Straight on Till Morning Page 7
A contemporary remembers a visit to the Clutterbuck farm around 1915 to enable her mother to ‘talk horses with Clutt…My mother found us sitting in the corner of a huge loose-box, watching in awe and admiration, as Beryl groomed a large, and very beautiful but reputedly savage imported stallion. He was squealing and snapping but never touched her. She had a truly wonderful gift of understanding and handling animals. She adored them and was quite fearless.’63
The same friend met Beryl a year later in different circumstances. It had been obvious for a long time that the wilful teenager would not learn anything from Mrs Orchardson. Jealousy was almost certainly the reason for this since her father and Mrs Orchardson were by then living together. But none of the governesses who succeeded her fared any better than Mrs Orchardson. Beryl ‘…got rid of them by putting spiders in their beds’. A particularly stubborn one threw back the covers to look for a suspected spider and found a black mamba.64 Two male tutors were engaged in succession and Beryl remembered them as being more successful, but these arrangements were curtailed by the war.
Towards the end of 1915 or early 1916 Miss Hilda Hill-Williams and her sister ‘Tuppence’ were sent to school in Nairobi. The school was run by Miss Secombe who had been a former governess of the Hill-Williams girls. ‘Beryl had been there some little while when we arrived,’ wrote the elder of the two girls. ‘Looking back we must have been a very difficult bunch of independent young things for the poor starched teacher-ladies to try and manage.’ The school was housed in a ‘ghastly little old wood and iron building on The Hill [the part of Nairobi where Government House was located]. We, boys and girls, had mostly come from farm homes where we ran free and rode our ponies and had wonderful lives. We were suddenly confined in what we felt was a prison. It was not easy for staff or pupils. I remember that Beryl didn’t care for authority at all. We were very awe-inspired by her, as she was older and taller and very beautiful. She was one of the loveliest girls I have ever seen.’65
Another pupil at the school, the late Sonny Bumpus (who would later join Beryl in one of the highlights of her life), described her differently. ‘She was a gawky girl, two years older than me…She tried to organize cricket, which never interested me, so I avoided playing and didn’t see very much of her. She was all arms and legs – no chocolate-box beauty. I think she was a very serious-minded person though, she was grown up from the time she was small.’66
Beryl remained at the school for some two and a half years, the only formal education she was to receive. She was a bright pupil but once again she resented the discipline. Cast as Alice in Wonderland in the school play she looked the part, but she was anything but the ‘butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth’ child she appears in the photograph of the event. ‘Beryl always did things better than anyone else – not popular at school,’ a friend noted with amusement.67 Eventually the teachers tired of her trouble-making and she was expelled – probably to considerable mutual relief. The same friend told me, ‘She didn’t get the sack just for being naughty, I think she tried to organize a revolt.’68
The previous few years had been especially difficult for Beryl. Lady Delamere had died, and – soon after he had joined the KAR (King’s African Rifles) – arap Maina had been killed fighting in Tanganyika. Then, later in that same year Beryl learned that her mother, Clara, had divorced her father ‘on the grounds of adultery, coupled with desertion’. Clutterbuck having failed to comply with a decree for restitution of conjugal rights dated 30 November 1913,69 Clara married Harry Fearnley Kirkpatrick in England on the day after the divorce became absolute, following which Charles Clutterbuck and Mrs Orchardson announced their intention to marry as soon as she too could obtain her freedom. After this, but not necessarily as a direct result, Beryl had been sent away to school in Nairobi where she was expected to conform and behave like a conventionally reared Edwardian child.
Any one of these incidents could have been traumatic; coming, as they did, in close succession, it is hardly surprising that the naturally intelligent youngster sought some outlet for her feelings of repression. A latent talent surfaced while Beryl was at school. It was a love of music. She showed great promise at the piano and had she pursued this, could have been a passable player.70
In 1916, following her expulsion, Beryl found herself at home in her beloved Njoro again. There was no more nonsense about Mrs Orchardson being her governess,71 although Emma and Clutterbuck were never able to marry legally as they had intended. Beryl continued to dislike her and refused to live in the farmhouse with her. Instead she remained independent in her own little house, a ‘gingerbread’ structure built for her by Clutterbuck, and made of cedar shingles from their own forest and saw mill.
It was a building to enchant a teenager, a low single-storey cottage with just three rooms. Each room had a pretty gabled roof whose point was topped with a decorative spike. The wooden floors and glass windows were a novelty after her grass hut and it was furnished with two chairs, a table and shelves for her books: ‘I used to read all the time – I could never get enough books.’72 Beryl’s little house is still there today, as are the huge barn-like stables. The cluster of buildings stands on a high sunny plateau under hot clear equatorial skies, surrounded by views that defy description.
