by Pattie Boyd
I had a bedroom to myself at Granny’s house and I remember her coming in to kiss me good night and smelling sweetly of juniper from the pink gin she always drank. She took me on holiday to the coast at Mombasa once, where she had rented a house for the week. There were vast white sandy beaches and I couldn’t believe how delicious the sea was. I pretended I had already learned to swim, knowing she wouldn’t let me into the water otherwise. I remember her giving me a teddy bear, which went everywhere with me—I still have it—and becoming hysterical when she hid it once because I had been naughty. She was much more accessible to me than my mother was; she had more time for me and a far greater influence over me.
I have practically no memory of my mother during my childhood, apart from the smell of her Dior perfume and her singing voice, which was beautiful. In retrospect, I think life must have been difficult for her, suddenly transported to Africa with three young children, a man she didn’t love and with whom she couldn’t communicate, no friends, and no money. She must have been deeply unhappy, but I was too young to appreciate that.
My grandparents were wealthy so there were several servants and nannies to look after us. And although I saw a lot of Granny, it was the nannies who brought us up. At night they bathed us and put us to bed while the grown-ups went off to their favorite watering holes—the Karen Club nearby (named after Karen Blixen, or Isak Dinesen, the author of Out of Africa—we arrived in Kenya just after that era) or the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi. At about this time I started having flying dreams, and when the grown-ups were out of the house, I would make Colin and Jenny stand on a table and try to teach them to fly.
The servants were Kikuyu, the most common tribe in Kenya, and they and their families lived in rondavels, traditional circular mud huts with thatched roofs, in a little community at the top of the drive. They adored my grandparents, and when, some years later, during the Mau Mau uprising, which began in 1952, they were threatened with death if they carried on working for white people, they came to my grandparents and said how sorry they were that they had to leave. It was a scary time in Kenya and a lot of white people slept with guns under their pillows for fear that their servants would try to murder them during the night. Many white farmers were killed.
One would call the Mau Mau freedom fighters today, I suppose, but I saw them as terrorists who were trying to incite and enrage the Africans I knew and loved. They wanted to overthrow British rule and evict the white settlers who had taken their land. Their tactics worked: there was an exodus of Europeans during the fifties. However, when my grandparents came back to England it was not because of the Mau Mau: it was my grandfather’s health.
I used to spend a lot of time with the Kikuyu who worked for my grandparents; they were my friends. They made the most delicious food, mostly Indian-based—lentils, spicy vegetables, curries—which they cooked outside on open fires and ate wrapped in chapatis. My father had a couple of horses and I remember riding bareback out into the bush one day with one of the Kikuyu stable boys. We came across a watering hole in a thicket, and as the horses were drinking I suddenly realized we were not alone. I turned and saw a group of tribe people with painted faces staring at me. It was the first time I’d seen anyone like them but the boy talked to them and told me not to be frightened. I wasn’t: I was used to so much being strange in Africa. I was fascinated by them and the jewelry they wore, earrings, bracelets, and necklaces.
I loved Kenya. I loved the huge skies, the vast landscapes, the incredible feeling of space, and the sky at night, full of bright, bright stars, so close you felt you could almost reach up and touch them. At night I would lie in bed and listen to the noises: the cicadas, tribe people chattering, the rhythmic beating of drums in the distance, the howl of hyenas and jackals, and the unmistakable roar of lions. But what encapsulates Africa for me is the smell: the smell of pepper trees and wild herbs combined with heat and dust. It’s an unforgettable mix, and every time I go back to Kenya, which I have done several times as an adult, that smell takes me straight back to my childhood.
It was quite a wild life, but wonderful for a child—there were few rules. I don’t remember any toys or presents—except the teddy bear my grandmother gave me. I don’t remember birthdays or Christmases either, although I do remember writing a letter to Father Christmas one year and the letter being gone the next day. We played outside: we rode bicycles or went into the woods to explore. I remember bouncing on my bed one night, watching a huge snake inch its way under the door and screaming for help. The houseboys rushed in, grabbed it, and killed it.
