Straight on Till Morning Read online

  Clutterbuck intended to make a success of his venture in Kenya from the start. He was more resourceful than many of the early settlers and he had the constant support and advice of Delamere; indeed it is difficult to separate Clutterbuck’s early projects from Delamere’s own concerns and interests. Much of Clutterbuck’s initial work was performed on Delamere’s behalf and was subsequently taken over by Clutterbuck, probably on very favourable terms.

  Delamere pointed out to him the fact that the railway company had a number of redundant engines at various points along the line, and so Clutterbuck purchased two old engines and used them to power a mill to grind the maize and wheat grown by himself and his neighbours.8 There was no easy living to be had, but Clutt’s Mill, as it was known to the settlers, slowly prospered, in spite of numerous farming difficulties affecting the protectorate. Over the years Clutterbuck astutely acquired government contracts to provide posho (ground maize) for the workers on the Uganda Railway.

  He was also quick to act on Delamere’s early concern that despite the enormous quantities of trees available in the country, timber for building had to be imported because of lack of processing facilities in Kenya. Clutt bought two more engines in the autumn of 1906 and built a saw mill at the side of the railway track where it crossed his land. Delamere had spotted the potential of saw mills some time earlier and had ordered his agent in England to acquire and send out ‘two small circular saws, a large rack circular saw and other woodworking equipment’.9 The equipment took a long time to arrive, but Delamere had postdated the cheque for the equipment by a year.

  Timber processed by Clutt was used by a newly arrived carpenter, Mr Francis Morris, to build his own and then Lady Delamere’s house in 1907.10 Lady Delamere, writing to her husband, told him, ‘The rain has been awful, and the cold intense. I hope you won’t be annoyed but I couldn’t stand it any longer and have bought a little house and have hired a carpenter to build it.’11

  ‘Intense’ cold, on a farm which has the equator running within its boundaries, is an interesting paradox, but Equator Ranch was more reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands than anywhere in Africa. Mr Morris lined the inside of Lady Delamere’s house with bamboo. When he subsequently built a house for Berkeley Cole (Lady Delamere’s brother), Mr Morris lined the walls with tapestry, a source of wonderment to his young son Langley, who thought it the ultimate in luxury.

  Gradually the number of Africans working on the Clutterbuck farm increased until there were over a thousand. When Winston Churchill briefly halted his train journey at the farm in 1907 there were nearly nine hundred employed solely on cutting timber and clearing the forest. Much of the timber was used to fuel the trains – a lucrative contract. Churchill described Clutterbuck as ‘A young English gentleman…a model employer of native labour’.12 This labour force sounds huge by today’s standards, but it was not unusual. Karen Blixen, for example, was welcomed to her farm in 1914 by a similar number of African workers.13

  The amount of effort involved in clearing land from the bush and forest was herculean. At that time there were no machines to pull the unyielding stumps from the ground even after the mass of timber was cleared. Many willing hands were needed, and teams of oxen. The Dutch who had trekked north from the Cape were the experts with oxen, and Clutterbuck took full advantage of their skills.14 Beryl was later to write of her father’s heroic work in

  clearing the trees from our farm – or rather…fighting the Mau Forest, which, in its centuries of unhampered growth had raised a rampart of trees so tall I used to think their branches brushed the sky. The trees were cedar, olive, yew and bamboo, and often the cedars rose to heights of two hundred feet blocking the sun. Men said this forest could not be beaten, and this was true but at least my father made it retreat. Under his command a corps of Dutchmen with hundreds of oxen and an axe to every man assaulted the bulwark day after day, and in time its outer walls began to fall.15

  For Churchill’s visit, Clutterbuck had a path cleared through the forest which linked a loop in the railway line. The path consisted of a leafy tunnel, about a mile and a half long, through the forest which Churchill described as dense and confused.

  The great giants towered up magnificently to a hundred and fifty feet. Then came the ordinary forest trees, much more thickly clustered. Below this was a layer of scrub and bushes and under, around and among the whole flowed a vast sea of convolvulus-looking creeper. Through this four-fold veil the sunlight struggled down every twenty yards or so in gleaming chequers of green and gold.

