The Ghosts of Happy Valley by Juliet Barnes

Author:Juliet Barnes [Barnes, Juliet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781311394
Publisher: Aurum Press

18

Murder Beneath the Mountain

Looking back to my first trip with Solomon to Clouds, I realised how much my quest had changed and expanded. Inevitably, perhaps, I’d initially become riveted by the Happy Valley hype – drugs, sex, scandal and murder. It’s a ‘forbidden’ world that horrifies, even repulses, and yet we can become caught in a compulsion to find out more. I know plenty of people in Kenya today who are overly dependent on alcohol, sex and drugs for their pleasure and even their ‘survival’. My paternal grandmother was an alcoholic whose marriage and career were destroyed by her addiction; as a child I watched her blot out each day before we’d even got as far as breakfast. Perhaps this explains why I was attracted to research a part of Kenya of such tarnished repute.

But then Happy Valley’s history takes a U-turn, with a new generation who remind me of my maternal grandparents: hardworking farmers with little money, often managing somebody else’s farm, or struggling to save up enough to repay the purchase of their own. My grandparents, after decades of managing a farm, bought their own small one in 1958, just when my 21-year-old father proposed to my mother; they’d met in Nyeri, where she was teaching at a boarding school and he was posted during Mau Mau. And thus we move into the realms of living memory, my interest stimulated by my own family’s stories about this new episode in the life of Happy Valley. Farmers like my grandparents struggled to keep their farms productive, while in the rest of the world friends and relations read with mounting alarm newspaper headlines that told of horrifying murders on Kenyan farms – and particularly those near the vast forests of the Aberdares where the terrorists were hiding. The murder of Charles Fergusson and Richard Bingley sent shock waves worldwide, but for their neighbours, it must have been thoroughly nerve-wracking.

Bubbles Delap told me about one night when she’d heard Mau Mau intruders. ‘They were on the roof, breaking in that way. Bill, after a few whiskies, heard nothing, but I called my daughters into one room, then ran around the house slamming doors and shouting until they went away. Later we heard they had planned to kill us!’ After that incident they’d built a fortified extension with an iron door and barred windows where they could sleep securely at night. ‘I felt safe in that fort. We were all nervous at night of course. We used to see Fergusson and Bingley sometimes in Ol Kalou Club, but I never went to their house. That murder was terrible. At about nine at night, just after it had been discovered, all the neighbours came over to us; the men rushed out with guns and the women stayed at our house. I learned to use a gun after that.’

Caroline Hanbury Bateman lived closer to Fergusson and Bingley, making it clear that the ‘Happy Valley lot’, as she described them in denigrating tones, were worlds

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