White Mischief (8 page)

In the Wanjohi, Alice resumed her life of ease and her bouts of depression. She lived mostly alone with her pet eland—a buck of enormous size—and her precious Dachshund “Minnie.” Patricia Bowles described her life:

She adored her dogs, she read a lot, played a hell of a lot of backgammon—we were new at it. We used to spend a considerable amount of time trying to decide where to have our S.N.S. [Saturday Night Souse]. We would drink as soon as she could persuade us to. She did a whisky sour with grenadine and fresh lime, which was delicious. She’d find very curious liqueurs from the duka [local store] and make the most wonderful cocktails, but the whisky sours sent you pretty quickly. Her house was all under one roof with no ceiling partitions between the rooms. So whatever was going on you could hear it and that often caused trouble. You might have thought it was off-putting, but it wasn’t. It was quite encouraging.

By 1940, Alice had adopted a new friend, Julian “Lizzie” Lezard, who was already a celebrated figure in London society. Lezard was an inspired buffoon—untidy, unshaven, and hilariously funny. Forever gambling, always broke, he had been sent to Kenya not by his father,
his regiment or his trustees, but by his wife. Men found him an exhausting joke. Women, with whom he was obsessed, found him “a tremendous relief at weekends full of twits.” They remember, too, his vitality and his profound curiosity about them. There is a pen portrait of this incredible figure in Sir Charles Johnston’s book of wartime Cairo,
Mo and Other Originals
*
(Lezard came to be known, for his exploits behind enemy lines in France, as “the man who broke his back at Monte Carlo”). Johnston describes Lezard greeting the news of his engagement in Cairo:

“You and Natasha are going places, Charlieboy,” he said. “When I’ve nothing else to do. I like to lie in bed sizing people up and that’s the conclusion I’ve come to. Your life together’s going to be like a really well run dinner party. You know, there are some dinners where everyone’s drunk with the fish, and some where they’re drunk with the meat. But in your life everyone will be drunk at midnight and not a minute before. Of course, my trouble,” he added reminiscently, “was that I got drunk before dinner and had to go out and be sick during the soup.”

“Lizzie” Lezard had been a gifted tennis player who had come from South Africa with the Davis Cup team. He was the privileged outsider, the victim of merciless teasing which he could turn to brilliant advantage. Deeply unsure of himself, he longed for affection and praise from the rich and aristocratic, and went to embarrassing lengths to secure it.

For some years Lezard was able to live in considerable style. He was taken up by and later married to Hilda Wardell, a lady of a certain age, and with plenty of money, who introduced him into the hunting world of Leicestershire. Tricked out in pink swallow-tails, his black curls escaping from one side of his top hat, Lezard rode with reckless bravery and little style with the Quorn and Pytchley, falling off and remounting like a circus clown. “It
was a strong Jewish urge of the period,” a fellow guest at the Wardell house remembers, “the determination to martyr themselves on the hunting field. I suppose it was to do with keeping up with the philistines.” Lezard always retained the jargon of the hunting field. His favourite motto was “Hit ’em and hold ’em.”

After several years, Hilda Wardell could take no more. Perhaps she had had to bail Lezard out of a gambling debt once too often. They divorced amicably and she sent Lezard to Kenya without a penny. He was told that Alice de Trafford, now divorced from Raymond and living in Happy Valley, would look after him. Alice brought him back to the Wanjohi Valley in her box-body car. The Wanjohi road was at its worst, the car slewing to the edge of the escarpment and the rain beating at the windscreen in curtains. Lizzie Lezard turned to Alice and said, “Look, I think I’d rather be a shit in London than a pioneer in Kenya.”

Erroll and Lezard were perfectly matched: the comedian and the Earl, both broke, both mad about women. Lezard was fascinated by Erroll, and the obvious place to stay, the very centre of social activity, was Erroll’s house at Muthaiga.

*
Elspeth Huxley.
Nellie: Letters from Africa
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1980).

*
Isak Dinesen,
Letters From Africa 1914–1931
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981).

*
Hamish Hamilton. 1971.

5

A SPELL IN MASAI COUNTRY

Such rich men with absentee wives may be revived only by a successful love affair. They are too grand to work and bitterness follow. They find themselves in a prison of the
déjà vu
, surrounded by good advice and grey hair; within the spirit is as youthful as ever, protesting “Can this be all?”

