The Final Curtsey (16 page)

Clipping from the
Gazette
, December 15th 1964 about the ordeal experienced by Shirley MacLaine and us

We jammed on our brakes; turned and followed. When the military vehicle stopped we tumbled out and ran towards Bhalla. He was handcuffed and had been badly beaten up. We learnt later that he had
managed to get within a few yards of the border and then came upon a Jeep which he thought was ours. It was a disastrous misjudgement. It was a Bhutanese army vehicle and he was immediately taken
prisoner and knocked about. Our plan was now in tatters and we had no choice but to swing around and follow the army Jeep down to the CLO’s office. We threw our weight around, such as it was,
and managed to get the handcuffs off Bhalla. By now the CLO was raging. He tore up our exit permits and placed us under arrest, forbidden to leave the country until the pleasure of His Bhutanese
Majesty was known. In desperation I invoked the name of the Queen of England, shouting that she was my first cousin, while Shirley declaimed that she was a famous American actress, and that the
whole firmament of Hollywood would rise up in protest, led by her brother Warren Beatty, at the way she was being treated.

But it was no good. The names of Queen Elizabeth II, Warner Brothers and MGM failed to impress our captors. We then demanded a telephone to speak to Thondup in Gangtok but were told that the
lines were down. We were, however, surprisingly taken to an office near the checkpoint where there was an antiquated radio telephone. We spent two and a half hours trying to get through to Sikkim,
but it was in the middle of the night and all the exchanges appeared shut down. We relayed messages through a signal’s officer to the Bhutanese higher command, and eventually received the
frightening reply that Mary Macdonald and Bhalla were to be kept prisoner, and that there was no chance of us leaving the country. Denys and I then stage-managed a row with the CLO outside the
office, as cover for Mary while she tried to get through to somebody — anybody — to alert them to our predicament. But after only a few minutes of Mary’s angry telephonic
shouting, the CLO realised what was going on and rushed into the radio telephone room to rip out the connections.

We were then ordered to return to the guest house. Mary and Bhalla were to be taken away, to God knows what. We could not permit this and surrounding them managed somehow to smuggle them inside.
We dragged all the mattresses off the beds and laid them side by side in the main room, placing Mary and Bhalla in the middle. Some soldiers burst in during what was left of the night, bent on
removing Mary and Bhalla from our protection, but seeing us all huddled close together gave up and went away. Early next morning we were ordered back into the CLO’s office and found that
suddenly everything had changed. He actually managed a smile. Word had come from the King personally that we were ALL to be allowed to leave. We didn’t wait. We headed for Sikkim, while
Shirley, Bhalla and Mary made for Calcutta, where Shirley was devoured by a hungry press. Thus ended a dramatic episode, but it didn’t put me off exploring. I have to add that Bhutan is now a
democracy under a twenty-eight-year-old King, the world’s youngest monarch. In 2006 the magazine
Business Week
rated it the happiest country in Asia. What a difference the passing of
the years makes.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Africa had cast its spell over me from the very moment I landed at Nairobi airport in the winter of 1955. Denys, who was researching a book about locust control, had gone ahead
of me by at least a month as it was difficult for European women to enter many of the places he wanted to visit, such as Somalia. I hitched a lift in a light plane to the locust control camp,
hoping to rendezvous with my husband, but sweethearts and wives were frowned upon in its all-male environment, so I was packed off back to Nairobi, where I then embarked on a lone woman tour to
stay with anyone who would have me. I ended up on a farm on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and was filled with a burning desire to scale its magical peak. It is an ambition as yet unfulfilled, and
I fear will remain so.

I loved the fact that the mountain had been given by Queen Victoria to Prince Friedrich of Prussia when he married her daughter, Vicky, the Princess Royal, in 1858. As a result the mountain
became part of German Tanganyika and the mapmakers had to draw a little bubble in the straight line of the frontier between British Kenya and Tanganyika. The imperial couple reigned briefly as
German Emperor and Empress; Fritz, as he was known, being seriously ill and dying just three months after his accession. They had strong liberal and Anglophile leanings, completely at variance with
their eldest son, ‘Kaiser Bill’, who took Germany into the First World War. It is a simplistic view, but I like to think that there would have been no First World War, and subsequently
no Hitler, and no Second World War, if Fritz had lived.

But I digress. Eventually I was scooped up by some friends of Denys’ cousin, Shaun Plunket; a friendship formed while he was doing a stint in Kenya with the British army. Peter and Susie
Marrian had a coffee farm set beneath the Aberdare Mountains and I had arrived to experience the Mau Mau uprising at its height. The insurgents were nearly all Kikuyu, a tribe living between the
farm and Nairobi, ninety miles away. They were actually more civilised than many of the other tribes, but some were committed to the savagery of the Mau Mau rebellion. In fact they murdered more of
their own people than white settlers, although the atrocities involving Europeans made the biggest headlines.

One of their tricks was to terrorise the house servants so as to gain access to the houses of whites. At meal times on the farm, we sat with a gun each beside our plates and the house boy was
locked into the room with us, using a hatch to receive food from the kitchen. All the farm workers and most of the house staff were Kikuyu and it was difficult to know whom to trust. Soldiers had
to camouflage themselves and hide for days in the forest while trying to locate Mau Mau camps, but more soldiers were killed by marauding rhino than by the Mau Mau. I didn’t, however, let the
Mau Mau stop me riding every morning, often exploring areas known to be dangerous. I was being foolhardy, but I found these gun-toting expeditions exciting and would often come across buffalo and
rhinos. The rhinos fascinated me, and occasionally I’d follow one, believing that if it charged I could easily out gallop it. Later I discovered that when a rhino charges it can travel faster
than a Derby winner.

