Straight on Till Morning Read online

  Mary S. Lovell has written several major biographies, including The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, Bess of Hardwick: Empire Builder, and A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton. The Churchills: In Love and War will be available from W. W. Norton in May 2011.

  For further information on books by Mary S. Lovell, please visit her website at www.marylovell.com

  Praise for Bess of Hardwick

  ‘Utterly absorbing…one of those biographies in which the reader really doesn’t want the subject to die.’

  Alexander Waugh, Independent on Sunday

  ‘The best account yet of this shrewd, enigmatic and remarkable woman.’

  Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times

  Praise for The Sisters

  ‘This is an excellent book – calm, dispassionate and respectful of its subjects.’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘The remarkable Mitfords have inspired dozens of books but this may well be the best.’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘A book that can be heartily recommended.’

  A. N. Wilson, New Statesman

  Also by Mary S. Lovell

  A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton

  The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

  Bess of Hardwick: Empire Builder

  The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart

  Cast No Shadow: The Spy Who Changed the Course of World War II

  A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby

  The Splendid Outcast: The African Short Stories of Beryl Markham

  STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING

  The Biography of Beryl Markham

  Mary S. Lovell

  Copyright © 2011, 1987 by Mary S. Lovell

  All rights reserved

  First published as a Norton paperback 2011

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lovell, Mary S.

  Straight on 'till morning: the biography of Beryl Markham / Mary S. Lovell.

  p. cm.

  Previously published: New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-33915-4

  1. Markham, Beryl. 2. Women air pilots—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Women air pilots—Kenya—Biography. 4. Air pilots—Biography. I. Title.

  TL540.M345L68 2011 629.13092—dc22[B]

  2011006380

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  To Clifford

  who introduced me to Beryl.

  Feet on the ground, heart in the sky!

  ‘How do you get to Neverland?’ Wendy asked.

  ‘Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.’

  J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 1890–1906

  Chapter 2 1906–1918

  Chapter 3 1918–1927

  Chapter 4 1927–1930

  Chapter 5 1930–1931

  Chapter 6 1931–1933

  Chapter 7 1933–1936

  Chapter 8 1936

  Chapter 9 1936

  Chapter 10 1936–1937

  Chapter 11 1937–1941

  Chapter 12 1941–1944

  Chapter 13 1944–1948

  Chapter 14 1949–1960

  Chapter 15 1960–1964

  Chapter 161965–1980

  Chapter 17 1980–1986

  Appendices

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  PREFACE

  During the weeks that Mary Lovell has been in Nairobi, she has spent each day but one at my house on the Ngong Racecourse. We have become friends.

  She tells me that people are interested in the things I have done in my life which were not written about in my own book West with the Night. I cannot think why this should be so, but I accept her assurances, and have made my collection of papers available to her.

  Day after day, I have listened while she read these papers to me. I have remembered times long past and people long dead. And when she has asked me I have tried to tell her about them. But some memories I have kept for myself as everyone must. And because she understands this I have tried to help her, as she – in her own way – has helped me.

  Beryl Markham

  Nairobi, 3 April 1986

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1985 my ex-husband, Cliff Lovell, flew his De Havilland Gipsy Moth airplane during the making of the movie Out of Africa. When he returned home at Christmas after three months of filming in Kenya, I asked him to tell me all about it. Instead of stories about Meryl Streep and Robert Redford (which is what I wanted to hear), he began telling me about an elderly woman who had been brought onto the set to see the Moth. Her name was Beryl Markham, and she had owned and flown similar planes in the 1930s when they were the most popular modern airplanes available.

  He told me that she now lived a retired life in Kenya, but that as a pioneer aviatrix she had been a bush pilot, had made many record-breaking flights, and was the first woman to fly the Atlantic ‘the hard way’ – east to west against the prevailing winds. She had also been a friend of Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, whose relationship was the basis for the Out of Africa movie, and she had been a leading racehorse trainer.

  To my knowledge I had never heard the name Beryl Markham, but I recall that I was aware of a frisson of recognition – almost amounting to déjà vu – and to this day I cannot explain it. As Cliff finished telling me about her he said, ‘Someone ought to write a book about her,’ and there it was again, an inexplicable prickle of the hairs on the back of my neck. Whatever it was, this sixth-sense nudge, drove me next day – in that pre-Google era – to the local library to research Beryl and her history. Because of holiday hours it was three days before I could get a copy of Beryl’s remarkable book West with the Night sent from another branch, and by then I had already ransacked the reference library shelves and begun going through the indexes of all the books in the aviation classification.

  For years I had collected antiquarian books on horses and fox-hunting, and among this collection was the hunting diary and scrapbook of a woman from Leicestershire. As I was flicking idly through this volume one evening, the name Charles B. Clutterbuck jumped off the page. This was the name of Beryl’s father. Again, I had never heard of him until two days earlier when reading Beryl’s memoir. Surely this was simply a coincidence? But hadn’t Beryl written about her father as a successful steeplechaser in England before he emigrated to Kenya? Sure enough, this was a newspaper clipping about Beryl’s father, romping home in a hunt race.

