by James Fox
In 1925, they moved from Slains to a house in the valley called Clouds, a large, low thatched mansion with many guest bedrooms along each of its wings, facing on to a courtyard. Guests began to come out from England in large numbers, and it was often so wet on the escarpment, so difficult to negotiate by car, that it was hardly worth leaving for weeks on end. Idina would make it very difficult for her guests to leave at all.
She was not to come to the height of her powers for another ten years, but she quickly dominated what there was of the social life of that remote part of the White Highlands and it was there, under her influence, that the Happy Valley legend began.
Idina was only happy, according to the survivors of her house parties—and it was held as truth at Government House where she was on the blacklist—if all her guests had swapped partners, wives or husbands by nightfall, or certainly by the time the weekend or the invitation was over. She would organise, from time to time, after-dinner games of “blowing the feather” across a sheet held out by the guests around a table. It was a frantic game that was designed to create near hysteria; when the feather landed all eyes would be on Idina, who, like a high priestess presiding over a sacred ritual, would divine and then announce who was to sleep with whom.
The bedrooms were locked, and Idina had numbered keys with duplicates which were laid out on a table so that bedroom partners could be chosen by an alternative game of chance, or what appeared to be so. “We always called ldina’s bed ‘the battleground,’” said a survivor, “and we all used to end up in it at various times of the day or night.”
Lady Altrincham (then Lady Grigg, wife of the Governor) put Idina on her blacklist. She remembers visiting Clouds and being shocked to find ldina’s clothes and pearls scattered across the floor, the dogs unfed and the servants gone. It was considered that Idina carried on shamelessly in front of Africans and this—the setting of a bad example—was inexcusable. Retrospectively, Idina is even thought by some to have made a significant contribution to Mau Mau and the end of British rule, through her scandalous behaviour.
Lord Francis Scott frowned on young officers visiting the Wanjohi, or frequenting Clouds. Eileen, who could never forgive ldina’s ability to assimilate this landscape so effortlessly, may have had something to do with it.
She wrote in her diary, “Most of the women wear shorts, a fashion inaugurated by Lady Idina who has done a lot of harm in this country. It is very ugly and unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary” was the key word. Sacrifice and toil was the image of the settlers that Eileen wished to project to her relations at home. Glamorous eccentricity trivialised the frontier and made it look easy and enjoyable, or worse. Idina was spoiling things. She infuriated Eileen, who believed deeply in the inherent superiority and virtue of those born to rule. After a miserably inadequate lunch visiting neighbours, Eileen wrote, “I wonder how Idina will enjoy trying to eat this type of food and washing out of a cracked old tin basin … Everything is so intensely dry. It splits the face and hair … All the women in this country, except Lady Idina, are burnt brick red, which is not very becoming.” Once they met at Nakuru races: “Lady Idina was there in an Ascot gown with a lovely brown ostrich feather hat. Why she didn’t die of sunstroke I can’t conceive.”
Idina’s closest neighbours were Comte Frédéric de Janzé and his young American bride, Alice. Frédéric, twenty-six, elegant, laconic, aristocratic, had motor raced at Le Mans, fought in the Rif mountains and moved in the literary circle of Proust, Anna de Noailles and Maurice Barrès.
De Janzé’s Vertical Land* includes anonymous pen portraits of some of the Happy Valley residents, their names pencilled in by the author in my own copy. This is how he evoked Idina:
With her back to the fire, gold hair aflame, in red and gold kekoi. she stands … Sunk in chairs, legs crossed on the floor, propped up against the wall, all our eyes hang fascinated on that slight figure … The flames flicker; her half-closed eyes waken to our mute appeal. As ever, desire and the long drawn tobacco smoke weave around her ankles, slowly entwining that slight frame: around her neck it curls: a shudder, eyes close. Contentment! Power! The figure in the golden kekoi.
He described Happy Valley as the “Habitat of the wild and free”:
In this décor live a restless crowd of humans, hardly colonists—wanderers, perhaps, indefatigable amusement seekers weary or cast out from many climes, many countries. Misfits, neurasthenics, of great breeding and charm, who lacked the courage to grow old, the stamina to pull up and build anew in this land.
