Straight on Till Morning (25 page)

They located a small herd, fortunately within a couple of hours' walk from the Imperial Airways landing ground at Makindu. After landing Bror hired a couple of Africans to accompany them to carry the rifles, food and water bottles, and they trekked towards the herd until they heard the sounds that they were close – occasional trumpeting, the flapping of ears and the puffing sounds as the elephants blew dust over their backs. Beryl had her Leica with a telephoto lens and they estimated that they should get to within thirty-five to forty-five yards for the best pictures. Once in position they waited for the bull to move from the thicket where the animals were feeding, across a clearing to a small clump of trees.

By the end of February Beryl had arranged to auction the Avian in order to finance a journey to England where she hoped to persuade Tom to join her in a record attempt on the Cape, or alternatively to find a backer for some other record attempt. She had a little capital and was not going empty-handed for once. In addition there was her annuity from the palace which was paid regularly into her bank account in London. With the old king dead and Prince Henry safely married to the former Lady Alice Montagu Douglas Scott, Beryl would not incur any royal displeasure by returning to England, at least none that need concern her unduly. Before leaving she flew to Melela to visit her father. It was to be some years before she saw him again, for shortly after Beryl left Kenya, Clutterbuck moved to Durban in South Africa to train in the rarefied atmosphere of the top-class racing of the Cape.
⁴⁰

It was a particular sadness to say goodbye to
arap
Ruta, her loyal friend from childhood days. Ruta had been at Beryl's side through all the shauries of her adult life. When she had made her first successful sortie into the world of horse-training he had smoothed her path. During her marriage to Mansfield he had looked after the horses in her absence, and eased her way when she returned. When she abruptly dropped training to learn to fly he became an adept aircraft mechanic. Uncomplaining, like an efficient shadow, Ruta was always there, virtually the only unchanging fact in Beryl's life through the trauma of Finch Hatton's death and Tom's desertion, for that was how she saw Tom's marriage to Dessie.
⁴¹

When she left Kenya to fly the 6000 miles to England in her Leopard Moth, Beryl took Bror as her passenger. Eva had gone on ahead some weeks earlier by boat, and would meet Bror in London, prior to the Blixens' departure for the United States where, among other things, the couple were to visit Hemingway who was in the Bahamas. It was a cool, highly professional woman who piloted Bror to England. Thanks to Tom, she had been offered interviews for several flying jobs in England, but it was not her intention to migrate simply to take a mundane flying job there. A routine occupation did not appeal to Beryl, she always needed a goal. In general terms her goal was to be
the
best at whatever she set out to do. Specifically it appears that she intended to try for a record attempt on the London–Cape–London route, or on the still unpicked plum of London–New York–London. She was setting out to show Tom that she was the best pilot there was.

Beryl's trusty Avian was purchased at auction by African Air Services. Some months later it crashed, killing its student pilot, and was burned out.
⁴²

1936

Bror Blixen had been intending to travel to his native Sweden by boat until Beryl had asked him to fly with her. No woman was at that time allowed to fly alone over the Sudan and despite her previous record she had been refused permission. The arrangement suited them both to perfection.

Early-morning mist briefly delayed their departure from Nairobi but they were soon flying over the Kikuyu Escarpment and headed for Kisumu, the first refuelling stop on their 6000-mile journey. Beryl recounts this journey in her memoir, and Blix wrote of it in
Letters from Africa
. There are minor differences in each version – both were written some time after the event – but it was clearly an eventful trip. The Abyssinian War had begun and North Africa was controlled by Mussolini's troops, among whom there was strong anti-British feeling.

Blix emphasized the platonic nature of the travelling companions in a letter:

After an uneventful flight to Cairo they ran into problems with officialdom. They had, in any case, decided to stop for a few days to overhaul the aeroplane but in the event were delayed for a week while their papers were examined by ‘Il Duce's' beautifully-clad officers. Not knowing that the delay would be so long, the pair settled happily into Shepheard's Hotel, then one of the great hotels of the world. ‘As you know spring in Cairo is warm. Beryl had lots of air-minded friends here and she spent most of her time with them.'
²
By the time clearance was given for the couple's departure ‘the small aircraft shone and glittered in the sunshine'. Beryl's friends at the nearby RAF aerodrome, Heliopolis, had been hard at work.