We would sometimes drive up into the forest, hoping to see a few rhino, although this was frowned on by the security services, as the whole Aberdare region was a Mau Mau fiefdom. From the forest
boundary one could walk to Treetops, an observation point built in a giant fig tree and overlooking a water hole frequented by animals. It was there, in 1952, that Princess Elizabeth, at the start
of a Commonwealth tour, became Queen. She was filming wildlife when her father, King George VI, died in his sleep at Sandringham, three thousand miles away. While she was there two water buck had a
fight, and one was fatally wounded. There is a Kikuyu legend that when two water buck meet in combat and one dies, this signals the death of a great chief. How strange that that came true that
night. Regrettably, Treetops was torched by the Mau Mau, but it was rebuilt on a much larger scale on the same site. The Queen made a return visit there in 1983.

Back in 1952, I sent a letter of condolence to the new Queen, and six days after she succeeded to the throne she replied, saying that I had ‘struck the nail on the head’ by saying
that it must have been ‘agony’ to be away when ‘Papa died’, and adding: ‘It really was ghastly; the feeling that I was unable to help or comfort Mummy or Margaret, and
that there was nothing one could do at all.’ He had died ‘so suddenly’, leaving her stunned, shocked and disbelieving. She thanked me for my letter, and said, touchingly:
‘Letters are such a comfort, and every one of them gives me further courage to go on.’

A year or two later Denys went alone to Zambia, gathering information for a new book. It was there that he met Jolyon Halse, who later moved to Kenya with his wife Stafford. They became very
great friends, and as he was a freelance geologist, he was fully equipped for every possible kind of safari. It became a passport for us to see many parts of the country, which would have been
impossible for the ordinary tourist. One time, sitting in the Halses’ garden in Kenya, we began planning a safari to the far north of the country. We had long wanted to explore the remoter
regions of the Northern Frontier District, the wildest and most exciting part of Kenya, hoping to circumnavigate Lake Rudolf, now called Lake Turkana. This was an over-ambitious plan as we had, at
that stage, no idea about the driving conditions or the time that such a trip would take. If we wished to go right round the lake, it would, as a geographical necessity, mean entering Ethiopia,
where the river Omo would have to be crossed. I had a wonderful idea that we should get Lever Brothers to script a commercial showing us washing our smalls in the river Omo with Omo washing
powder!

As luck would have it, that following summer we were delighted to be invited to a dinner at Windsor Castle, in honour of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. He was over to attend the Garter
Service in St George’s Chapel, having in 1954 been made a Knight of the Order, Britain’s oldest order of chivalry. The Emperor would only admit to speaking French, so the Queen placed
me beside him, as she knew that I would be able to converse reasonably well in that language. It seemed strange to be seated in one of the oldest inhabited British castles, talking French to an
African Emperor. He, of course, sat on the Queen’s right, and I was able to study him covertly until it came to my turn to talk to him. He was small and spare, with the finely honed features
of the Nilotic people. I took the chance to ask him if we would be allowed to cross into his country, so as to reach Lake Rudolf in Kenya, the far northern end of which cuts into Ethiopia. He
indicated that this would be possible, with the brief reply:
‘Mais oui, naturellement’
and although I never received a personally signed pass, I suppose, in the circumstances, he
couldn’t say
‘Non’
.

After all, the Queen was entertaining not only himself and many members of his family, but also his large retinue. It was Royal Ascot week and the Queen was hosting her usual Windsor house
party. Little did we know then of the Emperor’s tragic future. In 1974, the year after we met, he was deposed, spending the last months of his life as a prisoner. Many members of his family
were executed, but when he died in 1975 the official government version of his end was that he suffered respiratory failure following complications after routine surgery. Suspicions about the cause
of his death remain and supporters believe he was assassinated. In 1992 his bones were found under a concrete slab in the grounds of his palace and reports suggested that they were discovered
beneath a latrine. His Garter banner, which during his lifetime hung in St George’s Chapel, was returned by the Queen to the surviving members of his family.

We returned to Kenya in the early spring of 1974 and began serious planning. It would be advisable to have two vehicles in case of disaster. The aim was to circumnavigate Lake Rudolf, the
world’s largest permanent desert lake, named in 1888 in honour of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria by an Austrian explorer, Count Samuel Teleki de Szek, who was the first European to have
visited the lake, which after Kenyan independence was renamed after the region’s predominant tribe. At last D-Day arrived. Jolyon and Stafford Halse, and Denys and I, set off from Nairobi on
7 February 1974, driving north through Nyeri and on over the shoulder of Mount Kenya, and then down towards Isiolo and the flat plains which stretch endlessly towards the horizon. We made camp the
first night by the banks of the Uso Nyro and for the first time heard the roar of lions, the most exciting noise imaginable.

Soon after leaving our camp at first light, we caught sight of the wonderfully shaped Mount Ololokwe rising with incredible suddenness from the desert plain, its sides steep and cliff like and
its top completely flat, which reminded me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World
, the sort of place where one can imagine that prehistoric beasts might still roam. Further on, we
came to Marsabit, another mountain rising alone out of the desert, tree covered, and home to herds of elephants. The great Ahmed, Kenya’s largest elephant, whose long tusks swept the ground,
lived there. This valuable feature put him constantly at risk from ivory traders and he had his own platoon of Askaris to guard him from potential poachers.