P086 19410107
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Please note these are transcribed by software,so there WILL be mistakes.
Please tell us which page of which Portmanteua.
[in Betty's handwriting]
Could you please return this when you’ve read it?
Isoka,
N. Rhodesia.
PORTMANTEAU 86. 6th January, 1941.
Dearest Everybody,
This is the continuation of the Saga of P. 85 and for once in a way I have managed to do it fairly soon after. As I had foreseen, our Christmas was not as crowded as it might have been; we had two guests eventually, two road foreman, and they had an exceedingly dull time but enjoyed it I think, having lots of Christmas food and being in a house and a family instead of moping through the day in a tent all by themselves. Another came to lunch only, but was not able to stay the whole day as Christmas Day was not a holiday this year.
Well, to continue with the journey. We'd got to Arusha [700 miles from Isoka, 170 miles to Nairobi, 250 miles to Nyeri], on Saturday, October 26th. October 27th was doomed to failure from the instant we awoke. We had hoped to make a really early start so that we could get some shopping done in Nairobi all afternoon, but evidently the long journey yesterday had put us into a coma. From which we didn’t awake until 7, so we were not packed into the car and all ready to start till just after 8. But the car evidently wasn’t ready to start. It flatly refused to. So out we all climbed again and opened the lid and looked knowingly into its interior and shook our heads and shut the lid again and sent to the garage; they found that we had forgotten to put the bracket to hold the battery in (we use the battery for the wireless so it spends its time being popped in and out) and it was leaning lazily upon the leads and had burnt right through most of them, and we were jolly lucky to have got here without them giving up the ghost before! So they gave us beautiful new yellow leads and the car started like a lamb.
We walked about Arusha while this was being done, and went up to see the D.C. There are the most wonderful huge trees and masses of birds in them, and the most lovely lush gardens with cannas in huge masses along the banks of running streams, and from the D.C.’s house we got a splendid view of the mountain, quite clear of cloud, and what was our HORROR to find that it had NO SNOW at all and was only about 3 feet high - and it wasn’t Kilimanjaro at all - it was Meru, and Kilimanjaro is 80 miles further on! Such a blow, particularly as we had shown it proudly to the boys, as though we’d made it ourselves, and had told them to “Wait till tomorrow and then you’ll see the snow.”
They said it was a very bad road indeed so we went very Agagedly, but we found it was no worse than usual; then the car started buzzing, and we realised it was boiling, which was very odd as it was no hotter than it had been any day, and we were not going uphill nor using second gear, so we thought the boys must have forgotten to fill up and daren’t admit it, so we used our only water sack on it and went on. 5 minutes later it boiled again, so we realised it was something wrong and sent Chishimba to go back to the nearest water with a jug, and as soon as it was cooled down a bit we turned round and drove after him, as we knew there was a stream three miles back - and the further we drove the cooler the car got – maddening? - as we were going
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into the wind. But there still must be something wrong, as we can't have been going into the wind all the way from Isoka, so we decided we'd have to go back to Arusha, as we’d only done 13 miles and it was nearly lunchtime. But WHERE, by this time, was Chishimba? Just vanished into thin air. All round were rolling open downs, but not a dot on them could we see except miles away a cloud of dust raised by a large herd of cattle. So we decided to go back to the place where we had boiled, when we picked up enough water to get us there, and wait for him to come back there – and luckily, there he was waiting for us. When we asked him where he’d been and he said “Oh, up to that kraal there, but a whole lot of men came out at me with spears so I walked away.” I like “walked away”, don’t you.
So back to Arusha we buzzed, getting cooler and cooler every minute. When he had poked about in it, the Indian mechanic came out and mumbled something about a lot of grass in the radiator, which we thought quite likely as we had been down the Valley Road when it was long grass, and he mumbled something else about a bush as well. I thought that was a bit of an exaggeration, but it seemed rather odd that we would not notice a whole bush inside the engine, but it turned out to be a Thing that has to do with the radiator, which they call a Bush just to be difficult, so he apparently had to give us a new one and merrily charged us 50/- for it.
