West With The Night (VMC) (Virago Modern Classics)

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Under the authentic and authoritative voice of Ms Markham’s prose, Africa in all its splendor and terror came alive for me in a way that set me down into its myriad contrasts and changes and variances both heart and soul. I can’t think of a way I could possibly read this book without feeling completely that I was there and witnessing it all at first hand – living it myself. Divorce Court File: 7428. Appellant: Mansfield Markham. Respondent: Beryl Markham..." nationalarchives.gov.uk . Retrieved 11 March 2016. Markham was taken to Kenya at the age of four. As an adult she was befriended by Denys Finch-Hatton, the big-game hunter of Out of Africa fame, who took her flying in his airplane. Thrilled by the experience, Markham went on to become the first woman in Kenya to receive a commercial pilot's license. On 4 September 1936, she took off from Abingdon, England. After a 20-hour flight, her Percival Vega Gull, VP-KCC named "The Messenger", suffered fuel starvation due to icing of the fuel tank vents, and she crash-landed at Baleine Cove on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. She thereby became the first woman to cross the Atlantic east-to-west solo, and the first person to make it from England to North America non-stop from east to west. She was celebrated as an aviation pioneer. [3] [4]

Contrary to this absurd claim, anyone who is illiterate couldn’t possibly earn a commercial pilot’s license, nor speak five languages. Markham had many mentors, including her father as well as Denys Finch Hatton, who encouraged her to educate herself. Or the way she describes her aeroplane in the cross-Atlantic flight. “She found a sky so blue and so still that it seemed the impact of a wing might splinter it, and we slid across a surface of white clouds as if the plane were a sleigh running on fresh-fallen snow. The light was blinding — like light that in summer fills an Arctic scene and is in fact its major element.” But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear.”In 1906, he moved his wife and two small children there from the Midlands. Beryl was then was three years old. Her mother, Clara Agnes Markham, lasted only eighteen months in Kenya before returning to England with their son, Beryl’s brother Richard. Later, Beryl was sent to boarding school in Nairobi. After three years, she was expelled for being unruly and fomenting revolt among her fellow pupils. Her father read her the classics as she grew up, and she continued this habit into adulthood. This pastime would eventually serve her writing well.

This letter from Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins in 1942 sums up the book better than I ever could: I need neither breath nor muscles to cover the few hundred yards to the thorn tree. I am suddenly there, under its branches, standing in a welter of blood. The warthog, as large as any I have ever seen, six times as large as Buller, sits exhausted on his haunches while the dog rips at its belly. I have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure.

Early life

Beryl grew up among the native peoples of Africa, spending time hunting with a local tribe as though she were one of their own. On one such hunt, Beryl was separated from the tribal men while attempted to save her dog from a warthog. Although Beryl was able to kill the hog with her spear, the dog was viciously injured and required a long recovery period. Beryl also grew up with horses, spending much of her time helping her father train and care for the race horses on their farm. One such horse frequently fought Beryl's affections, throwing her to the ground and biting her. However, Beryl eventually won over the horse and discovered that when no one was looking, the horse would serve as her protector. Years later, Beryl's father gave her a colt she helped deliver, an act that initiated her solo career as a horse trainer. Markham, Beryl. West with the Night. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983 [1942]. ISBN 0-86547-118-5. I’m glad you’re going to do it, Beryl. It won’t be simple. If you can get off the ground in the first place, with such an immense load of fuel, you’ll be alone in that plane about a night and a day—mostly night. Doing it east to west, the wind’s against you. In September, so is the weather. You won’t have a radio. If you misjudge your course only a few degrees, you’ll end up in Labrador or in the sea—so don’t misjudge anything.’ I let Buller's head rest on the turf, stand up, and pull my spear from the body of the boar. Somewhere to the left there is a sound, but I do not recognize it and I can see only dim shapes that are motionless.

I read this because my boss and I were talking about the Swahili coast, and how beautiful it is. Markham grew up there and learned to fly planes there. What a beautiful and rough and interesting place to live. I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you are inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.” You can be assured that this review will in no way be as well written as Beryl Markham's "West with the Night." It was during a long, grueling two-year stint working as a banker in Huntsville, Alabama, I finally realized I needed to follow my dreams. After sojourning several places across the country, I now call Asheville, North Carolina, home, where I am the co-founder, publisher and editor of The Golf Sport ( www.golfsportmag.com) magazine and editor of Sporting Classics Daily ( www.sportingclassicsdaily.com). I am also a contributor to OutdoorHub and Global Outfitters, and hope to really inflate that balloon over the next couple years.I’ve been on a horse only on rare occasions, but Markham’s admiration for this noble creature is contagious. She strikes out on her own to train race-horses after her father’s farm fails and he quits Africa for Peru. What courage this young woman must have had to gallop away on her Pegasus from all she’d known since the age of four, to a place where she must start anew. It is while living in Molo that she will later embrace a new passion – flying. Jim Mollison lent me his watch. He said: ‘This is not a gift. I wouldn’t part with it for anything. It got me across the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic too. Don’t lose it — and, for God’s sake, don’t get it wet. Salt water would ruin the works.’ The old boar sees me, another enemy, and charges once more with magnificent courage, and I sidestep and plunge my spear to his heart. He falls forward, scraping the earth with his great tusks, and lies still. I leave the spear in his body, turn to Buller, and feel tears starting to my eyes.