Authors: Paul Spicer
As for her relations with Joss, these were complicated by the fact that Alice did not approve of his recent political attachments. In April 1934, Joss had flown back to London with Mary, spending the summer there. It was during this trip that he became a card-carrying member of the British Union of Fascists. Sir Oswald Mosley—known as “Tom”—had founded the union in 1932 and had been an acquaintance of Joss since the early 1920s, when the two men had first met. Now, with an entrenched worldwide depression, support for Mosley’s brand of staunch protectionism was growing, especially among members of the English upper class. The cause was a controversial one from the start. In June 1934, only a month after Joss’s initiation into the union, Mosley’s black-shirted stewards clashed violently with police and hecklers in London, causing an outcry and damaging the party’s already-dubious image. The union never recovered and was unable to gather sufficient support to play a part in the general election the following year. But Joss was convinced of the rightness of Mosley’s solutions, especially in terms of their application to the economic difficulties being experienced in the colonies. If the threat of foreign markets could be removed and trade within the British Empire developed into an economic stronghold, Joss reasoned, the possibilities for Kenya would be enormous. In Mosley’s thrall, he spent the following months attending rallies, meetings, and parties, appearing at the annual Blackshirt Cabaret Ball of 1934 with the union’s badge in silver on his sporran. By the time he returned to East Africa in August, he had been made Mosley’s delegate in Kenya.
The timing of Joss’s political conversion couldn’t have been worse when it came to garnering support for the fascist cause in the settler community of Kenya. By the middle of 1934, Kenya itself was feeling the direct threat of fascist forces. The Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had stationed his armies on the Abyssinian border with neighboring Italian Somaliland. It was believed that British Kenya, which bordered Abyssinia, could well be the next line of attack. Up until this point, Abyssinia had managed to fend off its aggressors, remaining one of the few independent states in European-ruled Africa, but everyone was beginning to feel nervous about Mussolini’s intentions in East Africa. In October 1935, a border incident between the Abyssinians and the Italians gave Mussolini the opportunity he had been waiting for: With the League of Nations failing to intervene, Mussolini and his troops pushed back the Abyssinian army, taking Addis Ababa on May 5, 1936. Abyssinia’s young leader, Haile Selassi, was forced to flee to Jerusalem via the Suez Canal and Haifa with the help of the British, taking with him 150 cases of silver coins so heavy that the sailors could carry only one case at a time. As head of the Coptic Church, he was given a sensational reception in the Holy City. Mussolini’s troops were now even closer to Kenya’s northern border.
None of these events would have gone unnoticed by Alice, but, unlike Joss’s, her politics inclined her strongly to the left. During one of her mother’s trips to Paris in 1936, Nolwen, then age fourteen, was sternly cautioned by Alice about expressing a preference for the fascist leader Francisco Franco over the Republicans in Spain. “My mother rebuked me with restraint but real indignation in being wrong thinking about the Civil War in Spain. She was fervently Republican. I, on the other hand, had been told how the Communists pumped up the bellies of innocent nuns with bicycle pumps…!” This was evidently not the only political situation about which Alice had a definite point of view. Alice’s elder daughter admitted to being “alarmed by my mother” on several other occasions—“not for fear of being shot by her, or because of some latent undercurrent of violence which I might perceive in her, but because I was inclined to much forthrightness in expressing opinions…. Poor Mama! Luckily there was Paola, who cared nothing for religion or politics and preferred animals above all.”
It was during the same trip to Europe that Alice extended her visit to include a rare trip to see her father in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. William Silverthorne was in ill health. In 1925, he had married a woman name Myrtle Plunkett “in order to have a nurse to look after him,” according to his daughter Pat Silverthorne. William was nearing seventy and had only a few years to live—perhaps Alice sensed that this would be one of her last opportunities to see him. Father and daughter had remained in contact via their correspondence, and—as Alice had suggested to Noel Case—she was helping to foot his medical bills. But even so, the visit does not seem to have constituted much in the way of reconciliation between father and daughter. It was too late for that. Again, Alice left for Africa, putting a distance of many thousands of miles between herself and her troubled past. She was thirty-seven and living an independent life, one that she had chosen for herself. Removed from the United States and Europe, without a husband, she shored up in her beautiful African houses with her books and her cocktails, a woman apart.
