Straight on Till Morning (6 page)

Another time when she was alone with her small son they heard something walking on the roof. The servants who were outside called out, ‘Don't come out – there is an animal on the roof who will kill you and eat your brains. Shoot at it through the roof.' ‘Mother, who did not know how to use a rifle, but did not want the servants to know this, called out that the bwana [master] would be angry if she shot holes in the roof and instead prodded the thatch with a native spear. The animal went away and later the servants told us it had been the nandi bear. This creature was long assumed by Europeans to be a mythical animal, but there has been evidence recently that it was a small species of bear. The Africans were quite correct, it had a tendency to kill its victims and eat the brains.'
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On Christmas Eve 1910 Annie gave birth to a second son, Nigel, and Beryl saw both cousins, as well as her aunt and uncle, as frequently as was convenient given the circumstances and the difficulties of travel. Beryl does not mention her aunt or her two cousins in her memoir, but it is inconceivable that during six important formative years of her life she would have been ignored by Annie, nor could she have failed to be affected by Annie's intrepid nature.

Undoubtedly Beryl's ability later in life to merge into London society, her cultured manners and accent, her pleasantly high, slightly nasal speaking voice, were developed by contact with expatriate upper-class Europeans. But these were external attributes. Beryl's character was developing in a complex manner; for instance without regular parental guidance her instinct led her to adopt the belief that ‘the end justifies the means' – a basic premise in the art of survival – and this characteristic was to reveal itself noticeably as she grew older when her tendency to ‘use' people – and their possessions blatantly, was even described as amoral. Her extraordinary energy, zest for life and the remarkable freedom she was allowed (or took), led her into many childhood adventures which would normally have been denied to girls, whether of European or African backgrounds. As an old lady she recalled, ‘I admire my father for the way he raised me. People go around kissing and fussing over their children. I didn't get anything like that. I had to look after myself and then I used to go off and read by myself and think by myself. Funnily enough it made me.'
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Admirable from her point of view it may have been, but it is difficult to rid oneself of the impression of a lonely child deprived of the affection she outwardly eschewed but inwardly craved, for she undoubtedly adored her father and for the remainder of her life never met another man who measured up to him.

If Clutterbuck, a former classics scholar, was worried about the lack of formal education for his daughter, his concern was not readily apparent. Beryl told me: ‘Daddy used to teach me things'; but this seems to have been limited to the retelling of stories of ancient Greece, and answering the child's constant stream of questions. As an eight-year-old she went to stay with a neighbour's wife and son, while Clutterbuck and the husband, Edward Lidster, went off to the Congo on an ivory-hunting expedition. During this time Mrs Lidster taught Beryl to read from Mee's
Encyclopedia
, an invaluable source of reference for colonial mothers.
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Beryl was an intelligent child and learned quickly, but she was no lover of organized lessons. By the time her father returned she could both read and write, and from then on she became an avid reader, but given half a chance she ‘ducked lessons, in favour of horses and games with her African playmates'.
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Doreen Bathurst-Norman recalled how Beryl told her of ‘wrestling matches with the African boys, which she often won. She grew immensely strong and knew how to use her physical strength to its best advantage.'

During her stay with the Lidsters, Beryl met Langley Morris, then aged about seven years old. According to him, European children were as scarce as hen's teeth – the farms themselves were widely scattered and the children seldom travelled off them. Beryl was the first white girl he had ever seen and he remembers her as looking like ‘…Alice in Wonderland…I don't mean pretty or missish, it was a sort of style of dressing that all the girls of that period affected. Loose fair hair, worn long and caught up in a ribbon. Rather Victorian than Edwardian, but fashions took a long time to reach East Africa. She was an intelligent girl, tall and slim with a bright vivacity…as I recall she knew the sort of things that I knew; what to do in case of snake-bite, where to shoot a charging elephant, where to hit a lion (in the shoulder to lame him; you couldn't hope to kill him with the first shot), how to skin a buck, the effects of strychnine poisoning'
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…‘these were the important things to us as children. The emphasis of the educational process was on survival.'
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Soon after his return from the Congo expedition, Clutterbuck hired as Beryl's governess Mrs Orchardson, the wife of a newly arrived English settler. Beryl took an instant dislike to her, and this dislike grew into open antagonism as the years passed. The reason for her hostility was almost certainly rooted in jealousy and still, nearly eighty years later, she referred to her former governess as ‘that bloody woman!'

Mr Orchardson,
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an artist of Royal Academy standard, turned anthropologist, was seldom in evidence since his objective in going to Africa was to conduct a serious study of the Kipsigis tribe and he spent the next nineteen years living in Kipsigis villages, returning occasionally to visit Mrs Orchardson and their son Arthur, who was the same age as Beryl.

Around this time the farm acquired a house built strongly of cedar. At night the light from the blazing log fires flickered on the polished floor and reflected in the panelled walls, and their warmth drew out the aromatic fragrance from the wood. In the main living room on the huge stone chimneybreast, Clutterbuck used to measure Beryl's height in charcoal on the stones. These marks remained until the farmhouse burned down in 1983 and the fireplace was dismantled.
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But Beryl, rebellious and defiant, was unwilling to move into the house under Mrs Orchardson's constant supervision, and she continued to sleep in her own mud rondavel some distance away.

