African Skies
- Book: West With The Night
- Location: Kenya
- Author: Beryl Markham
‘West with the Night’ is the autobiography of Beryl Markham (1902-1986), who was an accomplished aviatrix, horse trainer and writer. This book tells of her happy childhood in Kenya, then British East Africa. She grew up at one with the African landscape, barefoot and free. Her father was a renowned horse trainer, well known among the colonial set in the region. Beryl inherited his love of and emotional connection with thoroughbred horses. Horsebreeding being a fickle game, he fell on bad times and emigrated to Peru when Beryl was just seventeen. She decided to stay on and went to work on another farm training horses, just for her bed and board. She became very well-regarded in her own right, despite her gender and her youth.
She then transferred her attention to the idea of flying aeroplanes, and she turned out to be a natural. She showed extraordinary bravery and strength, flying her Gipsy Moth over vast terrain that was unknown and unmapped, with the aid of only very basic instruments. She worked as a commercial pilot, carrying mail and messages from place to place. Unfortunately, she also used her plane to herd elephants for hunting expeditions; she found it distasteful but she still did it as it was a source of income. At this time, in the twenties and thirties, wild game was much more plentiful than it is now and it seemed normal to whites in Africa to shoot lions, elephants and hippos just for sport. This is abhorrent to our twenty-first century sensibilities and anyway, there aren’t too many left now.
She also flew from Nairobi to London in her little plane, with ‘Blix’ or Baron von Blixen as a passenger. He is familiar as the husband of Karen Blixen in ‘Out of Africa’. Her prowess as an aviatrix was proven on this outstanding journey. While in London, she then embarked upon the project of tackling the challenge to fly solo across the Atlantic. This she did, on 4 September 1936. 21 hours and 25 minutes after taking off from Abingdon in England, she crash landed in a swamp. The swamp was on Cape Breton Island. She had done it.
The book ends there, but she apparently went back to live in Kenya, where her heart was, and reverted to training horses. At the age of 80, she was rediscovered and several renditions of her life appeared. There was a TV series, a movie called ‘Shadow on the Sun’ (where she was played by Stefanie Powers) and a wonderful novel called ‘Circling the Sun’ by Paula McLain. Some income from these improved her rather straitened circumstances in her very latter years. She died at the age of 83.
Even though Beryl Markham was very much a product of the British colonial regime in Africa, she was nevertheless an intriguing character. She was an adventurer who pushed the boundaries as to what was acceptable behaviour for young women and a role model for others who followed in her footsteps.
Please wait...
