Too Close to the Sun (12 page)

As adults, the brothers were emotionally close and mentally divided. An admirer of the visual arts, Denys cherished the old while embracing the new. Iconoclastic movements were springing up in every arena, from Sergey Diaghilev’s Russian ballet to the theater of Shaw and Granville-Barker and the freestyle dance of the tunic-wearing Isadora Duncan. Denys had warmed to Roger Fry’s groundbreaking exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” when it opened back in November 1908, despite the fact that the work was different from what had hitherto passed for art. The exhibition was, according to Virginia Woolf, a symbol of the way in which European ideas had invaded English conservatism. But the gap between conservatives and progressives was widening, not closing. Five years after Fry’s show, Toby visited a second exhibition. “Went to see ‘Post Impressionists’!!!!!?” was his only comment in his diary. Unlike his brother, Denys was equally at ease drinking port in the Tory stronghold of the Carlton as he was sipping hock-and-seltzer among the flashing mirrors and crimson velvet at the Café Royal.

In the December 1910 election, the second in eleven months, Liberals and Tories again came in neck and neck, and again the Liberals clung on. The following year was characterized by widespread social unrest, with almost a million workers involved in stoppages. More than fifty thousand armed troops were deployed to deal with riots; working men were shot dead; and in August, in the middle of the crisis caused by the arrival of the German gunboat
Panther
at Agadir in Morocco—a move Britain wrongly interpreted as evidence of German plans to establish a naval base on the Atlantic—four railway unions joined the seamen and dockers in the greatest transport strike the nation had ever seen. Nearing the end of his summer tour, Denys wondered if he was ever going to get out of the country. In the House of Commons, the Liberals had gotten as far as preparing the Parliament Bill to abolish the power of the House of Lords, while their lordships themselves were still fighting to preserve the constitutional privileges of the aristocracy. In the first week of August, as Denys whirled around London arranging for the shipment of supplies to Africa, dancing at the Cavendish Hotel and dining off Gunter’s suppers of langoustine and quail, the Lords perspired through passionate debates on the Parliament Bill. The vote took place the day Denys sailed from England. The government won, and the Parliament Bill became the Parliament Act. The next day the
Daily Mail
headline screamed
THE FLOODGATES OF REVOLUTION ARE OPENED
.

The revolution never came to pass, but the following summer the country was still churning with rebellion. Parliament was approaching a state of nervous breakdown over the question of home rule in Ireland. To imperialists like Henry, home rule was an abomination. There was talk of civil war. Denys was an outsider by nature; now events conspired to alienate him even from the familiarities of home. The suffragettes had that summer begun setting fire to the contents of mailboxes. The influence of their protests had seeped into the population at large, and pretty girls were no longer trussed up in fashions that thrust out their buttocks and breasts. London looked different in other ways, too. Motor taxis now outnumbered horsecabs, and the last horse-drawn bus had departed to the knacker’s. Cinemas were springing up all over town, as movies continued to capture the public imagination. (During Denys’s first three years in Kenya, the number of cinemas in London quadrupled.)

There were changes, too, on the domestic front. Topsy was married. Not only had there been no duchesses, ambassadors, or plutocrats this time; the Winchilseas had kept up their opposition to Ossie’s Liberal antecedents, and they refused to attend the wedding. After a series of family summits failed, arrangements were made for Topsy’s settlement, which was signed by her eldest brother one Monday morning. That afternoon, Toby gave her away. “Everything went very well, and Topsy looked very well,” he wrote in his diary with characteristic élan. There was no reception, just a glacial honeymoon in Bude, Cornwall. Shortly afterward, the couple went to Vancouver, where Ossie worked as a ganger on the Canadian Pacific Railway.

