Too Close to the Sun (26 page)

Tania and Blix on the farm

Kikuyu moran outside the farm in 1922

Tania, breakfasting with Minerva

Tania and staff. Farah is second from left in the front row.

The farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills, with Tania in the foreground

The beach house at Takaungu

Denys on safari with his client Frederick Patterson, an American manufacturing tycoon. Denys was rarely photographed without a hat, as he didn’t want people to know he was bald.

Denys gets himself out of trouble.

Denys (left) and Edward, Prince of Wales, take a tea break during the 1928 royal safari

Beryl Markham: not your run-of-the-mill Circe

Three thousand people gathered at the farm for the ngoma in honor of the Prince of Wales during his 1928 safari.

One of Denys’s own photographs. By the time he turned forty, he was more interested in shooting with a camera than a gun.

“Denys’s eyes had that distant horizons look one often saw in Kenya.”

Denys and the custard-yellow Gypsy Moth

DENYS HAD NOT BEEN
in England since 1917. Based alternately at Haverholme and at the Conservative Club in London, he toured the country, visiting everyone he knew who had not died. Although there were still parties, the Edwardian carnival was a distant memory. Housemaids no longer came upstairs to hook frocks before dinner, and the persistence of rationing ruled out lavish entertaining. Four years of fighting had thrown shadows over so many lives, and to its bones the nation felt what Churchill called “the ache for those who will never come home.” Denys visited the recently widowed Mrs. Barrington-Kennett at the house in Onslow Gardens where he had spent so many happy days with his huge flying partner, Victor, and his brothers. Three of the four boys had died: one a year for the first three years. Victor’s plane had been shot down over the Somme. As Viola Parsons said, “The war did not end with a shout of joy, but with the bleak outlook of a world without young men. Everyone felt a dull feckless feeling, as after a funeral.”