Flying out of Happy Valley and into history

James Fox

THE LIVES OF BERYL MARKHAM by Errol Trzebinski Heinemann, f17.99, pp. 396 Beryl Markham's original memoir, West With the Night, first published in 1942, was an elegant account of her African child- hood, the pioneering days of Kenyan avia- tion and her historic flight across the Atlantic. Republished in 1983, soon before she died, it has sold a million copies almost a million more than when it first appeared. The Markham industry has had a startling growth — a mini series, docu- Beryl Markham in Los Angeles in 1937, being interviewed about Amelia Earhart's disappearance over the Pacific mentaries, two biographies, of which this, the latest, is certainly the best and most reliable. There may be a feature film and her life will be seen as far more exciting than that of Karen Blixen who, after all, was only a writer, which Beryl, adventuress and woman of action, clearly never was. We shall see again Blix, Denys, `Tapia' (Karen Blixen), and the thorn trees. There will be scenes perhaps of Beryl as the enfant sauvage, playing Nandi warrior games in the Mau Forest. We will see her struggles and triumphs as a teenage trainer, abandoned by the father she admired, and eventually hear the exhilarating roar of the Vega Gull above the miles of the dark Atlantic, as she crosses, solo, east to west — the first person, and the only woman, to do so in the record-breaking days — a feat greater than that of Lindbergh, given the head-winds. The script will draw on this biography which fills in the gaps and secrets that Beryl left out of her idealised memoir, including her own abandonment of her infant son, and her career as a vora- cious seductress; her ability to slip sideways from most of her lovers — and all but one of her three husbands — with a light push on the rudder and not a trace of sentiment.

She was a remarkable woman, coura- geous and funny, as well as ruthless and cold of heart, and even until her very last days extraordinarily attractive — to men, at least. I met her a few years before the hordes of film-makers and reporters rediscovered her, when she would sit, vodka 'pinkie' in one hand and clam up, occasionally muttering insults in Swahili. They got very little and hardly a foot of usable film. When they tried to ration the pinkies, at least until 11 a.m., it got worse. She still had many secrets when she died in 1986, but they' re all out now.

The less obvious richness of Beryl as a subject, apart from her magnificent sexual career, is that her life — she was born in 1902 — neatly spans the white settler histo- ry of Kenya of which she was one of the most original, most African products. Ms Trzebinksi has been immersed in this world for some years and has accumulated a vast amount of intriguing detail on Beryl and sometimes has a problem fighting clear of it, or at least varying the weights of her dis- coveries in the narrative.

Many settler children grew up close to their African servants, but none quite as close as Beryl. Abandoned by her mother at the age of four, mistaking her father's mistress for her until the age of eight, she was raised between her autocratic colonial father who, when he was around, taught her harshly (but cleverly about horses), and the Africans on the farm, who adopted her by default. She opted for the certainties of the Nandi view of the universe and against the sadistic governesses — the 'bloody women' who tried to instruct her and get between herself and her father, a bwana mkubwa as she described him to me — a big man.

She became accustomed to amulets, taking for granted the powers of leaves and bark . . . beads strung along her bedstead to ward off devils while she slept.

Breaking the tribal taboos, she mixed with the boys in their rigorous preparation for warrior status, wrestling her fellow tows to the ground, believing in physical prowess and stoicism, learning never to show pain, nor even emotion, a 'heightening process' making her understand 'the hairline border between pain and exquisite pleasure'. Men apparently were mesmerised by this endur- ing part of her character. She was also strong and graceful, tall and lean with slim hips and 'cute little breasts' and she had an arrogance and untouchability about her, 'a fatalistic giggle'. 'She's really one of the most beautiful girls I've seen', wrote Karen Blixen.