De Janzé described the principal cast of characters, among them Fabian Wallis, a homosexual and a close friend of Josslyn’s; Michael Lafone, a fierce womaniser with an eyeglass, who was briefly and disastrously married in Kenya to Elizabeth Byng, daughter of the Earl of Strafford, and above all Raymond de Trafford, the epitome of the remittance man.
Raymond came from a grand English family from Lancashire, and had been in the Coldstream Guards before coming to Kenya. He was devilishly attractive, quickwitted, original, cultivated, hopelessly indiscreet, a heavy gambler and drinker. To women, he could be delightfully attentive when he felt like it, and a great relief to talk to. Evelyn Waugh called him a “fine desperado,” took a great liking to him when he met him in Kenya in 1931, and kept up with him afterwards. “Something of a handful,” he observed, “v. nice but so BAD and he fights and fucks and gambles and gets D.D. [disgustingly drunk] all the time.” They stayed together with the Delameres at Elmenteita. Waugh wrote of Trafford in his diary: “He got very drunk and brought a sluttish girl back to the house. He woke me up later to tell me he had just rogered her and her mama, too.”*
There was a music-hall jingle that went the rounds in Nairobi:
There was a young girl of the Mau
Who said she didn’t know how.
She went for a cycle with Raymond and Michael,
She knows all there is to know now.
Along with the champagne, the drugs of the new age, cocaine and morphine, had found their way into Happy Valley. The chief dealer was Frank Greswolde Williams, who got his supplies from Port Said and who openly plied his trade in the Muthaiga Club. One of his best customers was the American Kiki Preston, a Whitney by birth, a beauty who often stayed with Idina. She had had many lovers, including the two Valentinos, de Trafford and Lafone—and the late Duke of Kent.
When her supplies ran low, Kiki would send her aeroplane to Nairobi for a fresh consignment. Cockie Hoogterp was a close friend of Kiki and remembers her extraordinary performance with her silver syringe.
She was great fun and very witty and never made any bones about morphine. She always looked marvellous. She would be quite open about it digging the needle into herself while we sat up drinking whisky. She never went to bed until 4 a.m. Next morning we were always hung over and sleeping: but she was up at 8 a.m. beautifully dressed, and looking lovely, as if nothing had happened.
“I’m sorry to say,” said Sir Derek Erskine. whose wife had helped the Prince of Wales to destroy the Muthaiga Club dance records, “that drugs played a very large part in that period. Cocaine was taken like snuff in Happy Valley and certainly didn’t do anybody any good.” At another dinner party for the Prince of Wales in 1928, at Muthaiga, Erskine saw Greswolde Williams suddenly being manhandled out of the room by a white hunter called Archie Richie. When Erskine asked what had happened, he was told, “Well, there is a limit, even in Kenya, and when someone offers cocaine to the heir to the Throne, something has to be done about it, particularly when it is between courses at the dinner table.”
Josslyn’s days were mostly taken up with horseracing and polo—which was seen as a painful but bracing hangover cure. He had a farm at Nakuru, but paid little attention to it. Near Gilgil, on the plain below the Kinankop, four separate polo fields had been cut out and rolled, under the mountain, from the great orchard of green-black cactus trees and scrub—the sombre landscape that you still cross, on a few miles of dirt track, to reach them now. J
osslyn would turn up here wearing tightly fitting shorts with wide corduroy stripes and, invariably, with a red-ochre Somali shawl flung over his shoulder.
Unlike Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch Hatton, who had adopted the Somali shawl as a somewhat romantic affectation, Josslyn carried off the fancy dress without a trace of self-consciousness, more in the spirit of the privileged boys of Pop at Eton, whose right it was to make flamboyant variations on the school uniform, wrapping themselves in bright flannel.
Josslyn’s charm, and even his arrogance, brought him close to the males around him. His assumption of the leader’s role was effortless. He had indeed inherited, like the sons of Mary, “that good part.”
