Straight on Till Morning

by Mary S. Lovell

  The couple decided to emigrate to East Africa after a family syndicate was formed to finance a farm there, based on the enthusiastic reports of Tania’s and Bror’s mutual uncle Mogens. ‘A well-run farm in East Africa just now ought to make its owner a millionaire,’ he had told them. In his memoir African Hunter, Bror explains that his only anxiety was ‘…how I should be able to put all the money in the bank. The gold mine was ours, all we had to do was extract the rich ore.’8 Originally a 700-acre dairy farm was purchased by correspondence in British East Africa, but Bror went on ahead to reconnoitre and quickly decided that the best prospects lay elsewhere. ‘Gold could not be made out of stockbreeding,’ he concluded shortly after he arrived in Nairobi. Whose tin-roofed huddle he described as ‘more like an empty old anchovy tin than anything else. The houses were a collection of scattered, rather shabby tin boxes, among which goats, fowls, and all kinds of other domestic animals led a pleasant rustic life…but what did it matter? I had no objection. I was after gold, not smart hotels.’

  Disposing of the 700 acres, he bought 4500 acres near Nairobi, and about the same acreage near Eldoret, on which he planned to grow coffee. ‘Gold meant coffee. Coffee growing was the only thing which had any future; the world was crying out for coffee from Kenya.’ Recognizing the amount of labour required to turn the land into a coffee plantation, he set about hiring a workforce of Africans so that by the time Tania arrived at the farm a thousand workers were lined up to meet the memsahib.

  Bror and Tania were married at Mombasa immediately after her arrival. Then the pair travelled to Nairobi in the highlands by a special train which had been laid on for Prince Wilhelm of Sweden who, by a happy coincidence, was visiting the country, and who had been able to support Bror as his best man at the wedding.

  Within a year Tania found she had contracted the venereal disease syphilis.9 Substantiated reports of Bror’s infidelities were numerous, although it must be said here that neither of Bror’s subsequent wives believed he had ever suffered from the affliction. ‘And I should know if anyone does,’ said Cockie, the second Baroness Blixen. Nor, despite his renowned promiscuity, were there reports of any other woman making the same charge,10 and friends of many years’ standing state that Bror never displayed any outward signs of succumbing to the complaint.

  The farm did not prosper. Bror was often absent, initially due to his service in the war against German East Africa and later on his game-hunting exploits. The social benefits enjoyed by the holder of the title Baroness meant a great deal to Tania, but she was nevertheless a thoroughly unhappy and disillusioned woman by 1918 when she first met Denys Finch Hatton at the Muthaiga Club.

  In 1920 the finances of the coffee farm were chaotic, and the Blixens’ marriage was in dire trouble. The original mistrust of Tania’s family for Bror ‘…now turned into frank and righteous abomination…on financial as well as moral grounds’.11 While Tania was visiting them in Denmark, Bror, in an attempt to raise money for the farm, pawned her silver, ‘had her furniture attached by creditors and was ready to sign over the house and park to anyone who would negotiate a loan for them’.12 A year later Bror was summarily dismissed as manager and Tania was appointed to run the farm in his stead. The Dinesen financial syndicate were insistent that Bror was to have no further involvement with the farm, and he was forbidden even to set foot there. Later they were divorced, much against Tania’s will, but Bror had by then fallen in love with Cockie. Tania never forgave Cockie for taking Bror, but this seems oddly dog-in-the-mangerish considering Tania’s own situation. Long before Bror officially moved out of the farm, Denys and Tania were lovers and Bror customarily introduced Denys as ‘my wife’s lover, and my best friend’.

