Table of Contents
Title Page
Bill Bryson’s African Diary
Saturday, September 28
Sunday, September 29
Monday, September 30
Tuesday, October 1
Wednesday, October 2
Thursday, October 3
Friday, October 4
Saturday, October 5
CARE SAYS THANKYOU ...
THE FACTS ABOUT POVERTY
CARE
MOVING AHEAD WITH CARE
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
Intro to Excerpt
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
Outro from Excerpt
Copyright Page
Bill Bryson’s African Diary
In the late 1940s and early 1950s after he became a little too saggy to fit into a Tarzan loincloth without depressing popcorn sales among cinema audiences, the great Johnny Weissmuller filled the twilight years of his acting career with a series of low-budget adventure movies with titles like Devil Goddess and Jungle Moon Men, all built around a character called Jungle Jim. These modest epics are largely forgotten now, which is a pity because they were possibly the most cherishably terrible movies ever made.
The plots seldom got anywhere near coherence. My own favourite, called Pygmy Island, involved a lost tribe of white midgets and a strange but valiant fight against the spread of Communism. But the narrative possibilities were practically infinite since each Jungle Jim feature consisted in large measure of scenes taken from other, wholly unrelated adventure movies. Whatever footage was available—train crashes, volcanic eruptions, rhino charges, panic scenes involving large crowds of Japanese—would be snipped from the original and woven into Jungle Jim’s wondrously accommodating story lines. From time to time, the ever-more-fleshy Weissmuller would appear on the scene to wrestle the life out of a curiously rigid and unresisting crocodile or chase some cannibals into the woods, but these intrusions were generally brief and seldom entirely explained.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that no more than four people at a time ever paid money to watch a Jungle Jim movie. The series might well have escaped my own attention except that in about 1959 WOI-TV, a television station well known in central Iowa for its tireless commitment to mediocrity, acquired the complete Jungle Jim oeuvre and for the next dozen or so years showed two of them back to back late every Friday night. What is especially tragic about all this is that I not only watched these movies with unaccountable devotion, but was indelibly influenced by them. In fact, were it not for some scattered viewings of the 1952 classic Bwana Devil and a trip on the Jungle Safari ride at Disneyland in 196I, my knowledge of African life, I regret to say, would be entirely dependent on Jungle Jim movies.
I can’t say it actively preyed on me that my impressions of Africa were based so heavily on a series of B-movies made in California more than half a century ago, but when a personable young man named Dan McLean from the London office of CARE International, the venerable and worthy charity, asked me if I would be willing to go to Kenya to visit some of their projects and write a few words on their behalf, it occurred to me that there were some gaps in my familiarity with the Dark Continent that I might usefully fill in. So I agreed.
Some weeks later, I was summoned to CARE’s London offices for a meeting with Dan, his boss Will Day and a rugged and amiable fellow named Nick Southern, CARE’s regional manager for Kenya, who happened to be in London at the time. We sat around a big table spread with maps of Kenya, while they outlined what they had in mind for me.
“Of course, you’ll have to fly to the refugee camp at Dadaab,” Will observed thoughtfully at one point. He glanced at me. “To avoid the bandits,” he explained.
Dan and Nick nodded gravely.
“I beg your pardon?” I said, taking a sudden interest. “It’s bandit country all round there,” Will said. “Where?” I asked, peering at the map for the first time.
“Oh, just there,” Will said, waving a hand vaguely across most of east Africa. “But you’ll be fine in a plane.”
“They only rarely shoot at planes,” Nick explained.
This wasn’t at all what I had had in mind, frankly. By way of homework, I had dutifully watched Out of Africa, from which I derived the impression that this trip would mostly take place on a verandah somewhere while turbaned servants brought me lots of coffee. I knew that we would probably visit a clinic from time to time and that someone in the party might occasionally have to shoot a charging animal, but I hadn’t imagined anything shooting at me in return.
“So how dangerous is Kenya then?” I asked in a small controlled squeak.
“Oh, not at all,” they responded in unison.
“Well, hardly,” Will added.
“It depends on what you mean by dangerous, of course,” said Dan.
“Like bleeding and not getting up again,” I suggested. “Being shot and stabbed and so forth,” I added.
They assured me that that only very rarely happened, and that it was nearly always one or the other. You had to be very unlucky to be shot and stabbed, they said.
“It’s mostly diseases you have to worry about,” Nick went on. “Malaria, schistosomiasis, trypanosomiasis.”
“Rift Valley fever, blackwater fever, yellow fever,” said Dan.
“Dengue fever, bilharzia—the usual tropical stuff,” added Will.
But they pointed out that you can be inoculated against many of those and for the rest most people manage a more or less complete recovery, given time and a considered programme of physiotherapy. Many even walk again. I asked if there was anything else I should know.
“Well, the roads are a little dangerous—there are some crazy drivers out there,” Will said, chuckling.
“But apart from that and the diseases and the bandits and the railway from Nairobi to Mombasa, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about,” Nick added.
“What’s wrong with the railway?”
“Oh, nothing really. It’s just the rolling stock is a little antiquated and sometimes the brakes give out coming down out of the mountains—but, hey, if you worried about all the things that might happen you wouldn’t go anywhere, would you?”
“I don’t go anywhere,” I pointed out.
They nodded thoughtfully.
“Well, it’ll be an adventure,” Will said brightly. “You’ll be fine, absolutely fine. Just check your insurance before you go.”
And so it was that I became irrevocably committed to the African adventure which follows.
Saturday, September 28
We meet at the Kenya Airways check-in desk at Heathrow, the five brave souls who are to form our party from London. In addition to me and Dan, they are: David Sanderson, a thoughtful and kindly fellow who is soon to take up a post in Johannesburg as CARE’s regional manager in South Africa, but joining us now in his capacity as urban specialist; Justin Linnane, an intent but amiable young maker of television documentaries who has volunteered to make a video record of the expedition; and the photographer Jenny Matthews, whose brilliant and compassionate snaps grace this volume. White-haired and sweetly unobtrusive, Jenny is easily the wonder of the lot. If you saw her in a supermarket you would take her for a schoolteacher or civil servant. In fact, for 25 years she has gone wherever there is danger—to Chechnya, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda. She is fearless and evidently indestructible. If things go bad on this trip, it is her I’ll hold on to.
The first good news is that Kenya Airways has given us all an upgrade on account of our genial goodness and dapper manner, and so of course gets a glowing mention here. It is a nine-and-a-half-hour flight from London to Nairobi, and we are very pleased to pass it in comfort, with a better class of drinks and our own party packs.
An hour or so after we are airborne, by chance I come across an article in The Economist declaring Nairobi to be the new crime capital of Africa. My attention is particularly arrested by the disclosure that street children come up to cars waiting at traffic lights demanding money and if it’s not given they rub balls of human excrement in the victim’s face.
I share this information with my new companions and we agree that Dan, as group leader, will be our designated “rubbee” for the week. Conveniently, Dan is in the lavatory when the matter is discussed and so the motion carries unanimously. In order not to spoil his enjoyment of Nairobi we decide not to tell him of our decision until we see children advancing.
It is nighttime when we land at Jomo Kenyatta Airport and pleasantly cool. We are met by Kentice Tikolo, an immensely good-natured Kenyan lady who helps run CARE’s Nairobi office and who shepherds us into waiting cabs. In Out of Africa, Nairobi was depicted as a sunny little country town, so I am disappointed to find that at some time in the past 50 or 60 years they took away that pretty scene and replaced it with Omaha, of all things. Nairobi is merely yet another modern city with traffic lights and big buildings and hoardings advertising Samsung televisions and the like. Our hotel is a Holiday Inn—very nice and comfortable, but hardly a place that shouts: “Welcome to Africa, Bwana.”
“Oh, you will see plenty of Africa,” Kentice assures me when we convene at the bar for a round of medicinal hydration. “We’re going to show you lots of exotic things. Have you ever eaten camel?”
“Only in my junior high school cafeteria, and they called it lamb,” I reply. I take the opportunity, while Dan is at the bar, to ask her about the street children I read about on the flight.
“Oh, that’s the least of your worries,” Kentice laughs. “Car-jackings are much worse. They can be quite violent.”
“What a comfort to know.”
“But don’t worry,” she says, laying a comforting hand on my arm and becoming solemn, “if anything goes wrong we have excellent hospitals in Nairobi.”
We retire early because we have an early start in the morning. I am disappointed to find that there is no mosquito net around the bed in my room. Unaware that Nairobi is malaria-free, I slather myself with insect repellant and pass a long night sounding like two strips of parting Velcro each time I roll over in the bed and dreaming terrible dreams in which Jungle Jim, assisted by a tribe of white pygmies, chases me through the streets of Omaha with dung balls.
Sunday, September 29
In the morning we drive to Kibera, a sea of tin roofs filling a mile or so of steamy hillside on the south side of the city. Kibera is the biggest slum in Nairobi, possibly the biggest in Africa. Nobody knows how many people live there. It’s at least 700,000, but it may be as many as a million, perhaps more. At least 50,000 of Kibera’s children are AIDS orphans. At least a fifth of the residents are HIV positive, but it could be as high as 50 percent. Nobody knows. Nothing about Kibera is certain and official, including its existence. It appears on no maps. It just is.
You can’t just go in to Kibera if you are an outsider. Well, you can, but you wouldn’t come out again. Kibera is a dangerous place. We were taken on a walking tour by the district chief, an amiable giant named Nashon Opiyo, and three of his deputies, all Kibera residents. They are employed by the government to keep an eye—and occasionally a lid—on things, even though Kibera doesn’t officially exist.
To step into Kibera is to be lost at once in a random, seemingly endless warren of rank, narrow passageways wandering between rows of frail, dirt-floored hovels made of tin and mud and twigs and holes. Each shanty on average is ten feet by ten and home to five or six people. Down the centre of each lane runs a shallow trench filled with a trickle of water and things you don’t want to see or step in. There are no services in Kibera—no running water, no rubbish collection, virtually no electricity, not a single flush toilet. In one section of Kibera called Laini Saba until recently there were just ten pit latrines for 40,000 people. Especially at night when it is unsafe to venture out, many residents rely on what are known as “flying toilets,” which is to say they go into a plastic bag, then open their door and throw it as far as possible.
In the rainy season, the whole becomes a liquid ooze. In the dry season it has the charm and healthfulness of a rubbish tip. In all seasons it smells of rot. It’s a little like wandering through a privy. Whatever is the most awful place you have ever experienced, Kibera is worse.
Kibera is only one of about a hundred slums in Nairobi, and it is by no means the worst. Altogether more than half of Nairobi’s three million people are packed into these immensely squalid zones, which together occupy only about 1.5 percent of the city’s land. In wonder I asked David Sanderson what made Kibera superior.
“There are a lot of factories around here,” he said, “so there’s work, though nearly all of it is casual. If you’re lucky you might make a dollar a day, enough to buy a little food and a jerry can of water and to put something aside for your rent.”
“How much is rent?”
“Oh, not much. Ten or twelve dollars a month. But the average annual income in Kenya is $280, so $120 or $140 in rent every year is a big slice of your income. And nearly everything else is expensive here, too, even water. The average person in a slum like Kibera pays five times what people in the developed world pay for the same volume of water piped to their homes.”
“That’s amazing,” I said.
He nodded. “Every time you flush a toilet you use more water than the average person in the developing world has for all purposes in a day—cooking, cleaning, drinking, everything. It’s very tough. For a lot of people Kibera is essentially a life sentence. Unless you are exceptionally lucky with employment, it’s very, very difficult to get ahead.”
Every day around the world, 180,000 people fetch up in or are born into cities like Nairobi, mostly into slums like Kibera. Ninety percent of the world’s population growth in the twenty-first century will be in cities. “For better or worse, this is where the future is,” David said. Yet, amazingly, aid agencies like CARE can do little for urban slums like Kibera. The governments won’t let them. “Mostly they won’t permit any kind of permanent improvements because they fear it would just affirm Kibera’s existence, and also they are afraid that it would encourage more people to pour in from the countryside. So they’d rather pretend these places don’t exist.”
“But they must know it’s here.”
He smiled and pointed to a big house—a compound— commanding a neighboring hillside only a couple of hundred yards from Kibera’s edge. The house, David told me, was the Nairobi residence of Daniel arap Moi, president of Kenya since 1978. “This is what he sees every morning when he looks out his window. Of course they know it’s here.”
Walking along with us was one of our minders, a kindly man of indeterminate age named Bonard Onyango. I asked him if he had always lived in Kibera. “Oh no,” he said. “I came here from the country twenty years ago.”
“How bad can the country be that you’d prefer this?” I asked.
“The country is very nice,” he agreed, “but there’s no work there and so no money. If you have no money, you can’t send your children to school. But in the city if you work hard and you are lucky you can educate your children and maybe they will have a better life. All these people, they are here for their children.”
“Really?” I said, impressed.
“Oh, yes. Most of them.”
Kentice had been listening to this and was nodding in agreement. “Just over there,” she said, pointing vaguely along some roof tops, “is the Olympic Primary School. Do you know, it is the best primary school in all of Kenya?”
“Truly?” I said, impressed.
She nodded gravely. “Three of the eight top-scoring primary schools in the country are here in Kibera. People from outside Kibera try to get their children into these schools because they are so good.” She nodded some more. “People here will do anything to improve the lot of their children.”
“So it’s not completely hopeless?” I said.
Kentice gave a big laugh. “Oh, no,” she said. “In Kenya we always have hope.”
In the afternoon, just to make sure the contrast was total, we drove out to the western edge of the city through a succession of wooded suburbs that seemed to owe more to Guild-ford or Weybridge than to Africa. Our destination was a formerly all-white preserve called Karen, whose most famous resident was also, though coincidentally, called Karen. I refer to Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame.
We stopped at the Karen Blixen Coffee Garden, built around an old farmhouse that was once part of her coffee plantation, and now a popular spot for Sunday lunch. After Kibera anything would seem good, but this was almost painfully agreeable. Inside the farmhouse a lavishly varied buffet was spread out, and outside, scattered around a large shady lawn, were tables of all sizes, mostly occupied by feasting white families. It can’t have been greatly different in colonial times.
After lunch we strolled the few hundred yards up the road to Blixen’s house, the setting for much of Out of Africa. I can’t say I was hugely interested in the personal history of Karen Blixen, but it was an interesting insight into the privileged lifestyles of the colonial period—which, not incidentally, didn’t last all that long: only about 60 years. Blixen herself spent only 17 years in Kenya, barely a fifth of her life. Anyway, it was a very pleasant house and the grounds were gorgeous, with long views across to Blixen’s blue and beloved Ngong Hills. My big excitement, however, was that as we were walking back to the car I saw my first Maasai—a young man with a long walking stick and a bolt of red cloth wrapped around his waist and draped over a shoulder, loping past on the other side of the road. It seemed almost preposterously unreal to see a genuine African icon walking through this little lost corner of Surrey.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked, surprised.
Kentice looked at me with a touch of wonder. “He lives here,” she said. “It’s his country.”
Monday, September 30
Knowing of my interest in ancient pre-humans (because of a book I have been working on) Kentice set up a visit to the National Museum. There we met Dr Emma Mbua, the petite and cheerful chief paleoanthropologist. Thanks largely to the efforts of two generations of the Leakey family, the museum has the finest collection of early human remains in existence.
It is an exceedingly rare event when a human bone fossilizes—only about one in a billion does so—and even rarer when one is found. You could easily fit all the early human bones that have ever been discovered into the back of a small delivery van. If you include every last tooth and chip of ancient bone ever found, only about 5,000 individuals have contributed to the human fossil record. Five hundred of these are held in the Kenyan National Museum in what is aptly known as the Strong Room, a slightly oversized version of a bank vault, with a heavy steel door and thick windowless walls. It is the greatest single hoard in the world, more priceless by far than any collection of royal baubles. Almost never is a non-specialist allowed into this room. I was honored indeed.
All the specimens are kept in small wooden chests in cupboards lined up around the walls. For one giddy hour, Dr Mbua brought out one celebrated skull after another. Here was the first Homo habilis, found by Louis Leakey in 1964 and long thought to be our earliest direct ancestor. Then came the famous Australopithecus boisei, 1.6 million years old and found miraculously intact, lying on the ground in the open, by Louis’s son Richard in 1969. Then there was the extraordinary Turkana boy, whose nearly complete skeleton was found in northern Kenya in the 1980s and which at a stroke provided scientists with more Homo erectus bones than all the previous finds put together.
Dr Mbua’s most treasured relic was a 19-million-year-old skull of an ape known as proconsul. “It was sent to the British Museum for cleaning in the 1940s,” she said, “and it took us forty years to persuade them to return it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They coveted it,” she said, smiling serenely, but hinting at levels of darkness in the world of paleontology that I hadn’t known existed. “Now we don’t let anything leave the museum, ever. They are too delicate and too precious. If you want to see any of these special things, you must come to Nairobi.” How glad I was I had.
The scarcity of human remains isn’t just because few bones become fossils, but also because precious few landscapes offer the right conditions to preserve fossils. The greatest of them is the Great Rift Valley, and it was there we headed next.
I had always imagined the Rift Valley as some kind of canyon—a comparatively confined space where your voice would echo off walls of rock. In fact, it is a mighty plain, a hundred miles across and four thousand miles long. It is immense, and startlingly sumptuous in its beauty. As you head south and west out of Nairobi there comes a place where the ground just falls away and there spread out below you is the biggest open space you have ever seen: the Great Rift Valley. It is an amazing sight—a pale green vastness interrupted here and there by dead volcanic craters, but otherwise infinite and flat and very hot looking.
We were headed for a place called Olorgesailie, 60 miles beyond the Ngong Hills on the valley floor. When we arrived, we stepped from the vehicle into a dry, oven-like heat, which was all the more startling after the comparative coolness of Nairobi. In 1919, a geologist named J.W. Gregory was poking around in the area when he came across an expanse of ancient and distinctive teardrop-shaped hand axes of a type known as Acheulean. In the 1940s, Louis Leakey and his wife, Mary, got around to excavating the site. What they found was that Olorgesailie was a kind of factory where these tools were made in incalculable numbers over about a million years, from 1.2 million to 200,000 years ago. But here’s the thing. The stones from which the axes were made aren’t found on the Rift Valley floor. They had to be brought there from two nearby mountains named Ol Esakut and Mount Olorgesailie, each about ten kilometers away. Why the early people went to such trouble and what exactly they used the tools for have long been a mystery. Acheulean axes were beautiful pieces of technology for the time, and each represented a lot of effort to create, but they weren’t outstandingly good for cutting or chopping or scraping—certainly not a great deal better than almost any random unshaped rock would be.
Yet for a million years early humans went to the considerable trouble of collecting and carrying large hunks of quartz and obsidian miles across a baking landscape to make them into axes at this one ten-acre site. More than this, the excavations showed that there was one area where axes were made and another where worn axes were brought to be re-sharpened. It was all amazingly organized.
Today thousands upon thousands of these stone tools are heaped and scattered everywhere around Olorgesailie, left where they were dropped hundreds of thousands of years ago by ancestors so remote from us that they weren’t yet even Homo sapiens. It is an extraordinary site. One other curiosity is that no human remains have ever been found at Olorgesailie. We have to guess who the early people were.
I know all this because a very bright and enthusiastic young man named Jillani Ngalla from the Kenyan National Museum conducted us around the site. Ngalla appeared to know everything there is to know about Olorgesailie, Acheulean tools, the Rift Valley, and early hominids, and yet he seemed awfully young for an authority. I asked him how long he had been a paleontologist.
“Oh, I’m not,” he said cheerfully. “I am an aspiring paleontologist. I’ve been accepted at the University of Pretoria,” he added with a touch of pride, “but sadly I don’t have the necessary funds.”
“How much would it cost?” I asked.
“Ten thousand US dollars.” He gave me an apologetic look, as if he had just said ten million.
“And do you have any hope of getting that kind of money?” I asked.
“As things stand at the moment,” he answered and considered the question carefully for a minute, “no.”
In the early evening we made our way to the modestly grand central railway station in Nairobi to catch the overnight sleeper to Mombasa.
Kenyan Railways has something of a tradition of killing its passengers. In just the past decade, a little over 200 people have died in accidents on its trains. The accident that seems to have attracted the most publicity in recent years was one in 1999 when the overnight Nairobi-to-Mombasa train jumped the rails at an interesting sounding place called “Man Eaters Junction,” in Tsavo National Park, killing 32 people.
The crew blamed brake failure. Kenya Railways blamed the crew. No one really knows what happened. The following year another 30-plus people were killed in two accidents, both involving runaway trains, in the space of four days. The biggest disaster of all was in 1993 when a train bound for Mombasa from Nairobi plunged off a bridge and into the “crocodile-infested” Ngai Ndeithya River, killing 140 people. Ngai Ndeithya means “God help us” in Kiswahili, which would seem to be a not inappropriate motto for the railway itself. Almost since the beginning, however, the train has been known as the Lunatic Express. Can’t think why.
Man Eaters Junction is so called, by the way, because in 1898 during the construction of the railway about 140 Indian workers were snatched and eaten by two lions (giving a whole new meaning to the term “Indian takeaway”). The railway’s chief engineer, an ex-army man named Lt. Col. John H. Patterson, spent months trying to lure the lions into a trap (often using understandably reluctant Indians as bait), but always failed. On one notable occasion a junior employee named C. H. Ryall sat up all night in an open railway carriage with a rifle trained on a pile of bait outside, but unfortunately nodded off. The lions ignored the bait and took poor Ryall instead.
Finally in early December, after nine months of frustration, Patterson managed to bag one of the lions. Three weeks later he shot and wounded the second one, which then bounded off into the bush. At first light the next morning he followed the trail of blood to the beast’s lair. Though severely wounded, the lion charged. Patterson fired both barrels of his gun, and was nonplussed, to say the least, to find that the lion merely staggered sideways and then resumed coming for him. Turning to his rifle bearer for his backup gun, Patterson was additionally nonplussed to discover that the bearer was 50 feet away and climbing a tree. Patterson likewise followed, just managing to haul himself onto a branch, the lion snapping at his quivering flanks. There he snatched the gun from the cowering bearer and fired once more, and the lion at last fell dead. The fate of the bearer is not recorded, but I believe we may reasonably assume that he was not further entrusted with the custody of firearms.
The journey from Nairobi to Mombasa takes 13 hours, nearly all of it after dark, which is perhaps a mercy, all things considered. So long as it stays upright and settled on the rails, the train is quite wonderful. It was a little on the ancient side, to be sure, but we each had a snug private cabin, which looked comfortable enough, and the dining car was splendid, with a hearty three-course dinner and cheery, attentive service. Knowing the perils that lay ahead, we took the sensible precaution of anaesthetizing ourselves with many Tusker beers before, during and after dinner, but even so sleep was not to be found.
To begin with the beds were small and decidedly on the hard side, but it was the wild and extraordinary motions of the train that made even light dozing impossible. Normally I love overnight trips by train, but this was like trying to sleep through an earthquake. Even in its more tranquil spells, which were few, it was like being on one of those agitating conveyor belts that mining companies use to shake diamonds loose from piles of rubble. Because it was pitch dark outside, there was never any telling where we were, but the angle of the carriage made it evident that we were spending much of the night descending steeply. Every few hundred yards, or so it seemed, the driver would hit the brakes, setting off a chain reaction of collisions as each carriage slammed into the one ahead of it, followed a micro-instant later by the thuds and confused moans of people who have just been pitched out of bed. The experience would not have been a great deal different if they had put us all in a large barrel and rolled us to Mombasa.
Tuesday, October 1
And So We Stepped into the steamy morning heat of Mombasa, pleased to be back on solid ground. Our destination for the evening was the Driftwood Beachclub Hotel, a stylish but conspicuously underutilized establishment standing on the Indian Ocean at Malindi. A vehicle from the hotel was waiting to whisk us up the coast to Malindi. Our principal task for the day was simply to get in position to fly on to Dadaab and a big CARE refugee camp the next day, but we had much to do in the meanwhile.
First we drove to a beach hotel north of Mombasa where CARE people from all over Africa had gathered for a conference to thrash out a new five-year plan. There we dropped off David Sanderson, who was to address the conference before flying back to London, and picked up Nick Southern, CARE’s regional manager for Kenya, whom I had met in London, as you will recall, and who was to be our host and protector for the next five days. An old Africa hand, Nick has been in Kenya for most of the past 15 years and knows the country inside out.
With Nick collected, we resumed our journey up the coast, through a lush, tropical landscape of palm groves and endless sisal plantations (sisal is used to make rope, I was told) to a small resort called Watamu.
Watamu was tranquil to the point of being comatose. There were several good-sized hotels and associated businesses—diving shops and the like—but a decided paucity of holidaymakers. “Tourism has really taken a beating here,” Nick said, “especially the coastal resorts. If people want to see lions and giraffes, they still have to come to some place like Kenya, but if all they want is a beach holiday then they go to lots of other places.”
