White Mischief (5 page)

“A great friend of mine, Victor Perowne, who was eventually Ambassador to the Holy See—he’s dead now—‘took it’—‘hook, line and sinker.’ He even published several poems and prose pieces on ‘Haystacks’ (if you see the association, rather a clumsy one) in the
Eton Chronicle
—they must still be found there—of which the editor was sympathetic, and perhaps bitten, too. But I remember Josslyn myself indistinctly—and could never ‘see it’ as the phrase goes.”

Hay’s family was of immense antiquity and grandeur. The Earls of Erroll, as Hereditary Lord High Constables of Scotland since 1315, walked directly behind the Royals at coronations. The Jacobite Lord Kilmarnock dominated the family strain, but Josslyn’s great-grandmother was a natural daughter of William IV (from whom there was no legitimate descent), thus, perhaps, adding Hanoverian stamina to Highland gallantry. There had been family seats at Slains, Aberdeen, and Rosenglass, Cumberland, but the Erroll fortune had been whittled away by the 19th Earl, who had been unable to economise or adjust the management
of his estate after his return from the Crimea. Many of the family assets were sold by Josslyn’s grandfather, the 20th Earl, who had commanded the Household Cavalry and was Lord-in-Waiting to Edward Vll when the Empire was at its height. His father, Victor, Lord Kilmarnock, was godson to Queen Victoria and in 1919 went to Berlin as Charge d’affaires, the first diplomat to be sent to Germany after the Armistice. He took Josslyn with him as honorary attaché—his only job after leaving Eton—on the grounds that some practical experience might be useful before the boy took his Foreign Office exams.

Josslyn returned to London in 1922. passed the Foreign Office exams, and began to exploit his remarkable sexual attraction in London society, while the older generation began to describe him as “spoilt.” There was no question about that, but he was vulnerable, too.

The following year he fell in love with Lady Idina Gordon, the married woman with whom he eloped to Kenya. She was born Idina Sackville, the daughter of the 8th Earl De La Warr and she had been married twice, first to Euan Wallace with whom she had two sons, and secondly to Charles Gordon, whom she divorced in 1923. Gordon did not defend the case.

Idina was apparently irresistible. She was already
mal vue
in society for her “fast” reputation. She had had many boyfriends during her first two marriages, including Oswald Mosley, who had presented her with a pearl-inlaid dressing table. “She could whistle a chap off a branch,” said an old acquaintance. “She didn’t pinch other people’s men, but if they were left lying about, she’d pick them up.” She had a perfect figure, slight and little girlish, for which she was famous, and much admired; always wore the chicest clothes and walked barefoot whenever possible “to show off her size three feet.” Her face might have been beautiful were it not for the shotaway chin and. it is said, she was intelligent, well read, enlivening company.

Josslyn’s liaison with Idina became high scandal. Not only was she twice divorced, she was soon to marry a
mere boy, eight years younger than herself and the heir to an earldom. In addition she was seen, correctly, to have ended his chances of the Foreign Office career that in spite of the stigma of Josslyn’s dismissal from Eton, his father had managed to secure for him. Even after their marriage in September 1923, it was hinted that Joss and Idina would have been “unwelcome at Ascot” had they stayed in England. Idina had already lived for a year in Kenya with her second husband, Charles Gordon, and now it seemed the obvious, indeed the only, place to go. Their departure in April 1924 launched the Colony’s reputation as a place beyond the reach of society’s official censure, and so beyond the pale, although this was tame compared to the scandals that followed. The couple set up house at Slains, a fairly modest bungalow on the slopes of the Aberdares, named after the castle sold by Joss’s grandfather.

In 1925, they moved from Slains to a house in the valley called Clouds, a large, low thatched mansion with many guest bedrooms along each of its wings, facing on to a courtyard. Guests began to come out from England in large numbers, and it was often so wet on the escarpment, so difficult to negotiate by car, that it was hardly worth leaving for weeks on end. Idina would make it very difficult for her guests to leave at all.

She was not to come to the height of her powers for another ten years, but she quickly dominated what there was of the social life of that remote part of the White Highlands and it was there, under her influence, that the Happy Valley legend began.

Idina was only happy, according to the survivors of her house parties—and it was held as truth at Government House where she was on the blacklist—if
all
her guests had swapped partners, wives or husbands by nightfall, or certainly by the time the weekend or the invitation was over. She would organise, from time to time, after-dinner games of “blowing the feather” across a sheet held out by the guests around a table. It was a frantic game that was designed to create near hysteria; when the feather
landed all eyes would be on Idina, who, like a high priestess presiding over a sacred ritual, would divine and then announce who was to sleep with whom.