I
N
1936, J
OSS AND HIS WIFE,
M
ARY, MOVED INTO A BUNGALOW
in Nairobi, close to Alice’s own pied-à-terre in the Muthaiga area. Alice and her old boyfriend became neighbors again, as they had been during the days of Slains. Despite Joss’s political leanings, it was true that he remained one of the few constants in Alice’s life. Their intermittent love affair had weathered their respective marriages to Idina and Frédéric and the divorces thereafter, Alice’s runaway romance with Raymund, her trial and imprisonment, her exile from Kenya, and her subsequent marriage and separation from Raymund, not to mention Joss’s numerous other affairs and his marriage to Mary. In 1936, however, Mary’s health was worsening and she needed to be near a hospital and her doctors. What’s more, Joss was planning to stand for election to the legislative council, and so he needed to have a more permanent base in the capital than his usual rooms at the Muthaiga Club. With Joss living in such close proximity to Alice, it would have been impossible for him to resist the occasional secret meeting with his old flame, a habit that had been established for so many years. Alice had always made herself available to Joss, and she continued to do so.
In that same year, in his role as Lord High Constable of Scotland, Joss was expected to take his place in the procession at the coronation of the new king, Edward VIII. Then came the abdication crisis, during which Edward declared he would rather marry a divorcée—Mrs. Wallis Simpson—than ascend to the throne. The coronation of Edward’s brother George was delayed until May of the following year. Alice would have followed these events keenly: Edward was one of her old friends from her Embassy Club days in London. When Joss did finally return from the coronation in 1937, it was announced that he would stand for the Kiambu constituency in the forthcoming elections. Kiambu was at the very heart of the Kikuyu tribe, about eight miles from Nairobi, and had its own club, mainly supported by local coffee planters. Joss Erroll was duly elected and sworn in on April 8, 1938. By now, he had put his affilitations with Oswald Mosely behind him, celebrating along with the rest of his expatriate friends when the Munich crisis was averted in September 1938. When Chamberlain arrived in London waving a nonaggression pact signed by Hitler, there was a new optimism that “peace for our time” was not only possible but a certainty.
Toward the end of 1938, Alice had good news of a more personal nature: She received word that her old friend Paula Gellibrand would be arriving in Kenya before the end of the year. After divorcing the “Cuban Heel,” the marquis de Casa Maury, Paula had married William Allen in Paris, but the marriage had lasted only a year. Bill Allen worked for British intelligence, and he would, in time, visit Kenya in the run-up to the outbreak of war in 1939. For her part, Alice had finally become officially divorced from Raymund in October 1937. The two women were single again, and Paula, who wanted to try living in Kenya, decided to stay with Alice for a time. The friends proceeded to make the most of each other’s company, living at Wanjohi and riding out each morning with Alice’s dogs. The warmth of the relationship between these two attractive women is obvious from photographs they took of each other at Wanjohi Farm. Taking turns holding the camera, wearing identical short-sleeved gingham shirts and cord trousers—a boyish look that Alice cultivated and that the stylish Paula had evidently adopted since arriving in Kenya—they posed with Alice’s dogs. There were frequent trips to the beach house at Tiwi in Alice’s new 1938 DeSoto car, her old Plymouth having proven too uncomfortable for the frequent eight-hour trips along the hot and dusty murram road south from Nairobi to Mombasa. By contrast, the DeSoto, a straight-six affair with enormous wheels and excellent suspension, effectively steamrolled along the rough roads, making driving in Kenya an altogether smoother experience. The front windshield was split and could be opened by two handles on either side, keeping passengers both cool and comfortable. The two friends and Alice’s little dog Minnie would have made an elegant sight as they motored from the city to the highlands and to the beach.
