White Mischief (7 page)

Early the following year, Alice was back in Kenya, but under orders from Government House to pack up and leave the country, as an undesirable alien. In the remaining weeks she took up her old affair with Josslyn. Karen Blixen, in a letter to her elder sister, described their arrival at her house at the end of February that year. She met Joss in Nairobi and invited him out to the farm for a “bottle.” He asked if he could bring Alice. That same day Karen Blixen was paid a surprise visit by Lady MacMillan (Northrop had been given an honorary knighthood) and three “really huge and corpulent” old American ladies, who had landed from a cruise ship for some sightseeing. They were hoping, above all, to see a lion. Blixen wrote,

They started to discuss all the dreadfully immoral people there were in Kenya, Americans too, unfortunately, and as the worst one of all mentioned Alice, and I, who of course knew that she was about to turn up, let them go into great detail about it. So when their car drove up and I went out to receive them, and came in and presented Lord Erroll and Comtesse de Janzé, I don’t think that the devil himself could have a greater effect if he had walked in. It was undoubtedly better than the biggest lion and has given them much more to talk to their fellow passengers about.
*

*
Isak Dinesen,
Letters From Africa 1914–1931
(Weidenfeld & Nicoison, 1981); Karen Blixen also wrote under the name Isak Dinesen.

4

THE BONNY EARL OF ERROLL

In 1928, Joss’s father had died and he became the Earl of Erroll. His marriage to Idina was coming to an end, in a blaze of acrimony and bad debts which he had run up in her name with the Indian merchants. Idina might have approved of casual affairs, but not a serious romance that would take him away for long periods and disrupt her social programme.

Erroll had now fallen in love with Molly Ramsay-Hill, another married heiress and a beauty, also older than himself; a petite, slender, animated woman with auburn hair. Her husband, Major Cyril Ramsay-Hill, was a rancher who had built himself a huge whitewashed castle in the Moroccan style on the edge of Lake Naivasha, with crenellated walls, a minaret and lawns sloping down to the edge of the water. Oserian, as it was called, had been known since Happy Valley days as the “Djinn Palace.” Compared with the sub-Lutyens gloom of most settler architecture, it is a house of haunting beauty, with a magnificent Art Deco bar outside the dining room.

There is a legend, still current in Nairobi, that Ramsay-Hill horsewhipped Erroll, for his seduction of Molly, outside the Norfolk Hotel, “in front of a mixed audience of Africans, Asians and Europeans.” Erroll’sown Somali servant, who claims anonymity, witnessed the incident all those years ago, and remembers it differently.

He had gone with Erroll to the Djinn Palace, where a house party had been arranged. One day he was ordered by Erroll to load up Major Ramsay-Hill’s two Buicks for a safari into the Masai Reserve, towards Narok. The first Buick set off with Erroll and Mrs. Ramsay-Hill and the second followed with the luggage. When Major Ramsay-Hill discovered the absence of his wife and his Buicks, he sent his own Somali servant to look for her and then joined the hunt himself. It is not remembered precisely how many days this took but the search included a visit to the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, already a distance of some 100 miles and wildly off course. In fact, the Somali servants knew exactly where the party had gone but held back, apparently out of flawless discretion and because this was, after all, how the Bwanas chose to spend their time.

Ramsay-Hill finally found the couple in a tented camp at Narok. He had come with a rhino whip, with which he laid about Erroll as best he could, chasing him through the bush; then he got into one of his Buicks and went home to Oserian. In the divorce proceedings, Ramsay-Hill cited Erroll and won £3,000 damages to pay off the debts the couple had run up in his name, although Molly kept the Djinn Palace.

“It is obvious,” said the judge, “that the co-respondent is a blackguard.” As for Molly, it was obvious, that she too was a woman of very low character, though “that may be largely due to the influence of the co-respondent.” Assessing the damages to Major Ramsay-Hill, he said, “I should have thought that he was very well rid of a bad woman, but he does not take that view. It is obvious that he had a great affection for her.” In her own petition, meanwhile, Idina cited Molly and produced two enquiry agents to prove “misconduct” in a flat in Sloane Street, London, in April 1928.

In 1930, Erroll and Molly were married and moved into the Djinn Palace. The Scottish lord must have felt at home here, beside this beautiful lake, that had the look of a wild highland loch, encircled as it was by mountains
and plains, its wide grassy shore bordering the water which, seen from the veranda of the Djinn Palace on a fine day, was a clear, cool blue pool. For decoration there were herons, black duck, chalk white egrets, and hippos rose and sank in the water among the floating islands of papyrus.