In these stables the teenage Beryl was soon acting as head lad. It was her special responsibility to foal down the highly strung thoroughbred mares, and for this alone she must have been an invaluable aid to her father. Clutterbuck was more and more involved with farming and financial matters as the rains failed and he struggled to meet contractual obligations for the supply of posho at a fixed rate. True, he had gained a reputation as ‘the best trainer in the country’, but this was technically a sideline to the farm even though he had over eighty horses in his stables, among them the most successful racehorses in the country. Some belonged to him and the rest to leading figures in the protectorate.73
In 1917 Beryl supervised the foaling of a horse that was to mean a great deal to her – Pegasus. He was by an imported thoroughbred stallion out of a native mare. She remembered him still in 1986 as ‘a big bay gelding. I could do anything with him.’ In her memoir she explains the allegorical references to the name Pegasus that she chose for him on the night he was born, but friends thought she actually got the idea from the name of a brand of petrol widely available in Kenya at that time, which pictured a horse with wings. ‘Pegasus – the spirit of mileage and power’ ran the slogan.
Beryl became a well-known figure on Pegasus as the pair roamed the countryside together and won events at race days, gymkhanas and shows.74 One occasion has become a Kenya legend. In the show-jumping ring one of the jumps was a huge double which was causing some distress among the competitors. To the amazement of the crowd, Pegasus successfully cleared it in one enormous leap.75
Another horse came into Beryl’s life at this time, one of the few that she was to remember into old age. He was a big half-bred dark bay with a white blaze, his thoroughbred quartering obvious only in his courage for he had a large common head, and feathers, where Beryl was used to the clean-legged grace of her father’s thoroughbreds.
This horse was brought to Njoro by two men from F.O.B. Wilson’s Scouts.76 They had come to recuperate from the fighting with Von Lettow Vorbeck’s forces in German East Africa. When the party arrived they were all sick – the two men and the six horses. Beryl sat up for several nights nursing the horse to health. Afterwards she rode him out and came to know and love him for the generosity of his temperament. ‘If Camsiscan was the prince,’ she said later, ‘The Baron was the general, he was more capable than many men.’ He was a gallant campaign horse who had seen dreadful sights and had carried his unconscious rider to safety through some of the fiercest fighting on the front. The rider had half his face shot away and the horse too was badly injured.77
His rider, a captain whose name was Dennis, was tall, fair and a good horseman. He played endless games of cricket with Beryl while his face healed to a mass o
f scar tissue. They went shooting for the pot on horseback. In a short story published in 1944 Beryl wrote:
They taught me how to use a revolver. Mounted on their best horse called The Baron, I would go off with them. Those days stick in my mind as some of the happiest and most exciting in my life. We would come home tired and happy and in the evenings when my father had finished working, we would all play whisky-poker. I say when my father finished working at times he would work up till all hours of the morning, as he seldom got back from the forest and the mills etc., before dark. Then he had all his book work and accounts.78
Eventually the men and horses went back to the war and she never saw them again, but the horse left behind a bright and ever-present memory of a gallant animal, and a hatred of the sheer stupidity of war. First her friend arap Maina had been sacrificed to its senseless brutality, and now this horse with whom she had developed a special relationship had returned to almost certain slaughter. Many years later she wrote about the episode, as usual subtly altering the facts to provide a moving climax to her story.79
Again and again, people who had known Beryl as a growing teenager paid tribute to her horsemanship and fearlessness. ‘There was no horse she could not ride – even as quite a young girl.’ ‘She used to ride fearsome stallions with the reins held up loosely under her chin. Even as a child of eleven she was riding out alone on her father’s racehorses.’ It is difficult to deny that for Beryl, animals were her only real friends.
As she left her childhood behind, her extraordinary personality was beginning to emerge. She was fearless, strong and physically able to undertake any task she set herself. She was thoroughly at home in her surroundings and as at one with her adopted country as it is possible to be. She had great ability and was competent and knowledgeable at her work; and she had a unique facility for developing relationships with animals. What she lacked was the ability to handle human relationships. During her formative teenage years, when she perhaps could have achieved the closeness with her father for which she subconsciously yearned, she was driven from his presence more and more by her (self-inflicted and unreciprocated) dislike for her stepmother; and apart from her friendship with Kibii she developed no close relationship with anyone. In consequence she was a complex mixture of physical self-confidence and emotional awkwardness.
About this time, a clairvoyant told her, ‘You will always be successful, but you will never be happy.’80 It was a remarkably succinct summary. Beryl seemed to spend her adult life searching for something. Neither she nor anyone else knew what that something was, but she drove herself on in seemingly relentless determination to attain it. At sixteen Beryl had no way of knowing that it was to be a life full of adventure and incident, and would take her far from her beloved Njoro.
CHAPTER THREE
1918–1927
At sixteen Beryl was a tall, long-limbed and wilful beauty. She was afraid of nothing and was able to talk and compete with men on their own level. She knew and spoke her own mind and she had the reputation for upsetting people, especially female contemporaries. ‘She wasn’t very friendly…’ said one.1 She had virtually been raised as a boy and was hardly ever seen wearing a skirt after she left school.
Despite this she was intensely feminine. She took great pains over her appearance, and there was now no tomboyishness about her patrician beauty, which was enhanced by her sense of fun and an extraordinary energy. She developed the unconscious mannerism of patting her long hair into docility with her long shapely hands. With her clear, fair skin tanned to a golden brown, her light brown hair bleached by the sun because she never wore a hat, and her vivacious energy, she was in great demand as a dancing partner in the celebrations held to mark the end of the Great War. As yet she was unpolished. She did not know how to dress, and she had no one to tell her; socially she was gauche and awkward, with an appealing vulnerability.