This happy time together was to be short-lived, however. One evening, Idina invited Alice and Paula over to Clouds for dinner and to stay the night. Idina had recently separated from her husband, Donald, and had taken up with Flt. Lt. Vincent Soltau of the Royal Air Force, who would soon become her fifth husband. That evening, Boy Long—the handsome rancher and one of Idina’s former conquests—was among the guests. He was recently divorced from his first wife, Genesta, and became immediately smitten with Paula. Paula returned the compliment, and the couple wasted no time in marrying. The wedding took place toward the end of 1938. Boy’s actual name was Edward Caswell Long, but he had been called “Boy” for as long as anyone could remember. Genesta once said of her former husband, “Life with Boy was electric. I think he was the handsomest man I have ever seen, with infinite charm but ‘difficult.’” Boy was certainly a flamboyant dresser, with a penchant for wearing Stetson hats and colorful Somali shawls. Together with Paula, one of the most fashionable women in Europe, they made a striking pair. But although Alice was delighted that Paula had found her true love, Paula’s marriage registered as a loss. Later, in 1941, she would write in a letter, “Paula is gone in a way. Our way of life lies apart and her big, bold paramour has changed her nature a little.”
With Paula otherwise engaged, Alice began seeking out the company of new female friends. In 1938, she met Patsy Bowles at the Muthaiga Club. Barely out of her teens, Patsy had married one of Alice’s doctors, Roger Bowles, a man sixteen years her senior. Patsy was happy to let Alice take her under her wing, and in the coming years the pair would often join each other for drinks or dinner around town, often accompanied by two other girlfriends, Rose Delap and Noreen Pearson. Patsy later confirmed that Alice retained all of her beauty during this later period of her life and that her distinctive wide-set gray eyes continued to captivate. Although it was clear that Alice had depressive tendencies and was dramatic into the bargain, she was nonetheless excellent company, someone who thrived in social situations, was quick to laugh, and adored a good party. Certainly Alice continued to rely on strong cocktails to mitigate her moods, but Patsy was certain that her friend was too intelligent to use drugs. She also confirmed that Alice never spoke of her family or of Paris during their friendship. By now, Alice’s American accent was barely discernible—after all her years away from her native country, she spoke in the almost neutral tones of one who has left her home nation long ago.
Patsy also remembered Alice’s rather odd taste in reading material. Over the years, in part thanks to two literary husbands, Alice had collected a large library. Toward the end of the thirties, however, she began collecting volumes on medical problems, psychology, and the occult. Patsy recalled one of these books in particular,
A Journey Round My Skull
(1938), by the Hungarian author Friges Korinthy, which has since been declared a masterpiece of medical autobiography. Korinthy’s memoir tells the fascinating, if grisly, story of his brain tumor and the operation he had on it with only a local anesthetic. Noel Case also recalled Alice’s “morbid mind” and “books on horrible diseases” and how Alice would repeatedly ask her to mark out one place after another for her future grave site. According to Noel, Alice would sit on her veranda at Wanjohi Farm, gazing at the river bend opposite her house and pointing to the bank beside the deep pool as one possible burial place. Then she would change her mind and point to a completely different location: the iris beds on the edge of the “cut,” which she had made to take the stream water right around the edge of her house and garden. Perhaps the traumas that Alice had never managed to acknowledge fully—her mother’s death, her father’s abandonment—were beginning to manifest themselves in these morbid obsessions. Or perhaps as she grew older, Alice merely sensed that her years were numbered.
The new year would not be a particularly happy one for many of the inhabitants of Happy Valley. Locusts would devastate crop production, droughts were imminent, and the news from Europe continued to go from bad to worse. Despite Chamberlain’s pact with Hitler, war now seemed unavoidable, and the colonists began making nervous preparations. In February, Joss took on his new role as deputy director of the Central Manpower Committee, his patriotism trumping any lingering fascist allegiances (unlike many of his right-wing contemporaries, he was now fervently opposed to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler). Joss’s new job involved, for the most part, planning for the necessary distribution of military and civilian manpower and, as such, kept him well occupied. He was often away for weeks at a time, traveling throughout the Kenyan countryside, where he mobilized some two thousand European settlers. Despite his marital problems and considerable professional commitments, he still found time to see Alice—his offices, by coincidence, were located right next door to her Muthaiga cottage.
Always eager for a new conquest, however, Joss was also turning his attentions elsewhere. Phyllis Filmer was the wife of Percy Filmer, the managing director of Shell in East Africa, who had arrived in Nairobi in 1935. No one in Joss’s circle quite understood his fascination with Phyllis; she was considered rather dumpy and ordinary, at least by the standard of his more glamorous previous wives and mistresses. Even so, Joss continued to seek her out. Rumor has it that he was once discovered making love to her before dinner on the billiard table at the Norfolk Hotel. Alice would doubtless have felt not at all threatened by someone as unexciting as Phyllis—a small, rather conventional-looking blonde with none of Alice’s flair—but it is safe to assume that the affair would have rankled nonetheless.