  Having invested and lost his entire wealth in the virtually failed venture Bror was penniless. However it was not in his nature to whine about his misfortune. He simply carried on as before, sometimes staying with friends, sometimes camping out in the bush; scratching a living where he could. He was a man who always enjoyed life to the hilt, a man’s man, a lovable, impossible, improvident rascal. Bunny Allen described him as ‘far too rough for her…[Tania] was a very sweet girl, like a lovely-looking piece of beautiful china. He was never gentle with her, he was rough and ready and always ready to have a party with the boys. He drank a great deal and he wasn’t fussy who he went to bed with…He was nice enough in every way, but the difference between him and Denys Finch Hatton was the difference between chalk and cheese.’13

  Bror’s godson Eric Rundgren remembers him as a tall man with a kind, aristocratic face and a wonderful capacity for enjoying himself. ‘He was always in a good humour, enthusiastic and prepared to attempt any scheme. His personality captivated people. My father used to say that he could talk anybody into anything.’ He recalled the first time he had met Bror in the Norfolk Hotel surrounded by a dozen admiring fans – mostly women – and thinking, ‘This is the only life for me, such glamour, such opportunity and such fun.’ This impression was never displaced even when later Bror came to the Rundgren house to borrow money and Eric’s father told him, ‘There goes a man who in twenty-odd years must have made £200,000 out of hunting and now literally hasn’t a cent.’14

  Tania meanwhile had fallen deeply in love with Denys. She was intelligent, sensitive, imaginative. Denys was polished, gentle, intellectual and a man of such blinding charm that fifty years after his death that elusive quality is instantly recalled by his friends as his greatest asset. Most people found extreme difficulty in analysing his magnetism. A friend describes him as a leader, quick-thinking and decisive, but paradoxically he moved and acted with unstudied nonchalance, which may have been taken for indolence were he not well known as an achiever. Despite his scholarly appearance there was ‘a suggestion of an adventurous wanderer, of a man who knew every hidden creek and broad reach of the upper Nile, and who had watched a hundred desert suns splash with gilt the white-walled cities of Somaliland’.15 Many people agreed: ‘He was exactly like one of the old Elizabethan courtiers – courtly on the surface but underneath he was basically a man who would undertake any venture successfully.’ In short he was a man who wished to enjoy every experience life had to offer, be it physical, intellectual, aesthetic or sensual. Finch Hatton could never be described as handsome – he had too thin a face, a crooked smile and was almost totally bald – but he was immensely fit and so physically powerful that he once lifted a car out of a ditch unaided.16

  In common with his friend Berkeley Cole, Denys was deeply attracted to the life that Tania created in her house at Ngong, where she had assembled a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing collection of furniture, paintings, china and crystal. It was an oasis of cool, quiet civilization, where Denys could indulge his intellectual propensities and be assured of admiring and indulgent company. It was an ideal resting place for him between his adventures and unexplained business affairs and for as long as he could feel untrammelled by the relationship, he loved Tania. He moved his belongings into her house and for six years they were idyllically happy.

  Together the couple achieved a separateness from their companions and surroundings, so that even in company they seemed locked in their own shining world. Their love was tender, poetic and intense, on a plane that even their close friends found difficult to reach or to identify. They both adored the mysticism of Africa, the velvety soft nights under the vast canopy of stars, the hot dry days when they explored together the bush country, their senses heightened by passion. Tania has written in beautiful prose of their times together, without ever acknowledging the full force of her idolatrous love for Denys.

  Denys Finch Hatton had no other home in Africa than the farm. He lived at my house between his safaris, and kept his books and his gramophone there. When he came back to the farm, it gave out what was in it; it spoke – as the coffee plantations speak, when with the first showers of the rainy season they flower, dripping wet, a cloud of chalk. When I was expecting Denys back, and heard his car coming up the drive, I heard at the sa
me time, the things of the farm all telling me what they really were. He was happy on the farm; he came there only when he wanted to come, and it knew, in him, a quality of which the world besides was not aware, a humility. He never did but what he wanted to do, neither was guile found in his mouth. Denys taught me Latin, and to read the Bible, and the Greek poets…he also gave me my gramophone. It was a delight to my heart, it brought a new life to the farm, it became the voice of the farm – ‘The soul within a glade the nightingale is.’ Sometimes Denys would arrive unexpectedly at the house while I was out in the coffee field…He would set the gramophone going and as I rode back at sunset the melody streaming towards me in the clear cool air of the evening would announce his presence to me, as if he had been laughing at me, as he often did…He liked to hear the most advanced music. ‘I would like Beethoven all right,’ he said, ‘if he were not so vulgar.’17