For a decade up to the mid-1990s, Kenya was a hot destination. International visitor numbers hit 850,000 in 1995, but then slumped to under 500,000 in 1997 amid a welter of bad publicity. Nearly everybody you meet can tell you some unnerving story about visitors coming to an unhappy end. Before I even came to Kenya I was told three different versions of a story about a German tourist who was either walking on a beach, sitting at an outdoor café or in a car at a traffic light with his arm out the window when someone lopped the arm off with a machete and ran off with the attached Rolex. The story is untrue, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that people believe it.
“When people hear these things and then someone says, ‘Oh and by the way you have to take malaria tablets, too,’ a lot of them decide just to go to Spain,” Nick said. “It’s a shame because Kenya’s got so much going for it—beautiful countryside, lovely people, extraordinary wildlife, wonderful climate, great beaches. I mean, look,” he said and made a sweeping gesture across what was a setting of incomparable splendor: wide beach, nodding palms, bright sun, sparkling water.
We took a creaky glass-bottomed boat operated by two keen young men out to the reef about a quarter of a mile offshore and spent an hour admiring the large and colourful shoals of fish. “Virtually the whole of the coast is reef like this,” Nick said. “And they actually look after it pretty conscientiously. For all they do wrong, the Kenyans manage wildlife very well.” He gave a slight apologetic shrug. “You’re seeing a lot of bad things this week. I thought it might be nice to see something good.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“And the next thing,” he went on, “is really good. Have you ever heard of the Gedi ruins?”
“No,” I said without having to think.
“Not many people have. I think you’ll be impressed.”
The Gedi ruins are inland from Watamu and down a winding track through enclosing overgrowth. From the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries Gedi was a thriving but oddly secretive community hidden away in a jungly setting in what was then a remote nowhere along the coast between Malindi and Mombasa. The inhabitants, who were Muslim, traded with people from all over the world. Archaeologists have found beads from Venice, coins from China, an iron lamp from India, and scissors from Spain, among a great deal else. But nowhere in any written records in any language does Gedi or its industrious people appear. Somehow for four hundred years Gedi interacted with the world without being noticed, and no one knows how it managed to escape attention or why it chose to.
Gedi wasn’t rediscovered until the 1920s, by which time it was completely overgrown, but excavations since then have uncovered mosques, tombs, houses and a grand palace, spread across a 45-acre site. Monkeys run along the ruined walls, discreetly keeping an eye on visitors. The site still seems to half belong to the jungle, with mighty baobob trees growing up in what was once a busy lane or someone’s sitting room. At the end of the day, with long sun beams slanting through the forest, it was inexpressibly gorgeous. We were conducted around the site by Ali Abdala Alausy, the curator, a droll and cheerful man who was so clearly glad of visitors that he gave us what can only be called an exhaustive tour. There wasn’t an alcove or pediment to which we weren’t given a full history, not a pit or dwelling whose excavated contents weren’t thoroughly described. We left packed with knowledge and admiration, and ready for a very large drink.
We spent the night at the Driftwood Beachclub Hotel. The only other customers in the large dining room were a family of four at a distant table—white Kenyans on holiday, Nick supposed.
Everybody was tired after the sleepless train journey of the night before, but even so we were unusually subdued. I didn’t realize it at the time but this was because, with the exception of Jenny, who fears nothing, we were all quietly certain we were going to die in the morning.
Wednesday, October 2
A few years ago, I was on a scheduled flight on a 16-seater prop plane from Boston to my local airport in New Hampshire when the plane got lost in bad weather and couldn’t find the airport. For 40 minutes we flew around in a perplexed manner, occasionally dropping through the low clouds (which, I couldn’t help noticing, we shared with many mountaintops) before the pilot got his bearings, or lucky, and put us on the runway with a descent so steep that I sometimes still sit upright in bed at 3 a.m. thinking about it. I vowed then that I would never go on another light aircraft. Then two years ago I flew in a light aircraft across Fiji almost, but not quite, ahead of the leading edge of the biggest tropical storm I ever hope to experience and I vowed then that really, absolutely and under no conditions would I set foot on a light aircraft again.
And now here I was about to fly 400 kilometers into bandit country in a charter plane in a Third World nation. I mentioned my reservations to Nick Southern at breakfast.
“I know just what you mean,” he said with feeling. “I’m petrified myself.”
“That’s not quite what I was hoping to hear,” I said. “Absolutely bloody petrified,” he repeated for emphasis.
“I was rather counting on you to tell me everything is going to be fine, and that these planes never crash.”
“Oh, no, they crash all the time,” Nick said.
“I know they do, Nick. But I was hoping that you would tell me that somehow in Kenya they don’t and that for some reason that hasn’t occurred to me the world’s most outstanding pilots come here to do charter work.”
Nick didn’t seem to be listening to me any longer. “Crash all the time,” he said. “Poor Richard Leakey lost both his legs in a plane crash in Kenya, you know.”
“I’d heard that,” I said.
“And he was one of the lucky ones,” he added enigmatically.
Dan, also a piteous flier, arrived at the breakfast table just then. He was as white as a sheet, a condition somewhat exacerbated by the fact that he had inadvertently brushed his teeth with sun cream. Then poor Justin Linnane turned up looking similarly ghostly. He was uneasy because he had never been up in a small plane before and now learned that his debut experience was to be in the company of the three most hysterical fliers in Africa. Only Jenny remained serene.
Thus it was that we were to be found an hour later at Malindi Airport, kicking the tyres of, and otherwise closely examining, the single-engine aircraft that was to convey us to CARE’s refugee camp at distant, dusty Dadaab and thence, at the end of the day, to Nairobi.
The plane, I’m pleased to say, was quite new and looked sound, and the pilot, a man of great calmness named Nino, was unquestionably sober and reliable looking. Under questioning he pointed out that he wanted to crash even less than we did since he would have to pay for the plane. I found this immensely reassuring. Best of all it was a beautiful day for flying, the air still and almost cloudless. We were flying into the desert, after all, so the chances of storms were practically nil.
The flight itself proved blissfully uneventful. The engine purred steadily the whole way and no one took a shot at us. By the time we landed in Dadaab I was almost calm.
Dadaab is bang on the equator, in the middle of a dusty orange nowhere, about sixty miles from the Somalia border. There has been a drought there for years, which is evident with every dry scrape of wind. In the early 1990s, refugees from the fighting in Somalia began to stream over the border into northeastern Kenya, and a camp was hastily put together. Nearly a dozen years later it is home to 134,000 people.
The camp consists of three compounds, each a mile or two apart, and when traveling between any two you must be escorted by a truckload of Kenyan soldiers, just in case. The camp has become essentially a city in the desert, with schools and markets and permanent habitations. It has been there so long now that a generation of children has grown to adult-hood without knowing any life other than being behind razor wire and heavy iron gates, and a sense that all the world beyond this snug perimeter offers nothing but danger or indifference. CARE has 175 employees on site. Forty-five percent of its spending in Kenya goes to the camp. Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don’t end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can’t go back to Somalia because it isn’t safe and they can’t go elsewhere in Kenya because Kenya has problems enough of its own without having 134,000 Somalis pitching up in Nairobi or Mombasa, looking for food and work. And so way out in the desert there exists this strange city-that-isn’t-a-city filled with people who have nowhere to go and nothing much to do.
We spent a long day doing all the things you would expect to do at a refugee camp—toured the food distribution centre, visited schools, talked to administrators, learned how water was extracted from the ground and sanitized—but there was a curious lack of urgency about it all. The camp occupants weren’t dying or malnourished or in desperate need of medical attention. They were just normal people like you and me who wanted to be somewhere where they could have a life.
Nearly everyone I spoke to complained of shortages of one kind or another—of work, of food, of teachers, of things to do. There are 28,000 pupils in the camp’s schools, but only 807 desks. There is only one textbook for every 20 students, one classroom for every 75. I talked to a bright young man named James Makuach, one of 357 students preparing to take the Kenyan Schools Certificate exam, a prerequisite for going on to higher education. He told me the school didn’t have the facilities, in particular the scientific equipment, that would allow them to pass the test.
“You have no hope at all?” I said.
“Not much,” he said and gave me a heartbreakingly shy smile.
I couldn’t understand this at all. I asked Nick—demanded really—why conditions weren’t better than this. He looked at me with patient sympathy.
“There are 20 million like this all over Africa, Bill,” he said. “Money only goes so far.” Besides, he went on, dispensing aid is much more complicated than most people realize. It is, for one thing, a fundamental part of aid protocol that you cannot make conditions notably better for refugees than they are for their hosts outside the camps. It wouldn’t be fair and it would breed resentment. “Everybody would want to be a refugee,” Nick said. “In practical terms, you can only do so much.”
“But the kids,” I said. “They have no future.”
“I know,” he said sadly. “I know.”
Later, as we walked through the camp, Dan pointed out a nifty self-closing tap on a standpipe in the school grounds and told me that Nick had designed it, though he was too modest to say so. Nick, it turns out, is a water engineer by training and the tap was one of his first projects in Africa. You can find them all over Africa now, Dan told me.
Interestingly, nearly all the field workers for CARE were trained to do something else. David Sanderson was an architect before he became an aid worker. Adam Koons, whom we would meet in another day or so, was formerly a photographer on Madison Avenue in New York. A fellow working in Uganda for CARE in a previous life designed the round tea bag.
“People who work in the field are different from most of the rest of us,” Dan said as we strolled along. “They live far away from their friends and families in places like this that are generally difficult and often dangerous, trying to help people they don’t know to have better lives. Pretty remarkable really. Could you do that?”
“No,” I said.
“Neither could I.” He was thoughtful for a minute. “But then I’d never have thought of the round teabag either.”
Late in the afternoon we returned to the airstrip for the 90-minute flight to Nairobi. I asked Nino what the weather was like there.
“I’ll let you know when we get closer,” he said vaguely, as if he weren’t sharing all he knew.
Ten minutes before we arrived in Nairobi I found out why he was being coy. Ahead of us was a storm. It looked big. The thing about sitting near the front in a small aircraft is that you can see everything—to left, to right and straight ahead. None of it looked good.
We were over the outer suburbs of Nairobi and some way into our descent before we hit any turbulence—and it wasn’t too bad. It didn’t feel as if the wings were going to fall off or anything. But then the rain came—suddenly and noisily in staccato fashion. It was as if the windscreen were being pounded by wet bullets. Maybe it’s always like that in cockpit and you just don’t know when you are in a separate compartment further back, but this was most assuredly unnerving. Worse, after a minute it became evident that Nino couldn’t see a thing. He began to move his head from spot to spot around the windscreen, putting his nose to the glass, looking for any tiny bit of visibility. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t put the windscreen wiper on, then looked more closely and saw there wasn’t a windscreen wiper. I glanced across at Nick and we shared a single telepathic thought: There’s no windscreen wiper!
Actually two thoughts: There’s no windscreen wiper and we’re all going to die!
Nino was now bobbing around in his seat in the manner of someone who is trying to land an airplane while being attacked by fire ants. It appeared that from looking out the side window he could get a very rough fix on our location, but only very rough evidently because twice he banked very sharply, as if swerving out of the path of a big building or something. This was rapidly becoming worse than my worst nightmare.
But still he pressed on. For one long minute, nothing much happened. We just flew forward in a seemingly straight line, continuously descending. When we were some small distance above the ground—70 or 80 feet, say—and there was still nothing to be seen in front of us, I was pretty comfortably certain that we were going to die in the next few seconds. I remember being appalled, peeved even, but nothing more than that.
And then bang—and I use the word advisedly, of course—right before us, rushing at us at a ridiculously accelerated speed, was a runway. Nino tilted the plane and dropped us with the sort of suddenness that made our hats rise off our heads. We landed hard and decidedly off center, and for a long moment—the one truly frightening moment of the whole episode—it seemed that he wouldn’t be able to keep control, that we would hit the grass and somersault into a thousand pieces. But he managed to hold us steady and after a small eternity we came to a stop just outside a hangar.
“I’m naming my first child Nino,” Dan said quietly.
Nick was staring at his hand and a large piece of fuselage that he seemed to have pulled off in the course of the landing.
Nino took off his headset and turned around beaming. “Sorry about that, chaps,” he said. “Had a little trouble spotting the runway.”
“W-w-why is there no windscreen wiper?” I asked with difficulty.
“They’re no use with a single engine,” he said, pointing to the propeller directly in front. “Best wiper in the world couldn’t keep up with the spray off that thing.”
Somehow this didn’t seem an entirely satisfactory explanation, but I was happy to leave it at that. Besides, I had a sudden overwhelming urge to drink my body weight in alcohol.
And I can tell you this for certain now: however many years are left to me and wherever fate takes me, the only way I will ever be killed by a light aircraft is if one falls on me.
Thursday, October 3
And So to western Kenya. We set off bright and early to drive to Kisumu, Kenya’s third city, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Kisumu is only about 300 kilometers west of Nairobi, but the roads are potholed and slow for much of the way, so we had to allow five hours to get there. I didn’t care. None of us did. We were four feet off the ground and wouldn’t get any higher all day.
The countryside was gorgeous—green and grassy with long views to the rugged Mau Escarpment in one direction and to the green hills of Aberdares National Park and central highlands in the other, all beneath vast blue skies and baking sun. Here and there along the heights overlooking the Rift Valley there were roomy laybys where you could pull off to take in the views, each with 15 or 20 forlorn trinket and souvenir stalls waiting for customers who these days mostly never come. There was wildlife, too—families of baboons dining on road kill along the shoulder, herds of impalas and zebras dotting the grasslands, soda lakes carpeted with thousands of bright pink flamingoes. There was no question that we were in Africa now.
Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on 50 cents a day or less. Curiously, it looked more prosperous than many of the other places we had been. It had a trim, modern central business district and quite a lot of nice housing. There seemed to be more bicycles along the roads and fewer street urchins.
We had come to see the work of Wedco, a small bank— micro-finance institution is the formal term—that has been one of CARE’s great success stories in the region. Wedco began in 1989 with the idea of making small loans to groups of ladies, generally market traders, who previously had almost no access to business credit. The idea was that half a dozen or so female traders would form a business club and take out a small loan, which they would apportion among themselves, to help them expand or improve their businesses. The idea of having a club was to spread the risk. It seemed a slightly loopy idea to many to focus exclusively on females, but it has been a runaway success.
“Our ladies are very shrewd and very hard working,” laughed Peres Oyugi, Kisumu’s branch manager, as we drove to Kisumu’s Jubilee Market to see some of Wedco’s money in action. Ten years ago, she told me,Wedco had loans on its books of 18 million Kenyan shillings—about $250,000. Today its loan portfolio has increased nearly tenfold to over 175 million shillings and it is helping more than 200 groups in Kisumu alone. There are seven other branches spread across the region.
Jubilee Market is an extraordinary place—crowded, noisy, extremely colorful—with large, open-sided halls specializing in wet fish, dried fish, vegetables, nuts and other farm commodities. I had never seen such luscious produce more beautifully arrayed. Every stall was a picture of abundance and sumptuousness, every peanut and tomato and chili more neatly arranged and more richly colored than any I had seen before anywhere. It seemed impossible that people so poor could enjoy such plenty. I asked Adam Koons, CARE’s chief of operations for western Kenya, if it was as good as it looked. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “My wife and I do our own food shopping here. Kenyans haven’t got much money, but they are very particular about their food.”
Beyond the main food halls was a sort of bazaar of dark alleys containing tiny shops—cubicles really—selling everything from bolts of cloth to small electrical items. There I was introduced to several of Wedco’s happily prospering clients, among them a genial but weary-looking woman named Consolata Ododa. Ododa makes a living selling small oddments—batteries, torches, plastic wallets, key rings, playing cards. Like all the women in her group, Ododa works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, then goes home to cook an evening meal for her family, so it’s not exactly a life of luxury. Every two weeks she makes an overnight trip to Nairobi by bus to acquire new stock, returning in time to reopen the stall late the following morning. She had just returned that day from her latest trip, and it was for this reason that she was “a little tired,” she told me. For all this her turnover averages about 3,000 shillings a day—roughly $30—from which she must pay rent, electricity, taxes and interest and principle on her loan. Typically she will clear $6 or $7 for her 12-hour day—hardly a princely sum, but more, she told me, than she had ever dreamed of having before Wedco stepped into her life. And so by such means do people’s lives improve, little by little.
Friday, October 4
Fifty miles or so south of Kisumu is Homa Bay, a listless small city of potholed streets, baking sun and an inescapable air of being at the wrong end of a long road. Most of the drive from Kisumu is along an exceedingly rough and bouncy dirt track. Interestingly, all road maps show it as a first-rate highway. This is because some years ago the World Bank gave money for the road to be paved. In the event, however, some government official or group of government officials decided to spare Kenyan workers the wearying toil of laying tarmac under a hot sun, and pocketed the money instead.
This sort of thing happens quite a lot in Kenya. Once a model of probity and rectitude, after 23 years under the increasingly reviled Daniel arap Moi, Kenya has become a case study in mismanagement and corruption. A group called Transparency International, which monitors global corruption, now ranks it as the sixth least trustworthy nation in the world, ahead of only Bangladesh, Nigeria, Paraguay, Madagascar and Angola. In one year, according to the BBC, $10 billion of public funds went missing in Kenya. Ten billion dollars! In one year! And it didn’t even top the list!
Why institutions like the World Bank and IMF, not to mention our own slumbering governments, allow this to happen is a question I cannot answer, but it has unfortunate consequences for groups like CARE. First, it means that they are left to provide many of the services that any decent government would itself provide. It also means that donations for these services are harder to secure because so many people think that any money sent to Africa goes into the pockets of despots. If anyone ever, ever, ever tries to suggest to you that this is the case, you must poke them in the eyes with something at least as big as a snooker cue, for it just isn’t so.
Money given to aid agencies like CARE—and Oxfam and Save the Children and others beyond enumerating—doesn’t pass through corrupt intermediaries. It goes straight into projects.
Incidentally, Moi is to step down in December 2002 when elections are to be held. The universal hope, it appears, is that things will get better with a new government. “They can’t get worse,” I was told several times.
“It’s not about spending huge amounts of money, but about spending smaller amounts intelligently,” Phillip Makutsa, one of CARE’s project officers in the western province of Nyanza, told me as we bounced over more rough roads en route to the village of Ogongo Tir on the edge of the Lambwe Valley. He was explaining to me CARE’s new philosophy with regard to aid, which was essentially twofold— to make a little go a long way and to help people to help themselves. “It can be as little as narrowing the mouth of communal water containers so that people don’t dip their hands into the water and accidentally contaminate it,” Phillip said. “That one small step alone has produced a 58 percent decline in diarrhoeal outbreaks where implemented,” he added, beaming. We were arriving at Ogongo Tir. “You’ll see what I mean here,” he added.
Ogongo Tir was a scattered village in a green valley, which, thanks to CARE, boasted a new well. It was this that we had come to see. The well, it must be said, wasn’t one of the wonders of the world. It was just a simple long-handled pump of the kind still commonly encountered at camp-grounds. My grandfather had one just like it, dating from about 1900, on his Iowa farm, so this was hardly cutting edge technology. But what a difference it has made to Ogongo Tir’s 32I households.
Before this, one of the village elders told me, during droughts and dry seasons women gathering water had to make a seven-hour round trip to a spring atop a steep and distant hill, setting out from the village at three in the morning in order to be back in time for the day’s other chores. Because of the distance, none could carry more than a single five-gallon jerry can.
Now villagers have only to stroll to a clearing on the village edge to get safe, clean, adequate supplies of water. This was such a big deal to the community that the entire village turned out to greet us. Children sang us songs and their elders made speeches. Long speeches. Impassioned speeches. Speeches in Kiswahile and speeches in English. These were seriously grateful people.
“There’s been a big change in how these things are done,” Nick told me as we were taken on a tour of a nearby vegetable garden, which blossoms even in the dry season thanks to water from the well. “It used to be that we’d build a well for a village or make some other improvement and then move on. Eventually, the pump would break or something would go wrong and the people wouldn’t know what to do. They’d come back to us and ask us to fix it because they thought of it as our well.
“So the idea now is that we help them build the well, but then the village takes complete responsibility for it. They form a committee and run it as a kind of business. They make a small charge for anyone who takes water so that they then have a reserve fund for when they need to make a repair or eventually dig a new well.”
“And has it worked?” I asked.
“Brilliantly, everywhere we’ve done it. It’s amazing how long it took aid agencies to figure out that people really, really don’t want dependency. They want to help themselves.”
“Only natural,” I observed wisely.
“Only natural,” he agreed.
We returned to our vehicles and plunged deeper into the broad and comely Lambwe Valley. At length we stopped at a small farm, where we met a sweet and eager young farmer named William Gumbo. Gumbo owns four acres of good but semi-arid land in the most gorgeous setting in the very heart of the valley. It was almost uncannily reminiscent of Tuscany or Provence—a place of dry, warm, shimmering beauty. I can’t tell you how much I wish you could have met William Gumbo, for he was an inspiration.
Until 1999 Gumbo scratched a living raising maize and millet and a few chickens. Then CARE stepped into his life. As part of its Dak Achana (Kiswahili for “healthy households”) programme, it introduced him to a couple of agricultural specialists, who showed him ways to increase his yields and diversify crops. Today he runs a model farm—a four-acre outburst of verdant plenty in the midst of a dry, bare valley. He grows peas, tomatoes, bananas, pineapples, passion fruit, mangos and much else. Only sweet potatoes have been a failure: some livestock broke through a fence and gobbled them up.
William Gumbo loves his farm. He carries a hardback ledger in which he records every detail of his plants’ lives. Ask him about his banana trees and he will search through the book and tell you that he planted 310 of them on 20 April 2001, and then show you a weekly chronicle of their progress since. Everything is grown from seeds or cuttings. Nothing has been nursed on from a pot. It’s all from scratch.
He showed us a grove of eucalyptus trees—I,200 in all— that he has coaxed into being from seed. After a year and a half they are already 15 feet tall. In another year and a half they will provide excellent wood for timber and poles. The same amount of land devoted to maize would produce about 16,000 Kenyan shillings in income over three years. The eucalypts in the same period could produce as much as 200,000 shillings of income—over $2,500, a sum that most Kenyan farmers would find almost inconceivable.
The idea of the project is that CARE helps Gumbo create a model farm, then moves elsewhere. Gumbo, meanwhile, teaches what he has learned to his neighbours. Already he has helped 300 other farmers in the district.
The Lambwe Valley is not an easy place to prosper. It has long been notorious as one of the worst sites in east Africa for tse-tse fly. The fly populations have been much reduced in recent years, but they still take a good number of animals. The valley is also cruelly drought prone. As of early October, it hadn’t seen rain in over five months, so farming here will always be an uphill battle. Even if all goes well, William Gumbo will still be poor. His house has a dirt floor and it will be a very long time before he is luxuriating in shag carpets. But he will probably have enough to buy his kids school uniforms—a prerequisite for attending even state schools in Kenya—or textbooks or pencils or a birthday present.
William Gumbo, in short, is a happy man and he has a future. Surely every human being is entitled to at least that much.
Saturday, October 5
Well, that’s pretty much it, I’m afraid. We had another day in the countryside before we returned to Nairobi and flew home. We visited a tea plantation in Kericho, lunched with some jolly white farmers and toured a huge flower growing operation on the shores of Lake Naivasha, but for me the trip ended with the happy villagers at Ogongo Tir and their beloved well, and with the heroic William Gumbo.
Obviously there is only so much you can learn about a country in eight days. We didn’t have time even to visit many of CARE’s projects in Kenya, and Kenya is only a small part of what it does. But I saw enough to realize that Kenya is a terrific country that is just full of William Gumbos and Consolata Ododas (the lady, you will recall, selling oddments at Kisumu’s market) and Jillani Ngallas (the young man who longs to be a paleontologist but probably will never make it) and 30 million other people just as individual and real. I don’t suppose they can all be saintly and deserving, but they do have one thing in common with the rest of us: they are human beings. And, like us, they get only one life apiece, so naturally they tend to appreciate it—appreciate it very much, I believe—when people from a more comfortable part of the world take the trouble to help them make theirs better. For that’s what CARE does, you see. It makes lives better, in 64 countries, thousands of times every day.
I don’t know if you are fully aware of it, but in acquiring this slender volume you didn’t actually buy a book. You made a generous donation to a worthy cause and got a free book in return, which isn’t quite the same thing. It’s much nobler. On behalf of CARE, thank you.
As I am sure the jacket conspicuously notes, my publishers, Transworld in Britain and Broadway Books in the United States, are also not taking a penny of profit from this—I know, I can hardly believe it myself—which means that a great many people behind the scenes worked hard for free to make this happen, and at the very busiest time of their working year. I think they deserve a special thanks, and most of your future purchases.
As for me and the rest of us in our party, well, we’re very grateful too—grateful to the CARE people in Kenya for showing us around, and to you for your support. And best of all, not once in the week did we get rubbed with dung.
CARE SAYS THANKYOU ...
. . . for buying Bill Bryson’s African Diary. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.
This book was made possible through the generosity and hard work of many people—from CARE staff and the Kenyan communities they serve, to the staff of Broadway Books and Transworld Publishers.
And, of course, this book would not have been possible without Bill Bryson, one of the world’s finest travel writers, who withstood a punishing schedule to produce his first book on Africa, the royalties from which he is donating to CARE.
THE FACTS ABOUT POVERTY
Today, nearly half of humanity struggles to survive on less than $2 a day. More than 30 countries are gripped by armed conflict. AIDS threatens to take as many lives as all the wars of the twentieth century. Our world is indeed faced with complex challenges.
Yet every day, CARE sees victories over poverty that are neither captured by global statistics nor covered on the nightly news: A farmer in Malawi who grows enough food to feed his family. A young girl in Afghanistan who becomes the first in her family to attend school. A healthy child who is protected against preventable illnesses such as polio.
While people in poor communities face daunting odds, they also possess the determination and capability to improve their lives and bring us all closer to a world where poverty has been overcome.
CARE
CARE is one of the world’s leading international poverty-fighting organizations. With more than 55 years of experience, CARE understands the depth and scope of poverty. And we have no doubt that something can be done about it. Our integrated programs in more than 60 countries not only provide immediate assistance to families in need, they also work with communities to create long-term solutions to poverty.
We believe that together we can make the world better, more stable and safer for all. We take this goal seriously. So it’s not enough to simply alleviate the symptoms of poverty. CARE works with communities to find the source of the problem and solve it. For good.
MOVING AHEAD WITH CARE
Our efforts to overcome poverty depend on the support of people like you—people who care about the world in which they live. With your help, we can create lasting, positive change in communities around the world.
CARE is an effective and efficient steward of your investment. We direct 90 percent of our expended resources toward an array of poverty-fighting programs. And on average, for every $1 in private support raised, CARE can leverage another $5 in support from public sources.
To learn more about CARE and how to join our efforts to overcome poverty, please visit CARE’s global homepage, www.care.org.
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
The Lost Continent
Mother Tongue
Neither Here nor There
Made in America
Notes from a Small Island
A Walk in the Woods
I’m a Stranger Here Myself
In a Sunburned Country
Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words
Go to the Next Page to Read Chapter 7 from
Bill Bryson’s At Home
Coming in October 2010
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
THE DRAWING ROOM
I
If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition. Comfortable meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole’s day no one did.
Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older withdrawing room, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing room was challenged in more refined circles by the French salon, which was sometimes anglicized to saloon, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that saloon came first to signify a room for socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile. Salon, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places associated with artistic endeavors before being appropriated (from about 1910) by providers of hair care and beauty treatments. Parlor, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French parler, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.
Drawing room is the name used by Edward Tull on his floorplan of the Old Rectory, and almost certainly is the term employed by the well-bred Mr. Marsham, though he was probably in a minority even then. By mid-century it was being supplanted in all but the most genteel circles by sitting room, a term first appearing in English in 1806. A later challenger was lounge, which originally signified a type of chair or sofa, then a jacket for relaxing in, and finally, from 1881, a room. In America, living room came into being in about 1870, and quite rapidly drove parlor out of use there, but failed to catch on elsewhere.
Assuming he was a conventional sort of fellow, Mr. Marsham would have strived to make his drawing room the most comfortable room in the house, with the softest and finest furnishings. In practice, however, it was probably anything but comfortable for much of the year, since it has just one fireplace, which could do no more than warm a small, central part of the room. Even with a good fire going, I can attest, it is possible in the depths of winter to stand across the room and see your breath.
Though the drawing room became the focus of comfort in the home, the story doesn’t actually start there; it doesn’t start in the house at all. It starts outdoors, a century or so before Mr. Marsham’s birth, with a simple discovery that would make landed families like his very rich and allow him one day to build himself a handsome rectory. The discovery was merely this: land didn’t have to be rested regularly to retain its fertility. It was not the most staggering of insights, but it changed the world.
Traditionally, most English farmland was divided into long strips called furlongs and each furlong was left fallow for one season in every three—sometimes one season in two—so that it could recover its ability to produce healthy crops.* This meant that in any given year at least one-third of the nation’s farmland stood idle. In consequence, there wasn’t sufficient feed to keep large numbers of animals alive through the winter, so landowners had no choice but to slaughter most of their stock each autumn and face a long, lean period till spring.
Then English farmers discovered something that Dutch farmers had known for a long time: if turnips, clover, or one or two other amenable crops were sown on the idle fields, they miraculously refreshed the soil and produced a bounty of winter fodder into the bargain. It was the infusion of nitrogen that did it, though no one would understand that for nearly two hundred years. What was understood, and very much appreciated, was that crop rotation transformed agricultural fortunes dramatically. Moreover, because more animals lived through the winter, they produced heaps of additional manure, and these glorious, gratis ploppings enriched the soil even further.
It is hard to exaggerate what a miracle all this seemed. Before the eighteenth century, agriculture in Britain lurched from crisis to crisis. An academic named W. G. Hoskins calculated (in 1964) that between 1480 and 1700, one harvest in four was bad, and almost one in five was catastrophically bad. Now, thanks to the simple expedient of crop rotation, agriculture was able to settle into a continuous, more or less reliable prosperity. It was this long golden age that gave so much of the countryside the air of prosperous comeliness it enjoys still today, and allowed the likes of Mr. Marsham to embrace that gratifying new commodity: comfort.
Farmers also benefited from a new wheeled contraption invented in about 1700 by Jethro Tull, a farmer and agricultural thinker in Berkshire. Called a seed drill, it allowed seeds to be planted directly into the soil rather than broadcast by hand. Seed was expensive, and Tull’s new drill reduced the amount needed from three or four bushels per acre to under one; and because the seeds were planted at even depths in neat rows, more of them sprouted successfully, so yields improved dramatically, too, from between twenty and forty bushels an acre to as much as eighty.
The new vitality was also reflected in breeding programs. Nearly all the great cattle breeds—Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, Aberdeen Angus, Ayrshire*—were eighteenth-century creations. Sheep likewise were successfully manipulated to become the bundles of unnatural fleeciness we see today. A medieval sheep gave about a pound and a half of wool; re-engineered eighteenth-century sheep gave up to nine pounds. Underneath all that lovely fleece, sheep were gratifyingly plumper, too. Between 1700 and 1800, the average weight of sheep sold at Smithfield Market in London more than doubled, from thirty-eight pounds to eighty. Beef cattle expanded similarly. Dairy yields went up, too.
All this was not without cost, however. To make the new systems of production work, it was necessary to amalgamate small fields into large ones and move the peasant farmers off the land. This enclosure movement, in which small fields that had formerly supported many were converted into much larger enclosed fields that enriched a few, made farming immensely lucrative for those with large holdings—and soon in many areas that was almost the only kind of holding there was. Enclosure had been going on slowly for centuries, but it gathered pace between 1750 and 1830, when some six million acres of British farmland were enclosed. Enclosure was hard on the displaced peasant farmers, but it did leave them and their descendants conveniently available to move to towns and become the toiling masses of the new Industrial Revolution—which was also just beginning and was funded to a very large extent by the surplus wealth enjoyed by the ever-richer landowners.
Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed for industry. This didn’t always represent a notable advance in beauty—at one time in the eighteenth century, eighty-five open-cast coal mines could be seen from Chatsworth House, or so it has been said—but it did translate into gratifying heaps of lucre. Still others made money from leasing land to railways or building canals and controlling rights of way. The Duke of Bridgewater earned annual returns of 40 percent—and really returns don’t get much better than that—from a canal monopoly in the West Country. All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest—almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked. Many people were born into a world in which they had to do virtually nothing with their wealth but stack it. The third Earl of Burlington, to take one example of many, owned vast estates in Ireland—some forty-two thousand acres in all—and never visited the country. Eventually he was made lord treasurer of Ireland and still never visited it.
This wealthy elite and their offspring covered the British countryside with stout and rambling expressions of this new joie de richesse. By one count, at least 840 large country houses were built in England between 1710 and the end of the century—”dispersed like great rarity plums in a vast pudding of a country,” in the exuberant words of Horace Walpole.
Extraordinary houses need extraordinary people to design and build them, and perhaps none was more extraordinary—or at least more unexpected—than Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726).* Vanbrugh came from a large family—he was one of nineteen children—that was well-to-do and of Dutch extraction, though they had been settled in England for nearly half a century by the time Vanbrugh himself was born.
“A most sweet-natur’d gentleman, and pleasant,” wrote the poet Nicholas Rowe of Vanbrugh, who seems to have been well liked by everyone who met him (with the notable exception of the Duchess of Marlborough, as we shall see). A portrait of him by Sir Godfrey Kneller in the National Portrait Gallery in London, made when Vanbrugh was about forty, shows an agreeable man with a pink, well-fed, rather ordinary face framed—indeed,all but overwhelmed—by a periwig of baroque magnificence, as was the fashion of the day.
For the first three decades of his life he displayed no particular sense of direction. He worked in a family wine business, went to India as an agent for the East India Company—then still a fairly new and undistinguished enterprise—and finally took up soldiering, though without much distinction there either. Sent to France, he was arrested as a spy almost as soon as he stepped ashore and spent nearly five years in prison, albeit in reasonable, gentlemanly comfort.
Prison appears to have had a galvanizing effect on him, for upon his return to England he became with remarkable swiftness a celebrated playwright, producing in rapid succession two of the most popular comedies of his day, The Relapse and The Provok’d Wife. Featuring characters with names like Fondlewife, Lord Foppington, Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and Sir John Brute, the plays may seem just a touch heavy-handed to us but were the height of drollery in that overdone and highly fragranced age. It was pretty risqué stuff. One scandalized member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners said that Vanbrugh “had debauch’d the stage beyond the looseness of all former times.” Others loved his plays for exactly the same reasons. The poet Samuel Rogers thought him “almost as great a genius as ever lived.”
Altogether Vanbrugh would write or adapt ten works for the stage, but meanwhile, and with no less startling abruptness, he also turned his talents to architecture. Where this impulse came from was as much a mystery to his contemporaries as it is to us. All that is known is that in 1701, at the age of thirty-five, he began work on one of the grandest houses ever built in England, Castle Howard in Yorkshire. How he persuaded his friend Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle—described by one architectural historian as “rather nondescript but obviously uncontrollably wealthy”—to underwrite this seemingly insane ambition is no less uncertain. This was not just a big house, it was a place that was positively and determinedly palatial, built “on a scale previously the prerogative of royalty,” in the words of Vanbrugh’s biographer Kerry Downes. Clearly Carlisle saw something in Vanbrugh’s rough sketches, and Vanbrugh, it must be said, did have the backup of a real architect of undoubted gifts, Nicholas Hawks-moor, who had twenty years of experience but was oddly content to work as Vanbrugh’s assistant. It seems also that Vanbrugh may have worked for free. (No indication of money changing hands has ever been found—and on both sides these were men who kept track of such things.) In any case, Carlisle dismissed the distinguished architect he had been planning to use, William Talman, and gave the novice Vanbrugh free rein.
Vanbrugh and Carlisle were both members of a secretive society known as the Kit-Cat Club, an organization of Whiggish* disposition that had been founded more or less exclusively to ensure the Hanoverian succession—the dynastic change that guaranteed that all future British monarchs would be Protestant even if, in the short term, they were not notably British. That the Kit-Cats achieved this aim was no small accomplishment since their candidate, George I, spoke no English, had almost no admirable qualities, and was by one count no better than fifty-eighth in line to the throne. Beyond this one piece of political maneuvering, the club operated with such discretion that almost nothing is known about it. One of its founding members was a pastry chef named Christopher—or “Kit”—Cat. Kit-cat was also the name of his famous mutton pies, so whether the club was named for him or his pies has been a matter of debate in certain very small circles for three hundred years. The club lasted from only about 1696 to 1720—specific details are unknown—and total membership was only about fifty, of whom two-thirds were peers of the realm. Five members—Lords Carlisle, Halifax, and Scarborough and the Dukes of Manchester and Marlborough—commissioned work from Vanbrugh. Membership also included the prime minister Robert Walpole (father of Horace), the journalists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and the playwright William Congreve.
At Castle Howard, Vanbrugh didn’t exactly ignore the classical proprieties; he just buried them under a kind of kudzu of baroque ornamentation. A Vanbrugh structure is always like no other, but Castle Howard is, as it were, unusually unusual. It had a large number of formal rooms—thirteen on one floor—but few bedrooms: nothing like the amount that would normally be expected. Many rooms were oddly shaped or poorly lit. Much of the external detailing is unusual, if not actually erratic. The columns on one side of the house are simple Doric, but those on the other are a more ornate Corinthian. (Vanbrugh argued, with some logic, that no one could see the two sides at the same time.) The most striking characteristic of all, for at least a quarter century, was that the house was built without its west wing—though this was not in fact Vanbrugh’s fault. Carlisle got distracted and neglected to put up the west wing, leaving the house conspicuously unfinished. When the wing was finally built, twenty-five years later by another party, it was in an entirely different style, so that the visitor today is met with a baroque east wing as Vanbrugh intended and an inescapably unmatching Palladian west wing that pleased a later owner and hardly anyone else.
Castle Howard’s most famous feature, its domed crown (formally a lantern, from a Greek word meaning “to admit light”) over the entrance hall, was a late addition, and is strikingly out of scale with the building beneath it. It is too tall and too thin. It looks as if it were designed for another structure altogether. One architectural critic noted, diplomatically, that “at close quarters it does not fit very logically on to the building below.” It was at least novel. The only other domed structure in England at the time was Christopher Wren’s new St. Paul’s Cathedral. No house anywhere had ever had anything like it.
Castle Howard is in short a very fine property, but fine in a way that is entirely its own. The dome may be slightly odd, but Castle Howard would be nothing without it. We can say that with unusual confidence because for twenty years Castle Howard was without it. Late on the night of November 9, 1940, a fire was discovered in the east wing. In those days the house had just one telephone, and the phone melted like chocolate before anyone could get to it. So someone had to run to the gatehouse, a mile away, and call the fire department from there. By the time the fire crew arrived from Malton, six miles distant, two hours had passed and much of the house was lost. The dome had crumpled in the heat and fallen into the house. Castle Howard was domeless for the next twenty years, and it looked all right—it was still stately, still imposing, still stolidly grand—but it had lost its perk. When the dome was finally restored in the early 1960s, it became instantly and peculiarly endearing once again.
Despite his limited experience, Vanbrugh now landed the commission for one of the most important houses ever built in Great Britain, Blenheim Palace, that colossal explosion of magnificence at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Blenheim was intended to be a gift from the nation to the Duke of Marlborough for his victory over the French in the Battle of Blindheim (somehow anglicized into Blenheim), in Bavaria, in 1704. The estate came with twenty-two thousand acres of prime land, which brought an income of £6,000 a year, a hale sum for the time but not, alas, nearly enough to pay for a house on the scale of Blenheim—and Blenheim was so big as to be effectively off any scale.
It contained three hundred rooms and sprawled over seven acres.* A frontage of 250 feet for a stately home was enormous; at Blenheim the frontage was to be 856 feet. It was the greatest monument to vanity Britain had ever seen. Every inch of it was covered in decorative stony sumptuousness. It was grander than any royal palace and so, not surprisingly, very, very expensive. The duke, a fellow member of the Kit-Cat Club, seems to have gotten along with Vanbrugh well enough, but, after agreeing the general principles of the thing, he went off to fight more wars, leaving domestic arrangements in the hands of his wife, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. She thus oversaw most of the work, and from the start she and Vanbrugh did not get along. At all.
Work began in the summer of 1705 and was trouble from the start. Many costly adjustments had to be made along the way. The principal entrance had to be changed when a cottage owner refused to move, so the main gate had to be located in an odd place at the back of the town, requiring visitors to pass along the high street, turn a corner, and enter the grounds through what even today feels oddly like a tradesman’s entrance (albeit rather a grand one).
Blenheim was budgeted to cost £40,000. Ultimately it cost about £300,000. This was unfortunate, as the Marlboroughs were notoriously parsimonious. The duke was so cheap that he refused to dot his i‘s when he wrote, to save on ink. It was never clear who was to pay for the work—Queen Anne, the treasury, or the Marlboroughs themselves. The duchess and Queen Anne had a close, rather strange, and just possibly intimate relationship. When alone they gave each other odd pet names—”Mrs. Morley” and “Mrs. Freeman”—to avoid any awkwardness arising from the fact that one of them was regal and the other was not. Unfortunately, the building of Blenheim coincided with a cooling of their affections, which added to the uncertainty of financial responsibility. Things grew more complicated still after the queen died in 1714 and was replaced by a king who felt no particular affection for, or debt to, the Marlboroughs. Many of the builders went unpaid for years as the disputes dragged on, and most eventually got only a fraction of what they were owed. Building work ceased altogether for four years, from 1712 to 1716, and many of the unpaid workers were understandably loath to return when work resumed. Vanbrugh himself didn’t get paid until 1725—almost exactly twenty years after work started.
Even when things were moving along, Vanbrugh and the duchess squabbled endlessly. She thought the palace “too big, too dark and too martial.” She accused Vanbrugh of extravagance and insubordination, and became implacably convinced that he was a bad thing. In 1716, she dismissed him altogether—though at the same time instructing the workmen to stay faithful to his plans. When Vanbrugh came with his wife in 1725 to see the finished building—a building on which he had lavished some two-thirds of his architectural career and one-third of his life—he was informed at the gate that the duchess had left standing instructions that he was not to be admitted to the grounds. So he never saw his finished masterwork except as a shimmer in the distance. Eight months later he was dead.
Like Castle Howard, Blenheim is in a baroque style, but even more so. Its roofline is a festive eruption of orbs and urns and other upright embellishments. Many people hated its monumental scale and ostentation. The Earl of Ailesbury dismissed it as “one mass of stone without taste or relish.” Alexander Pope, after exhaustively enumerating its failings, concluded: “In a word, it is a most expensive absurdity.” The Duke of Shrewsbury dismissed it as “a great quarry of stones above ground.” A wag named Abel Evans wrote a mock epitaph for Vanbrugh:
Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee.
Blenheim is a gloriously overwrought piece of work without question, but transfixing nonetheless, and the scale is so off the chart that it can hardly fail to awe the first-time visitor. It is hard to believe that anyone would want to live in such an oppressive vastness, and in fact the Marl-boroughs barely did. They didn’t move in until 1719, and the duke died just two years later.
Whatever one thought of Vanbrugh and his creations, the age of the celebrity architect had begun.*
Before Vanbrugh’s day, architects weren’t much celebrated. Generally, fame went to those who paid for the houses, not those who designed them. Hardwick Hall, which we encountered in Chapter 3, was one of the great buildings of its age, yet it is merely supposed that Robert Smythson was the architect. It is a pretty good supposition, for all kinds of reasons, but there is no actual proof of it. Smythson was in fact the first man to be called an architect—or nearly to be called an architect—on a monument of about 1588, in which he is described as “architect or and survayor.” But as with so many others of his era, very little is known about his early life, including where he was born and when. He makes his first appearance in the records at Longleat House at Wiltshire in 1568, when he was already in his thirties and a master mason. Where he was before that is completely unknown.
Even after architecture became a recognized profession, most practitioners came from other backgrounds. Inigo Jones was a designer of theatrical productions, Christopher Wren an astronomer, Robert Hooke a scientist, Vanbrugh a soldier and playwright, William Kent a painter and interior designer. As a formal profession, architecture was actually very late developing. Compulsory examinations were not introduced until 1882 in Britain, and architecture wasn’t offered anywhere as a full-time academic discipline until 1895.
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, domestic architecture was getting a lot of respect and attention, and for a time no one had more of both than Robert Adam. If Vanbrugh was the first celebrity architect, Adam was the greatest. Born in 1728 in Scotland, the son of an architect, he was one of a quartet of brothers who all became successful architects, though Robert was the undoubted genius of the family and the one remembered by history. The period from 1755 to 1785 is sometimes called the Age of Adam.
A painting of Adam in the National Portrait Gallery in London, made in about 1770 when he was in his early forties, shows a kindly looking man in a powdered gray wig, but in fact Adam was not a particularly adorable fellow. Arrogant and egotistical, he treated his employees poorly, paying them little and keeping them in a kind of perpetual servitude. He fined them severely if they were caught doing any work other than for him, even a sketch for their own amusement. Adam’s clients, however, venerated his abilities and for thirty years simply couldn’t give him enough work. The Adam brothers became a kind of architectural industry. They owned quarries, a timber business, brickworks, a company for making stucco, and much else. At one point they employed two thousand people. They designed not just houses but every object within them—furniture, fireplaces, carpets, beds, lamps, and all else down to incidental objects like doorknobs, bell pulls, and inkstands.
Adam’s designs were intense—sometimes overwhelming—and gradually he fell out of favor. He had an inescapable weakness for overdecoration. To walk into an Adam room is rather like walking into a large, overfrosted cake. Indeed one of his contemporary critics called him “a Pastry Cook.” By the late 1780s, Adam was being denounced as “sugary and effeminate” and had fallen so far out of fashion that he retreated to his native Scotland, where he died in 1792. By 1831, he was so thoroughly forgotten that the influential Lives of the Most Eminent British Architects didn’t mention him at all. The banishment didn’t last terribly long, however. By the 1860s, his reputation was undergoing a revival, which continues now, though these days he is remembered more for his rich interiors than for his architecture.
The one thing all buildings had in common through Adam’s day was a rigorous devotion to symmetry. Vanbrugh, to be sure, didn’t entirely achieve symmetry at Castle Howard, but that was largely accidental. Elsewhere, however, symmetry was adhered to as an immutable law of design. Every wing had to have a matching wing, whether it was needed or not, and every window and pediment to one side of the main entrance had to be exactly mirrored by windows and pediments on the other side regardless of what went on behind them. The result often was the building of wings that no one really wanted. Not until the nineteenth century did this absurdity begin to end, and it was a remarkable property in Wiltshire—one of the most extraordinary ever built—that started the process.
It was called Fonthill Abbey, and it was the creation of two strange and fascinating men: William Beckford and the architect James Wyatt. Beckford was fabulously rich. His family owned plantations all across Jamaica and had dominated the West Indian sugar trade for a hundred years. Beckford’s doting mother made sure her son enjoyed every advantage in his upbringing. The eight-year-old Wolfgang Mozart was brought in to give him piano lessons. Sir William Chambers, the king’s architect, taught him to draw. Beckford’s wealth was so inexhaustibly great that when he came into his inheritance on his twenty-first birthday, he spent £40,000—an obscenely colossal sum—on the party. Byron in a poem called him “England’s wealthiest son,” probably rightly.
In 1784, Beckford became the centerpiece of the most spectacularly juicy scandal of his age when it emerged that he was involved in a pair of tempestuous, wildly dangerous dalliances. One was with Louisa Beckford, the wife of his first cousin. At the same time, he also fell for a slim and delicate youth named William Courtenay, the future ninth Earl of Devon, who was generally agreed to be the most beautiful boy in England. For a few torrid and presumably exhausting years, Beckford maintained both relationships, often under the same roof. But in the autumn of 1784 there was a sudden rupture. Beckford received or discovered a note in Courtenay’s hand that threw him into a fit of jealous rage. No record exists of what the note said, but it provoked Beckford into intemperate action. He went to Courtenay’s room and, in the slightly confused words of one of the other houseguests, “horsewhipped him, which created a noise, and the door being opened, Courtenay was discovered in his shirt, and Beckford in some posture or other—Strange story.”
Indeed.
The particular misfortune here was that Courtenay was the darling of his family—he was the only boy among fourteen siblings—and shockingly youthful. He was sixteen at the time of the incident, but may have been as young as ten when he fell under Beckford’s unwholesome sway. This was not a matter that Courtenay’s family would ever let drop, and we may take it for granted that Beckford’s cuckolded cousin was less than jubilant, too. Disgraced beyond any hope of redemption, Beckford fled to the continent. There he traveled widely and wrote, in French, a gothic novel called Vathek: An Arabian Tale, which is virtually unreadable now but was much admired in its day.
Then, in 1796, his disgrace nowhere near over, Beckford did a wholly unexpected thing. He returned to England and announced a plan to tear down the family mansion in Wiltshire, Fonthill Splendens, which was only about forty years old, and build a new house in its place—and not just any house but the largest house in England since Blenheim. It was a strange thing to do, for he had no prospect of ever filling it with company. The architect he selected for this slightly demented exercise was James Wyatt.
Wyatt is a curiously neglected figure. His only substantial biography, by Antony Dale, was published over half a century ago. He would perhaps be more famous but for the fact that so many of his buildings no longer exist. Today he is remembered more for what he destroyed than what he built.
Born in Staffordshire, the son of a farmer, Wyatt was drawn to architecture as a young man and spent six years in Italy studying architectural drawing. In 1770, aged just twenty-four, he designed the Pantheon, an exhibition hall and assembly room, loosely modeled on the ancient building of the same name in Rome, which occupied a prime site on Oxford Street in London for 160 years. Horace Walpole thought it “the most beautiful edifice in England.” Unfortunately, Marks and Spencer didn’t and in 1931 tore it down to make way for a new store.
Wyatt was an architect of talent and distinction—under George III he was appointed Surveyor of the Office of Works, in effect official architect to the nation—but a perennial shambles as a human being. He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years. When sober, however, he was much liked and widely praised for his charm, good nature, and architectural vision. A bust of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London shows him clean shaven (and indeed clean, a slightly unusual condition for him), with a very full head of hair and a face that seems curiously mournful or perhaps just slightly hungover.
