Straight on Till Morning (21 page)

Beryl clearly thought that Tom's new position was a temporary arrangement, for she apparently made no move to dissuade him from accepting it. Whether or not she would have been able to is in any case open to doubt for in retrospect it is obvious that Beryl was more in love with Tom than he was with her. Furness had already indicated that he would be spending the next few English winters in East Africa on safari trips, so Tom knew he would be returning to the colony within six months, perhaps earlier. The work would consist mainly of ferrying the Furness family around England and continental Europe, and was well paid. In addition Furness had agreed to allow Tom to compete in the King's Cup air race in his De Havilland Puss Moth during the summer months. Tom announced that he was flying to England in April.

Beryl had already purchased her blue and silver Avian, now bearing the Kenya registration VP-KAN painted on the fuselage and predictably earning it the nickname ‘the Kan'. Without telling Tom, Beryl planned to follow him, and managed to get in some advanced dual instruction from him before he left. Tom had often told her of his flights to and from England, so she had some idea of what to expect. Perhaps she questioned him more closely about his flights to Europe in those final days before his departure. Beryl's log book records intensive lessons in spinning, night flying, deliberately flying into a storm; and she passed all the tests. At the end of March Tom and Beryl flew to Naivasha where they spent a few days with friends. Two weeks later she new Tom to Nyeri where he picked up an American Waco bi-plane in which he departed for England.
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Beryl returned to Nairobi and set the wheels in motion for her own trip.

At dawn on 24 April, with 127 hours in her log, she took off from Nairobi headed for Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria on the first leg of her flight. The mechanics at Wilson Airways had been aghast when she told them she was flying to England. No special flight servicing had been done, and there was not even time to paint out the old British registration, GE-BEA, from the top of the wings. The flight to Kisumu was uneventful, other than a low run across her father's farm en route, and took just under two hours. She refuelled there, and stretched her legs briefly before taking off for Juba, a four-and-a-half-hour flight during which she encountered a very bad storm and was forced down with engine trouble some miles south of the airport – ‘Just clearing a swamp where landing might have meant death,' she said later. She stayed overnight at Juba and the next day, the weather having cleared, took off for Malakal – a refuelling stop and the first point on the Nile, an important navigational feature of the journey. Here she managed to have some minor repairs done to the undercarriage which had been damaged in the forced landing.

At Malakal she suffered doubts as to whether or not to carry on, for she sent word back to Wilson Airways that she might be returning. But a subsequent cable from the Shell Oil depot at Malakal advised that she had continued on her northern flight. She was forced down again at Kosti, just over halfway to Khartoum. The Avian's engine had been running rough but she made a perfect landing in deep sand in the desert on the western bank of the Nile. ‘My aeroplane was soon surrounded by a crowd of grinning natives. They just stood and watched me until I got the machine going again,' she told reporters later.
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But she managed to persuade them to help her push the Avian on to some firm sand, and she took off again, landing at the refuelling airstrip where she ‘fiddled about with the engine, trying to find out what was causing it to misfire'. Next morning she left for Khartoum, which she reached only with great good luck. The engine had cut out twice in the two hours taken to complete the distance. Here a mechanic had a look at the Gipsy II engine, and said he thought she had a cracked piston ring. She decided to push on to Atbara where he thought there was some chance that they might have the spares she needed.

There was silence then for a week before her friends, anxiously waiting at Nairobi, received news from an unexpected quarter. Sir Philip Wigham Richardson had landed at Atbara in the Sudan on his way south to Nairobi, and had met Beryl there. ‘She had a broken piston,' he reported, ‘but a spare had just arrived from Cairo. She was quite well and would proceed homeward when the repair was complete.'
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The next stages of her journey were equally troublesome. The engine continued to give problems and at Cairo she was forced down yet again in a dust storm so severe that the sun was blotted out and she was unable to see the ground. This time the Royal Air Force came to her rescue. They flew out a mechanic from Heliopolis to examine and make repairs to the engine. After this the engine ran better, and she continued north to Alexandria where she followed the southern Mediterranean coast via Tobruk and Benghazi to Tripoli. Here she flew across Malta to Sicily and on to London via Naples, Rome, Pisa, Marseilles, Lyon and Paris. She arrived at Heston aerodrome on 17 May.

