CHAPTER ELEVEN
1937–1941
Beryl spent Christmas on the ship she had boarded in San Diego. On 27 December she arrived at Sydney in New South Wales where she stayed for a week before boarding the Mariposa, bound for Melbourne. Interviewed there for the newspaper Truth she was described effusively as ‘Pretty as a talkie star, and utterly feminine, from her aureole of golden hair to her lacquered toenails. Her eyes are clear china blue. She has a flawless complexion and is as slender as a willow wand.’ She was surprised by her noisy welcome at the little port of Balmain, she said.
She wore slacks, the acid test of a woman’s figure – of royal blue linen, immaculately creased and zippered on the hips. On her feet were sketchy red sandals and on her blouse was a fluffy scarf with red, white and blue whirligigs, fastened with a small aeroplane brooch of the sort of gold that one finds in Kenya. About her wrist was a double chain linked with tiny enamelled flags spelling her name in morse code. Round the other…a wide silver bracelet, made in Arizona. In it is set a wide sensible watch flanked by two turquoises…
The reader also learned that Beryl’s favourite colour was blue, that she disliked green. That she was not superstitious. That she was not a teetotaller though she disliked cocktail parties. That she never gambled and unless it was unavoidable never played bridge. ‘Tea is her favourite drink.’ Beryl must have been playing with the lady journalist. The article went on to divulge that horses were Beryl’s favourite animals:
Dogs come next. Cats are not in it at all, and she doesn’t care for children in the mass, just an individual child here and there appeals to her…She takes great care of her complexion with cleansing creams…She is five foot nine and a half, weighs nine stone, takes size five in a shoe and 6½ in a glove. Her mother is Irish and her father an Englishman who gives her her head in flying exploits but asks her now not to do it any more over water.1
On 17 February aboard an Interocean Lines cargo boat which had left Perth three weeks earlier, Beryl returned to Africa, and was reunited with her father who was living in Durban. She stayed with him for only part of the three months she spent in South Africa. Her relationship with Emma Orchardson was still difficult and it was impossible for Beryl to spend any length of time there, no matter how pleased father and daughter were to see each other. During these few weeks, however, Beryl happily slipped back into the daily routine of a top-class racing stable; but her purpose in visiting South Africa was not solely to see her father. She also had meetings with potential backers, a syndicate headed by Schlesinger.
A record flight of some kind was still very much in her mind and she was able to provide details of the latest advances in civilian aircraft in the United States. The only information Beryl ever gave to journalists regarding these discussions was that ‘it was the only major flight not yet done’. Although it was never confirmed, the newspapers who wrote about Beryl were almost certainly correct in their assumptions that she had a ‘round-the-world’ attempt, or possibly a stratosphere night, in mind.2
In May she boarded an Imperial Airways flying boat and headed for England by way of Kenya. Her discussions with the potential sponsors had been inconclusive, and, interviewed in Mombasa where she broke her journey, she informed the journalist that ‘any future attempts at records are in the lap of the gods. I have no settled plans in the meantime, but I long to be back in Kenya,’ she continued, ‘I have such happy memories.’ The East African Standard concluded that her journey to Britain was in connection with another record-breaking flight.3
Here something of a mystery occurs. The stamps in her passport reveal a fast journey (21 April, Sudan; 22 April, Yugoslavia; 23 April, Brindisi and Bracciano; 24 April, Lyon and Paris), and one would assume from this that she flew to London by the scheduled airliner. But Beryl stated to me that she flew with Blix to Europe on that occasion and suffered some apprehension during the flight: ‘Europe was a rather dangerous place to be just then…’ Initially I was inclined to assume that Beryl had merely confused the dates with the flight that she had made with Blix in the spring of 1936. However a further piece of information revealed that her memory might not have been at fault.