Despite his shortcomings, he became the most sought-after architect of his day. However, he took on more commissions than he could manage and seldom gave satisfactory attention to anyone, to the endless exasperation of his clients. “If he can get with a large fire and have a bottle by him, he cares for nothing else,” wrote one of his many frustrated customers.
“There is an overwhelming consensus of opinion,” observed his biographer Dale, “that Wyatt had three outstanding faults: an entire lack of business capability, the complete incapacity for constant or intensiveapplication . . . and utter improvidence.” And these were the words of a sympathetic observer. Wyatt was, in short, feckless and impossible. A client named William Windham stuck it out for eleven years on a job that should have taken a fraction of the time. “A person has some right to feel impatient,” Windham wearily wrote his absent architect at one point, “finding the principal rooms of his house near uninhabitable because he has not been able to obtain from you what would not be the work of a couple of hours.” To be a Wyatt client was to be long-suffering.
Yet Wyatt’s career was both successful and remarkably productive. Over a span of forty years, he built or refashioned a hundred country houses, extravagantly reworked five cathedrals, and did much to change the face of British architecture—not always, it must be said, for the good. His treatment of cathedrals was particularly rash and sweeping. A critic named John Carter was so exercised by Wyatt’s predilection for ripping out ancient interiors that he dubbed him “the Destroyer” and devoted 212 essays in the Gentleman’s Magazine—essentially his whole career—to attacking Wyatt’s style and character.
At Durham Cathedral, Wyatt had plans to surmount the building with a mighty spire. This never came to pass, which is perhaps no bad thing, for at Fonthill Wyatt would soon show that there were few places more dangerous to be than under a Wyatt tower. He also wished to sweep away the ancient Galilee Chapel, the last resting place of the Venerable Bede and one of the great achievements of English Norman architecture. Happily, that plan was rejected, too.
Beckford was enthralled by Wyatt’s dashing genius but driven to sputtering fury by his unreliability. Still, he somehow managed to keep the wayward architect focused enough to draw a plan, and work started shortly before the turn of the century.
Everything at Fonthill was designed on a fantastic scale. Windows stood fifty feet high. Staircases were as wide as they were long. The front door rose to a height of thirty feet but was made to seem even taller by Beckford’s practice of employing dwarf doormen. Eighty-foot curtains hung from the four arches in the Octagon, a central chamber from which radiated four long arms. The view down the central corridor stretched for over three hundred feet. The dining room table—Beckford its only occupant night after night—was fifty feet long. Every ceiling was lost in a distant gloom of hammerbeams. Fonthill was very possibly the most exhausting residence ever built—and all for a man who lived alone and was known everywhere as “the man on whom no neighbour would call.” To preserve his privacy, Beckford built a formidable wall, known as the Barrier, around the estate. It was twelve feet high, twelve miles long, and surmounted by iron spikes to deter trespassers.
The Great Western Hall, leading to the Grand Saloon or Octagon, at Fonthill Abbey
Among the additional, incidental planned structures was a mighty tomb, 125 feet long, in which his coffin would be placed on a dais 25 feet above the ground, so that, he believed, no worms could ever get to him.
Fonthill was deliberately and riotously asymmetrical—”architectural anarchy” in the words of the historian Simon Thurley—and rendered in an ornate Gothic style that made it look like a cross between a medieval cathedral and Dracula’s castle. Wyatt didn’t invent neo-Gothicism. That distinction goes to Horace Walpole for his house Strawberry Hill, in outer London. Gothick, as it was sometimes spelled to distinguish it from the genuine medieval stuff, originally signaled not an architectural style but a type of gloomy, overwrought novel, and Walpole invented that too with The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Strawberry Hill, however, was a fairly cautious, picturesque sort of thing—a more or less conventional house with some Gothic tracery and other embellishments attached. Wyatt’s Gothic creations were vastly darker and heavier. They had looming towers and romantic spires and jumbled rooflines that were studiously asymmetrical, so that they looked as if the whole structure had grown organically over centuries. It was a kind of Hollywood imagining of the past, long before there was a Hollywood. Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt’s houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.* They dripped it.
In his obsession to get the project completed Beckford kept up to five hundred men working round the clock, but things constantly went wrong. Fonthill’s tower, rising to a height of 280 feet, was the tallest ever put on a private house, and it was a nightmare. Rashly, Wyatt used a new kind of rendering called Parker’s Roman cement, invented by a Reverend James Parker of Gravesend, yet another of that inquisitive breed of clergymen whom we encountered at the outset of the book. What impulse brought the Reverend Mr. Parker to the world of building materials is unknown, but his idea was to produce a quick-drying cement of the type once used by the Romans, from a recipe since lost. Unfortunately, his cement had little inherent strength and, if not mixed exactly correctly, tended to fall apart in chunks—as it did now at Fonthill. Appalled, Beckford found his mighty abbey coming to pieces even as it went up. Twice it collapsed during construction. Even when fully erect, it creaked and groaned ominously.
To Beckford’s boundless exasperation, Wyatt was often either away drunk or working on other projects. Just as things were literally falling apart at Fonthill and the five hundred workers were either running for their lives or twiddling their thumbs awaiting instructions, Wyatt was engaged in a massive, abortive project to build King George III a new palace at Kew. Why George III wanted a new palace at Kew is a reasonable question, as he had a very good one there already, but Wyatt went ahead and designed a formidable edifice (nicknamed “the Bastille” because of its forbidding looks), one of the first buildings anywhere to use cast iron as a structural material.
We don’t know what the new palace looked like, because no reproduction of it exists, but it must have been something. It was made completely of cast iron except for doors and floorboards—a design that would have given it all the charm and comfort of a cooking pot. Unfortunately, as the building rose beside the Thames, the king began to lose his sight and his interest in things he couldn’t see. Also, he never liked Wyatt much. So, with the building half finished and more than £100,000 wasted, work was stopped ten years after it began and never resumed. The structure stood empty and uncompleted for years until a new king, George IV, finally had it pulled down.
Throughout their fractious relationship, Beckford bombarded Wyattwith outraged letters. “What putrid inn, what stinking tavern or pox ridden brothel hides your hoary and glutinous limbs?” ran one typical inquiry. His pet name for Wyatt was “Bagasse” (pimp). Every letter was a screed of rage and inventive insult. Wyatt was, to be sure, maddening. Once he left Fonthill to go to London, ostensibly on urgent business, but got only three miles, to another property owned by Beckford, where he fell in with another boozy guest. A week later Beckford discovered them there together, insensate and surrounded by empty bottles.
The final cost of Fonthill Abbey is unknown, but in 1801 an informed observer suggested that Beckford had already spent £242,000—enough to build two Crystal Palaces—and the building was less than half done. Beckford moved into the abbey in the summer of 1807 even though it was uncompleted. There was no comfort in it at all. “Sixty fires had to be kept continually burning winter and summer to keep the house dry, let alone warm,” Simon Thurley records in Lost Buildings of Britain. Most of the bedrooms were as plain as monastic cells; thirteen had no windows. Beck-ford’s own bedchamber, strikingly austere, contained a single narrow bed.
Wyatt continued to attend intermittently and to drive Beckford to fury with his absences. In early September 1813, just after his sixty-seventh birthday, Wyatt was riding back to London from Gloucestershire with a client when his carriage overturned and he was dashed against the wall, striking his head a fatal blow. He died more or less instantly, leaving his widow penniless.
Just at this time, sugar prices went into a depression and Beckford ended up uncomfortably exposed to the downside of capitalism. By 1823, he was so strapped for funds that he was forced to sell Fonthill. It was bought for £300,000 by an eccentric character, John Farquhar, who had been born in rural Scotland but went to India as a young man and made a fortune manufacturing gunpowder. Returning to England in 1814, Farquhar settled in London in a fine house on Portman Square, which he conspicuously neglected. He conspicuously neglected himself, too—to such an extent that on his walks through the neighborhood he was sometimes stopped and questioned as a suspicious vagrant. After buying Fonthill, he hardly ever visited it. He was, however, in residence on the most spectacular day in Fonthill’s brief existence, just before Christmas 1825,when the tower emitted a sustained groan, then collapsed for a third and final time. A servant was blown thirty feet down a corridor by the rush of air, but miraculously neither he nor anyone else was injured. About a third of the house lay under the heaped wreckage of the tower, and would never be habitable again. Farquhar was remarkably equable about his misfortune and merely remarked that this greatly simplified the care of the place. He died the following year, immensely rich but intestate, and none of his bickering relatives would take on the house. What remained of it was torn down and cleared away not long after.
Beckford, meanwhile, took his £300,000 and retired to Bath, where he built a 154-foot tower in a restrained classical style. Called the Lansdown Tower, it was erected with good materials and prudent care, and still stands.
II
Fonthill marked the summit not only of ambition and folly in the domestic realm but also of discomfort. A curious inverse relationship had arisen, it seems, between the amount of effort and expense that went into a house and the extent to which it was actually habitable. The great age of housebuilding brought new levels of elegance and grandeur to private life in Britain, but almost nothing in the way of softness, warmth, and convenience.
Those homely attributes would be the creation of a new type of person who had scarcely existed a generation or so before: the middle class professional. There had always been people of middling rank, of course, but as a distinct entity and force to be reckoned with, the middle class was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. The term middle class wasn’t coined until 1745 (in a book on the Irish wool trade, of all things), but from that point onward the streets and coffeehouses of Britain abounded with confident, voluble, well-to-do people who answered to that description: bankers, lawyers, artists, publishers, designers, merchants, property developers, and others of generally creative spirit and high ambition. This new and swelling middle class served not only the very wealthy but also, even more lucratively, one another. This was the change that made the modern world.
The invention of the middle class injected new levels of demand into society. Suddenly there were swarms of people with splendid town houses that all needed furnishing, and just as suddenly the world was full of desirable objects with which to fill them. Carpets, mirrors, curtains, upholstered and embroidered furniture, and a hundred things more that were rarely found in homes before 1750 now became commonplace.
The growth of empire and of overseas business interests had a dramatic effect, too, often in unexpected ways. Take wood. When Britain was an isolated island nation, it had essentially just one wood for furniture making: oak. Oak is a noble material, solid, long-lasting, literally hard as iron, but it is really only suitable for dense, blocky furniture—trunks, beds, heavy tables, and the like. But the development of the British navy and the spread of Britain’s commercial interests meant that woods of many types—walnut from Virginia, tulipwood from the Carolinas, teak from Asia—became available, and these changed everything within the home, including how people sat and conversed and entertained.
The most prized wood of all was mahogany from the Caribbean. Mahogany was lustrous, warp-resistant, and sublimely accommodating. It could be carved and fretted into the delicate shapes that perfectly suited the exuberance of rococo, yet was strong enough to be a piece of furniture. No wood used in England before had had these characteristics: suddenly furniture had a sculptural quality. The central uprights of the chairs—the splats—could be worked in a way that was wondrous to a people who had never seen anything less clunky than a Windsor chair. The legs had flowing curves and luscious feet; the arms swept along to terminal volutes that were a pleasure to grasp and a delight to behold. Every chair—indeed, every built thing in the house—seemed suddenly to have elegance and style and fluidity.
Mahogany would have been nothing like as esteemed a wood as it was had it not been for one other magical new material, from the other side of the Earth, that gave it the most splendid finish: shellac. Shellac is a hard resinous secretion from the Indian lac beetle. Lac beetles emerge in swarms in parts of India at certain times of the year, and their secretions make varnish that is odorless, nontoxic, brilliantly shiny, and highly resistant to scratches and fading. It doesn’t attract dust while wet, and it dries in minutes. Even now, in an age of chemistry, shellac has scores of applications against which synthetic products cannot compete. When you go bowling, it is shellac that gives the alleys their peerless sheen, for instance.
New woods and varnishes dramatically broadened the forms that furniture could take, but something else was needed—a new system of manufacture—to produce the volumes of quality furniture necessary to satisfy the endless demand. Where traditional designers like Robert Adam made a new design for each commission, furniture makers now realized that it was far more cost-effective to make lots of furniture from a single design. They began to operate a factory system on a large scale, cranking out pieces that were cut from templates, then assembled and finished by teams of specialists. The age of mass manufacture had been born.
There is a certain irony in the thought that the people who did the most to establish mass manufacturing techniques were the ones we now most revere for their craftsmanship, and of no one is that more true than a shadowy furniture maker from the north of England named Thomas Chippendale. His influence was enormous. He was the first commoner for whom a furniture style was named; before him, the names faithfully recalled monarchies: Tudor, Elizabethan, Louis XIV, Queen Anne. Yet we know remarkably little about him. We have no idea, for instance, what he looked like. Except that he was born and grew up in the market town of Otley, on the edge of the Yorkshire dales, nothing at all is known of his early life. His first appearance in the written record is in 1748, when he arrives in London, already aged thirty, and sets up as a new type of maker and purveyor of household furnishings known as an upholder.
That was an ambitious thing to do, for upholders’ businesses tended to be complicated and extensive. One of the most successful, George Seddon, employed four hundred workmen—carvers, gilders, joiners, makers of mirrors and brass, and so on. Chippendale did not operate on quite that scale, but he employed forty or fifty men, and his premises covered two frontages at 60–62 St. Martin’s Lane, just around the corner from the modern Trafalgar Square (though that wouldn’t exist for another eighty years). He also provided an extremely complete service, making and selling chairs, occasional tables, dressing tables, writing tables, card tables, bookcases, bureaus, mirrors, clock cases, candelabra, candle stands, musicstands, sconces, commodes, and an exotic new contrivance that he called a “sopha.” Sofas were daring, even titillating, because they resembled beds and so hinted at salacious repose. The firm also stocked wallpaper and carpets, and undertook repairs, furniture removals, and even funerals.
Thomas Chippendale made indisputably fine furniture, but so did lots of others. St. Martin’s Lane alone had thirty furniture makers in the eighteenth century, and hundreds more were scattered across London and throughout the country. The reason we all know Chippendale’s name today is that in 1754 he did something quite audacious. He issued a book of designs called The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, containing 160 plates. Architects had been doing this sort of thing for nearly two hundred years, but nobody had thought to do it for furniture. The drawings were unexpectedly beguiling. Instead of being flat, two-dimensional templates, as was standard, they were perspective drawings, full of shadow and sheen. The prospective purchaser could immediately visualize how these handsome and desirable objects would look in his own home.
It would be misleading to call Chippendale’s book a sensation, because only 308 copies were sold, but the purchasers included forty-nine members of the aristocracy, which made it disproportionately influential. It was also snapped up by other furniture makers and craftsmen, raising another point of oddness—that Chippendale was openly inviting his competitors to make use of his designs for their own commercial purposes. This helped ensure Chippendale’s posterity, but didn’t do much for his immediate fortunes since potential clients could now get Chippendale furniture made more cheaply by any reasonably skilled joiner. It also meant two centuries of difficulty for furniture historians in determining which pieces of furniture are genuine Chippendales and which are copies made using his book. Even if a piece is a “genuine” Chippendale, it doesn’t mean that Thomas Chippendale ever touched it or was even aware of its existence. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that he designed it. No one knows how much talent he brought in, or whether the designs in his books are in fact from his own hand. A genuine Chippendale simply means that it came from his workshop.
Such is the Chippendale aura, however, that it needn’t even have been as close to him as that. In 1756 in colonial Boston, a furniture maker named
John Welch, using a Chippendale pattern as a guide, made a mahogany desk that he sold to a man named Dublois. The desk stayed in the Dublois family for 250 years. In 2007, Dublois’s descendants put it up for auction with Sotheby’s in New York. Though Thomas Chippendale had no direct connection to it, it sold for just under $3.3 million.
Inspired by Chippendale’s success, other English furniture makers issued pattern books of their own. George Hepplewhite’s Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide was published in 1788, and Thomas Sheraton followed with the Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book, issued in installments between 1791 and 1794. Sheraton’s book had more than twice as many subscribers as Chippendale’s and was translated into German, a distinction not accorded Chippendale’s own volume. Hepplewhite and Sheraton became particularly popular in America.
Although any piece of furniture directly associated with any of the three is today worth a fortune, they were more admired than celebrated in their own lifetimes, and at times not even all that admired. Chippendale’s fortunes slipped first. He was an outstanding furniture maker but hopeless at running a business, a deficiency that became acutely evident upon the death of his business partner, James Rannie, in 1766. Rannie was the brains of the operation; without him, Chippendale lurched from crisis to crisis for the rest of his life. All this was painfully ironic, for as he struggled to pay his men and keep himself out of a debtor’s cell, Chippendale was producing items of the highest quality for some of England’s richest households, and working closely with the leading architects and designers—Robert Adam, James Wyatt, Sir William Chambers, and others. Yet his personal trajectory was relentlessly downward.
It was not an easy age in which to do business. Customers were routinely slow in paying. Chippendale had to threaten David Garrick, the actor and impresario, with legal action for chronic unpaid bills, and stopped work at Nostell Priory, a stately home in Yorkshire, when the debt there reached £6,838—a whopping liability. “I have not a single guinea to pay my men with tomorrow,” he wrote in despair at one point. It is clear that Chippendale spent much of his life in a froth of anxiety, scarcely for a moment enjoying any sense of security at all. At his death in 1779, his personal worth had sunk to just £28 2s 9d—not enough to buy a modest piece of ormolu from his own showrooms. The firm struggled on under the directorship of his son but finally succumbed to bankruptcy in 1804.
When Chippendale died, the world barely noticed. No obituary appeared in any paper. Fourteen years after his death, Sheraton wrote of Chippendale’s designs that “they are now wholly antiquated and laid aside.” By the late 1800s, Chippendale’s reputation had fallen so low that the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography gave him just one paragraph—far less than it gave Sheraton or Hepplewhite—and much of that was critical and a good deal of it was wrong. The author was so little absorbed by the facts of Chippendale’s life that he had him coming from Worcestershire, not Yorkshire.
Sheraton (1751–1806) and Hepplewhite (1727?–1786) could hardly boast of magnificent success themselves. Hepplewhite’s shop was in a down-at-heel district, Cripplegate, and his identity sufficiently obscure that his contemporaries referred to him variously as Kepplewhite and Hebblethwaite. Almost nothing is known of his personal life. He had actually been dead for two years by the time his own book of patterns was published. Sheraton’s fate was even more curious. He seems never to have opened a shop, and no piece of furniture that can be attributed to him has ever been found. He may never have made any, but acted merely as a draftsman and designer. Though his book sold well, it appears not to have enriched him, for he had to supplement his income by teaching drawing and perspective. At some point he gave up furniture design, trained as a minister for a nonconformist sect known as the Narrow Baptists, and became essentially a street-corner preacher. He died in squalor, “among dirt and bugs,” in London in 1806, leaving a wife and two children.
As furniture makers, Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance, and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up—irremediably extinct—within just fifty years of its discovery. Some two hundred other species of mahogany exist in the world, and most are very good woods, but they have nothing likethe richness and smooth workability of the departed S. mahogani. The world may one day produce better chairmakers than Chippendale and his peers, but it will never produce finer chairs.
Curiously, no one at all appreciated this for the longest time. Many Chippendale chairs and other pieces, now considered priceless, spent a century or more being casually knocked about in the servants’ quarters before they were rediscovered and returned to the main house in the Edwardian era. Some six hundred pieces of Chippendale furniture have now been confirmed altogether. Others, handed down or disposed of in estate sales, could easily be sitting unregarded in some country cottage or suburban bungalow, more valuable than the houses that contain them.
III
If we were to go back in time to a house in Chippendale’s day, one difference that would immediately strike us would be that chairs and other items of furniture were generally pushed up against the walls, giving every room the aspect of a waiting room. Chairs or tables in the middle of the room would have looked as out of place to Georgians as a wardrobe left in the middle of a room would look to us today. (One reason for pushing them aside was to make it easier to walk through rooms without tripping over furniture in the dark.) Because they were kept against the wall, the backs of early upholstered chairs and settees were often left unfinished, just as we leave bare the backs of chests and wardrobes today.
When one had visitors, the custom was to bring an appropriate number of chairs forward and arrange them in a circle or semicircle, rather like storytime in an elementary school. This had the inevitable effect of making nearly all conversations strained and artificial. Horace Walpole, after sitting for four and a half hours in an agonizing circle of fatuous conversation, declared: “We wore out the Wind and the Weather, the Opera and the Play . . . and every topic that would do in a formal circle.” Yet when daring hostesses tried to introduce spontaneity by arranging chairs into more intimate clusters of threes and fours, many felt the result was tantamount to pandemonium, and more than a few could never get used to the idea of conversations taking place behind their backs.
The one problem with the chairs of the age was that they weren’t terribly comfortable. The obvious solution was to pad them, but that proved more difficult than one might have thought, because few craftsmen had all the skills necessary to make a good padded chair. Manufacturers struggled to get square edges where fabric met wood—piping and cording were originally brought in as a way of disguising these inadequacies—and were frequently out of their depth at producing padding that would maintain a permanent domed shape on the seat. Only saddlers could reliably provide the requisite durability, which is why so much early upholstered furniture was covered in leather. Fabric upholsterers also had the problem that many preindustrial fabrics could be produced only in widths of about twenty inches, creating a need for seams in awkward places. Only after the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733 did it become possible to produce fabrics in widths of three feet or so.
Improvements in textile and printing technologies transformed decorative possibilities beyond furniture as well. This was the age that saw the widespread introduction of carpets, wallpapers, and bright fabrics. Paint, too, became available in a range of bright colors for the first time. The upshot is that, by late in the eighteenth century, households were full of features that would have been the wildest indulgences a century before. The modern house—a house such as we would recognize today—had begun to emerge. At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated. They hadn’t entirely mastered comfort yet, but they had certainly discovered an alluring concept. Life, and the expectations that went with it, would never be the same again.
There was, however, one consequence in all this. The advent of comfort in the home, in particular the widespread use of soft furnishings, made furniture much more vulnerable to stains, burns, and other careless abuses. In an effort to save the most valuable furniture from the worst of the risks, a new type of room was created, and it is there, conveniently, that we go next.
*A furlong in horse racing is 220 yards, or one-eighth of a mile, but farming furlongs originally were of no particular length. The word means simply “long furrow.”
*Ayrshires were the creation of Bruce Campbell, inventive second cousin of James Boswell, who was put in charge of the family estate in Scotland only after Boswell himself declined the responsibility, preferring a life of conversation and refined debauchery in London to dairy farming in lowland Scotland. Had Boswell been more dutiful, we would have lost not only his great Life of Johnson but also one of the world’s best breeds of dairy cattle.
*Though the name is now pronounced “Van-bruh” or “Van-burra” (like the terminal diphthong of “Edinburgh” or “Barbara”), it appears to have been pronounced “Van-brook” in his own lifetime. It was frequently so spelled.
*Whig is a shortening of Whiggamore, the name for a group of seventeenth-century Scottish insurgents. Where Whiggamore itself came from is uncertain, as is the question of how it then suggested itself as a suitable name for a group of powerful English aristocrats. It was first applied derisively by the Tories, but embraced with pride by the target group. Exactly the same thing happened with the term Tory.
*In a large house, room numbers are generally notional. It depends on the extent to which you count storerooms, closets, and the like as separate rooms (and also no doubt how carefully one counts). The published numbers for the total rooms at Blenheim range from 187 to 320—quite a disparity.
*It was also, come to that, the age of the celebrity craftsman. One such was the great carver Grinling Gibbons, who lived from 1648 to 1721. His interesting Christian name was his mother’s maiden name. He grew up in Holland, of English parents, and came to England in about 1667, after the restoration of Charles II as king. He settled in Deptford, in southeast London, where he made a very basic living carving figureheads for ships. One day in 1671, John Evelyn, the diarist, chanced to pass his workshop and was immediately taken with Gibbons’s skill, personable manner, and possibly good looks. (Gibbons was by all accounts stunningly good-looking.) He encouraged the young man to take on more challenging commissions and introduced him to people of influence, such as Christopher Wren.
Thanks to Evelyn’s support, Gibbons became very successful, but most of his wealth actually came from running a workshop that produced statuary and other stonework. It was Gibbons, it appears, who came up with the idea of depicting British heroes as Roman statesmen, in togas and sandals, and this made his work in stone extremely fashionable. Though he is now widely thought of as the greatest woodcarver in modern times, he was not especially famous for it in his own lifetime. For Blenheim Palace, Gibbons produced £4,000 worth of decorative stonework but only £36 worth of wood carving. Part of the reason his wood carvings are so valued today is that there aren’t very many of them.
*Although he is little read now, Walpole was immensely popular in his day for his histories and romances. He was a particularly adept coiner of words. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with no fewer than 233 coinages. Many, like gloomth, greenth, fluctuable, and betweenity, didn’t take, but a great many others did. Among the terms he invented or otherwise brought into English are airsickness, anteroom, bask, beefy, boulevard, café, cause célèbre, caricature, fairy tale, falsetto, frisson, impresario, malaria, mudbath, nuance, serendipity, somber, souvenir, and, as mentioned a few pages back, comfortable in its modern sense.
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BILL BRYSON’S AFRICAN DIARY.