  Beryl Markham is on record as saying that she doubted whether the love between Denys and Tania was physically consummated.18 She did not repeat her claim when I interviewed her and the suggestion itself is difficult to accept; for although there can be no actual proof, the couple’s closest friends scoff at the suggestion. There are also two separate and well-documented occasions when Tania believed herself pregnant by Denys. In 1922 she appears to have suffered a miscarriage, almost certainly due to her fragile health following the brutality of early treatments for venereal disease.19 In May 1926, convinced that she was pregnant again, Tania cabled Denys who was in England visiting his family. She used the code-name Daniel in her cable; obviously a name they had used for an imaginary child in discussions, and one which she knew he would recognize and understand.20

  Denys’s curt reply – ‘STRONGLY URGE YOU CANCEL DANIEL’S VISIT’ – is breathtaking in its casual offensiveness. Tania’s cabled response to this is lost, but the subsequent cable to her from England explained, equally coolly: ‘RECEIVED YOUR WIRE AND MY REPLY DO AS YOU LIKE ABOUT DANIEL AS I SHOULD WELCOME HIM IF I COULD OFFER PARTNERSHIP BUT THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE STOP YOU WILL I KNOW CONSIDER YOUR MOTHER’S VIEWS DENYS.’ Injured pride speaks in every syllable of Tania’s final message in this sequence. ‘THANKS CABLE I NEVER MEANT TO ASK ASSISTANCE CONSENT ONLY TANIA.’ In the event this pregnancy too, ended in miscarriage, although it is possible she mistook the signs.21 Certainly after the second occasion she could have been in no doubt at all that her love for Denys would ever culminate in the marriage she craved.

  Eventually Tania was unable to contain her desperate urge to possess Denys entirely, even though she clearly recognized that it was destroying the relationship. It was as if she could not help herself. The dissolution started after the first royal safari in 1928 and her anger at Cockie’s inclusion among the guests. She was ultra-sensitive to the fact that there were now two Baroness Blixens moving in the tight social circle, and angrily tackled Denys about it. Ingrid Lindstrom thought that the quarrel ‘left a reserve of bitterness in both of them, to be tapped later’.22

  In 1929 Tania spent six months at the family home of Rungstedlund, near Copenhagen, where her mother was recovering from a serious illness. Denys too went home, took flying lessons, obtained a pilot’s licence and bought a D H Gipsy Moth aeroplane.23 For him this was a reintroduction to flying, for he had first learned to fly during the First World War.

  Whilst in England he met several old Kenya friends including Rose Cartwright and Beryl Markham. Rose was in England working as a social correspondent for the Daily Express and recalls being violently airsick when Denys took her flying – though not until after they had landed. Beryl, separated from Mansfield, was in the joyful throes of her ‘mad little gallop with Prince Henry’.

  At the beginning of October Tania visited Denys and his family in England. Earlier that summer Tania had appealed to him for financial assistance to save the farm, which had been visited by the twin afflictions of a July frost and a swarm of locusts. He had complied out of his slender funds but his solicitors, presumably acting on instructions, had written formally to Tania making it clear that there were limits to their client’s will to assist, and furthermore that she was to be responsible for the legal fees concerned in the matter which revolved around a debenture on the farm in the amount of £2000. Denys’s family did not, at first, take to Tania. They mistrusted her and her motives and were antagonistic. One relative declared, ‘I don’t like that woman. She is trying to take possession of Denys. It won’t work.’24 After the visit Tania returned to Denmark to spend Christmas with her family.

  Denys returned to Kenya at the end of 1929 in time for the second royal safari, which the Prince had insisted upon to compensate himself for his earlier, interrupted one. When Tania arrived in Nairobi Denys was already deeply involved in safari preparations. The spectre of Bror’s and Cockie’s close involvement with this event loomed over everything Denys and Tania did, placing a further strain on their relationship, though they went flying together in the Gipsy Moth,25 an experience which Tania described as ‘the greatest, most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm.’

  You have tremendous views as you get up above the African highlands, surprising combinations and changes of light and colouring, the rainbow on the green sunlit land, the giant upright clouds, and the big wild black storms, all swing around you in a race and a dance…when you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longenot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon.

