Too Close to the Sun (39 page)

The prince had borrowed Grigg’s motion-picture camera, and when Denys spotted a bull elephant in the Ol Mberesha Hills, HRH and his aides set out after it on foot. They got the pictures, but when a second elephant charged, Denys brought it down with a head shot with inches to spare. In the cool morning air, a tiny whorl of thin blue smoke rose through the bullet hole. It was the first of several uncomfortable incidents. The prince was apparently impervious to danger and wholly insensitive to the responsibilities his presence placed on others. When Denys judged that a charging rhino was close enough and shot it, the prince rounded on him.

“How dare you shoot without an order,” he snapped. “I wanted to get him right up to the camera.”

“Your Royal Highness,” Denys replied, “suppose you look at the matter from my point of view. If you, the heir to the throne, are killed, what is there left for me to do? I can only go behind a tree and blow my brains out.”

The two men had little in common. HRH never read a book and had no interest in classical music. He loathed being alone. But he could distinguish an independent spirit from a toady, and secretly liked to be dominated. Mature and unafraid, Denys had his measure, correctly hazarding that a firm line would have a more positive effect than craven capitulation. By speaking out, he established a basis for friendship. For once, the prince began to display genuine interest in his subject land, listening attentively as Denys spoke of Kenya and its people. Instinctually not a wanton slaughterer, he was shocked at the stories of orgiastic killers zooming around the plains of Tanganyika in motorcars, and over the next weeks proved an enthusiastic student as beer cooled in the canvas water buckets and skinners salted the hides. For his part, Denys was encouraged to have found an influential ally, and, as it turned out, the future king’s enthusiasm for photographing game did influence the fashion for shooting with cameras.

The next afternoon they entered Arusha, bush capital of the northern province of Tanganyika. Denys had asked Blix to be his second gun for the main part of the safari.
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Still managing the remote farm, Blix had driven to Arusha with Cockie and pitched camp near the small hotel where the prince was staying. He was shaking a cocktail in his tent when a little man came in.

“I’m the Prince of Wales,” said the man, “and should like to make your acquaintance.”

“You could not have chosen a more suitable moment,” Blix replied, pouring from the ice-cold shaker.

Still wearing the wilted
terai,
Blix, unlike many hunters, did not take himself too seriously. He laughed a lot, which made his fleshy cheeks wobble, and judged that 75 percent of a white hunter’s role was to be a glorified butler and keep clients amused, both tasks at which he was adept. The next day everyone proceeded to Babati, the scratchy settlement near the Blixens’ farm. Their only neighbors were the Popps. Mrs. Popp left her farm once a year to have a baby in Arusha: it was her annual holiday. Blix sustained himself with regular visits to the Fig Tree, a bar run by a drunken Scot and patronized by a pair of Estonians who had escaped from the French foreign legion by swimming to Marseille from a distant island. But there was to be no drinking till the prince got his lion; Blix’s attitude toward lions, HRH said later, was that of the prophet Daniel. When at last an old male bounded from a covert, the prince shot with a borrowed .350 double-barreled Express. He missed with the first bullet, but hit the lion in the chest at 140 yards with the left barrel. He ran up. The lion lay still, then got to its feet and limped off. Then it swiveled around to charge. The prince finished it off with both barrels. This time even Denys had broken into a sweat.

The prince had to leave for another round of official duties, and while he was away the safari moved to Blix’s farm itself. There Blix co-opted the help of his friend Chief Michaeli, a redoubtable M’bulu who presided over several thousand of his tall tribe. Dwelling in pits dug out of the surrounding hillsides, the agricultural M’bulu had been in the highlands for many generations; according to their legend they migrated there from Lake Natron. Chief Michaeli, keen to impress a future white king, obligingly summoned five hundred of his
moran
to assist the hunt. When the royal party returned, they all tracked buffalo together, and if the prince sat on a rock to rest the five hundred spread below, crouching with their spears between their thighs. If Michaeli appeared, they rose like a wave. Back on the farm at the cocktail hour, the boys squatted by the lorries, removing thorns that had worked their way into the tires while the prince fiddled with his Crichton ice-making machine, a device unknown to Africa, and one that Cockie coveted. She and the prince were getting on famously, and when he invited her to join them for the rest of the safari she accepted with pleasure, though she was a rotten shot. This was to prove awkward for Denys.

