Her reputation grew as her stock won more races, including the prestigious Kenya St. This pastime would eventually serve her writing well.īy the age of eighteen, Beryl become the first woman to become a licensed horse trainer. Her father read her the classics as she grew up, and she continued this habit into adulthood. After three years, she was expelled for being unruly and fomenting revolt among her fellow pupils. Later, Beryl was sent to boarding school in Nairobi. She learned all of their languages, with Swahili becoming her first tongue. She later explained she was raised “in a world without walls,” as her father was busy running the farm and raising horses while she hunted and played with the tribesmen working on the farm - the Nandi, Kipsigis, Luo, Kikuyu, and Masai. Her mother, Clara Agnes Markham, lasted only eighteen months in Kenya before returning to England with their son, Beryl’s brother Richard.īeryl and her father were left to their own devices. In 1906, he moved his wife and two small children there from the Midlands. He bought a thousand acres, mostly heavy bush and open pasture, in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Early Lifeīeryl’s father, Charles Clutterbuck, a former military man who struggled financially, sought his fortune in East Africa.
This book, Ernest Hemingway opined, was so good it made him feel ashamed because “she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers.” As is well known, Hemingway was rarely complimentary towards fellow writers.
Encouraged by Antoine de Saint Exupery, she wrote what would become a classic memoir about Africa, West with the Night. Beryl spent her childhood in Kenya, and grew up to breed champion racehorses and pilot planes. Then, having babies, supervising the staff, gardening, and fox hunting for the rest of her life.īut Fate had other ideas. She was also a racehorse trainer and had torrid love affairs and tepid marriages, all of which she recounted in her famed 1942 memoir, West with the Night.īorn Beryl Clutterbuck, she seemed at first destined to lead the kind of life described in old English novels – an uneventful childhood in a grand country house schooling in literature, language, and sewing by a Jane Eyre-like governess attending swish parties and tea dances until the day a handsome man from a fine family proposes, and that would be that. Beryl Markham (Octo– August 3, 1986) is perhaps best remembered as a pioneering aviatrix, becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic nonstop from Britain to North America.
0 kommentar(er)