Petal Allen, daughter of Sir Derek Erskine, remembers Josslyn Hay as the first really elegant man she ever saw, as a child. He sat on a shooting stick at the racecourse, and held Petal on his knee. He wore a white tussore silk suit, a polka dot bow tie and a panama hat. In the Wanjohi he would often wear a kilt. His hair was still oiled down and brushed into wings on either side and there was a transcendent perfection about his looks. He was immensely popular with most of the colonial community for his friendliness and his quick wit—a striking figure who made a lasting impression on the people he met.
And yet extraordinarily little is known about his life in Kenya, beyond the Don Juan legend. He is poorly remembered by the few surviving colonists who knew him, and he rarely returned to England. Either the drink has sealed away the memory or possibly the summary style of colonial language, whose every word is final, has suppressed it. “Oh! Tremendous charm. That was the thing.”
To press for detail is to introduce a tone of contradiction. But the judgments are often revealing. David Begg, a Scotsman known to the remaining whites around the Kinankop as “Bwana” Begg, knew Josslyn Hay well. He lives in a house of austere Highland decor, beside those same polo grounds at Gilgil which he owns, and which he cut out himself fifty years ago. He plays a skilful game, aged over seventy, and still speaks with a strong Scots accent. “He was a first-class fellow,” he said. “He was like a lot of those who never had anything to do. Clever, always had a brain. He’d always an answer. I used to play polo with him quite a bit. I would give him a hand loading his horses and he was always ready to take advice. Good eye for a ball and a strong, hefty fellow.”
“Tough,” a voice barked in the Muthaiga bar, “but very attractive indeed. Exploited by women, to whom he was irresistible.”
“He was very witty and pleasant to be with, a very good bridge player and a wonderful polo player,” said another contemporary, “but he wanted conquests and had innumerable women. Of course, you could live extremely well, put up a tremendous show for £2,000 a year.”
One of the few women who didn’t see him as the epitome of sexual attraction was Dushka Repton, a Russian beauty married to a settler farmer, Guy Repton, who was insanely jealous of his wife and eventually died of drink. Only once did Mrs. Repton consider Josslyn “irresistible,” when he appeared at a fancy dress ball at the Muthaiga Club, dressed in a black evening gown, sequins and pearls. The pearls belonged to Idina. She remembers Joss saying, “Pearls must be worn.”
At Clouds the parties that Joss and Idina gave were magnificent, and famous for their excesses. Nina Drury, born in 1901, was the young bride of Jack Soames, and in the mid-1920s they often went over to Clouds for dinner. “The dramas that used to take place were unbelievable,” she said. “It must have been the climate, I think.”
The evenings would begin with a certain formality and ritual preparation. In addition to her permanent house party, Idina would summon her neighbours, too, and all her young men, accepting no refusals. She had a Somali chef famous for his cooking and many servants to lay the separate tables and fill the rooms with fresh flowers. Then, at the appointed hour, ldina would take her bath—which was in the centre of her large bathroom—and like some royal mistress, bathe and dress herself in front of all her guests, talking away, insisting on permanent company, summoning new arrivals.
The excitement of ldina’s presence, of sharing her toilette, was heightened by a steady consumption of cocktails, and by the time dinner was served most of the guests were in a fair state of intoxication. One evening, Nina Drury remembers, a young woman, said in a loud voice that she had been making a list of all her lovers since she had been in Kenya. “Not very nice,” said Josslyn, “when she was my mistress this afternoon.”
A furious argument began between Raymond de Trafford and Frédéric de Janzé. Jack Soames told his young bride. “Now, my baby, there’s going to be trouble and you must go to bed.” Nina was very annoyed at being prevented from watching the drama. “But then,” she said, “various people were led into my room, sobbing and crying and saying that there was going to be a duel and that they were going to kill each other.” At the height of one of these evenings. Raymond de Trafford, maddened with drink, went outside and set fire to several of the African houses. His crime was settled like a gambling debt, and he was forced to pay up.