Ms Trzebinski is conversant with every liaison, adultery and break-up in up-coun- try Kenya in the Twenties and Thirties and tracks Beryl through them. The sheer dis- comfort, as well as the indefinable compul- sion to behave badly abroad, weeded out all but the strongest relationships and from her account the legend of Happy Valley has been underplayed rather than exagger- ated. But although many of that crowd were her lovers, Beryl was working too hard at training or aviation to be a playgirl. She seized her lovers and dumped them, `adept as any moran at choosing her part- ner for the night'. Even so, she had so many in the space of a few months at Mweiga in the 1930s that Ms Trzebinski is reduced to listing them in a roster.

It includes the old Happy Valley list: `Boy' Long, `Jacko' Heath and even old Joss Erroll, although when she led him to the Buick — the fatal automobile — the back seat was taken. Someone called Syd- ney St Barbe appropriately took the St Sebastian role, drugging himself to oblivion at Beryl's cruelty, weeping in the arms of her few, and temporary, woman friends. `Baby' Langlands described his affair as `the most startling and erotic he had ever known'. He added:

She was tough and detached over each of us at Mweiga . . . If a man caught her fancy, she was a real go-getter, not approved of in those days.

A woman neighbour of hers on Lake Naivasha told me:

Beryl knew how to treat men. She treated them, on the whole, badly.

We knew about her affair with the Duke of Gloucester, for which her husband, Mansfield Markham, extracted a royal pen- sion on her behalf, but not that she also seduced the Prince of Wales on that same safari, neither of them wise to the other. Instead of curtseying she raised her hands in a salaam and said, 'Hello there'. Pretty soon he was shinning down the drainpipe at Government House to meet her at Muthaiga. She complained, 'Edward P is being such a bore.'

Beryl also had a desire, to annihilate female rivals. Some of them felt they had no choice but to let her stay as if, like the locusts, she would then move on, having stripped the marriage of its foliage. She never bothered about the fury of memsahibs, never countered their gossip. Wondering why she had not seen so much of Denys before he died in his aero- plane at Voi, we learn that a nearly suicidal Karen Blixen was told by a caring woman friend that he had been seeing something of Beryl Markham. She replied wearily, `Oh, it was Beryl, was it?' Beryl became obsessed with Finch Hatton, another bwana mkubwa — largely because he ignored her, until the very end; also because she was jealous of the educated Blixen — an eight-year crush, which, says Ms Trzebinski, led her to learn flying to attract his attention.

Her days as a pioneering bush pilot could have been expanded upon. They were arguably more dangerous on average than the Atlantic flight; low flying in the heat, no charts, treacherous landings. Her description of Beryl standing by Denys' grave, facing Karen Blixen, is over my head:

Expressionless, she stood opposite her rival above the hole, the cartouche to the mas- querade, as the armature of their relation- ship was lowered into the red earth.

This is not, one has to say, typical of her prose, but there it sits. I have been described mysteriously as a saltimbanque in my approach to the aged Beryl.

Ms Trzebinski acknowledges that I gave her papers Beryl let me see which have helped her prove convincingly — with many supporting interviews with contem- poraries — that the real author, the stylist of West With the Night, was her third hus- band, Raoul Schumacher. Mary Lovell's previous biography set out to prove the opposite. It is perhaps not greatly to be relied on, given that she introduced an odd new twist into biography, having, she declared, intentionally inserted 'several fic- titious and apocryphal events' in her book `as a trap against unscrupulous copyright infringers'. The fact that Beryl wasn't the real author may reduce her glamour in the reader's eyes — knock off one achievement in an adventure-packed life. But had she been a writer — which no one who knew her well ever believed for a moment (Hemingway was astonished and under- standably a little paranoid when the book first came out) — her life would not have been the epic described here. The lost ten years in California, the marriage to Schu- macher — her longest one — which yield- ed up her memoir, provide, ironically, some of the best drama in this book, and break new ground. When Schumacher threatened to withdraw collaboration, Beryl persecuted him literally almost to death.

Back in Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s the horses she trained were unbeatable, until the Jockey Club turned against her. And when her book was republished and her fame returned it became a 'nightmare' for her to be praised and endlessly ques- tioned about the one achievement that was not her own. 'Bloody book', she would utter, or even 'Effing book.'