Out In The Midday Sun

by Elspeth Huxley

  On her rare visits to and from the Coast, Nellie generally broke the journey at Kilima Kiu, which belonged to her old friends Frank and Mary-Early Joyce. We spent a couple of nights there on our way back from Lamu.

  My earliest memory of the Joyces is of their arrival at our farm at Thika, having ridden across the plains on their ponies because they were too broke to afford the petrol. Frank said that his year’s budget had been thrown out of joint by breaking his watch-glass, which cost a shilling to replace. He was tall, good-looking, with crinkly, corn-coloured hair and blue eyes and, as a young man, he brimmed over with gaiety and charm. He was also hard-working and intelligent, not an Irish rattle.

  Three young men had arrived in East Africa in 1910 and 1911 to seek their fortunes: Frank Joyce, F.O’B. Wilson and Archie Lambert. They went into partnership in a block of land down the railway line from Nairobi towards Mombasa, lying in another of those buffer zones, this time between the Maasai and the Wakamba, who lived mainly in the hills and were great hunters. They filed their teeth into points, a custom many associate with cannibalism, but they were not cannibals. They hunted elephants for ivory, and they and the Maasai observed an uneasy and sometimes broken truce.

  These three partners decided to go in for ostrich feathers, then much in demand for trimming ladies’ hats, and bringing fortunes to farmers in South Africa. Two brothers, Harold and Clifford Hill, had already started ostrich farming near Machakos with success. Its great advantage was that very little capital was needed. You simply had to spot newly hatched broods of chicks, catch and put them into sacks, and avoid being savaged by the mother birds. Enough survived into maturity to yield tail feathers, which at one time fetched thirty-five shillings each. Then fashion changed abruptly and feathers became all but unsaleable. By then the partners had turned to other enterprises.

  Archie Lambert died during the First World War, a war which left Frank with a stiff leg and an American bride. Small and slender, Mary-Early had all the grace and vivacity, as well as the attractive drawl, one expects from Southern ladies, for whom the War Between The States and Ol’ Black Joe never seem far away. They had one daughter, Anne.

  I loved Kilima Kiu. You could see for miles and miles across the veld towards the distant Maasai plains in one direction, and towards the red and purple hills of the Wakamba in the other. You could ride or walk for miles and miles in pursuit of Thomson’s or Grant’s gazelle, zebra or kongoni, across the plains where ostriches still reared their broods; or up into the bushclad hills in pursuit of reedbuck, steinbuck or even the occasional buffalo. During the terrible droughts that periodically afflict eastern Africa, hordes of wildebeest from Maasailand have invaded Kilima Kiu and, despite all efforts to repel them, broken down fences and overrun the dams.

  At Kilima Kiu no one seemed to be in a hurry. Breakfast on the sunlit veranda was an especially delicious meal, for Mary-Early had introduced a Southern style of cooking, including muffins and flat maize-meal cakes. Most Europeans stuck firmly to wheat flour; they remarked on African conservatism in regard to food, but were no less conservative themselves. There was thick, dark, local honey – the Kamba were famous honey-hunters. After breakfast, ponies were led to the foot of the steps, and we set forth with Frank to check up on the cattle, the cultivations, dams and boreholes, and on what had gone on during the night. Doves were cooing fit to burst in every tree, and all the sounds of morning rose like bubbles into the air.

  Milking into buckets took place in the open with cows tied to posts or trees, and later in a moveable bail; the milkers used one hand to squeeze the teats and the other to hold the bucket. Then the milk was conveyed in ox-carts to the dairy to be cooled. At evening, when the temperature fell, it went off in wagons to the station. There was at first no refrigeration, and it was a wonder that the milk arrived fresh next morning in Nairobi and Mombasa, but it did.