Poor Emma Orchardson! She saw it as her duty to bring order and conventionality into the life of this strong-willed child. Until that time Beryl's father had treated his daughter like a boy. She was allowed to plan her own life, to work or play as she wished, to accompany her father as he worked about the farm, and occasionally to read a little and learn by listening to Clutterbuck. Her father was fair but firm and was not above taking a stick to her if she transgressed.
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Beryl accepted this – she loved and respected him. But she loathed Mrs Orchardson. Whenever she could, she ran off with her African friends to play in the cool Mau forests, or hid in the stables which by now had expanded to over twenty horses, in training and being brought on, by the enterprising Clutterbuck. ‘Daddy was very good about it – he understood how I felt,' Beryl recalled. ‘It was a very hard upbringing,' stated a friend.
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But it was the upbringing Beryl wanted. She revelled in it.

If she disliked Mrs Orchardson, she adored her father single-mindedly. The two became a familiar sight, for as she grew into adolescence she continued to accompany him when he went to Nairobi a hundred-odd miles to the south-east, for business reasons or to the races. They travelled down by the twice-weekly train, with their horses. By the time she was eleven Beryl was already riding out on her father's racehorses
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and had become an accomplished and competent horsewoman.

On some of these trips south the pair would hunt with the Masara Hounds. Jim Elkington, a huge Old Etonian with a genial countenance and sparkling blue eyes, was the Master and huntsman of this pack of imported foxhounds, and both a good friend and a rival of Clutterbuck on Nairobi's race course. The Elkington farm was a regular stop for Clutterbuck and Beryl when they came in from up country.

The Elkington homestead was ‘complete with bleached and horned animal skulls lining the walls, a veranda ran all round the ramshackle wooden bungalow, littered with riding crops and bits of saddlery with dog bowls and…a huge population of dogs and cats, waiting to trip you up.' A caged parrot acted as an early-warning system for approaching visitors, and above all there was Paddy.
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Paddy, the unusual companion of the Elkingtons' only child Margaret, was a huge black-maned lion. He was the only survivor of a litter of three cubs, the offspring of a lioness shot by accident.
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Raised by the Elkingtons on a mixture of egg and milk fed to him in a baby's bottle, he was regarded by the family as totally tame and was allowed to roam about the property like a pet dog, ‘loose about the house until he got so big that he could pat Mrs Jim [Mrs Elkington] and she fell down'.
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Beryl had already been told by her father not to trust this animal, but she ignored the warnings. In 1911 she was attacked by Paddy. How serious the attack was seems to differ in the telling. Beryl's own description is a dramatic and highly readable account.
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But Margaret Elkington claims it was no more than ‘a slight scratch'.
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Margaret's version of the story may have been coloured by a natural sense of injustice at Paddy's fate, for the eighteen-month-old lion was thereafter confined to a cage for the rest of his long life. It is quite likely that Paddy had merely attempted to play with Beryl in the way he was used to tumble about with other members of the Elkington family. Beryl, though, claimed that he attacked and would have eaten her, if she had not been rescued by Jim Elkington and some of his servants. It does not need a lot of imagination to picture a fully grown lion in his prime attempting to romp with a nine-year-old girl. From the child's point of view it must have been a terrifying ordeal, whatever the lion's motives.

Beryl soon recovered from her adventure. She even regretted Paddy's incarceration. She often saw him in his cage, for as she grew into womanhood the Elkingtons (including Paddy in his cage), moved from Nairobi up country, and Beryl was a frequent visitor to their home.
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In 1914 tragedy struck the Clutterbuck relations at Molo. Henry Clutterbuck had been ill for some time, and after major surgery, performed on the kitchen table, he died, leaving the valiant Annie and her two sons on a farm that was, like most in Kenya, mortgaged to the hilt. Annie's troubles were not restricted to grief, for in the general hysteria which surrounded the advent of war, no unprotected women and children were allowed to remain alone on isolated farmsteads. All their farming implements were confiscated and Annie had no option but to pack up and leave. She took the two boys to stay at Green Hills for a while before returning reluctantly to England. Hardships there may have been, but few settlers gave up and went home willingly. At this time Beryl was a lanky twelve-year-old.

Her cousin's last memory of her was of a typical Beryl prank. She packed the huge fireplace in the sitting room with tinder-dry kindling and set it alight. It virtually exploded into life, setting the chimney on fire and threatening the nearby thatched huts and dry grassland surrounding the house. For a while there was utter pandemonium. ‘Beryl simply looked on in wide-eyed amazement at all the fuss as though she had nothing whatsoever to do with it,' Nigel Clutterbuck told me.

Earlier the same day she had, with the assistance of her cousin Jasper, killed a black mamba – one of the most poisonous snakes in Africa – with sticks. The two children then paraded around the yard with the dead snake held aloft on poles. ‘She was absolutely wild and would try anything, no matter how dangerous it was,' her cousin Nigel recalled.
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As she grew to womanhood, Beryl's close association with the Africans, of whom she undoubtedly saw a great deal more than she saw of her father or any other European, continued to shape the young girl. It was her African friends who provided her with a companionship she enjoyed, and an education which she preferred to her dreary textbooks. In many ways it was the education given to a young boy of the tribe. She was tall, lithe and strong, fearless to a degree, or if she knew fear she quickly learned never to show it.

It was the Africans who taught Beryl to handle a spear, to shoot with a bow and arrow, and to play the complicated mathematical game of
bao
using stones or tiny round sodom apples in shallow depressions in the earth. She joined the young men and listened to the advice given to them by the tribal elders. The instructions meted out regarding hunting were given in the knowledge that hunting was a life or death affair to the young audience. When the African youth hunted lion, no friendly white hunter stood at his shoulder with a covering rifle should the spear fail in its attempt to kill the quarry. Beryl's version of such a hunt – a young man's test of skill and courage to determine his fitness to hold the title
moran
(warrior) – has about it the realism of a scene actually witnessed by the writer: