Straight on Till Morning Page 2

  Within days of my first visit I noticed that Beryl had started to wear lipstick. My ten a.m. arrivals found her carefully dressed and waiting for me, sitting facing the door instead of the fireplace. I told her I’d like to learn some Swahili – I hated it when I knew people were talking about me and I couldn’t understand what was being said. After that, she taught me some new words each day and was amused when she heard me use them to communicate with Adiambo and Odero. Adiambo usually smirked openly, but Odero smiled and duly went off to fetch a shawl for Beryl, let the dog out, or produce a glass of water or two cups of tea. Jambo; Hodi; Kwaheri; Maji; Hapana…ndio…Whenever she spoke to someone I would pick out a word or two and later ask the meaning. ‘What does kidogo mean, Beryl?’ ‘Small.’

  The hairdressing session was not a success. I thought her surprisingly thick hair, newly washed and dried, looked much better. Beryl could not wait to see it, but I realised where I had gone wrong the minute she looked in the mirror and said in a doubtful voice, ‘But it’s still white.’ I persuaded a hairdresser at the salon in my hotel to visit Beryl at home, apply a silvery-blonde tint, and cut and style her hair properly. Beryl enjoyed that, so the wash and blow-dry sessions became a regular feature during which we chatted away. One morning soon afterwards I noticed that her finger and toenails were painted bright pink – presumably by Adiambo.

  When I had been there a few weeks, I left the cottage at lunchtime one day to drive into the Ngong Hills to find and photograph the grave of Denys Finch Hatton and visit Karen Blixen’s house (which had been turned into a museum). On my return I took Beryl a book containing images from the movie Out of Africa which I thought she would like. She was rather scathing. ‘Who are these people?’

  ‘That’s supposed to be Tania [Karen Blixen was known to her friends as Tania] and Blix getting married,’ I explained.

  ‘Nothing like them!’ she declared.

  ‘Well, these people are just actors…you went to the film set, remember?’

  ‘What’s he supposed to be doing here?’

  ‘That’s Denys washing Tania’s hair.’

  ‘What?’ A tiny shriek of amusement. ‘Oh no, that’s quite wrong. He would never have washed her hair…’

  That evening I dined at the Couldreys’, who were shocked to hear that I had driven alone round the Ngong Hills, which were supposed to be extremely wild and dangerous.

  As the days wore on and I spent so much time with her, there were times when Beryl’s mind wandered. I came to know the signs. She would repeat herself or trail off in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes this lasted for minutes, sometimes much longer, and it was impossible to make any sense of what she said. On these occasions I would sit quietly, reading or making notes, until she’d demand strongly, ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ She seemed unaware of her departures, but she told me she had a fear of ‘growing old and losing my mind…and people laughing at me behind my back…’ Sometimes if she could not find the right word she became upset. I do not think she had this problem with Swahili – it was almost as if she was more at home in it than in English.

  One day when I arrived at the cottage she told me, ‘I walked to the door and back this morning.’ I was taken aback. ‘Really, Beryl? That’s wonderful news.’ Her friend Paddy Migdoll called soon afterwards en route to see her horses in training for a race on the following Sunday. She often interrupted her busy routine to sit with Beryl. I told Paddy what Beryl had said, and she was equally surprised. She called Adiambo out onto the patio and questioned her out of Beryl’s hearing. Adiambo denied that the memsahib had walked. ‘I’m afraid it’s just her imagination,’ Paddy said to me as I walked her to her car. It wasn’t. After lunch Beryl suddenly announced that she was going for a walk and summoned Odero, who held her hands. I stood ready to catch her, but it was not necessary. She pulled herself to her feet and walked slowly with great concentration to the door – maybe ten steps. ‘Outside now,’ she said. At her request I supported her at the waist as she stepped down onto the patio and then stood away again. Leaning on Odero’s hands, she walked twice round the patio and back to the front door. I was surprised by her height, as I had only ever seen her sitting down.

