West With The Night (VMC) (Virago Modern Classics)

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It is clear that Markham respects the wisdom and integrity she found in native peoples whom she befriended and learned from. At one rare point she touches eloquently on the social issues of race relations and colonialism:

Markham learned to fly and became a bush pilot. She delivered mail, passengers, and supplies to much of East Africa; she also scouted game for hunting safaris. In 1936, she became the first person to fly solo from east to west across the Atlantic. These experiences provided the material for West with the Night, an account of her life up to age forty, which aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery encouraged her to write. I’ve been on a horse only on rare occasions, but Markham’s admiration for this noble creature is contagious. She strikes out on her own to train race-horses after her father’s farm fails and he quits Africa for Peru. What courage this young woman must have had to gallop away on her Pegasus from all she’d known since the age of four, to a place where she must start anew. It is while living in Molo that she will later embrace a new passion – flying. Being alone in an aeroplane for even a short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind---such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.” You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it. I feel honoured and privileged to have had the opportunity to read this remarkable memoir. Beryl Markham’s story is outstanding enough by itself. What makes this memoir even more spectacular is the writing. On the cover is a quote from Ernest Hemingway: “[Markham] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers . . . It really is a bloody wonderful book.”But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear.”

As the relationship deteriorated, Finch Hatton moved out of Blixen’s farm to the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi, where Beryl Markham also happened to be staying upon a return from England. Her affair with Prince Henry had come to an end — at the Queen’s insistence. I was very pleasantly surprised at the magical prose and window into worlds of East Africa provided by this memoir. Markham is an interesting historical figure for her achievements in aviation and adventuring. For example, she was the first female bush pilot in the continent, the first woman to complete an East-to-West nonstop crossing of the Atlantic (ending into a near-crash landing in Cape Breton), and a legendary race horse trainer. And she was a bit of a celebrity among the glitterati that set down or passed through Naibobi in her time, a circle that included the famous Swedish safari hunter Baron Blixen and his wife Karen, who wrote “Out of Africa” under the name Dinesen. I understand that more about these connections is to be found in Maclean’s “Circling the Sun.” This book is more on the line of essays that showcase Markham’s skills in portraying her developing vision on life as shaped by her growing up and early adulthood in British East Africa, now Kenya. Beryl needed to find a way to make a living. She obtained a pilot’s license and spent the next several years, from 1931 to 1936, delivering mail, ferrying passengers, and scouting elephants for safaris all over Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Many of these flights are the basis of stories in West with the Night. The author tends to get slightly lyrical about Africa and exoticises the country, but draws the line at doing the same to the people who live there. This is probably because she grew up with the Nandi tribe and her best friend was a Nandi boy. She even reflects on how their relationship changes once they become adults, he becoming the servant, and she the mistress, unable to withstand the force of colonialism. I liked her a bit more for this regret, general colonial attitudes and privilege notwithstanding.He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant. Never mind that when he wrote his comments in a letter to a friend the ellipsis contained some typically misogynistic and foul references to Beryl Markham as a woman, the bare fact of his accolade is perhaps even more powerful because of it, wrung out of his wrinkled heart through a mangle stronger than his bias.