Copyright © 2002 by BILL BRYSON.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-41884-5
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Title Page
Bill Bryson’s African Diary
Saturday, September 28
Sunday, September 29
Monday, September 30
Tuesday, October 1
Wednesday, October 2
Thursday, October 3
Friday, October 4
Saturday, October 5
CARE SAYS THANKYOU ...
THE FACTS ABOUT POVERTY
CARE
MOVING AHEAD WITH CARE
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
Intro to Excerpt
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
Outro from Excerpt
Copyright Page
Bill Bryson’s African Diary
In the late 1940s and early 1950s after he became a little too saggy to fit into a Tarzan loincloth without depressing popcorn sales among cinema audiences, the great Johnny Weissmuller filled the twilight years of his acting career with a series of low-budget adventure movies with titles like Devil Goddess and Jungle Moon Men, all built around a character called Jungle Jim. These modest epics are largely forgotten now, which is a pity because they were possibly the most cherishably terrible movies ever made.
The plots seldom got anywhere near coherence. My own favourite, called Pygmy Island, involved a lost tribe of white midgets and a strange but valiant fight against the spread of Communism. But the narrative possibilities were practically infinite since each Jungle Jim feature consisted in large measure of scenes taken from other, wholly unrelated adventure movies. Whatever footage was available—train crashes, volcanic eruptions, rhino charges, panic scenes involving large crowds of Japanese—would be snipped from the original and woven into Jungle Jim’s wondrously accommodating story lines. From time to time, the ever-more-fleshy Weissmuller would appear on the scene to wrestle the life out of a curiously rigid and unresisting crocodile or chase some cannibals into the woods, but these intrusions were generally brief and seldom entirely explained.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that no more than four people at a time ever paid money to watch a Jungle Jim movie. The series might well have escaped my own attention except that in about 1959 WOI-TV, a television station well known in central Iowa for its tireless commitment to mediocrity, acquired the complete Jungle Jim oeuvre and for the next dozen or so years showed two of them back to back late every Friday night. What is especially tragic about all this is that I not only watched these movies with unaccountable devotion, but was indelibly influenced by them. In fact, were it not for some scattered viewings of the 1952 classic Bwana Devil and a trip on the Jungle Safari ride at Disneyland in 196I, my knowledge of African life, I regret to say, would be entirely dependent on Jungle Jim movies.
I can’t say it actively preyed on me that my impressions of Africa were based so heavily on a series of B-movies made in California more than half a century ago, but when a personable young man named Dan McLean from the London office of CARE International, the venerable and worthy charity, asked me if I would be willing to go to Kenya to visit some of their projects and write a few words on their behalf, it occurred to me that there were some gaps in my familiarity with the Dark Continent that I might usefully fill in. So I agreed.
Some weeks later, I was summoned to CARE’s London offices for a meeting with Dan, his boss Will Day and a rugged and amiable fellow named Nick Southern, CARE’s regional manager for Kenya, who happened to be in London at the time. We sat around a big table spread with maps of Kenya, while they outlined what they had in mind for me.
“Of course, you’ll have to fly to the refugee camp at Dadaab,” Will observed thoughtfully at one point. He glanced at me. “To avoid the bandits,” he explained.
Dan and Nick nodded gravely.
“I beg your pardon?” I said, taking a sudden interest. “It’s bandit country all round there,” Will said. “Where?” I asked, peering at the map for the first time.
“Oh, just there,” Will said, waving a hand vaguely across most of east Africa. “But you’ll be fine in a plane.”
“They only rarely shoot at planes,” Nick explained.
This wasn’t at all what I had had in mind, frankly. By way of homework, I had dutifully watched Out of Africa, from which I derived the impression that this trip would mostly take place on a verandah somewhere while turbaned servants brought me lots of coffee. I knew that we would probably visit a clinic from time to time and that someone in the party might occasionally have to shoot a charging animal, but I hadn’t imagined anything shooting at me in return.
“So how dangerous is Kenya then?” I asked in a small controlled squeak.
“Oh, not at all,” they responded in unison.
“Well, hardly,” Will added.
“It depends on what you mean by dangerous, of course,” said Dan.
“Like bleeding and not getting up again,” I suggested. “Being shot and stabbed and so forth,” I added.
They assured me that that only very rarely happened, and that it was nearly always one or the other. You had to be very unlucky to be shot and stabbed, they said.
“It’s mostly diseases you have to worry about,” Nick went on. “Malaria, schistosomiasis, trypanosomiasis.”
“Rift Valley fever, blackwater fever, yellow fever,” said Dan.
“Dengue fever, bilharzia—the usual tropical stuff,” added Will.
But they pointed out that you can be inoculated against many of those and for the rest most people manage a more or less complete recovery, given time and a considered programme of physiotherapy. Many even walk again. I asked if there was anything else I should know.
“Well, the roads are a little dangerous—there are some crazy drivers out there,” Will said, chuckling.
“But apart from that and the diseases and the bandits and the railway from Nairobi to Mombasa, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about,” Nick added.
“What’s wrong with the railway?”
“Oh, nothing really. It’s just the rolling stock is a little antiquated and sometimes the brakes give out coming down out of the mountains—but, hey, if you worried about all the things that might happen you wouldn’t go anywhere, would you?”
“I don’t go anywhere,” I pointed out.
They nodded thoughtfully.
“Well, it’ll be an adventure,” Will said brightly. “You’ll be fine, absolutely fine. Just check your insurance before you go.”
And so it was that I became irrevocably committed to the African adventure which follows.
Saturday, September 28
We meet at the Kenya Airways check-in desk at Heathrow, the five brave souls who are to form our party from London. In addition to me and Dan, they are: David Sanderson, a thoughtful and kindly fellow who is soon to take up a post in Johannesburg as CARE’s regional manager in South Africa, but joining us now in his capacity as urban specialist; Justin Linnane, an intent but amiable young maker of television documentaries who has volunteered to make a video record of the expedition; and the photographer Jenny Matthews, whose brilliant and compassionate snaps grace this volume. White-haired and sweetly unobtrusive, Jenny is easily the wonder of the lot. If you saw her in a supermarket you would take her for a schoolteacher or civil servant. In fact, for 25 years she has gone wherever there is danger—to Chechnya, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda. She is fearless and evidently indestructible. If things go bad on this trip, it is her I’ll hold on to.
The first good news is that Kenya Airways has given us all an upgrade on account of our genial goodness and dapper manner, and so of course gets a glowing mention here. It is a nine-and-a-half-hour flight from London to Nairobi, and we are very pleased to pass it in comfort, with a better class of drinks and our own party packs.
An hour or so after we are airborne, by chance I come across an article in The Economist declaring Nairobi to be the new crime capital of Africa. My attention is particularly arrested by the disclosure that street children come up to cars waiting at traffic lights demanding money and if it’s not given they rub balls of human excrement in the victim’s face.
I share this information with my new companions and we agree that Dan, as group leader, will be our designated “rubbee” for the week. Conveniently, Dan is in the lavatory when the matter is discussed and so the motion carries unanimously. In order not to spoil his enjoyment of Nairobi we decide not to tell him of our decision until we see children advancing.
It is nighttime when we land at Jomo Kenyatta Airport and pleasantly cool. We are met by Kentice Tikolo, an immensely good-natured Kenyan lady who helps run CARE’s Nairobi office and who shepherds us into waiting cabs. In Out of Africa, Nairobi was depicted as a sunny little country town, so I am disappointed to find that at some time in the past 50 or 60 years they took away that pretty scene and replaced it with Omaha, of all things. Nairobi is merely yet another modern city with traffic lights and big buildings and hoardings advertising Samsung televisions and the like. Our hotel is a Holiday Inn—very nice and comfortable, but hardly a place that shouts: “Welcome to Africa, Bwana.”
“Oh, you will see plenty of Africa,” Kentice assures me when we convene at the bar for a round of medicinal hydration. “We’re going to show you lots of exotic things. Have you ever eaten camel?”
“Only in my junior high school cafeteria, and they called it lamb,” I reply. I take the opportunity, while Dan is at the bar, to ask her about the street children I read about on the flight.
“Oh, that’s the least of your worries,” Kentice laughs. “Car-jackings are much worse. They can be quite violent.”
“What a comfort to know.”
“But don’t worry,” she says, laying a comforting hand on my arm and becoming solemn, “if anything goes wrong we have excellent hospitals in Nairobi.”
We retire early because we have an early start in the morning. I am disappointed to find that there is no mosquito net around the bed in my room. Unaware that Nairobi is malaria-free, I slather myself with insect repellant and pass a long night sounding like two strips of parting Velcro each time I roll over in the bed and dreaming terrible dreams in which Jungle Jim, assisted by a tribe of white pygmies, chases me through the streets of Omaha with dung balls.
Sunday, September 29
In the morning we drive to Kibera, a sea of tin roofs filling a mile or so of steamy hillside on the south side of the city. Kibera is the biggest slum in Nairobi, possibly the biggest in Africa. Nobody knows how many people live there. It’s at least 700,000, but it may be as many as a million, perhaps more. At least 50,000 of Kibera’s children are AIDS orphans. At least a fifth of the residents are HIV positive, but it could be as high as 50 percent. Nobody knows. Nothing about Kibera is certain and official, including its existence. It appears on no maps. It just is.
You can’t just go in to Kibera if you are an outsider. Well, you can, but you wouldn’t come out again. Kibera is a dangerous place. We were taken on a walking tour by the district chief, an amiable giant named Nashon Opiyo, and three of his deputies, all Kibera residents. They are employed by the government to keep an eye—and occasionally a lid—on things, even though Kibera doesn’t officially exist.
To step into Kibera is to be lost at once in a random, seemingly endless warren of rank, narrow passageways wandering between rows of frail, dirt-floored hovels made of tin and mud and twigs and holes. Each shanty on average is ten feet by ten and home to five or six people. Down the centre of each lane runs a shallow trench filled with a trickle of water and things you don’t want to see or step in. There are no services in Kibera—no running water, no rubbish collection, virtually no electricity, not a single flush toilet. In one section of Kibera called Laini Saba until recently there were just ten pit latrines for 40,000 people. Especially at night when it is unsafe to venture out, many residents rely on what are known as “flying toilets,” which is to say they go into a plastic bag, then open their door and throw it as far as possible.
In the rainy season, the whole becomes a liquid ooze. In the dry season it has the charm and healthfulness of a rubbish tip. In all seasons it smells of rot. It’s a little like wandering through a privy. Whatever is the most awful place you have ever experienced, Kibera is worse.
Kibera is only one of about a hundred slums in Nairobi, and it is by no means the worst. Altogether more than half of Nairobi’s three million people are packed into these immensely squalid zones, which together occupy only about 1.5 percent of the city’s land. In wonder I asked David Sanderson what made Kibera superior.
“There are a lot of factories around here,” he said, “so there’s work, though nearly all of it is casual. If you’re lucky you might make a dollar a day, enough to buy a little food and a jerry can of water and to put something aside for your rent.”
“How much is rent?”
“Oh, not much. Ten or twelve dollars a month. But the average annual income in Kenya is $280, so $120 or $140 in rent every year is a big slice of your income. And nearly everything else is expensive here, too, even water. The average person in a slum like Kibera pays five times what people in the developed world pay for the same volume of water piped to their homes.”
“That’s amazing,” I said.
He nodded. “Every time you flush a toilet you use more water than the average person in the developing world has for all purposes in a day—cooking, cleaning, drinking, everything. It’s very tough. For a lot of people Kibera is essentially a life sentence. Unless you are exceptionally lucky with employment, it’s very, very difficult to get ahead.”
Every day around the world, 180,000 people fetch up in or are born into cities like Nairobi, mostly into slums like Kibera. Ninety percent of the world’s population growth in the twenty-first century will be in cities. “For better or worse, this is where the future is,” David said. Yet, amazingly, aid agencies like CARE can do little for urban slums like Kibera. The governments won’t let them. “Mostly they won’t permit any kind of permanent improvements because they fear it would just affirm Kibera’s existence, and also they are afraid that it would encourage more people to pour in from the countryside. So they’d rather pretend these places don’t exist.”
“But they must know it’s here.”
He smiled and pointed to a big house—a compound— commanding a neighboring hillside only a couple of hundred yards from Kibera’s edge. The house, David told me, was the Nairobi residence of Daniel arap Moi, president of Kenya since 1978. “This is what he sees every morning when he looks out his window. Of course they know it’s here.”
Walking along with us was one of our minders, a kindly man of indeterminate age named Bonard Onyango. I asked him if he had always lived in Kibera. “Oh no,” he said. “I came here from the country twenty years ago.”
“How bad can the country be that you’d prefer this?” I asked.
“The country is very nice,” he agreed, “but there’s no work there and so no money. If you have no money, you can’t send your children to school. But in the city if you work hard and you are lucky you can educate your children and maybe they will have a better life. All these people, they are here for their children.”
“Really?” I said, impressed.
“Oh, yes. Most of them.”
Kentice had been listening to this and was nodding in agreement. “Just over there,” she said, pointing vaguely along some roof tops, “is the Olympic Primary School. Do you know, it is the best primary school in all of Kenya?”
“Truly?” I said, impressed.
She nodded gravely. “Three of the eight top-scoring primary schools in the country are here in Kibera. People from outside Kibera try to get their children into these schools because they are so good.” She nodded some more. “People here will do anything to improve the lot of their children.”
“So it’s not completely hopeless?” I said.
Kentice gave a big laugh. “Oh, no,” she said. “In Kenya we always have hope.”
In the afternoon, just to make sure the contrast was total, we drove out to the western edge of the city through a succession of wooded suburbs that seemed to owe more to Guild-ford or Weybridge than to Africa. Our destination was a formerly all-white preserve called Karen, whose most famous resident was also, though coincidentally, called Karen. I refer to Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame.
We stopped at the Karen Blixen Coffee Garden, built around an old farmhouse that was once part of her coffee plantation, and now a popular spot for Sunday lunch. After Kibera anything would seem good, but this was almost painfully agreeable. Inside the farmhouse a lavishly varied buffet was spread out, and outside, scattered around a large shady lawn, were tables of all sizes, mostly occupied by feasting white families. It can’t have been greatly different in colonial times.
After lunch we strolled the few hundred yards up the road to Blixen’s house, the setting for much of Out of Africa. I can’t say I was hugely interested in the personal history of Karen Blixen, but it was an interesting insight into the privileged lifestyles of the colonial period—which, not incidentally, didn’t last all that long: only about 60 years. Blixen herself spent only 17 years in Kenya, barely a fifth of her life. Anyway, it was a very pleasant house and the grounds were gorgeous, with long views across to Blixen’s blue and beloved Ngong Hills. My big excitement, however, was that as we were walking back to the car I saw my first Maasai—a young man with a long walking stick and a bolt of red cloth wrapped around his waist and draped over a shoulder, loping past on the other side of the road. It seemed almost preposterously unreal to see a genuine African icon walking through this little lost corner of Surrey.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked, surprised.
Kentice looked at me with a touch of wonder. “He lives here,” she said. “It’s his country.”
Monday, September 30
Knowing of my interest in ancient pre-humans (because of a book I have been working on) Kentice set up a visit to the National Museum. There we met Dr Emma Mbua, the petite and cheerful chief paleoanthropologist. Thanks largely to the efforts of two generations of the Leakey family, the museum has the finest collection of early human remains in existence.
It is an exceedingly rare event when a human bone fossilizes—only about one in a billion does so—and even rarer when one is found. You could easily fit all the early human bones that have ever been discovered into the back of a small delivery van. If you include every last tooth and chip of ancient bone ever found, only about 5,000 individuals have contributed to the human fossil record. Five hundred of these are held in the Kenyan National Museum in what is aptly known as the Strong Room, a slightly oversized version of a bank vault, with a heavy steel door and thick windowless walls. It is the greatest single hoard in the world, more priceless by far than any collection of royal baubles. Almost never is a non-specialist allowed into this room. I was honored indeed.
All the specimens are kept in small wooden chests in cupboards lined up around the walls. For one giddy hour, Dr Mbua brought out one celebrated skull after another. Here was the first Homo habilis, found by Louis Leakey in 1964 and long thought to be our earliest direct ancestor. Then came the famous Australopithecus boisei, 1.6 million years old and found miraculously intact, lying on the ground in the open, by Louis’s son Richard in 1969. Then there was the extraordinary Turkana boy, whose nearly complete skeleton was found in northern Kenya in the 1980s and which at a stroke provided scientists with more Homo erectus bones than all the previous finds put together.
Dr Mbua’s most treasured relic was a 19-million-year-old skull of an ape known as proconsul. “It was sent to the British Museum for cleaning in the 1940s,” she said, “and it took us forty years to persuade them to return it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They coveted it,” she said, smiling serenely, but hinting at levels of darkness in the world of paleontology that I hadn’t known existed. “Now we don’t let anything leave the museum, ever. They are too delicate and too precious. If you want to see any of these special things, you must come to Nairobi.” How glad I was I had.
The scarcity of human remains isn’t just because few bones become fossils, but also because precious few landscapes offer the right conditions to preserve fossils. The greatest of them is the Great Rift Valley, and it was there we headed next.
I had always imagined the Rift Valley as some kind of canyon—a comparatively confined space where your voice would echo off walls of rock. In fact, it is a mighty plain, a hundred miles across and four thousand miles long. It is immense, and startlingly sumptuous in its beauty. As you head south and west out of Nairobi there comes a place where the ground just falls away and there spread out below you is the biggest open space you have ever seen: the Great Rift Valley. It is an amazing sight—a pale green vastness interrupted here and there by dead volcanic craters, but otherwise infinite and flat and very hot looking.
We were headed for a place called Olorgesailie, 60 miles beyond the Ngong Hills on the valley floor. When we arrived, we stepped from the vehicle into a dry, oven-like heat, which was all the more startling after the comparative coolness of Nairobi. In 1919, a geologist named J.W. Gregory was poking around in the area when he came across an expanse of ancient and distinctive teardrop-shaped hand axes of a type known as Acheulean. In the 1940s, Louis Leakey and his wife, Mary, got around to excavating the site. What they found was that Olorgesailie was a kind of factory where these tools were made in incalculable numbers over about a million years, from 1.2 million to 200,000 years ago. But here’s the thing. The stones from which the axes were made aren’t found on the Rift Valley floor. They had to be brought there from two nearby mountains named Ol Esakut and Mount Olorgesailie, each about ten kilometers away. Why the early people went to such trouble and what exactly they used the tools for have long been a mystery. Acheulean axes were beautiful pieces of technology for the time, and each represented a lot of effort to create, but they weren’t outstandingly good for cutting or chopping or scraping—certainly not a great deal better than almost any random unshaped rock would be.
Yet for a million years early humans went to the considerable trouble of collecting and carrying large hunks of quartz and obsidian miles across a baking landscape to make them into axes at this one ten-acre site. More than this, the excavations showed that there was one area where axes were made and another where worn axes were brought to be re-sharpened. It was all amazingly organized.
Today thousands upon thousands of these stone tools are heaped and scattered everywhere around Olorgesailie, left where they were dropped hundreds of thousands of years ago by ancestors so remote from us that they weren’t yet even Homo sapiens. It is an extraordinary site. One other curiosity is that no human remains have ever been found at Olorgesailie. We have to guess who the early people were.
I know all this because a very bright and enthusiastic young man named Jillani Ngalla from the Kenyan National Museum conducted us around the site. Ngalla appeared to know everything there is to know about Olorgesailie, Acheulean tools, the Rift Valley, and early hominids, and yet he seemed awfully young for an authority. I asked him how long he had been a paleontologist.
“Oh, I’m not,” he said cheerfully. “I am an aspiring paleontologist. I’ve been accepted at the University of Pretoria,” he added with a touch of pride, “but sadly I don’t have the necessary funds.”
“How much would it cost?” I asked.
“Ten thousand US dollars.” He gave me an apologetic look, as if he had just said ten million.
“And do you have any hope of getting that kind of money?” I asked.
“As things stand at the moment,” he answered and considered the question carefully for a minute, “no.”
In the early evening we made our way to the modestly grand central railway station in Nairobi to catch the overnight sleeper to Mombasa.
Kenyan Railways has something of a tradition of killing its passengers. In just the past decade, a little over 200 people have died in accidents on its trains. The accident that seems to have attracted the most publicity in recent years was one in 1999 when the overnight Nairobi-to-Mombasa train jumped the rails at an interesting sounding place called “Man Eaters Junction,” in Tsavo National Park, killing 32 people.
The crew blamed brake failure. Kenya Railways blamed the crew. No one really knows what happened. The following year another 30-plus people were killed in two accidents, both involving runaway trains, in the space of four days. The biggest disaster of all was in 1993 when a train bound for Mombasa from Nairobi plunged off a bridge and into the “crocodile-infested” Ngai Ndeithya River, killing 140 people. Ngai Ndeithya means “God help us” in Kiswahili, which would seem to be a not inappropriate motto for the railway itself. Almost since the beginning, however, the train has been known as the Lunatic Express. Can’t think why.
Man Eaters Junction is so called, by the way, because in 1898 during the construction of the railway about 140 Indian workers were snatched and eaten by two lions (giving a whole new meaning to the term “Indian takeaway”). The railway’s chief engineer, an ex-army man named Lt. Col. John H. Patterson, spent months trying to lure the lions into a trap (often using understandably reluctant Indians as bait), but always failed. On one notable occasion a junior employee named C. H. Ryall sat up all night in an open railway carriage with a rifle trained on a pile of bait outside, but unfortunately nodded off. The lions ignored the bait and took poor Ryall instead.
Finally in early December, after nine months of frustration, Patterson managed to bag one of the lions. Three weeks later he shot and wounded the second one, which then bounded off into the bush. At first light the next morning he followed the trail of blood to the beast’s lair. Though severely wounded, the lion charged. Patterson fired both barrels of his gun, and was nonplussed, to say the least, to find that the lion merely staggered sideways and then resumed coming for him. Turning to his rifle bearer for his backup gun, Patterson was additionally nonplussed to discover that the bearer was 50 feet away and climbing a tree. Patterson likewise followed, just managing to haul himself onto a branch, the lion snapping at his quivering flanks. There he snatched the gun from the cowering bearer and fired once more, and the lion at last fell dead. The fate of the bearer is not recorded, but I believe we may reasonably assume that he was not further entrusted with the custody of firearms.
The journey from Nairobi to Mombasa takes 13 hours, nearly all of it after dark, which is perhaps a mercy, all things considered. So long as it stays upright and settled on the rails, the train is quite wonderful. It was a little on the ancient side, to be sure, but we each had a snug private cabin, which looked comfortable enough, and the dining car was splendid, with a hearty three-course dinner and cheery, attentive service. Knowing the perils that lay ahead, we took the sensible precaution of anaesthetizing ourselves with many Tusker beers before, during and after dinner, but even so sleep was not to be found.
To begin with the beds were small and decidedly on the hard side, but it was the wild and extraordinary motions of the train that made even light dozing impossible. Normally I love overnight trips by train, but this was like trying to sleep through an earthquake. Even in its more tranquil spells, which were few, it was like being on one of those agitating conveyor belts that mining companies use to shake diamonds loose from piles of rubble. Because it was pitch dark outside, there was never any telling where we were, but the angle of the carriage made it evident that we were spending much of the night descending steeply. Every few hundred yards, or so it seemed, the driver would hit the brakes, setting off a chain reaction of collisions as each carriage slammed into the one ahead of it, followed a micro-instant later by the thuds and confused moans of people who have just been pitched out of bed. The experience would not have been a great deal different if they had put us all in a large barrel and rolled us to Mombasa.
Tuesday, October 1
And So We Stepped into the steamy morning heat of Mombasa, pleased to be back on solid ground. Our destination for the evening was the Driftwood Beachclub Hotel, a stylish but conspicuously underutilized establishment standing on the Indian Ocean at Malindi. A vehicle from the hotel was waiting to whisk us up the coast to Malindi. Our principal task for the day was simply to get in position to fly on to Dadaab and a big CARE refugee camp the next day, but we had much to do in the meanwhile.
First we drove to a beach hotel north of Mombasa where CARE people from all over Africa had gathered for a conference to thrash out a new five-year plan. There we dropped off David Sanderson, who was to address the conference before flying back to London, and picked up Nick Southern, CARE’s regional manager for Kenya, whom I had met in London, as you will recall, and who was to be our host and protector for the next five days. An old Africa hand, Nick has been in Kenya for most of the past 15 years and knows the country inside out.
With Nick collected, we resumed our journey up the coast, through a lush, tropical landscape of palm groves and endless sisal plantations (sisal is used to make rope, I was told) to a small resort called Watamu.
Watamu was tranquil to the point of being comatose. There were several good-sized hotels and associated businesses—diving shops and the like—but a decided paucity of holidaymakers. “Tourism has really taken a beating here,” Nick said, “especially the coastal resorts. If people want to see lions and giraffes, they still have to come to some place like Kenya, but if all they want is a beach holiday then they go to lots of other places.”