  Characteristically, Churchill was not only observant of the scenery.

  What a way to cut fuel! A floating population…pecking at the trees with native choppers more like a toy hoe than an axe…Each of the nine-hundred natives employed costs on the whole six pounds a year. The price of a tree-felling plant, with a mile of mono-rail tram complete, is about five-hundred pounds, and [would] effect a sevenfold multiplication of power. It is no good trying to lay hold of Tropical Africa with naked fingers. Civilization must be armed with machinery if she is to subdue these wild regions to her authority.

  He talked of this to Clutterbuck as they scrambled through the forest path. But Churchill’s conclusion – ‘It is of vital importance that these forests should not be laid waste by reckless and improvident hands. It is not less important that the Uganda Railway should have cheap fuel’16 is oddly poignant, for in 1986 a visit to the site he describes reveals treeless farmland.

  As time went on there was no sign of Clara’s return to Kenya with Richard, but the farm thrived, thanks to Clutterbuck’s efforts and administrative ability, and Beryl thrived along with it. The horses were her special love. Her father was not slow to notice the special affinity Beryl had with all animals, but particularly with horses. Even as a child she had the ability to make a horse ‘quiet’, simply by touching it. She was, like both her parents, a natural rider totally without fear, and rode all horses on a long rein, with great sensitivity.17 Her own special horse, acquired when Beryl was only six years old, was an Arab pony stallion called Wee Macgregor.18 Years later Beryl wrote about her childhood friend:

  Wee Macgregor maintained throughout his life a gentle contempt for men and the works of men, and I am convinced that his willing response to their demands was born wholly of tolerance. He rarely ignored a word or resisted a hand…Wee Macgregor was an Arab. His coat was chestnut and his mane and tail were black, and he wore a white star on his forehead – jauntily and a little to one side, more or less as a street urchin might wear his cap. He was an urchin too by the standards of our stables. He was perfectly built but very small, and though he was a stallion, he was not bought to breed, certainly not to race, but only to work carrying myself, or my father – and even if need be to pull a light pony cart.19

  Before race days Beryl helped her father and the syces (grooms) to load the horses, including her own Wee Macgregor, on to the down train bound for Nairobi. She always accompanied her father to the race meetings, she recalled, and they slept in tents…‘nearly everybody did’.

  One race meeting in 1909 must have been especially exciting for the little girl, for her father won the Produce Plate riding Sugaroi, a horse he trained for Berkeley Cole. This race was being run for the first time in 1909 and soon it was regarded as one of the feature races in East Africa. No wonder Beryl grew up hero-worshipping her father when so often she saw him as king in his own country.

  As well as stables full of glossy thoroughbreds, there were always innumerable pets around Green Hills: ‘orphans mostly’, Beryl recalled: lambs, fawns orphaned by hunting ‘accidents’, goat kids and dogs. There was a pure-bred bull terrier (her father’s favourite dog, given to him by Lord Delamere), which was the sire of Beryl’s own crossbreed, Buller. Clara had left behind the large and very beautiful English sheepdog she had originally taken out to Kenya with her, and there were also two imported greyhounds called Storm and Sleet, and two great danes. Beryl recalled sadly that nearly all of them were killed by dis
ease or ‘taken by leopards’.20

  However, and despite Beryl’s assertions to the contrary in her memoir, there was another woman besides Lady Delamere who had some influence on her upbringing. It was her Aunt Annie. Clutterbuck’s elder brother Henry21 together with his wife Annie and their son Jasper had moved to Kenya from India in 1908 when the climate there proved too much for Henry’s constitution. They settled at Molo, about half a day’s ride from Njoro, and there was naturally some intimacy between the two families. Jasper was two months younger than Beryl and the two were occasional playmates.