In July of 1912, Alan Parsons married Viola Tree. Denys was best man, turning up at the church in an ancient shooting coat. The couple began their life together at what Viola called a “panelled slum” in Great Queen Street. Their finances were rickety and they ate spaghetti and parsnips, though at her father’s insistence they soon moved to more salubrious premises on Welbeck Street, where they lived in “beautiful and happy chaos.” The flighty Viola, who had gone into the family business, first as an actress then as an opera singer, was devoted to Denys. She named her firstborn after him, and he was honored by the role of godfather. Regulars at the semi-bohemian ménage included Charles Lister, now at the Foreign Office, Julian Grenfell and his brother Billy, Edward Horner, and Patrick Shaw Stewart, who had gone into the City and at twenty-five was the managing director of Baring Brothers. They all relished Denys’s African stories. “He’s such a tonic after all the dead-beats,” wrote Julian Grenfell, who characteristically embellished his friend’s exploits, reporting that Denys was based in a Nairobi palace, “entertaining the countryside on champagne and caviare.” Grenfell planned to visit him in Kenya in the summer of 1914, but when the time came the war drums were beating and the trip was postponed—forever, as it turned out. In her old age, Viola looked back at “the Valhalla of Julian, Billy, Charles, Denys….” It was already hard for them not to idealize the past. Denys himself was obsessively idealistic about Eton, returning to visit at every opportunity and once driving a girl over from a London party just to gaze at the school in the moonlight. It was part of a reluctance to grow up, and reflected a certain emotional immaturity. (His insistence on covering his baldness also bordered on the adolescent.) In later life, Denys had the gift of putting the past behind him, but Eton was the exception. When he was in England, it exerted a magnetic force. He remembered its simple joys even more clearly when mired in the conflicting demands of adulthood. Eton became a kind of Eden in his imagination, the setting of a golden period when he still had confidence in the future. Growing up was an expulsion. But his experience of a youthful paradise allowed him to believe in the African dream.

BETWEEN SUMMER SORTIES,
meanwhile, Denys floundered on in Africa. He had pooled ideas and resources with John “Jack” Pixley, a Bucking-hamshire friend who had followed him from school to Oxford (“another of those charmers,” according to Elspeth Huxley). The pair sailed to and from Europe together between 1911 and 1913, plotting a range of business ventures that had little connection with the reality of East Africa. Vague ideas were aired about scouting for farmland or for mining opportunities: there had been much talk of minerals waiting to be discovered in Kenya. Like his father with his Australian goldmine, Cousin Artie with his railway couplers, and Uncle Murray with his horseless carriages, Denys was attracted to the get-rich-quick schemes that are native to the heart of the gambler.

On their first expedition, in the second half of 1911, Denys and Pixley trekked up to the Laikipia escarpment, seven thousand feet above sea level in the north of the Rift. The plateau there drops to a series of steplike foothills and the Lake Baringo basin, all of it drier than the central Rift, with fewer people and harsher colors. High up, the nights were bitter cold, and hyenas’ eyes, red as embers, ringed the camp. In the morning, the two men dressed by lamplight and filled their pockets with cartridges. They walked through misty gulleys and up wooded hills, and when they climbed higher than the cedars they reached a belt of bamboos with feathery tops that met overhead and filtered the sunlight to a clear, pure green, like the windows of the great cathedrals. All white adventurers of the epoch engaged a team of boys,
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and Denys and Pixley’s crew now went off to barter with Kikuyu, returning with gourds of black honey crunchy with bee abdomens. This was the elemental life Denys sought. Steadily, as the little group journeyed south, his mind cast aside the clutter of Nairobi, of London, of four walls and all that went with them. At water holes he watched Maasai boys bleeding cattle. Twisting the head of a brindled bull to swell the jugular, a boy fired into the vein an arrow ringed with a small block of wood that prevented the tip from penetrating more than half an inch. When the boy plucked out the arrow, blood spurted into a calabash, and he closed the vein with his finger and thumb. Someone else would mix the blood with milk and cow’s urine and let it ferment for a day until it was the consistency of soft cheese, and then it was eaten.

