WHEN his daughter stepped on to a plane to Kenya and waved goodbye, the King was too British to tell her he was dying. His doctors, being British, hadn’t told him either, because it was none of his business when he had a job to do. But then this was the 1950s; they’d also told him that cigarettes were good for relaxing his throat.
Netflix’s The Crown whisks us back to the tense days of 1952 when Princess Elizabeth was asked to carry out a Commonwealth tour for George VI, believing he would be cured by the time she returned home.
The 25-year-old Princess escaped Buckingham Palace for Treetops, a rustic treehouse in the Aberdare forest as wild animals rampaged below. It was, by all accounts a dramatic time, and the Princess filmed it, agape at waterbuck goring a rival to death and rhino charging each other.
According to her hunter escort Jim Corbett, when the Princess was told it was time to come in for tea, she asked to take it on the balcony, saying: ‘I don’t want to miss one moment of this.’
The next morning, Elizabeth said she’d had such a good time in Kenya that she couldn’t wait for her father to visit. In The Crown, she is seen writing a letter to the King requesting that she and Philip live in Cyprus like a normal husband and wife. Then Palace aides track her down to her remote location to tell her that the King has died and that she is now Queen. Personally I’d have gone straight back to the treehouse and pulled up the ladder with me.
THE Queen and Philip’s last night of freedom was spent immersed in the lives of animals. I bought a crushable fedora and set out in the couple’s footsteps. Kenya’s safari parks still bring British visitors the same blast of friendliness and fresh air, and floating above the green Aberdare, Treetops still looks like a giant bird hide on stilts.
The original shack was commissioned by war hero Eric Walker, who turned bootlegger to fund his marriage to an aristocrat. Her indoors fancied a treehouse like Peter Pan’s hideout. She got one.
And in 1952, Her Majesty climbed up a rickety 30ft ladder to find herself in two rooms with a cubbyhole for a hunter, in case some leopard fancied a Royal with cheese.
Treetops now has showers and a ramp. Guests are no longer shown escape ladders and told: ‘Ten feet up is enough for a rhino, but 18ft is better for an elephant.’
But it is very much a treehouse; my gin rested on a giant twig thrusting through the polished wooden floor of the bar. I also spotted a buzzer on the wall.
‘If you’d like us to buzz you at night, leave it on,’ said the guide. ‘If there’s a fire?’ ‘If we see animals. One buzz for hyena, two for leopard, three rhino and four elephant.’ Already this was better than anything on television apart from Planet Earth II, and not too dissimilar, as Treetops floats above a watering hole. I had checked into a room over the animals’ pub, with opening t i me around sunset.
As the sun dropped, I was unpacking my fedora when I saw grey shapes just a few feet below. Dozens of elephants were in a row, drinking at the lake then dipping their trunks in the salty soil for minerals. I was so close I could hear them breathing and grum- bling at each other. The mums were hiding a baby elephant so small it could probably ride in my car.
As I ran downstairs to get even closer, I passed a huge skull. An elderly regular who died last year, said a guide, and given the loyalty of elephants, it is not impossible he was one of the youngsters putting on a show for the Queen all those years ago.
‘When he died the other elephants came to mourn,’ the guide said.
‘Elephants always do. If they’re his relatives, they stand facing away from him, t heir backs just touching him. For half an hour they stand in silence, then they leave.’
AT TREETOPS, the animals stay l ong enough for you to realise their faces are as different as ours. One buffalo had a neck as big as Mike Tyson’s, half a tail missing and a rotten temper. I asked a guide why he looked so fed up. ‘He has to look after all the females. There can be 200 females in one family – that is too many.’ He had a point. And his tail? ‘Bitten off by a hyena,’ said the guide. ‘Hyenas also bite off testicles.’ Bad tempered? The buffalo was a living saint.
We saw warthogs, giant forest hogs and colobus monkeys like flying skunks. The baboons, I suspect, were barred from the pub, so they broke in through the fence, sat around drinking, smacked their children and then left. I’m surprised they haven’t been given their own series on Channel 4.
The original treehouse i s no
longer standing but it wasn’t retired by choice. The Aberdare forest was a hiding place for the Kenyan resistance movement, the Mau Mau. During the Mau Mau Uprising at least 11,000 were killed. The British used Treetops as a base for their snipers, and in 1954 the thoroughly miffed Mau Mau burnt it down.