In Bror Blixen’s Letters from Africa he too wrote of their flight to Europe. He mentions no dates but, despite small differences, the flight he describes is clearly that which Beryl also writes about in her memoir. In West with the Night she states that the date of that flight was 1936; however, Bror ends his version with the following passage:
…it was getting dark as we approached the town at low altitude, in spite of regulations. Now we could discern the Eiffel Tower against the horizon and a little later we landed at Le Bourget. We taxied along the deserted hangars till we reached one that Beryl recognized. A surly old man, who was in a hurry to get home, opened the sliding doors. Voila! and we pushed in the plane. ‘Customs?’ ‘Non, non, monsieur, it is too late for that.’ I put my suitcases in a shed only taking out what I needed for the night. There was another man in the shed, fiddling with his luggage, and as he was leaving, I thought I recognized his gait – however, it could not very well be that person, as he was in Spain. Yet, who else would walk in that particular way with the great trunk slightly bent to the right and with those long arms like a gorilla’s? ‘Ernest!’ I shouted, and sure enough, it was Ernest Hemingway, unshaven and dirty, but him, without a doubt. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked in astonishment. I could ask the same, I from Africa and he from the Spanish Civil War.4
The trio drove together to the Ritz. Both men were unwashed and Hemingway had a week’s growth of beard. Beryl left them to have dinner with a friend ‘…some duchess or other’, Blix wrote. Blix records that the trio spent the following morning enjoying the sights of Paris, particularly ‘the chestnuts in blossom’ before continuing to London.5 This raises intriguing questions, for Ernest Hemingway never left the USA in 1936 but he was known to be in Paris on the very day in 1938 that Beryl’s passport reveals was the day she arrived there. The flight that both Beryl and Blix describe, with its delays and tribulations, could not have been made in 1938 for – as Beryl’s passport reveals – that journey took her only days from Kenya. Undoubtedly the meeting in Paris between Blix, Beryl and Hemingway took place. Perhaps it was Blix who telescoped several events into one. He arrived at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on a number of occasions unwashed and unshaven. On one of these he was accompanied by Sir Charles Markham and both men were dirty and dishevelled, having had their luggage stolen. An angry commissionaire tried to evict them from the hotel steps as undesirables until Bror’s wife Cockie came to their rescue by explaining that one of the ‘tramps’ was her husband.6
Beryl found a different London from the one she had left a year earlier. Now the talk everywhere was of war, though there was a brief respite in September after Chamberlain’s return from Munich declaring ‘peace in our time’. For a month or so there was almost a return to the old carefree days as relief flooded through the country, but soon came the first news of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and the murmurings in Europe refused to be stilled. Before long fears of war were again uppermost in people’s minds. It seemed a long winter, mitigated by parties drenched in enforced gaiety. Sensitive to atmosphere, Beryl became unhappy and restless. She did some riding and hunting, renewed some old friendships, and spent most of her time in aviation circles. In the spring, lonely and depressed, she was named in the papers as the respondent in a divorce case.
Mansfield had been pressing Beryl for a divorce for some years because he wanted to remarry, but she had always refused. In February 1938 at roughly the same time as she arrived in Natal, she had been mistakenly named by the British press in a divorce case with a co-respondent she had never met, a Mr Geddes. Later an apology was printed – the Mrs Markham in question was Sir Charles Markham’s wife.7 But Mansfield did file for divorce in the spring of 1939, naming Captain Hubert S. Broad as co-respondent. Mrs Broad also filed naming Beryl as co-respondent.8
Hubert Broad,
whom Beryl had met through Tom many years earlier, had been chief test pilot to De Havilland for a number of years and was a well-known and universally respected figure in British aviation. In 1925 he had been second in the Schneider Trophy and in 1926 he won the King’s Cup Air Race in one of the very first Gipsy Moths. Clearly a certain amount of evidence must have been available – the pair had spent a lot of time together that winter, according to witnesses but the case was defended strenuously by both Beryl and Broad, and no divorce resulted.
The court case with its attendant unwelcome publicity, lack of money and, more importantly, lack of any real love and support made Beryl very depressed. In addition her son Gervase, always inclined to delicate health, contracted meningitis that winter and was very ill. She saw him several times, and she worried about him, but of course she was virtually a stranger to the child.9 She was thirty-seven and felt that her life was leading nowhere. She had tried for some time, unsuccessfully, to get news of arap Ruta and in April she wrote to Roddy Hurt, an old friend, asking him if he had heard anything of Ruta, requesting news of Kenya gossip and pouring out her troubles. Roddy’s lengthy reply mirrors Beryl’s feelings at the time she wrote to him, as well as his obvious affection for her.