  Frank and F.O’B. Wilson ran Kilima Kiu together for some years and then they quarrelled. I was never clear as to just what the quarrel was about, but it was generally believed to have concerned butterfat. One of the partners was said to have accused the other of cheating. The quarrel grew almost to the proportions of pistols for two and coffee for one in the Machakos hills; the two men cut each other in public and so did their families. In 1934, the ranch and herds were divided into two. What was so absurd about the quarrel was that both protagonists were models of rectitude; it was impossible to imagine either of them cheating or doing anything remotely dishonourable. Frank had a quick temper, which may have had something to do with it. Both men were to undertake much voluntary public work and were widely, and deservedly, respected. F.O’B was eventually knighted. At the time of their quarrel, their friends had to split into two camps. Jos and Nellie were in the Joyces’ camp and so we never stayed with the Wilsons, or they with us. The feud gradually subsided, and their children finally buried the hatchet.

  Apart from this unfortunate rift, the white community of Machakos was a happy one. In numbers it was small and scattered, and the people of the district had the feel of being cut off from the rest of the world and not minding this a bit. Barbecues were popular, and excellent barbecues they were, held under brilliant stars in the soft African night.

  Philip Perceval, a famous white hunter, was one of the local stalwarts. His wife ran the farm while he took out safaris. There were many years of stringency. Their daughter remembers a two days’ journey in an ox-wagon with her parents to the Athi river, where her father shot a hippo to provide the household’s fat, and reims cut from its hide. A shortage of soap during the First World War was overcome by using a root which produced a lather for the wash.7

  The Wakamba, or A’Kamba, or just Kamba – these prefixes are confusing – were cheerful, friendly people well liked by Europeans, who found them less devious than the Kikuyu, and brighter than lacustrines like the Luo. When Njombo retired as headman, Nellie replaced him with a M’Kamba, called Muchoka.

  Intelligent and with a ready, open smile, he had prudently taken as his second wife a Kikuyu girl who was a distant relative of Njombo’s; this gave him the entrée, as it were, to Nellie’s small Kikuyu community, while his senior wife stayed in Ukambani to till his shamba, and tend his herd of five or six cows. He was reliable except on two counts, periodic drinking sprees – drink was a weakness endemic among the Wakamba – and over-staying his leave. He was supposed to take one month’s leave a year, but often disappeared for two or three; as he lacked a postal address, it was impossible to retrieve him. The Kamba people had an affinity for machinery, and were much in demand to operate tinka-tinkas, as all machines were called. Also they liked the police force and the army, and volunteered for these in greater numbers than men of any other tribe.

  But one thing they were not good at was conserving their land. Frank used to take us up into the hills to see their homesteads and shambas, where views were marvellous but soil erosion appalling. Their little cattle looked like skeletons with hide stretched over them. Worst of all was the silting up of the rivers that had once run all the year round and now dried up completely every year for six months or more. The hilltops had been stripped of their trees.

  In the latter years of the colonial period, much was done to reverse the process of decay in Ukambani. A big drive was launched to persuade the people to terrace their land. It was the women, not men, who made the terraces. They worked, voluntarily, in groups based on clans, reviving an old custom, and singing as they hoed. They also dug dams. A sort of missionary fervour to save not souls, but land fertility, came over those Europeans in charge of the scheme, including Frank Joyce. He set aside one quarter of Kilima Kiu for his employees and their families, each of whom was allotted so much land and allowed to keep so many cattle and no more, and to practice crop rotation. He was very strict about this. The area in question adjoined the Kamba reserve, and the contrast was dramatic: on one side of the fence good pasture, brown and stringy in dry weather but still pasture; on the other, bare red earth and rocks and sand
and gulleys. He used to say that to see the Kamba side looking like the Kilima Kiu side was his dream and his ambition, but knew that once he had relaxed his authority, land on the latter side would very soon look like land on the former side of the fence.

  Change has hitherto dealt lightly with Kilima Kiu. On my last visit there was honey still for tea, or at any rate for breakfast. A Land-Rover came round to the veranda steps instead of ponies, cows were being milked in modern parlours, machinery hummed in the dairy, but the thorn-tree-speckled land stretched as it always had to distant hills, a dirt track wound away towards the station, an old leather mailbag was brought still from the station, hunting crops hung from pegs on the veranda, the long white house continued to lack a telephone. Bougainvilleas blazed like fires in the garden, their colour almost bruising the eye. An air of calm and leisure concealed, as it did in Frank’s day, a lot of work and calculation; and Mui, grey-haired now – he has served the family for nearly sixty years – still greeted every visitor with enthusiasm and never forgot a face.