  I was well into work on another book when all this occurred, so my agent was surprised when I told him I was dropping the project to write a biography about Beryl Markham. I received the response to which I was to become accustomed over the next months: ‘Who’s Beryl Markham?’ I was defensive, not ready to share Beryl, or my small trove of information about her, with anyone else. ‘I don’t exactly know yet. But I just know I have to write about her.’

  After a few weeks of working in a sort of frenzy to learn more about Beryl’s career, I gathered enough material to draft what I thought was an outline for a book. I then wrote to Beryl care of her English publisher, Virago Press, asking if she would see me, and carried on with t
he research.

  Three weeks later I received a letter from a Jack Couldrey in Nairobi, introducing himself as Beryl’s solicitor. He said that although he had read my letter to Beryl he was not sure that she had entirely understood it. ‘…To all intents and purposes she is now virtually senile,’ he wrote. He went on to say that if I came to Kenya I could certainly see her and would even be able to carry on a conversation with her, but her mind was apt to wander.

  This was a blow, but disappointing as Couldrey’s letter was, I decided that I needed to see Beryl and attempt to speak to her. The same day I went into my local travel agent and booked a return flight to Nairobi. Then I began writing to everyone whose name had cropped up in my research so far. Many old Kenya ex-pats had retired to England after Independence in December 1963, so I was not short of contacts. A series of interviews followed, and I was astonished not only at the sweep of Beryl’s interests but also at the strength of feelings her name could generate. Some respected and admired her; others could not find a good word for her. Elspeth Huxley provided me with a list of names and letters of introduction for my forthcoming visit to Kenya.

  In March 1986, about ten weeks after I first heard Beryl’s name, I arrived in Nairobi. Expecting blasting heat and the parched landscape of African movies, I was enchanted by the lush vegetation and the colour of tropical flowers. The avenues were lined with flamboyant royal poinciana trees – the so-called flame trees of Thika – with gaudy scarlet blossoms as big as a man’s head and jacarandas with their startling mauve-blue flowers. The air had a fresh sparkle, like Switzerland in the summer.

  It being Sunday, I spent the first day on the telephone introducing myself to people I wanted to interview and arranging to rent a car. Next morning I collected the car, adorned with an impressive number of bumps and scratches, and eased myself into Nairobi’s undisciplined streams of traffic.

  My first call was at Jack Couldrey’s law offices. He seemed concerned that I might have wasted my time and money travelling to Kenya, but was happy to answer my questions. He explained how he first became involved with Beryl; indeed, his family had known her all his life. ‘Beryl can be difficult at times,’ he warned. ‘And she doesn’t particularly like women. She has few friends now, and is sad, and rather lonely. She has cut herself off. She swears terribly at her two servants. I don’t know why they stay with her. She has good times and bad…last night when I called in on her she was brighter than I’ve seen her for a long time…If you want anything photocopied please bring it here and we’ll copy it for you. I think a lot of things [documents and photos] have been taken away over the years, but you wouldn’t do that, would you? No, of course not…’

  I thanked him and left, stopping off at a flower stall to buy a huge bunch of flowers for what seemed a very small sum; several people had already suggested I’d do better to take a bottle of vodka.

  I found the cottage at the racecourse without any difficulty. The door was wide open, and as I got out of my car I could hear voices speaking in Swahili. I knocked on the door and poked my head into the sitting room. ‘Oh hello, do come in,’ said a clipped English voice. As I stepped inside she saw the flowers preceding me. ‘How lovely, thank you so much.’ She was instantly recognizable to me from the photographs I had seen, older, of course, than the stunning young woman whose face had once graced magazine and newspaper articles. On that first day there was little of the celebrated glamour in evidence, but her bone structure identified her. She wore pale blue denim jeans and a loose white shirt; her hair was pure white, combed close to her head, and had not seen a hairdresser in a long time. It was evident that I had stumbled into the middle of a domestic crisis. She was sitting deep in an armchair, her left hand clutching the upper part of her right arm, and her two servants – Odero, an ageing man, and Adiambo, a much younger woman – were hovering and looking anxious.

  I asked the obvious question. ‘Have I called at an inconvenient time?’ Beryl removed her hand and showed me a nasty wound on her arm – a large triangular flap of skin had been torn away and folded back almost surgically, exposing what looked like muscles and nerves. It looked clean, though, and there was almost no bleeding. She admitted ‘it hurt rather’ but she was very stoic, merely expressing annoyance. I asked if there were any dressings as I could see some flies in the room, and Adiambo went away, returning almost immediately with a bottle of cream shampoo, apparently telling Beryl it was all she could find. Beryl translated and looked at me questioningly.