  When she was back in her chair with a vodka and orange at her elbow, she was elated. ‘I told you I could walk. Call the girl and have your drink topped up. Come on – let’s have some fun, shall we?’ She then talked happily of what she was going to do now that she was walking again, convinced she would be able to drive her car. ‘The first thing I am going to do is drive to the bank and get some money out. I’ve quite a lot you know, from my book, only I can’t get out to the bank without a car.’ ‘Your book has been a tremendous success, hasn’t it?’ ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘It’s astonishing. I’d forgotten all about it.’

  ‘Why did you never write anything else, Beryl?’ I asked.

  ‘I did – lots of little things for those other people,’ she said airily. The ‘other people’ turned out to be magazines – she wrote some short stories, in the same autobiographical style as West with the Night, and these were published by national magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post in the United States.

  It was not an easy thing for me to say but I had to say it. ‘You know that some people tell me you did not write the book alone.’ She was contemptuously dismissive of this, telling me that of course she wrote it herself. So what had Raoul Schumacher – her second husband and, her detractors suggest, the author of the book – done, I wondered, to deserve the generous dedication and thanks? ‘He helped me at the end, he was very good at that sort of thing, very clever, but I wrote the book myself while he was away…he wasn’t even there.’

  Of course I wanted to believe this. Had the doubt not been placed in my mind by people I had interviewed, it would never have occurred to me to question the fact. Talking to her, being with her each day, she embodied all my expectations as the book’s author. I found her highly intelligent and cultured. She had at times an air of detachment which could have been taken for vagueness, but I gained the impression of an immensely strong and complex personality. There are a few stories about her life – more rumours – which I have not been able to verify one way or another to my satisfaction, but my subsequent research resolved any doubts about Beryl’s authorship of West with the Night.

  Sometimes I read to her from one or another of the books on her bookshelves. There were travel books and horse books, some juvenile classics – Peter Pan was a lifelong favourite, as was The Wind in the Willows. She discussed her books as old friends, although she said she had not been able to read for some time because a cataract in one eye had made reading difficult. Once I suggested that since she could walk a little, I would ask Jack Couldrey to organise a car and driver if she wished to go out somewhere – to the Muthaiga Club perhaps? ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I prefer to drive myself about. I am a good driver, you know.’

  She was always polite to me. When she did not wish to answer a question she was transparently evasive. ‘I’m afraid I can’t remember,’ she would say casually. ‘It’s all so long ago now.’ I almost expected a yawn for effect. But when she had genuinely forgotten something she was quite different, almost distressed. ‘I really wanted to tell you but now I can’t remember – I was thinking about it in the night and wanted to tell you…I’m so sorry.’ She was always interested in my research, the people I had talked to and what we had talked about, but I filtered much of the content of my interviews for obvious reasons unless I wanted her to comment on something. She was amused by the extracts I had copied from very early editions of the Kenyan newspaper, the East African Standard. I looked these up in Nairobi’s McMillan Library and at the Kenya National Archives, where the curators of both collections were accommodating enough to allow me to go in and work before the official opening time so that I would not be late going to the cottage. Beryl said she was happy for me to take away a few documents or photographs each night to photo
copy and return the next morning.

  On the only day I failed to see Beryl at all, I left Nairobi before seven a.m. to drive ‘up country.’ Driving up the Kikuyu escarpment, tracking the stupendous Rift Valley and shining lakes of Naivasha and Elmenteita (stopping a number of times to have tyres repaired; it was a dreadful car!), I was on my way to visit Pamela Scott at her house, Deloraine, near Beryl’s childhood home at Njoro. This was one of the interviews suggested by my friend and mentor Elspeth Huxley. Pamela drove me to the old Clutterbuck farm, which had become a wool-spinners’ cooperative. One of the men who worked there, an old African who had lost a leg in Clutterbuck’s sawmill as a child, remembered Beryl well. He stressed her devotion for her father, and her amazing rapport with horses. I was shown inside the small one-bedroom ‘house’ with a shingled roof that Clutterbuck built for Beryl when she refused to live in the same house with her governess. It was now used as a store by the cooperative; it smelled pleasantly of new rugs and was full of dust motes shining in the slanting sunbeams. We walked on the old gallops and Pamela told me she had often ridden on them herself. ‘Beryl always kept them beautifully level and perfectly maintained…’ she said. I drank it all in: the balmy, cedar-scented air, the views across to a distant mountain range in one direction and down the length of the Rift Valley in the other. Silence, except for birdsong. ‘Of course in Beryl’s day this was all forest…’ Pamela was saying. Now there were only clumps of trees in the tamed landscape which had long been divided into shambas (small holdings). Still breathtaking.