  Since Frank’s death in 1959 Anne Joyce has run the 23,000-acre ranch with its 2,000 cattle and 1,000 sheep and goats, its dams and boreholes, tractors and combines and all the rest with the quiet efficiency and firm authority inherited from Frank, perhaps impeded sometimes, though she never said so, by a tendency displayed by her many visitors from overseas to treat Kilima Kiu as a most comfortable hotel.

  In the 1970s the Wilsons’ half of the original block of land passed into the possession of a company formed by the Wakamba. The Joyces’ half will shortly follow. So the two halves are, like a divorced couple who re-marry, once more coming together.

  By the mid 1930s Nellie, though active as ever, had turned fifty, and the future of the farm was on her mind. She had always hoped that one day I would take it over, and that perhaps my children, if any, would inherit it in their turn. In fact I think a lot of her endeavour was fuelled by an almost passionate desire to be in a position to hand over a viable concern.

  It was clearly impossible for Gervas and myself to contemplate a nest at Njoro while he was constantly on the wing spreading the gospel of tea. So Nellie hatched a plan. On our walks about the farm we had sometimes paused on a certain rise to look down across the river to the forest beyond, a tapestry of different shades of green – very dark for cedars with their grey lichen beards, the lighter, almost brownish-tinted foliage of wild olives, the apple-pale of feathery bamboos – and to remark that this would be a perfect site for a house. You felt as if you might be standing on the bridge of a ship with a green ocean below, rippled by wind into waves of foliage and always changing like the sea. Boughs shook as Colobus monkeys leapt invisibly from tree to tree; a flash of red betrayed a turaco; a distant agitation might mean a herd of buffalo. At night you would hear a leopard’s sawing grunt and the cry of the hyrax, concentrating all the wildness of Africa into its harsh note.

  Here, suggested Nellie, we might build our house bit by bit, as and when we could afford small dollops of money. Later, under Nellie’s supervision, there would come to birth a small farm. She would make over to us one quarter of her land, including the house site and a river frontage, and gradually, bit by bit like the house, we would get it fenced and paddocked, bush cleared away, water pumped from the river and, in time, populated by heifers who would found a dairy herd. Then cheques would start to arrive and, when Gervas was ready to hand over his tea campaign to a successor, there would be a going concern and a home to come to.

  This was a neat little plan and, had history taken a different course, it might have been realised. Gervas’ feelings were clearly the key factor. It would be no good trying to dig him up if he did not wish to be dug. While he had no experience of farming, a love of the land was in his blood. He was an ardent gardener. On his mother’s side he came from a family of Yorkshire landowners, and yeoman farmers before that, and his father was a doctor who, on retirement from a London practice, had started a dairy farm where his pedigree Guernseys became one of the first herds in Britain to produce tuberculin-free milk. (He prescribed for his own bovine patients, and there is a story that the local chemist, having with difficulty decyphered one of his prescriptions, gazed at him in horror and exclaimed: ‘Excuse me, sir, but have you gone out of your mind?’ The dosage was so massive that no human patient could have survived it.)

  We pegged out an outline of the future house, which was soon surrounded by roughly levelled terraces. Then Nellie planted trees, and a mini-forest sprang up around the site. Next came fruit trees in a wire cage, and a road of sorts. Nellie knew a young woman in Nakuru who had just qualified as an architect and was starting her career, Dorothy Hughes. She designed for us a simple, single-storeyed, well-proportioned dwelling with a wide veranda from which we would be able to look out upon the ever-changing cloud patterns that moved across the forest of the Mau.

  Before our last pre-war visit to Njoro, a start had been made. The Lindstrom family had a constant flow of visitors of several nationalities, including a young German who had come from Tanganyika with his wife to look for work. We took him on as manager at the going rate, £10 a month. Nellie planned to buy half-a-dozen heifers on our behalf for about £5 each, and Gervas’ father ear-marked a bull calf for us from his pedigree herd. When we left Njoro at the end of 1938, the plan was well under way.