The night they reached Kondoa Irangi, the prince played his accordion before retiring, slept badly, and threw a boot at a noisy hyena in the night. In the morning, they received a cable informing them that George V was unwell. The sixty-three-year-old king had developed pleurisy, and that morning a truck had rumbled through the gates of Buckingham Palace with a set of the new X-Ray machines. Over the next days Reuters’ wires indicated that he was rallying. But on November 27, en route for Dodoma, the party got a private cable written in a code no one knew. “There was something ominous and exasperating in the uncertainty as to what the absurd code words were hiding,” an aide recalled. They pushed on to Dodoma, each man alone with his thoughts, and found there a rash of panicky cables urging the prince to return at once. Several were from the aldermanic prime minister, Stanley Baldwin. “I remember sitting, one hot night…deciphering, with the help of dear Denys Finch Hatton, the last and most urgent of several cables from Baldwin, begging him [the prince] to come home at once,” Lascelles wrote. Just as he and Denys finished decoding the missive, the prince appeared. Lascelles read him the cable.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said the heir. “It’s just some election dodge of old Baldwin’s. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Sir,” Lascelles replied, “the King of England is dying; and if that means nothing to you, it means a great deal to the rest of us.”

“He looked at me, went out without a word, and spent the remainder of the evening in the successful seduction of a Mrs Barnes, wife of the local commissioner,” the exhausted Lascelles wrote in his journal. “He told me so himself the next morning.” But the prince was bluffing, at least to some degree. “Imagine,” he told Cockie, “I could be king of England tomorrow.” When she asked him what he would do in that case, he replied that he would set the clocks at Sandringham back to the right time, as his grandfather Edward VII had kept them half an hour fast to counter his wife’s tardy tendencies, and George V had maintained the practice. (When he ascended, this was indeed one of his first tasks—almost as soon as he had left his father’s deathbed.)

At four in the morning on November 28, HRH left Dodoma for Dar on the governor’s train. He had capitulated. Denys went with him. They stopped to pick up telegrams, dictating replies to a station babu who typed them with one finger while his wife dispensed tea, a beverage that consisted mainly of sugar and raw ginger. As the massy African darkness moved outside the ill-fitting window, Denys watched the Prince of Wales smoking and fingering the cables. They arrived at Dar and drove straight to Government House, where they learned that the HMS
Enterprise,
which was to convey the prince forty-seven hundred miles to Brindisi, would not arrive for three days.

It was a tense interlude. “One sat and waited, one stood and waited, and HRH went to a children’s party,” an aide recalled. They sailed to Zanzibar in the governor’s yacht. The prince called on the sultan, dined at the residency, and sailed back. On the morning of December 2, the
Enterprise
appeared on the delphinium blue of the Indian Ocean and HRH was on his way home. He had asked Denys to go with him, but he had a booking to take out Baron Napoléon Gourgaud, a sporting Frenchman, so they said goodbye on the deck of the
Enterprise
and Denys hurried ashore to find a ship to take him up to Mombasa. Meanwhile, King George deteriorated. He was administered oxygen, Queen Mary took over his duties, and on December 4 a council of state was appointed to act in his place. Millions gathered around their wireless sets. But on the twelfth surgeons operated to drain an abscess on his chest, and the king again rallied. On the voyage home, the prince wrote a long letter thanking Denys: “What a mess up this all is, and this ship is vibrating at 20 knots to beat any face massage machine.” There was nothing to do but eat and sleep, he whined, and he expected every radio message to say that his father was dead. It was “a curious contrast to the happy life of our safari the first ten days. It was great fun and I was enjoying it all so much…. We miss you very much now…besides knowing more about hunting in Africa than nearly everybody, you kind of get the form of people so amazingly well…. We look forward to seeing you in England around May.” To make up for his disappointment, the prince had decided that if his father recovered he would return to East Africa to complete what he had started, and that no hunter but Denys would be good enough. (He did, in a little over a year.) Lascelles was too seasick to leave his bed, but Legh also wrote to tell Denys how much they missed him: “It was very sad saying goodbye to you…. We all wish you were with us.” He promised to deliver the note Denys had given him for Toby. “I do not think I have ever spent a more interesting fortnight,” Legh said. “In all the ten years I have been with HRH I have never known him enjoy a trip more and I do congratulate you in putting up such a wonderful show in such a ridiculous short space of time…. I hope you will have an enjoyable safari with your frog.” The prince later sent Chief Michaeli the King’s Medal for Africans, and Cockie an ice-making machine. Denys received an engraved blue, black, and gray enameled Raymond Templier cigarette case. The king recovered.