  Before her marriage, the tall and elegant Annie had been brought up in a very luxurious manner, one grandfather being Wykeham-Martin of Leeds Castle and the other the Earl of Cornwallis. Her photograph in court dress at the time of her presentation shows a poised and very lovely woman. In India she had been used to running her sizeable household with the aid of efficient, well-trained servants, and the privations of the farm at Molo came as a considerable shock. But she made the best of it and grappled valiantly with the odds. On one occasion during her husband’s absence on business her servants told her, ‘Some men have threatened to come and break in in the night and kill everyone and steal the stock.’ Annie calmly took out a revolver and loaded it before their eyes, slowly and deliberately. Then she lit a storm lantern and sat down in a chair facing the door. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘that I shall be patrolling the house all night. If I see anyone moving at all I shall kill them immediately.’

  Another time when she was alone with her small son they heard something walking on the roof. The servants who were outside called out, ‘Don’t come out – there is an animal on the roof who will kill you and eat your brains. Shoot at it through the roof.’ ‘Mother, who did not know how to use a rifle, but did not want the servants to know this, called out that the bwana [master] would be angry if she shot holes in the roof and instead prodded the thatch with a native spear. The animal went away and later the servants told us it had been the nandi bear. This creature was long assumed by Europeans to be a mythical animal, but there has been evidence recently that it was a small species of bear. The Africans were quite correct, it had a tendency to kill its victims and eat the brains.’22

  On Christmas Eve 1910 Annie gave birth to a second son, Nigel, and Beryl saw both cousins, as well as her aunt and uncle, as frequently as was convenient given the circumstances and the difficulties of travel. Beryl does not mention her aunt or her two cousins in her memoir, but it is inconceivable that during six important formative years of her life she would have been ignored by Annie, nor could she have failed to be affected by Annie’s intrepid nature.

  Undoubtedly Beryl’s ability later in life to merge into London society, her cultured manners and accent, her pleasantly high, slightly nasal speaking voice, were developed by contact with expatriate upper-class Europeans. But these were external attributes. Beryl’s character was developing in a complex manner; for instance without regular parental guidance her instinct led her to adopt the belief that ‘the end justifies the means’ – a basic premise in the art of survival – and this characteristic was to reveal itself noticeably as she grew older when her tendency to ‘use’ people – and their possessions blatantly, was even described as amoral. Her extraordinary energy, zest for life and the remarkable freedom she was allowed (or took), led her into many childhood adventures which would normally have been denied to girls, whether of European or African backgrounds. As an old lady she recalled, ‘I admire my father for the way he raised me. People go around kissing and fussing over their children. I didn’t get anything like that. I had to look after myself and then I used to go off and read by myself and think by myself. Funnily enough it made me.’23 Admirable from her point of view it may have been, but it is difficult to rid oneself of the impression of a lonely child deprived of the affection she outwardly eschewed but inwardly craved, for she undoubtedly adored her father and for the remainder of her life never met another man who measured up to him.

  If Clutterbuck, a former classics scholar, was worried about the lack of formal education for his daughter, his concern was not readily apparent. Beryl told me: ‘Daddy used to teach me things’; but this seems to have been limited to the retelling of stories of ancient Greece, and answering the child’s constant stream of questions. As an eight-year-old she went to stay with a neighbour’s wife and son, while Clutterbuck and the husband, Edward Lidster, went off to the Congo on an ivory-hunting expedition. During this time Mrs Lidster taught Beryl to read from Mee’s Encyclopedia, an invaluable source of reference for colonial mothers.24 Beryl was an intelligent child and learned quickly, but she was no lover of organized lessons. By the time her father returned she could both read and write, and from then on she became an avid reader, but given half a chance she ‘ducked lessons, in favour of horses and games with her African playmates’.25 Doreen Bathurst-Norman recalled how Beryl told her of ‘wrestling matches with the African boys, which she often won. She grew immensely strong and knew how to use her physical strength to its best advantage.’