By that time my charmed existence was crumbling at the edges. After nearly a year, my grandparents had had enough of Jock doing nothing but ride his horses and told him he had to get a job to support his wife and family. He and my mother effectively split up for about six months, at the end of which he had started work with the Jockey Club in Nairobi and we had a series of far less opulent houses. Eventually we moved to one that you reached via a long dirt drive, a series of thatched rondavels linked by corridors. My mother hated it but I thought it was wonderful. She had been used to considerable comfort with her parents, and must have found it a shock to adapt to such straitened circumstances, particularly with the arrival of a fourth child. In March 1951, my sister Paula was born in Nakuru hospital. I remember someone, probably Granny, taking Colin, Jenny, and me to see her, and spotting her and Mummy through the window as we walked around the outside of the building.
I had now started school—the first of many. Loretta Convent was in Nairobi and smelled of powdered paint. My mother took me on my first day and I was excited—until I arrived. The school was enormous, or so it seemed to me, and I had never seen so many people. Suddenly all of the children were running around, which frightened me, and then my mother said she was going. I panicked and held on to her skirt, begging her not to leave me, but of course she did. A nun took me aside and introduced me to painting, which I enjoyed. And that’s all I remember doing at Loretta, lots of painting and playing with the other children.
A year later, at the age of eight, I was uprooted from everything I knew and sent to boarding school in Nakuru. I had never felt so miserable. I didn’t know what I had done wrong, why I was being punished. I didn’t understand why my mother didn’t want me at home with her. I felt completely and utterly bereft—unloved, un-wanted, unimportant. With hindsight, I think I sensed something bad was going on at home but I was too young to know what it was—and that made my insecurity even worse. Every time I had to go back to school I would cry and my mother would smile and say goodbye. I couldn’t work out what message she was delivering and it left me feeling confused. I had the same sensation when I saw my first Laurel and Hardy movie. The two characters were being chased by someone in a car up a hill and at the top there was a sheer cliff—it was clear to me that they were going to die. I was weeping, yet everyone else was laughing. I couldn’t understand why they thought it was so funny.
Despite the tears and the trauma of being ejected from the nest, my memories of Nakuru School are good. It was a big school, surrounded by acres of brown playing fields—the predominant color of Africa—and with a long flight of steps leading up to the main entrance. I was terribly nearsighted, although I didn’t know it until many years later, and at the end of one term my grandmother was coming to collect me. I didn’t want anyone to think she was my mother because she was much older and not nearly as beautiful as Mummy, so I kept an eye open for her car so I could leap into it before she had a chance to get out and everyone saw her. At last her car drew up and I sped down the steps, jumped into the front passenger seat, and, to my astonishment, a man, a complete stranger, said, “Hello, little girl. And who are you?” Crimson, I fled.
We slept in big dormitories on black iron bedsteads with thin, lumpy mattresses, and every morning we had to tie up the mosquito nets that hung over us from the ceiling. I had long hair, which I wore in plaits, and one night after I had washed it, two girls decided they would dry it for
me. They each took a towel and rubbed either side of my head until my hair was so knotted it had to be chopped off. Misdemeanors were punished with a whack on the calf with a ruler. I was never very rebellious so I am still not sure what I did wrong, but I seemed always to have stinging legs and I was often made to sit in front of the class. It was an English school for expatriates, and I remember some Australian girls but I don’t imagine there were any black children, although I didn’t notice the difference. It was only when I arrived in England some years later and wondered where all the black people were that I appreciated there was a pecking order. I do remember being out for a walk at school once and coming across a line of African convicts digging beside a road, chained to each other. That horrified me.