  One day Denys and I flew to Lake Natron, ninety miles south-east of the farm and over four thousand feet lower…The sky was blue, but as we flew from the plains in over the stony and bare lower country, all colour seemed to be scorched out of it. The whole landscape below us looked like a delicately marked tortoise-shell. Suddenly in the midst of it was the lake. The white bottom, shining through the water, gives it, when seen from the air, a striking, an unbelievable azure colour so clear that for a moment you shut your eyes at it; the expanse of water lies in the bleak tawny land like a bright aquamarine. We had been flying high, now we went down, and as we sank our own shade, dark blue, floated under us upon the bright blue lake. Here live thousands of flamingoes…At our approach they spread out in large circles and fans like rays of a setting sun, like an artful Chinese pattern on silk or porcelain…We landed on the white shore, that was white-hot as an oven, and lunched there, taking shelter against the sun under the wing of the aeroplane.

  Often they flew around the nearby Ngong Hills close to the farm to see the buffaloes feeding, or to visit the eagles.

  Many times we have chased one of these eagles, careening and throwing ourselves onto one wing and then to the other, and I believe the sharp-sighted bird played with us. Once when we were running side by side, Denys stopped his engine in mid-air, and as he did so I heard the eagle screech.26

  But despite these brief periods of happiness, Tania’s misery knew no bounds when Bror and Cockie stayed as guests at Government House in February and she was excluded from the civic celebrations surrounding the prince’s visit. She quarrelled violently again with Denys, over what she saw as his disloyal acceptance of her isolation, and to try to make amends he arranged for the prince to dine at her farm. Clearly this quarrel precipitated the fracture of their relationship; Tania felt that if only she could call herself ‘the Hon. Mrs Finch Hatton’ all would be well, but Denys would not indulge her to this degree.

  The royal safari ended in the late spring of 1930, and for much of the year Denys was busy taking clients on safari. His visits to Tania were now infrequent and he called at her house more as a casual friend than as her lover. Though he was sympathetic to her problems regarding the farm, which were many, he refused to allow himself to become involved in her despairing attempts to put back the clock. To keep their meetings light and happy, he often misquoted a stanza from Shelley’s ‘Invocation’ to her:

  You must turn your mournful ditty

  To a Merry Measure.

  I will never come for pity,

  I
will come for pleasure.

  In its original form it is a poem which Tania herself could have written to describe her feelings at Denys’s rejection of her need.27

  At the end of the year Denys left on safari with clients (the Marshall Fields), and this coincided with Beryl’s return to Kenya following the end of her liaison with Prince Henry. She could not live with her beloved father because of her antipathy towards her stepmother, and instead she rented the small cottage in the grounds of the Muthaiga Club, where Denys also spent a great deal of his time when he was in Nairobi. When Denys returned from the Marshall-Field safari in the spring of 1931 he removed his belongings from Tania’s farm and left them at the house of a friend – Hugh Martin, a government official living in Nairobi. Denys claimed it was more convenient for him to be living in Nairobi, and that he did not like living among the packing cases which now littered Tania’s house.

  A friend of Tania’s, who does not wish to be named, claimed that this occurred only after Tania had flown into a rage because she had heard that Denys had been seeing Beryl since before the time he went on safari, and that the relationship between the two had been anything but platonic. It was during this quarrel that Denys took back the ring of ‘soft Abyssinian gold’, which he had given her at Christmas 1928, and which she had worn on her wedding-ring finger ever since.

  Rose Cartwright, a staunch friend of both Tania and Denys, is on record as stating that Denys confided to her that he had moved out of Tania’s farm after much thought. Tania’s jealousy and possessiveness were such that it seemed the only solution, and it was done in an attempt to preserve something of the relationship they had shared.28 There are many small indications however that at the time Denys and Beryl had their short love affair, his feelings for Tania were merely those of concern for an old and cherished friend going through a bad time. Tania’s farm was sold by then and though, by agreement, she remained on the farm as manager until the coffee harvest came in, she recognized that her time in Kenya was moving to a close. Denys’s notes to Tania at this period, when above all she needed love and understanding, are gentle but cool: ‘Let me know anytime you would like me to run out, if you have anything to arrange in your own plans in which I could help. I have a book here I want you to read. I will bring it out…’ And again: ‘I feel you are looking at the very darkest side of things. I would like to see you before you go and shall try to get out later.’29