Too Close to the Sun (6 page)

The bronchitic Henry, his mustache advancing farther downward and gripping the point of his chin, sat in the Lords for the first time on August 3, 1899, eleven months after inheriting the title. He was a member for twenty-seven years, and never spoke. His political ideology was characteristic of his class: he was opposed to the change and reform promulgated by the Liberal enemy, and he had nothing to say that had not been said already. In Henry’s worldview, the existing order was not to be troubled. At the time that he took his seat, the British Empire covered more than a quarter of the land surface of the earth. But at home the rising forces of democracy so distrusted by Lord Salisbury were becoming harder to ignore. The Independent Labour Party had been created in 1893. In 1899, the dockers went on strike again, action that led, eventually, to the organization of industry-based trade unions for unskilled workers. Henry viewed the world from an ultra-Conservative perspective, as Denys was to do, but whatever one’s vantage point, there was something disquieting in the existing order. Independent-minded young men were to think increasingly of escape.

T
HE DAMPLY UNPROMISING MONTH IN WHICH DENYS ARRIVED AT ETON
coincided with a period of intense chivalric patriotism. The school, like the country, was transfixed by events in southern Africa. Five years earlier, the Jamestown Raid had fanned the enmity smoldering between the Boers of the Transvaal and the British of Cape Colony. Britain was determined to win control of the gold and diamonds in the southern cone, and in order to do so aimed to create a united South Africa under the Union flag. The scramble for a slice of the African cake had almost reached its conclusion, and this final victory, it was hoped, would ensure British preeminence.

When the Boer War began in 1899, the country swelled with elation. Many boys at Eton were related to the men running the campaign, and flags moved over classroom maps as masters tracked the fighting with near-hysterical excitement. It brought Africa close. Then came the first rumble of defeat (British forces were routed in three battles in a row), and even doubt—that most un-Victorian of sentiments. An immobile army of red-faced retired colonials began to snort over reports of British weakness. In April of 1900, even Henry wrote to
The Times,
ranting over the military incompetence that had facilitated Boer successes. In response to the long guerrilla campaign, the British tactic was to herd women and children into concentration camps devised by the heroic Kitchener, an Irish-born military hero who had already vanquished the Sudan. But something akin to riots erupted in the schoolyard at Eton after the British military post at Ladysmith was finally relieved, and again on May 18, 1900, when the seven-month siege of the garrison at Mafeking was lifted. Not all boys were taken in. “Most of us know that Mafeking is a glorious pretext for a whole holiday and for throwing off all discipline,” John Maynard Keynes wrote to his parents on May 19.

At the beginning of 1901, while the war thundered on, Denys found himself shivering on the grounds of Windsor Castle as the entire school lined the last leg of the route of Queen Victoria’s funeral cortege. She had died on January 24. “So the blow has fallen,” Aunt Edith wrote theatrically to her daughter Muriel, “and we are without her! The greatest Queen the world has ever known, and the most perfect woman the world has ever loved!” But the histrionic Edith was in touch with the mood of the country. The Queen occupied a central place in the national identity, and bells tolled up and down the land; Osbert Sitwell, who arrived at Eton the year Denys left, heard them in Scarborough. The loss, he said, “was something in which no man, born and brought up in that long reign, could altogether believe.” At Windsor, bluejackets drew the coffin up the hill with ropes white with pipe clay, and the boys strained for a glimpse of the plumed helmet of Victoria’s grandson the kaiser wobbling among the crowned heads.

Denys’s housemaster, Herbert Tatham, was a benign and sympathetic figure. Gentle and adventurous at the same time, he had a solid face, deep-set eyes, and a drooping mustache that made him look like a good-natured walrus. He was a Cambridge classicist and, like many schoolmasters of his vintage, a mountaineer, flogging regularly up the foothills of the Eiger in stout boots and tweed knickerbockers.
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On Sunday evenings the whole house gathered in the classroom, and in the glow of the fire Tatham read aloud stories he had written himself—tales of derring-do involving knapsacks, wizards, and hunters, God always lurking in the background. Denys liked listening to stories, but in the classroom he showed interest only in literature, history, and music, and even these he preferred to study on his own, rejecting anything that whiffed of institutional learning. He was already an enthusiastic reader, especially of poetry, and by the end of his school career was widely read in the major Romantic poets as well as the full classical battalion and had made inroads into the English nineteenth-century novels of the tombstone variety. He read what he wanted to read and neglected his homework, shaking off the consequences with the supple ease that was to be his trademark. Failing to produce an assignment one day, he diverted Tatham’s attention by pretending to spot a mouse in the classroom. The housemaster joined in the hunt with a poker, upsetting a jug of water in the process. When he discovered the deception, he forgave everything in what one observer described as “a gust of Tathalmic laughter.” It was brattishness by any other name, but it illustrated the reach of Denys’s charm. Once released from the classroom, he wandered barefoot through Cloisters learning Bengali puns from the son of the maharaja of Cooch Behar, or languished at Little Brown’s tea shop teasing Bunko, the Mistress Quickly of the High Street. His practical jokes were legendary, and his vendetta against Henrietta, a master’s un-shorn poodle, was endlessly reported over cutlets and apple charlotte. As for games, they were a cult, and the athlete a hero. The alliance between physical and moral courage that produced Muscular Christianity exemplified a classic manliness, and boys yearned to multiply the caps hanging from the corners of their sporting prints (each cap signified selection for a school team). Once won, the caps were worn with careless indifference, as it was important at Eton to hide feelings and disguise ambition. Denys was an outstanding athlete, captaining numerous teams and sauntering out onto the hallowed turf of Lord’s for the annual Eton-Harrow cricket match. The grounds were pied with top hats and waistcoats, sisters paraded the light-blue Eton ribbons in their boaters, and mothers glided around in long white gowns and alarming floral millinery. Ritual rioting in front of the pavilion marked the end of the match.
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AT THIRTEEN, DENYS
wore his hair greased and parted over his left eye, a style that made his big ears look enormous. The pronounced dip in the middle of his top lip meant that the ends of his mouth appeared as if they were always about to turn up into a smile, and, like his mother, he had such a graceful way of moving that people said it was difficult not to look at him when he came into a room. Older boys indulged him, and, as he progressed through the school, younger ones worshipped him with unwavering devotion.

