All this had happened, and if some of it was hard for me to believe, I had my logbooks and my pound of scraps and papers to prove it to myself — memory in ink. It was only needed that someone should say, ‘You ought to write about it, you know. You really ought!’
And so the little freighter sat upon the sea, and, though Africa came closer day by day, the freighter never moved. She was old and weather-weary, and she had learned to let the world come round to her.
Image Gallery
Markham in 1931, shortly after she learned to fly.
“We began every morning at that same hour, using what we were pleased to call the Nairobi Aerodrome, climbing away from it with decisive clamour, while the burghers of the town twitched in their beds and dreamed perhaps of all unpleasant things that drone—of wings and strings, and corridors in Bedlam.”
Margaret Elkington and her mother, “Mrs. Jim” Elkington, with Paddy, the pet lion who attacked Markham when she was a child.
“So Paddy ate, slept, and roared, and perhaps he sometimes dreamed, but he never left Elkington’s. He was a tame lion, Paddy was. He was deaf to the call of the wild.”
C. B. Clutterbuck, Markham’s father. She kept this photograph (inscribed “Daddy, 1946”) by her side throughout her life.
“My father was, and is, a law-abiding citizen of the realm, but if ever he wanders off the path of righteousness, it will not be gold or silver that enticed him, but, more likely, I think, the irresistible contours of a fine but elusive horse.”
The house in Njoro, Kenya, that Markham’s father built when she was fourteen.
“The farm at Njoro was endless, but it was no farm at all until my father made it . . . He was no farmer. He bought the land because it was cheap and fertile, and because East Africa was new and you could feel the future of it under your feet.”
The house where Markham stayed when she returned to Kenya in 1948.
“‘The world is a big place,’ he said . . . ‘But everywhere a man goes there is still more of the world at his shoulder, or behind his back, or in front of his eyes, so that it is useless to go on.’”
Markham with her horse Blue Brook at Naro Maro, Kenya, in 1958.
“She will do whatever is asked of her, as she always has done. She turns her head, nudging me, speaking to me—do not worry; I will run. As long as these legs will bear me up, I will run.”
Markham’s Jockey Club trainer’s license, 1967–68.
“I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of destiny. It seems to get up early and then go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it.”
Markham’s “B” license from 1933—the eleventh such license issued in the colony and the first issued to a woman.
“A ‘B’ license is a flyer’s Magna Carta—it delivers him from the bondage of apprenticeship; it frees him to make a living.”
A page from Markham’s log book detailing the Assuit to Naples section of one of the four solo flights she made from Nairobi to London.
“No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things—the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold—were false to you.”
Tom Campbell Black, Markham’s flight instructor and friend, who was killed in an aircraft collision while she made her historic solo flight across the Atlantic. She kept this picture by her side until her death.
“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”
Markham in 1986.
“All this happened, and if some of it was hard for me to believe, I had my log-books and my pound of scraps and papers to prove it to myself—memory in ink. It was only needed that someone should say, ‘You ought to write about it, you know. You really ought!’”
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copyright © 1942, 1983 by Beryl Markham
cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4532-3791-5
Published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Beryl Markham, West With the Night
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