We had a nice restful afternoon after a late lunch, and our little Convoy came in in the afternoon as the usual ones came to drinks and dinner with us.
The next day we really did make an early start, having dealt with bills and petrol permits the night before, and we were away while it was still dark, before five. Soon after we had passed yesterday’s stopping place we began to get to the bad road, and it WAS bad, so bad that we did as many people had evidently done before us and got off the road and streaked across the plain, and it was so funny to see the way some of them knew the road and so cut off corners where they knew there was a curve in the road, but we went gingerly along close to the road. The country was very much more hilly than I expected, as from the air all this looks completely flat, but after passing several sharp woody little hills with streams running from them (one was where Mum and Dad came to look for elephant and rhino last year – and found them) we began to get to the flat, and soon we could see just plain, stretching right to the horizon with nothing to break it but giraffe and impala and hartebeest and wart hog, and all the usual stuff, and then we knew we were on the Athi Plains at last, with only them between us and Nairobi.
But we hadn’t finished yet. We came on a convoy. Thank heavens, it was standing still, having its hourly rest, so we raced towards it flat out, and started to pass, but they were so badly parked (Coloured drivers) that we had to go bump-bump-bump with one wheel in the ditch all the way up. We were about ¾ the way passed them when the first started to move on. We got past our remaining few as quickly as we could before they started, and I suppose there were then about ten out of the seventy in front of us. The white officer at the top stopped us and
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Said abruptly “Pull in here, will you, they won’t take a minute” and do you know, he meant it. He made us pull in and let the whole blinking lot go by us, and we counted them, 84 lorries we had let out our life’s blood to get past, and he gaily waves us aside and let them go past. We were absolutely speechless, and I took one look at Christian’s face and Cowered, absolutely Cowered. They took 40 minutes to go by, and then lumbered along at a maximum of 20 m.p.h. with the dust coming up in clouds. It was a splendid road with undulations and great curves, but our little motor car would have spinned along at about 70 all the way and dealt with the corrugations (which were frightful) without our noticing (which was the case on our journey back). We dragged along behind them for a bit, then gave it up and pulled up to wait for them to get ahead, but it’s awful impatient work doing that.
When we had done 15 miles in 65 minutes we were astounded to see them turning off, and the other turning pointing to Nairobi. We could hardly believe it, then sped along it with shrieks of glee – came up out of a little valley round the corner and saw lorries on the hill beyond, with a little railway between us and them. We said, “Ah, they are on the other side of the railway” but the words were hardly out of our mouths, when we were too, just behind the last lorry, having done a diversion. 16 more droning miles did we do, and then there was the blinking and shimmering of tin roofs in the haze, which presently cleared itself into a town and then we came to Tarmac ! and the approach to Nairobi.
The convoy had stopped just outside the town, and the officer very unwisely came back up to speak to us. I held my breath for what he had got. He said “I’m awfully sorry, really most frightfully sorry, at having held you back, but my drivers are so dangerous that I didn’t dare let you pass them on the move as they’d very likely run into you as you passed with sheer fright.” Christian with a sweet smile said “Oh, that’s all right, what an awful journey you must have had, all the way from Broken Hill.”
We went straight to New Stanley and devoured an enormous lunch, at 2:30, and booked ourselves a super room with our own bath, exquisite luxury. We then went to the immigration officer, who said sternly “Have you’ve got permission to enter the territory? You know no women are allowed here now it is a War Zone. What authority have you to enter? We are turning people back who have no permission, you know.” Cheering. I said quickly, “ . . . My mother, Lady Baden-Powell . . .” and everything was alright! She’d a very cleverly fixed up with them already that we would be coming.
But the crowning glory of the day was the expression on the faces of the boys when we went into the New Stanley. It is a fairly modern building with the stairs going up around the edge of the central hall which reaches into the roof, and there are three stories, which of course the boys have never seen in their lives before; they crept up the stairs, flat against the wall, walking on tiptoe in their bare feet, and then when we all went down again we took them down in the lift, and they stood there with their
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hands over their mouths and huge round white eyes, and when they got to the bottom they surged out and burst into gales of laughter, and hung on to each other and swayed with laughter and thought it was the most wonderful thing there had ever been!
