Straight on Till Morning

by Mary S. Lovell

  Over the next few months Beryl was a constant visitor to the Carberry ranch. The Carberrys had been leading members of the Happy Valley set in its mid-1920s heyday, and in the early 1930s their social lives were still interesting enough to annoy more serious-minded settlers. A veritable crop of books and articles, ‘mushy stories of loose morals in the Wanjohi valley’, had caused much criticism in England and by the early 1930s a visitor to Kenya was liable to be overwhelmed by protestations that the settlers were not sexually depraved, and that Kenya was not the last refuge of the morally lost.44 One visitor at least thought the whole thing overrated and described the Happy Valley social activities merely as a ‘group of highly coloured personalities trying a rather successful experiment in communal family life’.45 Elspeth Huxley’s mother, Nellie Grant, who used to visit Lady Idina, the acknowledged Queen Bee of the Happy Valley set, at her home, Clouds, ‘must have been unlucky, for she never struck an orgy; though she did once find Alice de Janze asleep on the floor at four in the afternoon’.46 Lady Idina changed husbands so often that no one ever bothered to remember her latest surname.

  Alice was rival Queen Bee to Lady Idina. Once after shooting her lover in a Paris station she attempted to shoot herself. Following this incident Alice was known in Kenya as ‘the fastest gun in the Gare du Nord’.47 Beryl remembered it all as great fun – but could recall no specific incidents. Her log book remains the chief documentary evidence of her life during that period. Flights to ‘Silvers’ (Jane Silver, later Jane Wynne-Eyton, the first woman to fly solo from England to Kenya and whose showmanship ran to a silver Gipsy Moth and a matching silver flying suit so that she came to be known, somewhat aptly, as ‘Silver Jane’), the Prestons, and many Wanjohi Valley notables form the majority of entries in Beryl’s log.

  The Carberrys’ daughter Juanita remembers Beryl’s constant visits to Seremai, though she was only eight at the time and Beryl was a glowing young woman of thirty. Beryl used to ride Juanita’s pony, the only person apart from Juanita herself allowed to do so. Beryl performed gymkhana stunts for the child, such as picking up a silk handkerchief at the gallop. ‘Of course I was filled with admiration but on the few occasions I secretly tried it, I usually ended up picking myself up,’ Miss Carberry recalled.48 There was a reason for Beryl’s constant visits to the Carberrys – a practical one. Carberry employed a full-time aircraft engineer at Seremai and had his own small fleet of aeroplanes based at his private landing-strip. Beryl could fly to Seremai and borrow an aeroplane whilst her own was serviced.49

  Until April, Tom was busy working for Furness. But in April he had some weeks free before following Furness back to England. He and Beryl spent all their time together up country at her farm.

  ‘If you’re really serious about getting your B licence,’ Tom told her, ‘you could get it by Christmas. Then perhaps you could get a job as a private pilot in England.’50 Tom left in June and Beryl worked from Melela. She flew at every opportunity to build up her hours, and worked like a demon on aviation theory for her commercial ticket. She was so busy that in the week she had to fly to Mombasa to take her B licence tests, she suddenly noticed that her log book entries were incomplete. Beryl always ensured that entries into her log book were neatly made and she habitually jotted down the details of each flight on a pad for copying later into her log book. On the only occasion that the log book is completed in a hand not her own, her father wrote up the entries from her rough notes.

  Beryl took the examination that would make her a commercial pilot. The tests included stripping an engine and cleaning jets, petrol and oil filters, changing plugs and adjusting magneto points as well as written and oral examination on the theory and practice of air law and navigation.51

  On 18 September the Mombasa Times announced that ‘Beryl Markham has now been granted her Air Ministry Pilot’s “B” licence which entitles her to carry passengers in an aeroplane for hire or reward. Mrs Markham holds the distinction of being the first woman in Kenya, and of being the first Kenya trained pilot to obtain a “B” licence. There are very few women “B” pilots anywhere in the world.’ Beryl reported later: ‘Heavens! How thrilled I was. “My girl, you are getting somewhere at last,” I said to myself.’52 Her first commercial job, before she left Mombasa, was taking tourists for joy flights along the coast.