The bedroom doors of the house faced an inner courtyard with a tiled pool and a fountain in the centre. Thus entrances and exits were easily observed. There was a sunken marble bath lined with black and gold tiles in the main suite—to facilitate, so the story goes, the vomiting of overindulgent guests. The rooms and terraces were furnished with deep sofas and armchairs, loose-covered in flowered chintz. And Erroll’s full-length portrait, in unpaid for Coronation robes, hung at the top of the stairs. Once again, however, he was financially secure: Molly’s estate produced an income of £8,000 a year.

Before long, out of boredom and an acute sense of his own abilities, the ruling instinct in Erroll began to assert itself and to bloom, encouraged by Lord Francis Scott, who recognised his natural talent for politics. The opportunities for power in that community were infinite: it was a tidy constituency and there was a marked absence of competition. The Premier Earl of Scotland was likely to be a figure of some weight, and he also expressed some forceful political sentiments. In 1934 he became a paid-up member of the British Union of Fascists.

Nellie Grant, Elspeth Huxley’s mother, described Erroll’s exploits on Oswald Mosley’s behalf in her posthumously published book,
Letters from Africa:

11th December 1934. Wednesday last was Joss Erroll’s meeting at the (Muthaiga) Club to explain British fascism. There were 198 people there, no less, and a very good-tempered meeting, as everybody cheered to the echo what anyone said. British fascism simply means super loyalty to the Crown, no dictatorship, complete religious and social freedom, an “insulated Empire”
to trade with the dirty foreigner, higher wages and lower costs of living …

All questions and answers cheered to the roof … Whenever Joss said British fascism stands for complete freedom, you could hear Mary Countess [Molly] at the other end of the room saying that within five years. Joss will be dictator of Kenya.
*

The following year Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, and Joss Erroll dropped his membership in the British Union of Fascists. Instead he was elected, aged thirty-four, to the Presidency of the Convention of Associations, the “settlers’ parliament”—a separate and unofficial rival to the Legislative Council. Eileen Scott, who described Erroll as “much improved,” was at the election.

To my surprise and delight, contrary to the expectations of most people. Joss Erroll was voted to the chair, largely outnumbering the Left Wing, and most of the executive are sound men too. It is a pity Joss hasn’t had a year’s more practice and experience; he has a brain like lightning, and it is difficult for him to listen patiently to this slow minded, if sound, community. However, it is a great step in the right direction, he is very able and a gentleman. Nearly everyone expected a Bolshie to be elected.

By now Erroll had begun to lose interest in his second Countess, and this, for Molly, signalled the beginning of a sad decline. She wanted desperately to produce a child and heir, and had many false pregnancies. Realising that she was losing Joss, she started to drink heavily and eventually to shoot morphine.

Erroll’s absences were prolonged: “He was very naughty with Molly,” said Patricia Bowles. “He gobbled up all her money and had walk-outs all the time.” “Bwana Hay told the servants,” his own Somali servant recalls, “‘I don’t mind if she dies.’ She got very drunk and had
hidden the bottles. He said: ‘Give the woman as much as she wants to drink. If she wants to die, let her have it. If she wants a drink, let her have one.’ Then she died.” The date was August 1939.

Dr. Joseph Gregory, the G.P. to the Muthaiga Club set, remembers that on his visits to Molly the house smelled of champagne and vomit. Molly’s body was covered with heroin abscesses. Gregory remembered their last conversation:

She had been ill and lonely for a long time and she said to me. “You will promise to come to my funeral, even if you’re the only one?” I said of course I would. She died that afternoon. After her death the flowers came pouring into the house, but while she was alive, not a daisy.

Molly’s trustees stopped the flow of money, and Erroll temporarily closed down the house, although she had left it to him in her will. He moved to a bungalow in Muthaiga, near the entrance to the Club. He was broke now, living on credit. His father had left him an income of £300 a year. Otherwise he was down to Molly’s pearls and his
droit de seigneur
.

By now, Erroll’s taste for politics had turned him into a hard and conscientious worker. He had become secretary to Sir Ferdinand Cavendish Bentinck (later the Duke of Portland), at the Production and Settlement Board. “He was rather a bounder,” said Cavendish Bentinck. “Very quick repartee, quite intelligent, very superficial. Bright, certainly, but not very profound. Too bright in that way really. Attractive chap.”