S
IX INCHES OF RAIN HAD FALLEN AT NGONG, AND TANIA, IN SUNNY SPIRITS,
was looking forward to another quiet Christmas with Denys. But when he arrived back from the royal safari and told her that Blix had been with him, her mood darkened. When she learned that Cockie, too, had joined the party, it turned to thunder. She could not understand Denys’s insensitivity. As a Parthian shot before he left with his French client, she told him it was “a law against nature” that he was friendly with Blix; “so would it be with you I believe if Bror had been your sister’s husband.” Many years later, Tania told a friend that Blix had never wanted her to have anything to herself. Now he was taking her lover. But Denys could no longer reach her emotionally. Ingrid remembered that the quarrel “left a reserve of bitterness in both of them, to be tapped later.” In her fiction, Tania frequently wrote of the pain of love. “He often wondered,” she said of one character, “how it came to be that, with the dagger in the heart, one might be stabbed anew twenty times a day.” One has indeed wondered; she puts it awfully well.

While Denys was away with Gourgaud, Tania learned from Thomas that their seventy-two-year-old mother was seriously ill. She left for Denmark immediately and remained at Rungstedlund for more than seven months. Denys at first stayed at the farm while she was away, and then, on May 22, left Kenya himself. Convinced that bush flying had a future, he had decided to return to England, requalify as a pilot, and ship a plane back. He sailed to Marseilles, hopped over to Tunis for ten days, and turned up in London on July 2, 1929. Toby, alerted by his cables, went to Victoria Station but missed him, and the pair were eventually reunited at the Conservative Club. On one of those fine summer days when the English countryside is as lovely as anywhere on earth, they motored to Ewerby to visit their parents’ graves. From there, Denys went on to Eton to see his nephew Michael. Finding the boy absent, he wrote him a note and weighed it down with a small ivory elephant. “Learn as much mathematics as you can,” he ordered the child. “It is useful. And read general history: it is amusing.” Michael remembered seeing him later that summer in London, where Denys, his dark English suit draped with a navy Somali shawl, was stocking up on homburgs at Lock’s on St. James’s Street, and on his trademark square-toed boots and shoes at Peal’s, where his lasts were stored.

In August, the whole family converged on Toby and Margaretta’s new Hampshire home, Buckfield House in Sherfield-on-Loddon, near Basingstoke. Built of red brick in 1898, Buckfield had twenty-five bedrooms and a two-mile drive, but none of the dreamy romance of Haverholme. The Drexel millions had contributed a tennis court, a plantation garden, and a swimming pool, and the mini-estate was run by a team of servants—including a pair of footmen and the master’s wartime batman, Fen, now transmogrified into a butler who had a habit of rummaging deeply in his pockets whenever he was asked a question, as if he might find the answer in their depths. Toby’s eighteen-year-old son, Christopher, had just finished at Eton. He was less confident than his handsome sisters and had a cast in one eye. The idea that she had borne an ill-favored infant displeased Margaretta, who regularly informed Christopher in public that he would “not get far with looks like that.” Toby, who had been on a diet and lost nineteen pounds, rarely crossed her; he walled himself off from the bits of her he didn’t like. As for Topsy, she had turned to the church after Ossie died—she had nowhere else to turn—and Toby and Margaretta’s fashionable world was foreign to her quiet circle. She leaned even further inward when Anne, her daughter, was knocked down by a car as they both got off a tram on a visit to Michael at school, sustaining head injuries that affected her short-term memory for the rest of her life. At her coming-out ball, Anne was the only debutante without a single partner on her dance card. So her brother, Michael, then twenty, danced with her. He had turned out a lot like Denys.

DENYS’S EARLIER EFFORTS
to induce the Tanganyikan authorities to suppress the killing of game from cars had failed. It was not surprising: few had time to worry about the East African herds, and fewer still considered conservation a remotely important issue. Nothing was going to happen without legislation and sanctions. But this time Denys did not simply move on to the next project. For the first time in his life, he had found something he believed in, a cause that was worth commitment. It was a kind of awakening. While still in Kenya he went public with a philippic to London, writing a long article for
The Times
extolling the pleasures of shooting with a camera. It appeared with a selection of his pictures. Speaking of “an orgy of slaughter” in Tanganyika, Denys proposed closed districts and, to compensate for the loss of gun-license revenue, a charge for photographic licenses. The piece ended with a rhetorical flourish: “Is it too much to hope that the appropriate influential bodies and individuals in England who have the interest of natural science and study and photography of wild animals in their natural surroundings at heart, will bestir themselves in time to get the necessary action taken before it is too late?” It was uncharacteristic of Denys to enter public life; he considered self-advertisement vulgar at any price. But he had been deeply moved by the undefiled abundance of East Africa and was responding passionately to the carnage he had witnessed, acting in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century explorers who had spoken out against killing for its own sake, among them Livingstone, Burton, and Stanley. Denys had suddenly seen the ruin the white man and his money might bring to a whole continent, and the prospect was too much to bear. He emerged from his foray into print as the archetypal Homeric hero, excelling in debate and action. But taken as a whole he was not Odysseus, tossed around by fate against his will and all the time longing for home. He was more of an eternal wanderer on a perpetual quest for knowledge and experience.