Internment Camp,
ISIOLO, N.F.D.
19th May 1939
Beryl my dear,
Thank you so much for writing to me, and I’ve been meaning to write back for nearly six weeks now, but somehow it didn’t become un fait accompli. I’m afraid I’ve been very slack – but I’ll try to make up for it now. My dear I loved getting your letter, and hearing from you again after a long time. I’m most awfully sorry to hear about all your troubles – poor Beryl – and you sounded so depressed and alone when you wrote. I wished I could suddenly find myself in England and have taken you out to dinner, and made you really tight in true Nyeri form. I haven’t seen or heard of the case at all. I wonder did Markham drop it at the last moment, or did it come off? Anyway if it did I hope you won all the way – and got a lot of damages. You deserve a lot of luck and happiness Beryl my dear, and don’t seem to get it which is so unfair. If I can help you in any way at all my dear, please, please do let me do so. Write to me, put any idea up to me, and let me see if I can be of any help to you. I don’t want to throw bouquets at you, they may be, and probably are – unwanted – and I’ve never told you this to your face – but I admire everything about you my sweet. I admire your personality, your terrific guts, your looks, your figure, and all the rest of it. I hope I am a friend of yours Beryl dear, and so, as such please tell me if I can ever be of any help to you.
You ask me for Kenya news. Actually I am a bad source from which to seek information, gup or titbits, because, like you, who say you have buried yourself away and practically gone into retirement these days – I too prefer to live 80% of my time in the NFD [Northern Frontier District] and as far away from the chitter-chatter, gup – scandal and ‘fetina’ as I can get. I go to Nyeri for a weekend, where I’ve a small cottage on Schofield’s farm behind Seremai, about once a month, and see the chaps and have a party. I’ve been to Muthaiga only twice in the last ten months, and when I go I’m afraid I find it so boring these days. The place is monopolized by Joss,10 who lives there, and by Mary who is too drunk to get up before afternoon, and then slowly appears in order to get tight again. She looks quite frightful these days. Brandy has practically closed up one eye completely, and the rest of her is covered with spots. She’s as round as the Albert Hall too.
No, I infinitely prefer the Aero Club, for my drinking, parties and friends. Nigel is being divorced and is going to marry Gladys Gooch – and the poor old chap has been kicked out as Secretary of Muthaiga. He goes on October 1st. Dina11 is out here again looking wonderful. She brought a Portuguese boyfriend with her from Europe but threw him away when she got to Nairobi, he fell for someone else and I don’t remember who is Dina’s chap now…June and JC [Carberry] left Nyeri a fortnight or so ago for England and America. Blix I haven’t seen or heard of for literally years…Kenya is a damn fine place…I’ve been here in Isiolo for two and a half years now and in the KAR for nearly six and I love it as much as ever. They made me a Captain a year and a half ago and gave me command of this Company, and the Internment Camp – and £750 a year.
I tried to trace your boy arap Ruta for you, but Alice was first ill and then went home, and no one else knew him, so I’m afraid I drew blank…Won’t you come back to us in this country Beryl dear? There are lots of people who think of you and say nice things about you, and we all miss you a hell of a lot. Do write to me again meanwhile, my dear. Snap out of your depression and loneliness, and please tell me if I can be useful to you in any way. Bless you and the very best of luck and everything to you.
Roddy12
With the divorce case out of the way Beryl’s spirits lifted, but now she was bored with London. Her friends had only one topic of conversation. Was there going to be a war? No one was interested in anything but the possibility of war. Record-breaking flights had already become a thing of the past, frivolous amidst the earnest military preparations. Beryl could raise no interest from anyone for her proposals. Many of her friends, anxious to secure their positions in the forthcoming fracas, were already wearing Royal Air Force blue. After a year she had still not found a job which offered fulfilment, creditors were pressing and her allowance from Prince Henry was already pitifully inadequate to support her lifestyle. She did not feel part of the groundswell of nationalistic pride and she hated the idea of war. As soon as she could get on to a ship, she booked a single passage to New York. Interviewed on her departure for the United States aboard the SS Manhattan she was still telling reporters that her journey was to look for an aeroplane in which to make an attempt on one of the big aviation records.
