Free White Mischief by James Fox

drunk with the meat. But in your life everyone will be drunk at midnight and not a minute before. Of course, my trouble,” he added reminiscently, “was that I got drunk before dinner and had to go out and be sick during the soup.”
    “Lizzie” Lezard had been a gifted tennis player who had come from South Africa with the Davis Cup team. He was the privileged outsider, the victim of merciless teasing which he could turn to brilliant advantage. Deeply unsure of himself, he longed for affection and praise from the rich and aristocratic, and went to embarrassing lengths to secure it.
    For some years Lezard was able to live in considerable style. He was taken up by and later married to Hilda Wardell, a lady of a certain age, and with plenty of money, who introduced him into the hunting world of Leicestershire. Tricked out in pink swallow-tails, his black curls escaping from one side of his top hat, Lezard rode with reckless bravery and little style with the Quorn and Pytchley, falling off and remounting like a circus clown. “Itwas a strong Jewish urge of the period,” a fellow guest at the Wardell house remembers, “the determination to martyr themselves on the hunting field. I suppose it was to do with keeping up with the philistines.” Lezard always retained the jargon of the hunting field. His favourite motto was “Hit ’em and hold ’em.”
    After several years, Hilda Wardell could take no more. Perhaps she had had to bail Lezard out of a gambling debt once too often. They divorced amicably and she sent Lezard to Kenya without a penny. He was told that Alice de Trafford, now divorced from Raymond and living in Happy Valley, would look after him. Alice brought him back to the Wanjohi Valley in her box-body car. The Wanjohi road was at its worst, the car slewing to the edge of the escarpment and the rain beating at the windscreen in curtains. Lizzie Lezard turned to Alice and said, “Look, I think I’d rather be a shit in London than a pioneer in Kenya.”
    Erroll and Lezard were perfectly matched: the comedian and the Earl, both broke, both mad about women. Lezard was fascinated by Erroll, and the obvious place to stay, the very centre of social activity, was Erroll’s house at Muthaiga.
    * Elspeth Huxley. Nellie: Letters from Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1980).
    * Isak Dinesen, Letters From Africa 1914–1931 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981).
    * Hamish Hamilton. 1971.

5
    A SPELL IN MASAI COUNTRY
    Such rich men with absentee wives may be revived only by a successful love affair. They are too grand to work and bitterness follow. They find themselves in a prison of the déjà vu , surrounded by good advice and grey hair; within the spirit is as youthful as ever, protesting “Can this be all?”
    C YRIL C ONNOLLY
    The Delves Broughtons (pronounced “Brawton”) began coming to Kenya on hunting safaris soon after the Armistice. Sir Jock Delves Broughton’s first wife, Vera, was a mighty huntress and adventuress, and Broughton had been told by his Harley Street doctor, Sir Farquhar Buzzard, that a spell in Masai country would be the best cure for his headaches and his excitable mental condition, though Broughton claimed this to be the result of sunstroke, contracted at Portsmouth while his battalion was loading up for France in 1914. In 1923 he had bought a coffee plantation in Kenya. Now in 1940, aged fifty-seven, he was returning with a new wife, this time looking for refuge from another war.
    Broughton was born into the protected, leisured world of racing and into the big league of landowning families.His father, the 10th Baronet, owned three houses: Doddington Park in Cheshire, Broughton Hall in Staffordshire and 6 Hill Street, in Mayfair, London. Doddington was the family seat—a fine if somewhat gloomy Samuel Wyatt house in an eighteenth-century setting of parkland and lakes. With the houses came some 34,000 acres: a vast estate mostly of prime Cheshire farmland, which would now be worth something over £70