Straight on Till Morning Read Free Page A

Journal , Collier’s , and the Saturday Evening Post in the United States.
    It was not an easy thing for me to say but I had to say it. ‘You know that some people tell me you did not write the book alone.’ She was contemptuously dismissive of this, telling me that of course she wrote it herself. So what had Raoul Schumacher – her second husband and, her detractors suggest, the author of the book – done, I wondered, to deserve the generous dedication and thanks? ‘He helped me at the end, he was very good at that sort of thing, very clever, but I wrote the book myself while he was away…he wasn’t even there.’
    Of course I wanted to believe this. Had the doubt not been placed in my mind by people I had interviewed, it would never have occurred to me to question the fact. Talking to her, being with her each day, she embodied all my expectations as the book’s author. I found her highly intelligent and cultured. She had at times an air of detachment which could have been taken for vagueness, but I gained the impression of an immensely strong and complex personality. There are a few stories about her life – more rumours – which I have not been able to verify one way or another to my satisfaction, but my subsequent research resolved any doubts about Beryl’s authorship of West with the Night .
    Sometimes I read to her from one or another of the books on her bookshelves. There were travel books and horse books, some juvenile classics – Peter Pan was a lifelong favourite, as was The Wind in the Willows . She discussed her books as old friends, although she said she had not been able to read for some time because a cataract in one eye had made reading difficult. Once I suggested that since she could walk a little, I would ask Jack Couldrey to organise a car and driver if she wished to go out somewhere – to the Muthaiga Club perhaps? ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I prefer to drive myself about. I am a good driver, you know.’
    She was always polite to me. When she did not wish to answer a question she was transparently evasive. ‘I’m afraid I can’t remember,’ she would say casually. ‘It’s all so long ago now.’ I almost expected a yawn for effect. But when she had genuinely forgotten something she was quite different, almost distressed. ‘I really wanted to tell you but now I can’t remember – I was thinking about it in the night and wanted to tell you…I’m so sorry.’ She was always interested in my research, the people I had talked to and what we had talked about, but I filtered much of the content of my interviews for obvious reasons unless I wanted her to comment on something. She was amused by the extracts I had copied from very early editions of the Kenyan newspaper, the East African Standard . I looked these up in Nairobi’s McMillan Library and at the Kenya National Archives, where the curators of both collections were accommodating enough to allow me to go in and work before the official opening time so that I would not be late going to the cottage. Beryl said she was happy for me to take away a few documents or photographs each night to photocopy and return the next morning.
    On the only day I failed to see Beryl at all, I left Nairobi before seven a.m. to drive ‘up country.’ Driving up the Kikuyu escarpment, tracking the stupendous Rift Valley and shining lakes of Naivasha and Elmenteita (stopping a number of times to have tyres repaired; it was a dreadful car!), I was on my way to visit Pamela Scott at her house, Deloraine, near Beryl’s childhood home at Njoro. This was one of the interviews suggested by my friend and mentor Elspeth Huxley. Pamela drove me to the old Clutterbuck farm, which had become a wool-spinners’ cooperative. One of the men who worked there, an old African who had lost a leg in Clutterbuck’s sawmill as a child, remembered Beryl well.