Nairobi is looking extremely warlike, every other person in uniform and frightfully busy saluting each other (particularly the women, who take it frightfully seriously!) the men think of it as a lark, as few of them at that time had seen action though I should think most of them have by now. We saw our first Air Raid Shelter – just pits dug in the ground with sandbags round them, I thought they’d be right underground so was rather disappointed. There are also sandbags in front of all the bigger buildings, the Bank, the Post Office, etc; and there is a black-out, and you have to have the lights of your motor car not bigger than a half-crown, I think it is, in circumference, but the military are exempt from this and fly about in a blaze of light.
While I was having my hair done that afternoon somebody shouted at me under my blower, and when I had shut it off said “Italy’s attacked Greece and Greece is in with us, isn’t it splendid.” It seemed absolutely extraordinary, and as we hadn’t heard the news at all since we left we had no idea it was coming, and it seemed so silly of the Italians to go and open yet another point of attack for us – but I suppose they thought the Greeks wouldn’t put up a fight and it would be just a matter of saying Hand over your ports and aerodromes and the Greeks would give in. By jove, they’ve had time to think THAT over now.
When we were in Kenya in March, G. shot a wart-hog when we were out with Charles Stockley, and Mum had sent the tushes to Heyer, the taxidermist opposite the New Stanley, to be mounted and sent to us, but they’d never arrived, so I walked in there and was met by a new young man, very new and very young, so I said “Could I speak to Mr. Heyer please?” And he said “No, I’m afraid you can’t as he committed suicide two years ago.” The answer to my inquiry about the tushes was that they have been interned! The taxidermist was a gentleman by the name of Zimmerman, and all his things were taken over by the Enemy Alien place, and as his name began with a Z they hadn’t yet got to him in the sorting!
We set off for Nyeri after lunch the next day, and our hearts sank as we saw the terrific sheets of rain coming down and in the direction we were going. We actually didn’t get any rain at all, but we got the results of it all right. 20 miles outside Nyeri we began to slide, and we just slid the rest of the way in second gear. Christian drove quite beautifully, and we only stuck once, just after a little bridge with a bad corner and a steep hill the other side. There was a native lorry stuck there, and as we pulled out to pass it we slid neatly into the ditch and there we stopped. We put branches under the wheels, and luckily there was a large crowd there because of the bus, and we managed to get out all right, but it WAS a job, and one could hardly stand up at all let alone push a heavy car out of a ditch, it was so slippery. It was very nerve-racking on those twisty hills with no edge, but we crawled round the corners and over the bridges and got in just after
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dark, having taken over five hours to do 100 miles! It was simply lovely to be back, and I felt all quivery with excitement and joy, and couldn’t believe it at all, as it was such a short time since we’d left Isoka. We drew up outside Paxtu and walked down through the wood towards the back door, to meet a shadowy figure – Migwe – and he was astounded to see us as he had no idea we were coming, and we told him not to say anything to the parents. We walked in to find Dad dozing in his chair by the fire, and I didn’t want to wake him so we walked into Mum’s room but she wasn’t there, and Migwe came in and whispered that she was getting food for Hyrie; with all the whispering Dad woke and looked round and said “Who’s there?” thinking it was some female friend of Mum’s barging in when she was out of the way; when he saw it was us he just couldn’t believe his eyes, and we sat on the arms of his chair and he said “Oh, pinch me, somebody, pinch me, I’m asleep, I’m dreaming!” Then there was a great gallumphing outside, and in bounded Mum. They’d no idea we were coming at all, they thought we’d just find a way sometime of getting Christian round by boat, but that it would take ages, and masses of correspondence and arranging, and they never dreamt I would come too. My letter telling them we were coming (but giving no date of arrival but saying “sometime in the middle of November” arrived the day I left, so they had no warning at all.