They were delayed several times by officialdom on the next leg of their journey which lay westward along the North African coast – on one notable occasion it was suggested that Beryl was a man in woman's clothing – but eventually they reached Benghazi. Here all the hotel rooms had been commandeered by the military and in Beryl's memoir she writes graphically of the brothel in which she and Blix were forced to spend the night. Her distaste for the filthy surroundings and the meal provided for them was tempered only by sympathy for the slatternly madam's pathetic history. Blix however saw it differently: ‘Finally,' he wrote, ‘we found two rooms, spaghetti, good wine, and best of all a friendly reception with a kind old woman who kept a brothel.' Next morning they were faced with the dilemma of taking off in a blinding dust storm or staying another night at the brothel. Beryl opted to leave despite her qualms that the heavy gravel being blown across the airfield might damage the Leopard Moth's metal propeller.

At Tripoli, ‘despite Beryl's blue eyes and blonde curls', they were not allowed to continue immediately and the couple were again forced to make an unscheduled overnight stop. ‘We had our meals in our rooms in bad humour – spaghetti and chianti,'
⁴
Blix revealed.

At last they left the North African coast behind them and after an anxious flight across the Mediterranean in thick cloud they reached the French coast – Beryl says Cannes and Blix says Nice. They then travelled on to London without any further delays and found it alive with gossip of Hitler's march into the Rhineland and of the king's affair with Mrs Simpson. With the death of the old king, Beryl's friend ‘Edward P' of safari days had come into his own at last, but he was to find his brief tenure of the crown an unhappy period. That first evening Bror and Beryl dined with Tom and Dessie Black.

Dessie had heard a great deal about Beryl from Tom, including the story (which Tom believed) that Beryl's son Gervase had a royal parent,
⁵
and she was intrigued when Tom telephoned her one afternoon, and asked her to meet him at the Mayfair so that he could introduce her to Beryl who had just flown in from Kenya. From Tom's descriptions of Beryl's horseriding ability and her skill as a pilot, Dessie half-expected to meet a masculine type of woman. Instead the tall, attractive girl, with blonde wavy hair, blue eyes and ‘long, thin, nervous hands' took her by surprise.
⁶

Dessie thought Beryl had a dreamy, vague personality and recalled that she was more often late for an appointment than early, and on several occasions forgot the appointment altogether.
⁷
In fact, of course, the ‘vague dreamy' outward appearance hid smouldering ambition. Beryl, who was now thirty-three years old, desperately wanted to attack one of the big flying records and she had certainly already given some consideration to a transatlantic crossing. Tom was sympathetic to Beryl's aspirations and even helped her by checking her out in the twin-engine Dragon aircraft so that she could gain a twin-engine rating, but Tom had plans of his own. Recently he had been contacted by a group of Spaniards whom he had met whilst in Spain with Dessie on their honeymoon. They wanted to buy some aeroplanes, they said, and they wanted Tom to fly one of the planes to Spain with an unnamed passenger. Money appeared to be no object.

Tom knew that the caller was almost certainly a fascist sympathizer, but he did not allow this to worry him. The Spanish war was no concern of his. ‘At that time,' Dessie said, ‘no one knew that the war in Spain would be a dress rehearsal for World War Two,' and even Hitler, at this stage, had caused no great concern: most people saw him as a strong, potentially good leader of the German people. The charter fee offered was unusually large and Tom needed the money, so he accepted and set the wheels in motion for his delivery trip. However his longer-term plan to compete in the Johannesburg Race in late September was taking time to organize – he had yet to find a sponsor.

Beryl got a job very quickly. She had several interviews and quickly accepted one with Air Cruisers Ltd in the position of chief pilot. This company was owned by François Dupré, a wealthy French financier who was a good friend of Mansfield's.
⁸
He also owned the George V Hotel in Paris and the largest racehorse stud in France. Beryl and Mansfield met occasionally, even dined together. He wanted a divorce, he told her. Beryl would not grant his request.
⁹
She also saw six-year-old Gervase and for a while used to visit the Markhams' house to say goodnight to her son. When Gervase would not go to sleep until Mummy had kissed him goodnight, his nanny put a stop to it. ‘One couldn't always depend on the fact that Mummy would turn up…'

Beryl enjoyed working for Dupré; the duties were light and generally involved being on call, for he used the aeroplane – an eight-seater, twin-engined De Havilland Dragon – only moderately. Several times a month Dupré needed to fly to Paris and spend a few days there. Occasionally there were internal flights, and sometimes he would fly to Deauville. The aeroplane was very expensively fitted out, and included a bar.