  After gaining her commercial licence she operated from the rented cottage at Muthaiga, taking any kind of flying job that came her way. Arap Ruta was still at her side, a faithful shadow who learned as much about aircraft maintenance as Beryl. Tom was in Kenya again with the Furnesses, and she saw him as often as his work allowed. He told her of his participation in the King’s Cup where in the early rounds he managed second, fourth and eighth places, but this was not good enough to get him into the final round.53

  Beryl had already started to build up her safari work, taking Blixen and his clients game-spotting, and providing a message service to and from Percival’s bush camps. From December 1933 she accompanied safari groups, making the camps her base for up to ten days at a time. Operating from hastily cleared landing strips, she would go off each morning scouting by air for the animal herds, reporting their position to the waiting hunters. Tom was unhappy about this work, and constantly warned her always to be on the lookout for somewhere to land. She got into the habit of spotting potential landing sites where she could make an emergency landing if necessary, but seldom had to use any of them.54 Throughout that winter while Tom flew for Furness, Beryl flew scouting sorties for Blixen and other white hunters.

  Beryl and Tom were still lovers during this period. ‘As far as I recall he was her only boyfriend,’ a contemporary recalled, and he shared Beryl’s delight when she landed her first contract. George Edye of East African Airways apparently sent for her one day. ‘Want a job?’ he asked. Beryl was too excited to speak and just nodded. The job was delivering mail and supplies to miners at the gold mines of Kakamega, Musoma and Watende. Beryl said, ‘It was difficult flying. The airstrips were pocket handkerchief size and a forced landing anywhere en route meant almost certain death from thirst.’55 Gold mining never became big business in Kenya, but in the early 1930s, when a few nuggets were discovered, there was a great deal of excitement and talk of another Rand. Miners flocked to the ‘gold fields’ some forty miles from Lake Victoria, and when Elspeth Huxley (then a young journalist) visited Kakamega in 1933, upwards of a thousand men were encamped there in tents and roughly erected native bandas, eagerly panning riverbeds and sinking shafts. What she remembered principally though were the fireflies: ‘At night the ridges and valleys around about sparkled with millions of these insects, flashing their signals till the countless stars overhead were matched, it seemed, by another canopy of stars below.’56

  G. D. Fleming, who was a pilot for East African Airways in 1935, well remembered Kakamega airfield. ‘It was 5000 feet above sea level, with two runways at right angles, each about 25 by 700 yards.’ On one occasion he landed there in a tropical storm. ‘It was coming down in a solid wall, the visibility was less than 25 yards. As soon as I crossed the boundary I closed the throttles and landed about 150 yards inside the hedge. The landing strip [I had chosen] sloped uphill very steeply, with tall trees at the top. We used to land uphill and take-off downhill. As the machine ran along the ground I saw through the wall of water a dim object in my path. As it rapidly came closer I realized that it was a car.’ He opened the throttle and bounced over the car but by then he could not stop within the length of the runway and the aeroplane somersaulted over the perimeter bank. He regained consciousness to see the passengers ‘hanging from the seat belts like bats and very red in the face’.57

  Beryl augmented her income from this contracted work by providing a courier service for safari parties, and delivering medical supplies or doctors to emergency cases. Sometimes she flew an accident victim or critically sick patient from distant outposts to hospital in Nairobi.58 In addition she provided an air taxi service to up-country farms, undercutting Wilson
Airways’ rates of one shilling and threepence per mile.59 Often she worked as a relief pilot for East African Airways and a colleague, G.D. ‘Flip’ Fleming, stated:

  She was a fine pilot with great courage and endurance, and with the exception of Jean Batten I think Beryl was the finest woman pilot in the British Empire…

  I never saw her tired or ‘the worse for wear’ even after a ten-hour flight or a party the night before. She always looked fresh and cheerful…her navigation was uncanny, and she could find her way to any spot in the vast open country of East Africa…I never saw her make a poor landing, even in really filthy weather, on bad aerodromes or at night.60

  When the Furness safari ended in January, Tom made preparations to fly to the Furness mansion near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. Beryl was heavily engaged in scouting for Blixen’s safaris until March and was busy and happy. The pair saw the forthcoming separation as a temporary one. Tom hoped to compete in the King’s Cup air races that summer and would return to Kenya for the safari season as usual. He was also hoping to involve himself in the big air race from London to Australia but this would need sponsorship and a special type of aeroplane, and at that stage it was very much a dream. He had made preliminary contact with Charles Scott, a fellow pilot with whom he was considering teaming up for the race, but their plans were very sketchy. The couple talked of Beryl’s flying to England during the summer, and this arrangement suited her.