Still, though, nothing happened to control the killing. Inspired by Marcuswell Maxwell’s lion photographs in
The Times
(the bizarrely named photographer had recently made two trips to East Africa), Denys wrote a second article, and it was published while he was in London. He was supported by the Prince of Wales, who that same week publicly condemned the practice of massacring game from cars. Recognizing the insidious influence of testosterone, in his piece Denys attempted to dispel the popular notion that cameras were for girls and that real men went around weighed down with bandoliers of ammunition, staggering back to the cave at dusk with another mammoth over their hairy shoulders. He did it by conjuring the danger of wildlife photography. “A treacherous eddy of wind, or the whir of gears in a motion picture camera, can instantly galvanize a placidly feeding pachyderm into four tons of rapidly advancing angry elephant,” he wrote. He followed the article with a letter condemning both the “hideous abuse” and the government that condoned it. This time Douglas Jardine, chief secretary to the Tanganyikan government, sprang up in a huff to defend himself. Over the course of the next week, he and Denys traded insults on the letters page of
The Times.
But Denys had a battery of facts with which to blast his opponent into submission. When he cited proposed amendments to a 1927 report to the League of Nations indicating that
no controls at all
were to be introduced in Tanganyika, he concluded persuasively that it would be “the beginning of the end.” This made Jardine look a nit, and flushed the argument into the open. Others weighed in, many of them old colonial hands (“In Nyasaland in my time…”). Parliament even debated the topic, and Sidney Webb, secretary of state for the colonies, asked the governor of Tanganyika for a report. The
Times
’s man in Dar wired a dispatch with the news that a game warden had been sent to the Serengeti plains. “Mr Finch Hatton’s crusade,” the journalist concluded, “has already begun to produce its effect.”

The story spread like a ripple, appearing in provincial publications from the Rochdale
Observer
to the Hull
Daily Mail,
in which the hero appeared as Denise. In November, the Tanganyikan government published a notice in the official gazette proclaiming part of the Serengeti plains a game reserve. Amendments to the game laws were announced at the same time, and in a parliamentary debate on “The Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire” Lord Onslow, supported by the archbishop of Canterbury, urged the enforcement of the law against hunting by car in East Africa. Julian Huxley returned from a fact-finding tour arguing for game reserves, but Secretary Webb took some persuading, as socialists perceived reserves as places where rich people could shoot at leisure. In the end, the conservationists won their case. “Within a few years,” Huxley wrote later with some satisfaction, “National Parks were established in all three East African territories.” The episode indicated how much Denys could accomplish if he chose. He did not care that his outspoken public comments had earned him enemies in the safari trade and among farmers gunning for a hunting free-for-all. Progress has always come chaperoned by bad blood. Most of Denys’s proposals were adopted, sooner or later. They were part of a legislative process that reached its logical conclusion, in Kenya, when hunting was banned outright in 1977.
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By then, of course, it was too late.

Issues surrounding the conservation of game impinged on the ongoing debate over the entire future of colonial rule. Did animals belong to the Africans, as Jardine implied when he proposed that “natives” should be exempt from hunting restrictions? Denys argued that restrictions should apply to African and foreigner alike. But public opinion was shifting ever further from a belief in the automatic wisdom of imposed white law. In January 1928, questions had been asked in the House of Commons about the alleged employment of women and children to build Kenyan roads. The Nairobi authorities indignantly denied the accusations, and on the farms settlers expressed irritation at what they perceived as ignorant interference by London do-gooders. But many at home believed that the gradual delegation of authority to native chiefs and councils was the only logical solution in Africa. The issue of the rights of indigenous peoples in the colonial project had moved forward with agonizing lack of haste since the war, but it did move. In May 1921, when attempts were made to reduce African wages, Harry Thuku formed the nontribal East Africa Association. When he started advocating civil disobedience, he was arrested and deported to Kismayo, then still in the Kenyan province of Jubaland. At the ensuing protest march in Nairobi, twenty-five Africans were killed. Settlers didn’t like it at all. Responding to calls for African education, an editorial in the
Standard
spoke for many when it proclaimed, “It is a terribly serious sign that certain elements among the natives within the Kikuyu tribe advocate reform.” In February 1929, Jomo Kenyatta went to England at the head of a delegation to present the African case to the British government. Thirty-four years later, he would be elected the first president of an independent Kenya.