  During her stay with the Lidsters, Beryl met Langley Morris, then aged about seven years old. According to him, European children were as scarce as hen’s teeth – the farms themselves were widely scattered and the children seldom travelled off them. Beryl was the first white girl he had ever seen and he remembers her as looking like ‘…Alice in Wonderland…I don’t mean pretty or missish, it was a sort of style of dressing that all the girls of that period affected. Loose fair hair, worn long and caught up in a ribbon. Rather Victorian than Edwardian, but fashions took a long time to reach East Africa. She was an intelligent girl, tall and slim with a bright vivacity…as I recall she knew the sort of things that I knew; what to do in case of snake-bite, where to shoot a charging elephant, where to hit a lion (in the shoulder to lame him; you couldn’t hope to kill him with the first shot), how to skin a buck, the effects of strychnine poisoning’26…‘these were the important things to us as children. The emphasis of the educational process was on survival.’27

  Soon after his return from the Congo expedition, Clutterbuck hired as Beryl’s governess Mrs Orchardson, the wife of a newly arrived English settler. Beryl took an instant dislike to her, and this dislike grew into open antagonism as the years passed. The reason for her hostility was almost certainly rooted in jealousy and still, nearly eighty years later, she referred to her former governess as ‘that bloody woman!’

  Mr Orchardson,28 an artist of Royal Academy standard, turned anthropologist, was seldom in evidence since his objective in going to Africa was to conduct a serious study of the Kipsigis tribe and he spent the next nineteen years living in Kipsigis villages, returning occasionally to visit Mrs Orchardson and their son Arthur, who was the same age as Beryl.

  Around this time the farm acquired a house built strongly of cedar. At night the light from the blazing log fires flickered on the polished floor and reflected in the panelled walls, and their warmth drew out the aromatic fragrance from the wood. In the main living room on the huge stone chimneybreast, Clutterbuck used to measure Beryl’s height in charcoal on the stones. These marks remained until the farmhouse burned down in 1983 and the fireplace was dismantled.29 But Beryl, rebellious and defiant, was unwilling to move into the house under Mrs Orchardson’s constant supervision, and she continued to sleep in her own mud rondavel some distance away.

  Poor Emma Orchardson! She saw it as her duty to bring order and conventionality into the life of this strong-willed child. Until that time Beryl’s father had treated his daughter like a boy. She was allowed to plan her own life, to work or play as she wished, to accompany her father as he worked about the farm, and occasionally to read a little and learn by listening to Clutterbuck. Her father was fair but firm and was not above taking a stick to her if she transgressed.30 Beryl accepted this – she loved and respected him. But she loathed Mrs Orchardson. Whenever she could, she ran off with her African friends to play in the cool Mau forests, or hid in the st
ables which by now had expanded to over twenty horses, in training and being brought on, by the enterprising Clutterbuck. ‘Daddy was very good about it – he understood how I felt,’ Beryl recalled. ‘It was a very hard upbringing,’ stated a friend.31 But it was the upbringing Beryl wanted. She revelled in it.

  If she disliked Mrs Orchardson, she adored her father single-mindedly. The two became a familiar sight, for as she grew into adolescence she continued to accompany him when he went to Nairobi a hundred-odd miles to the south-east, for business reasons or to the races. They travelled down by the twice-weekly train, with their horses. By the time she was eleven Beryl was already riding out on her father’s racehorses32 and had become an accomplished and competent horsewoman.

  On some of these trips south the pair would hunt with the Masara Hounds. Jim Elkington, a huge Old Etonian with a genial countenance and sparkling blue eyes, was the Master and huntsman of this pack of imported foxhounds, and both a good friend and a rival of Clutterbuck on Nairobi’s race course. The Elkington farm was a regular stop for Clutterbuck and Beryl when they came in from up country.

  The Elkington homestead was ‘complete with bleached and horned animal skulls lining the walls, a veranda ran all round the ramshackle wooden bungalow, littered with riding crops and bits of saddlery with dog bowls and…a huge population of dogs and cats, waiting to trip you up.’ A caged parrot acted as an early-warning system for approaching visitors, and above all there was Paddy.33

  Paddy, the unusual companion of the Elkingtons’ only child Margaret, was a huge black-maned lion. He was the only survivor of a litter of three cubs, the offspring of a lioness shot by accident.34 Raised by the Elkingtons on a mixture of egg and milk fed to him in a baby’s bottle, he was regarded by the family as totally tame and was allowed to roam about the property like a pet dog, ‘loose about the house until he got so big that he could pat Mrs Jim [Mrs Elkington] and she fell down’.35