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

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Beryl Markham (October 26, 1902 – August 3, 1986) is best remembered as a pioneering aviatrix, becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic nonstop from Britain to North America.

There were press cars parked outside the field at Abingdon, and several press planes and photographers, but the R.A.F. kept everyone away from the grounds except technicians and a few of my friends. 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.’ It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish. When she was four years old, she moved with her father to Kenya, which was then colonial British East Africa. He built a horse racing farm in Njoro, near the Great Rift Valley between the Mau Escarpment and the Rongai Valley. Markham spent an adventurous childhood learning, playing, and hunting with the local children. On her family's farm, she developed her knowledge of and love for horses, establishing herself as a trainer at the age of 17, after her father left for Peru. [2] And in reading this passage, I can only weep. This is the writing Hemingway praised in his review, “she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer…she can write rings around us all…”He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight.

It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday." This story is one of the best, most absorbing reads I have had the good fortune to encounter. This is a book to be experienced and savoured. By age twenty-four, she had started to fly, mentored by pilots like Finch Hatton. As Blixen’s love affair with Finch Hatton wound down, Beryl took up with him. Finch Hatton wasn’t the marrying kind, and eventually she married Mansfield Markham, an English aristocrat, by whose surname she became known. When the U.S. entered World War II, West with the Night practically vanished. The public was no longer interested in reading odes to Africa and Beryl’s adventures. She received royalties for a few years, providing a small income, and eventually, the book went out of print.West with the Night is divided into four numbered “books,” each subdivided into chapters whose titles suggest their topics. Chapter 1, “Message from Nungwe,” for example, tells of Markham flying emergency medical supplies to Nungwe, a tiny mining camp southwest of Nairobi. The message had been relayed to her by native runners and by telegraph, and it took three days to reach her. The year was 1935, and Markham was the only professional woman pilot in Africa. Markham’s account of her rescue actions is characteristically modest, and, as with the other events she recounts throughout the work, she reveals a compassionate but unsentimental interest in the people and world around her. Her writing shows her keen sense of observation and her equally keen ability to select events and incidents that both entertain and inform.