by James Fox
She met the sensitive, literary Comte de Janzé, who came from an ancient Breton family, in a Paris antique shop when she was twenty-one. They were married in Chicago in 1922 and spent most of their short marriage, between the births of their two daughters, on a succession of safaris in Kenya.
The virtual absence of children in Happy Valley is something of a phenomenon. They would certainly have obstructed the grown-ups’ leisurely programme, and it is a tribute to the residents of the Wanjohi that they managed to keep even accidental children from crossing the border. Joss and Idina did have a baby, called Diana, whom Nina Drury once saw asleep in the garage, dumped like the shopping on the back seat of their Hispano-Suiza. Alice’s solution was simply to leave her two children behind, and later to dismiss them from her life altogether. They were brought up by Frédéric’s sister at the family chateau in Normandy, and in Paris. “Alice knew that she would be a hopeless mother,” said Patricia Bowles. “I admired her for her honesty.”
Alice saw her children only occasionally on her rare visits to Paris, when she would stay at the Hotel de Bourgogne. One of her daughters, Nolwen, who is married to Lord Clark, recalls, remarkably, feeling no trace of resentment or angoisse at these meetings. Instead, she says, she was dazzled by the glamour of this mystery mother who lived in Africa. “I was very much in awe of her,” she says, “and later, as I grew up, I appreciated her great virtues of courage and fortitude … However, it was the quality of her beauty, which was so delicate and transparent and her delicious grace and elegance—that was what made my heart turn over when I looked at her. And her hats, scarves, shoes had one enthralled. She dressed beyond perfection, with an instinctive and mysterious subtlety.”
Alice made a great impression on Happy Valley, and on Idina herself, and seemed to inspire universal affection among her friends. She was always at the centre of things. She had a keen sense of the comic; she entertained them on her ukelele, singing in a low, broken voice. She was also intensely emotional, angrily bridling when her sense of justice was offended—especially when it came to the treatment of animals. Frédéric warned in Vertical Land, “No man will touch her exclusive soul, shadowy with memories, unstable, suicidal.”
There is a telling, beautiful photograph of Alice, sitting in a wicker chair on her veranda, wearing her usual corduroy trousers and a wide felt hat of the period. On her lap is a lion cub, weighing at least forty pounds, evidently too grown-up to be a pet, with paws the size of her own hand, and its tail hanging down almost to her ankle. Alice is staring to one side with a distant look of an icon mother. She was often described as looking like a “wicked madonna,” and the pose is perhaps self-parody. The lion cub, named Samson, was reared by Alice, who had a sizable menagerie on her farm. When it grew to be a lion, it required two zebras a week for its food. Alice couldn’t face that, and sent it away.
The photograph powerfully evokes that period in Kenya, in mid-1926, when Alice was beginning her stormy romance with Raymond de Trafford. Her intermittent affair with Joss, which continued despite her new infatuation, had been conducted in some secrecy and for a time without Frédéric’s knowledge. But with Raymond, who always extracted the maximum drama from any situation, that was impossible.
At first Alice had taken a violent dislike to Raymond, which made Frédéric suspect the beginning of yet another affair. As Alice told the story later, it was Joss who first discovered it. At a large party at Clouds he noticed that she and Raymond had slipped away. He crept into the adjoining bedroom, climbed up the wall partition, lay along the top of it, and heard the couple making plans to elope. “And what about poor Joss?” he interrupted. They did elope that night, but only as far as a cottage on ldina’s estate.
Nina Drury remembers ldina’s complaints the previous day about Joss’s affair with Alice getting out of control. Now she said, “I do wish you’d find Alice for me.”
Nina said, “But Idina, aren’t you upset by her behaviour with Joss?”
Idina replied, “You seem to forget that Alice is my best friend.”
There was a conference the following morning to decide how to get Alice back. Frédéric, the long-suffering husband, agreed to go, and found them in the cottage. Raymond had occupied the bed and Alice was sleeping on a chair. That was thought to be typical of Raymond. “I shall always remember her reception when she returned,” said Nina Drury. “She was received like Royalty. All the men went down on one knee in front of her.”