Her life was pleasant enough but it was getting her nowhere towards achieving her ambitions. Tom had introduced her to a wide circle of aviation friends among whom were the Mollisons, and she had her own friends on the fringe of court though she was never invited to the Fort as far as she recalled.
¹⁰
She was living at this time in a rented flat in Belgravia and was frequently seen about town throughout May, June and July. Later her landlady was to sue for non-payment of rent,
¹¹
and this was not Beryl's only brush with the law. Bow Street magistrates fined her two pounds for ‘causing an obstruction with a motor-car in New Bond Street on June 4th. The car was left unattended for two and a half hours whilst Mrs Markham was at a beauty specialist.'
¹²
At Woolwich she was fined ‘twenty shillings for exceeding the 30 mph speed limit at Rochester Way, Eltham. The Magistrate also ordered her licence to be endorsed. A policeman said in evidence that on July 4th he timed Mrs Markham's car for half a mile. Her speed was 50–55 mph. When stopped she said, “I did not know there was a speed limit. I have never been here before.”' A slight, and rather feminine exaggeration.
¹³

She considered entering the Cape Race, and one evening dined with her old friends from Kenya, the Carberrys. John Carberry was at the time having his own mount for the race built by Edgar Percival at Percival's Gravesend factory. Beryl hoped that wealthy John Carberry would sponsor an aeroplane for her in the race to Johannesburg. As it turned out his help was directed in an entirely different direction.

John Carberry was an Irish peer, and a pilot of no mean distinction. Born in 1892, he had succeeded to the title Baron Carbery at the age of six, and was educated at Harrow and later at Leipzig.
¹⁴
He learned to fly in 1912 (the first man in Ireland to fly) and represented England in the 1914 Schneider Trophy race. He married his first wife shortly before the outbreak of World War One in which he served as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Air Service. After visiting America in 1918 he was bewitched by the country to the extent that in 1919 he became a naturalized American. However there is a story that his naturalization papers were subsequently withdrawn when he ran foul of the law on bootlegging charges.
¹⁵
In 1920 he bought an estate in Kenya called Seremai (meaning the place of death – it was built on an old tribal battleground), renounced his title and took the name John Evans Carberry.
¹⁶
His accent became distinctly American. He was among the earliest aviators in the new colony and in 1924 he flew a DH 51 (forerunner of the Gipsy Moth) to Kenya from England. His second wife Maia was one of a handful of early women pilots in Kenya in the mid 1920s, and was killed in a flying accident at Wilson airfield in 1928.
¹⁷
Beryl claimed she was watching Maia fly when the accident occurred.

With his wealth, the advantages of birth, education and his undoubted flying ability Carberry should have been a popular figure. Indeed certain women did find the thin, erect, square-shouldered and loose-limbed man fascinating. But it was a deadly fascination, for he was an unpleasant character with a cruel, sadistic streak, particularly towards animals. During nearly a hundred interviews conducted for this book not one person could find a good word to say for him. He was thoroughly disliked, probably with good reason, and Beryl at eighty-three still hated him. But in 1936 she was glad of his help and influence. For many years she had taken advantage of the fact that he kept a full-time aircraft engineer based at the airstrip on Seremai and often had her aeroplanes serviced there, borrowing Carberry's detested Klemm to enable her to continue her work. Carberry's third wife, June, became a hard drinker. During interviews Beryl thought that anyone married to him would need to drink if only in self-defence.
¹⁸

At the dinner party in London Carberry made a surprising suggestion. The talk had been about various record attempts and Beryl allowed her enthusiasm to show. Carberry said that if Beryl would attempt to fly non-stop from England to New York, a flight which no one had yet successfully completed solo, he would lend her the aeroplane presently under construction for his own entry in the Cape race. He stipulated that it would have to be back in England in time for him to compete in the race in late September, and that he would only lend her the aircraft if she attempted that specific record. In her biography Beryl claimed that the suggestion that she should cross the Atlantic came from Carberry as a dare. But her contemporary press interviews make it clear that she had been mulling over the idea for a considerable time before the dinner party. All she had needed was the machine and finance.

Jim Mollison had flown the Atlantic from east to west solo in 1932 from Portmarnock in Ireland, but had not achieved his goal – non-stop to New York. Mollison's aeroplane, named
The Heart's Content
after one of a small group of villages in Newfoundland lying near his flight track, was a De Havilland Puss Moth. His flight, which was described as ‘the greatest flying achievement ever', received maximum press coverage and brought him worldwide recognition. He was not the first to fly the Atlantic, of course, but the east–west route was particularly difficult because of the prevailing winds, which were smack on the nose of any prospective flyer. Mollison failed in his bid to reach New York when, after more than thirty-one hours in the air, he took advantage of a temporary break in the thick fog which had enveloped him since he first sighted land, and touched down at Pennfield Ridge in New Brunswick, Canada.
¹⁹
He later carried on to New York, but despite another attempt with his wife Amy Johnson in the following year, the goal of ‘non-stop to New York' floated tantalizingly out of his grasp.