Imagine a blonde English girl who grew up in the heart of Africa playing with the natives, and who was more interested in perfecting her hunting skills than in learning good manners. This was Beryl Markham, who had an extraordinary, unconventional, life, with no rules. Beryl trained racehorses, was married three times, and had countless romantic, and sometimes scandalous, affairs. She wrote a memoir, bewitched none other than the great writer Ernest Hemingway, and went down in history as a pioneer aviator, the first woman to have flown solo across the Atlantic Ocean, from London to America, in a single flight.
Born on 26th October 1902 in Ashwell, Leicestershire, the youngest daughter of Charles and Clare Clutterbuck, she moved with her family to British East Africa, today's Kenya, just before she was four. Her father had decided to start a farm in Njoro, but her mother couldn’t bear the isolation, and after less than a year she moved back to England with her eldest son Richard, while her daughter stayed in Africa with her father. Beryl didn’t see her mother again until she was much older, and in any case she would never forgive her mother for abandoning her, and losing interest in her for all those years. Beryl carried the pain of this abandonment all her life, a loss from which she would never be able to fully recover, and which also led her to make one self-destructive choice after another. At the same time, however, this pain turned her into a strong, courageous and self-confident woman, albeit with deep, well-concealed insecurities, and the inability to manage personal relationships. In a way, Beryl didn't know what people wanted or expected from her, and so she followed her survival instinct, regardless of the cost to other people or their relationship. Paradoxically, however - or perhaps predictably – Beryl repeated her mother’s behaviour with her own son, Gervase, who also never forgave her. Meanwhile, Beryl continued to adore and worship her father, as her benchmark for all men, who inevitably could never measure up in comparison.