Frédéric took Alice home to Paris in an effort to save the marriage, but she returned to Kenya almost immediately to be with Raymond, then went back to Paris again to ask Frédéric for a divorce. On March 25th, 1927, Raymond came from London to Paris to tell Alice that his family, devout Roman Catholics, forbade him to marry her and had threatened to cut him off if he did so. A friend said, “Raymond could have written a letter, but he loved trouble and difficulty.” He got considerably more than he bargained for. Before he left for London, he lunched with Alice in a cabinet privé at Lapérouse. Afterwards they went to a sporting equipment shop, where Alice had a small parcel wrapped at the far end of the counter and Raymond looked at the rifles. At the Gare du Nord, Alice climbed into the carriage of the train to see him off. She knelt in front of him, kissed him, pulled out a gun and fired, first at him and then at herself. Both were badly wounded, Raymond near the heart, and Alice in the stomach.
Alice had brought with her a friend’s dog, a German Shepherd, which became hysterical and threatened to attack any of the attendants or policemen who tried to approach the wounded couple. Paula Long, the owner of the dog, said it was typical that Alice’s only concern, as she was carried away bleeding on a stretcher, was to make sure the dog was returned to the right address, which she repeated several times. In the English hospital Alice told Paula with some relish of a nurse who looked into her room, clutching a dead baby in each arm, and who said, “Back in a tick.”
Alice was charged with attempted murder. The scandal received enormous coverage, and she was released on probation from the Correctional Court on a wave of public sympathy. She was seen as the unhappy heroine of a true crime passionel, and the judge was seduced. “Vous êtes une traîtresse, Madame,” he told her before letting her off. It came out, during the hearing, that Alice had already made four attempts to kill herself. When the question of her having abandoned her children was mentioned, she said, somewhat ingenuously, “My only reply is that my action shows the strength of my love for the man for whose sake I made the sacrifice.”
Early the following year, Alice was back in Kenya, but under orders from Government House to pack up and leave the country, as an undesirable alien. In the remaining weeks she took up her old affair with Josslyn. Karen Blixen, in a letter to her elder sister, described their arrival at her house at the end of February that year. She met Joss in Nairobi and invited him out to the farm for a “bottle.” He asked if he could bring Alice. That same day Karen Blixen was paid a surprise visit by Lady MacMillan (Northrop had been given an honorary knighthood) and three “really huge and corpulent” old American ladies, who had landed from a cruise ship for some sightseeing. They were hoping, above all, to see a lion. Blixen wrote,
They started to discuss all the dreadfully immoral people there were in Kenya, Americans too, unfortunately, and as the worst one of all mentioned Alice, and I, who of course knew that she was about to turn up, let them go into great detail about it. So when their car drove up and I went out to receive them, and came in and presented Lord Erroll and Comtesse de Janzé, I don’t think that the devil himself could have a greater effect if he had walked in. It was undoubtedly better than the biggest lion and has given them much more to talk to their fellow passengers about.*
* Isak Dinesen, Letters From Africa 1914–1931 (Weidenfeld & Nicoison, 1981); Karen Blixen also wrote under the name Isak Dinesen.
4
THE BONNY EARL OF ERROLL
In 1928, Joss’s father had died and he became the Earl of Erroll. His marriage to I
dina was coming to an end, in a blaze of acrimony and bad debts which he had run up in her name with the Indian merchants. Idina might have approved of casual affairs, but not a serious romance that would take him away for long periods and disrupt her social programme.
Erroll had now fallen in love with Molly Ramsay-Hill, another married heiress and a beauty, also older than himself; a petite, slender, animated woman with auburn hair. Her husband, Major Cyril Ramsay-Hill, was a rancher who had built himself a huge whitewashed castle in the Moroccan style on the edge of Lake Naivasha, with crenellated walls, a minaret and lawns sloping down to the edge of the water. Oserian, as it was called, had been known since Happy Valley days as the “Djinn Palace.” Compared with the sub-Lutyens gloom of most settler architecture, it is a house of haunting beauty, with a magnificent Art Deco bar outside the dining room.
