Markham Beryl - Straight on till morning: the biography of Beryl Markham

During the weeks that Mary Lovell has been in Nairobi, she has spent each day but one at my house on the Ngong Racecourse. We have become friends.

She tells me that people are interested in the things I have done in my life which were not written about in my own book West with the Night . I cannot think why this should be so, but I accept her assurances, and have made my collection of papers available to her.

Day after day, I have listened while she read these papers to me. I have remembered times long past and people long dead. And when she has asked me I have tried to tell her about them. But some memories I have kept for myself as everyone must. And because she understands this I have tried to help her, as she in her own way has helped me.

Beryl Markham
Nairobi, 3 April 1986

In 1985 my ex-husband, Cliff Lovell, flew his De Havilland Gipsy Moth airplane during the making of the movie Out of Africa . When he returned home at Christmas after three months of filming in Kenya, I asked him to tell me all about it. Instead of stories about Meryl Streep and Robert Redford (which is what I wanted to hear), he began telling me about an elderly woman who had been brought onto the set to see the Moth. Her name was Beryl Markham, and she had owned and flown similar planes in the 1930s when they were the most popular modern airplanes available.

He told me that she now lived a retired life in Kenya, but that as a pioneer aviatrix she had been a bush pilot, had made many record-breaking flights, and was the first woman to fly the Atlantic the hard way east to west against the prevailing winds. She had also been a friend of Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, whose relationship was the basis for the Out of Africa movie, and she had been a leading racehorse trainer.

To my knowledge I had never heard the name Beryl Markham, but I recall that I was aware of a frisson of recognition almost amounting to dj vu and to this day I cannot explain it. As Cliff finished telling me about her he said, Someone ought to write a book about her, and there it was again, an inexplicable prickle of the hairs on the back of my neck. Whatever it was, this sixth-sense nudge, drove me next day in that pre-Google era to the local library to research Beryl and her history. Because of holiday hours it was three days before I could get a copy of Beryls remarkable book West with the Night sent from another branch, and by then I had already ransacked the reference library shelves and begun going through the indexes of all the books in the aviation classification.

For years I had collected antiquarian books on horses and fox-hunting, and among this collection was the hunting diary and scrapbook of a woman from Leicestershire. As I was flicking idly through this volume one evening, the name Charles B. Clutterbuck jumped off the page. This was the name of Beryls father. Again, I had never heard of him until two days earlier when reading Beryls memoir. Surely this was simply a coincidence? But hadnt Beryl written about her father as a successful steeplechaser in England before he emigrated to Kenya? Sure enough, this was a newspaper clipping about Beryls father, romping home in a hunt race.

I was well into work on another book when all this occurred, so my agent was surprised when I told him I was dropping the project to write a biography about Beryl Markham. I received the response to which I was to become accustomed over the next months: Whos Beryl Markham? I was defensive, not ready to share Beryl, or my small trove of information about her, with anyone else. I dont exactly know yet. But I just know I have to write about her.

After a few weeks of working in a sort of frenzy to learn more about Beryls career, I gathered enough material to draft what I thought was an outline for a book. I then wrote to Beryl care of her English publisher, Virago Press, asking if she would see me, and carried on with the research.

Three weeks later I received a letter from a Jack Couldrey in Nairobi, introducing himself as Beryls solicitor. He said that although he had read my letter to Beryl he was not sure that she had entirely understood it. To all intents and purposes she is now virtually senile, he wrote. He went on to say that if I came to Kenya I could certainly see her and would even be able to carry on a conversation with her, but her mind was apt to wander.

This was a blow, but disappointing as Couldreys letter was, I decided that I needed to see Beryl and attempt to speak to her. The same day I went into my local travel agent and booked a return flight to Nairobi. Then I began writing to everyone whose name had cropped up in my research so far. Many old Kenya ex-pats had retired to England after Independence in December 1963, so I was not short of contacts. A series of interviews followed, and I was astonished not only at the sweep of Beryls interests but also at the strength of feelings her name could generate. Some respected and admired her; others could not find a good word for her. Elspeth Huxley provided me with a list of names and letters of introduction for my forthcoming visit to Kenya.