Amos Ndegwa, 64, is a seasoned Treetops guide, carrying a 100year- old Winchester rifle that guarded the Queen in 1952. He took us up hills with runways of bare red earth from the top to the bottom. ‘The elephants make the tracks,’ said Amos. ‘They like to sit on their backside and slide down for fun.’
HE GAVE a different sense of history. ‘My uncle was a herbalist. The British took him to Burma to treat soldiers,’ he said, breaking peppery twigs for us to chew. ‘We call this the Maasai toothbrush – it kills 99 per cent of germs.’ Naturally I tried one – it’s eco Mr Muscle.
After Treetops, we headed south to Nairobi. At the five-star Sarova Stanley hotel, there is a photo of the Queen and Philip’s lunch there with the white-glove set. I suspect Her Maj didn’t get to sample to same world-class pancakes and buffet as me.
The Stanley is named after the explorer who tracked down the anti-slavery missionary explorer Dr Livingstone when he went AWOL, probably after saying something related to zero-hours contracts. It took Stanley nine months to find Livingstone. If he had faced the same level of traffic that clogs up Nairobi today, I’m sure he’d still be looking.
Ernest Hemingway sat where I sat in the Stanley’s cafe, writing The Snows Of Kilimanjaro.
‘I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke up that I was not happy,’ he also wrote, having not been shunted by minibuses to the point where you question why we left the animal kingdom behind.
I spent Sunday at Ngong racecourse, where Princess Anne once came to watch the turf fly. It’s racing in a tropical setting; horses gear up among hibiscus, bets are placed under palm trees, and gin glasses clink in the club rooms upstairs.
Princess Margaret was another Royal to visit this area. She headed for the anything- goes Kenyan coastal town of Mombasa, where she sat through some traditional dancing and then only history knows what fun she had.
One veteran business man remembers the Princess at the Women’s Association. Behaving royally? ‘Of course! She was representing the family!’ he said. All the time? ‘Look, she was only human!’ There can be no better lobby than at the Serena Beach hotel, with its Moorish chandeliers refracting the sun under a sweeping 25ft ceiling, and Persian rugs on polished tiles.
At Serena, I found myself back in nature. Instead of Germans, there were sunbathing blue lizards. There is an excellent dinner to be had listening to the night animals in the Jahazi Grill, and at breakfast bright yellow weaver birds eye your doughnuts. There is even a butterfly pavilion, where I photographed one born minutes earlier, drying its new wings in the sun.
I walked along the beach to watch seabirds and enjoy a sundowner in the Moonshine bar. Moonshine’s spectacular cocktail menu would stop an elephant, if not Princess Margaret. I had a daiquiri served in a pineapple, and the Dawa (the Swahili word for medicine) featured local honey with vodka. It cured everything, including its own side effect the next morning. On my last day I woke to the dawn chorus. It starts in the haze with birds, then what might be animals, joining some other species probably, then some more birds, until it’s an orchestra performing a wall of sound that gets louder and louder. Yes, I was right back in the animal kingdom.
The staff kindly suggested I shut my door in case monkeys bothered me, but I fancied hot tropical air. I was typing away when I sensed I was being stared at. A monkey was sitting by the kettle with a ‘Me? Stare? I’m not staring at you,’ stare as her fingers rifled Coffee Mate and Nescafe, and delicately tore sugar packets and upended them into her mouth. I was worried I was going to have a diabetic monkey so I broke all the rules and gave her (I think it was a her – she didn’t have a DayGlo rear view) a banana skin out of the bin. She took it before giving me a look that said: ‘What the heck do you mean by that?’
She then searched the room for the banana, before glaring at me, snatching every remaining sugar packet and leaving. We could learn a lot about plain speaking from dumb animals.
Elizabeth left Kenya a Queen, inheriting a civilisation where potatoes were rationed, her uncle had spurned the crown, and we’d nearly ended up speaking German. That would have been a pain for the Windsors, having only just changed their name from Saxe Coburg Gotha before the public noticed we were already occupied by the Germans.
Given all this, I’m glad HRH got away for a break from humanity before she rolled up her sleeves – and glad that it was Kenya, a getaway like no other.
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