For a decade up to the mid-1990s, Kenya was a hot destination. International visitor numbers hit 850,000 in 1995, but then slumped to under 500,000 in 1997 amid a welter of bad publicity. Nearly everybody you meet can tell you some unnerving story about visitors coming to an unhappy end. Before I even came to Kenya I was told three different versions of a story about a German tourist who was either walking on a beach, sitting at an outdoor café or in a car at a traffic light with his arm out the window when someone lopped the arm off with a machete and ran off with the attached Rolex. The story is untrue, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that people believe it.
“When people hear these things and then someone says, ‘Oh and by the way you have to take malaria tablets, too,’ a lot of them decide just to go to Spain,” Nick said. “It’s a shame because Kenya’s got so much going for it—beautiful countryside, lovely people, extraordinary wildlife, wonderful climate, great beaches. I mean, look,” he said and made a sweeping gesture across what was a setting of incomparable splendor: wide beach, nodding palms, bright sun, sparkling water.
We took a creaky glass-bottomed boat operated by two keen young men out to the reef about a quarter of a mile offshore and spent an hour admiring the large and colourful shoals of fish. “Virtually the whole of the coast is reef like this,” Nick said. “And they actually look after it pretty conscientiously. For all they do wrong, the Kenyans manage wildlife very well.” He gave a slight apologetic shrug. “You’re seeing a lot of bad things this week. I thought it might be nice to see something good.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“And the next thing,” he went on, “is really good. Have you ever heard of the Gedi ruins?”
“No,” I said without having to think.
“Not many people have. I think you’ll be impressed.”
The Gedi ruins are inland from Watamu and down a winding track through enclosing overgrowth. From the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries Gedi was a thriving but oddly secretive community hidden away in a jungly setting in what was then a remote nowhere along the coast between Malindi and Mombasa. The inhabitants, who were Muslim, traded with people from all over the world. Archaeologists have found beads from Venice, coins from China, an iron lamp from India, and scissors from Spain, among a great deal else. But nowhere in any written records in any language does Gedi or its industrious people appear. Somehow for four hundred years Gedi interacted with the world without being noticed, and no one knows how it managed to escape attention or why it chose to.
Gedi wasn’t rediscovered until the 1920s, by which time it was completely overgrown, but excavations since then have uncovered mosques, tombs, houses and a grand palace, spread across a 45-acre site. Monkeys run along the ruined walls, discreetly keeping an eye on visitors. The site still seems to half belong to the jungle, with mighty baobob trees growing up in what was once a busy lane or someone’s sitting room. At the end of the day, with long sun beams slanting through the forest, it was inexpressibly gorgeous. We were conducted around the site by Ali Abdala Alausy, the curator, a droll and cheerful man who was so clearly glad of visitors that he gave us what can only be called an exhaustive tour. There wasn’t an alcove or pediment to which we weren’t given a full history, not a pit or dwelling whose excavated contents weren’t thoroughly described. We left packed with knowledge and admiration, and ready for a very large drink.
We spent the night at the Driftwood Beachclub Hotel. The only other customers in the large dining room were a family of four at a distant table—white Kenyans on holiday, Nick supposed.
Everybody was tired after the sleepless train journey of the night before, but even so we were unusually subdued. I didn’t realize it at the time but this was because, with the exception of Jenny, who fears nothing, we were all quietly certain we were going to die in the morning.
Wednesday, October 2
A few years ago, I was on a scheduled flight on a 16-seater prop plane from Boston to my local airport in New Hampshire when the plane got lost in bad weather and couldn’t find the airport. For 40 minutes we flew around in a perplexed manner, occasionally dropping through the low clouds (which, I couldn’t help noticing, we shared with many mountaintops) before the pilot got his bearings, or lucky, and put us on the runway with a descent so steep that I sometimes still sit upright in bed at 3 a.m. thinking about it. I vowed then that I would never go on another light aircraft. Then two years ago I flew in a light aircraft across Fiji almost, but not quite, ahead of the leading edge of the biggest tropical storm I ever hope to experience and I vowed then that really, absolutely and under no conditions would I set foot on a light aircraft again.
And now here I was about to fly 400 kilometers into bandit country in a charter plane in a Third World nation. I mentioned my reservations to Nick Southern at breakfast.
“I know just what you mean,” he said with feeling. “I’m petrified myself.”
“That’s not quite what I was hoping to hear,” I said. “Absolutely bloody petrified,” he repeated for emphasis.
“I was rather counting on you to tell me everything is going to be fine, and that these planes never crash.”
“Oh, no, they crash all the time,” Nick said.
“I know they do, Nick. But I was hoping that you would tell me that somehow in Kenya they don’t and that for some reason that hasn’t occurred to me the world’s most outstanding pilots come here to do charter work.”
Nick didn’t seem to be listening to me any longer. “Crash all the time,” he said. “Poor Richard Leakey lost both his legs in a plane crash in Kenya, you know.”
“I’d heard that,” I said.
“And he was one of the lucky ones,” he added enigmatically.
Dan, also a piteous flier, arrived at the breakfast table just then. He was as white as a sheet, a condition somewhat exacerbated by the fact that he had inadvertently brushed his teeth with sun cream. Then poor Justin Linnane turned up looking similarly ghostly. He was uneasy because he had never been up in a small plane before and now learned that his debut experience was to be in the company of the three most hysterical fliers in Africa. Only Jenny remained serene.
Thus it was that we were to be found an hour later at Malindi Airport, kicking the tyres of, and otherwise closely examining, the single-engine aircraft that was to convey us to CARE’s refugee camp at distant, dusty Dadaab and thence, at the end of the day, to Nairobi.
The plane, I’m pleased to say, was quite new and looked sound, and the pilot, a man of great calmness named Nino, was unquestionably sober and reliable looking. Under questioning he pointed out that he wanted to crash even less than we did since he would have to pay for the plane. I found this immensely reassuring. Best of all it was a beautiful day for flying, the air still and almost cloudless. We were flying into the desert, after all, so the chances of storms were practically nil.
The flight itself proved blissfully uneventful. The engine purred steadily the whole way and no one took a shot at us. By the time we landed in Dadaab I was almost calm.
Dadaab is bang on the equator, in the middle of a dusty orange nowhere, about sixty miles from the Somalia border. There has been a drought there for years, which is evident with every dry scrape of wind. In the early 1990s, refugees from the fighting in Somalia began to stream over the border into northeastern Kenya, and a camp was hastily put together. Nearly a dozen years later it is home to 134,000 people.
The camp consists of three compounds, each a mile or two apart, and when traveling between any two you must be escorted by a truckload of Kenyan soldiers, just in case. The camp has become essentially a city in the desert, with schools and markets and permanent habitations. It has been there so long now that a generation of children has grown to adult-hood without knowing any life other than being behind razor wire and heavy iron gates, and a sense that all the world beyond this snug perimeter offers nothing but danger or indifference. CARE has 175 employees on site. Forty-five percent of its spending in Kenya goes to the camp. Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don’t end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can’t go back to Somalia because it isn’t safe and they can’t go elsewhere in Kenya because Kenya has problems enough of its own without having 134,000 Somalis pitching up in Nairobi or Mombasa, looking for food and work. And so way out in the desert there exists this strange city-that-isn’t-a-city filled with people who have nowhere to go and nothing much to do.
We spent a long day doing all the things you would expect to do at a refugee camp—toured the food distribution centre, visited schools, talked to administrators, learned how water was extracted from the ground and sanitized—but there was a curious lack of urgency about it all. The camp occupants weren’t dying or malnourished or in desperate need of medical attention. They were just normal people like you and me who wanted to be somewhere where they could have a life.
Nearly everyone I spoke to complained of shortages of one kind or another—of work, of food, of teachers, of things to do. There are 28,000 pupils in the camp’s schools, but only 807 desks. There is only one textbook for every 20 students, one classroom for every 75. I talked to a bright young man named James Makuach, one of 357 students preparing to take the Kenyan Schools Certificate exam, a prerequisite for going on to higher education. He told me the school didn’t have the facilities, in particular the scientific equipment, that would allow them to pass the test.
“You have no hope at all?” I said.
“Not much,” he said and gave me a heartbreakingly shy smile.
I couldn’t understand this at all. I asked Nick—demanded really—why conditions weren’t better than this. He looked at me with patient sympathy.
“There are 20 million like this all over Africa, Bill,” he said. “Money only goes so far.” Besides, he went on, dispensing aid is much more complicated than most people realize. It is, for one thing, a fundamental part of aid protocol that you cannot make conditions notably better for refugees than they are for their hosts outside the camps. It wouldn’t be fair and it would breed resentment. “Everybody would want to be a refugee,” Nick said. “In practical terms, you can only do so much.”
“But the kids,” I said. “They have no future.”
“I know,” he said sadly. “I know.”
Later, as we walked through the camp, Dan pointed out a nifty self-closing tap on a standpipe in the school grounds and told me that Nick had designed it, though he was too modest to say so. Nick, it turns out, is a water engineer by training and the tap was one of his first projects in Africa. You can find them all over Africa now, Dan told me.
Interestingly, nearly all the field workers for CARE were trained to do something else. David Sanderson was an architect before he became an aid worker. Adam Koons, whom we would meet in another day or so, was formerly a photographer on Madison Avenue in New York. A fellow working in Uganda for CARE in a previous life designed the round tea bag.
“People who work in the field are different from most of the rest of us,” Dan said as we strolled along. “They live far away from their friends and families in places like this that are generally difficult and often dangerous, trying to help people they don’t know to have better lives. Pretty remarkable really. Could you do that?”
“No,” I said.
“Neither could I.” He was thoughtful for a minute. “But then I’d never have thought of the round teabag either.”
Late in the afternoon we returned to the airstrip for the 90-minute flight to Nairobi. I asked Nino what the weather was like there.
“I’ll let you know when we get closer,” he said vaguely, as if he weren’t sharing all he knew.
Ten minutes before we arrived in Nairobi I found out why he was being coy. Ahead of us was a storm. It looked big. The thing about sitting near the front in a small aircraft is that you can see everything—to left, to right and straight ahead. None of it looked good.
We were over the outer suburbs of Nairobi and some way into our descent before we hit any turbulence—and it wasn’t too bad. It didn’t feel as if the wings were going to fall off or anything. But then the rain came—suddenly and noisily in staccato fashion. It was as if the windscreen were being pounded by wet bullets. Maybe it’s always like that in cockpit and you just don’t know when you are in a separate compartment further back, but this was most assuredly unnerving. Worse, after a minute it became evident that Nino couldn’t see a thing. He began to move his head from spot to spot around the windscreen, putting his nose to the glass, looking for any tiny bit of visibility. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t put the windscreen wiper on, then looked more closely and saw there wasn’t a windscreen wiper. I glanced across at Nick and we shared a single telepathic thought: There’s no windscreen wiper!
Actually two thoughts: There’s no windscreen wiper and we’re all going to die!
Nino was now bobbing around in his seat in the manner of someone who is trying to land an airplane while being attacked by fire ants. It appeared that from looking out the side window he could get a very rough fix on our location, but only very rough evidently because twice he banked very sharply, as if swerving out of the path of a big building or something. This was rapidly becoming worse than my worst nightmare.
But still he pressed on. For one long minute, nothing much happened. We just flew forward in a seemingly straight line, continuously descending. When we were some small distance above the ground—70 or 80 feet, say—and there was still nothing to be seen in front of us, I was pretty comfortably certain that we were going to die in the next few seconds. I remember being appalled, peeved even, but nothing more than that.
And then bang—and I use the word advisedly, of course—right before us, rushing at us at a ridiculously accelerated speed, was a runway. Nino tilted the plane and dropped us with the sort of suddenness that made our hats rise off our heads. We landed hard and decidedly off center, and for a long moment—the one truly frightening moment of the whole episode—it seemed that he wouldn’t be able to keep control, that we would hit the grass and somersault into a thousand pieces. But he managed to hold us steady and after a small eternity we came to a stop just outside a hangar.
“I’m naming my first child Nino,” Dan said quietly.
Nick was staring at his hand and a large piece of fuselage that he seemed to have pulled off in the course of the landing.
Nino took off his headset and turned around beaming. “Sorry about that, chaps,” he said. “Had a little trouble spotting the runway.”
“W-w-why is there no windscreen wiper?” I asked with difficulty.
“They’re no use with a single engine,” he said, pointing to the propeller directly in front. “Best wiper in the world couldn’t keep up with the spray off that thing.”
Somehow this didn’t seem an entirely satisfactory explanation, but I was happy to leave it at that. Besides, I had a sudden overwhelming urge to drink my body weight in alcohol.
And I can tell you this for certain now: however many years are left to me and wherever fate takes me, the only way I will ever be killed by a light aircraft is if one falls on me.
Thursday, October 3
And So to western Kenya. We set off bright and early to drive to Kisumu, Kenya’s third city, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Kisumu is only about 300 kilometers west of Nairobi, but the roads are potholed and slow for much of the way, so we had to allow five hours to get there. I didn’t care. None of us did. We were four feet off the ground and wouldn’t get any higher all day.
The countryside was gorgeous—green and grassy with long views to the rugged Mau Escarpment in one direction and to the green hills of Aberdares National Park and central highlands in the other, all beneath vast blue skies and baking sun. Here and there along the heights overlooking the Rift Valley there were roomy laybys where you could pull off to take in the views, each with 15 or 20 forlorn trinket and souvenir stalls waiting for customers who these days mostly never come. There was wildlife, too—families of baboons dining on road kill along the shoulder, herds of impalas and zebras dotting the grasslands, soda lakes carpeted with thousands of bright pink flamingoes. There was no question that we were in Africa now.
Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on 50 cents a day or less. Curiously, it looked more prosperous than many of the other places we had been. It had a trim, modern central business district and quite a lot of nice housing. There seemed to be more bicycles along the roads and fewer street urchins.
We had come to see the work of Wedco, a small bank— micro-finance institution is the formal term—that has been one of CARE’s great success stories in the region. Wedco began in 1989 with the idea of making small loans to groups of ladies, generally market traders, who previously had almost no access to business credit. The idea was that half a dozen or so female traders would form a business club and take out a small loan, which they would apportion among themselves, to help them expand or improve their businesses. The idea of having a club was to spread the risk. It seemed a slightly loopy idea to many to focus exclusively on females, but it has been a runaway success.
“Our ladies are very shrewd and very hard working,” laughed Peres Oyugi, Kisumu’s branch manager, as we drove to Kisumu’s Jubilee Market to see some of Wedco’s money in action. Ten years ago, she told me,Wedco had loans on its books of 18 million Kenyan shillings—about $250,000. Today its loan portfolio has increased nearly tenfold to over 175 million shillings and it is helping more than 200 groups in Kisumu alone. There are seven other branches spread across the region.
Jubilee Market is an extraordinary place—crowded, noisy, extremely colorful—with large, open-sided halls specializing in wet fish, dried fish, vegetables, nuts and other farm commodities. I had never seen such luscious produce more beautifully arrayed. Every stall was a picture of abundance and sumptuousness, every peanut and tomato and chili more neatly arranged and more richly colored than any I had seen before anywhere. It seemed impossible that people so poor could enjoy such plenty. I asked Adam Koons, CARE’s chief of operations for western Kenya, if it was as good as it looked. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “My wife and I do our own food shopping here. Kenyans haven’t got much money, but they are very particular about their food.”
Beyond the main food halls was a sort of bazaar of dark alleys containing tiny shops—cubicles really—selling everything from bolts of cloth to small electrical items. There I was introduced to several of Wedco’s happily prospering clients, among them a genial but weary-looking woman named Consolata Ododa. Ododa makes a living selling small oddments—batteries, torches, plastic wallets, key rings, playing cards. Like all the women in her group, Ododa works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, then goes home to cook an evening meal for her family, so it’s not exactly a life of luxury. Every two weeks she makes an overnight trip to Nairobi by bus to acquire new stock, returning in time to reopen the stall late the following morning. She had just returned that day from her latest trip, and it was for this reason that she was “a little tired,” she told me. For all this her turnover averages about 3,000 shillings a day—roughly $30—from which she must pay rent, electricity, taxes and interest and principle on her loan. Typically she will clear $6 or $7 for her 12-hour day—hardly a princely sum, but more, she told me, than she had ever dreamed of having before Wedco stepped into her life. And so by such means do people’s lives improve, little by little.
Friday, October 4
Fifty miles or so south of Kisumu is Homa Bay, a listless small city of potholed streets, baking sun and an inescapable air of being at the wrong end of a long road. Most of the drive from Kisumu is along an exceedingly rough and bouncy dirt track. Interestingly, all road maps show it as a first-rate highway. This is because some years ago the World Bank gave money for the road to be paved. In the event, however, some government official or group of government officials decided to spare Kenyan workers the wearying toil of laying tarmac under a hot sun, and pocketed the money instead.
This sort of thing happens quite a lot in Kenya. Once a model of probity and rectitude, after 23 years under the increasingly reviled Daniel arap Moi, Kenya has become a case study in mismanagement and corruption. A group called Transparency International, which monitors global corruption, now ranks it as the sixth least trustworthy nation in the world, ahead of only Bangladesh, Nigeria, Paraguay, Madagascar and Angola. In one year, according to the BBC, $10 billion of public funds went missing in Kenya. Ten billion dollars! In one year! And it didn’t even top the list!
Why institutions like the World Bank and IMF, not to mention our own slumbering governments, allow this to happen is a question I cannot answer, but it has unfortunate consequences for groups like CARE. First, it means that they are left to provide many of the services that any decent government would itself provide. It also means that donations for these services are harder to secure because so many people think that any money sent to Africa goes into the pockets of despots. If anyone ever, ever, ever tries to suggest to you that this is the case, you must poke them in the eyes with something at least as big as a snooker cue, for it just isn’t so.
Money given to aid agencies like CARE—and Oxfam and Save the Children and others beyond enumerating—doesn’t pass through corrupt intermediaries. It goes straight into projects.
Incidentally, Moi is to step down in December 2002 when elections are to be held. The universal hope, it appears, is that things will get better with a new government. “They can’t get worse,” I was told several times.
“It’s not about spending huge amounts of money, but about spending smaller amounts intelligently,” Phillip Makutsa, one of CARE’s project officers in the western province of Nyanza, told me as we bounced over more rough roads en route to the village of Ogongo Tir on the edge of the Lambwe Valley. He was explaining to me CARE’s new philosophy with regard to aid, which was essentially twofold— to make a little go a long way and to help people to help themselves. “It can be as little as narrowing the mouth of communal water containers so that people don’t dip their hands into the water and accidentally contaminate it,” Phillip said. “That one small step alone has produced a 58 percent decline in diarrhoeal outbreaks where implemented,” he added, beaming. We were arriving at Ogongo Tir. “You’ll see what I mean here,” he added.
Ogongo Tir was a scattered village in a green valley, which, thanks to CARE, boasted a new well. It was this that we had come to see. The well, it must be said, wasn’t one of the wonders of the world. It was just a simple long-handled pump of the kind still commonly encountered at camp-grounds. My grandfather had one just like it, dating from about 1900, on his Iowa farm, so this was hardly cutting edge technology. But what a difference it has made to Ogongo Tir’s 32I households.
Before this, one of the village elders told me, during droughts and dry seasons women gathering water had to make a seven-hour round trip to a spring atop a steep and distant hill, setting out from the village at three in the morning in order to be back in time for the day’s other chores. Because of the distance, none could carry more than a single five-gallon jerry can.
Now villagers have only to stroll to a clearing on the village edge to get safe, clean, adequate supplies of water. This was such a big deal to the community that the entire village turned out to greet us. Children sang us songs and their elders made speeches. Long speeches. Impassioned speeches. Speeches in Kiswahile and speeches in English. These were seriously grateful people.
“There’s been a big change in how these things are done,” Nick told me as we were taken on a tour of a nearby vegetable garden, which blossoms even in the dry season thanks to water from the well. “It used to be that we’d build a well for a village or make some other improvement and then move on. Eventually, the pump would break or something would go wrong and the people wouldn’t know what to do. They’d come back to us and ask us to fix it because they thought of it as our well.
“So the idea now is that we help them build the well, but then the village takes complete responsibility for it. They form a committee and run it as a kind of business. They make a small charge for anyone who takes water so that they then have a reserve fund for when they need to make a repair or eventually dig a new well.”
“And has it worked?” I asked.
“Brilliantly, everywhere we’ve done it. It’s amazing how long it took aid agencies to figure out that people really, really don’t want dependency. They want to help themselves.”
“Only natural,” I observed wisely.
“Only natural,” he agreed.
We returned to our vehicles and plunged deeper into the broad and comely Lambwe Valley. At length we stopped at a small farm, where we met a sweet and eager young farmer named William Gumbo. Gumbo owns four acres of good but semi-arid land in the most gorgeous setting in the very heart of the valley. It was almost uncannily reminiscent of Tuscany or Provence—a place of dry, warm, shimmering beauty. I can’t tell you how much I wish you could have met William Gumbo, for he was an inspiration.
Until 1999 Gumbo scratched a living raising maize and millet and a few chickens. Then CARE stepped into his life. As part of its Dak Achana (Kiswahili for “healthy households”) programme, it introduced him to a couple of agricultural specialists, who showed him ways to increase his yields and diversify crops. Today he runs a model farm—a four-acre outburst of verdant plenty in the midst of a dry, bare valley. He grows peas, tomatoes, bananas, pineapples, passion fruit, mangos and much else. Only sweet potatoes have been a failure: some livestock broke through a fence and gobbled them up.
William Gumbo loves his farm. He carries a hardback ledger in which he records every detail of his plants’ lives. Ask him about his banana trees and he will search through the book and tell you that he planted 310 of them on 20 April 2001, and then show you a weekly chronicle of their progress since. Everything is grown from seeds or cuttings. Nothing has been nursed on from a pot. It’s all from scratch.
He showed us a grove of eucalyptus trees—I,200 in all— that he has coaxed into being from seed. After a year and a half they are already 15 feet tall. In another year and a half they will provide excellent wood for timber and poles. The same amount of land devoted to maize would produce about 16,000 Kenyan shillings in income over three years. The eucalypts in the same period could produce as much as 200,000 shillings of income—over $2,500, a sum that most Kenyan farmers would find almost inconceivable.
The idea of the project is that CARE helps Gumbo create a model farm, then moves elsewhere. Gumbo, meanwhile, teaches what he has learned to his neighbours. Already he has helped 300 other farmers in the district.
The Lambwe Valley is not an easy place to prosper. It has long been notorious as one of the worst sites in east Africa for tse-tse fly. The fly populations have been much reduced in recent years, but they still take a good number of animals. The valley is also cruelly drought prone. As of early October, it hadn’t seen rain in over five months, so farming here will always be an uphill battle. Even if all goes well, William Gumbo will still be poor. His house has a dirt floor and it will be a very long time before he is luxuriating in shag carpets. But he will probably have enough to buy his kids school uniforms—a prerequisite for attending even state schools in Kenya—or textbooks or pencils or a birthday present.
William Gumbo, in short, is a happy man and he has a future. Surely every human being is entitled to at least that much.
Saturday, October 5
Well, that’s pretty much it, I’m afraid. We had another day in the countryside before we returned to Nairobi and flew home. We visited a tea plantation in Kericho, lunched with some jolly white farmers and toured a huge flower growing operation on the shores of Lake Naivasha, but for me the trip ended with the happy villagers at Ogongo Tir and their beloved well, and with the heroic William Gumbo.
Obviously there is only so much you can learn about a country in eight days. We didn’t have time even to visit many of CARE’s projects in Kenya, and Kenya is only a small part of what it does. But I saw enough to realize that Kenya is a terrific country that is just full of William Gumbos and Consolata Ododas (the lady, you will recall, selling oddments at Kisumu’s market) and Jillani Ngallas (the young man who longs to be a paleontologist but probably will never make it) and 30 million other people just as individual and real. I don’t suppose they can all be saintly and deserving, but they do have one thing in common with the rest of us: they are human beings. And, like us, they get only one life apiece, so naturally they tend to appreciate it—appreciate it very much, I believe—when people from a more comfortable part of the world take the trouble to help them make theirs better. For that’s what CARE does, you see. It makes lives better, in 64 countries, thousands of times every day.
I don’t know if you are fully aware of it, but in acquiring this slender volume you didn’t actually buy a book. You made a generous donation to a worthy cause and got a free book in return, which isn’t quite the same thing. It’s much nobler. On behalf of CARE, thank you.
As I am sure the jacket conspicuously notes, my publishers, Transworld in Britain and Broadway Books in the United States, are also not taking a penny of profit from this—I know, I can hardly believe it myself—which means that a great many people behind the scenes worked hard for free to make this happen, and at the very busiest time of their working year. I think they deserve a special thanks, and most of your future purchases.
As for me and the rest of us in our party, well, we’re very grateful too—grateful to the CARE people in Kenya for showing us around, and to you for your support. And best of all, not once in the week did we get rubbed with dung.
CARE SAYS THANKYOU ...
. . . for buying Bill Bryson’s African Diary. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.
This book was made possible through the generosity and hard work of many people—from CARE staff and the Kenyan communities they serve, to the staff of Broadway Books and Transworld Publishers.
And, of course, this book would not have been possible without Bill Bryson, one of the world’s finest travel writers, who withstood a punishing schedule to produce his first book on Africa, the royalties from which he is donating to CARE.