The bedrooms were locked, and Idina had numbered keys with duplicates which were laid out on a table so that bedroom partners could be chosen by an alternative game of chance, or what appeared to be so. “We always called ldina’s bed ‘the battleground,’” said a survivor, “and we all used to end up in it at various times of the day or night.”

Lady Altrincham (then Lady Grigg, wife of the Governor) put Idina on her blacklist. She remembers visiting Clouds and being shocked to find ldina’s clothes and pearls scattered across the floor, the dogs unfed and the servants gone. It was considered that Idina carried on shamelessly in front of Africans and this—the setting of a bad example—was inexcusable. Retrospectively, Idina is even thought by some to have made a significant contribution to Mau Mau and the end of British rule, through her scandalous behaviour.

Lord Francis Scott frowned on young officers visiting the Wanjohi, or frequenting Clouds. Eileen, who could never forgive ldina’s ability to assimilate this landscape so effortlessly, may have had something to do with it.

She wrote in her diary, “Most of the women wear shorts, a fashion inaugurated by Lady Idina who has done a lot of harm in this country. It is very ugly and unnecessary.”

“Unnecessary” was the key word. Sacrifice and toil was the image of the settlers that Eileen wished to project to her relations at home. Glamorous eccentricity trivialised the frontier and made it look easy and enjoyable, or worse. Idina was spoiling things. She infuriated Eileen, who believed deeply in the inherent superiority and virtue of those born to rule. After a miserably inadequate lunch visiting neighbours, Eileen wrote, “I wonder how Idina will enjoy trying to eat this type of food and washing out of a cracked old tin basin … Everything is so intensely dry.
It splits the face and hair … All the women in this country, except Lady Idina, are burnt brick red, which is not very becoming.” Once they met at Nakuru races: “Lady Idina was there in an Ascot gown with a lovely brown ostrich feather hat. Why she didn’t die of sunstroke I can’t conceive.”

Idina’s closest neighbours were Comte Frédéric de Janzé and his young American bride, Alice. Frédéric, twenty-six, elegant, laconic, aristocratic, had motor raced at Le Mans, fought in the Rif mountains and moved in the literary circle of Proust, Anna de Noailles and Maurice Barrès.

De Janzé’s
Vertical Land
*
includes anonymous pen portraits of some of the Happy Valley residents, their names pencilled in by the author in my own copy. This is how he evoked Idina:

With her back to the fire, gold hair aflame, in red and gold kekoi. she stands … Sunk in chairs, legs crossed on the floor, propped up against the wall, all our eyes hang fascinated on that slight figure … The flames flicker; her half-closed eyes waken to our mute appeal. As ever, desire and the long drawn tobacco smoke weave around her ankles, slowly entwining that slight frame: around her neck it curls: a shudder, eyes close. Contentment! Power! The figure in the golden kekoi.

He described Happy Valley as the “Habitat of the wild and free”:

In this décor live a restless crowd of humans, hardly colonists—wanderers, perhaps, indefatigable amusement seekers weary or cast out from many climes, many countries. Misfits, neurasthenics, of great breeding and charm, who lacked the courage to grow old, the stamina to pull up and build anew in this land.

De Janzé described the principal cast of characters, among them Fabian Wallis, a homosexual and a close
friend of Josslyn’s; Michael Lafone, a fierce womaniser with an eyeglass, who was briefly and disastrously married in Kenya to Elizabeth Byng, daughter of the Earl of Strafford, and above all Raymond de Trafford, the epitome of the remittance man.

Raymond came from a grand English family from Lancashire, and had been in the Coldstream Guards before coming to Kenya. He was devilishly attractive, quickwitted, original, cultivated, hopelessly indiscreet, a heavy gambler and drinker. To women, he could be delightfully attentive when he felt like it, and a great relief to talk to. Evelyn Waugh called him a “fine desperado,” took a great liking to him when he met him in Kenya in 1931, and kept up with him afterwards. “Something of a handful,” he observed, “v. nice but so
BAD
and he fights and fucks and gambles and gets D.D. [disgustingly drunk] all the time.” They stayed together with the Delameres at Elmenteita. Waugh wrote of Trafford in his diary: “He got very drunk and brought a sluttish girl back to the house. He woke me up later to tell me he had just rogered her and her mama, too.”
*

There was a music-hall jingle that went the rounds in Nairobi:

There was a young girl of the Mau

Who said she didn’t know how.