C
YRIL
C
ONNOLLY

The Delves Broughtons (pronounced “Brawton”) began coming to Kenya on hunting safaris soon after the Armistice. Sir Jock Delves Broughton’s first wife, Vera, was a mighty huntress and adventuress, and Broughton had been told by his Harley Street doctor, Sir Farquhar Buzzard, that a spell in Masai country would be the best cure for his headaches and his excitable mental condition, though Broughton claimed this to be the result of sunstroke, contracted at Portsmouth while his battalion was loading up for France in 1914. In 1923 he had bought a coffee plantation in Kenya. Now in 1940, aged fifty-seven, he was returning with a new wife, this time looking for refuge from another war.

Broughton was born into the protected, leisured world of racing and into the big league of landowning families.
His father, the 10th Baronet, owned three houses: Doddington Park in Cheshire, Broughton Hall in Staffordshire and 6 Hill Street, in Mayfair, London. Doddington was the family seat—a fine if somewhat gloomy Samuel Wyatt house in an eighteenth-century setting of parkland and lakes. With the houses came some 34,000 acres: a vast estate mostly of prime Cheshire farmland, which would now be worth something over £70 million.

Broughton was born in 1883 (though
Who’s Who,
for which he filled in the forms himself, gives the date as 1888). His mother died when he was two, and his father remarried. He could never get on with his stepbrother and stepsister, and hated his father, who kept him chronically short of money, instilling in him a lifelong sense of injury and disadvantage by comparison with his peers. There was a rumour at Eton, where he was thought both dim and overproud, that he had been forced to steal because of his tight allowance, and another that he had fits of ungovernable temper that kept his fellow pupils out of his way. After Eton he went to a crammer’s for some force-fed tutoring and joined the Irish Guards in 1902.

In 1913 he married Vera Boscawen, who came from an impoverished branch of a good family. She was tall and blue-eyed, with outstanding good looks, and Broughton may have been in love with her—he was certainly proud of her glamour and the wonderful clothes she wore. A Cheshire neighbour said of Vera that she was hard as nails, loved nobody and was determined to get all she could out of life. She liked racing, bridge, canasta and mah-jongg—any game or sport that made conversation impossible and dull people tolerable. “She also enjoyed the adventure of killing huge, brilliant animals. She probably despised Jock but found his money comforting.”

Broughton was thirty-one when his father died in 1914. Along with Valentine, Viscount Castlerosse, he was considered the best-looking officer in the Irish Guards. Having for years found it difficult to pay his bills at the officers’
mess, he now had a princely income along with the houses and the acres.

Just then, on August 12th, 1914, the Irish Guards (including the future Field-Marshal Alexander) sailed for France. With one exception. Kipling, whose son was killed in the same regiment, wrote in
The Irish Guards in the Great-War,
“Just before leaving. Captain Sir Delves Broughton, Bart, was taken ill and had to be left behind.”

Broughton was taken off the S.S.
Novara
by tender, and a telegram went off to headquarters, asking for Captain Hamilton Berners to take his place. The
Novara
cleared at 7 p.m. As dark fell, she passed H.M.S.
Formidable
off Ryde and exchanged signals with her. The battleship’s last message to the battalion was to hope that they would get “plenty of fighting.”

On the Aisne, exactly a month after his arrival, the replacement, Captain Hamilton Berners, was killed. So, too, was the Guards’ Colonel, the Hon. George Morris, and two other officers. Lord Francis Scott became Delves Broughton’s new Commanding Officer. Two more of the Guards’ wounded officers were invalided home: Captain Vesey and 2nd Lt. Viscount Castlerosse, who joined Delves Broughton at the Depot at Warley.

What was the nature of his illness? It was described later as “sunstroke” brought on through long hours of loading, but it suggested more strongly some severe psychosomatic affliction. A survivor wrote,

I merely heard he had gone sick. The day had not been over-strenuous for a normal fit man and there can be no question of sunstroke. He was not a very bellicose gent and he was certainly never again in a service battalion.

Nevertheless, Broughton was treated in hospitals at Netley and Millbank, and retired from the army in 1919, with a 50 per cent disability pension. He now dragged his left foot as he walked; he had an arthritic right hand with
a weak grip—the result of a motor accident in 1915—and was subject to bouts of confusion and amnesia.