  Neither knew it, but his departure from Kenya signalled the end of their love affair.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1933–1936

  In 1933, Beryl was a woman confident of her ability to fly and earn a living in an exciting new field. If she had failed in this venture she could still have supported herself, for her skill in handling horses would not have failed her. Indeed she still helped Clutterbuck occasionally on his farm at Elburgon where he was again training successfully; by the mid 1930s he had produced two Derby winners.1 But she was still searching for something. Destiny had not finished with her, she was convinced of that, and she was restless, almost apprehensively anticipating ‘something that would happen to change my life – I always knew it would’.2

  Notoriously fastidious about her appearance, Beryl regularly attended a beauty parlour in Nairobi to have her hair lightened and her nails manicured. She invariably dressed in her famous livery of white silk shirt and cravat and the loose white slacks which fitted snugly over her slim hips and flowed sensuously around her exceptionally long legs. Seeing her fine fair skin, her blue eyes and sheer femininity, but particularly her jaunty manner of speaking, an onlooker might have dismissed her as a society woman playing with aeroplanes. But flying was no game to her, and despite the apparent vulnerability in her shy smile she was always aware of the impression she created. Furthermore she was not displeased with reactions to her unusual combination of stunning looks and somewhat masculine profession. There were other women pilots in East Africa at that time, but none except Beryl earned their living at what was regarded as a rather dangerous sport.

  It is interesting to speculate about the feelings of a man, stranded in the bush for days with a broken ankle, waiting for assistance after he had sent a runner for help. He must have been delighted when the tiny blue and silver aeroplane roared over his camp. Anxiously watching the aeroplane land on the prepared bush clearing in the distance, he waited for the pilot to walk to his camp. If King Kong had walked into the clearing with first aid and fresh supplies he would have welcomed him like a brother. Imagine then his feelings when, instead of a helmeted male pilot, a tall Garboesque vision of a girl, dressed in white, with long blonde hair and painted nails, grinned cheerfully and handed over a bottle of gin – Beryl’s cure-all for bush-stranded hunters. ‘He must have wondered if he hadn’t died and gone to heaven,’ an old timer recalled when he retold the story, but this is only one of many such stories and it is now almost impossible to separate fact from legend.

  Operating from the Muthaiga Club, Beryl conducted her freelance flying business with great success. She was the first person to offer aerial elephant scouting commercially, and fortunately there is a report of the first time she tried it. Colonel Leonard Ropner, a Member of Parliament who visited Kenya for big-game hunting in October 1933, reported that Beryl had found a way of using the aeroplane most effectively for spotting elephant.

  I went to Egypt to study the political situation and finding that I had six weeks to spare before the recess ended, I thought I would go to Kenya. So I flew there from Cairo by the weekly Imperial Airways liner. We flew over lots of game, including elephant. At Nairobi, Baron von Blixen, a Swedish sportsman, joined us. The party consisted of ten Africans, three of whom were expert trackers…they had previously been poachers, and one was a murderer!…One of the most amazing sights is hunting by car, but it is not very sporting, I should not indulge in it. I was trying to get an elephant for three weeks but only on the last day of my stay in the bush did I succeed.

  Acting on Blixen’s advice, Colonel Ropner sent runners two hundred miles to Nairobi with a message for Beryl. She flew to their camp and undertook to scout for elephant and report to the hunters next day.