Her flight was widely reported through Reuters. ‘Dressed in grey flannel trousers, a blue sweater and an oil-stained white mackintosh, Mrs Mansfield Markham, 31-year-old sister-in-law to Sir Charles Markham, startled Heston aerodrome yesterday evening when in stepping out of an aeroplane she announced that she had flown solo from Kenya in seven flying days.' She told the press that she had simply decided to take a holiday in England, which she had not seen for about eighteen months, packed some bags and set out. ‘I experienced considerable engine trouble and was held up for days in the Sudan. The worst spots were crossing the desert, where the heat was terrific; crossing the Mediterranean, where I did not feel at all chirpy because of the engine trouble I had had; and from Marseilles to Lyon where the visibility and weather were very bad.' She added that on the long sea crossing from Tripoli she had worn an inflated inner tube around her neck. If those who received her at Heston were startled, it must have been something to have seen Tom's face when she confronted him in London that evening. ‘He was a little surprised I think,' she remembered. But he would soon have forgiven her – it was a spectacular achievement under any circumstances, even more so given her lack of experience. Could any man have resisted such a compliment from such a beautiful source? His own flight had been performed in a record five days and he must have blanched when he heard Beryl's story. It was less than five years previously that the very first flights between Kenya and England had taken place and Beryl's aircraft was equipped with only a compass, rev counter, altimeter and a lateral stability indicator;
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she had no form of direction-landing equipment or radio, not even a way of knowing her airspeed.

Immediately she was sucked into London's social whirlpool. In borrowed evening clothes she danced the nights away in the Dorchester, the Savoy and the Ritz. There were many Kenyan friends in England, including the Carberrys and the Soames, as well as the new circle of friends in Tom's aviation world. She spent her days at the airfield where Tom had arranged for KAN to have a complete engine overhaul. Meanwhile she used a borrowed Avian (G-ABLF) to fly around the fashionable aeroclub circuit of Heston, Stag Lane, Brooklands and Croydon. On 9 July her own Avian was returned, and she found to her delight that it flew beautifully, its engine problems repaired. She was also lucky enough to fly one of the brand-new Avro 631 Cadets, a new type added assiduously to her log book, along with a Genet Avian – an Avian with a Genet Major I radial engine specially built for the RAF.
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She saw the three-year-old Gervase on a couple of occasions, but she showed no signs of wanting him to be with her.
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If she saw her old flame Prince Henry, who was stationed in Tidworth with the 11th Hussars, the meeting was discreet and not recorded.

In mid August she made a somewhat mysterious flight to Coblenz in Germany and had to make a forced landing near Muendon when she ran out of fuel. She damaged the propeller and fuselage, was shocked and slightly injured and continued her journey by car to Coblenz where she was to ‘meet friends',
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Her snappy refusal to talk to the press of this mishap was uncharacteristic; indeed she only entered it in her log book as an afterthought, out of date-order. Maybe she was not going to enter it at all, but she had second thoughts – ten flying hours takes a lot of flying, and she was building up her hours with a purpose in mind. The flight went into the log book, without any comment on the problem.

That summer passed pleasantly enough; she saw Tom often, and flew with him on occasions to the Furness's mansion near Melton Mowbray where they used to ride together. Whilst watching the King's Cup air races Tom introduced her to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French writer/aviator; Hubert Broad, test pilot for De Havilland and one of the best racing pilots in the country; and to Sydney St Barbe, formerly an instructor with the London Aeroplane Club and a pilot of some distinction. St Barbe had latterly given up flying instruction in order to exploit the potential of sky writing, which had found great favour in the United States, although it was slow to catch on in England. Mary, Duchess of Bedford (known as the Flying Duchess), was a pupil of St Barbe's and later became famous for her long-distance flights. On one occasion after she had completed a particularly praiseworthy feat he greeted her return to England with the word BRAVO written in huge letters across the sky.
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All three of these men were to become firm friends, and over the next few years each in his way played a part in Beryl's story.

Tom departed for Kenya in early October with Duke Furness, and on 22 October, four days before her thirtieth birthday, accompanied by St Barbe, Beryl took off in her blue and silver aeroplane for the return flight to Nairobi. No problems were encountered and they spent a pleasant couple of days relaxing at the old town of Mersa Matruh on the North African coast, between Cairo and Tobruk. The journey took only ten days – eight not counting the two spent at Matruh. Their arrival at Nairobi was noted by the
East African Standard
, who ran a large report on the flight, and in the private diary of an acquaintance: ‘Beryl Markham (the Duke of Gloucester's love) has just flown out from England and looking very lovely.'
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Beryl spent Christmas with John and June Carberry, flying over to the Prestons' place on Christmas Eve to persuade the outrageous Kiki to join them at the Carberry ranch, Seremai, at Nyeri.
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Kiki, an amusing and beautiful woman, was quite openly on drugs and carried her silver syringe everywhere, causing the ever-witty Cockie Hoogterp to remark to a friend, ‘She's very clever with her needle.'
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When she ran out of morphine, Kiki used to send her own aeroplane down to Nairobi for a fresh supply.
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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.
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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'.
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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'.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.