Out In The Midday Sun Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Map of Kenya

  Foreword

  1 Hat Overboard

  2 Nuggets and Covered Wagons

  3 Nellie’s Friends

  4 Adolescent Nairobi

  5 Cockie, Blix and the Prince of Wales

  6 Umbrellas, Tea-birds and the Nandi Bear

  7 Livestock Barons of the Rift Valley

  8 A Man of Big Ideas

  9 Under the Mountain

  10 The Powys Saga

  11 Safari with Sharpie

  12 Tales of the Northern Frontier

  13 Among the Kikuyu

  14 Lamu to London

  15 Fifty Years On

  Notes and Sources

  Glossary

  Picture Section

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Elspeth Huxley captivated readers throughout the world with her ‘memories of an African childhood’ in The Flame Trees of Thika and The Mottled Lizard. In this final volume of her trilogy she tells the story of her adult life in Africa, in which the vigorously evoked personalities – from pioneer Lord Delamere and Baroness Blixen to Jomo Kenyatta – blend with her superb description of the social, cultural and political upheavals of the time.

  PIMLICO

  401

  OUT IN THE MIDDAY SUN

  Elspeth Huxley was born in 1906 and spent most of her childhood in Kenya. She was educated at the European School in Nairobi and at Reading University, where she took a diploma in agriculture, and at Cornell University, USA. In 1929 she joined the Empire Marketing Board as a press officer. She married Gervas Huxley in 1931 and travelled widely with him in America, Africa and elsewhere. She was on the BBC General Advisory Council from 1952 to 1959, when she joined the Monckton Advisory Commission on Central Africa. She wrote novels, detective fiction, biography and travel titles, and her books include The Flame Trees of Thika (1959), The Mottled Lizard (1962), The Challenge of Africa (1971), Livingstone and His African Journeys (1974), Florence Nightingale (1975), Scott of the Antarctic (1977), Nellie: Letters from Africa (1980), Whipsnade: Captive Breeding for Survival (1981), The Prince Buys the Manor (1982) and Last Days in Eden (1985, with Hugo van Lawick). She died in 1997.

  ELSPETH HUXLEY

  OUT IN THE

  MIDDAY SUN

  My Kenya

  Foreword

  If you live long enough you find, much to your surprise, that you have lived through a part of history; people and events that you recall as if they had lived and happened yesterday vanish into a seamless past and turn into legends. To anyone aged thirty, what happened fifty years ago seems as remote and peculiar as, say, the Crimean War or the War Between the States appeared to people of my generation. I think this is especially so in the case of British colonial history in Africa, which ended over twenty years ago. Elderly colonials have become period pieces in their own lifetimes; and now that they are obsolete and therefore harmless, a certain indulgence has crept into the general attitude towards them, softening the disdain in which they were previously held.

  This book is not, most emphatically not, an attempt at a political history, or any other kind of proper history. Nor does it take a stance on the wrongs and rights of colonialism. For good or ill, colonialism happened, as it has throughout the centuries from the time of the Assyrians, and I expect before, to the time of the USSR. I have little doubt that it will continue to happen, since the strong and confident will always wish to spread their doctrines and customs, and often their rule, to the less strong and confident, thereby enhancing their own strength and (as they hope) security, regardless of ethics.

  All I have attempted to do in these pages is to put on record memories of some of the people and places of eastern Africa, mainly of Kenya, in the period between the First and Second World Wars. I have not brought down a guillotine fore and aft, so the time-scale now and then extends backwards into earlier years and forwards into later ones. I have been greatly helped by many friends, some of them children or other relatives of the earlier members of the white tribe of Kenya, some of them tough old survivors pushing ninety, or even past that tidemark, who have lent me letters and diaries, and gone to much trouble to recall their own memories of fifty years ago and more. A list of names at this point would, I think, be rather tedious, so I have acknowledged their help in notes to each chapter at the end of the book. I hope they will forgive this form of thanksgiving which cannot, however offered, be adequate; I am deeply grateful to them all.