  Beryl was waiting impatiently next morning and wanted to hear about everything I had seen. ‘My little house? Oh yes, I remember that so well. It had a proper roof. I loved it though it was tiny…it was lovely up there…we used to ride in the hills…I had the gallops when I was training. No, they weren’t my father’s; they were mine. I used to land my aeroplane there sometimes…’

  One day I asked her if she would write a short introduction for the book. She agreed at once; she would dictate and I would type it. She still had her portable typewriter which lay in its case among the dusty piles of Horse and Hound on her dining table. I found some sheets of airmail paper and sat waiting while she gave it some thought. She dictated a few paragraphs.

  ‘What do you think? Is it any good?’

  ‘Mmm, I’m not sure…’

  ‘I don’t like it much either.’

  This went on for two days, on and off. There were many, many drafts and I began to doubt there would ever be one that she was happy with, but eventually there were three short paragraphs which she approved, and she signed it at my request.

  On the following day some unexpected visitors arrived – a Danish couple who had never met Beryl were brought by a man who had known Beryl many years earlier. Beryl moved into another gear in the company of an admiring male who flirted with her; she was gracious and funny, signing their copies of West with the Night with aplomb. I had a sudden thought and asked her if she would sign another copy of her introduction. ‘What, again?’ she asked. I told her I had found a typing error in the first and wanted it to be perfect for the book. She agreed, so I typed it again and read it out to her and the visitors, who agreed with her that it was good. Actually, there was no typing error; I merely wanted witnesses to the fact that the work was Beryl’s own.

  Not every day was a good day. Sometimes she was tired and querulous with Adiambo and Odero. Her physical frailty irritated her, and she took this out on Adiambo especially. Her biggest problem, though, was loneliness and boredom. She had no television or radio, and she was not able to read. She could not even play her records, for the record player had been stolen in a burglary. I flicked through her collection of disks: some classical, some popular dance music, a large number of Burl Ives LPs and a sound recording of the Derby being won by her famous racehorse, Niagara. She had fairly regular callers. Most days while I was there someone or other popped in to chat, and she always welcomed them. But I could see that these visits took up only a short time in what were otherwise long days of inactivity for her. The worst of it must have been the lack of mental stimulation, and that, I am sure, was why she looked forward to my visits. I used to buy the newspapers on my way in, the Standard and the Nation, and read to her from them.

  When my original three weeks ran out, I extended my stay, reluctant to leave this extraordinary world I’d found, and Beryl. I took advantage of her permission to have all her photographs copied, ensuring that she repeated the offer to me while Jack Couldrey was visiting. By this time, my collection of photocopies, notes, newspaper cuttings and photographs weighed nearly twenty kilos. I did not dare check them into the hold in case they went astray, so I had to pay an excess charge to allow them to travel with me in the cabin.

  On the final day of my time with Beryl – my flight was due to depart at nine p.m. – I was joined at Beryl’s cottage by another overseas visitor. It was George Gutekunst, the American who had read Beryl’s book West with the Night, which was written in 1941, and had been so captivated by it that he had organised for its republication. He had flown in two days earlier to secure film rights to the book, and we had dined together the previous evening. At Beryl’s request I went to the neighbouring cottage and invited ‘VJ,’ the racecourse vet, to join us in drinking the champagne I had brought. I had noticed that Beryl was never quite as bright when there were too many people around – she seemed to lack the concentration to deal with lots of people all talking to her. However, it was a pleasant occasion and Beryl sparkled. The conversation inevitably turned to the Derby, which was to be run that afternoon, and Beryl’s racing triumphs, and suddenly she announced, ‘I’d like to go to the Derby.’ We were silent for a moment, taken by surprise, but it was soon agreed that I would drive Beryl and George in my car. I telephoned the Jockey Club and special provisions were made for Beryl to be carried upstairs there, to the Owners, Breeders and Trainers Stand above the clubhouse, to watch the big race. I went back to the hotel to change and finish packing to be ready to leave for the airport about six o’clock.

