The Bolter (37 page)

Idina’s son David at his wedding to Pru Magor, London, January 1939

Two months after David’s wedding in January 1939, Idina married for a fifth time. She then wrote to her son with some advice: “Another book I would like you to read on quite a different subject is ‘Ideal Marriage’ … as a rule I can’t stand these books but this is full of sense and I think it should be read by everyone. Some of it is drawn out but that you skip—it is especially good for a man.”
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Idina’s new husband, Vincent Soltau, was an Air Force pilot known as Lynx “because he flew a Lynx airplane.”
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Idina wrote to David: “I am divinely happy—for some unknown reason Lynx worships me and we completely love and understand each other. It is what I have been searching for since Euan and I parted. Apart from love I have a feeling of absolute peace and security—that one is no longer alone in any way. The only snag is that his job takes him away a lot but there it [is] one can’t have everything.”
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Lynx was away a lot, and his first wife had run off, leaving him with a daughter, Ann, aged four, and a two year-old son, Tom. He married Idina knowing she would look after them.
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For Idina this was a chance to do right what she had earlier failed to—be a good mother to two tiny children, almost exactly the ages that David and Gee had been when she left.

They married near Lynx’s RAF base in Mombasa. After the ceremony
they held a small lunch at the Mombasa Club and posed for their photograph on its wide, white wooden steps outside: for this moment, Idina’s life appeared complete again. She had children, a husband, and a beautiful farm in the wilds of Africa—both domesticity and adventure. Lynx’s children moved into the room that led off of Idina’s bathroom, which they shared with her. “I can still smell that lovely horsey smell, as I sat in the bath hugging my knees every night, whilst the water from the lion’s mouth poured out into the middle,” remembers Ann.

Idina at her fifth wedding, to Vincent Soltau (“Lynx”), Mombasa, March 1939

Then, toward the end of 1939, six months after her marriage, as it had long been threatening to do, war came again. Nontroop travel ground to a halt. Mail sank to the ocean floor. Kenya and Europe were once again thousands of miles apart.

Chapter 24

W
hen the war started, Idina stayed up at Clouds with Ann and Tom. The children’s days followed a delightful rhythm. “I have always been grateful that my father chose her,” wrote Ann, “for she was a wonderful mother to us.… Though I know I often gave her good cause, she never raised her sultry voice to me. She was always polite, and fair in every way—(also to all the natives).” She “taught us kindness and compassion, and nursed us through various illnesses,” driving the children through the night to the hospital in Nairobi when emergencies arose.

Idina found Ann and Tom a governess, Miss O’Dell, whom they called Dellie, with whom they had breakfast and lessons each morning. Unlike Idina, she was “not a warm person.” She had perhaps been chosen for the total lack of sexual threat that she posed, “being short, fat, and lame, poor soul.” Every day Ann and Tom had lunch with Idina in the dining room. Idina would then take them for walks in the forest, looking for colobus monkeys, dik-dik, chameleons, and any other wildlife, and “collecting maidenhair ferns to put with her roses.” She taught her stepchildren how to fish for the rainbow trout stocked behind the dams she had built to provide electricity for the farm, and play croquet and clock golf.

Sometimes the three of them would stretch out a tartan rug under a tree and play records on the windup gramophone. Idina’s favorites were
the mournful “Stormy Weather” and the eternally optimistic “There’s a Small Hotel.” These were two songs whose lyrics seem to sum up both the men who let her down and the search for new love. “Stormy Weather” describes the emptiness that follows the end of a relationship and the fear so embedded in Idina—that of a lonely old age: “When he went away the blues walked in and met me, If he stays away old rocking chair will get me… keeps raining all the time.”

In “There’s a Small Hotel” a woman longs to be curled up in bed with her lover: “Not a sign of people—who wants people?… We’ll creep into our little shell. And we will thank the small hotel together.”

When it rained, they stayed indoors. Idina played cards with Ann and Tom, or mah-jongg. Idina “was always very enthusiastic about our various projects,” wrote Ann, “and very, very patient, and full of fun.” The children ate their supper with her in the library, while she had her “drinkies” before guests arrived for dinner. During the war, the three of them would sit there listening to the six-o’clock news every evening. If nobody was coming, Idina had her dinner brought to her on a tray and ate with Ann and Tom. Each night, before Ann went to bed, Idina brushed her hair one hundred times, taking it in turns to count each stroke. She “always said, ‘You start’ ” wrote Ann. And when Ann and Tom went to bed, it was under covers of hyrax skins. From time to time, Idina tucked her stepchildren up in her own huge bed together with an array of pet dogs (Mickey, an Alsatian called RAF, and a dachshund called Dushka). They would all fall asleep to the night sounds wafting in through the door, propped open for the dogs.

Clouds was a children’s paradise. Each June, elephants came down to the salt licks that Idina put out, and cavorted in the dams that she had built on the edge of the garden. Throughout the year Ann and Tom drove toy cars across the lawns, rode donkeys and even cows around the fields, and their own ponies across the hills. Other pets included two mongeese, who lived in the woodpiles on each side of the large fireplace in the sitting room. They were vicious to the household cats and dogs but Ann and Tom gave them Ping-Pong balls which they rolled along under their stomachs before flicking them against the wall, thinking they were eggs that would smash. One night, Idina, Ann, and Tom gave the mongeese some beer in a saucer, which they loved—too much—and “were soon rolling around in front of the fire. It was the only time we were able to touch them.”

