Free Straight on Till Morning by Mary S. Lovell Page A

couple had met when they were lunch guests of a mutual friend at the Cavalry Club in London in 1951. Viviane, who was on holiday from her home in France, was instantly attracted to Gervase and the feeling was mutual, but by a strange quirk of fate Gervase was leaving on the following day for a holiday in France. He was not due to return until Viviane herself left for France. ‘A case of ships that pass in the night you might say,’ chuckled Viviane. However Gervase managed to return earlier than planned, and the pair had a day together before Viviane went home.
    They wrote to each other constantly. ‘We more or less fell in love by letter. After our marriage, shortly after he came down from Oxford, Gervase had the opportunity to work in India – a country that I had passionately wanted to visit all my life. Our time there was a great happiness to us both, but it was almost a spiritual home-coming for me.’ On their way home to Europe they stopped over in Kenya to visit Gervase’s grandmother, Lady Markham, who had virtually raised Gervase, and who had remarried and moved to the colony. However, hearing that they were in Nairobi, Beryl telephoned and asked the young people to stay with her at Naro Moru.
    â€˜Beryl was very sweet to us,’ Viviane recalled. ‘She was not at all what I expected – she seemed very quiet and ordinary, not the sort of person who had lived the adventurous life that I knew she had.’ The couple liked Thrane and enjoyed the happy atmosphere that prevailed on the farm. Indeed the entire visit was a very successful one. Beryl did not behave ‘like a mother’, but then she never had. Her relationship with her son is an intriguing one, for she undoubtedly cared for him in her own way, but she had no strong maternal need to see him or have him around her. She talked of Gervase occasionally to close friends but somehow did not feel it necessary to make any contact with him, or indeed his family when he later had two daughters. Interviewed in 1986 for this biography she spoke of ‘my little kid’ in a way that would have suggested to a stranger that she had enjoyed the most intimate maternal relationship. But in fact that brief visit in 1955 was the last time that Beryl ever saw her son, and she never met her two granddaughters.
    Interestingly Gervase never spoke of his mother to anyone but his wife. ‘He was extremely proud of her achievements but of course he had never really known her as a mother.’ His two daughters, Fleur and Valery, grew up with a very hazy and confused picture of their maternal grandmother. 12
    In the mid 1950s Beryl suffered two bereavements. Firstly her half-brother Sir James ‘Alex’ Kirkpatrick was killed in a shooting accident. Beryl had liked him, though her affection for him was always tinged with reflected dislike of their mother and she disapproved of his drinking. Doreen Bathurst Norman recalled that between the two there had been ‘the mutually critical attitude that is very common between brother and sister’.
    Then, in 1957 Clutterbuck died in South Africa. It was a deep and lasting sadness for though she had not seen much of her father during the previous twenty years, Beryl still retained her hero-worship of him. 13 Clutterbuck was still successfully training horses until shortly before his death and told his daughter that although he would leave his estate to Emma Orchardson he would leave Beryl his ‘best horse’. He did so, and Beryl would have loved to have taken the horse, but South African horses could not be imported to Kenya and Beryl hadn’t the resources to cope with the problem. So she had to let the opportunity go by.
    With Beryl’s drive and ideas, and Jørgen’s herculean assistance, the establishment started to take shape. There were horse-boxes, feed stores, tack stores, exercise yard and gallops to be built, and in 1956 Beryl took delivery of her first