THE FACTS ABOUT POVERTY
Today, nearly half of humanity struggles to survive on less than $2 a day. More than 30 countries are gripped by armed conflict. AIDS threatens to take as many lives as all the wars of the twentieth century. Our world is indeed faced with complex challenges.
Yet every day, CARE sees victories over poverty that are neither captured by global statistics nor covered on the nightly news: A farmer in Malawi who grows enough food to feed his family. A young girl in Afghanistan who becomes the first in her family to attend school. A healthy child who is protected against preventable illnesses such as polio.
While people in poor communities face daunting odds, they also possess the determination and capability to improve their lives and bring us all closer to a world where poverty has been overcome.
CARE
CARE is one of the world’s leading international poverty-fighting organizations. With more than 55 years of experience, CARE understands the depth and scope of poverty. And we have no doubt that something can be done about it. Our integrated programs in more than 60 countries not only provide immediate assistance to families in need, they also work with communities to create long-term solutions to poverty.
We believe that together we can make the world better, more stable and safer for all. We take this goal seriously. So it’s not enough to simply alleviate the symptoms of poverty. CARE works with communities to find the source of the problem and solve it. For good.
MOVING AHEAD WITH CARE
Our efforts to overcome poverty depend on the support of people like you—people who care about the world in which they live. With your help, we can create lasting, positive change in communities around the world.
CARE is an effective and efficient steward of your investment. We direct 90 percent of our expended resources toward an array of poverty-fighting programs. And on average, for every $1 in private support raised, CARE can leverage another $5 in support from public sources.
To learn more about CARE and how to join our efforts to overcome poverty, please visit CARE’s global homepage, www.care.org.
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
The Lost Continent
Mother Tongue
Neither Here nor There
Made in America
Notes from a Small Island
A Walk in the Woods
I’m a Stranger Here Myself
In a Sunburned Country
Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words
Go to the Next Page to Read Chapter 7 from
Bill Bryson’s At Home
Coming in October 2010
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
THE DRAWING ROOM
I
If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition. Comfortable meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole’s day no one did.
Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older withdrawing room, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing room was challenged in more refined circles by the French salon, which was sometimes anglicized to saloon, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that saloon came first to signify a room for socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile. Salon, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places associated with artistic endeavors before being appropriated (from about 1910) by providers of hair care and beauty treatments. Parlor, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French parler, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.
Drawing room is the name used by Edward Tull on his floorplan of the Old Rectory, and almost certainly is the term employed by the well-bred Mr. Marsham, though he was probably in a minority even then. By mid-century it was being supplanted in all but the most genteel circles by sitting room, a term first appearing in English in 1806. A later challenger was lounge, which originally signified a type of chair or sofa, then a jacket for relaxing in, and finally, from 1881, a room. In America, living room came into being in about 1870, and quite rapidly drove parlor out of use there, but failed to catch on elsewhere.
Assuming he was a conventional sort of fellow, Mr. Marsham would have strived to make his drawing room the most comfortable room in the house, with the softest and finest furnishings. In practice, however, it was probably anything but comfortable for much of the year, since it has just one fireplace, which could do no more than warm a small, central part of the room. Even with a good fire going, I can attest, it is possible in the depths of winter to stand across the room and see your breath.
Though the drawing room became the focus of comfort in the home, the story doesn’t actually start there; it doesn’t start in the house at all. It starts outdoors, a century or so before Mr. Marsham’s birth, with a simple discovery that would make landed families like his very rich and allow him one day to build himself a handsome rectory. The discovery was merely this: land didn’t have to be rested regularly to retain its fertility. It was not the most staggering of insights, but it changed the world.
Traditionally, most English farmland was divided into long strips called furlongs and each furlong was left fallow for one season in every three—sometimes one season in two—so that it could recover its ability to produce healthy crops.* This meant that in any given year at least one-third of the nation’s farmland stood idle. In consequence, there wasn’t sufficient feed to keep large numbers of animals alive through the winter, so landowners had no choice but to slaughter most of their stock each autumn and face a long, lean period till spring.
Then English farmers discovered something that Dutch farmers had known for a long time: if turnips, clover, or one or two other amenable crops were sown on the idle fields, they miraculously refreshed the soil and produced a bounty of winter fodder into the bargain. It was the infusion of nitrogen that did it, though no one would understand that for nearly two hundred years. What was understood, and very much appreciated, was that crop rotation transformed agricultural fortunes dramatically. Moreover, because more animals lived through the winter, they produced heaps of additional manure, and these glorious, gratis ploppings enriched the soil even further.
It is hard to exaggerate what a miracle all this seemed. Before the eighteenth century, agriculture in Britain lurched from crisis to crisis. An academic named W. G. Hoskins calculated (in 1964) that between 1480 and 1700, one harvest in four was bad, and almost one in five was catastrophically bad. Now, thanks to the simple expedient of crop rotation, agriculture was able to settle into a continuous, more or less reliable prosperity. It was this long golden age that gave so much of the countryside the air of prosperous comeliness it enjoys still today, and allowed the likes of Mr. Marsham to embrace that gratifying new commodity: comfort.
Farmers also benefited from a new wheeled contraption invented in about 1700 by Jethro Tull, a farmer and agricultural thinker in Berkshire. Called a seed drill, it allowed seeds to be planted directly into the soil rather than broadcast by hand. Seed was expensive, and Tull’s new drill reduced the amount needed from three or four bushels per acre to under one; and because the seeds were planted at even depths in neat rows, more of them sprouted successfully, so yields improved dramatically, too, from between twenty and forty bushels an acre to as much as eighty.
The new vitality was also reflected in breeding programs. Nearly all the great cattle breeds—Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, Aberdeen Angus, Ayrshire*—were eighteenth-century creations. Sheep likewise were successfully manipulated to become the bundles of unnatural fleeciness we see today. A medieval sheep gave about a pound and a half of wool; re-engineered eighteenth-century sheep gave up to nine pounds. Underneath all that lovely fleece, sheep were gratifyingly plumper, too. Between 1700 and 1800, the average weight of sheep sold at Smithfield Market in London more than doubled, from thirty-eight pounds to eighty. Beef cattle expanded similarly. Dairy yields went up, too.
All this was not without cost, however. To make the new systems of production work, it was necessary to amalgamate small fields into large ones and move the peasant farmers off the land. This enclosure movement, in which small fields that had formerly supported many were converted into much larger enclosed fields that enriched a few, made farming immensely lucrative for those with large holdings—and soon in many areas that was almost the only kind of holding there was. Enclosure had been going on slowly for centuries, but it gathered pace between 1750 and 1830, when some six million acres of British farmland were enclosed. Enclosure was hard on the displaced peasant farmers, but it did leave them and their descendants conveniently available to move to towns and become the toiling masses of the new Industrial Revolution—which was also just beginning and was funded to a very large extent by the surplus wealth enjoyed by the ever-richer landowners.
Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed for industry. This didn’t always represent a notable advance in beauty—at one time in the eighteenth century, eighty-five open-cast coal mines could be seen from Chatsworth House, or so it has been said—but it did translate into gratifying heaps of lucre. Still others made money from leasing land to railways or building canals and controlling rights of way. The Duke of Bridgewater earned annual returns of 40 percent—and really returns don’t get much better than that—from a canal monopoly in the West Country. All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest—almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked. Many people were born into a world in which they had to do virtually nothing with their wealth but stack it. The third Earl of Burlington, to take one example of many, owned vast estates in Ireland—some forty-two thousand acres in all—and never visited the country. Eventually he was made lord treasurer of Ireland and still never visited it.
This wealthy elite and their offspring covered the British countryside with stout and rambling expressions of this new joie de richesse. By one count, at least 840 large country houses were built in England between 1710 and the end of the century—”dispersed like great rarity plums in a vast pudding of a country,” in the exuberant words of Horace Walpole.
Extraordinary houses need extraordinary people to design and build them, and perhaps none was more extraordinary—or at least more unexpected—than Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726).* Vanbrugh came from a large family—he was one of nineteen children—that was well-to-do and of Dutch extraction, though they had been settled in England for nearly half a century by the time Vanbrugh himself was born.
“A most sweet-natur’d gentleman, and pleasant,” wrote the poet Nicholas Rowe of Vanbrugh, who seems to have been well liked by everyone who met him (with the notable exception of the Duchess of Marlborough, as we shall see). A portrait of him by Sir Godfrey Kneller in the National Portrait Gallery in London, made when Vanbrugh was about forty, shows an agreeable man with a pink, well-fed, rather ordinary face framed—indeed,all but overwhelmed—by a periwig of baroque magnificence, as was the fashion of the day.
For the first three decades of his life he displayed no particular sense of direction. He worked in a family wine business, went to India as an agent for the East India Company—then still a fairly new and undistinguished enterprise—and finally took up soldiering, though without much distinction there either. Sent to France, he was arrested as a spy almost as soon as he stepped ashore and spent nearly five years in prison, albeit in reasonable, gentlemanly comfort.
Prison appears to have had a galvanizing effect on him, for upon his return to England he became with remarkable swiftness a celebrated playwright, producing in rapid succession two of the most popular comedies of his day, The Relapse and The Provok’d Wife. Featuring characters with names like Fondlewife, Lord Foppington, Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and Sir John Brute, the plays may seem just a touch heavy-handed to us but were the height of drollery in that overdone and highly fragranced age. It was pretty risqué stuff. One scandalized member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners said that Vanbrugh “had debauch’d the stage beyond the looseness of all former times.” Others loved his plays for exactly the same reasons. The poet Samuel Rogers thought him “almost as great a genius as ever lived.”
Altogether Vanbrugh would write or adapt ten works for the stage, but meanwhile, and with no less startling abruptness, he also turned his talents to architecture. Where this impulse came from was as much a mystery to his contemporaries as it is to us. All that is known is that in 1701, at the age of thirty-five, he began work on one of the grandest houses ever built in England, Castle Howard in Yorkshire. How he persuaded his friend Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle—described by one architectural historian as “rather nondescript but obviously uncontrollably wealthy”—to underwrite this seemingly insane ambition is no less uncertain. This was not just a big house, it was a place that was positively and determinedly palatial, built “on a scale previously the prerogative of royalty,” in the words of Vanbrugh’s biographer Kerry Downes. Clearly Carlisle saw something in Vanbrugh’s rough sketches, and Vanbrugh, it must be said, did have the backup of a real architect of undoubted gifts, Nicholas Hawks-moor, who had twenty years of experience but was oddly content to work as Vanbrugh’s assistant. It seems also that Vanbrugh may have worked for free. (No indication of money changing hands has ever been found—and on both sides these were men who kept track of such things.) In any case, Carlisle dismissed the distinguished architect he had been planning to use, William Talman, and gave the novice Vanbrugh free rein.
Vanbrugh and Carlisle were both members of a secretive society known as the Kit-Cat Club, an organization of Whiggish* disposition that had been founded more or less exclusively to ensure the Hanoverian succession—the dynastic change that guaranteed that all future British monarchs would be Protestant even if, in the short term, they were not notably British. That the Kit-Cats achieved this aim was no small accomplishment since their candidate, George I, spoke no English, had almost no admirable qualities, and was by one count no better than fifty-eighth in line to the throne. Beyond this one piece of political maneuvering, the club operated with such discretion that almost nothing is known about it. One of its founding members was a pastry chef named Christopher—or “Kit”—Cat. Kit-cat was also the name of his famous mutton pies, so whether the club was named for him or his pies has been a matter of debate in certain very small circles for three hundred years. The club lasted from only about 1696 to 1720—specific details are unknown—and total membership was only about fifty, of whom two-thirds were peers of the realm. Five members—Lords Carlisle, Halifax, and Scarborough and the Dukes of Manchester and Marlborough—commissioned work from Vanbrugh. Membership also included the prime minister Robert Walpole (father of Horace), the journalists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and the playwright William Congreve.
At Castle Howard, Vanbrugh didn’t exactly ignore the classical proprieties; he just buried them under a kind of kudzu of baroque ornamentation. A Vanbrugh structure is always like no other, but Castle Howard is, as it were, unusually unusual. It had a large number of formal rooms—thirteen on one floor—but few bedrooms: nothing like the amount that would normally be expected. Many rooms were oddly shaped or poorly lit. Much of the external detailing is unusual, if not actually erratic. The columns on one side of the house are simple Doric, but those on the other are a more ornate Corinthian. (Vanbrugh argued, with some logic, that no one could see the two sides at the same time.) The most striking characteristic of all, for at least a quarter century, was that the house was built without its west wing—though this was not in fact Vanbrugh’s fault. Carlisle got distracted and neglected to put up the west wing, leaving the house conspicuously unfinished. When the wing was finally built, twenty-five years later by another party, it was in an entirely different style, so that the visitor today is met with a baroque east wing as Vanbrugh intended and an inescapably unmatching Palladian west wing that pleased a later owner and hardly anyone else.
Castle Howard’s most famous feature, its domed crown (formally a lantern, from a Greek word meaning “to admit light”) over the entrance hall, was a late addition, and is strikingly out of scale with the building beneath it. It is too tall and too thin. It looks as if it were designed for another structure altogether. One architectural critic noted, diplomatically, that “at close quarters it does not fit very logically on to the building below.” It was at least novel. The only other domed structure in England at the time was Christopher Wren’s new St. Paul’s Cathedral. No house anywhere had ever had anything like it.
Castle Howard is in short a very fine property, but fine in a way that is entirely its own. The dome may be slightly odd, but Castle Howard would be nothing without it. We can say that with unusual confidence because for twenty years Castle Howard was without it. Late on the night of November 9, 1940, a fire was discovered in the east wing. In those days the house had just one telephone, and the phone melted like chocolate before anyone could get to it. So someone had to run to the gatehouse, a mile away, and call the fire department from there. By the time the fire crew arrived from Malton, six miles distant, two hours had passed and much of the house was lost. The dome had crumpled in the heat and fallen into the house. Castle Howard was domeless for the next twenty years, and it looked all right—it was still stately, still imposing, still stolidly grand—but it had lost its perk. When the dome was finally restored in the early 1960s, it became instantly and peculiarly endearing once again.
Despite his limited experience, Vanbrugh now landed the commission for one of the most important houses ever built in Great Britain, Blenheim Palace, that colossal explosion of magnificence at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Blenheim was intended to be a gift from the nation to the Duke of Marlborough for his victory over the French in the Battle of Blindheim (somehow anglicized into Blenheim), in Bavaria, in 1704. The estate came with twenty-two thousand acres of prime land, which brought an income of £6,000 a year, a hale sum for the time but not, alas, nearly enough to pay for a house on the scale of Blenheim—and Blenheim was so big as to be effectively off any scale.
It contained three hundred rooms and sprawled over seven acres.* A frontage of 250 feet for a stately home was enormous; at Blenheim the frontage was to be 856 feet. It was the greatest monument to vanity Britain had ever seen. Every inch of it was covered in decorative stony sumptuousness. It was grander than any royal palace and so, not surprisingly, very, very expensive. The duke, a fellow member of the Kit-Cat Club, seems to have gotten along with Vanbrugh well enough, but, after agreeing the general principles of the thing, he went off to fight more wars, leaving domestic arrangements in the hands of his wife, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. She thus oversaw most of the work, and from the start she and Vanbrugh did not get along. At all.
Work began in the summer of 1705 and was trouble from the start. Many costly adjustments had to be made along the way. The principal entrance had to be changed when a cottage owner refused to move, so the main gate had to be located in an odd place at the back of the town, requiring visitors to pass along the high street, turn a corner, and enter the grounds through what even today feels oddly like a tradesman’s entrance (albeit rather a grand one).
Blenheim was budgeted to cost £40,000. Ultimately it cost about £300,000. This was unfortunate, as the Marlboroughs were notoriously parsimonious. The duke was so cheap that he refused to dot his i‘s when he wrote, to save on ink. It was never clear who was to pay for the work—Queen Anne, the treasury, or the Marlboroughs themselves. The duchess and Queen Anne had a close, rather strange, and just possibly intimate relationship. When alone they gave each other odd pet names—”Mrs. Morley” and “Mrs. Freeman”—to avoid any awkwardness arising from the fact that one of them was regal and the other was not. Unfortunately, the building of Blenheim coincided with a cooling of their affections, which added to the uncertainty of financial responsibility. Things grew more complicated still after the queen died in 1714 and was replaced by a king who felt no particular affection for, or debt to, the Marlboroughs. Many of the builders went unpaid for years as the disputes dragged on, and most eventually got only a fraction of what they were owed. Building work ceased altogether for four years, from 1712 to 1716, and many of the unpaid workers were understandably loath to return when work resumed. Vanbrugh himself didn’t get paid until 1725—almost exactly twenty years after work started.
Even when things were moving along, Vanbrugh and the duchess squabbled endlessly. She thought the palace “too big, too dark and too martial.” She accused Vanbrugh of extravagance and insubordination, and became implacably convinced that he was a bad thing. In 1716, she dismissed him altogether—though at the same time instructing the workmen to stay faithful to his plans. When Vanbrugh came with his wife in 1725 to see the finished building—a building on which he had lavished some two-thirds of his architectural career and one-third of his life—he was informed at the gate that the duchess had left standing instructions that he was not to be admitted to the grounds. So he never saw his finished masterwork except as a shimmer in the distance. Eight months later he was dead.
Like Castle Howard, Blenheim is in a baroque style, but even more so. Its roofline is a festive eruption of orbs and urns and other upright embellishments. Many people hated its monumental scale and ostentation. The Earl of Ailesbury dismissed it as “one mass of stone without taste or relish.” Alexander Pope, after exhaustively enumerating its failings, concluded: “In a word, it is a most expensive absurdity.” The Duke of Shrewsbury dismissed it as “a great quarry of stones above ground.” A wag named Abel Evans wrote a mock epitaph for Vanbrugh:
Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee.
Blenheim is a gloriously overwrought piece of work without question, but transfixing nonetheless, and the scale is so off the chart that it can hardly fail to awe the first-time visitor. It is hard to believe that anyone would want to live in such an oppressive vastness, and in fact the Marl-boroughs barely did. They didn’t move in until 1719, and the duke died just two years later.
Whatever one thought of Vanbrugh and his creations, the age of the celebrity architect had begun.*
Before Vanbrugh’s day, architects weren’t much celebrated. Generally, fame went to those who paid for the houses, not those who designed them. Hardwick Hall, which we encountered in Chapter 3, was one of the great buildings of its age, yet it is merely supposed that Robert Smythson was the architect. It is a pretty good supposition, for all kinds of reasons, but there is no actual proof of it. Smythson was in fact the first man to be called an architect—or nearly to be called an architect—on a monument of about 1588, in which he is described as “architect or and survayor.” But as with so many others of his era, very little is known about his early life, including where he was born and when. He makes his first appearance in the records at Longleat House at Wiltshire in 1568, when he was already in his thirties and a master mason. Where he was before that is completely unknown.
Even after architecture became a recognized profession, most practitioners came from other backgrounds. Inigo Jones was a designer of theatrical productions, Christopher Wren an astronomer, Robert Hooke a scientist, Vanbrugh a soldier and playwright, William Kent a painter and interior designer. As a formal profession, architecture was actually very late developing. Compulsory examinations were not introduced until 1882 in Britain, and architecture wasn’t offered anywhere as a full-time academic discipline until 1895.
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, domestic architecture was getting a lot of respect and attention, and for a time no one had more of both than Robert Adam. If Vanbrugh was the first celebrity architect, Adam was the greatest. Born in 1728 in Scotland, the son of an architect, he was one of a quartet of brothers who all became successful architects, though Robert was the undoubted genius of the family and the one remembered by history. The period from 1755 to 1785 is sometimes called the Age of Adam.
A painting of Adam in the National Portrait Gallery in London, made in about 1770 when he was in his early forties, shows a kindly looking man in a powdered gray wig, but in fact Adam was not a particularly adorable fellow. Arrogant and egotistical, he treated his employees poorly, paying them little and keeping them in a kind of perpetual servitude. He fined them severely if they were caught doing any work other than for him, even a sketch for their own amusement. Adam’s clients, however, venerated his abilities and for thirty years simply couldn’t give him enough work. The Adam brothers became a kind of architectural industry. They owned quarries, a timber business, brickworks, a company for making stucco, and much else. At one point they employed two thousand people. They designed not just houses but every object within them—furniture, fireplaces, carpets, beds, lamps, and all else down to incidental objects like doorknobs, bell pulls, and inkstands.
Adam’s designs were intense—sometimes overwhelming—and gradually he fell out of favor. He had an inescapable weakness for overdecoration. To walk into an Adam room is rather like walking into a large, overfrosted cake. Indeed one of his contemporary critics called him “a Pastry Cook.” By the late 1780s, Adam was being denounced as “sugary and effeminate” and had fallen so far out of fashion that he retreated to his native Scotland, where he died in 1792. By 1831, he was so thoroughly forgotten that the influential Lives of the Most Eminent British Architects didn’t mention him at all. The banishment didn’t last terribly long, however. By the 1860s, his reputation was undergoing a revival, which continues now, though these days he is remembered more for his rich interiors than for his architecture.
The one thing all buildings had in common through Adam’s day was a rigorous devotion to symmetry. Vanbrugh, to be sure, didn’t entirely achieve symmetry at Castle Howard, but that was largely accidental. Elsewhere, however, symmetry was adhered to as an immutable law of design. Every wing had to have a matching wing, whether it was needed or not, and every window and pediment to one side of the main entrance had to be exactly mirrored by windows and pediments on the other side regardless of what went on behind them. The result often was the building of wings that no one really wanted. Not until the nineteenth century did this absurdity begin to end, and it was a remarkable property in Wiltshire—one of the most extraordinary ever built—that started the process.
It was called Fonthill Abbey, and it was the creation of two strange and fascinating men: William Beckford and the architect James Wyatt. Beckford was fabulously rich. His family owned plantations all across Jamaica and had dominated the West Indian sugar trade for a hundred years. Beckford’s doting mother made sure her son enjoyed every advantage in his upbringing. The eight-year-old Wolfgang Mozart was brought in to give him piano lessons. Sir William Chambers, the king’s architect, taught him to draw. Beckford’s wealth was so inexhaustibly great that when he came into his inheritance on his twenty-first birthday, he spent £40,000—an obscenely colossal sum—on the party. Byron in a poem called him “England’s wealthiest son,” probably rightly.
In 1784, Beckford became the centerpiece of the most spectacularly juicy scandal of his age when it emerged that he was involved in a pair of tempestuous, wildly dangerous dalliances. One was with Louisa Beckford, the wife of his first cousin. At the same time, he also fell for a slim and delicate youth named William Courtenay, the future ninth Earl of Devon, who was generally agreed to be the most beautiful boy in England. For a few torrid and presumably exhausting years, Beckford maintained both relationships, often under the same roof. But in the autumn of 1784 there was a sudden rupture. Beckford received or discovered a note in Courtenay’s hand that threw him into a fit of jealous rage. No record exists of what the note said, but it provoked Beckford into intemperate action. He went to Courtenay’s room and, in the slightly confused words of one of the other houseguests, “horsewhipped him, which created a noise, and the door being opened, Courtenay was discovered in his shirt, and Beckford in some posture or other—Strange story.”
Indeed.
The particular misfortune here was that Courtenay was the darling of his family—he was the only boy among fourteen siblings—and shockingly youthful. He was sixteen at the time of the incident, but may have been as young as ten when he fell under Beckford’s unwholesome sway. This was not a matter that Courtenay’s family would ever let drop, and we may take it for granted that Beckford’s cuckolded cousin was less than jubilant, too. Disgraced beyond any hope of redemption, Beckford fled to the continent. There he traveled widely and wrote, in French, a gothic novel called Vathek: An Arabian Tale, which is virtually unreadable now but was much admired in its day.
Then, in 1796, his disgrace nowhere near over, Beckford did a wholly unexpected thing. He returned to England and announced a plan to tear down the family mansion in Wiltshire, Fonthill Splendens, which was only about forty years old, and build a new house in its place—and not just any house but the largest house in England since Blenheim. It was a strange thing to do, for he had no prospect of ever filling it with company. The architect he selected for this slightly demented exercise was James Wyatt.
Wyatt is a curiously neglected figure. His only substantial biography, by Antony Dale, was published over half a century ago. He would perhaps be more famous but for the fact that so many of his buildings no longer exist. Today he is remembered more for what he destroyed than what he built.
Born in Staffordshire, the son of a farmer, Wyatt was drawn to architecture as a young man and spent six years in Italy studying architectural drawing. In 1770, aged just twenty-four, he designed the Pantheon, an exhibition hall and assembly room, loosely modeled on the ancient building of the same name in Rome, which occupied a prime site on Oxford Street in London for 160 years. Horace Walpole thought it “the most beautiful edifice in England.” Unfortunately, Marks and Spencer didn’t and in 1931 tore it down to make way for a new store.
Wyatt was an architect of talent and distinction—under George III he was appointed Surveyor of the Office of Works, in effect official architect to the nation—but a perennial shambles as a human being. He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years. When sober, however, he was much liked and widely praised for his charm, good nature, and architectural vision. A bust of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London shows him clean shaven (and indeed clean, a slightly unusual condition for him), with a very full head of hair and a face that seems curiously mournful or perhaps just slightly hungover.