Now began the twenty-year-long innings of the thirty-six-year-old Baronet, who started to spend heavily as if to make up for lost time, to gamble, to entertain on a large scale. Haunted by the fear that he would at any moment run short of cash, despite an income of £80,000, he liquidated a large part of the estate, some 15,000 acres, almost as soon as he had inherited it. He joined the Turf Club, kept a stable of thirty horses; and he sat on the Nantwich Bench as a Justice of the Peace. He had a passion for bridge and racing—although he was always “somewhere warm” for most of the steeplechasing season—and he was a tournament-class croquet player. Vera became a hunter of big game and in 1919–20 they made their first trip to Kenya. They went back again in 1923 and met Broughton’s old school friend, Jack Soames, who had settled in Nanyuki. Broughton bought the Spring Valley coffee estate near Nairobi. In 1928, again in Kenya, he met the Earl of Erroll at Muthaiga, and stayed with Lord Delamere and his wife, Gwladys, at Soysambu.

At Doddington Broughton insisted that all the guest rooms were filled each weekend. He would hire the band from Ciro’s to play the guests down to Cheshire on the train and would hold up the express at Crewe if his returning guests were late getting away to the station, with a telephone call and a brace of pheasants flung into the guard’s van. Train tickets were sent round in advance to his London guests by the secretary at Hill Street. The weekend parties were often reported in the
Sketch
and the
Tatler,
the guests paraded on the gravel drive for photographs, the readers reminded that the Broughtons were an ancient family, “of consideration for centuries in the counties of Cheshire and Stafford.”

For all his hospitality. Broughton, the sporting Baronet, was not popular among his contemporaries. Other men were suspicious of him—possibly because of his great
wealth, or because he could only unbend with women. He was certainly vain, “with his high collars and his haw-haw voice” (the false entry in
Who’s Who
hints at that); he was a name-dropper, and yet he could sulk for a week without giving a reason. He was distant, lonely, somewhat humourless. His guests at Doddington noticed his disconcerting habit of going into what appeared to be a trance for five minutes or more, especially at meals, staring blankly into the distance, unable to hear any remark addressed to him. “Sour!” was the adjective supplied by an elder statesman.

“You mean cynical?”

“No, worse than cynical. Sour.”

“He looked as if there was always an unpleasant smell under his nose.” said a Cheshire neighbour. “He liked scatological jokes.”

“Not a nice man,” said the Club servants, “arrogant, like the Blenheim lot. None of us liked him.”
*

“Dishonest, charmless, morose,” was the Clubmen’s view. “He was a coward, faked a sunstroke because he feared going to France.” A woman described him as a sad, rather querulous man, who never smiled, and another as “vicious, cold and cruel in more ways than one.”

Vera went racing with Lord Carnarvon, Lord Rosebery and Sir Brograve Beauchamp, but she was often away from home on her adventures to unreachable and forbidden places, and from the mid 1930s she spent more and more time on safaris or cruises with her great friend Walter Guinness, the third son of the Earl of Iveagh, who became Lord Moyne in 1932. There was certainly an imbalance in the marriage. Vera was energetic, curious, full of vitality. Broughton, by contrast or necessity, was afflicted increasingly with boredom and world weariness. They began to go their separate ways. The Earl of Antrim, who often visited Doddington, wrote to Cyril Connolly in 1969.

Perhaps Jock was finding life tedious; he had no intellectual tastes and although he went out hunting he never cut a dash. I believe he craved sympathy and affection and most of all to be amused. One could see how he lit up when he was enjoying himself.

Broughton’s only son and heir, Sir Evelyn, the present Baronet, was born in 1915. By the time he was nineteen and a Cambridge undergraduate in 1934, Evelyn and his father were more or less strangers, and Evelyn’s description of his father is revealing of the man. What contact there was occurred mostly out of doors, hunting and shooting. It appeared that Broughton was inflicting on his son what he himself had suffered as a boy. He visited Evelyn only once during his five-year career at Eton, and had never been to see him at his prep school. “If there was anything wrong,” said Evelyn, “my mother came down.”

When the Fourth of June, the birthday of the benefactor George III, came around at Eton, and other parents arrived with their hampers, Evelyn asked leave of his housemaster to go racing. (The Fourth of June sometimes coincided with the Coronation Cup at Epsom.) Often his father would be there, and they would meet in the grandstand, as if by chance.