In 1939, Erroll was elected to the Legislative Council as the member for Kiambu. His political views had come round from those of fascist sympathiser to outright opposition to the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain (although most right-wingers in Britain were appeasers). Hitler had demanded the return of Germany’s pre-war colonies.
In his maiden speech in the House of Lords on a brief visit to London the previous year. Erroll had argued forcefully against the return of Tanganyika to Germany.

By 1940, Erroll, now thirty-nine, had become military secretary for the Colony—he had joined the Kenya Regiment with the rank of Captain—and head of the Manpower Board. He was busy marshalling the East African fighting force for the Abyssinian campaign, and his administrative skill was widely praised. Sir Wilfred Have lock, who worked under Erroll. said, “I saw him as an executive; he was a demanding man. brilliant at his job. When he was working as head of Manpower, the records of all the military personnel were destroyed by fire. Erroll built them up again, completely out of his head.”

In 1940, Erroll was also in the middle of a serious love affair with a married woman from Happy Valley whom I shall call Nancy Wirewater. She was unpopular with the other women in that social set, who were bemused by Erroll’s infatuation with her. The lovers were forced to meet mostly in the lunch hour: Erroll would have a bottle of champagne put on ice each day in the billiard room of the Norfolk Hotel, where he was once caught by Auntie, the proprietress, having his way with Mrs. Wirewater on the billiard table.

Erroll never seemed to lose the affection, the devotion even, of his discarded mistresses. One woman who held a particular emotional claim on him, who had never quite got over their brief affair, was Gwladys (pronounced Gladys), Lady Delamere, widow of Hugh Delamere. In 1920, against the wishes of her friends, she had married Sir Charles Markham, who was younger than herself and considered a waster. The marriage lasted seven years with some conspicuous unfaithfulness on both sides.

She married Hugh Delamere in 1928, three years before he died. That same year she had travelled out to Kenya as the girlfriend of Edward, Prince of Wales on the first of his safaris. She was considered very attractive, with her
pale skin and jet black hair, although not by Karen Blixen who described, in addition to her “odd” looks, a fierce streak of recklessness in her behaviour. She wrote to her sister,

Lady Delamere behaved scandalously at supper, I thought. She bombarded the Prince of Wales with big pieces of bread, and one of them hit me, sitting beside him, in the eye, so I have a black eye today, and finished up by rushing at him, overturning his chair and rolling him around on the floor. I do not find that kind of thing in the least amusing, and stupid to do at a club; as a whole I do not find her particularly likable, she looks so odd exactly like a painted wooden doll.
*

On the Prince’s next safari, Gwladys was dropped from the entourage.

By 1940, Gwladys had become somewhat more unbalanced, partly, it was thought, from the effect of a serious bout of typhoid, and from unhappiness in love. She had lost her looks; her face had turned puffy with drink and she had taken to wearing elaborate headdresses. She had become exhibitionistic, touchy and unpredictable: loyal at one moment, she would cut you dead the next. At her birthday party at the Muthaiga Club, she threw a plate of bacon and eggs at another woman, and had to be removed. She was equally violent on the subject of race, publicly insulting a woman called Sybil Martineau for “having African blood” and leading the Muthaiga members to bar the Aga Khan—the spiritual head of the large Ismaili community in Kenya—from coming to the Club. Blunt, autocratic, perceptive, with a strident air and a sharp tongue, Gwladys, now the Mayor of Nairobi, had become the repository of “good advice,” the breaker and maker of matches. Her feelings for Erroll were now expressed in matronly possessiveness. In general she found it difficult to tolerate younger and prettier women.

Meanwhile, Alice had been allowed to return to Kenya and take up residence in the Wanjohi Valley. In 1932 she had made the mistake of marrying Raymond de Trafford five years after the shooting at the Gare du Nord. Barely three months after their marriage, at Neuilly, they were separated. Paula Long remembers their incessant fighting, and the final scene, enacted on a cafe terrace in Paris, over a dispute about the comparative gifts of two conductors. Alice was wearing a hat with a short veil. Raymond hurled his cocktail at her face, the maraschino cherry stuck to the veil, and he burst out laughing. They never saw each other again. In 1939, Raymond was jailed for three years for manslaughter—he had killed a pedestrian while driving in an advanced state of drunkenness. He was next in court in 1946, charged with bankruptcy. He gave his address as the Riviera Hotel, Maidenhead, Berkshire.