdares that I underestimated in
White Mischief
. Sex for Idina, its introduction to her when she was a young woman, was, says her great-granddaughter, “an activity for which she not only discovered she had a talent but which she clearly found so intensely enjoyable that it rapidly became impossible for her to resist any opportunity for it.”

It was the tales of Idina’s house parties that drifted back to London and made Kenya infamous. I had written merely about her after-dinner game of “blowing the feather” across a sheet—sexual partners were allotted by where it came to rest. But Frances Osborne describes “the sheet game” she presided over as another way of selecting a partner:

As cocktails were sunk, the game developed further. Holes were cut into the sheet. Hands, feet, elbows, noses were stuck through for identification. More cocktails were drunk. A new sheet was pulled across the room. New holes were cut. The men unbuttoned their trousers.

But Osborne’s book is a well-written and serious account of Edwardian and 1920s London, as well as a highly readable description of an earl’s socialite (and chinless) daughter setting up in what was then the pioneering wild of East Africa.

Five miles away from the house Idina shared with Erroll, Slains in the Aberdares, was the Wanjohi River, where Alice de Janzé, also Erroll’s on-and-off lover, had set up with her husband Frédéric de Janzé. Thus, as
White Mischief
describes, the Wanjohi Valley became the imagined epicenter of abandon. The river was said to run with cocktails. By some extraordinary coincidence, as my key source Juanita Carberry revealed in her own memoir,
Child of Happy Valley
, “njohe” in Kikuyu means “booze,” local brew; “wa” means “people of,” making Alice and the Wanjohi crowd “People of the Cocktail River.” All the women characters have featured as suspects in various works; Diana herself in a book called
Diana, Lady Delamere and the Lord Erroll Murder
.

But, as ever, no evidence emerges to enlighten us. According to Paul Spicer in his book
The Temptress
, Alice de Janzé—a friend of Spicer’s mother—was the murderer in “the White Mischief mystery.” When Diana came along, he says, Alice felt “ferociously jealous of Joss’s relations” with her. He had no evidence against Alice. He relies on syllogisms—illogical deductions—and a kind of nudging rhetoric. Alice had a pretty cast-iron alibi: She was sleeping with her lover, a man called Dickie Pembroke, at Muthaiga. “It is possible that Dickie slept through Alice’s departure and her return on the night of the murder,” Spicer offers. “That night Alice could easily have taken her revolver from the bedside table,” he writes, then “soundlessly” climbed into her car and “sped away.” She went to the crossroads, he writes, and waited. “Checking her revolver she would have made sure it was fully loaded.” And so on. (She might have done that before she went to all the trouble, one reflects). In fact, Alice’s moving and forlorn letters, published in
White Mischief
, written before she committed suicide, are proof, if any were needed, that she didn’t shoot Erroll. Spicer was not able to include these in his book.

Spicer’s book draws on the limitless Kenyan verbal gas reserve. Different rusty guns have been dug up from streams or waterfalls and are undoubtedly the murder weapon. Only locally grown information can be considered valid. Someone knows someone who saw a confession with his or her own eyes, but the attorney general didn’t act on it, or knows that a confession was left in someone’s will and suppressed. The secret is contained in someone’s diaries that never materialized. A woman promised to tell but “slipped into a coma before she could reveal her secret.” Murmurs persist that “a woman” did it, or so suggested anonymous letters at the time. These rumors are repeated with reverence and confidentiality to this day, hardened into beliefs and orthodoxies and handed down through the generations. They will always be told; no amount of clear evidence could shift them.

Many such tales are included in the most bizarre of these accounts,
The Life and Death of Lord Erroll
by Errol Trzebinski, who has been a friend for many years. Trzebinski is an arch researcher—and has written previous books about Kenya. All the more peculiar that her final seventy pages suddenly embark on a thesis that Erroll was murdered by MI6, the British secret service, because of his former connection to Oswald Mosley and the British Fascist party, because he knew too much about a cabal trying to do a deal with Hitler. There’s no evidence of that, or anything else in the thesis—for example, that the “beautiful” female agent assigned to kill Erroll at the crossroads was Cambridge educated, polylingual, a crack shot, and “sexually highly aware.” Despite this, the assassin “had been made up to look like an attractive middle-aged lady by Schouten’s (the Nairobi hairdresser) and a make-up artist from Nairobi amateur Dramatic Club.” In all the years, nobody, black or white, remembered or had heard of this small army of special forces buzzing around the Muthaiga Club, radios crackling, motorbikes revving up. According to Trzebinski, MI6 had
recruited
Broughton, and Diana, too. Trzebinski says she got it all from a man on the Isle of Wight who got it from someone else, not named. Not surprisingly one reviewer wrote, mildly, “I think someone’s been having a word in her ear.”