  As I turned off the murram track to Beryl’s cottage I had noticed a sign pointing to the Jockey Club offices, so, telling Beryl to keep her hand over the wound, I drove off to find them. There I was given the first-aid kit and returned to the cottage to dress the injury. After it was all tidied up, she said, ‘That’s better. What time is it? Let’s have a drink, shall we?’ I agreed.

  There was only vodka and orange – what my mother would have called ‘a tart’s drink,’ I expect. I watched with disquiet as Adiambo half filled two tumblers with what looked like neat alcohol and topped them off with orange squash and ice. But when I took a cautious sip I realised that the vodka had been well watered down. Beryl did not seem to notice; she took tiny sips from time to time while we chatted, and her glass was still half full when I left at six o’clock

  I told her I was there to write a book about her, but she knew this already from Jack Couldrey. I pressed on, ‘Do you mind?’ ‘No-oo, sweetie, of course not. When can I see it?’ After a few minutes she suggested I should open a large black tin trunk sitting under one of the windows. ‘Everything is in there,’ she said with an airy wave of her hand. ‘Bring me some of it and I’ll show you.’ I had already ascertained she could not walk unaided, had not done so in fact since the previous October when she suffered a thrombosis. ‘I probably could walk if I only had the right people around me,’ she told me briskly while shooting a meaningful glare at Adiambo.

  I took a handful of papers from the trunk. The first things to come out were letters and cables that Beryl had received at the time of her epic flight across the Atlantic. I read some to her and she laughed. ‘Oh, I say – how funny.’ There was no evidence that afternoon of the senility I had been warned to expect, nor of her mind wandering. I had clearly been lucky enough to strike a good day.

  ‘May I come back tomorrow, Beryl?’

  ‘Oh please do. I should love that…’

  I was in Kenya for almost six weeks, and during that time I saw Beryl every day but one. At ten a.m. I would turn up at her cottage and we would spend the hours in her modestly furnished sitting room with its walls lined with framed photographs of past glories: her airplanes, her triumphant arrival in New York in 1936 and a civic greeting by the mayor, her horses, and – above her chair – one portrait. It was of the aviator Tom Campbell Black. She was fascinated to hear that before I had flown to Nairobi I had interviewed Florence Desmond (Tom’s wife until his sudden death in a freak accident in 1936). After the first day I took snack lunches prepared for me by the hotel which fed us both; once or twice Adiambo cooked us a chicken. ‘That girl!’ Beryl snorted. ‘It takes her two hours to walk to the duka [shop] and back; it’s only a mile…’

  During the first week I dug through the contents of Beryl’s trunk, handing the items to her one by one, sometimes reading them out, or, in the case of her aviation maps, talking about them. She never seemed to tire of this, and we spent hours discussing the flights recorded in her pilot’s log book. She wanted to hear about everything I’d discovered about her. ‘How did you find out about that?’ At first she gave little away, and when I asked a direct question she’d hedge. ‘So and so said this…’ I’d tell her. ‘Is it true?’ She would turn her china-blue eyes on me and ask, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s true, Beryl.’

  ‘Well then…’

  Our conversations were not only about the biography. Within a few days I realised that Beryl was unhappy about her appearance, but as she was confined to her home, i
ndeed, mainly to her chair, she could not do a lot about it. I tentatively suggested that I could shampoo and set her hair for her. After all, if I could wash and dry my son’s hair I could manage hers. I arranged to borrow a hairdryer from my hotel over the weekend and planned a hairdressing session. Meanwhile, we talked about horses and vintage airplanes – interests we shared. I told her about my own favourite horse, Flashman, and about hunting in the New Forest. She suddenly remembered foxhunting as a young woman in England and told me about it. It was the first information she had volunteered.

  Meanwhile, my interviews with other people were being conducted over breakfasts and dinners. Occasionally I had to leave Beryl to go to a lunchtime meeting, and I was the grateful recipient of regular hospitality from pretty well everyone with whom I came into contact. Some people simply phoned the hotel, told me they had heard I was researching Beryl and could help; would I come and dine with them? I noted everything down and was initially foxed by the huge mountain of gossip, rumour and innuendo about Beryl.

  ‘She drinks like a fish, you know.’ ‘She had an affair with the Prince of Wales.’ ‘Prince Henry fathered her son.’ ‘She was paid an astronomical amount by the Palace and spent the lot.’ ‘Her family won’t have anything to do with her.’ ‘She couldn’t have written that book, she’s totally illiterate.’ The names of Beryl’s supposed lovers were supplied with breathtaking candour. It took me some days to recognise that gossip is the main social amusement in Kenya. When someone gave me a piece of information which I knew from my previous research could not possibly be true, they were not being malicious or mischievous: they were simply repeating part of the legend that had built up about Beryl since the early years of the twentieth century.