  This was the year of Munich. ‘When elephants fight,’ runs an African proverb, ‘it is the grass that is trampled.’ Our plan and Nellie’s hopes were blades of grass flattened by the elephants. When, after the war, I told her that for various reasons the idea must be abandoned, she took it hard. She had built too much upon sand. Jos had died in 1947 from emphysema, resulting partly from fragments of a bomb lodged in his chest during the First World War – ‘just like Jos to get blown up on Guy Fawkes’ Day’, remarked his brother – compounded by hard living, dust and malaria in the second war. In 1942 he had somehow got himself taken back into the army, despite his sixty-eight years. His job involved taking drafts of raw recruits from Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) to Cairo, mainly by rudimentary roads in overloaded lorries. The journey took at least five or six weeks, and anything in the way of rest and comfort en route was non-existent.

  More than twenty years after his death, I called in at a little pub in the Welsh mountains, near a cottage I then owned close by. The landlord greeted me by name. As I turned to go, a man sitting at the bar said: ‘I think you’re Major Grant’s daughter?’ ‘Yes’, I said. ‘Your father stayed a night with me in Mwanza in the war. I was DC there.’ Mwanza is a port on the southern shore of Lake Victoria. Jos, he said, had been on his way north with a convoy of recruits, and was suffering from malaria and difficulty in breathing. ‘He wouldn’t stop. He was one of the bravest men I’ve ever met.’ It was heartening to hear this, away in the Welsh mountains, from one who had known him so briefly and so long ago. Jos had been invalided out of the army a few months later for the third and last time – the first time in the Boer War because of dysentery, the second time because of the bomb fragments in France. ‘He was really a soldier at heart,’ Nellie wrote after his death. Yet he was the gentlest of men. Once, half exasperated and half amused by some display of non-aggression, Nellie had demanded: ‘Are you a man or a mouse?’ After a pause for reflection, pulling on one of the small cheroots he favoured, he replied: ‘I’m never quite sure.’

  After his death, Nellie knew that she must carry on alone, without fresh capital and without the prospect of passing on to her offspring what she had built with so much hope and toil. To have given up and retreated to England would have been to admit defeat and to compromise her independence, and independence was in the marrow of her bones.

  Before we left for Britain there was one last safari. Eight of us foregathered at Moshi in Tanganyika: Nellie, Jos, myself and the Lindstroms – Fish was in charge – Gervas together with his ‘man in Canada’, Ernest Gourlay and his wife Joan. We had our ancient Ford V8, the Lindstroms an even more dilapidated ve
hicle, and a shaky old lorry had gone on ahead with our camp kit and with Karanja, the Lindstrom’s driver and a general factotum. Just where our rendezvous with the lorry was to be on the vast Serengeti plain seemed unclear, but Fish was confident that the driver knew the spot.

  The Serengeti was then just a big and tawny slice of Africa with no tourist lodges, zebra-striped buses, roads, rangers and the rest. It was a game reserve, not yet a national park. Both our cars soon boiled away their water. Before nightfall, the Lindstroms’ car broke down altogether and had to be abandoned, and all eight of us piled into our over-heated, over-loaded Ford. We stopped every fifty yards or so and turned round to face into the wind, which we hoped would cool the engine, and spent a comfortless and foodless night beside the car. Next day, by one of those little miracles that Africa quite often provides, we came upon the lorry resting happily beneath a tree, with a pool of muddy water at hand – part of the dried-up water-course of the Seronera river, and not far from where the tourist lodge and the research centre were in future to stand.

  And here were the lions we had come to see, as tame then as they are now, lolling about under trees in attitudes of sloth and indifference, amber-eyed. Next day Monty Moore, VC, the game warden, appeared, and shot a zebra which we tied to the axle of our car and towed about as bait. Before we had gone two hundred yards, seventeen lions and lionesses emerged from their couches in the shade to pounce upon the zebra’s carcase, almost climbing into the lorry over each other’s backs. I had screwed my telephoto lens into my Leica, but had to replace the ordinary lens in order to encompass even one lion, let alone seventeen.