Today we went to stay the night with long term settlers the Barnley’s – Jane Barnley in her 90th year and son Richard who’s Colin’s age. There must be something in the Kenyan water because Jane and Sylvia Davidson are remarkable for their age. I had been hoping that Jane would remember my mother and Valerie since they were the same age. They are unlikely to have known each other in Kitale because Jane lived 23 km north of Kitale and my mother and Valerie lived 22 km to the South West of Kitale – all three went to Limuru Girls School and were therefore presumably in the same class. Alas no, it’s too long ago.
The Barnley’s lovely old bungalow is set in five acres of garden near the Cherangani Hills with mature native trees and five colobus monkeys, a breeding colony with a baby. These beautiful monkeys have nowhere else to go because all native habitat has been destroyed between this haven and Saiwa National Park 5 km away.
There is a direct consequence from this destruction for humans. Richard said that they had sold a sweet water spring with land adjacent to their house, and the new owners had cut down the native trees. The spring dried up so they planted quick growing but thirsty Eucalyptus! The spring came back but as a small trickle. It seems so obvious: no trees = reduced rain = springs dry up. The Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado made the connection and planted back part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil which brought back rain to the drought stricken land. How long will it take before the penny drops elsewhere?
During tea in the Barnley’s cosy sitting room with a lit fire – this may sound strange, but it is 6000′ here and when the sun goes down there is a nip in the air – Richard said that the bread and butter of his guesthouse business is returning settlers or descendants trying to find their roots. He keeps copies of the land survey map – the same that Sylvia Davidson had had with the names against block numbers – and we gratefully bought one for a small fee. This will be a great addition to help with the quest.
Richard also had a 1960’s map of the settler’s graveyard from the beginning of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly the oldest dates were in the middle at the top end. Some of the names were missing but there was Mrs Kuhn – without her first name or date of death but recorded and therefore remembered. The photo above is of this map pointing to Mrs Kuhn’s grave site. I added the date of her death, 17th September 1929, onto Richard’s copy and Colin took a photo. Poor Mrs Kuhn, the children’s nanny, killed thinking she was a leopard. The circumstances so odd that it seems probable the poor woman had gone a bit mad.
Mrs Kuhn had arrived on 4th January 1928, my mother and her twin Valerie’s second birthday. Her arrival marked the end of a desperate search to secure a nanny – a French and an Irish nanny had not worked out at all. The former had taken one look at the house, without any electricity and isolated, and refused to stay, the latter was unable to discipline the children to my grandmother’s satisfaction. Subsequently an English nanny with passage paid had found a husband in her boat out to Mombasa and broken contract. Establishing the farm took all the energy of my grandparents and, in any case, Edwardian ladies did not do child-rearing.
Mrs Kuhn had been interviewed and contracted by my great grandfather, Leonard Sutton who had also paid her passage. Her arrival was greeted with great relief and my grandmother left the following weekend for Uganda with ladies from the Kitale Club for a get together in Entebbe, Uganda for a week. Despite living with this longed-for, indispensable woman in a small house miles from anywhere, to whom she entrusted sole charge of her three very young children when she went away for breaks, she never referred to her by her first name, it was always the formal ‘Mrs Kuhn’. Later I found that her name was Gertrude Mary Kuhn from an official Notice in the digitised on-line Kenya Gazette Archives following Letters of Administration.
Musing this, and with another piece in the jigsaw, we turned in. Tomorrow we’ll be up at 6 am to go to Saiwa national Park to see birds.