On 23 June she arrived in New York, breezily telling journalists that she had returned to America ‘just because I like it better than any other place’. She also told them that she intended to divorce Mansfield by the end of the year and to become an American citizen. She did neither in the event, but readers learned that in contrast to her last visit following a crash landing in Nova Scotia, when she had needed to borrow a dress from a friend, Mrs Markham came equipped with ‘ten daytime outfits and several billowy evening gowns in her trunk’.13 It was almost certainly too late to cash in on her flight of three years earlier but Beryl was desperate enough to take anything – even demonstration work. First she needed to get an American pilot’s licence and she had already arranged through correspondence with Jackie Cochran to travel to California in order to do just that. Jackie put her in touch with the Ryan Aircraft Company which was looking for a demonstration pilot, but this came to nothing. In the spring of 1940 Beryl did do a significant amount of flying in the Ryan SCW14 but she never obtained her American licence.15
Within weeks of her arrival in California, Beryl received an offer of work from Paramount Studios. They had a motion picture called Safari on the stocks, in which the hero scouted big game from a small bi-plane. Beryl was offered the job of technical adviser. She rented an apartment near the studios and went to see the Paramount chiefs. Safari, she learned, was the story of an African hunting expedition and marked the third picture in which Edward H. Griffith had directed Madeleine Carroll. In those previous movies, Café Society and Honeymoon in Bali, Miss Carroll had appeared opposite Fred MacMurray. In Safari she would co-star with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Coincidentally, Madeleine Carroll’s first movie was financed and directed by Mansfield in England during the early 1930s. It made Miss Carroll’s reputation but almost bankrupted Mansfield.
Fairbanks was to play the lead part of Jim Logan, white hunter to the safari party which consisted of Linda Stewart (Madeleine Carroll) and Baron de Courland (Tullio Carminati) and others, but Fairbanks, Carroll and Carminati comprised the inevitable love-triangle which also included several familiar angles. The beautiful, but disillusioned heroine whose only love had been an aviator, killed in Spain, was now de
termined to find security and peace of mind as the wife of the rich titled sportsman financing the expedition. No one was surprised when at the end of the film the girl walked out on the despicable baron for the handsome adventurer, who at one stage in the film explained that prior to coming to Africa as a hunter, he had been an aviator with the Chinese army. Topically, he went on to tell the wide-eyed heroine, ‘I enlisted because men must fight to defend their freedom.’16 It was all good stuff, no shocks, very entertaining escapism. That was what moviegoers wanted!
Beryl was delighted. She was not only to assist in the flying sequences. It was her job to make the natives’ Swahili sound authentic, and to ensure that Miss Carroll’s wardrobe was suited to Africa rather than one of the many beaches near Hollywood. ‘Authenticity. That’s what we want,’ Beryl was told. She thought it was all going to be the most enormous fun. And so it turned out to be.
The studio had established two locations to shoot the film. One, at Baldwin Lake, was on a ranch once owned by a gentleman called ‘Lucky’ Baldwin. The ranch was east of Hollywood, not far from the Santa Anita Racetrack, and the small lake, surrounded by jungle-like growth which flourished in the Californian climate, had last been used to film The Road to Singapore starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour. For Safari, an African trading post (something which amused Beryl immensely because she’d never come across one quite like it in Africa) was built on the banks of the lake, complete with a huge warehouse and wharf.17
The other location was Sherwood Forest, west of Hollywood in the Santa Monica Hills, so-called because the leading man’s father had once made his memorable version of Robin Hood there. In and around Sherwood Forest several sets were built, including a complete African village, a safari base camp, and a landing strip.
Straight on Till Morning Page 27