In June 1911, the Colonial Office and its foot soldiers in Nairobi expelled the Maasai from their grazing for the second time in order to free up land for the settlers. Great bands of Maasai set out with 175,000 cattle and more than a million sheep, taking the names of hills, rivers, and plains with them, as toponyms embodied their past. From now on, the Maasai were doomed to live within fixed boundaries, and their system of pasture management based on unrestricted grazing was bound to break down. But they never rebelled. White historians have commented on the ease with which Kenya was subjugated, compared with the Congo and other territories on the continent. It is true that white heads did not bubble in pots, but in reality, the East African peoples were in no position to resist. They did not have the arms, the numbers, or the political will. The invaders, for their part, had no inkling of the cataclysm of social change they had unleashed. The imposition of random political boundaries, the destruction of the movement of the Maasai, the eradication of traditional agriculture—here were the roots of many tragedies of twenty-first-century Africa. In the middle of October, Denys and Pixley reached Uasin Gishu, a fabled plateau in the Rift initially settled by Boers, who hacked their way up the densely wooded slopes by lighting fires under their oxen’s noses to make them continue. There was only one proper settlement on the plateau, and the land in which Denys had an interest lay to the north. Flax had been planted, and the brown cone-shaped stacks were already stretching out toward the Cherangani Dorobo Mountains. Denys remained there for several months. He visited the other farmers and learned to pour boiling water over black ants before they ate the puppies’ eyes, to build sun shelters for pigs in the dry season, and to bait a leopard with a dead goat in a gun trap. When they skinned a leopard one morning, the pelt, according to one settler, “smelt of the sweat of a thousand jungle nights.” Denys went porcupine hunting using spears. The beasts, a menace in the vegetable patches, would dash off at high speed and then suddenly go into reverse, causing the pursuer to tumble into a thicket of sharp quills. At lambing time, he sat with the others to eat fried sheep’s tails for breakfast after heavy sessions at the Rat Pit, the “bar” at the back of the general store of the Uasin Gishu settlement, and when the short rains began in October the yards turned to liquid and water streamed down the metal walls of the cowsheds. When the rain stopped in the early evening, the sky was an immensity of unstained light, and the last trickles of water rounded into pearls on the sills.

On January 1, 1912, the cluster of buildings that made up the plateau settlement was officially named Eldoret. That same season, a branch of the Standard Bank opened on the main street. The safe, once unloaded from its wagon, was too heavy to move, so the bank was built around it. If customers arrived early they found the manager, Mr. Shaw, soaping himself in a hip bath behind the counter. There were now 250 farms on Uasin Gishu. The High Court was preparing to sit there, and a farmers’ association had been formed; Denys was appointed to the committee charged with organizing its agricultural show. During the course of his first three years in Africa, he continued to buy up land. He acquired a substantial estate at Naivasha on which to ranch cattle and grow pyrethrum, a chrysanthemum flower used in the production of crop insecticide. At one stage, he was also considering cotton farming. But as a full-time occupation farming bored him, at least after the intellectual and physical novelty had worn off. Denys had never aspired to be a farmer in the Delamere mold; his restless spirit needed physical expression. He was still searching for something to give his life purpose, to engage his ample gifts and to make money. For a short period in his endless quest for another horse to back, he turned his attention to trading.

In 1912, Denys and Jack formed Finch Hatton and Pixley, Ltd., and bought up a chain of
dukas,
the small stores that sprouted all over Africa where the white man turned the earth. One was at Lemek, a high valley not far from the Loita Plains and Narok. All Kenyan townships began as a string of
dukas,
the shopkeepers almost exclusively Indian. Once a settlement had a dozen or more, a man would appear with a Singer sewing machine at which he would treadle furiously day and night, and another would set up as a tinsmith, hungry for cigarette and paraffin tins. But the stores more or less ran themselves, and Denys was still looking for other ways to earn money. With his father and the Avunculus in mind, he now joined the board of the newly formed East African Exploration Development and Mining Company, a consortium led by Fred Marquodt, a prospector who had discovered rubies in adjoining German East Africa. Rumors of coal were circulating at the Norfolk (none had yet been found in the Protectorate), and even of a diamond seam. The public was invited to buy shares in the company. But the venture flopped, and when Marquodt died, in May of 1913, the consortium expired with him.