Free Straight on Till Morning by Mary S. Lovell

to Beryl – or if they did she paid no heed to them. She managed to raise £1500, the most likely sources being Mansfield, who helped her financially on a number of occasions, and Clutterbuck. Probably it was a combination of both.
    At the bottom end of the Bathurst Norman property was a small piece of land consisting of a small house and twenty-five acres, which providentially came on to the market. Originally it had been part of Forest Farm but it had been sold separately, some years before the Bathurst Normans arrived. Beryl put up her capital, the Bathurst Normans underwrote a bank loan and the small farm – heavily mortgaged – became Beryl’s. Twenty-five acres could never in normal circumstances have provided an adequate basis for the establishment she had in mind, but fortunately the Normans were happy for her to use some of their land, and their farm machinery and labour were at her disposal for gallops and the maintenance of paddocks. Equally important, she had the personal support of Charles, Doreen and Jørgen:
    Jørgen was tremendously excited and keen about the whole thing. She could never have got started again if it hadn’t been for his enthusiasm and hard work, he was an enormous help to her. He was detailed by the local ‘security committee’ to live at Beryl’s farm. The Mau Mau troubles were at their height and they would not countenance Beryl living there alone. Just before Beryl left we had an African visitor to the farm. He showed me a card which stated that he was a communicant of the Church of Scotland and that he could hold services on farms. I replied that I should make inquiries as to whether any of the farm workers would like him to do so, as several were skulking around looking at our visitor and appeared frightened. I got a lot of flak…Surely I would not prevent the workers from hearing God’s word, and so forth. I asked around and got the distinct impression that he wasn’t wanted but as it was nearly dark I grudgingly allowed him to stay the night. He did, and held a very different kind of ceremony – a Mau Mau oathing ceremony.
    We lived in a very vulnerable position, and deliberately did not have Kikuyu house servants. One night all our cattle were driven off. Having checked that Beryl was all right, Charles sent Jørgen off to the police at Naro Moru. Believe it or not we had no telephone until just near the end of the emergency! The result was that they caught the gang sitting around a fire drying their clothes and cutting up the meat from one of our cows. The police shot at them, killing one and wounding another but the rest vanished into the night. All the cattle broke back except about seven and we got one that wandered in from goodness knows where – possibly as the result of another farm raid.
    We heard later that it was considered that Charles, whom they referred to as Mzee (a mark of respect as well as of age), was considered to know all about them and they were reluctant to touch us as they believed they would certainly be caught. They never tried anything again. We all carried revolvers or automatics all the time…
    Beryl had arap Ruta to help her on her farm. She had tracked Ruta down when she visited Kenya after the war, and she never subsequently lost touch with him. Soon after arriving at Naro Moru, she suggested to the Normans that they should give him a job. He’d be very good, she told them. ‘In fact he was quite good, though by then he’d started to drink a lot and at times was rather a nuisance because of it,’ Doreen recalled. During her illness Beryl had also begun to drink quite heavily, but she managed to ease up after her recovery and disapproved of other people drinking to excess.
    Not long after her move to her own farm, Beryl was visited by her son Gervase and his heavily pregnant wife Viviane. They were en route to Europe after spending the first year of their marriage in India. The