Peter Marrian
Peter Derek Marrian - 1916 to 1999
What an extraordinary man my father was. I miss him and I think of him, often when I'm shaving! His peers remember him for the Oxford, Army, Kenya part of his life - the thirty years from the mid-thirties to the mid-sixties and that period is eloquently described in his monograph Purple Shadows, as well as by Colin Campbell and Miles Maskell (see side panel). This was the man of talent, pragmatism, vision and bravery; a handsome man who diverted an 18 year old girl from Oxford, where she should have gone, to the valley between Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Mountains for nothing short of an adventure of a lifetime - an adventure that saw the birth of three boys, a full-scale insurrection, coffee squeezed out of the red earth, and the ancient big beasts, rhino, elephant, the cats, lion and leopard, the plains game, monkeys, hyrax, the deadliest of snakes, all this life vibrant and moving at will across the developing farmland. It saw mad ideas like prospecting for uranium from a Piper Pacer or producing papain in the Congo, the latter enterprise decisively curtailed by the chaos that engulfed that country after independence
But there was another side, a lighter side, to this pioneer: he adored and was adored by women. The age was unimportant. He could charm and delight a teenager as easily as a grandmother. When the politics was over, the farm incorporated, the marriage ended, the boys on their way, the sixties past, thirty years of endeavour and achievement finished, I have the impression that he relied more on this characteristic for his contentment, for his joie de vivre. Whether in the house in Chelsea, where we still live, or in various Kenya abodes, the pilgrimage by women of all ages took place night in, night out. There were Scandinavians, French, English, Indian, African, various shades of North American, South American, Antipodean, Oriental - a gregarious and open-hearted man surrounded by a rainbow of laughter and tease and admiration. Those women were in turn rose pink, striking, random, coquettish, mad, dangerous, uptight, loose, bohemian, cultured and refined - every one of them special to him and made to feel special by him. And let us not forget his unconventional advice to a woman who asked whether she should marry a certain man: "Is he kind, does he make you laugh and does he make you come?"
For myself, cursed by a memory undeserving of its name, I remember only bits and pieces. My father play-boxing with a six year old on the veranda at Mweiga, gently touched my chin which so shocked me I ran in tears to my mother, or my ayah, or whoever was not likely to box me. On a drive from Nairobi to the farm, I was presented with a talk on maize production, or that's what I heard. It turned into a talk on baby production and, when running through the correct and slang words for various bodily parts he forgot the other half of balls, I had to interject with testicles at which point he asked me whether I was giving the talk or he was! I remember his driving through the mud, the landrover slicing from side to side, the locusts thick outside, smearing the windscreen; the revolver on the dining room table; the theft, no other word for it, of one of my two sausages for supper; the elegance of Saturday evening dress; the locked bedroom door of an afternoon; flights in the Piper Pacer and looking down from there on the pyrethrum fields in which had been picked "Happy Christmas"; being allowed to throw a walnut against the dining room windows on Christmas day (the walnut breaks); picking mushrooms on the airstrip for breakfast; watching Daddy Probin (see note below) in his glider being dragged into the sky by the mercedes; learning of the rope, kept by our nanny, with which we were to be hanged if the Mau Mau had had their way; taking the pet buffalo calf for walks. Years later, I lent him my MGB convertible. We filled up, put the hood down, and he turned to me and said: "We've got three hundred miles in the tank. Where do you want to go?" If I'd said Lands End, we would have gone there but, as it was, we went to Forde Abbey and he discovered Rubik's Cube. The youngest daughter of the Roper household was a master; she could do it in two or three minutes. If a girl barely in double figures could do it, then the Mzee was going to do it and, although he couldn't do it quickly, he did through determination and persistence, manage to do it, which I never, ever did!
He had a great life and, when I talk about his death, some say he had a great death too. But I don't see his death like that. I remember a woman talking on the radio about her role in comforting the dying and the idiot presenter said "So, death can be quite beautiful". The woman, who knew a thing or two about death, said death is never beautiful and it's not.
I came a week before. He was all but gone, yellow, unable to move. His nurse decided to put him on a drip because she knew a thing or two. His doctor didn't approve; let the poor man die. His oncologist came to the house but visiting the dying wasn't part of his day; that hurt. The drip gave us a week together; it also gave my sister time to come from New York. On the night she flew, they came for him but he was waiting for his only daughter and he fought them off, arms flailing weakly in his sleep. They spent the day together, her lying on his bed, talking, talking. He loved her deeply and he sacrificed considerably for her. Later that night, rested and calm, he called his maid to his bedside and thanked her for all she had done for him. He called his best friend similarly, who asked him if he was going to hang on for the "Millennium". His reply was "I'm going to slip away now". Within a couple of hours he was in a coma and he died at four o'clock the next afternoon. He knew the time of his death; perhaps we all do
Note: I am indebted to www.claytor.com for this short paragraph:
Probin is the only man I have ever met who was shot down by the Red Baron. If Probin, had a "Gin and Italian" for breakfast, he could climb back into his Sopwith Camel and take you with him. He never liked radios. Even at age 92, when he was still flying solo in Kenya, he would wait until the last moment before touching down at Wilson Airport in Nairobi, before announcing, "Probin landing." The tower would then scramble and remove all traffic from the way until Daddy Probin was clear. The only time a radio was any good to him was when the Red Baron shot his gunner, and the bullet that would have killed Probin lodged itself in the heavy lead-acid battery behind his seat. Probin trained most of the pilots for the Battle of Britain during World War II, so he had seen plenty in the warfare transition from Sopwith Camels to Spitfires.