White Mischief (43 page)

Broughton had underestimated Diana and overestimated his power over her. The descriptions of Diana’s betrayals and affairs, carried out with little attempt at secrecy, before they went to Kenya and after Erroll’s death, and her humiliation and mockery of him, were completely new to the story. So was the confirmation, which Hugh Dickinson originally provided, that Broughton was highly sexually attracted to Diana. At one point they had had a sexual relationship. But what also stands out starkly to me is that Broughton’s overriding desire, from the time Diana took up with Erroll, was to punish her. It was this that drove him to murder Erroll—not male jealousy. His desire to punish Diana drove out any sense of guilt about the murder. He continued to punish her afterward, as the letter shows. He was relieved when he felt he was able to do so. It made him feel powerful, in control again. This is, perhaps, why he told so many people he had killed Erroll.

Diana took the letter to Walter Harragin. Dickinson made a confession to the police about his role in the pearl theft and was never charged. News of the blackmail attempt was wired ahead of Broughton’s arrival in England. Broughton committed suicide a few days later at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool.

I don’t know how things would have played out if I’d discovered the letter while Diana was still alive. It is a damaging and libelous letter, and Diana could have stopped the book had I published it, or she could have forced me to leave it out.

Reading back on my book I was struck by the glaring fact that the murder weapon was—according to the expert firearms witness at the trial whom Connolly and I spoke to thirty years later—undoubtedly the gun used for target practice at Soames’s farm. It was here that the bullets were found, in the earth, providing the forensic evidence against Broughton. One of them matched the murder bullet. Only three people fired shots that day: Broughton, Diana, and Soames, and there is no evidence against the last two. Broughton was astonishingly lucky to get away with it. Today, with DNA testing, I believe he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

I paid a visit to my old acquaintance Juanita Carberry, who had first told me about Broughton’s confession to her soon after the murder—the crucial clue that seemed to end the quest. It was one of three confessions by Broughton, the last of which was on the day before he committed suicide. But “Juanita’s confession” had the added veracity of the fact that it was made to a fifteen-year-old, when Broughton was in a state of desperation, very soon after the murder, when he thought he was about to be arrested.

That visit in the spring of 2013 was the last time I saw Juanita. She was living, age eighty-six, in a council flat overlooking the Thames on Chelsea Embankment in London. She was almost blind, and her memory was still perfect, but she didn’t let on that she was fatally ill. She died three months later.

Juanita had left Kenya some years before when her failing eyesight made it difficult to live in her house in Likoni, near the port of Mombasa. On our way out to lunch she talked from her walkway to a fellow Kenyan in the courtyard below, in Kikuyu, about the forthcoming election. Juanita’s Kikuyu name, always used in Nairobi, is “Nyawera,” the word for a sacred herb.

We sat in a nearby restaurant.

“Do you want to see the stowage list?” she asked, referring to the menu. Juanita had spent seventeen years at sea in the merchant navy, soon after leaving home, after the final beatings by her governess and her father, John Carberry. She ran away initially to enlist in the army’s First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, and marched each year in the Cenotaph Parade in London on Remembrance Day with the FANYs.

Juanita’s is a life of remarkable self-sufficiency and survival after she turned her back on all family ties. After her years at sea, she returned to Nairobi and drove clients on mostly photographic safaris in Uganda, Tanzania, the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi.

“In the bush I can always find my way,” she said.

Juanita gave me one interesting new piece of information about her stepmother, June Carberry, who had given Broughton his alibi for comings and goings to her room on the night of the murder—Broughton’s only alibi: “I didn’t realize until much later that Broughton must have told June Carberry as well that he’d done the murder. She didn’t know he’d told me and I didn’t know he’d told her.”

Juanita was on a live radio program from South Africa in the mid 1980s talking about the murder. A man contacted the producer to say that his uncle had leased John Carberry’s workshop at Malindi in exchange for doing maintenance on Carberry’s hotel. The nephew, who knew all the details of people and places, said when he was cleaning out the rafters, he had found a shoebox that contained a revolver.

“He showed [the gun] to [John] Carberry,” said Juanita, “who, he said, freaked out and grabbed it and took it out in his boat and dropped it beyond the reef.”

June had gone to the Chania Falls on the same trip they all made there after the murder, and sent a shamba boy down to retrieve the gun that Broughton told her he’d dropped there—as he also told Juanita he had done. June took the weapon to Malindi, knowing the Carberry house at Nyeri was being watched. Such is Juanita’s surmise. Another tale of a hot revolver. But I always thought that June Carberry knew Broughton to be guilty. It was June who gave Broughton his alibi that night. Walter Harragin, the prosecutor, told several people over the years that he’d met Junein South Africa after the trial and she had admitted to him that her evidence had been false. She told him that she had heard Broughton walking past her door on the night of the murder. “Couldn’t let the old boy hang,” she told him.

I returned to Kenya many times after writing
White Mischief
, to report for newspapers and magazines, or just to travel. I came back in 1987 to watch the feature film being made, starring Greta Scacchi. Diana and I ended on friendly terms. She had me to lunch at her house on the coast, to the slight embarrassment of her friends—such was her fiercely independent way of carrying on. We looked at each other, I remember, each at an end of the table. She gave me a wink, across the silver pheasants and grouse, from one of those bright blue eyes that had charmed and seduced so many men.