The post was my lifeline at school, parcels my only joy, in which came jars of damson or medlar jam, peanut butter or Marmite, which I loved. One day an envelope arrived from Granny; when I opened it I was dismayed to discover she had forgotten to put the letter inside. Every Sunday we had to write to our parents and one week I wrote mine in milk, saying, “If you really want to read this you’ll have to light a fire.” Someone had told me that it was secret writing and if you held it up to heat, the words would reveal themselves. I went home at half-term, but there were no other breaks or weekends out, and I have no memory of either parent visiting me.
On one half-term holiday, I was taken to a new house in Nairobi. Inexplicably my mother had moved. There, she dropped a bombshell. She introduced me to a tall, dark stranger and said, “Darling, this is your new father.”
I was stunned. What had been going on while I was away? What had happened to our home? Where was Daddy? I shall never forgive myself for not asking that last question. I meekly said, “Hello,” and shook his hand. The next thing, I was back at school.
Apparently, my father had been spending a suspicious amount of time with a woman who was as mad about horses as he was. She would come to breakfast, according to my mother, then she and Jock would go riding together. I think my mother seized on this as proof that he was having an affair, and one night while I was at school, she woke my brother and sisters, bundled them into the car, and left him. She must have done some kind of secretarial course in preparation, because she had found herself a clerical job, which came with a house of sorts. She had told Jock she wanted a divorce. He seems to have been either powerless or unwilling to dissuade her, and their marriage, with our family unit, had been dissolved. But we children knew none of this. Neither my mother nor my father had said a word to us. All I know about their divorce is that the riding partner was not cited as corespondent; my father put forward some other woman’s name.
My mother had met Bobbie Gaymer-Jones, the man who became my “new father,” at a dinner party. There was not enough cutlery so she said she would go and get some from her house and he went with her. She was thirty-one and still very beautiful but utterly impoverished, living in what Bobbie described as a shack, with Porkie, as he called Paula, and a collection of cats and dogs. Paula was the only one of us my mother had with her: when she left Jock, she had deposited Colin and Jenny in some kind of boarding nursery school. They can remember nothing about it, except there being lots of Dinky toys. I don’t know why my mother didn’t go back to live with her parents while she had such young children. She must have been miserable on her own in Nairobi and can’t have had many friends; at that time divorce was taboo among her social circle and divorcées were frequently ostracized. Bobbie’s attentions must have been irresistible.
Bobbie was twenty-eight and very good-looking. He had been a captain in the Life Guards during the war and ADC to General Gayle, General Operations Commander, Middle East and Mediterranean. After the war he had joined the Dunlop Rubber Company and been sent out to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) for two years to develop the rubber market in that part of Africa. There were no roads or tourists in Tanganyika at that time—there was only one stretch of tarmac in Kenya—and few Europeans lived in Dar es Salaam. There was also a dearth of single women. He was in need of company as much as she was, and in no time at all, Bobbie and my mother were married.
Bobbie didn’t tell his parents about Diana until they were married and it was too late for any argument. He knew they would disapprove: a divorced woman three years older than him with four children in tow was not what they would have wished for their son and, predictably, they were very upset. I didn’t go to the wedding; I must have been at school. It took place in a register office in Dar es Salaam in February 1953. Colin and Jenny remember it.
The three of us spent the next school holidays at my father’s house. I don’t know why we went there and not to my mother’s. I can only imagine that she and Bobbie had baby Paula and didn’t want us hanging around. They were the perfect nuclear family—and could even, perhaps, pass off Paula as Bobbie’s. We didn’t look anything like him. But in my childhood nothing was ever explained; everything was a mystery. We still don’t really know the truth. And I couldn’t ask my father what was going on: he was a figure behind a newspaper. He wasn’t approachable in any way: he was awkward, humorless, distant, and silent. Mealtimes were the worst. We were not allowed to speak, but I discovered that if I wiggled my ears I could make Colin and Jenny dissolve into fits of suppressed giggles and, without a word, we could escape to a little world of our own. None of us knew our father. In later years when my mother was cross with me, she would say, “You’re so like your father!” I didn’t know what she meant but it wasn’t a compliment.