His most fervent admirer at Tatham’s was a small lisping aesthete with a French accent and a huge fortune. Philip Sassoon was descended from Baghdadi Jews who had accumulated their wealth in India from the opium trade, and his family was in the vanguard of the social and cultural elite—an indication of the extent to which the old landed order was losing preeminence. Dark-skinned, heavy-lidded, and moonfaced, Philip had inherited from his French mother, a Rothschild, flawless taste and an attenuated sensibility. He was both fastidious and frenetic: someone once wrote that “he might have been strung on electric wires,” and when a bad smell pervaded the drafty top floor of the house he tipped a bucket of eau de cologne over the linoleum. The other boys didn’t like pansies, and without Denys’s protection Sassoon would have been badly bullied. His gratitude veered toward the ludicrous. On one occasion, he visited a fluridden Denys bearing gifts of ruby shirt studs and diamond cuff links. On Sassoon’s departure, Denys threw them into the unlit grate, only to think better of his gesture and recover the gems for Topsy. Although he jibbed at conspicuously vulgar opulence, he was naturally attracted to aesthetes and intellectuals and could see beyond the prejudices of the group. Sassoon, as it turned out, was no ordinary underdog.

Throughout his Eton career, Denys’s closest friend was the dazzling Guy Buxton, the youngest of a tribe of gifted siblings referred to by a contemporary as “that family of fabulous good looks and charm.” On school holidays, Denys often went to stay at Dunston, the Buxton estate on the river Tas in Norfolk. The redbrick faux-Elizabethan mansion had fifty bedrooms and two bathrooms, and was as cold and drafty as Haverholme. But once the fires roared, the rooms filled with cigar smoke, and the click of billiard balls ricocheted down the passages, everyone forgot about drafts. In summer, the grounds were ideal for hurling cricket balls, a competitive sport pursued by all junior Buxtons, including the one girl, the tomboy Rose, with whom Denys was to fall in love. Like all the great estates, Dunston was maintained by a fleet of servants bred never to reason why. A French boy once stayed at the same time as Denys, and, struck down with a migraine, he retired to his room. In the early evening, Mrs. Buxton sent a footman up to ask if he wanted a cup of tea. The boy had just returned from a long spell in Germany, and, half-asleep, replied drowsily, “
Nein.
” The footman retired, only to reappear ten minutes later bearing a tray laid with nine cups of tea.

It was at Dunston that Denys first heard about British East Africa. Guy’s eldest brother, Geoffrey, had emigrated there, and was farming one of the first plots in the Wanjohi Valley. On Geoffrey’s visits home, Denys and the others listened in amazement as he described the Shangri-la he had found on the equator.

EAST AFRICA HAD NOT
begun to interest foreign powers until the last phase of the Scramble, and then only because of the access it offered to the El Dorado of the Great Lakes. Livingstone, Speke, Stanley, and others had all reported the existence of fertile tracts of country around Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika; some enthusiasts even claimed there was a new India there for the taking. In 1895, after more than a decade of vacillation and failed initiatives, London mandarins declared the existence of the Protectorate of British East Africa, now Kenya.
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Land to the west had already been designated the Protectorate of Uganda. For many years, both the British government and private entrepreneurs were far less interested in Kenya than they were in landlocked Uganda, as they indulged in the geopolitical fantasy that whoever controlled Uganda controlled the White Nile, the river that originates at Lake Victoria, joins the Blue Nile in the Sudan, and flows on to Egypt. Control of the Nile therefore meant control of the Suez Canal, the jugular of empire. But Uganda was so hard to reach. Every imperial filing cabinet had to be carried on a porter’s head for three months from the coast, and every tusk the same distance back. This was why the British government decided to finance a five-hundred-mile rail link between Mombasa and Lake Victoria, a characteristic act of late-nineteenth-century bravura. It was such an extravagant and impractical scheme, fraught with so many engineering challenges, that
Punch
dubbed it the Lunatic Line. Thirty-two thousand Indians were shipped in to build it. They put up 35 viaducts and 120 bridges and culverts while fleeing man-eating lions and scooping scorpions from their tents by the bucketful. When indigenous people objected to what was happening to their land, they were shot. The Lunatic Line cost British taxpayers £5.5 million. (The total government expenditure for 1899 was £133 million.) The eastern segment of the track ran within fifty miles of German East Africa—territory to the south of Kenya that was to become Tanganyika and then Tanzania—a proximity that would have a profound influence on that little-known epic of guerrilla action, the Great War in East Africa.