Something stirred inside me, an image of my younger self sitting at a table, Freddie’s hand clamping down on my shoulder as he introduced himself to my family. Life could turn on moments like these. Maybe it would be easier to live in denial, like Sylvie, but I couldn’t do it; on the other hand I couldn’t live in guilt, either. I wasn’t the person who had arrived in Kenya over twelve years ago, and I wasn’t the person who had returned eight years later. I wasn’t innocent, but I wanted to be good. I wanted to make Maud proud.

Historical Note

While Theo and the Miller family are completely fictitious, many of the characters and places in The Hunters are based on actual historical events and figures. When researching the period, I came across the story of Alice de Janzé (who became the inspiration for Sylvie), a beautiful heiress living in the Wanjohi Valley in Kenya who kept a lion cub as a pet, shot her lover, Raymond de Trafford (the inspiration for Rupert), and later married him. She conducted an affair with Josslyn Hay (a base for Freddie) and was rumoured to have shot him too (this time fatally) before killing herself.

I was immediately drawn to her as a character, to her privilege and her self-destructive quality, and the more I read about the crowd she ran with – dubbed the Happy Valley set – the more I saw those elements appear in all of them. Their lives seemed impossibly glamorous and hedonistic, filled with endless cocktail parties and sexual shenanigans, but also sad and seedy, tainted with drug addictions and stale relationships and sadism. It made me wonder how fulfilled they were out there, and whether they saw their situation as I did, as a desperate, doomed attempt to impose the already outdated culture of ‘the aristocracy’ onto another society.

I could imagine at the very least they would have felt disjointed and in limbo, which is something I wanted to communicate in the novel. These were people who had been raised to expect a certain status in their native countries, who were struggling to come to terms with the gradual erosion of the lord-peasant relationship, accelerated by changes introduced by the first world war. Kenya must have seemed a respite from this change, a civilisation that harkened back to Britain’s bygone era of feudalistic countryside life.

No wonder then that Josslyn Hay fought so hard to preserve white entitlement (as Freddie does), arguing in favour of securing the white highlands for European settlers only. He appears to have considered – as did many settlers and officials at the time – the Africans to be childlike, in need of paternalising and moulding, a view that sits uncomfortably with 21st century readers.