While we were with my father we were looked after by a nanny, Salome. My grandmother must have paid her—she paid my school fees, too, and probably for a lot more besides. Salome was Ankole, from northern Uganda, and I remember her baking a cake with purple icing to celebrate the Queen’s coronation in 1953, which we sat and ate in the usual excruciating silence. I felt sick afterward, and it turned out that I had mumps. I was taken to hospital and the only consolation was that my mother came to visit me.
At night Salome would tie up my hair and Jenny’s in long white rags, and in the morning she would pull them out, leaving us with ringlets. Salome was fun but she could also be scary. She would tell me the most horrific bedtime stories and said that if I was naughty the Mau Mau would come and get me. I used to have terrible nightmares.
Mummy came to see us just once while we were staying with Daddy. Colin, Jenny, and I were in the bath, splashing around and playing with Salome, when our mother burst in and announced that she was going to wash us. Salome told her to leave; she said that she would bathe us and a huge row erupted. In the end Salome was thrust out of the door and Mummy rolled up her sleeves. We were mystified. We had no idea what was going on and it was a relief to be out of the bath and into bed. And that was it: Mummy vanished as mysteriously as she had arrived.
Soon afterward she vanished for good. At least, that was how it felt. She, Bobbie, and Paula set sail for England, leaving Colin, Jenny, and me behind. I felt as though my world had ended; and I don’t understand to this day why she did it. Was it too expensive to take us all on the ship? Or maybe Bobbie didn’t want us to travel with them. What twenty-eight-year-old in his right mind would want three pesky children aged nine, seven, and six competing for his wife’s attention? They had only been married for three months when they left. I was desolate. I longed to be a bird so that I could fly after her to England. I started sleepwalking and waking up night after night by the locked four-door trying to escape.
I don’t know how long it was that we three stayed on in Kenya after my mother had left. It might have been six months; it might have been a year. I have no memory of saying goodbye to my father, and certainly no fear, when I boarded the airplane alone at Nairobi airport, that I might never see him again. All I know is that, for whatever reason, Colin, Jenny, and I, young as we were, traveled separately.
And suddenly, in December 1953, I was in England in a fairy-tale world of artificial light. At night Kenya was pitch-black, the only light from the moon and the stars
. I had never seen street lighting, and here I was in London at Christmas, with fairy lights on the buildings, flashing Belisha beacons at zebra crossings, neon-lit advertising, and the whole city bathed in a fabulous phosphorescent glow. I could barely contain my excitement.
With (left to right) Jenny, Colin, Paula, and my mother in Kenya.
TWO
A New Father
No sooner had I arrived in London and been joyously reunited with my mother and siblings than Mummy gave birth to David, the first of our half brothers, and Colin and I were dispatched to Northamptonshire to stay with some great-aunts. It was snowing and neither of us had ever been so cold. The only thing that kept our circulation going was an electric fire in our bedroom, which we were allowed to turn on. Neither of us knew anything about electric fires, of course, and one morning I put my icy-cold clothes over it to warm, then began to play with Colin. When I turned around my underwear was ablaze. We beat out the flames and hid the evidence.
For a brief period before David was born, home was a small flat in East Putney, southwest London, and I was fleetingly enrolled in Hazeldean School nearby. All I remember of the experience was that we had sausages and baked beans for lunch on Wednesdays. The luxury of a day school was short-lived, however. My parents—my stepfather, Bobbie, insisted on being called “Daddy”—moved to Wimbledon, and I was sent to boarding school in East Grinstead. Westcroft, in Victoria Drive, was a 1930s house that Bobbie’s father, an eminent surgeon, had bought for us. I can only assume that the arrival of a grandchild had brought about a change of heart in the doctor and his wife, and Bobbie certainly needed the gesture: he and my mother had very little money. Having been paid extremely well by Dunlop to work overseas, he came back to his regular salary and, with five children and a wife to support, it wasn’t enough.