She went for a cycle with Raymond and Michael,

She knows all there is to know now.

Along with the champagne, the drugs of the new age, cocaine and morphine, had found their way into Happy Valley. The chief dealer was Frank Greswolde Williams, who got his supplies from Port Said and who openly plied his trade in the Muthaiga Club. One of his best customers was the American Kiki Preston, a Whitney by birth, a
beauty who often stayed with Idina. She had had many lovers, including the two Valentinos, de Trafford and Lafone—and the late Duke of Kent.

When her supplies ran low, Kiki would send her aeroplane to Nairobi for a fresh consignment. Cockie Hoogterp was a close friend of Kiki and remembers her extraordinary performance with her silver syringe.

She was great fun and very witty and never made any bones about morphine. She always looked marvellous. She would be quite open about it digging the needle into herself while we sat up drinking whisky. She never went to bed until 4 a.m. Next morning we were always hung over and sleeping: but she was up at 8 a.m. beautifully dressed, and looking lovely, as if nothing had happened.

“I’m sorry to say,” said Sir Derek Erskine. whose wife had helped the Prince of Wales to destroy the Muthaiga Club dance records, “that drugs played a very large part in that period. Cocaine was taken like snuff in Happy Valley and certainly didn’t do anybody any good.” At another dinner party for the Prince of Wales in 1928, at Muthaiga, Erskine saw Greswolde Williams suddenly being manhandled out of the room by a white hunter called Archie Richie. When Erskine asked what had happened, he was told, “Well, there is a limit, even in Kenya, and when someone offers cocaine to the heir to the Throne, something has to be done about it, particularly when it is between courses at the dinner table.”

Josslyn’s days were mostly taken up with horseracing and polo—which was seen as a painful but bracing hangover cure. He had a farm at Nakuru, but paid little attention to it. Near Gilgil, on the plain below the Kinankop, four separate polo fields had been cut out and rolled, under the mountain, from the great orchard of green-black
cactus trees and scrub—the sombre landscape that you still cross, on a few miles of dirt track, to reach them now. Josslyn would turn up here wearing tightly fitting shorts with wide corduroy stripes and, invariably, with a red-ochre Somali shawl flung over his shoulder.

Unlike Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch Hatton, who had adopted the Somali shawl as a somewhat romantic affectation, Josslyn carried off the fancy dress without a trace of self-consciousness, more in the spirit of the privileged boys of Pop at Eton, whose right it was to make flamboyant variations on the school uniform, wrapping themselves in bright flannel.

Josslyn’s charm, and even his arrogance, brought him close to the males around him. His assumption of the leader’s role was effortless. He had indeed inherited, like the sons of Mary, “that good part.”

Petal Allen, daughter of Sir Derek Erskine, remembers Josslyn Hay as the first really elegant man she ever saw, as a child. He sat on a shooting stick at the racecourse, and held Petal on his knee. He wore a white tussore silk suit, a polka dot bow tie and a panama hat. In the Wanjohi he would often wear a kilt. His hair was still oiled down and brushed into wings on either side and there was a transcendent perfection about his looks. He was immensely popular with most of the colonial community for his friendliness and his quick wit—a striking figure who made a lasting impression on the people he met.

And yet extraordinarily little is known about his life in Kenya, beyond the Don Juan legend. He is poorly remembered by the few surviving colonists who knew him, and he rarely returned to England. Either the drink has sealed away the memory or possibly the summary style of colonial language, whose every word is final, has suppressed it. “Oh!
Tremendous
charm.
That
was the thing.”

To press for detail is to introduce a tone of contradiction. But the judgments are often revealing. David Begg, a Scotsman known to the remaining whites around the Kinankop as “Bwana” Begg, knew Josslyn Hay well. He
lives in a house of austere Highland decor, beside those same polo grounds at Gilgil which he owns, and which he cut out himself fifty years ago. He plays a skilful game, aged over seventy, and still speaks with a strong Scots accent. “He was a first-class fellow,” he said. “He was like a lot of those who never had anything to do. Clever, always had a brain. He’d always an answer. I used to play polo with him quite a bit. I would give him a hand loading his horses and he was always ready to take advice. Good eye for a ball and a strong, hefty fellow.”