Despite his shortcomings, he became the most sought-after architect of his day. However, he took on more commissions than he could manage and seldom gave satisfactory attention to anyone, to the endless exasperation of his clients. “If he can get with a large fire and have a bottle by him, he cares for nothing else,” wrote one of his many frustrated customers.
“There is an overwhelming consensus of opinion,” observed his biographer Dale, “that Wyatt had three outstanding faults: an entire lack of business capability, the complete incapacity for constant or intensiveapplication . . . and utter improvidence.” And these were the words of a sympathetic observer. Wyatt was, in short, feckless and impossible. A client named William Windham stuck it out for eleven years on a job that should have taken a fraction of the time. “A person has some right to feel impatient,” Windham wearily wrote his absent architect at one point, “finding the principal rooms of his house near uninhabitable because he has not been able to obtain from you what would not be the work of a couple of hours.” To be a Wyatt client was to be long-suffering.
Yet Wyatt’s career was both successful and remarkably productive. Over a span of forty years, he built or refashioned a hundred country houses, extravagantly reworked five cathedrals, and did much to change the face of British architecture—not always, it must be said, for the good. His treatment of cathedrals was particularly rash and sweeping. A critic named John Carter was so exercised by Wyatt’s predilection for ripping out ancient interiors that he dubbed him “the Destroyer” and devoted 212 essays in the Gentleman’s Magazine—essentially his whole career—to attacking Wyatt’s style and character.
At Durham Cathedral, Wyatt had plans to surmount the building with a mighty spire. This never came to pass, which is perhaps no bad thing, for at Fonthill Wyatt would soon show that there were few places more dangerous to be than under a Wyatt tower. He also wished to sweep away the ancient Galilee Chapel, the last resting place of the Venerable Bede and one of the great achievements of English Norman architecture. Happily, that plan was rejected, too.
Beckford was enthralled by Wyatt’s dashing genius but driven to sputtering fury by his unreliability. Still, he somehow managed to keep the wayward architect focused enough to draw a plan, and work started shortly before the turn of the century.
Everything at Fonthill was designed on a fantastic scale. Windows stood fifty feet high. Staircases were as wide as they were long. The front door rose to a height of thirty feet but was made to seem even taller by Beckford’s practice of employing dwarf doormen. Eighty-foot curtains hung from the four arches in the Octagon, a central chamber from which radiated four long arms. The view down the central corridor stretched for over three hundred feet. The dining room table—Beckford its only occupant night after night—was fifty feet long. Every ceiling was lost in a distant gloom of hammerbeams. Fonthill was very possibly the most exhausting residence ever built—and all for a man who lived alone and was known everywhere as “the man on whom no neighbour would call.” To preserve his privacy, Beckford built a formidable wall, known as the Barrier, around the estate. It was twelve feet high, twelve miles long, and surmounted by iron spikes to deter trespassers.
The Great Western Hall, leading to the Grand Saloon or Octagon, at Fonthill Abbey
Among the additional, incidental planned structures was a mighty tomb, 125 feet long, in which his coffin would be placed on a dais 25 feet above the ground, so that, he believed, no worms could ever get to him.
Fonthill was deliberately and riotously asymmetrical—”architectural anarchy” in the words of the historian Simon Thurley—and rendered in an ornate Gothic style that made it look like a cross between a medieval cathedral and Dracula’s castle. Wyatt didn’t invent neo-Gothicism. That distinction goes to Horace Walpole for his house Strawberry Hill, in outer London. Gothick, as it was sometimes spelled to distinguish it from the genuine medieval stuff, originally signaled not an architectural style but a type of gloomy, overwrought novel, and Walpole invented that too with The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Strawberry Hill, however, was a fairly cautious, picturesque sort of thing—a more or less conventional house with some Gothic tracery and other embellishments attached. Wyatt’s Gothic creations were vastly darker and heavier. They had looming towers and romantic spires and jumbled rooflines that were studiously asymmetrical, so that they looked as if the whole structure had grown organically over centuries. It was a kind of Hollywood imagining of the past, long before there was a Hollywood. Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt’s houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.* They dripped it.
In his obsession to get the project completed Beckford kept up to five hundred men working round the clock, but things constantly went wrong. Fonthill’s tower, rising to a height of 280 feet, was the tallest ever put on a private house, and it was a nightmare. Rashly, Wyatt used a new kind of rendering called Parker’s Roman cement, invented by a Reverend James Parker of Gravesend, yet another of that inquisitive breed of clergymen whom we encountered at the outset of the book. What impulse brought the Reverend Mr. Parker to the world of building materials is unknown, but his idea was to produce a quick-drying cement of the type once used by the Romans, from a recipe since lost. Unfortunately, his cement had little inherent strength and, if not mixed exactly correctly, tended to fall apart in chunks—as it did now at Fonthill. Appalled, Beckford found his mighty abbey coming to pieces even as it went up. Twice it collapsed during construction. Even when fully erect, it creaked and groaned ominously.
To Beckford’s boundless exasperation, Wyatt was often either away drunk or working on other projects. Just as things were literally falling apart at Fonthill and the five hundred workers were either running for their lives or twiddling their thumbs awaiting instructions, Wyatt was engaged in a massive, abortive project to build King George III a new palace at Kew. Why George III wanted a new palace at Kew is a reasonable question, as he had a very good one there already, but Wyatt went ahead and designed a formidable edifice (nicknamed “the Bastille” because of its forbidding looks), one of the first buildings anywhere to use cast iron as a structural material.
We don’t know what the new palace looked like, because no reproduction of it exists, but it must have been something. It was made completely of cast iron except for doors and floorboards—a design that would have given it all the charm and comfort of a cooking pot. Unfortunately, as the building rose beside the Thames, the king began to lose his sight and his interest in things he couldn’t see. Also, he never liked Wyatt much. So, with the building half finished and more than £100,000 wasted, work was stopped ten years after it began and never resumed. The structure stood empty and uncompleted for years until a new king, George IV, finally had it pulled down.
Throughout their fractious relationship, Beckford bombarded Wyattwith outraged letters. “What putrid inn, what stinking tavern or pox ridden brothel hides your hoary and glutinous limbs?” ran one typical inquiry. His pet name for Wyatt was “Bagasse” (pimp). Every letter was a screed of rage and inventive insult. Wyatt was, to be sure, maddening. Once he left Fonthill to go to London, ostensibly on urgent business, but got only three miles, to another property owned by Beckford, where he fell in with another boozy guest. A week later Beckford discovered them there together, insensate and surrounded by empty bottles.
The final cost of Fonthill Abbey is unknown, but in 1801 an informed observer suggested that Beckford had already spent £242,000—enough to build two Crystal Palaces—and the building was less than half done. Beckford moved into the abbey in the summer of 1807 even though it was uncompleted. There was no comfort in it at all. “Sixty fires had to be kept continually burning winter and summer to keep the house dry, let alone warm,” Simon Thurley records in Lost Buildings of Britain. Most of the bedrooms were as plain as monastic cells; thirteen had no windows. Beck-ford’s own bedchamber, strikingly austere, contained a single narrow bed.
Wyatt continued to attend intermittently and to drive Beckford to fury with his absences. In early September 1813, just after his sixty-seventh birthday, Wyatt was riding back to London from Gloucestershire with a client when his carriage overturned and he was dashed against the wall, striking his head a fatal blow. He died more or less instantly, leaving his widow penniless.
Just at this time, sugar prices went into a depression and Beckford ended up uncomfortably exposed to the downside of capitalism. By 1823, he was so strapped for funds that he was forced to sell Fonthill. It was bought for £300,000 by an eccentric character, John Farquhar, who had been born in rural Scotland but went to India as a young man and made a fortune manufacturing gunpowder. Returning to England in 1814, Farquhar settled in London in a fine house on Portman Square, which he conspicuously neglected. He conspicuously neglected himself, too—to such an extent that on his walks through the neighborhood he was sometimes stopped and questioned as a suspicious vagrant. After buying Fonthill, he hardly ever visited it. He was, however, in residence on the most spectacular day in Fonthill’s brief existence, just before Christmas 1825,when the tower emitted a sustained groan, then collapsed for a third and final time. A servant was blown thirty feet down a corridor by the rush of air, but miraculously neither he nor anyone else was injured. About a third of the house lay under the heaped wreckage of the tower, and would never be habitable again. Farquhar was remarkably equable about his misfortune and merely remarked that this greatly simplified the care of the place. He died the following year, immensely rich but intestate, and none of his bickering relatives would take on the house. What remained of it was torn down and cleared away not long after.
Beckford, meanwhile, took his £300,000 and retired to Bath, where he built a 154-foot tower in a restrained classical style. Called the Lansdown Tower, it was erected with good materials and prudent care, and still stands.
II
Fonthill marked the summit not only of ambition and folly in the domestic realm but also of discomfort. A curious inverse relationship had arisen, it seems, between the amount of effort and expense that went into a house and the extent to which it was actually habitable. The great age of housebuilding brought new levels of elegance and grandeur to private life in Britain, but almost nothing in the way of softness, warmth, and convenience.
Those homely attributes would be the creation of a new type of person who had scarcely existed a generation or so before: the middle class professional. There had always been people of middling rank, of course, but as a distinct entity and force to be reckoned with, the middle class was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. The term middle class wasn’t coined until 1745 (in a book on the Irish wool trade, of all things), but from that point onward the streets and coffeehouses of Britain abounded with confident, voluble, well-to-do people who answered to that description: bankers, lawyers, artists, publishers, designers, merchants, property developers, and others of generally creative spirit and high ambition. This new and swelling middle class served not only the very wealthy but also, even more lucratively, one another. This was the change that made the modern world.
The invention of the middle class injected new levels of demand into society. Suddenly there were swarms of people with splendid town houses that all needed furnishing, and just as suddenly the world was full of desirable objects with which to fill them. Carpets, mirrors, curtains, upholstered and embroidered furniture, and a hundred things more that were rarely found in homes before 1750 now became commonplace.
The growth of empire and of overseas business interests had a dramatic effect, too, often in unexpected ways. Take wood. When Britain was an isolated island nation, it had essentially just one wood for furniture making: oak. Oak is a noble material, solid, long-lasting, literally hard as iron, but it is really only suitable for dense, blocky furniture—trunks, beds, heavy tables, and the like. But the development of the British navy and the spread of Britain’s commercial interests meant that woods of many types—walnut from Virginia, tulipwood from the Carolinas, teak from Asia—became available, and these changed everything within the home, including how people sat and conversed and entertained.
The most prized wood of all was mahogany from the Caribbean. Mahogany was lustrous, warp-resistant, and sublimely accommodating. It could be carved and fretted into the delicate shapes that perfectly suited the exuberance of rococo, yet was strong enough to be a piece of furniture. No wood used in England before had had these characteristics: suddenly furniture had a sculptural quality. The central uprights of the chairs—the splats—could be worked in a way that was wondrous to a people who had never seen anything less clunky than a Windsor chair. The legs had flowing curves and luscious feet; the arms swept along to terminal volutes that were a pleasure to grasp and a delight to behold. Every chair—indeed, every built thing in the house—seemed suddenly to have elegance and style and fluidity.
Mahogany would have been nothing like as esteemed a wood as it was had it not been for one other magical new material, from the other side of the Earth, that gave it the most splendid finish: shellac. Shellac is a hard resinous secretion from the Indian lac beetle. Lac beetles emerge in swarms in parts of India at certain times of the year, and their secretions make varnish that is odorless, nontoxic, brilliantly shiny, and highly resistant to scratches and fading. It doesn’t attract dust while wet, and it dries in minutes. Even now, in an age of chemistry, shellac has scores of applications against which synthetic products cannot compete. When you go bowling, it is shellac that gives the alleys their peerless sheen, for instance.
New woods and varnishes dramatically broadened the forms that furniture could take, but something else was needed—a new system of manufacture—to produce the volumes of quality furniture necessary to satisfy the endless demand. Where traditional designers like Robert Adam made a new design for each commission, furniture makers now realized that it was far more cost-effective to make lots of furniture from a single design. They began to operate a factory system on a large scale, cranking out pieces that were cut from templates, then assembled and finished by teams of specialists. The age of mass manufacture had been born.
There is a certain irony in the thought that the people who did the most to establish mass manufacturing techniques were the ones we now most revere for their craftsmanship, and of no one is that more true than a shadowy furniture maker from the north of England named Thomas Chippendale. His influence was enormous. He was the first commoner for whom a furniture style was named; before him, the names faithfully recalled monarchies: Tudor, Elizabethan, Louis XIV, Queen Anne. Yet we know remarkably little about him. We have no idea, for instance, what he looked like. Except that he was born and grew up in the market town of Otley, on the edge of the Yorkshire dales, nothing at all is known of his early life. His first appearance in the written record is in 1748, when he arrives in London, already aged thirty, and sets up as a new type of maker and purveyor of household furnishings known as an upholder.
That was an ambitious thing to do, for upholders’ businesses tended to be complicated and extensive. One of the most successful, George Seddon, employed four hundred workmen—carvers, gilders, joiners, makers of mirrors and brass, and so on. Chippendale did not operate on quite that scale, but he employed forty or fifty men, and his premises covered two frontages at 60–62 St. Martin’s Lane, just around the corner from the modern Trafalgar Square (though that wouldn’t exist for another eighty years). He also provided an extremely complete service, making and selling chairs, occasional tables, dressing tables, writing tables, card tables, bookcases, bureaus, mirrors, clock cases, candelabra, candle stands, musicstands, sconces, commodes, and an exotic new contrivance that he called a “sopha.” Sofas were daring, even titillating, because they resembled beds and so hinted at salacious repose. The firm also stocked wallpaper and carpets, and undertook repairs, furniture removals, and even funerals.
Thomas Chippendale made indisputably fine furniture, but so did lots of others. St. Martin’s Lane alone had thirty furniture makers in the eighteenth century, and hundreds more were scattered across London and throughout the country. The reason we all know Chippendale’s name today is that in 1754 he did something quite audacious. He issued a book of designs called The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, containing 160 plates. Architects had been doing this sort of thing for nearly two hundred years, but nobody had thought to do it for furniture. The drawings were unexpectedly beguiling. Instead of being flat, two-dimensional templates, as was standard, they were perspective drawings, full of shadow and sheen. The prospective purchaser could immediately visualize how these handsome and desirable objects would look in his own home.
It would be misleading to call Chippendale’s book a sensation, because only 308 copies were sold, but the purchasers included forty-nine members of the aristocracy, which made it disproportionately influential. It was also snapped up by other furniture makers and craftsmen, raising another point of oddness—that Chippendale was openly inviting his competitors to make use of his designs for their own commercial purposes. This helped ensure Chippendale’s posterity, but didn’t do much for his immediate fortunes since potential clients could now get Chippendale furniture made more cheaply by any reasonably skilled joiner. It also meant two centuries of difficulty for furniture historians in determining which pieces of furniture are genuine Chippendales and which are copies made using his book. Even if a piece is a “genuine” Chippendale, it doesn’t mean that Thomas Chippendale ever touched it or was even aware of its existence. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that he designed it. No one knows how much talent he brought in, or whether the designs in his books are in fact from his own hand. A genuine Chippendale simply means that it came from his workshop.
Such is the Chippendale aura, however, that it needn’t even have been as close to him as that. In 1756 in colonial Boston, a furniture maker named
John Welch, using a Chippendale pattern as a guide, made a mahogany desk that he sold to a man named Dublois. The desk stayed in the Dublois family for 250 years. In 2007, Dublois’s descendants put it up for auction with Sotheby’s in New York. Though Thomas Chippendale had no direct connection to it, it sold for just under $3.3 million.
Inspired by Chippendale’s success, other English furniture makers issued pattern books of their own. George Hepplewhite’s Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide was published in 1788, and Thomas Sheraton followed with the Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book, issued in installments between 1791 and 1794. Sheraton’s book had more than twice as many subscribers as Chippendale’s and was translated into German, a distinction not accorded Chippendale’s own volume. Hepplewhite and Sheraton became particularly popular in America.
Although any piece of furniture directly associated with any of the three is today worth a fortune, they were more admired than celebrated in their own lifetimes, and at times not even all that admired. Chippendale’s fortunes slipped first. He was an outstanding furniture maker but hopeless at running a business, a deficiency that became acutely evident upon the death of his business partner, James Rannie, in 1766. Rannie was the brains of the operation; without him, Chippendale lurched from crisis to crisis for the rest of his life. All this was painfully ironic, for as he struggled to pay his men and keep himself out of a debtor’s cell, Chippendale was producing items of the highest quality for some of England’s richest households, and working closely with the leading architects and designers—Robert Adam, James Wyatt, Sir William Chambers, and others. Yet his personal trajectory was relentlessly downward.
It was not an easy age in which to do business. Customers were routinely slow in paying. Chippendale had to threaten David Garrick, the actor and impresario, with legal action for chronic unpaid bills, and stopped work at Nostell Priory, a stately home in Yorkshire, when the debt there reached £6,838—a whopping liability. “I have not a single guinea to pay my men with tomorrow,” he wrote in despair at one point. It is clear that Chippendale spent much of his life in a froth of anxiety, scarcely for a moment enjoying any sense of security at all. At his death in 1779, his personal worth had sunk to just £28 2s 9d—not enough to buy a modest piece of ormolu from his own showrooms. The firm struggled on under the directorship of his son but finally succumbed to bankruptcy in 1804.
When Chippendale died, the world barely noticed. No obituary appeared in any paper. Fourteen years after his death, Sheraton wrote of Chippendale’s designs that “they are now wholly antiquated and laid aside.” By the late 1800s, Chippendale’s reputation had fallen so low that the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography gave him just one paragraph—far less than it gave Sheraton or Hepplewhite—and much of that was critical and a good deal of it was wrong. The author was so little absorbed by the facts of Chippendale’s life that he had him coming from Worcestershire, not Yorkshire.
Sheraton (1751–1806) and Hepplewhite (1727?–1786) could hardly boast of magnificent success themselves. Hepplewhite’s shop was in a down-at-heel district, Cripplegate, and his identity sufficiently obscure that his contemporaries referred to him variously as Kepplewhite and Hebblethwaite. Almost nothing is known of his personal life. He had actually been dead for two years by the time his own book of patterns was published. Sheraton’s fate was even more curious. He seems never to have opened a shop, and no piece of furniture that can be attributed to him has ever been found. He may never have made any, but acted merely as a draftsman and designer. Though his book sold well, it appears not to have enriched him, for he had to supplement his income by teaching drawing and perspective. At some point he gave up furniture design, trained as a minister for a nonconformist sect known as the Narrow Baptists, and became essentially a street-corner preacher. He died in squalor, “among dirt and bugs,” in London in 1806, leaving a wife and two children.
As furniture makers, Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance, and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up—irremediably extinct—within just fifty years of its discovery. Some two hundred other species of mahogany exist in the world, and most are very good woods, but they have nothing likethe richness and smooth workability of the departed S. mahogani. The world may one day produce better chairmakers than Chippendale and his peers, but it will never produce finer chairs.
Curiously, no one at all appreciated this for the longest time. Many Chippendale chairs and other pieces, now considered priceless, spent a century or more being casually knocked about in the servants’ quarters before they were rediscovered and returned to the main house in the Edwardian era. Some six hundred pieces of Chippendale furniture have now been confirmed altogether. Others, handed down or disposed of in estate sales, could easily be sitting unregarded in some country cottage or suburban bungalow, more valuable than the houses that contain them.
III
If we were to go back in time to a house in Chippendale’s day, one difference that would immediately strike us would be that chairs and other items of furniture were generally pushed up against the walls, giving every room the aspect of a waiting room. Chairs or tables in the middle of the room would have looked as out of place to Georgians as a wardrobe left in the middle of a room would look to us today. (One reason for pushing them aside was to make it easier to walk through rooms without tripping over furniture in the dark.) Because they were kept against the wall, the backs of early upholstered chairs and settees were often left unfinished, just as we leave bare the backs of chests and wardrobes today.
When one had visitors, the custom was to bring an appropriate number of chairs forward and arrange them in a circle or semicircle, rather like storytime in an elementary school. This had the inevitable effect of making nearly all conversations strained and artificial. Horace Walpole, after sitting for four and a half hours in an agonizing circle of fatuous conversation, declared: “We wore out the Wind and the Weather, the Opera and the Play . . . and every topic that would do in a formal circle.” Yet when daring hostesses tried to introduce spontaneity by arranging chairs into more intimate clusters of threes and fours, many felt the result was tantamount to pandemonium, and more than a few could never get used to the idea of conversations taking place behind their backs.
The one problem with the chairs of the age was that they weren’t terribly comfortable. The obvious solution was to pad them, but that proved more difficult than one might have thought, because few craftsmen had all the skills necessary to make a good padded chair. Manufacturers struggled to get square edges where fabric met wood—piping and cording were originally brought in as a way of disguising these inadequacies—and were frequently out of their depth at producing padding that would maintain a permanent domed shape on the seat. Only saddlers could reliably provide the requisite durability, which is why so much early upholstered furniture was covered in leather. Fabric upholsterers also had the problem that many preindustrial fabrics could be produced only in widths of about twenty inches, creating a need for seams in awkward places. Only after the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733 did it become possible to produce fabrics in widths of three feet or so.
Improvements in textile and printing technologies transformed decorative possibilities beyond furniture as well. This was the age that saw the widespread introduction of carpets, wallpapers, and bright fabrics. Paint, too, became available in a range of bright colors for the first time. The upshot is that, by late in the eighteenth century, households were full of features that would have been the wildest indulgences a century before. The modern house—a house such as we would recognize today—had begun to emerge. At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated. They hadn’t entirely mastered comfort yet, but they had certainly discovered an alluring concept. Life, and the expectations that went with it, would never be the same again.
There was, however, one consequence in all this. The advent of comfort in the home, in particular the widespread use of soft furnishings, made furniture much more vulnerable to stains, burns, and other careless abuses. In an effort to save the most valuable furniture from the worst of the risks, a new type of room was created, and it is there, conveniently, that we go next.
*A furlong in horse racing is 220 yards, or one-eighth of a mile, but farming furlongs originally were of no particular length. The word means simply “long furrow.”
*Ayrshires were the creation of Bruce Campbell, inventive second cousin of James Boswell, who was put in charge of the family estate in Scotland only after Boswell himself declined the responsibility, preferring a life of conversation and refined debauchery in London to dairy farming in lowland Scotland. Had Boswell been more dutiful, we would have lost not only his great Life of Johnson but also one of the world’s best breeds of dairy cattle.
*Though the name is now pronounced “Van-bruh” or “Van-burra” (like the terminal diphthong of “Edinburgh” or “Barbara”), it appears to have been pronounced “Van-brook” in his own lifetime. It was frequently so spelled.
*Whig is a shortening of Whiggamore, the name for a group of seventeenth-century Scottish insurgents. Where Whiggamore itself came from is uncertain, as is the question of how it then suggested itself as a suitable name for a group of powerful English aristocrats. It was first applied derisively by the Tories, but embraced with pride by the target group. Exactly the same thing happened with the term Tory.
*In a large house, room numbers are generally notional. It depends on the extent to which you count storerooms, closets, and the like as separate rooms (and also no doubt how carefully one counts). The published numbers for the total rooms at Blenheim range from 187 to 320—quite a disparity.
*It was also, come to that, the age of the celebrity craftsman. One such was the great carver Grinling Gibbons, who lived from 1648 to 1721. His interesting Christian name was his mother’s maiden name. He grew up in Holland, of English parents, and came to England in about 1667, after the restoration of Charles II as king. He settled in Deptford, in southeast London, where he made a very basic living carving figureheads for ships. One day in 1671, John Evelyn, the diarist, chanced to pass his workshop and was immediately taken with Gibbons’s skill, personable manner, and possibly good looks. (Gibbons was by all accounts stunningly good-looking.) He encouraged the young man to take on more challenging commissions and introduced him to people of influence, such as Christopher Wren.
Thanks to Evelyn’s support, Gibbons became very successful, but most of his wealth actually came from running a workshop that produced statuary and other stonework. It was Gibbons, it appears, who came up with the idea of depicting British heroes as Roman statesmen, in togas and sandals, and this made his work in stone extremely fashionable. Though he is now widely thought of as the greatest woodcarver in modern times, he was not especially famous for it in his own lifetime. For Blenheim Palace, Gibbons produced £4,000 worth of decorative stonework but only £36 worth of wood carving. Part of the reason his wood carvings are so valued today is that there aren’t very many of them.
*Although he is little read now, Walpole was immensely popular in his day for his histories and romances. He was a particularly adept coiner of words. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with no fewer than 233 coinages. Many, like gloomth, greenth, fluctuable, and betweenity, didn’t take, but a great many others did. Among the terms he invented or otherwise brought into English are airsickness, anteroom, bask, beefy, boulevard, café, cause célèbre, caricature, fairy tale, falsetto, frisson, impresario, malaria, mudbath, nuance, serendipity, somber, souvenir, and, as mentioned a few pages back, comfortable in its modern sense.
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BILL BRYSON’S AFRICAN DIARY.
Copyright © 2002 by BILL BRYSON.
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