Life up on the Kipipiri was punctuated by trips down to Gilgil. “It wasn’t exactly your round-the-corner trip to the grocery shop,” says Ann, as the roads were ox-wagon tracks and the gorge through which they ran was often impassable in the rainy season, forcing drivers to turn back. When they did reach the town, they had to stay overnight. Back at Clouds, Idina had by now built up one of the strongest Jersey herds in Africa. She kept them breeding, calving, and being milked, sending great churns rattling down the hill to feed the troops and their support staff. During the week she ran the farm; at the weekend she entertained, trying to keep everyone jolly while the world tore itself apart.

In the middle of 1940 Lynx was moved from Mombasa to Cairo. From there back to Clouds took at least two days’ flying: Cairo to Khartoum, Khartoum to Kisumu on Lake Victoria. Each flight involved waiting around for a seat that wasn’t prioritized to somebody else, then for the plane itself to be working, and then for the fuel. Then, even when Lynx reached Kisumu, it was another long day’s drive down to Gilgil and up the hill. And for Idina to find the spare seats to take her up to Cairo was near impossible. Lonely at weekends, Idina started to travel up to Muthaiga. The club was no longer waiting for Race Week for its parties. Every weekend there was a band and a dance, the floor packed with young officers, most of them Air Force, who had driven from Kisumu and Mombasa desperate to have a good time on what might be their last night out. But Lynx wasn’t there.

Idina spent the evenings on the dance floor, careering from one pair of young arms to another, gathering up invitees for a weekend at Clouds and, at the end of the evening, tripping up the wide stone staircase, her fingers, with their dark-red nails, entwined with a younger hand.

Joss was at those parties too. He was still good friends with Idina, and Ann and Tom were taught to call him Uncle Joss—“even though he was not,” says Ann, “interested in children.” A couple of years earlier, in 1938, he had embarked on an affair with a woman called Phyllis Filmer. Phyllis was, like Idina, petite and large-breasted with short blond hair. She was the wife of the local managing director for Shell and lived in the company house, which was just around the corner from Muthaiga and therefore close to the bungalow opposite the club in which Joss lived. He and Molly had moved from Oserian at the start of the year for two reasons: Joss’s career in the Kenyan Legislative Council, and the need for the ailing Molly to live nearer to medical care.

Drugs and alcohol killed Molly in the first few days of the war. Joss had not, however, proposed to Phyllis. He had joined the Kenya Regiment as a second lieutenant and had been rising through the military ranks. In June 1940 he had been made Staff Captain to the East Africa Force, soon becoming the Force’s Assistant Military Secretary. And although he continued his affair with Phyllis, it was not an exclusive arrangement. He swanned around Muthaiga’s dance floor, a widower who could make some lucky woman his third Countess of Erroll.

Phyllis, besotted with Joss, accepted her new role as the woman he was unfaithful to until a month or so before Christmas 1940, when she was suddenly replaced by a recent arrival to Kenya, Diana Delves Broughton.

The young Diana had been married to her fifty-seven-year-old husband, the wealthy Sir Jock Delves Broughton, for all of a week when they reached Kenya in November 1940. Jock came from a grand farming family in Cheshire and had acquired land in Kenya under the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme. Ostensibly he had now come out to farm and produce food for the troops. Delves Broughton was Diana’s second husband. Her first marriage, to a man called Vernon Motion, had been made under the mutual misconception that the other was wealthy. The union had barely lasted a fortnight and Diana had resumed work by day as a model in a London fashion house and by night at a cocktail bar just off Berkeley Square called the Blue Goose, a happy hunting ground for rich men. Diana was a woman who knew how to make the most of herself. She dyed her mousy hair a bright blond, applied her lipstick with expertise, and learnt how to walk across a room. She had started off as Delves Broughton’s mistress, and he had installed her in a cottage in the grounds of the family’s stately home, right under his former wife’s nose.

While they looked for a house to rent, the Delves Broughtons had moved into Muthaiga. They hosted a large dinner to introduce themselves and began settling into Kenyan life. Almost immediately Joss started an affair with Diana. At first they were reasonably careful. Joss used the cover of being an old friend of Delves Broughton’s. Then Diana started finding excuses to slip away from her husband for a couple of days. By early January 1941 both Joss and Diana no longer appeared to care. They clung to each other for hours at a time on Nairobi’s plentiful dance floors—any venue with the space had drafted in a band to satisfy the wartime frenzy for a good time. Jock Delves Broughton, however, was not having a good time. While his new
young wife danced with one of his friends, he sat to the side, drink in hand and a sad smile on his face. By the middle of January he had almost ceased to bother to go out with Diana, remaining at home.

Joss’s body in his Buick

On the morning of 24 January 1941, Joss was found slumped in the foot well of his car near a crossroads a few miles outside Nairobi. His arms and legs were tucked beneath him and there was a patch of congealed blood behind his ear, and more flecks of blood were spattered across the windscreen. He had been there some time and his corpse was beginning to stiffen.

He had been killed by a bullet that “passed inwards through the soft tissues of the neck, and passed between the first vertebra and the base of the skull, through the medulla of the brain from left to right and out of
the spinal canal… The bullet [was] in two parts in the ligament attaching the vertebra to the base of the skull, lying in a mass of blood clot underneath the skin.”
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Death would have been “instantaneous.”
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