  After Kenya’s independence in 1963 some of the place-names were changed, African ones replacing those bestowed by British geographers and agents. In the main I have continued to employ the old colonial names, because they were in use at the time of which I have been writing, but I have indicated the modern ones.

  The Rhodes House Library in Oxford, which has assembled, and continues to assemble, a splendid collection of colonial records, was, as always, most helpful, and my thanks are due to the Librarian, Mr Alan Bell, and his staff; also to Mrs Olive Gorton of Cirencester, who with great patience and, I must assume, at times second sight, has managed to decipher both my handwriting and my two-fingered stabs at a typewriter well on its way to becoming an interesting and, I hope, in due course, a valuable antique.

  CHAPTER 1

  Hat Overboard

  An old diary is as good a starting point as any. I have never kept proper diaries, only little pocket ones recording the barest details; somehow or other, that for 1933 survives. It was in January 1933 that I set out to return to Africa after an absence of eight years.

  January 19. Left Victoria on P and O Express at 1.50 p.m. Seen off by Frank MacD, Jim and Polly, Michael and Ottilie, Aunt Vera, Basil Marriot, Eaton, Wilkie. Very cold, snow on ground.

  ‘Seen off’ – every voyage started with a party then. Station platforms and quaysides were crowded with well-wishers come to say Godspeed. Laughter, speculation, promises, awkwardness as time stretched out and one had said all there was to say. Once aboard, there would be flowers, telegrams, an attentive steward disposing of suitcases, the smell peculiar to ships compounded of – what? Paint, ropes, sea-water, some kind of disinfectant? An exciting smell anyway, and an exciting bustle. Departure was a ceremony investing the traveller with a little brief authority, a fleeting importance.

  ‘I’ll write from Port Said.’

  ‘Something light for the voyage. A new Ellery Queen.’

  ‘Press photographers. Who d’you think’s on board?’

  ‘Some actress …’

  Puffing grandly, the engine moved, the platform became a mosaic of waving hands, faces blurred and vanished. Once out of the station, sleet rattled on the window-panes. We were bound first for Marseilles.

  A year and one month since we married, and now we must part, Gervas for Ceylon and I for Kenya. The Depression was upon us, gaunt faces under shabby caps stared from street corners, the economic blood-stream of the Western world was clogged. One day Gervas said: ‘Our horse has been shot under us.’ The organisation that employed us both was to be abolished – axed, we called it, the Geddes axe.

  We had no resources, but Gervas had a friend called John Still, an unusual man, a poet, who had spent his life, save for an interlude as prisoner-of-war in Turkey, in the jungles and mountains of Ceylon. He had written evocatively about them in a book called The Jungle Tide. The Depression had not spared Ceylon and, in particular, the tea plantations. Chests of unsaleable tea were piled up in warehouses and were even, we heard, being thrown into the sea.

  A bold counter-stroke was planned. The world had too much tea. If people could be persuaded to drink more of it, e
ven a few cups each per year, the surplus would melt away. A body was formed to carry out this plan (or try to anyway) and someone was needed to direct it, starting from scratch.

  One cold November day I met Gervas at Paddington station en route for Oxford, where his father lived. It was dark and drizzly, soot-laden steam swirled around us, locomotives panted, whistles blew, lights were halo’d in smoke, it was like being at the bottom of a grimy sea. Over a cup of tea in the buffet he said: ‘Shall I accept?’ It would mean, for him, continuous travel for at least three years, and his modest salary would not provide tickets for me. Our perch must be abandoned – a little rented flat, sparsely furnished, in a turret, one room (three in all) on each floor. (On top was the sitting room whose ceiling had been painted midnight blue with silver stars.) The question was rhetorical. Three months later we were on our way.