The Delamere estates, huge areas of ranching land, still survive in their owner’s hands, despite the arrest and brief imprisonment of Tom Cholmondeley, son of the present peer, step grandson of Diana, for shooting poachers on his land on two different occasions. The survival of white-owned farms of many acres is one of the peculiarities that distinguish Kenya from almost any other former colony on the African continent, with the exception of South Africa.

The continued presence of white farmers and landowners is surprising too because there was, from as early as the 1930s, a struggle over land. The Kikuyu felt crowded by the whites and began to squat on the land. It was a squatters’ movement that eventually triggered Mau Mau and the rebellion against the British government. In the fifty years since independence, land inequality has increased. The subdivision of small holdings and a quintupling of the population have led to mass poverty and the growth of the horrendous Kibera, the Nairobi slum where the unlanded congregate—one of the largest and worst slums on earth. The political elite did acquire large amounts of land cheaply at independence, and have gifted to their friends and supporters even larger amounts of government land since. The Kenya time bomb, according to the historian Charles Hornsby, is the estimated two hundred thousand fraudulent or disputed land titles.

The white landowners themselves, the ones who have survived, have learned to adapt to this tricky situation in remarkable and surprising ways. Kenya was always the country that attracted settlers looking for adventure, the risk takers, those who came for the sheer love of the landscape and what it had to offer. Kenya attracted aristocrats, the second sons of earls—people like Gilbert Colvile, Diana’s second husband. Neighboring countries like Uganda and Tanzania, or those farther south like Rhodesia, were characterized by a different settler attitude, and perhaps a more ingrained racism that persuaded many, as it did in Kenya, too, to sell upon principle at independence. Some of the Kenya settlers, however, actually bought more land at independence. One of these, who purchased sixteen thousand acres near Nanyuki then, now has the premier Boran cattle stud in the country.

There is a new breed of young white settlers, often the third or fourth generation descended from settler farmers or colonial government officials, that is flourishing, often in partnership with or employment by the African owners of the land. In many cases, they are, in a nice irony, renting or leasing land from the descendants of their former colonial subjects, often farming in the same difficult conditions as their forebears. In Narok, in the Rift Valley, and toward the Masai Mara, these farmers are leasing land from the Masai to grow wheat—profitable and in huge demand for the exploding population—or to make tourist camps. They rent in some cases from absentee African landlords, be they Samburu or Kikuyu or Masai. Some are wealthy businessmen from Nairobi who acquired the land and aren’t interested in farming it.

“It’s easier to turn it over to a European who pays a check at the end of the month,” said one farmer I talked to. Fiammetta Rocco, an editor at the
Economist
in London whose family has lived and farmed on Lake Naivasha for four generations, said, “If they’ve stuck out the land requisitioning, the bad economics, the pilfering and the fear—they have reinvented themselves; they are often young and very adaptable, very organized, finding their way around the bureaucracy and the politics.”

Of those that I know about, their backgrounds are somewhat different from those of the second sons of earls that started out at the turn of the century. One is a graduate of Balliol, Oxford; another has a degree in agriculture; another a degree from Edinburgh in economics. All of them are cattle experts and trade cattle with their African neighbors. Some help their tribal neighbors, for example, to set up tourist ventures, and offer expertise. Some of the larger landowners sell parts of their land for conservation projects to overseas companies and manage them on their behalf. Anything not to be vulnerable like the early settlers to fluctuations in meat prices.

The members of this community on the equator keep together, as ever. They still meet at the Muthaiga Club. They congregate for Race Week in Nairobi as they did in the 1920s. They hold a cricket festival every year at the Olerai Cricket Oval in the Masai Mara, an annual rugby festival in the Rift Valley. Tom Sylvester, age forty-four, whose grandfather was district commissioner in colonial times, ranches beef cattle in Laikipia. Sylvester told me, “There is a very strong feeling among us that we’re Kenyans and we’ve got everything invested in it. We run our businesses here, bring our children up here, vote in elections. We get involved with party politics at [the] local level.”

That, certainly, is new. In previous years whites wouldn’t take part in local politics. What made Sylvester return from university and stay, he said, was “the freedom, the beauty of country, the lifestyle a nd the passion I feel about the place. You can really make a difference in your life; it’s a growing economy, you’ve got these challenges. The crucial thing is you must make the land work. You can’t be a king in a grass castle.” The pull of the land of the kind Elspeth Huxley described means that generations later, the descendants of colonists aren’t going to tear themselves away. They intend to stay until they’re told to go. Kenya is a tough school of reinvention and a risky one, but as Diana Delamere found out, it offers exhilarating prospects.

James Fox

CAST OF CHARACTERS

THE CENTRAL CAST

Josslyn Hay. 22nd Earl of Erroll
b. 1901. Educated Eton. Left prematurely. 1920–2. Brief spell in Foreign Office. Military attach High Commission. Berlin.

Sir John Henry (“Jock”) Delves Broughton
(pronounced Brawton) b. 1883. Educated Eton. Irish Guards (Captain).

Diana Caldwell
b. 1913. Daughter of Seymour Caldwell, the Red House, Hove, Sussex. Married briefly to Vernon Motion.

Carberry. June
née Mosley. b. 1912. Third wife of John Carberry (q.v.). m. 1930. Struck up immediate friendship with Diana on latter’s arrival in Nairobi.