It was heavenly to be back and to see them again, and we find Dad looking a bit better than we had expected from Mum’s letter, though a good deal older than when I had left him in April, and a bit more bent, but still as gay and alive as ever and full of fun. He was still writing as busily as ever, though hadn’t done any painting for some time, but had just completed their Christmas card – didn’t you think it was exquisite with a little picture of a statue of Hitler! – and he was doing a marvelous series of “incidents” called “Scraps from my Memory Box” which I thought were almost the funniest things he has ever written and quite gorgeous. His heart was a bit groggy, but the only advice doctors can think of for it was “a change of air and altitude” and when I asked if he would go if they said it would do him good, he said No, quite firmly. He’s far happier where he is, ill, than he would be anywhere else, well, and this certainly is the best place in the whole world to be lazy in, and he’s so comfortable in his little house it would be just senseless to move him.
[What she could not know was that her father would die two days after she wrote this.]
I only had two whole days at Paxtu, as Mum had long ago planned a trip round, to Nakuru, etc., which she couldn’t put off, and it was to take five days and end up at Nairobi. This suited me admirably, as I had no desire to drive my car through the mud, so Mum and Ronie Stockley (such fun being with her again and she WAS so sweet!) went off on our little to jaunt together and had the greatest fun, taking Hyrie of course, and Mahori and my Musonda, who simply loved every minute of it and he Mahori got on splendidly in a mixture of Swahili and English! It was dreadful cutting short my stay with Dad, but it was only meant to be a few days anyway as I was really only taxi, so it seemed an excuse to go away as otherwise I’d never want to leave at all except to get back to my family.
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We went via Thompson’s Falls, over the Daragwa Road to feast our eyes once more on Mr. Sharp’s quite Exquisite garden, and although they hadn’t had rain now for over a year and all round the forest was dry and parched and dying, this little spot in the snug little valley was green and cool and full of water, more pools than ever I think! with their little streams joining them up and all his tame-wild birds and a blaze of colour everywhere you look. We had lunch at Thompson’s Falls, then on to Nakuru where Mum inspected Guides and Brownies at the school and an Official Dinner Party at the Stag’s Head; the next morning we drove on, and right across the Rift Valley and up the other side to attend a fete at the place where Loretto Convent has been evacuated to, from Nairobi. A very good little show, practically everything made by the Guides themselves, and they had a whole lot of South African soldiers there from the camp nearby who spent masses of money and helped a lot with the Coconut Shies etc..
It was rather sweet, one of them, when a crowd of us were having tea together, turned to me and said “You’re Lady B-P’s daughter aren’t you?” And when I see Yes he said “Is she here today it?” And when I said “Yes, she’s sitting next to you” his eyes stood out on stalks and he just said “Well - I’m - Blowed!” And sat staring at her without another word as if she were bewitched - and he had shaken hands with her and talked to her for quite half an hour!
We slept that night at another little school at Tori, which is Mum’s pet one rather as they all seem such awfully happy children; they take all ages from 5 to 13 or 14. The next day we did Naivasha and one or two schools around there, and then up the escarpment again above Naivasha and across the plateau with the Kinonkop (the end big mountain of the Aberdare Mountains) looking lovely on our left, and we went right along the edge of the rift valley and then across to Nairobi.
On the 6th of November I started for home. I didn’t know the way, so Mum went ahead of me and piloted me out of the town, and when we were clear, out on the Athi Plains, she slowed down and waved me on and I sweppit past Into the Wild Unknown.
I felt very dentisty as I drove away, and extraordinarily nervous, which was so silly as I didn’t the least on the way up and I knew that it was all perfectly easy, and if I did break down we would pass at least one convoy each day who would pick up the bits and send them on to G. And I also knew that there was a convoy of leave-troops coming down a day after me, so I was perfectly all right. It was very depressing having to leave Mum though, so I expect it was partly that, and it wore off after a bit, and after that I enjoyed the whole journey tremendously and loved every minute of it. I had my knitting loose (I knitted a whole sock on the way up as Christian drove all the time!) And when we met a convoy I just took out my knitting and waited for them to pass – it usually took about ¾ hr to an hour, and once or twice I was able to go straight on past them and not stop.
We had engine trouble for the first day, within 20 miles of Nairobi, which was fixed by a convoy, and again at Iringa, but got home safer and sound on Nov. 11th.
But more about the return journey in Our Next.
Much love.
US.