  When I returned to the cottage Beryl was waiting for me, standing on the terrace, leaning against the doorpost. Here at last was the famous, indefinable glamour everyone had told me about. She was wearing a modern, pale blue denim trouser suit and a scarf she had borrowed from me (I still wear it with affection); her hair – now ash blonde and expertly styled – had been patted into shape; her finger and toenails were newly painted. Her china-blue eyes sparkled with triumph, and she acknowledged my compliment on her appearance, knowing full well that she looked sensational.

  That is the way I like to recall her. At the races she was constantly surrounded by people coming over to say hello. She enjoyed the Derby, sitting next to an old friend (Elizabeth Erskine), but she tired quickly, and afterwards a young man was sent for to carry her to my car (he often carried a disabled relative so was quite experienced). Unfortunately, he slipped halfway down the flight of stairs and the two of them tumbled to the bottom. Beryl was not injured, so George and I took her home, but she was very shocked. I rang her doctor but there was no answer, so I told Adiambo to give her some hot sweet tea and rushed back to the racecourse to find the course doctor (this was before the advent of mobile phones). I immediately found Charles Markham, who grasped the situation without the need for long explanations, and he arranged everything. I did not see Beryl after that because I was already running late for my flight, and I had to scramble to collect my things from the hotel and drive to the airport. From there, I telephoned Paddy Migdoll and was relieved to hear that she had been to the cottage and found Beryl sedated and resting comfortably. She was fine, just shocked…nothing to worry about, Paddy told me.

  Shortly after returning to England in May I gave up my job to work full time on the biography. I could not think about anything else and was totally obsessed with Beryl and her story. I was delighted to hear from Paddy that Beryl was walking every day, and the surprising news that she had accepted an invitation t
o travel to England in September to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of her record-breaking transatlantic flight at RAF Abingdon. Paddy had agreed to accompany her. In July I was in Santa Barbara, California, visiting Beryl’s old home there and interviewing some old friends of Beryl’s, when Paddy telephoned with bad news. Beryl had tripped over her dog and was now in hospital with a broken hip. I didn’t like the sound of it, but as the days wore on, the news was good. ‘She’s holding her own…fighting…they are pleased with her progress…’ Paddy reported. After Santa Barbara I drove up to San Francisco to visit George Gutekunst, and I was with him on August 3 when Paddy phoned to tell us Beryl had died that morning. We were both stunned.

  In the weeks that followed I organised a Thanksgiving service for Beryl’s life at St Clement Danes in London and met Beryl’s granddaughters, Fleur and Valery. I was proud and sad to watch Fleur Markham, standing in for her grandmother at the Abingdon show, accept the replica Vega Gull trophy from the station commander. Beryl would have adored the occasion. She would have loved, too, seeing her book climb through the sales charts in the United States. By Christmas 1986, five months after her death, her book had reached number one and remained there for weeks on end, on the back of interest generated by a PBS television documentary about her life.

  Beryl became so much a part of my life that it is hard for me now, looking back over twenty-five years, to accept that I knew her personally for only a few short weeks. She totally transformed my life. Her advice to me – ‘Never look back. You’ve got to keep looking forward. Something will always happen if you try to make it happen…’ – inspired me to resign from my well-paid job (which I enjoyed) to write full time. I had always wanted to be a writer but lacked the courage to cast myself adrift from a regular salary. ‘What’s stopping you?’ Beryl asked when I told her this. I muttered something about mortgages. ‘If it’s what you want to do you must do it…it will all work out. It won’t always be easy. Hardly anything worth doing is easy…’