To make matters worse, Alice’s health was in decline. In March 1939, she visited her favorite doctor, William Boyle, complaining of stomach pains. The injury she had sustained during the shooting at the Gare du Nord often bothered her, but it is also possible that she was developing the first symptoms of ovarian cancer. Dr. Boyle arranged to have her hospitalized and a drain was inserted. As soon as she was well enough, Alice flew up to Nakuru in an ambulance plane with a nurse and went home to Wanjohi Farm. By now, Alice’s devoted housekeeper, Noel, had left Wanjohi, and Alice began to rely increasingly on Flo Crofton for help running her household. Flo was the daughter of a former Kenyan governor, Gen. Edward Northey, and was married to Dick Crofton, a white hunter living near Gilgil. After Alice’s return from the hospital, Flo agreed to look after the house so that Alice could leave Kenya to visit her children in France. Despite her recent operation, Alice was determined to make the trip, aware that if war was declared, it might be one of her last opportunities to see Nolwen and Paola for some time. On March 16, 1939, she wrote to Aunt Tattie in France that the large rubber drain had been removed from her stomach, replaced by a gauze one, which the nurse would remove in small pieces each day. It was still hard for Alice to sit up, and so her doctor had attempted to convince her that she should stay for another week to build up her strength for the journey home, advice that Alice had decided to ignore. She admitted to feeling greatly unsettled by the German army’s recent march into Prague, but despite her anxiety about events in Europe, she went on to say that she was making all the necessary travel arrangements. It is revealing that Alice’s greatest concern in the letter was not her children, but her fear that passage on British ships might be restricted if war broke out and that she might somehow be prevented from returning to Africa. If all went well, she hoped to visit friends in Athens on her way home in June, traveling on a Belgian line. “I do hope and pray there will be no war,” she wrote. “Heaven knows what happens to our homes in such a case.”
Alice arrived in Paris in late March, as planned, remaining there for two months in order to spend time with Nolwen and Paola. Soon after her arrival, however, she decided to change her travel plans. She began to make arrangements to return to Kenya via Belgian West Africa, rather than by way of Athens. The Congo interior was a place that her friend Idina had visited two years previously, venturing deep into the rain forests to see the indigenous Pygmy tribes living there. In the 1930s, there were still many thousands of Pygmies living in the region—Idina must have returned to Wanjohi and regaled Alice with stories of her trip, because now Alice became determined to see the Pygmies for herself. Although Alice had also visited the Congo during her 1932 safari with the Vanderbilts, she had not been able to visit the tribes, as her American host was interested only in hunting. And so on March 29, 1939, just after her arrival in France, Alice wrote to her uncle Sim in New York to ask for funds from her “Fifth Avenue Account” to be processed so that a letter of credit of $2,400 and a further $400 in traveler’s checks could be provided for her Congo trip. She intended to leave on June 4, traveling across central Africa all the way to Kenya. The trip would last about four months, she wrote. For two months, she would be in places so remote that she would be unable to send or receive mail or cables. She asked that her checks be cashable in the Congo towns of Matadi, Kinshasha, and Stanleyville, as those were the places where she “will be quite alone, and between the first and last place mentioned, out of all communication.”
The decision to travel to the Congo was extraordinarily bold and, some would say, even dangerous. She would be venturing far into central Africa, a single woman, alone, unwell, with Europe on the verge of war, and—as she underlined in her letter to Uncle Sim—traveling to a remote area where she would be unable to make contact with the outside world.
The tribal region she was to visit was three hundred miles southeast of Stanleyville, now Kisangani, the provincial capital of Tshopo Province and itself the farthest navigable point upstream from the capital, Kinshasa. Certainly her doctor strongly advised against her going. But Alice was determined, and after leaving Paris, she sailed for West Africa. In some sense, the adventure was an act of defiance—Alice had always been headstrong and prone to making impulsive decisions—but perhaps it also represented her continuing need to live on her own terms during this period of her return to Happy Valley as a single woman, without Frédéric, Raymund, Joss, or her American or French families. In any event, Alice survived her extraordinary expedition and returned to Wanjohi toward the end of the summer of 1939.