  This was her first charter of this description. She took up the Baron to look for elephant. At last they spotted one big bull elephant with tusks which looked as though they might be over 150-pounds. There were two others with tusks over 100-pounds. It took them only half an hour to fly back to camp, but it took a day and a half to march through the bush to the position indicated. At dawn the next day [Beryl] flew up and down at the place where the elephant had been seen, while we made fires to let her spot us. She returned and dropped a message which stated that she had seen four large bulls. Even then it took us five hours to reach the spot.3

  Sometimes Beryl worked for Bunny Allen. ‘She was an excellent pilot…’ the former white hunter recalled, explaining that Beryl would fly into their camp using a makeshift airstrip which was as close as the hunting party could make it. Having ascertained what animal the party were after, whether elephant or buffalo, she would take off and locate a herd. ‘If it was specified that she should look for a big elephant, she was a girl to know what a big elephant meant.’ A big elephant meant big tusks – up to 200 pounds in weight. Sometimes she would return and land at the camp, and perhaps take one of the hunters along to show him. Or she might drop a note to the party in one of the special leather message bags she carried in the Avian for the purpose. To these little bags were attached streamer ribbons in her racing colours of blue and gold. A leather bag could easily lie lost in the bush, but the gaily coloured ribbons led searchers to the message quickly.4

  ‘She knew her way about the country wonderfully well…and was a very good bush pilot. Sometimes we would make an arrangement to rendezvous with her at a certain point on a river, or by a certain pond that happened to be left over from the last rains.’ Sometimes when thick bush made a landing impossible she would indicate the position of the animals by flying in wide circles over them.5 During the whole of this period Beryl had no sophisticated direction-finding instruments and no radio. Her aeroplane was fitted only with a compass, a turn and bank indicator and an altimeter. If she had gone down in the bush she had no way of letting anyone know her position.

  In January 1934 Ernest Hemingway visited Kenya and went on safari with Phillip Percival, the most famous white hunter of them all. He later portrayed Percival as big-game hunter Robert Wilson in one of his African stories.6 During his visit Hemingway contracted dysentery which became further complicated. ‘I became convinced that I…had been chosen to bear our Lord Buddha when he should be born again on earth.’7 It was not childbirth, but a prolapse of the lower intestine. A rescue aeroplane was hastily summoned and Hemingway was hospitalized in Nairobi. Despite the severe pain he was suffering, he not only took note of the flight over Kilimanjaro but was able to use his memory of it with typical eloquence in his novel The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

  Whilst convalescing he met Bror Bl
ixen and the pair, alike in so many ways, became firm friends. Hemingway invited Bror to join him at the end of February on a deep-sea fishing trip in the Indian Ocean, an invitation which also included Bror’s safari client Alfred Vanderbilt. Bror introduced Hemingway to Nairobi society, including Beryl, who had been contracted to work full time for Bror aerial scouting for the Vanderbilt safari. Hemingway referred to this period some years later when, writing of Beryl’s memoir, he said, ‘I knew her fairly well in Africa…’8 He could not have imagined that his letter would be a moving force in Beryl’s rediscovery as a writer nearly half a century later. Bror Blixen also refers to this Vanderbilt safari in African Hunter:

  The first time we went elephant hunting in the country around Voi, but it was a miserable business. We had sight of a big elephant that defied us for two and a half months. We were continually in harness the whole time, wore out many pairs of boots, smashed up an aeroplane and three cars, but all to no purpose.

  This aeroplane could not have been Beryl’s, for her log book shows no break in the operation of KAN throughout the period; she flew for the Vanderbilt party every day for two weeks, during which time she took both Blix and Vanderbilt up in the Avian to look for animals around Kilamakoy.

  When the safari season ended Beryl earned her living ferrying passengers to and from up-country farms, and taking any flying job that came along such as cargo delivery, or flying a Nairobi doctor to patients in remote locations. There were diversions: she still competed in gymkhana events and her name generally appeared in the prize list for jumping classes. In April 1934 a new airstrip called Njoro Landing Ground was officially opened. Beryl flew in, along with well-known aviators such as Carberry, St Barbe, Florrie Wilson and Silver Jane. Beryl won a prize for landing at a time prescribed some days previously by the aviation committee, and later collected the trophy for winning the Aerial Derby. This was a thirty-mile course but ‘several of the competitors went astray’, and Beryl cruised into a finish some minutes ahead of her rivals. The day finished with joy flights for spectators until dusk called a halt to the flying, whereupon everybody trooped to the clubhouse and dancing went on until the early hours.9