Her life was a full one. She worked happily and competently for her father, spending her spare time riding or travelling round to race meetings, and there was a crowd of young people to provide a round of social activities. She was confident in herself and her skill with horses, and as a friend told me, ‘She was just not like other girls of that age.’2 Evanston Muwangi worked for Beryl in the stables at Green Hills, and still works on the farm which is now owned by a weaving cooperative.3 He remembered that Beryl loved horses more than people. She was very strict with syces: ‘If you did good work she had no quarrel, but to those who did not do right she was tough.’ Another friend said, ‘She was very particular about feeding and grooming. A syce hadn’t to behave badly more than once and he was out…If he failed to clean out his horse’s feet when he should have, or something like that, she would say, “Look for a job somewhere else – I don’t want you in my stable.”’4 She was hard but fair, she knew her job and worked hard and expected the same of others.
With around a hundred horses in his stables, both Clutt and Beryl were kept busy. Clutterbuck rarely involved himself in politics or any other non-equine activities. It is difficult to find much trace of him, outside of faded memories, and innumerable reports of racing successes, but a number of letters written by him to the editor of the East African Standard reveal something of his character.
The following letter, written in September 1918, was in response to a letter printed the previous week in the Standard, from Berkeley Cole – an old friend from the early days of European settlement in Kenya, and one of Clutt’s horse owners:
I have just read Mr C.B. Cole’s letter in your issue of 21st, in which he apparently condemns the action of the authorities in calling on the Masai5 to produce 400 men for the KAR [King’s African Rifles] and upholds the attitude of the Masai in refusing to do so.
I fail to understand Mr Cole’s arguments. Large numbers of every other tribe in the protectorate have been called upon to do their share in the war, many of them both as Askaris [guards or policemen] and Porters; and practically all the Masai have done is to sell cattle and sheep for cash, which I consider they ought to have been compelled to do even before the war for their own good and the country at large.
There have always been a number of ‘Masai Maniacs’ in the country, some honestly so, and some because they think it is the swagger thing to be followed about by a Masai boy, who is too tired to speak unless he can lean against something to support him while he is doing so, and who would have a fit if requested to carry his master’s bag! The Masai boast that they are a fighting people. They were told to supply only 400 fighting men, which they refused to do. In my opinion they should no longer be given the chance, but 2000 of them should now be taken, not as fighting men but as porters.
It appears to me to be a most undesirable thing if…Lord Delamere has been asked to ‘clean up the mess’. He has always been the arch Masai Maniac, when not engaged in writing letters on behalf of the Somalis and equally useless and objectionable people. To the uninitiated savage (and there is no greater savage than the Masai), this must appear a confirmation of the weakness of the authorities. Mr Cole seems to be rather frightened about his herd boys. This, to the man in the street, might suggest the possibility of his letter being not altogether uninterested. I have not heard the employer of the Kavirondo, Wakikuyu or Wakamba labour complain, when thousands or hundreds of these tribesmen were taken as porters, nor would the tribes in question have been given the chance of listening to the soft persuasive utterances of the noble Lord, before being punished if they had the temerity to refuse to obey orders.
As far as I can see, the Masai, when competing with other tribes in the protectorate, have not done their bit in any way since the war was declared. If, as Mr Cole states, they are not amenable to discipline, then the sooner they are taught to do so the better, and as they are apparently too proud or too frightened to fight, a little load carrying would act as a very useful tonic for their swollen heads.
A further letter in a lighter tone appeared in August 1919, complaining about a recent article by the Standard’s rac
ing correspondent regarding the merits of moving the racecourse6 to another site. It gives an insight into his pithy sense of humour.
…It is a pity that if you must publish articles on racing, that you do not get them written by someone who understands a little of the game. The gentleman who wrote the article in your issue of last Tuesday would appear to be more conversant with whippets than horses!
In rapid succession Clutterbuck took every major racing trophy, among them the Jubiland Cup, the Produce Stakes, Kenya Steeplechase Cup, Naval and Military Cup, War Memorial Cup and the East African Standard Gold Cup. Camsiscan ran often and with great success in spite of being heavily handicapped. There can be no doubt that Clutterbuck had a genius for bringing out the very best in horses. All the knowledge he had, he passed on to his daughter.
There was another talented youngster around the Clutterbuck farm. Arthur Orchardson, the son of Mrs Orchardson and her ever-absent anthropologist husband, also grew up with a tremendous knowledge of horses and was a good rider.7 In later years he was to be a great help to Beryl as a trusted aide and jockey.
Meanwhile, the drought which had been creating severe problems for settler farmers caused even greater concern to Clutterbuck. He had contracted to supply large quantities of grain to the authorities at a fixed price. He could not grow sufficient grain to meet the contract, and as the rains failed the price of grain rocketed and grain stores emptied. In order to meet his obligations Clutterbuck had to buy grain for more than his contracted sale price for the milled product. He purchased all he could get from his neighbours, among whom was ‘Jock’ Purves.