The Bolter (24 page)

The Kerries remained a success, however. Idina took farming immensely seriously. The writer Elspeth Huxley later praised the work that the couple had done at Slains: “They enhanced rather than damaged
the natural charms of their valley, by leaving native trees alone and … by paddocking green pastures.”
²⁶
In the era in which Idina had grown up, landowners had thrown themselves into farming with gusto. Many knew every inch of their land, every detail of their livestock, and made a hobby of trying to improve both—vying ferociously with one another at local agricultural shows. Muriel had done just this, both in building Old Lodge and in breeding her rare Kerry cattle.

Now, instead of being “so free that you can see the four walls of your freedom,”
²⁷
Idina was busy from dawn to dusk: turning virgin equatorial soil and its thick-rooted weeds into good land for both grazing and growing cattle fodder was hard work. There were no tractors. Teams of oxen were harnessed to plows and driven slowly through the clodded and tangled earth. At every turn a new obstacle was encountered: a plowshare that twisted, an ox that stumbled and failed to rise. Idina spent her days walking and riding around her
shamba
. When the irrigation failed, when her dairy cows calved with difficulty, she was there. She designed herself workwear—an open-necked man’s shirt and corduroy trousers that she had run up by the tailor in Gilgil. Idina rapidly became so at ease with her new environment that, like the local Kikuyu tribesmen and much to their amazement, she both walked and rode barefoot, the stirrups and thorns tearing into her flesh. When one friend was helping her apply a “scalding poultice” to a “very swollen and obviously painful” foot afterward, Idina “never flinched.” The friend “asked if she was afraid of anything. ‘Yes, one thing—old age,’” Idina replied.
²⁸

It was not, however, a life of unceasing toil. Idina taught her
watu
(her staff—it means “people” in Swahili) how to mow and weed. A Mr. Pidcock ran the farm. Marie, Idina’s French housekeeper, ran the house and directed the
mpishi
(cook) and his
totos
(kitchen boys). This left plenty of time free for nonagricultural pursuits. As she and Charles had done, she and Joss rose at dawn to horses saddled up and waiting and galloped across the balmy, dewy hills for two hours before breakfast. They marked out polo pitches on the grasslands below Slains and employed a soldier-settler, Captain Lawrence, to school their polo ponies and racehorses. They went off on safari for days or even weeks at a time, walking or riding through eye-level grass—the excitement of being surrounded by so much unseen danger sending adrenaline pumping around their veins.

In the Kenyan hills, Idina had created a mix of rural idyll and raw adventure with which she could be truly happy. Photographs of her
around the farm and bent double pulling weeds out of the mud show a radiant woman. She had a cozy home with breathtaking views, a busy farm with its constant cycle of life, and a husband whom she adored. But there was one thing that neither Joss nor she could do without: sexual adventure.

Idina and Joss’s house, Slains, nearing the end of its construction, with the grass
banda
(hut) they had been using in front

New bed companions were not, at first, easy to find. The average white farmer in Kenya, unlike Idina, would have been appalled by the prospect of bed-hopping. For the most part, Idina and Joss needed to find like-minded “Edwardians” among the Muthaiga Club set of landed gentry in exile. This was a growing group. Safaris had become an established tourist activity before the war, bringing the moneyed classes to what was then the East Africa Protectorate in droves in search of big game.

Dazzled by the landscape, wildlife, and sense of virgin territory, some stayed. Others, disheartened by a Europe ravaged by war, had returned since 1918: the number of whites in the country had more than doubled since 1914. Many of these were younger sons of peers who could afford in Africa the thousands of acres and dozens of servants that their elder siblings had acquired in England by birthright. Prominent among these aristocrats (although an elder son himself) was Lord Delamere, known as D, who had been an early settler and now owned tens of thousands of acres on the far side of Gilgil from Slains, around Lake Elmenteita in the Rift Valley. He had started as the unofficial head
of the settlers and was now leader of the eleven elected members of Kenya’s Legislative Council. D had been followed by his two brothers-in-law, Berkeley and Galbraith Cole, sons of the Earl of Enniskillen, and a rush followed. This included Denys Finch Hatton, the magnetic and enigmatic younger son of the Earl of Winchilsea. Finch Hatton had first come to the East Africa Protectorate before the war and had tried his hand at both shop-owning—he bought a chain of
dukas
(small shops)—and mine-owning before becoming a prominent hunter who led visitors to Kenya deep into the bush for weeks on end. In between these expeditions he was the lover of the pilot Beryl Markham and, more famously, of the writer Karen Blixen—the affair immortalized in the film
Out of Africa
.

Idina with her Hispano-Suiza in Kenya

Regardless of each individual’s private practice, all had been brought up to regard marital fidelity as infra dig and extramarital sex a normal course of behavior. The key distinction between good and bad behavior was discretion and remaining tight-lipped about others. When not at Muthaiga, however, it was hard for any settlers to talk about anything to anyone. They were spread out across several hundred square miles of the area known as the White Highlands. This was the rich farming territory on the high-altitude lands in the center of Kenya which, after a great deal of gun-toting and foot-stamping by some of the white settlers in 1920, had been officially reserved for colonization by whites only, thereby excluding not only the native Africans, but also the fast-growing new Indian population.