  Gervas had indeed been fortunate, and my luck was in too. Rather more than a year before, the pioneer of white settlement in Kenya, Lord Delamere (third Baron), had died. His life in Africa had spanned, or very nearly spanned, Kenya’s colonial period up to date; he had entered into every controversy and been involved in almost every development. To write his life would be to write Kenya’s history over the past thirty years, a fascinating but exacting task for which I had no qualifications beyond some experience in journalism and a little knowledge of the country. Nevertheless I wrote to Delamere’s widow Glady and she, to my surprise and delight, authorised me to write the biography.

  There remained the obstacle of money. Clearly I had to get to Kenya where most of the material lay. Here I was fortunate again: a publisher expressed interest and offered an advance of two hundred pounds. To sign the contract, I was led through silent panelled anterooms, half expecting to see clerks perched on high stools clasping quill pens and bent over ledgers; then up a wide staircase and into the presence of a tall, stooping figure who rose courteously from a commodious arm-chair, extended an arm and touched my hand – the merest touch, putting me in mind of a limp fish. This was Harold Macmillan.

  So here we were, bound for Marseilles and the parting of our ways.

  January 20. Lunch on board ss Maloja. Went to Hotel Beauvais, dinner at the Frégate, very good meal. Gervas went on board 10 p.m.

  Alone, I returned to the hotel. My ship, the ss Malda, was due next morning but failed to arrive. Marseilles in January was bleak, lonely and cold. I wrote letters. Next morning the Malda put in; amid a rattle of winches and shouts of seamen I climbed a gangway slippery with salt spray, and we steamed into a wintry Mediterranean sea.

  January 23. Sick. Cold. Passed Corsica. Dr Burkitt on board.

  Dr Burkitt I knew. He was one of Kenya’s characters and a great doctor in his way, but his way was rough and ready and I was thankful that I had never been his patient. Had I been suffering from malaria, I would have been made to sit naked in a tub in the draughtiest place available, such as a veranda, and sponged continuously with cold water – teeth chattering, blue with cold – until either I expired or my temperature sank to normal. This was Dr Burkitt’s famous cold-water cure, based on the theory that the parasites which cause malaria and other fevers thrive only at high body temperatures, and perish at normal ones, so that if you can only get the temperature down, you overcome the disease. Apparently the theory worked, and Dr Burkitt cured many sufferers; if he also killed some, they would probably have died anyway. The theory was extended to horses, and became the standard treatment for the disease known as horse-sickness for which no other cure or antidote was known. Many is the hour I had spent sponging down shivering and miserable ponies tethered to a tree while buckets of water were brought in relays. Dread and affection competed equally for ascendancy in the minds of the doctor’s patients.

  Dr Roland Burkitt had arrived from Ireland in 1911 to start the first private practice in Nairobi.1 He was a surgeon, not a physician, but in Africa medicine couldn’t be shut into compartments. Many Burkitt stories were in circulation, such as that describing how he had driven a hundred miles or so to a sick woman – he would drive any distance, anywhere, by day or night, in an old rattle-trap of a car, to answer a call – and had stripped her naked, bundled her into the back of his jalopy and driven furiously over bumps, potholes, rocks and rivers to the hospital, stopping at intervals to take her temperature. As they proceeded, the woman’s temperature fell and Dr Burkitt removed first his jacket, then his shirt and finally his trousers to clothe his patient. When they arrived at the hospital, Dr Burkitt was naked and the woman fully clad.

  That, at any rate, was the story. Another related how a patient, loaded into the doctor’s car while in a coma, came round to find that he was sharing the back seat with a dead antelope. The doctor always carried a rifle in his car and would now and then alight to shoot something for the pot when on his errands of mercy. Snakes were a favourite in his diet. Another of his favourite cures was bleeding.

  Chief among his enemies were the ultra-violet rays of the tropical sun, which he considered lethal. Sun helmets of cork or pith, double terais (two thicknesses of felt with red flannel in between) and spine-pads, also lined with red material and covering the back, were to him essential armour against these ever-threatening rays. Nearly all the Europeans in East Africa at this time held the same views and took the same precautions. I had started the voyage with a handsome new double terai, but it blew off in the Red Sea. ‘Hat overboard’ was not a cry to galvanise the ship’s crew into rescue operations, and the hat bobbed away out of sight.