There is a legend, still current in Nairobi, that Ramsay-Hill horsewhipped Erroll, for his seduction of Molly, outside the Norfolk Hotel, “in front of a mixed audience of Africans, Asians and Europeans.” Erroll’sown Somali servant, who claims anonymity, witnessed the incident all those years ago, and remembers it differently.
He had gone with Erroll to the Djinn Palace, where a house party had been arranged. One day he was ordered by Erroll to load up Major Ramsay-Hill’s two Buicks for a safari into the Masai Reserve, towards Narok. The first Buick set off with Erroll and Mrs. Ramsay-Hill and the second followed with the luggage. When Major Ramsay-Hill discovered the absence of his wife and his Buicks, he sent his own Somali servant to look for her and then joined the hunt himself. It is not remembered precisely how many days this took but the search included a visit to the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, already a distance of some 100 miles and wildly off course. In fact, the Somali servants knew exactly where the party had gone but held back, apparently out of flawless discretion and because this was, after all, how the Bwanas chose to spend their time.
Ramsay-Hill finally found the couple in a tented camp at Narok. He had come with a rhino whip, with which he laid about Erroll as best he could, chasing him through the bush; then he got into one of his Buicks and went home to Oserian. In the divorce proceedings, Ramsay-Hill cited Erroll and won £3,000 damages to pay off the debts the couple had run up in his name, although Molly kept the Djinn Palace.
“It is obvious,” said the judge, “that the co-respondent is a blackguard.” As for Molly, it was obvious, that she too was a woman of very low character, though “that may be largely due to the influence of the co-respondent.” Assessing the damages to Major Ramsay-Hill, he said, “I should have thought that he was very well rid of a bad woman, but he does not take that view. It is obvious that he had a great affection for her.” In her own petition, meanwhile, Idina cited Molly and produced two enquiry agents to prove “misconduct” in a flat in Sloane Street, London, in April 1928.
In 1930, Erroll and Molly were married and moved into the Djinn Palace. The Scottish lord must have felt at home here, beside this beautiful lake, that had the look of a wild highland loch, encircled as it was by mountains and plains, its wide grassy shore bordering the water which, seen from the veranda of the Djinn Palace on a fine day, was a clear, cool blue pool. For decoration there were herons, black duck, chalk white egrets, and hippos rose and sank in the water among the floating islands of papyrus.
The bedroom doors of the house faced an inner courtyard with a tiled pool and a fountain in the centre. Thus entrances and exits were easily observed. There was a sunken marble bath lined with black and gold tiles in the main suite—to facilitate, so the story goes, the vomiting of overindulgent guests. The rooms and terraces were furnished with deep sofas and armchairs, loose-covered in flowered chintz. And Erroll’s full-length portrait, in unpaid for Coronation robes, hung at the top of the stairs. Once again, however, he was financially secure: Molly’s estate produced an income of £8,000 a year.
Before long, out of boredom and an acute sense of his own abilities, the ruling instinct in Erroll began to assert itself and to bloom, encouraged by Lord Francis Scott, who recognised his natural talent for politics. The opportunities for power in that community were infinite: it was a tidy constituency and there was a marked absence of competition. The Premier Earl of Scotland was likely to be a figure of some weight, and he also expressed some forceful political sentiments. In 1934 he became a paid-up member of the British Union of Fascists.
Nellie Grant, Elspeth Huxley’s mother, described Erroll’s exploits on Oswald Mosley’s behalf in her posthumously published book, Letters from Africa:
11th December 1934. Wednesday last was Joss Erroll’s meeting at the (Muthaiga) Club to explain British fascism. There were 198 people there, no less, and a very good-tempered meeting, as everybody cheered to the echo what anyone said. British fascism simply means super loyalty to the Crown, no dictatorship, complete religious and social freedom, an “insulated Empire” to trade with the dirty foreigner, higher wages and lower costs of living …
All questions and answers cheered to the roof … Whenever Joss said British fascism stands for complete freedom, you could hear Mary Countess [Molly] at the other end of the room saying that within five years. Joss will be dictator of Kenya.*
The following year Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, and Joss Erroll dropped his membership in the British Union of Fascists. Instead he was elected, aged thirty-four, to the Presidency of the Convention of Associations, the “settlers’ parliament”—a separate and unofficial rival to the Legislative Council. Eileen Scott, who described Erroll as “much improved,” was at the election.