It seems that Josslyn was quite sober at these moments. His own recklessness was more methodical: he was more dedicated than most to the cause of seduction. But he would never question the right of his friends to act without restraint, whatever the burden on the African staff. Servants, by nature, were there to be inconvenienced. “Hay never paid his servants,” said his former Somali houseboy, “but the Somalis said ‘don’t worry,’ and when he eventually got round to it he gave the wages to the top Somali. Sometimes they waited six months to be paid, but they were fed and clothed and housed.”
Paula Long, a famous beauty of the period, married to “Boy” Long, a cattle rancher at Elmenteita, remembers Josslyn’s unpleasantness towards the staff: “He was horrible to Africans, and swore at them in Swahili,” she said. “He kept the staff up all night and was quite unscrupulous.”
This cynical, bullying side of Josslyn’s personality could also be seen within his own circle. The roaring jokes and the good company he provided redeemed him only up to a point, and he often antagonised people with his scathing tongue and his sexual arrogance. His innumerable women had one thing in common—they were all married. “To hell with husbands,” he was fond of saying. And to cuckold a man carelessly, while slapping him on the back or borrowing a fiver, added to his pleasure.
Patricia Bowles lived through two marriages in Happy Valley as a close friend and neighbour of Idina, and, at times, a participator in her ceremonies. (She has since retired to Kilifi.) Though fond of Josslyn, she well remembers this vicious element in his nature.
“At the Norfolk Hotel one day he said to some child, ‘Come to Daddy.’ I thought, ‘You bounder!’ It stuck terribly in my mind that he could say something so awful to somebody, indirectly, who was within earshot. That was the sort of thing he’d think funny. And he could be very humiliating and crushing to women. He would say, ‘What a revolting dress. God, how I hate mauve.’” The men’s bar at Muthaiga was the perfect place to display this particular form of wit and to boast of his conquests. In these conversations with his male friends, women would be divided into three categories, “droopers, boopers and superboopers.”
“He used to hold forth in the men’s bar, telling dirty stories. He was a terrific gossip,” said Patricia Bowles, “until he saw a pretty face through the hatch, when he would go and accost the stranger. He thought of nothing but women, liked them rich and broke up many marriages.”
One of the first marriages to be threatened by Josslyn was that of Frédéric and Alice de Janzé.
* Daphne Fielding, Mercury Presides (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954).
* Duckworth. 1928.
* Duckworth, 1931.
3
THE FASTEST GUN IN THE GARE DU NORD
Alice fell in love with Joss the moment she saw him, on her first trip to Kenya with her husband in 1925. She was twenty-five. They had been married for three years and had two small daughters. Patricia Bowles, who became her closest friend, says of her affair w
ith Joss, “It was on and off, on and off, I think on many and various occasions. It was never a sort of acknowledged affair. But I think she was always in love with him.”
Alice was probably the most dangerous of his mistresses, perhaps the most fascinating and certainly, when she was in her twenties, before the excesses of Wanjohi got the better of her, the most exquisite-looking. Her face was pale and delicate, with high cheekbones and wide, calm eyes of deep violet colour. She had a lovely, slightly frail figure and short black hair bound tightly in the nape of her neck. She would invariably dress in corduroy trousers and bright, loose flannel shirts.
Alice was the only child of William Silverthorne of Chicago, a rich felt manufacturer of Scots descent, and through her mother she was an heiress to the Armour meatpacking fortune. She possessed all the attributes that Josslyn found irresistible: she was mysterious, she was married, and she was rich.
The danger came from Alice’s waywardness and instability, heightened by the madness of the 1920s, with which she was fatally touched. She had been a wild teenager, the shock element at Chicago deb parties, and there was a disorder somewhere in her psyche, a lasting melancholy. Her mother had died of consumption when she was five years old and Alice herself was consumptive from birth. She was brought up mostly by a German governess, in large houses in New York. After a traumatic and unexplained incident involving her father, who was a drunk, she was made a ward of her uncle. But her father had often taken her to Europe, dressing her in lace and taking her to nightclubs while she was still in her early teens. Alice developed a liking for cocktails and a mania for animals and would be seen conspicuously walking her black panther, in its white collar, up and down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.