  Next day we anchored off Port Sudan, where passengers disembarked to stretch legs and ride upon camels. Not, perhaps, the most alluring of prospects but I did not want to be left out. Dr Burkitt was horrified. In his powerful brogue he forecast the direst disasters should I venture hatless ashore – dementia praecox, cardiac failure, renal occlusion, possibly even flat feet. Actinic rays softened the brain, rotted the guts and sapped the moral fibre. Having lived since an early age in Africa, and being young, I thought I knew best and went ashore at Port Sudan and had my camel ride. I suffered no ill effects and did not hesitate to rub this in to Dr Burkitt. He bore no malice, merely remarking: ‘If God had intended you for a salamander he’d have given you a tail.’ I never wore a sunhat in Africa again.

  Like all ships plying between British and East African ports, the Malda carried a number of colonial officials proceeding on, or returning from, their home leave, which lasted for six months as a rule; and in a very short time they sorted themselves into groups depending on their branch of the service. At the top came the Brahmins, men of the administration–provincial and district commissioners, district officers and officials of the secretariat. Next came men of the various technical services – medical, agricultural, veterinary, educational, police and so on; finally, at the bottom of the heap, employees of the Public Works department and the Railway. Like dairy cows who, on entering their milking parlours, find their way without hesitation to their correct positions, each official knew his place. Wives followed suit. It was interesting to see a pecking order so quickly established and so faithfully observed.

  Young cadets going out for their first tour of duty were kept at a distance by the Brahmins, but rewarded now and then, like a dog with a chocolate drop, by a ritual ‘good-morning’. For their part they were on the lookout for girls to stroll with on the boat deck and admire sunsets that inflamed sea and sky with passionate colours; or, when darkness fell, to lean over the rail and watch pale green phosphorescence shining and writhing as the ship’s bow sliced into the waves; or to search the sky for a first glimpse of the Southern Cross.

  Tables in the dining saloon were status thermometers. The grandest passengers – a colonial governor perhaps, a visiting politician or extra-rich Americans going out for a safari – sat at the Captain’s table. Next in prestige came the table presided over by the First Officer, then the Chief Engineer’s, the doctor’s, the purser’s and so on down the scale. You always changed for dinner. Very early in the voyage a sports or
ganiser emerged, no one knew quite how, from the ranks of the passengers, and thereafter competitions raged almost without an interval – deck quoits, shuffleboard, deck tennis. Territories in the shape of deck chairs were staked out early on and faithfully respected. At eleven in the morning stewards came round with hot soup west of Suez, cold drinks east of the Canal, when the ship’s officers changed from blue uniforms into white ones.

  You took in coal at Port Said and at Aden, and the voyage lasted nineteen days. Then came into view the low green island of Mombasa with its coconut palms and customs sheds, its white lime-washed houses and red-tiled roofs and lush vegetation. The Malda steamed slowly between island and mainland into Kilindini harbour, by then equipped with deep-water berths so that you could walk down a gangway on to the island instead of, as in the past, being ferried from ship to shore on tenders.

  Mombasa’s history is long and bloody; the dogs of war have made a killing here, many killings. Now that they were kenneled for the time being the island, lying like a viridian tongue between two mainland lips half-closed over a mouthful of sparkling blue creeks and inlets, presented a gentle aspect to the world. The island of war (its old name) had become an island of colour; bougainvilleas were everywhere, cherry-red, brilliant orange, royal purple, smothering the houses; flamboyants, hibiscus, datura, oleander, frangipani, many other flowering shrubs dazzled the eye: wonderful names, wonderful colours. Dark-foliaged mango trees encircled by a dark band of shade arose from the greenery, queer-shaped baobabs with grey glistening boles and outstretched branches stood starkly upright, coconut palms fringed the mainland like sentinels guarding the outskirts of the continent.