To my surprise and delight, contrary to the expectations of most people. Joss Erroll was voted to the chair, largely outnumbering the Left Wing, and most of the executive are sound men too. It is a pity Joss hasn’t had a year’s more practice and experience; he has a brain like lightning, and it is difficult for him to listen patiently to this slow minded, if sound, community. However, it is a great step in the right direction, he is very able and a gentleman. Nearly everyone expected a Bolshie to be elected.
By now Erroll had begun to lose interest in his second Countess, and this, for Molly, signalled the beginning of a sad decline. She wanted desperately to produce a child and heir, and had many false pregnancies. Realising that she was losing Joss, she started to drink heavily and eventually to shoot morphine.
Erroll’s absences were prolonged: “He was very naughty with Molly,” said Patricia Bowles. “He gobbled up all her money and had walk-outs all the time.” “Bwana Hay told the servants,” his own Somali servant recalls, “‘I don’t mind if she dies.’ She got very drunk and had hidden the bottles. He said: ‘Give the woman as much as she wants to drink. If she wants to die, let her have it. If she wants a drink, let her have one.’ Then she died.” The date was August 1939.
Dr. Joseph Gregory, the G.P. to the Muthaiga Club set, remembers that on his visits to Molly the house smelled of champagne and vomit. Molly’s body was covered with heroin abscesses. Gregory remembered their last conversation:
She had been ill and lonely for a long time and she said to me. “You will promise to come to my funeral, even if you’re the only one?” I said of course I would. She died that afternoon. After her death the flowers came pouring into the house, but while she was alive, not a daisy.
Molly’s trustees stopped the flow of money, and Erroll temporarily closed down the house, although she had left it to him in her will. He moved to a bungalow in Muthaiga, near the entrance to the Club. He was broke now, living on credit. His father had left him an income of £300 a year. Otherwise he was down to Molly’s pearls and his droit de seigneur.
By now, Erroll’s taste for politics had turned him into a hard and conscientious worker. He had become secretary to Sir Ferdinand Cavendish Bentinck (later the Duke of Portland), at the Production and Settlement Board. “He was rather a bounder,” said Cavendish Bentinck. “Very quick repartee, quite intelligent, very superficial. Bright, certainly, but not very profound. Too bright in that way rea
lly. Attractive chap.”
In 1939, Erroll was elected to the Legislative Council as the member for Kiambu. His political views had come round from those of fascist sympathiser to outright opposition to the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain (although most right-wingers in Britain were appeasers). Hitler had demanded the return of Germany’s pre-war colonies. In his maiden speech in the House of Lords on a brief visit to London the previous year. Erroll had argued forcefully against the return of Tanganyika to Germany.
By 1940, Erroll, now thirty-nine, had become military secretary for the Colony—he had joined the Kenya Regiment with the rank of Captain—and head of the Manpower Board. He was busy marshalling the East African fighting force for the Abyssinian campaign, and his administrative skill was widely praised. Sir Wilfred Have lock, who worked under Erroll. said, “I saw him as an executive; he was a demanding man. brilliant at his job. When he was working as head of Manpower, the records of all the military personnel were destroyed by fire. Erroll built them up again, completely out of his head.”
In 1940, Erroll was also in the middle of a serious love affair with a married woman from Happy Valley whom I shall call Nancy Wirewater. She was unpopular with the other women in that social set, who were bemused by Erroll’s infatuation with her. The lovers were forced to meet mostly in the lunch hour: Erroll would have a bottle of champagne put on ice each day in the billiard room of the Norfolk Hotel, where he was once caught by Auntie, the proprietress, having his way with Mrs. Wirewater on the billiard table.