The roads in the Highlands, where they existed, were no more than dirt tracks. They were regularly graded and, just after grading, could provide hard, fast racetracks along which to rattle. Rain, however, reduced them to rivers that hardened into a mudscape of peaks and gullies. The going in the racing Bugattis, solid Model T Fords, or even Idina’s Hispano-Suiza, its silver stork splattered with liquid orange
earth, was slow. A visit to a lover was likely to be a full morning or afternoon’s drive each way, the adventure of even a short African journey spilling over into the meeting. And, with only an equatorial twelve hours’ daylight for traveling in, a single encounter could take a day or two at a time. This was a day or two away for which an excuse—such as needing to look at some potential livestock—would be politely, if barely plausibly, concocted, and equally politely, if incredulously, accepted.

In between these episodes, Idina and Joss might go for several long days at a stretch, wandering around the vast expanse of their farm without seeing any of their
mzungu—
white—neighbors. Only a trip down to the
dukas
in Gilgil to buy provisions and order more pairs of corduroys to replace those ripped to shreds on fast rides through the bush presented an opportunity for social interaction.

Even then they would be lucky to turn up there at the same time as one of their crowd.

This all changed on livestock auction days, held regularly at Gilgil and the neighboring towns of Naivasha and Nakuru. These were true double-entendre cattle markets. An assortment of both hands-on and veranda farmers—so-called because they directed their farm employees from the veranda rather than working in the fields themselves—would roll up in gleaming cars a couple of hours after dawn, having driven down from the hills the day before and stayed nearby. Out they stepped into the thick red dust, suited, hatted, their wives dressed to the nines, cigarettes tipping out of long, black holders slid between gray-gloved fingers, and their eyes just glimpsed through the veils hanging over the top half of their faces. As the animals were herded through the ring in lots, bids rising, these men and women leant over the rails and eyed their neighbors. After weeks of the stark, staring, monotonous claustrophobia of sitting across the dining table from the same single face, an army of servants catering to their every possible need, even some of the industrious, God-fearing, buttoned-up types found a frustrated desire for fresh human contact overwhelming.

Auction days, and even the odd day’s horse racing organized in the towns, were, however, thin pickings compared with Race Week in Nairobi. The proportionally idler, richer, and grander Kenyan farmers all drove to Nairobi and booked into Muthaiga for the duration. The club was packed. Rooms were fought for, and then their inhabitants fought over. Instead of a maximum of a few hours around a bullring in which to operate, the promiscuous had a full seven days in which to
identify, catch, and devour their prey. It was not hard. Race Week presented a rare and precious period in which to spend time with somebody other than the person you were married to and saw almost every night of the year. Emotions soared and fell with horses and the bets placed on them. Heavy drinking began at noon with pink gins next to the course or in Muthaiga’s bars. Gin fizzes saw out the afternoon until teatime, when sundowners of ferocious spirit blends kicked in. Every evening there was a ball, for which the female guests had to wear a different outfit each night—and they dressed to kill, glittering with Paris silks and family jewels from some of the grandest houses in Europe. One night Joss poked fun at the absurdly overdone attire by appearing in a sequinned black evening gown borrowed from a larger female friend and Idina’s pearls strung around his neck. “Pearls must be worn!” he squeaked in a falsetto, as around him, intoxicated and unsatiated, new bedfellows tried to disappear to the club’s bedrooms together, everyone else turning a studiously blinkered eye.

The months stretched in between Race Weeks. Idina and Joss alternately muttered that they had to see a friend or a chap about a cow and slipped off for a day or two. Idina was certain that she would return. Slains was her self-contained paradise, a house, garden, even cattle that she seems to have mothered in place of her children. And she was, despite her varied sexual appetite, smitten with Joss: “My darling Lion,” she called him.
²⁹
However, even this name carried the suggestion that Idina understood he might wander off periodically as male lions do. Her other name for him, “the child,” connoted a more permanent separation: that one day he might simply grow up and leave for good. As if to encourage him to stay as long as possible, Idina made life on the farm as much fun and as irresistible as she could.

Guests were invited for weekends—and came—driving six or seven hours each way. Insect-bitten and dust-coated, they arrived at bath time on Saturday. As they drew up at the house, half a dozen men in fezzes and long white robes started appearing from all directions. The cars were emptied of bags and these were whisked away as the guests were ushered through into bedrooms scattered with tapestries and antiques, each with its own bathroom, fed by a tank, heated by a bonfire outside, that filled a bath within minutes. When they hauled themselves out of the tub, glowing, steam-cleaned, hair swept back or brushed down, their bags had been unpacked and put away. On the linen pillowcase lay a pair of patterned silk pajamas—a present from Idina, and still the rage back in Europe. Beside them lay a bottle of whisky.